Like Night and Day 42
Chapter 42
The Decline
There aren’t many things in the world one individual can control. At the end of the day, no matter the choices that were made, every person is laid to rest in the ground. Death was inevitable and the end result of a long lifetime was the same no matter the cards played. This thinking, however, disintegrates the value of moments. It takes the joy out of life and the meaning of love, relationships, and free will.
Though grim, Baekhyun could feel himself begin to feel the contagious disease of that dark mindset. His eyes began to see everything as hopeless, gray in color with no vibrant spectrum to lighten him. Choices no longer mattered when all he could think about was the end. The final result.
The letters were foolish, but he was the bigger fool to begin doubting. He knew of it. His mind did not stray from the fact as he silently walked the aisles of the convenience store, searching for something to relieve his pain. He only wished there was something to cure him of his doubts, of his faults.
Why Chanyeol chose to love someone so indignantly frustrating... Baekhyun felt himself shaking. Upset. His mind a chaotic, ugly mess.
Quickly, he grabbed a familiar pain reliever brand.
Maybe Chanyeol was settling. After all, Baekhyun was never a choice. He was a lottery number. For whatever reason, Chanyeol made him his target, and though he made it clear that he was, without a doubt, madly (and genuinely) in love, Baekhyun couldn't move past it.
Call it a fairy tale. It was too fake, too unreal. But it was true. Chanyeol loved him so much that it was terrifying. It was a horror to know how in love he was, especially when they were never supposed to be together... Chanyeol was settling, just like the letters said. The athlete had approached him with a broken heart, making it possible for him to become attached to the person who healed him. There was no doubt that what Chanyeol felt for him was love, but Baekhyun didn't want that love born out of gratitude, and that was how he felt for what it was. Partially gratitude. Maybe a bit of fascination. Whatever it was, the letters were beginning to taint him like ink on blank, white paper, and Baekhyun couldn't stop it. In his mind, it made sense. It brought an unfamiliar feeling of hurt to his chest, something the brunet had never experienced before, and he didn't know what to do but to push… Push away until he was pushed back by Chanyeol. Until the jock realized it was too much. Until he wanted Baekhyun out of his life... Baekhyun was waiting for their breaking point, their inevitable end.
Baekhyun paid for the medicine and left the store, popping one immediately from the bottle and swallowing without water. He ignored the rough feeling in his throat. It was nothing.
The headache was bad. It seemed like every other day he was getting the same diagnoses. It might’ve been from stress or the lack of sleep--Baekhyun didn't know. He didn't want to know.
Chanyeol texted him, asking how he felt. Are you okay? he had asked. Quietly, Baekhyun bit his bottom lip, staring at the text as he sat on a bench, waiting for the bus to take him back to school. He could've answered. He should've, but Baekhyun didn't want to lose control. There was a part of him that wanted to say no, he wasn't fine. He was madly in love with a person he wanted so badly, yet at the same time, he wanted to push them away. He was in love with someone who made him happy but constantly hurt him unknowingly.
Baekhyun put his phone aside for a minute, closing his eyes. He was paranoid with his insecurities running high. With every relationship, friendship or with his last bit of romance, he always found himself looking over his shoulder. When is the end? When will it start to hurt so bad, he has to disconnect himself from the world in order to feel nothing? When will the conversations end? When will I Love You become a memory?
The question of when always brought on the cruelest game of nature. Waiting. To sit idle for the inevitable was the torture. And Baekhyun didn't want to wait in patience for the pain to seep inside. He wanted control of it. It might’ve been a false sense of responsibility, the rising need to be the one in control of how it all ended, but Baekhyun didn’t know how else to cope with the feelings that tormented him.
Kyungsoo had been right. His gut from the moment he met Chanyeol had been right. Love was great… It was comforting, nice, familiar, and sound, but nothing lasted forever. Though Chanyeol never asked forever from him, only time and the present, Baekhyun was already convinced that he had enough. The present was sweet and euphoric, but bad things liked to live in the darkness of the future. They were beginning their descent to the bottom, and there was nothing Chanyeol could do about it as long as Baekhyun was behind the wheels of their relationship.
If things were going to burn to the ground, he wanted to be the one to start the fire, because to him, the best way to cope with pain was to get it over fast as soon as possible.
Looking down at his phone once again, Baekhyun began to type a short response, one that bore no truth, but attempted to pull a blanket over the jock’s eyes. His hands shook as he typed with a heavy heart, “I’m fine.”
-
-
Kyungsoo’s habit with his cigarettes died along with a few of his other obsessions. Instead, he occupied his craving for self-inflicted pain with hard, sour candy. He didn’t specifically love the Jolly Ranchers, but they took his mind off of things.
Standing on the school roof used to bring him a sense of power. To peer through the aluminum fence and curl his fingers around the metal just to see the school lot like he owned it. He was king, the authority. But as the days passed and graduation began to bear a heavy burden in his mind, the place that used to be his playground for power was nothing more than a bleak, ugly reminder that he was no king. His power was nothing more than his ego. The playground itself was not a wonderland. It was a prison.
He was not special. There bore no signs indicating him as king of anything. Kyungsoo realized he was a cattle, just like the lot of them, being shifted from one school establishment to be put in another.
New York. A place where dreamers went to live or die, but Kyungsoo was no dreamer. He had no dreams, just a set plan given and orders to follow.
It wasn’t unusual for Baekhyun to skip class, nor was it odd for Kyungsoo to spend his free period alone on the roof, but rarely did they ever see each other at such a time since the giant athlete barged into their picture, the one Kyungsoo had cherished in silence for so long. Given this fact, it came to a slight surprise when Baekhyun pushed through the roof entrance and paused for a second before slowly closing the door behind him.
Kyungsoo narrowed his eyes, lips tight as he watched the latter with curiosity. In his heart, he felt defeated when it came to Baekhyun. Rejection was one thing, but the act of acknowledging that he had to move on was another. It was he who was supposed to look as if he was mourning the loss of a love, but confusion set in when he looked at Baekhyun in the eyes and saw a reflection of who he was. Someone defeated.
“Baekhyun…” Kyungsoo was careful. His voice, though strong and loud, bore no anger or agitation for the fact that the latter was out of class. “What’re you doing here?”
“I wanted to get away, Soo.” Baekhyun swallowed, moving from the door and slowly taking a seat off to the side where the shadow of the roof exit’s structure blocked the sun. “I wanted some air, too…”
“There’s perfectly good air in the classrooms where you should be at.” Kyungsoo walked away from the fence, his fingers untangling from the metal. “Your graduation status is too thin on the line for you to be fucking around.”
“I’m not fucking around.”
Kyungsoo looked at him. “Then what's this?” He tapped Baekhyun’s feet with his own. “If you don’t graduate or meet the requirements, I can’t save you.”
“I’m doing all the work. I just need some time to clear my head right now.”
“Bullshit.” Bending his leg, Kyungsoo moved as if he was intent on kicking the latter hard, but then stopped. He took two steps to the left of the brunet and sat down beside him, back to the shadowed wall. “I’m not the one to be saying this, because you know I can’t stand this place. I hate it so much, sometimes I feel like it’s better to just jump off and die. Get it over with. Life’s nothing but a slow roast ‘til Death decides it’s time to take us somewhere. I don’t know where. Heaven or Hell. Maybe we just stop existing… But you have to graduate. Life is terrible, because at the end of the day, you’re in school for one third of your life, working for another third, and if you’re lucky, you get to spend the last third of your life waiting for death on retirement. We’re only in the first third, so the least you can do is graduate and make the other two thirds slightly easier. Unless you’re planning on marrying a rich man, a degree might do you some good.”
Baekhyun said nothing, his eyes kept low, face slightly blank. During his silence, his cell phone rang in tune for a new text message, but as Kyungsoo observed, the brunet did not move. He stayed sitting, hands limp between his legs.
“Baekhyun--”
“Kyungsoo, when we were together, I tried really hard to keep us together. I really did love you, but you were getting too hard to love. You wouldn’t let me in and you kept pushing me away to deal with things yourself…” Baekhyun raised his eyes but only slightly. His gaze still kept on the gray concrete of the roof. “So, I ended it… I broke up with you because I thought it was for the best. You were too inside your head and you wouldn’t let me pull you out… But, we turned out fine. It was for the best. Look at us now… We’re still friends, right?”
“Why’re you telling me this?” Kyungsoo said, his voice stiff. “Of course you did what you thought was right. You ended it before it got bad, before I had the chance to snap at you or the other way around. We ended on good terms, and you’re still the only one I trust, but why are you telling me the love story of something already dead?”
“Because…” Pausing, Baekhyun shrugged. “Do you think that Chanyeol and I could be the same?”
“What?”
“If I broke up with him, do you think we’d be okay enough to be friends?” Baekhyun repeated, his eyes still a blank slate, unwilling to give any details to his inner mind.
Kyungsoo’s jaw locked. He held a dislike for the athlete for his character and false bravado, but for a reason unknown to Kyungsoo, he felt sad. He could see the way Baekhyun was already in chin-high waters and though he was angry at Chanyeol for being blind on the matter, he couldn’t blame it all entirely on him.
Jongin was right. The more he stared at Baekhyun’s face, the way his body was so limp and his voice so calm yet hollow, the more he began to see it. The brunet was the present version of how he used to be in the midst of his spiral.
For a second, he felt awful at the fact that Baekhyun was beginning to think about separation while Chanyeol was off in class, possibly daydreaming about moving in together and other frivolous things that boisterous people like himself often did. It was a feeling that he was guilty of having but could not help.
Shaking his head, Kyungsoo answered the question. “No. I don’t.”
“Why not?” Baekhyun replied quickly, his voice still void of emotion.
“Because he’s too in love with you, Baekhyun.”
“What if he’s really not?” Baekhyun finally raised his head, turning his attention directly to Kyungsoo. “Eight billion people live in this world. Two thousand at this school. Two hundred seniors. Chanyeol dated four people, Kyungsoo--four--before me. One after the other. Eight billion people and he chose me because... I looked like I was easy. Not because he liked me for one reason or another, but because he thought he’d settle for someone like me…”
Kyungsoo turned away. He couldn’t stand the look in Baekhyun’s eyes. “I gave you up because you said you loved him. I decided it was pointless to try and hold on to you when his name was the the only thing that came out of your lips… And now you’re telling me that you’re finally doing what I told you to do five months ago? You honestly think you’re going to break up with this dumb fuck now after everything that’s happened!? Because you think he doesn’t love you--Fucking hell, Baekhyun!”
“I’m not doubting that he loves me,” Baekhyun said as he watched Kyungsoo push himself off the ground to pace back and forth in front of him, “but I can’t stop thinking about the circumstances that love and the possibility that… Kyungsoo, eight billion people in the world. There has to be someone he wants, someone who he doesn’t have to settle for.”
“Shut the fuck up, because you’re pissing me off. In fact, both of you piss me off.” Kyungsoo grit his teeth, hand gripping his hair back. “When you were mine, things were simple. It was just us against the world. Got it? But with him, it’s a whole ‘nother game, Baekhyun, and I shouldn’t even be telling you this because it’s your goddamn relationship and not mine. I gave you up to him… I gave you up because I realized that while time stood still for me and my eyes, you were moving on with him--Park Chanyeol.”
“Kyungsoo--”
“You know I hate him. He is the most insufferable piece of trash I have ever had the unfortunate luck to ever lay my eyes on, but you know what? You wanted him. I knew what he did before you knew. I knew about his girlfriend, my ex-vice president, and I know about the fourth lover’s string that won’t let him go. I know everything there is to know about him, and I tried to warn you! I tried and you still said, ‘I love him, Soo. I’m in love with him!’ like you didn’t know how that made me fucking feel.”
“I didn’t think those things matter at the time, but I started thinking about it, and all of a sudden, I just thought that maybe--”
“No, no. You don’t understand,” Kyungsoo said, cutting him off, finger shoved in his face. “I suffered as much as you did… As angry as I was with you at the time, I was even angrier and jealous on the inside. You don’t know how your petty little confessions about your love for him made me feel… And it’s pissing me off that you want to break it off now, because then that means I gave you up for nothing.”
Baekhyun stared at him, he's moving as if he wanted to speak, but in the end, he kept silent.
“Break up with him. I don’t care. It’s not my relationship…but don’t expect him to be fine with being friends with you.” Kyungsoo paused. “I was fine with being friends because I still loved you enough to want you selfishly by my side at whatever cost. I also understood why you wanted to end it. Chanyeol is another case. He won’t understand. He wants to be your boyfriend and nothing less, and if you selfishly deny him that, with no explanation at all, because, let’s face it, Baekhyun. If you tell him what you just told me, he’s not going to take this break up lightly. I hope you know that at the end of the day, he’s more likely to hate you than to agree that being friends without the sexual benefits is okay.”
“I know that.”
“Then you’re fine with the fact that he’s going to hate you.”
Baekhyun voice was quiet as he nodded. “It’s something that can’t be avoided…”
“Some things are avoidable. There are only two things in life humans can’t control. Life and death. Everything in between is up to us… It just depends on our choices...” Kyungsoo turned his eyes away, focused on the fencing once more. “I don’t care what your choices are, Baekhyun. No matter what you do, you know I’ll take care of you. It’s simple between us, remember? Us against the world… As for that boyfriend of yours, I don’t think you’ll find it easy to break up with him. I think it’s best if you find a way for him to break up with you, but I shouldn’t even have to tell you this... It’s what you’ve been planning since the night I told you about his ex.”
a/n: okay so to clear things up, basically... Baekhyun loves Chanyeol a lot. Chanyeol loves Baekhyun a lot. Baekhyun thinks that maybe Chanyeol only loves him because he was the one who made him forget about his ex and now he's just grateful and that gratefulness developed into a love that's more like a love born out of thanks and not actual feelings (you know). Kyungsoo is moving on. Swear on pears.
The Decline
There aren’t many things in the world one individual can control. At the end of the day, no matter the choices that were made, every person is laid to rest in the ground. Death was inevitable and the end result of a long lifetime was the same no matter the cards played. This thinking, however, disintegrates the value of moments. It takes the joy out of life and the meaning of love, relationships, and free will.
Though grim, Baekhyun could feel himself begin to feel the contagious disease of that dark mindset. His eyes began to see everything as hopeless, gray in color with no vibrant spectrum to lighten him. Choices no longer mattered when all he could think about was the end. The final result.
The letters were foolish, but he was the bigger fool to begin doubting. He knew of it. His mind did not stray from the fact as he silently walked the aisles of the convenience store, searching for something to relieve his pain. He only wished there was something to cure him of his doubts, of his faults.
Why Chanyeol chose to love someone so indignantly frustrating... Baekhyun felt himself shaking. Upset. His mind a chaotic, ugly mess.
Quickly, he grabbed a familiar pain reliever brand.
Maybe Chanyeol was settling. After all, Baekhyun was never a choice. He was a lottery number. For whatever reason, Chanyeol made him his target, and though he made it clear that he was, without a doubt, madly (and genuinely) in love, Baekhyun couldn't move past it.
Call it a fairy tale. It was too fake, too unreal. But it was true. Chanyeol loved him so much that it was terrifying. It was a horror to know how in love he was, especially when they were never supposed to be together... Chanyeol was settling, just like the letters said. The athlete had approached him with a broken heart, making it possible for him to become attached to the person who healed him. There was no doubt that what Chanyeol felt for him was love, but Baekhyun didn't want that love born out of gratitude, and that was how he felt for what it was. Partially gratitude. Maybe a bit of fascination. Whatever it was, the letters were beginning to taint him like ink on blank, white paper, and Baekhyun couldn't stop it. In his mind, it made sense. It brought an unfamiliar feeling of hurt to his chest, something the brunet had never experienced before, and he didn't know what to do but to push… Push away until he was pushed back by Chanyeol. Until the jock realized it was too much. Until he wanted Baekhyun out of his life... Baekhyun was waiting for their breaking point, their inevitable end.
Baekhyun paid for the medicine and left the store, popping one immediately from the bottle and swallowing without water. He ignored the rough feeling in his throat. It was nothing.
The headache was bad. It seemed like every other day he was getting the same diagnoses. It might’ve been from stress or the lack of sleep--Baekhyun didn't know. He didn't want to know.
Chanyeol texted him, asking how he felt. Are you okay? he had asked. Quietly, Baekhyun bit his bottom lip, staring at the text as he sat on a bench, waiting for the bus to take him back to school. He could've answered. He should've, but Baekhyun didn't want to lose control. There was a part of him that wanted to say no, he wasn't fine. He was madly in love with a person he wanted so badly, yet at the same time, he wanted to push them away. He was in love with someone who made him happy but constantly hurt him unknowingly.
Baekhyun put his phone aside for a minute, closing his eyes. He was paranoid with his insecurities running high. With every relationship, friendship or with his last bit of romance, he always found himself looking over his shoulder. When is the end? When will it start to hurt so bad, he has to disconnect himself from the world in order to feel nothing? When will the conversations end? When will I Love You become a memory?
The question of when always brought on the cruelest game of nature. Waiting. To sit idle for the inevitable was the torture. And Baekhyun didn't want to wait in patience for the pain to seep inside. He wanted control of it. It might’ve been a false sense of responsibility, the rising need to be the one in control of how it all ended, but Baekhyun didn’t know how else to cope with the feelings that tormented him.
Kyungsoo had been right. His gut from the moment he met Chanyeol had been right. Love was great… It was comforting, nice, familiar, and sound, but nothing lasted forever. Though Chanyeol never asked forever from him, only time and the present, Baekhyun was already convinced that he had enough. The present was sweet and euphoric, but bad things liked to live in the darkness of the future. They were beginning their descent to the bottom, and there was nothing Chanyeol could do about it as long as Baekhyun was behind the wheels of their relationship.
If things were going to burn to the ground, he wanted to be the one to start the fire, because to him, the best way to cope with pain was to get it over fast as soon as possible.
Looking down at his phone once again, Baekhyun began to type a short response, one that bore no truth, but attempted to pull a blanket over the jock’s eyes. His hands shook as he typed with a heavy heart, “I’m fine.”
-
-
Kyungsoo’s habit with his cigarettes died along with a few of his other obsessions. Instead, he occupied his craving for self-inflicted pain with hard, sour candy. He didn’t specifically love the Jolly Ranchers, but they took his mind off of things.
Standing on the school roof used to bring him a sense of power. To peer through the aluminum fence and curl his fingers around the metal just to see the school lot like he owned it. He was king, the authority. But as the days passed and graduation began to bear a heavy burden in his mind, the place that used to be his playground for power was nothing more than a bleak, ugly reminder that he was no king. His power was nothing more than his ego. The playground itself was not a wonderland. It was a prison.
He was not special. There bore no signs indicating him as king of anything. Kyungsoo realized he was a cattle, just like the lot of them, being shifted from one school establishment to be put in another.
New York. A place where dreamers went to live or die, but Kyungsoo was no dreamer. He had no dreams, just a set plan given and orders to follow.
It wasn’t unusual for Baekhyun to skip class, nor was it odd for Kyungsoo to spend his free period alone on the roof, but rarely did they ever see each other at such a time since the giant athlete barged into their picture, the one Kyungsoo had cherished in silence for so long. Given this fact, it came to a slight surprise when Baekhyun pushed through the roof entrance and paused for a second before slowly closing the door behind him.
Kyungsoo narrowed his eyes, lips tight as he watched the latter with curiosity. In his heart, he felt defeated when it came to Baekhyun. Rejection was one thing, but the act of acknowledging that he had to move on was another. It was he who was supposed to look as if he was mourning the loss of a love, but confusion set in when he looked at Baekhyun in the eyes and saw a reflection of who he was. Someone defeated.
“Baekhyun…” Kyungsoo was careful. His voice, though strong and loud, bore no anger or agitation for the fact that the latter was out of class. “What’re you doing here?”
“I wanted to get away, Soo.” Baekhyun swallowed, moving from the door and slowly taking a seat off to the side where the shadow of the roof exit’s structure blocked the sun. “I wanted some air, too…”
“There’s perfectly good air in the classrooms where you should be at.” Kyungsoo walked away from the fence, his fingers untangling from the metal. “Your graduation status is too thin on the line for you to be fucking around.”
“I’m not fucking around.”
Kyungsoo looked at him. “Then what's this?” He tapped Baekhyun’s feet with his own. “If you don’t graduate or meet the requirements, I can’t save you.”
“I’m doing all the work. I just need some time to clear my head right now.”
“Bullshit.” Bending his leg, Kyungsoo moved as if he was intent on kicking the latter hard, but then stopped. He took two steps to the left of the brunet and sat down beside him, back to the shadowed wall. “I’m not the one to be saying this, because you know I can’t stand this place. I hate it so much, sometimes I feel like it’s better to just jump off and die. Get it over with. Life’s nothing but a slow roast ‘til Death decides it’s time to take us somewhere. I don’t know where. Heaven or Hell. Maybe we just stop existing… But you have to graduate. Life is terrible, because at the end of the day, you’re in school for one third of your life, working for another third, and if you’re lucky, you get to spend the last third of your life waiting for death on retirement. We’re only in the first third, so the least you can do is graduate and make the other two thirds slightly easier. Unless you’re planning on marrying a rich man, a degree might do you some good.”
Baekhyun said nothing, his eyes kept low, face slightly blank. During his silence, his cell phone rang in tune for a new text message, but as Kyungsoo observed, the brunet did not move. He stayed sitting, hands limp between his legs.
“Baekhyun--”
“Kyungsoo, when we were together, I tried really hard to keep us together. I really did love you, but you were getting too hard to love. You wouldn’t let me in and you kept pushing me away to deal with things yourself…” Baekhyun raised his eyes but only slightly. His gaze still kept on the gray concrete of the roof. “So, I ended it… I broke up with you because I thought it was for the best. You were too inside your head and you wouldn’t let me pull you out… But, we turned out fine. It was for the best. Look at us now… We’re still friends, right?”
“Why’re you telling me this?” Kyungsoo said, his voice stiff. “Of course you did what you thought was right. You ended it before it got bad, before I had the chance to snap at you or the other way around. We ended on good terms, and you’re still the only one I trust, but why are you telling me the love story of something already dead?”
“Because…” Pausing, Baekhyun shrugged. “Do you think that Chanyeol and I could be the same?”
“What?”
“If I broke up with him, do you think we’d be okay enough to be friends?” Baekhyun repeated, his eyes still a blank slate, unwilling to give any details to his inner mind.
Kyungsoo’s jaw locked. He held a dislike for the athlete for his character and false bravado, but for a reason unknown to Kyungsoo, he felt sad. He could see the way Baekhyun was already in chin-high waters and though he was angry at Chanyeol for being blind on the matter, he couldn’t blame it all entirely on him.
Jongin was right. The more he stared at Baekhyun’s face, the way his body was so limp and his voice so calm yet hollow, the more he began to see it. The brunet was the present version of how he used to be in the midst of his spiral.
For a second, he felt awful at the fact that Baekhyun was beginning to think about separation while Chanyeol was off in class, possibly daydreaming about moving in together and other frivolous things that boisterous people like himself often did. It was a feeling that he was guilty of having but could not help.
Shaking his head, Kyungsoo answered the question. “No. I don’t.”
“Why not?” Baekhyun replied quickly, his voice still void of emotion.
“Because he’s too in love with you, Baekhyun.”
“What if he’s really not?” Baekhyun finally raised his head, turning his attention directly to Kyungsoo. “Eight billion people live in this world. Two thousand at this school. Two hundred seniors. Chanyeol dated four people, Kyungsoo--four--before me. One after the other. Eight billion people and he chose me because... I looked like I was easy. Not because he liked me for one reason or another, but because he thought he’d settle for someone like me…”
Kyungsoo turned away. He couldn’t stand the look in Baekhyun’s eyes. “I gave you up because you said you loved him. I decided it was pointless to try and hold on to you when his name was the the only thing that came out of your lips… And now you’re telling me that you’re finally doing what I told you to do five months ago? You honestly think you’re going to break up with this dumb fuck now after everything that’s happened!? Because you think he doesn’t love you--Fucking hell, Baekhyun!”
“I’m not doubting that he loves me,” Baekhyun said as he watched Kyungsoo push himself off the ground to pace back and forth in front of him, “but I can’t stop thinking about the circumstances that love and the possibility that… Kyungsoo, eight billion people in the world. There has to be someone he wants, someone who he doesn’t have to settle for.”
“Shut the fuck up, because you’re pissing me off. In fact, both of you piss me off.” Kyungsoo grit his teeth, hand gripping his hair back. “When you were mine, things were simple. It was just us against the world. Got it? But with him, it’s a whole ‘nother game, Baekhyun, and I shouldn’t even be telling you this because it’s your goddamn relationship and not mine. I gave you up to him… I gave you up because I realized that while time stood still for me and my eyes, you were moving on with him--Park Chanyeol.”
“Kyungsoo--”
“You know I hate him. He is the most insufferable piece of trash I have ever had the unfortunate luck to ever lay my eyes on, but you know what? You wanted him. I knew what he did before you knew. I knew about his girlfriend, my ex-vice president, and I know about the fourth lover’s string that won’t let him go. I know everything there is to know about him, and I tried to warn you! I tried and you still said, ‘I love him, Soo. I’m in love with him!’ like you didn’t know how that made me fucking feel.”
“I didn’t think those things matter at the time, but I started thinking about it, and all of a sudden, I just thought that maybe--”
“No, no. You don’t understand,” Kyungsoo said, cutting him off, finger shoved in his face. “I suffered as much as you did… As angry as I was with you at the time, I was even angrier and jealous on the inside. You don’t know how your petty little confessions about your love for him made me feel… And it’s pissing me off that you want to break it off now, because then that means I gave you up for nothing.”
Baekhyun stared at him, he's moving as if he wanted to speak, but in the end, he kept silent.
“Break up with him. I don’t care. It’s not my relationship…but don’t expect him to be fine with being friends with you.” Kyungsoo paused. “I was fine with being friends because I still loved you enough to want you selfishly by my side at whatever cost. I also understood why you wanted to end it. Chanyeol is another case. He won’t understand. He wants to be your boyfriend and nothing less, and if you selfishly deny him that, with no explanation at all, because, let’s face it, Baekhyun. If you tell him what you just told me, he’s not going to take this break up lightly. I hope you know that at the end of the day, he’s more likely to hate you than to agree that being friends without the sexual benefits is okay.”
“I know that.”
“Then you’re fine with the fact that he’s going to hate you.”
Baekhyun voice was quiet as he nodded. “It’s something that can’t be avoided…”
“Some things are avoidable. There are only two things in life humans can’t control. Life and death. Everything in between is up to us… It just depends on our choices...” Kyungsoo turned his eyes away, focused on the fencing once more. “I don’t care what your choices are, Baekhyun. No matter what you do, you know I’ll take care of you. It’s simple between us, remember? Us against the world… As for that boyfriend of yours, I don’t think you’ll find it easy to break up with him. I think it’s best if you find a way for him to break up with you, but I shouldn’t even have to tell you this... It’s what you’ve been planning since the night I told you about his ex.”
a/n: okay so to clear things up, basically... Baekhyun loves Chanyeol a lot. Chanyeol loves Baekhyun a lot. Baekhyun thinks that maybe Chanyeol only loves him because he was the one who made him forget about his ex and now he's just grateful and that gratefulness developed into a love that's more like a love born out of thanks and not actual feelings (you know). Kyungsoo is moving on. Swear on pears.