here you are (exo)
baekhyun/chanyeol (exo)
pg
vampire au
1931
They’re halfway through the next century when they meet again.
Chanyeol is sitting in a café, staring out at the restless streets of Paris. He’s careful to stay in the shade, cold fingers trying to resist the urge to press against the warm window. A car honks angrily as he takes a sip of his coffee. The heat nearly burns his tongue as it slides down his throat.
It would have, and something akin to bitterness wells up in Chanyeol’s throat.
He doesn’t do bitter anymore. Two centuries do that to you. He’d spent a decade brooding, trying to force tears in his eyes; throwing himself off cliffs just to snap a boulder in half; swallowing a bullet and spitting it back out immediately.
No, he doesn’t do bitter. He learned to stay at home during sunny days, learned how to lie low, disappear and reappear somewhere a decade later. He learned how to say goodbye without hurting people, hurting himself.
Vampire Survival 101. He learned from the best.
And maybe, maybe he longed to feel the sand lodged between his toes, the sun beating down on his face without feeling like he was about to combust the next second.
That was Old Chanyeol. New Chanyeol learned how to kiss quickly and leave in the middle of the night.
The steady drone of the café slowly lures him into a sleepy sort of daze; even if the coughing of the chef in the back alleyway is unbearably magnified and the syrupy smell of blood in the room would have turned him insane a century ago. But he had practice. He learned how to ignore the way he could notice the tiny spider climbing up the table next to him, the way he could hear the quiet giggling from across the street.
Chanyeol closes his eyes, opening them almost instantly when the door of the café opens.
The new scent of an undeniably non-human presence makes him straighten in his seat. A short man enters almost gracefully into the café, pausing before looking around.
The man meets his eyes, and Chanyeol’s stomach drops down to reside near his legs.
This time his dark brown hair is styled with a heavy fringe, framing a pair of red eyes camouflaged by brown contacts.
The man’s hand is still on the doorknob, and Chanyeol hears a minuscule hitch of breath before the man heads over to the counter, ordering a cappuccino in a familiar, lilting voice that completely short-circuits his brain.
In hindsight, Chanyeol thinks he probably should have left during the time it takes for his coffee to arrive. The man turns around and eyes him carefully, as if sensing his intention. Chanyeol slumps back into his chair, knowing that he would only be found again. He walks over to his table in a sort of determined way that would have made Chanyeol laugh if he wasn’t frozen in shock. His alabaster skin is almost translucent in the café light, and Chanyeol stares as he sits down, large hands absently reaching out to place 3 packets of sugar next to his cup.
The man blinks, then gives him a smile that tugs painfully at Chanyeol’s chest.
“You remember,” he says, eyes crinkling into crescents.
“Of course I do,” Chanyeol says, trying to force the strain out of his voice.
He remembers more. He remembers unbearable pain and burning thirst. He remembers soft lips and soft hands; tiny, long fingers tracing his face and silvery laughter punctuating his sentences. He remembers heat despite freezing skin; burning scratches on backs and feverous lips.
But he also remembers disappearances and long searches across the globe. He remembers staring across the room and watching as his lips touched someone else’s. The ring on his finger that wasn’t from him, the stolen kisses he could hear from around the corner. He remembers the nothingness: the cobblestones pressed against his cheek and the tears that will not fall.
Something warm grazes his ankle and his eyes snap involuntarily upwards. A tiny part of him longs to take his phone out just to have something to look at something other than him, but something in his smile stops Chanyeol from reaching into his pocket.
“So, Chanyeol,” he says carefully, and Chanyeol resists the urge to identify the pity in his eyes. “How have you been?”
Chanyeol waits for the acid to roll off his lips, but there is no bitterness. All he finds is exhaustion and relief.
“I’m fine, Baekhyun,” he says almost honestly. The name sounds rusty on his tongue, almost metallic on his lips. He rolls the familiar but foreign syllables in his mouth, noting the way it makes his heart accelerate.
If Baekhyun notices the irregular fluttering of Chanyeol’s heartbeat, he doesn’t show it.
“What brings you here?” Chanyeol blurts out, desperately trying not to inhale, because Baekhyun still smells the same and he’s leaning across the too-small table.
Baekhyun cups the coffee in his hands, long fingers managing to overlap each other. Chanyeol’s breath hitches when he stares too long at them, hurriedly retreating to study his own cup. It irks him that he knows how Baekhyun’s fingers look on his own skin, how the bruises look on his hip, exact replicas of Baekhyun’s handprint.
“You stopped looking for me,” Baekhyun mutters, tongue reaching out to wet his lips.
“Yes,” Chanyeol says slowly. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
Baekhyun winces and Chanyeol should be angry because is he really turning this back on him?
He remembers arriving at the edge of the clearing, breathless because Baekhyun had been so hard to trace but here he was, in the middle of England. Chanyeol remembers watching a blond Baekhyun fall into a field of daises, fingers entwined with a girl in a pretty white dress. He remembers seeing the light catching on both of their rings, and the way his heart stopped, like the last time, like the times before that.
He remembers turning to leave, because he will never be that girl, or the boy with the big eyes who made Baekhyun smile larger than he’d ever seen, or the countless others before them.
Chanyeol knew when Baekhyun realised he was there; the way his back stiffened and his head whipped around, looking right at where he was hiding behind a particularly big tree. Maybe Baekhyun was too quick for him, or maybe he was just too slow, but suddenly Baekhyun was snarling in front of him, his white suit strangely illuminating. Among the why do you have to ruin everythings and the why won’t you leave me alones, Chanyeol had stayed silent, relishing in the way Baekhyun was finally speaking to him, the way he could pretend the fire in his eyes was passion instead of fury.
This time, he didn’t look back.
It’s funny how the world works sometimes, Chanyeol thinks, watching Baekhyun take a sip of his coffee. For all those times, Baekhyun’s never been the one to actively seek him out. It feels a bit like cheating.
For all the wasted years (decades, centuries), for the emptiness, for the pain. Giving up mortality for this wonderful, beautiful boy. He should be angry. He wants to be angry, even.
But Baekhyun is sitting across from him-breathing, moving, blinking and there’s hope blooming in his chest like sunshine on a winter morning and he thinks he’s allowed to hold onto it this time.
Because if anything two centuries of living has taught him, is that it was and it is and will always be Baekhyun.
When Baekhyun looks up from his cappuccino, Chanyeol smiles back.
*
A chocolate croissant later and both of them are pretending the previous century didn’t happen.
Baekhyun laughs as widely as he remembers and he struggles to reign in the urge to hold his hand.
“I’m a designer,” Baekhyun says through a mouthful of bread, nearly spraying Chanyeol in the face with crumbs. Chanyeol feels an odd sensation of nostalgia, and resists the itch to kiss him and hand him a napkin at the same time. “Fashion. I have a showcase, actually. Next week.”
“Fashion designer, huh, Baek?” He smiles, finally deciding to push a napkin across the table. A hushed conversation in a library two centuries ago flashes in his mind. “You must be ecstatic.”
“Yeah,” Baekhyun says breathlessly and Chanyeol recognises the glint in his eyes. “I can’t believe it worked out.”
“I can,” Chanyeol says, and he laughs when Baekhyun nearly inhales coffee through his nose.
“What are you doing in Paris?” Baekhyun says almost accusingly, jabbing a finger at his chest.
“I’m a photographer.”
“Oh,” Baekhyun blinks. “I thought you didn’t like photography?”
Something threatens to gush out of Chanyeol’s mouth and he clamps his lips shut, swallowing. “People change,” Chanyeol replies weakly.
They spend the next hour discussing the worst fashion trends of the century, and Chanyeol tries not to take a peek at Baekhyun’s ring finger.
*
Almost two hours after Baekhyun first sat down, Chanyeol realises something akin to warmth is fluttering around in his chest.
“Are you seeing someone?” Baekhyun asks abruptly in the middle of a very lame joke.
Chanyeol looks up, blinking when Baekhyun refuses to meet his eyes.
“I…no,” Chanyeol says into the depths of his coffee cup. “I’m not.”
“Oh,” he hears Baekhyun say, and when he makes the mistake of peering upwards, he sees him grinning widely, before he schools his expression into one of polite concern.
The gesture delights him more than it should.
Minutes bleed into hours, and he finds himself staring too long at Baekhyun’s slender fingers, the way his eyes still crinkle and the way his lips form his pout. Their legs are a large mess of limbs under the table, and Chanyeol finds out that Baekhyun still kicks his legs like a small child during a particularly exciting story. Baekhyun discovers that Chanyeol is still as clumsy when his long arms nearly sweep their cups onto the floor for the fifth time in an hour.
Only when the café owner arrives to collect their cups personally do they realise it’s already past dinnertime.
“Was I keeping you?” Baekhyun says, eyes widening, as they edge past the tables towards the door.
“Not really,” Chanyeol says truthfully, and they duck out of the café into the sun setting over the city. Light spills over the slant of Baekhyun’s face, bathing his ivory skin in golden beams. Chanyeol sucks in a tiny breath, but he doesn’t look away.
“Do you have-” Baekhyun stops and gazes up at him uncertainly. Chanyeol is struck again by how small he is, the top of his head barely grazing his chin. “Do you want to grab dinner?”
“Y-” Chanyeol thinks it’s ridiculous that he still gets tongue-tied and nods, not trusting his own voice. He doesn’t bother reminding him that vampires don’t actually need dinner.
Baekhyun smiles as they walk away from the café, chattering eagerly about a dish he wants to try. Paris is becoming alive under the sinking sun and Chanyeol notes his sudden affection for this achingly beautiful city.
“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun mumbles suddenly, halfway through a dramatic monologue about the beauty of mussels.
And Chanyeol knows. Chanyeol knows why.
Baekhyun stops walking and Chanyeol finds himself staring down at him in the middle of the street.
“You’ve been waiting for a long time, haven’t you?” Baekhyun says almost sadly.
“Yes,” Chanyeol says, surprising both of them when his hand reaches for Baekhyun’s. “But I’m not now.”
aka baekhyun being tsundere af
pg
vampire au
1931
They’re halfway through the next century when they meet again.
Chanyeol is sitting in a café, staring out at the restless streets of Paris. He’s careful to stay in the shade, cold fingers trying to resist the urge to press against the warm window. A car honks angrily as he takes a sip of his coffee. The heat nearly burns his tongue as it slides down his throat.
It would have, and something akin to bitterness wells up in Chanyeol’s throat.
He doesn’t do bitter anymore. Two centuries do that to you. He’d spent a decade brooding, trying to force tears in his eyes; throwing himself off cliffs just to snap a boulder in half; swallowing a bullet and spitting it back out immediately.
No, he doesn’t do bitter. He learned to stay at home during sunny days, learned how to lie low, disappear and reappear somewhere a decade later. He learned how to say goodbye without hurting people, hurting himself.
Vampire Survival 101. He learned from the best.
And maybe, maybe he longed to feel the sand lodged between his toes, the sun beating down on his face without feeling like he was about to combust the next second.
That was Old Chanyeol. New Chanyeol learned how to kiss quickly and leave in the middle of the night.
The steady drone of the café slowly lures him into a sleepy sort of daze; even if the coughing of the chef in the back alleyway is unbearably magnified and the syrupy smell of blood in the room would have turned him insane a century ago. But he had practice. He learned how to ignore the way he could notice the tiny spider climbing up the table next to him, the way he could hear the quiet giggling from across the street.
Chanyeol closes his eyes, opening them almost instantly when the door of the café opens.
The new scent of an undeniably non-human presence makes him straighten in his seat. A short man enters almost gracefully into the café, pausing before looking around.
The man meets his eyes, and Chanyeol’s stomach drops down to reside near his legs.
This time his dark brown hair is styled with a heavy fringe, framing a pair of red eyes camouflaged by brown contacts.
The man’s hand is still on the doorknob, and Chanyeol hears a minuscule hitch of breath before the man heads over to the counter, ordering a cappuccino in a familiar, lilting voice that completely short-circuits his brain.
In hindsight, Chanyeol thinks he probably should have left during the time it takes for his coffee to arrive. The man turns around and eyes him carefully, as if sensing his intention. Chanyeol slumps back into his chair, knowing that he would only be found again. He walks over to his table in a sort of determined way that would have made Chanyeol laugh if he wasn’t frozen in shock. His alabaster skin is almost translucent in the café light, and Chanyeol stares as he sits down, large hands absently reaching out to place 3 packets of sugar next to his cup.
The man blinks, then gives him a smile that tugs painfully at Chanyeol’s chest.
“You remember,” he says, eyes crinkling into crescents.
“Of course I do,” Chanyeol says, trying to force the strain out of his voice.
He remembers more. He remembers unbearable pain and burning thirst. He remembers soft lips and soft hands; tiny, long fingers tracing his face and silvery laughter punctuating his sentences. He remembers heat despite freezing skin; burning scratches on backs and feverous lips.
But he also remembers disappearances and long searches across the globe. He remembers staring across the room and watching as his lips touched someone else’s. The ring on his finger that wasn’t from him, the stolen kisses he could hear from around the corner. He remembers the nothingness: the cobblestones pressed against his cheek and the tears that will not fall.
Something warm grazes his ankle and his eyes snap involuntarily upwards. A tiny part of him longs to take his phone out just to have something to look at something other than him, but something in his smile stops Chanyeol from reaching into his pocket.
“So, Chanyeol,” he says carefully, and Chanyeol resists the urge to identify the pity in his eyes. “How have you been?”
Chanyeol waits for the acid to roll off his lips, but there is no bitterness. All he finds is exhaustion and relief.
“I’m fine, Baekhyun,” he says almost honestly. The name sounds rusty on his tongue, almost metallic on his lips. He rolls the familiar but foreign syllables in his mouth, noting the way it makes his heart accelerate.
If Baekhyun notices the irregular fluttering of Chanyeol’s heartbeat, he doesn’t show it.
“What brings you here?” Chanyeol blurts out, desperately trying not to inhale, because Baekhyun still smells the same and he’s leaning across the too-small table.
Baekhyun cups the coffee in his hands, long fingers managing to overlap each other. Chanyeol’s breath hitches when he stares too long at them, hurriedly retreating to study his own cup. It irks him that he knows how Baekhyun’s fingers look on his own skin, how the bruises look on his hip, exact replicas of Baekhyun’s handprint.
“You stopped looking for me,” Baekhyun mutters, tongue reaching out to wet his lips.
“Yes,” Chanyeol says slowly. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
Baekhyun winces and Chanyeol should be angry because is he really turning this back on him?
He remembers arriving at the edge of the clearing, breathless because Baekhyun had been so hard to trace but here he was, in the middle of England. Chanyeol remembers watching a blond Baekhyun fall into a field of daises, fingers entwined with a girl in a pretty white dress. He remembers seeing the light catching on both of their rings, and the way his heart stopped, like the last time, like the times before that.
He remembers turning to leave, because he will never be that girl, or the boy with the big eyes who made Baekhyun smile larger than he’d ever seen, or the countless others before them.
Chanyeol knew when Baekhyun realised he was there; the way his back stiffened and his head whipped around, looking right at where he was hiding behind a particularly big tree. Maybe Baekhyun was too quick for him, or maybe he was just too slow, but suddenly Baekhyun was snarling in front of him, his white suit strangely illuminating. Among the why do you have to ruin everythings and the why won’t you leave me alones, Chanyeol had stayed silent, relishing in the way Baekhyun was finally speaking to him, the way he could pretend the fire in his eyes was passion instead of fury.
This time, he didn’t look back.
It’s funny how the world works sometimes, Chanyeol thinks, watching Baekhyun take a sip of his coffee. For all those times, Baekhyun’s never been the one to actively seek him out. It feels a bit like cheating.
For all the wasted years (decades, centuries), for the emptiness, for the pain. Giving up mortality for this wonderful, beautiful boy. He should be angry. He wants to be angry, even.
But Baekhyun is sitting across from him-breathing, moving, blinking and there’s hope blooming in his chest like sunshine on a winter morning and he thinks he’s allowed to hold onto it this time.
Because if anything two centuries of living has taught him, is that it was and it is and will always be Baekhyun.
When Baekhyun looks up from his cappuccino, Chanyeol smiles back.
*
A chocolate croissant later and both of them are pretending the previous century didn’t happen.
Baekhyun laughs as widely as he remembers and he struggles to reign in the urge to hold his hand.
“I’m a designer,” Baekhyun says through a mouthful of bread, nearly spraying Chanyeol in the face with crumbs. Chanyeol feels an odd sensation of nostalgia, and resists the itch to kiss him and hand him a napkin at the same time. “Fashion. I have a showcase, actually. Next week.”
“Fashion designer, huh, Baek?” He smiles, finally deciding to push a napkin across the table. A hushed conversation in a library two centuries ago flashes in his mind. “You must be ecstatic.”
“Yeah,” Baekhyun says breathlessly and Chanyeol recognises the glint in his eyes. “I can’t believe it worked out.”
“I can,” Chanyeol says, and he laughs when Baekhyun nearly inhales coffee through his nose.
“What are you doing in Paris?” Baekhyun says almost accusingly, jabbing a finger at his chest.
“I’m a photographer.”
“Oh,” Baekhyun blinks. “I thought you didn’t like photography?”
Something threatens to gush out of Chanyeol’s mouth and he clamps his lips shut, swallowing. “People change,” Chanyeol replies weakly.
They spend the next hour discussing the worst fashion trends of the century, and Chanyeol tries not to take a peek at Baekhyun’s ring finger.
*
Almost two hours after Baekhyun first sat down, Chanyeol realises something akin to warmth is fluttering around in his chest.
“Are you seeing someone?” Baekhyun asks abruptly in the middle of a very lame joke.
Chanyeol looks up, blinking when Baekhyun refuses to meet his eyes.
“I…no,” Chanyeol says into the depths of his coffee cup. “I’m not.”
“Oh,” he hears Baekhyun say, and when he makes the mistake of peering upwards, he sees him grinning widely, before he schools his expression into one of polite concern.
The gesture delights him more than it should.
Minutes bleed into hours, and he finds himself staring too long at Baekhyun’s slender fingers, the way his eyes still crinkle and the way his lips form his pout. Their legs are a large mess of limbs under the table, and Chanyeol finds out that Baekhyun still kicks his legs like a small child during a particularly exciting story. Baekhyun discovers that Chanyeol is still as clumsy when his long arms nearly sweep their cups onto the floor for the fifth time in an hour.
Only when the café owner arrives to collect their cups personally do they realise it’s already past dinnertime.
“Was I keeping you?” Baekhyun says, eyes widening, as they edge past the tables towards the door.
“Not really,” Chanyeol says truthfully, and they duck out of the café into the sun setting over the city. Light spills over the slant of Baekhyun’s face, bathing his ivory skin in golden beams. Chanyeol sucks in a tiny breath, but he doesn’t look away.
“Do you have-” Baekhyun stops and gazes up at him uncertainly. Chanyeol is struck again by how small he is, the top of his head barely grazing his chin. “Do you want to grab dinner?”
“Y-” Chanyeol thinks it’s ridiculous that he still gets tongue-tied and nods, not trusting his own voice. He doesn’t bother reminding him that vampires don’t actually need dinner.
Baekhyun smiles as they walk away from the café, chattering eagerly about a dish he wants to try. Paris is becoming alive under the sinking sun and Chanyeol notes his sudden affection for this achingly beautiful city.
“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun mumbles suddenly, halfway through a dramatic monologue about the beauty of mussels.
And Chanyeol knows. Chanyeol knows why.
Baekhyun stops walking and Chanyeol finds himself staring down at him in the middle of the street.
“You’ve been waiting for a long time, haven’t you?” Baekhyun says almost sadly.
“Yes,” Chanyeol says, surprising both of them when his hand reaches for Baekhyun’s. “But I’m not now.”
aka baekhyun being tsundere af