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Sometimes, James wonders what death might feel like.
It’s not often, or even purposeful. It’s the sort of thing that creeps up on him every once in a while, like the itching sensation in your throat when you’re about to catch a cold, or the ache of an old scar that tells you the season is changing. He goes through the motions of the life he’s carved out for himself, clawed his way to the top with his bare hands until he bled from the tips of his fingers, and the sweet fantasy of it all ending sings to him within his mind, stuck in his head on loop like his pop songs on the radio. Today, he’s given enough autographs to prepubescent girls who seem incapable of shutting up that his hands are cramping horrifically and about ready to fall right off, and he could really go for a drink. But soju makes him want fried chicken, he’s already a few hundred calories over his daily limit, and he needs to drop three pounds by his next comeback. So he says no to soju, and busies himself with cutting up a cucumber in his empty apartment.
The weight of the knife is comforting in its own way, soothing his nerves as he glides it through to separate the cucumber into thin slices. He loses a few in the process, boiled down to little else but water, but he carries on anyway, slicing and slicing and slicing until he nearly cuts his fingertips clean off. He drops the knife and shakes his hand in a jittery motion as if it’ll somehow take away the pricks of pain building at his nails, and throws away the stained cucumbers that got caught in the crossfire. He’s not sure how many calories are in blood, and he’s not too keen to find out. Three pounds, a voice in the back of his head helpfully reminds every time he so much as looks at an ingredient.
He flirts with the idea of seasoning them with salt, checks the back of the container, and puts it right back where it was. He positions his cutting board over a bowl, and scrapes the slices off and into it, careful to avoid any of them touching the bloodstain. He tosses it into the sink and leaves it for the housemaid to deal with when she comes in the morning, and searches in every cabinet he can think of for a first aid kit. After looking for as long as he can make the interest last, and smearing small lumpy circles of red all over his white furniture, he comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t keep one in the house. Go figure.
His bag’s still filled with his sweaty clothes from his workout today, and he leaves it by the bathroom so she knows to wash it, and goes up to his room, bowl in hand. Every inch of his apartment is bare, white walls expanding past his entryway, naked of any paintings or trinkets. Crystal tried to hang up some of her drawings the last time she was over, those family tree ones they make you do in school, and he could only stare blankly at the crude rendition of him, pink hair and all. James had found fourteen year old Crystal to make some awfully compelling points about why they needed to be up for everyone to see, but he still took them all down to hide in his desk drawers the moment she left.
He collapses over his warm bed face first, the soft fuzziness of his covers brushing against his bare skin. They’re from some collab he’d done with a company a while back, something random he’d half listened to his manager ramble on about and agreed to without thinking much of it. He’s not entirely sure why a K-POP idol would collab with a literal blanket company, but he certainly wasn’t complaining when the check came in. The only reason he even still uses it is because blowing an absurd amount of money on online shopping lost its thrill after the first hundred times, and he doesn’t see a point in having high quality products he’ll never be photographed in. He has an entire team to plan out his looks and outfits for him, so he doesn’t worry himself with such menial duties. Just about anything from the convenience store can satisfy his needs as they come to him.
He wills himself to roll over, even though the entirety of his being aches and protests to stay in its position. He’s been working his body hard since he had the sense to do so in his youth, and the negative and positive impacts it’s had on him remain omnipresent even in his current state. The only difference is that he has his own personal gym now, and doesn’t need to fill up big jugs of water to use as weights. Small blessings, and all that. Almost immediately after facing upright, he decides to just roll over and faceplant again.
His hair is gross and due for a wash, far more visible since it’s colored, but he doesn’t know if he has the energy to get up and shower again today. He’ll be up at four in the morning to work out, anyway, so he tells himself he’ll do it then, and it’s not like anyone is around to see him. The only people allowed in the apartment is his housemaid to keep it looking the same it did the day he bought it—which is to say, not lived in—and the chairman.
James squints. Cucumber, he remembers, and he pushes himself up slowly, pausing for a minute on his elbow and knees. He gets up the rest of the way, lazily rolling over, sighing as his back crashes against the bed. He eats a handful of cucumbers, thinks about how weird that is, and turns on the television to a random channel, lowering the volume to a mere whisper.
This is one of those times, where he thinks about everything and nothing and all the things in between, where his mind takes over and he’s only a spectator to watch as it brings him places he has no control over. It likes to torture him like this, sometimes, manifest images of his worst moments and memories and all the things he wants to forget, but despite his many efforts he can’t lock them out. He has enough money to buy his way through the world, but there’s nothing that can solve the way his fucked up brain decides to work. He likes to think of himself as a tortured genius—he is, separately, both of those things. Tortured beyond belief and too intelligent for his own good.
His nails make a horrible scraping sound against the bottom of his bowl, and he realizes he’s run out of cucumbers already. It’s not like one cucumber will get you far to begin with, and he was eating them in the fistfuls, so he doesn’t know what he really expected. His stomach growls against his firm commands, and he resolutely ignores it, uncaringly tossing the bowl somewhere he’ll have to fish out when he wakes up next. The image behind his eyes is one of him when he was a child, right before the beginning of what he likes to think was the end of it all for him. Before he became whatever this is. There can be no end to James Lee if he never lived to begin with.
The television is still low and muffled, and he can make out bits and pieces of what the characters are saying if he strains his ears, but he can never focus long enough to catch what’s happening in the story. He thinks it might be one of his own shows, anyway, and he slowly lets his head fall back on his large pillow, eyes fluttering. His room is cold and goosebumps are pricking up on the skin of his arms, but he refuses to ever touch the thermometer. His hair is greasy and irritating him, his stomach is rumbling to be fed, and he’s exhausted, not for the first time, of this life.
These are the moments he often begins to dream of it.
He dreams to be ensnared between the jaws of death, sharp teeth digging into the softness of his skin and making red drip from him, to dangle from the edge of the cliff with only one hand on the ledge, to feel the hopelessness consume his body as the strain on his arm slowly becomes too much to bear. What would that feel like? He hasn’t a clue. He knows what it’s like on the giving end; he’s stomped on the hand of every person who dared to cross him until it gave, dropped them all into the waiting mouth of an angel-faced demon they couldn’t have ever hoped to evade.
The other side. James wants to know what it would be like on the other side.
He’s heard the saying that it’s lonely at the top more times than he could possibly recall, but to tell the truth, James never gets lonely. He just gets bored. He’s been untouchable in every sense of the word for as long as he can remember, and there’s little that excites him anymore. The age old thrill, the spark from fighting has long since gone out, leaving only a smoldering smoke in its wake. He sees clear as day how every situation will unfold before they even begin to play out, and it’s dreadfully boring. Numbness has slowly trickled its way through his mind, and he can only wonder when it will take his body next.
He longs for an equal. It’s not that he desires companionship—far from it, really—and if he wanted such a frivolous thing he could easily pick any ordinary girl out from a crowd and take her home with him, all without a word spoken. He, of course, would not ever do something like this; he’s an idol with an image to protect, and regular people don’t interest him, anyway. No, what he truly desires is someone to match him in strength. Being the most powerful man in the world is as much of a curse as it is a blessing, and there’s not a single person he could hope to relate to him, a single person that could make the hair prick up on his arms or ice cold terror wash over his body.
If a life exists without fear, what is the drive to continue it?
Sometimes, James thinks about him.
More than he cares to admit. He tries not to, but for someone so good at denying himself things, he finds it hard to reject this. It’s always on nights like these, when the misery and numbness mix into one awful cocktail and he’s drunk on it, and the exhaustion in his body makes him feel like he could shut down and never wake up again, that it occurs. The gears of his mind turn, take his hands in theirs and gently guide him back to the pleasant memory of his back meeting the wooden wall so hard he thought it’d break. He breathes in, then out.
A shaky sigh slips past his lips, still soft from his chapstick, as his long, slender fingers trail down the length of his body, starting from the Adam’s apple of his neck, down to his muscled torso, all the way to his sweatpants where he’s already sporting a half chub. He makes pitstops along the way, though, draws it out as long as he can, keeps himself in what he thinks might be his truest form until he can’t anymore. He loosely curls his fingers around the slender line of his throat and squeezes, but his body and mind can never agree and he can’t choke himself like he wants to. He soothes himself with the image of invisible fingerprints staining the pale skin of his neck, and lets himself move on, feeling his body through his loose tee.
He’s nothing to scoff at, he knows, softness completely lacking in his body where his fingers trail along his muscled torso. He thinks about what it may feel like to be punched and for it to last, for someone to mold the shape of their knuckles against his skin and it to stick in a pretty painting of blues and purples. He might know a man that could pull it off, if James would ever allow it. It’s no fun to just let people get an easy hit in—it ruins the entire game for him, and it wouldn’t fulfill the need. He rests his palm gently on his bulge, but doesn’t touch, even as he feels it twitch beneath him.
It should be damn embarrassing, and in some ways, it is. Longing for a person you can’t have. Longing for a person at all, let alone one that no longer roams the Earth. But dead men tell no tales, and James can safely tuck his shame into his pocket, bury it in his chest with the knowledge that the object of his strange affections will never know about this momentary weakness of his. He sees pure darkness when his eyes slip close, and then the outline of him, tall and imposing, big and towering over him. His fingers flex, all six of them, and James barely contains a whine at the thought of them inside him. His fingers are thick, thicker than his own, and he couldn’t possibly take them all, but he’d certainly try. It’s a thought that he hadn’t wanted to form this quickly, but it seems his mind is against him today, and it remains stuck there anyway.
The picture of him is beautiful, and it makes James swallow. It’s been years now, but he can still see him clear as day, black hair to his shoulders, his eyes too probing, too knowing, too understanding, and the stick of his stupid tanghulu dangling between his teeth. He can’t quite recall the design of that jacket he always wore, but he’d never forget that face of his. He thinks if he were still alive today, he’d make it as a model easily; James would see to it himself, even though the man would probably despise it. His natural facial structure is unfairly stunning, his eyes intense enough to probe you through the camera, and even those extra fingers wouldn’t subtract too many points from him. James swallows. His fingers.
The image comes rushing back as quickly as it left, and he groans weakly, slamming his head back against his pillow. James Lee has always been stubborn to a fault, and the word ‘quit’ isn’t something that exists in his dictionary. He doesn’t believe Seongji would give into him easy, just like that, but James can be awfully persuasive when he wants to be, and he already is without trying. He thinks Seongji would be the type to want him to ask nicely—and god, isn’t that a thought, him, reduced to begging—but that’s not the sort of person James is, and he’d dance around it and find any exploitable loopholes he could. He’d goad him into it, push and press at the soft parts of his soul, dig his fingernails into the rawest wounds he knows Seongji wouldn’t want him to reopen, and he’d win.
He’d push him down and he’d break him in two, press one finger in dry and James would feel something in his body, in his soul, crack and become whole again but all wrong, put back together with ugly stitching. It’d hurt and he would want it to and he might even cry, and he wants that so, so badly. His hands scramble at his sweatpants, pushing them down just enough for his hard and already dribbling cock to slap against his tummy, waistband digging uncomfortably into his thighs. The need to be touched is raw and consuming, and liquid heat melts into his veins as he finally gets a hand around himself. He gives himself a few, quick pumps as if to reward himself for waiting so long, then slows it to something more manageable.
Where was he again? Right. He’d probably be so tight from the lack of playing with himself, so much so that it’d be near impossible for Seongji to fit his finger up to the second knuckle. He knows, realistically, those handsome features would twist with concern within seconds, but he likes to pretend that they wouldn’t. That Seongji would just push his thighs open wider, press and press until his palm was flat against the curve of his ass and James could feel a hot burst of liquid dripping from his hole.
He has to rip his hand away from himself, and he hiccups pathetically as the feeling that had been steadily building just to peak too soon fades away, an unsatisfying ache forming in his stomach. His dick twitches, coats the smooth plane of his torso with another layer of pre.
“More,” He groans aloud without meaning to, and his mind eagerly fills in the blanks for him.
“Do you think,” Seongji’s voice would be low and unamused, eyes never leaving his. “That you deserve it?” He’d tsk, and twist his finger horribly until James cried out, voice warbled with pain.
He wants to hear his voice again, just one last time. Fuck, he should have brought like, a tape recorder, or something when he first met him. It’s a hysterical thought that nearly breaks him out of the haze of lust, reminds him how absurdly insane he’s being about this. He presses his thumb against the tip of his dick and rubs in slow, teasing circles, and that thought melts away fast.
It wouldn’t take long for Seongji to feed more of his fingers to his hole, the way eased with the lubricant his body so helpfully produced, and James knows his lower half would be burning, screaming with pain. Low murmurs against his ears, condescending and mean and nothing like what he’d say, and James would claw at his back, searching for purchase on anything. He groans, allowing himself to start pumping himself again, turning his face to the side, cheek smooshed against the pillow.
The thought is good, but the fantasy is too far fetched. Nothing like that would ever happen, Seongji Yuk too good of a man to ever even consider it. It doesn’t stop him from wishing for it sometimes, though. He longs for the fear that Seongji imposed on him on their first meeting, searching for the feeling in any possible way he can. He briefly imagines the press of lips, gentle against his face, and he chokes on his own spit, aggressively jerking to the side. He dismisses the thought instantly. There is no room for softness in James Lee’s life, and he finds zero purpose or comfort in it. The numbness is easily solved with the arrival of something new, something interesting, and pain is the only thing he hasn’t felt in a long, long time.
Still.
He sounds worshipful, even to himself. Even though he knows that at the end of the day, Seongji Yuk is nothing special. James Lee has met a thousand men like him, a thousand men better than him, and he’s beaten them all the same. None of them have offered him tanghulu, though, he’ll at least give him that.
..Isn’t that such a funny thing? To care for someone you know nothing about, to care for someone who would kill you within a second as soon as you let your guard down, for someone who would indirectly aid your death? James thinks Seongji Yuk is a funny man. He wishes he were still alive. God, he wishes he were still alive. Even then, he knows the intense sort of emotion he’s feeling—and isn’t that rare? James Lee, feeling anything other than numbness—is merely his mind conjuring up what he longs for. A dead man is the perfect vessel for his fantasies. A dead man can’t disappoint you. A dead man can’t be any weaker than they already are.
Seongji will forever be immortalized as the man who nearly, nearly bested him, and James will never have to think about if he’d be able to crush him in his current state. He’ll never know. He can pretend all he wants that Seongji could kill him. Could wrap those fingers—god, yes, all six of them—around the slender curve of his throat, slowly increasing the pressure until James could see black spots blurring his vision, until the image of Seongji and his face became blurry.
He’d probably cum in his pants, like some virgin. He’s honestly about to cum just thinking about it right now. He’s hardly touched himself, so caught up in the fantasy, and he hisses a sigh of relief through his teeth when he squeezes himself.
“Seongji.” He moans aloud, unabashed, unashamed. A dead man tells no tale, he reminds himself hysterically. His hips buck into his hand on their own accord, imagining one bigger, one with better grip strength.
“..Hyung.” He whispers, so quiet, so afraid, so unlike him, and he shoots white all over his palm with a low whine.
His alarm wakes him at four in the morning, and he has seven missed calls from his manager. They’re behind schedule by ten minutes already, and James is in desperate need of a shower. He picks out whatever clothes are clean from the last time the maid came over, steps into the bathroom, and life goes on.