09; exo; diffraction, and the reasons we bend but never break
diffraction, and the reasons we bend but never break | pg-13 for mature situations (spoiler: character death)
baekhyun/chanyeol, mild jongin/joonmyun
2k words
oneshot
side story to in the gaps between the fireflies, my entry to aideshou's third challenge.
for the person who was wondering how baekyeol's story went. :)
Not that ectoplasmic bodies should be common, or anything; it’s just that Chanyeol is a ghost made of candle lights, and Baekhyun has to cup his hands over him to make sure he doesn’t wisp away.
diffraction, and the reasons we bend but never break
One minute, they’re poring over the words in their textbooks, sifting through them and watching for the ones that need to be highlighted with new topic yellow or with definition pink -
Chanyeol’s head lands on the table with a thud and a clatter of pens.
Baekhyun already knows to reach out for the coffee mug next to Chanyeol’s pathology notes, moving it closer to his side with little but a blink. He’s not a stranger to Chanyeol’s exaggerated expressions of fatigue, and the results aren’t unfamiliar to him, either; he just doesn’t want to end up replacing another coffee-soiled textbook.
When Chanyeol stays slumped for almost an entire minute, Baekhyun chuckles and asks while turning a page, “Don’t tell me you have a concussion.”
The only reply he gets is the air on Chanyeol’s back shimmering oddly, and Baekhyun looks to the window past the other man’s prone form to see an ocean of fireflies in the sky.
And then, right where Chanyeol’s cervical vertebrae ends, out flitters another one, vibrating as if it’s high on coffee. Baekhyun knows that vibrating motion; it’s the same one he sees on the corner of Chanyeol’s lips each day.
It's not hard to understand what happened, really.
He reaches a hand out to catch the firefly and it settles into his palm contentedly, warm orange glow almost seeping past his epidermis. As it rolls around in the gaps between his fingers, Baekhyun stands and opens his dorm room’s door, only to see precisely two fireflies flitting past the fish-eye lens on Yixing and Kyungsoo’s door.
Well.
He glances down to his hand, only to find the firefly gone, and he looks back inside his room to see Chanyeol sitting on the lower bunk, faint glow disappearing from his fingertips and posture slouched as if his own corpse isn’t collapsed on the pile of handouts on the table.
Chanyeol blinks at him, eyes wide, mouth frozen in a circle. After a stare-off, he says, “I think we should be more shocked than this.”
Kyungsoo briefly lingers over Baekhyun’s shoulder, like the usual mothering touch he does when Baekhyun leaves their group study sessions, but Baekhyun only cracks a joke back. “It’s hard to be more shocked than the time I opened a cadaver and found a nest of worms, though.”
Chanyeol gags, claps, and laughs, all in only a few seconds, his expressions so bright and alive. Baekhyun finds himself grinning back, but it’s only then that he notices his hands, trembling like the world’s shaking him. It makes him wonder if the little firefly from earlier felt it, too, winding around his knuckles.
When Chanyeol holds Baekhyun’s wrist with a withering smile, it turns out that both of their hands are quaking, and maybe the world’s not just shaking. Maybe it’s already collapsed.
Something in Baekhyun says that studying through this is the way to go, and so he listens to it, going over his schedule to prepare for the exams and tests he’s never going to have. There’s one in Psychiatry on Tuesday. He can probably get Kyungsoo’s overly neat notes, now, since it’s not like he can ask Kyungsoo for permission anymore.
Chanyeol pulls up his own unmoving body from the table with little effort, but rigor mortis has already set in, and he almost breaks one of his own shoulders. The laugh he makes this time is almost hysterical.
They settle in their places again, after a while, studying as if they’re cramming; medical school, after all, is about cramming every day and having coffee and coke at your side when you get sleepy, or maybe even several bottles of ammonia looted from the times you have pharmacy duty. This routine is familiar to Baekhyun, and he likes it.
Chanyeol looks like he has no idea what’s he’s doing, though, looking at Baekhyun every once in a while with his eyebrow cocked.
Baekhyun just smiles back and grabs another highlighter, making a new line of summary blue on his page. It is often distress in the present and lack of hope for the future that lead an individual into needing treatment.
So it’s Sunday. Baekhyun has another day to study, but Chanyeol’s exams are already done. It’s hard to have study sessions with someone from a different school, but they manage.
“I think you should stop studying, though,” Chanyeol says, fingers tapping the surface of Baekhyun’s netbook. He doesn’t leave any fingerprints, but the sounds he makes are rhythmic, falling into patterns that make it sound like he’s playing on his drums. Suddenly, he smiles. “Or is it because you're scared of glowing bugs?”
“No,” Baekhyun answers, putting on a smile that accommodates Chanyeol but doesn’t accommodate his own words. “Can’t fail med school, right? Have to succeed my dad and all.”
Chanyeol sighs, trying to sound fond, and he becomes a bit more solid and real in the air. “We need to get out of this place. I’m bored, and then you’re bored and crazy.”
“Crazy for wanting to listen to my dad, for once?” Baekhyun turns the page, but something in his hands makes his movement too harsh and the paper almost tears and oh, he thinks to himself. I’m pissed for some reason.
“No,” Chanyeol says, a glint to his eyes that sharpens them, even though the rest of his face is trying to be soft and understanding. He would’ve made a great doctor. “Crazy for using him as an excuse to stay here.”
Tensions like these usually disappear with food, video games, and a few minutes of free time, but the deathly quiet is too accepting and an invisible wall lingers in the air between them for hours.
Someplace halfway through the last passages about pons and the first few about cerebellums, Chanyeol stretches from his books and decides to crouch over his own body instead.
“It’s like a mirror,” he says, holding one of his soulless self’s eyes open and waving a flashlight in front of it like he’s expecting something to happen. “Except I move more.”
“Except you move,” Baekhyun corrects, smiling tiredly. He had never stopped studying, since earlier; his goal just changed. Maybe he can make Chanyeol go back and occupy his own neocortex again, as if an eyeball-sized light representing his spirit and consciousness hadn’t slipped out of it, or maybe go back to the hippocampus if the neocortex is too abstract for him. “We’ll go once I get you back in your body, promise.”
Chanyeol frowns, but then it’s gone in a flash, replaced by his usual smile. Moments like these are when Baekhyun feels like they’re perfect for each other, lying but being found out the next second anyway. “Can I make a promise for you instead?”
“What, then?”
Chanyeol leans his shoulder against Baekhyun’s and Baekhyun lets him, since Chanyeol weighs like nothing but light now, anyway. “We’ll go out, one day. Promise.”
The omission makes Baekhyun wonder and wonder until a thought wanders right into his throat, coming out of his mouth unthinkingly. It needed to get out. “So are you staying like that forever, or something?”
Chanyeol's reply isn’t an answer, just a nod and a few words that sound like something he’d picked up from his bedside manner books. Not that he’s announcing a diagnosis of terminal illness, or anything. “I think about that, too.”
He’s being honest, Baekhyun knows.
And when Baekhyun tells himself that Chanyeol will be staying forever, period, he knows that that’s something else.
That one day comes too soon, when he realizes that he doesn’t have a single highlighter with ink, anymore.
Chanyeol pulls Baekhyun up to his feet, but outside is a world that’s changed too much, and Baekhyun’s books are still here, along with his studies, his routines, his life as it used to be, perfectly normal and spent with a Chanyeol who he’s certain will stay.
But it’s not like he can just let Chanyeol stare at his own body, too, untouched by elements and decomposition and the body’s own ways of shutting down. Like it’s waiting for something to happen first, just as Chanyeol is.
So when Chanyeol walks backwards out the door, smile on his face and Baekhyun’s fingers tangled in his own, Baekhyun tries to smile back and holds on as tight as he can. The sky is dotted by only a few stars, only a few fireflies, and he doesn’t want Chanyeol to try filling in the gaps.
They’ve just left a bookstore with a number of new highlighters that they both know they will never use.
“I wonder if we were left behind on purpose,” Chanyeol begins, one arm in his parka’s pockets. His other is at his side, hand twined around Baekhyun’s, fingers gripping only tightly enough to reassure of his presence.
Baekhyun doesn’t like how light the hand in his grasp feels, but he likes how Chanyeol’s pulse is still strong in his ulnar artery, going at a healthy rate somewhere close to sixty beats per minute. One per second. He counts each one as he speaks. “Or if we were left behind for a purpose.”
“Oh, I’m sure about that one.” Chanyeol grins again, turns in Baekhyun’s direction, and the fireflies above his head go out in time with his heartbeats. One per second. “I think I’ve fulfilled mine.”
And the light shines past Chanyeol’s everything, lighting him up, making his smile the brightest Baekhyun’s ever seen.
Baekhyun can feel his amygdala clamoring, in the way his breaths become more choked and stuck behind his breastbone.
Maybe they shouldn’t be taking advantage of an empty mall like this, while the generator is still working and while walks through malls still feel like dates. Maybe this is already a date. Maybe it isn’t, because couples don’t rehearse the goodbyes right in the middle of one.
“I promised to get you out of there,” Chanyeol reminds, smiling, the both of them lying on a luxuriously comfortable bed in one of the furniture stores near the top floor. The windows are too big; a little mote of light would easily pass through. “I guess I should’ve promised to stay with you, too.”
Baekhyun waits for Chanyeol to lean on his shoulder, but when he doesn’t, he reaches for Chanyeol’s head instead and fits that mess of curly hair somewhere near his clavicle. It fits. “Can’t you, right now?”
“I promise,” Chanyeol says, heart rate going at fifty, then at thirty-five, then at twenty, “that you won’t be alone.”
Chanyeol is never one to break promises, Baekhyun knows, because he doesn’t like lying if there isn’t a single person who thinks that he is.
It just so happens that when he fulfills one, he ends up breaking everything else -
The lights go out, and a new one takes its place, a more fulfilled glow compared to the small, quivering one Baekhyun saw a few days ago.
He doesn’t catch it, this time.
It’s a day or two after when he meets Jongin.
Briefly, when Jongin’s fingertips just accidentally brush over his, they’re much too light. Baekhyun will have to be alone, still.
But Baekhyun doesn’t cry because when Jongin comes back again, a week or few later, the younger man is tired and bright and entirely translucent, the man sleeping on his back in the same state. Jongin says that the man's name is Joonmyun and that he needs to be healed, but Baekhyun knows that they both don’t need anything more.
“I guess you’ve accomplished your mission, too,” Baekhyun says, checking both of their pulses, only because Jongin asked for it. Heart rates going at fifty, then at thirty-five… “Congratulations.” And he’s being honest.
The man on Jongin’s back goes first, but the little mote of light is patient, lingering in the air.
Baekhyun waves, and Jongin leaves with a smile.
When Baekhyun follows the two fireflies out the mall, he sees an orange lantern in the distance, dangling from someone’s hands.
Chanyeol never breaks his promises, after all.
fin :)
- masterlist + requests - watch - join -
again, side story to in the gaps between the fireflies, so if you're interested, please check it out, too :)
please support in the gaps between the fireflies by voting for it here if you liked both of these fics~ comments are loved <3
baekhyun/chanyeol, mild jongin/joonmyun
2k words
oneshot
side story to in the gaps between the fireflies, my entry to aideshou's third challenge.
for the person who was wondering how baekyeol's story went. :)
Not that ectoplasmic bodies should be common, or anything; it’s just that Chanyeol is a ghost made of candle lights, and Baekhyun has to cup his hands over him to make sure he doesn’t wisp away.
diffraction, and the reasons we bend but never break
One minute, they’re poring over the words in their textbooks, sifting through them and watching for the ones that need to be highlighted with new topic yellow or with definition pink -
Chanyeol’s head lands on the table with a thud and a clatter of pens.
Baekhyun already knows to reach out for the coffee mug next to Chanyeol’s pathology notes, moving it closer to his side with little but a blink. He’s not a stranger to Chanyeol’s exaggerated expressions of fatigue, and the results aren’t unfamiliar to him, either; he just doesn’t want to end up replacing another coffee-soiled textbook.
When Chanyeol stays slumped for almost an entire minute, Baekhyun chuckles and asks while turning a page, “Don’t tell me you have a concussion.”
The only reply he gets is the air on Chanyeol’s back shimmering oddly, and Baekhyun looks to the window past the other man’s prone form to see an ocean of fireflies in the sky.
And then, right where Chanyeol’s cervical vertebrae ends, out flitters another one, vibrating as if it’s high on coffee. Baekhyun knows that vibrating motion; it’s the same one he sees on the corner of Chanyeol’s lips each day.
It's not hard to understand what happened, really.
He reaches a hand out to catch the firefly and it settles into his palm contentedly, warm orange glow almost seeping past his epidermis. As it rolls around in the gaps between his fingers, Baekhyun stands and opens his dorm room’s door, only to see precisely two fireflies flitting past the fish-eye lens on Yixing and Kyungsoo’s door.
Well.
He glances down to his hand, only to find the firefly gone, and he looks back inside his room to see Chanyeol sitting on the lower bunk, faint glow disappearing from his fingertips and posture slouched as if his own corpse isn’t collapsed on the pile of handouts on the table.
Chanyeol blinks at him, eyes wide, mouth frozen in a circle. After a stare-off, he says, “I think we should be more shocked than this.”
Kyungsoo briefly lingers over Baekhyun’s shoulder, like the usual mothering touch he does when Baekhyun leaves their group study sessions, but Baekhyun only cracks a joke back. “It’s hard to be more shocked than the time I opened a cadaver and found a nest of worms, though.”
Chanyeol gags, claps, and laughs, all in only a few seconds, his expressions so bright and alive. Baekhyun finds himself grinning back, but it’s only then that he notices his hands, trembling like the world’s shaking him. It makes him wonder if the little firefly from earlier felt it, too, winding around his knuckles.
When Chanyeol holds Baekhyun’s wrist with a withering smile, it turns out that both of their hands are quaking, and maybe the world’s not just shaking. Maybe it’s already collapsed.
Something in Baekhyun says that studying through this is the way to go, and so he listens to it, going over his schedule to prepare for the exams and tests he’s never going to have. There’s one in Psychiatry on Tuesday. He can probably get Kyungsoo’s overly neat notes, now, since it’s not like he can ask Kyungsoo for permission anymore.
Chanyeol pulls up his own unmoving body from the table with little effort, but rigor mortis has already set in, and he almost breaks one of his own shoulders. The laugh he makes this time is almost hysterical.
They settle in their places again, after a while, studying as if they’re cramming; medical school, after all, is about cramming every day and having coffee and coke at your side when you get sleepy, or maybe even several bottles of ammonia looted from the times you have pharmacy duty. This routine is familiar to Baekhyun, and he likes it.
Chanyeol looks like he has no idea what’s he’s doing, though, looking at Baekhyun every once in a while with his eyebrow cocked.
Baekhyun just smiles back and grabs another highlighter, making a new line of summary blue on his page. It is often distress in the present and lack of hope for the future that lead an individual into needing treatment.
So it’s Sunday. Baekhyun has another day to study, but Chanyeol’s exams are already done. It’s hard to have study sessions with someone from a different school, but they manage.
“I think you should stop studying, though,” Chanyeol says, fingers tapping the surface of Baekhyun’s netbook. He doesn’t leave any fingerprints, but the sounds he makes are rhythmic, falling into patterns that make it sound like he’s playing on his drums. Suddenly, he smiles. “Or is it because you're scared of glowing bugs?”
“No,” Baekhyun answers, putting on a smile that accommodates Chanyeol but doesn’t accommodate his own words. “Can’t fail med school, right? Have to succeed my dad and all.”
Chanyeol sighs, trying to sound fond, and he becomes a bit more solid and real in the air. “We need to get out of this place. I’m bored, and then you’re bored and crazy.”
“Crazy for wanting to listen to my dad, for once?” Baekhyun turns the page, but something in his hands makes his movement too harsh and the paper almost tears and oh, he thinks to himself. I’m pissed for some reason.
“No,” Chanyeol says, a glint to his eyes that sharpens them, even though the rest of his face is trying to be soft and understanding. He would’ve made a great doctor. “Crazy for using him as an excuse to stay here.”
Tensions like these usually disappear with food, video games, and a few minutes of free time, but the deathly quiet is too accepting and an invisible wall lingers in the air between them for hours.
Someplace halfway through the last passages about pons and the first few about cerebellums, Chanyeol stretches from his books and decides to crouch over his own body instead.
“It’s like a mirror,” he says, holding one of his soulless self’s eyes open and waving a flashlight in front of it like he’s expecting something to happen. “Except I move more.”
“Except you move,” Baekhyun corrects, smiling tiredly. He had never stopped studying, since earlier; his goal just changed. Maybe he can make Chanyeol go back and occupy his own neocortex again, as if an eyeball-sized light representing his spirit and consciousness hadn’t slipped out of it, or maybe go back to the hippocampus if the neocortex is too abstract for him. “We’ll go once I get you back in your body, promise.”
Chanyeol frowns, but then it’s gone in a flash, replaced by his usual smile. Moments like these are when Baekhyun feels like they’re perfect for each other, lying but being found out the next second anyway. “Can I make a promise for you instead?”
“What, then?”
Chanyeol leans his shoulder against Baekhyun’s and Baekhyun lets him, since Chanyeol weighs like nothing but light now, anyway. “We’ll go out, one day. Promise.”
The omission makes Baekhyun wonder and wonder until a thought wanders right into his throat, coming out of his mouth unthinkingly. It needed to get out. “So are you staying like that forever, or something?”
Chanyeol's reply isn’t an answer, just a nod and a few words that sound like something he’d picked up from his bedside manner books. Not that he’s announcing a diagnosis of terminal illness, or anything. “I think about that, too.”
He’s being honest, Baekhyun knows.
And when Baekhyun tells himself that Chanyeol will be staying forever, period, he knows that that’s something else.
That one day comes too soon, when he realizes that he doesn’t have a single highlighter with ink, anymore.
Chanyeol pulls Baekhyun up to his feet, but outside is a world that’s changed too much, and Baekhyun’s books are still here, along with his studies, his routines, his life as it used to be, perfectly normal and spent with a Chanyeol who he’s certain will stay.
But it’s not like he can just let Chanyeol stare at his own body, too, untouched by elements and decomposition and the body’s own ways of shutting down. Like it’s waiting for something to happen first, just as Chanyeol is.
So when Chanyeol walks backwards out the door, smile on his face and Baekhyun’s fingers tangled in his own, Baekhyun tries to smile back and holds on as tight as he can. The sky is dotted by only a few stars, only a few fireflies, and he doesn’t want Chanyeol to try filling in the gaps.
They’ve just left a bookstore with a number of new highlighters that they both know they will never use.
“I wonder if we were left behind on purpose,” Chanyeol begins, one arm in his parka’s pockets. His other is at his side, hand twined around Baekhyun’s, fingers gripping only tightly enough to reassure of his presence.
Baekhyun doesn’t like how light the hand in his grasp feels, but he likes how Chanyeol’s pulse is still strong in his ulnar artery, going at a healthy rate somewhere close to sixty beats per minute. One per second. He counts each one as he speaks. “Or if we were left behind for a purpose.”
“Oh, I’m sure about that one.” Chanyeol grins again, turns in Baekhyun’s direction, and the fireflies above his head go out in time with his heartbeats. One per second. “I think I’ve fulfilled mine.”
And the light shines past Chanyeol’s everything, lighting him up, making his smile the brightest Baekhyun’s ever seen.
Baekhyun can feel his amygdala clamoring, in the way his breaths become more choked and stuck behind his breastbone.
Maybe they shouldn’t be taking advantage of an empty mall like this, while the generator is still working and while walks through malls still feel like dates. Maybe this is already a date. Maybe it isn’t, because couples don’t rehearse the goodbyes right in the middle of one.
“I promised to get you out of there,” Chanyeol reminds, smiling, the both of them lying on a luxuriously comfortable bed in one of the furniture stores near the top floor. The windows are too big; a little mote of light would easily pass through. “I guess I should’ve promised to stay with you, too.”
Baekhyun waits for Chanyeol to lean on his shoulder, but when he doesn’t, he reaches for Chanyeol’s head instead and fits that mess of curly hair somewhere near his clavicle. It fits. “Can’t you, right now?”
“I promise,” Chanyeol says, heart rate going at fifty, then at thirty-five, then at twenty, “that you won’t be alone.”
Chanyeol is never one to break promises, Baekhyun knows, because he doesn’t like lying if there isn’t a single person who thinks that he is.
It just so happens that when he fulfills one, he ends up breaking everything else -
The lights go out, and a new one takes its place, a more fulfilled glow compared to the small, quivering one Baekhyun saw a few days ago.
He doesn’t catch it, this time.
It’s a day or two after when he meets Jongin.
Briefly, when Jongin’s fingertips just accidentally brush over his, they’re much too light. Baekhyun will have to be alone, still.
But Baekhyun doesn’t cry because when Jongin comes back again, a week or few later, the younger man is tired and bright and entirely translucent, the man sleeping on his back in the same state. Jongin says that the man's name is Joonmyun and that he needs to be healed, but Baekhyun knows that they both don’t need anything more.
“I guess you’ve accomplished your mission, too,” Baekhyun says, checking both of their pulses, only because Jongin asked for it. Heart rates going at fifty, then at thirty-five… “Congratulations.” And he’s being honest.
The man on Jongin’s back goes first, but the little mote of light is patient, lingering in the air.
Baekhyun waves, and Jongin leaves with a smile.
When Baekhyun follows the two fireflies out the mall, he sees an orange lantern in the distance, dangling from someone’s hands.
Chanyeol never breaks his promises, after all.
fin :)
- masterlist + requests - watch - join -
again, side story to in the gaps between the fireflies, so if you're interested, please check it out, too :)
please support in the gaps between the fireflies by voting for it here if you liked both of these fics~ comments are loved <3