Page 65 of Damian & Jun, Episodes 9-12
Jun smelled the coffee. It was rich and dark and fitting but too hot to drink. He sorted out his pages and picked up his pen.
Words flitted through his brain, one at a time, barely linked to a melody or a count. He scratched them down, dropping them in random piles. Lyrically, he sang in four languages, although Yoihei always went over anything in Japanese. He scribbled summer down again in all four languages, writing it out phonetically in Chinese, in hiragana in Japanese, and then in English and Korean, which were phonetic by default. They could do a concept song playing with the word in multiple languages. Mind spinning off, his pen doodled loosely.
Winter.
He’d drawn winter all over his page again. In all four languages, covering up summer.
He wanted to throw his pen. Instead, he sighed and thunked his head against the table.
“Is this your normal process?”
Jun looked up. He’d forgotten where he was and with whom he was with. Émeric had lowered his book.
Jun grabbed his coffee and took too large of a sip, the dark, sharp liquid searing his tongue. He set it down quickly.
That—that was the taste of the music in his mind: sharp, hot, dark, and cutting but so inviting. He blinked back tears and took a sip of the milk sitting to the side, soothing his mouth.
“Not really. I’m just sucking at it right now.” He dropped his pen. If he kept holding it, he was going to throw it. It would be so satisfying to flick it end over end across the room.
“What’s the problem?”
“I need to write summer sun. All I want to write is snow-white crimes.”
“Can I see?”
Jun hesitated. He hadn’t shown anyone but the guys some of the words in front of him. He hadn’t even shown Damian, but Damian had fucked him once, surrounded by some of the lyrics. They’d been busy though. He shrugged.
Émeric drew some of the pages toward himself. No matter the language, he looked over each of them carefully.
“You read Korean?”
“No, but I can read kanji, and you have a lot of that here.”
If Émeric could read kanji, the Japanese version of traditional Chinese characters, then he would be able to glean some meaning from the Chinese lyrics as well, although the grammar would be different, and Jun preferred to write in simplified characters, not the traditional set Japan used. History in a writing system, his mother had once told him, explaining why so many people used the same characters to talk to each other but spoke different words.
“There’s a lot of anger here.” Émeric’s finger paused over a verse and the start of a chorus in English.
Porcelain doesn’t cry
What am I, your idol?
Your doll up on the stage
Cold fingers, pink ginger, a spice, late-night ice
I call you, you stranger,
My ink will never lie!
You’re dreaming visions of a cage
But what am I?
Red stamps on an invisible page
Jun’s cheeks turned crimson. He reached for the scrap of paper. “It’s just silliness.”
“No, it’s real, and it’s what you’ve experienced. That’s what’s coming through.” He lifted another piece of paper. Jun had scrawled the idea of a sketch to one side and a poem in the upper corner, like a classic Chinese poem on a painting.
