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This fic is for BFF, whom I love with my entire heart. The actual events don't match - for a start we're not Korean idols - but I ended up stuffing a ton of that love in here anyway. She doesn't know what an EXO is, and will probably never read this, but it doesn't matter at all: she doesn't need to read it to know what it says.
~*~*~
2028
Sehun’s walking an elderly Vivi very slowly around the park, and maybe it’s just the nostalgia of summer evenings, but he’s thinking: none of them are idols anymore, exactly.
Sehun acts half the time and models most of the rest. Chanyeol dove into the underground scene, and made a Japanese EP and a long list of collaborations before figuring out that writing music was the best bit, and now he's a producer. Jongin danced until his physiotherapist really lost her mind at him last year, so now he sticks to singing and variety shows and choreographing. Kyungsoo acts and does the odd musical, but the thing he talks about most is Weekend Restaurant, a variety show he co-hosts. Jongdae mostly does solo singing, film scores and the like, but joins up sometimes with Minseok and Baekhyun, the two who are most like idols still.
Baekhyun’s solo career is going from strength to strength, he’s written two books, and he’s not aged a day as far as Sehun can tell. Minseok’s still performing, but he says he’s getting too old for the energetic style, so mostly these days people know him from his talk show, where his attention turns about half the guests into flustered blushing teenagers. Junmyeon’s never off the TV, except when he’s never out of business meetings, and Sehun can’t even follow what he’s doing half the time. In a strange twist of fate, it’s Junmyeon that speaks to Yixing most often now, where presumably they talk about Yixing’s first full-time job of CEO rather than his second full-time job of composer-performer.
Sehun still misses him sometimes—in the way he’d miss his brother if he moved to Australia maybe, a quiet fondness over distance without regrets. The rest of them don’t see each other that much more often anyway, now that they’re not exactly a group. They didn’t break up so much as scatter in different directions, and they keep in reasonable touch. Sehun sees Junmyeon as much as his ludicrous schedule allows, replies to all of Minseok’s irregular check-in texts, and hears from Jongdae more in “say-hello-to-Jongdae-hyung”/“Jongdae-says-hi” conversations with Minseok than directly, which is understandable: he has five children. Sehun calls or meets Baekhyun in the feast-or-famine way Baekhyun does between projects, doesn’t text Jongin because he still never checks his phone but did learn to use email of all things during military service, and replies to Kyungsoo’s infrequent but perfectly regular video messages, as if he has a monthly calendar entry for ‘contact members’. They all meet up around Chuseok and somewhere-near-Christmas, and in groups of whoever can make it for their various birthdays.
He sees Chanyeol at least once a fortnight unless life and his schedule is really hellish, because otherwise, honestly, life goes to hell anyway. He’s run that experiment twice. It was worse, the second time, because he knew how bad it would be: the slow, cold deadening of his own heartbeat and the creeping sensation of walking around just piloting his body instead of living in it wasn’t even an interesting surprise.
These days, he sometimes goes whole days without thinking about being in love with Chanyeol, for the same reason that he doesn't often think about the colour of his living room walls, or whether he picked the right career. The sun rises in the east, he’s happy enough being an actor and definitely has no desire to try doing anything else for a living, and he’s been in love with Chanyeol for half his life. Sometimes they have sex and sometimes they don't; the last year or so they mostly haven’t. Sehun does miss it, honestly, but Chanyeol's been having a weird time of it this year, showing up withdrawn and quiet just to exist in Sehun’s house, as if he’s thinking about something and not getting anywhere with it. It makes sense: Chanyeol’s house isn’t messy like people often expect—he followed Sehun’s advice and just hired an organiser to put everything away and then a cleaning service to keep it that way—it’s just that he has four dogs, and it can get pretty noisy and chaotic.
Sehun’s been letting him be; if it keeps up, he’ll prod Chanyeol, but for now they just spend time together quietly when they can, and Sehun makes sure his meal service delivers more than he needs so he can stick a few servings in the freezer, and keeps Chanyeol’s toothbrush in the cup next to the sink and house slippers next to Sehun’s in the porch. They might not live together, the way Sehun had once not-so-secretly hoped they would, but when Chanyeol comes here he doesn’t wear guest slippers, which feels like nearly the same thing.
One day Chanyeol shows up with his hands balled up in the sleeves of his hoodie, hovering in Sehun’s doorway as if he hasn’t had a key to the apartment as long as Sehun’s owned it. Sehun takes one look at him and says, “A Somaek kind of week?”
Chanyeol’s gaze flicks up and away, but he doesn’t answer. He’s an awful liar a lot of the time, because guilt is written all over his face and body when he feels it, and now is one of those times. Sehun just wants to kiss him, really. If there’s a dead body, maybe Sehun will panic and then get a shovel, but whatever Chanyeol thinks he’s done now, if there aren’t any dead bodies, they’ll handle it.
“So, um,” Chanyeol says, “I wanted to…talk to you.”
Sehun breathes. Wait, wait, don’t react; wait, wait, don’t react: the mantra he adopted when it became horribly clear that ‘react calmly’ wasn’t an option, and the best he could do was cry in the bathroom afterwards.
“You’re talking now,” Sehun says, bitchier than he means to be. Chanyeol’s having a strange time, but he knows Sehun doesn’t react well to this sort of thing and he’s doing it anyway. “Are you going to take your shoes off?”
Chanyeol looks up from his hands for half a second. “Well, in case—I just thought…” A pause. He’s tugging on his hoodie sleeves with his hands still in fists and tapping one foot in a fast, messy rhythm. “So, I think I’m a girl? Surprise?”
It doesn’t take any effort at all for Sehun to not react, because for a minute he just has no idea what’s going on, and his entire body holds position so stiffly that it feels as if the lightest breeze might unbalance him. Time, or maybe his thoughts, go very slowly. What does that mean? He’s seen Chanyeol naked. Of course Chanyeol isn’t a girl. He’d have noticed. If Chanyeol were a girl, Sehun wouldn’t be horribly in love with her. They wouldn’t—
He cuts that thought off by pure reflex, and in the internal silence that follows, Sehun can think. Chanyeol’s saying: he’s going to be a girl. Is a girl. Was always? Is that how it works? There was a drama about trans people, Sehun remembers vaguely; a short web drama that came out last year. He even watched it with Chanyeol, curled up next to him on the couch that’s less than 10 feet away on the other side of the wall. Sehun can’t remember which one of them it was that chose it. Did Chanyeol know, then? Did he lie in Sehun’s lap and wonder what to do? Did Sehun say something that made it worse, could he have said something that would have helped? Was it easier or harder to watch with Sehun’s hands running through his hair, trying not to react, than it would have been alone on his own sofa covered in dogs?
Sehun should say something. Chanyeol’s face is going from tense to terrified, and Sehun physically cannot watch that, so he unlatches his jaw, works his throat, and manages, “...Okay.”
At least it makes Chanyeol pause in the spiral down to wherever it was going. Chanyeol’s shoes are still on, laces tied, as if he was prepared to run. “Yeah? Just—just, okay?” It doesn’t sound hopeful, exactly, but cautious curiosity makes a space for hope.
“Yeah,” Sehun says, slowly, as if he’s picking up the scattered, confused pieces of his brain and slowly putting them back together. “I mean, you would know, right?”
A bleak laugh. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you.”
Sehun shrugs. His shoulders move as if they’re made of dry wood from neck to fingertips. “I don’t know what to think.” He bites the inside of his lip; maybe that was the wrong thing to say. Chanyeol is still wearing shoes. “Are you going to, you know, do anything?”
Chanyeol’s clutching an elbow with the opposite hand. “I. I’ve been thinking about it. A lot.”
That part, at least, makes sense. Sehun nods, though the sensation is like playing a VR video game; there’s no tactile feedback to prove that he has, just the disconcerting jump of his surroundings. “Who have you told?”
“Just you,” Chanyeol says. “I might just. See how it goes, for a while.”
See how what goes? But that’s enough, Sehun decides, enough of Chanyeol looking tense and afraid and miserable and on the verge of turning around and leaving, so he just says, “Did you want that somaek?”
“Oh. That’s—yeah.” Chanyeol still sounds as off-balance as Sehun feels, but off-balance is better than frozen.
Sehun turns around to walk to the kitchen, forcing breath into his ribcage to fight the gray fuzzy sensation at his peripheral vision that tells him he wasn’t breathing. Decides to trust that Chanyeol will stay. He manually pilots his body to the kitchen, fetches beer from the fridge and soju from the cupboard, four shot glasses and two beer glasses. Stacks them on a tray to bring through to the living room. It’s a relief to see Chanyeol on the couch, where he—she? He’ll ask, when he can reliably make words without his throat clicking painfully—is tucked into the corner, knees under his chin and arms wrapped around his shins
Sehun puts the tray down on the coffee table and sits down right next to Chanyeol, though he has to sit weirdly in the middle to do that. He opens the soju and stacks two shot glasses, pours to the line, and is utterly unprepared for a stray brush of his elbow against Chanyeol’s arm to jolt her into motion: she grabs the soju glasses and shoves them blindly down on the table, and launches herself at Sehun. Chanyeol’s body is shaking so hard that, this close, Sehun can hear his teeth click occasionally, and he clutches the fabric of Sehun’s T-shirt so hard it might rip, and begins to cry with strange, high-pitched sounds like a wounded animal. Sehun wraps his arms around her as tightly as he can, and places one hand very softly on the back of her head to nudge her face into the dark space where his neck meets his shoulder. After a while her tears sound like regular tears, instead of like a fox cub in a trap crying for its mother. Sehun’s neck is wet, and his face, and he’s going to have snot on his top, but that’s the very last thing he cares about.
“It’s really okay? You still—” Her voice hits a cadence he’s never quite heard before, though there’ve been echoes of it in places, when Chanyeol was joking or drunk or doing an impression. When he was sad, lost and afraid.
“Still,” Sehun says, not sure he could manage more. Not sure there is more. Because no matter how that sentence could have ended, yes. Still. Always.
—
After that, the only strange thing about it is that it barely feels like it happened. They still hang out, play games, watch things, eat; the everyday things, the things they’d do alone but make more sense done together. Sehun can’t forget Chanyeol’s unsettling, desperate tears, or how he wouldn’t let go the whole evening—not that Sehun wanted him to, after that. Chanyeol stayed for three nights all told, and then finally got up in the morning, poked clumsily at the coffee machine, and said, “Eh, I’ll get out of your hair now, hyung.”
Sehun doesn’t know what to make of that, exactly, or what to feel about how close they came, one night, to kissing. But they didn’t, which is good, because Sehun has a rule these days about having sex when he and his partner are upset, which is: don’t. It’s been a long time since he broke it, and nearly that long since he last felt like raw eggshells afterwards.
So life goes on, and Sehun can’t help but think: he still looks like Chanyeol to me, and I still want—It's the same, and it's the same some more. They go to work and they hang out and Sehun hooks up once or twice. He hadn't thought about how Chanyeol hasn't been dating much, this last year or two; he always used to talk about dating and hookups, and now he never does.
It's the same until it isn't the same; or rather, Chanyeol's the same until she isn't, hair grown out so it looks long now instead of just messy. As far as Sehun knows she’s still living in T-shirts and sweatpants, until one day he falls through her front door, late, and falls over four excited dogs to find her leaning on the kitchen counter eating noodles in a tank top and women’s pyjama shorts. Her shoulders are bonier and her arms are slimmer like when she was young, and she's got a bra on and shaved legs and painted toenails, and Sehun's chest is full of something he has no idea how to even feel, it's so huge, never mind find a name for.
Chanyeol blushes, noodles hanging out of her mouth for a minute before she remembers to keep going, and the dogs are only getting more impatient to be properly greeted, so he kneels down and gives them attention to quiet them.
He finds himself saying, “I’m hungry,” with hopeful lilt, as if he’s still the seventeen-year-old he sometimes feels instead of the thirty-something he is.
Chanyeol slurps her noodles. Her ears are still a bit pink. “Well, I've got spicy chicken or shrimp, and you know where the kettle is,” she says through a mouthful of food, unrepentant, and Sehun wants—he doesn't know what he wants.
Maybe he just wants to be close to her, just to be them, so he deadpans, “Shouldn't girls be better at cooking?”
She blinks her big sincere eyes at him—like she always does when they're playing their game of trying to be the last to break character and laugh—and says, “Well, they failed me out of girl-school the first time, so I'm in remedial classes,” and it takes everything Sehun has not to cry right there in her kitchen.
He walks past to flick the kettle on, and then shuffles up close behind her, wrapping his arms loosely about her waist and pressing his face against her neck. She smells different, he notices, but not so different he wouldn’t know it’s her in the dark. “Seems to be going pretty well now, though,” he says, and it comes out a bit scratchy and wet, and he feels her deliberate slow inhale in the movement of her ribs.
“Oppa,” she protests in the most annoying voice she can manage—which would be very annoying if he had anything but fondness in him. Are they still doing that? At least she isn’t on stage these days, so he doesn’t have to suffer through the excruciating experience of listening to her talk earnestly about how they decided the world made more sense if Sehun was the older. Chanyeol decided, really, and Sehun went along with it because he always did and always will, when she feels that sincerely about something. She was right. Sehun knows how to be the youngest—though inevitably it’s not very common these days, unless a few of the members are meeting up—but when it’s just him and Chanyeol, he takes care of her like an big brother would, and she takes care of him like a little sister would. He’s so fucking proud of her for looking at the world and imagining how it could be better, even in little ways; for trying to find what would feel most right.
He drops a kiss on her shoulder over her tank top, and notices the bra strap peeking out: it’s pale pink, embroidered with flowers. She’s always loved pretty things. He’ll think of something pretty to buy her later. She’s richer than him by virtue of having a way with money, but she bounces like a child at the smallest of gifts.
Sehun’s exhausted now, though, so he pries himself away before he can fall asleep standing up leaning against her—it’s happened before—and puts his attention on something safe and normal, like pouring hot water into the ramyun cup, and plucking the chopsticks out of her empty cup. There’s no point in dirtying two sets.
“You really don’t mind, do you,” she says softly.
“I don’t,” he says, and it’s not a surprise that that’s true, but it’s a bit of a surprise how easy it is to look at her like this, changed and yet not changed. How strange it isn’t to think ‘Chanyeol’ and have the image in his head be a tall, gangly woman with a cute face eating noodles in her polka dot pyjamas.
She lifts one shoulder in a shrug, crossing her arms under her breasts. “I just…dunno. You don’t really have any friends who’re girls, oppa.”
He doesn’t. If he spends five consecutive seconds standing near a woman in public, the media immediately decide he’s marrying her. There’ve been a few costars—usually the older married ones, or fellow models who’re just as gay as he is—whose company he’s liked, but though he thinks of them fondly, his best and closest people are all men.
“My best friend is a girl,” he says, and it feels deeply, colossally inadequate, but her answering smile is like the summer sun.
—
It doesn’t happen overnight, that she’s dating this performance artist and hanging around with a bunch of the coolest women Sehun has ever met in his life. It just feels that way: Sehun filmed two series back-to-back, and they hung out every exhausted evening Sehun could spare, which wasn’t very many, and he fell asleep on her couch every single time and didn't make it to the end of any of the movies they put on.
Then it’s over, and after the initial rush of promotions is done, he sets aside his first afternoon off in months for her. Chanyeol is sitting in this cafe that isn't a queer cafe and isn't not a queer cafe, wearing a sundress and a necklace Sehun doesn’t recognise, to introduce him to her girlfriend Minkyung. It’s strange to look at her and know that to everyone else, she looks totally at ease, but Sehun doesn’t need to see her grip on Minkyung’s hand under the table to know she’s nervous. He sits down across from them and peels off his mask only once he’s sure his face is doing something sensible; he’s missed her like he misses getting eight hours of sleep.
Minkyung looks Sehun up and down. “So, should I be worried your best friend is in the top ten of every ‘Korea’s Most Eligible Bachelors’ list they've published in the last five years?”
Sehun's stomach curdles, but Chanyeol smiles easily and replies for him, as she often does when he’s stressed or tongue-tied. They haven’t been in the kind of situation where he’d need that lately, but she picks it up as if they had a joint interview just last week. “Nah. I've known him for two decades, and he's never given a woman a first glance, never mind a second.”
And that’s true, but. Well. Is it true anymore? Because Chanyeol—but he looks at her, really looks at her, and realises that although he wants to bundle her into his arms every single time he sees her, he doesn't, anymore, feel...
It doesn't seem possible that he could have seen her every week for the past year or two or five and not noticed the point at which he stopped wanting her. That wanting used to hurt every time he touched it, so he wrapped it in gauze and hid it away and tried not to want her like a lover, not to want more than they had. When did wanting more become wishing he had more time with her? When did wanting her become wanting her to be happy? The place inside of his chest that aches when he looks at her feels exactly the same as it always has.
Maybe that's Junmyeon's fault, since Junmyeon was Sehun's first: they were together, and then they weren't, and the only real difference it made was that they stopped having sex and Junmyeon kept trying to call them real brothers. Which they aren't, because Sehun's feelings about his actual older brother are far easier to understand, far simpler to deal with, and—crucially—Sehun has never been attracted to his brother. Gross.
The rest of the members feel like family, like the people you know and love and see on holidays and festivals, birthdays and weddings. Sehun messages Chanyeol every day and calls Junmyeon at least every week, more if he can spare the time, and every year they go on holiday together. It feels as if he really doesn't know what the difference between a friend and a lover is if it isn't sex—and if it isn’t sex, then neither Chanyeol nor Junmyeon are his friends exactly, and they aren’t his lovers exactly. Because there’s no difference at all for him and Chanyeol, either, between when they were having sex and now: none but the slow, gradual shift of two people who know each other to the bone growing older and changing, not exactly in unison but definitely in sync.
Sehun’s been working so much, lately, and he hasn’t seen Chanyeol enough: that’s why he’s in his head like this. He’ll tell her about it sometime, about how he doesn’t think 'friend' is enough, how he feels a little like he's lying when he says to other people, “She’s my best friend.” They don’t know that he means every part of me is hers if she needs it, or you haven’t got a chance if she doesn’t like you, or if there’s an emergency, call her and then call Junmyeon, but she’s probably the one who’s nearby. He’ll tell her and they’ll laugh about it, and then two weeks later she’ll say something incredibly thoughtful, in the soft meandering way she talks when she hasn’t quite worked out how to phrase something.
“Remind me not to do two shows back to back again,” he says, and Chanyeol will never in a million years remember to tell him something like that, but if he actually does it again, or just says he’s thinking about accepting an unwise project, she’ll pout at him or laugh at him, and tell him he’s an idiot or threaten to send a truck of the worst coffee in the world to the crew.
“Don’t do two shows back to back again,” she deadpans. “You’re too old for that many all-nighters, Sehun-ssi: it’ll ruin your skin, and you’ll fall off the eligible bachelors lists.”
Sehun holds his straight face, but it takes effort. “Yes, ajumma,” he says gravely. “I’ll look after myself so that women will want to marry me.”
Chanyeol breaks first and snorts strawberry milkshake up her nose, and they laugh so hard there’s barely any sound, because that’s how they learned to laugh late at night in the dorms so they wouldn’t wake anyone. Minkyung hands Chanyeol a napkin, and she picks it up but doesn’t wipe her face, just waves it around while her whole body shakes with mirth. “Ajumma,” she wheezes. “You asshole.”
—
She goes through six or eight or ten months of wearing dresses and skirts all the time, and then one day she falls through Sehun's door—he can always tell it's her from the way the slam of the door sounds behind her—peels off her rain-soaked jumper dress, and shouts over Vivi’s barking, “Can I borrow some clothes?”
He waves her into his bedroom, and she comes out wearing some old, old clothes, ones that she used to borrow before, and she still looks like herself. What she doesn't look like—the memory detailed from repetition—is like her old self. Not because her wet bangs and ponytail and the gentle effects of time on her skin change her appearance much, but because compared to the last time he saw her wearing that T-shirt and sweatpants, she's so fucking happy.
It's not something you think about often, seeing someone all the time, how often they're happy or they're sad. Chanyeol is moody and changeable and always has been, and she still comes over in a terrible mood and pulls soju out of the cupboard, still needs Sehun to go over to hers and shove her towards the shower every 6 months because she's stuck and spiralling. There just isn’t this thing that rested in the background of her face, where if you caught her not paying attention, or not feeling much of anything, her face would settle into the shape of quiet despair, or open sadness, or fear.
"What?" she says, peering down at herself, then feeling her hair. “Do I have leaves in my hair, or something?” Even though she looks tired and ratty, there's a smile hiding in her eyes, ready to come out at a moment's notice if either of them say anything funny, or if she gets a sudden amazing idea, or just—just if Sehun smiles at her first.
He can't explain that, though, so he doesn't try. "I forgot I still had that shirt.”
She fakes a disgruntled pout, folding her arms and cocking one hip. “Oppa, you're supposed to tell me I'm pretty even when I look like a drowned rat in boy's clothes.”
He holds his best straight face and says, “You're a very pretty drowned rat,” and she whacks him on the arm as she marches past him to his own kitchen. They often don’t drink anymore, and he can hear her pulling out milk and mugs and hot chocolate powder. They say it’s because they’re too old for hangovers: Sehun doesn't have the tolerance of his twenty-something self, and Chanyeol fake-complains that the extra calories go straight to her hips.
The real reason they don’t drink at home much anymore is that they don’t need alcohol anymore. Sehun only needs the dreamy half-reality of 2am and the black glow of the TV screen that’s still plugged in to tell her, “You are pretty, though. The boy's clothes don't make a difference.” She always has been pretty, blessed with big eyes and a soft mouth and a face that lights up when she smiles. Sehun's biased, but he thinks she has the best face in the world. The best girl's face he's ever seen, anyway, by a very long way.
“What, you think this is a good look?” she says, dubiously, lifting her arms to display the shapeless T-shirt that hangs down from her shoulders, the seams stretched out at the neckline and hem.
Sehun shrugs. “If you want to know if you should wear it to a fashion show, then no,” he says, although unisex leisure-wear is in, and you could do something with the overall shape if the t-shirt weren't so ratty. “But you look pretty anyway. I mean, if you trust my judgement about what makes a woman pretty.”
She snorts. “Great. Gay man finds me pretty; I'm sure that'll get me all the girls.”
Sehun takes a huge breath, bracing for pain, but none comes: it doesn't hurt anymore, when she talks about girls like that. It doesn't squeeze his ribcage so tight he can't breathe. She’s dating, and they still talk every day, and she’d still drop everything if he really needed her. If one day he gets to stand at her wedding—and now he’s thought of it, he wants with a sudden, furious intensity for her to be able to have one—he won’t even try not to cry.
“It should get you all the girls,” Sehun says, because these words are ones that will come out. “They hire me to know what looks good.”
“They hire the photographer to know what looks good,” she says, but there’s no real disagreement in it: she’s modelled, she knows how it goes. She could model still, really: there’s a growing trend for models in their thirties, with designers looking for a mature, classy image. Chanyeol is tall and slim, and her face was always attractive, but as a woman’s face it’s truly striking. Broad shoulders make clothes hang well, and she has good posture and knows how to walk confidently, and Sehun has met some indie designers who might…
He tables this before he can get too caught up in work thoughts; she’s nearly glued to the inside of her studio, but he’ll tell her later, just in case. Chanyeol knows him so well that she seems to see roughly where his thoughts were going, and says quietly, “Take me shopping?”
They haven't gone since—before. He supposed she was doing her own thing, even though he has a perfectly good eye for women's fashion as long as they want to look elegant and stylish rather than attractive to men. He hasn't offered in years, and gently regrets not suggesting it sooner, but there’s no real self-recrimination. They can go now; there’s time. “Sure,” he says. “I’ll make some calls and we can do it in style, with fancy coffee and things.”
She rolls her eyes. “Champagne,” she insists, “If we’re doing it right. But I’ve already got a stylist, and he takes commission in ramyun and movie nights, so I’m not listening to anything the staff say.”
As if she doesn’t buy him something ridiculously expensive for his birthday every year, and often some more random presents whenever she decides to. Sehun buys nearly all their shared food, and small gifts whenever he sees something she’d like. They both have more money than would make any of those things worth keeping track of, and it’s still not a drop in the ocean of everything they’ve given each other. The debts between them are infinite, and so they’re nothing at all; it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if he gave her a kidney or she bought him the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, except that they’d never live it down. It’d be nothing but ‘drink more water, you’re pissing with my kidney’ and ‘it’s fine, I guess, but it’s no famous art museum’ for the rest of their lives.
“I’d take commission in you coming to Brittany with me and Junmyeon next summer,” he says, because she’s been non-committal about it and he’s feeling hopeful.
She huffs. “You think I wanna crash your weird couples holiday and watch you both fail horribly to speak French?” Which means: I haven’t said no yet. Convince me.
“It’ll be a weirder couples holiday if you’re there, and Junmyeon’s been practising.” Which means: come on, it’ll be fun.
“Gods spare me. And the people of France.” Her face twists into something that’s no longer the joke. “Anyway, I’d have to do something about a passport, and I don’t—have the time.” Which means: I want to say yes, and I forgot for a minute why I haven’t.
Sehun hadn’t thought about the passport. He hasn’t been involved in much of the legal, medical, technical side of things, though he figured out the pattern of her early doctor’s appointments or therapist’s appointments or whatever it was by the regular timing of her showing up on his couch with two bottles of soju. He did offer, but. She has friends who understand it better, and he doesn’t know which of her friends that is, and hasn’t asked. He doesn’t have to know things all the time.
If there’s something you have a hard time doing, trade tasks or pay someone to do it for you, Sehun’s always thought. Mostly it lands on the temporarily deafened ears of his control freak friends, but he keeps trying. “Well, I can call my agent, and she can call around and find someone who knows what they’re doing to take care of it, if you want.”
“Okay,” she says, quietly.. “I—yeah, I could use someone to do the paperwork shit for me, I’m no good at that stuff.” Her feet tap rhythms into Sehun’s thigh where they’re resting, and she curls around her tucked legs, taking up a suddenly too-small space on the sofa.
Ah, he didn’t mean to spoil the mood. It’s easy to do; he doesn’t beat himself up about it so much anymore, because she’s still Chanyeol, still sensitive about things even though she bounces back easier these days. She told him once, in the middle of 2019, or maybe 2020, when everything was as bad as it’s ever got, that the best thing he did for her was just not leave, just always want to be around her even when she was depressed and difficult to handle. It took him another four years, until after his military discharge, to reciprocate. To say that the best thing she does for him is always want him around even at her worst, is always text and make plans to hang out or just show up, is let him just be with her even when he can’t do much to help.
He squeezes her shoulder, and extracts himself carefully to stand and take the hot chocolate mugs back to the kitchen. When he comes back, she’s falling asleep on the couch with her head at a weird angle, eyes still open and glazed, because all the gifts in both of their lives have come with a side of weirdness. He takes a picture, because she knows that too and it’ll make her laugh, and then nudges her gently awake so they can sleep somewhere with neck support.
—
Chanyeol’s girlfriend breaks up with her a few months later. She sends Sehun a text that just reads Minkyung left, and he sends her a photo of Vivi with a toy in her mouth and a screenshot of a takeaway menu with lots of desserts on it, then quietly cancels his plans to have dinner out. He leaves the house ten minutes later with Vivi: they order food and Chanyeol’s okay, and they play with the dogs and she's okay some more, and they're drinking beer and not soju because they're adults who have work in the morning, and then it’s bedtime and she isn't okay at all.
Sehun folds his whole body around her in bed, and she sobs into his shoulder in a way she's never done at the end of a relationship before, though he's seen her cry a hundred times and she's seen him cry a hundred more. Her ribcage feels narrower, somehow, when he holds her; his arms curl further around her, hold tighter. It’s a strange thought to have when he hugs her all the time, but it’s been so long since she cried in his arms like this, and apparently his arms remember what she felt like then.
He waits until she's crying a little less hard, gets up to fetch 2 water bottles, grabs a comfy-looking pyjama set from her dresser, and then kicks off his own jeans so he can get back into bed comfortably.
She’s already ditched her work pants, and waves off the pyjamas with a hoarse, “I don't care,” pulling off her top and unhooking her bra and tossing them both on the floor. He shrugs, puts the pyjamas back and her clothes in the laundry basket, then hands her a water bottle. This earns him an unimpressed, impatient look, but she does drink, and she’ll be happier in the morning to not have a dehydration headache.
Sehun gets back into bed, and she curls into the circle of his arms again, shivering. He’d say something about the pyjamas, but he really doesn’t care whether she’s nothing but panties, or pyjamas, or a fur coat, as long as she’s comfortable, and with two of them under the covers she’ll warm up. Sehun breathes in sync with her for a few minutes and then tries to slow it down. It’s as if they're still teenagers, afraid and exhausted and curling together for comfort, but it's so, so much fucking better. Back then they didn’t know they could calm each other’s breathing by matching it, and that’s only the start of the things they didn’t know about themselves and each other. Even though she's hurt, feeling her breaths ease and her tears quiet has him full of something soft and fragile and not entirely unlike happiness.
She’s often happy these days, breakups aside. Sehun’s often happy too, though he hasn’t had what he’d call a real relationship in more years than is comfortable to count. This is the only way he ever wants to hold her—the way he always wants to hold her, feeling her heartbeat against his chest with how close they are—and there's not a single bit of him that's hurt except for the places where she is. She grouses when he moves one arm off her, but it’s just to dry his face.
The next time Chanyeol takes him to meet a girlfriend, Sehun is going to bring a shovel. He's planning the speech already, as if he’s running lines for a new role. It needs some work, but he’s pleased with what he’s got so far: Hello, I’m Oh Sehun. It's nice to meet you. You'd better take care of my noona.