fic - "you and i, learning to speak."
you and i, learning to speak.
PG-13 · 8408 words · EXO
Baekhyun/Chanyeol
Chanyeol leaves the country to find himself, Baekhyun doesn't know how much he needs Chanyeol until he does, and none of his friends give him good advice. AU, established relationship.
note: Largely inspired by my psychotic text post full of revelations on Tumblr, idek.
I honestly haven't written fic in about four years so lmao we'll see how this goes...
The title is from "Fall" by the lovely Ed Sheeran.
This is for Tori (herocountry) because I automatically blame her for everything! Meimei loves jiejie, OK. ♥
-
They break up on a Thursday.
Technically, it’s not even a real “breakup” breakup-just a “break,” as Chanyeol so helpfully supplies over their standard Thursday evening spaghetti dinner, from their stuck-like-glue, strangely symbiotic relationship that none of their friends have ever understood.
Their conversation goes something a little like this:
“I think that maybe we should take a break,” Chanyeol says around a mouthful of spaghetti.
Baekhyun stops chewing for a moment. He has long given up trying to break Chanyeol from his habit of talking with his mouth full. Then, he plans to formulate several arguments as to why exactly they should not take a break from their relationship. Instead, the only thing that comes out of his mouth is an extremely flat, “What.”
Chanyeol’s gaze shifts from Baekhyun to the horrendous floral wallpaper the previous tenants have applied during their stay in the loft.
“I just thought, you know.” He purses his lips and pushes the half-eaten plate of spaghetti away from him. Baekhyun eyes Chanyeol’s hands warily; he had already broken two out of the set of six, and they had been a housewarming present from Chanyeol’s mother-their first year of university seemed so long ago from now. “We’re always together. Haven’t you noticed? It’s like I’ve forgotten who I am when I’m not with you. Like I can’t be Chanyeol because I’ve been Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol for so long. And…”
He trails off and Baekhyun thinks that it was a good thing the porcelain plates were expensive and matched the wallpaper, or else he’d be hurling it at Chanyeol’s head.
“You don’t know if you’re the one for me,” Chanyeol reasons, “and I don’t know if I’m the one for you. Don’t say so otherwise-how could we know? We’ve never been with anyone else. Just think about it, okay?” His tone has acquired a pleading tone at Baekhyun’s prolonged silence. “It’s just something that I think we need to do. Just a small break from Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol to be-well, Baekhyun and Chanyeol. A teeny, tiny break.”
Baekhyun takes one look at Chanyeol’s bittersweet smile, gingerly sets down his sterling silver fork, and doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening.
That was last week.
-
A tiny, vindictive, unpleasant part of Baekhyun hopes Chanyeol gets run down by a renegade car while trying to flag his regular Friday night cab because nothing says “What part of ‘I don’t want to take a stupid break from our relationship’ don’t you understand?” like getting multiple bones crushed in a single instant.
Baekhyun thinks that it’s really too bad that for the most part he still loves Chanyeol because for all his sweetness and good humor, Baekhyun is terrifyingly good at being a jilted lover. Nobody would know he had it in him-not even Baekhyun himself.
“Hyung, I don’t even think you should be angry,” Zitao gently says to him one afternoon over coffee in endearingly stilted Korean.
“I’m not angry, Tao,” replies Baekhyun angrily and robotically stirs two packets of sugar into his cappuccino.
Tao can’t claim to know much about coffee so he refrains from making judgmental comments about his drink. “Well, I think he still loves you,” he declares with a note of finality. “You’re just not seeing each other at the moment. Like a long distance relationship.” Baekhyun scrunches his nose and hides his smile by sipping his cappuccino because he’s supposed to feel vexed and be irritated at everything and everyone, but the truth is that Tao is a cute kid and Baekhyun doesn’t have the heart.
Instead, he manages to channel his hatred of happy, normal couples that don’t take “breaks” out of the blue into a half-hearted scoff.
Tao frowns. “It’s true!” he insists. “After all you’ve been through together, I think it would take a lot more than a spaghetti dinner to break Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol up.”
“I think that was Chanyeol’s point, Tao.” He feels like moping. “We’ve been together since high school. We’re practically inseparable. It’s like… like a parasitic relationship, or like a poisonous friend-you just can’t get rid of them of them, no matter how hard you try.”
Tao looks horrified at the mention of parasites and poison and Baekhyun wishes he could take back those words.
“Forget what I said,” Baekhyun says hastily, waving a hand to show that it wasn’t as big of a deal as Tao thought it was. “What I mean is that maybe-just maybe-Chanyeol’s right. Who am I without Chanyeol? It’s like I don’t know how to function without him. I barely know how to drink this coffee and talk to you at the same time!”
“That’s because you’re drinking it when you haven’t even let it cool down, hyung,” Tao says wryly. “You’re scalding your tongue. Just give him some time. That’s what he asked for, right? That’s all you need.”
Baekhyun goes home that evening to a loft that’s too big and pretends that he doesn’t miss Chanyeol’s stupid laugh and the way that he wrinkles his nose and his bug-eyed stare when he’s concentrating on something that Baekhyun would never even think about if it weren’t for Chanyeol.
It’s stupid, he decides, how Chanyeol had decided to throw a curveball at him on any old ordinary Thursday without prior warning or even the simplest premise. All Baekhyun really needed was an explanation because now, drowning in low self-esteem and feelings of doubt sounded like a good idea.
It’s not a good idea but he does it anyway.
Maybe there’s someone else, offers an ugly voice in Baekhyun’s head as he lies wide awake in an empty, lonely bed. All he’s ever had was you-maybe he wonders what else he can be besides a part of Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol. Maybe you’re suffocating him.
His eyes snap open and suddenly he can’t stand the feeling of being in his own skin. He stumbles out of the bedroom to the handrails above the staircase and peers down into the murkily lit sitting room, picking out the little things that Chanyeol had left behind.
On the untouched sofa was the raggedy old tribal-print blanket that Chanyeol took naps with; his favorite The Hundreds snapback was carefully placed on top the clothes stand; the bananas he insisted on buying last Tuesday were growing brown spots, and Baekhyun was sure there was a special circle in Hell for people who insisted on buying bananas but never intended to eat them because they would want to “take a break” in two days.
Take a break-what a joke. Baekhyun wishes he was brave enough to text Chanyeol with something passive aggressive and pleading all at once because a week has almost gone by and wasn’t a week enough for a standard vacation?
Instead, his phone hangs heavy in his pocket, and suddenly he realizes that the loft isn’t the same, wasn’t meant for just one person-that maybe it isn’t Chanyeol’s presence that Baekhyun misses, but Chanyeol’s absence that he hates. It’s sort of a funny feeling, one that makes his heart twinge just a smidge, and the tips of his fingers unexpectedly ache.
He crawls back into his side of the bed feeling no better than when he left it. Perhaps this was what Chanyeol had meant by a “break”-maybe it was about self-introspection and feeling empty and lonely and weird at three in the morning and figuring how much you can actually miss a person before you pick up the phone and call without still feeling vexed from a Thursday spaghetti dinner (admittedly, a lot).
Baekhyun falls asleep alone. That was Wednesday.
-
Baekhyun loves Kyungsoo, but the thing is that Kyungsoo is a baby and thinks that all real world problems can be solved by food.
Perhaps he isn’t being fair to Kyungsoo, Baekhyun thinks as he halfheartedly listens to Kyungsoo while picking at his ravioli at the unauthentic Italian restaurant they like to frequent on their days off. Kyungsoo had no real life experiences to base his food hypothesis on. Kyungsoo didn’t have boyfriends who were weird and did things as they pleased without warning. But Kyungsoo was painfully earnest and his doe eyes were so genuine that Baekhyun begrudgingly let him speak, even if he knew he was wrong.
And he was wrong.
“… and besides, once I brought cupcakes to the meeting and everyone suddenly started to agree with each other, so maybe you should make cupcakes for Chanyeol. I could help if you want,” Kyungsoo offers. He has all but ignored his faux Mediterranean-style salad for the past ten fifteen minutes, his salad fork untouched-but Baekhyun understands; it really wasn’t that good in the first place.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, but we broke up over dinner,” Baekhyun reminds Kyungsoo dryly.
“You two didn’t break up,” he protests.
“Same difference!” Baekhyun gives up on his ravioli and leans in and crosses his arms, huffing. “He hasn’t talked to me in days, I haven’t talked to him in days-we’re not calling it a break up, sure, but it feels just the same.”
An uncomfortable silence falls over the two. For a while, both of them return to playing with their food, even though Baekhyun is pretty sure that Kyungsoo’s salad is actually too revolting to finish.
“Hyung, have you ever wondered why Chanyeol-hyung might want to… you know?”
Of course he’s wondered, he wants to say. He wants to tell Kyungsoo that sometimes he feels so lonely and confused that he can’t sleep, that the vacant space in their king-sized bed freaks him out sometimes, that the hoodies Chanyeol left behind make him angry, but Baekhyun doesn’t have answers to his whirlwind of emotions because Chanyeol is gone. But it’s hard to put the thoughts running through his mind at breakneck speed into actual words, so Baekhyun just nods and says weakly, “Yeah.”
“Have you ever wondered that maybe… maybe it might be your fault?” Kyungsoo says this in a tiny, tiny voice, as if saying it louder might offend Baekhyun and make him flip the restaurant’s tables out of rage.
“Yeah,” Baekhyun repeats quietly.
“Oh,” utters Kyungsoo, a little startled, and they leave it at that.
They part ways shortly after, and Baekhyun is by himself in the apartment again. He debates going out with his friends more, then decides otherwise because all their conversations would be exactly like Tao and Kyungsoo’s.
It’s Saturday-nine days after Chanyeol had dropped the bomb, and Baekhyun hates himself for being so overly dramatic and thinking in terms of “Before Chanyeol” and “After Chanyeol.” It’s not healthy, he thinks as he drops like a sack of potatoes on the sofa and kicks Chanyeol’s dumb blanket to the side; it’s almost summertime and getting too hot to sleep with covers. He glares at the clock with its fluorescent blue numbers. 15:32, it cheerily displays. Of course it’s cheerful; it used to be Chanyeol’s.
Baekhyun takes out his phone and thinks that if he were a character in a romantic comedy, this is the turning point of everything that has gone wrong in his life. His thumb hovers over Chanyeol’s number on the touch screen, prays to God that whatever tumbles out of his mouth won’t make him sound like an idiot, and calls.
Chanyeol doesn’t pick up.
“Great,” he deadpans into the emptiness of the loft, his voice bouncing off the walls and echoing.
He remembers a little too late that life isn’t a romantic comedy because if it were, everything would be a lot easier than it actually is and Tao and Kyungsoo would actually give him some real advice, and Baekhyun wouldn’t be here pining over somebody that he already has like some stupid teenage girl who can’t get herself together.
So he does the next best thing instead-which, admittedly, wasn’t too far off from being a teenage girl-and throws his phone across the room. It lands with a dull thump! and, pacified, Baekhyun turns onto his side and falls asleep with Chanyeol’s blanket half draped across his body.
-
A few months ago, when Baekhyun and Chanyeol were still Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol, they had walked hand-in-hand to Joonmyun’s neighbor’s fancy garage sale in a nice part of the city. To Baekhyun’s dismay, Chanyeol had instantly fallen in love.
“Chanyeol,” Baekhyun began with the patience of a parent of hyperactive three-year-old.
“Baekhyun, don’t ruin it,” he immediately interrupted, putting a large hand over Baekhyun’s mouth. He yelped when he felt Baekhyun’s tongue on his palm. “Stop! I already know what you’re going to say, and I don’t want to hear it!”
“Chanyeol,” he tried again, but with the ease of someone far taller than him, Chanyeol had simply spun Baekhyun around using his shoulders as a pivot and looked him straight in the eyes.
“You want what’s best for me, don’t you Baekhyun?”
“You know I do, but the truth is that it’s hideous-”
Chanyeol had the gall to audibly gasp, causing several heads to turn in their direction.
“How could you say that?”
“I’m just telling you the pure unadulterated truth!” he protested.
“It’s perfect!” Chanyeol declared, scrunching his eyebrows together and angrily folded his arms.
“Are you two seriously having a lover’s spat at my neighbor’s garage sale? Over a garden gnome?” Joonmyun interjected wearily. They both ignored him.
“It’s small, fat, ugly, missing an ear, wearing Christmas colors, and I swear to God, Chanyeol, if you buy that garden gnome, I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life.” Baekhyun paused his tirade to think. “And then I’m going to banish you to the couch. Forever,” he added as an afterthought and narrowed his eyes.
“It’s one-of-a-kind,” Joonmyun’s neighbor said before things could get any uglier than they already were. “My great-great-great grandfather bought it in the Netherlands. An antique!”
“How much is it?” Chanyeol snapped, irritated, and kept his gaze at Baekhyun. Baekhyun happened to be fine with that and glared right back.
“9900 won,” replied the neighbor hastily.
Chanyeol pressed a 10,000 won bill into the neighbor’s hand and said with a note of triumph, still looking at Baekhyun as if this had been a competition all along, “Keep the change.” He snatched the misshapen garden gnome from the table like he was afraid that Baekhyun might break it before he even had the chance to take it, and that’s how Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol ended up with the world’s ugliest porcelain figurine in the world on their fireplace.
Baekhyun had been happy to forget about the stupid garden gnome but good things don’t last forever; on Tuesday morning, twelve days after Chanyeol decides he wants a break, Baekhyun receives a postcard with a suspiciously familiar garden gnome in front of the Eiffel Tower.
The postmark is from France. It’s signed Park Chanyeol.
Baekhyun swallows down his dread and hesitantly takes a glance at their now vacant fireplace and wonders what he could have possibly said or done to Chanyeol for him to want to flee the country without telling anyone like a fugitive on the run and take the sorry excuse for a gnome with him. He wonders so deeply that he forgets that he was angry with Chanyeol in the first place, flips over the postcard, and squints in an effort to read Chanyeol’s serial killer handwriting.
Dear Baekhyun,
I know you’re mad at me. You’re always mad when I do something I don’t tell you about. Sometimes you get mad at me when I do things you tell me to do. But that’s OK, because I love you despite your freaky moodswings.
I’m in Paris! Did you know Joonmyun’s parents have a flat here? I’ve always wanted to go to France but you knew that already. Sometimes I think that you know everything about me, and then I wonder if I have to start making stuff up to keep our relationship spiced up. That’s something I read in my sister’s magazine BTW. This is something that I have to do.
I love you! And Klonker does too!
- Chanyeol
“Who the hell is Klonker?” Baekhyun says out loud before he remembers the horrendous gnome. Which idiot at the gate let the biohazard through the terminal? He chooses to ignore the fact that he hadn’t noticed Klonker was gone until today. He pretends not to feel disappointed when he realizes that Chanyeol had written “I love you,” but not “I miss you.”
-
Their first date is at the annual carnival in town. It’s somewhat of a disaster: Baekhyun rides the spinning Ferris wheel four times in a row and spends the rest of the day in various states of nausea and Chanyeol forgets to tell Baekhyun that he’s actually grounded for the weekend and gets scolded in front of Baekhyun by his mother.
“I don’t know what a nice boy like you is doing with a troublemaker like Chanyeol,” his mother says, glaring at her son and shaking her head.
“I, ah, don’t worry, Mrs. Park, I’ll keep him in line,” replies Baekhyun, trying his hardest to smother his laughter. Chanyeol, who had looked worried for the entire ride home, spares a glance at him and the corners of his lips quirk up. Baekhyun thinks that Chanyeol’s smile could light up every last corner of the universe and beyond that, too.
Oh, his mind provides. The neural impulses in his brain stutter. It’s at that moment that Baekhyun realizes that he’s in love.
He goes home and loses sleep over this revelation. He’s never been in love before; his only experiences with love had come from unrealistic romance movies and sad love songs, and Baekhyun had lived most of his life never expecting that he would actually fall in love. He thinks about their horrible nauseating first date and comes to the conclusion that if he could see Chanyeol smile just one more time, he’d suffer-grudgingly-through a million horrible nauseating first dates.
Baekhyun calls Lu Han at three in the morning and his part of the conversation was made up of largely I don’t understand’s and What’s and Oh my god’s.
“Couldn’t you have called in the morning?”
“It is the morning! This is important!”
“I meant later in the morning. Like, at an actually reasonable hour of the day. Maybe past dawn. I’m too tired to talk in Korean and I have exams tomorrow-something a baby like you wouldn’t understand.” Lu Han’s voice comes through the phone as crackled, thick with sleep. He tries to stifle a yawn but it slips through the cracks anyways.
“I’m not a baby, I’m in love, Lu Han-hyung,” Baekhyun breathes, sounding a little awed, like he couldn’t believe it himself.
Lu Han smiles in spite of the ungodly hour. “Okay then, Baekhyun. It’s as simple as that.”
-
It happens in the tiny park seven minutes away from Baekhyun’s house. Technically, it’s past their curfew, but they’re milking the last of dregs of summer vacation; Chanyeol has brought his favorite tribal-print woven blanket and they lie tangled up against each other on the quickly cooling grass, silent, counting the stars.
“Sixty-one,” Chanyeol murmurs into Baekhyun’s hair, his fingers tracing nonsensical patterns into his shoulders. “How about you?”
“… Now I’ve lost count. Thanks, you big loser,” Baekhyun protests feebly, gently slapping him on the arm, but Chanyeol only laughs and Baekhyun feels strangely content from the short sound alone. He wonders what he’d do without Chanyeol, and it frightens him for a fleeting moment that it was possible that Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol might not be forever.
So he tilts his head upwards and slides a hand against Chanyeol’s neck to bring him down to press a slow, soft kiss to his lips. It’s quiet and subdued and on this side of sad, and Baekhyun wishes he could kiss the uncertainty away from this moment but that was only wishful thinking.
“What was that for?” Chanyeol asks after they gradually pull away, not even bothering to hide his smile.
“Nothing,” Baekhyun says breezily. “Can’t I kiss you whenever I want to?” He breaks their gaze and starts to pull at the grass instead. “I don’t know, it just felt right. Like, this date is way too romantic for us or something. Maybe I’m going crazy?”
“Well, you’re definitely crazy.”
“You were the crazy one first! You probably infected me with your crazy.”
“Whatever! You just don’t appreciate my genius.” He huffs and sticks his tongue out jokingly.
Baekhyun purses his lips. “But you see what I mean, right? It feels weird when we get all romantic and stargaze-y. I guess maybe I’m just used to our banter.”
Chanyeol nods eagerly. “That’s right, our banter is sexy.”
“Definitely foreplay,” Baekhyun agrees.
“We should get a room or something.”
“I agree, I don’t think public eyes are ready for this.”
“Maybe we should tone down the PDA a little…”
They grin at each other. Baekhyun settles his head against the crook of where Chanyeol’s neck and shoulder meet and they fall into a comfortable, sleepy silence.
And then Baekhyun decides to ruin the rest of his life by blurting out, “I love you.”
Chanyeol doesn’t respond for a very long time and Baekhyun wants to crawl under the blanket and then maybe throw himself off a cliff while he’s at it. For a brief moment he considers apologizing, but what’s there to apologize for? He tries to convince himself that Chanyeol could have just been a momentary blip in his good judgment, that this is just the honeymoon phase, that maybe if they break up sometime soon, Baekhyun would spend the next few years trying to remember the gangly, tall boy with honey-brown hair and the brightest smile he’s ever seen.
“Do you know how many stars in the Milky Way you can see with the naked eye?” Chanyeol finally says. Baekhyun silently shakes his head no, still hiding his face into Chanyeol’s arm. “Well, it depends where you are, but around 2500.”
He pauses for a moment, then hesitantly runs his fingers through Baekhyun’s hair.
“Do you know how many stars are actually in the Milky Way? 400 billion.” He stops again. Then: “I think about these things sometimes, you know? How 2500 out of 400 billion is so insignificant when you think about it-we’re just tiny beings, lost people who don’t know where we’re headed and sometimes it gets overwhelming. Like, what are we doing here in the first place? What’s the point of anything when you know that you’re just a little speck out of trillions and trillions?” Chanyeol laughs. “I don’t know why I’m saying this, I must be freaking you out…”
“A little bit,” he replies slowly, voice muffled by Chanyeol’s sweatshirt.
“I like having fun. I like having fun with you. I think you make the world a better place. Sometimes I still don’t get the point of a lot of things, but I don’t mind being lost with you.” He hums quietly under his breath, a soft mmm, and Baekhyun thinks he sounds a little nervous. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that you make me feel like I can see all 400 billion stars. Not just 2500.”
Baekhyun slowly pulls himself away from Chanyeol’s shoulder. He doesn’t know why he suddenly feels like crying or why it feels like this sweetness is only fleeting.
Instead, he repeats what he’s been telling himself since the beginning. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he tells him earnestly.
Chanyeol only beams and says, “Well, that’s easy. Never leave me, then.”
-
He ignores the postcards from Milan and Vienna and tries not to feel sad and listless and channels all his loneliness into singing, instead. It works, for the most part, until his voices breaks from overexertion. He gives up after that.
The worst part of it all is that Baekhyun knows exactly what Chanyeol is doing because he’s played this game before, too-he’d used to ignore Chanyeol’s texts and silently count down the hours and the days until he showed up at his door with concern written all over his face, saying something stupid like, “Why didn’t you answer me, I thought your dog finally ate you!” And Baekhyun would just kiss Chanyeol’s cheek and make up a short lie about losing his phone in his messy room and they’d laugh about it together. The only thing different now is that Baekhyun isn’t laughing.
On Tuesday, Chanyeol’s postcard from Beijing arrives-delayed, but still in tact. It’s of him and Klonker hiking through the Great Wall of China, and why is Baekhyun not surprised that Chanyeol took that stupid garden gnome all the way up to one of the Seven Wonders of the Medieval World?
Dear Baekhyun,
It’s taken me a long time and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I know, crazy-me, think? But it’s true. Maybe I run away too much. I ran all the way to Europe and back because I guess that’s the only way I know how to deal with things.
I think when you’ve been with someone too long your ideals start to warp a little. Did you know I looked at Klonker this morning and thought, “Hey, maybe his nose is a little lopsided”? I think maybe you start to become like that person, and I love you but sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore. Like, do I actually like warm places or am I just used to you complaining about the cold all the time? Do I actually like bananas or do I just like hearing you complain about the brown spots? Do I just like hearing you complain?
But here’s the thing: it’s taken me weeks but I’ve finally figured it out-I’m lost with you, but I’m lost without you, too. So where do we go from here?
- Chanyeol
The loft is eerily quiet, the only noise from the hum of the refrigerator, as Baekhyun reads it over and over again. He chews on his lip absentmindedly as he tries to figure out what the emotion he’s feeling and decides that it’s probably a mix of irritation and sadness and forgiveness.
Forgiveness.
It’s a weird one. He thinks about it all the way down the stairs of their apartment complex and stumbles over the last step like he always does without Chanyeol’s warning. He thinks so hard that he takes a left at the intersection instead of the right and ends up in front of the overpriced organic farmer’s market instead of where he actually wants to be and has to call poor Sehun for directions.
“Hyung, why is it that you never know where you are in the city?” Sehun grumbles, his voice sounding static through the speaker.
“I just moved here!” Baekhyun exclaims.
“Like three years ago,” he reminds him cheekily. “You and Chanyeol-hyung moved at the exact time and he never asks me for directions,” he adds and Baekhyun rolls his eyes and sticks out his tongue, even though Sehun can’t see him.
“Get lost, Sehun,” he replies easily and hangs up.
Forgiveness, Baekhyun mulls over on the train, looking out the window and feeling more placid than he’d been in weeks. He says it out loud, softly in the empty compartment, fiddling with his smartphone and wishes he was as physically impulsive as Chanyeol. Maybe he was emotionally on par with Chanyeol’s spontaneity-Baekhyun could never keep him in one place, and for the longest time he’d resented the fact that Chanyeol could go as he pleased with no regrets or cares or worries.
He thinks about their first fight as the train passes by endless stretches of farmland. It had been about bananas, only it wasn’t about bananas at all, and Baekhyun decides that the first thing he’d do when he sees Chanyeol again is punch him in the face; the second is admit that he’d never really hated bananas-it was just the principle of it all.
It had been three summers ago, when they’d first moved into the loft together and Chanyeol had been taking extra classes at the university, leaving Baekhyun to putter about in the empty loft littered with their still-unpacked furniture, listless and annoyed.
“Why do you keep buying bananas if you never eat them?” Baekhyun asks one night as he lies on his side and absentmindedly watches Chanyeol change into pajamas.
“Um,” Chanyeol replies, getting stuck trying to pull his thin summer sweater over his head. Baekhyun sighs wearily and, with gentle hands, eases it off of Chanyeol, smoothing his auburn hair as it sticks up from the static. “I don’t know, aren’t bananas good for you?”
“Not when they get spotty because someone’s never home to eat them,” Baekhyun retorts quietly, half under his breath.
He was quiet for a moment, contemplating his words. “Are you mad at me?” he finally replies, incredulous, mouth hanging half-open like it was the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. “You get mad at me for the stupidest things-”
“I’m not mad, I’m just saying that there are overripe bananas in our nice porcelain fruit bowl that your mom gave us.”
“And what’s the real meaning?”
“Of what, Chanyeol?”
Chanyeol purses his lips and gives Baekhyun a pointed look, and Baekhyun wants to curl up and sleep and forget that this conversation ever happened. “Is this about unpacking or something? Because you know I’m busy-”
“Chanyeol-”
“-with my classes, and you know, I really thought you’d be supportive-”
“Okay-I am, I’m just saying that-”
“-but really, it’s just as hard for me as it is for you, Baekhyun, and not everything revolves around you and your damn OCD-”
“Chanyeol-”
“-I knew this was a bad idea in the first place, you’re always so insecure about everything-”
“How come you’re never here?” Baekhyun bursts out, forcing the words out through his rapidly closing throat, and honestly doesn’t how what he feels-like crying, obviously, but there’s a part of him so lonely inside that he just wants Chanyeol to sit down on the bed and hold him like nothing had ever happened. “How come I’m always by myself? I didn’t move halfway across the country to live with a ghost who keeps buying bananas even though he never eats them because he’s never home with me. I left everything I’ve ever known for you and you’re never here and I’m just-”
He stops abruptly and tries to breathe sharply through his nose. He covers his face with his hands but he finds that he can’t cry; he’s too hysterical or something, or maybe he’s so sad that he’s beyond tears.
They stay like that for a long time, neither of them daring to move. Baekhyun can hear Chanyeol’s breath slowly even out and he misses the times when he used to fall asleep to Chanyeol’s rhythmic breathing-soft inhales and deep exhales, intertwined and cozy and in love.
He wonders where that warmth has gone. He thinks about carnivals and their stupid dancing and the pictures on Chanyeol’s expensive camera and stars.
It sort of feels like the end of the world.
The bed dips gently when Chanyeol gingerly crawls in. Baekhyun slowly tears his face away from his hands but can’t quite face him yet.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that,” Chanyeol apologizes after a moment, his normally loud voice gentle into the night. Baekhyun hums idly and hesitantly tucks his head into the crook to where Chanyeol’s neck and shoulder met.
“It’s okay.”
He pauses.
“Do you remember,” he begins slowly, still a little unsure of himself, “that night in the park? How you said that we’re all lost and looking for who we really are and what the world holds in store for us? How you said that you didn’t mind if you got lost with me because-well, we fit together well, don’t we? Sometimes I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where the train station is and it would take me ages to figure it out without you. You know that stupid step at the entrance of our complex? I trip over it all the time when you’re not with me.”
“I remember those steps the first time you tripped,” Chanyeol says lightly and Baekhyun laughs a little. “I thought they were a one-time thing. I guess not.”
Baekhyun drops his gaze to his tiny hands, traces the spaces between his fingers on his right hand with his left.
“Be lost with me,” he says finally, like a truce, “because I don’t know who or where I am without you.”
Chanyeol doesn’t speak. He merely slides a hand around Baekhyun’s shoulder and pulls him close. It’s bittersweet, he decides, as he turns off the light and they fall asleep like that, limbs all over the bed and interlaced. He thinks about forever and imagines it to feel a lot like this.
-
Baekhyun’s mother stuffs him with food until he thinks he might cry and keel over and beg for mercy; his father looks like he must be the same, too. She’d ended up making so much food that they had to call the neighbors over, and Baekhyun almost doesn’t recognize Jongin at first.
“You’ve grown so much!” he exclaims, ruffling his hair lightly.
“Oh, geez, hyung,” Jongin huffs, lightly batting his hands away before flashing a small, shy smile, and Baekhyun remembers how Jongin was so fierce when he performed on stage and marvels over the stark difference between Jongin the dancer and Jongin his baby neighbor.
In the end, they’d snuck away when their parents weren’t looking, stomachs aching from being overstretched, both sprawled and basking in the last hours of sunlight on Baekhyun’s front porch. They don’t say much-there was nothing much to say between the both of them in the first place-but it’s a comfortable, relaxed silence that falls with people who’ve known each other for years and years.
“I heard about Chanyeol-hyung,” Jongin says after a while as he picks at the chipping paint, his voice a mix of emotions that Baekhyun can’t quite distinguish. “Your mom told my mom that you guys weren’t seeing each other right now.”
“Mmm, yeah, not right now,” Baekhyun replies, propping his chin up with one hand. “He’s out finding himself or something. I don’t really know. I haven’t called him in ages and he only sends me postcards from the places he’s been. I guess I’m jealous… I don’t really know, exactly.”
“But hyung, you’ll get back together right?” Jongin asks. He stops picking at the wood and looks up at Baekhyun, and Baekhyun lets out a tiny laugh.
“You know, it’s funny-I used to be so mad at Chanyeol. I think I still am, but I’ve been trying to put myself into his shoes for once, and I don’t know if it’s working or not but I think I understand him a little better now. I mean, I still don’t understand why he was so repulsed by the idea of us living together forever and ever that he had to escape to think on another continent, but that’s Chanyeol for you… Chanyeol is so…”
Baekhyun claws at the air to think of the word but he gives up. “Chanyeol is just so Chanyeol, and I know that sounds really stupid and trite but that’s him! That’s really it. That’s all there is to it. The thing is that when Chanyeol thinks about the future, he thinks about everything that could happen. He’s always been more in love with the hypothetical. You know, theories. I think that maybe he’s afraid of being stagnant because the way he sees it, there’s world of possibilities out there, and being in one place for too long just means that he’s missing out. That, maybe, he never pictured a future with someone else before and we’ve been together for so many years he’s bound to get second thoughts. Like, this is just one of his endless quirks, so I probably should have expected it in the first place.”
He pauses for a moment to rearrange his thoughts. “I forgive him-well, for the most part, anyways. I think that both of us have a lot to learn, still, because right now I still like pushing him into incoming traffic. I think-”
Baekhyun cuts himself off and Jongin gives him a confused look.
“What’s wrong, hyung?” he asks, concerned, and pulls himself up so that he isn’t lounging all over the porch.
“Nothing,” he replies, half-heartedly batting a hand in Jongin’s direction. He stands up abruptly and regrets it the moment the blood starts to rush all at once to his head. “I just-I really need to call him. Like-I don’t know-like, if I were in a romcom right now, this is what I would do, I’d call him and I’d-we’d… I mean, I know we’re not in a romcom and my life is nothing remotely like a romcom but I just-”
He stops himself again and smiles gratefully at Jongin.
“I’m a mess right now, sorry, but thanks for listening, even though you’re a baby.” Jongin makes a squawk of indignation. “This was the problem all along, wasn’t it? I’ve been talking to babies for advice the whole time. You’re all really sweet but you’re all absolutely useless.” He shakes his head jokingly. “I should have just called Lu Han-hyung instead.”
“And risk international phone charges?” Jongin teases.
“Well, that’s what KakaoTalk is for, Baby Jongin,” Baekhyun replies just as easily. “Good luck with ballet-not that you’ll need it of course.”
“Good luck with Chanyeol-hyung because you will!” he says and they laugh.
He tiptoes his way up the stairs to avoid his and Jongin’s parents, flanking the walls and is reminded of the ugly floral wallpaper in the loft. When he opens the door to his childhood room, he’s surprised at how small it feels-how small he feels without Chanyeol, like an overgrown baby taking his first steps into the real world: alone.
He had grown up in this room. This was his castle as an over-imaginative five-year-old who watched too many Saturday morning cartoons and where he hid from his older brother as a seven-year-old. He’d opened his mouth and sung for the first time when he was ten and fell in love with the music from his headphones as he got older. He’d called Lu Han at three in the morning when he was seventeen, the blankets covering his head while his feet stuck out over the bed, panicking and wondering what falling in love really meant.
He’d led Chanyeol by the hand in there, shy and stuttering and their first kiss hadn’t felt like fireworks or earthshaking revelations, but it was Chanyeol and it was all that really mattered. It had been the only thing that mattered all along, even before he had learned to tell Chanyeol exactly what he wanted and how he liked it, and their first time was messy and awkward and felt like tumbling down the stairs or getting on the highway without knowing exactly where you were going because you couldn’t bring yourself to open your mouth and just speak.
Baekhyun realizes that maybe the problem was that they had never really known how to talk to each other about themselves. Maybe they had been talking at each other all this time.
When Baekhyun pulls out his phone from his pocket and unlocks it, the screen says Wednesday, 19:48. He taps Contacts, scrolls down to Chanyeol, and touches his number. The phone starts to ring.
The hideous wallpaper. Ring. Chanyeol’s ancient blanket. Ring. Klonker. Ring. Breaking the curfew over and over again. Ring. The stars. The universe. The spaces between their hands. Ring.
Chanyeol’s line clicks and there’s a brief silence.
“Baekhyun?” Chanyeol breathes like he can’t quite believe it and Baekhyun’s breath catches in his throat.
“Hi, Chanyeol,” he says shakily. It feels a little anticlimactic and like starting over, all at once. “Long time no talk, huh?” The laugh he lets out is a little hysterical but after a while, Chanyeol laughs too, his deep voice reverberating even though the phone, and it feels good. It feels right. It feels like all of the planets have been magically aligned, and Baekhyun falls back onto the bed that’s too small for him now. He doesn’t feel whole quite yet but he thinks he could get there.
Forgiveness, he thinks, and starts to speak.
-
They’re kicking idly at the woodchips underneath their feet, firmly planted side-by-side on the swing set after they’ve chased off the small, frightened children who were on it before. It almost feels like old times-or chasing away a flock of pigeons on the streets-only Baekhyun hasn’t seen Chanyeol in weeks.
Chanyeol, the useless lump, doesn’t say much besides “Hey,” “I missed you so much,” and a mumbled “Pleased don’t be too mad at me” before enveloping Baekhyun in a bone-crushing hug and tenderly kissing him on the forehead and plopping down on the swings, even though it had been standard for him to talk Baekhyun’s ear off about uncorrelated subjects, jumping from telescopes to the groceries to association football. Chanyeol had always complained about Baekhyun’s mood swings, but Baekhyun knew better-it was Chanyeol who was randomly touchy about one thing and then wanting to spend ages on it later, only to return to being touchy again and asking him why he wanted to know in the first place.
Typical.
“Typical,” Baekhyun says out loud, a little annoyed, still staring straight in front of him because Chanyeol had been, too. Maybe it was petty of him to think this way but he didn’t want to apologize first.
“Me?”
“Who else would I be talking about? My mom? Those kids? Klonker?”
“Don’t talk about Klonker like that, he has feelings, too,” returns Chanyeol half-heartedly.
“He’s a dumb hunk of porcelain, Chanyeol, he doesn’t even have internal organs.”
“Don’t be like that, Baekhyun,” he replies, a little distant, and they lapse back into their tunnel vision silence again.
-
They’ve moved onto the colorful metal slide now-well, Chanyeol had stood up abruptly, causing the woodchips that had somehow crawled into his lap fall off, which had startled Baekhyun more than he would care to admit, and marched over to the slide with a determination Baekhyun had only seen in action movies or cliché romcoms where the guy has decided that this was the pivotal moment to confess his undying, never-ending love for the girl.
Baekhyun then realizes that he should probably stop comparing his life to romcoms because they only gave him unrealistic expectations.
“I’m sorry,” calls Chanyeol as he climbs the bright green ladder to the top. It’s sort of cute, Baekhyun thinks. He doesn’t say anything but trails after Chanyeol like a lost puppy and stands there waiting for him to talk again.
“I really am,” Chanyeol repeats, but Baekhyun remains standing, silent, arms hanging loosely at his sides with a wistful expression on his face. Chanyeol is sitting right where the slide begins and he knows that he’s too tall for the slide but he lets himself go anyways.
For the briefest of moments, he feels free, like he could go anywhere, but his jacket causes too much friction and he’s too big for a ride for little kids less than half his size, so he stays there, laying down on his back and staring straight up at the night sky. His legs hang off the edge and he kicks the woodchips, trying to aim for Baekhyun but misses by a long shot.
Baekhyun has to bite down on the insides of his cheeks to stop his laughter and wills himself to keep from kicking woodchips back.
“What are you doing, Chanyeol?” he asks, almost amused, and he thinks that they’re getting there but one of them has to give.
“I don’t know,” Chanyeol answers honestly, sounding a little breathless, absentmindedly tracing the constellations with his pointer finger. Baekhyun feels a little sad-nostalgic. Drowning in memories.
Maybe they both have to.
-
“Does this feel a little familiar to you?” asks Chanyeol when they climb on top of the monkey bars. Baekhyun is the tiniest bit afraid of heights but he swallows down his fear and sits on the uncomfortable cold metal bars anyways.
“We said that we loved each other there,” replies Baekhyun, gripping the bars tightly, too scared to gesture at the nearby field. Chanyeol lowers his gaze from the stars to Baekhyun’s whitening knuckles.
“I didn’t say that I loved you,” he corrects, a little pained. He plays with fraying edges of his favorite Christmas sweater, which he wore even though it was the end of August-cold, but still summer. “I don’t think I was brave enough then. We were just kids. I listened to rap songs and bought expensive hats and chased you down the hallways and the teachers always yelled at us for being too loud. What did I know about love?” He stops fidgeting when he hits a snag in his sweater. “I just knew that sometimes it hurt and sometimes you fall out of it.”
Chanyeol lets out a heavy breath and lets his hands fall limply into his lap. “You were the first person to ever tell me that you loved me. I guess was afraid that maybe you were just deluded or crazy or that you would just leave after you got to know me, so I just told you what I knew how to say.”
“And then I got to know you, and it wasn’t so bad, was it?” Baekhyun asks gently.
“Well… I fled the country?”
“I understand. It’s okay, Chanyeol.” He pauses for a moment. “Well, actually, it’s not okay, but I get it. We’re all afraid of something. I’m afraid of getting left behind. I’m bad at reading maps. I don’t know where I’m going half the time without you. You’re afraid of being codependent. You’re afraid of being too attached to someone and they’ll leave you hanging. You like having fun with someone but when that someone’s finished with you, you’re afraid you won’t know how to live without them.”
Baekhyun looks at him for the first time that night.
“Chanyeol… you know I’ll never be that someone, right? That I’ll never leave you, right? I know you think that I’m just saying that right now but it’s true. You can go wherever you’d like. You can find yourself whenever you want. And of course, yeah, I’ll get angry for a really long time, but you know that I want to get to know you, don’t you? That’s why we’re here.”
Chanyeol smiles, and the rational part of Baekhyun knows that it’s the middle of the night but the whole world feels aglow.
-
“I think maybe it’s a good kind of lost, the way that I am with you,” Chanyeol says unexpectedly as they lie on their backs in the slightly damp field, counting the stars. It feels strange without Chanyeol’s blanket but they make do. They’re not quite curled together but there’s not gaping space between them, either, and Baekhyun wonders what this all means.
“I’m a bad kind of lost, the way that I am without you,” Baekhyun jokes weakly.
Chanyeol snorts. “You never know where you park the car!”
“Remember when I was trying to get out of the grocery store but I tried to go the wrong direction and you had to drag me the other way?”
“Remember when I had to grab you by the arm when we were going into the city for the first time and your mom gave me weird looks for like, the whole entire month because she thought we were doing some weird S&M thing?”
Baekhyun laughs and turns to lie on his side, resting his head on his arms. “Yeah, I remember, she kept calling me and asking me if I was okay.”
Chanyeol is silent for a moment, then rolls over to face Baekhyun. They breathe quietly, eyes flickering over each other like this had been the first time they’ve ever seen each other, and it feels-delicate, maybe; Baekhyun doesn’t exactly know how to describe it in words, only the endless flood of memories that rush over him as if the memories alone were convincing him that everything would be okay in the end.
“Do you love me?” Baekhyun asks quietly.
Maybe it’s a stupid question.
“You know I do,” Chanyeol replies, and it sounds so genuine it hurts.
“Then you have to be there for me,” he says and they go quiet again.
Baekhyun thinks about the stars, how they have been a mystery for thousands of years, coveted by millions and millions of people. He thinks about what Chanyeol has told him all those years ago, how there were 400 billion in the Milky Way alone but people could only see 2500 on a good day.
He thinks about the spaces between people, the distance between his and Chanyeol’s houses as they grew up, not really together but not apart, either. He thinks about the emptiness of the loft when it’s just him, and the miles and miles between him and Chanyeol when Chanyeol had been off in the world. He thinks about the gaps between their hands and their bodies and the warmth he had felt when Chanyeol held him close. He thinks about how he was never good at telling people what he wanted.
88 constellations, 400 billion stars, 13.2 billion years old. Two out of seven billion people. Suddenly, the park feels tiny, like nothing of great of importance.
The vastness of the universe was overwhelming to him. Somehow, it felt a lot like love.
Baekhyun reaches out to take Chanyeol’s hand, and Chanyeol’s gaze drops down to their intertwined fingers, a small smile on his lips.
“So, where do we go from here?” he repeats from Chanyeol’s last postcard.
“I don’t know,” he admits, relaxing and squeezing Baekhyun’s hand, “but being lost with you sounds like a good start.”
“Mmm, okay,” Baekhyun hums and beams at him. “That’s easy. Never leave me, then.”
PG-13 · 8408 words · EXO
Baekhyun/Chanyeol
Chanyeol leaves the country to find himself, Baekhyun doesn't know how much he needs Chanyeol until he does, and none of his friends give him good advice. AU, established relationship.
note: Largely inspired by my psychotic text post full of revelations on Tumblr, idek.
I honestly haven't written fic in about four years so lmao we'll see how this goes...
The title is from "Fall" by the lovely Ed Sheeran.
This is for Tori (herocountry) because I automatically blame her for everything! Meimei loves jiejie, OK. ♥
-
They break up on a Thursday.
Technically, it’s not even a real “breakup” breakup-just a “break,” as Chanyeol so helpfully supplies over their standard Thursday evening spaghetti dinner, from their stuck-like-glue, strangely symbiotic relationship that none of their friends have ever understood.
Their conversation goes something a little like this:
“I think that maybe we should take a break,” Chanyeol says around a mouthful of spaghetti.
Baekhyun stops chewing for a moment. He has long given up trying to break Chanyeol from his habit of talking with his mouth full. Then, he plans to formulate several arguments as to why exactly they should not take a break from their relationship. Instead, the only thing that comes out of his mouth is an extremely flat, “What.”
Chanyeol’s gaze shifts from Baekhyun to the horrendous floral wallpaper the previous tenants have applied during their stay in the loft.
“I just thought, you know.” He purses his lips and pushes the half-eaten plate of spaghetti away from him. Baekhyun eyes Chanyeol’s hands warily; he had already broken two out of the set of six, and they had been a housewarming present from Chanyeol’s mother-their first year of university seemed so long ago from now. “We’re always together. Haven’t you noticed? It’s like I’ve forgotten who I am when I’m not with you. Like I can’t be Chanyeol because I’ve been Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol for so long. And…”
He trails off and Baekhyun thinks that it was a good thing the porcelain plates were expensive and matched the wallpaper, or else he’d be hurling it at Chanyeol’s head.
“You don’t know if you’re the one for me,” Chanyeol reasons, “and I don’t know if I’m the one for you. Don’t say so otherwise-how could we know? We’ve never been with anyone else. Just think about it, okay?” His tone has acquired a pleading tone at Baekhyun’s prolonged silence. “It’s just something that I think we need to do. Just a small break from Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol to be-well, Baekhyun and Chanyeol. A teeny, tiny break.”
Baekhyun takes one look at Chanyeol’s bittersweet smile, gingerly sets down his sterling silver fork, and doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the evening.
That was last week.
-
A tiny, vindictive, unpleasant part of Baekhyun hopes Chanyeol gets run down by a renegade car while trying to flag his regular Friday night cab because nothing says “What part of ‘I don’t want to take a stupid break from our relationship’ don’t you understand?” like getting multiple bones crushed in a single instant.
Baekhyun thinks that it’s really too bad that for the most part he still loves Chanyeol because for all his sweetness and good humor, Baekhyun is terrifyingly good at being a jilted lover. Nobody would know he had it in him-not even Baekhyun himself.
“Hyung, I don’t even think you should be angry,” Zitao gently says to him one afternoon over coffee in endearingly stilted Korean.
“I’m not angry, Tao,” replies Baekhyun angrily and robotically stirs two packets of sugar into his cappuccino.
Tao can’t claim to know much about coffee so he refrains from making judgmental comments about his drink. “Well, I think he still loves you,” he declares with a note of finality. “You’re just not seeing each other at the moment. Like a long distance relationship.” Baekhyun scrunches his nose and hides his smile by sipping his cappuccino because he’s supposed to feel vexed and be irritated at everything and everyone, but the truth is that Tao is a cute kid and Baekhyun doesn’t have the heart.
Instead, he manages to channel his hatred of happy, normal couples that don’t take “breaks” out of the blue into a half-hearted scoff.
Tao frowns. “It’s true!” he insists. “After all you’ve been through together, I think it would take a lot more than a spaghetti dinner to break Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol up.”
“I think that was Chanyeol’s point, Tao.” He feels like moping. “We’ve been together since high school. We’re practically inseparable. It’s like… like a parasitic relationship, or like a poisonous friend-you just can’t get rid of them of them, no matter how hard you try.”
Tao looks horrified at the mention of parasites and poison and Baekhyun wishes he could take back those words.
“Forget what I said,” Baekhyun says hastily, waving a hand to show that it wasn’t as big of a deal as Tao thought it was. “What I mean is that maybe-just maybe-Chanyeol’s right. Who am I without Chanyeol? It’s like I don’t know how to function without him. I barely know how to drink this coffee and talk to you at the same time!”
“That’s because you’re drinking it when you haven’t even let it cool down, hyung,” Tao says wryly. “You’re scalding your tongue. Just give him some time. That’s what he asked for, right? That’s all you need.”
Baekhyun goes home that evening to a loft that’s too big and pretends that he doesn’t miss Chanyeol’s stupid laugh and the way that he wrinkles his nose and his bug-eyed stare when he’s concentrating on something that Baekhyun would never even think about if it weren’t for Chanyeol.
It’s stupid, he decides, how Chanyeol had decided to throw a curveball at him on any old ordinary Thursday without prior warning or even the simplest premise. All Baekhyun really needed was an explanation because now, drowning in low self-esteem and feelings of doubt sounded like a good idea.
It’s not a good idea but he does it anyway.
Maybe there’s someone else, offers an ugly voice in Baekhyun’s head as he lies wide awake in an empty, lonely bed. All he’s ever had was you-maybe he wonders what else he can be besides a part of Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol. Maybe you’re suffocating him.
His eyes snap open and suddenly he can’t stand the feeling of being in his own skin. He stumbles out of the bedroom to the handrails above the staircase and peers down into the murkily lit sitting room, picking out the little things that Chanyeol had left behind.
On the untouched sofa was the raggedy old tribal-print blanket that Chanyeol took naps with; his favorite The Hundreds snapback was carefully placed on top the clothes stand; the bananas he insisted on buying last Tuesday were growing brown spots, and Baekhyun was sure there was a special circle in Hell for people who insisted on buying bananas but never intended to eat them because they would want to “take a break” in two days.
Take a break-what a joke. Baekhyun wishes he was brave enough to text Chanyeol with something passive aggressive and pleading all at once because a week has almost gone by and wasn’t a week enough for a standard vacation?
Instead, his phone hangs heavy in his pocket, and suddenly he realizes that the loft isn’t the same, wasn’t meant for just one person-that maybe it isn’t Chanyeol’s presence that Baekhyun misses, but Chanyeol’s absence that he hates. It’s sort of a funny feeling, one that makes his heart twinge just a smidge, and the tips of his fingers unexpectedly ache.
He crawls back into his side of the bed feeling no better than when he left it. Perhaps this was what Chanyeol had meant by a “break”-maybe it was about self-introspection and feeling empty and lonely and weird at three in the morning and figuring how much you can actually miss a person before you pick up the phone and call without still feeling vexed from a Thursday spaghetti dinner (admittedly, a lot).
Baekhyun falls asleep alone. That was Wednesday.
-
Baekhyun loves Kyungsoo, but the thing is that Kyungsoo is a baby and thinks that all real world problems can be solved by food.
Perhaps he isn’t being fair to Kyungsoo, Baekhyun thinks as he halfheartedly listens to Kyungsoo while picking at his ravioli at the unauthentic Italian restaurant they like to frequent on their days off. Kyungsoo had no real life experiences to base his food hypothesis on. Kyungsoo didn’t have boyfriends who were weird and did things as they pleased without warning. But Kyungsoo was painfully earnest and his doe eyes were so genuine that Baekhyun begrudgingly let him speak, even if he knew he was wrong.
And he was wrong.
“… and besides, once I brought cupcakes to the meeting and everyone suddenly started to agree with each other, so maybe you should make cupcakes for Chanyeol. I could help if you want,” Kyungsoo offers. He has all but ignored his faux Mediterranean-style salad for the past ten fifteen minutes, his salad fork untouched-but Baekhyun understands; it really wasn’t that good in the first place.
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, but we broke up over dinner,” Baekhyun reminds Kyungsoo dryly.
“You two didn’t break up,” he protests.
“Same difference!” Baekhyun gives up on his ravioli and leans in and crosses his arms, huffing. “He hasn’t talked to me in days, I haven’t talked to him in days-we’re not calling it a break up, sure, but it feels just the same.”
An uncomfortable silence falls over the two. For a while, both of them return to playing with their food, even though Baekhyun is pretty sure that Kyungsoo’s salad is actually too revolting to finish.
“Hyung, have you ever wondered why Chanyeol-hyung might want to… you know?”
Of course he’s wondered, he wants to say. He wants to tell Kyungsoo that sometimes he feels so lonely and confused that he can’t sleep, that the vacant space in their king-sized bed freaks him out sometimes, that the hoodies Chanyeol left behind make him angry, but Baekhyun doesn’t have answers to his whirlwind of emotions because Chanyeol is gone. But it’s hard to put the thoughts running through his mind at breakneck speed into actual words, so Baekhyun just nods and says weakly, “Yeah.”
“Have you ever wondered that maybe… maybe it might be your fault?” Kyungsoo says this in a tiny, tiny voice, as if saying it louder might offend Baekhyun and make him flip the restaurant’s tables out of rage.
“Yeah,” Baekhyun repeats quietly.
“Oh,” utters Kyungsoo, a little startled, and they leave it at that.
They part ways shortly after, and Baekhyun is by himself in the apartment again. He debates going out with his friends more, then decides otherwise because all their conversations would be exactly like Tao and Kyungsoo’s.
It’s Saturday-nine days after Chanyeol had dropped the bomb, and Baekhyun hates himself for being so overly dramatic and thinking in terms of “Before Chanyeol” and “After Chanyeol.” It’s not healthy, he thinks as he drops like a sack of potatoes on the sofa and kicks Chanyeol’s dumb blanket to the side; it’s almost summertime and getting too hot to sleep with covers. He glares at the clock with its fluorescent blue numbers. 15:32, it cheerily displays. Of course it’s cheerful; it used to be Chanyeol’s.
Baekhyun takes out his phone and thinks that if he were a character in a romantic comedy, this is the turning point of everything that has gone wrong in his life. His thumb hovers over Chanyeol’s number on the touch screen, prays to God that whatever tumbles out of his mouth won’t make him sound like an idiot, and calls.
Chanyeol doesn’t pick up.
“Great,” he deadpans into the emptiness of the loft, his voice bouncing off the walls and echoing.
He remembers a little too late that life isn’t a romantic comedy because if it were, everything would be a lot easier than it actually is and Tao and Kyungsoo would actually give him some real advice, and Baekhyun wouldn’t be here pining over somebody that he already has like some stupid teenage girl who can’t get herself together.
So he does the next best thing instead-which, admittedly, wasn’t too far off from being a teenage girl-and throws his phone across the room. It lands with a dull thump! and, pacified, Baekhyun turns onto his side and falls asleep with Chanyeol’s blanket half draped across his body.
-
A few months ago, when Baekhyun and Chanyeol were still Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol, they had walked hand-in-hand to Joonmyun’s neighbor’s fancy garage sale in a nice part of the city. To Baekhyun’s dismay, Chanyeol had instantly fallen in love.
“Chanyeol,” Baekhyun began with the patience of a parent of hyperactive three-year-old.
“Baekhyun, don’t ruin it,” he immediately interrupted, putting a large hand over Baekhyun’s mouth. He yelped when he felt Baekhyun’s tongue on his palm. “Stop! I already know what you’re going to say, and I don’t want to hear it!”
“Chanyeol,” he tried again, but with the ease of someone far taller than him, Chanyeol had simply spun Baekhyun around using his shoulders as a pivot and looked him straight in the eyes.
“You want what’s best for me, don’t you Baekhyun?”
“You know I do, but the truth is that it’s hideous-”
Chanyeol had the gall to audibly gasp, causing several heads to turn in their direction.
“How could you say that?”
“I’m just telling you the pure unadulterated truth!” he protested.
“It’s perfect!” Chanyeol declared, scrunching his eyebrows together and angrily folded his arms.
“Are you two seriously having a lover’s spat at my neighbor’s garage sale? Over a garden gnome?” Joonmyun interjected wearily. They both ignored him.
“It’s small, fat, ugly, missing an ear, wearing Christmas colors, and I swear to God, Chanyeol, if you buy that garden gnome, I’m going to have nightmares for the rest of my life.” Baekhyun paused his tirade to think. “And then I’m going to banish you to the couch. Forever,” he added as an afterthought and narrowed his eyes.
“It’s one-of-a-kind,” Joonmyun’s neighbor said before things could get any uglier than they already were. “My great-great-great grandfather bought it in the Netherlands. An antique!”
“How much is it?” Chanyeol snapped, irritated, and kept his gaze at Baekhyun. Baekhyun happened to be fine with that and glared right back.
“9900 won,” replied the neighbor hastily.
Chanyeol pressed a 10,000 won bill into the neighbor’s hand and said with a note of triumph, still looking at Baekhyun as if this had been a competition all along, “Keep the change.” He snatched the misshapen garden gnome from the table like he was afraid that Baekhyun might break it before he even had the chance to take it, and that’s how Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol ended up with the world’s ugliest porcelain figurine in the world on their fireplace.
Baekhyun had been happy to forget about the stupid garden gnome but good things don’t last forever; on Tuesday morning, twelve days after Chanyeol decides he wants a break, Baekhyun receives a postcard with a suspiciously familiar garden gnome in front of the Eiffel Tower.
The postmark is from France. It’s signed Park Chanyeol.
Baekhyun swallows down his dread and hesitantly takes a glance at their now vacant fireplace and wonders what he could have possibly said or done to Chanyeol for him to want to flee the country without telling anyone like a fugitive on the run and take the sorry excuse for a gnome with him. He wonders so deeply that he forgets that he was angry with Chanyeol in the first place, flips over the postcard, and squints in an effort to read Chanyeol’s serial killer handwriting.
Dear Baekhyun,
I know you’re mad at me. You’re always mad when I do something I don’t tell you about. Sometimes you get mad at me when I do things you tell me to do. But that’s OK, because I love you despite your freaky moodswings.
I’m in Paris! Did you know Joonmyun’s parents have a flat here? I’ve always wanted to go to France but you knew that already. Sometimes I think that you know everything about me, and then I wonder if I have to start making stuff up to keep our relationship spiced up. That’s something I read in my sister’s magazine BTW. This is something that I have to do.
I love you! And Klonker does too!
- Chanyeol
“Who the hell is Klonker?” Baekhyun says out loud before he remembers the horrendous gnome. Which idiot at the gate let the biohazard through the terminal? He chooses to ignore the fact that he hadn’t noticed Klonker was gone until today. He pretends not to feel disappointed when he realizes that Chanyeol had written “I love you,” but not “I miss you.”
-
Their first date is at the annual carnival in town. It’s somewhat of a disaster: Baekhyun rides the spinning Ferris wheel four times in a row and spends the rest of the day in various states of nausea and Chanyeol forgets to tell Baekhyun that he’s actually grounded for the weekend and gets scolded in front of Baekhyun by his mother.
“I don’t know what a nice boy like you is doing with a troublemaker like Chanyeol,” his mother says, glaring at her son and shaking her head.
“I, ah, don’t worry, Mrs. Park, I’ll keep him in line,” replies Baekhyun, trying his hardest to smother his laughter. Chanyeol, who had looked worried for the entire ride home, spares a glance at him and the corners of his lips quirk up. Baekhyun thinks that Chanyeol’s smile could light up every last corner of the universe and beyond that, too.
Oh, his mind provides. The neural impulses in his brain stutter. It’s at that moment that Baekhyun realizes that he’s in love.
He goes home and loses sleep over this revelation. He’s never been in love before; his only experiences with love had come from unrealistic romance movies and sad love songs, and Baekhyun had lived most of his life never expecting that he would actually fall in love. He thinks about their horrible nauseating first date and comes to the conclusion that if he could see Chanyeol smile just one more time, he’d suffer-grudgingly-through a million horrible nauseating first dates.
Baekhyun calls Lu Han at three in the morning and his part of the conversation was made up of largely I don’t understand’s and What’s and Oh my god’s.
“Couldn’t you have called in the morning?”
“It is the morning! This is important!”
“I meant later in the morning. Like, at an actually reasonable hour of the day. Maybe past dawn. I’m too tired to talk in Korean and I have exams tomorrow-something a baby like you wouldn’t understand.” Lu Han’s voice comes through the phone as crackled, thick with sleep. He tries to stifle a yawn but it slips through the cracks anyways.
“I’m not a baby, I’m in love, Lu Han-hyung,” Baekhyun breathes, sounding a little awed, like he couldn’t believe it himself.
Lu Han smiles in spite of the ungodly hour. “Okay then, Baekhyun. It’s as simple as that.”
-
It happens in the tiny park seven minutes away from Baekhyun’s house. Technically, it’s past their curfew, but they’re milking the last of dregs of summer vacation; Chanyeol has brought his favorite tribal-print woven blanket and they lie tangled up against each other on the quickly cooling grass, silent, counting the stars.
“Sixty-one,” Chanyeol murmurs into Baekhyun’s hair, his fingers tracing nonsensical patterns into his shoulders. “How about you?”
“… Now I’ve lost count. Thanks, you big loser,” Baekhyun protests feebly, gently slapping him on the arm, but Chanyeol only laughs and Baekhyun feels strangely content from the short sound alone. He wonders what he’d do without Chanyeol, and it frightens him for a fleeting moment that it was possible that Baekhyun-and-Chanyeol might not be forever.
So he tilts his head upwards and slides a hand against Chanyeol’s neck to bring him down to press a slow, soft kiss to his lips. It’s quiet and subdued and on this side of sad, and Baekhyun wishes he could kiss the uncertainty away from this moment but that was only wishful thinking.
“What was that for?” Chanyeol asks after they gradually pull away, not even bothering to hide his smile.
“Nothing,” Baekhyun says breezily. “Can’t I kiss you whenever I want to?” He breaks their gaze and starts to pull at the grass instead. “I don’t know, it just felt right. Like, this date is way too romantic for us or something. Maybe I’m going crazy?”
“Well, you’re definitely crazy.”
“You were the crazy one first! You probably infected me with your crazy.”
“Whatever! You just don’t appreciate my genius.” He huffs and sticks his tongue out jokingly.
Baekhyun purses his lips. “But you see what I mean, right? It feels weird when we get all romantic and stargaze-y. I guess maybe I’m just used to our banter.”
Chanyeol nods eagerly. “That’s right, our banter is sexy.”
“Definitely foreplay,” Baekhyun agrees.
“We should get a room or something.”
“I agree, I don’t think public eyes are ready for this.”
“Maybe we should tone down the PDA a little…”
They grin at each other. Baekhyun settles his head against the crook of where Chanyeol’s neck and shoulder meet and they fall into a comfortable, sleepy silence.
And then Baekhyun decides to ruin the rest of his life by blurting out, “I love you.”
Chanyeol doesn’t respond for a very long time and Baekhyun wants to crawl under the blanket and then maybe throw himself off a cliff while he’s at it. For a brief moment he considers apologizing, but what’s there to apologize for? He tries to convince himself that Chanyeol could have just been a momentary blip in his good judgment, that this is just the honeymoon phase, that maybe if they break up sometime soon, Baekhyun would spend the next few years trying to remember the gangly, tall boy with honey-brown hair and the brightest smile he’s ever seen.
“Do you know how many stars in the Milky Way you can see with the naked eye?” Chanyeol finally says. Baekhyun silently shakes his head no, still hiding his face into Chanyeol’s arm. “Well, it depends where you are, but around 2500.”
He pauses for a moment, then hesitantly runs his fingers through Baekhyun’s hair.
“Do you know how many stars are actually in the Milky Way? 400 billion.” He stops again. Then: “I think about these things sometimes, you know? How 2500 out of 400 billion is so insignificant when you think about it-we’re just tiny beings, lost people who don’t know where we’re headed and sometimes it gets overwhelming. Like, what are we doing here in the first place? What’s the point of anything when you know that you’re just a little speck out of trillions and trillions?” Chanyeol laughs. “I don’t know why I’m saying this, I must be freaking you out…”
“A little bit,” he replies slowly, voice muffled by Chanyeol’s sweatshirt.
“I like having fun. I like having fun with you. I think you make the world a better place. Sometimes I still don’t get the point of a lot of things, but I don’t mind being lost with you.” He hums quietly under his breath, a soft mmm, and Baekhyun thinks he sounds a little nervous. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that you make me feel like I can see all 400 billion stars. Not just 2500.”
Baekhyun slowly pulls himself away from Chanyeol’s shoulder. He doesn’t know why he suddenly feels like crying or why it feels like this sweetness is only fleeting.
Instead, he repeats what he’s been telling himself since the beginning. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he tells him earnestly.
Chanyeol only beams and says, “Well, that’s easy. Never leave me, then.”
-
He ignores the postcards from Milan and Vienna and tries not to feel sad and listless and channels all his loneliness into singing, instead. It works, for the most part, until his voices breaks from overexertion. He gives up after that.
The worst part of it all is that Baekhyun knows exactly what Chanyeol is doing because he’s played this game before, too-he’d used to ignore Chanyeol’s texts and silently count down the hours and the days until he showed up at his door with concern written all over his face, saying something stupid like, “Why didn’t you answer me, I thought your dog finally ate you!” And Baekhyun would just kiss Chanyeol’s cheek and make up a short lie about losing his phone in his messy room and they’d laugh about it together. The only thing different now is that Baekhyun isn’t laughing.
On Tuesday, Chanyeol’s postcard from Beijing arrives-delayed, but still in tact. It’s of him and Klonker hiking through the Great Wall of China, and why is Baekhyun not surprised that Chanyeol took that stupid garden gnome all the way up to one of the Seven Wonders of the Medieval World?
Dear Baekhyun,
It’s taken me a long time and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I know, crazy-me, think? But it’s true. Maybe I run away too much. I ran all the way to Europe and back because I guess that’s the only way I know how to deal with things.
I think when you’ve been with someone too long your ideals start to warp a little. Did you know I looked at Klonker this morning and thought, “Hey, maybe his nose is a little lopsided”? I think maybe you start to become like that person, and I love you but sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore. Like, do I actually like warm places or am I just used to you complaining about the cold all the time? Do I actually like bananas or do I just like hearing you complain about the brown spots? Do I just like hearing you complain?
But here’s the thing: it’s taken me weeks but I’ve finally figured it out-I’m lost with you, but I’m lost without you, too. So where do we go from here?
- Chanyeol
The loft is eerily quiet, the only noise from the hum of the refrigerator, as Baekhyun reads it over and over again. He chews on his lip absentmindedly as he tries to figure out what the emotion he’s feeling and decides that it’s probably a mix of irritation and sadness and forgiveness.
Forgiveness.
It’s a weird one. He thinks about it all the way down the stairs of their apartment complex and stumbles over the last step like he always does without Chanyeol’s warning. He thinks so hard that he takes a left at the intersection instead of the right and ends up in front of the overpriced organic farmer’s market instead of where he actually wants to be and has to call poor Sehun for directions.
“Hyung, why is it that you never know where you are in the city?” Sehun grumbles, his voice sounding static through the speaker.
“I just moved here!” Baekhyun exclaims.
“Like three years ago,” he reminds him cheekily. “You and Chanyeol-hyung moved at the exact time and he never asks me for directions,” he adds and Baekhyun rolls his eyes and sticks out his tongue, even though Sehun can’t see him.
“Get lost, Sehun,” he replies easily and hangs up.
Forgiveness, Baekhyun mulls over on the train, looking out the window and feeling more placid than he’d been in weeks. He says it out loud, softly in the empty compartment, fiddling with his smartphone and wishes he was as physically impulsive as Chanyeol. Maybe he was emotionally on par with Chanyeol’s spontaneity-Baekhyun could never keep him in one place, and for the longest time he’d resented the fact that Chanyeol could go as he pleased with no regrets or cares or worries.
He thinks about their first fight as the train passes by endless stretches of farmland. It had been about bananas, only it wasn’t about bananas at all, and Baekhyun decides that the first thing he’d do when he sees Chanyeol again is punch him in the face; the second is admit that he’d never really hated bananas-it was just the principle of it all.
It had been three summers ago, when they’d first moved into the loft together and Chanyeol had been taking extra classes at the university, leaving Baekhyun to putter about in the empty loft littered with their still-unpacked furniture, listless and annoyed.
“Why do you keep buying bananas if you never eat them?” Baekhyun asks one night as he lies on his side and absentmindedly watches Chanyeol change into pajamas.
“Um,” Chanyeol replies, getting stuck trying to pull his thin summer sweater over his head. Baekhyun sighs wearily and, with gentle hands, eases it off of Chanyeol, smoothing his auburn hair as it sticks up from the static. “I don’t know, aren’t bananas good for you?”
“Not when they get spotty because someone’s never home to eat them,” Baekhyun retorts quietly, half under his breath.
He was quiet for a moment, contemplating his words. “Are you mad at me?” he finally replies, incredulous, mouth hanging half-open like it was the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. “You get mad at me for the stupidest things-”
“I’m not mad, I’m just saying that there are overripe bananas in our nice porcelain fruit bowl that your mom gave us.”
“And what’s the real meaning?”
“Of what, Chanyeol?”
Chanyeol purses his lips and gives Baekhyun a pointed look, and Baekhyun wants to curl up and sleep and forget that this conversation ever happened. “Is this about unpacking or something? Because you know I’m busy-”
“Chanyeol-”
“-with my classes, and you know, I really thought you’d be supportive-”
“Okay-I am, I’m just saying that-”
“-but really, it’s just as hard for me as it is for you, Baekhyun, and not everything revolves around you and your damn OCD-”
“Chanyeol-”
“-I knew this was a bad idea in the first place, you’re always so insecure about everything-”
“How come you’re never here?” Baekhyun bursts out, forcing the words out through his rapidly closing throat, and honestly doesn’t how what he feels-like crying, obviously, but there’s a part of him so lonely inside that he just wants Chanyeol to sit down on the bed and hold him like nothing had ever happened. “How come I’m always by myself? I didn’t move halfway across the country to live with a ghost who keeps buying bananas even though he never eats them because he’s never home with me. I left everything I’ve ever known for you and you’re never here and I’m just-”
He stops abruptly and tries to breathe sharply through his nose. He covers his face with his hands but he finds that he can’t cry; he’s too hysterical or something, or maybe he’s so sad that he’s beyond tears.
They stay like that for a long time, neither of them daring to move. Baekhyun can hear Chanyeol’s breath slowly even out and he misses the times when he used to fall asleep to Chanyeol’s rhythmic breathing-soft inhales and deep exhales, intertwined and cozy and in love.
He wonders where that warmth has gone. He thinks about carnivals and their stupid dancing and the pictures on Chanyeol’s expensive camera and stars.
It sort of feels like the end of the world.
The bed dips gently when Chanyeol gingerly crawls in. Baekhyun slowly tears his face away from his hands but can’t quite face him yet.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said all that,” Chanyeol apologizes after a moment, his normally loud voice gentle into the night. Baekhyun hums idly and hesitantly tucks his head into the crook to where Chanyeol’s neck and shoulder met.
“It’s okay.”
He pauses.
“Do you remember,” he begins slowly, still a little unsure of himself, “that night in the park? How you said that we’re all lost and looking for who we really are and what the world holds in store for us? How you said that you didn’t mind if you got lost with me because-well, we fit together well, don’t we? Sometimes I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where the train station is and it would take me ages to figure it out without you. You know that stupid step at the entrance of our complex? I trip over it all the time when you’re not with me.”
“I remember those steps the first time you tripped,” Chanyeol says lightly and Baekhyun laughs a little. “I thought they were a one-time thing. I guess not.”
Baekhyun drops his gaze to his tiny hands, traces the spaces between his fingers on his right hand with his left.
“Be lost with me,” he says finally, like a truce, “because I don’t know who or where I am without you.”
Chanyeol doesn’t speak. He merely slides a hand around Baekhyun’s shoulder and pulls him close. It’s bittersweet, he decides, as he turns off the light and they fall asleep like that, limbs all over the bed and interlaced. He thinks about forever and imagines it to feel a lot like this.
-
Baekhyun’s mother stuffs him with food until he thinks he might cry and keel over and beg for mercy; his father looks like he must be the same, too. She’d ended up making so much food that they had to call the neighbors over, and Baekhyun almost doesn’t recognize Jongin at first.
“You’ve grown so much!” he exclaims, ruffling his hair lightly.
“Oh, geez, hyung,” Jongin huffs, lightly batting his hands away before flashing a small, shy smile, and Baekhyun remembers how Jongin was so fierce when he performed on stage and marvels over the stark difference between Jongin the dancer and Jongin his baby neighbor.
In the end, they’d snuck away when their parents weren’t looking, stomachs aching from being overstretched, both sprawled and basking in the last hours of sunlight on Baekhyun’s front porch. They don’t say much-there was nothing much to say between the both of them in the first place-but it’s a comfortable, relaxed silence that falls with people who’ve known each other for years and years.
“I heard about Chanyeol-hyung,” Jongin says after a while as he picks at the chipping paint, his voice a mix of emotions that Baekhyun can’t quite distinguish. “Your mom told my mom that you guys weren’t seeing each other right now.”
“Mmm, yeah, not right now,” Baekhyun replies, propping his chin up with one hand. “He’s out finding himself or something. I don’t really know. I haven’t called him in ages and he only sends me postcards from the places he’s been. I guess I’m jealous… I don’t really know, exactly.”
“But hyung, you’ll get back together right?” Jongin asks. He stops picking at the wood and looks up at Baekhyun, and Baekhyun lets out a tiny laugh.
“You know, it’s funny-I used to be so mad at Chanyeol. I think I still am, but I’ve been trying to put myself into his shoes for once, and I don’t know if it’s working or not but I think I understand him a little better now. I mean, I still don’t understand why he was so repulsed by the idea of us living together forever and ever that he had to escape to think on another continent, but that’s Chanyeol for you… Chanyeol is so…”
Baekhyun claws at the air to think of the word but he gives up. “Chanyeol is just so Chanyeol, and I know that sounds really stupid and trite but that’s him! That’s really it. That’s all there is to it. The thing is that when Chanyeol thinks about the future, he thinks about everything that could happen. He’s always been more in love with the hypothetical. You know, theories. I think that maybe he’s afraid of being stagnant because the way he sees it, there’s world of possibilities out there, and being in one place for too long just means that he’s missing out. That, maybe, he never pictured a future with someone else before and we’ve been together for so many years he’s bound to get second thoughts. Like, this is just one of his endless quirks, so I probably should have expected it in the first place.”
He pauses for a moment to rearrange his thoughts. “I forgive him-well, for the most part, anyways. I think that both of us have a lot to learn, still, because right now I still like pushing him into incoming traffic. I think-”
Baekhyun cuts himself off and Jongin gives him a confused look.
“What’s wrong, hyung?” he asks, concerned, and pulls himself up so that he isn’t lounging all over the porch.
“Nothing,” he replies, half-heartedly batting a hand in Jongin’s direction. He stands up abruptly and regrets it the moment the blood starts to rush all at once to his head. “I just-I really need to call him. Like-I don’t know-like, if I were in a romcom right now, this is what I would do, I’d call him and I’d-we’d… I mean, I know we’re not in a romcom and my life is nothing remotely like a romcom but I just-”
He stops himself again and smiles gratefully at Jongin.
“I’m a mess right now, sorry, but thanks for listening, even though you’re a baby.” Jongin makes a squawk of indignation. “This was the problem all along, wasn’t it? I’ve been talking to babies for advice the whole time. You’re all really sweet but you’re all absolutely useless.” He shakes his head jokingly. “I should have just called Lu Han-hyung instead.”
“And risk international phone charges?” Jongin teases.
“Well, that’s what KakaoTalk is for, Baby Jongin,” Baekhyun replies just as easily. “Good luck with ballet-not that you’ll need it of course.”
“Good luck with Chanyeol-hyung because you will!” he says and they laugh.
He tiptoes his way up the stairs to avoid his and Jongin’s parents, flanking the walls and is reminded of the ugly floral wallpaper in the loft. When he opens the door to his childhood room, he’s surprised at how small it feels-how small he feels without Chanyeol, like an overgrown baby taking his first steps into the real world: alone.
He had grown up in this room. This was his castle as an over-imaginative five-year-old who watched too many Saturday morning cartoons and where he hid from his older brother as a seven-year-old. He’d opened his mouth and sung for the first time when he was ten and fell in love with the music from his headphones as he got older. He’d called Lu Han at three in the morning when he was seventeen, the blankets covering his head while his feet stuck out over the bed, panicking and wondering what falling in love really meant.
He’d led Chanyeol by the hand in there, shy and stuttering and their first kiss hadn’t felt like fireworks or earthshaking revelations, but it was Chanyeol and it was all that really mattered. It had been the only thing that mattered all along, even before he had learned to tell Chanyeol exactly what he wanted and how he liked it, and their first time was messy and awkward and felt like tumbling down the stairs or getting on the highway without knowing exactly where you were going because you couldn’t bring yourself to open your mouth and just speak.
Baekhyun realizes that maybe the problem was that they had never really known how to talk to each other about themselves. Maybe they had been talking at each other all this time.
When Baekhyun pulls out his phone from his pocket and unlocks it, the screen says Wednesday, 19:48. He taps Contacts, scrolls down to Chanyeol, and touches his number. The phone starts to ring.
The hideous wallpaper. Ring. Chanyeol’s ancient blanket. Ring. Klonker. Ring. Breaking the curfew over and over again. Ring. The stars. The universe. The spaces between their hands. Ring.
Chanyeol’s line clicks and there’s a brief silence.
“Baekhyun?” Chanyeol breathes like he can’t quite believe it and Baekhyun’s breath catches in his throat.
“Hi, Chanyeol,” he says shakily. It feels a little anticlimactic and like starting over, all at once. “Long time no talk, huh?” The laugh he lets out is a little hysterical but after a while, Chanyeol laughs too, his deep voice reverberating even though the phone, and it feels good. It feels right. It feels like all of the planets have been magically aligned, and Baekhyun falls back onto the bed that’s too small for him now. He doesn’t feel whole quite yet but he thinks he could get there.
Forgiveness, he thinks, and starts to speak.
-
They’re kicking idly at the woodchips underneath their feet, firmly planted side-by-side on the swing set after they’ve chased off the small, frightened children who were on it before. It almost feels like old times-or chasing away a flock of pigeons on the streets-only Baekhyun hasn’t seen Chanyeol in weeks.
Chanyeol, the useless lump, doesn’t say much besides “Hey,” “I missed you so much,” and a mumbled “Pleased don’t be too mad at me” before enveloping Baekhyun in a bone-crushing hug and tenderly kissing him on the forehead and plopping down on the swings, even though it had been standard for him to talk Baekhyun’s ear off about uncorrelated subjects, jumping from telescopes to the groceries to association football. Chanyeol had always complained about Baekhyun’s mood swings, but Baekhyun knew better-it was Chanyeol who was randomly touchy about one thing and then wanting to spend ages on it later, only to return to being touchy again and asking him why he wanted to know in the first place.
Typical.
“Typical,” Baekhyun says out loud, a little annoyed, still staring straight in front of him because Chanyeol had been, too. Maybe it was petty of him to think this way but he didn’t want to apologize first.
“Me?”
“Who else would I be talking about? My mom? Those kids? Klonker?”
“Don’t talk about Klonker like that, he has feelings, too,” returns Chanyeol half-heartedly.
“He’s a dumb hunk of porcelain, Chanyeol, he doesn’t even have internal organs.”
“Don’t be like that, Baekhyun,” he replies, a little distant, and they lapse back into their tunnel vision silence again.
-
They’ve moved onto the colorful metal slide now-well, Chanyeol had stood up abruptly, causing the woodchips that had somehow crawled into his lap fall off, which had startled Baekhyun more than he would care to admit, and marched over to the slide with a determination Baekhyun had only seen in action movies or cliché romcoms where the guy has decided that this was the pivotal moment to confess his undying, never-ending love for the girl.
Baekhyun then realizes that he should probably stop comparing his life to romcoms because they only gave him unrealistic expectations.
“I’m sorry,” calls Chanyeol as he climbs the bright green ladder to the top. It’s sort of cute, Baekhyun thinks. He doesn’t say anything but trails after Chanyeol like a lost puppy and stands there waiting for him to talk again.
“I really am,” Chanyeol repeats, but Baekhyun remains standing, silent, arms hanging loosely at his sides with a wistful expression on his face. Chanyeol is sitting right where the slide begins and he knows that he’s too tall for the slide but he lets himself go anyways.
For the briefest of moments, he feels free, like he could go anywhere, but his jacket causes too much friction and he’s too big for a ride for little kids less than half his size, so he stays there, laying down on his back and staring straight up at the night sky. His legs hang off the edge and he kicks the woodchips, trying to aim for Baekhyun but misses by a long shot.
Baekhyun has to bite down on the insides of his cheeks to stop his laughter and wills himself to keep from kicking woodchips back.
“What are you doing, Chanyeol?” he asks, almost amused, and he thinks that they’re getting there but one of them has to give.
“I don’t know,” Chanyeol answers honestly, sounding a little breathless, absentmindedly tracing the constellations with his pointer finger. Baekhyun feels a little sad-nostalgic. Drowning in memories.
Maybe they both have to.
-
“Does this feel a little familiar to you?” asks Chanyeol when they climb on top of the monkey bars. Baekhyun is the tiniest bit afraid of heights but he swallows down his fear and sits on the uncomfortable cold metal bars anyways.
“We said that we loved each other there,” replies Baekhyun, gripping the bars tightly, too scared to gesture at the nearby field. Chanyeol lowers his gaze from the stars to Baekhyun’s whitening knuckles.
“I didn’t say that I loved you,” he corrects, a little pained. He plays with fraying edges of his favorite Christmas sweater, which he wore even though it was the end of August-cold, but still summer. “I don’t think I was brave enough then. We were just kids. I listened to rap songs and bought expensive hats and chased you down the hallways and the teachers always yelled at us for being too loud. What did I know about love?” He stops fidgeting when he hits a snag in his sweater. “I just knew that sometimes it hurt and sometimes you fall out of it.”
Chanyeol lets out a heavy breath and lets his hands fall limply into his lap. “You were the first person to ever tell me that you loved me. I guess was afraid that maybe you were just deluded or crazy or that you would just leave after you got to know me, so I just told you what I knew how to say.”
“And then I got to know you, and it wasn’t so bad, was it?” Baekhyun asks gently.
“Well… I fled the country?”
“I understand. It’s okay, Chanyeol.” He pauses for a moment. “Well, actually, it’s not okay, but I get it. We’re all afraid of something. I’m afraid of getting left behind. I’m bad at reading maps. I don’t know where I’m going half the time without you. You’re afraid of being codependent. You’re afraid of being too attached to someone and they’ll leave you hanging. You like having fun with someone but when that someone’s finished with you, you’re afraid you won’t know how to live without them.”
Baekhyun looks at him for the first time that night.
“Chanyeol… you know I’ll never be that someone, right? That I’ll never leave you, right? I know you think that I’m just saying that right now but it’s true. You can go wherever you’d like. You can find yourself whenever you want. And of course, yeah, I’ll get angry for a really long time, but you know that I want to get to know you, don’t you? That’s why we’re here.”
Chanyeol smiles, and the rational part of Baekhyun knows that it’s the middle of the night but the whole world feels aglow.
-
“I think maybe it’s a good kind of lost, the way that I am with you,” Chanyeol says unexpectedly as they lie on their backs in the slightly damp field, counting the stars. It feels strange without Chanyeol’s blanket but they make do. They’re not quite curled together but there’s not gaping space between them, either, and Baekhyun wonders what this all means.
“I’m a bad kind of lost, the way that I am without you,” Baekhyun jokes weakly.
Chanyeol snorts. “You never know where you park the car!”
“Remember when I was trying to get out of the grocery store but I tried to go the wrong direction and you had to drag me the other way?”
“Remember when I had to grab you by the arm when we were going into the city for the first time and your mom gave me weird looks for like, the whole entire month because she thought we were doing some weird S&M thing?”
Baekhyun laughs and turns to lie on his side, resting his head on his arms. “Yeah, I remember, she kept calling me and asking me if I was okay.”
Chanyeol is silent for a moment, then rolls over to face Baekhyun. They breathe quietly, eyes flickering over each other like this had been the first time they’ve ever seen each other, and it feels-delicate, maybe; Baekhyun doesn’t exactly know how to describe it in words, only the endless flood of memories that rush over him as if the memories alone were convincing him that everything would be okay in the end.
“Do you love me?” Baekhyun asks quietly.
Maybe it’s a stupid question.
“You know I do,” Chanyeol replies, and it sounds so genuine it hurts.
“Then you have to be there for me,” he says and they go quiet again.
Baekhyun thinks about the stars, how they have been a mystery for thousands of years, coveted by millions and millions of people. He thinks about what Chanyeol has told him all those years ago, how there were 400 billion in the Milky Way alone but people could only see 2500 on a good day.
He thinks about the spaces between people, the distance between his and Chanyeol’s houses as they grew up, not really together but not apart, either. He thinks about the emptiness of the loft when it’s just him, and the miles and miles between him and Chanyeol when Chanyeol had been off in the world. He thinks about the gaps between their hands and their bodies and the warmth he had felt when Chanyeol held him close. He thinks about how he was never good at telling people what he wanted.
88 constellations, 400 billion stars, 13.2 billion years old. Two out of seven billion people. Suddenly, the park feels tiny, like nothing of great of importance.
The vastness of the universe was overwhelming to him. Somehow, it felt a lot like love.
Baekhyun reaches out to take Chanyeol’s hand, and Chanyeol’s gaze drops down to their intertwined fingers, a small smile on his lips.
“So, where do we go from here?” he repeats from Chanyeol’s last postcard.
“I don’t know,” he admits, relaxing and squeezing Baekhyun’s hand, “but being lost with you sounds like a good start.”
“Mmm, okay,” Baekhyun hums and beams at him. “That’s easy. Never leave me, then.”