back to the future ; chenyeol ; 2/3
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Chanyeol remembers the summer of his eighteenth year with sensations.
He remembers the heat, sticking to his skin, heavy and suffocating. He remembers the sweat and his ear burning against his phone as he talked with his best friend who was in Japan with his family. He remembers said best friend, Do Kyungsoo, with fondness and loud laughter. He remembers the crushing pressure, the stress weighing down on his lungs every night and how sensitive he felt, how unpleasant the mere contact of his sheets was.
He remembers red, a lot. Red for the crosses on his calendar, for the deadline trotting its way to him, for lipstick. He remembers the soft, warm smell of wet grass after the first thunderstorm and the sinking feeling of his soles sucked in by mud. He remembers his mum’s lilac perfume and her loving eyes, the smell of delicious food, the overwhelming realization that she cooked only his favourite dishes to cheer for him. He remembers the long days behind the tiny restaurant register, he remembers the smell of fried rice and the sudden embarrassment he felt when foreigners would try to speak with him in English.
Chanyeol remembers the summer of his eighteenth year with sensations, and with the wise knowledge that only comes with age that this was, truly, the summer that ended his childhood.
He remembers the deadline and how tangible the idea of going to university was. He remembers banana bread and lonely bus rides. He remembers, maybe more vividly than everything else, the cheap coconut perfume that Moon Byulyi wore.
Moon Byulyi happened on the first day of summer break, between two English clients, between two gulps of water and between two longing stares at tables covered with delicious food. She, too, was a between even though Chanyeol didn’t know it yet, and that’s how he remembers her. With feelings and colours (silk black for her hair, soft pink for the blush on her cheeks) and with the knowledge that she was a middle, a transition. But when she stopped before the cash register, long hair curling on her shoulders and eyes taking Chanyeol in with so much intensity he forgot to breathe, she felt like a start. She was dazzlingly beautiful, she smelled like coconut and summer, and Chanyeol was smitten.
She wore red lipstick like it had been made for her, and it looked like it did.
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It’s hot. The smell of fried rice is heavy around Chanyeol, so thick that it feels tangible, and he thinks he feels it crawl on his nape more than once. (It’s just sweat.) It’s sticky and disgusting, it feels foreign. His mother’s cooking smells so much better when he’s in the warmth of their house, when he’s the one sitting at a full table.
The cash register ticks his day away with whirr-and-ring sounds, and Chanyeol slowly sinks on the high stool, his back curving a bit more with every minute passing by. Next to him, Jongdae dangles his legs on his own stool, the upper half of his body leaning over the newspaper open on his thighs. Long silky locks fall over his forehead and hide his eyes, but Chanyeol can still catch his thin lips curled in a thoughtful pout as he chews on Chanyeol’s pen.
“What are you doing?” Chanyeol asks when Jongdae splatters red ink over the newspaper as he circles random words.
“I’m reading the news,” is Jongdae distant answer.
Chanyeol doesn’t have time to do more than raise his eyebrows because a family walks up to him, pleased faces filling his vision. He bows down, greets and flashes his best smile as the older man hands him his ticket. Chanyeol’s fingers find the matching keys easily, and he calculates the total before it even pops up on the little screen. He even gets the cents correct. The man rummages through his wallet and Chanyeol glances at Jongdae’s newspaper on which a few more red flowers have bloomed.
“Thank you,” Chanyeol bows down again when he gives the man his change. “We hope to see you again. Please, have a great day.”
They all bow down in perfect unison (seventy degree Chanyeol gauges) and turn around. Chanyeol patiently waits until they’re out to ask, although he feels impatiently curious.
“What are you doing?” he asks Jongdae again, and the latter chuckles as he sits up. “I’m pretty sure people don’t read the news like that.”
“Well that’s a shame then,” Jongdae says. He has a tiny smudge of red ink on the right corner of his lips, but it somehow looks like it belongs. “I’m just circling wordings and phrases that I think sound great.”
Chanyeol glances at the newspaper, taken aback. He throws another confused look at Jongdae who merely shrugs.
“I like words,” he says like it explains everything, but it doesn’t.
Chanyeol thinks that it would have been more normal to hear Jongdae tell him that he’s just practicing and translating into English a few sentences he randomly chose. Then he realizes that that doesn’t make much more sense.
“Words,” he repeats. Jongdae nods. “I like them better when they’re in books, when they tell stories.”
Jongdae chuckles.
“Words have impact on people, don’t they? Whether they’re creating fictions or repeating news. I want to learn how to use them correctly to trigger the right feelings in people who listens to me. It’s practice for my radio show.”
Chanyeol stares, and Jongdae stares back. It’s practice, Jongdae said. He wants to learn, but these are things they are not taught in school. Chanyeol is suddenly hit with the realization that everything that is to be learned isn’t said in school, and for a fleeting second, he feels devastatingly shallow. It’s a short-lived existential crisis, but its bitter taste lingers in his mouth, as well as a distant echo in his head which sounds like what’s the point.
Jongdae hands him the newspaper with an innocent look.
“Try,” he offers. “It’s funny.”
He hops down from his stool, and Chanyeol echoes his gesture without even asking. Jongdae shoves the red pen in his hand and takes his spot in front of the cash register. He takes in the screen, fingers hovering over the keys and lips stretching into a grin.
“It looks like the one we have in our grocery store,” he says. “I’ll be fine.”
“Don’t make mistakes with the money though. My mom would kill me.”
Jongdae casts him a judging look.
“Algebra is as important for business as it is for accounting. I’m gonna rock these numbers.”
Chanyeol snorts, but he doesn’t add anything, too eager to focus on Jongdae’s newspaper. He checks the page Jongdae was on, takes in the big bold headlines, and starts reading the first article. Jongdae merely underlined a few words, but he did circle whole chunks of sentence throughout the whole article. The words reverberate in Chanyeol’s mind in a much brighter voice, and he rereads them again and again, wondering what Jongdae saw in them, what they made him feel. He feels his brain doing this weird thing when it zooms in on details and tries to turn them into puzzle pieces just so he can complete the whole picture.
“Hello,” Jongdae greets next to him.
Chanyeol’s head snaps up by force of practice as two girls stop in front of the cash register. One of them, the tallest, gives Jongdae their meal ticket.
“Did you enjoy your meal?” Jongdae asks warmly as his eyes scan the cash register’s screen for the right keys.
The tallest girl nods, her lips stretching in a bright, dazzling smile. She wears red lipstick like it has been created for her, and it sure looks like it has. Chanyeol catches a faint hint of coconut perfume and he vaguely wonders who between the two friends uses it. His eyes meet the tallest girl’s, and they exchange a friendly smile. She’s probably taller than him, he realizes, or maybe she looks very tall because her friend is very small.
“It will be twenty-seven thousand won,” Jongdae informs them.
Chanyeol catches the smaller girl look at Jongdae with sparkles in her eyes and dimples pressing into her soft cheeks, and he lets go of the lipstick girl to draw his attention on Jongdae too. The latter flashes more friendly smiles, adds a few polite but genuine formalities as he puts the money inside the cash register and hands them their change. He speaks with simple, banal words, with words that he could have circled in the newspaper, but Chanyeol realizes they do sound different in his voice. He’s pretty sure it’s not the words though, it’s Jongdae himself.
“Thank you,” Jongdae says in lieu of a goodbye as he bows down.
The small girl smiles widely at him, and he beams at her. The two friends finally walk out of the restaurant as they share secretive giggles and giggly looks. Chanyeol totally misses the lipstick girl glancing at him over her shoulder as she steps out of the shop because he’s looking at Jongdae, and Jongdae is looking back at him.
“So?” Jongdae asks him playfully. “How did I do?”
“Pretty well.”
Jongdae smiles proudly. His eyes fall on the newspaper and he nods at it.
“What do you think?”
“Those are just … words,” Chanyeol shrugs. “But I think I know what you mean, although I’d say it’s more about… who says the words.”
Jongdae hums with a thoughtful smile. Chanyeol gives him back his newspaper and they switch again.
“You might be right,” Jongdae finally says after casting another look at the article.
“Of course I am.”
Jongdae snorts and playfully shoves him. His hand lingers on Chanyeol’s shirt though, fingers looking like they’re about to clench around his shirt just in case Chanyeol would fall off his stool, and Chanyeol does pretend to be swaying dangerously just to feel Jongdae’s knuckles brush against his side. Jongdae looks up at him, eyes full of mischief and lips stretched over white teeth.
“You have red ink here,” Chanyeol finally says, pointing as Jongdae’s mouth, and the latter chuckles.
This time, it’s Chanyeol’s hand that lingers when he hands Jongdae a napkin. Jongdae thanks him and doesn’t pull away, and Chanyeol thinks it’s definitely more about the person than the words. They don’t sound the same in his head than when Jongdae says them, and it’s a shame. Memorizing formulas would have been much easier.
Chanyeol thinks about computers when he really should focus on the huge map of China taking over the mess on his desk. He thinks about capacity and disk memory, about huge essays stashed in USB sticks and about that annoying sound that pops up when he tries to put one too many songs in his phone. He thinks about giant calculators that would take an entire room, and about the fact that computers were first created to basically do what the human brain does but faster. With thick darkness lurking behind his window and the furious glare of his desk lamp, he can’t help but think that he’s reached his memory capacity. There’s no annoying sound yet, but it’s heavy, and he feels himself slowing down already. His eyes freeze on words that take one second too long to make sense and China looks less and less like a country in front of him.
There’s a virus staining his mind, feeding on useful information such as the Joseon Dynasty and leaving behind things like billiards rules and the opening hours of the Rilakkuma store. Chanyeol’s anti-virus can’t even update because his head is filled with things he should have never wasted memory on, and as he feels himself on the edge of a full-system crash, he sees them flash before his eyes, like one last reminder of his past mistakes. Everything he’s ever learned, from guitar playing to some of his mother’s recipes, is preventing his brain from taking in that stupid map. He can’t even remember the words he’s been reading for the past ten minutes, because there’s no room in his head anymore. He’s outdated, and about to go down in flames.
He sits up and forces himself to breathe in deeply. China is still mocking him with its mountains and provinces. Its wide surface area is weighing down on him, and its one point three milliard people are stomping over him. Or is it one point four? Chanyeol groans and swallows his frustrated scream. Both his parents are fast asleep, their computer brains busy making all the necessary updates while his own hard drive is forgetting what it’s supposed to be doing. He catches the red cross form the corner of his eyes, his desk calendar bright and blinding under his lamp, and he lets out a long sigh. There’s not enough room in his head for him to feel stressed anymore.
Something bips in the silence of his room, and Chanyeol’s heart misses a beat. For a fleeting, but very scary second, he thinks it came from his mind and that he really has reached his limits. There’s still a hint of sanity under the layers of exhaustion and the now-rising panic though, and Chanyeol remembers with relief that he owns a phone, and that said phone bips when he gets a message.
It does it again somewhere under the mess drowning his desk, and Chanyeol immediately dives into the piles of books and notes as silently as he can. When he finally finds his phone and unlocks it, Jongdae’s name happily takes over the screen. It comes with a blurred picture of Jongdae’s fingers closed around what looks like the most delicious banana bread Chanyeol has ever seen, and characters that ring with a faint chuckle in his mind.
i’m addicted because of you
Chanyeol looks up to his window and catches the rose bushes looking ghostly and glum under the streetlights. Behind them, in large, imposing shadows, Jongdae’s house stands still and cold. The tulips are like knobbly hands reaching for the sky. The world looks like it’s walking on a thin line between life and death, trapped in a reality where seconds last hour, and Chanyeol and Jongdae are the only ones awake. Chanyeol types his answer with a little smile. Not so different after all.
Jongdae’s second message comes less than a heartbeat later. It’s loud, but in a very quiet way, the characters are still and detached, mechanic, but Jongdae’s words are laughing and lively. Chanyeol glances at the street between their two houses, amazed and mesmerized.
my mom bought so many of them, i don’t want to eat regular food ever again
Chanyeol wonders if Jongdae’s house is the perfect reproduction of his own, if the rooms are the same size and if the bedrooms are at the same place. He wonders if Jongdae is sleeping in the smallest one, like him, with the window that opens on the front lawn.
i ate my last one yesterday
His fingers run across the screen as he selects a crying sticker, and he presses the send button almost in a hurry before looking up at his window. The street is still, and the hot summer weather doesn’t change the fact that it looks cold and haunted, like those abandoned gardens in gothic novels. Jongdae’s house is the mansion with death written all over its architecture, the very solid building from which the stillness of the landscape around seems to be coming. Behind those walls though, Chanyeol knows that Jongdae is opening his message and smiling at his sticker, and it makes his insides squirm with excitement.
Jongdae’s answer comes with another picture. His hand is pointing at a mountain of banana breads stashed inside a cupboard, his skin looking yellowish and sick under the artificial kitchen light. Chanyeol recognizes the cupboard, because there’s the same one in his kitchen, except that it’s not filled with bread, but with rice. He also recognizes the faint blue web of veins on the inside of Jongdae’s wrist.
wanna share?, Jongdae’s voice rings in his head.
Chanyeol sends another sticker. Mr and Mrs Kim’s house remains still, a solid shadow in the night, but somewhere inside, Jongdae chuckles.
meet me in the street in 3, 2, 1….
Chanyeol is the one muffling his chuckling with his palm as he runs for his shoes, this time. He is the one looking sick and yellowish under the sudden lights of the entrance hall, the one being too lively for the night weighing down on the house, but it’s a nice change from the last hours so he doesn’t question it. He opens the door and steps out of the house, streetlights and starless sky swooping down on him. The neighbourhood is far enough from the city centre for the nocturnal life noises to merge in a soft buzzing in the background. It hits him even harder now that he’s outside, how still and condemned the place looks, like time has been locked out of the neat streets and long alleys of random flowers.
Chanyeol closes the door behind him. He knows this place by heart, he knows the cracks in the concrete he used to jump over when he was a kid, but at this precise moment, it feels so different, it feels foreign and suffocating. When he turns around towards the main street stretching back to the city, he expects to stumble upon dummies standing there like in those nuke villages, but instead he finds Jongdae in the middle of the road, a plastic bag in one hand, and the other waving at him.
“Hey you,” Jongdae says with the same voice he always has. It sounds different though, but Chanyeol muses the night creeping on them may have a lot to do with it. Jongdae lifts his bag, his smile widening on his thin lips. “Fancy a midnight snack?”
“More like two and a half snack,” Chanyeol snorts.
Jongdae shrugs.
“Doesn’t really matter, does it?”
He gestures at Chanyeol to come closer before sitting down on the concrete, his legs folded under him. He’s sitting on the white line separating the lanes, and the whole symmetry of the place hits Chanyeol like a freight train as he makes his way to Jongdae. In the background, the tulips stand out under the closest streetlight, petals closed down for the night, and Chanyeol knows that if he were to look over his shoulders, he’d find his mother’s roses protectively curled up too. His eyes catch all the lines, the angles, the curves and the mirror images and it turns houses into walls and the neighbourhood into a maze. He falls more than he sits down next to Jongdae.
The latter casts him a long look that Chanyeol can’t read, and he finally hands him a banana bread. The wrapping paper shrieks in the night, the sound sharp and angry, like a cat hissing, and the soft smell of the sweet grazes Chanyeol’s nose. He takes a first bite as Jongdae unwraps his own bread.
“It does though,” Chanyeol whispers.
Jongdae looks up, still chewing. He doesn’t look as yellowish out there, but definitely paler than what Chanyeol knows him to be. His sharp features seem to catch every shadow lurking around, and they spread over his face in lazy curls. His cheekbones look even sharper, but nothing seem to be able to lessen the smooth line of his nose. The soft curve of his lips seems to be hanging lower from usual, dragged down by the angry purple of Jongdae’s eye bags. Chanyeol feels his own shade of exhaustion weigh down on his features, and he thinks about tulips and roses with purple and violet petals. It doesn’t seem fair to him that the flowers he and Jongdae are growing feed on them and are not that pretty.
Jongdae is still beautiful, though.
“Chanyeol?” Jongdae asks in a soft, gentle voice.
Their eyes meet, and Chanyeol flashes him a weak smile. Jongdae immediately answers with one of his own, a much brighter one.
“Thank you for the bread,” Chanyeol says.
“Don’t mention it.”
They eat in silence, their knees hovering over the white line, and their backs bent down under the streetlights. Chanyeol doesn’t fear the possibility of a car driving through the street, and the peacefulness in Jongdae’s eyes as he casts several looks around them says a lot about his own concerns. The bread is easy to chew on, easy to swallow, and it feels amazing in Chanyeol’s stomach, mostly because he gets to feel all those bodily functions he started to forget in the suffocating atmosphere of his room. The neighbourhood would be dead silent without their chewing sounds, without Jongdae’s low breathing and without Chanyeol’s raging on. The street might look cold and trapped in time, it’s not their case. They’re alive.
“What were you studying?” Jongdae finally asks him. The tip of his tongue darts out to collect some crumbs on the corner of his lips, and Chanyeol’s eyes linger more than they should.
He looks away and his heart misses a beat.
“China,” he sighs. “I can’t seem to learn the provinces. It doesn’t stay in my head.”
“You’d think that wouldn’t be a problem with a head as big as yours,” Jongdae teases.
Chanyeol glares at him, and Jongdae flashes him an innocent smile. His lips stretch and cut into the shadows covering his cheeks.
“I can help you with that,” he says. “But you’ll have to give me a hand for sciences. I’m confused by the chapter I’m studying.”
Chanyeol doesn’t even pause to think. He immediately stretches his hand out, fingers spreading to welcome Jongdae’s against his palm. They’re a good team anyway. He helped Jongdae learn one hundred and fifty English words the other day, just after Jongdae helped him memorize the Korean dynasties. (Each one of them is still printed in Chanyeol’s mind with Jongdae’s expressions when Chanyeol got them right. His favourite is the Korean Empire, because it comes with Jongdae’s proud smile and scream of victory.)
“Deal,” he says.
Jongdae hops on the spot, his body shivering with excitement. He shoves the last half of his bread in his mouth as he scans their surrounding with eager eyes. He reaches out, grabs a greyish gravel and tries it on the concrete. It rasps so loudly in the silence around them that they both wince in unison. Jongdae flashes a victorious eye smile at Chanyeol when the rock leaves a white mark on the road.
“China,” Jongdae says. “Let’s go.”
He jumps on his feet and crouches down to start drawing on the concrete. One line after the other, China slowly spreads between two white lines, its borders faint and unsure, but familiar enough for Chanyeol to recognize them. Jongdae tilts his head when his wrist tackles the light curve up towards Russia, and his tongue darts out again, his front teeth biting softly on it as he scrunches up his face in focus. Chanyeol’s tired brain desperately tries to take a shot of him, for memory storage, but because it still feels as stuffed as before, it only manages to catch details, tiny pieces of Jongdae that would fit between the Rilakkuma shop opening hours and the long list of songs Chanyeol can play on his guitar. There are the moles on Jongdae’s temple, the cowlick on the back of his head, the start of his collarbones diving under the loose collar, and the soft, smooth line of his neck as he leans down.
Chanyeol looks away, heat spreading on his cheeks. He’s losing it again, he tells himself. He’s so tired. It’s just pressure and exhaustion.
“Okay,” Jongdae finally sighs as he takes a look at China now spreading at his feet. It starts at the tip of his shoes, the usually big country tiny next to Jongdae, and the imagery is so beautiful that Chanyeol’s heart misses another beat. Exhaustion.
“Let’s start with the bigger ones,” Jongdae goes on, still focused on his drawing. He puts a hand on the concrete for balance and leans over to draw the first border.
“You have Xinjiang up there,” he explains. “And just under, Tibet.”
“Xinjiang, Tibet,” Chanyeol repeats in a whisper.
The names sound foreign, heavy, although he’s heard them so many times before. The borders Jongdae is drawing also look aggressive, and the more Chanyeol tries to remember the province Jongdae is now tracing on the concrete, the harder it is for him to remember Xinjiang and Tibet. He breathes in, his mind filling with the loud annoying sound his phone makes when it’s full, and he breathes out a mix of oxygen and important dates he should be remembering.
“Quinghai,” Jongdae says, pointing at the new province that spurted out of his fingers. Chanyeol’s eyes zoom on Jongdae’s index finger and on the dirty traces left by the gravel.
“And just next to it…” Jongdae’s voice trails off as he adds another broken line. “Gansu.”
Xinjiang, Tibet, Quinghai, Gansu. Xin…Xinghai? Gansiang? Chanyeol holds his breath, now convinced that his lungs let go of knowledge instead of oxygen when he breathes out.
“Let’s add another one,” Jongdae says in his cheerful voice. “And then we’ll go over those four ones.”
“Jongdae,” Chanyeol manages to croak out.
Jongdae looks up, and the smile on his face dies out. Chanyeol realizes, through Jongdae’s horrified eyes, that he’s started crying. He can feel the saltiness - so bitter - on his lips, and the tingly feeling in his eyes. His whole body hurts, and he’s pretty sure half of his muscles have shrunk in a tensed bundle of nerves. Every time he blinks, China’s borders are burning on the back of his eyelids.
“Chanyeol? What - What’s going on?”
Chanyeol shakes his head. The gravel emits an unexpectedly low thud when it hits the concrete after Jongdae let it go. The very same fingers that were holding the tiny rock barely a second before are now curling around Chanyeol’s wrist. Jongdae easily enters Chanyeol’s private space with a discreet smell of banana. Chanyeol’s breath catches in the back of his throat.
“I can’t,” he says. His voice breaks. The crack starts in his mouth and it spreads to the rest of his body. Hours of cramming seep out of him, never to return, and Chanyeol shrinks. He looks up at Jongdae. “I - I don’t want to be an accountant.”
Jongdae fills the holes Chanyeol quiet sobs are digging in his mind. He watches Chanyeol with soft, gentle eyes, every little detail falling into place as he leans in and wraps Chanyeol in his arms. They lock on his back, muscles tensing around Chanyeol as he tightens his hold on the latter, banana smell filling the air around them when he buries his head in the crook of Chanyeol’s neck.
“I know,” Jongdae whispers. “I know.”
Chanyeol breathes out, and more data, more formulas and definitions fly away. Jongdae’s fingers curl on his nape, his other hand following Chanyeol’s spine in slow circles, and Chanyeol realizes how wrong he was. Jongdae may live in a similar house in the same street, he’s more different from Chanyeol than the stupid tulips might have hinted at. He knows China’s provinces and one hundred and fifty English words more than Chanyeol, but mostly, he knows the way out of this place, and he’ll get out of here undoubtedly. Chanyeol will keep coming back to the same rose bushes for the rest of his life, trapped not in a forsaken street, but in an office at the top of a skyscraper.
Jongdae’s fingers brush against his cheeks as he wipes away Chanyeol’s tears with soft touches before tightening their embrace. It takes Chanyeol all his strength to lift his arms, but when he does, he locks them on the small of Jongdae’s back, desperate and needy.
Somewhere behind Chanyeol, rose bushes are sleeping peacefully, bathing in streetlights and soft moonlight. Farther away, his mother, with her wrinkled eyes and her loving smiles, is dreaming of her accountant son, her oldest child already shining in college, and she smiles in her sleep. Next to her, her husband has a restful sleep because he doesn’t have to worry about his children’s futures, and the questions he’s been asking himself for years now have finally found their answers. Yura is on her way to becoming a great journalist, and Chanyeol, his only son, is studying so hard to become an accountant, and he couldn’t be prouder. Their brains are resting, data and software updating like they should be doing, and they don’t have to fear the prospect of drawing a red cross in the morning.
And Chanyeol is crying in the middle of a still street, disappointing and guilty, his fingers clenching on Jongdae’s back, and a half drawn map of China’s provinces next to him.
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Chanyeol’s first kiss happened on a Monday.
He’s not sure about the place anymore, not sure about the settings, but he knows for sure that it was on a Monday. He still can hear himself think with nervous excitement, as though he had known what was coming, that seeing Moon Byulyi on a Monday was not a coincidence. He still had hundreds of English words buzzing in his mind from his last cramming session, but Byulyi made learning the names of the planets so easy. She was just like the moon, silvery pale and glowing, and, although he had not realised it yet, cold and distant.
He knows she took his hand and looked up at him, and that is when he told himself that spending those few hours with her on a Monday was the best decision he had ever made. She was the moon, it was the day of the moon, and she was leaning in.
His first kiss happened on a Monday, and it left a faint red stain on his lips. It was after an intensive English cramming session and just before a mathematics one.
Sometimes when he can’t sleep, Chanyeol thinks about Byulyi’s red lips on his, about her fingers brushing against his neck, about the figures he shoved down his throat barely an hour later, and he wonders if that’s when he messed it all up. Moon Byulyi may not have been the best memory of his teenage days, she still deserved better than a few flashes and a day of the week. The fact that he remembers how many pages he studied after their date much clearly than he does her hair or the twinkle in her eyes when she stepped closer often leaves him gasping for air in the dead of night, his fancy flat closing in on him.
His first kiss happened on a Monday, and he has no idea whether it was good kiss or not.
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Chanyeol feels uncharacteristically self-conscious when he opens his bedroom door and lets Jongdae step inside. It’s the same room it was when he woke up in the morning, but now that Jongdae is throwing curious looks all around him, it looks terrible and messy. There are bread crumbs on his nightstand, chocolate bar wrappings on the floor, and the whole desk region looks like a battlefield. Grenades of crumbled paper have blown up here and there and shaving remnants of his pencils are scattered all over the floor like landmines. It’s even worse on his desk: dead bodies are lying around, red ink staining their pale skins like flesh wounds and holes left by Chanyeol’s frustrated pencil stand out like stabbing scars. It’s a veritable scene crime, and he feels deeply ashamed.
He turns to Jongdae who’s now standing in the middle of Chanyeol’s room, his eyes already on the latter and a smile tugging harder on the right corner of his lips.
“I have the same mess in my room,” he says.
Chanyeol sincerely doubts it, but he’d rather not dwell on it. He makes a poor attempt at gathering the flying sheets left all over his desk, but he only manages to knock his pencil holder. They rain down with a sound that resonates in Chanyeol’s mind like mocking giggles. He watches, desperate, as they roll at his feet, most of them hurrying under his book shelf.
“I’ll never see those pencils again,” he sighs, silently mourning his lucky pen, the one with the good lead.
“Come on,” Jongdae chuckles. “I’ll help you.”
He walks to the shelf and grabs Chanyeol by the sleeve before pulling him down. As they both get on their knees, Chanyeol breathes in a lungful of Jongdae’s scent. He doesn’t smell like cologne, but there’s still something flowery coming from him, like he sleeps in freshly washed sheets. And he probably does, in a clean room whose organized desk is the biggest sign that he is not losing it, like Chanyeol is.
He watches as Jongdae leans down to peek at the small space between the floor and his book shelf, feeling like his mind has been kicked out of his own body. They don’t talk about Chanyeol’s breakdown. Not with words anyway, because Chanyeol has caught Jongdae casting him several looks since that night, in which he reads what he thinks is pity. Jongdae’s fingers linger every time now, in that odd way only Jongdae’s finger do; they dodge Chanyeol’s fingers with a little curl then follow the back of Chanyeol’s hand before curling around his wrist, thumb pressing against the softer skin on the inside. Chanyeol is falling apart a bit more every day, but Jongdae always looks so whole, so in control despite the purple of his eye bags turning to a worrisome black. More than the leftovers of his three previous meals scattered all around the room, or the war he’s obviously lost against his notes, this makes Chanyeol self-conscious.
Jongdae lets out a tiny groan as he pulls his hand out of the hole, thus breaking Chanyeol away from his reverie.
“I got one,” Jongdae says in a delighted voice, only to pause and scrunch up his nose in disgust when his fingers reappear. They are indeed wrapped around one of Chanyeol’s pencils - his lucky one - but with said pencil came dust bunnies now tangled in his grip.
“Gosh, I’m sorry,” Chanyeol groans. He scurries to wipe Jongdae’s hand, embarrassed. “This whole place is a mess.”
“You should see my room,” Jongdae chuckles.
He puts the pencil on one of the shelves and presents his opened palms to Chanyeol for the latter to untangle the knots of dust from his fingers. God, does he really lose that much hair?!
“I think the last time the floor under the furniture has seen a vacuum was when my mom still cleaned my room. Like, four years ago.”
Chanyeol is losing his patience because of a particularly big ball of dust caught in Jongdae’s ring, and the warmth he can feel blooming on his cheeks doesn’t really help.
“I’m sure your room is perfectly fine,” he grumbles.
He finally manages to clean Jongdae’s ring. The latter’s hand looks so small between Chanyeol’s fingers, so delicate, and even Chanyeol’s inner wrist Jongdae’s fingers are now crawling to is too big, too large. He pulls out his hand and avoids Jongdae’s eyes before leaning down and almost forcing his face under the book shelf. He shoves a hand in the darkness, winces at the hairy things he brushes, and palms the floor for the few pens he still has to get back. He doesn’t even care and usually considers whatever ends up under the furniture in his room to be lost forever, but Jongdae’s presence is making him particularly fidgety today. He takes these few seconds of fumbling around to try and pull himself together. He’s been feeling so sensitive since his childish crying fit a few days ago and deeply ashamed, to the point that he can’t look at his parents in the eyes anymore. Even worse, he can’t seem to be able to focus on his studying anymore.
He hoped that asking Jongdae to come by for a few hours of cramming would help. It doesn’t.
“Do you write?” Jongdae’s voice asks somewhere behind him.
The question is odd, but it immediately sends a warning in Chanyeol’s mind. His heart leaping up in his throat, he immediately pulls away from the shelf and straightens only to find Jongdae still on his knees next to him, one of Chanyeol’s many notebooks in his hands. Opened.
Chanyeol’s eyes stop on the lower shelf, the one currently filled with numerous notebooks completely identical to the one Jongdae’s holding. His heart leaps out of his chest this time.
“Are those… song lyrics?” Jongdae asks again, nodding at the page he’s reading. He looks up at Chanyeol and the latter makes a face.
“It’s just… words,” he mumbles as he reaches out to snap the notebook away from Jongdae’s hands.
He knows he made a terrible job at satisfying Jongdae’s fierce curiosity even before the latter takes another look around him. It’s a thing Jongdae has with everything he touches, sees, reads or hears. The need to know more, to have more. Chanyeol watched him drift from his daily English vocabulary list because he wanted to learn the name of every gardening tools, and not just the basic ones. Now, the same thirst is sparkling in Jongdae’s eyes as he scans Chanyeol’s room, the same smile is lightening his face, easily eclipsing the sickish glow of his skin. Chanyeol knows better than to fight against it, so instead, he braces himself.
It hits him when Jongdae notices the abandoned acoustic guitar in a corner and the keyboard hiding under a dusty blanket just next to it. The gasp he lets out doesn’t annoy Chanyeol, surprisingly. If anything, it just makes him blush even more, especially when he thinks he reads admiration in Jongdae’s eyes before the latter jumps back on his feet.
“Are you a musician?” he screeches in his signature high-pitched voice. (Oh my god Chanyeol, scythe! How do you even pronounce that?!)
Chanyeol shrugs as he gets back on his feet, his eyes following Jongdae up to his instruments. The latter reaches out and brushes against the guitar’s strings, the slight vibration enough to create a deep buzzing that thrums in the sound chamber and in Chanyeol’s guts. He makes a face at the distorted and out of tune note that comes out.
“I’ve always wanted to learn,” Jongdae muses, lost in his thoughts. His fingers are still following the guitar’s headstock, sometimes circling around the tuning machines. “But I never had the chance, I guess. Also I’m pretty sure I’m not patient enough.”
His voice gets all giggly and bubbly as he turns back to Chanyeol.
“I’ve heard that the first year can be quite frustrating? I’m sure I wouldn’t even reach six months.”
Chanyeol takes in his guitar, thinking hard about his first months learning, his fingers not quite used to the thickness of his pick and his eyes taking way too long to read the chords on his laptop.
“I don’t know,” he finally says. “It went quite fast for me.”
Jongdae doesn’t say anything. Instead, he moves to the keyboard, his fingers running on the keys over the blanket. He inadvertently presses one of them, and the only sound the unplugged keyboard produces is a coarse thump that reminds Chanyeol of nights spent playing with his earphones plugged in. Jongdae flashes him a sorry look that Chanyeol dismisses with another shrug.
“So do you write your own songs?” Jongdae asks.
“I used to. It’s been quite some time to be honest…”
Jongdae hums in understanding. If Chanyeol were to carbon date the dust now covering his guitar, he’d probably go back all the way to his previous school year, when tests were still distant, but already heavy in the teachers’ minds - and in the amount of work they gave them. Now, there’s just not enough hours in a day for him to pause, sit down and grab his guitar.
“You know I sing?” Jongdae continues but his voice grows distant in Chanyeol’s ears. “But because I can’t really accompany myself with any instrument, I just stop after melodies. I’ve never finished a song to this day and -“
Jongdae’s voice drowns in a shrieking whistle piercing Chanyeol’s eardrums as he stares without blinking at his guitar. He still remembers his seventh eleventh birthday when he unwrapped it, half screaming half crying. His parents had kept the secret with a military like strictness and even Yura had participated in the surprise. A few weeks before, she had told Chanyeol that he would never get a guitar because it was too expensive, and Chanyeol had cried so much. Until it finally was there, between his fingers, heavy and so beautiful. He did learn to play quite fast and easily, and there wouldn’t be a day without him playing for a couple of hours. Until, at least, his seventeenth year.
“ - tried one of those programs because sometimes I do hear a sort of melody, but I’m just not good with those. My last attempt could have been the background music of a Mario level.”
“Let’s not study,” Chanyeol blurts out.
Jongdae blinks, taken aback. He has one hand under the keyboard blanket, and Chanyeol has no trouble picturing him getting there inch by inch, his touch slow and delicate - just like he’s done with Chanyeol. He doesn’t look as much out of place as he did barely five minutes ago, but Chanyeol can’t help but see missed opportunities all over his face. If Jongdae had been in his room one year and a half ago, he would have played guitar for him. Things could have been so different. Chanyeol feels so ashamed right now, so sad. The layer of dust is breaking his heart and heaving on his shoulders like it’s lead.
“You don’t want to study…?” Jongdae repeats, confused.
Chanyeol shakes his head. He can’t spend one more day stuck between those four walls not doing what he used to love more than anything.
Jongdae opens his mouth to add something, and it lures a puff of air in his mouth. For a moment, it’s the only thing breaking the silence of the room, because Jongdae doesn’t talk in the end. He just watches Chanyeol with those deep eyes. Chanyeol grows more self-conscious with every second ticking by until, finally, Jongdae flashes him a smile. It’s soft but wide, but most of all, it’s comforting, and it works.
“What do you want to do?”
The question rings in Chanyeol’s mind and he slowly shakes his head in frustration. He doesn’t care. He just wants to get out of there, and possibly without a terribly heavy backpack hanging of his shoulder. But Jongdae looks at him like he’s supposed to know, and the question turns into a matter of life and death in Chanyeol’s mind. His heart speeds up and he starts panicking, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he wants to do.
“I - I have no idea,” he croaks.
“That’s okay,” Jongdae’s light voice immediately intervenes. He pulls out his hand from under the blanket and rubs his palms to get rid of the dust. “Take your bus pass.”
Chanyeol doesn’t ask or even hesitate. He rushes to his bag, grabs his wallet and knocks against his desk in his haste to walk out of his room. Jongdae chuckles and takes his hand to lead the way. He doesn’t even throw a single look at his own bag still waiting on the floor of Chanyeol’s room, thick books and carefully organized notes filling it. He doesn’t pause or think as he drags Chanyeol to the closest bus stop, but it doesn’t surprise Chanyeol at all. Jongdae knows what he wants to do, he knows where to go and why he’s doing whatever he’s doing.
More than the shame, the fear and the anxiety, Chanyeol feels grateful that, for once, he gets to experiment this, and even more that Jongdae is the one showing him what it feels like.
“You could become a fireman,” Jongdae says.
Chanyeol looks away from the scenery to cast a confused look at Jongdae. The latter is still munching on the snack they bought together when they reached Namsan Tower after what felt like hours of climbing up the steep path. The lack of money, but mostly Jongdae’s excited eyes, forced Chanyeol to dismiss the idea to ride a bus or even the cable car, but his tired legs are now making him pay. He’s pretty sure he won’t be able to stand up when Jongdae will call it a day.
“A fireman?” he repeats, lost.
Jongdae nods. The hiking dusted his cheeks with a faint pink and a few sweaty strands of hair are now sticking to his forehead. He looks much less frail and small in his casual clothes than he does in his school uniform, and if the enthusiast with which his strides swallowed the distance earlier is any indication, he definitely is stronger than he looks.
“You’re tall,” Jongdae nods. “That would work out pretty well.”
“I’m pretty sure being tall isn’t the only required quality to become a fireman and, you know, be responsible of people’s lives,” Chanyeol chuckles.
Jongdae reaches out and wraps his fingers around Chanyeol’s biceps, his fingertips unleashing a storm of goosebumps on Chanyeol’s skin.
“You just climbed a mountain, I think your physical condition is also pretty good,” Jongdae teases him.
Chanyeol lets out a groan that would have been a chuckle if not for Jongdae’s proximity. The latter is still pressed against his arm, his smiling face tilted up to him, much closer than he’s ever been. Chanyeol’s eyes catch details, like the long lashes, the moles spreading around Jongdae’s eyebrow or the drop of sweat rolling down his temple. His heart speeds up in his chest.
“Did you force me to walk up there to prove your point?” he asks in a mock accusatory tone supposed to hide his internal breakdown over Jongdae’s perfect face.
Jongdae shakes his head, chuckling. The jutting bone of his wrist digs into Chanyeol’s side, causing more eruptions of goosebumps.
“I thought you’d enjoy getting up here on your own. Like, it would remind you that you are perfectly capable of doing stuff.”
Jongdae slowly untangles himself and straightens on the bench, his eyes avoiding Chanyeol and focusing on Seoul spreading at their feet. Chanyeol resents the absence of a red pen and a piece of paper, because that, he thinks, are words that would have been worth circling. His eyes fall on Jongdae’s hand, now on the bench between them, and he wonders if he could take it instead.
“How do you do it…?” he asks in a small voice that the flow of tourists and the light gushes of wind almost drown. “To be this… confident and so sure about your future?”
Jongdae slowly shrugs.
“It’s not as easy as you seem to think, you know. I had to fight for years for my parents to acknowledge my wish, and even though they do now, I still have to get a business degree.”
“Aren’t you going to college for the student radio though?”
Jongdae chuckles. “They don’t know about that yet.”
“They don’t?” Chanyeol repeats.
Jongdae shakes his head. This time, his smile is smaller, almost shy and too weak to completely tug the corner of his lips upwards.
“I kinda have a lot on my plate right now. I’m too tired to fight.”
He looks away for the second time, but Chanyeol doesn’t pay attention to the beautiful scenery opening at his feet this time. Instead, he follows the outline of Jongdae’s side view, taking in the sharpness of his features and the smoothness of the bridge of his nose. Even under the bright light of midday, his skin looks sickish, almost yellow around the darkness of his eye bags, and his cheeks do look hollower. Chanyeol himself has lost a few pounds somewhere along ruffling pages and scribbled notes. Jongdae did stop and waited for Chanyeol when the latter fell behind during their hiking, but Chanyeol also had to reach out and grab Jongdae’s hand to make sure he would not stop walking.
He glances down and does it again, only this time his fingers slide between Jongdae’s. His palm is warm and sweaty, but the way he grips Chanyeol’s fingers is worth it.
They exchange a look, and Jongdae flashes him a slight smile.
“You look great,” Chanyeol says with a smile of his own. The words register a heartbeat too late in his mind, and it’s only when Jongdae chuckles, amused, that he realized what it sounded like. Hopefully, the heat and the long walk will dissimilate the blush creeping on his cheeks. “I mean… You really give the impression that you’re handling everything well.”
Jongdae’s smile deepens, and more wrinkles spurt out from the corner of his eyes. His thumb slips out of Chanyeol’s fingers’ embrace and slides to the inside of Chanyeol’s wrist for a gentle press.
“And you look like you’d be a great fireman.”
Chanyeol shakes his head.
“I don’t want to be a fireman,” he protests. “I want to work in the music field.”
Jongdae’s eyebrows raise in surprise, and Chanyeol’s heart speeds up. They stare at each other for a couple of seconds, perfectly still. Jongdae’s fingers tighten around Chanyeol’s and his heartbeat gets even more erratic, but it’s a different kind of chaos. It’s irregular and far from the crescendo that always comes before his panic attacks. It makes him feel fuelled and strong, complete and determined, like he could run down the mountain without slowing down once.
“Nice,” Jongdae says. His smile is obvious in his voice even before it tugs at the corner of his lips. “Although not as sexy as being a fireman if you ask me.”
Chanyeol chuckles, and Jongdae retaliates with a low giggle that quickly turns into a full laughter. Chanyeol is washed away by the mirth blooming on Jongdae’s face, and it hits him in full speed. Before he realizes, Jongdae is curling his hand on his nape and pulling him in for a hug. He lets go of Chanyeol’s fingers at the very last moment, and Chanyeol feels them run to his back over the light fabric of his shirt. His own fists clench on Jongdae’s shirt, his knuckles digging into Jongdae’s shoulder blades.
Jongdae slightly tilts his head up to draw in a lungful of air. His chest swells against Chanyeol, his breath curls against Chanyeol’s nape and his fingers spread on his back. Chanyeol grows hyper aware of their surroundings, of the people snapping pictures of the scenery and the little café selling snacks by dozen. At the same time though, his brain seems to be focusing only on the tiny spaces left between his and Jongdae’s chest and on every other parts the sharp angles of Jongdae’s body are touching. He’s so thin.
“You’re so tall,” Jongdae groans, his cheek resting against Chanyeol’s collarbone. His voice vibrates against Chanyeol’s chest and crashes against his skin with a shiver that runs down his spine.
“You’re so small,” he counters.
Jongdae chuckles.
“Be nice or I won’t invite you to my radio show.”
The way he says it, with so much confidence and trust, has Chanyeol’s heart missing a beat. Butterflies take wing in his stomach, spreading a nice liquid warmth in his guts. He closes his eyes and buries his face in the crook of Jongdae’s neck. He feels powerful, yes, but possible achievements will have to wait a bit. He has better things to do right now.
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