“Beneath this mask is more than flesh. Beneath this mask is an idea.”

“You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.”

“Do you tell me lies because they sound better?”

기억 (gi-eok) – noun – a memory.

상기하다 (sang-gi-ha-da) – verb – to remember.

잊다 (it-da) – verb – to forget.

루한 (lu-han) – noun – a rainbow of scarlet and vermillion, wood and chocolate,

goldenrod and peach, and the color of the sky; laughter that sounds like a chorus of harpies; a childhood love.

(phrase) to try to get or achieve something that is difficult or impossible.

기억 – I

상기하다 2014-2-19

“I don’t want to remember.

But I think I have to.”

Sehun remembers a time when he wasn’t alone. It’s been a while – a long, long while – but he still recalls once being able to reach out in any direction at any time and touch another pair of waiting hands. It wasn’t a family in the strictest sense, but it was damned near close to it, caught in the confines of his childhood neighborhood. Whenever he thinks of that place, a fixture still permanent and fresh in his memory, faces flicker at the back of his subconscious, and he can’t discern if he feels less lonesome or more. He remembers Jongin, his next door neighbor, who used to catch frogs with him in the man-made pond behind Sehun’s house. Tao, who lived across the street, who used to carry a purse full of pebbles he found in his gravel driveway and hit people with it when he was frustrated. Jongdae, who sometimes pretended to be a

Chasin

g R

ainbows

dinosaur and chased them around the cul-de-sac as an allosaurus (“Not a T-Rex, they’re so overpowered!”), roaring and stomping and occasionally charging more like a bull than anything.

Most of all, though, Sehun remembers Luhan. Sehun remembers him seeming so old, in middle school while Sehun was trudging behind in primary. He’d always wished he was as smart and sophisticated as Luhan was, even if he’d never dare to say it. Sehun remembers him being so soft-spoken and shy the first time he met him, even though Sehun was practically still a baby. He also remembers the way he warmed up to him, teasing him and ruffling his hair and calling him yeodongsaeng, little sister, even though Sehun would always protest that he was just as much a boy as Luhan was. Luhan had always been one to look at the world through rose-colored glass, and he never forgot to remind everyone that he loved them. Jongin and Jongdae would say they loved him back, but Tao would roll his eyes, and Sehun would usually just laugh in his face. Luhan called him off-color, but Sehun didn’t know what that meant. When he asked, Luhan didn’t know, either. “My mom says it.” Sehun thought Luhan’s mom said a lot of fancy things, and even though he knows what they mean now, he still thinks she sounds too European.

He remembers how Luhan would always take his side when Tao kicked his shins for tackling him too hard, or when Jongin said that he’d caught the frog with the pretty red spots and he should keep it, or when Sehun said Jongdae looked more like a camel than a dinosaur anyways and Jongdae gave him a bloody lip for it. Luhan always played with Sehun’s hair and scavenged his house for superhero band-aids when Sehun got scrapes and bruises, and even though he said it was childish, he helped Sehun fill Disney coloring books with the hues of his Crayola box, although he always colored Ariel’s hair purple and Eric’s skin the lightest shade of blue. Sehun told him those colors were unrealistic, and Luhan told him they were more realistic than the real world was. Sehun never knew what that meant, really, but he thinks about it from time to time whenever he remembers.

He’s spent far too much time remembering since then, in any case.

Sehun remembers the other parts of his life vaguely. He had kept himself consumed with his friends, because even though Tao bullied him about picking his nose, and Jongin reminded him twenty times a day that he was three months older than him and was therefore in charge, and Jongdae used the “you’re rubber and I’m glue” comeback more times than should be legal, they were all better company than the inhabitants of his house. He doesn’t know much about what went on there because he would run away the second anything started to stir – when he heard his mom raise her voice at one of the men she’d brought back from the streets, or when the crashing happened, the sounds of struggle and of harsh words at top volume. He’d tried to help

before, when he was younger and more naïve. The only things it ever earned him were bruises, black as night, and his mom’s blank gaze. She was never appreciative, or unappreciative, really; she was just utterly barren. Unconcerned. After having one of the men lift him off of the ground by his shirt collar and shake him out like a wet towel once, Sehun decided that her having no reaction at all was probably worse.

He was never there when his dad came to visit; he made sure of that. He’d conditioned himself to recognize the loud stutter of his truck’s engine, puffing exhaust like a pack-a-day addict, and he was out the window in an instant if he ever heard its familiar roar. It always ended badly when his dad came. He was worse than all of the strangers that frequented his house combined.

So he’d sneak out. He’d sit in Jongin’s front yard because Jongin’s parents were always nice to him, or he’d climb Jongdae’s fence so he could play with their dog in the backyard. Sometimes he even took refuge in Tao’s garage, digging through the giant bins of dolls that Tao didn’t want in his room but wouldn’t let his parents get rid of, either. Nobody ever protested or told him to leave. None of the adults really talked to him much at all, only gave him these sad, sympathetic looks that he wasn’t entirely sure he understood and let their kids come outside to keep him company.

His favorite thing to do in these times was to climb the tree next to Luhan’s window. He’d tap the glass four times because two wasn’t enough but Luhan didn’t like the number three, and no matter what he was doing, Luhan would always open the window and clamber out onto the limb to sit next to him, chattering far into the night. Sehun, to be such a hyperactive kid, was surprisingly calm when he talked to Luhan, knees curled into Luhan’s sides and eyes attentive to every movement of Luhan’s mouth. Luhan used to tell Sehun to go home when it got so dark and cold that he’d start to shiver, but when he realized it made Sehun’s eyes widen and face fall, he started just slinging his arm around his shaking body instead. There was once that Luhan invited him inside to stay the night, but when Luhan’s mom found them huddled together on Luhan’s bed in the morning, she instructed Luhan to never let him in without Sehun’s mother’s knowledge. When Sehun tried to explain that his mom wouldn’t mind, that he’d stayed the night with Jongin for a straight week one time without telling her and she hadn’t gotten mad, Luhan’s mom only bit her lip the same way Luhan did when he got uneasy and asked them to go outside and play a while. Sehun saw her talking seriously with Luhan’s dad as Luhan dragged him out by the wrist, catching the words “nobody should treat their kid that way” before he felt the sun on his back and heard Luhan scream something like “Catch me!” before darting off into the bushes.

Then, he forgot about it. Sehun’s always been bad about forgetting.

A week later, Sehun’s dad came, just like he did about once a month for reasons that Sehun never really cared to find out. Sehun clambered down from his second story room, the same as he always did when the beast of a car grumbled into his driveway, except this time, he lost traction on the bricks. It had just rained the night before, and the world was still slick with the dewy remnants of the storm. Sehun had made the descent a thousand times before in worse conditions, but something happened – maybe the wind blew, maybe his hand slipped, maybe he was pushed by some invisible creature for a laugh – and he tumbled. He managed to land on his feet, but one of his feet slipped on damp grass, and his entire leg buckled beneath him. He cried out as he stumbled onto the ground before clapping a hand over his mouth, wincing and breathing heavily.

He knew the second he couldn’t walk that he should get help. Every adult he’d ever met had told him so, when he got hurt – his teachers, his friends’ parents, even his mom, when she found the occasion to concern herself. He also knew, though, that even if he went inside his house now, his limp would be ignored in favor of yelling and smashing and bubbling anger between his mom and dad, just like it always did and just like it always would. It was never actually a choice, to go back inside, but sometimes, Sehun still wishes he’d chosen differently, anyways.

He dragged himself to Luhan’s house, and even though he could hardly put any pressure on his ankle without making little mewls of pain, he tugged himself all the way up their tree, hugging the trunk every few feet and panting softly. When he made it to the top, he tapped on the glass of Luhan’s window four times, and then another four times, and another, until Luhan was suddenly there, peering concernedly at Sehun and rattling off a thousand questions as he took him into his arms and pulled him inside. Sehun collapsed on Luhan’s floor. He didn’t even realize he was crying until Luhan’s hands were on his face, wiping his tears away.

“What happened?” Luhan asked, again and again, each time his tone growing more worried, more agitated, more frightened. Sehun could only manage to grip his collar, burying his head in Luhan’s chest.

Luhan called for his mom, and Sehun shook his head, murmuring, “I’m scared, don’t bring her, I’m scared,” but it was too late by then. She was already there, and then she was at Sehun’s side, too, yanking him from Luhan’s arms. She looked down at him, and Sehun noticed how much she looked like Luhan, the anxious lines of her face puckered in all the same places that Luhan’s were. He wanted Luhan’s arms back, so he reached out to him as she inspected his injured ankle. Luhan immediately interlaced their fingers, pressing a tiny hand to Sehun’s tiny forehead.

“He’s just got a twisted ankle,” she said, seeming relieved. Sehun nodded timidly, an apology on his lips. “How’d this happen? Does your mom know you’re here, honey?”

Sehun shook his head, fiddling with Luhan’s hand. “I fell out of my window,” he said in a small voice.

“Why didn’t you get your mommy, Sehun?”

Sehun curled up further into himself. He could barely hear his own words. “Because Daddy is here.”

Luhan’s mom’s face got dark, but the reassurance in her eyes didn’t change. She vanished briefly to get some things to take care of Sehun’s ankle, promising to come back before he could blink. Sehun panicked at first when he did blink and she was still gone, but she returned with bandages and a much gentler smile than she left with. When his ankle was dressed and he was safely tucked into the left side of Luhan’s bed, his mom told him that he could stay the night, and that they’d go to the hospital in the morning to make sure it wasn’t worse than she expected.

Luhan was tickled pink with Sehun’s sudden permanence, jumping into the bed and hugging Sehun as tightly as was physically possible. He was very careful not to disturb Sehun’s bound leg, but it didn’t stop him from crawling on and off the bed, hopping down to grab something or another and scrambling back up to show Sehun with all the wonder of a child, just like he did every time they were together. They spent the night discussing marker colors and the tint of the sky, Luhan animatedly acting out his words while Sehun watched from his place propped up by pillows. When he eventually calmed down, Luhan looped his arm through Sehun’s, and they both stared up at the ceiling. Luhan’s lungs were background music. Sehun could practically hear the rainbow in the sound of his breathing.

“Sehun,” Luhan said, biting his lip like his mom did earlier. “You said you were scared before. Are you still scared?”

“Nope,” Sehun said confidently. “Your house makes me feel better.”

Luhan turned to look at him, eyes jaded in a way a twelve-year-old’s should never be. “Do you ever get scared that your parents will leave you, like they do on TV?”

Sehun thought for a bit, wrinkling his nose. “No,” he finally said, meeting Luhan’s eyes. “I think I’d only be scared if you left me.”

Luhan grinned at that. “Like I’d ever. Pinky swear!” He held out one slender pinky, and Sehun remembers being glad that he hadn’t sprained his pinky instead because that would have made promising a lot harder. They linked pinkies, and then

Sehun had gone ahead and linked all their other fingers, too, and Luhan had laughed and let him. They fell asleep shortly after, practically in sync, breathing softly into each other’s ears – Luhan’s colors and Sehun’s shades of black.

Sehun spent his last few days at their house. Luhan’s mom took him to the hospital, whose employees had instructed him to never walk on a sprained ankle again because it made it swell up worse than before. Luhan’s mom looked a little upset at that, but she hadn’t said anything. They had given him a proper splint and some crutches that he used more to terrorize Tao with than anything else. Jongin had been impressed by his injury, mouth in a small “o” as Sehun proudly catapulted himself up the stairs to Jongin’s house to prove his skills with the crutches. Jongdae had made it his goal to knock them out from under him, so Sehun predictably made it his goal to knock him out with them. Luhan just laughed at them as they bickered and lashed out at each other, Jongin snickering at his side as he inspected whatever new animal he had caught that day. Luhan laughed more than Sehun would have ever thought was acceptable, but he didn’t have crooked teeth like Sehun, and his face lit up into colors, so Sehun had thought it was pretty okay.

(Sehun often wished he was as pretty as Luhan was, that his eyes would sparkle bronze in the sun and his teeth would shine white like fresh snow, the way Luhan’s did.)

His mom didn’t look for him up until the very end, when the blank white vehicles showed up in their driveway. It was almost like the times when Sehun’s dad came but worse, so much worse. She came out screaming the same way she did to his dad, something about “a crazy bitch stealing my kid,” and Luhan’s mom had screamed back just as loudly. Sehun had never heard her that inexplicably enraged. He doesn’t remember much of the details now, but he vividly recalls Luhan coming up behind him as he was hiding behind the doorway and linking their fingers together, just like their first night.

“We’ll always be together, right, Luhan?” Sehun whispered as he watched his mom lash out at all the workers in their strange white suits. One of them unsheathed something that glittered with energy and she fell to the ground twitching.

“I’ll never leave,” Luhan had replied, squeezing Sehun’s fingers and pulling him away from the sight.

Sehun figured out later that “I’ll never leave” is much different than “I’ll always be with you” when he was packed into the same van that his mom had screamed at and carted away from his neighborhood. Luhan wasn’t the one to leave; he was never meant to be.

Sehun was.

A lot of the details have blurred together since then – whether his mom was left in the front lawn or carried in, or whether Jongin or Tao or Jongdae had come outside to see what was going on. He’s forgotten the colors of the wilting flowers in his mom’s garden, or of his house’s trim, or of the windowpanes, and he can’t for the life of him remember whether his house had two bedrooms or three.

He’ll never forget Luhan, though. He’ll never forget how Luhan gripped the sleeves of one of the workers, pleading for Sehun to stay. He’ll never forget how Luhan begged his mom to let them keep him, or how he’d tried to run to the van and climb in next to him, to link their fingers together one more time. The way he’d watched from his mom’s side as the van drove away is permanently imprinted in Sehun’s mind, tears streaming down red cheeks and wide eyes puffy with strain. Whenever Sehun thinks about times when he wasn’t alone, that’s the first image that comes to mind and the last one that lingers along the corners of his memory.

After all, you don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.

“I’ve learned that people will forgetwhat you’ve said,people will forget

what you did,but people will never forgethow you made them feel.”

— Maya Angelou

“Can I help you?”

Sehun’s voice is tired and monotonous, and he’s completely sure that the customer outside in their car is already reconsidering all the other fast food restaurants in their immediate area, even as they hesitantly list their order. He types it up slowly on his little computer, even though he knows exactly where all the menu items are on the keyboard by now. He can practically feel the customer fidgeting as he sluggishly works, painstakingly recording what he’s pretty sure is more of a feast than an order before reading off the price and instructing them to go to the window that he isn’t currently tending to. His co-worker Kyungsoo glares at him from the other window, where he’s been stationed at.

“Do you really have to give me all the customers?” he grumbles, ambling off to start the twelve drinks they’d ordered. Sehun shrugs, ignoring the new people waiting at the drive-thru to take a swig of his water bottle.

“Better they see your cheery face than mine.”

“It’s hard to be cheery when you’re sitting over there in a bubble of death.” Kyungsoo opens his window with an ironically bright smile, handing out two of their drinks and promising that their food would be out soon before closing it and knitting his brows in annoyance all over again. “Couldn’t you come to work one day without looking like you just woke up on the wrong side of the planet?”

“I would if it weren’t true,” Sehun mumbles back, tossing his empty water bottle towards the trash can and very blatantly missing. Kyungsoo stares at it as if it were an offense, and Sehun shrugs without making any move to pick it up. “I always feel like I’m in the wrong place.”

Kyungsoo finally scurries over to pick the bottle up and stores it in the recycling bin where it belongs. He sighs even louder in exasperation. “Then maybe you should find a new place to be.”

Sehun glances over at him curiously, but he’s hurrying to the back where the grills are to ask where the party platter is. Sehun shrugs again, more to himself this time, before turning back to the drive-thru button and breathing out slowly. He presses it distastefully. “Can I help you?”

This is the tedium of Sehun’s daily life. If anyone asked (not that they would – no one really cares much about Sehun anymore), the first word that he’d use to describe his life is boring. Everything is always exactly the same. Each morning, he arrives precisely twelve minutes late, citing traffic when everyone knows that there are zero cars out at 5A.M. Kyungsoo gets delegated all the cleaning duties, probably because

he’s the only one that actually seems to enjoy being unnecessarily clean, and most of the workers agree that he’s the reason they have a 101 sanitation score. Sehun, on the other hand, sits on his Gameboy, sometimes retreating to the bathroom when Kyungsoo starts scowling at him from where he cleans the counters.

When the place opens, Sehun takes his place at the first window because he doesn’t have the social skills to work at the front, and he always, always sends his customers to Kyungsoo’s window, who, despite his complaints, is much more okay with being generally friendly than Sehun is. At the end of the day, Sehun is let off early while Kyungsoo stays back to clean some more, and their manager, Junmyeon, always stops him to ask him if he’s been doing his best job. Sehun feels guilty every time he assures Junmyeon that yes, he’s super dedicated, and he thinks that Kyungsoo probably just has ridiculously high standards for employees, yeah, that’s definitely why he sends in so many complaints, just look at him scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush, uh huh, he’ll come in early tomorrow, he promises. Junmyeon is a bit of a pushover, so he typically believes Sehun, even when he actually doesn’t. Sehun tries to make up for taking advantage of it by bringing Junmyeon a coffee to go every once in a while, when he remembers. (He doesn’t remember often.)

Every time Junmyeon lets him go, Sehun sticks his tongue out at Kyungsoo, who slaps his own face in distress, making the most unearthly sounds of indignation that Sehun has ever heard. Junmyeon just beams and slaps Kyungsoo on the back, and Kyungsoo can’t even manage to throttle him like he so obviously wants to because he’s Junmyeon. He settles for pinching Sehun’s retreating figure between his fingers and pretending it has the power to kill. Sehun checks to make sure he’s not dead, sarcastically clicking his heels together at Kyungsoo as he leaves to show that he’s still alive and kicking, but he’s pretty sure Kyungsoo is just taking pieces of him every time.

So that’s where they go. I guess it’ll kill me eventually.

After Sehun splits from work, he drives the same way home, past the abandoned gas station that he stops and gets coffee at in the mornings, past the cow fields that smell worse than his shitty apartment’s indoor plumbing and the trailer park that Sehun wishes he could live in, even though he’s terrified of trailer parks in tornados. He’d give anything to have his own place, even something as awful as a teeny mobile home. At least he’d have some land to himself, some grass to lay out on and space away from all the dumb neighbors, unlike in his apartment complex. At least he’d be alone in the physical sense instead of just alone, the emotional kind. At least he’d have a reason to always feel desolate then, instead of this swirling, billowing, encapsulating…nothing.

Everything is vacant. Everything is quiet. Worst of all, everything is horribly ordinary.

And then there is his old neighborhood. It’s not exactly the silver lining or the sunshine after the storm, but it’s something, anyways. He always looks down it, every day, but it’s the only thing that doesn’t feel like a broken record. It feels different each time he crosses its path – some days, it’s mysterious, but others, it feels the same as it did when he was a kid and his bus would turn onto it to let him out. He always puts on his turn signal when he passes it, as if he’s going to finally explore it the way he hasn’t let himself yet, but he never does. He always panics, scared it will be completely different, or that this part of his world will have forgotten his presence had even existed. He doubts that anyone he remembers still lives there, anyways, but even the prospect of them having remained terrifies him. He can’t imagine Jongin without a butterfly caught in the cups of his hands and a head too big for his tiny body, or Tao without the crooked eyeliner that he’d proudly applied himself with his little nine-year-old hands right before wushu-flipping out his window so his parents wouldn’t see it when he left. He can’t fathom a world where Jongdae isn’t in a beanie that envelops all his hair and mismatching socks that are so big that they wade all the way up to his knees.

He’s afraid of the last scenes of his childhood playing behind his eyelids again – his mom passed out on the lawn, the people in their white suits manning the van as if a criminal were getting in it, all the neighbors peeking out their windows.

He’s particularly scared of the idea of everything having advanced, and of him not being able to tell that anything’s different at all.

He’s scared of re-seeing Luhan, too. Luhan’s laughlines, too old to be his, and Luhan’s outstretched fingers, too small to reach, and Luhan’s tree with its long branches, sturdy enough for two tiny boys to crouch on for hours at a time. Luhan’s face, twisted in worry; Luhan’s face, blanketed with fear; Luhan’s face, stained with resigned tears; Luhan’s face, marred by the tinted windows of a child’s protective services van. Mostly, he’s scared of seeing the real Luhan – the Luhan that grew up, just as he did, and that exists somewhere else in the world, just like he does. He’s scared of seeing Luhan as an adult, of noting how much he may or may not have matured.

He’s really scared of meeting Luhan, only to have Luhan smile at him in the slightly diffident way he does with people he doesn’t know and introduce himself all over again.

Sehun forgets many things, but the thing he’s most scared of in all the world is being forgotten.

That day, everything goes by routine. Kyungsoo makes the same quips he makes every morning, afternoon, and night, and Sehun retorts with as many backhanded compliments about Kyungsoo’s neatness as he possibly can. Junmyeon

stops him after hours, and the conversation they always have takes place – “How are you doing, Sehun?” “I’m fine, just finished my shift. Did you know Kyungsoo squirted me with a spray bottle today? So rude.” – and, just like the day before, the week before, the month before, Junmyeon lets him off with his version of a “warning,” which is a promise of a pay raise if he behaves. Sehun doesn’t give a solitary shit about a pay raise, but it’s Junmyeon, so he smiles and nods and makes small noises of appreciation as he scoots stealthily towards the door. Kyungsoo is going over all the tables with a Swiffer duster, his back turned to him, so Sehun books it out before he can fantasize about squishing his head between his fingers like a cherry tomato. Breaking tradition already. How scandalous. Sehun starts his car with a few twists of the ignition – nowadays, it usually takes more than one – and he begins his drive back. He nearly falls asleep and swerves off the road when he reaches the highway because of how mundane it all is.

Can you die from boring? Because if you can, I think I’m already dead.

When he reaches the point where he crosses the neighborhood, he glances down the path and flicks on his turn signal out of habit, but he’s far too tired to entertain any thoughts about attempting to follow through. The only thing he can think about is the last of his rose tea and the news, maybe a little video gaming (an old version of Mario Party that he’s played through at least twenty-five times because it’s the only game he owns) punctuated by a lukewarm bath. Maybe he’ll doodle in his well-worn coloring books, maybe he’ll practice doing the worm because he’s beaten everyone he knows at it and wants to keep it that way – hell, maybe he’ll catch up on Netflix originals in the corner of his apartment where his phone’s 3G picks up since there’s no Wifi. The possibilities are endless.

He knows one thing he won’t be doing, and that’s extinguishing grill fires and typing up orders he doesn’t care about for $4.75 an hour.

He passes by like he would any other night, leaving the tick of the turn signal on to give him a sense of rhythm, but the shadowed road feels stranger than usual. It’s the same mysterious vibe, but it’s somehow off. Even in the dark, he can see the deep greens of the forest backdrop and the mottled yellow of the houses and the rich reds of mailbox handles, and it’s odd because he can normally only make out hues of gray and grayer. It’s as if someone’s taken the handle on the world’s saturation and twisted it just enough to feel wrong. Something stirs in him, almost like a rat crawling around his insides, and he feels the same kind of queasy that he’d felt the time he tried cooking a meal for himself at the grill and gave himself food poisoning. He grips the wheel of his car a little tighter, turning to watch the road with a bit more fervor than necessary, as if he expects something to pop out in front of him at any minute.

Nothing does. The colors fade back into black the farther he gets from it. Sehun tries to laugh it off, but he only succeeds in wondering what had possessed him in the first place.

Near the point where he turns into his apartment’s parking lot, he picks up on some sort of commotion. He had taken great care in choosing a quiet neighborhood, far from the city life congested around his job’s location. He’d investigated the families around him, pawed through review after review of his apartment’s owner, and had satisfied himself that he was in a safe, secure, uneventful place, cheap and welcoming to his own colorless addition of company.

The cacophony directly across from his complex speaks a different story from his research. Frowning, he peeks out the window without rolling it down.

There’s a car stopped on the opposite side of the road. Someone is screeching out the driver’s window – a very angry, very drunk college-aged man, by the looks of it – and a girl on the passenger’s side is holding onto his arm for dear life, trying to talk some sense into him. Sehun can’t see much behind their tinted windows, and he’s not sure if he wants to stick around much longer to witness how the scene plays out, but suddenly, another guy is stumbling out of the backseat of the car and the yelling man is flooring it, speeding off in a swerving mess of a line. Sehun shrivels behind the wheel when the car swings briefly into his own lane, bracing for head-on collision, but it diverts its direction just in time to miss him and keeps going. Sehun glares back at it, honking his horn loudly. I’ll hear about that crash and burn in the morning news tomorrow.

When he turns back to the boy who was kicked out, he notes that he has fallen to his knees, vomit pooling the ground around him. He’s pressing his palms over his eyes, sobbing so loud that Sehun can hear the choking sound of it. Sehun toes over the gas pedal, indecision bubbling in his gut. He looks longingly in the direction of his home, so close and yet so far in his conscience’s mind. He can practically taste the tea, hear the unharmonious blare of Mario theme music, and feel the slosh of bubble water over his body.

He risks a look back at the boy, and it’s the worst decision he could have made. The kid has sunk to his side on the wet grass, gripping the front of his t-shirt as if willing himself to rip it off and quaking from every limb.

He grudgingly puts his car in park. He isn’t about to make this kid drag himself up a tree to get help, like he did. He hops out of the car and slams the door, looking both ways before jogging across the street.

“Hey,” he calls as he approaches. The guy doesn’t look up from his hands. Sehun stands awkwardly a few paces away from him, debating yet again on getting

back into his car and driving off as if he hadn’t seen anything. “Hey, kid. Are you alright?”

“I’m not a kid,” the boy mumbles with a small burp. Sehun wrinkles his nose in antipathy. “I’m legal. I have my ID.”

“Sure, okay,” Sehun says, using his drive-thru voice to keep the kid from noticing his repulsion. “I’m not here to report you, anyways. I just wanted to see if you were fine.”

“My fineness is none of your business,” the boy groans. He hiccups, and it causes his cheeks to puff out. Sehun is concerned that he’s dangerously close to throwing up again, but he doesn’t want to get close enough to find out.

“Well, do you need any money to get home or something?”

“I have money,” he says, then curses under his breath. “Shit, I left my wallet in Minseok’s car, they took my money, how can I ever…” He breaks down into tears again, shaking like a leaf, and Sehun is bad with emotions, so he takes a couple steps back and holds his hands up.

“Well, if you don’t want my help, I’m just gonna—”

“Wait,” the guy interrupts. He’s finally looking up at him with bleary eyes, flapping a hand as if he’s trying to wave an imaginary white flag. There’s blood on the corner of his brow, in scrapes along his arms and under his fingernails, and his face is twisted in worry, blanketed with fear, stained with resigned tears. Even as Sehun takes in his entire visage, he’s drawn to the fact that the kid is biting his lip in this uneasy way, and Sehun is thinking of one of the last times he saw that, when Luhan’s mom was looking down at him as if he were a broken doll, and then there’s the picture of Luhan asking if Sehun was still scared playing in the back of his mind, and all of the air in his lungs vacates the second he realizes that this frightened boy is—

“Can you take me home?”

Sehun can’t speak quite yet because he’s too busy processing and focusing on the fact that he’s no longer capable of unconscious breathing. He puts both of his hands on his head, stepping away from the crouched figure for a second to regain his grasp on thought. Then, he breathes out and turns back to Luhan – Luhan, who had cried cobalt tears when he left and is crying them all over again now. “Sure. Why not. Why the hell not.”

When Luhan stands, he falls all over again, and Sehun steps toward him but doesn’t help him up because he’s scared to touch him. His hands are still as small as they were ten years ago, when he’d interlaced their fingers in his bed and laughed at

the thought of ever leaving Sehun, and although his body has gotten taller, he’s still shorter than Sehun, if only a little. That had always been a sore point when they were still children – even though Sehun was younger, he was always the taller of the two, and Luhan always stood on his tiptoes around him so he’d look like the hyung. Remembering this makes Sehun ache a little inside, and the cramp in his chest only intensifies when Luhan finally stands, squints directly at Sehun’s face, and says, “Have I met you before?”

Sehun guesses his face has changed. His hair definitely has – it’s now an array of autumn colors pasted on ivory that he’d decided to get on a whim. (He’d kept it because Kyungsoo constantly gawks at it as if it were the stupidest thing in the world, and Sehun thinks it’s funny when his mouth hangs open that far.) His jawline is more defined than it was back in the day, when he still had his child fat, and his body has similarly slimmed out. If he’s honest, he looks more like a pencil mark than a human being.

It still hurts all the same. Luhan tilts his head, waiting for an answer, and Sehun smiles ruefully.

“Nope. Never met you before tonight.” Sehun gestures to his car, still parked and running across the street. “My car’s over there. If you can make it to the passenger’s side on your own, I’ll give you a lift.”

“Won’t you help me walk?” Luhan whines, his bottom lip jutting out. Sehun flashes back to all the times Luhan has made that exact face, back when his face was just as fat as Sehun’s but still somehow twice as pretty. He’d never been able to say no to Luhan before when he pulled that face.

If there’s anything Sehun’s learned the hard way, however, it’s that, over time, flawed practices can evolve, and senses of obligation can shift. He waves a hand towards his car again before turning his back and striding over to it, getting into the driver’s seat and slamming the door. I’ll give him five minutes, he thinks, but it looks like it won’t be enough, because Luhan sits himself down on the ground as if in protest. They share a staring match for the entirety of time that Sehun has allotted, Sehun training his face into listlessness while Luhan tires an entire spectrum of emotions. When it’s up, Sehun bites his lip before realizing that he hasn’t done so in years. He curses, putting the car in drive and backing up to make his turn.

“WAIT!” Luhan is on his window in an instant, pounding at the glass. “I’m here, just let me in!”

Sehun unlocks the doors and points to the passenger’s side solemnly. “Get in yourself,” he commands, and even he is surprised by how apathetic he sounds. Luhan

curses some more, and Sehun thinks that the Luhan he knew would never use so much colorful language near someone he’d just met. Then again, the Luhan he knew would also never take rides from strangers, especially while drunk and after getting forcibly booted out of a car, and yet here he was, falling all over himself to get into the passenger’s seat and fumbling ungracefully with his seatbelt. Sehun looks at the road ahead of him, refusing to meet Luhan’s inquisitive stares. When he hears the tell-tale click of a seatbelt, he makes a U-turn and starts them on the road.

“Where are we going?” he asks, face still stoic. Luhan leans against the window, eyes closed and mouth open. He swings his hand around in the air, nearly hitting Sehun in the face. Sehun ducks in annoyance, resisting the urge to swat at his fluttering fingers.

“A neighborhood,” he slurs. “It’s really close by. You can’t…miss it.”

Sehun sets his jaw. He knows exactly where Luhan is talking about, but he isn’t ready. Not yet. Not tonight, when all he wants to do now is to sleep off all of his forlornness – to dream, for a few hours, that he isn’t alone. Now that he truly isn’t, he feels even more solitary than before. It’s as if having Luhan here, half-asleep and barely capable of recognizing his own hand, is more like having a giant void in his passenger’s seat, open and sucking all the matter of Sehun’s existence into it.

When it comes down to it, Sehun would have never forgotten Luhan, drunk, high, or otherwise. He wouldn’t have forgotten the way he smiled, even if he suddenly had purple hair or skin the color of the sky. He could have changed his entire face and Sehun would have known, instinctively, that it was the same Luhan that he’d huddled with in an old sycamore and admired for as long as he was a child – longer, even. Luhan was always meant to be the one who remembered things, like homework assignments, or his classmates’ names, or how many days it had been since Sehun had been home. Now, it seems that it’s Sehun who remembers, and Luhan who forgets.

Sehun has never felt more isolated in his entire life.

He drives to their old neighborhood. He already has his turn signal on by the time Luhan points it out to him, but Luhan is too out of it to notice. Sehun feels his gut clench, and he considers just dropping Luhan here and letting him hobble to his house, but Luhan’s crying again, as if he’s remembering why he got ejected from his ride in the first place, and Sehun couldn’t leave anybody on the side of the road to just cry. He turns sharply, before he can change his mind, and Luhan rocks hard into his shoulder, wiping tears and drool onto his shirt. He grimaces but stays rooted in place as he drives. “Which house is yours?” he asks, knowing very well the answer.

Luhan points, and the first thing Sehun notices is that the place he’s indicated is sat directly next to a pitiful little tree stump. He feels a cold heat course through his chest and he looks around at the rest of the blocky homes, willing it to be the wrong house. He sees his neighborhood landmarks – the pond behind his old house, shimmering under the moonlight, and Tao’s old mailbox, dented from the time he swung his weighted purse at Sehun’s head and hit it instead. He notes the rubber tire markings on the road from the time that Sehun convinced Jongin to drive his mom’s car around the block while she was out with his dad, and he sees a ring of burnt grass, still not growing after Jongdae accidentally set it on fire instead of the bag of dog shit he’d had ready for Jongin’s porch steps.

Luhan’s house was in the middle of everything, sitting proud and tall at the end of the cul-de-sac, as if it owned the place. It’s still in the same place as it was before, and so is the tree stump – exactly where Luhan’s tree once grew. Sehun looks down a moment and belatedly tries not to remember all the time he spent on that tree. He tries not to think about how it had looked, feathery branches stretched out against the moon. He tries not to see it in the backdrop of grey that settles in his mind.

He could have very well succeeded if Luhan didn’t wave his hands at it and laugh.

“That tree,” he starts, pausing to gather his thoughts, “was my favorite tree in the whole world, and a damned storm took it down.”

Sehun feels a slight relief that it wasn’t an intentionally orchestrated demise, but he still feels the pang of want to sit Luhan on its old branches and talk him out of his drunken nonsense. He almost asks how long ago it happened, what storm, what day, if Luhan had cried at its loss. Instead, he stops the car and subtly wipes his eyes. “Is this your stop, then?”

Luhan’s biting his lips again. Sehun can see it out of the corner of his eye. “Will you walk me to my door?” he asks quietly, reaching out to skim a finger over the back of Sehun’s hand. Sehun flinches and withdraws, looking at him in horror.

“Why would I do that?” he snaps, unaware of where his defensiveness is stemming from but completely unable to stop it. “I got you here. That’s what you asked me to do.”

“Because you’re a gentleman,” Luhan retorts, and it sounds almost like an accusation. “I just want to make sure I can get in my house.”

Sehun keeps his hands far away from Luhan, who’s eyeing him expectantly, and as much as he wants to drive off into the dark and fool himself into thinking this night

was a dream, he can’t. He kicks open the car door, and Luhan claps excitedly. “Just hurry up,” Sehun commands, walking briskly up the path.

Luhan follows behind him in a slow waddle, staring determinedly at the ground to make sure the way is clear before taking a step. Sehun taps his foot impatiently as Luhan meanders forward. When he finally makes it, Luhan searches his pockets for keys and comes up empty.

“I must have left them in Minseok’s car,” he muses. Then, he visibly perks up. “Hold up, I’ll ring the doorbell! My mom will answer, I know she will.”

Sehun is a little taken aback – people still live with their mothers? – but he shrugs languidly as Luhan presses the ringer over and over again. A light flickers on in the top bedroom, and after a couple minutes of Luhan incessantly ringing the bell, the door flies open to reveal an ostensibly annoyed man.

“What do you want?” he asks gruffly, and Sehun is completely aware that this is not Luhan’s dad at all. He’s too round, with too much scruff on his face and a far thicker nose, and Sehun is suddenly second-guessing his decision to trust Luhan’s judgment while inebriated. Luhan squints at the man, looking incredibly confused.

“You’re not my dad—” he starts, but the man’s eyes suddenly widen and then cross, and he starts shaking his fist as if he’s going to pound through the screen door and into Luhan’s face.

“You again,” the man yells, face contorting in what looks somewhere between endless rage and potential homicide, “how many times have I told you to stay away from my goddamn house—”

Luhan’s face draws in to match the man’s expression, and he opens his mouth to make some sort of snappy response, but Sehun claps a hand over it. He bows to the man, apologizing profusely and stating that they’d gotten the wrong house until the man finally decides he’d rather be sleeping than screaming and slams the door shut. Luhan squirms, attempting to object as Sehun pulls him away. He eventually takes the initiative to bite Sehun’s palm until Sehun shakes him off, frowning.

“Why are those people in my house?” Luhan demands, pointing at the bedroom light that has just flickered out again. “That’s my house. Me and my mom and dad live there.”

“Kid,” Sehun says slowly, and although Luhan begins to argue that he isn’t a kid, Sehun continues, “How old do you think you are right now?”

Luhan blinks. “I’m twenty-two,” he asserts, as if Sehun is dumb for asking. “Why?”

“And you’ve lived in the same neighborhood since you were young?”

Luhan screws up his face in thought. “I can’t remember,” he admits, but he immediately continues, “I know someone else in this neighborhood anyways. He’s my best friend in the whole wide world. He’ll help me. He lives right over there.”

Luhan starts forward, raising his fist like a marching warrior, and Sehun’s blood runs cold when he notices Luhan’s intended direction. He grabs his arm, pulling him back and hissing, “What is your best friend’s name?”

Luhan wrenches his arm from Sehun’s grasp and leans into his face. “Sehun,” he spits, and Sehun’s vision goes blurry for a few seconds. “Now can you let me get there?”

“Sehun doesn’t live there anymore,” Sehun hears himself say somewhere in the distance of reality. He’s already checked out of that, but his body keeps moving anyways, directing itself on autopilot, as if it knows exactly what he would do if he were still in control.

“What?” Luhan’s voice sounds apprehensive, as if his worst fears have been realized, and Sehun can’t register his face but he can picture it, just like he could when they were younger. He can see his worry lines, his furrowed brows, his mussed hair and his bottom lip caught between his teeth. He can see his glow dimming, the tone of his voice dragging his shades down duller and duller. He can see it, but he can’t stop it. He feels his hands clasp at Luhan’s wrist again.

“Sehun’s gone,” he breathes, and Luhan blacks out onto Sehun’s front lawn, just like his mom had done ten years earlier.

기억 – II잊다 1999-7-14

“I’m staying the night with Tao today.He taught me how to roundhouse kick,

but he got mad when I accidentallykicked him in the face.I thought it was funny.

I stayed the night with Jongdae last night.We made a camp in his backyard,

but his mom wouldn’t let us build a fire.(We built a secret one in the tent, anyways,

and we only burnt a tiny corner of the blanket.)

I stayed the night with Jongin before that,and we caught fireflies by the pond.

Jongin brought a jar.I tried to tell him to let his go,but he never listens to me.

Maybe the fireflies will escape by themselves.I bet they don’t have

chronic dumblike he does.

…How many nights has it been?

I’ve forgotten.”

Sehun isn’t sure how he makes it home, but he does. He doesn’t remember carrying Luhan in either, but he’s on the couch now, snoring under a Mickey Mouse blanket that Sehun usually keeps mildewing in the closet because it’s never cold enough in his apartment for two covers. He stares at him, watching him sleep, wondering what he’s going to do with him in the morning and drawing up blanks. He’s pictured reuniting with Luhan a million times, but he never could have fathomed this route of reconvening. He’d always imagined that Luhan would still be in his tree when he drove up, waving from its branches with nothing but the saffron of elation marking his features. He had always believed that they’d link fingers and move on from the silly

goodbye that wasn’t a goodbye, anyways, because they were going to meet again, were meant to meet again.

He’d never thought that he’d have to see tears dirtying Luhan’s face a second time. He’d never thought that Luhan would forget him at the same time that he remembered. He’d never thought finding him again would make him feel this lost.

He finds himself sighing for the umpteenth time that night as he dabs Luhan’s eyes with a wet paper towel because he’s heard it reduces swelling. He thinks he’ll call out of work, even if Kyungsoo will bitch about it for a straight week. This is too emotionally exhausting to not be a legitimate reason to take an impromptu vacation. He figures that he can take care of Luhan tomorrow and make sure he’s physically and spiritually sound. When he’s sober, he can lead them to the right house, where Sehun will drop him off and probably never see him again. It’ll be for the best, he thinks, but he curls his fingers around Luhan’s anyways and wishes things were different.

Luhan responds in his sleep, muttering something under his breath, but when Sehun tries to dislodge his hand, Luhan only grips him tighter. His worried features smooth out, and Sehun almost swears that he’s smiling, something he hasn’t done since Sehun encountered him on the side of the road.

He looks so much more like Luhan that way, and Sehun feels grateful for finding him after all.

Sehun wakes up a few hours later to find that he’s been slumped in his chair next to the couch, and although he distinctly remembers Luhan being on the other side of his hand, there’s no one there to confirm those memories now. Sehun would probably forget them if Luhan wasn’t the star of them; now, it’s all he can think about, and he unexpectedly panics at the thought of Luhan being gone. He hears the toilet flush somewhere in his apartment and jolts to his feet, walking briskly towards it and running into a small figure in the hallway. Luhan takes a step back, rubbing the point where his head made contact with Sehun’s chest sheepishly, and peeks up at him, eyes half-closed with what Sehun thinks is probably the beginnings of a massive hangover.

“Hi,” Luhan says meekly. Sehun waves, shifting his weight onto one foot and scratching the back of his neck. Luhan does about the same, wringing his hands out around each other, before finally blurting, “I am so so so so sorry for last night, whatever I said or did was probably out of line and I can’t really remember any of it but—”

“It’s fine,” Sehun interjects, waving a hand dismissively. “I didn’t want you out and alone, and you couldn’t remember where you lived, so I brought you back here. Nothing happened, so don’t worry about it.” He gestures behind Luhan, looking pointedly over his head. “Can I use the bathroom now?”

Luhan reddens and moves nimbly out of the way, apologizing again as he shuffles his way past Sehun. Sehun trudges into the bathroom, but he doesn’t use it. He sits heavily on the toilet, placing his head in his hands, and for the first time in a long time, Sehun cries. It’s only a few stray tears, really – not nearly enough to make his face swell or his eyes go glassy and red like Luhan’s – but it’s more than he’s had since the day he was shipped off to his first foster home, all the way across the country. He’s not even sure which pit in his brain that the tears are surging from, but they’re very much there, anyways, and they sear across his memory, even as they disappear under his fingers.

It takes a few moments before he can manage to compose himself again. He stands to leave and flushes the toilet for good measure, skipping handwashing because he doesn’t care that much about the accuracy of his fake bathroom trip, and steps out to find Luhan sitting on the very edge of his couch, peering down uncomfortably at his own fingernails.

Sehun coughs as he enters, drawing Luhan’s attention. His eyes are even bigger than they were as a child, Sehun notes, although his face has grown enough to suit them. He looks up at Sehun somewhat expectantly, as if searching for an answer to some question he hasn’t asked yet. Sehun coughs again.

“Do you want any coffee?” he asks, rubbing an arm nervously. Luhan looks surprised, but he nods and offers Sehun a tiny smile.

“That would be nice,” he says slowly. “But only if it wouldn’t inconvenience you.” He pauses a moment, staring fixatedly at Sehun’s face again. Sehun fights the urge to run out of his own apartment. “Have I… Have we met before now?”

Sehun laughs, and it sounds a little crazy, even to his own ears. “You asked me the same question last night, and I told you that we’d never met before. I guess you don’t remember.”

Luhan looks back down at his nails. “I don’t remember much anymore,” he mutters under his breath. “The only things I remember now are the things I want to forget.”

Sehun doesn’t know how to respond, so he pads into his kitchen instead to start the coffee. Luhan must have gotten up and followed him because he’s in the doorway now, hugging the wall and watching Sehun measure enough coffee grounds for two cups.

“What’s your name?” Luhan asks, and Sehun freezes. He’s not sure why he’s compelled to lie, but after Luhan’s announcement the previous night about his best

friend, Sehun knows that he’ll remember him if he says his real name. He doesn’t want Luhan to remember him – not now. He can’t explain why it feels like the wrong time, the wrong way, but it does.

When he was younger, he had a puzzle – the simple kind, geared towards children. It consisted of three pieces: a triangle, a circle, and a square. Each had its own respective spot, and no matter how many times Sehun tried to stuff the square piece in the circular hole, it would never fit.

Telling Luhan his real identity feels sort of like that.

“Kyungsoo,” Sehun finds himself blurting. “My name…my name is Do Kyungsoo.”

Luhan smiles. “I guess I really haven’t met you,” he muses. “I would remember a name like that.” Sehun finally finds his muscles again, and he continues making the coffee in silence up until Luhan begins again. “Luhan. My name is just… Luhan.”

Sehun doesn’t know what to say, so he just chooses not to think about it. “That’s a nice name. It’s…familiar.”

“Yeah?” Luhan giggles behind his palm, and it sounds exactly the same as it used to – like a starved hyena. Sehun nearly drops the mug he’s been preparing. “Maybe we’ve met in another life or something. Some weird sort of déjà vu. You ever heard of that?”

“Yeah,” Sehun says, turning to hand Luhan the first full cup of coffee. “I think it’s a little different, though. A little more…boring.”

Luhan accepts the coffee cup, taking a tentative sip and looking pleased at the result. Sehun turns back to his coffee pot to make his own cup, trying to hide the pink that’s tinting his ears. “But don’t you think that déjà vu is meant to be exciting? Sort of like unraveling a mystery or something. The mystery of a thing that you’ve experienced, but also haven’t.”

“I’ve lived enough déjà vu to be completely sure that it’s boring and dumb and nothing like that at all.”

“You’re no fun,” Luhan accuses, and this isn’t the way Luhan would talk to someone he’d just met. Not ever. Maybe drunk Luhan would, but drunk Luhan isn’t real Luhan, anyhow. The Luhan that’s standing in front of him is the real Luhan, the one that’s ignoring the coffee foam on his upper lip in favor of dipping his face closer to the cup and shifting from foot to foot as if he can’t keep still. This is the Luhan whose laugh sounds like whales mating, who’s apologetic at the same time that he’s curious and kind at the same time that he’s nervous – this is the same Luhan who crosses his eyes when

he’s got nothing to say and the same Luhan who holds philosophical discussions about how to make crayons, and Sehun isn’t sure how he knows that just by looking at him, but he does. Luhan must have noticed, too, because he’s looking up from his coffee at Sehun as if he is someone he’s known all his life, which, technically, wouldn’t be completely untrue.

“I really feel like I know you,” Luhan says. “Like… I’m comfortable here. Isn’t that weird?”

Sehun takes a sip of his own coffee, flicking off the machine. “I guess déjà vu can be pretty weird sometimes.”

기억 – III상기하다 2000-4-7

“Jongdae thinks he’s so cool.He said he could take Tao in a fight,

if he had to.If Tao was there, he would have beaten him

silly.

I tried to remind him of that one timehe helped an old lady with her groceries

and tripped over her cane.The ground beat him up pretty bad, then.

He pretendedthat he didn’t remember.”

They spend the morning watching the news on Sehun’s microwave-sized television, Luhan pointing and laughing at all the exaggerated politicians and falling into blue silence at any mention of death. Sehun watches Luhan more than he watches the screen, pressing into memory the picture of his wide smile and his crinkling eyes and the life that hums from the tips of his fingertips, the soles of his feet, the ends of his hair and the beginnings of his black roots. He reminds Sehun of the little weapon the social workers had used to pacify his mom, except he’s far less scary and far more…something else. It’s different than the sort of life that buzzed through him when he was a child, full of energy at all hours of the day.

That’s one thing that’s changed about Luhan – his entire atmosphere feels tired, as if he was born with a battery and it’s finally running low. Luhan falls into naps on and off all morning, and when Sehun wakes him the first time to ask him about his house, Luhan only blinks at him, rubs his eyes sleepily, and snuggles back into the couch pillow. Sehun presses his lips together in frustration, but he gets up, padding toward the kitchen. Every time Luhan has been awake thus far, he’s felt like he’s been about to fall into a big black pit of unconsciousness, anyways, so Sehun figures it’s better to let him get it out of his system. It’s only for a day. I’ve only got to make it through this day.

Even though Luhan is different, Sehun thinks that it’s pretty hard to ignore how much he’s still the same. The life whispering through his limbs may be unlike his childhood version, but it’s still life, the same sort that Luhan always had as a kid – happy, even if it’s imbued with a wistfulness that Sehun can’t rightfully explain.

Luhan wakes again an hour and a half later, stumbling into the kitchen as if he were still drunk and croaking, “Water.” Sehun immediately grabs the first glass he sees, wrinkling his nose at all the scuffs and scratches on the outside, and fills it with distilled water from his sink. Luhan downs it in one go, wiping his lips with the back of his hand and panting. His hair is even more disheveled than it was the first time he woke up, and he glances worriedly at the clock before groaning.

“I missed my class,” he gripes, dragging a hand down his haggard face. “I’m nearly out of absences for that one.”

Sehun shrugs, which is probably his favorite response to anything that anyone could ever say. He grabs another glass and pours some water for himself, taking much smaller sips before again offering it to Luhan, who’s eyeing it with near-frenzied want. “I tried to wake you up, but you weren’t having it.”

Luhan takes the glass and practically swallows it whole, too, water dribbling down his chin. He stares gratefully at Sehun and imitates his shrug with a small grin. “I’m pretty adamant about my eight hours.”

“More like fifteen.” Sehun takes the empty glasses out of Luhan’s hands and sets them in the sink, leaning back on his counter. “Are you ready to go home yet?”

Luhan recoils, and Sehun feels his stomach plummet. “I…” Luhan bites his lip. He’s always doing that. “I guess I’m ready whenever you want me out of your house.”

Sehun studies him with careful eyes. He’s never been the most observant, but it’s always been different with Luhan. He can read every stray emotion on Luhan’s face, and right now, it’s screaming don’t make me leave. Sehun braves a question. “Why did your friends blackball you last night?”

That hits even closer to home than the suggestion of leaving. Luhan looks physically pained, and he subtly grabs the wall to steady himself, but Sehun notices because it’s Luhan. “I don’t… I can’t. I just—”

Sehun wants to revoke the question, but it’s already in the air. He takes a step closer to Luhan, and Luhan reacts instantly, his head snapping up to peer warily into Sehun’s face. Sehun tethers his own hands behind his back in an attempt to seem less intimidating, and he mirrors Luhan’s facial expression. “Do you…. Do you not remember?”

Sehun gives him a meaningful look as he says it. Don’t say anything you don’t want to. Luhan’s face softens appreciatively. “I… Yeah. It’s… It’s all kind of a blur right now.”

Sehun shrugs. Kyungsoo usually tells him that his shoulders are going to cramp up like that one day when he does that, but Luhan just looks at him as if he’s some sort of angel. It’s making Sehun slightly uncomfortable, so he brushes past Luhan towards his living room, although he doesn’t really feel like watching any more news broadcasts right now. Luhan doesn’t follow him, but he does turn with him, and Sehun can feel his eyes, hot and searching on the back of his head.

“I live in a dorm,” he says quietly. “With my friend, Minseok. You can… You can take me there. Whenever you need me to go.”

Sehun hazily remembers Luhan mentioning the name Minseok the night before. He’d left his stuff in the car. That was it. Wallets and keys and money, oh my. “Was Minseok one of the people who kicked you out of the car?”

Luhan gnaws on his lip. “Yeah. Yeah, he was. It wasn’t his decision, but… Yeah.”

“So he wasn’t the one in the front seat screaming like a maniac?”

Luhan shakes his head quickly. “No. My other friend wanted to drive, and when he wants to do something, he just sort of…does it. Minseok was in the back. With me.”

Sehun purses his lips. The way Luhan says Minseok’s name is…strange. As if it’s lodged somewhere. As if it’s choking him, but not from his throat. From somewhere harder to reach. Luhan isn’t looking at him anymore, choosing instead to peruse the carpet, which just so happens to be the blandest beige flooring ever. Sehun is usually a fountain of indecision, always relying on other people to make the choices for him, but in this instant, he feels exceptionally clear. He reaches out and puts a hand on Luhan’s shoulder, squeezing gently, and even though he knows this is probably the worst idea he’s ever had, the look of pure surprise on Luhan’s face is enough to shove that thought down.

“Stay as long as you need to,” Sehun says, pulling his hand back again. “As long as it takes to figure out whatever is…wrong.” He gestures ambiguously, but Luhan seems to understand what he means. Luhan looks like he might cry again, and Sehun isn’t sure where he’s erred, but then Luhan’s arms are clasped behind his neck in a hug that feels more like a lifeline.

“Thank you,” Luhan whispers. His voice breaks, and Sehun doesn’t know what to make of it. He rests clumsy hands on the protruding bones of Luhan’s hips, scared of enveloping him completely, as if he’ll dissolve into dust if he makes any move too far. When Luhan pulls away, Sehun’s hands fall obediently back to his sides, but he still feels the tickle of Luhan’s palpable life itching along his fingers. It’s like Luhan’s spark has rubbed off on him, the way glitter rubs off on your fingers when you touch it or the way graphite smudges on the sides of your hands when you brush penciled notes. Sehun wants to reach out, to link their fingers together and tell him how much he’s missed these things about him since their childhood days.

Instead, he shrugs, and listlessly moves to the bathroom to cry again.

기억 – IV잊다 2001-6-3

“Jongin got bit by a snake today.His mom had told him they don’t like being held,

but I think he’d forgotten.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

Kyungsoo is livid, to no one’s surprise. Sehun walks in with his steaming coffee cup a week after finding Luhan for the first time, but he’s actually two minutes early that day, which Kyungsoo has blissfully ignored. Luhan’s presence has him all out of whack, no matter how quiet he is while he’s sleeping.

Sehun shrugs, putting down his coffee cup on the counter that Kyungsoo has just buffed. Kyungsoo responds by snatching it up and glaring. “I had an unexpected visitor, so I took the week off to get him acclimated.”

It wasn’t untrue, for once. Luhan slept through most of the days, but when he’d manage to drag himself out of bed, he would be buzzing with energy. It was almost as if he were twelve again, bouncing on and off the couch to look around Sehun’s tiny home and report back his findings, even though Sehun obviously already knew about all of them. (“Did you know you have rash cream in your cupboard? I thought only grandmas and babies still used that!” or “You have, like, thirty packs of beer under your bed. Aren’t you underage?” or “There’s twelve different bags of coffee in here. I counted! Do you have a caffeine addiction or something?”) Luhan was practically vibrating with questions, and every time Sehun provided an answer, he just asked more and more and more, about everything, about nothing at all, until Sehun felt like he was going to go into cardiac arrest trying to keep up with everything Luhan was saying.

Near the middle of the week, to stop him from talking a blue streak, Sehun offered to take him to the grocery store and buy him some things he needed. Luhan had been using his finger to brush his teeth like a two-year-old and washing his briefs in the bathroom sink daily, and although Sehun liked to keep an abundance of snacks, they were almost completely depleted in the couple days Luhan had been there. Luhan had nodded eagerly and pranced to Sehun’s car like an overzealous deer, strapping himself in and babbling about wanting cookies and pepero and all sorts of other sweets. He didn’t stop talking throughout the entire trip, racing through the store and asking for enough candy to give a small child diabetes, and although Sehun initially accommodated, he eventually had to start saying no at the request of his panicked wallet. Luhan didn’t stomp around and throw tantrums like he used to with his mom, but he did jut out his lip in pleading before trudging back to the shelves he’d ripped all the

food from. Sehun ended up buying more snacks than he did necessities (he forgot the toothbrush when Luhan dragged him out of the oral care aisle to show him the Valentines’ Day stuffed animals on the sales rack) and Luhan looked as though he wouldn’t have it any other way, cradling his giant bags of chips like a kid would his puppy. Sehun shook his head tiredly, and Luhan stuck his tongue out at that, but he smiled, anyways, and Sehun smiled, too, even though he felt like he shouldn’t.

On the way back, Luhan had thrown a fit when he’d seen a park across from the grocery store. “It reminds me of a park I used to go to when I was young,” he muses, turning to Sehun with shining eyes. “Can you take me to my park tomorrow?” Although Sehun initially refused on the basis of going back to work, Luhan had tugged on his sleeve until it was impossible to say no.

By the time they’d gotten home, they’d planned a rendezvous for after Sehun got back. Sehun had been impossibly tired when they’d gotten home, and Luhan, impossibly smug.

He guesses he’d had it coming for a long time for using Junmyeon so frequently.

Kyungsoo has been talking for about ten minutes now, and he’s taken to snapping in Sehun’s face to wake him up from his own mind, looking even more peeved than usual. Sehun blinks, once, twice, then pretends to go to sleep on the sparkling countertop. Kyungsoo swats the back of his head and huffs, scurrying off to grab a towel and muttering something about nasty rainbow head germs and hairnets. Sehun picks himself up and makes his escape before he can return, breaking out his Gameboy mid-stride on his way to the bathroom. Even on weird days like this one, some things will never change.

Sehun immediately regrets leaving his phone number in a note on the counter because even though Sehun is technically not allowed to respond, it doesn’t stop Luhan from sending picture after picture of all the little things he finds. He texts him a picture of Sehun’s stuffed animal stash at around one o’clock, accompanied by several laughing Japanese emojis that look way too similar to his actual face. He sends a picture of himself hugging the biggest one last, rubbing an eye and pretending to yawn as if he’d just gotten up (he probably had). There’s one of a little black thumbtack that he discovered on Sehun’s floor with the message “I almost stepped on this, you dummy!” attached beneath it. Another is of Sehun’s kitchen rug covered in Trix cereal and a text

that reads, “ㅠ.ㅠ I spilled…”

An hour after, Sehun receives a bundle of pictures all at once, filtered with outside light, and he realizes that they’re all of a tiny dandelion bud in a small patch of grass outside the apartment complex. Luhan sends six photos total of it taken from various angles and the word “white” in six different languages tacked on each one.

Sehun thinks about the fact that the apartment’s owners have giant flower pots overflowing with budding petunias and roses and lilies lining every walkway on every floor. Luhan had to have bypassed every one of them.

Sehun sneaks him a text back. “Our flower. 우리 꽃. Yeah?” Luhan responds with

nothing but a smiley face. (That one looks more like Sehun’s actual face, this time.)

Sehun receives the last picture a couple minutes before his shift is over. It’s a picture of his empty parking spot, which Luhan has somehow remembered and tracked down. Below it reads the words, “Hurry up, dandelion boy!”

Sehun sends him a threat back on his way out. Kyungsoo throws him his usual sinister glance, but Sehun is too absorbed in his phone to notice. When Junmyeon tries to stop him for their usual after hours chat, Sehun quickly explains that he has somewhere to be and races out the door. Both Kyungsoo and Junmyeon look altogether puzzled, but Sehun is already in his car, turning the ignition until it cranks and flooring it out onto the main road. He doesn’t dip below sixty the entire way back home.

Luhan is waiting in Sehun’s parking spot when he gets there. He doesn’t even give Sehun the chance to turn off the car before he’s hopping in and slamming the door, turning to him with excited eyes.

“Are you ready?” he practically squeals. “I haven’t been to the park in ages, oh man, I wonder if they have pogo rides like they used to, do you think I’m too tall for the rock climb now—”

“Luhan,” Sehun interrupts, laughing softly. “Have you been waiting this entire time?”

“Not the entire time. Just, like, the past twenty minutes or so.”

“Didn’t you have classes today?”

“I did. I slept through them again.”

“You know, a responsible parent doesn’t reward his kid for being a lazy bum.”

Luhan sticks his tongue out. “I’m not a bum, and I’m not your kid. I’m your associate.”

“Not even friends, are we?”

Luhan scrunches his face in thought. “You did buy me candy, I guess…” He shrugs, face alight with a smile. “Fine. I accept your extension of friendship.”

Sehun shifts the car into reverse. “I never extended my friendship.”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, my friend. You extended friendship the second you extended your home.” He crosses his arms proudly. “It was just up to me to accept it!”

Sehun pulls back out onto the main road without answering. It’s not like he can say much to that.

He’s right, anyways.

기억 – V상기하다 2001-6-7

“Mom, don’t.

Don’t look at me like you’re broken anymore,like you don’t care,or you can’t care.

I’m your son.

Don’t you remember?”

Luhan turns out to be the worst at giving directions. He causes Sehun to miss at least three turns on their way to the park because he’s too involved in talking to notice when they’re coming up, and he drags Sehun along the highway for six miles longer than he should have before looking at the numbered signs and blankly saying, “Oh, we were supposed to get off four exits ago.”

Sehun is perturbed and more than a little impatient, but at the same time, he doesn’t mind Luhan’s chatter much. It’s soothing, the way his voice fills up the car and

makes it overflow with sound. Sehun has always functioned better with background noise, and Luhan isn’t a demanding conversationalist. He only wants to talk, regardless of lack of response, and Sehun appreciates that because he’s never been much of a multitasker. He drives as Luhan points at various things – leaves, trees, flowers, weeds – and tells long-winded stories about all of them, as if he knows exactly how each of them had come to life.

“Are you actually friends with all these plants?” Sehun asks in between anecdotes. Luhan’s eyes flash towards him as if he’s just been provoked.

“Of course I am. How else could I come up with this kind of stuff?”

“Do you know anything about humans, then?”

Luhan gets quiet. “Sometimes,” he concedes. “About some people.”

“Do you not like them?”

“No, that’s not it,” Luhan replies quickly, waving his hands in front of him defensively. “It’s just… Most of the people I really, really cared about sort of… Left. You know?”

Sehun nods because he knows very well what that’s like, even if he’s usually on the opposite end. “Well. What about Minseok? He’s still around, right? You seem pretty close to him. Tell me about that.”

Luhan snorts. “Minseok is… He’s great, he really is. He’s just a little… I don’t know. He just sort of goes with the flow, and it’s usually nice, but then things like that night happen, and you just wish he’d stand up for something, for once in his life. You wish he’d…” Sehun can almost hear when Luhan’s teeth meet his lip. It’s nearly a second nature at this point. “You wish he’d stand up for you most of all, or something like that. That’s what I wanted from him. But I guess after what I did that night…”

“You did something?” Sehun breaks in without thinking, and he wishes that he could clamp his mouth shut because Luhan’s face looks like a maraschino cherry. “I mean… I didn’t mean to—”

“No, it’s okay,” Luhan breathes, smiling tightly. “I did. I did something stupid that I shouldn’t have, and that’s why I don’t really want to see Minseok. I think I… I really messed up with him. Like, we’re pretty fucked for next year, I’d bet money on it. So if you ever meet him, and everything is awkward…” He swallows, chipping a portion of his fingernail off with shaking hands. “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you, anyways.”

“I can deal with awkward,” Sehun assures him vacantly, coughing a little to dislodge the tension from his voice. “I’ve dealt with awkward basically every day of my life.”

Luhan laughs a little. It’s still strained. “Yeah, sure.”

There’s a vexing silence in the air now, and Sehun misses Luhan’s babble, so starts to prod him again. “Well…” And then he can’t think of anything to say worth talking about. Luhan regards him with expectant eyes, still overcast with Minseok, and Sehun panics for a second before blurting, “What about when you were a kid?”

The second it comes out, he knows he shouldn’t have said anything at all. He knows he should stop him before he starts because he really, really can’t handle hearing that kind of stuff now. Hey, how about you don’t, okay? But he doesn’t. Because just the mention of childhood makes Luhan brighten, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

“Well, there were a bunch of kids in my neighborhood that I was close to,” he starts, and there’s a dreamy look in his eyes. Sehun wonders if he looks like that when he thinks about that neighborhood. He’s pretty sure he just resembles a kicked puppy. “Oh, man, I loved those kids. I was the oldest, so I took care of them. Like a real dad!” Luhan’s chest puffs out, and Sehun snorts.

“Or a real mom.”

Luhan ignores him, eyes cast somewhere over the hills, to something Sehun can’t see. “There was…Jongin. He used to run around catching everything, even stupid things. Like balls of dandelion fluff, or fall leaves that got blown off their branches. He liked animals a lot, though. I think he had to have had at least twenty jars and boxes where he kept all kinds of them.” Luhan’s chuckling now, and Sehun is right there with him because he knows for a fact that Jongin had exactly thirty-two, and he was damned proud of it. Luhan sighs then, looking more than a little pensive. “He moved out when I graduated. I was going to college, so I wouldn’t have seen him much anyways, but… I miss him a lot. I hear he went to America somewhere, to uni. He texts me sometimes, but not much. He doesn’t have much time for that kind of thing anymore.”

Sehun remembers a Jongin who always had time. He can’t remember a single instance where Jongin was alone that he wasn’t lying on his bed, staring up at his ceiling, just waiting for Sehun to get there so they could go out and corner rats together.

“And then there’s Tao. Good Lord, that kid is a wreck.” It sounds harsh, in concept, but Luhan says it so affectionately that Sehun finds himself nodding in agreement. Yep, that kid was a total nutjob. In the best way. “He bullied people with one

of his mom’s purses. He used to fill it with rocks and hit them. He said that was what all good geologists did when their theories were brought into question—” Luhan clutches his sides, his smile so wide that it looks like it’s about to catch up with the stretch of his cheeks and jump right off his face. Sehun keeps his eyes on the road, but his heart is swelling with nostalgia. He remembers back when Tao had wanted to study rocks – right up to the point that he decided rocks were dirty and revoked his desires. “Tao…he had you convinced he was the most innocent creature to grace planet Earth one second, and by the next, he was kicking your ass with nothing but two stones attached to string and his soul. He’s been trying to launch a modeling career for a handful of years now.” Luhan shrugs and shoots Sehun an impish grin. “He has a pretty nice collection of hats. I’ll give him that.”

“Better than stones,” Sehun laughs. “He sounds like the kind of person that plays with dolls and kicks your shins when you’re mean to him.”

“Exactly!” Luhan claps his hands together. Sehun feels sort of like he’s cheated, but Luhan’s cheering makes it seem a little better. “You’re a true character analyst, through and through. Are you sure you weren’t meant to be a psychologist instead of a fast food clerk?”

“I’m really bad at both those things, so I think I’d say I’m not either of them.” Sehun is pretty sure they’ve long since passed where they were supposed to get off – in fact, he’s completely sure because he saw a sign for a totally different city about a mile and a half back – but Luhan is so full of vitality that he’s afraid to stop him.

Besides, he hasn’t mentioned the name he most wants to hear him say.

“I knew a Jongdae, too. That little troll. He heard about imps stealing half of your pairs of socks once, so he decided to cut everyone’s briefs in half and say that the imps stole half of those, too. When I found out, I smeared peanut butter on mine. That little punk was allergic to peanuts.”

“You could have killed him!” Sehun accuses with a laugh. He remembers that – Jongdae had a rash along his arm for a week and a half, and Luhan had a self-satisfied smirk the size of Canada for a month longer.

Luhan waves him off. “I knew it wouldn’t. He wasn’t all closed-lungs and red-eyes allergic to it. It just irritated his skin. And he got me back, anyways, when he emptied a can of anchovies into my backpack one day.” Luhan smiles softly. “Jongdae was my only friend in high school. He was two years younger than me, though, so my first couple years were pretty awful.” He screws up his face in thought. “I was…sort of a black sheep.”

Sehun glances ahead of them in search for a turnaround. “A horse of a different color?”

“Yeah,” Luhan smiles softly. “You know, my mom used to say that a lot.”

Sehun neglects to respond that he already knows.

Sehun gets off on an exit he doesn’t recognize. Luhan doesn’t notice. “Are you still friends with Jongdae?”

Luhan gives him a melancholy smile. “We don’t talk much anymore,” he says. “He doesn’t exactly like what I’m doing with my life right now.”

“What? Going to college? Getting an education?”

“Nah,” Luhan responds. “He doesn’t like that I’m ‘wasting my education’ painting the town red. You know – partying and stuff. He thinks it’s stupid, and that you can’t possibly succeed if you do it.” He brushes his bangs out of his eyes, twisting his nose like a rabbit. Sehun finds it hard to believe that Luhan spends most of his time guzzling alcohol and still manages to look this innocent. “The kid is too pure. I don’t think he knows yet that you can be good and bad. He still thinks it’s one or the other, not both. Black and white, even though the rest of the world is in Technicolor.” Luhan waves his hand indifferently, nearly socking Sehun in the face and neglecting to apologize when he flinches out of the way. “He can do what he wants. I still make fine grades, and it’s not like I’m driving my car into walls or getting a thousand STDs or something.”

“You did get left on the side of the road the other night,” Sehun starts cautiously, looking to Luhan to gauge his expression. Luhan’s face doesn’t really change.

“You’re right,” Luhan acknowledges. “But that’s not because of my lifestyle. That’s because of my terrible choice in company.”

“Maybe you should try talking to Jongdae again, then. He sounds like the better kind of company.”

Luhan smiles at him. “Right again,” he confirms. “I’ll just need to find some excuse to.”

“You never need an excuse for old friends,” Sehun says quietly. Luhan peers at him curiously, and Sehun wonders if the trepidation in his voice has given himself away. Pot calling the kettle black. He quickly continues, “Is that all of your friends?”

Luhan stares harder. “No, it isn’t,” he says, not moving his gaze off Sehun. Sehun can feel his eyes traveling down his face, his neck, resting on his shoulders

before continuing to his flexed fingers. Luhan clears his throat. “Did you have any childhood friends?”

“None that I can think of,” Sehun responds passively. Luhan somehow doesn’t look convinced. “Who’re the other friends of yours?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Am I not allowed to know about the tenants in my household?”

Luhan looks troubled, but he doesn’t argue with Sehun’s reasoning. “There’s… There’s one more.”

“What was his name?”

Luhan reaches out and brushes the back of Sehun’s hand. He jumps and draws it back from its place on the gear change, finally glancing at Luhan. Luhan’s eyes are blazing, even as the rest of his face wrenches in distress, and Sehun doesn’t know why.

“It wasn’t a he,” Luhan retorts, and Sehun’s stomach drops. “It was a girl. She was my best friend in the entire world.”

Sehun remembers those same words from the night Luhan was drunk and disoriented. He’d said that Sehun was his best friend in the entire world then. He isn’t sure which Luhan to believe.

“What was her name, then?” Sehun asks, licking his lips. He cautiously resettles his hand back on the stick shift, gripping the ball tightly between his fingers to keep them from shaking. Luhan doesn’t move his eyes from him, even after Sehun returns his gaze to the road stretching in front of them. He does beam at his sudden interest, however, sliding smugly back into his seat.

“Her name was Sehun, and she was the biggest idiot I ever knew, but she was my yeodongsaeng and I loved her more than I’ve ever loved any other person.”

Sehun makes a strangled sound that he immediately wishes he could take back. Luhan turns his attention outside of the window, and Sehun can’t tell if he’s ignoring his obvious distress or if he is too fixated by the scenery flashing by his window to hear him. This is the kind of thing people say that results in a spit take, Sehun thinks, but he can only sputter with a dry mouth. “Her?”

Luhan doesn’t respond, and Sehun realizes that was probably not the reaction he should have had. He backtracks as fast as he can, continuing, “You mentioned a Sehun when I took you to the wrong house, but you called him a ‘him’ at the time, so I’m a little confused—”

“You took me to the wrong house?” Luhan’s eyes are wide now, and he looks moderately perplexed. “When did that happen?”

Relieved that Luhan didn’t entirely catch him misspeak, he continues. “Yeah. You took me to a neighborhood and tried to get into this house with a pretty cranky old man in it. It had a tree stump next to it, and the man yelled at you as if you’d been there before—”

Luhan groans and hides his face. “Let me guess. Directly after that, in my hilariously drunken stupor, I tried to go to another house, claiming it was Sehun’s.”

“Basically.” Sehun pauses. “Has this…happened before?”

“Way too many times to count.” Luhan curls up, hugging his legs to his chest. “Every time. Every single time I get too drunk, I end up back there.”

Sehun quiets, probably long enough for Luhan to think that he’d forgotten they were in the middle of a conversation. “You know, this kind of thing is exactly the reason why psychology majors exist.”

“Are you one?” Luhan asks, not moving his face from between his knees.

“No,” Sehun replies. “I’m a nothing major. But I know enough about it to say that that’s definitely some psychoanalytic shit.”

“Undecided?” Luhan persists, and Sehun is fully aware that he’s trying to get the attention off himself. Curiosity is burning in his chest. He glances at Luhan, whose terrible posture is writing volumes about inner turmoil, and he inwardly sighs.

“No. I don’t go to college. I finished high school and decided that I had had enough of education for one lifetime.”

“Why?” Luhan asks with a small smile. “Was your dream getting free fast food burgers every lunch break for the rest of your life?”

“You say that as if I actually trust the food I serve. The last time I ate there, I threw up for three straight hours.”

Luhan snickers. “Sounds like a treat. I want to go sometime.”

“Unless you have a stomach of steel, I can’t allow you to do that.”

“I do. Years of near-alcohol poisoning have turned my digestive system into a god.”

“I watched you puke your guts up on the side of the road. I don’t think your stomach is ready for sacrificial worship yet.”

Luhan doesn’t have any comeback to that, so he sticks his tongue out, and Sehun thinks of Jongdae’s “I’m rubber and you’re glue” and wishes he could have been their best friend through high school, too. He thinks that he could have stopped Luhan from going down whatever path he’s treading now. He thinks he could have kept him from messing up with Minseok and hanging out with doucheboy in the front seat that Sehun doesn’t want to put a name to. He thinks he could have changed both their lives, if only he’d stayed. If only he’d been able to.

But then he glances at Luhan, still basking in the glow of sunshine and fresh banter, and he decides that it’s not too late to start saving him again.

They pull up to the park about twenty minutes later, when Luhan remembers he’s supposed to be the navigator (“Wow, we are way off course”) and directs Sehun to a proper parking place. He stretches like a cat when he steps out into the sunlight, turning his face up towards the sky and marveling at everything. He’d said that he’d come there often as a kid, but the way Luhan looks at everything makes Sehun wonder if it’s somehow new to him. He glances around, trying to find all the unfamiliar corners of it.

The slides are dull red, the plastic floors of the jungle gym dull blue. The connecting tubes are spotted with chipping pieces of freckled yellow paint, and the rectangular fence denoting the parameters of the playground guard a mosaic of flaked brown lumber that cling to Luhan’s shoes when he hops into them. Trees surround them on all sides, an army of deep green hues met with coffee-colored bark that stand alert under the careful watch of the sky. The sun filters through openings between leaves turned up as if it’s going to rain later, and Luhan pauses every few steps to examine the places where it kisses his skin. Sehun tries to find clouds in the sky, but there aren’t any – only warm air and the damp humidity of Korean spring, lusting along the lines of a storm.

Sehun shoves his hands in his pockets, waiting for Luhan’s attention to be diverted from the sights, and sure enough, the second they’re near enough to see the monkey bars, he makes a beeline for them. He climbs two rungs of the ladder to reach them and takes a wild leap to the second one, grinning as his body’s momentum casts him back and forth. Sehun shakes his head, but when Luhan calls him over to him, he obediently follows.

Sehun can reach them if he stands on his tiptoes, but Luhan is still just barely short enough to swing, so they invent a game of Ape Versus Bear, where Sehun is assigned the job of roaring and Luhan pretends to eat bananas from his feet. Sehun wins due to what Luhan claims is “unfair gravitational advantage;” Sehun says bears

could maul the crap out of monkeys any day of the week, get over it, it’s the will of the gods. Luhan reminds him that his stomach is a god and rules in favor of himself, and Sehun tells him to shove a banana in it.

Around the time that they’ve deteriorated to “your mom” jokes, they’ve begun moving towards the rest of the playground. There are kids there, but Luhan’s braying frightens them off in a hurry. Sehun laughs as they tug at their mom’s sleeves and point nervously. Mommy, who’s the loud man? He sounds like he’s dying. Luhan is hilariously oblivious, so Sehun starts telling bad joke after bad joke to keep him sounding like a native going into war (“Hey, there’s this guy with a wooden leg named Smith, but he doesn’t know what to name his other leg!” and “What did the covers say when they fell off the bed? Oh, SHEET!”). Luhan is drowning in his own drool, wiping spittle from his face, and when Sehun tells him to stop because it’s gross, he only giggles louder and chases him with his finger.

Needless to say, the kids keep their distance.

They climb up the slides, sniggering at their rebellion (“It’s like going up the down escalator!” Luhan croons, and Sehun is pretty sure it’s less hardcore but he doesn’t argue), and Luhan chastises Sehun for trying to crawl through the connecting tubes when any real adventurer would climb over them.

“When you slide off and fall the nine feet to the ground, I’m going to leave you there with your broken ankles,” Sehun warns as Luhan sits atop the cylinder, swaying back and forth like a tree in a windstorm. Luhan gives him about the most shit-eating grin he can possibly manage and waves him off.

“I’ve got ankles of pure gold, wrought in the fires of the Skyforge, and no measly nine foot fall can shatter me.” He leans too far to one side and almost loses his balance. Sehun, without thinking, reaches out over the tube and grabs his flailing wrist, to which Luhan sheepishly brushes him off after regaining his center of gravity. “I’m fine, I’m fine. You act like I’ve never put myself in perilous situations before.”

“I’m not saying you haven’t. I’m just saying that you’re toeing the line between ‘perilous’ and ‘life-threatening.’”

Sehun dutifully bends his body into the tunnel and shuffles forward on his elbows and knees, grimacing at the pressure. He flips out the other side onto his back (wouldn’t Tao be proud of my wushu skills), and Luhan is already there, smiling self-righteously and brushing off perfectly clean shoulders. “See? Much more efficient, taking risks every now and then.”

“I take risks,” Sehun pouts, idly scratching his belly from under his shirt. Luhan’s eyes narrow, then widen, almost unnoticeably. Sehun immediately tugs his shirt back down, suddenly feeling all too embarrassed, and Luhan averts his eyes, shading them with a hand and pointing out into the distance.

“Look!” he exclaims, and his voice is a little dense, but it’s easy enough to pass off as a trick of the ears. “There’s a swingset down there! Those are my favorite.”

Sehun knows that’s not true – Luhan’s favorite has always been the spinny thing, the merry-go-round without horses – but he accepts it as a means of transition anyways. He pulls himself up into a sitting position, tucking his arms in between his legs. “Should we go, then?”

“Duh,” Luhan replies, grabbing Sehun’s arm and pulling until he’s up on his feet and pattering down the narrow ramp of the jungle gym. As they approach the swingset, Luhan drifts unconsciously toward the diaper swings that moms use for their infants. Sehun snickers.

“You may have bird legs, but I still don’t think they’ll fit into that,” he comments, toying with one of the holes of the swing Luhan isn’t currently clambering into. Luhan grunts in response, carefully lowering himself to a squat inside the little chair and wrapping his arms around his knees. He sits like that, giving Sehun a defiant look that dares him to shove him off.

Sehun resists, mostly because he’s never seen something so comical in his entire life.

“I used to be scared of falling off swings,” Luhan says defensively. “So I used the baby swings with the little leg security, just to make sure I wouldn’t die, even when I was, like, eleven.”

“Except you’re in your twenties now,” Sehun says, taking up residence in the normal swing beside him. He absorbs himself in kicking his legs out and in, back and forth, in steady rhythm, until he’s leagues in the air. Luhan’s voice gets louder and softer as he passes him like a pendulum.

“Not at heart,” he mumbles, fitting his legs through the holes of his diaper chair and attempting to copy Sehun. His legs are constricted, though, thighs bloated against the circular edges, so he gives up and toes at the ground with his shoe instead. “I skipped my entire childhood, anyways, so I guess I’ve sort of reverted since then.”

“Skipped how?” Sehun calls from up in the air, turning his head in Luhan’s direction as he falls back down to earth. Luhan reaches out and grabs one of the metal chains, and Sehun yelps as he’s twisted by the impact. Luhan is dragged back, but he

lets go just in time to avoid dislocating his arm, snickering as Sehun struggles to regain his fluid forward motion.

“Skipped as in… I dunno. I grew up pretty fast, all at once.”

Sehun skids the soles of his sneakers into the ground to slow himself, carefully straightening his line of movement as his swing crawls to a stop. “How?” he repeats, shoving his heel into the playground woodchips.

“I just…got into some rough stuff. When I was about thirteen or fourteen.” He glances down at his hands, inspecting them as if they were some kind of germ under a microscope. “It started with alcohol, and it peaked a little in my first year, but I managed to simmer down before I killed myself with it all.”

“Why did you do it?” And Sehun isn’t sure if he’s fishing, but Luhan looks so strangely open, as if he’s prepared himself for any question Sehun can ask and is willing to answer them all. He doesn’t look scared, at least – mildly restless, but not scared.

“I’ve been trying to forget,” he says. “Everything. Remembering sucks. I don’t want to do it anymore.” He stares quizzically at his palms. “I’ve almost entirely forgotten his face,” he murmurs, looking a little amazed at himself. He traces some pattern on his hand. Sehun vaguely thinks that it looks sort of like a head. “I’ve almost completely forgotten what he looks like.”

Sehun pretends he doesn’t know who he’s talking about. He changes the subject before he can be reminded. “Remembering is the only way to keep your old life, though.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Luhan says, shaking his head. “It’s not going to come back. There’s no point in asking it to.”

Sehun bites his lip, but he doesn’t continue. “And now you’re…reverting?” The word comes out in a wobble because Sehun vividly remembers every ounce of color that had been drained from Luhan’s face the first night they had re-met.

“Sort of.” Luhan slides his legs back out of the holes with some effort, settling back down like a bird on its nest. “I still…do it, sometimes, but it’s college, and I’m legal now. Of course I’m going to drink.” He glances at Sehun knowingly, nodding his head towards him. “It’s not like you’re legal, anyways, and you still have beer under your bed. I see right through you.”

“I’ve had those for months and still haven’t opened them,” Sehun muses. “They were a…going away gift. From someone.”

Luhan shrugs. “Same difference.” He hops out of his swing, wandering over to Sehun. He tugs at the chain impatiently. “Let’s go look at the flowers.”

Sehun doesn’t move at first. After a while, Luhan quits tugging, and his eyes drift down to the empty expanse that is Sehun’s thigh. He stares at it calculatedly, eyebrows wiggling. If he’d had a beard, Sehun is sure he’d be stroking it by now.

He angles himself suddenly and hops onto Sehun’s lap, settling down into the space where his knees part and pressing a cheek into Sehun’s chest. He glances up with adoring eyes, clasping his hands together in a silent plea.

Sehun is out of the swing in an instant.

Luhan skips ahead as Sehun brushes at his thighs, as if trying to get rid of dirt. (He’s really trying to get rid of the tingles by his knees, the electricity galloping through his blood stream, but he finally decides that it’s not something he can remove through touch alone and follows after.)

Sehun stops when they reach an open field a couple minutes away from the park. He leans against a lone tree bent against the invisible outskirts of the expanse and watches as Luhan’s eyes widen and glimmer with awe. There are blossoms as far as the eye can see, in coral rows and tangerine bushels and periwinkle columns snaking up trees, and Sehun has been many places in his life, but he’s never seen one this radiant and full of color. Luhan takes off running, and Sehun about loses his lunch laughing because the kid is actually frolicking through the flowers. Luhan hears him and scurries back over, dragging him from the tree and whirling him around by the wrists. Sehun shakes him off several times, but each time, he grabs hold of him again and spins them with even more fervor, laugh growing into a loud shriek of excitement until Sehun finds himself crowing with him like a wild parrot and chasing him across the grass. Sehun jumps on him from behind, wrapping his arms around him, and drags them both to the ground. They collapse into giggles, and Luhan rolls over to look at the sky again, trapping Sehun’s arm under the small of his back. Sehun doesn’t mind at all, even when his entire body locks up and screams for mobility.

Luhan lolls his head to one side toward Sehun, and at first, Sehun just stares at him. He studies the slope of his brow, thick with untrimmed hairs, and the subtle upturn of his nose. He sees the bags under his eyes, the tiredness marking his features even after thirteen and a half hours’ worth of naps, but his face is rich with youth, with energy, with spirit and exuberance that could fool even the keenest of people into thinking he was always this charged. His cheeks rise to heights unheard of when he smiles, and he has an overbite when he laughs too hard, but Sehun is too distracted by wondering how a single person’s teeth can be so perfectly lined. His neck has more surface area than

any other part of his body, and the tips of his ears are soft and pressed so close to his head that Sehun almost can’t see them past tufts of shaggy hair.

Sehun has never been so torn between the features of someone’s face. He feels his gaze reaching for all of them, trying to focus on everything all at once, memorizing Luhan’s face in every instance that it exists because even the most miniscule of differences between moments is monumental in Sehun’s mind. He can’t imagine missing a single expression, a change in the glisten of his eye or the stretch in the corner of his lip, so he watches.

Luhan becomes aware of it all at once, though, and although only a second has passed since they met eyes, Luhan rolls his head over in the other direction. He reaches his arm out as far as he can before letting it thump to the ground, pointer finger outstretched. “There’s a group of dandelions over there.”

“Where?” Sehun asks, propping himself up by the shoulder and leaning over Luhan’s chest. Luhan shrinks from underneath him and scrambles to his feet, plodding over in the direction of a group of flowers. He squats down and observes them, sliding a finger over their stems.

Sehun military crawls after him. Luhan glances up only long enough to snort before turning back to his discovery. When Sehun catches up with him, he immediately reaches to pick one of the dandelions.

Luhan promptly smacks his hand away. Sehun withdraws in amusement.

“I’m sorry, did I hurt your friend?” he asks. “I apologize profusely to all my brethren dandelions. I meant no harm, only death.”

“Shut up,” Luhan warns, but his tone is playful. He coasts a finger over the dandelion’s seeds, soft enough not to disturb them.

“Don’t you ever blow them out?” Sehun asks, rolling back onto his back and folding his hands over his bellybutton. Luhan nods.

“I do,” he says, still riveted to the dandelion. Sehun wonders if he’d signed adoption papers for it or something while he was on his way over. “But I don’t pick them to do it. You can just…blow them out as is. Like the wind.” As if in demonstration, Luhan flattens himself onto his belly, levelling his lips with the base of the dandelion. Sehun watches with keen interest because he hasn’t seen Luhan with puckered lips yet, or Luhan with his eyes crossed, or Luhan on the cusp of making wishes. He blows out, and all the seeds scatter but one, each one held suspended in air by rays of sunshine and the color of foliage. Luhan frowns at the remaining seed.

“I don’t get my wish now,” he complains, pushing himself up onto his arms to watch the others float off. Sehun scoots closer, bumping into Luhan’s shoulder in the process. He lines up his mouth with the dandelion and blows as hard as he can, until the last seed dislodges itself and chases after its siblings. Sehun nudges Luhan, looking pleased with himself.

“I wished that you’d get your wish,” he says, glancing up at Luhan proudly. He’s surprised to see a reflection of panic in his eyes. Luhan bites his lip and looks off after the seeds, each one slowly drifting down to be swallowed up by blades of grass and strewn pebbles. Sehun doesn’t miss how his face is overcast with bloodrush, or how his fingers are twisted in the hem of his shirt. Luhan clears his throat, so Sehun sits up beside him.

“It doesn’t count because it wasn’t a full one anyways,” he mutters. “Nice try, dandelion boy.”

Sehun snorts. “Why am I the dandelion boy? You’re the one who takes pictures of them and defends their honor and stuff.”

“I can’t be the boy. I’m the dandelion.”

Sehun licks his lips slowly in thought, tilting his head curiously. “So… You’re the dandelion, and I’m the boy?”

“Literally what I just said.” Luhan flicks at him lightly, but he still doesn’t touch him. “So don’t kill me, asshole.”

“I’ll try my best, but no promises,” Sehun teases. “A man of such power can only hold back so much.” Luhan only smiles weakly back, looking for all the world like a child shaken by war. Sehun loops his arms through Luhan’s, making a chain out of the bend of their elbows, and Luhan looks surprisingly uncomfortable. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Luhan says, glancing at where they interlock. “Everything is just…a little too right.”

“Isn’t that something to celebrate?”

Luhan shifts his weight, leaning onto the arm that isn’t tethered to Sehun’s side. “The last time things were this right, I lost a lot of my life.”

“Well someone sounds like they’ve been listening to a little too much punk rock.” Sehun starts wailing into his fist as if it were a microphone, and Luhan finally smiles at the same time that he socks a good one into Sehun’s arm. Sehun tries to unlock himself, but Luhan squeezes him tighter between his forearm and his bicep, sticking out his tongue.

“As long as I’m not cursing my dad into a mic, I think I’m safe from the teen angst phase of my life.”

“You’re never safe from that. Never.”

“Considering your swoopy hair and minimum wage, I’d say you’re the one still stuck there.” Luhan thumps his chest proudly. “I, on the other hand, am a proud almost-graduate.”

Sehun thinks of a million comebacks right off the bat – a proud almost-SHAT-uate, haha, get it, it’s funny because you suck – but he (somehow) manages to keep them to himself. Instead, he looks Luhan dead in the eyes and says, “I’m proud of you, too.”

Luhan tries to keep his grin secret, but Sehun sees it spread the second he turns away. Sehun doesn’t think he’s fooling anyone.

Sehun thinks he’s fooling himself, though.

(He waits until they’re chased back to the car by the threat of an imminent rainstorm, opening the passenger’s side for Luhan and tucking him into his seatbelt as his back is shadowed by clouds rolling in overhead. It isn’t until after he closes the door that he lets himself have his own.)

On the ride back, Sehun mentions visiting Luhan’s dorm to pick up some clothes, just in case he’s planning on staying for a while. “I noticed you rewashing your dirty underwear in my bathroom sink,” he comments, “and I don’t want it near the place I wash my face every morning. It could have gunk on it.”

Luhan tightens up instead of taking the bait, all the mirth dissipating. He plays with the corner of a plastic water bottle, eliciting a steady crinkling sound that helps Sehun focus on both the road and the prognostic features of Luhan’s face at the same time.

“Will you come with me?” Luhan asks unsurely, clenching and unclenching his little fists. Sehun glances over at him and notes the way he is hunched over, eyes trained on his lap.

“I have to work,” Sehun says slowly. Luhan closes his eyes and takes a deep, silent breath that Sehun still manages to hear.

“That’s alright. That’s fine. I understand.” He pauses, forcing a smile, but his knuckles are still white with strain. “I’ll manage. I’ll go when Minseok isn’t there, and…”

“I can go after work,” Sehun exclaims before he can stop himself. “Or during. They don’t even care, anyways. My boss is a doormat.”

Luhan laughs, and it sounds like a cheese grater running across a car door, but at least that means it isn’t faked. “You don’t have to skip out of work. It’s really not a big deal, I’m just…”

“Worried?” Sehun shrugs as Luhan bites his lip in confirmation. “You always seem to be worried about something. It’s up to me to stop that.”

Luhan smiles behind his hands. “After work, then?”

“It’s a deal.” Sehun almost says date, but he stops himself just in time to fix his wording. His face gets hot either way. He wonders if Luhan would have even reacted at all. He wonders if he would have said yes, or pretended it wasn’t a slip of the tongue, or smiled the shy smile he’s adopted whenever Sehun says something particularly stupid.

Sehun wonders if Luhan ever wonders at all. Luhan doesn’t notice any of it. He has already turned his attention out the window, where it has started to rain.

기억 – VI

잊다 2001-9-27

“Sometimes,I think Tao is one of my favorite people.

I don’t think about him sometimes.Maybe because he stays in his room

to study thingsthat I think are kind of dumb,

like mathand how to stay alive in hand-to-hand combat.

Then,he kicks Jongdae’s butt

with nunchucks that he made out ofsticks and string,

and I decidethat he’s definitely one of my favorite people.

And I wonderhow I ever sometimes forgot.”

It takes a couple more weeks to convince Luhan of the necessity of going to his dorm. He’s started wearing all of Sehun’s hoodies and sweatpants, lounging around the house with his hands in the pockets. Whenever he ventures out with Sehun into the outside world, he wears shower shoes or Sehun’s powder blue old man slippers, shrugging when Sehun gives him looks of disapproval. Sehun swears he’s started using his toothbrush because there’s no way his teeth can stay that immaculate with only the smooth node of his pointer finger, especially after drinking as much coffee as he does. Luhan also admits that he’s been flying blind in his classes because all of his textbooks are back in his room.

Sehun walks in on Luhan one day washing his underwear in the sink again, only this time, it’s the kitchen sink, and he’s completely naked save for a pair of Sehun’s boxers. That’s about the time that Sehun decides that force is necessary.

Luhan doesn’t protest when Sehun arrives home and doesn’t even change out of his work clothes before announcing that today’s the day, get up and stop being a bum, soldier. He doesn’t protest when Sehun pulls him off the couch by the wrist and throws him a pair of real person shoes, or when Sehun confiscates his half-full coffee cup (probably his third of the hour) and tosses it in the sink. Sehun expects more lip than he gets, so when Luhan buckles himself into the seat obediently and smiles at Sehun, he regards him warily. “I thought you were scared of going on this trip,” he asks.

Luhan thinks for a bit, wrinkling his nose. “No,” he finally says, meeting Sehun’s eyes. “I think I’d only be scared if you weren’t there.”

There’s something way too familiar about that line.

Déjà vu can be pretty weird sometimes, Sehun thinks as he pulls back out onto the road and Luhan begins a story.

Luhan drifts between periods of cheerful wakefulness and introspective silence, staring out the window with hooded eyes. Sehun nudges him during those times, and he responds immediately to the touch, smiling again and launching into some topic that’s probably unrelated to what he was thinking two seconds prior. This is how Sehun keeps him distracted, and even though he’s fairly sure it’s not the most effective way of helping, it’s the best he can think of. Luhan appreciates it, anyways; by the time they arrive, he’s curled in a ball, but he looks a lot happier, at least. He glances at Sehun every minute or so, as if confirming he’s still there, that they’re still in this together and he isn’t going to get left behind like he did that night. Sehun meets his eyes when he’s properly parked, and Luhan’s pupils dilate as if trying to take in all the light around Sehun’s face.

Luhan’s fingers twitch towards him before retracting just as swiftly. Sehun gets out of the car before they have the chance to change their mind.

Luhan hops out of the car directly afterwards with his normal amount of tired energy, mouth running a thousand miles an hour and eyelids drooping as if ready to close at any minute, but the second they get into his dorm’s looming shadow, he cowers and freezes in his steps. He peers up at the immaculate stone walls, round eyes crossing, and it’s almost as if he’s curled into a ball standing up because he visibly shrinks at the sight of it. Sehun stops a few paces ahead of him, turning back when he realizes Luhan is no longer following him.

“I don’t want to go anymore,” Luhan says. His voice sounds like a fist tapping on an empty pot – hollow, and echoing in Sehun’s head. “I changed my mind. I can live off what’s in your apartment. I’ll wash the clothes I have on, and I’ll pay you for the detergent later, I’ve got enough money saved up to last another month—”

“Luhan,” Sehun stops him, and he feels a strange jolt go through him at the taste of his name. Luhan quiets, giving his attention to Sehun, but he still looks alarmed. “There’s no way I’m letting you go another month wearing my intimates.”

“It was one time,” Luhan groans in response. “I didn’t even know they were yours.”

“Who else would they belong to? The brief gnomes?”

And Luhan snickers at that, but he still backsteps until he’s back in the sun. Sehun sighs and follows close behind. “You’ve… We’ve got to do this eventually. We’re already here. Why are you still worried?”

Luhan scratches at his arm. “I just…am.”

“Why?” Sehun persists. Luhan is white as bedroom sheets. He presses his lips into a thin line, seeming to toy with the notion of speaking, before finally opening his mouth.

“I don’t want Minseok to see me,” he admits falteringly under his breath. “I don’t want him to give me that…that ‘I-kicked-a-puppy’ look.”

“Luhan—” Sehun starts, but Luhan has already gotten going. He’s trembling and rubbing his hands together as if he’s trying to get warm, even as the sun beats down on his back, and his eyes are flickering from Sehun’s face to the dorm and back so fast that they almost look blurred. Sehun takes a step forward, but Luhan doesn’t seem to notice. He just keeps rattling off disconnected sentences, worry lines sinking deeper and deeper into his face.

“I don’t want him to pity me. I don’t want him to stand there all awkward and say nothing. I don’t want him to try to defend himself or defend anyone else, and I don’t want him to act like nothing happened. I don’t want him to say that he’s sorry, or to say he’s not, either, and I don’t want him to expect an apology from me because I fucked up, sure, but I’m not sorry about it.”

“Luhan,” Sehun says again, because the more Luhan speaks, the more he shudders. He takes another step forward.

“I don’t want to even be around him,” Luhan chokes out past precarious tears, “because nothing he says or does will make anything better at all. I don’t even want to exist. I don’t want—”

He stops then, but only because Sehun has wrapped his arms around his stomach and is awkwardly shoving his face into his shoulder to make him quit talking. It takes Luhan a minute longer to really trail off, but when he does, he’s completely still. Sehun feels even gawkier than before, so he coughs and shrugs and holds the bends of his elbows out so they don’t touch Luhan’s sides, but he doesn’t let go. “You’re worrying again,” he manages when he can iron out something to say that doesn’t sound totally inane. “The whole point of me coming is so you won’t worry.”

Luhan laughs, and it’s nails on chalkboard, but Sehun can hear the chiming of sleighbells underneath it. “Worry is like my second skin. I’m not a snake, Kyungsoo. I can’t just molt out of it.”

Sehun pinches his arm. “I can pull it off for you, y’know,” he taunts, and Luhan breaks the embrace to swat at him. Sehun runs at first, but Luhan is faster than he is – he always has been. Sehun had hated tag when he was younger because when he was it, Luhan always lingered just far enough away, an arm’s length from his fingertips.

Sehun finally chooses to stand his ground and block Luhan’s heavy palms from his face, grabbing his wrists and keeping them engaged at his sides.

Luhan smiles and makes little noises of dissent at first, but after Sehun holds him motionless for long enough, his face falls into the same seriousness that he gets when news anchors announce murder victims. He locks onto Sehun’s eyes, and it reminds Sehun of video game missile launches. He wonders if Luhan sees a little red target on his face or if he always has that glint in his eyes when he looks at people.

Luhan opens and closes his mouth to speak three times before he can get anything out. It’s like a thumbtack in Sehun’s heart when the only word he can manage is a name that’s not even his. “Kyungsoo.”

“Yeah?” Sehun feels like it would be a good idea to release Luhan’s arms because Luhan is giving him a look that he hasn’t gotten in a long time, but he doesn’t. He feels like he should break eye contact, too, because he’s one hundred percent sure that every swirling emotion is being communicated in an electric line stemming from his line of vision to Luhan’s, but he doesn’t do that, either. Instead, he coughs. And then he shrugs. Because that’s what Sehun does when he can’t think at all.

“If I… If I asked you to stay with me for a while, would you run away?”

That’s the crash it takes to tailspin Sehun back into reality, and he lets go of Luhan in order to awkwardly scratch his neck and glance anywhere but at his face. “We just met,” he reminds him, knowing that’s not even remotely true.

Luhan starts shaking a little again, so Sehun tethers himself back to his arm. Luhan smiles wanly at the pressure. “It just…doesn’t feel like it, is all.”

Sehun shrugs. “I can give you that.” Then, before he can think about it, he manages, “I’ll never leave.”

He tugs Luhan along without giving him the chance to respond, despite his dragging feet. Luhan catches up after a while, and Sehun forces himself to glance in his direction. He looks even more perplexed than before. Sehun isn’t sure what reaction he had intended to elicit, but that one doesn’t feel right.

How many times do I have to talk before I finally say the right thing?

They make it up the elevator to the fourth floor where Luhan lives in silence. Minseok isn’t there when they arrive, and although Luhan is still a little tense, the entire atmosphere gets significantly more comfortable when they find that they’re alone. Luhan starts packing things up immediately, humming to himself while Sehun marches through the tiny flat.

Sections of it are painstakingly neat. When Sehun peeks in the cupboard, he notices that there are several different types of teas, all sorted by flavor. The tabletops have been thoroughly dusted, and the silverware in their little drawers is so well-organized that Sehun briefly wonders if Kyungsoo has a second job as this dorm’s personal maid. The carpets still have marks from a vacuum, and there’s a bookshelf in the corner filled with volumes that are ordered from tallest to shortest.

It takes a little bit of searching to notice the pockets of mess, but Sehun sees them, too, after a while. There are two laundry baskets in the bathroom, and although one of them is laden with tidily folded sweaters and colored shorts, the other is a haphazard mess of jeans and long-sleeved t-shirts spilling out over the top. There’s a buttmark permanently imbued on one half of the futon and a half-empty cup of soda on the nightstand next to it, and when Sehun searches cupboards on the other side of the small kitchen, he notes that they are stuffed with bags of chips and empty candy boxes that spill out when he goes to open them. In one corner, there are two different brands of water bottles – one whose plastic has been torn to shreds and another that has a neat rectangular hole cut at the top – and, in the other corner, next to a paper shredder, is a neglected pile of paper scraps in dire need of attention.

When Luhan returns with two suitcases and a backpack full of things, Sehun is running a finger over the table holding the flat soda, only to find that it is covered with soot-colored dust. “Please tell me you’re the neat roommate,” Sehun grimaces, wiping his finger on the couch cushion.

“Sadly, no,” Luhan grins, tossing a suitcase in Sehun’s direction. “But I promise to treat your apartment with respect. Scout’s honor.”

“Maybe you should just sleep on the front porch. It’s more suited to feral beasts like you.”

“Considering this is coming from the crowned king of bathroom hairballs, I think I am far more entitled to inside quarters than you are.”

Sehun is about to say something back, probably suggesting that Luhan should bow down in the presence of royalty, when he’s suddenly aware of the sound of keys rustling against a locked door. He stops mid-word, ears perked to listen, and Luhan is about to ask him what his deal is when the door opens and his face pales into near-transparency. Sehun glances behind him to see a boy, short and chubby and dressed in khaki slacks that make him look more like a safari explorer than a college student. He tosses his keys on the couch and turns the corner before stopping mid-stride to take in the fact that there are people in his apartment. He reacts slowly – tensing first and rifling through his initial instincts for a proper action to take – before his eyes fall on Luhan and recognition etches itself across his face. Sehun watches the boy’s expression change

from confusion to shock to guilt in the span of an instant, and he opens his mouth to speak but Luhan quickly shoves past him out into the hall. By the time Sehun can react and try to follow behind, he’s already gotten on an elevator and manually closed the doors.

Sehun stares at Luhan’s roommate apologetically and coughs. “Well. This is awkward.”

“Who are you?” Minseok says, and it’s wary and almost denunciatory. Sehun logically knows that he’s guarded because there’s a stranger in his room, but it makes the sudden temptation to punch him no less inviting. Sehun grits his teeth, trying to decide whether it’s Minseok or Luhan he should be interrogating.

“I’m a friend,” he finally answers. “Of Luhan’s.”

“I know all of Luhan’s friends. I don’t know you.”

Sehun winces, but Minseok’s eyes don’t yield. Sehun narrows his own. “Well, I’m a better friend than the ones you know. I’m not the kind to leave him drunk and puking on the side of the road.”

That seems to hit a nerve because Minseok’s demeanor falters, and the guilt that had splayed itself across his face before swiftly returns. “It’s not like that. It’s complicated.”

“The fact that you’re not running after him to apologize says it all.” Sehun fumbles with the suitcases that Luhan has left him with, wishing he’d had the decency to take at least one bag before ditching him to face his tiny, angry roommate alone. “Not that you should do that, anyways. I don’t know what happened between you two, but Luhan doesn’t seem too keen on having you say anything to him right now.”

“If you were his friend, he would have told you,” Minseok hisses in response, but it’s not nearly as intense as it was two minutes ago. When Sehun tries to march past him, bags piled on each other in an unstable, mountainous blob, Minseok grabs his shoulder with one firm hand. The luggage topples. His tone is suddenly pleading. “Wait.”

Sehun shakes him off. “Why should I?”

Minseok doesn’t bite his lip like Luhan does when he’s upset. He doesn’t shrug when he’s awkward, like Sehun. Minseok has no physically apparent tell. His face is smooth, his shoulders are even, and he stands as straight as a pole, puffing out his chest as if trying to make up for the height difference between them. What gives him away is the tremor of his voice – the way it peaks at a falsetto and settles back into a rumbling bass as he speaks. “Because I need to know that Luhan is going somewhere

safe. And I need to know that he knows that he can come back, whenever he wants or needs to.”

“You can trust me when I say he’s going to be in company leagues better than what he’s found for himself here.” Sehun restacks the suitcases that have gone erratic at the abrupt stop, trying to keep his voice level. “And I wouldn’t bet on that with the way you’ve proved the steadfastness of your friendship.”

“I’m not saying I haven’t been a shitty friend,” Minseok spits, and even though it’s obviously heated, Sehun thinks he sounds more distressed than anything else. Sehun stops just long enough to look at the kid, really look, and it’s then that Sehun notices all the layers. He notices the way his shirt is pressed, but the tail of it hangs out from where it’s supposed to be tucked, like he’s too exhausted to fix it. He notices that his shoes are scrubbed clean, but they’re falling apart, peeling away at the edges and ripping along the heel. He notices that his mostly-pressed slacks have untended wrinkles at the bottom, and he notices that the way his face is contorting is bringing out worry lines that are too deep to be new. He compares them to the ones that have carved themselves into Luhan’s face and shivers. It suddenly makes sense that they’re roommates, even with the stark organizational contrast.

What really gets to him is how Minseok is eyeing him with distrust, but also desperation. Sehun thinks of the hungry looks that homeless people in the thick of Seoul’s downtown alleys give him when he walks past. It’s exactly the same.

Minseok’s voice jumps three octaves as he continues. “I’ve been the worst kind of friend. I’ve been misunderstanding, and I’ve been uncommunicative, and I’ve been passive, and I know that. I know I should have handled this differently, but it was all just such a shock, I didn’t know how to react, and then he was getting thrown out before I could even say a word otherwise—”

“What was a shock?” Sehun demands. “What should you have handled differently?”

Minseok’s face darkens, and he takes a step farther inside his home, eyes downcast. “I think he should decide when to tell you. He has that right.” His tone falls to a low murmur, like a babbling brook turned down an interval. “I just don’t want him to think it’s his fault. I don’t want to leave this…this giant scar between us. I think I have that right, too.”

Sehun wants to keep hold of his animosity. He wants to remember the look on Luhan’s face when he raced out of the room, to avenge the pain in the curve of his spine and the flayed skin of his bottom lip, but he’s just noticed the tears falling from behind Minseok’s turned back, and that’s all he can see anymore. There’s no curve in

his spine, and his lips are as untouched as a newborn’s, but there’s pain in the stretch of his skin along white knuckles, and in the glint of fluorescent lights on his bared teeth, and in the wobble of his legs, as if they’re about to buckle. Sehun has never been good with feelings, but he’s always been good at trying, so he sets the luggage aside and pats Minseok’s shoulder with a flat palm. Minseok flinches. Sehun does, too. “I’ll… I’ll convince him to come back, eventually. I’ll tell him how sorry you are. Just give me time, okay? Jesus, stop crying. Go clean something if it’ll make you feel better.”

Minseok gazes at him as if he’s been mildly jarred, but he nods apprehensively after Sehun coughs to fill the silence. “Okay. Okay, whatever, I can wait, just… Just make sure he’s okay. Always make sure he’s okay.”

Sehun pats him again in confirmation, grabbing the heap of suitcases. As he leaves with Minseok’s shrewd eyes on his back and takes the same elevator Luhan had escaped in only fifteen minutes earlier, he wonders exactly how often Luhan is not okay.

기억 – VII

루한 2001-11-25

“Our tree is colorful now.

Luhan likes it better in the fall.He has lots of names for the colors.I just call them red, brown, yellow;

but he calls themscarlet and vermillion,wood and chocolate,goldenrod and peach.

He calls them mottled or smooth,patchy or solid,

but he never calls them simple.

I think he’s forgotten

what half those colors look like,but I also think,

for the most part,he remembers.”

Sehun finds Luhan already strapped into the passenger’s seat of his car. He tosses the luggage in the back and jokes, “You could have warned me I was being employed as a packmule.”

The wisecrack isn’t enthusiastically received. Luhan just glances around blankly. His eyebrows are knit together unconsciously, his eyes focused on nothing and everything at the same time. They look right past Sehun when he climbs behind the wheel and cranks the ignition four times, but they still seem to take him in. They look out into passing moments, not connecting with them but trying to, and his body doubles in on itself. It’s almost like he’s trying to stop his world from going in the same circles it’s always tread. It’s almost like he’s trying to stop himself from going in the same circles he’s always tread.

And it’s almost like he’s failing. Like he’s given up on breaking his own pattern at the same time.

Sehun drives them home in silence because he’s scared that saying something will make him a part of the circle that Luhan can’t break.

When they’re back at the apartment, Sehun has to announce their arrival for Luhan to notice. He hops out of the car and plods ahead of Sehun, eyes caught on all the marred digits of the ground. Sehun has to stop himself from clearing his throat four times before they make it to right floor. He pauses next to a pot of flowers, playing with the idea of pointing them out to Luhan, but Luhan walks by them without a second glance. Sehun follows docilely, deciding they aren’t rosy enough for him, anyways.

Luhan lays himself down on the couch as soon as Sehun unlocks the door. His eyes seem to close even before he settles, and he’s curled so tightly in a ball that Sehun thinks he could use him for a middle school dodgeball match.

Sehun could leave him to sleep it off, technically. He could let him figure everything out on his own. Luhan knows the situation better, just like Minseok. He is the only one who can ultimately make the best decision, and Sehun, despite being generally young, apathetic, and spiritually stupid, knows that.

But Sehun feels like, if he leaves him alone now, he’s not going to wake up again in the strictest sense. It’s not going to be like a transformation, a sad Luhan caterpillar rebirthing into a lovely Luhan butterfly, or a silly Luhan child reforming into a matured Luhan adult. It’s going to be the same thing, over and over again. Luhan is going to wake up without his wings, and he’s going to think that going to sleep will somehow make them grow. He’s going to seek sleep in daylight, seek sleep in public, seek sleep even in his dreams. The sleep gets longer and longer, more and more desperate. Sleep becomes the only real thing, even when it isn’t.

Some people are frantic enough to seek its permanence. Dyed-in-the-wool. Forever.

Sehun knows because he’s been that person. The same way Luhan returns to places in drunken stupors, Sehun had returned to them in dreams. Sleep once became so important to him that he forgot temporarily that the things of his unconscious mind were once real.

The logic is a circle. It keeps happening until an outside force stops it. Sehun’s outside force was age. Luhan’s outside force, Sehun figures, is himself.

He sits heavily next to Luhan, locking a hand around his ankle. Luhan doesn’t move, but he does whisper, “Leave me alone.”

“I want to know what happened with you and Minseok to the point where you’re both these giant messes of sorry and mad.”

“Minseok isn’t sorry or mad,” Luhan says. “He’s just Minseok. He’s cool with everything. Cool if I stay, cool if I go. Cool if I come back, cool if I never do.”

“That’s not true.”

“And what? You talked to him once? Had a conversation with him while I was crying in the car and decided that was enough to confirm to you that he’s a good, repentant soul?” Luhan snorts. “I’ve known Minseok for four years. I think I can guess exactly what he’s thinking right now, and it’s probably something along the lines of, ‘Damn, why is he even mad? I didn’t do anything. I just sat there like a slug.’”

Sehun quiets. “You’ve only known me a couple days, and you’ve already decided I’m decent enough to move in with.”

Luhan doesn’t respond. It’s probably the best response he can give, anyways.

“He told me how sorry he was, you know,” Sehun tries again. “He didn’t tell me what happened, but I could tell how bad it was just by the way he talked about it. He was torn up. He started crying, and made me promise that I’d make sure you were okay, and—” And that I’d eventually make you come back. The words are on Sehun’s lips, but they die in this throat because he’s not sure how he could possibly say them. “…and that I’d keep you safe. Even from yourself, which is what I’m trying to do right now.”

Luhan pulls his ankle away from Sehun’s hand and tucks his knees further into his chest. “I find that really hard to believe.”

Sehun scoots closer, resting a careful hand on Luhan’s hip instead. Luhan is still rigid. Sehun kind of wants to get up and leave. Instead, he crawls even closer, sliding a hand up Luhan’s side, and loops his body around him. He hears a stutter in breathing, but he can’t tell if it’s his or Luhan’s.

“Even if it’s not true,” he whispers, “I’m not Minseok. I’m not going blacklist you over something you do and leave you on the side of the road. I’m not going to sit back and watch people push you around. And I’m not going to let you push yourself around either—”

“I kissed him.”

Sehun stops cold in his tracks, eyes widening to Luhan-size. “Wh—”

“That’s what happened that night.” Luhan’s arms are taut, folded as far into his body as they possibly can. He looks more like a hand fan than a person. “We were way drunk, and Minseok was laying on me in the backseat. And I had thought… I’d been thinking for a while, what if Minseok felt the things that I felt? We were always so similar in thoughts and opinions, so I thought…there was a chance…” Luhan swallows at nothing, but his voice still sounds caught. “I’ve just been so…lonely, for so long, and Minseok isn’t reliable, but he’s still always there, and even when he doesn’t stand up, he’ll talk to me afterwards, you know? So I thought he could care the way I cared—”

“Luhan,” Sehun breathes. “Luhan, they kicked you out for kissing him?”

Luhan smiles deplorably. “My friend is a bit of a…homophobe. And I guess Minseok isn’t really into the same-gendered thing, either, because he was off me in an instant, all wide-eyed and freaked out like a rabbit.”

“That is that stupidest reason to leave someone to walk home in the dark that I’ve ever heard.”

Luhan laughs, talons on wooden floors, and it gets so bad that he starts crying a little, slapping his leg for emphasis. “Of course it’s the stupidest reason you’ve ever heard. That’s because it’s the stupidest reason ever.”

Sehun presses his face into Luhan’s back, rubbing his cheek absentmindedly on the fabric of his t-shirt. “That’s not even that bad. The way you both reacted, I thought you’d murdered a baby or something and given it to him as a present.”

Luhan smacks at his leg because it’s the only thing he can reach, but his muscles are relaxed now, molding unconsciously into Sehun’s solidity. “I’m gay, not homicidal.”

“You mean those things aren’t synonymous?” Luhan giggles hard enough to start hiccupping, and Sehun pats his back dramatically to get him to stop. When it’s dwindled into silence, Sehun clears his throat and opens his mouth after a moment’s hesitation. “So, you…you liked him then? Minseok, I mean.”

“Yeah.” He shrugs, and Sehun wonders if Luhan has picked that up from him. “I don’t know to what extent, though. I think it was sort of like…an infatuation. To fill some weird, empty hole in me or something. I just figured out the extent of all this…sexuality stuff, I guess you could call it, so I was probably eager to…to try it out on someone.” Luhan is reddening, stumbling over his words, and it’s Sehun’s turn to laugh.

“So you’ve never really liked someone?”

Luhan bites his lip, and Sehun is suddenly aware of exactly how close they are, clothed skin on clothed skin, his hands drifting lazily along Luhan’s stomach and his face pressed into the indention between Luhan’s shoulderblades. He suddenly realizes that although Luhan is more relaxed, he’s also decisively motionless in response to Sehun’s movement. Sehun pauses, all at once unsure if what he’s doing is even allowed. Luhan notices, and he places a comforting hand on Sehun’s, then removes it, then rests it there again, as if testing the waters, too.

“Two,” he says quietly. It distracts Sehun from the creeping pressure in his head caused by their proximity. “I’ve liked two people. The first… I didn’t know what liking was when I liked them, but I know I did, because I still can’t forget about them. I still can’t stop wanting them to come back.”

Sehun still doesn’t move. His breath is stuck in his throat because, for a moment, he’s forgotten how to use his lungs. Luhan’s hand encases his in a sudden burst of bravery, dragging it up to his chest as he dips his chin lower to meet it. Sehun can feel his nose brush his fingers. Luhan clears his throat. Sehun thinks Luhan must have

gotten that from him, too, and he’d be sorry for transmitting his awkward like some sort of disease if he wasn’t completely mortified at the moment.

“Sehun,” he says, and Sehun’s world is in grayscale because his eyes have stopped working next. His entire body is suddenly failing, falling into disuse at the sound of his own name. For a second, Sehun thinks that Luhan is calling him that – that he’s figured out his secret somehow, in Sehun’s body language or in the feel of his hands as Luhan links them together or in the recognition that must flicker in Sehun’s eyes when he looks at him. Then, Luhan continues. “I… I liked Sehun. Loved him, even. In love?” And it’s a question, but it doesn’t waver on his tongue in the same way that questions usually do. If Luhan hadn’t already noticed Sehun’s offness, he’s sure that it’s palpably obvious now, because he’s fallen into complete silence. He can’t even cough. There’s a lump in his throat preventing him from saying anything. “And I’ve never been able to stop thinking about him, ever since he left ten years ago and never came back.”

Sehun slips his hand away from Luhan. He feels Luhan tense all over again, but it doesn’t stop him from drawing away and sitting up, stretching to hide his discomfort. “He must have been a really special kid,” he says dully. “A really stupid, really special kid.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” Luhan protests, but it’s half-hearted, and Sehun wonders if he really does blame him for having to go away, the same way he seems to blame Minseok for wasting away in loneliness. “His mom… My mom… It was complicated. I still don’t really know what happened. I just came outside one day, and everyone was telling me that he couldn’t stay here anymore. Person after person after person told me that. Right after I told him I’d never leave him, he left me, instead.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” Sehun repeats somewhere beneath his breath, but Luhan doesn’t hear him. He’s scared to speak up because he’s sure that Luhan will hear his voice quake if he does. Luhan returns into his little sphere of cramped extremities as soon as he’s released. Sehun wants to pull him into his arms, the same way Luhan had the night he came in hurt and scared, but Sehun is starting to realize that there hasn’t been a night since that those feelings have really dissipated for him. He can’t very well take care of someone when he’s stuck in his own despair, caught in his own torment. So he doesn’t. He gets up off the couch, lingering only briefly in the living room. Luhan looks up at him, panic sullying his features. Sehun doesn’t meet his gaze, only pads off to the kitchen in silence.

“Kyungsoo—” Luhan’s tone is frenzied, so Sehun holds up a hand.

“I’m making tea,” he says. “Did you want any?”

Luhan falls into a silence that permeates the air like humidity. It weighs heavy on Sehun’s shoulders as he busies himself with pots and mugs. At least it won’t make my hair frizzy. He would snort at his own joke, but nothing is all that funny right now.

“The other one was you,” Luhan whispers quietly.

Sehun pauses in front of the burners. Then, he clanks the mugs together louder.

“I’ve almost entirely forgotten his face because the only one I can remember now is yours.”

Sehun drops the teapot on the ground. Cold water spills at his feet, but he doesn’t say a word. He only moves to pick it up.

There’s a small sigh. “No, thanks,” Luhan finally voices. He sounds drained. Resigned, even, and Sehun pretends that he doesn’t know what he’s done wrong. “I don’t want anything.”

Sehun hears unspoken words in his answer. I don’t want anything because I can’t want anything. I don’t want anything because no one will give me anything. Sehun feels like Minseok, ignoring Luhan’s silent pleas for help, but he can’t deal with them right now. The only thing he feels capable of doing is making tea. The only thing he feels capable of feeling is nothing.

Sehun can hear Luhan shift behind him a couple times before the room is completely still. When he finally feels capable of looking back, he sees Luhan’s eyes closed and his lungs rhythmically moving. He’s fallen into his metamorphosis sleep.

A circle he won’t break.

Sehun turns back to his tea and debates going for round three of bathroom crying when he realizes that sleep has made Luhan’s worry lines even more visible.

기억 – VIII

상기하다 2002-6-3

“Dad came today.

I got scared and tried to run,but I fell out my window.

Luhan’s mom is really nice.She’s taking care of me

even though she thinks it’s Mom’s joband keeps saying

that I need to go home.

Maybe, if I ask Mom, she’ll let me stayforever!

Wouldn’t that be something?

I’ll ask her once she remembers.”

It takes them a while to get back into any sort of routine after their rendezvous with Minseok, and Sehun is more than a little disappointed about it. He almost wishes that he’d let Luhan talk him into postponing it a little while longer, but he isn’t sure what would have changed with time, so he lets it go. Sehun likes routine, anyways – he likes how it’s settled, non-chaotic, and peaceful. He likes the idea of being able to tell people his personal timetable – coffee, work, home, tea, sleep – without having to recall all the variations because, really, he can never remember the specifics of any given day. Even if it drags a little, Sehun is fine with that. He’s tired of staying places hardly long enough to even form routines, habits, attachment. He’s tired of the surprises.

Luhan was one of the biggest surprises he’d ever been hit with, but now he’s become routine. Sehun would be happy about that if the routine they’d formed wasn’t not seeing each other for days at a time.

He can’t stop thinking about his promise to Minseok. He is at a total loss as to how to complete it. Luhan expresses no desire to leave, but he expresses no desire to stay, either – he’s gone nine times out of ten when Sehun gets home. He doesn’t come back until later, feign smiling as he chucks his shoes off at the door and retires onto the

part of the couch that he’s claimed as his own, drunk and yet still unnervingly quiet. Sehun swears he’s imprinting a permanent buttmark there to match the one in his dorm room, but Luhan doesn’t laugh at that joke anymore – only smiles distractedly, face caught somewhere in between legitimate joy and paralyzing sadness.

Sehun thinks he’d prefer one or the other, but he never tells Luhan that.

Sehun talks to him when he gets the chance about topical things that he knows don’t matter. Hey, how are ya? (He knows exactly how Luhan is.) Wonderful weather we’re having. (Luhan gives him funny looks when it’s storming, but he doesn’t say anything.) Okay, see ya around. (He often doesn’t see him again until he’s passed out on the couch.) Luhan humors him, chipping into meaningless conversations with all the ardor he can muster, but in the end, they both know what they’re skirting around.

Sehun hates it. He hates it so much that he falls asleep every night physically ill from hating it so much.

The days that Luhan comes back fully sober are the worst ones of all. Alcohol dulls Luhan’s veins, mutes the spark in his eyes, dims the glow of his skin, but sobriety makes him beam, and Sehun hurts when he hurts, but he hurts even more when he’s shining without him. Luhan starts coming back more and more without a lick of alcohol in him as the weeks go on, radiating this barely subdued happiness, and Sehun is a jealous creature because he wants him to gleam like that when he’s around.

One night of sleeplessness, Luhan creeps in at one in the morning. Sehun glances at him from his chair in front of the television, and Luhan gives him a look that resembles a disobedient teenager that’s just been caught. Sehun nods up at him, and Luhan returns it awkwardly.

“Where were you?” Sehun asks. It’s the first time he’s shown any interest in anything besides what food Luhan wants to eat for dinner or how his classes have been going, now that he’s got his books back. Luhan looks taken aback, so he shrugs off Sehun’s hoodie slowly instead of answering.

“I was…with a friend,” he starts slowly.

“Minseok?”

“God, no.” Luhan tosses the hoodie on the kitchen counter and pads to the refrigerator to retrieve a diet soda. Sehun watches him as subtly as he can. “Someone else.”

“Do I know them?” Sehun asks offhandedly, turning back to the television because he’s not sure why he’s so interested in Luhan getting a drink. He hears a can

pop open, but Luhan doesn’t close the refrigerator. He just plops into his place on the couch, taking a long swig and focusing on the breaking news story splayed across the television screen. “Are you going to close that?”

“I’m going to go back in like, two seconds,” Luhan responds, swallowing another mouthful of fake sugar and carbonated water. Sehun wrinkles his nose. “No point in closing it.”

“I pay for that power bill.”

“I’ve got money.”

Sehun rolls his eyes, but he repeats, “Do I know them?”

Luhan pauses, mulling over something in his head, before sighing and saying, “No. You don’t.”

Sehun catches his hesitation, so he follows up with, “Do I know of them?”

Luhan bites his lip. “…yes.”

“Wait, let me guess,” Sehun says, holding up a finger. He taps his bottom lip thoughtfully before saying, “BoA.”

Luhan scoffs from the couch, rolling over onto his side to look at Sehun. “She’s famous, numbnuts.”

“I thought you had friends in high places. Is it the president of America? Have you been meeting in secret?”

“Yes. I am an undercover American agent disguised as a Chinese guy speaking Korean. You’ve caught me.”

“It sounds like a pretty good cover-up.”

Luhan shakes his head, but he smiles, too. Sehun feels accomplished. “It’s actually…Jongdae. You know, my childhood best friend? I got back in contact with him, like you suggested.”

Sehun feels a pang of guilt. He brushes it off because he’s not even sure where it came from. “He still lives around here?”

“Yeah.” Luhan downs the remainder of his drink and hops up to get another. “He goes to a university a little ways away from here, so I’ve been taking the bus to hang with him.” He quiets. “He lives in an apartment with Tao. Remember him?”

“The model,” Sehun muses. “So you’ve killed two birds with one stone.”

Luhan pauses beside the kitchen counter. Sehun feels him lingering beyond his vision. “Maybe…three birds?”

Sehun casts his gaze back to him. He twists a dirty dishrag between his hands, his second soda abandoned on the countertop. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Luhan sighs, “Tao is moving next year, to China, because he thinks he’ll have more opportunities to succeed in modeling and stuff there, and Jongdae…offered me a place to stay. There, you know. It’s close, and I wouldn’t…be burdening you anymore.”

“…burdening.” It takes a second to process. “You’re not burdening me.”

“Don’t pretend,” Luhan replies with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “It’s been awkward, recently. I don’t want to be the source of you being uncomfortable in your own home.”

It’s true that Sehun has felt more and more pressed to be quiet and stoic lately, but for some reason, Luhan leaving doesn’t feel even remotely like the solution to this problem. “Luhan, I really don’t think—”

“I haven’t told him I would yet,” Luhan assures, “so don’t worry about it too much right now. It’s only a suggestion. If you ever need me gone.”

Sehun presses his lips shut before he can protest anymore. Before he lets slip the first response that crosses his mind.

I said I’d never leave. You’re not allowed to be me.

Luhan downs another diet soda in silence before settling down to go to bed, looking a little wary of Sehun’s presence in the livingroom. Sehun doesn’t move, though, keeping his eyes riveted on the late night cop show marathons plastered across every channel he flips through. It doesn’t take Luhan long to doze off, even with Sehun hovering from a table away, and Sehun decides that he can’t possibly mind him staying if he’s unconscious.

Sehun curls up in the chair, knees to chest, heartbeat thumping next to his thighs and back bending like elastic. Even when he closes his eyes to sleep, he sees Luhan’s silhouette against his eyelids for a long time afterwards.

A knock on the door resounds through Sehun’s apartment at 10:13 the next day, jolting him out of a strange dream of a world made only of the color red. He rubs his eyes groggily, attempting to lift himself into a sitting position and effectively rolling

himself off the chair and onto the floor instead. He groans when the knock comes again, crawling on all fours to the door. Luhan snores softly behind him, not at all bothered by the noise, and Sehun envies him his ability to sleep through anything. He’d probably dream about catching on fire before he woke up in a burning building. Sehun grunts when he gets to the door, pulling himself up onto his feet and dusting off his shirt before throwing it open and—

His eyes widen of their own accord. The boy outside shifts, looking a little surprised, but not much. Sehun coughs as the kid smiles politely, holding out a curled up phone charger with his left hand.

“Sorry, you know Luhan, right?” he asks, and Sehun’s heart sinks to the bottom of his stomach. He wants to say something, to deny it or to confirm it or to shake the boy’s shoulders because doesn’t he recognize someone he knows when he sees them—

“I’m Jongdae,” the boy continues, unabashed. “Luhan came over last night, I don’t know if he told you, but he left this here and he’d told me your address in case I needed to come for any reason, so—”

“I’ll give it to him,” Sehun interrupts, swiping the phone charger from his palm and going to shut the door. Jongdae jumps, and at the sound of his voice, his eyes widen, too, eyelashes fluttering innocently against high cheekbones. Before Sehun can block him off, he hears the beginnings of a syllable coming from Jongdae’s mouth. “Se—”

He slams the door closed without another word.

Jongdae starts ramming the door again with his fist, but Sehun slides up against it in panic. Luhan stirs from across the room, and Sehun curses that kid for being so damned loud all the time, and he can’t open the door but he can’t keep it shut, either, if he keeps going like this, because if Luhan wakes up there’s no way he can explain his way out of it, no way he can hide the truth from Jongdae and Luhan at the same time, and this is a giant mess, oh God what do I do, what do I say, what do I—

“Sehun!” Jongdae’s muffled voice breaks through the barrier of wood between them. Luhan’s eyes roll behind his eyelids, and his brow draws together.

“Sehun…” It’s Luhan’s voice this time, heavy with sleep. Sehun’s breath catches.

He finally opens the door as Jongdae is in mid-swing and swears when his fist connects with his chest. He closes the door abruptly behind his back and hisses, “Will you be quiet?”

“Where the hell have you been?” Jongdae exclaims, shaking out the hand that he’d hit Sehun with, and although it’s the same question that Kyungsoo had asked four weeks ago, it sounds a lot different in Jongdae’s mouth. Sehun’s mind goes completely blank when he realizes that Jongdae is smiling at him, toothy grin spread wide across his taut features, that excitement is coloring his words and his arms have spread wide to overtake him in a brohug to rival the heavens, and Sehun can do nothing but freeze up in his grasp.

“I thought you left for good!” he practically yells next to Sehun’s ear. Sehun sputters, drawing away and shushing him with a finger. Jongdae glances up at him in surprise, glancing around cautiously. “What is it?”

“Luhan is asleep,” Sehun whispers. Jongdae’s brow smooths at that, smile returning full force.

“So? He sleeps like a stone building,” Jongdae laughs, smacking Sehun’s back. “Where have you even dropped from? Luhan never mentioned that he was staying with you! That little sneak, keeping something this big hidden—”

“How did you recognize me?” Sehun demands. “How?”

Jongdae trails to a stop, tilting his head in confusion. “How? It’s obvious. You’ve got some pretty nifty hair now, sure, but I’d recognize that dumb monotone voice anywhere—”

“Then why didn’t he?”

Jongdae is completely silenced by that, face contorting in concern when Sehun leans against the side of the building and slides down to sit. He looks more befuddled than ever, squatting down to take in Sehun’s sulky expression. “What are you talking about?”

Sehun jerks his thumb back towards the inside of the apartment. “He doesn’t know I’m me.”

“Then…why didn’t you tell him?” Jongdae scratches his head. “He’d know it was you the second you said your own name—”

“I couldn’t,” Sehun breaks in, aghast. “Remembering my name isn’t the point. He doesn’t remember me.”

“Well, sure he does,” Jongdae starts again with the beginnings of a smile. “If you said you were Sehun, then he’d see all the things that he was missing right off the bat, as if it were obvious the whole time—”

“It should have been obvious anyways.” Sehun rolls his head back to hit brick, sighing loudly. “It’s not a big deal. He’s going to move in with you, apparently. I won’t ever have to tell him.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Jongdae says, waving his hands frantically. “You mean you’re thinking of not telling him? What are you, stupid?”

“It’s easier,” Sehun replies tiredly. “I wish you’d never recognized me.”

Jongdae winces. “Ouch, man. That’s harsh.”

“It would have made things so much less complicated. He could have just…gone.”

“Well, sucks for you,” Jongdae replies matter-of-factly, “because there is no way I’m letting him walk away from here now without knowing that you’re the kind, adoring soul who’s taken him in in his time of need—”

Sehun turns sharp eyes in Jongdae’s direction. Jongdae topples and falls flat onto his butt, eyes round and startled. “Don’t even think of telling him.”

“Why would telling him be such a bad thing? Look, whatever reasons you had for not telling him in the first place, I think he deserves to know at some point—”

“I’ve got a life that I can maintain on my own, and so does he. We don’t have any business hanging around each other much longer.”

“But you guys were best—”

“Leave the past in the past.”

“But—”

“Jongdae.”

Jongdae frowns at him, straightening his legs and brushing off his pants. “You know, I missed you too, you asshole. And if it were me, I would have wanted you to tell me, so I could tell you that.”

Sehun’s eyelids droop to a close. “I… I missed all of you for a long time.”

“Implying you don’t anymore. Right.” Jongdae turns, scuffing his shoes against the concrete, before pausing a couple steps away. “You know, Luhan still talks about you all the time. He literally lights up whenever he hears your name. And he gets dark at the same time.”

“It’s better than shorting him out,” Sehun mutters.

Jongdae shakes his head and leaves without another word.

When Sehun summons the willpower to pick himself up off the ground outside an hour later, he walks in to find Luhan thumbing through his phone, tongue stuck out in dismay. Sehun stops, still subconsciously clinging to Luhan’s phone charger. Luhan glances up. “So I got the weirdest text— Oh hey, is that mine?”

“Oh,” Sehun murmurs, looking down at his hand. He tosses the charger at the couch, and Luhan swats it to the ground instead of catching it. Sehun suppresses his laughter. His head still feels too heavy with thoughts. “Your friend came by to drop it off because you left it last night or something. What message did you get?”

“It was actually from him,” Luhan sighs, retrieving the charger from the floor and stretching to plug it in without removing himself from the couch. He hooks up his phone and smiles in satisfaction as the lock lights up with a lightning bolt.

Sehun’s entire body stills, even though his brain is commanding he walk to the chair and sit, like he normally would. “What did it say?”

“Jongin’s coming back from the states, apparently, and he’s in desperate of a place to stay, so the roommate offer has been revoked.” Luhan shrugs. “Mind dealing with me a little longer?”

Sehun can only shake his head in disbelief.

He still thinks it’s one or the other, not both.

“Unless you need me to leave.” Luhan’s voice is worried.

Black and white, even though the rest of the world is in Technicolor.

Sehun sighs. “Stay as long as you need.” He means it, even if he doesn’t want to.

That little troll.

기억 – IX잊다 2002-6-7

“They took me away today.They didn’t let me say goodbye.

I’m scared.

They left me in a white room.Luhan would probably say it’s cream,

or ivory,or pearl,

but it’s just white, really.

Plain,and simple,and white.

…I think I’ve been forgotten.”

Luhan is starting to get restless.

He paces the house whenever he’s there, and he’s started texting Sehun random things again when he’s not. Most of them are something along the lines of, Jongdae won’t take me out. He just sits around his apartment being boring. HELP ME.

Tao isn’t much help for him either, apparently. He’s always out of town on some urgent business or another, taking care of the arrangements to leave and meeting repetitively with his manager. Luhan stresses his betrayal even more than Jongdae’s.

Sehun is technically not allowed to respond. (He does anyways.)

He decides after a couple weeks of text smalltalk, badgering grievances, and nearly getting caught on the phone by Kyungsoo multiple times a day that he’s had enough, so he wakes Luhan up one morning as he’s on his way out to work. Luhan rubs

his eyes, blinking against the lights billowing from livingroom lamps. He smiles tiredly when Sehun’s face swims into view.

“Kyungsoo,” he yawns, stretching his arms out. “What do you need of me so bright and early in the morning?”

“You wanted to go to work with me one day,” Sehun says, shifting to tuck the wrinkled bottom of his uniform into his pants. “Today’s the day, scout. Let’s go.”

“But I don’t even have time to get ready,” Luhan complains, flopping his limbs out in protest. Sehun thinks he’s a lot more Luhan when he’s sleepy. He’s missed that more than he’ll admit to himself. “I can’t go meet your co-workers looking like a slob. They’ll hate me.”

“My co-workers hate me already. They’ll hate you by association.” Sehun pulls Luhan up by the wrist. Luhan makes tiny grunts of resistance, but Sehun knows that the attempt to wrench his arm away will be half-assed at best, enervated at worst, so he holds on. It doesn’t take much for Luhan to begrudgingly agree to his terms with a small yawp and a scowl that melts into laughter when Sehun sticks his tongue out at him.

By the time they get in the car, Luhan has thrown on a sweater that’s been laying on the floor for weeks and a pair of Sehun’s blue jeans that he’d mistaken for his own, a size too big. His hair has been brushed, but it’s got cowlicks jutting out that he couldn’t quite tame, and his eyes are still crusted over with sleep that he hasn’t had the time to pick out yet.

Sehun looks down at himself. He’s mostly orderly, his hat covering hair that can be perfectly fixed with a flick of his head and dress pants that belie his lowly cash register position. They’re a little short, riding up past his ankles, and his socks are bright orange, but he still thinks they’re okay. He feels pretty sharp.

He also feels like he pales in comparison to Luhan.

As he drives, Luhan watches him. It’s not like it’s anything particularly new – Luhan is a watcher by nature, and Sehun is an exceptionally consistent target of his – but there’s something different about his fixated gaze today. It’s expectant, as if Luhan is waiting for an explanation for this sudden demand of company. They haven’t really been together since their red-letter day, choosing instead to converge at the apartment whenever they feel like making up for lost time, so Sehun supposes his curiosity makes sense.

He doesn’t want it to, though. He wants to be able to just do things with him at his own will.

He wants to be Luhan’s friend.

He wants to be Luhan’s best friend. Like he was before.

He wants it so bad that it actually constricts his chest sometimes.

He pretends he doesn’t see Luhan’s inquisitive stares. He also pretends that his stomach doesn’t drop a little further every time Luhan turns away and back again, away and back, like a boat being cast along by errant waves. He’s so completely unsure of Sehun, so completely in the dark about everything, and Sehun doesn’t know how to give him a spark without starting a fire. He’s rubbing sticks together in his mind, but never hard enough to ignite.

Predictably, Sehun forgets about Kyungsoo’s entire existence, so when he’s expected to introduce Luhan to everyone, he’s reluctant to bring him too close.

“Hi,” Kyungsoo says pleasantly, holding out his hand. “My name is—”

“Baekhyun,” Sehun finishes for him, and Kyungsoo looks taken aback by the interruption. Sehun shoots him a warning glance. “His name is Baekhyun.”

“Nice to meet you, Baekhyun,” Luhan returns with a bright smile, eyes wrinkling at the corners. Kyungsoo looks a little dubious, but he accepts the name without any further complaints, telepathic or otherwise, to Sehun’s complete and utter surprise. He bustles off to start cleaning after that, and Sehun breathes a private sigh of relief until Luhan turns to him and pulls at his sleeve. “Am I allowed to get free food?”

“I don’t care,” Sehun replies dismissively. “Just make sure…er, Baekhyun is supervising when they make it. He’d never let you get spoiled food.”

“Then how did you get spoiled food?” Luhan asks with a wry grin, turning his eyes repeatedly towards the grills in the back.

“He doesn’t like me,” Sehun says dryly. Luhan laughs, and this time it sounds like cats fighting. Sehun catches Kyungsoo looking up, irritation clear and vivid in his eyes.

Sehun lets Luhan fill a little more of his heart, just for that glare.

Sehun keeps Luhan tamped down to a low simmer until after lunch, instructing him to sit like a good boy at one of the tables while he’s on duty. Luhan is remarkably impressed by his job, and Sehun makes sure to stand extra straight in front of the cash register, just to look more official. Kyungsoo, of course, comments on the state of his attire, offering to buy him an iron for his birthday – “offering” being a loose term, as it comes out more of a demand. Sehun simply nods in response, cutting his eyes to Luhan, who is watching in awe from his place in the corner. Sehun laughs and claps

Kyungsoo on the back while Luhan observes. (Luhan turns away long enough to grab a napkin and Sehun immediately apologizes to a wide-eyed Kyungsoo, who doesn’t hesitate to warn him never to touch him again.)

He asks Junmyeon for an extended lunch break, and thanks to Luhan batting his eyes from the table, Junmyeon grants it without much protest. In fact, the only protest at all is, “Will Kyungsoo get mad?” to which Sehun replies with, “Nah, it’ll make him work harder anyways.”

Kyungsoo graciously watches over their cooks as they prepare their food, giving Sehun meaningful looks whenever Luhan calls him “Baekhyun” but still choosing to keep to himself about it. He serves Luhan with a flourish and Sehun with a resentful clatter of his tray before whisking himself off to other tasks. Luhan eats his food slowly, looking excessively pleased.

“This is delicious,” he says as sauce dribbles down his chin, managing to make it to the hollow of his neck before Sehun can reach over with a napkin and mop it up. As Sehun takes a bite, he is incredibly surprised that he actually agrees with that statement. The burger is juicier than any other he’s had at the establishment, and the vegetables are astonishingly crisp. Kyungsoo had really outdone himself. Sehun is very suspicious as to why he’s been so compliant. He’s not sure if he should question or accept it. He decides to do neither.

Luhan licks his entire hand when he’s done, grease pooling in the creases of his palms and the lines of his sandwich wrapper. Sehun neatly wipes himself off with the napkin mountain he’s accrued from the dispenser on the adjacent table. He offers the last few to Luhan, who affably accepts, dabbing at the corners of his mouth and the spots on his shirt where burger residue has accumulated.

Sehun buys him an ice cream float afterwards. He flashes Kyungsoo a wicked smile when he hands it over to Luhan. Kyungsoo looks wary, but he’s definitely unprepared for the next few hours ahead.

Luhan is a hyperactive nightmare. As a kid, sugar had been his Popeye’s spinach, giving him what appeared to be a mixture of superspeed and unpredictability, and years haven’t stripped him of those superpowers. He runs around the kitchen like a whirlwind, watching people cook without permission and sneaking fries straight from the trap. He escapes nimbly whenever Junmyeon makes rounds, but it wouldn’t have mattered, anyways, because he’d charmed Junmyeon so thoroughly at their first meeting that Sehun is surprised his boss hasn’t proposed yet. Luhan terrorizes Kyungsoo, stealing his hat off his head when he’s busy making an order or sitting on the counters that Kyungsoo has just cleaned. Kyungsoo looks about ready to pop his head off his body, but he somehow keeps his cool so long as Sehun calls Luhan over to

reprimand him. It feels rewarding, being the responsible one for once, even though he’s secretly incredibly gratified by watching Kyungsoo glower at someone else. By the end of the day, Kyungsoo seems almost cordial with Sehun, as if he’s nothing but the well-intentioned mother of the spawn of Satan. Kyungsoo pulls him aside at some point, looking a level of tired that Sehun hadn’t even known existed for him.

“Calm your pet down,” he growls, but it’s more of a general anger than one meant solely for Sehun.

“I’ll get him under control,” Sehun promises, even though he fully plans on smuggling more chocolate chips to Luhan as a reward. Kyungsoo stares at him, maybe to stress his point, maybe to figure out if Sehun is lying, but he ultimately releases him, making to leave. He turns back suddenly about halfway through the door. Sehun nearly bumps into him, caught off-guard by his hasty stop.

“Why did you tell him my name was Baekhyun?” Kyungsoo demands.

Sehun shrugs, peering down at his scuffed dress shoes. “Baekhyun is your roommate or something, right?”

“That doesn’t answer my question.” Kyungsoo is steadfast in his scrutiny. Sehun feels like a table waiting to be cleaned. “Are you hiding something from him?”

Sehun speaks a nothing that tells Kyungsoo all he needs to know. Kyungsoo turns again, then stops.

“I’m playing along because you’ve been acting differently.” Sehun is a bit bewildered by this, but he has no time to gather his bearings before Kyungsoo continues. “I’m guessing you’ve been acting differently because of him, somehow. But whatever you told him, you’d better untell him fast, before he figures it out for himself. You can’t be friends with someone who lies about who they are.”

“I know,” Sehun whispers, but it’s to an empty room. Kyungsoo has already left to oversee the rest of the employees.

기억 – X상기하다 2005-5-5

“The foster homes are getting worse.They make me clean a lot,

even though I like the bugs that I find in the corners.They remind me of Jongin.

He liked rolly pollies.

The kids here don’t like me like Jongin liked me.They don’t like rolly pollies,so I don’t like them much,

either.

What was my house number?I can’t remember.”

After having the beast inside him unleashed by sugar, Luhan is a tired mess of limbs and soft breathing. He falls asleep the second Sehun gets them out on the highway, and Sehun watches him the way he was watched earlier, trying and failing to remember back to a time when he thought his life was boring.

When they get home, Luhan is stubborn in resisting Sehun’s attempts to rouse him from sleep. He turns onto his side, not even bothering to release his seatbelt, and falls back into cadenced breathing when Sehun prods at him. Sighing, Sehun undoes it himself, sliding Luhan into his arms and pulling him up off the seat with a grunt. He slams his car door shut with a foot and adjusts Luhan in his arms, cradling him in what he imagines is the same manner as a first-time dad – awkward and afraid of his own lack of balance. He gets him up to his own floor without incident and sets him carefully down on the couch inside, trying to escape before he inevitably wakes up, but he is too late. Luhan blinks twice as Sehun staggers out from under him, peering up at his face with a dazed expression. Sehun smiles back sheepishly. “Go to bed, Luhan, you’ve looked ready to pass out for a straight week now—”

“Sehun?”

Sehun stops in his tracks, eyes widened. He has the sudden urge to cover his face. He can’t tell if Luhan is asleep or awake, so he says nothing. Luhan blinks again and sighs contentedly.

“Your hair is so colorful,” he murmurs. “You used to say…purple hair was…unrealistic…”

His eyes droop methodically as he speaks, every word drawing them closer together until they’ve successfully shut out the world a second time. His soft snores resume, and Sehun breathes easier before colliding all his weight with the edge of the couch that Luhan isn’t currently occupying.

That was way too close.

It’s time to set some things straight with himself, he’s decided.

First, he is Sehun. Not Kyungsoo. Not Minseok. He is lazy, and Sehun is lazy. He is stubborn, and Sehun is stubborn. He coughs when he’s nervous, and Sehun, surprise surprise, coughs when he’s nervous. He, therefore, has to be Sehun, and this business of pretending is getting far too complicated far too fast. At the end of the day, no matter who he tells otherwise, he is still the same Sehun that left and the same Sehun that didn’t want to leave. He is the Sehun that was Luhan’s best friend, no matter which gender Luhan prefers to call him by, and he is the Sehun that Luhan loved.

Which brings him to his second point, of course – the one that still makes him nauseous and unsure of his every step in the world. Luhan liking the fake him is enough to send him stumbling, but that’s not the part that bothers him.

In love?

It had been a question, but it had also been rhetorical. Luhan had already known the answer to it. Sehun isn’t entirely sure how deep Luhan imagines that this affection ran – or still runs, for that matter – and he’s so scared to ask that it nearly paralyzes him just to think about it.

Not to mention how he might feel in return. He has yet to go anywhere near that tsunami wave of chaos. Every time he’s so much as brushed up against the thought, he’s abruptly gotten up to make tea as a distraction.

(He belatedly realizes that he’s moved himself to the kitchen somewhere in between his thoughts and is robotically making tea right now.)

He knows he needs to be honest with Luhan, but he also knows that he knows nothing about how to handle other peoples’ feelings, romantically or otherwise. He’s had so few friends since he moved, and even the people he likes are simply targets for

whatever discord he feels like brewing. He’s had no significant others as long as he’s lived, male or female, and he’s really considered nobody particularly worthy of the task of taming him for the job.

(Luhan is worthy. Sehun knows that because he knows Luhan better than his own body, better than the forestry at the edge of his old neighborhood and the names of all the districts of Korea. He knows him better than Kyungsoo knows cleaning products, and he knows him better than Jongin knew animal species. And Luhan knows him the same way.)

(He’s unconsciously started making a second cup of tea that he also doesn’t plan on drinking.)

He knows that being honest will pose certain….difficulties. It’ll compromise the living situation. It’ll compromise Luhan’s feelings towards this “Kyungsoo” character that he’s come to blindly trust. Hell, it might even compromise his feelings towards the actual Sehun. Sehun thinks that’s the most frightening part of all.

Which blends easily in with his third point, which is not so much a point as it is a potential plan of action.

A plan of action that he doesn’t entirely know yet.

Sehun sighs into his small cup army, draping himself over his own counter in despair. Romeo didn’t have it this hard. All he had to do was see her to know he loved her. Everything else was cake from there. Even dying.

(He becomes unexpectedly aware that he’s started a third and fourth cup simultaneously. He promptly dumps both mugs of hot water into the sink, accidentally scorching his own hand with the backsplash. He swears.)

I hate everything.

Luhan stirs behind him, and this time, he looks suspiciously more awake, sitting up and stretching instead of just blinking up at Sehun like a lost deer. “How long was I out?” he mumbles distractedly past a tiny yip as he extends his arm too far. Sehun ambles over to him, rubbing Luhan’s shoulder as he tries to roll it back. Luhan peers at him in some mixture of drowsiness and appreciation before rising from the couch.

“A while,” Sehun says honestly. “It’s eleven. You might as well go back to sleep.”

“No, no,” Luhan protests, reaching down to touch his toes. “I’m not… I don’t wanna sleep, I wanna…” He yawns in the middle of his sentence. Sehun tries to press him back down to sit on the couch, but he resists.

“You want to sleep. You’ve looked ready to die the past few weeks, you’ve been so tired.”

Luhan brushes him off, making a face. “But this is the first time that—” And he stops just as fast, clamping a hand over his mouth before realizing that’s way more obvious and throwing it off. His eyes are fully awake now, wide in alarm. Sehun doesn’t understand.

“First time that what?”

Luhan bites his lips. “Nothing. Nothing, I just didn’t feel like going to sleep yet.”

Sehun shrugs. “Well, I was planning on hitting the hay soon, anyways, so goodnight either way.”

Luhan’s face falls, and Sehun understands even less. Then, Luhan catches sight of the little mugs of tea on the counter. He perks up and immediately points, leaning onto his toes. “Did you make both of those for us?”

Sehun turns back, caught a little off-guard. “Oh, no. I mean, I made them, but they weren’t for—”

“Let’s drink them together.” Luhan grabs onto Sehun’s wrist. He doesn’t let go when Sehun tries to shake him off, only covering his first hand with a second and pouting. Sehun relents quickly, smiling in spirit but frowning in face. Luhan admittedly looks a little guilty, but they’ve both forgotten by the time that they take refuge on the couch, cradling their mugs in their laps. Luhan blows over the top of his, grinning when it makes ripples in the water. Sehun ignores him in favor of tilting his own to his lips.

“Kyungsoo,” Luhan says, and Sehun looks up from where he’s taking a sip. “Tell me a story about your childhood.”

“Why?” Sehun maintains nonchalance, accidentally dipping his nose into his tea and wiping it off with the back of his hand. Luhan snickers but doesn’t let up.

“You know so many things about my life. Isn’t it fair to make it even?”

“A person should know things about someone he’s letting into his home.”

“And a person should know things about someone they’re living with.” Luhan’s face tints pink as the words tumble from his mouth, but he doesn’t try to retract them. Instead, he says, “Just one thing. I don’t even know if you’re a good storyteller yet because you haven’t told any!”

“Are you going to be sitting here, judging my skills the entire time?” Sehun laughs, but it doesn’t sound right, even to himself.

He’s scared.

He’s scared of lying anymore, and he’s scared of telling the truth, and he’s scared of Luhan losing the laugh from his eyes, too, because of him. All he wants is for Luhan to stop, for Luhan to slip into his transformation sleep and let it go for a few more days, just long enough for Sehun to prepare some kind of explanation. Just long enough for Sehun to hammer at the circle.

Luhan doesn’t.

“Maybe,” he says, drifting farther and farther from the sleep Sehun wants from him by the minute. “Wouldn’t you want to know where to improve?”

Sehun quiets. “What if I told you I didn’t?”

“Then I wouldn’t judge you! I’d just listen—”

“What if I told you I didn’t want to tell you at all?”

Luhan blanches at the words, and he holds his cup a little tighter. Sehun does the mental correspondent of bashing his head into a wall and reaches out to pet Luhan’s leg because he’s never been good at communicating, but Luhan cringes away from that, too. He stands up suddenly. “I’m going to—”

Sehun stands with him. Some of his drink sloshes out, but it’s cooled enough not to scald him. Luhan bites his lip, and Sehun wishes more than anything that he could pry his mouth apart so he would stop.

“I’m tired,” Luhan says. “I think I’ll just… I think I want to sleep, if that’s alright with you.”

Sehun doesn’t know what to say, but he’s still saying things, anyways. “It isn’t alright with me.”

Luhan’s eyebrows draw together, and his mouth turns down. “Then what the hell is alright with you?” he challenges. Sehun steps back because his tone is suddenly way too serious.

“I don’t know what you’re talking—”

“You ask me my secrets, I tell you, and you walk away like you’re scared of them. I keep my distance because I think that’s what you want, and you take the initiative to invite me out instead. You ask about me, I let you in again, but the second I act curious,

the second I ask anything at all of you, poof—suddenly that’s not alright either. And now I can’t even sleep when I want to?”

“You could sleep if you wanted to,” Sehun snaps back, “but you don’t want to, so you can’t.”

“You know what I want to do right now?” Luhan isn’t yelling. Sehun doesn’t think he’s capable, even after all these years, but he’s definitely doing the Luhan equivalent of it. His tiny hands are fisted at his sides, and the veins in his arms, usually hidden by long sleeves and bone, are sticking out in little tendrils. His face looks so furious, and Sehun has seen it before, when Tao crushed Luhan’s toe under his purse, and when Jongdae dropped Luhan’s phone in the bathtub as a prank, and when Jongin accidentally released his arsenal of spiders in Luhan’s room, but he’s never received it. He hunches a little, feeling ashamed, even though he doesn’t know why, even though he feels like the only things he’s really done wrong are the things that Luhan doesn’t even know about yet, and he’s terrified because he doesn’t know what that will mean when he gets around to it, or what it means now.

Luhan turns his gaze down to his curled hands, and he takes a deep breath. “You know what? Nevermind. You wouldn’t get it even if I spelled it out for you.” He gathers himself in crossed arms and makes for the door. “I’m going out.”

“Wait,” Sehun says. It feels like the first night they re-met, except he’s on the pleading end and Luhan isn’t listening. He runs out after him, but Luhan bolts. Sehun almost takes off after him, but then he reconsiders. He doesn’t know what he’d do if he caught up – tackle him? Hit him from the back? Trip him up? – and he’s very much under the impression that Luhan doesn’t want him to, anyways.

Besides, Luhan has always been faster than him.

He slides down the outside wall of his apartment as Luhan disappears down the stairs. He can hear his boots thudding down all the flights, and he counts the footsteps until they’re too quiet to make out from the throbbing silence around him. He covers his face with his hands. He understands less than anything now. He understands negative things.

I don’t just hate everything. I hate anything, too.

Sehun wants badly to call somebody. He wants to sit in Jongin’s front yard. He wants to climb Jongdae’s fence and play with his dog. He wants to take refuge in Tao’s garage and dig through his giant bins of dolls for the ones that aren’t terrifying or disfigured.

He wants to climb Luhan’s tree and sit. He wants to soak up moonlight from its branches and rap on the window until Luhan comes out, all crinkled eyes and wide smile and abrasive laugh. He wants to make pinky promises with Luhan about being together forever, and to go ahead and link the rest of their fingers together, too. He wants Luhan to laugh and let him.

Those days are long past for him now.

They’re long past for Luhan, too. This Luhan is the one that drinks enough to estrange his friends and hangs in bad company. This Luhan is the one that sleeps more than he talks because he’s secretly too exhausted to be alive. This Luhan is the one to run away because he’s terrified of people running away from him first.

And this Sehun is the one who lets him.

Sehun takes a good, long look at his hands. He pretends he can read his future in them, like the palm mystics that hide behind curtains in marketplaces. Your name is Oh Sehun. You’re eighteen years old. Your life line says you’re going to live forever, but your love line says you’re going to die alone. Your dumbass line says that even when you have the opportunity to stop people from leaving, you won’t, because it’s all you’ve ever known.

Actually, your “you’re-a-giant-dick” line says it’s because you’re a giant dick. Yeah, that sounds more accurate.

Sehun finally gets his phone out.

Luhan. Where did you go? Please come back before something bad happens.

He sends it, but it doesn’t feel like enough, so he types up another message.

I did something wrong. I don’t know what it is because I’m an idiot, but I know I did something wrong. And I know that I’m still doing something wrong because I let you leave, and I never should have.

Fifteen minutes pass. Sehun tries again because he can’t think of anything else to do.

I said I’d never leave.

He wants to put You said you’d never leave, either, but he can’t bring himself to do it.

There are tears on his screen. Sehun can’t really see anymore, so he types his last message blindly.

I’m coming to find you.

He’s up and moving before he even has the chance to press send.

기억 – XI

잊다 2012-4-12

“Next year, I’m eighteen.They say they won’t take care of

someone that old.

I saythey don’t take care

of people who are young,either.

They keep reminding methat once I’m old enough,

I’m out.

As if I’d ever forget.”

“Hello?”

The voice on the other end of the line is unfamiliar. It’s bright and excited, despite the fact that it’s twelve in the morning, and Sehun is immediately irritated with it. It probably has more to do with the fact that he’s been tearing his hair out for an hour trying to find Luhan, but rationalization means nothing when you’re already at the end of your rope. Sehun’s voice is colored with panic.

“Hi, can I talk with Kyungsoo? It’s urgent.”

The voice sounds a little worried, but he’s at least obedient. “Yeah, sure, I’ll wake him up for you. Is everything alright? I’ll try to make sure Kyungsoo doesn’t tear either of our heads off for this— Hey, Soo!”

Sehun hears a soft, feathery thud, and then there’s Kyungsoo’s voice, upset and accusing in the background. “Baekhyun, what the fuck, I have work tomorrow—”

“Someone called for you, and they said it’s urgent! They sound really scared.”

“Does that mean you have to throw pillows at my head? Why can’t you just shake me like a normal human being—”

“If I’m going to subject myself to your unquenchable rage at twelve A.M., then I’m going to at least have fun with it.”

“Why did I ever decide to room with you—” Kyungsoo’s voice is getting closer, and Sehun is starting to panic even more because he’s suddenly unsure of what he’s going to say. Hey, the little monster I brought by earlier today escaped. Can you help me recapture him?

Sehun almost hangs up, but then Kyungsoo’s voice is there, gruff and slurred with sleep, and Sehun knows that if the line goes dead, Baekhyun will have hell to deal with.

“Um… Kyungsoo? Hey, it’s Sehun. I was just wondering—”

“Sehun?” Kyungsoo sounds so startled that Sehun wonders if there was actually somebody else that he was expecting. It occurs to him all at once that Kyungsoo actually has a life beyond work. It’s a revelation he would welcome any other time besides now, but he can feel the tick of clocks pushing him into a box. He feels like the mice that he and Jongin cornered as kids, and he hates it, hates it, so when Kyungsoo tries to start off their conversation with his standard condescending comment, Sehun silences him immediately.

“Luhan is missing.”

“What? You mean your little demon?”

Sehun growls under his breath, but he outwardly confirms. “Yes. I need help finding him. I don’t know who else to call besides his friends, and I don’t have their cells.”

“What about Junmyeon?” Kyungsoo asks, and Sehun stops briefly. Oh, yeah. I probably could have done that. “How did you get my number, anyways?”

“Does it matter?” Sehun barks. He can practically feel Kyungsoo recoil because no matter how sarcastic Sehun is, he’s never sharp. “I just… I need your help. Please.”

“Since when do you need anything from me besides your insult fix?”

“Since…” Sehun rests his head on his arms briefly before looking back up at the road. “Since you talked to me like you actually cared earlier. About lying to Luhan.”

Kyungsoo drifts into thoughtful silence. Sehun wants to punch the steering wheel, but he doesn’t. A car passes him on a solid line, and he wants to honk his horn, to run into the back of it, to do something to express how livid he is with that goddamn car as an extension of the world, but he doesn’t do that, either. He forces himself to wait, and it pays off after a minute of quiet, when Kyungsoo finally exhales and says, “Fine. Do you have any idea where he might be?”

“I’ve been checking around all the roads in town. I didn’t think he could wander that far that fast, but I can’t find him at all. Not even a lead. I’ve been looking for an hour.”

“Just tell me where you’ve searched and I’ll look where you haven’t.”

Sehun gives him the information and hangs up after Kyungsoo has promised twelve times to text him with updates (and told Baekhyun to shut up nine times, as he apparently was insistent on badgering Kyungsoo about the “danger man” the entirety of the phone call). He breathes easier with a soldier backing him, and he briefly considers enlisting Junmyeon, too, but he decides against it. One is enough for his army, especially when that one is a Kyungsoo. He’ll probably be wielding Febreze as a weapon. Or a spatula.

Sehun still isn’t really in the mood to laugh, but if he was, he would have probably let a good chuckle loose at the idea of Kyungsoo in a military-styled apron, freshening spray in one hand and various kitchen utensil in the other. He turns down another backroad, slowing down to check in every front yard, and in every backyard, too, if he can see back far enough.

It’s another forty-five minutes or so before there’s any lead, and it’s from Kyungsoo, not him. His phone beeps a merry tune, and he snatches it up and scrolls until he finds it – a message under a number he hasn’t had the chance to save as Kyungsoo’s yet.

I found him. He was wandering in some neighborhood. I’m sitting with him now, but he won’t get in the car with me.

Sehun releases a pent-up breath that’s been building in his chest all night. He goes to text him back, but Kyungsoo beats him to it again.

He keeps asking for you.

Sehun’s tears get a little too thick behind his eyelids, and he has to pull over to let them clear. He texts back with shaky fingers.

Which me?

Kyungsoo’s reply is nigh imminent. The you, you? He keeps mumbling ‘Sehun’ and insisting I find you and bring you to him. I think he might be a little inebriated. What other you is there?

Sehun can’t reply. He’s too busy gathering himself enough to be able to drive again. Kyungsoo sends him another message.

He’s still calling me Baekhyun. It’s starting to make me uncomfortable.

Sehun finally manages to drag himself out of his stupor long enough to respond. Text me your address. He gets himself back on the road and in a general direction to nowhere when he gets a bundle of texts, all at once. He reaches down to palm through them.

Shit.

Sehun’s heart stops for a moment long enough to put him in a hospital. Well, that isn’t a good start to this. He scrolls down, panic rising with each message.

Shit, Sehun, I spooked him. He ran off into the woods.

God, I can’t find him, I can’t figure out where he went.

I… I told him I wasn’t Baekhyun. I’m so sorry, Sehun. I didn’t know that it was because you were me.

That doesn’t even make sense, goddammit.

Look, I’m looking for him as we speak. Just come to the address I sent you. He shouldn’t be far from there by the time you make it.

…I’m sorry. I’m so, so, so sorry.

Sehun remembers the last time he got a bundle of messages – from Luhan, of the dandelion, our flower – and he recalls his stomach dropping then, too, but not quite like this.

He floors it when he glances down at the address – and realizes he knows exactly where it is.

He’d already checked there, but it makes sense now that Luhan would wait.

Every time. Every single time I get too drunk, I end up there.

Sehun isn’t sure where he went first. He isn’t sure where he got the alcohol, or how he’d managed to wander all the way back afterwards, but he figures it doesn’t matter. He knows where he is now.

And he has to find him.

기억 – XII

상기하다 2013-5-1

“It feels so good to be on my own.

It’s lonely,but it’s lonely when you’re surrounded

by people who don’t like you, too,so I guess it’s alright.

I moved back near my old neighborhood.Did you know?

It makes me remember.”

When he makes the turn into his childhood neighborhood, Kyungsoo’s car is waiting at the corner, still running and illuminating the road with its brights. Kyungsoo steps out, not bothering to switch it off. His usual look of annoyance crosses his face, but it’s nearly masked by an all-consuming fear. Sehun doesn’t know which one he prefers. He thinks the answer is neither.

“What way did he run?” Sehun asks before he has even one foot out of the car. Kyungsoo points to what Sehun chooses to believe is the north, towards the forestry that Sehun has trekked through hundreds of times with smaller legs and a bigger mind. Sehun nods and goes to take off, but Kyungsoo grabs him by the shoulder before he can get anywhere.

“Sehun,” he says seriously. “I don’t know what you told that kid. I don’t want to know. I don’t care. The only thing I care about is the way he cried and took off like a shot animal the second I brought it up. Do you understand what I’m trying to say here?”

Sehun swallows and nods. “I know. I… I was going to tell him. Soon.”

“You should never have had to ‘tell’ him anything in the first place.” Kyungsoo releases him, stepping back to let him take the lead. “Next time, don’t lie to people. And if you’re going to lie, make sure it’s to people you don’t plan on ever seeing again.”

“I wasn’t planning on ever seeing him again when I first met him—”

Kyungsoo silences him with a wave of his hand. “You and I both know that’s not true.”

Sehun pauses mid-protest. Then, he reluctantly nods again. “Would have never pegged you for a guru, Kyungsoo. Can I adopt you as my Splint sensei?”

“Now is not the time.” He pushes Sehun forward. “Go. I’ll be right behind you.”

Beneath the wide-eyed alarm and permanent irritation, there’s a sudden flicker of concern in Kyungsoo’s face, too. It’s almost affectionate. Sehun instantaneously decides that that one is his favorite before he pulls himself away and starts jogging towards the woods, accelerating to a sprint when the criticality of the situation crashes down on him again.

Sehun considers calling out for Luhan, but as much as he wants to believe that Luhan will come running at the sound of his voice like a lost puppy, he knows he’ll much more likely run farther. He doesn’t feel like his eyes pierce far enough into the dark, and all at once he’s cursing the black of night for walling him in from the front, for chasing him from the back and for blocking his peripherals from both sides, like a giant cage of hardened ink. He wishes the sun would rise and illuminate all the colors of the trees that have fallen into murky shades of onyx, of the ebony moss lined along fallen trunks the color of slate, of the raven leaves that crunch under his charcoal shoes that he knows should be red, bright red, scarlet and vermillion and crimson and rose. He wants the glow of pigments stretching his vision to the end of the earth because he knows that, in the light, Luhan will outshine every sharpened pencil in his Crayola box. In the light, he’ll be the easiest to find.

Because in the light, Luhan will be the brightest, richest, most vivid color of them all, and no matter how many times Sehun will try to paint him in his memory, it’ll never be quite so beautiful as he is.

It isn’t long before Sehun directs Kyungsoo to split up to take up the other half of the forest, promising that it isn’t far enough for him to get lost. Kyungsoo looks at him wearily, and Sehun wonders if he’s used to being on the receiving end of orders – he even bosses Junmyeon around at times, really – but he acquiesces, directing Sehun to keep his phone on him (probably to reassert his authority). He splinters off without another word otherwise, and within minutes, the woods have swallowed him whole.

When he’s gone, Sehun feels inexplicably alone, surrounded on all sides by emptiness that serves as a constant reminder of all the places where Luhan is not. It’s been so long since Sehun’s been alone that the pang of isolation feels almost new and just as bloody as the first time, when he’d moved to his first home and a kid called him stupid because of his perpetually blank face.

He’d missed Luhan a lot that night. He misses Luhan a lot right now, too.

Everything is quiet – he can’t even hear Kyungsoo’s crunching footsteps anymore. He’s racing around in a frenzy, checking behind every tree and whirling around every handful of seconds to make sure Luhan isn’t escaping from behind him. Fifteen minutes pass. Thirty. Forty-five. He can’t find Kyungsoo anymore, let alone anyone else. Let alone Luhan.

He stops to lean against a tree momentarily, catching the breath that he’s lost.

He hears something underneath the sound of his ragged breaths. He holds them in an attempt to separate silence from the noise, but the sound of stuttering lungs doesn’t stop. He creeps forward and sees a figure, crouched and tense, with their head

in their arms. The first thought he has is That’s not Kyungsoo. The second is of the worry lines on Luhan’s mom’s face.

The third is of two hands, linked together at the fingers.

“Luhan?” he calls timidly. He’s scared of sneaking up on him – scared that he’ll spook and run, and Sehun will never be able to catch up with him. The figure doesn’t move, doesn’t look back, doesn’t even twitch. Sehun creeps closer. “Luhan, is that you?”

It isn’t until he’s close enough to ghost his fingers over the person’s sweater that they stir. Their head raises, eyes blinking dimly as they try and fail to take in the little light illuminating Sehun’s face. “Who are you?” he starts, before deciding better of it and closing his face back up in his arms. “Nevermind, I don’t care. Go away.”

“Luhan,” Sehun tries, lingering a few steps away from Luhan’s curled body. He scuffs his shoes against a couple loose gravel rocks. He wonders how pebbles managed to travel so far into the forest, away from the neighborhood. Maybe Tao threw them out of his suitcase and they just never moved. “I want you to come back with me.”

Luhan attempts to look up at him, squinting. “Colors,” he says, words slurred and sluggish against his tongue. “Your hair…”

Sehun nearly breaks out in laughter. Twilight has managed to suck out the color of everything, the reds and blues and yellows and all their in-betweens, and Luhan can still tell the color of his hair. “Luhan, my hair is not important. Do you remember who I am? Do you know where you are?”

“Your hair,” Luhan continues, as if he’d never been interrupted, “is the color of… Don’t tell me. It’s—” He squints harder, as if it’s some code to decipher. Sehun feels his fingers start to shake, like they always do when he’s under Luhan’s scrutiny. Luhan’s eyes widen, and he blurts, “It’s more than one! It’s—”

“It’s the color of Ariel’s hair,” Sehun snaps, “and the color of Eric’s skin. It’s the color of the leaves on autumn trees, and it’s the color of a stupid white room that I never wanted to go to.” Tears claw at his vision, as if the shadows clinging to everything he sees isn’t enough. He blinks them away as fast as he can and takes a shuddering breath. “It’s the color of you, Luhan. Because the real world is unrealistic, and you’re the only thing that makes sense.”

The sun may still be hours away from them, but it’s dawning in Luhan’s eyes, clearing out the clouds that freckle his vision. He stands slowly. Sehun can’t help but notice that the taller he gets, the farther he leans away, towards the edge of the woods that are opposite of him.

“Kyungsoo,” he spits, and then shakes his head. Violently. “No. Not Kyungsoo. No, you were never Kyungsoo, were you?” He laughs, and it’s even worse than usual because there’s a sinister tone to it, a sound of absolute resentment. Sehun feels his gut twist. “When were you going to tell me you were him? When were you going to tell me that you were the person I’ve been looking for for ten years, huh?”

“Luhan, it’s not what you think—” Sehun begins, but Luhan is way ahead of him. He takes a step back and points a slender finger.

“No, I think it’s exactly what I think,” he says, voice bubbling in his throat. He shakes his head slowly. Sehun can’t see his tears, but he can hear them. “I think you left me. And I think you’re going to leave me again. Because that’s what you do is leave.”

“I got taken, Luhan, it’s not the same thing—”

“Leave me alone.”

Sehun starts saying something else, something that sounds so much like a plea for life that he’s surprised he isn’t kneeling before a king, but it doesn’t matter. It’s Luhan who’s leaving, taking off as fast as his drunken legs will allow him. Sehun runs after him, but even inebriated Luhan is too fast, even with his shorter legs and his uneven gait, even with Sehun’s years of running from the bigger kids in his homes, running from his foster parents, running from Tao’s rocks and Jongdae’s fire and Jongin’s reptiles, even with all that, Sehun is about to lose him in the branches, in the roots, in the brushes, in the horrible shades of black—

There’s a crack. Sehun thinks it’s himself, at first, and he stumbles to a stop. He hears Kyungsoo’s voice in the distance somewhere for the first time in an hour, screaming his name, and he wonders if the noise was really that loud. He looks forward, expecting to see Luhan disappearing into coal and soot.

He instead sees him crumpled in a pile, completely still.

Sehun catches up with Luhan for the first time in his life. He wonders first if it counts if he’s not moving.

He wonders second whether his shoes are the same color as Luhan’s blood.

기억 – XIII

잊다 2014-2-19

“I found Luhan today.

…I think he’s forgotten.”

“He’s got a twisted ankle and a concussion,” the doctor begins, and Sehun marvels at the parallels of his life. He’s been sitting in the waiting room for two hours, Kyungsoo on one side and Minseok on his other, attempting to shut the two of them up from bickering while Jongdae paced, too distraught to address anybody. Sehun had contacted both Jongdae and Minseok from Luhan’s phone, and they’d both rushed to the hospital, tense and ready to plead for mercy from some higher being. The nurses had been eyeing them all warily ever since Minseok showed up at Sehun’s call, shaking his short arms around like he was ready to kill, and Kyungsoo immediately shut him down after a few hastily thrown accusations.

“It’s your fault,” Minseok had said, pointing a frenzied finger at Sehun. Sehun lifted tired eyes to Minseok’s passion-inflamed face, but he hadn’t reacted beyond that because he completely agreed. “You’re dangerous, and he never should have moved in with you—”

“Hey,” Kyungsoo had barked, standing up and pushing Sehun behind him. Sehun hadn’t resisted that, either. He only watched, noting how having them stand side by side made them look almost normal height. Jongdae lingered at the corners of his vision, disappearing behind one of their heads and popping up behind the other as he trotted from side to side. “Sehun hasn’t done anything all night except try to find him. You

wouldn’t have known shit about his whereabouts if Sehun hadn’t informed you. Sit down before you embarrass yourself, kiddo.”

“Where did he get the alcohol?” Sehun had asked slowly, and Minseok’s face had paled.

“He came in for two seconds while I was in the shower,” Minseok had said quickly, as if trying to defend himself. “I got out when I heard someone rummaging around, but I only caught him when he was running out the door with a backpack full of whiskey bottles. He was in the elevator before I could catch up.”

Sehun was satisfied with the answer, but Kyungsoo was boiling over. “You let him escape with alcohol and you have the audacity to say it was Sehun’s fault?”

“If Sehun hadn’t insulted him in one way or the other, anyways, he wouldn’t have come in the first place—”

It’s progressed since then into catty insults and childish comebacks. There was even a point where Kyungsoo pressed his fingers to his ears and sang at the top of his lungs to tune Minseok out (Sehun wonders if Kyungsoo learned this from Baekhyun or if he’s always been secretly prone to acting this juvenile). Sehun snapped at both of them at one point – “Both of you are short and ugly so shut up!” – so they both sat on opposite ends, boxing him in and occasionally leaning over to glare at one another before resuming sulking.

They all rose as the doctor spoke, though, even Jongdae coming to a halt, and Sehun appreciates the fact that they’re all here for the same reason, at least. Jongdae stares off into the distance behind the doctor, but Minseok is drinking in the doctor’s every word as if they were from the veins of life itself, and Kyungsoo looks equally as attentive, even though he had been ready to murder Luhan just earlier that day.

Earlier that day. Sehun shudders at the thought that it had hardly been twenty-four hours since Luhan was still happy and blissfully ignorant of everything.

You should never have had to ‘tell’ him anything anyways.

“Can we see him?” Sehun asks, scratching at his thigh nervously.

“He’s not awake yet,” the doctor responds, “but he shouldn’t be unconscious much longer. If any of you would like to sit in and wait for him to come to, I welcome you to it.”

“Thank you,” Minseok replies, eyeing Sehun as the doctor nods and directs a nurse to them. The nurse gestures for them to follow, but Kyungsoo grabs Sehun’s sleeve before he can.

“I really should get home,” he whispers as Minseok and Jongdae both awkwardly wander after the nurse to a room somewhere down the hallway. They disappear, and Sehun feels his muscles tighten in longing. “Baekhyun called me seven times while I was driving us here, and he’s still texting me like a worried mother.”

“I understand,” Sehun says, waving him off with the outline of a smile. “Go. If you end up at work tomorrow, tell Junmyeon that I can’t make it.”

“Should I tell him why?” Kyungsoo asks, and they both snort in unison because, honestly, Junmyeon won’t argue the point either way. Kyungsoo nods and places a hand on Sehun’s shoulder. He tips his chin up to look at him (or down, Sehun guesses, since Kyungsoo is an entire head shorter).

“Listen,” he starts. “I know I was kind of harsh earlier, and I meant what I said, but—” He pauses. Sehun has never heard him so unsure of spoken words before. Kyungsoo’s eyes wander, as if trying to find his point in some unlit corner of the room. Sehun follows them with his own until they meet. Kyungsoo sighs. “I know you care for that kid. And I know he knows you care for him, no matter what he said or tries to say. And I know he knows you know he cares about you, too.”

“I didn’t follow that.”

“Yes you did, you idiot.” Kyungsoo’s hand drops from his shoulder and flops uselessly by his side. “What I’m trying to say is… If he’s angry, make him understand. Because I know you have a reason for all this. And if you don’t—” Kyungsoo raises a fist solemnly. “I will beat your face in for making me stay out until four in the morning for nothing. You get me?”

“Yes, Master Splinter,” Sehun says in his most serious voice, bowing. “Arm me, and I will do better next time.”

“Like I’d ever give you a weapon. They’d arrest me for that.” Kyungsoo punches him, but it’s not without a smile. “You’ve got this. And,” and Kyungsoo actually cracks his fists this time, “if pipsqueak over in the room there tries to bully you again, just call. I’ll bring Baekhyun with me. He’s like a little attack dog when he wants to be.”

And Sehun is laughing, now, actually laughing to the point of tears, gripping Kyungsoo’s sleeves as if he’ll fall without their support. “I have never liked you more than I do right now,” Sehun says, wiping his eyes. “Who knew you could be grumpy and funny?”

“Come on. I’m nineteen, not fifty.” He smiles, and Sehun notices for the first time that it’s heart-shaped. He’s seen Kyungsoo scowl so much that he almost didn’t think he could smile.

It’s creepy. But he likes it, anyways.

Kyungsoo heads toward the exit, but Sehun doesn’t let go of his sleeve. “Hey,” he says, and Kyungsoo glances back with questions in his eyes. “I didn’t mean it when I called you ugly.”

“I mean it when I say you’re stupid though,” he deadpans. Sehun just grins and lets go.

Sehun turns and walks in the direction the nurse had disappeared in as Kyungsoo takes his leave. He has to peek into several rooms to find them (one elderly man gives him the finger when he pokes his head in; another unleashes a gummy smile that makes Sehun a little frightened). The first thing he notices is that Minseok is already at Luhan’s side, holding his hand and whispering intently at his blank face. The second thing he notices is that Jongdae is just sitting in a chair facing the wall instead of any one person, whispering at himself.

The third thing he notices is that Luhan is awake, eyes blinking slowly. That’s about where the panic starts.

Minseok turns to regard him with a cold glare, but his fingers don’t stop caressing Luhan’s knuckles. He quickly gives out on Sehun, turning back to Luhan to keep his steady stream of soothing conversation going.

Luhan’s eyes train on Sehun. They don’t move from him, even when Minseok shakes him to get his attention.

“You know what?” Minseok raises his voice, so Sehun assumes it’s for him. He glances at him, but he keeps his peripherals trained on Luhan, who still refuses to break his stare. Jongdae looks up at the ceiling, grimacing at the noise. “I think you should leave. You’ve already had him trembling in the woods, falling over tree roots and knocking his head on rocks—”

“Minseok,” Luhan croaks. It’s enough to stop Minseok in his tracks. His eyes turn back to Luhan immediately, softening at the sight of Luhan’s bruised forehead. “Leave him alone. Actually, leave us both alone for a minute. I need to talk to him.”

Minseok worries on his bottom lip, and Sehun absentmindedly thinks that he and Luhan are like blood twins. “Luhan, are you sure? I want to be here if you need anything—”

“Minseok,” Luhan says again, and he’s smiling this time. It’s the first time that Sehun has seen him smile at Minseok since he’s known him, and even with Minseok’s

sullen looks swatting at the back of his head, he’s immensely glad that they’re on good terms.

It’ll make him leaving easier.

Sehun feels a sudden urge to make a cup of tea.

“I appreciate you being here,” Luhan continues, “but I really need to straighten some things out, okay?”

“If you say so, Lu,” Minseok says, rising from his seat, “but if you need me, I’ll be right out in the hall—”

“Okay,” Luhan laughs, shooing him out. Minseok turns to him one last time.

“Will you at least reconsider moving back in with me?”

“I’ll reconsider,” Luhan promises, and Sehun’s stomach sinks right to the pits of Hell as Minseok shuffles his way out the door. Sehun stops him before he can leave.

“What do you want,” Minseok states, staring at the floor instead of into Sehun’s face.

Sehun shrugs.

“Thank you for coming,” he mumbles. “And for being a good friend to him.”

Minseok finally meets his eyes. Sehun sees a mixture of feelings strewn across his face, but before he can identify any of them, Minseok grunts and shoulders his way past again.

“Jongdae, would you mind stepping out for a second, too?”

Jongdae doesn’t make any protest at all. He stands and turns mechanically, offering an empty look of recognition at Sehun before departing as well and dragging his chair after him.

Sehun looks back at Luhan. To his dismay, Luhan’s smile has fallen into a tired frown. He gestures for Sehun to shut the door, so he does.

“Come here,” Luhan orders. Sehun does what he’s told, gripping the bottom edge of the bed and shimmying closer.

“What did you want to say?” Sehun asks, mostly because he can’t think of anything else to broach the conversation with. He coughs and shrugs and knows it’s a

stupid question because he’s already heard bits and pieces of it, but Luhan doesn’t look too offended. He just looks drained.

“Why did you leave the first time?” Luhan says lowly, playing with the patient-issued bedsheets. “Really.”

“Because they told me to,” Sehun replies firmly. He meets Luhan’s eyes and hopes his sincerity is sincere enough. Luhan doesn’t look entirely convinced.

“And why did you lie to me?”

“Because…” Sehun draws a blank. He knows, but he doesn’t know how to articulate it, to make Luhan understand all the reasons he felt he couldn’t let him know. Luhan waits for a time, but he gets impatient.

“Were you planning on kicking me out, after a while?”

“Absolutely not,” Sehun says, and he sounds almost horrified because he is. The thought of Luhan being gone sends waves of pain through his entire chest. It’s not until after they’ve diminished that he remembers his promise to Minseok. “Well… I told Minseok I would tell you that you could come back at any time, but I was never going to make you—”

“Did you really know who I am?”

The question catches him offguard. He swallows and nods after a moment’s hesitation. “Yes,” he says. “I would never forget who you are.”

Luhan sits forward in his bed. His IV pulls, and he winces. Sehun wants to reach out and steady him, but he’s scared to touch him. “Then tell me why you lied.”

Sehun opens his mouth, but no words come out. Luhan finally sits back with a huff, crossing his arms. “You’re unbelievable.”

Sehun scratches at his arm, his legs, his palms, anything he can reach, and takes a deep breath. “That’s no way to talk to your best friend,” he manages, cautiously looking up to judge his reaction.

Luhan’s mouth turns down just a tiny bit more. “My best friend is Sehun,” he says, slowly and clearly. “You’re not my best friend.”

“Didn’t you hear that we’re the same person?”

Luhan shakes his head and scoffs. It makes Sehun feel smaller, so he stands up as straight as he can. “You might be Sehun, but you’re not the Sehun I knew. I think I’d recognize my best friend.”

“No,” Sehun says softly, more to himself than to Luhan. “You wouldn’t.” Luhan’s eyebrows draw to crease the middle of his forehead, and he opens his mouth to give rebuttal, but Sehun cuts him off. “I should have never expected you to.”

“What?” Luhan asks, wrinkling his nose in confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“That’s why I lied,” Sehun says, looking down at where his hands are gripping the bedposts. Luhan falls into silence. “I lied because you saw me and didn’t know who I was. I lied because I thought you had forgotten me, and everything that I was to you. But…you didn’t.” He swallows, and it’s thick and hot and clogs his throat, but he talks through it anyways. “I’m not the same best friend as I was. I’ve…changed, a lot. So have you. But that doesn’t make us any less of best friends. That doesn’t mean you care less, or that I do. And just because you can’t see me in this face…doesn’t mean you don’t remember me in this…me.”

“You don’t know anything,” Luhan mutters, but Sehun hears the note of insecurity in his voice. Sehun shuffles forward, pressing a hesitant hand into Luhan’s shoulder. Luhan doesn’t look at him, but he doesn’t flinch away, either.

Progress.

“That’s true,” Sehun continues desperately, grasping at the nuggets of understanding that he can see in Luhan’s brow. “But if there’s anything that I’m close enough to knowing, it’s that you’re my best friend in the entire world, and even though I’m the biggest idiot you’ve ever known – I’ve ever known – I’m your yeodongsaeng, and you’re my oppa, and…” There’s a pause, probably long enough for Luhan to think that he’d forgotten they were in the middle of a conversation, but he hasn’t, he never would, because conversations with Luhan are precious and every word of them counts. “And I love you more than I’ve ever loved any other person.”

Luhan freezes.

“You recognized me from the getgo. It’s like…” He pauses and snaps, pointing at Luhan, who can only receive his efforts with wide eyes and confusion. “Our tree! Like our tree, Luhan, don’t you get it?”

The look on his face says he very much doesn’t get it, so Sehun restarts. “The tree was something big and beautiful and wholly there, and it held all our memories, all our late night talks and our last hurrahs and our everything. And then it was cut down, as if it were any old tree. As if it was nothing, when to two kids, it was the world. But look at it! It’s a stump now. It’s nothing like a tree, with the leaves and the colors and the branches to sit on, but when I look at it, I still remember, I still feel the same as I did

when I was eight and you were twelve and we had barely started making our way in the world. We’re like that, Luhan. You said I was familiar, that you trusted me immediately, that it felt like déjà vu. Because that was all true. Because we did know each other, because we’ve always known each other, and because no matter what we look like, no matter how far we’re cut down, we will always feel the same because we both know how the other makes us feel.”

Sehun inhales sharply. It feels like he hasn’t taken a breath in that entire speech, and in hindsight, he’s pretty sure that’s probably true.

His throat tingles with use, still vibrating with the echoes of his voice, but he doesn’t cough.

Luhan finally meets his eyes. He stares at him in a way that makes Sehun feel like he’s about to disappear. The only thing that’s keeping him rooted is the fire inside them. Sehun wonders if Luhan will remember this in the morning, when the purple bump on his head has gone down and the alcohol still lingering in his veins has been filtered out. He wonders if he’ll remember the way that Sehun looks, standing unsurely at his bedside, framed by hospital windows but unmoving – for once, not running away. He wonders, because he knows he’ll always remember how Luhan is looking at him, how Luhan is anchoring him into existence, how Luhan is lifting his torso up towards him and how even the smell of stale liquor on Luhan is beautiful. He’ll always remember how Luhan grabs at his shirt collar, more limbs than arm, too much elbow and not enough hands, and he’ll always remember how Luhan envelops him in the warmest embrace he’s ever felt.

He’ll probably forget the tears that sting his eyes and the hospital fans that chill even his clothed skin. He’ll forget what day it is, what hospital room they’ve come to, whether Luhan was dressed in a white robe or a black one, and whether or not he wants to make tea right now (he finds, surprisingly, that he doesn’t). He’ll forget how he had managed to find him, how long it had taken to get to the hospital, and whether his shiner was more violet or sapphire, because purple and blue are too boring of colors.

He won’t forget Luhan, though. He won’t forget the champagne of his hair or the ochre of his eyes, the shades of bronze between the tickles of his skin or the amber waves of his whiskey-tinged breath.

He won’t forget the flush of lips against lips. It’s the first time he’s ever tasted a rose, and it’s the first time he’s ever cared to.

“My Sehun wouldn’t say sappy things like that,” Luhan whispers when he leans away. He bites his lip, but it’s not with worry this time. “But… I think I like the Sehun who does better.”

He won’t forget leaning in for a second time, and how it’s more russet than the first one, but it’s just as special. And he won’t ever forget how Luhan looks when they part again. His face, for the first time since childhood, is completely smooth, and Sehun thinks it’ll be etched in his memory, too, just like the last time he saw him.

After all, you don’t forget the face of the person who was your only hope.

기억 – XIV

루한 2014-4-9

“I found Luhan, again, today,

and he hasn’t.”

“Can I help you?”

Sehun’s voice is as bright as a streetlights, and he’s completely sure that the customer outside in their car approves by their hearty “Yes, sir!” as they pleasantly list their order. He types it up in a flash on his little computer, buttons falling under his fingertips in ease, quickly recording what he’s pretty sure is more of a celebration than an order before reading off the price and instructing them to go to the window that he isn’t currently tending to. Kyungsoo grins at him from the other window, where he’s been stationed at.

“You seem happy today,” he comments, ambling off to start the twenty drinks they’d ordered. Sehun shrugs, but his smile can’t lie. He follows behind Kyungsoo, grabbing ten cups to split the work in half. Kyungsoo gives him an appreciative look, but Sehun waves him off.

“I’m never happy. Remember? I sit over here in a bubble of death.”

“Your bubble has been a lot less graveyard lately. More sunshines and flowers. It’s almost scarier.” Kyungsoo goes to open his window, but Sehun beats him to it, handing out two of their drinks and promising that their food would be out soon with a lopsided grin and a wave. Kyungsoo shakes his head in disbelief when Sehun closes the window back and his smile doesn’t disappear. “Couldn’t you come to work one day without looking like you just woke up next to the prettiest girl on the planet?”

“I would if it weren’t true,” Sehun teases back, grabbing a four-drink tray to pass to the car rumbling in wait outside. Kyungsoo follows behind with another, anxious to get back into the groove of working. “I think Luhan is prettier than the prettiest girl on the planet.”

Kyungsoo sighs loudly in mock exasperation. “Then maybe you should just quit your job and stay at home forever. Before your happiness gets contagious or something.”

“I think it already has been,” Sehun announces, poking Kyungsoo in the stomach. Kyungsoo flinches but, for once, he doesn’t attempt to strike back. Sehun is still getting used to that. “Baekhyun still calls me every once in a blue moon to thank me for not making your life so hard anymore. He calls you Kyung-sool now. He said you even initiate the pillow fights sometimes.”

“Do not.” Kyungsoo sticks his tongue out and attempts to juggle the five bags of food the order requires. Sehun quickly dives in to help, and Kyungsoo almost smiles, but he resists. “Okay, fine, I do, but it’s only as a means of revenge for all the years of torment.”

“I sense affection,” Sehun singsongs, and Kyungsoo – against protocol – whacks him with one of the bags. Sehun can feel a burger flatten against his arm, and he snickers as Kyungsoo hands it out anyways, smiling graciously at the driver. None the wiser. Sehun glances over at him fondly, but he’s hurrying back to the front to grab the rest of the drinks. Sehun shrugs again, more to himself this time, before padding back to the drive-thru button and breathing in slowly. He presses it, beaming, even though he knows the customer can’t see him. “Can I help you?”

This is the tedium of Sehun’s daily life. If anyone asked (Luhan does every day), the first word that he’d use to describe his life is low-key. Everything is always exactly the same. Each morning, Sehun arrives precisely on time with three coffees (one for himself, one for Kyungsoo, and one for Junmyeon) and window cleaner, so he can help Kyungsoo with the cleaning duties. He doesn’t actually enjoy being unnecessarily clean, but he does enjoy squirting Kyungsoo with dishsoap and texting Baekhyun about how he got him “right between the eyes.” He sometimes retreats to the bathroom to clean the toilets, too, when Kyungsoo starts to return fire with his air freshener.

When the place opens, Sehun takes his place at the first window because it’s where he’s always been, and where he always wants to be, and he always, always sends his customers to Kyungsoo’s window because the one and only time he tried to take over them himself, Kyungsoo moped around all day like a lost puppy. At the end of the day, Sehun is let off early because Kyungsoo and Junmyeon both know he’s got Luhan waiting for him at home, texting him stupid pictures with stupid captions that all mean I miss you, and Junmyeon always stops him to ask him when Luhan is going to come back to visit. Every time Junmyeon lets him go, Sehun sticks his tongue out at Kyungsoo, who responds by throwing raw burger patties at Sehun’s face. Junmyeon tries to get him in trouble the first time but eventually stops since he cleans up his mess, anyways.

After Sehun splits from work, he drives the same way home, past the abandoned gas station, past the cow fields and the trailer park, and past what he knows now is Luhan’s former college campus, always slowing down to admire the unblemished walls of the dorm that Luhan no longer stays at and wonder what Minseok is doing. He passes Jongdae’s college, too, and he can’t see Jongdae and Jongin’s apartment from there, but he knows all the turns to get there. He and Luhan visit regularly, and as warm a host Jongdae is, he’s still the same kid who hides whoopee cushions under couch pillows and gives them salty milk.

Jongin keeps two dogs and a chinchilla against the apartment’s rules, but all their neighbors like him so much that no one tells. Sehun brings him rolly pollies in little plastic cups closed with sandwich wrap to add to his collection. Jongdae sticks out his tongue in disgust, but it doesn’t stop Jongin from stacking them on top of his dresser and admiring them under lamplight with a brilliant, childish smile. (Sehun brought him a lizard once, too, which he promptly released in Jongdae’s bed one night while he’s sleeping. Luhan started calling Jongdae yeodongsaeng too, after that, because the shriek he let out sounded like a little girl.)

Tao visits once every couple months and takes them out to expensive restaurants on his modest modeling paycheck. He shares about landing roles in movies and turning them down because he couldn’t come back if he didn’t. Sehun always slings

his arm around him and tells him he’s the most selfless geologist he’s ever known. Tao calls him a dirty peasant, usually, but sometimes, he just snuggles down into Sehun’s side as if he’s missed the touch. (And Sehun won’t mention it, but he’s caught the kid pocketing pebbles off the streets more times than once. Some habits never die.)

Minseok comes by to check on Luhan sometimes, but when it’s only Sehun home, he occasionally lingers anyways. Sehun thinks he might even be checking on him, too, and Minseok turns his nose up at the idea, but it doesn’t stop him from buzzing around their apartment and tidying the places Sehun has overlooked.

And then there is his old neighborhood – or, rather, his new neighborhood, too. It’s both the silver lining and the sunshine after the storm, nowadays. After he’d saved enough money together with Luhan, Sehun made it a point to move into the smallest house available in the back pocket of the place. He always puts on his turn signal when he nears it, and now, he turns, too, without any fear. It is completely different, and for the most part, this part of his world has forgotten his presence had even existed.

But there’s someone there that remembers him. Someone that will always remember him now, even if his hair is purple and his skin is the lightest shade of blue.

Everything is full. Everything is vibrant. Best of all, everything is wonderfully extraordinary.

And with Luhan, Sehun wouldn’t have it any other way.

기억 – CLXXIV

세훈 2014-4-9

“Sehun told me he thought I’d forgotten him,

so I kissed him

and told him I loved him.

I think he remembers that now.”

세훈 (se-hun) – adjective – unforgettable.

BONUS

• 2014-4-12 •

It’s Sehun’s birthday.

It’s the first birthday he’s spent outside of foster homes, where they’d feed him cardboard instead of cake as a joke and make him clean the toilets extra well, “so the birthday boy has a sparkling throne to sit on when he’s done.” He’s never had a surprise birthday before, so when Luhan starts sending him picture after picture of the empty rooms in their house and demands he come home quickly, he doesn’t expect anything out of the ordinary.

He does think it’s strange when Junmyeon asks him to close up, and he thinks it’s even stranger when Kyungsoo leaves with him instead of polishing the tables. Sehun grunts as Kyungsoo ruffles his hair and tosses his jacket over his shoulder.

“I’ve got plans,” he says, “so I’m leaving my legacy to you. Those tables better be as spotless as they would under my care, you hear me?”

“I’ll be sure to spitshine them to perfection,” Sehun promises, sticking out his tongue.

“Your spit is disgusting. Keep it in your mouth.”

“Some professional you are.”

Kyungsoo rolls his eyes, but Sehun’s idle threat isn’t enough to keep him from leaving. When the restaurant is devoid of everyone but Sehun, silence filling every crack and crater in the flooring, Sehun shifts.

He feels kind of alone. It’s been a while.

He texts Luhan that he’s going to be late, but Luhan doesn’t seem all that fazed. He just tells him to take his time with whatever he’s doing.

But you wanted me home quickly. What changed?

The circumstances, Luhan replies, and he doesn’t answer Sehun’s following texts at all.

Sehun cleans to the best of his ability, but he’s resigned himself from the very beginning that it won’t be up to Kyungsoo’s standards. When Kyungsoo texts him to see how he’s faring, his only reply is, how do you do this every night?

Kyungsoo says it’s because he’s a superior creature. Sehun spends five minutes photoshopping a picture of Kyungsoo’s head onto a fairy on his phone, and when Kyungsoo doesn’t answer within a minute of receiving it, Sehun figures he probably won’t at all.

He gets a text from Baekhyun a couple minutes after saying Kyungsoo was grumbling about a dumb picture that Sehun made. Baekhyun also tells him that he sent it to himself and made it the background of his phone.

Success.

It takes an hour for him to finish the cleaning and lock up. By then, night has fallen, casting the parking lot into beast-shaped shadows. Sehun nervously stumbles to his car, dropping his keys when he goes to unlock it and nearly tripping in his hurry to

shove himself in the driver’s seat when he manages the fling the door open. His car starts after four cranks (it’s always four nowadays), and he settles down after a good five minutes spent on the road.

When he gets home, all the lights are off, which is exceedingly odd because Luhan has a horrible tendency of leaving them all on all at once when he paces through the house in fits of jitters. Not even the TV is on, Sehun notes when he approaches to unlock the door, and even the refrigerator is snugly closed. Sehun wonders if Luhan is even home at all. There’s no way he could exist in the darkness for long without turning on a nightlight, the bathroom, a lamp, something—

Sehun pops the door open and immediately reaches to flip on the hall light.

Someone beats him to it.

“Surprise!”

There’s a chorus of people screeching, all at once, clustered together in the livingroom and surging forward to greet the new addition. Baekhyun is on him first, hopping into his arms and laughing like an idiot in between exclamations of “Happy birthday!” and “Jeez, you’re tall.” Luhan is next, clinging to the arm that’s not currently supporting all of Baekhyun’s weight, and Jongdae grabs the arm that is and gives it a teasing shake. Baekhyun topples from over it, falling to his knees and swatting at Jongdae as if they’ve been friends forever. Tao hasn’t seemed to get the “attack Sehun” memo because he wraps his arms around Jongdae’s shoulders instead, grinning at Sehun from behind him. Minseok is on the couch, neglecting to even get out of his chair, although he is shooting a congratulatory thumbs up, and Jongin is next to him, face buried in the fur of some animal that he probably brought from home. Kyungsoo and Junmyeon linger near the outskirts, the latter holding a champagne bottle and the former brandishing a cake the size of his torso, piled up high with layers and layers of chocolate icing. There’s a white Power Ranger balanced on top that Sehun belatedly notices has been spotted with markers the color of fall and violet and pasty blue. Is that supposed to represent my hair?

By the next second, the scene has overwhelmed him, and Sehun screams.

Everyone jumps, Baekhyun tittering backwards and falling on his butt as Kyungsoo nearly drops the cake on Junmyeon’s white dress shirt. Jongdae flinches, and Tao drops from off his back without dislodging his arms. Minseok has inched away to the edge of the couch and is now pressed warily to Jongin’s side, who has only looked up because his dog did, too. The only person who hasn’t completely shied away is Luhan, who’s still attached to his arm and giving him a concerned look.

“Sehun, are you okay?” he asks, and Sehun’s eyes swim because he doesn’t know what to do. He takes a step back, dragging Luhan with him.

“I’m sorry,” Sehun whispers, clearing his throat, “I’m just… I don’t like surprises—”

“But it’s a good surprise—” Jongdae starts, but Tao hits the back of his head to shut him up as Sehun regains his composure.

“I’ve had a lot of surprises in my life, but none of them have been good before.” Sehun attempts to laugh, scratching the back of his head. Luhan squeezes his arm tighter. “Err… Thanks, you guys. Sorry…about that.”

“Next time, warn us before you go all serial killer victim on us!” Baekhyun pouts, crossing his arms instead of picking himself up off the floor. It isn’t until Kyungsoo sets down the cake and pads over to him that he gets up, and even then, it takes all of Kyungsoo’s strength to pull him into an upright stance.

“It’s way more fun watching you guys all freak out,” Sehun retorts, spirits returning, and Luhan laughs, but it’s soft – not at all like the all-encompassing howl Sehun is used to. Junmyeon eventually coaxes Sehun into the kitchen with alcohol and food, and Sehun totes Luhan around with him like a proud trophywinner. They all eat together in the livingroom, and their conversation eventually deteriorates to whooping loudly and seeing how many screams of terror they can make before the neighbors call the police. (Only Sehun and Baekhyun partake in this, really; the rest only raise their voices loud enough to tell them to shut the hell up.) Sehun sits next to Jongin, who smiles gratefully at him from behind tufts of poodle. Sehun decides this isn’t enough, so he slings his arms around his shoulders and noogies him until he taps out on the arm of the couch.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming back so soon,” Sehun accuses. Jongin just laughs again, petting his dog’s head with one hand while he socks Sehun with the other.

“They made me come back early so I could come to the party,” he says. “It was the ultimate surprise birthday gift.”

“That’s the worst gift ever. I wanted a pony.”

“I can hook you up,” Jongin grins, and Sehun didn’t think he was even capable of missing someone this much, especially when they’re in the same room.

Luhan leans over Sehun’s chest to talk to Jongin, and Sehun is still a little awkward, but he lets him. Jongin doesn’t seem surprised by the advancement of their relationship. Then again, Jongin has never seemed surprised by anything at all. He’s

the all-seeing oracle. He’s our mindreader. I bet he’s been keeping up with everyone’s horoscopes. Minseok sits on Luhan’s other side, looking a little perturbed with life, so when Luhan straightens, Sehun leans over his chest to engage him in conversation. (Minseok is still a little crabby with him, sometimes, but they’ve made progress. Sehun even makes a short joke, and Minseok actually laughs instead of shaking his fist at him.) Kyungsoo and Baekhyun engage in round after round of arm wrestling, each time Baekhyun talking up a shitstorm about how tough he is before subsequently losing. Junmyeon is drowning himself in champagne, giggling behind his hand at everything that goes on, and Jongdae and Tao are playing tic-tac-toe with an erasable marker on the countertop. Tao punches Jongdae every time he makes a move. Jongdae doesn’t hit him back, but he does threaten him with the prospect of putting itching powder in all his suitcases. Tao punches him anyways.

It isn’t until around four in the morning that everyone has fizzled out. Jongdae and Tao are the last to go, each giving Sehun a hug before sauntering out the front door. Sehun rubs his eyes sleepily, but Luhan is wide awake and tugging at his arm. “Wanna go on an adventure?”

“Isn’t it a little late for that?” Sehun mutters, tongue slurring his words. Luhan giggles, and it’s loud and stuttering and obnoxious, and Sehun likes it that way.

“A little. But it’ll only take a minute. I’ll drive.”

Sehun concedes easily because Luhan always gets his way, and before long, they’re on the road in Sehun’s shitty box of a car, engine roaring beneath their toes. Luhan holds his hand, even though he has to unhinge them constantly to change gears. Sehun focuses all his energy into not falling asleep. He’s pretty sure he does anyways because, in a blink, they’re outside his old apartment complex, Luhan swiftly turning off the ignition and trotting around to open Sehun’s door.

“We’re here!” he declares, eyes bright with excitement. Sehun grumbles as he slumps out of the car, blinking blearily at his surroundings.

“Why’re we here?”

“Did you forget?” Luhan asks teasingly as he takes him by the arm and tugs him in the direction of the building. “We left something very special here.”

“I took all the stuff out of the apartment—” Sehun starts, but Luhan hushes him with a finger.

“It’s not something that was in the apartment. Look.”

Luhan stops them at a familiar patch of grass. Sehun can’t tell if he’s mildly drunk or just stupid because he can’t tell what they’re looking at until Luhan bends down and touches it.

“Our flower,” Sehun mumbles, squatting next to Luhan and reaching out to brush their fingers together. Luhan nods gently.

“It’s bloomed,” he says, touching the fuzz of its seeds. “See? It’s all grown up now. Its kids are ready to sail away.” He glances at Sehun and holds his eyes for a moment, linking their pointer fingers together. “Let’s blow them out together.”

Sehun nods, and they both flatten out and knock their heads together in an attempt to line up with the dandelion. Luhan asks Sehun to count down, and Sehun counts to four, because two isn’t enough but he knows Luhan doesn’t like the number three. They blow together, and the seeds are flung out into the grass in clumps, hovering on the flow of their breath before sinking into patches of long grass. Sehun taps his chin in thought as the last one falls out of his vision.

“Why are you so against picking them?” he asks. Luhan gives him a look so patronizing that Sehun can almost feel it.

“Because picking them results in death, you idiot,” he scoffs, resting a finger lightly against the stem. “Blowing them out as is… Then they can watch their children frolick off. It’s using one life to create many lives. Like making a family.”

“I’m pretty sure making a family requires a very different path of action,” Sehun responds, wiggling his eyebrows.

Luhan thumps him between the eyes so hard that he actually sees stars.

“Don’t be such a kid,” he chastises before rising to his feet. “The dandelion babies might mistakenly take after you.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Sehun counters, rubbing his forehead gingerly. Luhan ignores him in favor for picking his way back to the car. Sehun follows close behind, but as they reach the edge of the grass, Luhan pauses.

“Sehun,” he says haltingly. Sehun thinks he’s probably still getting used to having the name “Sehun” on his lips instead of “Kyungsoo.” “Were you…really upset, earlier? About the party?”

Sehun scratches absentmindedly at his arm. “I told you. I just don’t like surprises.”

Luhan turns to him fully, biting his lip. “Is that really it?”

Sehun rocks his weight from side to side, feeling very unsure of himself. “I…” He trails off, wracking his brain for the right things to say. “The first time I got a surprise, it was when I got…taken.”

Luhan nods in understanding, taking Sehun’s busy hand in his and lacing their fingers together. Sehun takes a deep breath.

“Surprises from the foster cares weren’t exactly ideal. And… One of the last surprises I got…ended up with you in a hospital. So, ultimately, yeah. That’s it. I just don’t like them.”

Luhan puts his other hand on Sehun’s cheek. “You know,” he starts out slowly, “finding you again was the biggest surprise that’s ever happened to me.”

Sehun smiles at that, cupping Luhan’s hand and tracing his fingers down his arm. “I guess… Not all surprises are bad.”

Luhan sighs and resumes his path to their ride, kicking at the rocks scattered along the parking lot. “I’d been trying to find you all my life, and nothing ever turned up.” He snorts, leaning against the driver’s side of the car. “It was like chasing rainbows.”

Luhan looks incredibly vulnerable like this, shoulder meeting the top of the car and fingers tracing the overhang of his bottom lip. Sehun reaches out to tug his hand aside, replacing it with his own. “I felt the same way for a long time, about everything. But then I decided that you…”

Luhan glances up at him then, and his eyes are as wide as the moon glinting off them. Sehun leans in to kiss him, and then he laughs into it, and Luhan pushes him off and laughs, too.

Sehun doesn’t finish his sentence before they get in the car, but Luhan hears it, anyways.

You were the only rainbow worth chasing.