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The antique storekeeper isn’t the main character of his story.
There’s Jongin, and Sehun, and an entire lineup of crooks, few people pay attention to the third young man in the misshapen old coat. But he is part of the story because he lives right downstairs, a product of convenience: someone needs to ask curious questions about all the strange bags Jongin keeps hauling up the stairs at suspicious hours.
For the longest time, he had no name. He doesn’t even begin the story with a profession. The antique store shows up later, nearly two volumes in. For months, he existed only in the stairwell, appearing when bidden, and vanishing into nothing otherwise.
Then, one day, he is given a home.
It’s a cluttered little store, dimly lit to add to the mysterious charm, and it supplies Jongin with the final clue to their eight-chaptered investigation. The things in his store have lived longer than most people, and they know more than most people, too. Sometimes, what they know is hidden between two paper-thin photographs, tucked away in an old frame.
And Jongin, stumbling into the store on a rainy evening looking to borrow an umbrella, knocks over the frame and finds the secret he’s been hunting for all along.
And then the writer gives the antique storekeeper a great big secret of his own. At the back of the store, in a painted cabinet nearly three centuries old, lies a collection of books extensive enough to make a library, including eight volumes of an ongoing detective graphic novel.
A detective novel featuring Sehun, Jongin, and a formerly nameless man who lives in the antique store downstairs.
‘This is Chanyeol!’ The writer says, in tiny handwriting at the bottom of volume three. “Every story has their omniscient god, and Chanyeol is mine! He knows everything I know, but he won’t help unless the time is right. It’s nice to play with a character like this, isn’t it?”
So Chanyeol can’t be the main character of his story. He knows far too much for that.
But the book in the cabinet that interests him the most isn’t his own story. It’s a different one that he obsesses over, an award-winner, a love story, a dream come true. It’s a graphic novel like his own, a story about two soulmates finding each other in a park on a Saturday like any other, and Chanyeol has read it cover to cover so many times that he knows it all by heart.
No one cares what he gets up to in his free time, so he does as he likes. While Sehun and Jongin break into an old factory and save the day, when they’re miles away doing their own thing and he’s not required on the stairwell, Chanyeol dreams.
There’s not much room for soulmates in his universe. Now, eleven volumes in, the only people he ever talks to are still Sehun, Jongin and criminals.
So he dreams of a different world, one where he’s free to fall in love at parks or street corners and coffee shops. He admires the thin brush strokes of a Sunday morning breeze, the little stars that appear in the eyes of a loved one.
Then one day, while rereading the final chapters of Busted! volume nine, Chanyeol spots something very odd indeed. He flips back to chapter eighty-one, and the mystery begins to unravel.
There’s a plot hole, and a large one at that.
Curiously, Chanyeol gazes into it.
Climbs
O
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and
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D
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and
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Eventually, the strange, dark, tunnel ends, and he steps out into the light again. On the other side is a living room he’s never seen before, papers spilling off the coffee table and dog-eared comics piled along the wall.
Most importantly, everything is in full-colour, all the details sharper and clearer than Chanyeol has ever seen before. Overwhelmed, Chanyeol crouches down by the comics, his eyes immediately picking out the series of detective novels. He peels the first volume off the pile, relieved to see the familiar black-and-white pages.
He doesn’t even appear in this volume, only a shadow against Jongin’s window in the dark of the night, but it is reassuring all the same.
Chanyeol picks up a stray page, fluttering lightly, caught beneath the table’s leg. Before he can glance at it, a toilet flushes somewhere, and he jolts. He’s witnessed enough crimes to know that being caught in the wrong place can be a good enough conviction as any.
He sprints for the front door and throws himself out of the house just as the person steps out of the bathroom. He hastily puts some distance between himself and the apartment, and hides around the corner, breathing heavily.
He’s still holding the paper he picked up earlier in his hand, and he looks down at it.
It’s a lightly-sketched page from Busted! but one he has never seen before. It’s a storyline that doesn’t even exist in his collection, and he scans through it, confused. It’s completely uninked, some of the dialogue boxes still blank, handwritten notes in the margin.
Then it clicks.
It would make sense that he would come to his maker in this world. Chanyeol knows he is fiction, that someone in a different universe wrote him, and that he is at his creator’s whim.
But Chanyeol doesn’t feel fictional. Especially not in this world, where the sun is warm and the air is fresh, and the buildings don’t look like squiggly lines against a stippled sky.
Beaming, Chanyeol slips back around the corner, sliding the page under the door without knocking. He has no interest in meeting his creator. He has a park to get to and a soulmate to find.
There’s no room for a third protagonist in his own story, but he is about to be the main character of this one.
---
In a stroke of luck, there’s a park a few streets away. He follows the sweet scent of flowers and wanders, open-mouthed under the canopy of cherry blossoms. He’s only ever seen this in ink, and even double-page full-color spreads could never do the beauty of real life justice.
It looks exactly like a romance novel, and he can’t wait for their first meeting.
There are fluffy little creatures running around underfoot, and one of them bumps repeatedly against Chanyeol’s leg. Chanyeol scoops it up and peers into its eyes. It licks him on the nose with a long, wet tongue.
“You must be a cat,” Chanyeol says in adoration, and sneezes.
The cats in his world were always skinny, skulking things in alleys, growling whenever Chanyeol got too close. This one has a pink tongue and curly black fur, and smiles up at Chanyeol, waiting to be pet.
Chanyeol is going to pet it forever.
It’s only been a minute into forever before a voice interrupts them. “Sorry! Meokmul loves strangers, you can put him down anytime now.”
Standing in front of Chanyeol’s park bench is a young man, and just as their eyes meet, the wind blows and tiny petals fall from the sky. He smiles at Chanyeol, and his mouth forms a little heart-shape.
This is it.
This is the moment he’s been waiting for.
This is Chanyeol’s soulmate.
---
Except he isn’t.
And Meokmul isn’t a cat, either.
“I really think you need to go out more,” Kyungsoo says. Meokmul, a dog, is sleeping in his lap, and the image of them beneath the cherry blossom trees is breathtaking. Chanyeol can’t believe that real life is robbing him of his perfect love story.
“My soulmate and I didn’t exactly meet-cute either. You don’t have to wait here in this park, you know,” Kyungsoo says, and there’s that heart-shaped smile again. His cheeks flush pink. “Don’t tell him I called him that. We’ve only been together two years.”
Chanyeol stares at him. Does it take two whole years to find a soulmate? There’s no way he’ll be back in the book in time to help Jongin with the missing candlesticks. Chanyeol should have left his keys in the door.
Kyungsoo’s phone goes off in his pocket, and he looks down at it.
“Speak of the devil,” He says. “I’ve got to go get groceries. I’ll see you around, Chanyeol.”
He stands to leave, and Meokmul snuffles, waking up.
“Are you sure you aren’t my soulmate?” Chanyeol asks. “There wasn’t a spark or anything when you first saw me?”
Kyungsoo hefts Meokmul against his chest. “A little tip, Chanyeol. You’re probably not going to find a soulmate by going around asking people if they’re yours. And don’t sit here for too long, it’ll be getting cold.”
It’s much colder in the book, where it’s perpetually late-autumn and rainy, but Chanyeol pretends to stand anyway, so Kyungsoo won’t worry. He waves goodbye to Meokmul, and watches as his not-soulmate walks away.
Chanyeol sits back down.
But reality isn’t like a romance novel at all. Apart from Kyungsoo, none of the people in the park seem remotely interested in meeting Chanyeol’s eyes from across the fountain, beneath freshly falling blossoms.
Chanyeol supposes he shouldn’t have been too hopeful. Real life isn’t like a detective mystery either, so there’s no reason why it should unfold like a love story. But, Chanyeol thinks optimistically, they could still be at the beginning of the story. There’s still plenty of time to fall in love.
He finally gets up for a walk, and around the street corner finds a small bookstore with a familiar image plastered over the front door, accompanied by a name.
Byun Baekhyun.
Chanyeol knows this name better than he knows his own.
It’s on the front page of every volume of Busted! , and all the little notes at the end of every chapter are always signed off with a tiny Baekhyunnie 'ㅅ'
Two years is going to be a long time to spend on a park bench. Maybe he should go back to the apartment. Baekhyun frequently talked about changing the storyline on a whim, maybe he can give Chanyeol a romance arc. Chanyeol wishes he had a picture of Kyungsoo. Baekhyun could draw him a Kyungsoo of his own, and they could live happily-ever-after.
The antique store would be far nicer with a Kyungsoo in it, Chanyeol thinks.
Baekhyun would do well to add a few more flowers and sunny days, too. And some dogs. Chanyeol likes dogs.
Mind made up, Chanyeol retraces his steps back to the apartment where he first appeared, and rings the doorbell.
There’s the sound of footsteps inside the apartment and someone pokes his head out the door. He’s wearing round, silver glasses, and they slip off his nose as he stares up at the storekeeper. He doesn’t look anything like how Chanyeol imagined his almighty creator to be.
“Are you Byun Baekhyun?” Chanyeol asks. “We need to talk.”
“Is this a prank?” The man says, looking a little dumbfounded. He peers around Chanyeol and out into the corridor. “Are you a very realistic standee?”
“Byun Baekhyun! If you’re flirting with the postman again I’m going to end you! We’re still four pages behind!” Someone yells from further inside the apartment.
“I’m not, leave me alone!” Baekhyun shouts back, unable to take his eyes off Chanyeol.
“Chanyeol?” He whispers.
He reaches out slowly, as though afraid Chanyeol might disintegrate beneath his touch. Chanyeol moves, allowing Baekhyun’s fingers to brush against the surface of his coat.
“Oh,” Baekhyun says, looking even more shocked than before. “Has this always been tweed? I meant for it to be something more comfortable, I’m sorry.”
“Seriously Baekhyun, I swear to god—” The loud voice continues, and someone emerges from the room down the hall. He stops mid-sentence, looking back and forth between them.
“Is it just me, or does that look like antique storekeeper Chanyeol?” He asks. “What have you done now, Byun Baekhyun?"
“What could I possibly have done to pull one of my characters out of my series and into real life?” Baekhyun demands.
---
“I told you that was a noticeable plot hole,” Jongdae says, once Chanyeol has finished explaining himself. He throws a cushion at Baekhyun and it bounces off his left shoulder. “I can’t believe you left a plot hole so big that one of your characters escaped through it.”
“Don’t throw things at me, the book is done, there’s nothing more I can do about it,” Baekhyun says. He buries his face in the cushion. “Jongin’s been looking for you for the past three hours, Chanyeol. No matter what I tried, you wouldn’t appear in the stairwell or open your door.”
“I’ll go back, I just want a favour. Can you draw me a soulmate?” Chanyeol asks.
“He wants a what?”
Baekhyun stares at him.
“You know, the person I’m going to meet under the cherry blossoms? I’ve already found him, his name is Kyungsoo, he might be at the park again tomorrow. Will you come with me to look? I want you to draw him into the book with me."
“Kyungsoo? My Kyungsoo?” Jongdae says.
Chanyeol finally looks at him. “Your Kyungsoo? Are you the soulmate that Kyungsoo talked about?”
Jongdae gasps, far too loudly. “Did Kyungsoo say that about me? That I was his soulmate? Does he think we’re soulmates?”
Baekhyun grabs something off the table and it lights up, presenting a picture of Kyungsoo’s face, complete with Meokmul and another dog that Chanyeol needs to pet immediately. “Is this him? You want me to add this Kyungsoo into the book?"
“Yes please, he’s perfect,” Chanyeol says.
“Wait a minute—” Jongdae begins.
Baekhyun shushes him with a finger, turning to Chanyeol. “This is Jongdae, my editor, and the reason that the stolen locket arc felt rushed. He made me cram it into five chapters when I wanted seven. He’s also Kyungsoo’s boyfriend.”
“I thought you were soulmates.” Chanyeol says.
“Hold on, what exactly did Kyungsoo say?” Jongdae demands. “Don’t draw him anything until he tells me, Baekhyun.”
The front door opens again, and Chanyeol stands up, knocking his chair to the ground.
It’s fate. It must be fate.
There Kyungsoo is, after doing all his groceries, and his eyes are wide and starry, just like Chanyeol remembered. Meokmul scampers around at his feet, and lets out a delighted yip.
“Oh, it’s you,” Kyungsoo says, looking back and forth between Chanyeol and Jongdae. “I didn’t think you knew each other. I—I’m just going to put these away.” He adds hastily, hurrying for the kitchen and nearly tripping over Meokmul.
“Don’t be like that, soulmate,” Jongdae says. “Come sit in my lap.”
There’s the very audible sound of Kyungsoo dropping something, and Jongdae’s smile turns downright devious. He pushes up from the sofa and heads for the kitchen.
“Oh yeah.” Baekhyun says, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Kyungsoo’s also my best friend, and he lives here. You really want him in your story?”
---
Chanyeol doesn’t need to eat. He apparently doesn’t need to change clothes either, if Baekhyun’s illustrations are anything to go by. However, he does both that very evening, Baekhyun wrinkling his nose at the tweed coat and throwing a soft sweater at him.
Kyungsoo makes pasta for dinner, and Chanyeol pushes his food around the plate, intrigued. Jongin and Sehun almost never ate either, only discussed important matters over a dinner that vanished magically without them ever bringing the spoon to their mouths.
“Let me get this straight,” Jongdae says, “You introduced our character to romance comics, and now he won’t go back into the story until you turn our series into a Cherry Blossom Spring spinoff?”
“It was a personality quirk, it wasn’t supposed to take over his entire person,” Baekhyun says, gnawing on his fork. He’s brought a notepad to the table with him, and is penning notes while he eats, ankles crossed casually on the chair. “I thought it would be nice if the mysterious shopkeeper had a romantic side to him. How on earth could I have prepared for something like this?”
“Maybe when I said for the sixteenth time, ‘hey Baekhyun, there’s a huge plot hole here, maybe you should patch it up’ and you submitted the manuscript for inking anyway?”
Baekhyun throws a crumpled piece of paper over his shoulder, missing the trash. Meokmul mistakes it for a ball and goes careening after it.
“Who is your soulmate? Everyone has a soulmate, don’t they? They always do in the romance novels I read.” Chanyeol asks, watching Baekhyun wrestle the paper from Meokmul’s jaws and drop it in the bin.
“What even makes you think this is a romance novel?” Jongdae asks. He kicks one of the legs of Baekhyun’s chair. “I feel like it’s a joke strip, being around this one every day.”
“Watch it, I’ll name another murderer after you,” Baekhyun says, without looking up.
“Ah.” Chanyeol thought the name seemed familiar. He glances warily at Jongdae, and hopes that any resemblance of the characters to living persons is purely coincidental.
Baekhyun drops his pen on the table, his forehead following shortly after.
“I’ll make Kyungsoo the kindergarten teacher,” Baekhyun says. “He’ll appear in the next arc, okay? Mystery of the missing class fish, a red herring.”
“You’re an actual joke,” Jongdae says. “I can’t believe we’re still getting published.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you’ve shown me a sketch,” Chanyeol says stubbornly, trying to read Baekhyun’s scrambled notes past his shoulder.
Baekhyun huffs, closing the notepad with a snap.
“Fine. You can sleep on the couch. I’ll show you something tomorrow,” Baekhyun says.
---
“Kyungsoo doesn’t look like that,” Jongdae says, early the next morning, offended on Kyungsoo’s behalf. He’s made everyone coffee, and Chanyeol’s tasting it for the first time, finding that he doesn’t really like it much.
“He does! I got all the important points,” Baekhyun insists, further thickening the lines of Kyungsoo’s eyebrows.
Kyungsoo, sitting quietly between them and buttering a slice of toast, offers no input of his own.
Chanyeol looks at the sketch, takes the pencil from Baekhyun’s hand and adds a little flower behind Kyungsoo’s ear.
“He’s perfect,” He tells Baekhyun, “Thank you.”
When Chanyeol returns to his antique store after breakfast, the world seems brighter already.
He rereads the old volumes, wondering what his life would be like with Kyungsoo in it, and spots something else. Since Baekhyun turned out to be kind, Chanyeol wonders if he can ask for just a little bit more. He reaches for volume nine again, grinning.
“Don’t tell me I left another plot hole.” Is the first thing Baekhyun says when he returns to his apartment and finds Chanyeol wandering around in his tweed coat.
“It was the same one as before, since it’s published and all,” Chanyeol reassures him.
“Can I make a quick request?” Chanyeol waves at himself vaguely. “I’m tired of this dark aura you always have hanging around me, can you cut it down a little? Why do I always have to be mysterious and looming? No one will even talk to me outside of plot points.”
Baekhyun eyes Chanyeol up and down.
“You do loom a great deal.”
“I can’t possibly make you shorter,” Baekhyun adds, when Chanyeol looks at him pointedly. He sinks onto the couch, and pulls out a ring binder from his briefcase.
“You can help me do the erasing, since you already have me busy writing your love story.” He tosses an eraser at Chanyeol. Contemplatively, he chews on the end of his pencil. “I don’t suppose you can learn to draw, can you?”
He settles down on the floor, spreading his pages out across the coffee table.
“Kyungsoo’s working late tonight, so we have monopoly of the tv. We can finally watch something that isn’t that cooking competition he’s been following for months now. What should we watch?”
Chanyeol doesn’t mind the cooking show, and tells Baekhyun so. He’d watched it with Kyungsoo and Jongdae the previous night, and anything that reminds him of Kyungsoo makes Chanyeol happy.
Baekhyun gives Chanyeol a withering look. However, fifteen minutes and brief glimpses of two gory zombie movies later, the cooking show is playing on the television anyway.
Chanyeol beams, watching as one of the contestants stack a small pyramid of tomatoes on their chopping board. For the rest of the evening, he diligently scrubs away the mysterious aura under Baekhyun’s watchful eye, and tries to angle himself so he can steal glances at what Kyungsoo will be like.
Two weeks later, he steps out of the house just as someone is coming up the stairs, holding an empty fishbowl.
“Hello,” he says to Chanyeol. “Is this where the detectives live?”
His mouth is still a heart. He’s so kind and pretty, Chanyeol loves him.
He shows Kyungsoo up the stairs to Sehun and Jongin’s doorway, and lingers on the staircase just to hear Kyungsoo’s voice as he talks about his missing fish. Baekhyun draws him at the corner of the panel with a dark, smudged aura around him, eavesdropping mysteriously, but Chanyeol doesn’t even care.
He shares a panel with Kyungsoo about four more times over the next few weeks, and soon starts running into him outside of the story too.
“They found my missing fish.” Kyungsoo tells Chanyeol one afternoon. He’s still carrying the fishbowl around, and the red fish is swimming happy circles. “I work at the kindergarten on the other side of town, let me know if you ever want to show some of your antiques to the kids. It might be fun.”
Chanyeol agrees. He’ll agree to almost anything Kyungsoo asks of him.
They’re soulmates, after all.
But it still feels like something is missing.
---
The next time he goes back to Baekhyun’s apartment, no one is home. Chanyeol sits at the table and tries some of Baekhyun’s snacks, but they’re all too sweet or too crumbly. He can’t figure out how to work the television, so he perches at the armchair by the door, and consequently is the first thing Baekhyun sees when he gets home.
“What do you want this time?” Baekhyun asks in resignation. “Did Kyungsoo turn out to be really mean? That isn’t my fault, he’s like that in real life too, you picked him anyway.”
The door to Kyungsoo’s room creaks open, and Baekhyun’s head whips back to look over his shoulder sheepishly. But only Jongdae slinks out, hair tousled from sleep. He ignores them both and goes straight for the kitchen.
“Kyungsoo isn’t mean, he’s the kindest person in the whole story,” Chanyeol says. Jongin is always breaking into other people’s houses and Sehun’s always charming his way into secrets. Chanyeol bets Kyungsoo has never broken into someone’s house to steal a diary, like Jongin did just last night.
He follows Baekhyun to his bedroom as he puts down his things and changes from the button-up shirt into the oversized hoodie Chanyeol is used to seeing him in.
“Do you know what a dog is?” Chanyeol asks.
The second Baekhyun’s head pops out of the other end of his hoodie, he stares at Chanyeol.
“Do I know what a dog is?” He repeats.
Chanyeol tries to make a fluffy motion with his hands. “It’s this small thing with lots of fur, short legs, the cutest animal—”
“You mean Meokmul,” Baekhyun interrupts flatly.
“Yes! Why haven’t you included a dog in your story, ever? They’re so cute and tiny, Baekhyun, please. Just draw one standing at the side of the road as Jongin and Sehun walk by. Does our house allow pets? I’ll adopt it.”
“Not all dogs are small. The dogs in detective stories are usually bloodhounds,” Baekhyun says, complete gibberish to Chanyeol. “I don’t think you’d want to see one at the side of the road.”
Chanyeol gazes intently at Baekhyun as he lays out the day’s pages again. There’s handwriting all over the margins, and Baekhyun’s signature smiley face at the bottom.
“Even Sehun and Jongin would love to have a dog, I don’t think you understand how important this is.” He squints at the upside-down writing on Baekhyun’s notepad. “I don’t care about haunted flowers, please give us some dogs. It would surely help me win Kindergarten Kyungsoo’s heart.
“Please never call him that again!” Jongdae shouts from the kitchen.
“It’s haunted towers,” Baekhyun says, “And you’re the hero of the chapter when you find the missing pearls on the highest turret.”
“I’d rather find a dog,” Chanyeol says petulantly.
Baekhyun sighs. “I thought I made you all quiet and mysterious, why do you talk so much? I’ll see what I can do about the dog. Please go back into the story, Chanyeol. The plot can’t progress with you here.”
Chanyeol, obedient and eager, vanishes back into the story.
Three weeks later, shortly after Chanyeol finds the missing pearls in the haunted tower, there’s the strangest creature in the antique store, lying flat on the floor beside an old lampshade. At first, Chanyeol mistakes it for a new rug.
On closer inspection, it still looks very much like a rug.
---
“Is that my new dog?” Chanyeol asks the following evening, popping up in Baekhyun’s living room. Jongdae and Kyungsoo, making out beside the shoe rack, jump five feet apart before realizing what happened.
“He’s in the office,” Jongdae says, a hand over his heart. “Please try to knock on the front door like a normal person, Chanyeol.”
Chanyeol seizes the latest chapter off the coffee table and goes to Baekhyun’s office. He finds the page with the little rug-dog in the background, and puts it down in front of Baekhyun.
“What kind of dog is this supposed to be?” Chanyeol asks. “It isn’t like Kyungsoo’s at all.”
“You didn’t say you wanted Kyungsoo’s dog, specifically. You see enough of Meokmul over here, don’t you want a different type of dog to play with?” Baekhyun says innocently.
“But what type of dog is it? It doesn’t even have a face!”
“I drew him in the shadows so you can imagine his face yourself,” Baekhyun says. “It’s the silhouette of a dog, the best kind there is.”
Jongdae laughs, voice echoing from the living room. “He didn’t actually get where he is now because of his stellar art skills.”
“Apparently, not for his plot either,” Kyungsoo adds.
“Don’t be rude, it’s how my dog looks. My brother dropped him off two weeks ago, I used him for inspiration,” Baekhyun says. Loudly, he hollers down the corridor, “Mongryongie!”
It is not, thankfully, how Baekhyun’s dog looks.
After dinner, Baekhyun’s still sulking over Chanyeol’s rejection of his silhouette dog, even though Chanyeol’s warmed up to it a little after seeing the pup it was inspired by. He sprawls out on the couch with Jongdae and Kyungsoo, watching the cooking competition that he’s almost caught up with by now, given how often he’s around. In his bedroom, Baekhyun’s hammering at his keyboard and pretending to be outlining the next chapter, even though Chanyeol doubts the writing process involves such rapid key mashing and agonized wailing.
It’s just past ten that Jongdae gets up to leave, taking Kyungsoo with him for the night. The apartment has gone silent, and three heads peek into Baekhyun’s bedroom.
He’s fast asleep, the computer still whirring away. There’s a scoreboard of some kind on the screen, numbers Chanyeol doesn’t understand.
“Hard at work, as usual,” Kyungsoo says dryly. He places a hand on the small of Jongdae’s back, soft. “I’ll go get my bag.”
Jongdae leans over the computer and logs Baekhyun out, the screen finally going dark.
“I know it doesn’t look like it,” Jongdae says, glancing behind him at Chanyeol, “but Baekhyun worked really hard on that dog you asked for. Give him a break, okay?”
He picks up a sketchbook from the desk, and presses it into Chanyeol’s hands before leaving the room.
It’s filled with drawings, the book nearly two-thirds used. There are all kinds of oddly shaped dogs, long ones and short ones, fat ones and thin ones, ones with too-large mouths, and ones with tiny eyes.
Meokmul? Baekhyun writes, Meokmul?????
And a few pages later, WHAT ABOUT A CORGI?
Chanyeol didn’t know there were so many types or dogs, or so many ways to ruin the face of one. All things considered, the rug-dog in his store is a grand improvement. Chanyeol will keep and cherish it.
He runs his hand along the side of the blanket, resting it warmly on Baekhyun arm for a moment.
“Thank you. I have everything I need now,” He whispers. He steps out of the room, turning off the lights behind him as he leaves.
---
Spring comes around in his universe, and Jongin and Sehun are busy being stranded on a deserted island. They’ll find their way back eventually, but Chanyeol isn’t really needed in the store or stairwell for awhile. Spring isn’t much cheerier than their neverending fog season, but the weather is less gloomy when there aren’t any mysteries waiting to be solved.
He plays fetch with his puppy, a game it is terrible at but enjoys nonetheless, and reads more romance novels in the back room. Baekhyun has restocked his cabinet with new stories, adding some other genres too.
Chanyeol reads the new romances, but more often he finds himself combing through the Busted! volumes instead. There’s more of Baekhyun in it than he ever realized, and Chanyeol starts to hear Baekhyun’s voice in some of the lines of dialogue, laughs when he reads Baekhyun’s chapter notes. Chanyeol begins to recognize some of the things in his store as objects that are in Baekhyun’s apartment too, but layered with dust and worn down from use.
He picks up his mug one afternoon, a plain white one with an abstract pattern, and it’s the same one that he used the morning he’d woken up on Baekhyun’s couch, waiting to see Kindergarten Kyungsoo for the first time. It makes Chanyeol’s heart ache in an unexplainable way.
He figures he just misses Kyungsoo, that's all.
So Chanyeol takes the dog out for a walk, and heads to the side of town where the school is. He and Kyungsoo haven’t spoken in awhile, and Chanyeol isn’t sure what stage their relationship is at. In most romance novels, surely they should have gotten stuck in an elevator together at least once by now. Maybe he can get Baekhyun to renovate their housing block and include an elevator or two.
He wanders towards the school grounds, still wondering if he should have brought flowers or a picnic lunch with him. The mystery of the mid-February petunias has yet to be solved, and Chanyeol wouldn’t mind going back to the field to take another look. Maybe Kyungsoo would go with him.
But before Chanyeol makes it to the front gate, he sees something that makes him stop. It’s Kindergarten Kyungsoo, leaning over the fence of the playground to talk to one of the parents. The pinkness of his face nearly matches his red apron.
They look cute together, and it doesn’t make Chanyeol as sad as it should. He watches them for a little while, and sighs. He decides not to interrupt, and instead, pays a visit elsewhere.
The familiar apartment is quieter than usual, and Chanyeol finds Baekhyun sitting on the couch, wrapped in an oversized blanket. The tv is playing on mute, and Baekhyun looks up when he hears the soft thud of Chanyeol's arrival.
“I think Kindergarten Kyungsoo somehow found himself a Single-Parent Jongdae,” Chanyeol tells him. Baekhyun yawns, and raises the corner of his blanket so Chanyeol can join him.
---
“The person you were based on is someone named Park Chanyeol,” Baekhyun shares, much later. They had sat for awhile in silence, until the sun was mostly gone from the sky. The view of the sunset hadn’t been all that great from Baekhyun’s apartment, but the way the rays of fading sunlight had slowly inched across the furniture was lovely in its own way.
“Park Chanyeol was a boy I knew in high school, and he was always hiding some stray animal he picked up on the way to school in his bookbag.”
Baekhyun laughs. “He was my first kiss, and then the squirrel in his bag bit me. None of my relationships since then have been much better.”
Chanyeol makes a sympathetic noise, gently patting Baekhyun’s knee. Baekhyun gives him a crooked smile.
“Love is hard, Chanyeol. I’m sorry I gave you so much personality it made you miserable. Do you want me to get rid of Jongdae? I don’t know how he got in there.”
“It’s okay, they looked happy. Let them have each other. I don’t feel all that miserable these days,” Chanyeol tells him.
It’s the truth. It’s hard to feel lonely with someone like Baekhyun around. And it isn’t the heart-fluttering romance Chanyeol was looking for, but it’s nice, whatever it is they have.
---
Chanyeol looks his name up on the computer, after Baekhyun has gone to bed. Jongdae had taught Chanyeol to use Baekhyun’s desktop once, and after a few false starts, it turned out to not be as difficult as it seemed.
There are twenty-seven Park Chanyeols in the city of Seoul. Four of them are around the same age as he and Baekhyun are, and Chanyeol studies each one carefully, wondering which one he was named after.
He’s nothing like an accountant, or a businessman, or a lawyer, or a schoolteacher. He wonders if Baekhyun knows how they turned out, if they still meet sometimes.
He wonders, if sometimes Baekhyun still wishes Chanyeol was the real one. The one with the squirrel in his bag, that he’d shared his first kiss with.
Baekhyun’s left him spare blankets and a pillow on the sofa, but Chanyeol turns off the computer and reaches for the graphic novel on the shelf. He doesn’t say goodbye.
---
For a couple of months after that, Chanyeol doesn’t visit Baekhyun again. He thinks it was a mistake, stepping out of the book that first time. Now he has a soulmate who is in love with someone else, a dog with no face, and what feels like a crush on someone he’s never supposed to have met.
Jongin and Sehun return from their deserted island, and the rain comes back harder than before. Chanyeol doesn’t leave the shop unless he has to, and he’s pretty sure the dark aura around him is growing darker.
It’s late one evening when Chanyeol’s woken from his nap by an insistent tugging, telling him he’s needed in the stairwell. Chanyeol stands as quickly as he can without waking his puppy, and lets himself out of the store.
Sehun is sitting on the steps, a painting in his lap.
“Do you want to come in?” Chanyeol says, propping the door open with his body.
Sehun stands, holding up the painting. “It’ll be quick. We just wanted to know if you recognize this place? It looks like a school.”
Chanyeol looks at the painting. It’s Kyungsoo’s school, and Chanyeol almost laughs out loud. Baekhyun is really bad at this. There’s no way Sehun doesn’t know where the school is. They had investigated it thoroughly for the red herring, after all.
“Yeah, it’s a kindergarten across town, the one around the corner from the church,” Chanyeol says.
“Okay, thank you,” Sehun says, too quickly.
Chanyeol makes to head back inside, and he feels a gentle touch on his shoulder. Surprised, he turns to Sehun again.
He’s looking at Chanyeol, really looking at him for the first time they’ve known each other. He doesn’t have to— Chanyeol is no one, he’s only there for their convenience.
Sehun clears his throat. He’s nervous. Chanyeol wonders if it’s because he’s still looming and mysterious. “Jongin and I were wondering— well— I mean, we talk to you for work a lot— but I don’t know, maybe you’d like to come up for dinner one of these days? It must get lonely, being down here by yourself all the time.”
Chanyeol blinks at him, heart unfolding like a sheet of origami paper to let them in.
“Yeah,” He says with a smile. “I’d like that a lot. Thank you, Sehun.”
Sehun hugs the painting close. “And maybe… you’d like to come over tonight?”
Chanyeol nods. He takes two steps after Sehun up the stairs, and quickly stops.
“Wait a moment. There’s someone I’d like to introduce to you both,” Chanyeol says. He hurries back into the shop, scoops his silhouette puppy off the armchair, and rushes out again.
---
“You didn’t have to do that,” Chanyeol says, letting himself through the book once more. It’s late, much later than he’s ever gone over before. He’d spent several hours with Jongin and Sehun, getting to know one another over dinner. They didn’t own a tv, didn’t even know what one was, but in a way, it wasn’t very different from hanging out with Jongdae and Kyungsoo.
They’d been comfortable and friendly, and Chanyeol wonders how much of the interaction had been stolen from Baekhyun’s own comfortable nights in his apartment with his friends.
Jongin and Sehun had loved his puppy with their whole hearts, just like Chanyeol knew they would, and finally when it was time to part, Chanyeol had left it in their eager care for the night.
He’d returned to his shop, a funny feeling welling up inside him, and dug open the old chest where he’d locked the book away, out of sight. Volume nine. Chanyeol knows his way around the pages well enough, even though it’s been awhile.
Baekhyun is at his desk, and the familiar sight makes Chanyeol’s heart pang. His glasses are different now, boxy, and they make his face look older, in a good way.
“Hey, Chanyeol. You didn’t come to visit any more,” Baekhyun says. “I hoped it wasn't something I said, or did. But I wasn't sure. And I hoped you weren't lonely."
Heat prickles at the back of Chanyeol’s throat.
“So you let Jongin and Sehun talk to me,” Chanyeol says, through the thickness.
“Can I ask you something?”
When Chanyeol doesn’t respond, Baekhyun turns around, putting his pencil down.
“Did I make you a terrible world?” Baekhyun asks. “Because I didn’t want to. I wanted to give you nice things, Chanyeol. I wrote you a happy ending, you know.”
“While you were gone, I gave you everything you could want—” Baekhyun says, and pulls out a stack of papers from the compartment under his desk. It hits the surface with an audible thump.
“Jongdae said it wouldn’t fit the storyline, but I wouldn’t settle for anything else. You deserved more, you were so real to me, Chanyeol. I couldn’t bear the thought of you being unhappy,” Baekhyun says.
The amount of sleepless nights that must have entailed for Baekhyun makes Chanyeol ache. Baekhyun doesn’t seem to notice, and he clasps his hands over the stack of papers, pensive.
Finally, he looks at Chanyeol again. “Just wait another month. You won’t have to be lonely any more. I promise.”
Chanyeol sits at the edge of Baekhyun’s bed, fingers curled into the blanket. He’s not the protagonist of a love story, the words don’t come that easily.
“Baekhyun,” Chanyeol says eventually, “Come sit with me.”
Baekhyun doesn’t, not for a while. He stares at Chanyeol as if he’s a puzzle that needs solving, a plot that needs ironing out, a drawing that doesn’t look quite right.
Finally, he stands and takes a seat beside Chanyeol. The bed dips under his weight.
“Don’t publish it. I think I’ve found a happy ending, but it isn’t something you can draw for me,” Chanyeol says.
Baekhyun tilts his head, giving Chanyeol a slow once over. His shoulders are tense, but then they relax again, and Baekhyun’s expression is soft.
“Just like you to come in and turn my story on its head. You really do write your own tale, don’t you, Park Chanyeol?”
“Sorry,” Chanyeol says, when he isn’t. More than anything, he’s hopeful.
“It’s okay,” Baekhyun says.
Over the blanket, his hand folds over Chanyeol’s.
---
On screen, confetti fills the kitchen, and Kyungsoo cheers, nearly knocking the armchair over when he turns around and gives Jongdae a kiss. Chanyeol watches with a grin, and Meokmul escapes from his lap, barking excitedly by their feet, not knowing the cause for celebration but being happy anyway.
“She! Won!” Kyungsoo says, between kisses, “She was our favourite!”
“I know,” Jongdae says, laughing. “You only talked about her noodles half-a-million times!”
“The way she cooked those prawns at the end, did you see that? God, that was such a good finale, they both did so well,” Kyungsoo says, and his face is all lit up.
Chanyeol watches them and feels the warmest sense of fondness, but there’s no fireworks, no sparkles.
He gets up from the couch, pushing the door open to Baekhyun’s bedroom open.
Baekhyun is at his desk, and he’s sketching Jongin in his kitchen, Sehun standing at the doorway, and a peculiarly shaped rug by his feet. Chanyeol grins, going up behind Baekhyun and leaning against the back of his chair. Baekhyun makes a soft noise of contentment.
“Funny story,” Baekhyun says, leaning back into Chanyeol, tangling their fingers together. “I ran into Park Chanyeol on my way home today. He asked me out for dinner.”
“And?” Chanyeol presses.
“And, I told him I was taken. I didn’t tell him who by, though.” He untangles one hand to pick up a business card sitting at the corner of his desk and passes it to Chanyeol. So, it was the lawyer after all.
“We should send him a thank you card,” Baekhyun says, smiling.
Chanyeol laughs, lighter than a feather. There are twenty-seven Park Chanyeols in the city of Seoul, and it is him, the one from a different universe that Baekhyun chooses in the end.
“Anyway, I’m having some trouble with the story,” Baekhyun says, spinning around in his chair so that they’re face to face. “Sehun and Jongin have been running circles for ages now, and Vivi is of no use to them since he has no nose. If only I had a wise, mysterious side character to point them in the right direction.”
Chanyeol snorts, already pulling away and turning to the bookcase. “If only,” he agrees, “Now where on earth could you find yourself someone like that?”
Baekhyun makes grabby hands, reeling him back in for a quick kiss.
“Come back safe,” Baekhyun says, “I’ll be sure to leave you another plot hole.”
“Don’t you dare!” Jongdae shouts from outside the door.
Chanyeol laughs, picks up the detective novel and turns to chapter eighty-one. And later, once Baekhyun is done with work, Chanyeol will come back, he always does.
He doesn’t know what the future will be like, has no cabinet of books here to tell him life’s secrets. But Baekhyun will be waiting for him, and that’s more than enough for now. Chanyeol can’t wait to see how their story will go.
Together, Chanyeol thinks, they’re going to write a pretty good one.