[fic] How to Get Rich Quick (2/5)

[ofolivesnginger]

Author: ofolivesnginger
Fandom: EXO
Pairing: Chanyeol/Baekhyun
Rating: PG-13
Words: 6040
Warnings: Adopted brothers.
Summary: Baekhyun hadn't expected Chanyeol to be so good at being famous.
A/N: Moving right along, we are! I should warn that this fic will eventually get quite high in rating. (And by that I mean like, NC-17.) Other than that, enjoy!

Part Two of the How to Get Rich Quick series.

Part I






II. Buy and Borrow

It’s 10:30 on Saturday morning when Baekhyun wakes up, curled feral on top of his blanket, and drops just about right back to bed. He doesn’t fall asleep again, as much as he would have loved to, instead lies while the sun beats against his ass and thinks about the gravity of what he’d agreed to last night.

Eventually he manages to stop thinking. And the first thing he chooses to do is make a bunch of phone calls, and for one reason or another, he gets Sehun to agree to water his plants first before actually informing the bar of his leave. He’s known the owner for years, so it’s not like he was worried he’d get rejected. Problem comes when the guy asks him “how long?” Baekhyun blanks out for a couple of seconds, having never considered the question until then. He’d just assumed that Chanyeol’s “a while” meant that he was free to leave whenever he felt like it, or at least until Kris was back. In a fit of madness he asks for two whole months, just to be safe. And he gets it, a little too easily.

He thinks about phoning Chanyeol on the second day, just to remind him again that he’s coming, except he clearly remembers the way to the house and still has a key, so he decides on a surprise visit. He pays the rent in advance, sets up his answering machine, leaves a sticky on the fridge for Sehun and some cash for the kid in an envelope, stuck on with a magnet. He packs his bags last-just a medium sized suitcase with a few sets of clothes, socks and boxers, toiletries, chargers, laptop. He brings two sets of formal attire, and remembers while going through the drawers to bring Chanyeol back the tie he accidentally took with him last time.

Baekhyun revives the SUV from the underground parking lot dungeon, and she hums as he lugs his stuff down the apartment’s stairs. It’s been a while since he’d driven the car, been a while since he’d driven at all, really. If he thinks about it, it’s a little like downgrading. From getting picked up everywhere to driving. Driving two bodies, then driving one. And then foregoing the car altogether for public transport and monthly passes. The one he’s been buying is fairly local. Gangnam by metro is too long a ride to boil in moving tin compartments.

So he takes the car down the usual highways. He’s been down the road once or twice, but the exit off Bucheon isn’t hard to catch. About half an hour on the road the sun gets right over his head, and Baekhyun cranks open the sunroof and two black tinted panes, driving 80 miles an hour with the wind whipping past his windows, taking with it all the dust that’s collected on the car’s dashboard.

Baekhyun slides on a pair of shades, leans an elbow on the windowsill. The radio’s set to an English station, sound fuzzy and static, so Baekhyun reaches into the glove compartment hoping for some CD’s. His hands find the thickness of cassette boxes, the ribbed texture of its sides, tossed in the corner of a Kia Sorento 2012 for whatever reason. He pulls one out, looks at it.

He remembers owning a convertible some time ago, only for a little while, some collateral for something owed to some friend’s brother’s something’s girlfriend but there it was. Left to the band’s disposal for three weeks the summer after high school. Bunch of rugged country boys relapsing back to their natures, riding her through wheat fields where there was one stoplight every two miles. It was like civilization never got to that part of town all over again. Prehistoric animalistic insanity, half a dozen boys carried by a hunk of baby blue on wheels meant for four. There were beers and stuff, during day and after dark. Chanyeol’d just cut his hair short when it’d grown past his shoulders and Baekhyun couldn’t braid it while he was asleep anymore. At some point Baekhyun’d sat on a bottle cap and the ridges left scratches on the paintjob in the shape of a sheriff’s badge. They got away with paying for it when the brother’s friend’s cousin’s wife came back. Baekhyun can’t remember how.

That car back then did have a cassette deck built in. They’d play their own songs until they could throw up hearing that guitar rift one more time. Chanyeol’d taught Baekhyun the acoustic just sitting on the trunk, in one short summer. It was fruitful. Things were learnt and things were forgotten. Feelings raised and feelings fell and eventually it was college. The band didn’t really split as much as it just fell apart after a while. One of the guitarists got arrested, and they threw a party for him when he got out. Everybody smoked and Chanyeol wouldn’t take any on behalf of both of them, and so they stopped offering. The band just kind of fell apart after that half-assed party.

Baekhyun closes the compartment, tucks that all away. For a little while this had been Chanyeol’s car, and Baekhyun hadn’t the need to clear it out yet, and he doesn’t really feel like starting now.

When he gets to the place by noon, he’s greeted by the fountain turned on for the first time Baekhyun’s seen it actually flow with water. It’s more a simple Venetian than ornate Greek, layer upon layer upon layer, like a wedding cake. It’s modern enough looking to match the house itself and its interior, and that was why they chose it. In the summers past, though, neither Baekhyun nor Chanyeol’d really cared enough to fiddle with it, get it working, so Baekhyun’s glad to know it’s still functional after years of disuse, even though he has no idea why Chanyeol would suddenly feel like operating it now.

The front door’s lock had been fixed since the last time, thank God, so Baekhyun’d let himself in. Aside from some additional décor, nothing’s really changed. More paintings, more ornaments on ledges. What he does notice is that the place gained a more oriental feeling, maybe from the patterns of the couch cushions, or the new watercolor bamboo paintings, or maybe it’s the color scheme of the place-more curiously, the entire first floor is color-coordinated now. The job of some meticulous designer.

Baekhyun finds Chanyeol the first time in a year flailing over a video game on the bed. Standing in the threshold feels almost intrusive-the guy’s so absorbed that he doesn’t even notice Baekhyun hovering at the doorway, big eyes still impossibly big when he squints intensely at the screen. Mario Kart, probably, judging from the way his torso leans dramatically with every turn on the screen like it’d somehow make Princess Peach turn faster. Chanyeol’s making these weird hissing sounds laced with some exclamations, and Baekhyun relaxes into the frame, arms crossed, watching Peach fall into quicksand. Chanyeol yelps. He still hasn’t learned how to skid.

Five seconds after Chanyeol’s back in the race, Wario passes the finish line, and the game ends. Chanyeol watches 4th Place flash, and groans painfully, tossing the remote aside and falling back onto his bed. His head rolls off the edge, hanging upside down when he finally sees him.

“Baekhyun.” His mouth hangs open. Chanyeol doesn’t make an effort to get up, so Baekhyun just walks past him and drops his stuff on a chair. There’s a moment before he greets him back, when Baekhyun just looks down at the prone form of his pajama-clad body, sprawled on some freaking expensive sheets, and Chanyeol doesn’t have to sit back up to know he’s judging. It was like a first impression again, despite the past twenty five years of acquaintance. This image of him leaves something, and Chanyeol quickly realizes, in the midst of this awareness, that it’s rather appropriate, so he doesn’t move to get himself sorted.

Reunions like this depend a lot how the first greetings are done. In Chanyeol’s mind, before Baekhyun came, he’d mapped out vaguely two separate routes this can go. He supposed it depends on him this time around, seeing as he’s the one extending the offer, so he gave himself two options. One is to react initially with that smattering of awkwardness, of formality, two past lovers meeting again. Make himself presentable and receive Baekhyun properly. Ignore the elephant in the room, so blatantly they both can taste it in each other’s stiff responses, building a pressure until it collapses, but he’ll deal with that then. The other is to fall effortlessly back into being brothers, both still carrying consciously all that’s happened in the level of familiarity to be observed-and carefully documented still, in their heads. It’s a mind game. All this, ready to tip off their tongues any moment, enduring this tension in hopes that maybe, in the reawakened intimacy, the great explosion can be avoided. Somewhat opposite courses of actions, somewhat opposite results; it’s hard to find an in-between. At the end of his nebulous brainstorming, Chanyeol ended up deciding to just let it happen. As it turns out, this is how it happens, so he readily adjusts himself to being Park Chanyeol the Brother again.

“Play a game,” he waves his controller at Baekhyun, sitting up now. When Baekhyun gives him that look like he’s fucking crazy for a 26 year old, Chanyeol puts that on the blanket and crawls off to swipe another from the basket under the plasma screen. Plugs in, calibrates, the whole shebang, and it looks clean enough, dustless as the other. Baekhyun sinks into the bed with a sigh, pulling off his socks, wondering if Chanyeol sometimes coerces Kris into playing this stuff with him off the excuse that he’s too uptight and insufferably so.

Chanyeol takes Peach again, and Baekhyun’s only half-attentive, so he just clicks ok on default Mario. “Tch,” Chanyeol sounds annoyed, like the kart selection matters more than the driver’s skills, or like this matters a whole lot in the big picture. It reminds him that he feels a little bit the same, annoyed. Like this is the root of all their problems, the reason for their division, how much fuck Baekhyun gives about Mario Kart.

“I’m telling you, Baek,” the countdown flashes. At 2 Chanyeol starts revving up the car the way he never did before, “this past year I got so much better,” and as soon as he finishes talking Baekhyun zooms off into the distance.

It’s a ton of shit. “You’re a ton of shit,” Baekhyun quips, when he’s half a lap ahead and Chanyeol’s just dove head first into a pit of lava. “Can’t even throw a fucking banana straight.”

“Man, shut up,” he laughs. It’s airy, a little self deprecating, a little bit cute. That’s one thing Baekhyun still hasn’t understood, after all this time. How he hasn’t yet gotten a little cocky, how he still manages to laugh at himself. He’d always been like that, found himself so ridiculous he couldn’t stop laughing. It filled the silence at their dinner table, when everyone was drawn in thoughts or fatigue, except him. Yapping even when the TV was on, that kid.

Baekhyun crashes into a box. The icon in the corner shuffles, like a slot machine. He gets a squid and uses it, watches Chanyeol’s side of the screen get splashed with black blobs. He sneak’s a glance-Chanyeol’s still smiling. It makes Baekhyun smile, if even a little. He doesn’t know how different he’d expected Chanyeol to be, but he’s not that surprised that he hasn’t changed at all, Baekhyun realizes.

Chanyeol gets lucky and lands a bullet, gets shot right up to second behind Baekhyun, and Baekhyun loses focus a minute trying to figure out if Chanyeol dyed his hair and slips on a banana. The table turns in a matter of the few seconds right before the end, and Chanyeol crosses the finish line first with a war cry.

“What’d I tell you, huh? And you didn’t believe me?” And that faux-egotism is back in a snap, like on cue, like there’s some psychological routine behind these half-hearted exchanges.

“Good for you, Yeol.”

“We gotta record this moment in history, Baek. Gonna kick Kris’ ass when he gets back. The bastard’s always beating me with these ninja moves he won’t show me.” Baekhyun falls back onto the bed, still in his jacket and jeans and all, listening to Chanyeol scuffle like he’s really gonna take a picture. He’s thinking of how strange it is that he feels so tired all of a sudden from this insipid banter, especially when Chanyeol’s probably making an effort to start off on the right foot again. They’re barely grazing the surface and he’s already tired. Or maybe that’s the reason.

The bed dips, somewhere above his head, and Baekhyun opens his eyes to the sleek red case of an iPhone, held parallel to his face, and above it Chanyeol’s hair falling into his eyes. Baekhyun’s eyes focus on the case, where against the red background is the Cheshire Cat, grinning that maniacal grin of his with “Cheshire Cat” in block letters beneath him. Chanyeol’s grinning too, half covered by the phone. Baekhyun bats it away before the camera goes off, groaning, rolling on his side towards the window where the light spills in, his back to Chanyeol and it feels stuffy, all of a sudden. “What’re you, twelve?”

There’s a pause, and no response, not even a lazy comeback. Chanyeol’s probably thinking again, one of those flashes in time and space where he disconnects from the dimension. A minute later he recovers and says, tone many times graver than just a minute ago, “Kris left a grocery list on his desk for you.”

Baekhyun nods. “He’s only booked us ‘till the end of the month, because he…didn’t know how long you’d be staying.”

Chanyeol’s voice thins out at the end, and the whole thing sounds like a question. Chanyeol doesn’t wait for an answer, though. “How many sets of presentable clothes did you bring?”

“Is two enough?”

“Gonna need one more.”

“Oh.”

“Then there’s a bunch of afterparties to go to, bunch of people asking to meet you, and uh.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Chanyeol chuckles, really softly. “Thanks again, Baekhyun.”

Baekhyun thinks it’s probably the first time he’s sounded his age the entire day so far. There are questions, now, tangible in the silence, flashing like those neon signs on the streets back home. Why did you agree to it? How long are you staying? Baekhyun doesn’t know what to say, so he drifts off, feeling all too comfortable in this bed. Neon signs, green and red and blue. OPEN 24 HOURS, and a little coffee cup outline in white. Baekhyun’d spent a whole night there before, leaving for a smoke break at around four and then sitting until breakfast folks started to show up. That’s how he’d met the band. Not his band. The one he now sometimes plays with.

It’s too much, too soon, he decides. He rolls onto his back and closes his eyes, lets out a deep sigh. “I saw Kris’ new haircut.”

Chanyeol shifts, and Baekhyun opens his eyes to take in his expression. There’s enough shock and confusion there that Baekhyun reasons Kris wasn’t lying. “Yeah. He came to find me before he left. He chased a bunch of girls away.”

Chanyeol looks like he’s almost about to ask more, except he just coughs out a startling laugh. Baekhyun flinches, and the both catch it. Chanyeol’s voice softens in an instant, and he starts to really laugh the way Baekhyun remembers.

“Yeah, he has that effect on people.”

And that’s that, Baekhyun supposes.

Chanyeol makes dinner. “Why did you make dinner.”

They both know how the dinner system works when it comes to Chanyeol. Baekhyun’s got his arms crossed, a blatant rejection of the offering, though not for long. Chanyeol on the other hand has his hands folded on his lap, itching towards the chopsticks like he wants to get this over with. He’s smiling and he looks evil, sneaky and sly and definitely plotting. “You want something, I know. Out with it.”

So he does. “I want to ask you to not fill my schedule after all of Kris’ things are done.”

“Are you joking right now?” Chanyeol’s still smiling, a little sheepish now, looking down. “It’s summer. There is not a better time for promotions than summer, you know that.”

Chanyeol’s in this battle with his debate prepared, though.

“Yeah, but it’s summer, Baek! In fact, it’s the peak of summer! Sparkling June and July, y’know? Beaches and barbeques and stuff.”

Baekhyun’s eyes go wide.

They’re eating on the open deck of the third floor, twin lounge chairs on either sides of a round table, with its flapping tablecloth tickling their bare calves. Chanyeol’d said it was too warm to eat indoors in the weather they’re getting, so dinner’s accompanied by the evening wind. Right behind them, below the deck, is the pool, and Baekhyun’s trying not to look at it, one because they’re sitting so close to the fancy wooden railings that one bad step backwards and flip they’d go, and two because that twenty feet long hole in the floor was about 75% the reason why Chanyeol’d wanted this house, and from what Baekhyun can see up here, the pool’s covered entirely by a plastic sheet. Earlier on Baekhyun’d seen Chanyeol try to light candles on the deck with this wind going, and he’d even had an armful of those colorful sticks, tip of his lighter diving for the tips of their becks like he’s trying to detonate a whole bunch of dynamite sticks while the wind keeps blowing them out, and Baekhyun would have cackled out loud because it was the fucking funniest thing he’d seen in years if he wasn’t gonna get caught witnessing Chanyeol’s stupidity.

But the reason why he’s choked up is not because Chanyeol was being ridiculous. He’d choked up because his initial reaction to Chanyeol’s plead for slack was to argue that summer is the most opportune time of the year to make appearances, except he checks himself before that slips out.
He’s watching Chanyeol now, who’s watching him back with a smile softened down and knowing gaze like he can just see Baekhyun’s thought process right now, like he’d mapped it out beforehand.

Baekhyun knows where this is going, but he doesn’t know why. Suddenly the wind’s knocked out of him, because what if Chanyeol’s finally figured out something? What if he’s figured out that Baekhyun’s kind of been hoping for this getaway ever since the summer he got famous? On the other hand, he doubts it’s that simple. In perspective, there’s nothing simple about this trip.

Chanyeol doesn’t let go of his eyes, hands still twined where they were on his lap. There’s a pot of steaming spaghetti on the table between them, steam blowing off the top. It comes in a bulk the way mum used to make her Kimchi. Chanyeol didn’t understand the concept of separate dishes, made every western dish self serve. He’s always been a little bad at gauging proportions. Measurements, magnitudes of things, even beyond the dinner table.

“I’m your Acting-Manager,” Baekhyun says, slow and careful. “It’s my job to get you out there.”

“I don’t want to go out there.” He almost sounds like he’s whining, childish whining, except he looks dead serious. “Let’s stay in this year, Baek. Do some of the fun stuff we used to do.”

As if they’d ever followed an agenda for these things. Like Baekhyun could begin listing some of these things he makes sound routine. Annual holiday visits, with a set of conduct to follow. I had fun, see you next Thanksgiving. Living together for twenty something years, that’s not made from dots on a calendar.

And Chanyeol, Chanyeol might have been bad at it, but Baekhyun had always known where to draw the line. “Chanyeol,” he starts, shoulders sagging just a little, “you wanted me to come be your manager, so here I am.”

“What’re you, becoming Kris now? Let loose a little, will you?”

“You’re a professional, Chanyeol, you should know how to keep personal life and work separate.”
That seems to shut both of them up for a moment, in the wake of Baekhyun’s chilling statement. It incises, just that like, clean to the core. Raw on the table.

“What, I’m not allowed to want to be with my family a little?”

“That’s not what you sai-“

“We both know that’s a ton of crap, Baek! What I said was a ton of crap! I missed you, Baekhyun, is that good enough?”

Baekhyun watches him slam his mouth shut. Chanyeol’s eyes are bulged wide, his breathing laborious through his nose. He’s watching Baekhyun the way someone watches a loved one deteriorate on a hospital bed, like he’s losing him by the second.

“Let’s be brothers again, Baekhyun.”

The thing about Chanyeol is that he never understood the concept of consequences. To him, everything could always be fixed, all past conflicts corrigible, and there were no permanents. Whenever they had fights, it would never last long, because Chanyeol would see a better future in reconciliation than a cold shoulder. He couldn’t hold grudges. It’s one of the things Baekhyun still hasn’t learned. “There are some things that you just can’t mend, Chanyeol.”

Chanyeol waits, though, for him to continue, like he’s waiting for what Baekhyun’s saying to amount to something relevant. “We took a chance.”

And then Chanyeol leans back, and for a second Baekhyun thinks he’s about to get up and leave, except Chanyeol just sighs and looks deep in thought. After a moment he says, “We had the chips in our hands, and we both put them on the table. We took the gamble.”

He leans back and grabs a pair of tongs, brings a clump right out of the steaming pot, onto Baekhyun’s plate first and then his own, like the conversation was abruptly concluded with no conclusion. Baekhyun thinks Chanyeol’s given up when he leans back into the chair and stirs the parmesan on his spaghetti, plate on his lap, so he leans back too. The silence echoes their last words for a few minutes, amplifying them. Baekhyun’s starting to get the stuffy sense that he’d said something wrong when Chanyeol speaks up again.

“We talked about this before.”

Baekhyun’s head snaps over. Chanyeol’s chewing, fork in one hand, plate in the other. He’s looking ahead, off into the distance like he’s still thinking hard.

“About what?”

“This. What happens if one day something fucks up, what we do then.”

Baekhyun sucks in a breath through his nose. He remembers the discussion. Years and years ago, past the honeymoon stage where it was all senses, and the reality was beginning to sink in for both of them. In its wake came the rationalizing, and Baekhyun remembers clearly this discussion, actually. He was on his back on the bed, feet kicked high on the wall, reading something from his phone, and Chanyeol was on the computer customizing his cyworld or some shit like that. Chanyeol was the one who brought it up-he was the one who brought the majority of these concerns up, but Baekhyun was the one who made most of the decisions. “What if one day we fuck this thing up?”
he’d said, turning to Baekhyun on a whim, brows knitted. Baekhyun’d assessed his look, and Chanyeol probably had been brooding over this the whole time he was writing the new diary entry, while Baekhyun was reading some jokes his friends forwarded to him. Chanyeol looked genuinely baffled, and all of a sudden lost, so Baekhyun just laughed a little and told him, “well, then we go back to being brothers. Family’s always first.”

Family’s always first.

“Give this a shot, Baekhyun. We’ll have time. Kris is gone indefinitely, and my next movie gig doesn’t start until mid August-”

“Who says I’m staying that long?”

He sneaks a glance at Chanyeol, who’s looking back at him, expression indecipherable. He wonders what Chanyeol would say right now if he knew that Baekhyun’s allotted vacation time does actually mean he’s staying ‘till August. Chanyeol’s put down his food now, plate held in both hands on his lap, fingers mindlessly tracing the circumference of the porcelain.

“One month then,” he says to the space around them. “Until the start of July. If you still can’t stand me by that time, then you go right back and I won’t stop you.”

Baekhyun takes a moment, except he already knows what he’s going to do. “Fine,” he sighs. “Fine. No schedule. We go on biking trips and climb mountains like brothers do.” He’s a little afraid to lift his head and look at Chanyeol right now, afraid what kind of expression he’d find there, so Baekhyun hurries to sprinkle cheese on his plate, so he can lean back and swing his legs on the chair and look dead ahead, look like he’s thinking about things the way Chanyeol is always worrying himself over them.

“The food good enough for you, honorable guest?”

Baekhyun’s caught up on the bitterness of the term, the fact that he’s considered a guest now at this place they’d bought together, but he supposes it’s only correct. In the backdrop, the last sliver of sun is descending over the horizon.

“Of course.”

Chanyeol wakes the next morning to the soft splashing of water beneath his balcony.

He’d left the sliding glass door open a crack last night to let the breeze in, resting his AC for a night of comfortably warm wind on his naked arms. He wakes to the hazy thought of a piece of dialogue, some fragment of a dream he can’t remember, perhaps the end of it. “You know, spotlight’s gonna be on you,” says an ambiguous figure, while Chanyeol is blinking the sleep away. There is no visual, just voice, or maybe just words, but Chanyeol knows the way people just know in dreams that it’s Baekhyun. “You dump this stuff on entertainment TV then disappear off the face of it, people are gonna start looking for you.”

And in the little snippet, Chanyeol hears himself reply. He says, “I know,” sounding somewhat assuring. Curled up in his blankets still, he’s hit with the feeling that his response embodies a confidence so full it’s foreboding of something Baekhyun does not perceive. Even though he’s realized by this point that this exchange did indeed happen before bed last night, the real version did not conclude in himself sporting an answer. In fact, he didn’t know, didn’t think about it, and still doesn’t know, except he’s left with the feeling that he should, that a solution is so obvious that he could find it in his dreams.

The splashing sounds again. Chanyeol rouses, tugs on his disheveled clothes, and quietly slips out onto the balcony.

He finds Baekhyun aimlessly trudging through the length of the pool in his boxers, body lowered till the water reaches his collarbones. Chanyeol watches him, floating there in the middle, arms waving about, carried by the water. He dips in, and dips out, swims a few paces, smoothes his dripping hair back behind his head.

Baekhyun’d waken an hour earlier, at around 7, and lay on the bed of the guest room for half an hour, thinking about insubstantial things. When the feeling of displacement became too baring-just sitting there, within bleak walls and vapid furnishings and the stale air of disuse, he’d spent fifteen minutes checking emails on his laptop. Sehun’d said thanks for the money, and that was about it. There’s a wind chime hung outside his first storey window, and Baekhyun’d spent another minute or two watching the sun reflect on the assembly before he decided to join it.

The water seemed clean enough underneath the sheet. Baekhyun folded it, set it on the side, and threw his t-shirt on a lounge chair. There are towels on an end table. He dipped himself into the cold water slowly, trying to keep quiet.

He’s floating on his back now, resting the way one would in a coffin-hands laced on his stomach, back straight, eyes closed. Only his nose and mouth hover above the water, and he listens to the calming undulating of the water that surrounds him, takes deep breaths. In him, there’s a lethargy, and at some point Baekhyun’d began to wonder exactly how long it had been since the feeling began to settle. He’s trying to will his head into the same tranquility when all of a sudden rock music blasts out from all directions, loud enough even with his ears submerged, and before he has the chance to react he’s drowning, engulfed by the water, breath knocked out of him by a pair of strong arms around his waist.

He thrashes in Chanyeol’s grip, hearing his laughter before kneeing him blindly in the stomach. They somersault in the water, turn once like a wheel from the momentum, and Baekhyun kicks the floor of the pool. Chanyeol tries to stand, loses his hold when Baekhyun trips him. Baekhyun resurfaces, hacking out water, and Chanyeol a second later, coughing and laughing before he’s pushed back in by the shoulders.

Baekhyun watches his brother straighten up from the water again, breath erratic and body wracked with resentment where the other’s with laughter. Before Chanyeol wipes his eyes clean of water, Baekhyun steps forward and punches him hard in one shoulder, and has an instance of surprise when Chanyeol’s knocked back as easily as that. Baekhyun’s hand aches as he watches Chanyeol catch himself before he falls.

“Have you lost your mind!?” He shouts at Chanyeol, past the noise from the stereos Chanyeol fucking carried out, Chanyeol who’s still smiling, smoothing his hair away like this is some joke. “I could have fucking drowned, shithead!” He’s charging towards Chanyeol again, who’s backing up with a hand outstretched, held up like a barrier.

“I was gonna pull you back out, y’know!” he says, choking on the water and his laughter. Baekhyun lunges again, this time for his chest, and they both crash back into the water, falling into a tussle. Elbows lodging into ribs, arms around necks, hands clutching at fabric and feet kicking, tangling. Baekhyun shoves Chanyeol’s head down as leverage to come up and breathe, but then he’s dragged down by the waist with the speed people go under in horror films. Before he sees it coming, Chanyeol traps his wrists in both his hands, and this suddenly immobilization strikes something in Baekhyun and he can’t breathe.

When they both come up finally Chanyeol’s still laughing, lout even against the music, and Baekhyun’s a little short for breath and green, but he guesses Chanyeol doesn’t notice. That moment of seizure Baekhyun felt underwater, like a jolt of a needle puncturing somewhere deep in his core, still buzzes, radiating now like electric sparks running to the tips of his fingers. All too suddenly he becomes aware of what he wants, what he really wants, watching Chanyeol whip the water from his hair like a dog. It’s an unwelcome thought, that this hazy idea would not only ring in the hollows of his mind, but to be engraved so corporeally.

“Damn, that felt good!” Chanyeol cries out, ruffling his hair wildly with his fingers, splashing everywhere. He makes his way to the stereo he left on the edge of the pool and shuts off the music. The yard calms, but he’s just hyper as before, still got that maniac grin when he turns to Baekhyun finally. “I missed this, man.”

“What, drowning me?” He retorts, sarcastically but weakly, watching Chanyeol unstick his white beater from his chest and watching the fabric cling again to the lines of his stomach, dip at his belly button. He walks to where the pool is more shallow and wrings the water out the end, and when he’s satisfied he stretches.

When his limbs fall back to his sides, there’s an idle moment when he regards Baekhyun with that dazed and sated expression, like he’s at peace with everything, absorbing the gentleness of the sunlight on his skin. Then he pulls his mouth into a smile, one of those expressions that make him instantly look decades more mature, and holds out an arm. “C’mere,” he says softly. Baekhyun sighs, but he walks over into the half embrace and pats Chanyeol a few times on the back.

“I missed you, man,” Chanyeol says, an echo of his earlier words. He lets go with a hand on Baekhyun’s shoulder. “Kris just feels like a living ghost. When he’s not beating my ass around he’s locked in his room working on his Master’s. It gets too quiet around here, especially for summer.” They climb out of the pool, dribbling water along the way. “Sometimes I feel like I’m the only thing alive and in motion in this place.”

Baekhyun hands him a towel, “is that why you turned on the fountain?”

Chanyeol laughs, “That one’s because I’m too lazy to clean it all the time.”

They get back inside and change into something light, Baekhyun settling for a graphic tee and sweatpants and Chanyeol in another beater and cargo shorts. Baekhyun’s glad there are eggs in the fridge, so he makes them scrambled while Chanyeol waits on the other side of the island, browsing something on his iPad.

It’s ridiculously easy to fall back into this routine of being brothers, so much easier than Baekhyun’d imagined when he’d mapped out all the things that would go wrong. With the eggs sizzling in the skillet and the vent whirring above him, it feels almost like two, three years ago all over again, when they were squished in that narrow strip of a kitchen. Something quite vivid comes up: Baekhyun’s balancing a pan of fried rice, dodging Chanyeol who’s on the phone about his next audition, pressing Baekhyun into the oven when he squeezes through behind him to the little balcony on the other side of the rectangular room to check the weather. Baekhyun watches him try to tie a tie with one hand and shout into the phone because the fan on the wall outside is too loud, and then he himself starts shouting for Chanyeol over the rumble of the ancient vent. It’d been hot enough outside and hotter in the room, and the greasy smell of the rice was making him nauseous. Baekhyun remembers leaving the pan frustrated and pushing his way onto the balcony to do Chanyeol’s tie for him, while Chanyeol shouts into the phone right beside his ear. That was what their days had been like in the most arid, hectic days of summer.

Now, though, there’s AC, and Chanyeol’s sitting with his back straight, legs crossed, hair held in place by a rubber band. While he’s reading his iPad intently, he’s gliding his forefinger around the rim of the glass, transparent and properly cylindrical. They used to know this kitchenware designer who gave them a set of cups with Chanyeol’s name engraved on the base, and the look on Chanyeol’s face, god. He traces the ridge in a crescent, back and forth and back, the way he used to do it all the time with beer and coke cans, and coffee mugs with his thumb. The light from the enormous window panes lights him up like a dissection, clean cake cut behind the shadow of the counter, blazing his stray hair gold. What Baekhyun sees, then and now, looking at him all lit up in this surreal light, it makes him grimace. The toast is going cold, and Baekhyun’s going cold standing in the shadow, but the sunlight’s spilled onto the crystalline marble of the counter, and the shards in the mosaic black blink back at him, and it hurts his eyes too much to go any closer.

Part III

a/n: on the off chance that you found this through LJ, you can find the series on my tumblr.