76 » [fanfic] EXO: Opus 37
Title: Opus 37
Pairing: Chanyeol/Baekhyun
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,426
Warnings: angst, mentions of violence, abuse, un-beta'd??
Summary: There’s another soft knock on the door that shakes Baekhyun from his thoughts, and Baekhyun thinks, suddenly horrified at himself, that this thing he has with Chanyeol most certainly is not Love.
A/N: I made Chanyeol somewhat terrible, and for that I do apologize. This is also my first time sharing and EXO related work, so please be kind.
The title comes from an instrumental song that's similarly named.
Opus 37
Baekhyun sits on the corner of his bed nursing a black eye and a purple arm in the darkness of his bedroom.
There’s a tapping on the door, and a small voice whispering apologies. The taps had started out loud and angry, but have since grown quiet and apologetic. The voice is quiet, but it’s deep so it carries, penetrating through more than just Baekhyun’s closed door.
His head pounds painfully around repeated apologies, and what Baekhyun thinks sounds like small sobs. Something tightens in his chest with each sniff and every pathetically tiny tap on his door.
“Baekhyun,” the voice has occasion to say. This time it comes out as a whimper, and Baekhyun’s arm throbs as he digs trembling fingers into it’s bruised flesh, trying to strengthen a crumbling resolve, but before he realizes it he’s standing next to his bed. His vision goes white momentarily from standing too suddenly. His body feels too light to hold the weight of his throbbing head.
“Baekhyun,” it whimpers again, and in the blink of an eye he is standing next to the door, hand gripping tight to the small white door handle. His fingers are so cold, the handle feels warm, and he wills himself not to turn it; tries to override the dark ache in his chest urging him to open it.
He thinks all he has to do is open the door and this heartbreak will be gone--replaced with a different kind of pain, he’s knows all too well. His chest tightens, and his head pounds against his temples.
Self preservation hanging by a thread, he pries his fingers from the knob, forcing himself to take a small step back.
“I’m sorry, Baekhyun,” the voice says, and Baekhyun’s knees jerk him forward, towards the door, towards his salvation and his sin, but his head defies, and he ends up in a heap of limbs on the floor instead, hands covering his mouth, meant to muffle quiet sobs. A few escape him, anyways, making their way through his too-thin fingers.
He breaks down, and the commotion on the other side of the door grows, “Baekhyun? Baekhyun, are you alright? Listen Baekhyun, I’m sorry. I--I wasn’t me! The person that hit you it wasn’t me Baekhyun, please. Please just open the door,” the man pleads.
Baekhyun wants nothing more than to believe in the words. To open up, and see the man he loves waiting for him with an expression filled to the brim with love and adoration and the happiness he remembers from before things got so complicated. He remembers those times well (probably a little bit too well, he thinks, spending most days trying to relive them).
Sleepless nights spent talking about anything and everything. About the future (about how things were supposed to be, but can’t and won’t be anymore). Deliberating on about pointless things like what they’d eaten for dinner, or sharing some stupid joke someone had told them earlier that day.
He remembers the way they’d laugh together alone in their room in the middle of the night huddled together on one bed leaving the other unused a majority of the time, unafraid of anyone or anything that might have been of any consequence. They were loud and brash, and head-over-heels-out-of-their minds in everything they did together, and it translated breathtakingly well into a kind of love that blossomed and flowered into something so beautiful it was almost blinding for a time.
But all flowers die, and no action goes without consequence. They wilt and wither, taking their beauty with their life.
And just like a flower, Baekhyun and Chanyeol’s love, too, had wilted and withered with the passage of time.
It was a gradual decline, one that transitioned so smoothly Baekhyun hadn’t even realized anything was different until the first time he found himself locked in his bathroom with a black eye and a twist in his gut so tight it had him retching horribly into the cold porcelain toilet, emptying the contents of his already-empty stomach into it.
Before that, Baekhyun thought maybe they had just been spending too much time together; that what Chanyeol needed a break. But after it, Baekhyun had begun to see that Chanyeol had become… distant. No longer clinging to Baekhyun’s affections the way he had.
After it had happened a second time, Baekhyun could have sworn that in the bright, revealing sunlight of day he’d seen guilt working its way into Chanyeol’s eyes the very few times he had glanced Baekhyun's way.
So stress is what he had chalked it up to then; the pressures of idol life finally catching up to them-- well, to Chanyeol.
For a few months after that it hadn't happened again, and Baekhyun was allowed to believe in his little lie. His fib that underneath the surface there weren't fissures forming into something bigger between the two of them, waiting to crack, waiting to make a hole much larger and far more irreparable than before. So Chanyeol took to distancing himself, and while he was suddenly, heart-breakingly alone, Baekhyun thought it best to give the other man space. This one burden he could bare on his own.
But one day, as if on the turn of a dime, Chanyeol was back in Baekhyun’s space, and it was like he’d never left: all big eyes and big teeth and big everything, and Baekhyun was too blinded by it and by his own greedy happiness to care that something was very off about the boy. He let himself indulge in the encouraging screams of the fans and ignored the skeptical looks given to the pair from their band mates when Chanyeol suddenly could not stop touching him again.
He indulged, and he ignored. Ignored, ignored, ignored until suddenly instead of soft lips against his own there was a fist on his jaw and a foot in his stomach, and the return of the familiar twist in his stomach telling him this was not how things were supposed to be.
Even so, he found avoidance his best option.
Pretending not to see the worried looks given to him by Junmyeon or Kris or Kyungsoo (and probably the other members, too but Baekhyun had stopped looking, unable to bear the weight of their pitiful stares).
Pretending that wearing the least revealing clothing smack in the middle of a record-hot summer in Seoul was a normal thing to do. It’s fashion he’d insisted to Kyungsoo rather shortly one day when the boy had asked him about it. He had backed down immediately, and Baekhyun felt relieved, but horribly guilty at the same time.
Pretending that Chanyeol wasn’t one person during the day, and a completely different person during the night.
Their love had warped, turning from a beautiful flower into a weed that grew out of control, consuming and destroying until one day there wasn’t anything left for it to reach. Not until Baekhyun, so consumed in his own desire to live in the past, accepted his new reality with nothing but the promise of a new mark each night.
And now, as Baekhyun lies on the floor hiding from reality in the twisted space of his own mind, he thinks maybe his bruise is something to be cherished. Thinks of this mark, and every mark Chanyeol left on him as a signifier that he was (no--is) Chanyeol’s. He thinks of it as something that tethers them together; like a hickey, or a bracelet.
Then he thinks of all the times that Chanyeol held him close. Held him like he was something precious, something to be loved and cherished. He remembers all the quiet kisses that were only quiet because neither of them needed any words--they just knew. And he thinks of how Chanyeol doesn’t do any of that anymore. It’s maybe a fuck, and it’s definitely not a kiss, and they’re loud at all the wrong times, and Chanyeol is far too detached.
There’s another soft knock on the door that shakes Baekhyun from his thoughts, and he thinks suddenly, horrified at himself, that this thing he has with Chanyeol most certainly is not Love. Perhaps it was--once, but Chanyeol had destroyed that the moment he'd laid a hand on Baekhyun that first night.
It’s with that in mind that Baekhyun drags himself back to the door. Crawls there, more like, because he’s too fucking exhausted to get up. Not scared. He was at first, and maybe that was why he’d bottled everything up and pushed away help and let Chanyeol do this to the both of them. But he wasn’t now. Not scared, just tired.
He hears the click of the door as it unlocks and he sits on his knees, moving out of the way of the door a bit as he pulls it open.
Chanyeol had been leaning against the door, and so he is startled as it pulls away from him. He adjusts quickly so he is looking at Baekhyun. Baekhyun watches Chanyeol watch him, and he finds that the ache he thought would go away at the sight of Chanyeol only increases as he watches the other boy’s face contort into an unbefitting mix of sadness and self-loathing. He watches as he takes in the redish-purple bruise Baekhyun knows decorates his right eye, and very noticeably cringes.
The doorway separates the two of them, and they sit in silence, just staring at each other for a very long time, neither one willing to make the first move; Baekhyun too tired and sore, and Chanyeol too afraid, he thinks rather ironically.
Baekhyun watches various emotions flicker across Chanyeol’s face. A sad countenance is constant, but it’s mixed with other things like exhaustion and helplessness.Then misery, when he notices Baekhyun’s shoulder, which is fully exposed underneath an old tank that doesn’t do much in the way of leaving things to the imagination.
He also watches as Chanyeol’s expression begins to shift completely. His eyebrows knit together, and a too-familiar anger seeps in around the edges, and it has Baekhyun scrambling onto his feet in a heartbeat, an attempt to get the upper hand.
Relief fills him as he sees what little anger there was dissipate, but the ache in his own chest grows a little more when it’s replaced by a heartbreak that Baekhyun thinks he is probably mirroring.
“Chanyeol, I--” he begins, only to find himself choking on words he doesn't know how to say. Chanyeol remains on the floor, watching him, looking like he’s waiting for the worst blow of all.
Baekhyun beings to tremble again, and his heart threatens to beat right out of his chest, and his throat burns with the sobs he wont let out.
“Chanyeol,” he says, voice cracking terribly, and his vision begins to blur, Chanyeol becoming a dark blob at his feet. “Chanyeol, I never--I never stopped loving you, and I don’t think I ever will, despite all the crap you put me through.” He wipes furiously at eyes that are too moist, “But I can’t do this anymore. You aren’t the Chanyeol I fell in love with 3 years ago anymore,” and then the blob is moving, and there are hands gripping a little too tightly to his arms, and Baekhyun braces himself for a blow.
What he gets instead is the sound of Chanyeol’s quiet sobs. There isn’t any anger, or denial, or any empty promises that he’ll change; just quiet sobs.
“Chanyeol, I think--I think maybe we both need to let go,” he says and he attempts a smile, but thinks he’s missed the mark by about a miles, because it doesn’t feel like a smile at all.
“Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says, sounding more broken than Baekhyun thinks he’s ever heard him, “Baekhyun, I’m sorry. I never deserved you. I'm so, so sorry.”
“That’s not true at all,” Baekhyun chides solemnly, gently detaching Chanyeol from himself. He uses one of his hands to brush a few stray hairs away from Chanyeol’s face. His eyes are red and swollen and he looks so small, even though he towers over Baekhyun. He looks like a child, and it reminds Baekhyun of the old Chanyeol. The one he fell in love with. The one he hadn’t seen for a very long time; not even a trace of the new, angry Chanyeol left in his wake. But there’s no way to be sure he won’t ever come back, and Baekhyun knows he doesn’t want to be there if he does.
“Chanyeol,” he pauses. “This is goodbye, I think. To us,” for now, he wants to say, but doesn’t, because he doesn’t want Chanyeol to hope for nothing.
He kisses Chanyeol then, while he’s still his Chanyeol. Their mouths stay closed, but they still fit together so wonderfully that it doesn’t do much in the way of providing the sort of comfort Baekhyun thinks it was supposed to: it doesn’t make leaving Chanyeol now any easier, nor does it give him the kind of closure he thought it would.
He starts to pull away, but a hand on the back his neck pulls him back in, and Chanyeol’s mouth is on his, open this time, tongue begging for entrance. He senses no anger in the way Chanyeol is holding or kissing or pressing him, it’s all rather gentle, so Baekhyun let’s it happen, parting his own lips for the other, letting himself have this one last indulgence.
Chanyeol tastes the same way he had before things changed, and Baekhyun finds himself not wanting to let go, because he’s suddenly drowning in Chanyeol, and his own emotions, and he can feel the tears that are running down his face being smudged into his cheeks by Chanyeol’s hand on his face.
He decides quickly then, that the shorter the kiss the better, and uses very little force to push at Chanyeol’s chest before the other man obliges, removing his mouth from Baekhyun’s. They're both sniffling pathetically.
“I’ll miss you,” Chanyeol says, pressing his forehead to Baekhyun’s, and Baekhyun chokes on all the words he wants to say, but can’t. Shouldn’t.
So instead of saying anything he closes his eyes, quietly removes Chanyeol’s hand from the back of his neck, and brings it to his mouth. He brushes his lips across the back of the hand once before dropping it, where it falls limply back to Chanyeol’s side, and stepping around the other boy. He steps past him, away from his room and away from Chanyeol, and when he opens his eyes he isn’t in front of the younger anymore. All he sees is the empty hallway. He leaves without another word, and Chanyeol doesn’t stop him.
A/N: I don't really know how this happened all I know is that I'm just really, really sorry, and even I kind of hate myself.