Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I lived as though I was dead, so at some point I ended up being far away;

Even when I was somehow in the same place with them, I was an alien.

Flew in from the cosmos and crash landed, I’m a loner who’s only filled with wounds.

"I'm sure this wasn't written up on the contract." 

Soobin used all the strength he had on his lungs to sigh, way too relieved to go back to his body's normal form than he had ever been before. The ridiculously heavy box he carried for four rows of stairs rested now by the side of a bed, still without sheets, where Huening would sleep from now on. One more sigh. It was really heavy. Huening had joked around before, saying it was because he had filled it up with rocks, but it didn't sound so impossible anymore. 

Coming to talk of Huening — HueningKai for strangers, Hyuka for the closest ones and Huening for Soobin, that considered himself somewhere in the middle; a smiley, tall and blonde guy (well, gorgeous, too), younger than Soobin for humildes two years —, he had been partially left behind by Soobin's rush to cross the corridor, and was just now placing his box in front of the room's door. It seemed as heavy as the first one. Maybe he was carrying bricks to lift up a new wall somewhere inside that tiny room. 

"It would be, if there was a contract," the younger replied, letting out two or three breathless breaths before giving up and sitting down on the cold floor even though the jeans he was wearing were theoretically new. Thanks to the problem with the dorm's elevator, the luggage's work was being way harder than expected. Which wasn't little, already. 

Soobin decided to copy him and threw himself into the bed covered by dark blue sheets that Huening's absent roommate had already claimed as his. That maybe wasn't the most respectful thing to do, but he wasn't thinking straight. No one with any conscience would have the energy necessary to carry on bare arms a nineteen year old boy's luggage on a Saturday morning and still, later, be able to pay attention to the part of the brain responsible for the conscience. Even worse: to hear or to obey it. Choi Soobin was just a common human. He had already exigido too much of himself last night, when he went to sleep and put on his own head that he was waking up before eight. 

"Seriously though," he managed to say, after one or two more minutes of contemplating the reasons to regret all the choices he made in life that took him there. Huening seemed to have recovered enough to take his phone from his pocket and furiously type something in there, back leaning on the door opened to the inside. "I don't even live in our school dorms. There's a million people who would be better choices for you to ask for help today." 

Huening, still typing with one hand — the other being used to wipe the sweat that runned down on his face —, didn't see it as a big deal: 

"And what about it? You're my godfather. You're the best choice for the job. Besides, I needed your arm strength, not your knowledge about the dorms." 

Soobin looked down at his own arm, as thin as a stick, that laid up on his stomach when he straightened up on the stranger's bed. Arm strength. This kid has so much creativity. 

"Did you get enough rest, already?" the blonde asked before Soobin had the time to say anything in response, putting himself up on a hop. It's admiravel the infinite disposition that young people have. "Let's get the rest of the stuff."  

Soobin really, really would like to have an argumento strong enough to convince the younger to let him rest a little longer, but no argumento is strong enough to HueningKai. There they went then, descendo os four rows of stairs as if their lives depended on it, to get the baggage of a simple nursing freshman that for sure didn't need everything he packed in all those boxes. Soobin kept questioning himself, without stopping to rest a single second, the reason why he said yes to Huening in that situation that seemed too far away despite having been just last week.  

(The situation in question:

"So you can adopt me?" had asked Huening, his eyes gleaming with that characteristic excitement of those that were just starting, after five innocent minutes of conversation.

"Adopt you?" Soobin frowned. "What does that mean?" 

"Every veteran should adopt a freshman, duh!" exclaimed Huening, as if that was obvious. "It means you're my official veteran to ask questions and help me with anything I need during the adaptation." 

"Ah… Every veteran should?" It seemed like it would sound ridiculous if he said it now, but the truth was that Soobin had never heard that in his entire life. Not even in his freshman year. It's also true that he didn't get to interact much with anyone between the other freshmans nor his veterans at the time, but…  

“Uhm.”

"Well, okay, then. You're adopted now, Huening." 

If the smile that occupied the entire face of the younger boy was any indicative, Soobin had made the right choice. He didn't mind much about saying yes or no, but at that moment it seemed good to make Huening happy.) 

Soobin went to campus on that day, even though they were in the middle of vacations, devolver a book to the library. If he knew that was the day of the freshmans' registration and he was going to find it as crowded as he did, he wouldn't have gone. He should've paid more attention to the university's social media posts. Wouldn't be carrying heavy boxes on a Saturday morning if he did. 

They got back from the second and last round to find the white door of room 407 locked up, the deafening sound of music too loud for a collective housing getting through the walls and reaching their ears. 

Huening didn't seem to find it strange, so Soobin didn't either.

"Our reinforcements are here," the younger said instead, leaving on the floor the two little boxes he had carried this time and taking a bunch of keys from the front pocket of his jeans. Huening got his boxes back after unlocking the door and entered the room before Soobin, who immediately busied himself on closing it again behind him after he followed the younger inside. 

It didn't seem so much like it before, with the door opened and just two people in there, but now that Soobin and Huening shared, up on their feet, the tiny space between the two beds, it was clear how small the room was. The two bed headboards were located on opposite sides of the door, and a tiny wardrobe shared space with a desk full of drawers on the other wall. And that was all; a little bathroom window tried to breathe in a small gap left by the two furnishings on the wall, almost suffocating. 

Huening soon went ahead, kicking his luggage boxes under the bed and sitting down by its feet, leaving just one of the little boxes he now poked on his lap. Soobin sat down on the bed headboard, leaving his charging on the cushion between the two of them, and lifting up his face in the direction of the younger boy's roommate. 

The first thing he saw was something close to a dark shadow, that contrasted with the blinding white of the room. On second thought, the boy was skinny, a little bit shorter than him, had hair as black as his own shoulder length and all his clothing followed the same color scheme. (Or lack of color; in short, black.) He laid down on his bed staring at the ceiling and the loud music came from a sound box that rested close to his head. So the walking rainbow HueningKai had a gothic best friend. 

"I think you're not permitted to listen to loud music like this on here," Soobin commented. 

Huening was still immersed in the search for something inside that box on his lap and didn't pay attention, but the new boy turned his face in his direction. 

"Do you want me to turn it off?" he asked. He had a nice likeable voice in comparison to his appearance. 

Soobin shrugged. The song was a little bit too rock for his taste and he couldn't understand anything of the lyrics because of it being in English, but it didn't exactly bother him.  

"I don't care. But I think you're gonna be in trouble." 

The boy seemed to analyse it for an instant and did not turn it off, in the end, but turned the volume down until it was basically ambient sound. Soobin thought it made no sense to turn it down so much that they couldn't even hear it clearly, but anyways. Huening's friend laid down again and held his phone in front of his face, still looking at it while he said:  

"I forgot to say I'm Beomgyu. Literature freshman. You're Soobin, right?" 

It looked like Huening really liked to talk, for strangers to know Soobin's name like this. 

"Right," he just said.  

Beomgyu kept quiet in response and Soobin was already getting his phone from his pocket, just to have something to look at, when Huening seemed to come back to the real world and went back to interacting: 

"Guy!" he called, catching the other two off guard with his yell. It hadn't been long since Soobin knew him, but he was already aware that his thing was to be loud and laugh scandalously and talk without pauses, so he was starting to get used to it. "I found our plaque." A psychopath smile took place on his face as he lifted to the height of his face a decorative board. Soobin couldn't read it from where he was, but it was white with details in red just like a transit board. 

Huening put the luggage box to rest on the floor and got up, grabbing Beomgyu's arm and pushing it syly. 

"Come on!" he called, and perhaps his shrill voice was going to be a bigger problem than Beomgyu's loud music. He kept pushing his arm when his invite didn't get any results. "It's time for our opening ceremony." 

"Your ass," Beomgyu retorted, absolutely unbothered. "I'm not taking part in this cringe stuff of yours."

Huening sighed loud and dramatically, letting go of the other's arm.

"You'll regret not participating in it later. Come on, Soohbin-hyung, let's leave this embittered guy alone." 

Huening left the room in the blink of an eye, leaving Soobin confused about what he should do. He didn't really feel like getting up from his seat, but Huening could be hurt if Soobin didn't join him in whatever that was. He ended up following him. 

Just as Soobin arrived on the corridor, Huening slammed the door shut — what got him angry curses from Beomgyu almost immediately. If you think of the loud laughs he let out in response, it was probably what he aimed for. 

Said opening ceremony that Huening insisted on doing ended up being Soobin holding the board on the door, as straight as he could, while he stuck it with thumbtacks. On the glorious decor board that Huening was so proud of buying it was written up, in black letters, inside of a red circle in front of a white background:

In case of emergencies

HIT YOUR HEAD ON HERE

Soobin contemplated on the matter a little after saying goodbye to go back home and came to the conclusion that HueningKai (he and the way he fell down on laughter looking at that board like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen) was certainly a very strange guy.  

Soobin's younger brothers would always come to greet him when he got home. 

There were three of them: two humans and a canine. Soojin and Soomin were ten years old and twins. They used to spend the entire day annoying and yelling at each other around the house, but it was almost impossible to see one of them without the other being right by his side. They were considerably agitated and talkative, noisy, even, but none had ever caused any problem at school, and were always bragging about their older brother to people when he wasn't around, all proud. Binsoo was a mix of Golden Retriever and mutt that resulted in a dog heavier than the twins, but as affectionate as them, and was the only alive soul that had permission to get inside Soobin's room besides the owner. 

The twins were who named him, by the way, and it took a long time for Soobin to get used to it. Now it was normal for him, but his mother was still delighted with the idea of her younger sons naming their dog after the oldest. If she found it adorable, then, great…? 

Soobin would greet his brothers (which of course includes Binsoo!) with hugs and kisses and smiles on his face to please them, listening to the stories about what they did while he was out and telling them about this and that that he had seen and would interest them, but the truth is that he was never capable of understanding why his arrival was so interesting for them. It happened all the time. It also wasn't as if he was that archetype of hero brother or something like that; actually, if he had to choose, would be obliged to admit he was a horrible brother. He barely spent time with the twins. There was no reason for them to like him that much. In any case, they would grow up in the blink of an eye and find out there was nothing that great about Soobin. 

Today, Soobin got home and greeted the three of them, all attentive, as he was used to, waved to his mother without much delay when he saw her in the living room, found something to eat in the kitchen and then went to his room.

There isn't much to say about what Soobin did after this because he didn't do much. It was not long past 12PM and it was a sunny and clear Saturday, nevertheless nothing stopped him from feeling exhausted as if he had spent the last entire twenty four hours working with Huening without any rest. 

Soobin wouldn't be able to say if it was the working or the with Huening part that made him tired, but does it matter? The only thing it meant was that he would need the rest of the afternoon to recover. It was a relief that he didn't have anything else to do that weekend. The effort to go out today would already cost him all the disposition he had left to handle real life for the rest of his days. 

A pile of blankets covered his body and modelled a Soobin-shaped cocoon when he got back to the arms of his natural habitat; and there he stayed. Soobin amended a calm nap with some hours of music and a bunch of chapters of the book he was reading, and then another nap, all this without getting out of the bed neither barely moving at any moment. In these last weeks of vacation, he had been trying to break his record of hours without needing to get out of the bed to go to the bathroom. 

It was six past thirty, almost seven, when Soobin gathered courage enough to stop pretending his phone didn't exist and plug it in the charger. A whirlwind of text messages threw itselves into his direction as soon as the device was on; most of it was Yeonjun, though, so it was mostly fine. 

22:35  hyung: soobin im going crazy they got me responsible to do the canva edit for the posters of next weeks protests and i made it but its ridiculously ugly they'll kick me out of the council 

22:36  hyung: srsly what do i do 

22:40  hyung: u little shit stop ignoring me 

23:00  hyung: fine then i won't tell u anything about today's party when I get back then 

23:00  hyung: sounds like you have a problem bc heeseung is gonna be there…. 

23:01  hyung: hihihihihihihihiihhiihii 

03:02  hyung: hihihihhihihihihihihihihihihhihihihihihihhiihi 

04:59  hyung: hihihihhiihhihihihihiihi

11:30  hyung: good morning im coming over after work today 

19:03  soobin: ? i thought you weren't telling me anything? 

19:15  hyung: and im not. 

19:15  hyung: hihiihhihihihihihihi 

19:15  hyung: nothing stops me from keeping quiet the entire time just looking at ur face 

19:30  soobin: nothing stops me from not opening the door for you 

19:39  hyung: actually ur mom does 

19:40  hyung: :p 

19:40  hyung: on the bus now 

19:43  soobin: :s

Yeonjun coming over did not mean much in matters of changes of routine because Yeonjun was basically always there. If Soobin had the willpower to calculate this kind of thing, he was sure he would end up coming to the conclusion that Yeonjun spent more time on his house than on his own. 

The most curious thing is that he didn't do it just because he didn't have anything better to do; actually, Yeonjun was the busiest person Soobin knew. 

Between hydration sessions to his pink hair, hours in the practice room for his dance major, internship, student council, political protests and all the parties he heard about, Yeonjun was always finding a way to spend time at Soobin's place. It was practically proven that he didn't sleep. 

(Every once in a while, Yeonjun really would go into social retirement and spend two days in a row just sleeping. This kind of occurrence just made Soobin's theories sound even more possible. Who could spend 48 uninterrupted hours on Morpheus' land if one visited it daily like any normal person?) 

Soobin wondered if he should get up to make some coffee while Yeonjun was on his way — because, well, isn't it obvious?, his best friend had the exact perfect personality of a coffee lover for a reason: he was one. In the end, Soobin spent so much time analysing the pros and cons of leaving his fortress of comfort and warmth that his phone started to vibrate with a call he didn't even need to pick up to know for sure that it was Yeonjun asking him to open the door for him.

Soobin had this secret plan of calling his mom to have a serious conversation and convince her to permit Yeonjun to have a copy of their house keys because of moments like those. 

Forty minutes later, Yeonjun laid down under Soobin's blankets with him. 

Choi Yeonjun could be a year older and have much more bad face than Soobin could ever have, but the feeling of being close to him was permanently that of being close to a flower — he was so little! Tiny. Soobin had collections of ways to clown him that he invented based on the way Yeonjun's hands and feet were so smaller than his and every once in a very, very long while, when Yeonjun won a discussion and got Soobin to take a selfie with him, it was uncomfortable if they were standing up because their heights differed too much. Soobin used to feel like a gasoline doll compared to him, all clumsiness and silly faces while Yeonjun was delicate and pretty, but it had been a while since he got used to it and now things were just the way they were. Moreover, when they took on the challenge to make both of them fit into Soobin's little single-bed, it only worked well because Yeonjun was small and clingy. He would curl up into Soobin like a snake does to its prey the moment they got under the blankets, and like that he stayed.  

“Are you really not gonna ask anything about yesterday?” Yeonjun couldn't stop himself from asking, as soon as he and Soobin were alone in his room. They had spent a little time at the kitchen before coming there, Soobin sipping a cup of sweet coffee as he watched Yeonjun's extroverted ass talking to his parents and brothers as excitedly as if they were his best friends living in the house. 

“Didn't you say you weren't going to tell me anything?” Soobin asked back nonchalantly. “Go a little closer to the wall, I can't move a muscle in here." 

"I'm squeezed on the corner already!" 

"You're not, look at all that space remaining!"  

Yeonjun snorted dramatically and it was only after minutes of turning and moving around that they finally got themselves comfortable again. Yeonjun was now laying on his side, squeezing Soobin's body as if it was a human sized pillow. Just then he got back to the conversation that mattered: 

"I was being dramatic. Of course I'm gonna tell you." 

"What happened to the guy who said he was going to stay silent just looking at my face?" interrupted Soobin. It was very great to throw this type of annoyance to Yeonjun because he was highly sensitive and took the bait for all of them. 

Soobin already knew for sure that the pink-haired wasn't, on any possibility, going to be capable of not telling him anything — with the biggest amount of details possible. As always. He just had a tendency of sharing every little thing about his life with people, and that grew even bigger when it came to Soobin. It's one of those things that only happens after ten or eleven years of friendship, you know? It's a thing only those who grew up together have. All the barriers fall down at some point and intimacy becomes more of a prague than something cute to admire or wish for.

"I'm gonna do that, too. If you want it so bad." 

"You're too gossipy to stay silent."

"It's not gossip if it's about me!" 

Yeonjun let out an incredulous laugh, one of those that comes from agony rather than fun. You were told he was sensible. 

Soobin shook his head, giggling in mute like it was his speciality before arranging his head more comfortably on the pillow and closing his eyes. They kept like this for a tiny second, in silence. 

"So," started Yeonjun, for the third time already, impatience starting to show on his voice, "I saw Heeseung yesterday." 

"Yes." 

"And he saw me, too." 

"Yes." 

"You're not going to fall asleep while I talk, right?" 

"Just tell me already!" 

Silence. 

"Okay. He ignored me the entire party. It was humiliating!" 

"I don't believe you." 

"It's true! I wasn't believing at first, too, until I tried to get close to where he was and he turned his back and walked out without even trying to disguise. That dick." 

"He's in love with you, dude, this doesn't make any sense. You're making stuff up because you don't want to tell me the truth." 

"I'm not!" Yeonjun lifted up his body, leaning on his elbow to look at Soobin from a little further. "I wish I was, it was a complete humiliation. Heejin told me he must be playing hard to get because of that CuriousCat thing from last week, but it didn't get any less humiliating." 

"That's stupid." 

"I know." 

Yeonjun chuckled lightly. After the difficult part was done (and Soobin would hate to have to watch this kind of romantic drama if it wasn't about Yeonjun), it got easier to comment on the details and funny moments they had missed from each other's life. More Soobin on Yeonjun's than the opposite, obviously, because they were on vacation from university and Soobin did not work, so he only left home when absolutely necessary. 

It was interesting that their friendship worked so well exactly because of that: Soobin and Yeonjun were ridiculously different. Not different in that cute way that makes up the "opposites attract themselves" cliché; it was more likely a difference on the level of people that wouldn't be able to be close even if they tried to. It's the kind of difference that can only be overcome when a highly strong bond, like siblings or cousins or something like this, is involved. 

Soobin and Yeonjun became friends just as they grew up enough to not just cry and sleep but also interact with other humans. They had never been apart since then, and that perhaps was almost the same as being linked by blood. 

It was at that time of life that Soobin's mother was sick and he used to stay at any relative's place for longer than his own, since his father was always working or in the hospital with his mom and couldn't take care of him. Yeonjun's father and his own were very good friends, and Soobin started to visit them frequently after that day he was there for the first time. 

And so they were friends even before developing a personality to judge whether it was similar or not to the other's, and that's why they were close up to now. They had the time to build a bond too strong to be broken by something like that. 

Even though Yeonjun disagreed, saying he would become friends with Soobin even if they met now, after growing up, Soobin knew that and knew for sure. In the end of the day, he was as opposite to Yeonjun as he was in comparison to any other person in college. And surprise: Soobin really could not get close to anyone in university, exactly thanks to the invisible abyss that existed between him and all those people. 

The difference was, perhaps, that in that case, Soobin did not really care; when they commented on that matter — the subject always being brought up by Yeonjun, that was always worrying about Soobin's lack of social life as if that was actually a problem or something palpable that could get up out of nowhere and point a weapon to the younger's head —, Soobin would always cut all of Yeonjun's arguments by saying that everyone in that university lived in a world too different from his for him to care. 

"The problem, though," Yeonjun had said once, in a day he had spent twenty entire minutes just parentally lecturing Soobin just because he had spent his birthday sleeping in his room, "is that you are going to regret it later. If you don't enjoy your days in college. And then I'm gonna say that I told you so."

"You love to let out an 'I told you so' to people. I see no problem," Soobin had cut it, immediately coming up with another conversation for the two of them and thanking god the subject was over. 

("I'm not saying you should completely turn into someone else just to make friends in college," Yeonjun had said on another occasion, that time trying to convince Soobin to apply to a reading club or something similar. "There's also people in there that are going to like you and want to be your friend exactly because of who you are. Just like me." 

"I have you already. Why would I need anyone else?" 

Yeonjun snorted so hard that all the dust particles around him flew. Soo

bin, knowing that meant he had given up, laughed out loud like he barely did. 

He knew that, in the end, what Yeonjun wouldn't ever understand was that it didn't matter in what world those people lived, they wouldn't be able to get along well with him because Soobin did not live in any world.) 

The thing, in the end, is that Soobin and Yeonjun are best friends and no one, not even Soobin, would be able to explain the reason why. Well… Yeonjun was popular, had bubble gum pink hair and a wardrobe straight out from the most acclaimed Pinterest layers, was an artist, extroverted, liked to talk and laugh noisily and had never hidden a single emotion before. He could've even been a person more timid in that time they met, and in kindergarten, and had spent the entire period of elementary and middle school in deep existential crises around the issue of getting to know and accepting himself, but that was in the past now. The Yeonjun from high school, alone, had already accumulated too many hair colours, friends and life experiences to keep judging fruitful to have Soobin by his side. But, for some reason, he did. And kept doing it, even after they went to college and the amount of people they knew had gotten bigger proportionally to Yeonjun's almost infinite social circle.

And still, for some reason, Soobin was his favorite.

Soobin didn't understand the reason, obviously, even more if you consider that Yeonjun was the friendship's side that gave way more than received: he was the one who called, spammed Soobin with texts, visited his house every week and came up with activities that the younger would like to do with him. Soobin knew that, if it depended on him, that friendship probably wouldn't exist anymore (which wasn't a surprise, since, if it depended on him, maybe he himself wouldn't exist). But Yeonjun somehow still liked him for who he was.

(The last time Soobin asked it, Yeonjun had kicked him with his smelly feet under the blankets, told him to fuck off and stop thinking of that, you can't explain affection . It kind of was a successful move — Soobin got traumatized enough to promise himself he wouldn't ask Yeonjun about that ever again.) 

Yeonjun was typing furiously in his phone while Soobin dozed off by his side, their legs intertwined in a complicated wire under the blankets, when the younger's phone vibrated somewhere on the blanket, giving them the biggest shock of their whole lives. Soobin was a person to get easily startled by anything sudden, and hopped up on the bed, cringing all the muscles in his body and scaring Yeonjun more than the phone did. 

"Argh!" his pointed voice cut down the silence around them. "Fuck, when did I unmute my phone?" He passed his hands through the layers of blankets around, looking for the phone. Yeonjun had thrown a pillow on the light switch on the other side of the room and turned the lights off earlier, but turning on the device with the screen brightness on medium already hurt his eyes. 

"Who is it?" Yeonjun asked, unbothered. 

“Huening.”

Soobin had turned his phone screen off again when he responded, and he had looked at the phone for a while too short to mute it back and reply to a text. Thus, Yeonjun knew exactly what answer he was going to get when he asked: 

"What does he want?" 

"I don't know." Soobin turned to lay on his side. "I'll talk to him later, I'm sleepy." 

(Yeonjun also knew too well that later meant in no less than a week, maybe more, unless HueningKai had an unregistered amount of luck.)

"You're so insensible, Soobin, text him back! It may be urgent." 

"Huening texts me all the time, it's probably nothing. He's still too dazzled with college." 

"Of course he is, he's a freshman. That's exactly why you should reply to him, what if he needs your help? You said it yourself that he doesn't know anyone from nursing besides you." 

"He has Beomgyu, he can help him. They'll survive."

“Soobin.”

“Hyung…”

"If you had just taken this phone and typed a message right away, it would've taken way less time than discussing with me. Just do it already." 

Soobin got his phone from between the bodies of the two of them, where it had fallen, a sigh to leave his throat. Yeonjun never gave up on that thing of trying to convince him to be a better person.

23:09  huening: hi

23:21  soobin: hi

"Done, I replied," he announced, turning off the phone screen back and putting it on the bedside table. 

"What did he say?" 

" 'Hi.' " 

"Soobin." 

"Okay, okay, I'm taking the phone again already. You're a pain in the ass." 

23:26  soobin: so

23:26  soobin: do u need me for something? 

23:26  huening: oh!!!!! hi hyung

23:27  huening: not exactly that i need you

23:27  huening: actually I want to talk to u about something

23:27  huening: so! its been a few days since beomgyu and i had been trying to decide something we could do to celebrate moving in  

23:28  huening: because its something too important not to celebrate!!!!!  

23:28  huening: but well its not been that easy bc the first idea when u move in is throw a party at the new house but we can't even have many people over 

23:28  huening: and unfortunately no one's rich so we decided just to go out with some friends to grab a drink or smt

23:29  huening: ANYWAYS: I reaaally wanted u to come to so please if you can!!!! ill let you know where we will meet once we DECIDE it lol 

Soobin analysed the texts in silence for a second or two. 

"Huening wants me to go grab a drink with him tomorrow." 

"On a Sunday?" Yeonjun asked immediately, his eyes not leaving his phone. 

"I don't know. Is tomorrow a Sunday?" 

"Uhum." Yeonjun let out a dramatic sigh. "How nice it must be not to have to go to work."

Soobin thought for another moment. 

"I'm gonna tell him I can't go because it's a Sunday." 

Yeonjun turned his face in Soobin's direction so fast that some joints of his cracked. 

"But you can go." 

Shrugging, Soobin occupied his hands by starting to play with his phone case, not looking very pleased. 

“Huening doesn’t know I don’t have a job.” 

“Soobin! And you want to lie to him?” 

“He is not going to be my friend for long anyways,” he argued, “just while the semester doesn’t start. Later he’s gonna make other friends and forget about me. And we’re already a week away so…”

“You don’t even start with this.” Yeonjun elbowed him. “You will go, and you guys will stay friends, and ask him if I can go too.” 

Soobin even tried to argue more after this, but Yeonjun wasn’t the type of person to give up on something he decided to do. In the end, Soobin just agreed to get rid of that conversation and please Yeonjun enough for him to let him sleep. Who cares about tomorrow anyways? Future Soobin could find a way out of that. 

23:41  soobin: okay

23:41  soobin: just let me know the time too, when u guys decide on it

23:41  soobin: can i take a friend with me?

23:42  huening: of course!!!!

23:42  huening: is he from nursing? im just too anxious to meet my sunbaes soon oskdjifojaskmvn

23:44  soobin: oh, no, actually hes in dance major

23:44  soobin: its my childhood friend 

23:45  huening: ooooooh!!

23:45  huening: its fine hyung!!! i love people from humanities as you can see im even friends with beomgyu

23:46  huening: actually!! if theres anyone else u might want to come you can just invite them okay? bring them all we all love to meet new people

23:47  soobin: oh okay! i dont think theres anyone else but if i do think of someone i can call them

23:47  soobin: see u later, huening

23:47  huening: bye hyung! see u later 

23:47  huening: alligator 

23:48  soobin: in a while 

23:48  soobin: armadillo 

23:49  huening: armadillo? 

23:49  soobin: I had an armadillo named hyuk once 

23:49  soobin: basically you 

23:50  huening: so you're calling me hyuka now?????!!!! :OO 

23:25  soobin: no

23:25  soobin: huening and armadillo boy only

23:25  armadillo boy: LMAO hyung you really are something else 

23:40  armadillo boy: wait 

23:40  armadillo boy: does that mean i LOOK like an armadillo???

23:40  armadillo boy: DID THE ENTIRE WORLD JUST HIDE THIS FROM ME FOR 20 YEARS?

“That clown you guys call a friend, Park Jeongseong, said he won't be able to come." It was right on that awkward moment the music suddenly paused that Huening chose to talk, causing the people on the other tables to send them a bunch of crooked looks. 

Jake, one of Huening and Beomgyu's friends, started chewing everything on his mouth two times faster than normal just to be the first one to respond: 

"Poor guy, he has to work tomorrow." 

"Yeonjun hyung, Soobin's friend here, also has to work and he came!" 

"But Yeonjun sets the standard too high, guys, he's not like us ordinary people." This time it was Park Sunghoon who spoke, a mischievous smile covering his face. He was another one of Huening's freshmen friends and also, as they all found out, one of the friends he and Yeonjun had in common. They explained how they knew each other, but Soobin deleted the information from his brain as soon as he assimilated it. 

Yeonjun shook his head, pretending to be all disgusted, "I already told you I'm not paying for you, Sunghoon. These compliments are too cheap." 

Sunghoon seemed scandalized. "I'm giving you my heart here!!!" 

Soobin fidgeted on his seat, looking down to his food on his plate while the boys around him laughed out loud and kept on teasing each other. He took another little bite of his hamburger while Hyejoo, another one of Huening and Beomgyu's friends, led the topic of the conversation to another one so fast it was difficult for him to keep up with. 

He took another two big sips of the orange juice he had ordered, the liquid pushing the food down to his stomach in the process. 

It ended up being that, when Soobin got his phone today, five minutes before getting out of his house, for the first time on the day!, to check his texts, he found out that Huening and Beomgyu had decided to go out to have dinner before actually going to drink. It was complicated news: Yeonjun and Soobin had just eaten dinner with the exact intention of not being hungry later. Now he had to eat again, afraid of being seen as rude if he was the only one not to order anything. (We need to talk about how Yeonjun's stomach was secretly punctured.)

Something reflected with the lights of the room right on Soobin's eyes, making him cover it with his hands. Yeonjun, sitting by his side, was bursting into laughter because of something that someone had said on the other side of the table. When the reflection moved, Soobin looked for its source for a fleeting second until finding a hand full of rings on its long fingers, the tips of the nails covered with black polish, holding tight a cup of beer. He didn't even need to lift up his eyes much to find Beomgyu, sitting right in front of him at the rectangular table. 

The reflection went back to disturbing Soobin's sight when Beomgyu lifted the cup to drink again, now leaving it empty. 

Coming to think of it, Beomgyu had been silent ever since Soobin and Yeonjun got there. With the long bangs covering his eyes in a way it didn't on the day Soobin met him, a bunch of necklaces hanging from his neck, black band t-shirt and uninterested glaze, the boy hadn't done much that night other than sit there and drink. 

He didn't seem to be the quiet type the other time they met. And, comparing his lack of interest with Huening's excitement and loud laughs on the end of the table, besides their friend's unending gabble and the amount of questions about university they had with which they machine-gunned Yeonjun and him since they got there… Between one and another not very full fork of food, Soobin wondered if some kind of spirit of bitterness had possessed him or something like that. Going out today had also been his idea, after all. 

"Soobin!" A poke on his shoulder and a familiar voice calling him made Soobin's attention come back to the world around him and realise the movement on the table. He turned his face in Yeonjun's direction, looking for an explanation. "Come on, we are leaving. Let's go grab a drink." 

Soobin grimaced. 

"Is it far away from here?" 

"Not even two streets away," Yeonjun explained, a good-humoured laugh leaving his throat while he threw his jacket around his shoulders. "Sunghoon and I still have to pay, you can go with the others for now." 

Soobin got his phone, keys and wallet in the front pocket of his hoodie and did as his friend said. Crossing the doors of the restaurant, he found the majority of Beomgyu's and Huening's friends already reunited there, talking and laughing quietly under the artificial streetlights. It was strange to think that all those people were younger than him. 

"But, guys, what's happening to Beomgyu today, uh?" a girl was asking when Soobin got close enough to hear. "I've never seen him so quiet before." Soobin recognised her as Choi Yerim, a dance freshman that became friends with Yeonjun in the blink of an eye. She had her hair dyed purple and peeked through the windowpane, Beomgyu being the last one to leave the table they were sitting at for the past hours. 

“Soobin hyung!” Huening threw his arms around his shoulders, smiley. "Let's leave Gyu alone for today, Cherry. He had a bad day." 

Comprehension flashed through the girl's face, and then her expression suavized. 

"Oh. That sucks."

"I know, right."

Huening carried Soobin into the middle of an enthusiastic conversation with Jake and Hyejoo. The three of them were trying to convince Soobin to post on Instagram a picture Huening had taken of him when he wasn't paying attention and that had "came out really well, all boyfriend material" when Yeonjun and Sunghoon finally got in there, talking to each other through yells. Soobin pushed Yeonjun, playfully, for the startle it took him and half the other people around, and everyone was laughing and poking each other in one of those classic chaotic moments when a bunch of drunk young people are together… all this excluding the insignificant fact that — besides Beomgyu, that was joining them just now — no one had started to drink yet. 

When all of them were walking, unhurried, through the street, and the conversations had softened up, Soobin put himself on the viewer mode again. Everyone had naturally separated into duos to walk on the sidewalk, and he realised he was at the end of the row, side by side with Beomgyu.  

Yeonjun was listing for Yerim the teachers he liked the most and those she should avoid on the dance subjects when the classes started right in front of them, and Soobin started to disconnect himself from what was happening around and just breath the night's fresh air.

It was something he liked to feel, from time to time; it wasn't that cold today and it had been weeks since Soobin had really left his house after the dark, so he was fully capable of enjoying the sensation for today. It was an enjoyable night, too; there were tons of stars in the sky and even though they were in a commercial district, full of people and noise everywhere, it was easy for Soobin to disconnect from everything and absorb from the environment only what was useful to him. There was a moment he could actually feel like he was alone in there. 

It was at that moment that a car in full speed came turning the corner, skidding on the street by their side and almost pulling out Soobin's heart from his chest with the startle. Soobin, as if by reflex, jumped back and put his hand on his chest at the same time, letting out a humiliating cry that soon turned into an angry curse and it was just at this moment that he realized he was stepping on someone else's feet. ("Ouch, Soobin, it wasn't even that bad," complained Yeonjun, whose discourse was interrupted by his friend's yelling.) 

"Oh! Sorry, it wasn't me!" he shouted, covering his face with both his hands and turning to his side to glare at a Beomgyu with hair on his face and a lost expression on his face. 

The pair of sneakers he was wearing and where Soobin had stepped at were, at least, black, and hadn't gotten dirty. 

"It wasn't you?" he asked lightly, laughing. Beomgyu pushed his hair out of his face with both his hands and then waved as if asking Soobin to forget that. “It’s okay, it didn’t hurt. You’re not that heavy.”

Beomgyu let out a giggle. His breath smelled a bit like alcohol and it was a little bit bothersome, but he didn’t seem to be actually drunk yet. 

“Are you drunk?” Soobin asked. 

“Halfway there,” Beomgyu confirmed, looking down at his feet. 

They had already gone back to walking. Soobin stuck his hands in his pocket. 

“I like your sneakers,” praised Beomgyu. Soobin checked his own shoes; it was a pair of pink all-stars Yeonjun had lent him. 

“Thanks, but they’re Yeonjun’s. I didn’t expect you to like colorful stuff.”

Beomgyu shook his head, his hair flying along with it, and put on his face a serious expression: “I’m also an admirer of what doesn’t fit me.” And he let out a loose giggle.

Soobin rolled his eyes, not realizing he was also smiling; it made no sense to try to talk to a drunk person. But Beomgyu didn’t seem so depressed now. 

They looked at each other's eyes for a fleeting second and laughed out loud. It was curious because, for the rest of the short walk to the bar, Soobin didn’t throw himself again into his particular mental universe. 

Instead, he had this feeling that he and Beomgyu were walking together. Which was different than, rationally, knowing that he and Beomgyu were walking together. 

Even though similar, it was something else. 

The little rock Soobin had just kicked made a bunch of ephemeral noises as it rolled down the street. 

A shiver made him shrink his shoulders as an air current ran through his face, making a mess out of his hair and probably leaving a reddish color on the edge of his nose. It’s true that it wasn’t the time of the year to feel too cold, but a short-sleeved shirt and a thin pastel lilac hoodie aren't usually enough to fight against the night breeze. 

Soobin was now walking down a large street in a fancy residential neighborhood that stood close to the bar where he and the others had spent the night, for the first time in hours enjoying the company of silence and the awareness that he was alone. He had poked Yeonjun on the ribs not many time ago, still at the pub, and gotten a nod in response when inviting him to go home, but ended up denying the ride invitation that his friend — who, aware that would be driving later, didn’t drink a drop of alcohol — made him. The idea of going back home on a walk that showed up in Soobin’s head earlier was too tempting to disclaim.

He did this all the time back in high school, when school wasn’t as far from home as college did and a twenty-minute walk was all it took to get home. The worst days of summer and winter turned that mundane action into turture, it’s true, but most times, when the weather wasn’t working hard to ruin his short moments of peace, Soobin had no choice but to admit he liked doing that. There was something about the friendly breeze caressing his face and the automatic activity of going through the same path every single day and the world softly spinning, independent of his participation. That walk from earlier had brought back to him those memories.

And then there was Soobin now. Earlier at the bar everything happened normally; everyone had gotten drunk, laughed out loud, talked in yells and brought into the confraternization random people that were also around and started to blend in the conversations. He had stood quietly right where he sat down just as they got there, sipping a cup of beer and trying not to grimace with the bitter taste, replying when people talked to him but not putting in too much effort. Typical Soobin. The situations where he put effort into something were rare. 

The buzz of his phone vibrating on his pocket pulled him back to reality as a fish hook does with its prey underwater. Soobin picked up the device and looked at the bright screen in the middle of the dark pitch that surrounded him with his eyes squinted for a second, both because of the sudden clarity and his confusion. 

Oh, he thought when he, finally, was capable of reading the name on the screen, it’s just Huening.

“Hello?” Soobin picked up right away, putting the phone close to his ear before he found a reason not to. It was still 2AM and he and Yeonjun had just now been the first ones to go home, which meant Huening was calling him from the pub. When they said goodbye, he didn't seem high enough to ambush Soobin into a drunk call right now, but it was a possibility that still couldn't be forgotten. 

"Hyung!" Huening exclaimed on the other side, urgently. "Are you home yet?" 

Soobin frowned. His friend's voice was, for sure, somehow slurred from the alcohol, but he seemed to still be more inclined to the sober, serious side. Other than that, Soobij was capable of hearing his words well enough to conclude that Huening was outside of the barnow, in a try to avoid the noise. 

"Not yet, Huening, I decided to go walking. Did anything happen?" 

"Is Beomgyu with you?"  

"Beomgyu?" asked Soobin, disoriented. "No, I'm alone. Shouldn't he be there with you?" 

"Well, he should, but he's nowhere to be found and he just called me saying that he was going home with you. No one saw him leaving, but it was probably right after you and Yeonjun-hyung left." Huening sighed. Soobin could clearly imagine him walking from side to side in front of the pub's door, a shaken-up look on his face. "I'm kinda worried because he was very drunk, he sounded like a maniac on the phone ." 

Standing under a streetlight in the middle of that desert street, Soobin hurried to scan with his eyes every place his sight could reach, after any signal of someone in there. When he didn't find anything, he ran his fingers through his hair once and assured Huening, way before thinking of what he was doing:

"So, here's what I think we should do: you stay here and try to call him again while I walk my way back and see if I can find him. Yeonjun went home by car and the way to his house is basically opposite to mine, so I'll call him to check if he saw anything."  

Huening's obedient face, frenetically nodding in response to what he was saying, almost crossed the phone line and materialized right there, in front of Soobin. HueningKai was, in fact, a very much transparent guy. To be read so easily by Soobin like that. He said goodbye on the phone hurriedly and said he would be waiting for any updates before Soobin came back to that dark street's solitude. 

The soles of Soobin's foot hurt on top of Yeonjun's sneakers' hard insoles while he walked up the road. The street's inclination didn't feel so steep when it was time to walk down. 

At the same time that he scrolled down the contacts app on his phone, looking for Yeonjun's name, Soobin could see a glimpse of a dark-haired head coming far across the street. He lit up his phone's lantern and pointed it towards the silhouette, officially spotting Beomgyu coming down the street in his direction. 

The boy's steps were unsteady and his arms were swimming back and forth clumsily, as if they were independent bodies hanging from his shoulders. Soomin hurried to text Huening even before getting close enough to talk to the boy:  

02:38  soobin: i found him

02:38  soobin: gonna take him back there

Soobin put his phone back in his pocket in a hurry, without even considering waiting to read Huening's response. Beomgyu was more urgent now. 

The boy had now silently concluded the walk in Soobin's direction and was now standing in front of him without saying or doing anything. They exchanged mute glances for a fleeting second before Soobin broke the silence: 

"Hi." 

Beomgyu nodded once, but still didn't say anything. He didn't look like a maniac like Huening had described, however all that silence wasn't that comforting either. 

"Come here. I'll take you back to your friends." Soobin held Beomgyu under his arms and they both started to walk slowly. 

Beomgyu didn't say anything more, and Soobin could just hope with all his strength that someone that was in the bar with Huening had a car or other way of easy locomotion. 

At a certain point in the middle of the way, when they were already close enough to the pub's location, Soobin turned his head in Beomgyu's direction after hearing him snuffling. For very much of his surprise, he realised Beomgyu had been crying, a couple of silent tears running down his cheeks and reflecting the street's artificial lights. 

Soobin stopped at his feet, taken aback at the situation for a second. Even after all the signs that Beomgyu had displayed of not being that well today, he was absolutely not expecting such a raw demonstration of fragility. Maybe because he just couldn't get himself to think of how he would've handled something like that. For all effects, Yeonjun never cried in his presence, even though it was as clear as water when he was going through a tough time and needed Soobin's support. 

But having a drunk stranger to cry right next to you was different than trying to cheer up your sad best friend by all means, and that was all the damn experience Soobin had. He ended up just doing the bare minimum then, running his open hand on Beomgyu's back for a minute, while the younger managed to calm himself down. They stood there at the street silently for a couple minutes, Beomgyu rubbing the back of his hands on his eyes in a useless try of stopping the stream of tears, while Soobin looked gently at him and tried to make him get the message he understood. Even though he had no idea of why the boy was crying, and was not exactly aware of how being on Beomgyu's feet felt like because he wasn't even used to crying either. For that matter, Soobin could be considered what people may call cold. 

Beomgyu ended up calming down after some more minutes of Soobin's hands patiently rubbing his back up and down in what he hoped would feel reassuring, and he turned his head to look up at the older boy for the first time since they've stopped there. 

Soobin was kind of expecting him to say something that would make that situation feel a little less bizarre, but all Beomgyu did was open a weak grin in his direction, thankful. Something about the way he just suddenly started to look better made Soobin feel like, whatever he had done just now, he had done right. 

Something in that moment and in the sparkles that the streetlights painted in Beomgyu's eyes made the extreme lack of understanding from just now fade into a mutual feeling of something he couldn't quite name, but made him sure that Beomgyu was just as surprised as him that they ended up in that kind of a situation; that it wasn't usual to him to end up crying in the arms of a strange either. 

They went back to walking after that, Beomgyu still as sluggish as someone could be after all that drinking. Therefore, as their glares separated and their thoughts went back to running solitarily in their minds, Soobin had that strange feeling that he had just left a part of himself with him. 

Huening was going nuts when the two of them finally made it to the bar. He was standing in front of the doors just like Soobin had pictured it when they talked on the phone, walking from side to side as if he was determined to make a Huening-shaped hole on the floor and looking quite disturbed. 

Soobin found it endearing how badly he clearly worried about his friend; it was almost funny, like the blonde tall boy could worry about Beomgyu even harder than his mom would. He was a grown up guy after all, alcohol couldn't change it for a night. Even if he hadn't found the boy in the street earlier, he was sure Beomgyu would've been just fine. 

"Here he is," Soobin announced as he and Beomgyu, still being held below the arms by him, stopped in front of Huening, "safe and sound." 

"And drunk!" Beomgyu spoke with a giggly voice for the first time in a while, surprising Soobin for a second. It seemed like the crybaby version of Beomgyu had already permanently left, leaving him back again with the classic drunk personality of finding everything funny. 

"As drunk as a barrel of rum." Huening rolled his eyes. "Come here, baby bear, let's go home." He took Beomgyu's hand and gently tried to disentangle him from Soobin's arms. Beomgyu, however, didn't seem too interested in the idea. 

"No! I wanna stay with Soobin-hyung," he cried. "Do you want to separate us because you're jealous because he's my new best friend?" 

Soobin wasn't quite expecting that, so the younger's words actually managed to surprise him for a second. Huening probably wasn't too, because he let out one of those loud ass laughs of his, seeming to be having fun for the first time since earlier when he called. 

"So you're best friends with him now and don't need me anymore?" He asked Beomgyu with a smile still adorning his face, making the dark-haired boy fright in Soobin's arms in response to his voice's loud volume. Huening then told Soobin, shaking his head softly, "he always says he's going to find a better best friend and dump me." 

"Wasn't expecting that to be me," Soobin said quietly, tring to join Huening's playfulness. The blonde smiled at him. 

"Well, hyung, we're taking the bus to go back to the dorms and Beomgyu gets absolutely unbearable when he's drunk, so you can just go with us if you're fine with it. Sunghoon's going with us, I just have to go back inside to call him, and he doesn't have a roommate yet so we have an extra bed we can work with today." He then added after a second of thinking, "it's not the ideal sleepover setting but it's gonna be an extra adventure for the day."

Soobin was not happy with the idea of not coming back to his bed today, but wasn't sure of how to say that and ended up nodding anyway.

When Soobin woke up the next morning, the first thing he felt was that the bed he was laying at wasn't his. 

He opened his eyes almost unconsciously, finding in front of him the sight of Huening and Beomgyu's ceiling; it was still predominantly dark, a snippet of light coming from the tiny bathroom window at the corner and forming a string of dim light that crossed the room. It wasn't bright enough to come directly from the sun, which was enough to convince him that the day hadn't dawned yet. 

Soobin stirred on the bed, not daring to peek at any of the two boys sleeping in the room before covering his head with the blankets and closing his eyes again, determined to fall back asleep.

Instead, last night's memories started to, little by little, fill his thoughts. Back at the bar, Soobin hadn't drunk almost anything, just accepting a cup or two that someone offered him, to be polite. He was as sober as always, then, when he found Beomgyu in the middle of the street and almost carried him back to Huening's arms. (Well, at least figuratively). 

The truth was that for the rest of the night Beomgyu remained clinged to him as if he was a sloth, and Soobin, the biggest, oldest and healthiest tree of the entire forest. To be honest, it would've been extremely uncomfortable in any common setting, but the entire situation was so out of the blue that having Beomgyu insisting on not letting him go and attacking Huening with hints dropped about the new-best-friend thing was just one of the day's strange things. 

He, Beomgyu, Huening and Sunghoon left the bar just as Huening messaged Sunghoon for him to join them, and it took them a 10-minute walk to get to the bus stop. Beomgyu laughed out loud and talked nonsense the entire time, to which Huening and Sunghoon always said stupid stuff back just to annoy him. Soobin thought about how they were right now being the exact young and drunk guys passing by noisily whom's presence always bothered him. (He very much appreciated silence.) 

The bus ride was then very silent. There were other two or three people there with them, and the only thing they could hear was the deafening sound of the bus' cogs working under them and the wheels passing over the asphalt. Beomgyu fell asleep on his shoulder there, and Soobin had a lot of time to look around and wonder why the hell he had accepted to be there. 

Everything happened so fast and things were so all over the place that it was almost like Soobin had no power over anything and he was just um expectador da realidade. It was a feeling he had from time to time; when it was needed, his limbs moved by themselves and his mouth talked without his brain commanding it to. It was like the outside world was behaving so abnormally that his mind couldn't process it in time for him to actively participate in it.

They got out of the bus and it was one of those situations: Soobin felt the ground under his foot and Beomgyu's lazy fingers around his arm, but it wasn't like it was real. It made him remember why he disliked going out and doing standard young people things the most. 

The elevator still wasn't fixed, so the four of them went up the stairs until the 4th floor, where Huening and Beomgyu lived, and, next thing Soobin knew, Sunghoon was coming down from his room at the 5th floor with a mattress on his shoulders for him to sleep in his friend's room. When they went to the bathroom later, Huening told him something about not wanting him to be uncomfortable sleeping in the room of someone he had just met today, which he deeply appreciated. 

Soobin felt the silence a little bit longer until he heard someone moving in one of the beds around him; whoever it was, the person kicked a blanket aside and it fell on top of him. The person then moved a little more and ended up staying still again. Moving his blanket away so it wouldn't cover his head anymore, Soobin felt the bother in his eyes for the sudden artificial light before he actually saw the phone with the screen turned on in Beomgyu's hand. 

The boy also seemed to be struggling to handle the blue light, squinting hard as he typed on the device with so much agility his fingers were nothing but a blur. His face was a little bit puffy and the long hair pointed to all possible directions on top of his head and throughout the back of his neck. He couldn't quite see it, but Soobin knew he was wearing the exact same clothes as last night, except his jacket, because Huening had refused to help him change it. ("For everything there is a limit and this is mine," he had mumbled before laying on his bed.) 

Soobin had never had any doubts about Beomgyu being considered handsome for the outside world's standards. Now, nevertheless, was the first time he saw himself personally thinking of him as someone attractive. 

"I don't want this blanket either," he said quietly instead of any of these things, getting to sit on the mattress.

Even after he took the blanket, made a ball with it and threw it back to Beomgyu's bed, the boy didn't show any reaction; he kept on typing on his phone as if his life depended on it. 

"Hello?" Soobin called. "Your visitor is talking to you." 

Beomgyu directed him a rueful look for a millisecond before facing the phone again. 

"Give me just a second," he said, "I need to write this down before I forget."  

The silence made its presence back in the room after that, Soobin spacing out while looking at the little ray of sunshine that came out of the window while Beomgyu kept immersed on his phone, the only sound of the room being the soft mix of Huening's low snores and Beomgyu's long nails touching the phone's screen. It did not feel as uncomfortable as he expected it to, to wake up in Huening and Beomgyu's room. Probably something about last night's ridiculous situations had grown them closer in Soobin's mind. (Which made no sense at all, but was still a try.) 

"I'm done," Beomgyu broke the silence as he said, turning off the phone screen and looking at Soobin. 

It took the older boy a second or two over the normal to react; without even realising it, he had almost fallen back asleep right there, sitting on the bed. He now wondered why he had called Beomgyu's attention first of all, sure he had nothing to talk to the boy about. They were strangers. 

"What were you typing?" Soobin ended up asking then, after throwing away all the questions about how Beomgyu felt waking up after all that alcohol. 

"Got an idea for a dialogue scene." Beomgyu shrugged. "Did you know I write? That would probably sound too random if you didn't." 

Soobin smiled, "I didn't." 

Beomgyu scratched the back of his head, grimacing before he said: "Well, I'm sorry, then." He chuckled. " I thought I could've mentioned it last night, I honestly don't remember much about it. I only write young adult sci-fi so don't expect too much, though." He stretched on the bed the blanket he had just now rejected and laid down again as he kept going, "how did you end up sleeping here, by the way?" 

Soobin raised his eyebrows, "I like sci-fi. Can I take a look at yours?" 

A groan ran out of Beomgyu's mouth as he gave Soobin an over dramatic look, "can we talk about my ridiculously high quality writing after you tell me if I, yes or no, humiliated myself to death last night? I only have fragments of memories and honestly, I'm scared." 

Huening moved a little in his bed, causing them to suddenly realize the possibility of waking him up by accident and start, for precaution, a whispered conversation: 

"You didn't," whispered Soobin, trying to put on his face something he hoped would seem like a reassuring look. "I mean, I'm not sure about your drunk habits, but the only thing you did yesterday was to stay silent most of the time, cling to me and make fun of Huening."

"That one was a right choice," Beomgyu joked. 

Soobin sent him a soft smile; he had left out the boy's cry on purpose, almost sure he wouldn't be happy to show a stranger that vulnerable side of him. That information would die with Soobin for sure, as he would never tell anyone about it; that was, then, the closer option to deleting that occurrence from existence: to pretend it didn't happen. "And so how did Huening convince you to sleep here?" 

"You are quite the culprit," said Soobin, having fun with the surprised face the boy put on. "You couldn't accept to let go of me until you fell asleep already on our way here." 

The black-haired went back to laying down on his bed, the soft rhythm of the conversation making him feel comfortable. Beomgyu went back to talking only after he was done, both of them now looking at the ceiling just as captive as bugs were to light, "I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I get that you're more inclined to the reserved type." 

"I'm fine," Soobin assured, waving with his hand up in the air for Beomgyu to see. He then put on a more enthusiastic intonation to his whispers: "and how about the books?" 

"Oh, they're not books," said Beomgyu with a quiet tone. "I write fanfiction."

Soobin felt his brows growing closer. "You do?" he asked. "No offense, I just didn't know people still do that." 

"None taken," said Beomgyu, chuckling softly. "I feel like most people in our surroundings don't, so I'm used to having to explain it. Actually, I feel like the fanfiction community is now bigger than it was back when we were teenagers." Soobin took a second to think about it, so he had the time to add: "or maybe it is just that I got better so I now have more audience." 

"As if you weren't still a teenager," joked Soobin, now rationally agreeing to talk to Beomgyu as if they were friends, as the boy didn't seem bothered by it. 

The younger one let out a whiny sound, "I'm 20."

"So you write young adult sci-fiction to post on the internet," Soobin continued, n

ow talking more to himself than to Beomgyu. It surely didn't match his persona for some reason, making the whole thing more interesting. 

"It's what I like to do." Beomgyu moved on his bed. Soobin couldn't see his face from where he was, which somehow made the conversation easier. "Don't you have something like that, too?" 

Soobin took a moment to think. "I like to pretend I don't exist," he said under his breath. 

"What did you just say?" Beomgyu asked back, politely.

"I said I would love to take a look at your works." 

It was only a week later when Soobin and Beomgyu got to see each other again. The long-awaited first day of the semester had finally arrived, and it was true that they had the entire last week of vacations to see each other in one of Huening's get togethers, but Soobin invented a new rule now that he had invitations to go out to make excuses for: he wasn't living his house until the time to go to college on Monday morning, so he could recharge his social battery at maximum. Huening hadn't yet discovered that Soobin wouldn't leave his house at all for the rest of his life if he could, so it worked for now.  

When Soobin got out of the house for the first day of classes that monday, he did it carrying with him the layers and layers of patience he had accumulated during his days retiring at home, but it wasn't even time for lunch now and he was already going crazy. 

This was, basically, the situation going on when he first saw Beomgyu on campus: Soobin was sitting in a bench near to some trees after getting out of his last morning class of the day, his journal open in front of him with his weekly schedule and a pile of sheets by his side, which he had just taken off of the journal after ruining it. The professors of the first classes had given them the semester's schedule and he had to write everything down to start to organize himself to study for all those tests, but first he needed to have his schedule written down right somewhere. And he better get a new mousepad for his laptop before going home today, because his was trash. It was going to be a busy semester, ugh.

Beomgyu was coming from another building he had no idea which major was for and had a considerably big group of people around him, talking and laughing and showing each other stuff on their phones, so Soobin figured his stress was probably showing on his face a little too much for the boy to take the trouble to leave everyone behind so he could talk to him.

"Shouldn't I be panicking with my first day of classes?" he came around asking, holding the pile of paper Soobin had left on the bench to sit down by his side. 

Speaking of Beomgyu, Yeonjun had spent this entire last week dedicated to looking for creative reasons for him to be glued to Soobin like he was on the day they went out together. "Maybe he's got a crush on you," was his first guess, the one he blurted out just as Soobin was done telling him on the phone everything that happened. The theory didn’t last long, though; it was, by the way, canceled by Yeonjun himself, when he hushed to stalk all of  Beomgyu’s social media profiles after any other hints to entertain him, and melted in disappointment as he found a tweet where the boy said he was straight. “Maybe he just doesn’t know yet,” he had told Soobin later on, still hopeful with the idea of watching a romantic drama happening. The black-haired, however, didn’t get really convinced. 

“I don’t think so,” he responded, unbothered, perched on his desk chair while Yeonjun looked at him from his bed. “Later on, when he was sober, he acted pretty normal. If it was you, you would’ve kept on hitting on the person at every sentence.” Begrudgingly, Yeonjun agreed.

But of course he didn’t give up so easily.

That day, after the fanfiction conversation that evolved from Beomgyu sending his works' links to Soobin into them exchanging book recommendations — a topic that bloomed after the younger's long dedicated attempts into convincing Soobin to watch one of the animes he wrote about (which he wasn't going to do) —, they had got sleepy again as time passed and ended up falling asleep again. It was past 1PM when the two of them got up again thanks to Huening's attempts to get out of the room without waking anyone up, and not even 2PM when Soobin got home. He was starting to get good at the art of running away from Huening's going out ideas, only staying to help them to get Sunghoon's mattress back and nod to him a little "thank you", because he was a polite boy. Having breakfast in the afternoon together would have to wait for another day (never, if he was lucky enough). 

Yeonjun forced Soobin to tell the story again countless times, in search of hints of the reason why Beomgyu had done that. So many times that he would be able to recite Soobin’s speech without a single error now, just like a voice recorder. Nothing productive got out of there, though, and Yeonjun ended up going back to analyze the memories he himself had from that day, looking for the few moments where he paid attention to Beomgyu’s silent presence.

“Hyuka had said he was sad that day, didn’t he?” he dug up from his memory trunk at a certain point, looking at Soobin with his eyes shining in expectation as if something actually useful could get out of all that drama he was making. 

Soobin shrugged in response, murmuring an uninterested “I guess so”.

That didn’t intimidate Yeonjun, though, who kept going with his theories on kpop-stan-level about how Beomgyu “was probably needing a friend that day, right, because he was sad, and he may have found Soobin likable and friendly and that was probably it!, Hyuka’s kind of a fool so he may not even know how to comfort a friend on the way they need to, and so Beomgyu needed a new shoulder to cry on.” 

Soobin went to sleep at night with a headache after hearing the words “probably” and “friend” so many times. Yeonjun still bothered him nonstop after that, in search of approval for his theories — which Soobin negligently gave him. 

From the bottom of his heart, Soobin couldn’t care less. He now sympathized with Beomgyu, but it didn’t change the fact that the younger boy was way too drunk that day. It’s a legit waste of time to try to understand drunk people’s actions. 

It was absolutely normal when Beomgyu came to talk to him today, then. Soobin thanked all the entities he knew for Yeonjun not being there now to make a scene at the interaction and played it cool: “I don’t know about people from your major, but Huening’s probably breaking down harder than me somewhere in this building right now.”

“Hey,” Beomgyu censored, “do not underestimate literature. Can you see this heavy backpack here?” He broke away from the backpack he was carrying to lift it to his face’s height, “it’s all books. That I have to read from beginning to end. For this month.” He opened up a maniac smile. 

“I thought you liked it,” Soobin commented, looking back down to his journal.

“And don’t you also like medicine?” retorted Beomgyu, humorous. 

“It’s nursing.”

Beomgyu chuckled teasingly, “that’s what I said.”

Soobin shook his head before closing his journal and putting it on his backpack. He didn’t even realize how familiar Beomgyu’s sense of humor sounded to him now, after so much of seeing his characters making use of a similar one. 

“I read your stuff,” he decided to say. Beomgyu’s face lit up almost immediately, and it was funny to see him all smiley on that burial clothes he was wearing. Not that it was ugly; just black. Emo teenagers probably wore stuff like that on Pinterest. 

“Seriously?” he asked, and unconsciously inclined himself in Soobin’s direction while he clapped enthusiastically. 

Soobin would tease him about his posture change, now that he felt the freedom to do so, if he didn’t have so much to say about the stories it was almost like he was in a hurry to bring them up. He went on shoving all the stuff he had spread around him on the backpack, while sorting his thoughts as fast as he could. It wasn’t like Soobin to stress out so much at any point in the semester, anyways, let alone right in the beginning; his schedule could wait for the lunch break. 

It was just then that Huening appeared, coming from the same building where Soobin had his classes at and ruining their soon-to-be best moment of the day: the one they would spend talking about fanfiction in a university campus and ignoring their adult commitments. 

"My dear friends!" the blonde exclaimed, running-hopping in direction of the boys with open arms and a smile on his face just like a fictional character known by his exceptional good humour would do. "Were you waiting for me to go have lunch?" he asked excitedly as he stopped in front of them. 

"I didn't even know you were nearby," Beomgyu stated, cutting down his exaggerated enthusiasm. "So that one is the nursing building?" 

"Uhum. It's humongous, I got lost three times there already just to get on the first class and I already don't remember how to go back to where I was, I'm so fucked HAHA," he told them, ending the report with a high-pitched laugh typical of his. "Let's go to the dining hall already, guys, I'm starving. Soobin-hyung, later I have Histology in room 17, do you by any chance know where it is?" 

"It's on the second floor. There are 10 rooms on each floor, from 1 to 10, 11 to 20 and so on," Soobin explained. He got up slowly, while Beomgyu had already jumped to Huening's side a second after the lunch invitation. "I can't go with you guys for lunch now, sorry. I have to go hand in my subscription to an internship, it's up to 1PM. Good luck with the rest of the first day," he said, waving goodbye and leaving in a hurry under the waves and good luck wishes of the other two. 

It wasn't a lie that there was an internship receiving subscriptions until 1PM on that day, but it also wasn't true that Soobin was thinking of trying it.

The low-down truth was that Soobin was one of the most so-so students that could exist. That's all. He was at the beginning of third year already, but hadn't yet completed anything from the supplementary workload nor involved himself in any extracurricular activities. We also can't say he stood out with his grades at any class up to now. Not even that he tried. 

Soobin had already lost count of how many extension courses and researches and study groups announcements he had ignored, and he knew that if that didn't change he would graduate with the emptiest curriculum among all students in his major.

The problem was that Soobin didn’t do anything that he didn’t really feel like doing and, from every opportunity that had crossed his path until now, he didn’t feel like subscripting to none. There wasn’t any big reason behind it; it’s just that everything was uninteresting.

Soobin wouldn’t even go to his classes if it wasn’t mandatory, let alone be in university out of its time.  

Even so, he now had already said he was going to apply for the internship, and Huening was for sure going to ask about it later. It would be a bother to have to explain that he just came up with that to be able to have lunch alone while listening to music, so Soobin ended up stopping by the nursing coordination building and filling in the registration form. It was just a volunteer internship for short hours a week, but there were few vacancies and he probably wouldn’t be selected. Soobin had heard students with grades way better than his commenting on having applied for it. At least he would be able to tell Huening what kind of questions you are asked in subscriptions for this kind of thing. 

Soobin could be a lot of things, but he wasn’t dumb. The proof for it is that he answered this exact question, coming from Huening’s mouth, just as he had predicted, a few days later. 

“But what kind of questions do they ask in subscriptions for these things?” the blonde boy had asked. 

The funny part was that Huening stared at his own figure in the mirror without even blinking, let alone look around to face Soobin, while trying to reproduce a perfect eyeliner idea he had seen on TikTok, and could still, somehow, pay full attention to their conversation. Soobin couldn’t get so involved in the topic even when he was just idle looking at the other person.

"The basics," he responded, playing with one of his jacket's buttons, "they ask for your academic information and the reason why you want to take part in the internship. And they didn't ask for it this time, but it's common for them to want to know if you've involved yourself before in something that has to do with that same subject like scientific research and this kinda stuff." 

Soobin looked up from the analysis he was making of his outfit just in time to witness the free demonstration of enthusiasm that Huening was making to his image in the mirror. (The mirror in question, by the way, was somehow put hanging in one of the wardrobe's doors. Huening and Beomgyu were making magic with that little room.) 

"My gosh, hyung, who's this cute guy right here?" he joked, pointing to himself in the mirror and letting out a loud laugh. He laughed even louder after seeing Soobin shaking his head negatively in response, from the little corner in his bed where he was seated. 

It was the beginning of a Friday night on the first week of classes. Huening had only been well succeeded in convincing his hyung to go with him on the first party of the semester because Soobin secretly planned using that as an argument not to show up in any other after that. ( "So you're telling me you're not going with me because you've already been to too many parties this semester??!" would be future Huening scandalized reaction.) 

They were in Huening's room, who had begged for company while he got ready, since Beomgyu was busy with his friends from his major and would meet them in the party later. It wasn't like Soobin gave his appearance half the importance that his friend did to his own, but he had already worn his fabulous jeans pants, shirt and black jacket back at home. There he was to accompany Huening, though. 

"I can't believe I'm going to my first uni party," commented Huening, transpiring enthusiasm while taking a bunch of mirror pics that certainly would show up on his Instagram feed later. Soobin could see it in his eyes how hard it was for him not to invite him to take part in the shooting, after a random conversation they had in which he said he didn't really like taking photos. "Are there going to be many sunbaes? I didn't talk to many of them besides you. There's Yeonjun-hyung, of course, but he isn't from our major." 

"You're about to get in the best place to meet your veterans," assured Soobin, who walked on thin ice trying not to break the younger's enchantment for the new world in which he entered. "But there's going to be a lot of people from other majors too, besides Beomgyu and his friends. The nursing major parties are pretty well known."

"The more people the better! Let's get going, hyung, I still have to stop by Taehyun's room to take him in tow; he's just like you, doesn't get out of his house if there's not a Huening to make him do it." Taehyun was the new friend that Soobin hadn't yet met. It was hard to keep up with Huening's social abilities. 

The blonde boy crossed the room in the direction of the door, on the way kicking under his bed a pile of anatomy books he had probably borrowed from the university library. He grabbed his keys on the bedside table while Soobin got up to accompany him, even taking time to tidy up the bed sheets. 

Huening stopped on his feet when the two of them were already on the other side of the door.

"Did I forget anything?" 

Both of them runned their eyes through the room: Huening's clean and arranged bed, the writing desk already accumulating books and notes and a black backpack laying on top of all the supplies at Beomgyu's half of the room; the little bathroom window opened to ventilate the ambient and the wall full of posters contrasting with the empty white wall on Huening's side glared back at them. Soobin, now that he actually paid attention to the room for the first time, was surprised at how much the place had already changed in just a week. It looked like the same people had been living there for months already. 

Funnier than that was only the unexpected fact that he recognised some stuff, even though just by name, in the mess of interests Beomgyu had organised in his wall. One single long conversation had done that; maybe Soobin had, after all, the potential to perceive and assimilate the world around him like a normal person. If only he tried a little harder. 

"No, I didn't," concluded Huening, after passing through the same environment scan. He closed the door in front of Soobin's eyes right before he got done with his mental considerations about the weird obsession Beomgyu had with Harry Potter and sports themed anime, and locked it. Huening had put on a keychain with a penguin plushie on his copy of the room's keys. 

Blaming the lack of the conversation about his fanfiction that he and Soobin ended up never having, Beomgyu texted the older just as he was free that same day they had met on campus. It was funny because his interest to hear what Soobin had to say about his writings was so easy to see and so genuine; Soobin thought it was greatly courageous of him to give so much importance to such a simple thing and not even worry about hiding it from the outside world. The two of them had not even interacted on social media before; Yeonjun would be proud to know that Soobin had replied to him. (It would be wrong to leave the poor boy without the feedback he so honestly wanted, he had convinced himself.)

Soobin was led upstairs to Kang Taehyun's room, on the 6th floor. Huening did him the favor to share some information about his new friend; he was a pharmacy freshman and had moved from another city to the dorms before the semester started. 

"We met on the line for lunch on the first day of classes, but if that didn't happen we would've ended up bumping into each other here at some point anyways." 

Soobin nodded absentmindedly as he went on. Huening showed his excitement for making friends that majored in similar areas and was already planning on enrolling in the same classes with Taehyun for the subjects they had in common. 

Meanwhile, Soobin wondered if Beomgyu would have time to dedicate to writing now that classes had started. Soobin himself, at least, would not be able to find any space between his student obligations for any hobby. Generally, the only thing he would do when he wasn't studying would be to contemplate the reasons for his existence… and sleeping.  

But he hoped that it could be different to Beomgyu. His most recent work, a fantasy story about three anime characters trying to survive in a society of supernatural beings that lived hiding from humans, and at war with each other, was not completed yet. Soobin had gotten so distressed with the end of the last chapter that he was sure he wouldn't be able to sleep at night until he discovered what happened next. . 

Beomgyu was aware of this, actually. After he sent Soobin a bunch of messages that Monday, those which Yeonjun would probably be proud of his friend for replying to, Soobin had sent him twice the amount of messages with his impressions. It was a fun conversation, even if Soobin wasn't sure if he was sounding like a normal person or making a fool of himself. 

I mean, the first thing he said in response to Beomgyu's cute "hello hyung, i don't know if you like to talk to people through texts but i was really curious of your opinions on my works as we ended up not being able to talk about it earlier" was literally this: 

20:09  soobin: YOU 

20:09  soobin: WHAT DO YOU FUCKING MEAN THEY WERE SENT TO THE UNDERWORLD? 

20:10  soobin: CAN ALIVE PEOPLE GO TO THE UNDERWORLD? 

20:10  soobin: i literally cant go to sleep tonight i need ANSWERS and im going CRAZY. these are my impressions. good night choi beomgyu 19 years old living at the university's dorm which i exactly know where is located, room 045. never forget i know where to find you. i know where you live. u better be cautious. 

20:11  beomgyu: SINSJAWONDJSNWKNDJAMAKDNISKQKWBFJSKSK LMAO

20:11  beomgyu: HOW DO I REPLY TO THIS OMG IM SO SORRY 

20:11  beomgyu: youre going to find it out soon i swear!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

20:12  beomgyu: im glad u enjoyed it tho.... 

20:13  soobin: i enjoyed it a little bit too much im going crazy right now if u didnt notice i need therapy im sending u the bills later 

20:13  soobin: like seriously. they are literally the MAIN CHARACTERS. the HEROES. how can u tell me the SYSTEM or the green or satan whatever thinks they BELONG to the underworld theyre the GOOD GUYS 

20:14  soobin: but uve got some good writing skills beomgyu!!!! i got rlly hooked since the beginning cant believe im talking to the contemporary shakespeare

20:15  beomgyu: NONSENSE

20:15  beomgyu: I'm a mere peasant just one random citizen from ao3 in middle of so many superior beings that live in there 

20:16  beomgyu: but!!!!! it's sooooooo important to hear that so thank u so much hyung

!! 

20:16  beomgyu: let alone from someone that knows so much about books like you 

It was probably here that the conversation inclined in direction to the unbalanced wisdom that both of them had when it came to books. It was fun because Beomgyu could even not have read everything that Soobin liked, but he at least had already heard of it and knew where he was coming from when he shared his opinions. Soobin always talked about books with Yeonjun — principally about the one he would get from his friend on his birthday every year —, but it was different because he didn't know any of them, even though he would always listen attentively and have the best reactions about what happened in them. Not that Soobin didn't appreciate Yeonjun's efforts of listening to him even when the topic wasn't of his best interest; it's just that talking to Beomgyu ended up being different than what he was already used to. 

They kept the topic going on for a long time before changing it, which explained Soobin's newly acquired repertoire about Beomgyu's interests. No work was needed from his part, in reality, for Beomgyu to be already like this half an hour later:  

20:50  beomgyu: no but dude this shit im telling you is an absolutely SERIOUS matter ok there are NO. ARGUMENTS. against it. 

20:50  beomgyu: he is. bisexual. end of conversation.  

20:51  beomgyu: no one gets obsessed about a man how he was for vitor krum and then shows up later saying that is only attracted to women

20:52  soobin: put that knife down already i didn't even say anything 

20:53  soobin: actually I found it beautiful inspirational everyone has the headcanon they deserve and ron does deserves the most superior of all its not easy to carry the burden of being bi and handsome AND perfect

20:54  beomgyu: BUT. THAT WAS EXACTLY MY POINT: ITS NOT A HEADCANON

20:54  beomgyu: HE WAS CANONICALLY IN LOVE WITH VITOR KRUM MAN THERE IS NO OTHER EXPLANATION 

20:54  beomgyu: there's NO other way to explain his behaviour at the quidditch world cup. SERIOUSLY in the beginning of the book he would marry vitor right there if he proposed  

20:55  soobin: thats true though

20:56  beomgyu: I TOLD U  

20:56  beomgyu: and that's not even the best! theres a fact even more superior that is pan ginny  

20:57  beomgyu: idk if you remember but. her room is full of women posters. quidditch players etc 

20:58  beomgyu: i'm sure that if someone asked her about it she would've said it was admiration hihihihihihihihhi

20:58  beomgyu: it's just. there are no arguments about this. its impossible. 

20:59  soobin: JSJSJANKSJDHS I REMEMBER thinking the same thing when I read that………..  

21:00  soobin: weasley family just has no flaws they're redheads extroverts funny pretty sympathetic lovely and bi/pansexual 

21:00  soobin: don't even let me start about the TWINS ….. them ….. <3 

21:01  beomgyu: omg YES.

21:01  beomgyu: I was afraid of bringing them up and sounding a lil TOO obsessed 

21:01  beomgyu: but behind everything theres already a huge heavy basis of argument

21:02  soobin: i understand JWBAJNASNAJ

21:02  soobin: although there's no need to even start with the arguments in this case right. just looking at their faces, it's written bi in their FOREHEADS srsly

21:02  beomgyu: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

21:03  beomgyu: ICB I FINALLY FOUND SOMEONE WHO GETS IT 

"My favourite characters are the Weasley twins," said Soobin quietly in response to Taehyun's polite question. They were now at the bus stop, trying to deal with the fact that the night line was way slower than the day line, and quietly talking not to bother the mother with a baby sitting next to them. "Taehyun has also read Harry Potter before, you like it, right, hyung?" had Huening brought the subject up earlier. 

"Ah! I like them too," Taehyun had agreed with a mannerly smile, "but I'm more inclined to be the type of person to like the villains, so my favorite is Malfoy. I also really like Slytherin." 

If Soobin was absolutely blunt, Draco Malfoy did not have all the characteristics necessary to be considered a villain. He had a 10 pages long dissertation about it done in his head, but it was left unsaid. "I'm Ravenclaw," he shared, looking down to a tiny rock that he had been kicking from side to side with his shoe's sole. 

No one said anything for a second until Huening went back to conducting it, enthusiastic: "I hate it when you guys start to talk about those houses! It's so excluding for those who don't know anything about it." He crossed his arms in front of his chest, pouting dramatically. It was such a Huening thing to do Soobin even felt his heart growing bigger to fit his friend inside of it better, grateful for not being left alone in the conversation. 

"You should just watch the movies, Huening-ah," he said, even. Come to think of it, Soobin couldn't believe Beomgyu hadn't made Huening watch it up to that day, now that he was aware of how big of a fan he was. 

"I tried to when I was younger, but I slept in the middle of the first one and never got to try again." 

"That's offensive," Taehyun said. Soobin agreed with his eyes, then realised no one would understand it and ended up nodding softly. 

"I mean," continued Huening, now looking as if the topic had just grown inside of him, "I already know that Voldemort dies at the end so why should I waste my time?!" 

"Because it's amazing!" Taehyun shook his head in frustration. "You're gonna regret ignoring it when you finally get to watch it." 

Soobin watched them arguing for a surprisingly long time until the bus arrived. It was so much more comfortable to be in the corner of most social situations; he just didn't know why he should try to act differently. 

Actually, there is not much stuff to address about the nursing department party. It was the standard college party: people drinking, people making out in all the possible directions you could look at, loud music on the speakers all the time, alcohol smell, cigarettes, sweat, too little air.

Soobin wasn't as bad as handling it as you would imagine: he would be fine even if Huening just left him there and went away with Taehyun; he would get himself a drink and watch people talking at the bar as long as he could before start looking like a stalker psychopath, and in his best days would even walk around the salon, if there was space enough to do it without constant physical contact with everyone around. He could go to all the parties the nursing department organised and all the others to which he occasionally was invited and act this exact way. It would be unbearably boring . But he could. 

Today, Soobin followed Huening around for a time so long it felt like hours, getting introduced to people he wouldn't remember and were already too drunk to remember him either, listening to half-told stories — that his friend was too anxious to tell to wait for later, but that were almost completely swallowed by the outside noise —, and trying to stop him from fall with his teeth on the ground all the million of times he stumbled in the dark. Taehyun wasn't able to keep up with Huening's rhythm and had escaped to God knows where just as they got there. 

Huening hadn't drank a lot yet (had spent too much time speaking to have the time to do any other thing with his mouth) when he left Soobin behind to get something in the bar. Soobin wanted to tell him he didn't need to be babysitting him all the time and tell him to go have fun without worrying about him, but he still hadn't found the way to do that without sounding rude.   

That was the first time Soobin was left alone that night, and also the first time he spotted Beomgyu in there. 

The other Choi was showing what Soobin was, little by little, starting to build in his mind to call standard Beomgyu behaviour. In other words: wore black from head to toes, including a black beanie on his long hair and leather pants, danced in the midst of countless other people, held a cup on each hand and from time to time yelled the lyrics of the song that was playing, even though Soobin wouldn't, not even in a million years, be able to distinguish his voice among all that chaos. He seemed way too cool in that moment, handsome and surrounded by people and having too much fun it was almost difficult to connect that same boy in the party with the one who wrote anime fanfiction and cared about Soobin's opinions on his works enough to message him just to be able to listen to it. 

At the same time, however, he was so undeniably himself at the same time it was almost blinding. Soobin found it so unusual to be so many things at the same time in order to fit in so many different situations. He then started to crack up at himself, realising how ridiculous it was to be thinking of stuff like this. Beomgyu was still a stranger at the end of the day, it was just normal for anything about him to feel new.

The second time Soobin was left alone that night came much later than he would have expected. Even after seeing an excited Huening coming in his direction with two yellowish drinks and being dragged into a conversation with a bunch of freshmen who "were really excited to meet him" at the bar, he kept feeling it was wrong to be baby-sitted by the younger during the entire party. He ended up finding a good moment to talk about it just when the little group, for some reason he didn't quite catch in the middle of all the noise, grabbed their drinks and made their way out of the party location and into the empty campus.

“Just go with them and have some fun, I’m staying inside,” he shouted-said to Huening, standing in front of the stool he was seated at while everyone was already leaving. 

“But I don’t want to leave you alone here, hyung,” Huening argued, looking worried.

Soobin waved it off, “I can be alone just fine, Huening, don’t worry about me. Go enjoy your party!”, he insisted. 

Huening seemed hesitant, but ended up going after telling Soobin to call him if anything happened or he was uncomfortable.

Soobin waved goodbye to his friend before losing sight of him.

At that point, it was already so late and all his limbs hurt so much that he figured the better decision would be to just vibe around for a minute or two more before going home. Just so tomorrow he could tell Huening he didn't go straight home after they parted ways. 

That's what made Soobin make his way back to the bar. He was everything but the biggest fan of alcohol, but the time to finish a drink seemed like the perfect way to calculate his last minutes in the only party Soobin was attending that semester — that, obviously, if everything went according to his plans. 

Inside of the party's main location, things were going way crazier than the last time Soobin had been there. Which means: there was not a single sober soul to tell the story. It was really his time to go home. 

In between people pushing, elbows poking him, feet running over his own, a handful of bad smells mixed and music too loud for him to distinguish the sound of his own thoughts, Soobin found a way to get to the barista that had talked to him and Huening earlier. He was a guy of similar age, apron, a piercing on his lips and greyish hair, that sold him a cup of beer without coming up with any conversation this time. 

After he found a random corner to prop up, Soobin brought the glass to his lips. Argh . Why the hell did he choose to drink beer, when he knew it tasted so bad? 

Grimacing, he looked for something interesting happening around to take his attention out of the taste in his mouth. A considerable number of people had already had classes with him at some point, and Soomin already knew by sight a good amount of students of his university by now, but the quantity of unknown people never seemed to decrease in this kind of event. Yeonjun, who only had friends from the humanities, would surely be able to name more people in the party than him. 

That was, basically, the moment Soobin spotted Beomgyu. It was a funny moment for him, if you ask, because he was just thinking of how he didn't know anyone for then the universe threw at him the sight of the, most likely, person he knew the most in the entire party. 

(Not that it meant much, anyways. Soobin had so little about himself that a person could get to know him in fifteen minutes worth of conversation, so he had to keep reminding himself that it didn't work like that with other people. One or two facts about another person didn't mean anything. He didn't know Beomgyu as much as it felt like.) 

The second time Soobin saw Beomgyu that night didn't differ so much from the first one when it comes to how much of himself he seemed to be being. That because Beomgyu always seemed to act one hundred percent like he wanted to. Like the world was just a giant comfort zone for him. 

He seemed wasted: his hair was messier that time, probably because of the amount of time he had spent dancing like it was the last day of his life, and it was humid with sweat. His clothes were also a little messy from the exercise. Soobin could not see his makeup from that far, but he was sure it was still as pretty as before. He had a cigarette between his fingers and was, in a hurry, drinking something from a transparent cup the moment Soobin laid his eyes on him. The next moment, he had finished his drink and threw away the plastic cup to occupy his hands by putting it on the face of a girl he was suddenly kissing. 

Seemed sudden for Soobin, at least, who had not even seen her there before. 

Soobin took another sip of his drink, turning up his nose at its bitterness, and looked away. It didn't take thirty seconds for him to move his eyes back there, just wondering if that girl was someone he knew. She had short blonde hair, from what he could tell, but it was impossible to spot her face. But it was most likely no, anyways. 

Soobin took another sip of his drink, a bigger one this time, and laid his eyes on another situation, still frowning at the free demonstration of heterosexuality back there. He was the most expressive when he knew no one was paying attention. 

The minutes went by lazily as Soobin spent it at the noisy party. He watched a group of girls dancing and singing to an Olivia Rodrigo song like they had just been through their third divorce, passed by countless couples making out he didn't pay much attention to, saw a lot of people turning their glasses with one shot and a bunch of phone cameras pointing to confusing scenes that would probably make completely nonsense videos.

He started to analyse people's appearances at some point, rather than their actions. There were a lot of people wearing black and growing long, alternative hairstyles just like Beomgyu, but they all differed from him at some point. Soobin could never tell if they were being themselves or just following a trend, too. He never understood quite well that big necessity of validation most people had, but was aware of it enough to know it was the culprit behind an annoyingly big amount of situations. 

Soobin didn't care about other people's opinions because he didn't at all care about other people. Neither himself. No people, basically. Way more serene.

He had just finished his drink, placed the empty plastic cup in the first empty surface he had found and was about to get his way out of there when his eyes found their way back to where Beomgyu was before. Soobin heard the loud shouting before he saw what was happening, as there were a lot of people gathering in a circle around some fuss taking place that for sure was not there a second earlier. 

It should not be that surprising that there was something like that building up in a giant party full of drunk and high college students, but Soobin felt something off about it anyways, and could not help but end up finding his way in the direction of the comotion.

If anything, he at least would be able to tell Huening and Yeonjun any detail the gossip that would for sure reach their ears later could have left behind. It would be very unusual, mainly for Yeonjun, to get to hear any gossip from Soobin and not the other way around. 

Soobin felt so many feet stepping on his own as he tried to cross the crowd that he for sure would need to soak his sneakers in soap when he got home. It was the same standard combination of screams in his ears, elbows in his ribs and feet on his own that he went through, with only the addition of dramatic-slash-angry yelling that he could barely hear on top of the loud music. 

It was only because of the circle of people around the unknown source of the fuss moving and opening up more in response to whatever the hell was happening inside there that Soobin was able to get to the core of the situation. The people around him started to step back and back until he was face to face with a guy as tall as him and with double the amount of muscles being held back by another one a little bit shorter, but as strong. The unknown man had a raging face and tried to get away from his friend's grip and go ahead in direction of another guy. He had a killer glare and made a face that showed his teeth and disturbingly reminded Soobin of a dog about to bite someone to the bones.

Soobin's eyes ran towards the guy's target, and it was strange because when he spotted Beomgyu there he felt everything but surprise. It was just like it was obvious that if he, Choi-I-hate-to-leave-my-room-Soobin would end up alone at a party sneaking in to discover who was the person who was the cause of the commotion of the night, it would never end up being a random person. Just because. 

The thought did not last long anyway, and he never got to look back at it when he reminisced about that night. That because just as Soobin saw Beomgyu there, standing with the most confused expression he had ever seen on his face, two or three girls next to him gathering to scream at the unknown guy's face, the blonde short-haired girl he had been kissing just a breath ago crying her eyes out, he saw no option but to go there and take responsibility for him. 

That if you consider stepping forward to grab his arm and pulling him through the crowd out of the parlor as a way of taking responsibility. 

Beomgyu looked so lost and so young and so high when Soobin looked back at him from time to time while they walked to the exit door, linked only by his hand's grip that had slipped to his wrist, that he felt like he was doing just the exact right thing to do. What would Beomgyu do if he stayed there, anyways? Throw his now extinguished cigarette at the stranger's face? Cry with the blonde girl? Be beaten? Maybe scream? Because Soobin was feeling his arm's skin right now and he had no doubt there was everything but muscle in there. 

They stood in the middle of the empty campus not much later, now distant enough from where the party was located that the only sign of it was a distant buzz of the noisy music and a big amount of cars in the parking lot nearby.

Soobin didn't know what to do when they crossed the front door and were officially out of the party, so he just kept on walking and carrying Beomgyu with him until they were far away also from the people who hang out at the dark campus streets. 

Beomgyu shook his wrist in Soobin's grip a little and the older let him go the moment he understood the signal. They stopped wandering, and Soobin, who not even once dared to look at Beomgyu's face after that first time still back at the party and walked a few feet in front of him the whole time, finally permitted his eyes to get to the other's again. 

Beomgyu still seemed lost. He had the exact look on his face of someone who would let another person carry him meters and meters with no purpose at all and without objecting. 

"Why are you here?" he asked, throwing at Soobin his most confused look of the night. 

The Choi could smell alcohol from his breath even from that distance, but the most bothering of all was to just now realise that Beomgyu didn't even know he attended the party in the first place. And he yet followed him like that, like Soobin was the most reliable person he knew when he probably didn't even see who was that stranger carrying him out of that fuss back there. It made Soobin feel even more grateful for being there that time, for it to be him the person who interfered in the situation and took that vulnerable high boy out of there without any second intentions. 

As if Beomgyu wasn't a grown ass man who could take care of himself perfectly well. 

What a strange sensation, to know something and still feel otherwise. 

"I came with Huening," Soobin responded. Beomgyu nodded once, still looking at him, and it was written on his face that he was working hard to process the new information. 

"Is he here now?" Beomgyu asked, turning his neck to look for him from side to side, and squinting his eyes in the direction of the darkness that surrounded them. "Are you guys conspiring together to take me home?" 

Soobin chuckled lightly at the theory, "why would we?"

"You carried me out of the party," accused Beomgyu, now turning to look all whiny with his arms crossed and a pout on his lips. Oh, the odds of drunk Beomgyu. 

"You managed to get yourself involved in a fight," Soobin argued. He was just starting to get uncomfortable standing there without knowing exactly how to proceed when light drops of rain started to fall down on his face and hair. Maybe he should as well just get Beomgyu home. "Come on," he said, taking the younger by his hand, "let's get out of here." 

Beomgyu followed him closely, shirking and softly hopping and yelling in response to every drop of rain that he felt on his skin. 

"Too cold! Argh! I'm ice myself!" he exclaimed with a funny squeaky voice that accompanied the little hops and Soobin, who curiously refused to let go of his hand, let himself be carried with him, a step to one side, other to another, two, three, ten. The two of them walked through the most labyrinthine path that a drunk person could make up. 

"Can I take you to your dorms?" asked Soobin later on, when he and Beomgyu were already comfortably seated at the bus stop, safe from the light rain. 

Beomgyu, who without rest tried to align his moist hair on his forehead, shook his head from side to side just like a puppy getting out of a bath. He looked at Soobin with an empty expression after abruptly stopping. 

"You can?" he asked. His bangs now covered his eyes more than it did before, and eyeliner drained down his cheeks similarly to tears, but in a humorously cute way.

Soobin shook his head and let out a giggle, "gosh you're a total chaos right now." 

"I live for chaos," stated incisively Beomgyu, bringing up his sucker for teenager literature personality. Soobin couldn't help but keep chuckling. 

"You did bring chaos to that party today," he commented. "But can I take you to your dorms?" He looked at Beomgyu's blank face. "I mean, do you have the keys or will I have to call Huening?" 

"Oh." Beomgyu made a face like he finally understood a difficult assignment. "I have lots of keys!" he exclaimed, taking out of his back pocket a bunch of keys united by a teddy bear keychain which looked very similar to the penguin one that Huening carried around all the time. Soobin made no comments on that. (It was, though, truly endearing.) 

"Then I gotta take you to your dorms," Soobin announced. It was a specific speech he wouldn't have wasted his time doing if Beomgyu wasn't drunk right now. 

The younger one smiled. "Yay!" He threw up the keys with both his hands and catched it with just one of them, all excited. "No need to bother Hyuka-ya! Beomgyu is here! Is Hyuka home?" He turned to look at Soobin. 

"Not yet," he giggled. What a child. "But I can text him asking for him to go be with you." 

Beomgyu clapped. "Gyu's coming home to wait for his best-Hyuka-friend!" He opened up a large proud smile, then turned to look at Soobin's eyes. "Soobin-hyung, did you know Hyuka's my best friend? And that I live with him? Isn’t it amazing?" 

"Yes, Beomgyu, I know. By the way, what was that fight back there about? Were you hitting on someone taken?" 

Beomgyu frowned, bringing back the pout. He had rubbed his eyes at some point, and now his make up was a total mess. Funny because Soobin could bet his appearance was in a perfect state to star in a music video 2010-Avril-Lavigne fashioned. 

"I don't know, I'm gonna ask my best friend Kai Kamal Huening when I get to my house because that's where he lives too! Hehe." And there he went. What could Soobin possibly do? Stop the boy from being himself? 

They got to the front of the university's dorm half an hour from that, and it was funny because Soobin was so focused on getting that stray cat home safely that he had no time remaining to mentally complain about wanting to go to his own home, which he so deeply starved for before. 

Just as they got on the bus, Soobin texted Huening so he would come home take a look on Beomgyu. The ride had been a fun one thanks to his dumb ass who accidentally managed to call Beomgyu a stray cat out loud, not aware of the strong emotions the boy had for them and had led him to discourse on it for fifteen minutes non-stop. It was productive because Soobin now knew that if one day he had to choose Beomgyu a gift, it would be a siamese cat. Just for him to have more material for his point of them being the cutest creatures on earth. 

(They did talk about the fuss too, as Soobin so incisively insisted. He needed to know if he was taking Beomgyu out of a situation he was actually guilty for involving himself in, or not. That's what he got, in short: 

"Did that blonde girl you were with have a boyfriend?" 

"Which one? There were so many blonde people back there!"

"The blonde girl you kissed. Short hair, I don't know, couldn't look for long." 

Beomgyu went silent for a moment as he looked at the bus' ceiling thoughtfully, only to then respond with a fun smile running to his face: "I don't know. Kissed a bunch of 'em tonight." He then frowned. "Like, seriously, at least three or four different girls. There's always so many of them at parties. How would I know? Do you know, hyung?" 

Soobin could only shake his head, not a bit surprised. "You almost got seriously beaten back there." 

Beomgyu's eyes widened. "I know, right? I wonder who that gentleman was. How rude! Oh, Soobin-hyung, look! It's a cat in that house's ceiling!" 

The cat was already out of sight when Soobin's eyes reached the bus' window, and the conversation about the fight in the party got as lost as it. Soobin decided to officially not care about it anymore if Beomgyu didn't know. It wasn't his fault. And the way he talked about kissing a bunch of unknown people was kind of disgusting, so he didn't want to think of it anymore.) 

"Now, where's your keys again?" asked a lost-looking Soobin, staring at Beomgyu's blushed face from the cold breeze and not quite sure if he should enter the building with him or not. 

"Right here!" announced an excited Beomgyu as he got his keys out of one of his black ripped jeans' pockets and bounced the teddy bear keychain in front of his eyes like a pendulum. "Oh, hyung, it's so dark, you can't see it clearly," he said in a whiny voice. Soobin wondered where the crybaby drunk Beomgyu had gone that night. 

"I can see it well enough," assured Soobin. "Do you want me to take you to your room?" Beomgyu didn't seem too drunk to manage to get there alone and without waking up the entire building, but asking would not do any harm. 

"No!" answered him right away, gesticulating a negative with his finger, and stumbling a little when he tried to step closer to Soobin. "Thank you, hyung, but Beomgyu's an adult! I can go to my room!" 

"Well, I'll be heading home then," said Soobin. He wasn't that used to dealing with drunk people but just felt this urge to talk down everything as clearly as he could not to have any misunderstandings. A cold breeze passed running through where they stood, making him shrink his shoulders. "I want to see you entering the building at least, though. And make sure to go to sleep right away. Huening will be here in no time." 

Beomgyu opened a touched smile. "Oh, hyung, you are so lovely!" 

He naturally leaned closer to hug Soobin just like the other drunk day. It felt different somehow, however, maybe because he was in a whole different high persona, maybe because he just wasn't as drunk as the first time and Soobin felt like it was just a standard hug other than a drunk one. "You are so good to me, it makes me want to squish you," sounded Beomgyu's voice, stuffy from Soobin's shoulder where he was pressing his face. It had been long since Soobin's been held by someone other than Yeonjun; his neck hairs all shivered as his body responded faster than he ever would. 

The hug went on for quite a while until it was starting to get awkward from how long it had been. Beomgyu had not moved or talked anymore, and Soobin wondered if he could've fallen asleep on the spot. 

"Uh… Beomgyu?" he called. The younger one grunted in response. "You can let me go now." 

He felt Beomgyu's arms loosen around him, and it seemed to be going to be okay until he looked up and made a dramatic crying face.

"No, but hyung!" Beomgyu cried, running his arms around Soobin's neck, "you really are an angel to me, you're so kind. You read my writings and you bring me home and take care of Hyuka when I'm not around, you even go to parties with him and you don't like it, he told me. And you-" He fake-cried a little, shoving his face into Soobin's neck and then looking up again, "you have these eyes so pretty," he whimpered. "I hate it when you look at me with them." 

"I…" Soobin blinked. "I'm sorry?" 

Beomgyu then leaned in closer and Soobin only knew the boy was going to kiss him after already having robotically dodged.

"Beomgyu," he called. 

A pout bloomed on the younger's face. He looked so hurt Soobin wouldn't be surprised if he just started to cry. 

He tried again after a second of thought and Soobin allowed himself to feel his breath and the strong smell of alcohol only once before moving away from his face once again. Beomgyu furrowed his brows until they almost touched each other and looked hurt when he finally let the older go. 

The metallic noise of his keys touching each other in his pocket was the only thing that filled the ambient for a moment.

Soobin's mind was almost as blank as a new notebook when he watched an unsteady walking Beomgyu enter the dorms' building. Drunk Beomgyu did it again, he did think, though, as he headed back home in the dawn's darkness. 

Soobin wondered if when you keep thinking and thinking about something over and over again it means it affects you. 

It didn't really feel real when Soobin opened his Gmail inbox on Monday and found an acceptance letter of the internship he had applied to last week. 

First of all because he did not even recall applying to it anymore. When he first read the subject of the e-mail, he had to take a second to think before encountering in a corner of his memory the moment he filled the inscription forms a week ago, on the same day he ran away from having lunch with Beomgyu and Huening. 

Funny because he was sure he wouldn't get selected. 

Soobin thought of all the people exploding in enthusiasm and nervousness who he had already watched reacting to internship acceptances as if that was the best thing that could ever happen in their lives. He wondered if he could be one of them, maybe if he only had created a little bit of expectations. That wouldn't be so bad, to be happy for getting accepted now that he had no going back. The reality was only a bother of less free time than he already had in his old schedule.

The plain and dull fact was, anyway, that Soobin got accepted. 

And that was how he ended up in a meeting about said internship in the first half of the next week. It was hard from the start because it was scheduled to start at 7:30 AM and he had not really had a great night of sleep (some stuff about being up, overthinking about a certain literature student's behaviour after a certain party, but that's something we can talk about later.) It was a rainy Wednesday when Soobin got out of the meeting, in huge contrast to the strong sun rays that he saw when he left home. He wondered if that meant anything. 

9:39  hyung: so????? 

9:39  hyung: how was it??!!!!!!! 

No need to say, but Yeonjun was dying from excitement to know more details about it.

9:45  soobin: i sometimes wonder if there is ever going to be a day where i look at my phone and theres no text from you waiting for me

9:47  hyung: that would probably mean im dead 

9:47  hyung: where u at? 

9:48  soobin: hiding at a staircase in the nursing building

9:48  soobin: i dont have classes until 11 but im not planning on leaving here either

9:49  hyung: lmao

9:49  hyung: if u were doing something interesting i would leave this class im at to join u but i guess todays not my day

9:49  hyung: im not paying attention anyways

9:50  soobin: i have an extremely useful suggestion for you: go to study u lazy fucker

9:50  hyung: im gonna study for the discipline: soobin

9:50  hyung: tell me about the internship reunion before i pass out of curiousity 

9:52  soobin: [pic]

In the picture attached, Soobin's notebook could be seen, with all the topic notes he had taken throughout the meeting and that, all together, were less than half a page long. In there, it could be read: 

• monday to friday 08:00 - 11:00 

• buy lab coat, white clothing, stuff from the list well get 

• hand in documents until friday 

• notebook for daily report

9:53  hyung: wow , you're not even typing it for me? 

9:53  soobin: im just being myself :( the easier the best

9:53  hyung: icb you're waking up early everyday from now on LOLLLLLLLLL

9:53  hyung: whenn does it start?

9:53  hyung: where is it going to be? how many more people from your major are going? 

9:54  hyung: how long is it gonna take for u guys to cut someone open 

9:54  soobin: my first patient is going to be YOU, hyung. would you be my guinea pig? <3 

9:55  hyung: clown

9:55  soobin: you

9:55  soobin: it starts the week after the next

9:55  soobin: bc we need time to get all the documents 

9:56  soobin: counting me, it's 10 people 

9:56  hyung: wowwwwww nice

9:56  hyung: what exactly do people do in internships like this? sorry for the dumb question you know I'm an artist 

9:57  soobin: i don't know either LAKJDJAMWKKFNJSLWK 

9:57  soobin: I think more than anything we're just gonna watch bc its an internship for the first half of the course, we're far from being able to do important procedures yet 

9:57  soobin: the only thing they told us about it yet is that there is gonna be a nurse who's gonna be assigned to be like our teacher and he's gonna show us everything and monitor us and stuff

9:58  soobin: if i got it right he works at the emergency room so we'll probably be mostly there too

9:58  hyung: so it means that if I need to go to the hospital someday you're the one who's gonna take care of me? [emoticon in love]

9:59  soobin: not if i can help it 

9:59  soobin: :D 

9:59  hyung: ONE DAY, IM GONNA GO AWAY AND LEAVE YOU

9:59  hyung: AND THEN YOURE GONNA REGRET HOW U TREATED ME ALL THIS TIME  

10:00  hyung: thank god the class is fucking OVER

10:00  soobin: can I read my webtoon now? 

10:02  hyung: wait I'm leaving the classroom

10:04  hyung: so here's the thing

10:04  hyung: i saw Beomgyu today and he asked how you were doing

10:04  hyung: thats a good thing right? 

10:05  soobin: neither good nor bad

10:05  soobin: dude, he's been acting normal with me

10:05  soobin: i told you already, abt how I went to their dorm with huening these days and he was there and we talked normally 

10:06  soobin: he probably doesn't even remember anything from that party 

10:06  hyung: but soobinnieeeee :( 

10:07  hyung: i need to have emotion and drama in this life or else ill die 

10:07  hyung: but are u rlly sure you're not gonna talk to him about it? 

10:08  soobin: there's nothing for me to say 

10:09  soobin: he was too drunk and that's all

10:09  soobin: AND if I start to talk about these things out of nowhere and he still don't get to remember the straight ego is gonna start to inflate and he's gonna think im making this up to hit on him or smt dumb like that 

10:10  soobin: and nothing productive would come out of it even if he remembered it anyways so its pointless 

10:10  hyung: choi soobiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnn 

10:10  hyung: straight guys don't kiss other men when they're drunk

10:10  hyung: ive never kissed a girl just bc I was drunk

10:11  soobin: he didn't kiss me either though??? 

10:11  soobin: i didn't let him do it . 

10:11  soobin: hehe. argue now if u can

10:12  hyung: i really can't with you, choi soobin. I can't. 

10:12  soobin: <3 ily too hyung 

Okay. Now we can talk about it. 

Here it goes: the truth is that Soobin did think a lot about what happened that dawn after the party. And about talking with Beomgyu about it. 

Actually it was more like waiting for it to happen. He himself would never plan to go talk to the younger about it; quite the opposite, Soobin was so sure that Beomgyu would come to him to explain himself for what happened. So much so that he spent a lot of time thinking about how to react to the classics "I was too drunk", "I don't see boys like that", "I want to keep being your friend". 

That because, well, most people had acted kind of like that towards him in the past over stuff waaay smaller than a kiss attempt when he came out in the beginning of high school.  

It's true that Beomgyu knew nothing about his sexuality because right now Soobin did not care enough to showcase it or even talk about it, but it pretty much did not matter in a situation like that.

It's just heterosexual nature to try to explain themselves over the most inoffensive situations, after all. How worse wouldn’t it get when it couldn’t even be considered “inoffensive” anymore?

Soobin could not, then, avoid to jump into the conclusion that Beomgyu did not remember doing that when they got to talk to each other the first time after the party and the younger boy didn't mention the kiss nor even anything similar to that. He thanked Soobin for getting him home, though, which led him to conclude that Beomgyu did remember some stuff, although probably not that clearly. 

And that was how stuff slowly fell down into the new normal: Beomgyu and Soobin would talk to each other sporadically, sometimes through Huening, sometimes on their own, but never much over the civil or towards intimacy. Soobin would still get anxious every time they saw each other, feeling like he had a time bomb in his hands, anxiously waiting for its time to explode. That was all probably Yeonjun's fault, actually, to keep expecting for something interesting to happen regarding that. (Not that Soobin had not kicked him enough for being the most unbearable person he had ever met when he realised that.) 

That went on for just a week and a half, anyways. It was a Friday when things changed. 

Today's party was organised by the pharmacy department and, to be totally honest, Soobin wouldn't be able to say for sure how he ended up there.

It was a fresh Saturday night, deliciously contrasting with the awful hot day the city had just gone through. It was the first weekend for Soobin as an adult who worked during the weekdays and he felt kind of horrible. 

Perhaps to say horrible was an exaggeration, to be honest  — that's what he told Yeonjun when they talked about it earlier —, but… It's just that it was hard to describe. 

It had been a long week and Soobin had never missed his bed so bad as those days. Even when he was home, he had to spend too much time at his desk studying now that he has less time to do it, and his body ached so much that maybe it was just about to give up on him. 

Still, in terms of pain, his muscle tissues lost badly to his head. Soobin had been right when he'd guessed that he would spend more time in the emergency room than in other areas of the hospital because it was the area where the nurse in charge of their guidance worked. 

There's only one thing to say about the emergency room (or the ER, as everyone quickly got used to calling it to make themselves look smarter): it's chaotic .

There's always someone crying or moaning or screaming in pain no matter what time it is or where you go, and when you're a trainee nurse, there's always an employee yelling at you no matter what you do. This was probably the worst thing about the internship compared to classes: Soobin could never come in silently, take his notes quietly in his corner, and then leave. There would always be someone giving him orders and everyone always seemed to be bursting with stress and so much was happening at the same time from all sides that it was almost as if someone had packed the world in a little box and thrown it with all their strength in his face.

He wasn't even sure of how he'd survived the first week. Trying to access the memories now, very little was left. The only thing Soobin could say for sure was that every day at the hospital so far had been great examples of those times when he felt like he gave the remote control of his own body into someone else's hands and just stood on the sidelines, watching everything unfold.

It was strange because he felt it in practice, at the very moment things were happening. It wasn't just a block his brain created to memories, but something bigger. Every time Soobin walked through the front door of the hospital, backpack with all his belongings on his back and dark circles on his face, it was as if this curtain of mist descended in front of his eyes and separated him from reality.

Of course, Soobin didn't say any of that when Huening came, all excited and boisterous as he always was, asking him for a review of his first week as an intern. The most the youngest was able to get out of him was that it was exhausting and that Soobin was thinking about dropping out of college so he wouldn't lose focus on sleeping eight hours a night, which earned him a loud laugh and a very good argument ("you need to have some fun!”) to try to convince him to attend tomorrow's party, organized by Taehyun's course's department.

Soobin wasn't going, obviously. Now that the weekend had arrived, he planned to go on social retreat to his room and not see the light of day again until Monday morning. What ended up not going as planned was his head that kept aching, his brain that couldn't turn off for the sacred afternoon nap after a cursed morning of studying, and Yeonjun, who had managed to convince him to take his call on Discord.

"If you spend the whole day studying after a whole week of doing this non-stop, you can't help but to go cuckoo", the eldest had told him on the other end of the line, without the slightest shame in his face to say so soon after telling his friend that he had also done nothing but study until now. "I'm all for you going to the party tonight with your friend HueningKai. There you'll have everything you need: alcohol, illegal substances, music that isn't depressing like the ones you listen to and most importantly: me."

Soobin should perhaps be ashamed to show up at the party after having so pointedly hung up on him.

He was already half drunk when he left the house, however; in fact, it's quite possible that Yeonjun can be blamed for that too. It was him and his little motivational speech (or the very passionate attempt he made to develop one) that reminded Soobin of the existence of alcohol in general, and then of the beers his father had stored in the fridge yesterday when he came home from grocery shopping with his mother.

Not that Soobin had gone out drinking all his poor dad's beers without permission; it was just one or two, three at most. At the end of the day, Soobin will never be the most alcohol resistant person out there because he doesn't really like it. Most of the situations in which he drank, he did so out of politeness or to be social or to avoid who knows what fault people see in those who don't drink with them.

The whole situation of sitting on the bedroom floor and drinking beer alone wasn't humiliating for Soobin, who considered it high-end pastime, but it turned into something very similar when he started to feel guilty about not studying and put a video lesson to run on his laptop. It was when he remembered the internship reports waiting for him to sort them out and felt close to tears that Soobin jumped to his feet and decided to call Huening and see if he already had any friends who would give him a ride to the party. Continuing to drink in public was perhaps a good thing because then he avoided crying. (It's a joke. Please let it be a joke.)

From there, it's easy to summarize how things unfolded. Huening on the phone, changing clothes, the horn of a never-before-seen car blaring from the front of the house gate. Drunk Soobin isn't much different from sober Soobin in terms of personality, so he sat quietly in the back seat while Huening chatted in the front seat with the girl driving the car.

Her name seemed to be Chaewon and she had bright orange hair. She noticed him constantly dangling his foot against the car mat, by the way, and was friendly and commented to Huening about his friend already looking like he'd started drinking before the party in a way that didn't sound mean. Yeonjun would have befriended her for sure. (On a second thought, maybe Yeonjun was already friends with her.)

Once inside the party, Huening just didn't spend the entire time babysitting Soobin again because Soobin wouldn't let him. "You have to have fun too, I feel bad," he'd said with an expression he hoped showed how serious he was about this; each syllable was interrupted by the beat of the loud music, but the feeling was strong enough not to get lost in it.

"But hanging out with you is fun for me, hyung. We're friends," Huening had insisted with a seven-foot-long pout and a childish face that didn't match the place at all. Chaewon had already said goodbye to the two for now and gone to meet her friends. 

"Go find someone to make out with, Huening," Soobin had retorted once more, pushing him towards the dance floor while his own body was already facing the bar. "That's what parties are for." Huening was about to object when he added, "I'll find Yeonjun soon! I'm fine, Huening."

The poor extrovert, too devoted to his adoption of introverts, still threw a glance or two in Soobin's direction before the older one slipped out of sight.

And just like that, Soobin ended up where he was now: propped up on the bar counter, a large glass of drink in his hand and his gaze lost in the people who passed by. His facial expression made him look like a professional 40-year-old man on drunken nights and watching drunk young men with bitter judgments. Not many drinks had passed since he'd arrived, but Soobin could have sworn he'd never been as high as he was now; the ceiling lights seemed to turn into long, blinding beams, he couldn't make out a word of the lyrics of the song he was singing, and his head seemed to spin constantly on top of his neck. Is it humanly possible to do something like this?

Since his knowledge of alcoholic beverages was absurdly close to zero, Soobin had been choosing drinks by color. He'd already gone through a neon orange, a sky blue with a pink umbrella, and an attempt at a purple to blue gradient. It was the one he'd just finished, setting aside now with a lazy shove with his fist on the glass onto the wooden surface. When he was satisfied with the distance between his body and the glass, Soobin called the student who took care of the bar today and asked for a dark green drink he would never have come close to if he were sober.

That was funny, testing colored drinks all night and feeling the world existing around him with an absurd force, but that now didn't seem to try to swallow him as hard as it always did before.

Soobin couldn't say the exact reason — probably something involving the alcohol — but he'd just tasted the green drink he'd been served (and grimaced at the way it had burned down his throat with every inch of it) when he felt an overwhelming urge to get up and dance.

Okay, maybe dancing was still a little too much. As drunk and with his head in the clouds as he was, he ended up preferring to just walk around the party, chuckling to himself at the funny scenes he witnessed from time to time (there was someone dancing shirtless on top of a table; a girl wearing a neon green bucket hat he sang the lyrics to the song that played so loud her voice was distinguishable from an unnatural distance; a crying drunk hid behind a castle of plastic cups in one corner). That's what Soobin was good at: watching the world go by without actually participating in it. It might be true that all the booze he'd just ingested had been behind much of the motivation for his actions, but he felt like he was in the driver's seat now.

It was Soobin's direct and clear order to his body members to approach Choi Beomgyu when his eyes spotted the boy's slender figure in the midst of a huddle of dancing youths on the floor. Beomgyu was more colorful today than he had ever been at any other time in his life: he wore a plastic necklace that glowed neon orange in the dark and red-and-black plaid pants. Soobin didn't quite notice how or when this happened, but at some point, he had started rocking from side to side almost as if he were dancing as he walked towards the younger one; now, he had blended into the middle of the floor masterfully, and he and Beomgyu were facing each other face to face.

There was a certain tension that had built up around Beomgyu since that day of the first party of the semester, a result of Soobin's feeling that at any moment he might remember the kiss attempt, start acting strange and the friendship they had built would collapse. It was something as fragile as that. 

To be honest, Soobin hadn't even noticed the presence of this strange sensation until now, when he noticed it was gonna.

He and Beomgyu looked at each other and burst out laughing almost in sync; the feeling was so fulfilling and overwhelming that it almost felt like they had agreed to meet there now. Until a second ago, Soobin hadn't even considered the idea that Beomgyu might be at the party. But it was funny because they were already dancing and laughing together and at that moment there was too much alcohol coursing through his veins and the music was too loud and the light was too little and the smell of Beomgyu was too good for Soobin to remember to bother with it.

Two or three songs left with indistinguishable rapidity. Soobin was no longer thinking: he didn't remember finishing the last drink, and he also had no idea where the cup had ended up; not even the things unfolding in front of her eyes seemed to be being processed by his brain anymore.

The only thing he did was to feel, and feel the urge to dance without paying attention to how the world around him perceived him, and smell Beomgyu's neck where he had buried his face at some indefinite moment, and feel him in every inch of his skin that he encountered on his way. It was natural when Soobin's hands went up to his neck and then face and then hair and Beomgyu probably thought — felt — the same thing as they only pulled away to look each other in the eye for a moment before moving closer again, and Soobin had no more oxygen in his lungs and it was his first kiss in a long time.

It was all too chaotic and noisy and Soobin probably wouldn't remember any of the details later, but he could feel Beomgyu's hesitation in his own skin as their lips met. It was brief, fleeting, even; but it sure was there. He felt the insecurity, the confusion, something strong and controlling that held Beomgyu back for a moment; it didn't last long, but its presence was so overwhelming that it hit him right to the bone, under his fingernails, in the most hidden corner of his consciousness. Soobin found himself suddenly sober for a second. So Beomgyu held his face with one hand and tangled the other in the hair from the back of his head and Soobin forgot his own name.

The rhythm became frantic again: Soobin could clearly feel the younger's hands exploring his body, exploring every place they reached with courage and curiosity that gladly contradicted the hesitation of moments before, now completely forgotten. Beomgyu’s mouth felt like alcohol just as much as Soobin’s own probably did, with a hint of that bothersome smell of cigarettes. It still turned into a taste that wasn't actually all that bothersome; which probably would've been, if it was another person. They clung to each other so tightly it was as if they wouldn't be satisfied until they proved the laws of physics wrong, and Soobin didn't know how to breathe anymore.

Soobin came back to his senses just to find himself, limbs almost entwined to Beomgyu's, moving softly towards the corner of the salon, in the direction of the wall. Moving is too strong of a word, actually: he almost stumbled there , strength had almost completely left his legs. 

He felt his nape and back encountering the wall before realising they’ve already gotten there. Beomgyu was so drunk he made his way back to Soobin’s mouth and still managed to get it wrong, making both of them chuckle lightly under their breaths while the younger shoved his head onto Soobin’s shoulder. The room around them seemed to have gotten suddenly darker and Soobin felt the pressure of the loud music throbbing on the veins of his ears. That’s when Beomgyu’s face grew as close to the older’s face as he could to ask, catching Soobin off guard: 

“Why did you reject me last time?” 

Soobin automatically felt his senses coming back to his mind. That did not help him to do anything particularly productive, though. Everything he managed to do was to frown and tremble and think of too much useless stuff at the same time, before bending his knees lightly for his mouth to match Beomgyu’s ears height and hesitantly murmur that “I didn’t know you remembered it.”

It was too dark to be sure about any visual information, but Soobin could’ve swore he saw Beomgyu’s expression stiffening a little before he insisted: “Why?” 

“You’re straight.”

That probably would not have been Soobin’s first choice of words if he just was a little bit sober, but whatever.

Beomgyu’s reaction was not as bad as he would’ve expected to be, nonetheless; all he did was shrugging before coming closer to Soobin’s ear again and confidently telling him that “yeah, but I want to kiss you.” As if it was as simple as that. 

For a second it did feel like it was, though, as Beomgyu leaned in closer and captured Soobin's lips with his own and everything else immediately ceased to exist.

It was strange because it was intense. 

Do not take Soobin wrong: he wanted to deny. He understood it already that there was some sexuality-self-acceptance-slash-discovery going on with the younger boy, and he knew how difficult it could get and did not want to make it harder for him in any way. Beomgyu was a good person and he did not deserve to go through that kind of struggle. 

But, the point is: that hurt. Soobin tried to move his neck away and not let Beomgyu kiss him any more than he had already done, but even seriously considering it was so hard it felt like the air was getting physically hard up on his shoulders. 

This type of stuff does not happen. 

It seemed to right now, anyways, and Soobin was too drunk not to just let it be. Instead, he allowed himself to drown in how Beomgyu's skin felt against his own; in how he felt so desperate within the kiss it was almost like he feared Soobin was going to disappear right in that moment, in his hands.

Beomgyu kissed just like he seemed to do everything else in life: with passion, with strength, even. As if that thing in that moment was the most important one in his entire life, in a way Soobin could not hold in the whimper he let out when the younger’s hands traveled their way under his shirt, gripping his waist tight. Lucky him the music was so loud it would be hard for Beomgyu to hear. It had been eras since the last time Soobin felt someone else’s touch on him like that. It was natural for him to not even remember how sensitive he actually was. 

They were still standing closely to the wall, now almost leaning their sides on it, when Soobin instinctively felt that was not the smarter way to make use of their surroundings. He gently pushed Beomgyu in its direction then, his hand on the younger's nape so he did not hurt himself when his back reached the hard bricks. 

Beomgyu seemed to have reached his element right away, lifting up his left leg for his core to rub on Soobin’s, and pulling himself out of the kiss to leave the space for the older’s lips to get to his neck. Soobin moved his own knee up to rub against Beomgyu’s now starting to pulse member and got a graspy groan in response, which only reached his ear thanks to his face being now on the other’s neck, leaving wet kisses and nibbles all the way down. 

It was not a minute later when Beomgyu’s legs were now tangled up in Soobin’s waist, the older squeezing him against the wall so hard that his hand on the boy’s pants wasn’t even actually necessary to hold him there. They kissed so fervorously Soobin was starting to feel palpably dizzy, his brain right now too cloudy for him to even define if it was actually Beomgyu’s or the alcohool’s fault. Time kept going ahead even as if he had no idea of how fast it did, and the surroundings started to disappear around them and Beomgyu’s enraptured face started to disfigure more and more and that was where Soobin’s memories of that night ended up. 

Next thing he knew, it was an annoyingly sunny morning. 

Soobin felt the sun's heat in his face and body even before opening his eyes, and when he did it it was with so much irritation even the furniture in the room must have gotten offended. He reached out his hand in the direction of the yellow flourish curtains, hanging from the wall close to the bed, and closed it so naturally that it was even funny, in a way, to realise that he was in an unknown place. Soobin never opened his room's windows (except, maybe, the days in which he wanted to watch the rain fall), let alone the curtains. So he  never woke up with the sun in his eyes.

He tried to lift his body so that he could sit on the bed. That was when a metaphorical hammer, pointed and much heavier than normal, probably close to a ton, fell from the ceiling, hitting him hard on the forehead and causing Soobin the worst headache he had ever felt in his life. He grunted and fell back onto the soft pillows without even trying again, awareness just now finishing to hit him with the last memories he'd assimilated. There was no point in insisting on a hungover head to work.

Soobin had never drank like that before — which, still, shouldn't really be considered thaaaat much — but he'd taken care of post-drunk Yeonjuns enough to know the theory. (He had never done anything like that he did with Beomgyu, nor seen him like that, but, then again, here we are.)

It was just now that he started to recognize the yellowish furniture around him and the amount of flower pots of decoration, let alone the humongous mirror on the wardrobe's door. He was at Yeonjun's. His best friend was nowhere around to be seen, though, as he laid alone amongst the familiar blankets. 

(There wasn't anyone there other than Soobin, just to make it clear. It was a relief the size of the Earth when he was done making sure no Beomgyu slept around, on the ground or inside of Yeonjun's closet. He would not be able to find it in him to handle the situation if he woke up to the information that they had slept together.) 

It was uncomfortable to come back to reality. Soobin found his phone with the screen facing down on the bedside table. He put the fingerprint on the reader without much excitement and managed to feel the headache growing little by little as soon as he turned on the internet, as the notifications went down on the screen.

A lot of messages in the internship group — if it was hell having to give your colleagues your number so they could put you in a group where they didn't stop talking for a minute, imagine noticing that you had forgotten to silence it precisely on a hangover morning after a crisis night. The message from Huening (or the armadillo boy contact) asking a "where are you??" before they met the night before, which Soobin didn't know about until now. A few notifications from people asking for permission to follow Soobin's Instagram account after Huening tagged him in a story yesterday (it would be disappointing when they found out he didn't have any pictures of his face there). His brothers flooding the family group with audios, photos and messages without text but full of emojis. Yeonjun during the night filling him with messages asking if he had already gone home, where he was and all the possible variables. No signs of Beomgyu.

He wasn't that glad to be back in a world like that. 

Soobin locked the phone again and dropped the device onto his chest. He squinted his eyes tight for a moment and studied the bedroom furniture from top to bottom as he searched for the courage to get up and face the headache, which seemed to get worse every time he formulated a thought.

Considering that Soobin did nothing but think on a daily basis, how long would he survive such pain before he ran off to search Yeonjun's cupboards for aspirin, the life draining from his body?

He heard the sound of glass breaking in the apartment's kitchen and couldn't hold back the giggle through his nose that he felt a crazy urge to let out, even though his head throbbed a little harder because of it. It was getting weird, really, all this time record of silence if Yeonjun hadn't left the house and left him there, alone.

Soobin put on the fox slippers he had bought for his friend for his birthday last year to the sound of the other man's characteristic swear words at the broken utensil. Yeonjun was crouched on the floor filling a grocery bag with shards of glass in the format of a former cup when Soobin arrived in the kitchen, eyes puffy and half red from sleep, body still half tottering, unable to find the sober balance lost yesterday.

"It's not even noon yet," Yeonjun said as he lifted his face towards his friend, "go sleep some more."

"As if you could do that with you smashing everything on the other side of the wall," Soobin teased with newfound good humor and went to sit at his friend's four-seater dining table. Yeonjun was ready to defend himself as he continued, “What happened yesterday? I have no idea how I got here.”

Yeonjun finished gathering the shards of glass. “Wait up.” He ran to the laundry area with the grocery bag before taking another run, now with his hands free to comb his pink hair between his fingers. “It's really fun to see you in the position of the person who has no idea what he did the night before, just for a change,” he said with a playful tone as he stopped in front of Soobin with an arm around his waist.

“First and last time,” the younger replied bitterly. "Enjoy your five minutes of glory. I'll get you an aspirin, okay?", he warned, standing up. Yeonjun shrugged and watched his friend rummaging through his closets as if he was the owner of the house with a look of someone who had just bumped into the winning lottery ticket. 

“Why is my coffee not ready yet?” Soobin complained after drinking a full glass of water in one go on top of his medicine.

“I was going to make it,” said Yeonjun, nodding at the coffee pot on the counter, almost finished brewing the coffee he had poured before breaking the cup, “but you look good enough to make your own.” He pulled up a chair to sit on. “Already walking and all.”

"I have a hangover, I didn't break a leg," snapped a sour Soobin.

Even so, he headed back to Yeonjun's kitchen cupboards and went out looking for cups, milk, and sugar. Maybe the hangover was psychological and it would pass if he started acting like it didn't exist. (It was a brick being thrown at his head with every step he took, so maybe it would turn out not to be the case.)

“Are you going to tell me what happened yesterday or not?”

“I should be the one to ask you that question,” Yeonjun replied, flashing a smile that made him look eerily like the Joker. “I didn’t know that Choi-emo-straight-Beomgyu had become friends with you enough to carry you home drunk.”

Soobin's heart skipped a beat and he nearly spilled milk on the floor by accident. It didn't sound like a very good story.

“Did he take me home?” He wanted to know, (of course he would), averting his gaze from the incarnate Joaquim Phoenix in his best friend's living room and concentrating on serving the cups of coffee while Yeonjun scratched his throat and prepared to tell him.

“He tried,” he finally replied, “but he didn't get very far anyway. We met at the bus stop in front of the campus. I didn't have the balls to drive there, so I didn't have a car. He was carrying you all groggy and I had drunk Hyuka by my side, like the roles were reversed. We looked so confusedly at each other, it was hilarious. Then we switched drunk guys and each took a bus.” Yeonjun let out a giggle. “Actually, he was also very high, I don't even know how he must have gotten home. Well, at least he could stand up alone.”

Soobin didn't quite know what to think. "I thought he was drunker than I was."

Yeonjun shrugged, reaching out to accept the cup his friend reached for him. “I don't know,” he began. He took a sip of his coffee without milk and sugar and flashed an approving smile before continuing, “you've finally learned how to make it! But I don't know, maybe Beomgyu is just a more functional drunk or something weird like that. Although, the way you were on another planet, it would be hard to get over your drunkenness. What got into you, huh, Soobin?”

Soobin, standing in front of the counter, stuffed his sweet coffee into his mouth so he wouldn't have to answer. The grimace he made — he'd gotten distracted by Yeonjun's coffee and forgotten to put sugar on his own! — must have been so funny that the eldest fell like a duckling in the urge to laugh and in his change of subject. 

“Did Beomgyu say anything to you about how he ended up carrying me? I don't remember anything, it's not making any sense in my head."

Yeonjun twisted his lips into one of those sour expressions older people have when they start talking about their time, “Welcome to my world.”

Soobin wrinkled his nose. “Welcome nothing. It was the first and last time.”

“That's just how it starts,” said Yeonjun. “The next phase is to start saying that you are going to stop drinking.”

“I am not you, Yeonjun.”

“Wow, how bitter. When it's time to be rude to me there's no more hyung, right?”

Soobin rolled his eyes at his friend's hurt expression, trying not to lose his pose and start laughing at the teasing. It was impossible to have a single serious conversation with Yeonjun. It even felt like the outside world hadn't just exploded.

“As you said…” Soobin rushed to say as Yeonjun opened his mouth to do some new and more creative drama, “yesterday, Beomgyu?”

"Oh yes." Yeonjun wilted in his chair, returning to the real world. “Beomgyu. Bemgyu said that… Calm down, let me remember. He said he saw you running to those little bushes near the entrance to the party and he went there to see and you were trying to throw up.” Soobin covered his eyes with his free hand and then dropped his coffee on the counter just so he could do the same with his other. “Calm down, it's no big deal! You didn't throw up. Or you did and he invented that you didn't to not embarrass you, I don't know. As if hearing that you threw up would be the most embarrassing thing I'd ever seen you go through… Anyway, that's all.”

It made no sense, of course. Soobin even wondered if Beomgyu had invented something other than the truth to tell Yeonjun. But he had no reason to lie, so whatever. Yeonjun sure as hell shouldn't be as sober as his story made him seem to be either.

"Okay then," Soobin said. Quickly, he brought the coffee cup back to his mouth and finished the remaining liquid in one go, not even noticing if it was still hot or not.

Yeonjun watched him wordlessly as Soobin left the cup in the sink and ran into the room to get his shoes.

"I have to go home," Soobin warned, out of the blue, as he finished putting on his sneakers sitting on the couch and jumped back to his feet.

"Without even satisfying my curiosity?" Yeonjun asked, making a pity puppy face, but not moving from his seat at the table. He already knew it was a lost cause.

"If you saw my pile of overdue content to study, you'd be more curious about how I haven't died yet." Soobin pulled the key from its place on the shelf with the comfort of someone in his own home and unlocked the apartment door. Yeonjun's colorful beaded keyring clattered against the wood of the door as he opened it. "See you later." He waved.

Yeonjun did nothing but give a lazy wave back, already busy mumbling about how he would be, now, forced to get up to lock the door again.

Soobin did worry about what would happen to his and Beomgyu's relationship now. 

They for sure were not the bestest friends in the world neither had that much stuff in common for their lives to entwine all the time; they did share a HueningKai, however. That itself, though, ended up being a big thing. 

(Truth is, just as Soobin was getting close to forget the matter and focus on his homework for the first time that afternoon, Huening had videocalled him — to what he did not respond — and then messaged him calling for a picnic on the park with him, Beomgyu and some other friends. Soobin politely declined, explaining about all the studying he had to get done today, but could never again get his focus back now that he was reminded of that new issue. It was his first time so clearly realizing how big a part of his life Huening had actually become.) 

Next day at the hospital, Soobin was watching a sunbae of his drawing blood from a patient that had arrived last night. The sunbae's name was Song Hayoung and she had an interesting orange hair, and seemed to sympathize with Soobin for some reason. She was an intern from the last year of college, so she had more liberty to do practical things at the hospital. Soobin and his colleagues practically just watched their sunbaes working and took notes. (Not that he disliked it.)

"She arrived here this dawn, her mother said they were going to come in the morning but she didn't sleep at all because of the nausea", Hayoung was telling, calmly, as she changed the blood collectors on the needle. The little girl was dozing with her head cocked to one side; she had short hair and bangs and couldn't have been more than twelve. "It's probably a stomach infection, we just have to wait for the results of the blood test now and the others she did earlier."

Soobin nodded his head two or three times, holding his cell phone in his hand with the notes app open. He was supposed to be writing the report for the day as he and all the students in the internship should do, but the page was still blank. Trying to look like he was listening to everything that people told him was draining all of Soobin's energy today. It was probably a side effect of Saturday's binge; his body wasn't used to that kind of tiredness and his headache had not left yet. 

How do people even go out to drink on school or work nights? More than 24 hours had already passed and he still had not recovered.

He knew Beomgyu had way more experience at that drinking thing, but still wondered how he was doing now at college. 

"Soobin? Are you there?" Hayoung called, waving her hand in front of his face curiously. She seemed to have already finished with the patient and held all the materials inside of a tiny clinical box in front of her chest. 

"Huh? Yes, sunbae, I'm listening," Soobin answered, forcefully blinking his eyes. 

"Are you okay?" She asked. "You look a bit out of it today. I mean you're always quiet, but usually it's in a way I know you're paying attention." 

Soobin didn't know exactly what to respond. 

"Nevermind," she continued, waving her free hand in front of him as if asking for him to forget it, "I had too little sleep last night, maybe I'm making stuff up." They started to walk, in direction of where the blood should be delivered, "but anything, you just ask for a day off, okay? It does get a little too much sometimes." 

Soobin nodded, looking a little confused. 

"I saw your blank notes," she explained, good-humoured. "I can help you with today's notes later if you need it, we're together almost the entire day anyway. I'm tired of you already, by the way." 

She was so serious Soobin could not help but laugh a little, feeling present for the first time today. Maybe Hayoung did have a point. 

They passed by a bed where a doctor performed CPR on a patient, the sobbing relatives being conducted by a nurse to the waiting room. Soobin then looked down to the list of other patients waiting for Hayoung to the blood tests of the morning. 

She was kind for suggesting that he take a day off, but it would be better if he just didn't. He could not see himself wanting to go back there if the momentum of the routine got broken.

Soobin had an annoyingly heavy pile of books in his arms when someone bumped into him. 

He stumbled his way some steps back, trying to get back his body's balance at the same time that he struggled to not let all the books fall to the ground. On the other side of the infinite paper pile, someone apologized:

"I'm sorry, oh my God, are you okay?" 

Soobin had his equilibrium back already when he looked over the pile just so he could come across with a Choi Beomgyu with eyebrows furrowed and worried glare. The black backpack he'd insisted on carrying on one shoulder was now hanging off his arm, probably after almost falling out of his grasp.

Something in his gaze slightly changed when he recognised Soobin. 

"Oh, Soobin-hyung…" he mumbled, seeming a little lost. 

"Hi Beomgyu," Soobin managed, doing his best to sound relaxed. He was now also a little bit worried about how that interaction is going to turn out, and that is an odd feeling if you consider that Soobin never actually cares much about human interactions. "I'm fine, and this was probably my fault so I'm sorry. I can't see much with all this stuff in front of my eyes." 

It was a Tuesday afternoon and Soobin was done with his classes earlier than planned, so he figured he should stop by his house and take the books he had selected for the donation the university was organising. He himself did not realise how much stuff he had chosen to bring until he put all of it on his arms, but carrying it like that was still less bothersome than having to make the ride twice. His backpack was also full of books. 

"I'm fine, don't worry, hyung, and I can, huh, help you with these," Beomgyu blurted out, running over the words, and he had already taken half of Soobin's books in his arms before the older could even process his words. "Are these all for the donation event?" he asked at the same time that Soobin mumbled a simple: 

"Thanks." 

They barely looked at each other before starting to walk awkwardly. 

"And yes, they are for the donation event," Soobin explained, "took some time to separate out of my collection some stuff I don't like that much anymore." 

Beomgyu sounded surprised: "Wow, I feel strange being the one who's studying English when you're so far ahead at the art of being a bookworm." He kept looking around, not even once landing his eyes at Soobin, and his speech felt somewhat robotic. It was the strangest thing in the world for Soobin to be in such a situation with the younger (even more after he got to know some stuff about his freely genuine soul). 

Soobin then shook his head — funny that he didn't even realise Beomgyu could never see that as he refused to look at him. 

"It's nothing." He shrugged. "Just a hobby." 

Normal Beomgyu would probably have a lot to say in response to that simple phrase, but Beomgyu post-drunken-make-out just kept quiet. 

They walked together for a short while until arriving at the literature's building, where the books for donation were being collected. Beomgyu waved goodbye and walked out awkwardly as soon as they left the books to rest on top of the counter. The feeling that rose to Soobin's throat was the weirdest of all he'd ever met. 

"I can't believe you are finally going to take me out of the darkness from that." 

"Don't get too excited or else I'm giving up," Soobin threatened him right away, looking at Yeonjun with censorship.

"Uh, wow, didn't know you were this stressed today. I'm taking that back then," said Yeonjun, lifting up his hands in rendition.

Soobin rolled his eyes, sinking his body on his friend's couch. It was a huge victory just to take him out of his house, to start with. Yeonjun should be celebrating for having him in his living room in full Wednesday evening.

He crooked his nose, offended, just as Soobin told him that. "You sure? It's always me who goes to your house every time, it was passing the time for you to pay me a visit for a change."

"I don't really remember me specifically asking you to come over none of the times you did, but whatever." Soobin shrugged. 

Yeonjun did nothing but shoot him a sour look from his spot exactly halfway between the living room couch and the bathroom door. He was standing with his pink hair buried in a hair treatment mixture, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

After Soobin had texted him earlier saying he needed a best friend to talk to and Yeonjun, like the good puppy that he was, had picked him up at his house not five minutes later, he had pulled an armchair right in front of the sofa and settling in after some joke about being a therapist for a day. Today's nourishing mask was new, however, and Yeonjun was too anxious to know how it would fare not to keep getting up to check in the bathroom mirror all the time. It didn't take long for him to just give up on sitting still. 

"Can we please focus?" asked Soobin tiredly. 

"I'm all ears." 

"So, as I said..." started Soobin, moving a little at the couch and laying his head on the pillow he'd put there in a way so he couldn't look at Yeonjun while talking. "It starts on last Saturday, and it is about Beomgyu."

"I'm getting the goosebumps." 

"Shut up. So, I'm first of all making it very clear that I am not going to give you the details, because I know you are going to ask for it, but, dude, just no. So you don't need to know why, when or how, but we ended up kissing- we ended up making out for a while at Saturday's party. That's fact one." 

Yeonjun gasped with his own saliva. 

"That's fact one? " he asked, scandalized, gesticulating like crazy so excitedly he was almost hopping on his feet. "Does that mean what I think it means? Is there more? " His voice reached a surprisingly high pitch. "Oh my God, who are you and what did you do with my Soobinie?" 

"Can you please chill?" murmured an unbothered Soobin, aware as hell that that was going to be Yeonjun's reaction. He just couldn't log off from the drama for even a spare second. "And it's not the kind of 'more' you're expecting." He peeked out of the corner of his eye his friend's steps, who now walked in circles in all the free space he could find around the couch, facial expression in awe. Sighs. Is there a way to be more Yeonjun than that? 

"Oh." Yeonjun stopped suddenly, turning to look at Soobin with his brows furrowed. "Is it the bad kind of 'more'?" 

Soobin pulled back the tips of his lips, in a funny expression that wasn't a smile nor a pain expression. "Basically." 

"Here comes the headache," said Yeonjun dramatically, rushing to sit on the armchair in front of Soobin. He looked at him with serious determination, a curve forming on his forehead. "Go on. Take off the band-aid." 

Soobin shook his head, blocking a chuckle from coming out. "I really can't bear you." 

Yeonjun nodded suggestively, encouraging him to continue. Soobin did it:

"It's the standard, I guess. We haven't been talking. Stuff had been strange with him since he first tried to kiss me the first time, but that was only inside my head. This time it's real shit. We talked for the first time yesterday after avoiding each other or something and it was bizarre. I almost went nuts." 

"I don't really see the problem," said Yeonjun, all serious now. "Not yet. If it was me, you would be the first person to tell me to go talk to him about it." 

Soobin shrugged, or did the equivalent to it for when you're laying down. "I just don't know what to do with what I have in my hands," he said quietly. 

"You mean, you don't know what to tell him if you guys talk about it?" 

"Yeah, that too." Soobin moved on top of the couch, going back to sit down and placing a pillow on his lap. "I don't know what I want, if you go a little deeper. Like is that even worth it trying to pursue? I can't let go of the way he said he wanted to kiss me even though he was straight." 

"He did that?"

"Basically." 

"Oh, man. That's fucked up." 

"Tell me about it." Soobin let out a heavy sigh, as if trying to get the weight of his thoughts out of his lungs. "So I now have this stuff to handle and I wasn't waiting for that, I guess." He grimaced. "Like, I liked kissing him for sure, but I just. I'm not sure if I want this burden. Boy probably has got some complicated issues going on and I can't deal with my own problems to save my life. Isn't it going to be a little too much?" 

Yeonjun stood up, his face a mix of shock and confusion and delight all at the same time. He then went down to sit on the floor, just recalling the product on his hair when he was trying to put his head on his hands, ending up with an expression of almost-disaster.

He then looked up to stare at Soobin. "There is one thing I agree with you. This is too much." 

Soobin did nothing but shake his head while watching Yeonjun's mental breakdown. It would take a little while for him to go back to function, but he could wait. 

"Okay, let's go again but slower. Tell me again. Did you like kissing him?" 

"Like crazy." 

"I fucking knew it!," a mad-looking Yeonjun let out, an expression on his face so intense anyone who saw it would think that was the most important matter of his entire life. He then looked at Soobin and got all serious again, "sorry. I'm not helping at all. It's just that I knew from the start that there was something going on between you two you probably didn't even realise." 

Soobin shrugged, "we talked a little and I felt like we clicked well. It isn't that special." 

"Good relationships aren't that easy to find, actually. You shouldn't just throw it away." 

Soobin didn't respond, and they both kept quiet for a moment. 

The younger then asked, "is that your only advice?" 

"Huh? Hell no. " Yeonjun frowned hard, "Just starting. I have a lot to say." He crossed his legs on his seat on the floor, then looked down, uncrossed and crossed them again, placing the other one on top. Then, he continued: "don't you have anything else to add?" 

A shrug met Soobin's shoulders. "I think I summed it up pretty well." 

"Well, then first of all I should tell you that I clearly saw your efforts to make it look like you didn't care and it was impressive, so congrats, but I know you better. And it's been a little while since I've last seen you so worked up on something. So please chill." He gesticulated and looked at Soobin with an expression of one who was pushing so convincingly that it was as if he were trying to make the other relax with the force of his thought.

That wasn't quite how it worked, but it was enough to make Soobin chuckle weakly through his nose.

"As for the actual stuff, I see where you're coming from and I can't tell you it isn't going to suck a little but you shouldn't give up just because of that. I know ," he raised his voice as Soobin looked like he was about to interrupt him, "that you are Choi Soobin, and you give up for much less, and you hate work, and everything in life should be easy and do-able from our beds but this is different. I'm not telling you Beomgyu is the love of your life neither it even exists but I just feel like you're looking for a reason to give it up. Because any relationship demands time and brain cells, and can be a huge source of stress, and you weren't looking for that now, but still. You should try. Just a little. Just enough for you not to look back later and think you ran away too fast." 

Soobin threw a pillow on Yeonjun's face. The older Choi could never react differently than screaming. 

"Please stop talking," said Soobin. "I hate the way you make sense." 

Soobin really truly genuinely hated the way Yeonjun made sense. 

Choi Soobin was a simple guy. He liked coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar, his dog, reading quietly in his room and quiet music. 

He didn't exactly like to think, but did that excessively nonetheless. That's what he did when he got home after the visit he did to his best friend Choi Yeonjun that Wednesday, and that's what he kept doing even more than he was used to in the next few days. 

The biggest conclusion wasn't even close to satisfactory: 

He was, for sure, a simple guy. He also liked silence for sure, but that did not seem to be as good as he thought after he and Yeonjun — after a long and full of bickering conversation — settled the topic as closed when the agreement was made that Soobin was going to try for one conversation. 

One conversation ("and one conversation only," as Soobin incisively inquired, standing in the middle of Yeonjun's living room with his hands on his waist) seemed to be a good deal that time, but not anymore. Soobin did not even want to start thinking of what he was going to tell Beomgyu, because. What the hell was he going to say? (Except that he already thought a great amount of thoughts about it; the more he did, the more worried he got.) 

When Huening came with the Harry Potter movie night idea, it sounded perfect . 

"I invited Gyu, obviously, Taehyunie and Yeonjun-hyung already. You can't say no," he said, peeking over his laptop screen at Soobin. 

Investing in the drama a little bit, Soobin took a sip of his pineapple juice and pretended to think for a second or two before shrugging and murmuring a little "okay, then". Huening celebrated quietly on his seat, clapping and getting all smiley as if Soobin's presence in yet another of his countless get-togethers with friends was the greatest thing that could ever happen to him. Soobin almost felt bad for being so hard to be convinced to hangout. 

Especially because what was on his mind right now wasn't the exact point of it. A movie marathon was going to be the perfect environment to just look at Beomgyu and say something like "everything fine with us, right?" and get nothing but a nod in response because the movie was going to start, and he could then just go and tell Yeonjun that he did try. He himself wouldn't feel so guilty for not trying to do anything at all, too.

Huening, then, started to enthusiastically talk about his plans. Soobin looked at his own laptop's screen for a second and agonised for the anatomy assignment he had to get done for tomorrow morning before just closing it, aware he wouldn't be able to focus on anything about college with a Huening as excited as the one he had in front of him right now. The blonde also didn't seem to remember much about his own assignments he had to do today, so whatever. The study date was also Huening's idea, obviously, and so they wouldn't study if Huening wasn't feeling like it. 

"I'm not really a big fan of watching stuff, but you all like it so much I think I got influenced already because I'm all excited about it," he was saying, gesticulating with a hand that held an Iced Americano so strong in caffeine Soobin got surprised when he tasted it earlier. "Oh! Also, I wanted to ask you about something. We still didn't decide on a place, right, because the school dorms are too small for all of us to gather comfortably and all that, and when I commented about it with Yeonjun-hyung he said we could do it at his place. I didn't say yes because what if he was just being polite?, so, what do you think? I don't know yet if there's going to be more people or not and Yeonjun also doesn't know Taehyun yet…" 

"Yeonjun is fine," assured Soobin, "he is all cool with having people at home." He crossed his arms in front of his body, leaning his back on the chair rest. "I would offer my place if I didn’t live with two younger brothers and my parents and a dog. Yeonjun is the only one who lives alone so it makes sense, too.”

"Then it's settled down!" exclaimed Huening. "But now that we came to this topic, I would really like to meet your little brothers someday, hyung. I don't look like it because I'm clumsy, but I'm good with kids! And I want to raise a dog so bad I feel a little better just looking at other people's pets these days." Huening looked like a dog himself now, all prying eyes over Soobin. Soobin didn't know how to respond to the important part of his speech, so he said exactly that instead.

"You look like a dog yourself right now." 

"Hey!" Huening chuckled, "I'm going to turn into a dog for real if I don't meet and pet one in the next 24 hours!" 

Soobin laughed softly, shaking his head. "That would be a catastrophe for sure." 

Chapter Text

Time seems to fly when you are too caught up in your own catastrophic life, as the moment to go to Yeonjun's house and help him prepare the house to receive visits (which means: sweeping) arrived in the blink of an eye. 

In a less dramatic remark, Soobin had been doing the same stuff he always does on the days that separated his and Huening's study date from the Harry Potter marathon day: going to the hospital, going to college, trying his hardest not to bump into Choi Beomgyu, working on assignments, reading on his bed, sleeping listening to unproductive podcasts, you know how it is. 

Just like that, he and Yeonjun calmly talked about this and that while Soobin swept and Yeonjun rummaged through cupboards looking for something edible to offer guests. The assignments due the following week, some acquaintance of theirs from high school that Soobin had met at the hospital during the week, the professor who had corrected Yeonjun's exam wrong and caused a massive drama in the university's arts department.

It was in the middle of this uncompromising conversation — and it was a perfect gift in the midst of their crazy daily lives — that Soobin came to realize just how close Yeonjun and Huening have gotten to each other.

"You even call him Hyuka now," observed a surprised Soobin, looking at his best friend in disbelief. He was standing next to the pile of dust he had swept until now, waiting for Yeonjun to get him a dustpan.

"It's a great nickname," Yeonjun said matter-of-factly. He was now sitting at the couch, occupied looking through the food app in search of something to order for them to eat, so he couldn't get Soobin and his dust a pan now. "You know he would be happy to hear you using it too, right? You guys are even closer than us." 

Soobin shrugged it off. "I'm used to Huening now." 

Yeonjun was in the middle of formulating his argument to attack him back when the intercom rang. He ran to pick it up as if waiting for some celebrity to be on the ground floor wanting to go up to his apartment instead of some friend in advance. Soobin, who is no fool, took the opportunity to escape the previous conversation and ran to the bedroom. He could still hear Yeonjun telling the doorman to send the person upstairs before closing the door behind him, going to look for cushion covers in Yeonjun's drawers as an excuse. (It wasn't all that unreasonable, considering half of the sofa's cushions had been bare since last week, when the eldest took everything to wash and "was too lazy to put them back later.")

Whoever was the early bird, he was already talking to Yeonjun in the living room when Soobin was done choosing the color of the cushion covers and started to make his way back there. 

“I do like Harry Potter, what do you mean?” Yeonjun was saying, already all worked up in an useless argument with the new guest. Soobin guesses he wouldn’t so soon get his pan to throw away the freaking dust . “I’m just not all fanboy about it like you and Soobin. I do it in a normal amount.” 

“In a local amount, I would say,” corrected the guest, whose voice Soobin recognized at the same time he got to the living room and also pictured the face. 

Choi Beomgyu. He was wearing a black jeans jacket on top of a plain white shirt and black jeans pants, and had his long hair tied back in a way it was Soobin’s first time seeing. He wondered if Beomgyu planned on growing his hair even longer or not, and how long it had been since he started to do it…  

“Hm, hi,” said Soobin awkwardly, but before he could get too dragged away by his thoughts. 

Both Yeonjun and Beomgyu turned their faces to look at him as if they hadn’t seen him there yet, which was probably true for the latter, but ridiculously suspicious for the first one. Yeonjun then went ahead with confirming Soobin’s guesses about his strange behaviour: 

“Hey, Soobin. Beomgyu, can you help Soob with the pillows while I pop outside to take out the trash?” he asked with all the nerve in the world, holding up two grocery bags full and closed with knots that certainly hadn't been there for a second ago.

Soobin did nothing but stare, not able to find a way to get out of that pathetic situation. Choi Yeonjun was a fucking brat. 

"Sure, hyung," replied Beomgyu innocently, getting out of his seat on the armchair Yeonjun and Soobin had earlier dragged back to the right place — where it hadn't been back since their little meeting to talk about exactly the person who had ended up sitting there now. He took his cell phone out of his pants pocket and dropped it on the seat, then asked a Yeonjun who was already surreptitiously walking towards the door, “are you going to need any more help?”

“No, everything's fine,” said Yeonjun as he unlocked the door, “me and Soobin had been cleaning up some stuff since earlier. I’ll see you in a minute!” he shouted, closing the door with a bump. 

Soobin honestly didn’t even know why he was so surprised. 

He turned to look at Beomgyu, scratching his throat.

Seriously, it was such a Yeonjun thing to plan something childish like that. He should not be so affected. 

“I like your hair,” said Soobin in an impetus, while giving Beomgyu some of the cushion covers. The way he wasn’t even looking at the younger’s face when he said that was ridiculous, almost as much as the way Beomgyu looked up from his hands to Soobin’s face in response. 

Each of them stood by one side of the couch, starting to put the cushions inside the covers.

“Thanks,” he said, and it was just now that Soobin realised how gawky he also was. “I don’t really like it tied… I was just working out before coming.” 

“You work out?” asked Soobin, surprised. (He was even more surprised at himself for following the situation along so well and actually talking to him.)

“It was my first try, but might as well be the last.” Beomgyu chuckled awkwardly. He softly threw on the sofa one of the cushions now with a cover, taking the last one that remained.

Soobin felt something churn inside his stomach in response to the sound of that giggle. That’s when he knew: he missed Beomgyu. 

He may not have realised that until now that he saw him, but it was true; Soobin missed him every day they didn’t meet. He missed his skin, missed his touch, missed the way everything felt so crazy good when they kissed. He missed their silly conversations too, those they had before everything started to get strange. It was looking at Beomgyu’s expectant eyes on his direction, awaiting for some kind of reaction, that Soobin realised he wouldn’t be able to just let that go even if Yeonjun hadn't convinced him to talk to him again, even if he didn’t plot this dumb reunion. Even if he wanted to. 

That’s what made him say the first word. 

“We should probably talk about that party.” 

Beomgyu’s shoulders stiffened up, at the same time that his face showed relief. Soobin wondered what was happening inside of his brain. 

“Yeah. We should. I was trying to bring that up, honestly, but I didn’t know how to,” Beomgyu confessed, sitting down at the couch after he was done with the last cushion. Soobin kept standing there, holding a pillow just to have something to do with his hands. 

“Just like this, I guess.” He shrugged. 

They both made silence for a brief second before Beomgyu started to talk: “Look, Soobin, I’m really sorry. I don’t know what got into me that day that made me act like that and I didn’t even know if you wanted it or even if you were into boys or not and just did it, so… Seriously. I’m so sorry I don’t even know what to say, but I truly am.” 

“It’s fine.” Soobin incorporated the cushion he held onto his hand wave. He couldn’t yet judge if that was leading to a good or bad outcome. “I’m bi, actually. But I’m not offended and I was also really drunk that day, so everything’s fine.” 

“I don’t know if it would’ve been better or worse if you were also straight,” Beomgyu said, still a little nervous, a little awkward, and that’s when reality hit Soobin. It really was not supposed to go so smoothly. 

Straight boys don’t kiss other straight boys when they’re drunk, Soobin thought to himself. He just didn't have it in him to say it out loud. 

Soobin never talks a lot about being a biromantic demisexual just because he, at all, never talks a lot. 

It had never actually been an issue to him. When he started to grow into puberty and realised he didn't had such repulse to the thought of being with a boy as all the other boys at school seemed to have, getting all offended with those trashy jokes that kids learned with the older people around them about boys acting feminine or anything actually, he naturally started to grow the possibility of not being straight inside him. He knew he liked girls for sure and had had some childish crushes in one or two of them before, but couldn't pretend that could be the end of it; Soobin was a great combatant of bisexual erasing after all. Yeonjun had always made him so aware of all the information they could grab about the LGBTQ+ community before the internet got so easy and popular, as he himself had probably been born coloured in rainbow stripes. 

It remained as just a possibility not often touched for a long while, though always there, until Soobin met Han Jisung. 

When Jisung was transferred to Soobin's school, it was freshman year of high school. His mom had just one month ago left the maternity hospital, and his two little brothers were bundled around her and Soobin's dad’s bed almost every single time he saw them. It was the year Yeonjun had spent studying in another city and school was added to the list of places he felt an outsider in as soon as he put his foot in there. Han Jisung was the only person who quite seemed to get anything he felt, and the only one he actually talked to in real life. The relationship they built was so natural Soobin wasn't even conscious of it at first. 

When he did realise what was happening, nonetheless, even though as afraid as he was, Soobin also felt some strange kind of peace. It seemed like that feeling he had of not being just like everyone around him had chased him with the doubt for a while and finally dissipated now that he had met the final incontestable truth after falling in love with a boy. 

So he did like boys, after all. It was a palpable fact that sat comfortably around the answer to that so-annoyingly-common-to-the-age question of who he was. Jisung was also going through something similar with his own issues, and they ended up being each other’s response to a lot of stuff they grieved for at the time. Soobin still feels grateful for having that strong kind of a bond back then.

Not even that disastrous first kiss was able to destroy it. Jisung understood where Soobin was coming from when he explained to him how he felt, did everything in his reach to make him stop blaming himself for “coming up with” another drama after they were finally okay with themselves enough to admit they liked each other, and was patient enough to let Soobin take his time and get the awesome second kiss they had some weeks later. How right it felt that time was the last proof Soobin had to collect before starting to identify as demisexual, now relieved to understand why he couldn't get himself to want to kiss anyone in particular in the pre teenager parties Yeonjun had dragged him to to last year, and anyone other than Jisung now. 

Soobin even remembers thinking to himself that his relationship with the shorter, chubby-cheeked boy was the only thing going right in his life at that moment. 

It was kind of corny. 

It ended before they could manage to call themselves sophomores though, and Jisung left school to join an entertainment company by the end of the year and find some closure to some unsolved stuff he had with a girl from his past that reappeared when he last expected. Soobin was hurt and listening to sad playlists nonstop on Spotify for a while, but then Yeonjun was back in town and he had a therapist’s face to stare at for 50 minutes a week without saying a word and everything kind of gathered together to make fire and melt every thought of Jisung lasting in his brain. 

Some months later, he was fine. Soobin had also never thought of romance again — be it lack of time or interest, it doesn’t really matter —, but slept peacefully at night with the certainty of knowing who he was and being okay with it. 

Soobin got to hear Beomgyu’s laugh not very long into the conversation they’ve dove into, and it was so precious he found himself wishing for him to also be able to feel that security. To feel how great it is. 

That was the first time he realised he was screwed. 

"It's been difficult to make it work. They are both so stubborn I have no idea if it's even possible to make any romance happen at all." 

Beomgyu was sitting at Yeonjun's sofa now that they're done with their work with the cushions, hugging one of them tightly while Soobin opened the fridge and got a bottle of coke. Soobin had managed to ask about the younger's fanfiction out of politeness and to try to get rid of the awkward silence, and it didn't take five minutes for the conversation to get genuinely interesting. Beomgyu's main character had been secretly in love with a friend of his for a while, but the story was so un focused in romance that the readers had never expected anything to happen between them until it did. 

"I know," said Soobin as he approached the other with a cup of coke he handed him, "it's been long since Killua first noticed Gon but I could never actually see him all lovey-dovey as he is now. It's so cute. But I truly have no idea how you're solving all that shit so they can actually be together." 

"Neither do I." Beomyu opened a bitter smile and Soobin chuckled. He ended up just standing in the middle of the room while taking sips of his cola, afraid that physical proximity would ruin the easiness of the atmosphere. 

"It's really new to see any kind of romance in your writing," Soobin said. "You are good at it." 

Beomgyu giggled all silly to the compliment. "Believe it or not, I actually love to write romance." 

"You do?" Soobin leaned in his direction, all curiosity. Beomgyu was so good at writing fantasy and action and creating all those complex new worlds where mystical things happened that it had never hit him to expect the younger to like the old but gold romance. It was rare in his stories as much as Soobin knew; if much, he would work up an insinuation here and there.

"Yeah, obviously! I'm a sucker for good romance, isn't it basically written on my face?" Beomgyu pointed to himself, seemingly surprised. Maybe he thought that was obvious. 

"All that's written on your face is that you love dark," Soobin couldn't help mockingly saying.

The other boy almost choked on his cola from the sudden urge to laugh that rose upon him. 

"Hey!" he exclaimed, faking a dramatic offended expression, and they both chuckled comfortably. "I have a secret to tell you, then." He approached his hand to his mouth and cupped it as if just about to whisper something in Soobin's ear, then said a decibel lower than his usual voice tone: "I'm a fan of Jane Austen." 

Soobin's chin dropped to the floor.

"No, you're not." 

"Yes, I am?" insisted Beomgyu in a surprised-laughing state. "I've been reading her books since I was like, twelve. I was a boy made of Harry Potter and sweet pinkish love stories." 

Soobin went to sit on the armchair and only looked at him for a second. "That's shocking." 

Beomgyu laughed out loud. "You're too dramatic!" 

"I'm happy to know you have great influence, though," commented Soobin when he was about done processing the information (because, apart from the drama, it was really unexpected to discover Beomgyu as a hopeless romantic or something close to it. Seriously. He had all that "romance is an invention made by capitalism" and "married to the emo" vibe around him that never even permitted Soobin to consider the opposite). "I'm a great fan of a good romance too and now that I know you have the foundation I'll have big expectations for Gon and Killua’s future." 

"Please, don't," Beomgyu waved both his hands in front of his body, "I have no idea what I'm doing. Reading is way easier than writing. And I'm sorry for this moment not to be all that reciprocal; it's not a surprise you like romance." 

"How come? I find myself to be very discreet." 

"I've scrolled through your Goodreads." 

Soobin fell into scandalous laughter. 

"You're ridiculous! Send me the link to your account later, or just follow me so I can find you, whatever." 

Beomgyu nodded. "I was surprised at first, I wasn't expecting to find so many romance books. Thought you were a suspense kinda guy or something." 

"I pretend to be," Soobin shrugged. 

Beomgyu chuckled lightly, "It works." 

"No but seriously," started Soobin, leaning towards the other with his elbows resting on his knees, "I really like the way books describe all this thing around finding someone you like. I don't really feel like romantic love is that big of a thing in real life, but books make you feel like it matters." 

Listening quietly, Beomgyu just nodded quietly. He turned to look at Soobin when he was done, as if wondering if he had anything else to add. 

"And why don't you write your beloved romance, writer-nim?" 

He let out a tiny tired breath. "It's complicated." 

"How come?" 

"It's just that, y'know," Beomgyu looked around, as if the right words to explain himself would be found anywhere in the room, "Because all story arcs need characters to change," he shrugged, "I'm sure you know that already… Basically it's just that I feel like it is so limited when it comes to romance. If I am to write a love story, I'll have to find a way for my characters to grow in order for that relationship to work, or because they met that person or are in that relationship or anything like that." 

"But I'm sure a lot of people do change because of the relationships they build with other people in real life." 

"Yes, you're right," Beomgyu hurriedly agreed, "that's not what I meant." He shook his head. "It's just that I feel like doing this is a way to reproduce the idea that the only thing anyone needs to be happy in life is a romantic partner. And that's quite wrong."

Soobin blinked and rested his chin on his hands, deep in thought. He's never thought of love stories like that. "You mean you don't like people thinking that dating will solve all your problems?"

"Roughly, yes." Beomgyu sighed. "I feel like a lot of the content around us keeps insisting that our lives will only be complete when we find the 'right person,' " he rolled his eyes, "or that finding such a person will solve everything that's wrong. Because it won't, right? We almost naturally live waiting for something to happen, some change, I don't know, and I've waited a long time to find that true love just to discover that your problems don't wait for the magic resolution in the form of a person. We have to fight alone."

Soobin could see where he was coming from. He was not a person to keep waiting for something crazy to happen and change his life into an utopian and unrealistically happy one (he was not a person to think of the future at all), but was already used to people talking about it in those kind of self-help conversations and speeches that pop out of nowhere and force even people uninterested like him to listen. It was useful, in a way, because he now knew that many people did that, and could understand Beomgyu better. 

Other than that, Soobin could also really relate to the love-doesn't-change-anything state of mind. He had already been in love and in a happy relationship before, but it didn't save him from his problems back at home, for instance. It was a separate thing from the whole other course of his life, the part that magically comes to place when you find a partner in contemporary romantic books. Come to think of it, Soobin agreed a lot with Beomgyu's remark. He was a smart guy. 

He said that, then, but in a more fun way.

"You have a lot of ideas for someone this young." 

Beomgyu let out a loud laugh of indignation. "We're practically the same age!"

"And what about it?" joked Soobin, all teasingly. "I'm still your sunbae . You lack life experience, y'know? The knowledge you'll only have when you're as old as me." 

"This doesn't mean anything anywhere outside of college," Beomgyu argued, "and guess what? Is Yeonjun-hyung's house a new part of campus?" 

"This escalated into a nightmare too quickly." 

They both bursted into laughter.

"But, yeah," said Beomgyu after the laughs had calmed down and they were just staring at each other comfortably, "that's why I'm more into writing sci-fi and fantasy and apocalypse anything like that. It's more realistic." 

"It's hard to think about falling in love when you're too busy trying to survive and stop the world from ending at the same time." 

Beomgyu grinned. "Exactly." 

The five of them were all cozily settled around Yeonjun's living room not that long later. Soobin had ended up liking that armchair so much that he was still in there, not even once leaving his seat since earlier when he was talking to Beomgyu. (He would have to, probably in the middle of the first movie, though, because the need to visit the bathroom was starting to appear.) 

Yeonjun, Huening and Taehyun had all entered the apartment together sometime in the middle of Soobin and Beomgyu's peaceful conversation — the three of them had bumped into each other in the entrance hall, while Yeonjun spent time fooling around after taking out the trash to let the two friends chat in his apartment. 

His excuse was that he started looking at something on his phone and got too distracted to see when the elevator he had called arrived, but Soobin knew better. Yeonjun had even sent him a playful wink after the subject was closed and everyone naturally started to comment on other things, nodding suggestively at Beomgyu, who was now distracted by something Huening was saying.

Speaking of him, Huening got really immersed in the Harry Potter world all at once. Soobin was even a bit surprised at it, seeing how he was so talkative and agitated when they were talking and moving around before the movie, but got all quiet and focused when Yeonjun pressed play. 

He was, though, the kind of person to comment on the stuff that was happening in the scenes and talk to the characters and laugh and react, as Soobin soon figured, so they heard his voice a lot during the first movie. It was a lot of fun to see Huening discovering all the wizard world's secrets and get almost as surprised with it as Harry did, and was almost followed by Yeonjun who all the time would comment how he didn't remember this or that happening. Beomgyu would tease him all the time calling him a local or a poser. Taehyun, with whom Yeonjun had become friends very fast, seemed to be the type of fan to know all the lines of the movies, and Soobin couldn't really judge him because he also knew everything, but still. It didn't have the chance to get annoying though, because Yeonjun elbowed him on the very first line he repeated aloud, and threatened his life "if he continued with that bullshit." It's nice to have a Yeonjun.

Soobin was, as everyone would already expect, the quiet one. The Philosopher's Stone was the Harry Potter movie which he had also watched the most, and he used that as his excuse to keep looking away from the TV and stopping at a Beomgyu sitting on the floor halfway through.

Beomgyu's back sight was interesting. His hair covered all of his neck, his shoulders seemed broader that way, and it wasn't even weird that he wasn't sitting with the best back posture in the world. Just like Soobin, he didn't talk much during the entire film, but didn't seem to be able to stay still either, changing his sitting positions every five minutes. His moves would always call Soobin's attention back to him, just as the older was finally starting to focus at what was happening on the screen in front of him. 

At a time, he turned to sit in a position that placed him in profile in Soobin's direction. The point of his nose was the clearest thing for the older boy, so delicate even when illuminated by the TV screen from behind; following close behind it were his eyelashes and the contour of his lips. His eyes followed the movements on the screen closely, the pupils changing focus from time to time to follow the action scenes. Something about him was almost ethereal.

That was probably the second time Soobin realised he was screwed. 

Hours later, the boys were halfway into the second movie when Yeonjun forced everyone to pause the video so he could go to the bathroom "real quick". As much as Soobin was having fun with the Moaning Myrtle scenes, which would never stop being some of his favorites because the girl is entertainment incarnate (kind of; you got it), he was really tired and sleepy and, before he could even realise, was dozing off on his seat as soon as there was no movie to force himself to focus on. 

Soobin woke up with a start not two minutes later when Yeonjun came back into the room talking loudly and giggling excitedly. A quick glance — charged with as much resentment for waking him up that Soobin managed to place — in the direction of Yeonjun brought him the explanation: he had gotten the genius idea of mixing up alcohol with the thing, bringing in his hands as many beer cans as he could take. Anyway, right? It's Yeonjun.

"Will you want one, Soob?" 

To say he generally would've said not would be an understatement. Nonetheless, Soobin truly wanted to find a way to keep himself awake for at least the rest of this movie. It was probably early in the evening yet and they had another six movies to go, so it wasn't acceptable to fall asleep in the middle of the second one. He also really wanted to see Huening's reaction to Harry's fight against the Basilisk.

Taehyun ended up not being an alcohol person too, and he and Soobin agreed to share a single can. "Just to accompany you guys," the younger boy had said jokingly. Soobin had nodded along to his speech, as if to make clear he agreed. 

It was from here that things started to escalate, and it was quick.

Soobin himself had to stop on his feet and pay attention to every little detail lasting in his memory to try to make up again everything that happened properly and in chronological order. It was that confusing. 

Stuff genuinely mixed up inside his head: it went back and forth between Harry's and Draco's sword fight to Yeonjun tripping over his own feet and breaking a glass filled to the brim with Beomgyu jumping in fright; Fawkes, Dumbledore's Phoenix, crying over Harry's wounds and Huening choking in the room in shock and Soobin pulling out another can of beer and refilling his glass; Hermione looking at a mixture in a cauldron and Yeonjun coming back from the kitchen again, this time with Huening at his side, with a glass of drink that Soobin couldn't get close enough to the label to read, and Beomgyu jumping to his feet when he turned around and saw them coming. Lots of laughter sounds. Taehyun asking where there was a broom. The shards of glass from the cup that Yeonjun had broken earlier and another from an unknown culprit piled up in the corner of the room. His throat burning. Beomgyu getting up to get more drinks after getting detailed instructions on where they were kept. Yeonjun pulling out his phone to research drinking games and starting to sob from crying. Huening turning off the television in the middle of the third movie maybe…? Beomgyu's rant about the Weasley twins. Huening ignoring him to tell Soobin and Taehyun his opinions. Beomgyu throwing a tantrum.

Soobin felt ridiculous to already feel familiar with the sensation of being drunk. There was a point where he almost started to cry for not quite feeling like himself, and was only stopped by the curious view of Taehyun carrying Yeonjun in the direction of his bedroom. 

It got even more interesting when the younger boy gave up on the mission and just left Yeonjun's lost ass walking side to side in his own living room in absolute awe as if he had never been there before. Soobin started to chuckle lightly and to laugh out loud after Beomgyu also did it seated by his side, clapping and pointing at Yeonjun's confusion as if that was really that funny. Taehyun looked at them with disgust and ran his fingers through his blonde hair and for a spare second it seemed like he was seriously considering ripping it all out of his head. 

Soon he recomposed himself, took a Huening who was already dozing off on the couch by the hand and took him with him in the direction of Yeonjun's bedroom. 

The sound of the door slamming probably brought Yeonjun back to his senses enough to remember where he was and get deeply offended by his two friends locking themselves to sleep in his room without him. He knocked on the door for a while and got ignored by Taehyun for some minutes until Huening screamed, sounding pretty mad, something similar to "WON'T YOU SHUT UP? THERE'S PEOPLE TRYING TO SLEEP HERE!" 

The unexpectedly angry HueningKai made Yeonjun stop right away, turn his back and walk all stiff, as if with a tail between his legs towards the sofa, stopping only to turn off the lights before lying down curled up. He hugged a cushion and made no more sounds until his breathing got lighter and Soobin could tell he was sleeping. 

After all that chaotic scene was over, Soobin got back to feeling conscious about who, where and with whom he was. He and Beomgyu just stood in silence listening to each other's breathing for a while, as if processing the situation, until Soobin took the first step to turn to look at the other boy. 

There was not much he could see with all the apartment's lights off, but it felt like Beomgyu was also staring at him now. Soobin could not actually tell if that was really happening or not — his eyes were not used to the darkness enough to distinguish more than a silhouette sitting on the floor by his side. But it felt like it. 

It felt just natural to lean his body into Beomgyu's direction; just natural to feel his touch accepting and adjusting and reciprocating to him in response, perhaps at the same time. He didn't even have time to question anything about all that.

It would feel ridiculous to state something like this in the real world, out loud, concretely put in words but, for Soobin, at that intangible moment, Beomgyu’s body almost felt familiar. Scratch that; it did. His waist’s curvature and the soft skin of his cheeks and the way his lips would part as soon as Soobin’s touched them. The way all his muscles would turn into gelatina at the first bare try that Soobin would make to take the lead, be it putting his hands on the other’s neck in an indirect ask for his head to lean to another direction a little bit; be it leaning his own body forward little by little and push Beomgyu’s body to do the same, until they were laying down on the ground. 

When Soobin parted his lips from Beomgyu’s and started to kiss his jaw, neck and down to the collarbones, until it started to get too hot and his skin was melting and Beomgyu’s felt like a pool of lava and everything around them was burning and they were in fucking hell and the younger’s shirt suddenly wasn’t on his body anymore it was the first time, but it felt strangely familiar. When Soobin touched all of Beomgyu’s chest and kissed and nibbled and made a mess on it, it was the first time for them to ever get this far. It was; nevertheless, the feeling was familiar. Not in the sense of it being just a rewind of the other day at that party; more than that, it was exactly what they had felt every single time they ever were in each other’s presence. It was stronger and deeper and bewilder, but still the same. They were the same. 

What they did to each other’s feelings was the same.

They kept kissing for the longest time Soobin had ever spent doing that in his life. Beomgyu’s rhythm was insane. He would run his hands to squeeze all his limbs at the same time, his face, cheeks, jaw, scalp, and although the little involuntary noises he would let out from time to time made it clear that he liked Soobin’s exploration of his body, he would never keep his mouth far from the older’s for too long. He just couldn’t. Soobin didn’t have much time to spend dazzling himself about the way he so shamelessly craved for touch as if his life was ending if he didn’t get it now, but would for sure have his thoughts haunted by it later. 

It was curious how most things with Beomgyu always happened in the dark, with the room drowning in silence. Almost as if both of them felt like they didn’t truly exist in the pitch dark and could, now that it had less weight, do the things they wanted to the most.  

At some point, Soobin started to feel his body getting heavier, and his conscience being able to reach out to him enough to stop him from going any further than where he and Beomgyu had already done, in the middle of Yeonjun’s living room with him sleeping on the couch and Huening and Taehyun on the bedroom just a few steps from there. He managed to pull himself out of Beomgyu’s grip only to look at him for a moment and murmur something about where they were at and how tired he was before passing out at the spot. 

It was funny to wake up the next morning and remember how the movie night was supposed to be the occasion where Soobin would get rid of his only one duty of talking to Beomgyu and letting all that odd stuff after the kisses in the party go away forever. 

Apparently, drinking made Soobin oversleep.

Aside from being the last one to wake up the next morning, when no visitors were left in Yeonjun's living room other than himself, sipping black coffee strong enough to force him to grimace, he still went back to sleep for hours during the afternoon later, after returning home. Soobin told himself it was the week's fatigue, perhaps stacked with last night's; he didn't have the heart to admit that he wasn't ready to deal with the whirlwind of thoughts that what he had done with Beomgyu would cause him, and he very wonderfully avoided it through sleep.

Monday morning was also an especially sleepy occurrence; after trying to catch up on his studies through the night as a result of having slept all day, there was no way it could be otherwise. Soobin almost fell asleep three or four times on a fifteen-minute bus ride, which was a record even for him, who was a natural enemy of waking up early.

On the second bus he took on his way to college, the one on which he spent much more time than on the first, Soobin sat by the window on the side where the sun would shine straight into his eyes — a cheap attempt to try to feel less sleepy — and pulled his phone from his hoodie pocket. The same barrage of notifications as always hit him: Yeonjun (this time saying good morning), Huening (this time sending him a screenshot of a funny tweet), internship group, family group. The latter was especially crowded today with the photos his mother had taken of his siblings with the cousins they'd gone to visit the day before. Soobin had been invited, but he had stayed at home with the pretense of trying to come to terms with his studies.

He dragged everything to the side until it disappeared and decided to make his periodic visit on Twitter. Soobin was as much of a tourist on the social network as any inactive account you could find, but he always ended up giving up on uninstalling at the last second when he remembered the plethora of useful things he could occasionally find there. Things like the thread with all the Harry Potter movies on Google Drive where Yeonjun had taken the links to where they (tried) to watch the series on the weekend.

Soobin's timeline was especially uninteresting that day, anyway. He was about to get out of that app and go look for something to do somewhere else when a tweet that caught his attention showed up.

It came up to his timeline as a Tweet someone he followed had left a like on, and the display name and usernames were somewhat familiar to him as some organization originated from the university's English and Literature course. Said tweet was a response to a question asked on the account's CuriousCat. 

" Please, tell me if Choi Beomgyu hoobae kisses boys!" — He said he kisses… on the cheeks!

Soobin clicked on the account's photo icon and soon discovered that it was the profile made for the party organized by the English department of their university. Scrolling the account's posts down the screen, he noticed that they had spent the entire previous day responding to anonymous messages dedicated to members of the student community, just like an anonymous mail. Apparently the account was active because the date of the English party for that semester was close.

Returning to the tweet he had first seen, Soobin read and reread the same three lines over and over as if searching for something. Maybe it was because he didn't know what it was he was looking for that he couldn't find it. He went back to searching that account's Tweets for more messages dedicated to Beomgyu, but nothing came up. He had no choice, then, but to keep thinking about that tweet he had seen before and that was there, public and absurdly recent. From yesterday. Hours ago.

It didn't mean anything. Yet, for some reason, he felt hurt.

Soobin was on his way to his pathology class, caught up in worries about the homework he would have to do after getting home, when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket.

It was not a familiar sensation as he was used to always keeping it on mute, but he was obligated to check it as soon as he could because of a meeting of the internship that was supposed to take place that morning in lunch time, but got cancelled in the last minute and was going to be rescheduled to some time probably in that same afternoon. He was worried as soon as the teacher told them that as he had classes the entire afternoon without any breaks, but that class he was heading to was already his last one and nothing had been decided, so he hoped it wouldn't be possible to do that in that day and he would be able to go home and study. That notification better not be a message from his teacher, then. 

Let's go straight to it. It was from Beomgyu. 

16:25  beomgyu: what does what we did that day make of me?

Oh, well. That was... a little too unexpected. 

Soobin stopped on his steps, sighing. He truly was just a simple guy wanting academic peace for the day. 

When Soobin arrived in front of the literature building, he didn't exactly know what he was looking for. 

It was starting to look like a dumb decision now that he finally came to think of it. Soobin didn't know anyone from that course and was too shy to go to a stranger to ask for Beomgyu. Even more important than that: he didn't even know if Beomgyu was there. What if he had no classes that afternoon, or did but was already done with them anyway and had already left? Nothing in the text he wrote indicated that he was on the campus. 

Even if he was there, he could be in the university's restaurant, the library or any other place in the campus. He could have entered an important class during the time Soobin spent walking to the building. He could be in the middle of a test. He could be in so many different situations it was least likely for him to be able to talk to Soobin each second that passed. That all being concluded even before Soobin had the time to question himself if Beomgyu would want to talk to him. (Don't people send texts when they don't want to talk to someone in person? Was Soobin dumb? What was he doing there?!) 

Time and space did not stop on its tracks to let him have his crisis in peace, anyways; Soobin hadn't even had the time to give up, turn around and go home when someone approached him. 

"Aren't you friends with Beomgyu?"

"Huh?" Soobin looked up to meet an unknown, but kind face. "I am, but...?" 

"Ah, sorry," the boy let out a tiny chuckle, "I've seen you two together once or twice already. I'm Hyunjin by the way! Beomgyu's my friend too so I probably know you by name from him having mentioned you some time, I'm sorry for being all weird." He smiled again, awkward but finding it funny at the same time. 

"Oh, hi," Soobin tried to seem comfortable, "I'm sorry I didn't know you." 

"It's fine," Hyunjin waved it off. He was a little bit taller than Soobin and really good-looking. "Are you waiting for Beomgyu to get out of today's presentation as well?" he asked. 

Soobin felt awkward for not knowing what he was talking about. "Huh, well, not exactly. I was kind of looking for him." 

"Oh, didn't he tell you about today's presentation?" 

"No, we... We've not been talking these days." 

"I see. You're lucky, he's been so nervous about this we've been talking about nothing but the things he shouldn't forget to say even if he gets too nervous." Hyunjin reached for his phone in his back pocket, "but it's almost 4:30 so he's probably done and getting out of the building for now. We have a class together later, but it's not in another whole hour, so we figured we'd just hang out and talk about that damn presentation, but I can lend you him if you want. We share too many classes so I haven't really yet got the chance not to talk to him for a single day." 

Soobin figured he shouldn't clarify about the actual reason he and Beomgyu had not been talking. Just as he was about to respond, someone approached them from behind bouncing all excitedly. 

"What's popping guys?" asked Beomgyu's voice as he wrapped his arms over both Hyunjin and Soobin's shoulders. With his back turned to his direction, Soobin couldn't recognise Beomgyu until he was there, and it seemed to be the case for the younger too. They looked at each other's eyes for a fleeting second just as understanding overcame them, and Beomgyu's complexion suddenly got paler. 

"We were waiting for you!" Oblivious to all the priceless drama unfolding around him, Hyunjin did nothing but smile excitedly and clap his hands. "How did the presentation go?" 

"I didn't know you guys knew each other," said Beomgyu as he untangled himself from Hyunjin and Soobin's shoulders, a little awkwardly. "It went really well! The teacher even complimented me, I'm so relieved." He was back to normal Beomgyu state way before he was done speaking. Soobin wondered if those tenuous character changes were real or just something he was making up in his head.

"We met just now," chuckled Soobin in a lower voice. Hyunjin nodded and smiled assuringly. 

"Soobin wanted to talk to you, Gyu. I decided to cancel our hangout then and was just making him company while you weren't done." 

"Oh... You wanted to talk to me, hyung?" 

Soobin nodded, embarrassed. That conversation that seemed to go in circles was only serving to make him distressed.

"But it doesn't need to be now," he said, eager to get out of that, "you and Hyunjin can go do your thing and I'll talk to you another time. It isn't that important." 

"No, no, I'm leaving already" told Hyunjin, frowning at Soobin, "you came all the way here so you talk to your Gyu. I'm off to meet Seungmin and I'll see you at class later," he concluded to Beomgyu, who nodded. "It was nice to meet you, Soobin! Let's hang out all together sometime!" 

After that, Hyunjin really just disappeared in the middle of the campus. Soobin's attention turned back to the boy by his side, nervously. 

He was truly starting to regret appearing there out of nowhere just because of a text message. 

"Do you want to... I don't know, take a walk?" Beomgyu suggested. He tried to gesture something backwards and then gave up and reached for the strap of the backpack he carried on his back clumsily.

"Sure." 

The two of them set their way off from the front of the literature building and started to walk slowly, each one looking to a different side of the view and never meeting the other's eyes. The campus was settled in a more secluded area of the city, wooded and full of plants and flower beds that humanities students loved to take pictures of to post on Instagram. Soobin really liked the environment too; it was cool and at times like now, in the late afternoon, when it wasn't crowded anymore, walking around was something that got that healing vibe you just can't get enough of.

Today was not a healing day, though, and the pleasurable view of the campus was not working as well as normally as an instrument to make stuff better. Soobin would glance at Beomgyu from the corner of his eye from time to time, wondering when he would finally break the silence. Even the sound of the soles of the other's sneakers stomping on the floor was cooperating to make him nervous. Really. What in the world was he going to say about that goddamn message?

"You had an important presentation today?" he suddenly asked, before the urge to do so left him. The fleeting instant between his question and Beomgyu's response was the worst for his nerves.

Beomgyu shrugged his shoulders tightly and then let go, stretching his arms afterwards as if trying to relax his muscles. "I did." He turned to Soobin for the first time and made a dramatic grimace of pain that drew a chuckle from the older boy and made everything suddenly seem simpler again. "It was about Don Quixote, it was horrible, I was scared to death of saying the wrong thing. I know everything that happens but I couldn't finish reading it in time."

Soobin frowned, "Isn't Don Quixote, like, 1500 pages long?"

"Exactly! And we had what? A month to read it? It's humanly impossible."

"But apparently you did well."

"Oh yes, but I was lucky." Beomgyu shook his head no. They were walking past the university's art buildings, which had several parts decorated with student graffiti.

"You read a 1500 page book and you mean it was luck?"

Beomgyu let out a shy chuckle.

"It was never luck, it was always religiously reading 5 chapters a day!" he exclaimed playfully. Before Soobin could say anything, he pointed to a stone bench they were passing by, "Wanna sit down?"

"Sure."

They sat down and the conversation ceased as Beomgyu looked for his water bottle on his backpack and drank half of it at once. Then they watched the trees' leaves swinging with the wind. Soobin was starting to want to go home again. 

"So," Beomgyu started, "why were you looking for me?" 

Soobin looked down at his shoelaces.

"I'm not too happy about it being about me," he said quietly. "The point should be the text you sent me."

He looked up from his tapping toes to see Beomgyu turning the color of a pepper.

He tried to play it cool, "Oh, that?" laughed weakly. "Everyone freaks out once in a while, right? It was either that or cut my own hair in the men's room to cope. I couldn't get a bad grade and look ugly on the same day."

Soobin got a little taken aback at the idea of Beomgyu having any sort of breakdown over something he mostly pretended didn't even exist. What did he mean he wasn't indifferent to it? 

"But you got a good grade", he decided to tease him. It worked; Beomgyu shot him a frustrated look and he laughed out loud.

The two were silent again.

"But seriously, Beomgyu." Soobin looked him in the eye and tried to look serious. "It wasn't something you were supposed to be asking me."

The black-haired cringed, grimacing as he stretched his arm muscles. "I know, okay?" snorted. "It wasn't really a question, it should have just acted as a smoke signal that I'm not pretending to be a no-feelings and no-thoughts rock like that out of spite." He pulled both legs up onto the bench and hugged his knees. "Oh Soobin, why do you do this to me? Let's stop kidding, okay? I'm too sober for this conversation. I'm actually not prepared at all, I guess. I haven't talked to my emotional support sister in a week and then when that happens I get like this because I don't know how to live without her."

He was a mess. 

"I didn't even know you had a sister," Soobin commented without even thinking much, his head still in the wind. It was always kind of hard to assimilate those moments when Beomgyu came out from behind the shield he'd built around himself and allowed himself a moment of frankness. "Why aren't you two talking?"

"Sibling basics," Beomgyu shrugged, "I'm actually ignoring her to prove a point. Last time, I was doing all this drama over the fact that she gives her new girlfriend more attention than me."

"Aren't you giving her less attention this way, though?"

Beomgyu frowned hard. "I hadn't thought of it that way… I hate this thinking thing you do.Well it's just drama so it doesn't have to make sense."

Soobin shook his head. “I wonder why this is so funny.” 

“It’s because I’m a genius.”

“I prefer not to comment on that.”

"Hey!"

Soobin chuckled. That face of someone who had just heard the most offensive thing in history Beomgyu always did was too much for him.

“I’m just kidding, you could never not be a genius having written all that good stuff that’s up on your AO3 profile...” 

“Well, I must thank you for that,” Beomgyu replied, running his hands through his hair, all pompous.

"But!" Soobin arched his brows, looking up at him and making a second of silence to heighten the suspense of the teasing. "It's quite peculiar that so much geniusness and so much dumbness can come out of the same head."

Now it was Beomgyu who was laughing out loud, “Hey!” he pointed at Soobin. “I will never let you know when I post a new chapter again.”

“I will never send you a picture of Binsoo again.”

Beomgyu got all serious. “Oh no, wait a minute, it got heavy now. Pet photos are sacred, you can't joke about it!"

Soobin, all laughing and pulling his cell phone out of his pocket to show pics of Binsoo with a new toy the day before, realized that now the world didn't even seem so likely to end anymore.

“But seriously,” Soobin could finally get himself to say after a session of dog pics he and Beomgyu had looking on his phone’s gallery, “why aren’t you talking to your sister? I didn’t even know you had one and when I discover it you guys are not even talking!” 

Beomgyu waved it off, “I unironically am just making drama for her. In a few days I surrender and send a message.” He lowered his gaze, “but today's outbreak might have been avoided if I'd been up to date with her advice. Ugh.”

“It was literally just a message,” said Soobin, amused, trying to take it to a more relaxed side. "It's okay, no one died and your hair is still intact."

Beomgyu cupped his head and hair with both hands, dramatically. “It took too long to grow to leave me so soon.” He then looked at Soobin, good-naturedly, “later you really have to meet my sister. She is very wonderful, I swear, she is my guru in everything in life. And she's all scientistic like you, she's almost graduating in biology now. I know it's not that much like nursing, but it will be great if you understand something of her scientific talks because I don't understand anything and I don't know how to stop her either.”

Soobin took a moment to respond; it was still pretty awkward for him to be related to things involving natural sciences or the health area, even though he had been in college for some time already. It was even more unexpected to have Beomgyu wanting him to meet his sister.

“I would love to,” he said then, “does she live with your parents or in her college’s dorm like you?” 

"She lives alone," Beomgyu said, "in an apartment downtown. I lived there with her a while after I came of age. It's kind of far from here, she even studies at another college closer, I wanted to be accepted there too to be closer to her, but I couldn't."

"The good thing about studying at our college is that you got to know me," Soobin said, all serious. Soon after, he burst into laughter.

Beomgyu followed up, "It could only have been fate!" His voice then took on a nostalgic tone, "wow, it's bizarre to think that I was there almost on the other side of town living with Yerin not even three months ago, really. I've gotten so used to the dorm that it feels like I and Huening have lived in the same room together since forever."

"You're kidding right? It feels to me like you guys just moved.”

“That's because you visited us there a few times, otherwise you would have gotten used to it too,” Beomgyu said lightly. “I thought I knew Hyuka well before, but living together like this is something else. I feel sorry for his sisters who had to put up with this for nearly twenty years.”

“Do you miss living with your sister?” Soobin wanted to know.

It was an unpretentious question, just because it kept getting mentioned, but Beomgyu seemed to take it quite seriously, pausing to think for a moment, brows furrowed and focused gaze and all.

“Well, yes,” he said at last. He chuckled. “Living with Hyuka in the dorm now means I've taken a step forward in life and I couldn't have a better roommate, but I miss spending more time with Yerin. Since my classes in uni started and classes at hers resumed, we haven't had much time to see each other. We always planned for Hyuka and I to go to her house for the holidays, but her girlfriend is moving there now and I feel like if we went we would just get in the way.”

“You're her brother, of course you wouldn't get in the way. She must miss you too.” Soobin hesitated for a moment. “Must be nice to have an older sibling.”

Beomgyu threw into him a significant glare, “I’ve always wished I was the older sibling.”

“Just so you could have an excuse to tease her all the time?” Soobin joke.

“Hell yes .” They both laughed. “But to be honest, it would be nice if I could’ve taken better care of her a few years ago. I wish I could've. When she came out, a lot of stuff happened and it wasn't that nice,” he admitted. Soobin wasn’t expecting that conversation to turn into a serious one. The content of it got him even more taken aback. “We’re not rich, you know. She’s only living as comfortably as she is now, in a nice apartment and shit at such young age because we had a lot of family drama going on just because she wasn’t straight and our father was too homophobic to handle it. So she had to go live by herself as soon as she became an adult. It was horrible to watch her being basically dumped out and be too young to actually help. It took me months to get a job to help her sustain herself just because I was, like, a middle schooler.” 

“That’s... awful” Soobin said, still trying to process it all. “But… it’s not your fault to be younger, you know that, right? It’s very nice that you kept looking for a job all that time because you wanted to help her. Most people would’ve given up way before.” 

Beomgyu smirked, not looking at all convinced. “It was still the least I could do.” 

“But everything’s fine now, right?” Soobin asked, worried now that all the information started to fit in his head. “With your family and your sister and everything?”

“Well…you can say that it is. Yerin is fine, really; she's the happiest I've ever seen her. My parents got divorced; Yerin and I cut strings with my father years ago, so we have no idea where he is now, and my mom is living with my grandma again. She didn’t handle it well when I left to live with Yerin as soon as I was 18 and our father left not long later, so we had to take care of her for a while. I convinced her to go to therapy and etc, but she's fine now as well. She got back to work this year.” Beomgyu chuckled humorlessly. "Actually, that first day we went out together and I was all down, I don't know if you remember, it was exactly because of that. My mother had a crisis. What happened left the family all fucked up in the head. At least we're all in this together, right?!" He smiled with sarcasm.

“Beomgyu, this… sounds horrible. No one should go through all this shit at once.” 

“What do you mean? I’m having the time of my life now, it’s alright. Everything’s in the past," he said, earnestly. "Like, seriously. This year has been like, the best in my life so far, there’s nothing to be sorry for.” 

Soobin did not know what to say, so he kept silent. He knew nothing in details, but it already felt deadly bad to think that the bright kid sitting in front of him right now had gone through so much at such a young age. Beomgyu was always so carefree and acting like he was having the happiest moment of his life it somehow hurt to find out he hadn’t always been like that. 

He, on the other hand, had a perfectly peaceful and fine family structure and still could never be half as positive as Beomgyu. It truly did not make any sense. Or maybe Soobin was just too bad of a person to ever be like him. 

They kept talking for a while longer after that, until Beomgyu had to leave for his next class and Soobin walked to the bus stop trying to think of an excuse he could come up with for not appearing at the internship meeting — that ended up happening, sadly. The conversation topic turned to some nice comment’s Beomgyu had received on his last fic and wanted to share with Soobin, and everything went back to normal, but the older Choi couldn’t really focus at reading what the other was showing him. 

All he could think about was that impression he first had when reading Beomgyu’s works that there was always some guy with a closeted crush in his male best friend, or male partner in crime, or male enemy, or whatever. He thought Beomgyu did not want to focus on the minor romance because that was not the point of the plot, or maybe he was just seeing more than there was in the characters' relationships, but now… 

Maybe there was something about them. Maybe they were written as an escape, but Beomgyu couldn’t find it in him to develop it into more than insinuations. Maybe he was doing it unconsciously. It was too complex to say. 

[Google Search] Books about people discovering their sexuality

[Google Search] Books about queer people with homophobic families

[Google Search] Books about people in denial to their own sexuality 

[Google Search] LGBT self discovery themed books 

“Did Hyuka invite you to his best friend’s major party this weekend?” 

Soobin lifted his gaze from his phone screen to face Yeonjun. The pink-haired, on the other hand, was too focused on the video he was watching on TikTok to look at his friend for even a spare second. 

Soobin decided to go back to his restaurant game, and nonchalantly replied, “he did tell me about it, but I wasn’t actually invited.” 

“What do you mean?” Yeonjun wanted to know right away, immediately forgetting his TikTok. “Why wouldn’t he invite you?” 

Soobin handed a customer a donut on the game as he said, “Huening isn’t even going. He’s so overwhelmed with homework he couldn’t finish it to save his life.” 

Yeonjun shifted in his place on the corner of the bed until he stopped with his elbow resting on the mattress, facing Soobin's direction. “Let’s go with me, then." He onIy earned a groan in response. "What is it? I really think you should. Not even because Beomgyu is going to be there; you know the literature department’s parties are the biggest within all of our university right? You can’t graduate without having been to at least one.” 

Soobin started to pull the pillow the two of them shared towards him, frowning, "Oh, hyung, you got the whole pillow for yourself again." He then bluntly added when Yeonjun let out a groan, “I don’t know why you’re still trying, we all know you just think I should go because of Beomgyu.” 

“Well, but you also know you should. Come on, Soobin. We understand his reasons now. He isn’t an asshole and you like each other. It’s now time for you to do something.” 

"I don't know where you got it from."

“From experience.”

“We’re a year apart.” 

“A long year.”

Soobin cried a nervous laugh. 

"C'mon, Soob." 

"It's just that…" Soobin cringed. "I don't know, hyung. Why would going to a party even change anything?" He blocked his phone and looked at Yeonjun. 

"You guys can meet there, dance, flirt, go out to talk, make out, I don't know! The boy is clearly programmed to run away from the problem. The action needs to come from you, y'know? I think he just needs to feel like it's okay for him to like to be around you and this kinda shit. He seems to be comfortable at those party spaces so it seems perfectly fine to me." 

Sighing, Soobin pushed the bed sheets to cover his head. Yeonjun kept quiet for a moment for him to think and then insisted, "so?" 

The younger one pulled the sheets out and looked at him with lost eyes, "I don't know, hyung." 

Yeonjun chuckled, "you're just like a kid sometimes." Soobin grabbed his phone and went back to his game.

It wasn't until another thirty whole minutes had passed that Yeonjun started to lose his patience. 

"You know that cargo pants of mine? Those I bought online and left your address because I wouldn't be home to get it?" 

"Uhum." 

"I'm thinking of wearing it at the party on Friday. I bought another one that is exactly the same but a little darker but I actually think it would look better on you. What if we go matching?" 

"Hyung…" Soobin called in a thin voice. He was lying with his back to Yeonjun now, still playing games on the phone. His friend had put his phone in charge and said he was going to sleep, but instead he was lying on his back watching the room in the dim light of Soobin's phone screen.

"What is it?"

"I still don't know if I'm going. I don't know if it's the right thing to do."

Yeonjun sighed heavily. "Ok."

A few more minutes passed. The only sounds in the room were their breathing and the soft snores of the family dog, Binsoo, who slept on the bedroom rug.

"Aren't you tired of looking at your phone screen?" was the question Yeonjun broke the silence with. 

Soobin didn't get it. "Uhm?" 

"I asked if you aren't tired of looking at your phone screen." 

"I guess? Phone screens are a part of people's lives nowadays."

"Sure. A part of the outside world they carry with them for stuff to get easier. Not the other way round." 

Soobin blinked. He put an egg on the frying pan in the game. 

"You make no sense sometimes, hyung." 

"It's just that I…" Yeonjun sighed. "I just mean that life's calling you to live it and you are hiding." 

"You're really bad at analogies, then." 

Yeonjun let out an agonised laugh. "I have a point anyways. That's what matters."  

Soobin did not respond. Yeonjun did not say anything after that either, and not longer later his soft sleep-mode breathing could be heard across the room. Soobin, on the other hand, stayed up, too many thoughts running on his mind at the same time for him to even remember what it felt like to rest. 

Here's the thing: 

Soobin was insecure. 

Applause, everyone! It took him hours to admit to himself and put into words what he was feeling. Having that sentence written up there is already a win. 

So. After all that has happened in those last weeks, Soobin felt like it's okay to assume there was, for sure, something about Beomgyu. In all senses: there was something he felt for Beomgyu, and there was something Beomgyu felt for him. Soobin isn't someone to make assumptions, but he felt like this was above his rational perspective of what happened. He couldn't say for sure exactly what he felt for the younger boy (was he in love? Was he just needy? Was he, you know, just making things up in his mind because he'd been alone for too long? It couldn't be just physical attraction, but it didn't mean it was automatically love. Soobin still couldn't define it) but, whatever it was, he knew it was reciprocal. He felt it. He felt it in the way there was this invisible thing that always built up around them when they were together, and worked to get them closer. 

And that's where the problem came from: Soobin knew that, whatever it is that he and Beomgyu had, it was intense. And that's not how he was used to things being. 

Soobin was used to live just for himself. Not in a egotistic kinda way; more in a not-being-part-of-the-reality-around-him kinda way. Be it in college or at home or anywhere else. If people started to fight near where he was at university, someone would break them apart before he processed it and got to do anything. If his teacher told the class something he didn't get, he would stay quiet and study it again alone at home. If someone invited him to hang out somewhere, he wouldn't go, and all those people's social bubbles would build up without adding him. If his brothers fought, his father or his mother would solve it. If his mother needed help to clean the kitchen, his father would get there before he did. If his father was bored on a day off, his brothers would ask him to play with them. The Earth would spin around the exact same way he being on top of it or not.

Whatever it is, he was used to just watching stuff happen in front of his eyes and never interfering. Even in those rare times where he had strong feelings in relation to it, he still ended up just watching it unrolling and fantasizing about doing an interference. After all this time, Soobin was not sure if he still remembered how to do that. 

But Beomgyu needed him to. After getting to know a little tiny bit about him, Soobin knew that fighting for that intense feeling he'd acknowledged was not going to be easy. And what if he can't do that? What if he wasn't enough? What if this ended up being too much for him to handle? He didn't want Beomgyu to struggle any more than he'd already done. He didn't deserve to. He was a good person. Soobin wasn't sure he was the right person to be around him at such a crucial moment.

Choi Soobin was undisturbedly up at 6AM the day after the party, then, because he decided not to attend it. It was a Saturday, but he needed to pay for a day he skipped work to do a test on college. 

Soobin's humour obviously was not the best that morning; it was awful enough to be at the hospital working on weekdays. He thought being there on a Saturday would feel exactly the same as it did on a normal day — who cares so much about what day of the week it is, anyways? —, but from the moment he got there and went to change into his lab coat it didn't because he was the only intern there and the absence of his colleagues kept reminding him of how everyone but him was sleeping at home right now. Amazing. 

When scheduling the date Soobin would be there to pay for his day off, a day where one of the tutors of the interns would be there was specially chosen. That was why he was following the nurse in charge of the emergency room help him get some blood tests done first thing in the morning. At first, Soobin was so focused on a grandma that a grandson took to the hospital at that time of the morning for a blood pressure drop that he didn't even look at the other patients. It wasn't until he was walking back to the lab to deliver the box of collection tubes they'd used, put the syringes in the trash, and get another one for the next patient that Soobin had time to take a look around at the ER situation that morning.

Everyone knows what an emergency room looks like. Let's be a little straightforward here: amidst all the unfamiliar faces of the day's patients was a terrifyingly familiar head of black hair.

Beomgyu was most likely going to be fine. Soobin made sure of this the second time he passed his bed, as he returned with the new syringes for the second blood draw patient: he slept with his body covered up to his neck by the hospital sheet, but one arm was uncomfortably sticking out from the deck where he received saline. No apparent physical injuries. There was no escort-looking person around him, but a bag and some clothes were hanging on the bed stand. It was disturbing to see him there, but probably not a tragedy.

The next patient was a little boy with a blue cap and a lollipop in his mouth who, according to his blond, pantsuited mother, had been passing out every time he got nervous. He had an important event at school that morning or something, but he ended up there because he passed out in the car. Soobin kept thinking that maybe Beomgyu had ended up there because of some fainting too. Just a theory. The first time the tutor called his attention to reach for the syringe refill, Soobin didn't listen. When he went to take the collected blood back to the lab, he tripped over his own feet and nearly dropped everything on the floor.

The little boy's mother glared discontented at him as he bowed apologetically before leaving very quickly.

Soobin muttered curses to himself under his breath as he walked back to the ER. His tutor had already washed his hands in between patients as ordered the procedure and was now standing in front of the next patient's bed. It was Beomgyu. He was now awake and sitting down with his back leaning against the headboard, saying something in response to Soobin's teacher's standard nursing questions.

Soobin did not know what face to make when his and Beomgyu's eyes met. He ended up just giving him a nod to greet him and walking to the nurse's side quietly. Beomgyu's eyes had huge dark circles under it, and smudged makeup was all over his face. He looked sick.

"So she brought me here," the younger was saying to the nurse. Soobin was dying to know what had happened, but couldn't get himself to say anything directly to Beomgyu, let alone ask him to repeat what he was just saying. 

"Thank god your friends were wrong then," Soobin's tutor told him in response, "but alcoholic coma isn't the only thing that can happen when someone drinks too much, so it's not impossible that this was the reason you got sick. Soobin?"

Beomgyu shifted in his seat as Soobin handed the nurse the equipment for the draw. In the midst of explaining the procedure, Soobin's tutor gave Beomgyu a true lecture on alcoholism, limits, youth, health, and everything in between. The older Choi tried with everything in him to pay attention to what he said, as well as his duties as an assistant, and the theories he was formulating in his head with the new information about why Beomgyu ended up there. It was complicated. The other guy didn't say anything the entire time, just nodded constantly and apologized to the nurse, which earned him an "apologize to yourself, not me!".

When the nurse found a vein in the patient's arm and went to insert the syringe, Beomgyu turned away and closed his eyes tightly. It was a common sight around there — many patients are afraid of needles and prefer not to look — but for some reason Soobin felt really bad at that moment. Something about that made him feel vulnerability in Beomgyu, both at that very moment and in everything else.

He suddenly realized that perhaps his presence would have been useful to stop the youngest from drinking as if he didn't have just two kidneys to take care of everything the night before if he had gone to the party, and the guilt fell on him like the cloaks that weigh tons on Dante's Inferno.

There were no more blood draw patients around now, so Soobin and the professor went to deliver the collection tubes to the lab together.

"Go talk to someone to change Choi Beomgyu's saline for glucose", the nurse asked as he took the box with the tubes from Soobin's hands. "Follow them to see how it's done."

Soobin nodded and bowed.

"Sorry for the question, professor, but why glucose? I couldn't hear the explanation of what happened to him."

"Too much drinking. He had a short faint in the middle of a party and his friends, all drunk around him, thought it was an alcoholic coma and somehow managed to get him here. Asked an older sister for help if I'm not wrong. Save other questions for later, he's been receiving a useless serum for hours already." The nurse gestured for Soobin to walk away, and he did so in a hurry.

When Soobin and another nurse returned to change the serum, Beomgyu was already asleep again. After that start to the day in the emergency room, Soobin spent the rest of his time running to get boxes of medicine from the hospital pharmacy, but his mind never left the hairy boy sleeping with no companion in sight and waiting for the result of a blood test that would probably come out scary.

Soobin's brain worked hard that morning, but it's not like a lot of productive stuff came out as a result. All he could think about was the horror of alcohol Beomgyu always drank and no one had realized the fact that it was a problem, not even himself. Soobin must have gone to the party. He would have at least tried to do something. It was a relief that Beomgyu's friends were around and worried even though they didn't quite understand what was happening, but the image of the youngest getting sick and falling into the middle of a crowd didn't fail to break his heart.

At one point in the morning Soobin started to laugh at himself. Beomgyu would be fine. Everyone drinks like crazy at college parties and no one ever died. Since when did how much that boy drank or did not drink interested him?

And then it was complicated because apparently it really mattered to him. Remembering that Beomgyu was in that same hospital a few floors away as a patient remained a nuisance.

Soobin's shift ended at noon. Instead of leaving the hospital, he returned to the ER in his everyday clothes and went after Beomgyu.

There was no big epiphany-like reason for it. Actually, there was not even much thought spent on the matter; it just felt obvious that Soobin should go look for the younger when he had the time. Yeonjun would be proud, probably, after all that go-live-your-life discourse of the other day. (Yeonjun possibly wasn't as wrong as Soobin tried to make it look like, but that is a subject for another moment.) 

Beomgyu was sitting in bed wearing jeans and an overcoat when Soobin saw him. He had washed his face, too. On his lap laid the bag that was hanging on the bed earlier, most likely with the party clothes he was wearing before inside it, and he was talking to a nurse. His expression was somehow relaxed now, so Soobin imagined it was a good sign. Beomgyu also had a paper on his hands. The blood test results. 

When their eyes met, Beomgyu waved loosely, a light smirk on his face. That was the assurance Soobin needed to stop being nervous. He didn't even realise he was nervous until that moment, when he wasn't anymore. 

"Hi," he said quietly as he stopped in front of the bed. Beomgyu gave him another small smile with raised eyebrows and the nurse bowed slightly towards him. She explained a few more things and then said goodbye.

Beomgyu got to his feet and turned towards Soobin.

"Hi," he repeated.

The two chuckled softly.

"Want to go have lunch?"

Beomgyu was for sure looking a lot better, but it did not take Soobin ten entire minutes to observe he was still very tired and sore. Maybe a little groggy too; his abilities to perceive the outside world still didn't seem to have fully returned, so Soobin had to warn him at all times when to watch out for something he might trip over or someone asking for permission to pass.

They walked down the street from the hospital to a restaurant where Soobin would go for lunch every now and then when he had free time after leaving work. Though a little out of sorts, Beomgyu spent the entire time chatting and joking, and it was a relief to see that his mood seemed as good as ever.

The mystery was finally solved: Beomgyu told him everything on the way. He had had a sudden illness and passed out at the party the day before. Luckily his friends, even if they were drunk, were around, and they were so worried that they swore it was an alcoholic coma and managed to call Beomgyu's sister and make her take him to the hospital. He woke up when he was in the car with her, Hyunjin and Kai. The two had gone home soon after as they didn't have much to collaborate as wasted as they were, but Yerin stayed with Beomgyu until the morning, when he insisted he was fine and she should go to work. It was she who had brought the clothes he wore now too; it was starting to get a little hot for coats and jackets, but there weren't many options for Beomgyu's clothes at his sister's house.

Soobin felt somehow relieved to know he didn’t go through all that alone but, in general, still felt as bad as he did before. 

“Now, please,” said Beomgyu while they got to sit at a table close to the windows at the restaurant, “if you feel the slightest bit sorry for me, let's skip the lecture. I've had to hear too much from Hyuka, from Yerin, from all the doctors... When I got my phone in my hands, I wanted to uninstall KakaoTalk.” He took off his overcoat and placed it on the back of the chair. He was wearing a white turtleneck blouse underneath; it was interesting to see Beomgyu wearing white.

“You deserve it, though,” Soobin responded. “That was some serious shit. I can’t believe they even discharged you so soon; it would normally take the rest of the day.” 

“Hyuka sent me an audio as soon as he woke up.” Beomgyu took his phone out of his pocket and started to look for something in there, “he was so pissed off. You don’t understand. It was ridiculous because he’s Hyuka, and he was so sleepy and hungover he couldn’t even speak properly but it scared the shit out of me. I promised him I’m not drinking anything alcoholic until my birthday next year.” He looked up at Soobin, who observed him with the menu opened on his hands. “Guess that kinda solves it all right?” He opened up an awkward smile. “I swear it won’t happen again.” 

Soobin nodded in acknowledgement.

“I’m glad Huening already did it for me,” he admitted. “Didn’t know how I was going to lecture you while I still feel kinda bad for seeing you there.” 

Beomgyu laughed heartily, nodding, “Forget it, it's fine. I'm already cured. Let’s listen to Hyuka’s voice message now, I’m not kidding, it’s hilarious.” 

If Soobin was asked to define it in just one word, it would be “comfortable” without any doubt. 

They listened to Huening’s morning voice messages, laughed out loud and even sent him a couple texts clowning him. He seemed relieved they were together. Soobin helped Beomgyu choose a healthy meal, and they both ordered natural juice made of their favorite fruits (watermelon and orange). Beomgyu told him about how Yeonjun fell on a boy's feet on the dance floor the day before, and Soobin had a fit of laughter after telling him about the one-sided crush that Yeonjun had always had in said guy. They commented on the title reveal of a new book from a series they both liked. Soobin completely forgot the school assignments he had waiting for him at home. 

Both of them parted ways with an easy smile on their faces. During the rest of the day, Soobin kept thinking about how that afternoon felt like the beginning of something. 

Days started to pile up one after another as if that was nothing. 

Soobin had been ridiculously busy: in between classes, the internship, study sessions at home, Yeonjun's dramas, Huening's new inventions every other day and Choi Beomgyu's existence, it was pretty difficult to find some time for himself. 

A drastically big part of it was Beomgyu's fault only, as he had, since the hospital day, permanently turned into a part of Soobin's life. 

He was everywhere now, and that's not a complaint. Soobin would see him when he arrived at the campus, wearing his black ripped jeans and his jackets and looking for him with a smile on his face just because he wanted to talk a little before they both went to their classes. He would see Beomgyu again when he got out of a class, then, inviting him to go grab something to eat even though lunchtime had already passed because he was suddenly hungry in the middle of the afternoon. He would see Beomgyu at his and Huening's room every once in a while, just chilling on his bed when Soobin and Kai would stop by before heading off somewhere, or doing his make-up on the tiny mirror they had before a party (which he now attended to with a 0 alcohol politic), or walking from side to side in the little space they had and gesticulating and talking loudly in the rare opportunities Soobin would agree to just hang out there for a while. Soobin would see Beomgyu in his message notifications, always sending him a funny meme he just saw or telling him about something interesting that had just happened or sending him gold-worthy links to files on Google Docs with the drafts for his fic's new chapter. 

Soobin would see Beomgyu when they accidentally met each other on campus and would start to talk and walk until they were at an area no one ever went to and they could steal kisses from each other in peace. He would see Beomgyu blushing even without actually seeing him in front of him when he would send him those messages talking of creative ideas of places they could go or restaurants they could try — Soobin would agree and they would work on all that act of pretending they were interested in the program instead of just being on the other's presence. Soobin would see him smiling under the moonlight in the rare parties he would attend, and where he and Beomgyu would always end up sneaking from to make up on the first corner they found. 

Up to now, they never talked about it. 

It was just natural: they would meet and then talk and at some point Soobin would feel the urge to kiss Beomgyu or vice versa and so they would kiss. And then they would go back to talking and laughing and teasing each other and Soobin always felt so comfortable in that little bubble they would build that he never felt the necessity to sit down and talk it through. He knew Beomgyu wasn't seeing anyone else, but they weren't exactly dating, either. To keep it a secret was a mute agreement. 

Soobin wasn't exactly bothered by any of these things, to be honest. That's exactly how he felt: like it was happening naturally. He was a quiet person and would never have the need to display his relationship to the world or something, so to let Beomgyu have his time was fine by him. The only thing that would change in Soobin's ideal world was that he would tell Yeonjun and Kai about it. (Both because he wanted to and because Yeonjun was starting to be suspicious of his attempts to change the subject when he asked how things were going with Beomgyu.) To call Beomgyu his boyfriend would also be great, but not a life-or-death urge. Soobin was just fine with whatever was better for him. 

More than anything, was the solid fact that Beomgyu had great issues with his sexuality. He obviously never said that, but Soobin couldn't have a different posture than to be sure of it at that point. That was also probably the reason he had never talked explicitly about what they had. He was way different than Soobin, so it felt like he would talk about it all the time if he was comfortable doing so. 

But it was fine. Soobin's worst nightmare was to end up rushing Beomgyu's process of acceptance. It wasn't on his hands to do anything about it other than give him space to go through it. To have someone during those times probably wasn't ideal, and Soobin didn't want to make it more difficult than it naturally was. 

In other words, everything worked to get their relationship right where it was now. There's no way to explain it any further than this.

“There’s no way to explain it any further than this,” was also exactly what Soobin was telling Beomgyu, an impatient tone in his voice, as they walked through a street Soobin could’ve sworn he had never been to before. 

“Okay, but…” Beomgyu’s facial expression was the exact same as the one he would make if his brain was about to explode. It kind of was, but metaphorically. He tried to gesticulate, his hands not really doing much in front of his body as he looked for a way to express himself. “I really want to understand it, okay?” He let out a nervous laugh. “But it makes no fucking sense! You can stop kidding me now.” 

“I’m telling you the truth!” Soobin exclaimed, offended. He almost stopped walking just to look at Beomgyu’s eyes as he said the most seriously he could: “Jinx kills her two brothers and their adoptive father on the series. It’s all over the internet, how come you still didn’t know? Vi’s the only one who’s left.” 

“But why would she do that?”

“I told you it was an accident!” 

Soobin looked at Beomgyu. He was wearing a yellow pair of all-stars that strongly stood out when put together with his black jeans and shirt. His hair was a little messy from the wind and he was carrying his backpack on his shoulder and a cup of milkshake he had bought on the way on his right hand.

They were on their way to their university to meet with some of Beomgyu’s friends, right now using that as an excuse to make the walk they were taking together a little longer. As their classes for today were over, they decided to go around in the city for a while before they both took their buses, but Beomgyu got a call from one of his friends inviting him to hang out. 

Soobin normally wouldn’t, but Beomgyu was always talking about how much he wanted his friends to meet him, and he felt like it was time to agree. So he did.

“Are you, perhaps, dumb?” Soobin asked after staring at Beomgyu with a shocked face for a few seconds. 

The younger one hit him on the arm and kept walking. 

“I’m not going to watch that show,” Beomgyu said, “it’s too much suffering for me.”

"You don't even know the worst of it yet." 

"And you mean to convince me with this information?"  

"Ah, come on!" Soobin let out a frustrated breath, "it's really good. I can't believe you're doing this to me." 

"Alright, alright, I'll watch it. The sacrifices we make for love!" Beomgyu hugged Soobin from the side, burying his face in his dramatic scarf-covered neck and making Soobin's loud laugh echo down the empty street.

Soobin got a new unexpected glimpse of Beomgyu's life that day when they met his friends. 

He had understood that the meeting point would be their university, but he didn't expect Beomgyu to lead him inside the campus and that there would be no one waiting in front of or near the entrance when the two arrived. It turned out that they were planning to hang out on campus, in a room with sofas and refrigerators and a pool table and phrases from books written on the wall that the Letters course had as its space for socializing. Soobin had never seen anything like it among his colleagues from the health area.

Soobin had already met quite a few of Beomgyu's friends in random situations since they'd first met, but seeing them all gathered there, drinking the wine they had collected together to buy and talking about teachers and experiences they had in common, in their spectrum, it was almost like meeting them all again for the first time. Beomgyu included. All Soobin did was sit on the corner of a sofa next to Beomgyu and watch the conversations, but some of them were so agitated and full of energy that that alone tired him. It was almost a meeting between several Yeonjuns.

They talked a lot about their major in general too, and Soobin got himself paying close attention to the parts of the conversations that brought information about it. From what he could get, the list of books they read for literature classes was dreamlike . Soobin would be obliged to interview Beomgyu on what exactly he had read in his first semester so far, with details. A lot of them were crazy passionate about it, and heated discussions were created out of opposite opinions on titles or authors all the time. Apparently, some of them liked to write their own pieces too, like Beomgyu. Soobin laughed quietly to himself when he thought they were like the real-life version of the Dead Poets' Society. 

Beomgyu seemed to get along well with everyone that was present; he was one of those who talked and laughed the most, but he never ignored Soobin. He was aware of how Soobin was more an observer than a talker when it came to group conversations, but would turn to look at him from time to time to quietly ask his opinion on something, or to explain some inside joke or situation they would comment about he had no way to know of. To everyone around them, he was just Beomgyu's "friend Soobin from nursing" ( "yes, another one" "he's not my roommate, that's HueningKai") , but the younger had a personality clingy enough to spend the entire time crossing arms with Soobin without it feeling any abnormal. It felt nice. To kind of be brought directly inside his life like that, and at the same time be acknowledged as another part as valid as it. 

It was a really great afternoon. 

The next day, when thinking back to it, Soobin felt bad. 

He never talked about it to anyone so he wouldn't know if this was something everyone did or it was just him but, ever since he was a child, Soobin has gotten an impression that the worst things always happened right after the best ones. Like he would fall over and scrape every part of his body after spending a whole day playing with his cousins and dedicating everything he had in him to having fun. He would lose his new box of crayons right after he got a ridiculously beautiful new coloring book.

His mom would go to the hospital after saying goodbye to him with a smile on his face and several kisses and promises that as soon as his little brothers were born his father would call his grandparents, at whose house he would stay, and they would be the first to know. And then his little brothers would be born and Soobin would be the happiest in the world when meeting them, but then his mother would start to look more tired and pale every time he would get to visit her at the hospital and the news that she was sick would meet his ears just as he was having the happiest time of his life playing with the twins, now staying with him at their grandparents'.

And from the moment he became aware of that bad news, Soobin would look back and his happy moments would make him feel even worse. Just minutes ago I was playing and running around happily, how did that happen? We were ready to be the happiest family in the world. How did this happen?

Soobin was a dramatic child, but he genuinely felt a lot. 

Maybe he was still a child. 

When that patient's heart stopped beating and the heart rate monitor's traumatizing sound reached his ears, Soobin felt like it was just yesterday he had nightmares with this same exact sound every night. He had never heard it outside of TV until now; his mother was safe at home despite all the nightmares he had with it back then. But it hurt so much he felt like a child again, lost right in front of something he wasn't ready to face. 

Soobin wasn't at all needed in that hospital room after the patient died — a grandmother with a dedicated daughter he always met at the hall ever since he started working there, and who always greeted him politely even though he had never done anything remarkable to be remembered by her —, so he ran to the bathroom before someone had the chance to see him and ask him to do something. 

There, Soobin looked at his own reflection in the mirror and did nothing. His hair was sweaty and gluing to his forehead, his lab coat was begging to be washed and his dark circles were never so deep. He remembered how happy he was yesterday and wondered what went wrong for him to be feeling so bad a day later. Then, he felt bad for even thinking of himself in a moment like that. Maybe he wasn't as kind as people used to imagine. 

Soobin looked down at his hands. He recalled the grandmother's hands. When he accompanied his tutor on a visit to her room before, Soobin remembered paying attention to her hands. They were much thicker and more wrinkled than his, just like most grandparents' hands. She was sleeping when Soobin visited and he didn't have much in his memory about her, but it hurt too much he couldn't even imagine going through something like this when it is someone you're attached to. 

He could never imagine how that daughter would feel when they called her to give the news. She was in her early forties and had a little daughter she brought with her sometimes to visit grandma, but came to the hospital mostly alone. Her mother had been sick for a while, so she knew a lot of people who worked at the hospital; she was decided to know by memory the biggest number of names possible, and that was the reason she knew Soobin. They talked a little the day he visited the grandma; she was curious because she had never seen him there before. What was she going to do now? How was she going to face all those people? How was she going to handle the amount of memories in there she had built? What would she do without her mother? How would the granddaughter handle it? 

Soobin wanted to throw up. 

A considerable part of his internship was spent in the emergency room, but it wouldn't be considered surprising that Soobin hadn't yet seen anyone die. He spent very little time with each patient, and when something was serious, they were transferred to the assigned sectors as quickly as possible. The ER was a passing place. People he saw there died, but not in front of him. That way it was easier to pretend it wasn't real.

But not today. Not like that. Not when the crocheted bag the patient's daughter always carried was still resting on the floor beside her bed, full of skeins of yarn that the old lady was probably spending her time turning into something new. Not when his professor had asked him for a case report on that patient, and Soobin had written about the latest exam results being promising. Not when he couldn't forget that the patients he saw in the hospital were as human as he was. Too real.

Soobin faked a stomachache (which wasn't even that fake) and managed to get himself released for the rest of the morning.

He didn't pay much attention to it at first. When Soobin got home, all he could think about was hiding in between his blankets and his cozy mattress and pretending he was a part of that corner of his room rather than a human being. That is exactly what he did. He got changed and didn't even grab anything to eat before he collapsed into bed, falling asleep in the hope that the fatigue and the existence of the space around him would take care of deleting him from the universe.

Soobin could not have paid attention to his phone in that condition in any circumstance. He didn't blame himself. Who could? 

He texted Beomgyu later that afternoon, sitting lazily in front of his desk with the light of his laptop illuminating his face with the homework of the day of school he had missed. Soobin and Beomgyu, opposite to those first conversations back then, had gotten quite used to never saying much through text messages. They saw each other often enough not to need it a lot. All they would do would be share concrete information like where are you and at what time are we meeting or I'll be half an hour late ; if much, when it was important, comment in advance about something they would discuss more in detail later. 

Beomgyu personally preferred calling over text ("typing out what I want to say takes too much time! I think way faster than I type, it's uncomfortable", he would argue). Soobin hated phone calls, so that's how they ended up adjusting to each other's preferences.

The point is: when Beomgyu didn't reply, Soobin did not find it strange. It was, in a way, normal. 

Thinking back to it now, Beomgyu would probably reply right away even if they were going to see each other in five minutes if he received a text from Soobin saying that "I saw someone die for the first time today" . Beomgyu wasn't stupid. Neither did he have a cold heart. He would worry. 

But he also didn't have his read receipts active, so he could just be busy. Soobin wasn't the type to get paranoid over something like that. 

The clock kept ticking and Soobin couldn't find it in himself to go on with his day as if nothing had happened. 

He kept thinking about how that was his future. 

About how he was going to see people dying all the time, almost as a part of his routine, everytime he and those around him failed with their work or just got a patient with a problem science couldn't solve. About how he was going to go everyday work in a place people went to and then never left. 

About how he, too, was going to die someday, be it in a bed like the patients or in an accident or god knows where and he would see the world closing around him and lose his conscience and never get it back. Just… stop existing. 

That grandmother loved her daughter as much as her daughter loved her, but there was nothing left now. Her brain stopped working. There were no chemical reactions right now; no more feelings. What would that feel like? 

Idiot, that didn't feel like anything. She was dead. How can you feel anything when you die? 

18:56  soobin: i saw someone die for the first time today

02:34  soobin: i dont think i can keep working on a place like that

"I thought he was with you." 

HueningKai did not look too well that day. 

To be fair, most people in their social bubble didn’t. Semester was starting to tighten now, with assignments being thrown at students’ faces everyday and the test dates that teachers scheduled and seemed so far in the first week of classes suddenly becoming next week or the day after tomorrow or today. No one had much time to spend in front of the mirror doing makeup or fixing bad hair day problems and it was rare to see someone without dark circles. It's the price you pay for a degree. Soobin himself wasn’t all that different. 

Huening’s problem, nonetheless, was nothing like that. Actually, scratch that; he did have all those end-of-semester issues. On top of that, however, was the fact that he hadn’t seen or heard from his roommate in the last two days. 

“Why would he be with me?” Soobin responded, a little bit too overwhelmed to say anything productive at all. Before Huening could open his mouth to say that they’ve gotten so much closer these days he was already talking again: “You should’ve asked me at least.” 

Huening sighed heavily. He sat down at a bench that happened to be close to them and took his backpack off his shoulders to grab a water bottle. He spilled it all over his wrists before Soobin was able to ask for a sip. They were at the park and it was a quite hot Sunday afternoon, so water right now would be a highly requested product even if they weren’t as nervous. 

“Did you talk to him on the weekend?” Huening wanted to know. 

He had already told Soobin about how the last time he had seen Beomgyu was Friday morning when they both went to campus together. Their classes finished at different times and when Huening got home Beomgyu’s backpack was already there so he just thought he had gone out somewhere again. Huening himself wasn’t home the entire day yesterday so they maybe were just missing one another.

But it was almost 5PM on Sunday and Beomgyu’s social media profiles were all untouched since Thursday and it was becoming a reason to worry. 

“I sent him some texts on Friday but he didn’t reply. I thought he was just busy," said Soobin.

He was starting to get worried too. The grocery bags he was carrying were starting to weigh more than they were supposed to in his hands. When Huening called him wanting to meet up and he agreed just because he was already out doing groceries, that was not what Soobin expected to find.

Where could Beomgyu be? What could have happened to him… What could he have done? 

“I just wish he didn’t do anything dumb,” said Huening as he typed furiously on his phone. Soobin didn’t need to take a look to know he was texting everyone that could possibly be with Beomgyu. 

Seeing Huening worry about the exact same thing as he did made Soobin feel even sicker. He perceived Beomgyu as someone so sensible and so sentimental and so impulsive and that was what made him worry. But he knew Huening knew him even better, so there were things he could see that Soobin couldn't. If Soobin brought up something like this and Huening waved it off, saying not to worry, Soobin wouldn't worry either.

But Huening being as preoccupied as him didn't feel like a good sign. 

Sometimes it doesn’t feel good to be right. 

Soobin sat down by Huening’s side. He rested the grocery bags on the grass ground. 

He wondered if he wasn't overreacting; he wondered if he wasn't underreacting. Up to what Soobin knew, Beomgyu could be just sleeping in a friend's house or kidnapped with his hands tied on his back.

“Nothing bad happened, right? As far as you know?” 

Huening took a deep breath, “no. As far as I know. But his family has so much shit going on we can never be sure.” 

He stood up and looked at Soobin, putting his backpack over his shoulder again.

“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do: I’ll go back to the dorms in case he shows up there. I texted lots of people, it's impossible that no one won't know anything about him, but we have to wait for them to respond. Let's keep trying to talk to him, and if you have any ideas let me know.” He sighed. “I think that's it for now. If he doesn't show any signs of life by tomorrow, I'll start to get worried about worse stuff, and you'll go to the police station with me, hyung, because I'm a child and I can't." He made a crying face.

"Of course I'll go with you," Soobin assured. "But we won't need to." He stood up too, picking up the grocery bags back from the floor. "Have you tried talking to anyone in his family?"

"Not yet." Huening let out a grunt of discomfort as they started walking together while their paths were still in the same direction. He was just like that, he had to express everything out loud even if he couldn't be in words. "I want to text his mother, but I'm afraid he won't be there and she'll end up freaking out more than us. Then there's going to be two problems."

"And what about his sister?" 

"I have her number, but it's in my old phone. I'll talk to her as soon as I get home."

Huening shook the new device in his hand. He had decided to switch from Android to iOS for the first time in his life and had spent the last week almost incommunicable because he couldn't learn how to use the phone. It was understandable that he still hadn't learned to sync contacts.

"You should have talked to her first thing," Soobin said. A wave of relief passed through him for an instant; if there was still a chance that Beomgyu was with his sister, there was still a chance that nothing bad had happened.

"I forgot, okay? I panicked!"

"It's okay. We already know that you just don't forget your head because it's stuck to your neck."

Huening laughed lightly. Apparently the possibility of Beomgyu being with his sister had also reassured him.

They said their goodbyes with a pact to text each other immediately if they had any news. 

Thankfully, Soobin got home to a bunch of text messages with updates from Huening. 

18:09  armadillo boy: i called yerin noona

18:09  armadillo boy: was too anxious to just send a text

18:10  armadillo boy: thank god, beomgyus there 

18:10  armadillo boy: she said hes not feeling that well but shes taking care of it. i asked her if anything specific happened and she said no

18:10  armadillo boy: but idk… she told me he was there since friday, right, so i asked if he was a little better already. she said yes but it didn't feel like an honest response 

18:10  armadillo boy: should I be worried

18:22  soobin: lets take a moment to just be grateful we found him 

18:22  soobin: im sure he'll be fine huening!! the worst has already passed

18:23  soobin: ask her to send updates

18:25  armadillo boy: i hope so, hyung 

18:25  armadillo boy: will ask her!

The funny part, however, was that Soobin was the one reassuring Huening as if he himself wasn’t already spiraling over what could’ve happened to Beomgyu. 

He kept thinking without a single pause and he couldn't find any reason why he didn't think of checking on Beomgyu even once for the entire weekend. He felt bad for just sending him messages talking about himself without considering that Beomgyu maybe was having a bad day too. 

Soobin opened his chat with Beomgyu and looked at the texts he sent. Maybe Beomgyu was feeling lonely. Someone coming to talk about their own problems like that would only make it worse. He considered sending more texts now apologizing and making sure the younger knew he could come to Soobin if he ever needed anything, but was too afraid to just end up bothering him more. 

He then wondered if he himself wasn’t the problem. What if Beomgyu was sad because of something he did? Or didn't? Maybe Soobin was getting everything wrong. Maybe Beomgyu did not even like him the way he thought he did, and now didn’t know how to tell him that. Maybe all the things Soobin noticed about him that made him think he understood what Beomgyu felt were wrong. Maybe Soobin was just making things up without even realizing it because he liked Beomgyu too much. Maybe Beomgyu just treated him the same way he treated all his friends. Soobin could’ve ruined even their friendship with his delusion. 

As if he was the center of the universe. Beomgyu for sure had more important things to worry about than his friend Choi Soobin. He probably, I don’t know, did not even realise Soobin’s absence. They didn’t even talk that much and Beomgyu had so many friends to talk to and… 

Soobin took a pill and put himself to sleep out of conscience. Just to stop this hell you just saw above. At least for a couple hours. 

The week dragged on.

Soobin had always thought he counted down the hours to get out of the stage early. Well, it's true that he did, but it was nothing compared to the way things turned out after that Friday.

The hands of the clock moved so slowly that they might have needed the help of a cane. Soobin kept looking at all the patients and wondering if their ending would be happy or sad. Just on Monday, he broke the record for the most times a person can check the time within five minutes.

Sometimes he wondered what Beomgyu's friends and colleagues he'd met the week before were doing now. Some were school interns and had hilarious and adorable stories from their little students to tell. Others were members of researches he didn't even know existed about books and authors that Soobin would give his life to be a part of.

Now that a little time without new major events had passed, Soobin's brain had gotten everything it needed to get as many thoughts out of it as possible on a single subject. A curious thing that had crossed his mind, one day as he was carrying a box of syringes to another floor of the hospital, was that it was very unfair that some people had such fun things to call a profession while he got the bad part. With the cries of pain from patients in the ER and the cries of mothers with sick children and that feeling that something very bad was about to happen that always followed him while he was in the hospital.

Then he remembered Beomgyu. And he felt bad again because he still hadn't shown up. And it was already Monday.

Tuesday.

Wednesday.

And Soobin had spent all that time unable to relax.

Soobin was home earlier than normal on Wednesday afternoon just because of a test he had tomorrow. The test would take place in a practical class and the only grade he was guaranteed to get was zero, so he decided to skip the last class of the day to get home earlier and have more time to study.

The "skipping classes to study" thing is very real in college , he was thinking about the bus. And it wasn't beautiful. It was a torment.

It was more than unexpected to finish off the short walk from the bus stop to his house with the sight of a tall dark-haired boy standing in front of the gate.

Beomgyu had a grey hoodie on with the hood joining his hair on covering his face and a headset on top of the other two; he was, also, looking down and standing sideways in a way Soobin couldn't ever get to see his face from where he was. Soobin would, yet, recognise him from a hundred miles away. 

"I can't believe you're here" was the first thing that left Soobin's mouth. He walked a few more steps until he was standing face to face with Beomgyu. "You literally drove me crazy these last few days, do you know that?" 

As relief ran across Soobin’s veins to finally see Beomgyu safe and sound in front of him, a new wave of worries already took place. Him being there out of nowhere after all the days they had no news of him at all couldn’t mean anything good. 

Beomgyu just then looked up to meet Soobin’s eyes, taking the headset off to rest on his neck at the same time. Soobin wasn’t expecting him to look happy or even healthy, but still couldn’t get to feel any good about what he saw.

Beomgyu didn’t look tired: he looked exhausted . Excluding the parties where he wore make-up, Soobin did not remember seeing him without dark circles under his eyes. Today, however, it was so bad anyone would assume the boy had spent an entire week without dozing off even once. A couple pimples were covering his formerly perfect forehead skin and, looking carefully, his hair’s roots were greasy from probably two or three days without meeting water and shampoo. 

God. Would things ever feel okay? 

“You caught me red-handed,” said Beomgyu with a good-humoured voice, in a tone that almost succeeded at hiding his nervousness. “Was debating on ringing the bell or giving up and pretending I never showed up here.” 

“Let’s… Let’s get inside first,” Soobin said robotically. Perhaps it really was too early to feel relieved. 

Soobin took his keys out of his pocket. They crossed the yard and got into the house in silence. No one was home in a time like that; his parents were at work and the twins stayed at daycare during business hours. Beomgyu’s fingers clinged roughly to his backpack’s handle. He was so nervous he didn’t even take the time to look around even when he had never been at Soobin’s house before. 

No way something good was ever going to come from a situation like that. 

Binsoo came running from wherever he was before in Soobin’s direction when he opened the front door and threw himself into him, licking every tiny bit of skin he saw and trying to stand on the hind legs and support the front legs on his owner's body. The pet’s presence broke a little of that heavy atmosphere. 

“I can’t believe I’m meeting your dog,” said Beomgyu with amusement. 

“You can pet him if you want to,” Soobin offered, taking out his own hand from the dog’s furry head. 

Beomgyu hesitantly placed his hand on top of Binsoo’s head. He let out a little scream when Binsoo turned into his direction and tried to lick his wrist. A tender smile adorned his face when he looked for Soobin’s eyes after that, and they both started to laugh affectionately. 

“Hold on a little, big boy, we’re just meeting!” he said playfully as Binsoo got excited at the caresses and started to lean so much weight onto him he could fall on his butt. And to Soobin, “is he always this restless?” 

Soobin shook his head. “You haven't seen anything yet.” 

Tension started to build back up on their shoulders after Binsoo left the humans to play with his toys and they sat on the living room couch to talk. 

They had steamy teacups on their hands; Soobin had offered to prepare it after he locked the front door while Beomgyu played with Binsoo a little bit more. Would also be good to have something to look at other than the other boy’s face. 

“So… are you back from your sister’s place now?” 

"I guess so." Beomgyu shrugged. He buried his face onto the teacup for a long second. "The decision kind of depends on how this right now ends up turning out." 

"Oh," Soobin chuckled, adjusting himself on his seat. Too much frankness for him to handle. "If you say it like this I’'ll start to feel all important." 

"Oh, please," retorted Beomgyu in a more serious tone. "You know how important you are." 

Soobin didn't see that coming. He made a face that probably told Beomgyu without words that actually, no, I have no idea of how important I really am.

Beomgyu did catch what Soobin meant without him saying it, because he then let out a nervous chuckle and turned his face down. He stared at the fuming tea as he took a deep breath.

“Sorry,” he managed, looking back up at Soobin. “It just sounded like I came here to argue with you when I actually want to confess.” 

Oh. 

Soobin also definitely did not see that coming. 

“I…” Beomgyu started. “I don’t know how to organize all the information I want you to know right now, I also did not really prepare because thinking of actually doing it was making me even more anxious so I’m sorry if it gets confusing. You can just ask me if it does. I’m sorry.” He took a sip of the tea and grimaced when the hot liquid met his tongue. He put the teacup on the center table and took another breath, shorter this time, to steady himself before continuing. “So, I’m not sure if it makes sense to place this information here like this, but just to give you a little context, I had a little breakdown this last week because of you. I mean, not you, but…” Beomgyu made a vague gesture sinalizing both of them, “us.” 

Soobin nodded. Oh my fucking God. This was happening too fast. 

“What I mean is: there’s no problem with you. Or with whatever we have. It’s just that, I’m sure you’ve noticed it already, but it’s not like we can say I’m out. If you know what I mean.” 

Soobin opened his mouth to talk. Beomgyu didn’t need to be out if he didn’t want to. He did not say anything, though, because the younger hurried to shake his head and both his hands in front of him and then say “please let me finish it first.” 

So Soobin let him do it. 

Beomgyu cleared his throat. “I promised myself I would talk clearly so, what I mean is, I don’t even know what I am. Like, sexuality-wise. I know I like you and I know I’ve liked other boys before you and I know I like girls and I’ve liked other girls before but this is not an actual answer. I did not find the word for it yet, I guess.” 

“You don’t need to.” Scratch that. Soobin needed to say it. 

“I know I don’t. That’s not the point. I mean. Maybe that’s a problem too, but…” To Soobin shaking his head, trying to make Beomgyu understand he did not need to name his sexuality if he was not sure, Beomgyu chuckled a little under his breath. “Okay. That’s not a problem. Anyways . The problem isn’t not knowing but not accepting . It’s not that I have a problem with boys liking boys or girls liking girls or people or…” He grabbed the teacup back and took another sip. “I’m rambling.” 

“I get it.” Soobin tried to help. “It’s just not easy at first. It’s hard to handle who we are.”

Beomgyu nodded.

“It is.” He held the teacup in his hands that time. “So I was still kind of in denial when I met you. Well, totally in denial. Living like it didn’t even exist. Then you came in and everything happened so fast and this just held me by the neck and obliged me to do something about it, and I almost went crazy. Because I wanted to be with you but I was not sure I was okay with what that meant.” He made a pause. “I’m sure you kind of know it by now. The way you just adjusted to my way of doing things… You didn’t even tell anyone.” 

Beomgyu looked like he expected Soobin to say something about it, so he murmured: “I knew you weren’t ready.” 

A sad smile adorned Beomgyu’s lips. He looked hurt, tender, grateful. 

“I’m sorry. And thank you. Sorry, I’ll just keep going before I get too sentimental. I still have things to say.” They both chuckled. “So we had all that and it for sure made a great impact in the way I was dealing with who I was, but… I don’t know. At the same time, we never talked about it, so I kept pushing the thought out of my head whenever I could using all the dumb things you can think of as excuses. But all my insecurities kept piling up like a snowball and last Friday I broke down. Just out of overthinking.” 

Another sip of tea. Soobin’s cup was already cool in his hands and he had completely forgotten its existence. 

“So I talked to my noona a lot about it these last few days. I also thought a lot. It was really difficult to tell her about this stuff, and I figured we started all this without putting any of it into words and I feel like it made it less concrete in my mind. At least enough for me to be able to ignore the weight of reality, y’know? So I feel like doing it — confessing, I mean — will help me feel like it is more real. Like, getting back to that step we missed. Does that make sense?” 

“It does.” 

Soobin was glad he didn’t need to talk a lot. His voice was shaking.

“So. Just to make it clear…” Beomgyu played with a pillow cover with the hand that wasn't holding the cup, and his eyes laid on everything around them in the room but Soobin. “This is really important. And difficult. I’m doing it because I don’t want to deny it anymore. I want to overcome this. I want to be with you like a normal couple. I want to stop feeling there’s something wrong with me.” 

Soobin did his best to nod. Fucking God, he was so nervous. He felt like he could throw up on Beomgyu’s feet as soon as he tried to move a muscle. 

“So this is my first step out. Out of this cage. Maybe not to the entire world, but at least for you and me. At first. For myself.” 

Beomgyu took another deep breath. 

“So. I like you, Soobin. Choi Soobin. I like you. Fuck, maybe I should just skip that and just say I love you already. Just the fact that you exist already hurts. I like you so much it hurts. Knowing that you are a real human being and that all these amazing things you say to me are thoughts that you actually have in your head, and that you are somewhere in the world existing and breathing and thinking whenever I think of you, and that it couldn't have been all in my head… It's bizarre. You are bizarre. Okay, that wasn’t as romantic as it sounded in my head.” He chuckled. “But in a good way. You’re unreal, Soobin. Everything I get to learn about you makes me feel like I’m about to explode because there’s no fucking way someone like this exists. I don’t even know what to do with it. I just stand there looking at you or thinking of you and I want to start to run and yell all my lungs out. And I want to know so much more. Every little thing about you, like really stupid things like the mole I found in your hand or the way your’re ticklish on the neck makes me feel like I’m going to combust and I still want more. It never feels enough. I want to know you whole. Every tiny little thingy about you. As if I could handle it!” 

Beomgyu takes a second to run his free hand through his hair, look at the ceiling and think, and then he keeps going. 

“And the way you are so caring about me. Ever since the very first day. You’re so kind. How can someone be like that? You didn’t tell anyone about what drunk me said to you that day. You threw yourself in the middle of a party fight to rescue me even when I’m sure it felt like the worst thing that could ever happen to you. You have been so patient about all this shit I have going on when you could just give up on me and be with someone less complicated. Thinking about it just makes me freak out more because you're just so!, and I feel so much I feel like I'm just going to drown in myself.” He drank all the remaining tea, now cold, at once. 

They both just stayed in silence for a whole thirty seconds. 

“This is what I meant to tell you,” Beomgyu said in a calm voice. "Just to finish, I also wanted to apologize to you. For throwing all this at you at once, and for all the stupid things I've done to you, all the damn times I acted like nothing was happening and looked into your eyes and said I was straight. I knew I was hurting myself, but I was stupid and I didn't realize I was taking you with me. I'm sorry."

Soobin took a sip of his cold tea just to have something to do while he processed all he heard. A lot of emotions bubbled up in his stomach at the same time right now, and he was still not sure he should already jump to conclusions, but it did seem like a good omen. 

Soobin cleared his throat. It turned into a cough. His and Beomgyu’s eyes met, and they started to laugh. Endearingly. 

“That was the most beautiful thing someone has ever said to me,” he finally managed after their laughter ceased. 

Beomgyu looked at him with so much relief in his eyes that just now it hit Soobin that he could be afraid of being rejected. 

"I can't believe you put the apology up front and ruined our cute moment. But it was. Beautiful."

Beomgyu laughed in disbelief.

"I'm sorry for apologizing then?!"

Soobin laughed out loud. He didn't laugh out loud like that all the time. He was happy.

"You're forgiven about everything." He paused for a moment just so they could look at each other, happiness brimming in their eyes, before continuing. It could only be a lie that they were there right now, living that. "I can't say I understand, because I've never been through anything like this, but we spent a lot of time together, you know? I got a thing or two about you, already. I understand that the weight this has for you is different and even worse. I forgive you. I want you to be okay. I can't deny that it hurt me, but I wouldn't have stayed with you all this time if the good things didn't outweigh the bad. I wouldn't have stayed with you if it hadn't been forgiven already. If I didn't want to. I love all this you’ve just said and it surely sounds like a lot, but I like you even more than you like me, Beomgyu. Beommie. Gyu-yah.” Soobin let out a cringey laugh. “I’ve always fantasized about calling you corny nicknames, but was too afraid you wouldn’t like it.” 

“Beommie is cute. Everyone else uses Gyu already.” 

“Beommie it is.” Soobin smiled. “Anyways, I… I like you much more than you can imagine. Before we met, it had been so long since I was last interested in someone. Not even romantically, but in general. I don’t have much interest in people at all, I guess. It’s almost impossible for me to be interested in anything out of my bubble, much more in a person. But you did it. You first appeared and then you grew in me and it’s like you’ve always been here and you’re always novelty, at the same time. You know that feeling when something is new and you are more interested in it because it’s not been here for a long time? You bring this with you somehow together with that familiar feeling of home.” Soobin sighed. “I never thought I would tell you this out loud. All of this you just said, I feel the same way about you. I’m sorry I’m not good at expressing it as you do. You… you brought me out of my cocoon at the same time that you made me look inside of myself and get to know better all this I have inside here. I keep looking forward to seeing you and I keep wanting to know more about you and I want to understand the way every single cog in your brain works. I want to help you overcome every struggle you meet on your way and I… I want to shove you in my bed and squeeze you like a teddy bear while I read.” 

Soobin covered his face with both his hands, sure his cheeks were on fire. Beomgyu laughed out loud. It was a happy laugh. 

“I… I thought it was impossible to feel like this. That it only existed in fiction.” 

They looked at each other’s eyes for a brief second before Beomgyu threw himself into Soobin’s arms. 

Soobin wasn’t exaggerating; it felt like home. It felt so new at the same time, though, to hug Beomgyu with that invisible barrier out of their way. Soobin closed his eyes. He wanted to stay like that the entire day. It was so strange. How could one feel so much for another person? 

“And about what you said before,” Soobin continued when they moved away, "you don’t need to come out if you don’t want to. I'm not going to demand you to go out screaming anything to the wind. Even if you want to stay with me.”

“I want to stay with you.” Beomgyu grabbed Soobin’s hand and held it with both of his on his lap. “And I want to come out. Maybe not to the world. Maybe yes, to the world, but not right now when I don’t know exactly what I am. But I don’t want to hide anymore. I want to tell Hueningie. I want you to tell Yeonjun hyung. I want all my friends to know, and Taehyunnie, and my family. All those important people. I want to meet your family too, play with your little brothers here in this living room while you complain that you thought I would come here to see you, and I want your parents to call me son-in-law. It just… has to happen slowly. I told my sister and now you. I’m planning to go home today and talk to Hyuka. We can figure it out from there, step by step. Maybe you can tell Yeonjun hyung too, he deserves to know his best friend now has a boyfriend… if you might.” 

Soobin thought his heart was about to explode. 

“Of course I do. I wouldn’t be happier with anything else.” 

Beomgyu’s face bloomed with a smile so pretty it was hard to believe this person had ever been hurt before. 

Soobin really felt like kissing him right now. It was still strange to feel such strong inclinations all the time. He would get too drained of him if he did, nonetheless, and there was still something he wanted to say, so he kept the urge to him for a little longer. 

Soobin looked up at Beomgyu’s eyes. He was still squishing the older’s hand on both of his own, now caressing it so adorably it was difficult to focus on anything else. 

“Just to make it clear,” he said, “that I couldn’t be more honoured by being trusted by you with all this you just said to me. I’ll make sure to do everything in my reach to help you be more comfortable in your own shoes.” Beomgyu tightened the grip on his hand. “And I really meant it when I said you don’t need to announce anything to anyone if you don’t want to. I just want you to be comfortable. Everyone has a way of dealing with their sexuality; I myself don't pay much attention to whether people know or not, but it's my way. I just want you to be at peace with yourself. I know that being LGBT can be very overwhelming at times because we are in danger daily and the fight never ends, but each one only has to collaborate with what is within their limits. Otherwise it would be another form of violence. And even in this hellish reality, we have no choice but to accept who we are — it doesn't matter how long it takes — because otherwise we will always be unhappy.”

“Tell me about it,” Beomgyu said. The tone he used was playful, but his eyes were wet. 

Soobin chuckled. “Maybe it isn't even as romanticized as it is, like the world is horrible but me being myself makes it all alwats worth it because it's not, we're fucked as long as we're trapped in this society and that's it. What I mean is that the feeling of being yourself and having the security of just being able to be that way without hiding or censoring yourself is too good to deny. Not because it's a super awesome, wonderful gift, but because it's the least .”

Beomgyu nodded. He edged closer to Soobin on the couch a little at a time until he engulfed him in another hug. Soobin felt himself drowning in his smell almost instantly.

“I wish you were the president of the world.”

Soobin chuckled.

“Don’t worry,” he said, face buried in the hairs at the back of his neck, “I’m already flattered enough by being your boyfriend.” 

“I might not end up becoming a nurse." 

The wind blew on their fringes at the same time as Soobin said that. It was probably just a stupid impression of a boy in love, but nothing — starting from the leaves of the trees around them rustling in the wind, to go until Beomgyu's comprehensive expression instead of a judging one in response to his phrase — felt real. As far as Soobin knew, he could wake up exactly right now on his bed and it wouldn't be surprising when the realization that it was just a dream got to him. 

But it was real: Beomgyu's grip on his hand tightening, the little smirk that grew on his face as he faced Soobin, the creak of an empty swing moving with the wind. It was happening. He was experiencing it. 

Soobin had to keep reminding himself of it all the time, or else he would get lost in thoughts and let the moment go to waste. 

"What do you mean?" Beomgyu asked in response. Soobin didn't know he had noticed it until the face he made listening to him speak. Now both of them knew he wasn't asking because he didn't understand, but because he wanted Soobin to talk about it. 

Soobin stretched his free arm and shifted in the seat a little, taking his time to speak. He looked around; it was the beginning of spring now, but the orange glow that the setting sun shed on the plants at that time of the afternoon did an extraordinary job of deceiving the eyes, reminding them of autumn.

The playground they were in wasn't far from the Choi's house, but it's obvious that Soobin hadn't been there much since they moved in. It wasn't also the plan to go there today. 

He and Beomgyu had left the house to take a walk before Soobin's family arrived. They aimlessly stopped at the park after a couple minutes of strolling, and just stayed there after Soobin sat on a wood bench and figured he was too lazy to get up. (It was such a Soobin thing to do; he should have predicted it would end up like this.) 

“I don’t know,” he shrugged, “it’s just an idea that’s been fleeting in my mind these last few days. I still don’t know what it means exactly; I just have been kinda wondering what would I do with my life if I wasn’t studying nursing.” 

Beomgyu blinked at him, focused. “Does that have anything to do with those texts you sent me last week? I’m very sorry about it, by the way,” he said, running over the words one after the other, “both about the patient and for not having answered before. I just saw your messages today on the way here. Yerin made me put my phone away while I was there because scrolling through social media makes me way more anxious and I couldn’t afford getting worse than I already was.” 

“It’s fine,” Soobin chuckled, waving his hands at him, “calm down.” 

“Sorry,” Beomgyu chuckled back to him. “I felt really guilty about not replying to it earlier. It must have been horrible.” 

Soobin nodded. He looked at Beomgyu, that good feeling of knowing he could now look at him as much as he wanted without it being strange rushing through his body. Beomgyu, kind and gentle and understanding and attentive and looking at him with all his focus, waiting to listen to him talk about his problems as if that was the most important thing in his life. 

“It was awful, to be honest. I felt like the world was trying to swallow me alive. As if I was suffocating. I don’t know. It was just so sad. I wasn’t even there when they told her daughter about it. I wonder if I would’ve been invited to the funeral if I stayed at the hospital. I keep imagining her daughter’s reaction when they told her about it, how much it must’ve hurt. Her mom had been sick for a while and she was there everyday to take care of her. I keep thinking about it, everyday since then. Every time I have a moment to stop and relax, stop thinking about what I’m doing or what I need to do next, I remember it. It’s like it’s haunting me.”

He sighed. It was just now, as he talked about it to somebody else, that Soobin realized how much it actually hurt him. How real that pain was. 

Beomgyu grabbed his hand and just kept silent for a while, stroking his thumb on Soobin’s skin. 

“I guess it’s a day for difficult conversations,” he joked after a second. Soobin smiled at him. The wind blew. 

They continued in silence. Soobin lifted his face to look at Beomgyu. He was shining brighter than Soobin had ever seen him that afternoon, fighting neck to neck with the sunset on his back. He still looked tired and lacking sleep, but something stronger took place on his features, making that almost unnoticeable now. It was like he had been liberated from a cave he had been prisoner of for weeks or months or years and hadn’t yet even had the chance to get his feet on his house, but just the outside air was enough to change his appearance entirely. 

He held a patient expression towards Soobin. Kind Beomgyu. Gentle Beomgyu. 

“Did you start thinking of not being a nurse because of what happened?” he asked softly. 

“Actually, no,” Soobin responded. “I mean, mostly, yes. But not that only. The train of thought was like, me thinking I didn’t want to see something like that happening ever again, and then me looking for something that was a reason strong enough for me to keep doing it despite having to see people die, and I realized there is nothing. I thought there was gonna be something. I felt like it should. But there wasn’t.” He opened a soulless smile. “So I figured maybe I could do something else.” 

Beomgyu made a face like he was thinking for a second, and then asked, “why did you choose to become a nurse?” 

Soobin let out an embarrassed laugh. “This is gonna sound a bit stupid. I chose it because my mother wanted me to.” 

Beomgyu seemed surprised. “Your mother?” 

“Yeah.” Soobin shrugged. “Is it that unexpected?”

Beomgyu shrunk his shoulders. “You just don’t talk a lot about your mother." 

"Well, I guess I don't. But it really was because of her." 

"Why did she want it?" 

Soobin kicked a pebble that rested near his foot. "I don't know. It was probably because she was enchanted by the nurses that took care of her when she was in the hospital. She probably still is." 

"What did she have?"

"Some illness from complications in childbirth. I never really knew, I was very young, and now I prefer not to ask and continue not knowing." Soobin's voice sounded a little squeaky, strange. It was very out of character for him to talk about it.

Beomgyu seemed to be looking for the next profound question to ask.

"Anyway," he continued to say before that could happen, "she wanted me to be a nurse. It wasn't like The Dream she had for my life, but it was the idea she came up with when I asked what she thought would be nice for me to study. And I was going through a moment of really wanting to please her at the time, so I did. I don't know."

"Would she dislike it if you left the nursing major?"

"She probably wouldn't advise me to do that, but she wouldn't complain if I said that was what would make me happy either."

The problem with Soobin's family wasn't that. Whatever he wanted to do, they would be cool with it. That necessity to fit in on their perfectly crafted puzzle only made sense inside Soobin's brain chemicals. 

“Anyways,” continued Soobin, "I thought of all this stuff at once back on the day it all happened, so I kinda just shrugged it off and soon later was much more worried about you than my choice of majors. So I figured it was just a random overthinking subject, and I would go on with my life as if nothing had happened. But I couldn't. Even right now as we speak, I can't. It feels like some button inside of my brain has been pressed and shifted something in me and now I can't live as if nothing had happened. I can't forget that grandmother that died in front of me and I can't forget this feeling that all I've done up to now in that university was pointless because I don't feel anything about it. And I can't forget how your eyes shine when you talk about what you study, because, wow, I never thought it was actually possible to love what you study in university until I met you and saw how passionate you are about analyzing the same classic book from four hundred different points of view. Now I can't stop thinking I should be doing something that makes me feel like this. I'm so jealous of you and I don't even know if it's because of the amount of cool authors you are studying as if college wasn't made to be torture instead of so fucking amazing , of if it's just because you like what you study." 

Soobin let out a heavy sigh. 

“Maybe it’s both,” said Beomgyu quietly in response. He lifted his head to look at the older boy. “Damn it, Soobin. You are so fucking smart. You would be ridiculously good at our literature classes. I know you prefer to listen to people quietly but if you just said out loud one of those genius remarks you tell me when we’re discussing our readings, you would be every teacher’s favorite.” 

That caught Soobin off guard. 

“What do you mean?” 

“You fit even better at the English student stereotype than I do. I don’t know if you’ve realized it already. But I think you would love to know this and that thing I learn in class all the time and then I go to tell you and you really like it. I think you should at least give this possibility a thought.” 

After this, Soobin kept silent for a moment. Beomgyu’s thumb continued to scrub his hand’s skin. 

Maybe he was right. 

It was true that Soobin loved to read. He was a big fan of a lot of the authors Beomgyu commented he was studying. It was also true that each time he got to know something new about what his boyfriend studied, he was surprised. In a good way. All right, let’s be honest: he was jealous. Soobin said it already. He was jealous that some people got to study such cool things while he was there, stuck with anatomy and what diseases did to our bodies and how to act when someone was on the verge of dying in front of him. 

When he told Beomgyu that, he was pulled into a hug. 

“It doesn’t need to be like this,” the black-haired said, his hot breath making Soobin’s neck ticklish. “But maybe you could take a semester off to think about it,” he said, pulling back to look at Soobin. “Maybe there’s something you would like to do even more than being a college student. We could find that out. Or maybe there’s something you would like to study even more than literature. It was just a first idea. There’s a lot of stuff to be done. You don’t need to decide right away just because you figured it’s not going to be nursing.” 

Soobin pulled him back into their hug without saying anything. And just by the way he squeezed Beomgyu’s body as if they could merge right there, Beomgyu knew. He was getting good at that decipher Soobin thing. 

“I have no idea how I managed to survive in this world for so long without you,” Said Soobin anyway, nestling his chin on the younger's shoulder, when the words had organized themselves into a complete sentence inside his head.

Beomgyu nodded clumsily from the position he was in and pulled away a little for his lips to meet Soobin’s. 

Me neither, said his umpteen kisses. Me neither. 

(“But what if taking some time off makes me chicken out and give up on changing majors?” worried Soobin later on that same day, when the sun was entirely absent and he and Beomgyu were back to strolling, watching the city lights as if that was their first time. 

They had never been together for so many hours in a row like that and, regardless, neither of them wanted to go home. The most time they spent together, the less real it felt like. It was one of those one in a million moments. Where the world could stop and never resume spinning and they would not open their mouths to complain. 

Beomgyu looked up at him, their entwined hands rocking back and forth between their bodies. “I won’t let you give up. I’m good at cheering on people.” 

“You haven’t seen how big of a coward I am yet. I’m already afraid of how difficult it’ll be. It’s easier to run away” 

“I’m telling you I won’t let it happen,” Beomgyu insisted. “There’s no need to be afraid. I’ll be there with you through all of it.” He squeezed Soobin’s hand. “There’s no point in running away from who you are, what you want or like. It’s going to come back to you sooner or later.” 

Soobin did not say anything after that. There was no need to. 

He was still afraid, but he knew Beomgyu was too. Yet, they were taking steps ahead as if that was no reason not to. 

They both knew exactly what Beomgyu’s words meant.) 

“Today feels like the end of something.” 

Soobin looked up from the lemon ice cream he was devouring and would be sharing with Beomgyu if the other wasn’t too busy talking non-stop to eat sweets. 

“What do you mean?” asked Soobin. “It was literally the first day of classes.” The wind blew, and a couple of seagulls that had been walking along the water's edge went flying and cawing. The Han River had an interesting appearance at that time of year. (Soobin wouldn't know; he'd recently started visiting it often.)

“You’re questioning your sunbae again?” Beomgyu turned his face to look at his boyfriend with an accusing frown. These days, he had been using that sunbae card in literally every opportunity that appeared, and yet Soobin couldn’t help but keep finding it adorable. He was having the time of his life with that. 

“Sorry, Beomgyu sunbae,” he said after holding in one or two giggles, “I’ll listen to what you have to say first.” 

“I’ll let it slide just because I’ve never had a cuter hoobae before,” responded Beomgyu, patting his head with a corny smile on his face. Soobin cackled a little before stuffing his mouth with ice cream. “It’s just that, I don’t know… It surely feels like a new beginning, but it’s also the ending of those unsure days. I’m happy with it, but I’ll kinda miss being your guru at the same time.” He turned to look back at the landscape after talking. The sun was setting in front of them and the river and it was beautiful. Sunsets always reminded Soobin of their very first day together, several months ago. 

Beomgyu was so damn fucking dramatic. It was a hundred times more a new beginning than the end of anything. 

“I don’t think you’ve ever lived a better life than right now, calling me hoobae at every breath.” 

“It’s literally what you are?! It’s not my fault.” 

Soobin took a bite of the ice cream cone and shook his head in denial.

But here between us: it was, in fact, literally the truth. Today had been the first day of the semester and, after an entire day of classes, Soobin was finally starting to feel like an English major student. His semester off had gone by in the blink of an eye, it was even funny now to think how he worried if it would pass too slowly. Beomgyu was proudly called a sophomore now, heaven knows how having survived freshman year so well he even carried his boyfriend with him to study the same thing. 

(That’s the exact same joke, by the way, that Yang Jeongin, another college friend of Beomgyu, had made today, when he found out Soobin was majoring in the same thing as them now. It is interesting to mention that Beomgyu had already a great reputation because of how fucking smart he was. It was ridiculous. Even more when you start to analyze the amount of time he spent both with Soobin and complaining about how he should be studying. When did he actually study to be this good, no one knows. Why did he complain so much when he was always so good, no one knows, either.) 

Speaking of Beomgyu, he wasn’t exactly wrong for seeing that day as the end of something, though. Even when Soobin’s journey was just getting started and his was, too, far away from the ending.

The last six months also deserved a wrap-up, after all. 

It had been a tough journey. Soobin did his research and was confused about his future career choice for a few days, but the decision was already halfway done when Beomgyu sat down on his room floor with him to look through the course’s obligatory subjects. He hit the hammer after Beomgyu showed him the ultimate list of readings for literature classes. (That was crazy. ) The remaining doubt was erased after Yeonjun told him about the research someone he knew from the masters was doing. It was still ridiculous for him that people actually studied stuff like that. Seriously. It was too perfect to be real. 

But Beomgyu, he… Well, he was Beomgyu. He worried too much about Soobin sticking to that first decision without considering other options before and kept coming up with new ideas all the time. It was kind of adorable. 

Soobin spent half of his time during the last few months exploring the curriculum of numerous courses, watching documentaries and movies and reading books, of course, about different career paths — his favourites were flower shop owner, dog trainer and librarian —, learning different hobbies like painting and candle-making and crochet. (“What if you start a crochet business?” asked a shining eyed Beomgyu out of nowhere one day as he arrived at Soobin’s before even saying hi. They spent money they didn’t even have with yarn and made a mess out of Soobin’s room, but Beomgyu ended up magically making him a scarf and, just like that, it was worth it.) The other half of Soobin’s time was spent studying how many centimeters of his body could be glued to his boyfriend’s at the same time. They were like siamese twins.

It was a nice time. 

It was in this game that Soobin ended up discovering, hidden deep in his guts, the desire to teach. It felt like coming back to those feelings he had as a kid, when he spent more time with his teachers than with his parents and started to want to be like them, and discovering a whole new part of himself at the same time. Beomgyu was so proud of helping him with it. (“I told you it wasn’t a pointless search!” he screamed when Soobin first told him of it.) So he was minoring in education. Just like Beomgyu. That boy of many dreams. 

“Teacher Jang asked me today to send him the chronicle I wrote for an assignment he asked for last semester. He wants to publish it in the university’s newspaper.” 

Soobin, who at some point laid down on the grass, sat up suddenly.

“Are you kidding?” he asked, exasperated. “Beommie! That's amazing!”

Beomgyu laughed out loud. “I know, right!” He turned to look at Soobin with those gleaming eyes of his. “I really hope it works out. Let's keep it a secret while we're not sure, okay? I don't want to disappoint anyone.”

“I’m not telling anyone,” assured Soobin, at that point already used to the youngest’s way of dealing with uncertain things, “even though I’m sure there’s no way it can go wrong.” Soobin thought for a moment before adding, “Does Hyuka count?”

A sarcastic chuckle escaped Beomgyu's lips, who rolled his eyes.

"Of course not. He found out before I even decided whether or not to tell.”

Soobin laughed weakly. "As always."

(Hyuka was doing alright, by the way. He overcame the fact his favorite senior was not going to be a senior of his any more way faster than expected, and most importantly climbed the way until the “Soobin-hyung’s second best friend” title after Beomgyu was no longer a friend and left that spot empty. Soobin didn’t understand why that kid liked him so much, but was proud of himself for opening up a little more to the world through that friendship.) 

Silence didn’t last more than a breath before Soobin suddenly hopped out of his spot and threw himself into Beomgyu. “I’m so proud of you, Choi Beomgyu, what the hell!” he yelled, blowing kisses all over his face and hugging his boyfriend’s body the best he could as they were now both lying on the grass, Beomgyu on his back, Soobin up on him. The sun hadn't completely gone out yet, but a streetlight a few feet away had just lit. They would have brought a towel to spread out on the grass if they had planned to go there, not spontaneously resolved in the middle of a walk after the first day of school.

Beomgyu laughed out loud, closing his eyes tightly, “don’t be dramatic! It’s just a university newspaper.” 

“It’s a first step,” argued Soobin. He put his weight on his elbows and looked at his boyfriend. “Don’t pretend you don’t know me when you become a famous writer.” 

“Shut up,” Beomgyu opened up a smile without showing his teeth, looking down. It was one of the first and most amusing things Soobin got to know after they started dating: Beomgyu had a shy smile. Beomgyu could be shy. 

Soobin stopped for a moment just to admire the younger boy's face under the artificial lights of the street and the last bit of sun. Under the lamp in his room, in the dark with only the dim light of his phone, next to the bedside lamp he and Hyuka had bought for their dorm, under the heat of a cloudless afternoon, temporarily multicolored thanks to the dim lights of a party. Soobin still hadn't gotten tired of looking at Beomgyu's face. Of watching how it changed from one to another situation, and how it was somehow always the same. Of discovering little bits of new details everyday, and of feeling the comforting familiarity it brought.

Something absurdly cheesy and strong that made him want to live there, if it was possible.

Beomgyu turned his eyes back up to meet Soobin’s, not smiling anymore. Soobin had grown ridiculously fond of Beomgyu’s resting face. He liked so badly how he so much appeared to be an intimidating serious person like that, just to open his mouth and reveal how chaotic he actually was — first through his cute voice, second through his words.

Beomgyu looked a hundred times more handsome than he ever had been these days. Soobin was sure of it today’s morning, when every inch of him shone when they entered campus together, hands entwined. The face of a man with one less burden on his back.

“Pretend I don’t know you?” the black-haired asked, taking Soobin’s attention back to the topic. “If I ever release a book, I’ll make sure to include a red-haired teacher who has the coolest boyfriend in the world and wears specs and brownish sweater vests to class everyday.” 

Soobin, now laying down by Beomgyu’s side with his arms around his body, didn’t even know why he looked down at his own clothes, to make sure Beomgyu had gotten everything right. The red hair wasn’t a reality till next week, but would be. 

“I don’t need glasses, though,” he said innocently. 

“You’re gonna need it someday. You’re going to be a teacher and you’re studying literature. There’s no way out.” 

Soobin let out a laugh. 

“There’s gonna be two of us, then.” 

"Let's hope my book becomes famous enough for us to cover the eye care bill."

“Hmmmmm…” started Soobin, playfully. “If you put in there a scene of this red-haired teacher going to the teacher's room and meeting his cool boyfriend there, fixing his glasses on the arch of his nose while gossiping with some student in the corner, I'm sure it will be a hit .”

“Don’t forget I write about apocalyptic worlds.” 

“There’s room for sweetness even in the apocalypse.” 

Beomgyu chuckled through his nose. He found Soobin's hand and intertwined it with his own. 

“For sure.” 

The only thing predictable about life is 

Its unpredictability

Anyone can be anything

You can be everything.