Forever (and the Reasons Why We Fall In Place)
Title: Forever (and the Reasons Why We Fall In Place)
Author: Anonymous until 1/30/14
For: sweet_mintx
Pairing: Baekhyun/Chanyeol
Word Count: 9,470
Summary: It doesn't matter how far apart they are, when they've imprinted themselves on each other's soul.
Warnings: Swearing
Rating: PG-13
One
Six hours before the ceremony, he stands in front of the mirror and knots his tie.
It’s funny, Baekhyun thinks, how four years can pass and yet the piece of cloth around his collar is as suffocating as ever. He’s never liked being restrained. But right now, when he’s just moments away from receiving a pretty certificate proclaiming his freedom from secondary education, he doubts if he’s ready to let go.
Someone once told him that he was the only one capable of holding himself down. That he grew his wings because they were beautiful and not because he wanted to fly -- that no matter how many times Baekhyun dragged him along to see hilltop sunrises and rainbows, Baekhyun himself shut the window blinds on sunsets and closed doors on the rain. Always eager to start new things, that someone would say, one hand on Baekhyun’s heart and eyes filled with a kind of understanding that raised goosebumps along his arms, but never ready for them to end.
His fingers trip on silk. Sunlight creeps down the wooden floorboards, rays touching the parts of him that’s learned to live without the shadows. He adjusts his sleeves, buttons up the cuffs, takes a deep breath.
The phone on his desk has been silent for three days. Or maybe it’s just muted, maybe it isn’t that no one’s contacting him at all, but simply that he tunes out anything that’s not what he’s been waiting for. It’s not like he isn’t patient. He’s been patient for years, months, weeks, days, hours -- so, so patient that the very act of waiting is ingrained into his bones. He knows he’s trapped. There is nothing he can do about it.
You do realize that things don’t work that way, Baekhyun. You can’t stay in one place forever. You need to keep going somewhere, and even if you do wait, the world will not wait for you. It will only leave you behind.
“I know,” he says out loud, listening to the way his own admission bounces right off the walls. “Goddamit, I know. You’ve said that so many times.”
His phone is still silent. The knot holding his tie in place is tight, and though the eyeliner rimming his eyes is supposed to make him look confident, he feels vulnerable. Tiny. A passing breeze might knock him down and scatter pieces of him to other lands, other continents. Baekhyun thinks he might like that. He’s always dreamed of traveling the world.
What do you want?
÷
It’s on the cusp of New Year when they collide, sparklers clutched in grubby hands and feet stumbling one too many times on loose rocks. The neighborhood’s gathered together for a celebration, and Baekhyun’s running around with the other little kids, his laughter spilling out of his lips. But then he bumps straight into someone and he drops his sparkler, hands thrown out to stop the earth from kissing him good night.
“I’m sorry,” the other kid says, looking down at him with wide, terrified eyes. His ears stick out and his lower lip wobbles, and soon enough he’s pushing himself off of Baekhyun with tears perching on his eyelashes. The sparklers sputter out the last of their short lives, and Baekhyun registers the sharp pain in his knee.
“It’s okay,” he says, trying to be nice because his mother’s always told him to be considerate of people’s feelings. But his knee isn’t being nice to him, and it’s kind of the kid’s fault, and Baekhyun doesn’t want to be nice to him at all. “But you should have been looking where you were going.”
“I’m sorry,” the kid sniffs. He looks stricken. It’s funny how he’s the one crying when Baekhyun’s the one who’s injured. “I did -- I was looking, but the lights were so pretty, and I didn’t want to drop my sparkler --”
“Don’t,” Baekhyun says, pushing himself up to a sitting position. “You don’t need to explain, it doesn’t matter.”
“Are you okay?” the kid asks, crawling toward him.
“My knee hurts,” Baekhyun says, blinking back tears. He’s not weak. It’s just a tiny wound, he reasons, there’s nothing to cry over.
“Where’s your mom?”
Baekhyun shakes his head. He knows his mom is just going to scold him for straying away from her and he doesn’t want that at all, and so he grabs the kid’s hand and pulls him down to sit beside him. “Stay,” he says. “It doesn’t hurt that much. Besides, you can’t just leave me here.”
“But --”
“What’s your name?” Baekhyun interrupts. “I’m Baekhyun.”
The kid tilts his head a little to the right, and he’s stopped crying for the meantime. “I’m Chanyeol,” he says. “I’m really sorry about your knee. Are you sure you don’t want me to call your mom?” He bites his lip and looks so unsure, and Baekhyun’s heart squeezes just the tiniest bit.
“No, it’s okay,” Baekhyun says. “Let’s just --”
A loud Boom! rents the sky to pieces, and soon it is nothing but jagged puzzle pieces of colors and shapes. The two children fall silent in awe, mouths dropping open and pain forgotten, and they sit there watching the fireworks crowd out the stars. Baekhyun squints to see Polaris between the fingers of a sulfuric lotus display, red and blue tumbling out of clouds and crashing down in arcs of dying beauty.
He feels a hand on his shoulder. It’s warm, reassuring even, and Baekhyun turns to look at the smile white-hot on Chanyeol’s lips. “Happy New Year,” he says, though not without an edge of worry.
And maybe Baekhyun can be nice to him, after all, because Chanyeol had stayed instead of tattling off to his mother, and he’d chosen to greet him even though they didn’t know each other.
So he says, when the chemical dragon in the air lets time slip out of its claws, “Happy New Year to you, too.”
Their families find them curled up in each other’s arms, the grass lulling them to sleep just seconds after the countdown ends. No one bothers to wake them, but when Baekhyun walks down the stairs to breakfast, all he gets is a bandaged knee and a It’s good that you’re making friends with other people your age.
When class resumes a week later, Baekhyun accidentally drops his textbooks on Chanyeol’s foot in the middle of the hallway. The slightly taller child laughs, long and loud and explosive, and Baekhyun finds himself thinking he can live with that sound and that expression for the rest of his life.
Life isn’t a math equation, after all. There is no predicting the absolute maximum of attraction, and no cost function to determine the marginal amount of effort needed to build a friendship. Let B be the first person and let C be the second person. If B likes blank pages and walking on the right side of the road, and C likes messy scrawls and skipping on the left side of the road, how long does it take for them to intersect?
The answer is two hours in a stairwell, lunch boxes balanced on knobby knees and smiles flitting off of motor neurons. A relationship isn’t a constant. Often it happens slow and uncertain, rates beginning at zero and then gaining speed, but with them it’s different. With them, it’s almost instantaneous.
A collision, two sparklers blazing farewell, dropped books and laughter: Sometimes you don’t even need a second. Sometimes, you just know.
÷
The clock tells him he has five hours to go, and so Baekhyun tries to ignore the lack of new messages arriving in his phone inbox. Instead he crouches, careful not to get dust all over his slacks, and he slides out a box from underneath his bed. He’s trapped most of his memories here, caged them within velvet lining and varnished wood grain, kept them far from reach with a rusting lock. The catch crumbles to fragments of iron oxide in his palms, and he flips it back.
Polaroids spill out, rubber bands holding together stacks of 50 each, and he takes care as he flips through them. Some are fading back to the yellow base, but moonbeam smiles and starlight eyes linger even in rolls of negatives. He finds one of him and Chanyeol at 14, sitting on a dead log and arms thrown over each other’s shoulders, both of them snug in matching hoodies. They’re caught mid-laughter -- Baekhyun’s face all scrunched up and hands clutching onto Chanyeol’s hoodie, the column of Chanyeol’s throat exposed to the night air as he throws his head back.
This is the two of them painted in shades of reckless abandonment. In worlds that turn at precise angles and societies that create new rules everywhere, there is little room for fly-by-night souls. Perhaps it’s the reason why he and Chanyeol have always been the anomalies. Rule-breakers, partners in crime, pranksters.
It makes him want to go back back back, when their only concern was whether or not tying a bucket of slime above the men’s bathroom door meant 10 hours of community service or a night of cleaning classrooms. On days tossed away like pretty pennies flipped to reflect the glow of sun, the two of them race on their skateboards along choked sidewalks. It’s always about the thrill, the chase, the feeling that crawls into your veins and makes you feel more alive than you’ve ever been.
Don’t you wish we can do this forever?
He does. Every single day and every single night, he’s on the lookout for shooting stars. He stands guard for 11:11, looks for wish bones in every chicken dish, searches for four-leaf clovers. Dreams are elusive things. He knows this now, and he regrets not knowing sooner.
We’ll have to grow up.
There is a plastic bag of shells and white sand in a corner of the box. He twirls it in his hands, watches the shells sink deeper into the sand as if finding comfort in something that’s close to home. If he closes his eyes and forgets enough of reality, he can feel the sea gathering in his hands, overflowing through the spaces in his fingers.
Not now, though. Let’s grow up tomorrow.
The thing is, tomorrow has come and gone. Tomorrow is today.
÷
They’re on the threshold of 16 when Chanyeol clambers over to his balcony with a guitar case slung across his back. He’s a cocktail of height and elfin features now, black hair long enough to swirl shadows over the contours of his cheekbones, and Baekhyun often strains his neck in order to look up at him.
“You could have knocked on the front door,” Baekhyun says, amused. Chanyeol’s slumped over and leaning his head against the balustrade. There are twigs in his hair and leaves in the pockets of his pants. His chest rises, falls.
“Yeah,” he says after a while, deep voice coming out a little fragmented because he’s still out of air. “Yeah, but it’s ten in the evening and our parents might throw a fit.”
Baekhyun raises an eyebrow. “So you decided that climbing up a tree would be much safer?”
Chanyeol shoots him a look. “Okay, so that may have been a bit stupid --”
“More like really stupid because you could have fallen and gotten injured, and I wouldn’t be able to ride on your shoulders for the concert we’re supposed to watch --”
“But it was the only way and your room’s not so high up,” Chanyeol finishes, standing up. Baekhyun steps back and lets him walk through the glass sliding doors. “Anyway, I got an invite from a friend of mine about a live cafe a few blocks away from school. I was thinking about performing a cover.”
“What does this have to do with me?” Baekhyun asks, flopping back down on his bed and staring up at his ceiling. They’re covered in neon highlighter doodles and sharpie scrawls. The stupid string of red headless chickens and ducks are Chanyeol’s work, while the sensible drawings are Baekhyun’s, done on nights when Chanyeol was willing enough to let him ride on his shoulders until the markers bled dry. “Also, which friend is this?”
Chanyeol’s sitting, indian-style, on the other side of the bed as he tunes his guitar. His limbs are rough pencil strokes, and he looks at Baekhyun with graphite eyes laid too thick on paper. “Would you rather I didn’t tell you?” he says. “And the friend I’m talking about is Kris. You know -- the captain of the basketball team, senior year, and likes flying to different countries on a whim?”
Baekhyun does know Kris. He’s seen him, a lanky figure with 00 screaming on the back of his jersey, going hard on the court until the ball’s a perfect arc and whistling through the net. Kris is one of those popular jocks with enough money to burn, loping his way through school with long legs and good looks and piercing stares.
“I never knew you were friends with him.”
Something about Baekhyun’s tone has Chanyeol setting down his guitar. He scoots closer and tugs Baekhyun up to face him, and Baekhyun’s not in any mood to resist. He stares at the graphic on Chanyeol’s hoodie.
“Jongin dragged me to one of their practice games once,” Chanyeol says as he tilts Baekhyun’s face up. “Remember when we were partners for that Lit project? We were supposed to do it after his basketball practice, and so he told me to meet him at the gym after class. I watched the game, waited for Jongin to get his things, and Kris came and talked to me while I was waiting.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Baekhyun mutters. “I don’t care.”
“Because it’s bothering you,” Chanyeol says.
Baekhyun bites his lip and pulls away. Chanyeol lets his hand fall back down to his lap, but his gaze is still pinned on Baekhyun.
“It’s not bothering me,” he says, swallowing down the feeling that flutters in his gut. It’s both restless and intrusive, drumming against epithelial cells in a bid for the way out, and he doesn’t understand it. That doesn’t mean he likes it.
That doesn’t mean he likes the fact that Chanyeol’s been hanging out with other people, people he’s never introduced to Baekhyun or told him about, people outside of the sphere of mutual friends they’ve both built between their worlds. It’s equal parts irrational and petty for him to be acting this way, but Baekhyun doesn’t like sharing his best friend. He’s not too comfortable with the fact that Chanyeol does things Baekhyun’s not privy to -- it almost feels like he’s losing his place in Chanyeol’s life.
These past few months, he’s realized just how easy it is to lose Chanyeol. Childhood friendships built out of sandcastles and toy battleships can only last for so long, and people don’t quite like holding on to the past. He’s seen Chanyeol drift away, inch by inch, the moment they’d been assigned to different sections in high school. Sometimes he feels like he’s the only one tugging on the rope connecting them so that it doesn’t snap, and he feels the burn of twine on his fingertips one too many times.
“Hey,” Chanyeol says, and Baekhyun hears the Please look at me lying beneath his tone. “You do care. That’s why I’m telling you about the live cafe. Kris will be there. I’d like you to meet him.”
Baekhyun begins twisting and turning the hem of his shirt. “What, is he your boyfriend or something? Am I supposed to give you my blessing?”
“Baekhyun.”
“Okay, so he’s not your boyfriend, then,” Baekhyun says. “I still don’t care. Why are you here? You could have just texted me or waited until tomorrow. It’s ten in the evening, Chanyeol, this is a waste of time.”
The silence drifts down, almost excruciatingly slow, settling on Baekhyun’s toes and falling in delicate folds over his mouth. He knows hurt when it’s in the form of tense shoulders and cracked irises -- when it comes out as a dent in the mattress and feet padding across the room and a wire-stiffened back.
He’s always been too harsh, he knows. Chanyeol is the only one capable of softening the blows. He soaks the chill of Baekhyun’s words in warmth, kindles them with compassion, compresses them in gentleness.
“I just wanted to spend time with you.” Chanyeol’s voice is lower now. His back is turned to Baekhyun and he’s standing in the middle of the room, hands clenched. “I just wanted to ask you if maybe, maybe you wanted to come with me to the cafe, to sing the song I’d composed.”
Baekhyun stills. “You composed a song?”
“I don’t know why it’s wrong for me to make new friends,” Chanyeol continues. “Always, when you see me with someone else, you get this look on your face. I don’t want us to fight over something like that so I’ve always just let it go, but Baekhyun, how long will it take for you to see that I’m not trying to replace you?”
“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun murmurs. The words are fragile, hanging in the air before slipping down, down, down. “I’m just...scared.”
“Scared of what? There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re being selfish, Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says, and it hits Baekhyun hard. “Selfish and unreasonable and stubborn, like always.”
“You don’t need to fling that in my face,” Baekhyun bites out.
“But that’s who you are,” Chanyeol says, though his tone is softer this time. He turns around. “That’s who you are, and even if you’re all those things, you’re also loyal and determined and willing to fight for what you believe in. I like you like this.” He crosses the distance between them and squats in front of Baekhyun so that they’re eye to eye. “What I’m trying to say is, I’m not leaving you. I’m not going to replace you. I can have a million friends, but none of them will ever have a prayer of taking your place. No matter who you are, no matter how difficult you can be, I don’t want anyone else. Okay?”
Baekhyun buries his face in his hands. How does one dilute the taste of salt when a handful of it’s been sprinkled on your wounds, and how does one hold back the bitterness so that it doesn’t taint the sweetness?
“Baekhyun?”
“Okay,” Baekhyun says. He feels the familiar weight of Chanyeol’s arms wrapping around him, pulling him close. “Okay.”
“Don’t be like this,” Chanyeol whispers in his ear. It’s soothing, the way he sounds. “There is nothing to be jealous of, alright? We’re soulmates. Soulmates don’t leave each other’s side. Even if they do, the connection will forever be there, and nothing can erase that.”
Baekhyun can’t find the appropriate words to respond to that. He can’t, and so he simply nods his head against Chanyeol’s chest.
“Let me hear your song,” he says after a moment. “I want to know how bad it is so I can make it sound better with my singing.”
“You brat,” Chanyeol says, but there’s only affection coursing through the term. He ruffles Baekhyun’s hair. “Let go of me, then, so I can get my guitar.”
Baekhyun lets go. As he watches Chanyeol retrieve his guitar and come back to sit beside him, he thinks of the years they’ve been together. They’re not attached to the hip but they’re never that far apart either. He thinks of crumpled paper notes and lame handshakes, of rubber swings and treehouses and origami boats. There is a decade they’ve spun together -- a decade of soda pop afternoons, barefoot races, beach hide-and-seek, and sleepovers where they are cocooned in blankets and cotton pajamas.
They’ve lasted longer than most childhood friends do. Gunning for the expiration date and then way past it, but the relationship’s never soured and the communication lines have never curdled. It’s the reason why he’s always on edge, because he knows well enough that every beginning has an end, and he thinks it’s right around the corner for the both of them.
But as Chanyeol gives him that gasoline smile, happiness streaking his lips and eyes bright-hot, Baekhyun thinks that it’s maybe time for him to believe.
÷
Chanyeol’s never been perfect.
But neither is he, and maybe that’s why they fit so well. His cold, calm blue is matched by Chanyeol’s fiery, enthusiastic orange. Complements, the two of them -- sharp lines adhering to rounded edges, sandpaper smoothing out wood splinters, two bodies so distinct from each other.
If Chanyeol is careless, knocking down tables and chairs and maybe people’s feelings, Baekhyun is the one with tact. He sweeps up the broken pieces, sets them right again. If Chanyeol slides up and down the emotional scale, Baekhyun is steadier, a little more in control of his feelings. If Chanyeol is conceited and clever enough to fashion masks out of what people want from him, Baekhyun’s the opposite. He’s down to earth enough to bring Chanyeol back down from his high, and he’s more honest with what he shows other people.
They are too riddled with flaws when separated, fine cracks running through their images. Together they are still flawed, but they balance each other out, and somehow the imperfections are whittled down and tamed.
Chanyeol and Baekhyun overlap, filling the empty spaces and hiding sites of ruin.
Do you ever get tired of me?
It’s hard to view them as individuals. The boundaries defining them have long since blurred and they’ve melded, bodies set apart but thoughts braided together. Folded into each other, boxed up, and knotted: They form a parcel of human consciousness impossible to break up. Maybe, maybe they do exist without the other. Maybe they are capable of waking, breathing, living when they are divided. But it’s not one they will ever desire.
Sometimes I do. But that doesn’t mean I’m going away. All I need to do is fall asleep, and when the next day begins, you’ll be someone entirely new and I’ll discover you again.
Four hours to go.
÷
He finds out that the flip side of the world is a dark, scary place around five months after he turns 13. By this time, he knows what’s considered normal and what’s not, and he keeps up a running list. Walking to school, playing soccer, having pets -- these are normal. Liking guys instead of girls, when you’re a guy yourself, is not.
He realizes this the moment a boy named Kim Junmyeon, president of the batch two years above Baekhyun’s, offers him a hand when he’s struggling over his History essay. Chanyeol’s not around because he’s sick, and Junmyeon notices his distress a computer station away. It’s when Junmyeon’s breath lingers on his nape with each spoken word, when Junmyeon’s hand brushes past his to press the correct keys, when Junmyeon gives him a smile that resembles the endless glow of a star -- that’s when Baekhyun knows. He knows that the feelings wreaking havoc in the pit of his stomach are the very same feelings he’s been searching for, feelings he’s hoped would show themselves whenever a pretty girl flounced by.
He doesn’t know how to deal with this knowledge. So he creases it into an origami rose and lets it wilt in a corner of his mind, deprived of light and carbon dioxide and acceptance. Chanyeol recovers after three days. Baekhyun’s jittery. He wonders if his best friend will still accept him, or if those wide, mischievous eyes will be clouded by disgust.
Chanyeol’s oblivious but he’s not dumb, and he’s spent a long enough time with Baekhyun to know when something’s wrong. And so, on a Friday night with bruised skies, he coaxes Baekhyun into his bedroom and locks the door. He leans his full weight against it so that Baekhyun can’t run away.
There are no words exchanged between them. They’ve never needed that, and they don’t need that now, and Baekhyun fiddles with the straps of his backpacks. Chanyeol’s gaze coats him in patience from head to toe.
Honesty is the one thing they’ve built their friendship on, and maybe that’s why Baekhyun retreats into Chanyeol’s closet and plunges into the thick of his best friend’s dress shirts, body quivering with nerves.
He hears Chanyeol standing up, only just stopping a few feet away from the closet. “Baekhyun, what are you doing? We need to talk, and we can’t do that if you’re in there.”
“Don’t move,” Baekhyun croaks out. His hands are balled up into fists. “Just -- just stay where you are?”
“Baekhyun, tell me what’s going on.”
He needs to do this now, before his courage becomes dust and he’s left to wander crop circles of lies. With a deep breath, Baekhyun pushes open the doors, and he steps out.
Chanyeol’s eyebrows are knitted together. “What are you doing?”
“I’m,” Baekhyun says, and it takes all of his will not to turn this into a joke and hide from the issue, “I’m coming out of the closet.”
Chanyeol blinks. “What are you saying --”
“I’m coming out of the closet.”
It registers slow. For Baekhyun, these are the most painful eleven seconds of his life, watching the realization spread through Chanyeol’s eyes. And then his face is closed off, and the pain turns to a kind of fear that turns him cold.
He doesn’t know he’s crying until Chanyeol’s clutching him tight to his chest. They’re on the floor, a mess of limbs and torsos and heads, and Baekhyun breathes in the citrus scent of Chanyeol’s hair.
“You’re not -- you’re not ashamed of me?” Baekhyun stutters out.
“No, why would would I be ashamed of you?” Chanyeol says, and his tone is comforting. “I mean, I’m ashamed when you start doing random poses in the middle of the street, but I’m not ashamed of you.”
“I’ll have you know that I have the potential to be a good model, unlike you,” Baekhyun says. Relief is a bubble growing in his chest.
He feels Chanyeol smile against his hair. “What are you saying, you brat?”
“So we’re still best friends?” Baekhyun asks, clutching Chanyeol’s shirt.
“Of course,” Chanyeol says, and his grip on Baekhyun tightens for a fraction of a second. “You’re still Baekhyun. I’m still Chanyeol. Nothing’s changed.”
The tears come back faster now, but he’s happy. Even though it’s terrifying, even though he’s still off-balance, Baekhyun is happy.
No matter what happens, he’ll still have Chanyeol by his side.
÷
It isn’t that promises are made to be broken. It’s simply that they are meant to end. At some point in time, fulfilling a promise ceases to matter, and it’s a fact that people tend to overlook. That’s why he and Chanyeol have always linked pinkies over things with a clear due by date, drawing the limits so as to avoid disappointment. Except, that is, for one thing.
How long is forever, though?
“I swear off of video games until the day of the last exam.” Or, “I’ll take care of Baekhyun until the third of October.” Sometimes: “I’ll help Chanyeol pick gifts on the week before Christmas every year.”
They’ve learned that being vague about durations, that letting deals trail off until the beginning of the unknown, can only cultivate betrayal. It’s better to establish the lines. What’s finite is easier to deal with, to weigh and to appreciate. Expecting someone to follow through with their promises, though, until the world gathers itself together and shreds apart the cosmos -- that’s asking too much from a person.
He wonders why they let themselves believe that one time they should have continued doubting.
Forever is forever. Forever is until you forget me, and maybe even beyond that.
He has three hours left. Three hours, and then he will be face to face with forever, and he’s not sure how he’s supposed to deal with that. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to resist or to yield.
All he knows is that he won’t forget.
÷
After three relationships crashing and falling through to the core of the Earth, Baekhyun finds himself a senior with uncertainty shoved down his pressed shirt sleeves. Eighteen isn’t all that it’s made out to be. All it does is declare him legal enough to drink when he’s been downing shots of soju on beach trips with Chanyeol since he was 15. By now he’s had enough bad experiences with liquor to see remnants of its allure, and it’s ironic that now he’s not so keen on drinking.
“It’s because you’re a lightweight,” Chanyeol says, throwing his head back and laughing. But the cans of beer he brings to their sleepovers grows fewer and fewer, until the alcohol is replaced with coke and popcorn and those salsa dips for nachos. Chanyeol can hold his liquor better, but he always adjusts to his best friend’s whims and preferences.
A month and a half into the first semester, Chanyeol pelts him with a paper airplane during study hall. And when Baekhyun turns around, he’s on the receiving end of Chanyeol’s emerging grin, blinding and joyful and wide. He doesn’t know what happens. He doesn’t know why his heart strains against his rib cage and jumps, startled, within his chest. His thoughts accelerate then slow down.
This is when it begins.
Chanyeol’s hugs are prisons and strait jackets. His happiness is pure torture. When he crosses his legs and closes his eyes and strums his guitar, Baekhyun’s left to deal with wrecked melodies and a rapidly beating heart. A smile tossed his way becomes a wound; a feather-light touch becomes a pebble weighing him down. The feeling grows heavier and heavier, and Baekhyun fights back harder and harder, even as he asks, Why now?
He lets the truth go unsaid when they play spin-the-bottle. They are on different sides of the river even though they’re breaths apart, and Baekhyun curls into a ball to generate heat on frozen nights. Chanyeol reaches for him. Baekhyun turns away.
These days their communication lines are muddy and unclear. Every message is riddled with static. Every word spoken is jumbled and mixed up, and where they used to talk through subtle glances, now they spend entire arguments dissecting the things left to simmer in silence.
Chanyeol asks him what’s wrong.
Baekhyun thinks it’s a familiar pattern, one that’s tie-dyed and messy, and he doesn’t want it. He says, “Me.”
He leaves Chanyeol with confusion, with emotions he’s never wanted to deal with, with forevers and tomorrows and promises kept even after their expiration dates.
He leaves Chanyeol with all of himself, but it’s hard to tell him he’s got Baekhyun’s heart cupped in his palms when Baekhyun’s the one slamming the door closed.
÷
The life of each person is a circle, and everyone else they come across is a tangent line. Chanyeol’s deflected off of him, passing through only one point and holding on longer than most, but there’s a reason why they’re not interlinked. The connection exists between them and it will last, but that doesn’t mean they’ll always be together.
He plays with the keychain hanging off of his phone and scrolls through the messages. 11:59 of yesterday evening, Jongdae texts him, we r graduating tomorrow, what’s your plan? At 9:45 in the morning of today, Jongin sends him a >:( and talk to Chanyeol, pls. There are seven missed calls from Kyungsoo, made in the span of 12:33 in the afternoon to 12:57. Baekhyun deletes them all.
It’s funny how the two of them chose to drift apart now. At the same time, it feels right, because this is when they have to face new beginnings and fashion their futures. In some ways, it’s a wise decision. That’s what Baekhyun tells himself when he’s curled up in bed and watching the searing white of Chanyeol’s bedroom light straggle on until morning.
In most ways it’s a punishment, and Baekhyun cannot fathom just how different everything is without Chanyeol. He goes home earlier because there’s no one to wait for, no reason to stay in school because Chanyeol’s band practice ends 30 minutes before the gates close. He spends weekends looking for something to do, waste away the hours he’s saved up without Chanyeol around to squander them.
Didn’t we say we’d stay together forever?
His heart constricts whenever Jason Mraz comes on. The streets echo with Chanyeol’s laughter, and when he concentrates enough, he can feel the taller guy’s hold lingering on his skin. Forever is dependent. It’s a variable relying on the magnetism of two opposite poles, the fickle nature of emotions, and the passing of time. Forever doesn’t mean eternity. It only means until both sides let go.
We are staying together. Just not always. Just not every single time.
There is a knock on his door. Baekhyun takes one last look at himself in the mirror, and then he’s grabbing the garment bag containing his toga and graduation cap, and he runs down the stairs.
You said you’ll never leave me.
His family’s waiting in the living room, faces shining with pride. There’s a camera in his mother’s hands and someone says, “Let’s take a picture!”
But I’m not leaving you, not really. I’ll still be around. Maybe not right beside you, but I’m always at the other end of a phone call, a shitty Skype connection or a 12-hour-long plane ride.
Baekhyun thinks of a boy with bright eyes and huge ears, and his cheeks stretch with the biggest smile he’s ever worn.
÷
He remembers many things he’s shared with Chanyeol, but one that’s stuck with him is this: He is 15 and inebriated, mind swimming in seas of incoherence, and he hangs himself over Chanyeol’s shoulder. Or maybe Chanyeol’s the one who decides to carry him like that. But that’s not important, and soon Chanyeol is strapping him into the passenger seat of his car and driving him home.
Baekhyun doesn’t end up in his bedroom, though. He ends up in Chanyeol’s, his eyes seeing constellations on Muse posters and his throat aching, bitterness on the tip of his tongue. He doesn’t have a clear play-by-play of everything that’s happened that night.
When Chanyeol hovers over him with an expression that’s impossible to read in the dark, Baekhyun reaches out to hold his face in his hands. He brings him near enough so that their noses are just brushing. Baekhyun shivers at the contact, but Chanyeol’s grip on his wrist is tight enough to crush, and he says, “You’re drunk. I found you kissing Sehun and his hands were up your shirt while yours were on his ass.”
Baekhyun giggles. “He has a nice ass.”
Chanyeol doesn’t respond, but there’s something curious about how he takes in breath after breath. He’s always held his liquor better than Baekhyun.
“You can’t sleep in these clothes.” His tone is harsh though his hands are not, and soon he’s easing out Baekhyun’s shirt and replacing it with one of his old pajama tops. Baekhyun kicks off his denims and, with a little help, he slides on Chanyeol’s old sweatpants.
Baekhyun rests his forehead on his best friend’s shoulder. “I like Sehun. He’s a really good kisser. Great dancer, too.”
“Okay,” Chanyeol says, but his voice sounds a little different. Baekhyun tries to turn his head so he can look up at him. All Chanyeol does is push him off gently, setting him back down amongst the pillows. “Go to sleep, Baek.”
“Chanyeol?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you like me?” Baekhyun asks. He’s a little dizzy and the sheets become a whirlpool in his mind’s eye, but he reasons to himself that he’s sober enough to hold a conversation.
“Of course.” The words come out strangled, and when Baekhyun takes a peek at Chanyeol, he sees his eyes glistening in the dark. He wonders if he’s only imagining the way Chanyeol’s lower lip trembles. “Of course I like you.”
“That’s good, then,” Baekhyun says. He bunches up the blanket around his legs. “‘Night.”
The next morning he wakes up with the sun in his throat and an ocean in his head, and he drinks the hangover medicine sitting on Chanyeol’s bedside table. But when he comes down to breakfast, he sees only Chanyeol’s mother setting the plates, and she gives him an apologetic smile.
“Chanyeol left,” she says. “He had something to do. But here, have some breakfast.”
Baekhyun sits down and eats, but something nags at the back of his mind. Chanyeol never leaves him. He just doesn’t, not even when Baekhyun’s retching up the dregs of his bad decisions into a toilet bowl, not even when he’s confined in a hospital. On days after a night of hard partying, he always makes sure to stick around and take care of Baekhyun while he nurses a hangover.
Chanyeol returns at half-past two in the afternoon and Baekhyun goes over to his house, but his smile is puppet-like and strained and wrong, and Baekhyun leaves after 50 minutes. He knows when he’s not wanted.
He just wants to know why.
÷
He’s dreamed of this for the longest time. Several years with his nose in his textbooks and his hands cramping from taking down notes have turned him restless, eager for the moment he can break free. College, he’s been told, is liberating. Schedules are created out of one’s own preferences. Career paths are staked out on a map of individual interests. Baekhyun just wants something that’s a little less suffocating than the tie around his neck, pulling taut through the fabric of his collar.
It’s an hour before the ceremony and right now he’s in the thick of the other graduates -- his batchmates, people he’s grown up with but was never close to because his perspective of the world was limited only to what he and Chanyeol had created for themselves -- and he lets the excited chatter wash over him. Everyone is reminiscing, walking down memory lanes as if the path isn’t gutted and chaotic right now, and Baekhyun finds it amusing.
He learns about how so-and-so ripped his pants during the freshman orientation. Someone mentions the time he’d had to climb over the gate because he was around 40 minutes late, and the guard had nearly caught him when he’d fallen into the bushes. There’s an anecdote or two from the popular couples, revolving around how she passed by my desk and smiled at me and I fell in love and I thought he was an asshole but then he gave me his jacket when it was raining one night and he drove me back home.
It reminds of him and Chanyeol. Always so inextricably bound to each other, the two of them; always worrying about each other even in the most random moments. Chanyeol is the only one he can call when it’s a Saturday night and he’s more drunk than sober, looking for a ride home. It doesn’t even matter where he is. Chanyeol will find him, and Chanyeol will make sure he’s fine, and Chanyeol won’t scold but he will take care of him.
Did you put a GPS tracker in my phone or something?
If, on sheets of graphing paper, two objects are headed toward each other at different speeds, what is the distance traveled before they collide? He and Chanyeol are extremes. They average out into pranks and impromptu joy rides, forever spontaneous, forever a shade reckless before shifting gears back to primary and stepping on the brakes. His blue, when mixed with Chanyeol’s orange, becomes a sludge of hues that diffracts into a prism of rainbows.
No. But I -- I kind of just know where you are, where you’re likely to go. I’ve spent 12 years with you, haven’t I? In this place, and all the places beyond, I’ve memorized all your haunts.
He sees Jongdae come marching through the crowd, tiptoeing on his shoes as he looks for something. And then his gaze lands on Baekhyun, fifty feet away but still there’s a chasm between, and he seems to tuck in a breath before heading his way.
Baekhyun contemplates disappearing into the clumps of other graduates, but his feet are glued in place and he stays.
But what if, for example, I’m not in the first five haunts you’ve checked? Shouldn’t you just go home?
“You haven’t been replying to our calls and text messages,” Jongdae says. His toga’s draped on his body and it suits him. It should. Jongdae’s going up the stage as the salutatorian, after all.
“I know,” Baekhyun says. He offers no excuse; an explanation, even less so.
“He misses you.”
Baekhyun sighs. Something claws its way out of his chest, drums against his rib cage, precipitates in the marrow of his bones. “I miss him too.”
Jongdae shifts from foot to foot. “Then why?” he says eventually. “Why are you being like this? Why can’t you just talk to him?”
It’s not pride, Baekhyun knows. It’s not the feeling of being unable to step down. It’s not his usual tenacity, either, or his selfishness. Chanyeol’s helped mellow those qualities some time ago.
It is simply that he doesn’t know how to face him, not anymore. It hurts because he knows that where they’re going, they won’t be together like they’ve sworn they will, and he doesn’t want to prolong the agony. He doesn’t want to have to cling to bits and pieces of Chanyeol until the end, and so he chooses to isolate himself. It lets him acclimate to a new world without Chanyeol.
“I don’t know.”
So what if you’re not in those first five haunts? I’m not going home. I’ll keep driving, keep checking every street corner and every restaurant, until I find you. I’ll find you wherever you are.
÷
It builds up the way misunderstandings always do, layer upon layer of half-truths and omissions teetering on the edges of crashing. He and Chanyeol begin to find new hobbies. Baekhyun’s never been one to move, to seek back alleys leading nowhere, but Chanyeol needs direction. He’s got a thirst for getting lost, a wanderlust that drains Baekhyun of any protests.
He’s always wanted to see what the colorful blobs on the map truly look like, but Chanyeol takes things a step further. He wants to go away, to pin his existence down on foreign land, to live with a brook of language he’s learning but doesn’t yet understand. Baekhyun wants to leave so he can go home. Chanyeol just wants to leave for the sake of leaving.
He finds this out when Chanyeol drags him to the stairwell where they’d first discovered the similarities of their humor. The taller guy hands him a crisp white envelope that has a different seal on it, different from the one on the envelope that Baekhyun hands Chanyeol. He knows he’s not supposed to jump to conclusions but his blood’s become ice. With shaky fingers, he tears open the envelope, and he reads out loud that Chanyeol’s going to some performing arts university in a place called California.
“Congrats, Baek,” Chanyeol says, and he tries to slip on a smile but it falters. “You’re accepted.”
“When were you planning to tell me?” Baekhyun asks. He’s only just holding on to what little calmness he has left. It’s hard, though, it’s so hard because Chanyeol’s broken the one principle they’ve always lived by: Honesty. But he hasn’t been entirely honest with things either; they haven’t been all that open to each other for the past few months. Not since Baekhyun’s realized that he’s in love with his best friend.
Chanyeol winces. “I wanted to tell you,” he says, “for the longest time. But I didn’t know how you would take it. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“You made me believe,” Baekhyun spits out, “that we were going to the same college. You made me believe that everything would be okay because we’d be together like always, and that we’d rent an apartment and be roommates. How could you make me hope?”
In a sense, he thinks he’s not just talking about college. He’s talking about everything they’ve been through, the shards of each other that they wrap in quilts and tuck away in their breast pockets, the feelings he’s come to know earlier this year.
Hope is a dangerous weapon to have. It draws out the happiness of a person until they’re light enough to fly, and then it sends a barb that has them plummeting to the ground.
“I’m really sorry,” Chanyeol says. “I’m really sorry. I wanted to tell you but I knew you wouldn’t like it. I knew you were going to change my mind. And -- I -- it’s not like you don’t matter to me, Baekhyun. But there are things I want, and I have to pursue them. You’ve always been my one weakness. You would have asked me to stay.”
Baekhyun drops the envelope. It flutters, lands on the tiles with a soft plop. He takes a step forward and encircled Chanyeol’s wrist with his hand. “Stay.”
“I can’t,” Chanyeol says. “You know I can’t. God, I want to stay, but I want to pursue my dream as well.”
“You can’t leave me,” Baekhyun whispers. “Not like this. Not when I’ve fallen in love with you and it hurts when you’re with someone else. How much more will it hurt when you’re out of my sight?”
Chanyeol stiffens. “What did you say?”
Baekhyun squeezes his eyes shut. It’s his last chance to tell him -- his last chance to unload himself on Chanyeol like he always has. If he’s leaving, this is Baekhyun’s remaining opportunity to give him the truth.
“I’m in love with you,” he murmurs, looking down at his feet. “I just -- when you smile and you laugh and you help me with things, I find it hard to breathe. It’s stupid. But I’m in love with you, and if you’re going to leave me here in Seoul, then I want you to know.”
“Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says, and he sounds choked, “Baekhyun, don’t lie to me. I know you’re just trying to get me to stay. You don’t have to do this, Baek. Don’t do this.”
“But it’s true,” Baekhyun stutters out. He feels the tears winding down his cheeks, leaving liquid trails of sadness that fade in the breeze. “This isn’t about me guilt-tripping you. This is me, telling you I want you to stay, because I’m in love with you and I don’t know what to do without you.”
A hand tilts his chin up, and when he looks up, it’s with shock at the fact that Chanyeol is crying too. “This isn’t fair, Baekhyun,” Chanyeol whispers. “You’re not being fair.”
Why now?
“I’ve been in love with you for the longest time,” Chanyeol continues, voice dropping lower and lower until it embeds itself to the crust of the Earth. “Since we were 14 and walking along the beach and you sang to me with the moon reflected in your eyes. You broke my heart when you dated Sehun and all those other guys. And it isn’t fair that you wouldn’t even let me make friends, wouldn’t even let me learn to live without you so that I could dull the pain.”
“What?” Baekhyun’s lost. He’s drifting in the midst of high tides, bioluminescence turning the waters red. He knows Chanyeol’s never been in a relationship, never had a girlfriend, but he’s simply taken that to mean Chanyeol just isn’t interested in anyone. This is a punch to the gut.
“I’m in love with you, too,” Chanyeol says, thumb brushing away Baekhyun’s tears. “But we can’t work.”
“Why not?” Baekhyun asks. He’s not sure why he does. There’s no way he’s ready to receive an answer.
“Because it’s too late,” Chanyeol murmurs. “We’re graduating in three days.”
“But --”
“I can’t stay, Baekhyun.” Chanyeol lets his hand drop. “I loved you, I’ve loved you for four years, but I can’t stay. I’m flying to America the morning after graduation.”
Baekhyun absorbs this. The knowledge trickles into his thoughts, but it doesn’t stick. “You said we’ll always be together.”
This is when Chanyeol takes a step back. This is when the light streams in, and Baekhyun realizes they’ve lived in the darkness without realizing it, tearing out an oblivion impossible to bridge between the two of them. How did this happen? When did this happen?
“We will be together,” Chanyeol says. “Just not always. Just not every single time. You’ll always find me on the other end of an overseas phone call, a shitty Skype session, or a 12-hour-long plane ride.”
And so Baekhyun continues drawing his own circle, while Chanyeol goes on and on and on.
÷
They’re standing in line now. Jongdae’s gone ahead to the front because of the honors he has to receive. Baekhyun thinks it must be nice to have plenty of awards, but then he thinks of midnights spent writing songs and defeating the latest Pokemon release, and he finds he doesn’t regret anything he’s done.
It’s hot in the auditorium, and wearing both the toga and cap isn’t making things any easier. Sweat soaks his undershirt. He feels icky, especially considering that the march hasn’t even started yet, and he wishes for good air conditioning.
When a palm rests, heavy yet somehow light on his shoulder, Baekhyun doesn’t need to turn around to know who it is. It’s a weight he’s grown accustomed to for most of his life. It’s one that he will lose tomorrow, one that he wil miss on late nights trying to study what needs to be studied.
“Hey.”
There are so many things Baekhyun wants to say to Chanyeol. His thoughts clamor in his head, bubbling over with the desire to be spoken, but there will never be a right time or place to say them. So instead what comes out of his lips is: “Hey.”
“So we’re graduating, huh,” Chanyeol says, and Baekhyun can almost see the wry smile on his face. Almost because he hasn’t turned around yet.
“Yeah,” Baekhyun says. “Four years of suffering now over and done with.”
He doesn’t expect it, but then he’s never a lot of things from Chanyeol. He’s whirled around, and his nose bumps against Chanyeol’s chest, and soon rough fingers are cradling his face and he looks up. Their gazes meet in that unerring way they always do.
“I’m not asking you to send me off tomorrow,” Chanyeol murmurs. “But it’s perhaps best for you not to, because that will only weaken my resolve. But you do know you can still contact me, right? You have my number. You can call me, or email me, or send me your daily selcas. I don’t care. Just -- I’ll always be here to listen if you want someone to talk to.”
“I know,” Baekhyun says, hands clutching onto Chanyeol’s toga. The fabric is coarse. “I’ll clog up your inbox and remind you of things you might forget.”
“I’m not going to forget you,” Chanyeol says. “I’ll be back during summer vacation, anyway. I’ll still be around, like, miles away.”
“You better.”
“Baek?” Chanyeol taps his chin twice. “I just want to say thank you for everything. For putting up with me for 12 years, for always going along with my silly requests, for letting me in through your balcony even when it’s three in the morning. I’m sorry for not telling you about this. I didn’t want to hurt you, I never want to, and it’s because...well, it’s because I love you.”
Baekhyun nods his head. He understands. It’s taken him some time, but he understands. “Thank you, too,” he says. ‘Thank you for calming me down when I’m angry, cheering me up when I’m sad and taking care of me when I was in trouble. I’m sorry for being too selfish. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth -- I’m sorry I hurt you with the things I’ve said and done. I love you, too, Yeol.”
They stay locked in an embrace even though the opening notes of the march is played. It’s only when the line begins moving and someone nudges Baekhyun that they let go, but he doesn’t move for a few more seconds. He just drinks in Chanyeol, the way he looks right now -- wide-eyed and eager, always taller than he is, and strong on the outside but almost too soft on the inside. Chanyeol looks back at him, and he knows he’s doing the same thing: Memorizing the plane of each facial feature, the angle of each smile, the crinkled corners of eyes.
It’s not like the image of each other isn’t already etched into the recesses of memory, reaching far deeper and lasting even longer than other details do. But they’re taking these mental snapshots for no reason other than as a notch on the goal post, something they can use to track the changes when they see each other again.
As Baekhyun comes up to receive his diploma, he thinks he’s finally ready to see sunsets and let the rain in. The shell’s broken off of him into a cracked membrane of defensiveness and he steps out of it.
He catches Chanyeol’s eye in the thick of people waiting to receive their diplomas. It’s fleeting but it’s there, the audible snap of the connection clicking into place, the effortless way they communicate across the distance between them. It tells him they’ll be okay.
He’s looking forward to the time that Chanyeol comes back from America.
÷
On the summer of their third year in high school, Baekhyun and Chanyeol discover an abandoned building on the outskirts of Seoul. It’s not been neglected long enough for it to be crumbling, but the rooms have dressed themselves in shadows and shards of light, and they take care not to disturb anything that must never be disturbed.
They find themselves on the rooftop at 6:45 in the evening, huddled together in a worn, beer-stained couch sagging beneath their combined weight. The stars are shy tonight, leaving the skies a clear, blank blue stretching into oblivion.
“What if we never found each other?” Baekhyun asks, and his words punch a hole into the wall of silence rising between them. “What if I never went to that party? What if you ran away?”
“Then we would have found each other somewhere else, at some other time,” Chanyeol says. “Maybe later, maybe sooner, but we were never intended to be apart. We’re soulmates, remember?”
“Soulmates,” Baekhyun repeats. The idea seems absurd, but it’s filled with an authenticity he can’t place. It’s the only thing that can describe what they have.
“Yeah, soulmates. We might never be together physically, maybe not even until the end of time, but we reside in each other’s heart. If ever I have to go somewhere, I’m never truly leaving you. You will still have pieces of me wherever you go, and by then my thoughts will have become parts of yours, and I will linger within you. Maybe not forever, but I will stay long enough.”
Baekhyun snuggles closer to Chanyeol, eager to soak in the warmth emanating from his best friend’s skin. He’s scared of tomorrow, of what time will bring them and where the paths they’ll take will lead, but Chanyeol’s words are safe in his heart. They flicker and dance in his chest.
Someday, Chanyeol might not be beside him. But all Baekhyun has to do is think of this night -- the empty skies, the far-away harmony of city traffic, the wind’s soft caress -- and he will be fine.
Chanyeol’s right, after all. They are bound in a way that transcends physicality and space and time. The marks he has left are embedded into Baekhyun’s being and they will scar, but they will never fade, and Baekhyun just has to remember that always.
Chanyeol’s not leaving him and he’s not leaving Chanyeol. It’s written on their souls.
A/N:
Hello! I really hope you like this fic, even if it may not live up to your expectations. I enjoyed working with your prompt. A word of gratitude goes to my beta, who makes my writing seem decent and never fails to clean up my messes.
One
Author: Anonymous until 1/30/14
For: sweet_mintx
Pairing: Baekhyun/Chanyeol
Word Count: 9,470
Summary: It doesn't matter how far apart they are, when they've imprinted themselves on each other's soul.
Warnings: Swearing
Rating: PG-13
One
Six hours before the ceremony, he stands in front of the mirror and knots his tie.
It’s funny, Baekhyun thinks, how four years can pass and yet the piece of cloth around his collar is as suffocating as ever. He’s never liked being restrained. But right now, when he’s just moments away from receiving a pretty certificate proclaiming his freedom from secondary education, he doubts if he’s ready to let go.
Someone once told him that he was the only one capable of holding himself down. That he grew his wings because they were beautiful and not because he wanted to fly -- that no matter how many times Baekhyun dragged him along to see hilltop sunrises and rainbows, Baekhyun himself shut the window blinds on sunsets and closed doors on the rain. Always eager to start new things, that someone would say, one hand on Baekhyun’s heart and eyes filled with a kind of understanding that raised goosebumps along his arms, but never ready for them to end.
His fingers trip on silk. Sunlight creeps down the wooden floorboards, rays touching the parts of him that’s learned to live without the shadows. He adjusts his sleeves, buttons up the cuffs, takes a deep breath.
The phone on his desk has been silent for three days. Or maybe it’s just muted, maybe it isn’t that no one’s contacting him at all, but simply that he tunes out anything that’s not what he’s been waiting for. It’s not like he isn’t patient. He’s been patient for years, months, weeks, days, hours -- so, so patient that the very act of waiting is ingrained into his bones. He knows he’s trapped. There is nothing he can do about it.
You do realize that things don’t work that way, Baekhyun. You can’t stay in one place forever. You need to keep going somewhere, and even if you do wait, the world will not wait for you. It will only leave you behind.
“I know,” he says out loud, listening to the way his own admission bounces right off the walls. “Goddamit, I know. You’ve said that so many times.”
His phone is still silent. The knot holding his tie in place is tight, and though the eyeliner rimming his eyes is supposed to make him look confident, he feels vulnerable. Tiny. A passing breeze might knock him down and scatter pieces of him to other lands, other continents. Baekhyun thinks he might like that. He’s always dreamed of traveling the world.
What do you want?
÷
It’s on the cusp of New Year when they collide, sparklers clutched in grubby hands and feet stumbling one too many times on loose rocks. The neighborhood’s gathered together for a celebration, and Baekhyun’s running around with the other little kids, his laughter spilling out of his lips. But then he bumps straight into someone and he drops his sparkler, hands thrown out to stop the earth from kissing him good night.
“I’m sorry,” the other kid says, looking down at him with wide, terrified eyes. His ears stick out and his lower lip wobbles, and soon enough he’s pushing himself off of Baekhyun with tears perching on his eyelashes. The sparklers sputter out the last of their short lives, and Baekhyun registers the sharp pain in his knee.
“It’s okay,” he says, trying to be nice because his mother’s always told him to be considerate of people’s feelings. But his knee isn’t being nice to him, and it’s kind of the kid’s fault, and Baekhyun doesn’t want to be nice to him at all. “But you should have been looking where you were going.”
“I’m sorry,” the kid sniffs. He looks stricken. It’s funny how he’s the one crying when Baekhyun’s the one who’s injured. “I did -- I was looking, but the lights were so pretty, and I didn’t want to drop my sparkler --”
“Don’t,” Baekhyun says, pushing himself up to a sitting position. “You don’t need to explain, it doesn’t matter.”
“Are you okay?” the kid asks, crawling toward him.
“My knee hurts,” Baekhyun says, blinking back tears. He’s not weak. It’s just a tiny wound, he reasons, there’s nothing to cry over.
“Where’s your mom?”
Baekhyun shakes his head. He knows his mom is just going to scold him for straying away from her and he doesn’t want that at all, and so he grabs the kid’s hand and pulls him down to sit beside him. “Stay,” he says. “It doesn’t hurt that much. Besides, you can’t just leave me here.”
“But --”
“What’s your name?” Baekhyun interrupts. “I’m Baekhyun.”
The kid tilts his head a little to the right, and he’s stopped crying for the meantime. “I’m Chanyeol,” he says. “I’m really sorry about your knee. Are you sure you don’t want me to call your mom?” He bites his lip and looks so unsure, and Baekhyun’s heart squeezes just the tiniest bit.
“No, it’s okay,” Baekhyun says. “Let’s just --”
A loud Boom! rents the sky to pieces, and soon it is nothing but jagged puzzle pieces of colors and shapes. The two children fall silent in awe, mouths dropping open and pain forgotten, and they sit there watching the fireworks crowd out the stars. Baekhyun squints to see Polaris between the fingers of a sulfuric lotus display, red and blue tumbling out of clouds and crashing down in arcs of dying beauty.
He feels a hand on his shoulder. It’s warm, reassuring even, and Baekhyun turns to look at the smile white-hot on Chanyeol’s lips. “Happy New Year,” he says, though not without an edge of worry.
And maybe Baekhyun can be nice to him, after all, because Chanyeol had stayed instead of tattling off to his mother, and he’d chosen to greet him even though they didn’t know each other.
So he says, when the chemical dragon in the air lets time slip out of its claws, “Happy New Year to you, too.”
Their families find them curled up in each other’s arms, the grass lulling them to sleep just seconds after the countdown ends. No one bothers to wake them, but when Baekhyun walks down the stairs to breakfast, all he gets is a bandaged knee and a It’s good that you’re making friends with other people your age.
When class resumes a week later, Baekhyun accidentally drops his textbooks on Chanyeol’s foot in the middle of the hallway. The slightly taller child laughs, long and loud and explosive, and Baekhyun finds himself thinking he can live with that sound and that expression for the rest of his life.
Life isn’t a math equation, after all. There is no predicting the absolute maximum of attraction, and no cost function to determine the marginal amount of effort needed to build a friendship. Let B be the first person and let C be the second person. If B likes blank pages and walking on the right side of the road, and C likes messy scrawls and skipping on the left side of the road, how long does it take for them to intersect?
The answer is two hours in a stairwell, lunch boxes balanced on knobby knees and smiles flitting off of motor neurons. A relationship isn’t a constant. Often it happens slow and uncertain, rates beginning at zero and then gaining speed, but with them it’s different. With them, it’s almost instantaneous.
A collision, two sparklers blazing farewell, dropped books and laughter: Sometimes you don’t even need a second. Sometimes, you just know.
÷
The clock tells him he has five hours to go, and so Baekhyun tries to ignore the lack of new messages arriving in his phone inbox. Instead he crouches, careful not to get dust all over his slacks, and he slides out a box from underneath his bed. He’s trapped most of his memories here, caged them within velvet lining and varnished wood grain, kept them far from reach with a rusting lock. The catch crumbles to fragments of iron oxide in his palms, and he flips it back.
Polaroids spill out, rubber bands holding together stacks of 50 each, and he takes care as he flips through them. Some are fading back to the yellow base, but moonbeam smiles and starlight eyes linger even in rolls of negatives. He finds one of him and Chanyeol at 14, sitting on a dead log and arms thrown over each other’s shoulders, both of them snug in matching hoodies. They’re caught mid-laughter -- Baekhyun’s face all scrunched up and hands clutching onto Chanyeol’s hoodie, the column of Chanyeol’s throat exposed to the night air as he throws his head back.
This is the two of them painted in shades of reckless abandonment. In worlds that turn at precise angles and societies that create new rules everywhere, there is little room for fly-by-night souls. Perhaps it’s the reason why he and Chanyeol have always been the anomalies. Rule-breakers, partners in crime, pranksters.
It makes him want to go back back back, when their only concern was whether or not tying a bucket of slime above the men’s bathroom door meant 10 hours of community service or a night of cleaning classrooms. On days tossed away like pretty pennies flipped to reflect the glow of sun, the two of them race on their skateboards along choked sidewalks. It’s always about the thrill, the chase, the feeling that crawls into your veins and makes you feel more alive than you’ve ever been.
Don’t you wish we can do this forever?
He does. Every single day and every single night, he’s on the lookout for shooting stars. He stands guard for 11:11, looks for wish bones in every chicken dish, searches for four-leaf clovers. Dreams are elusive things. He knows this now, and he regrets not knowing sooner.
We’ll have to grow up.
There is a plastic bag of shells and white sand in a corner of the box. He twirls it in his hands, watches the shells sink deeper into the sand as if finding comfort in something that’s close to home. If he closes his eyes and forgets enough of reality, he can feel the sea gathering in his hands, overflowing through the spaces in his fingers.
Not now, though. Let’s grow up tomorrow.
The thing is, tomorrow has come and gone. Tomorrow is today.
÷
They’re on the threshold of 16 when Chanyeol clambers over to his balcony with a guitar case slung across his back. He’s a cocktail of height and elfin features now, black hair long enough to swirl shadows over the contours of his cheekbones, and Baekhyun often strains his neck in order to look up at him.
“You could have knocked on the front door,” Baekhyun says, amused. Chanyeol’s slumped over and leaning his head against the balustrade. There are twigs in his hair and leaves in the pockets of his pants. His chest rises, falls.
“Yeah,” he says after a while, deep voice coming out a little fragmented because he’s still out of air. “Yeah, but it’s ten in the evening and our parents might throw a fit.”
Baekhyun raises an eyebrow. “So you decided that climbing up a tree would be much safer?”
Chanyeol shoots him a look. “Okay, so that may have been a bit stupid --”
“More like really stupid because you could have fallen and gotten injured, and I wouldn’t be able to ride on your shoulders for the concert we’re supposed to watch --”
“But it was the only way and your room’s not so high up,” Chanyeol finishes, standing up. Baekhyun steps back and lets him walk through the glass sliding doors. “Anyway, I got an invite from a friend of mine about a live cafe a few blocks away from school. I was thinking about performing a cover.”
“What does this have to do with me?” Baekhyun asks, flopping back down on his bed and staring up at his ceiling. They’re covered in neon highlighter doodles and sharpie scrawls. The stupid string of red headless chickens and ducks are Chanyeol’s work, while the sensible drawings are Baekhyun’s, done on nights when Chanyeol was willing enough to let him ride on his shoulders until the markers bled dry. “Also, which friend is this?”
Chanyeol’s sitting, indian-style, on the other side of the bed as he tunes his guitar. His limbs are rough pencil strokes, and he looks at Baekhyun with graphite eyes laid too thick on paper. “Would you rather I didn’t tell you?” he says. “And the friend I’m talking about is Kris. You know -- the captain of the basketball team, senior year, and likes flying to different countries on a whim?”
Baekhyun does know Kris. He’s seen him, a lanky figure with 00 screaming on the back of his jersey, going hard on the court until the ball’s a perfect arc and whistling through the net. Kris is one of those popular jocks with enough money to burn, loping his way through school with long legs and good looks and piercing stares.
“I never knew you were friends with him.”
Something about Baekhyun’s tone has Chanyeol setting down his guitar. He scoots closer and tugs Baekhyun up to face him, and Baekhyun’s not in any mood to resist. He stares at the graphic on Chanyeol’s hoodie.
“Jongin dragged me to one of their practice games once,” Chanyeol says as he tilts Baekhyun’s face up. “Remember when we were partners for that Lit project? We were supposed to do it after his basketball practice, and so he told me to meet him at the gym after class. I watched the game, waited for Jongin to get his things, and Kris came and talked to me while I was waiting.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Baekhyun mutters. “I don’t care.”
“Because it’s bothering you,” Chanyeol says.
Baekhyun bites his lip and pulls away. Chanyeol lets his hand fall back down to his lap, but his gaze is still pinned on Baekhyun.
“It’s not bothering me,” he says, swallowing down the feeling that flutters in his gut. It’s both restless and intrusive, drumming against epithelial cells in a bid for the way out, and he doesn’t understand it. That doesn’t mean he likes it.
That doesn’t mean he likes the fact that Chanyeol’s been hanging out with other people, people he’s never introduced to Baekhyun or told him about, people outside of the sphere of mutual friends they’ve both built between their worlds. It’s equal parts irrational and petty for him to be acting this way, but Baekhyun doesn’t like sharing his best friend. He’s not too comfortable with the fact that Chanyeol does things Baekhyun’s not privy to -- it almost feels like he’s losing his place in Chanyeol’s life.
These past few months, he’s realized just how easy it is to lose Chanyeol. Childhood friendships built out of sandcastles and toy battleships can only last for so long, and people don’t quite like holding on to the past. He’s seen Chanyeol drift away, inch by inch, the moment they’d been assigned to different sections in high school. Sometimes he feels like he’s the only one tugging on the rope connecting them so that it doesn’t snap, and he feels the burn of twine on his fingertips one too many times.
“Hey,” Chanyeol says, and Baekhyun hears the Please look at me lying beneath his tone. “You do care. That’s why I’m telling you about the live cafe. Kris will be there. I’d like you to meet him.”
Baekhyun begins twisting and turning the hem of his shirt. “What, is he your boyfriend or something? Am I supposed to give you my blessing?”
“Baekhyun.”
“Okay, so he’s not your boyfriend, then,” Baekhyun says. “I still don’t care. Why are you here? You could have just texted me or waited until tomorrow. It’s ten in the evening, Chanyeol, this is a waste of time.”
The silence drifts down, almost excruciatingly slow, settling on Baekhyun’s toes and falling in delicate folds over his mouth. He knows hurt when it’s in the form of tense shoulders and cracked irises -- when it comes out as a dent in the mattress and feet padding across the room and a wire-stiffened back.
He’s always been too harsh, he knows. Chanyeol is the only one capable of softening the blows. He soaks the chill of Baekhyun’s words in warmth, kindles them with compassion, compresses them in gentleness.
“I just wanted to spend time with you.” Chanyeol’s voice is lower now. His back is turned to Baekhyun and he’s standing in the middle of the room, hands clenched. “I just wanted to ask you if maybe, maybe you wanted to come with me to the cafe, to sing the song I’d composed.”
Baekhyun stills. “You composed a song?”
“I don’t know why it’s wrong for me to make new friends,” Chanyeol continues. “Always, when you see me with someone else, you get this look on your face. I don’t want us to fight over something like that so I’ve always just let it go, but Baekhyun, how long will it take for you to see that I’m not trying to replace you?”
“I’m sorry,” Baekhyun murmurs. The words are fragile, hanging in the air before slipping down, down, down. “I’m just...scared.”
“Scared of what? There’s nothing to be scared of. You’re being selfish, Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says, and it hits Baekhyun hard. “Selfish and unreasonable and stubborn, like always.”
“You don’t need to fling that in my face,” Baekhyun bites out.
“But that’s who you are,” Chanyeol says, though his tone is softer this time. He turns around. “That’s who you are, and even if you’re all those things, you’re also loyal and determined and willing to fight for what you believe in. I like you like this.” He crosses the distance between them and squats in front of Baekhyun so that they’re eye to eye. “What I’m trying to say is, I’m not leaving you. I’m not going to replace you. I can have a million friends, but none of them will ever have a prayer of taking your place. No matter who you are, no matter how difficult you can be, I don’t want anyone else. Okay?”
Baekhyun buries his face in his hands. How does one dilute the taste of salt when a handful of it’s been sprinkled on your wounds, and how does one hold back the bitterness so that it doesn’t taint the sweetness?
“Baekhyun?”
“Okay,” Baekhyun says. He feels the familiar weight of Chanyeol’s arms wrapping around him, pulling him close. “Okay.”
“Don’t be like this,” Chanyeol whispers in his ear. It’s soothing, the way he sounds. “There is nothing to be jealous of, alright? We’re soulmates. Soulmates don’t leave each other’s side. Even if they do, the connection will forever be there, and nothing can erase that.”
Baekhyun can’t find the appropriate words to respond to that. He can’t, and so he simply nods his head against Chanyeol’s chest.
“Let me hear your song,” he says after a moment. “I want to know how bad it is so I can make it sound better with my singing.”
“You brat,” Chanyeol says, but there’s only affection coursing through the term. He ruffles Baekhyun’s hair. “Let go of me, then, so I can get my guitar.”
Baekhyun lets go. As he watches Chanyeol retrieve his guitar and come back to sit beside him, he thinks of the years they’ve been together. They’re not attached to the hip but they’re never that far apart either. He thinks of crumpled paper notes and lame handshakes, of rubber swings and treehouses and origami boats. There is a decade they’ve spun together -- a decade of soda pop afternoons, barefoot races, beach hide-and-seek, and sleepovers where they are cocooned in blankets and cotton pajamas.
They’ve lasted longer than most childhood friends do. Gunning for the expiration date and then way past it, but the relationship’s never soured and the communication lines have never curdled. It’s the reason why he’s always on edge, because he knows well enough that every beginning has an end, and he thinks it’s right around the corner for the both of them.
But as Chanyeol gives him that gasoline smile, happiness streaking his lips and eyes bright-hot, Baekhyun thinks that it’s maybe time for him to believe.
÷
Chanyeol’s never been perfect.
But neither is he, and maybe that’s why they fit so well. His cold, calm blue is matched by Chanyeol’s fiery, enthusiastic orange. Complements, the two of them -- sharp lines adhering to rounded edges, sandpaper smoothing out wood splinters, two bodies so distinct from each other.
If Chanyeol is careless, knocking down tables and chairs and maybe people’s feelings, Baekhyun is the one with tact. He sweeps up the broken pieces, sets them right again. If Chanyeol slides up and down the emotional scale, Baekhyun is steadier, a little more in control of his feelings. If Chanyeol is conceited and clever enough to fashion masks out of what people want from him, Baekhyun’s the opposite. He’s down to earth enough to bring Chanyeol back down from his high, and he’s more honest with what he shows other people.
They are too riddled with flaws when separated, fine cracks running through their images. Together they are still flawed, but they balance each other out, and somehow the imperfections are whittled down and tamed.
Chanyeol and Baekhyun overlap, filling the empty spaces and hiding sites of ruin.
Do you ever get tired of me?
It’s hard to view them as individuals. The boundaries defining them have long since blurred and they’ve melded, bodies set apart but thoughts braided together. Folded into each other, boxed up, and knotted: They form a parcel of human consciousness impossible to break up. Maybe, maybe they do exist without the other. Maybe they are capable of waking, breathing, living when they are divided. But it’s not one they will ever desire.
Sometimes I do. But that doesn’t mean I’m going away. All I need to do is fall asleep, and when the next day begins, you’ll be someone entirely new and I’ll discover you again.
Four hours to go.
÷
He finds out that the flip side of the world is a dark, scary place around five months after he turns 13. By this time, he knows what’s considered normal and what’s not, and he keeps up a running list. Walking to school, playing soccer, having pets -- these are normal. Liking guys instead of girls, when you’re a guy yourself, is not.
He realizes this the moment a boy named Kim Junmyeon, president of the batch two years above Baekhyun’s, offers him a hand when he’s struggling over his History essay. Chanyeol’s not around because he’s sick, and Junmyeon notices his distress a computer station away. It’s when Junmyeon’s breath lingers on his nape with each spoken word, when Junmyeon’s hand brushes past his to press the correct keys, when Junmyeon gives him a smile that resembles the endless glow of a star -- that’s when Baekhyun knows. He knows that the feelings wreaking havoc in the pit of his stomach are the very same feelings he’s been searching for, feelings he’s hoped would show themselves whenever a pretty girl flounced by.
He doesn’t know how to deal with this knowledge. So he creases it into an origami rose and lets it wilt in a corner of his mind, deprived of light and carbon dioxide and acceptance. Chanyeol recovers after three days. Baekhyun’s jittery. He wonders if his best friend will still accept him, or if those wide, mischievous eyes will be clouded by disgust.
Chanyeol’s oblivious but he’s not dumb, and he’s spent a long enough time with Baekhyun to know when something’s wrong. And so, on a Friday night with bruised skies, he coaxes Baekhyun into his bedroom and locks the door. He leans his full weight against it so that Baekhyun can’t run away.
There are no words exchanged between them. They’ve never needed that, and they don’t need that now, and Baekhyun fiddles with the straps of his backpacks. Chanyeol’s gaze coats him in patience from head to toe.
Honesty is the one thing they’ve built their friendship on, and maybe that’s why Baekhyun retreats into Chanyeol’s closet and plunges into the thick of his best friend’s dress shirts, body quivering with nerves.
He hears Chanyeol standing up, only just stopping a few feet away from the closet. “Baekhyun, what are you doing? We need to talk, and we can’t do that if you’re in there.”
“Don’t move,” Baekhyun croaks out. His hands are balled up into fists. “Just -- just stay where you are?”
“Baekhyun, tell me what’s going on.”
He needs to do this now, before his courage becomes dust and he’s left to wander crop circles of lies. With a deep breath, Baekhyun pushes open the doors, and he steps out.
Chanyeol’s eyebrows are knitted together. “What are you doing?”
“I’m,” Baekhyun says, and it takes all of his will not to turn this into a joke and hide from the issue, “I’m coming out of the closet.”
Chanyeol blinks. “What are you saying --”
“I’m coming out of the closet.”
It registers slow. For Baekhyun, these are the most painful eleven seconds of his life, watching the realization spread through Chanyeol’s eyes. And then his face is closed off, and the pain turns to a kind of fear that turns him cold.
He doesn’t know he’s crying until Chanyeol’s clutching him tight to his chest. They’re on the floor, a mess of limbs and torsos and heads, and Baekhyun breathes in the citrus scent of Chanyeol’s hair.
“You’re not -- you’re not ashamed of me?” Baekhyun stutters out.
“No, why would would I be ashamed of you?” Chanyeol says, and his tone is comforting. “I mean, I’m ashamed when you start doing random poses in the middle of the street, but I’m not ashamed of you.”
“I’ll have you know that I have the potential to be a good model, unlike you,” Baekhyun says. Relief is a bubble growing in his chest.
He feels Chanyeol smile against his hair. “What are you saying, you brat?”
“So we’re still best friends?” Baekhyun asks, clutching Chanyeol’s shirt.
“Of course,” Chanyeol says, and his grip on Baekhyun tightens for a fraction of a second. “You’re still Baekhyun. I’m still Chanyeol. Nothing’s changed.”
The tears come back faster now, but he’s happy. Even though it’s terrifying, even though he’s still off-balance, Baekhyun is happy.
No matter what happens, he’ll still have Chanyeol by his side.
÷
It isn’t that promises are made to be broken. It’s simply that they are meant to end. At some point in time, fulfilling a promise ceases to matter, and it’s a fact that people tend to overlook. That’s why he and Chanyeol have always linked pinkies over things with a clear due by date, drawing the limits so as to avoid disappointment. Except, that is, for one thing.
How long is forever, though?
“I swear off of video games until the day of the last exam.” Or, “I’ll take care of Baekhyun until the third of October.” Sometimes: “I’ll help Chanyeol pick gifts on the week before Christmas every year.”
They’ve learned that being vague about durations, that letting deals trail off until the beginning of the unknown, can only cultivate betrayal. It’s better to establish the lines. What’s finite is easier to deal with, to weigh and to appreciate. Expecting someone to follow through with their promises, though, until the world gathers itself together and shreds apart the cosmos -- that’s asking too much from a person.
He wonders why they let themselves believe that one time they should have continued doubting.
Forever is forever. Forever is until you forget me, and maybe even beyond that.
He has three hours left. Three hours, and then he will be face to face with forever, and he’s not sure how he’s supposed to deal with that. He’s not sure if he’s supposed to resist or to yield.
All he knows is that he won’t forget.
÷
After three relationships crashing and falling through to the core of the Earth, Baekhyun finds himself a senior with uncertainty shoved down his pressed shirt sleeves. Eighteen isn’t all that it’s made out to be. All it does is declare him legal enough to drink when he’s been downing shots of soju on beach trips with Chanyeol since he was 15. By now he’s had enough bad experiences with liquor to see remnants of its allure, and it’s ironic that now he’s not so keen on drinking.
“It’s because you’re a lightweight,” Chanyeol says, throwing his head back and laughing. But the cans of beer he brings to their sleepovers grows fewer and fewer, until the alcohol is replaced with coke and popcorn and those salsa dips for nachos. Chanyeol can hold his liquor better, but he always adjusts to his best friend’s whims and preferences.
A month and a half into the first semester, Chanyeol pelts him with a paper airplane during study hall. And when Baekhyun turns around, he’s on the receiving end of Chanyeol’s emerging grin, blinding and joyful and wide. He doesn’t know what happens. He doesn’t know why his heart strains against his rib cage and jumps, startled, within his chest. His thoughts accelerate then slow down.
This is when it begins.
Chanyeol’s hugs are prisons and strait jackets. His happiness is pure torture. When he crosses his legs and closes his eyes and strums his guitar, Baekhyun’s left to deal with wrecked melodies and a rapidly beating heart. A smile tossed his way becomes a wound; a feather-light touch becomes a pebble weighing him down. The feeling grows heavier and heavier, and Baekhyun fights back harder and harder, even as he asks, Why now?
He lets the truth go unsaid when they play spin-the-bottle. They are on different sides of the river even though they’re breaths apart, and Baekhyun curls into a ball to generate heat on frozen nights. Chanyeol reaches for him. Baekhyun turns away.
These days their communication lines are muddy and unclear. Every message is riddled with static. Every word spoken is jumbled and mixed up, and where they used to talk through subtle glances, now they spend entire arguments dissecting the things left to simmer in silence.
Chanyeol asks him what’s wrong.
Baekhyun thinks it’s a familiar pattern, one that’s tie-dyed and messy, and he doesn’t want it. He says, “Me.”
He leaves Chanyeol with confusion, with emotions he’s never wanted to deal with, with forevers and tomorrows and promises kept even after their expiration dates.
He leaves Chanyeol with all of himself, but it’s hard to tell him he’s got Baekhyun’s heart cupped in his palms when Baekhyun’s the one slamming the door closed.
÷
The life of each person is a circle, and everyone else they come across is a tangent line. Chanyeol’s deflected off of him, passing through only one point and holding on longer than most, but there’s a reason why they’re not interlinked. The connection exists between them and it will last, but that doesn’t mean they’ll always be together.
He plays with the keychain hanging off of his phone and scrolls through the messages. 11:59 of yesterday evening, Jongdae texts him, we r graduating tomorrow, what’s your plan? At 9:45 in the morning of today, Jongin sends him a >:( and talk to Chanyeol, pls. There are seven missed calls from Kyungsoo, made in the span of 12:33 in the afternoon to 12:57. Baekhyun deletes them all.
It’s funny how the two of them chose to drift apart now. At the same time, it feels right, because this is when they have to face new beginnings and fashion their futures. In some ways, it’s a wise decision. That’s what Baekhyun tells himself when he’s curled up in bed and watching the searing white of Chanyeol’s bedroom light straggle on until morning.
In most ways it’s a punishment, and Baekhyun cannot fathom just how different everything is without Chanyeol. He goes home earlier because there’s no one to wait for, no reason to stay in school because Chanyeol’s band practice ends 30 minutes before the gates close. He spends weekends looking for something to do, waste away the hours he’s saved up without Chanyeol around to squander them.
Didn’t we say we’d stay together forever?
His heart constricts whenever Jason Mraz comes on. The streets echo with Chanyeol’s laughter, and when he concentrates enough, he can feel the taller guy’s hold lingering on his skin. Forever is dependent. It’s a variable relying on the magnetism of two opposite poles, the fickle nature of emotions, and the passing of time. Forever doesn’t mean eternity. It only means until both sides let go.
We are staying together. Just not always. Just not every single time.
There is a knock on his door. Baekhyun takes one last look at himself in the mirror, and then he’s grabbing the garment bag containing his toga and graduation cap, and he runs down the stairs.
You said you’ll never leave me.
His family’s waiting in the living room, faces shining with pride. There’s a camera in his mother’s hands and someone says, “Let’s take a picture!”
But I’m not leaving you, not really. I’ll still be around. Maybe not right beside you, but I’m always at the other end of a phone call, a shitty Skype connection or a 12-hour-long plane ride.
Baekhyun thinks of a boy with bright eyes and huge ears, and his cheeks stretch with the biggest smile he’s ever worn.
÷
He remembers many things he’s shared with Chanyeol, but one that’s stuck with him is this: He is 15 and inebriated, mind swimming in seas of incoherence, and he hangs himself over Chanyeol’s shoulder. Or maybe Chanyeol’s the one who decides to carry him like that. But that’s not important, and soon Chanyeol is strapping him into the passenger seat of his car and driving him home.
Baekhyun doesn’t end up in his bedroom, though. He ends up in Chanyeol’s, his eyes seeing constellations on Muse posters and his throat aching, bitterness on the tip of his tongue. He doesn’t have a clear play-by-play of everything that’s happened that night.
When Chanyeol hovers over him with an expression that’s impossible to read in the dark, Baekhyun reaches out to hold his face in his hands. He brings him near enough so that their noses are just brushing. Baekhyun shivers at the contact, but Chanyeol’s grip on his wrist is tight enough to crush, and he says, “You’re drunk. I found you kissing Sehun and his hands were up your shirt while yours were on his ass.”
Baekhyun giggles. “He has a nice ass.”
Chanyeol doesn’t respond, but there’s something curious about how he takes in breath after breath. He’s always held his liquor better than Baekhyun.
“You can’t sleep in these clothes.” His tone is harsh though his hands are not, and soon he’s easing out Baekhyun’s shirt and replacing it with one of his old pajama tops. Baekhyun kicks off his denims and, with a little help, he slides on Chanyeol’s old sweatpants.
Baekhyun rests his forehead on his best friend’s shoulder. “I like Sehun. He’s a really good kisser. Great dancer, too.”
“Okay,” Chanyeol says, but his voice sounds a little different. Baekhyun tries to turn his head so he can look up at him. All Chanyeol does is push him off gently, setting him back down amongst the pillows. “Go to sleep, Baek.”
“Chanyeol?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you like me?” Baekhyun asks. He’s a little dizzy and the sheets become a whirlpool in his mind’s eye, but he reasons to himself that he’s sober enough to hold a conversation.
“Of course.” The words come out strangled, and when Baekhyun takes a peek at Chanyeol, he sees his eyes glistening in the dark. He wonders if he’s only imagining the way Chanyeol’s lower lip trembles. “Of course I like you.”
“That’s good, then,” Baekhyun says. He bunches up the blanket around his legs. “‘Night.”
The next morning he wakes up with the sun in his throat and an ocean in his head, and he drinks the hangover medicine sitting on Chanyeol’s bedside table. But when he comes down to breakfast, he sees only Chanyeol’s mother setting the plates, and she gives him an apologetic smile.
“Chanyeol left,” she says. “He had something to do. But here, have some breakfast.”
Baekhyun sits down and eats, but something nags at the back of his mind. Chanyeol never leaves him. He just doesn’t, not even when Baekhyun’s retching up the dregs of his bad decisions into a toilet bowl, not even when he’s confined in a hospital. On days after a night of hard partying, he always makes sure to stick around and take care of Baekhyun while he nurses a hangover.
Chanyeol returns at half-past two in the afternoon and Baekhyun goes over to his house, but his smile is puppet-like and strained and wrong, and Baekhyun leaves after 50 minutes. He knows when he’s not wanted.
He just wants to know why.
÷
He’s dreamed of this for the longest time. Several years with his nose in his textbooks and his hands cramping from taking down notes have turned him restless, eager for the moment he can break free. College, he’s been told, is liberating. Schedules are created out of one’s own preferences. Career paths are staked out on a map of individual interests. Baekhyun just wants something that’s a little less suffocating than the tie around his neck, pulling taut through the fabric of his collar.
It’s an hour before the ceremony and right now he’s in the thick of the other graduates -- his batchmates, people he’s grown up with but was never close to because his perspective of the world was limited only to what he and Chanyeol had created for themselves -- and he lets the excited chatter wash over him. Everyone is reminiscing, walking down memory lanes as if the path isn’t gutted and chaotic right now, and Baekhyun finds it amusing.
He learns about how so-and-so ripped his pants during the freshman orientation. Someone mentions the time he’d had to climb over the gate because he was around 40 minutes late, and the guard had nearly caught him when he’d fallen into the bushes. There’s an anecdote or two from the popular couples, revolving around how she passed by my desk and smiled at me and I fell in love and I thought he was an asshole but then he gave me his jacket when it was raining one night and he drove me back home.
It reminds of him and Chanyeol. Always so inextricably bound to each other, the two of them; always worrying about each other even in the most random moments. Chanyeol is the only one he can call when it’s a Saturday night and he’s more drunk than sober, looking for a ride home. It doesn’t even matter where he is. Chanyeol will find him, and Chanyeol will make sure he’s fine, and Chanyeol won’t scold but he will take care of him.
Did you put a GPS tracker in my phone or something?
If, on sheets of graphing paper, two objects are headed toward each other at different speeds, what is the distance traveled before they collide? He and Chanyeol are extremes. They average out into pranks and impromptu joy rides, forever spontaneous, forever a shade reckless before shifting gears back to primary and stepping on the brakes. His blue, when mixed with Chanyeol’s orange, becomes a sludge of hues that diffracts into a prism of rainbows.
No. But I -- I kind of just know where you are, where you’re likely to go. I’ve spent 12 years with you, haven’t I? In this place, and all the places beyond, I’ve memorized all your haunts.
He sees Jongdae come marching through the crowd, tiptoeing on his shoes as he looks for something. And then his gaze lands on Baekhyun, fifty feet away but still there’s a chasm between, and he seems to tuck in a breath before heading his way.
Baekhyun contemplates disappearing into the clumps of other graduates, but his feet are glued in place and he stays.
But what if, for example, I’m not in the first five haunts you’ve checked? Shouldn’t you just go home?
“You haven’t been replying to our calls and text messages,” Jongdae says. His toga’s draped on his body and it suits him. It should. Jongdae’s going up the stage as the salutatorian, after all.
“I know,” Baekhyun says. He offers no excuse; an explanation, even less so.
“He misses you.”
Baekhyun sighs. Something claws its way out of his chest, drums against his rib cage, precipitates in the marrow of his bones. “I miss him too.”
Jongdae shifts from foot to foot. “Then why?” he says eventually. “Why are you being like this? Why can’t you just talk to him?”
It’s not pride, Baekhyun knows. It’s not the feeling of being unable to step down. It’s not his usual tenacity, either, or his selfishness. Chanyeol’s helped mellow those qualities some time ago.
It is simply that he doesn’t know how to face him, not anymore. It hurts because he knows that where they’re going, they won’t be together like they’ve sworn they will, and he doesn’t want to prolong the agony. He doesn’t want to have to cling to bits and pieces of Chanyeol until the end, and so he chooses to isolate himself. It lets him acclimate to a new world without Chanyeol.
“I don’t know.”
So what if you’re not in those first five haunts? I’m not going home. I’ll keep driving, keep checking every street corner and every restaurant, until I find you. I’ll find you wherever you are.
÷
It builds up the way misunderstandings always do, layer upon layer of half-truths and omissions teetering on the edges of crashing. He and Chanyeol begin to find new hobbies. Baekhyun’s never been one to move, to seek back alleys leading nowhere, but Chanyeol needs direction. He’s got a thirst for getting lost, a wanderlust that drains Baekhyun of any protests.
He’s always wanted to see what the colorful blobs on the map truly look like, but Chanyeol takes things a step further. He wants to go away, to pin his existence down on foreign land, to live with a brook of language he’s learning but doesn’t yet understand. Baekhyun wants to leave so he can go home. Chanyeol just wants to leave for the sake of leaving.
He finds this out when Chanyeol drags him to the stairwell where they’d first discovered the similarities of their humor. The taller guy hands him a crisp white envelope that has a different seal on it, different from the one on the envelope that Baekhyun hands Chanyeol. He knows he’s not supposed to jump to conclusions but his blood’s become ice. With shaky fingers, he tears open the envelope, and he reads out loud that Chanyeol’s going to some performing arts university in a place called California.
“Congrats, Baek,” Chanyeol says, and he tries to slip on a smile but it falters. “You’re accepted.”
“When were you planning to tell me?” Baekhyun asks. He’s only just holding on to what little calmness he has left. It’s hard, though, it’s so hard because Chanyeol’s broken the one principle they’ve always lived by: Honesty. But he hasn’t been entirely honest with things either; they haven’t been all that open to each other for the past few months. Not since Baekhyun’s realized that he’s in love with his best friend.
Chanyeol winces. “I wanted to tell you,” he says, “for the longest time. But I didn’t know how you would take it. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“You made me believe,” Baekhyun spits out, “that we were going to the same college. You made me believe that everything would be okay because we’d be together like always, and that we’d rent an apartment and be roommates. How could you make me hope?”
In a sense, he thinks he’s not just talking about college. He’s talking about everything they’ve been through, the shards of each other that they wrap in quilts and tuck away in their breast pockets, the feelings he’s come to know earlier this year.
Hope is a dangerous weapon to have. It draws out the happiness of a person until they’re light enough to fly, and then it sends a barb that has them plummeting to the ground.
“I’m really sorry,” Chanyeol says. “I’m really sorry. I wanted to tell you but I knew you wouldn’t like it. I knew you were going to change my mind. And -- I -- it’s not like you don’t matter to me, Baekhyun. But there are things I want, and I have to pursue them. You’ve always been my one weakness. You would have asked me to stay.”
Baekhyun drops the envelope. It flutters, lands on the tiles with a soft plop. He takes a step forward and encircled Chanyeol’s wrist with his hand. “Stay.”
“I can’t,” Chanyeol says. “You know I can’t. God, I want to stay, but I want to pursue my dream as well.”
“You can’t leave me,” Baekhyun whispers. “Not like this. Not when I’ve fallen in love with you and it hurts when you’re with someone else. How much more will it hurt when you’re out of my sight?”
Chanyeol stiffens. “What did you say?”
Baekhyun squeezes his eyes shut. It’s his last chance to tell him -- his last chance to unload himself on Chanyeol like he always has. If he’s leaving, this is Baekhyun’s remaining opportunity to give him the truth.
“I’m in love with you,” he murmurs, looking down at his feet. “I just -- when you smile and you laugh and you help me with things, I find it hard to breathe. It’s stupid. But I’m in love with you, and if you’re going to leave me here in Seoul, then I want you to know.”
“Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says, and he sounds choked, “Baekhyun, don’t lie to me. I know you’re just trying to get me to stay. You don’t have to do this, Baek. Don’t do this.”
“But it’s true,” Baekhyun stutters out. He feels the tears winding down his cheeks, leaving liquid trails of sadness that fade in the breeze. “This isn’t about me guilt-tripping you. This is me, telling you I want you to stay, because I’m in love with you and I don’t know what to do without you.”
A hand tilts his chin up, and when he looks up, it’s with shock at the fact that Chanyeol is crying too. “This isn’t fair, Baekhyun,” Chanyeol whispers. “You’re not being fair.”
Why now?
“I’ve been in love with you for the longest time,” Chanyeol continues, voice dropping lower and lower until it embeds itself to the crust of the Earth. “Since we were 14 and walking along the beach and you sang to me with the moon reflected in your eyes. You broke my heart when you dated Sehun and all those other guys. And it isn’t fair that you wouldn’t even let me make friends, wouldn’t even let me learn to live without you so that I could dull the pain.”
“What?” Baekhyun’s lost. He’s drifting in the midst of high tides, bioluminescence turning the waters red. He knows Chanyeol’s never been in a relationship, never had a girlfriend, but he’s simply taken that to mean Chanyeol just isn’t interested in anyone. This is a punch to the gut.
“I’m in love with you, too,” Chanyeol says, thumb brushing away Baekhyun’s tears. “But we can’t work.”
“Why not?” Baekhyun asks. He’s not sure why he does. There’s no way he’s ready to receive an answer.
“Because it’s too late,” Chanyeol murmurs. “We’re graduating in three days.”
“But --”
“I can’t stay, Baekhyun.” Chanyeol lets his hand drop. “I loved you, I’ve loved you for four years, but I can’t stay. I’m flying to America the morning after graduation.”
Baekhyun absorbs this. The knowledge trickles into his thoughts, but it doesn’t stick. “You said we’ll always be together.”
This is when Chanyeol takes a step back. This is when the light streams in, and Baekhyun realizes they’ve lived in the darkness without realizing it, tearing out an oblivion impossible to bridge between the two of them. How did this happen? When did this happen?
“We will be together,” Chanyeol says. “Just not always. Just not every single time. You’ll always find me on the other end of an overseas phone call, a shitty Skype session, or a 12-hour-long plane ride.”
And so Baekhyun continues drawing his own circle, while Chanyeol goes on and on and on.
÷
They’re standing in line now. Jongdae’s gone ahead to the front because of the honors he has to receive. Baekhyun thinks it must be nice to have plenty of awards, but then he thinks of midnights spent writing songs and defeating the latest Pokemon release, and he finds he doesn’t regret anything he’s done.
It’s hot in the auditorium, and wearing both the toga and cap isn’t making things any easier. Sweat soaks his undershirt. He feels icky, especially considering that the march hasn’t even started yet, and he wishes for good air conditioning.
When a palm rests, heavy yet somehow light on his shoulder, Baekhyun doesn’t need to turn around to know who it is. It’s a weight he’s grown accustomed to for most of his life. It’s one that he will lose tomorrow, one that he wil miss on late nights trying to study what needs to be studied.
“Hey.”
There are so many things Baekhyun wants to say to Chanyeol. His thoughts clamor in his head, bubbling over with the desire to be spoken, but there will never be a right time or place to say them. So instead what comes out of his lips is: “Hey.”
“So we’re graduating, huh,” Chanyeol says, and Baekhyun can almost see the wry smile on his face. Almost because he hasn’t turned around yet.
“Yeah,” Baekhyun says. “Four years of suffering now over and done with.”
He doesn’t expect it, but then he’s never a lot of things from Chanyeol. He’s whirled around, and his nose bumps against Chanyeol’s chest, and soon rough fingers are cradling his face and he looks up. Their gazes meet in that unerring way they always do.
“I’m not asking you to send me off tomorrow,” Chanyeol murmurs. “But it’s perhaps best for you not to, because that will only weaken my resolve. But you do know you can still contact me, right? You have my number. You can call me, or email me, or send me your daily selcas. I don’t care. Just -- I’ll always be here to listen if you want someone to talk to.”
“I know,” Baekhyun says, hands clutching onto Chanyeol’s toga. The fabric is coarse. “I’ll clog up your inbox and remind you of things you might forget.”
“I’m not going to forget you,” Chanyeol says. “I’ll be back during summer vacation, anyway. I’ll still be around, like, miles away.”
“You better.”
“Baek?” Chanyeol taps his chin twice. “I just want to say thank you for everything. For putting up with me for 12 years, for always going along with my silly requests, for letting me in through your balcony even when it’s three in the morning. I’m sorry for not telling you about this. I didn’t want to hurt you, I never want to, and it’s because...well, it’s because I love you.”
Baekhyun nods his head. He understands. It’s taken him some time, but he understands. “Thank you, too,” he says. ‘Thank you for calming me down when I’m angry, cheering me up when I’m sad and taking care of me when I was in trouble. I’m sorry for being too selfish. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth -- I’m sorry I hurt you with the things I’ve said and done. I love you, too, Yeol.”
They stay locked in an embrace even though the opening notes of the march is played. It’s only when the line begins moving and someone nudges Baekhyun that they let go, but he doesn’t move for a few more seconds. He just drinks in Chanyeol, the way he looks right now -- wide-eyed and eager, always taller than he is, and strong on the outside but almost too soft on the inside. Chanyeol looks back at him, and he knows he’s doing the same thing: Memorizing the plane of each facial feature, the angle of each smile, the crinkled corners of eyes.
It’s not like the image of each other isn’t already etched into the recesses of memory, reaching far deeper and lasting even longer than other details do. But they’re taking these mental snapshots for no reason other than as a notch on the goal post, something they can use to track the changes when they see each other again.
As Baekhyun comes up to receive his diploma, he thinks he’s finally ready to see sunsets and let the rain in. The shell’s broken off of him into a cracked membrane of defensiveness and he steps out of it.
He catches Chanyeol’s eye in the thick of people waiting to receive their diplomas. It’s fleeting but it’s there, the audible snap of the connection clicking into place, the effortless way they communicate across the distance between them. It tells him they’ll be okay.
He’s looking forward to the time that Chanyeol comes back from America.
÷
On the summer of their third year in high school, Baekhyun and Chanyeol discover an abandoned building on the outskirts of Seoul. It’s not been neglected long enough for it to be crumbling, but the rooms have dressed themselves in shadows and shards of light, and they take care not to disturb anything that must never be disturbed.
They find themselves on the rooftop at 6:45 in the evening, huddled together in a worn, beer-stained couch sagging beneath their combined weight. The stars are shy tonight, leaving the skies a clear, blank blue stretching into oblivion.
“What if we never found each other?” Baekhyun asks, and his words punch a hole into the wall of silence rising between them. “What if I never went to that party? What if you ran away?”
“Then we would have found each other somewhere else, at some other time,” Chanyeol says. “Maybe later, maybe sooner, but we were never intended to be apart. We’re soulmates, remember?”
“Soulmates,” Baekhyun repeats. The idea seems absurd, but it’s filled with an authenticity he can’t place. It’s the only thing that can describe what they have.
“Yeah, soulmates. We might never be together physically, maybe not even until the end of time, but we reside in each other’s heart. If ever I have to go somewhere, I’m never truly leaving you. You will still have pieces of me wherever you go, and by then my thoughts will have become parts of yours, and I will linger within you. Maybe not forever, but I will stay long enough.”
Baekhyun snuggles closer to Chanyeol, eager to soak in the warmth emanating from his best friend’s skin. He’s scared of tomorrow, of what time will bring them and where the paths they’ll take will lead, but Chanyeol’s words are safe in his heart. They flicker and dance in his chest.
Someday, Chanyeol might not be beside him. But all Baekhyun has to do is think of this night -- the empty skies, the far-away harmony of city traffic, the wind’s soft caress -- and he will be fine.
Chanyeol’s right, after all. They are bound in a way that transcends physicality and space and time. The marks he has left are embedded into Baekhyun’s being and they will scar, but they will never fade, and Baekhyun just has to remember that always.
Chanyeol’s not leaving him and he’s not leaving Chanyeol. It’s written on their souls.
A/N:
Hello! I really hope you like this fic, even if it may not live up to your expectations. I enjoyed working with your prompt. A word of gratitude goes to my beta, who makes my writing seem decent and never fails to clean up my messes.
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