DAY 6: Again, Today, I Reach Out My Hand
Title: Again, Today, I Reach Out My Hand
Written by: metafictionally
Pairing: Baekhyun/Tao
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Mentions of death, illness
Summary: Tao is the student who can hear when people are dying, and Baekhyun-is, well, dying. Based on the manga "The Day I Become A Butterfly."
0.5
"The kids at school are saying that he can predict when someone is gonna die," Baekhyun tells the doctor, lying on his back on the examining table and counting the dots in the ceiling tiles. "Everybody made a bet on the school principal. Tao was the only one who got it right."
The doctor gives him a disapproving look from where she's filling in blanks on a form. "That's not a very tasteful joke," she says. "You shouldn't listen to things like that, Baekhyun-ah."
"Mmm." Baekhyun sits up, pulls his shirt back on over his head. "I was thinking of asking him how much longer I have left."
"Baekhyun-"
"I know," Baekhyun says, looking out the window behind the doctor's shoulder. "I know."
"You've come this far! You're going to be fine," says the doctor, her voice softening into something quiet and sympathetic. It's the voice people have been using with Baekhyun for the last three months, through tests and screenings and biopsies and increasingly negative prognoses. "Don't worry so much, Baekhyun-ah. You'll just stress yourself."
Later, in the car driving home, Baekhyun looks out the window and thinks about Tao, his dark hair and dark eyes and the way his mouth had set, the first time he walked into class and saw Baekhyun sitting there.
Am I that much to be pitied? Baekhyun thinks.
Maybe he will ask Tao, tomorrow.
1.0
They kiss the first time and it is an accident, a chance brushing of Baekhyun’s lips against the cool skin at Tao’s collarbone.
There is a distinct polarity, a gravitational pull that draws them together like that-Tao’s arm around Baekhyun’s back and Baekhyun’s arms pressed against Tao’s chest. It is awkward and not in the least romantic, and Baekhyun’s stomach hurts, but even then he is vaguely aware of the press of soft skin on skin and the tingle of soft electricity that runs between them.
It's funny, because Tao doesn't really like him, Baekhyun thinks. Tao doesn't really like anyone-or, at least, he keeps everyone at an arm's reach, distant. When he speaks, he does so coldly. His eyes are almost never kind.
Baekhyun doesn't think he can blame Tao for that.
After all, the rumors that began to circulate when Tao came to school for the first time-"Have you heard? He can predict someone's death." "Isn't that a little too much?" "I'm just saying, that's what I've heard!"-had been hard to ignore. Baekhyun knows a little of what it feels like to have all eyes on your back, but none to meet your gaze when you turn around to see.
"And here I thought you hated me," he murmurs against Tao's skin, and is fairly sure that the words are lost before they reach his ears.
1.5
Here is how it happened:
In the middle of a conversation, pain spikes through Baekhyun's side, so bright and sharp it makes him want to throw up or pass out or both. "Oh," is what he manages, hands clutched over his stomach, stumbling against a desk and then dropping into a crouch.
"Baekhyun-ah," Kyungsoo says, alarmed, his voice a little too loud for the chatter of the classroom.
The students all know he's sick. Baekhyun wishes their concern wasn't so obvious.
"I'm fine," he says, although the words are weak, forced out through a throat thick with bile and closed by pain. It feels a little like drowning, if Baekhyun were to think of what drowning felt like, like not being able to take a breath, like his head is spinning, like his organs are on fire.
And then someone's arms under his, lifting him, holding his body quiet and steady. Tao, Baekhyun thinks, his hands pressed to a warm, solid back.
"Taking you," Tao says. His voice is low and not unkind, not cold, the way Baekhyun had expected it to be. "To the nurse's office."
"Oh," Baekhyun says. He lets Tao pick him up, brushes his lips over Tao's collarbone, and falls unconscious halfway there.
2.0
They kiss the second time and it is purposeful.
Tao drags Baekhyun’s shirt up and exposes his stomach, the one place on his own body at which he cannot stand to look. It is the source of every one of his nightmares-that tumor, growing there. Cancerous and malignant, malicious. Baekhyun hates it, but Tao presses his lips against it, gentle and sweet and all of the things that Baekhyun never knew him to be, and suddenly it is all right.
This is not a romantic gesture, either. It is intensely intimate and personal in too many ways to count, but it is hardly romantic. Baekhyun doesn’t know if Tao knows how to be romantic, whether Baekhyun would even want him to be.
They still aren't friends, really.
It's just that somehow, Baekhyun's is the hand that Tao will take when he reaches it out, even when no one else will look his way. Afraid of what Tao can do, or what he could be, maybe.
Baekhyun isn't. When you know you're going to die, it changes the way you look at things.
"Don't," he says, one hand pressed over his face and the other pushing at Tao's shoulder. It doesn't help. Tao is much stronger than Baekhyun, even if Baekhyun were at his healthiest.
"No, you don't," Tao replies, his hands warm and large and solid on Baekhyun's hips, his mouth still pressed to the soft skin of Baekhyun's stomach. No one has ever touched him like this, like even the worst part of him, the weakest, sickest part, is something that deserves tenderness.
Eyes still closed, hand still pressed to Tao's shoulder, Baekhyun asks, "Why me?"
For a long moment, Tao doesn't say anything. He presses another kiss against Baekhyun's stomach and then pulls back, looks down at Baekhyun, his hands still on Baekhyun's waist. "I don't know, either," he says, but something about the words tastes like a lie.
"You can't really…" Baekhyun begins, and regrets the words as soon as he starts to say them. "You can't really tell, right? If someone's going to-?"
Tao is silent.
"It's silly to even think about," Baekhyun says. "I just… because I'm so sick…"
"I'm not your friend because you are sick," Tao says, his words slow and soft and measured, and Baekhyun takes them as the solace he wants them to be.
2.5
At school, Baekhyun sits down in the desk next to Tao's and writes him a note.
Tao, it says. To be honest, it's hard for me too.
He tucks it into Tao's notebook and goes back to his seat, and even when Tao comes in and sits down, Baekhyun doesn't turn around.
3.0, 4.0
The third and fourth times come in quick succession. They're in Baekhyun's room, in the early afternoon, and Tao’s arms are around Baekhyun again.
"Baekhyun," Tao says. Baekhyun likes the way Tao says his name, the edges colored by Tao's accent. He scoots a little closer, so that his knees are pressed to Baekhyun's.
Tao is so much bigger than Baekhyun, but in this space, in the quiet, it seems like he's just as small and quiet and fragile as Baekhyun feels, sometimes.
"What?" Baekhyun whispers back. Tao's hands are around his wrists, fingers rubbing over the bones in Baekhyun's arm. They're visible now, protruding through skin that seems too paper-thin to keep him contained anymore.
"I like you a lot." Tao's voice is low-hardly a whisper-and suddenly they are so close that it seems like the most natural thing in the world for Baekhyun to lean up and kiss him. So he does, his lips pressing to Tao's in a kiss that lingers, sweet, for only a moment before Baekhyun pulls away.
"Sorry... I don’t know why I did that," Baekhyun excuses, but Tao is kissing him again, hands cupped around his face and lips pressed against his own. That is the fourth time, their fourth kiss-entirely unexpected and painfully beautiful.
"Who said you should be sorry?" Tao asks him, and kisses him again.
4.5
They schedule the surgery for May, springtime, so classes will be over. The cherry blossoms will have bloomed by then, and the air will be warmer, heavy with the incipient moisture of summer's thunderstorms. It's a tiny comfort to know that he'll be able to see that, at least, and the students won't be staring at Baekhyun's empty chair.
He voices that thought aloud exactly once. His mother slaps him across the face and then cries, and Baekhyun doesn't mention it again.
Still, when he sees Tao next, he folds himself into Tao's arms and doesn't speak, not a word. Tao doesn't make him-he never does. He just wraps his arms around Baekhyun and pulls him close, presses soft kisses to his hair and waits until Baekhyun has finished crying before he lets Baekhyun pull away to wipe his eyes.
"May 16th," Baekhyun eventually says, his words muffled into the fabric of Tao's sweatshirt.
"That is a long time from now," Tao says.
5.0
Baekhyun wakes to the fifth time in Tao's bed, a slow and sweet rise into consciousness that ends in Tao’s eyes. They are soft and fluttering this time, a press of lips to the neck, the forehead, the corner of Baekhyun’s mouth. "Can’t sleep?" Baekhyun asks, and Tao is silent-and they are kissing again, and the suffocating hopelessness that perpetually fills Baekhyun’s chest is dispersed, for the moment.
"I don’t want to go home." What he means is, Keep me here with you.
The knowledge of what ‘home’ means hangs heavy in the air above and between them, thoughts of surgeries and scalpels and doctor’s reports clouding their senses. Baekhyun is terrified and Tao is there, is pressing his lips to the hollow of Baekhyun’s throat and inhaling.
I love you, Baekhyun thinks, his hands cupped around the back of Tao's neck.
But he doesn't say it aloud.
6.0
They skip school and spend the day in Tao’s bed, lazy in the afternoon sunlight that filters through his window shades.
Naked, they press together in ways that neither thought possible, and Baekhyun explores every inch of Tao’s skin, smooth and bared beneath his fingertips. His body is so different than Baekhyun's, skin golden and sunkissed, stretched over muscles Baekhyun has never had. Tao is beautiful. Baekhyun wonders that he ever found Tao frightening.
Tao's skin against Baekhyun's is intoxicatingly bittersweet. "A dying wish," Baekhyun mutters, and Tao silences him with a kiss.
The sunlight comes in, hazy and golden, onto the sheets and pillow and Tao's hair, and time passes in the form of changing shadows and the color of the highlights in his eyes. They turn the clock towards the wall and immerse themselves in each other, and they move carefully.
Sometime during the vague in-between, Baekhyun wonders to himself: "If I died, I would be happy because of this." And when Tao’s eyes go dark, Baekhyun realises he’s spoken aloud.
"I would rather that you didn’t."
6.0
Baekhyun goes home that afternoon, fingertips twined in Tao’s and a smile on his face. His parents' faces are stony, but their bodies release angels of relief at the sight of him, and the sight is nearly enough to tether Baekhyun's body back to the earth. Nearly.
Tao lets him go-lets him fly. Baekhyun looks back and feels the gentle, insistent throb of the half-wing tattooed on his hand, exactly reversed and perfectly symmetrical with Tao’s.
(The man at the parlor had almost turned him away for being too young, but Baekhyun had looked at him very quietly and said, "I have cancer," and the man had relented.)
And then Tao chases him as he walks away, reaches out and takes his hand and tells him. "I’m not strong enough," he says, and he cries, and Baekhyun reaches out with his arms and with his heart and takes Tao in.
"The people you tell can become stronger because of it," Baekhyun tells him, and "You’re truly kind."
"Come back to me," Tao says.
I love you, and I need you. They say a thousand things without saying a word, their noses pressed together and their mouths barely brushing, and it’s as if they only have to think the words and they’ll know.
They always know.
Tao was there when Baekhyun was terrified, and Tao let himself fall even though he knew Baekhyun would soon be gone. The faith is tangible between them, that trust, and spoken aloud in Tao’s words-"Come back to me"-is a desire stronger than anything they’ve ever felt before.
7.0
Baekhyun goes-
0.0
-and is reborn again, in a thousand silver-winged butterflies fluttering on the afternoon breeze.
When he gets home, Tao is waiting.
Written by: metafictionally
Pairing: Baekhyun/Tao
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Mentions of death, illness
Summary: Tao is the student who can hear when people are dying, and Baekhyun-is, well, dying. Based on the manga "The Day I Become A Butterfly."
0.5
"The kids at school are saying that he can predict when someone is gonna die," Baekhyun tells the doctor, lying on his back on the examining table and counting the dots in the ceiling tiles. "Everybody made a bet on the school principal. Tao was the only one who got it right."
The doctor gives him a disapproving look from where she's filling in blanks on a form. "That's not a very tasteful joke," she says. "You shouldn't listen to things like that, Baekhyun-ah."
"Mmm." Baekhyun sits up, pulls his shirt back on over his head. "I was thinking of asking him how much longer I have left."
"Baekhyun-"
"I know," Baekhyun says, looking out the window behind the doctor's shoulder. "I know."
"You've come this far! You're going to be fine," says the doctor, her voice softening into something quiet and sympathetic. It's the voice people have been using with Baekhyun for the last three months, through tests and screenings and biopsies and increasingly negative prognoses. "Don't worry so much, Baekhyun-ah. You'll just stress yourself."
Later, in the car driving home, Baekhyun looks out the window and thinks about Tao, his dark hair and dark eyes and the way his mouth had set, the first time he walked into class and saw Baekhyun sitting there.
Am I that much to be pitied? Baekhyun thinks.
Maybe he will ask Tao, tomorrow.
1.0
They kiss the first time and it is an accident, a chance brushing of Baekhyun’s lips against the cool skin at Tao’s collarbone.
There is a distinct polarity, a gravitational pull that draws them together like that-Tao’s arm around Baekhyun’s back and Baekhyun’s arms pressed against Tao’s chest. It is awkward and not in the least romantic, and Baekhyun’s stomach hurts, but even then he is vaguely aware of the press of soft skin on skin and the tingle of soft electricity that runs between them.
It's funny, because Tao doesn't really like him, Baekhyun thinks. Tao doesn't really like anyone-or, at least, he keeps everyone at an arm's reach, distant. When he speaks, he does so coldly. His eyes are almost never kind.
Baekhyun doesn't think he can blame Tao for that.
After all, the rumors that began to circulate when Tao came to school for the first time-"Have you heard? He can predict someone's death." "Isn't that a little too much?" "I'm just saying, that's what I've heard!"-had been hard to ignore. Baekhyun knows a little of what it feels like to have all eyes on your back, but none to meet your gaze when you turn around to see.
"And here I thought you hated me," he murmurs against Tao's skin, and is fairly sure that the words are lost before they reach his ears.
1.5
Here is how it happened:
In the middle of a conversation, pain spikes through Baekhyun's side, so bright and sharp it makes him want to throw up or pass out or both. "Oh," is what he manages, hands clutched over his stomach, stumbling against a desk and then dropping into a crouch.
"Baekhyun-ah," Kyungsoo says, alarmed, his voice a little too loud for the chatter of the classroom.
The students all know he's sick. Baekhyun wishes their concern wasn't so obvious.
"I'm fine," he says, although the words are weak, forced out through a throat thick with bile and closed by pain. It feels a little like drowning, if Baekhyun were to think of what drowning felt like, like not being able to take a breath, like his head is spinning, like his organs are on fire.
And then someone's arms under his, lifting him, holding his body quiet and steady. Tao, Baekhyun thinks, his hands pressed to a warm, solid back.
"Taking you," Tao says. His voice is low and not unkind, not cold, the way Baekhyun had expected it to be. "To the nurse's office."
"Oh," Baekhyun says. He lets Tao pick him up, brushes his lips over Tao's collarbone, and falls unconscious halfway there.
2.0
They kiss the second time and it is purposeful.
Tao drags Baekhyun’s shirt up and exposes his stomach, the one place on his own body at which he cannot stand to look. It is the source of every one of his nightmares-that tumor, growing there. Cancerous and malignant, malicious. Baekhyun hates it, but Tao presses his lips against it, gentle and sweet and all of the things that Baekhyun never knew him to be, and suddenly it is all right.
This is not a romantic gesture, either. It is intensely intimate and personal in too many ways to count, but it is hardly romantic. Baekhyun doesn’t know if Tao knows how to be romantic, whether Baekhyun would even want him to be.
They still aren't friends, really.
It's just that somehow, Baekhyun's is the hand that Tao will take when he reaches it out, even when no one else will look his way. Afraid of what Tao can do, or what he could be, maybe.
Baekhyun isn't. When you know you're going to die, it changes the way you look at things.
"Don't," he says, one hand pressed over his face and the other pushing at Tao's shoulder. It doesn't help. Tao is much stronger than Baekhyun, even if Baekhyun were at his healthiest.
"No, you don't," Tao replies, his hands warm and large and solid on Baekhyun's hips, his mouth still pressed to the soft skin of Baekhyun's stomach. No one has ever touched him like this, like even the worst part of him, the weakest, sickest part, is something that deserves tenderness.
Eyes still closed, hand still pressed to Tao's shoulder, Baekhyun asks, "Why me?"
For a long moment, Tao doesn't say anything. He presses another kiss against Baekhyun's stomach and then pulls back, looks down at Baekhyun, his hands still on Baekhyun's waist. "I don't know, either," he says, but something about the words tastes like a lie.
"You can't really…" Baekhyun begins, and regrets the words as soon as he starts to say them. "You can't really tell, right? If someone's going to-?"
Tao is silent.
"It's silly to even think about," Baekhyun says. "I just… because I'm so sick…"
"I'm not your friend because you are sick," Tao says, his words slow and soft and measured, and Baekhyun takes them as the solace he wants them to be.
2.5
At school, Baekhyun sits down in the desk next to Tao's and writes him a note.
Tao, it says. To be honest, it's hard for me too.
He tucks it into Tao's notebook and goes back to his seat, and even when Tao comes in and sits down, Baekhyun doesn't turn around.
3.0, 4.0
The third and fourth times come in quick succession. They're in Baekhyun's room, in the early afternoon, and Tao’s arms are around Baekhyun again.
"Baekhyun," Tao says. Baekhyun likes the way Tao says his name, the edges colored by Tao's accent. He scoots a little closer, so that his knees are pressed to Baekhyun's.
Tao is so much bigger than Baekhyun, but in this space, in the quiet, it seems like he's just as small and quiet and fragile as Baekhyun feels, sometimes.
"What?" Baekhyun whispers back. Tao's hands are around his wrists, fingers rubbing over the bones in Baekhyun's arm. They're visible now, protruding through skin that seems too paper-thin to keep him contained anymore.
"I like you a lot." Tao's voice is low-hardly a whisper-and suddenly they are so close that it seems like the most natural thing in the world for Baekhyun to lean up and kiss him. So he does, his lips pressing to Tao's in a kiss that lingers, sweet, for only a moment before Baekhyun pulls away.
"Sorry... I don’t know why I did that," Baekhyun excuses, but Tao is kissing him again, hands cupped around his face and lips pressed against his own. That is the fourth time, their fourth kiss-entirely unexpected and painfully beautiful.
"Who said you should be sorry?" Tao asks him, and kisses him again.
4.5
They schedule the surgery for May, springtime, so classes will be over. The cherry blossoms will have bloomed by then, and the air will be warmer, heavy with the incipient moisture of summer's thunderstorms. It's a tiny comfort to know that he'll be able to see that, at least, and the students won't be staring at Baekhyun's empty chair.
He voices that thought aloud exactly once. His mother slaps him across the face and then cries, and Baekhyun doesn't mention it again.
Still, when he sees Tao next, he folds himself into Tao's arms and doesn't speak, not a word. Tao doesn't make him-he never does. He just wraps his arms around Baekhyun and pulls him close, presses soft kisses to his hair and waits until Baekhyun has finished crying before he lets Baekhyun pull away to wipe his eyes.
"May 16th," Baekhyun eventually says, his words muffled into the fabric of Tao's sweatshirt.
"That is a long time from now," Tao says.
5.0
Baekhyun wakes to the fifth time in Tao's bed, a slow and sweet rise into consciousness that ends in Tao’s eyes. They are soft and fluttering this time, a press of lips to the neck, the forehead, the corner of Baekhyun’s mouth. "Can’t sleep?" Baekhyun asks, and Tao is silent-and they are kissing again, and the suffocating hopelessness that perpetually fills Baekhyun’s chest is dispersed, for the moment.
"I don’t want to go home." What he means is, Keep me here with you.
The knowledge of what ‘home’ means hangs heavy in the air above and between them, thoughts of surgeries and scalpels and doctor’s reports clouding their senses. Baekhyun is terrified and Tao is there, is pressing his lips to the hollow of Baekhyun’s throat and inhaling.
I love you, Baekhyun thinks, his hands cupped around the back of Tao's neck.
But he doesn't say it aloud.
6.0
They skip school and spend the day in Tao’s bed, lazy in the afternoon sunlight that filters through his window shades.
Naked, they press together in ways that neither thought possible, and Baekhyun explores every inch of Tao’s skin, smooth and bared beneath his fingertips. His body is so different than Baekhyun's, skin golden and sunkissed, stretched over muscles Baekhyun has never had. Tao is beautiful. Baekhyun wonders that he ever found Tao frightening.
Tao's skin against Baekhyun's is intoxicatingly bittersweet. "A dying wish," Baekhyun mutters, and Tao silences him with a kiss.
The sunlight comes in, hazy and golden, onto the sheets and pillow and Tao's hair, and time passes in the form of changing shadows and the color of the highlights in his eyes. They turn the clock towards the wall and immerse themselves in each other, and they move carefully.
Sometime during the vague in-between, Baekhyun wonders to himself: "If I died, I would be happy because of this." And when Tao’s eyes go dark, Baekhyun realises he’s spoken aloud.
"I would rather that you didn’t."
6.0
Baekhyun goes home that afternoon, fingertips twined in Tao’s and a smile on his face. His parents' faces are stony, but their bodies release angels of relief at the sight of him, and the sight is nearly enough to tether Baekhyun's body back to the earth. Nearly.
Tao lets him go-lets him fly. Baekhyun looks back and feels the gentle, insistent throb of the half-wing tattooed on his hand, exactly reversed and perfectly symmetrical with Tao’s.
(The man at the parlor had almost turned him away for being too young, but Baekhyun had looked at him very quietly and said, "I have cancer," and the man had relented.)
And then Tao chases him as he walks away, reaches out and takes his hand and tells him. "I’m not strong enough," he says, and he cries, and Baekhyun reaches out with his arms and with his heart and takes Tao in.
"The people you tell can become stronger because of it," Baekhyun tells him, and "You’re truly kind."
"Come back to me," Tao says.
I love you, and I need you. They say a thousand things without saying a word, their noses pressed together and their mouths barely brushing, and it’s as if they only have to think the words and they’ll know.
They always know.
Tao was there when Baekhyun was terrified, and Tao let himself fall even though he knew Baekhyun would soon be gone. The faith is tangible between them, that trust, and spoken aloud in Tao’s words-"Come back to me"-is a desire stronger than anything they’ve ever felt before.
7.0
Baekhyun goes-
0.0
-and is reborn again, in a thousand silver-winged butterflies fluttering on the afternoon breeze.
When he gets home, Tao is waiting.