ABOUT
Afterthought. It was what they'd all called it, when Leslie was showing up at the hospital pregnant and they were skipping appointments because they'd done this all before. They had been finished with their little almost-nuclear family as far as they were concerned; living well in San Francisco and making careers in full because they didn't have to devote themselves so hard to children anymore. But then Labor Day had rolled along and Samantha's cocktails were just so damn strong...
So, the third Lim child was on his way, eleven years after the last. An afterthought. And for all of Taemin's life, that was what held true. Though he was never forgotten at home while the family went on a trip somewhere, life was never too much of a focus either; with three children and intense careers it was impossible for Taemin to not feel a little bit like a lag in their days, though. The only person whose eyes seemed to focus on him properly was his grandmother, an ailing artist who lived with them only because she wasn't safe to live on her own anymore.
Margarette was the first in her family to travel to America, to make a name for herself in her little community. A long, difficult life had broken her, as far as her family was concerned; her son-in-law was kind enough in heart to let her live in with them, his own parents passed on, and her daughter had little left to care for about her mother who was neither here nor there. They never really believed in her gift, the way she traveled between worlds, but Taemin did. From the earliest age in which he could speak he did — she was a person who lived between and she taught Taemin to believe in it, when she could.
She gave him language and fantasy, gave him whole universes where creatures he named ran wild. Often times, Taemin could see it, could step into his own imagination and suddenly see them both in open fields with wild new birds flying overhead. But then his parents would come and things, well, went back; they went frigid and odd. By the time Keiko was on steady medication, Taemin was already being sent out to private classes, to steady himself. Too much energy and trouble wasn't right for a young boy. They needed him to understand that it couldn't always be about himself.
And usually, it was far from it. Taemin was a side piece, a toy. His brothers hated how flamboyant he was, often bullied him, fought him when he dared to talk back. His grandmother eventually stopped telling her stories and only held his hand, like she was so far away she needed to remember where she belonged better. And as for his parents... they were anything but there. Dance became a comfort, though; performing for himself, his classmates, his grandmother when she was aware and alert. It would bring her back, sometimes, get even the haze of medication to drift off her eyes when she watched her Sparkling Boy spin and spin with joy. So when she passed away, Taemin knew that spinning was the way to keep honor on her name.
In a house where everything about her became boxed away save for the letter she'd left Taemin, dancing out stories was a miracle. His mother actually came to recitals, she paid attention when her boy became a little ballerino — Taemin almost felt connected to her whole and sure when he would come off a stage and run into her arms. Even Taemin's own father came to one a year, which was as close to an off night he allowed himself to have and meant, well, everything. Just about everything.
Because the years toiled on that way, with events turning into decisions, as if the children were checkmarks to put down on lists. They couldn't make it to this event because they'd just gone to this graduation; it became a balance beam they clearly didn't want, and Taemin did his best not to resent them. It was easier to try to stay along on his own instead. Even when an old childhood friend moved back to the area and began to show up at events with Taemin, he didn't know how to hold it against people who weren't there. It was nicer to focus on who was.
He only learned to care about what wasn't available when everything suddenly went wrong at once.
It started like a flu, a flu that Taemin couldn't shake. But two weeks off became a third where nothing got any better and everything hurt; at fifteen he was already old enough to know something was off more than a virus in his system. His mother was who took him in first, listening to his symptoms and thinking there was finally something more than awkward eyes born from the late life birth she'd had. Fifteen years of thinking the worst was slow social skills and gray eyes had become a terror of every awful possibility that could exist. And one, it shone through.
Leukemia struck hard, and fast. They gave him months to live at best; the hospital bed became home, and Taemin understood better than ever how alone he was. With Reid busy with classes and Taemin's brothers away at university, it was just his parents, now and again. And the emptiness of medication reminded him so much of his grandmother that he started to dream of her again, to think of how much she'd be there for him. He never even realized when the dream meant the pain had gone away; he never noticed when the dream had stopped letting him wake up.
Two months he spent in a coma. Two months of being in a storybook that his grandmother and he had made; Taemin remembered only parts of it at first, when he woke up. Remembered green fields and large dogs and... and life. No one really got it, not the way he tried to tell it. They said it was just like Keiko and her ramblings, that she'd bothered the child too much. But then — Taemin's eyes shifted colors while trying to speak on it and they began to glow violet. It was strange, too strange to note for them, until the Safe Haven came by. He was like Margarette, nearly just like her, really, and they tried to explain it away.
Training was more like private lessons than Taemin had ever expected. It was a bus ride to and from after class, and though his legs ached with pain the leukemia had retreated, they said; remission meant it would always be a possibility, but tangled with his Requite it was impossible to tell when it might come back to him. Every six months, he'd go to the doctor, let his spine know pain and then lay there on a bag of ice until he was good enough to ride home again. Training was no different, even when Taemin tried to bring a whole creature through with him, the water-bound beast his grandmother had sent to save him when he first went into his private universe.
When it shrunk down into something more sensible, one silly dog of its own, Taemin had to walk home. He was only grateful that the ache had waited until a few blocks from home before it settled into his bones then; the same way he found grace in being able to graduate high school alone, his best friend already having started to go at it again to try and make it as a singer. It gave Taemin reasons to cling to virtues given: gifts from his brothers like telescopes for his star gazing, memories of flowers that had made his parents smile; he learned to cope with gratitude. The same gratitude had Taemin happy when he was accepted to Pratt Institute, to study the arts and figure out some proper way to map things out in the home his grandmother had been so wistful for. Maybe he couldn't spin and excite as surely as he had once upon a time, maybe he couldn't even try to get proper eyes on him, but he could make sure what she left for him had a diligent way to grow. He could always have that.
An appreciation for what was there more than what wasn't.
Favorites
Food
chicago pizza, tempura, noodle dishes, meat, xxx.
Films
Nana, I Am A Hero, The Eclipse, Witches
Books
The Nakano Thrift Shop, Kitchen, Grandmother Loves You, Strange Gateways
TV Series
Adrift, The Voice, Warehouse 13, Kevin Probably Saves The World
Actors
Tomohisa Yamashita, Oguri Shun, Zac Efron, Megan Fox, Katherine Hepburn, Kathy Bates
Musicians
The Chainsmokers, We - The Captain
