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Kyungsoo’s life can be divided in eras based on which stupid neighbor he had at the time.
His childhood was Byun Baekhyun era. Kyungsoo’s very first memory of human contact apart from his family is Byun Baekhyun convincing him to take a shot at jumping across the distance between their windows, and then the horrified scream of his mother as Kyungsoo attempted to climb onto the rabbet of the window. Their windows were, indeed, so close that they could hold onto each other’s hands without even straining their arms too much, but they also lived in the fifteenth floor, and Kyungsoo was only four years old.
Then, after Baekhyun moved to the seventh floor to take care of his grandparents, nine-year-old Kyungsoo entered Jongin era. Jongin was eight and very sweet, but a moron nonetheless. He was scared of absolutely everything, and wouldn’t be able to sleep unless Kyungsoo stayed at the window singing for him. He was scared of planes, of playing at the roofs, of the mailman, of other children… he also believed every urban legend told about the joint (courtesy of Byun Baekhyun once again) and it was Kyungsoo who had to soothe him and assure him that no, the temple near Block XXI wasn’t haunted, and there was no such thing as a liver-eating man who walked on the walls. Eventually, his father’s barbershop in the first story became famous, and the family got enough money to move into a higher story, so Jongin tearfully bid goodbye two years after they first met.
Enter Kyungsoo’s current and most worrisome era – Park Chanyeol era.
As of now, Kyungsoo is drinking some tea at the window. It’s half past five in the morning; his parents are already down in the streets working, and it won’t be long till he has to go to school. One story up, dramatic love ballads play, disrupting any quietness that could still remain at that time. In the building to the left, a woman talks loudly to her immediate neighbor, chatting lively about how her son seems about to propose to his girlfriend (Kyungsoo, who has heard about him, highly doubts it, but he’s wiser than to interrupt). Right in front of him, Park Chanyeol is building another one of his inventions, tools clanking loudly and arms darkened with smudges of grease.
Kyungsoo sighs silently over his mug of tea. “Chanyeol.” He doesn’t have to raise his voice too much for him to hear it – their buildings are almost glued to each other. Chanyeol jumps up and turns around. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for school?”
Chanyeol smiles, scrambling to his feet and running towards the window. His hair is all clipped back with pink hairclips, and there’s a black streak of grease just under his left eye. With that added to his worn-out yellow pajamas and safety gloves that look way too big for him, he looks remarkably moronic.
“Hey, Kyungsoo! Good morning! Guess what I’m building now?” Instead of answering Kyungsoo’s question, he pitches him a question himself, as it's typical of Chanyeol. He bounces excitedly on the ball of his feet, looking at Kyungsoo with manic eyes. Kyungsoo sighs again.
“A flashlight.”
“No.”
Another sigh.“A go-kart?”
“Nu-uh!”
“A computer.”
“And that’s three guesses! All wrong,” Chanyeol claps, his gloves sliding slightly and revealing a tear near the thumb. “I’m making a flying machine!”
Kyungsoo raises both brows in justifiable disbelief. Above his head, a male voice wails over the violin melody. “Oh yeah?”
“Last week, Miss Jung taught us about old cars and stuff,” Chanyeol is practically climbing over his wall at this point. His entire face is lit up with excitement. “You know? Have you had a class like that? What does Miss Cha teaches you about?”
“Science,” Kyungsoo answers vaguely.
“Well, this is science! So, well, a long time ago, Leopoldo Da Vinci built a flying machine, right? Kind of like a helicopter,” Chanyeol keeps talking, his hands moving so widely that Kyungsoo fears one glove might slide off and fall, only to become trapped forever on the external water pipes. “And I thought, if he could build it a long time ago, when stuff like screwdrivers didn’t exist, I can build one too, right? So I’m building one.”
Typical. Absolutely typical Chanyeol, so much that Kyungsoo isn’t even surprised; he’s just tired, body heavy with a sense of foreboding, oh my, here we go again. The burnt remains of the pink curtain that used to hang around Chanyeol’s windows are a glum reminder of what Chanyeol is capable of when obsessed with an idea.
“Good luck, then, Da Vinci,” Kyungsoo finishes his tea just as it starts getting lukewarm. He still has to cook and eat breakfast, clean up the apartment, and iron his clothes before setting off for school, all the way down block XCII. Chanyeol’s classes start one hour later than Kyungsoo’s, but Miss Jung’s apartment is twice as far as Miss Cha’s, and Chanyeol clearly needs a shower. “Drop it for now, Chanyeol. You’re going to be late.”
“Just a minute,” he says, and it’s enough for Kyungsoo to give up on him and retreat back inside. Chanyeol’s ‘just a minute’s are never promises – always dismissals. There’s nothing else to say.
For breakfast, Kyungsoo eats plain kimchi rice, remains from last night’s dinner. He finishes cleaning as quickly as always, and hums along the cheerful song that plays somewhere in Chanyeol’sbuilding while ironing his dark grey pants and white button up shirt. As he finishes putting them on, he approaches the window again. Chanyeol is still on the same position Kyungsoo found him, sitting on the floor, tools clanking.
“It’s six o’clock,” Kyungsoo informs suddenly, and Chanyeol snaps his head to look at him. There’s some mockery to how Kyungsoo props his elbows on the window, clean and relaxed, his old brown leather school bag hanging from his shoulder. “You’re going to be late.”
“Shit,” Chanyeol curses, jumping to his feet and glancing at the clock on his wall – one that Kyungsoo never saw, but knows it’s there. “That’s the time already?! I still have to clean up, shiiiit.”
“Well, good luck,” Kyungsoo smirks cruelly. “I’m off. See you later.”
“Kyungsoo!!” Chanyeol runs to the window, colliding against the wooden frame so hard that he almost flies the distance between their windows. “Please help me! There’s no way I can finish this in time, and I’ll be grounded if mama finds out!”
“I told you to get ready one hour ago,” Kyungsoo points out, face nursed into an expression of indifference. “But you didn’t listen to me.”
“I know! I’m sorry!” Chanyeol bows, letting his forehead thump on the wood beneath his hands. “But please pleaseplease help me! If I get grounded I won’t be able to play with you after class!”
Kyungsoo snickers. “What a loss.”
“And! And if you help me,” he raises his head again, leaning forward so his stupid long arms almost reach Kyungsoo’s folded ones. “I’ll teach you everything that Miss Jung taught us about Da Vinci!! And, and other history stuff too!” It’s then that he activates his ultimate weapon – the wide, pleading eyes, glistening with dependence and anxiety. “Help your hyung out, Kyungsoo. Pleeease.”
Kyungsoo stares at him in silence, and Chanyeol responds by being silent, too, but never dropping the puppy eyes. After a moment, Kyungsoo rolls his eyes. “Bye, Chanyeol,” he says, grabbing his umbrella and heading out.
“KYUNGSOO!” is the last thing he hears before the door clicks closed behind his back.
Even though they’re an arm away from each other, the walk to Chanyeol’s apartment takes Kyungsoo ten minutes, because their blocks aren’t connected. He has to climb down to the ground floor, walk around Block XL, along the streets, turn around Jongin’s family’s barbershop’s corner, and climb the same distance up again. When Chanyeol opens the door to answer to his knocking, Kyungsoo is humid and glaring at him.
“Kyungsoo!!” Chanyeol’s face does that thing where it lights up so violently it illuminates its surroundings. “I knew you wouldn’t leave me hanging!! I love you!”
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Kyungsoo grumbles, but that’s a lie. He knows well he can’t resist Chanyeol’s bribery. Also, if Chanyeol gets grounded, he’ll be forced to hang out with people like Baekhyun, and, in comparison, Chanyeol’s company doesn’t seem so dangerous after all. “Go shower. Have you eaten?”
“Not yet,” Chanyeol starts peeling his clothes off, not minding Kyungsoo’s presence. “There’s some stuff in the fridge though. Help yourself!”
“… I already ate breakfast,” Kyungsoo mutters, but Chanyeol has already entered the bathroom, and the loud rustling of pipes starts suddenly, indicating that he has been quick to get under the water. Well, he’s right to be in a haste… Kyungsoo opens the fridge, and widens his eyes in delight when he spots noodles.
“Chanyeol!” he screams over the noise, and Chanyeol yells back to signalize he’s listening. “Can you eat these noodles?”
“Yeah, sure!” Chanyeol’s answer is muffled by the door, and Kyungsoo hesitates, not sure if Chanyeol actually heard his question. Noodles are much more expensive than rice; the Do family only eats noodles once in a month and on special occasions. He’s not sure if he should touch it. Chanyeol’s parents could be angry at him.
At last, Kyungsoo makes a decision to only cook using half of the portion he found, and he uses a wok that’s lying around to fry the noodles with kimchi, soy sauce, and herbs. To protect his white shirt, he fishes an apron from inside the oven, one with a hole burnt near the crotch area that just spells Chanyeol.
In the end, Kyungsoo ends up eating the noodles too – he isn’t hungry, but he can’t resist – they clean up as fast as they can, but they’re already very much late when they finally leave the apartment, umbrellas in hand, mouths aching with the spice of kimchi and mint toothpaste.
“This is your fault,” Kyungsoo repeats as they rush along the narrow streets, avoiding collisions with other people the best they can in the dim light of the fluorescent lamps. The water drips noisly on their umbrellas. “I had never been late for any lessons before I met you!”
“Well, now you’re taking a walk in the wild side!” Chanyeol turns around to grin at him, at the risk of tripping down the steps on the sidewalk just to show Kyungsoo his stupidly numerous teeth. “See you later!”
“Bye bye,” and they part ways, running in different directions in the moldy labyrinth of the ground floor.
Kyungsoo ends up arriving Miss Cha’s apartment right on time for the lesson to begin, but, later, when he meets Chanyeol, he pretends to have arrived late just to play with his friend’s mind a little.
“I’m really sorry?” Chanyeol offers again, clearly not putting enough effort in sorting the laundry as he should. “I’ll keep my promise, though. After we finish here, we can go to the roof and I’ll tell you about what Miss Jung told me today, about robots and stuff! Also, you can help me build my flying machine!”
Behind Kyungsoo’s back, a pot full of pig trotters and herbal water hisses in the fire. Kyungsoo is just finishing his afternoon chores – doing laundry, sorting clothes, ironing, dusting, cooking dinner and cleaning the bathroom – after which he’s supposed to do his homework. Instead, he’ll grab his notebook and pencil and climb to Block XL’s ceiling, where he’ll meet Chanyeol, and both of them will sit near the TV aerials and chat till the sun sets. Usually, he finishes the afternoon with seventy percent of his homework done, which is actually good if compared to Chanyeol’s ten percent.
“What do you need a flying machine for, anyway?” Kyungsoo asks as his fingers dexterously fold one of his father’s shirts. “Starting a business? Cruising from here to Seoul for fifty won the mile?”
“As if! Though, that’s not an entirely bad idea,” Chanyeol’s eyes glaze over, and Kyungsoo scoffs. Typical. “But no, that’s not it. Well, you don’t want to live here forever, do you?”
The question is so strange that Kyungsoo halts still. With his fingers still holding one of his own short pants, one that has grown too short but he still wears during the summer, he frowns. “You don’t?”
“Duh!” Chanyeol rolls his eyes, shaking a denim jacket to free it from creases. “Look at this place! It’s noisy and wet, and we can’t go out at night because it’s ‘dangerous’,” he makes air quotes with his fingers, as if people were making the danger up to keep him from having fun. “I’ve been to Seoul once,” he adds in a quieter voice, glancing down to the pile of clothing he’s supposed to sort. “And everything is so much better there.”
Someone, somewhere – this time, Kyungsoo can’t pinpoint the exact location – is watching TV, loud enough for them to hear it, but not to make out what show it is. The sounds of voices seem to emanate from the walls; normal conversations, happy conversations, hushed conversations, secrets from underneath the water pipes, in the streets where sunlight doesn’t reach. Mold tints the gray walls an even darker gray, falling in streaks over the cracked concrete. A city of home over home over home, building beside building beside building, a never-ending multiplication of blocks, all numbered, but uncountable.
Kyungsoo shrugs, folding a towel. “I like it here.” He pauses, then adds. “I’ve never been anywhere else.”
“You’ve never gone to Seoul?!” Chanyeol widens his eyes at him, still shaking the same jacket. Kyungsoo feels strangely defensive.
“Not really. I think my mother took me there once, but I don’t remember anything.” He had been too young to remember. “So, you want to build a flying machine to run away? Sounds like it’s gonna work.”
“Not run away, my friend. Fly away,” Chanyeol corrects him with a grin, and Kyungsoo can’t help but laugh. “And wait till you see it. My baby will take me to the distance.”
Turns out that Chanyeol’s flying machine looks a lot like a broken chair with metal bars taped to it. Because that’s exactly what it is.
“I started building it this week! Of course it doesn’t look good,” Chanyeol mutters in a sulky voice as Kyungsoo laughs and laughs at his invention. “Now listen to me—listen to me, Kyungsoo, stop laughing—the wings, that is, these bars, will be shaped like a hang glider—”
“A hang glider?” Kyungsoo exclaims, laughter mixed with disbelief. He facepalms, rubbing his eyes with his palms. “God, Chanyeol, you’re completely insane! A hang glider?!”
“Wait and see,” great, now Chanyeol is pouting. Well, at least Kyungsoo knows it won’t last much; Chanyeol is unable to remain upset at people. “Just wait and see. They’re going to work as a hang glider. And then, I’m gonna install another bar underneath the chair, and put, like, a pedal and some wheels—”
“Like a bicycle,” Kyungsoo points out, and Chanyeol stutters to a stop. Soon, his eyes widen in realization, glimmering with excitement. Damn. Kyungsoo wasn’t supposed to be helping him.
“A bicycle! That’s it!!” Chanyeol jumps to his feet, the hem of his pants riding down his skinny hips as he hops in excitement. “I can use that old bycicle I found on LIII’s roof! I’m sure no one uses it anymore!”
“That one that’s all rusty?” Kyungsoo makes a face. “That thing’s gonna fall apart if you touch it.”
“I can repair it! I’m sure Uncle Oh can help me,” Chanyeol dismisses Kyungsoo’s opinion with a gesture, grabbing his tool box and kneeling in front of his grotesque creation. “Yah, but really, that was a great idea, Kyungsoo! Thank you!”
Kyungsoo sighs, covering his eyes with his hand as if wishing to disappear. Chanyeol is the most stupid fourteen-year-old boy in Korea. No, in the planet. And Kyungsoo hates him to his guts. “Not my idea, if you ever decide to give me credit for it.”
“And since it was your idea!” Chanyeol obvious doesn’t listen to him, lost in his own world of excitement and machines made of junk. “I mean, since your idea is going to help me build my baby, you get to name it! How’s that? That’s such an honor, right?”
“I refuse to,” Kyungsoo affirms categorically, seizing that Chanyeol is crouching and kicking him on his butt, hard. Chanyeol falls on the concrete floor with a yelp, and he’d have scrapped his hand if he weren’t wearing his enormous gloves once again. “I don’t have anything to do with it, anyway.”
“Of course you do!” Chanyeol turns around, still on his butt, to stare at Kyungsoo with wide eyes. He looks slightly hurt. “Someday – when I finish this and it looks super shiny and rad – I’ll let you ride it with me. Then, we’ll go to Seoul together!” He gets on his knees and crawls to where Kyungsoo is sitting, in the slightly elevated platform built for the aerials, and grabs Kyungsoo’s hands with his dirty, rough gloves. “We can stay there for some weeks and have a big adventure! Cool, right? Have you ever eaten bungeoppang? It’s a fish-shaped sweet cake-sort-of-thing. We can eat it together!”
Kyungsoo makes a face, tugging his hands off Chanyeol’s grip, and accidentally pulling him closer. “That sounds disgusting.” A gush of cold wind blows, making the heat in his cheeks feel unbearable. Chanyeol pouts, leaning closer to him, too close, way too close. “Fine!! Fine, I’ll name it! Lay off!” Kyungsoo makes a show of pushing Chanyeol away, which leads the older boy to laugh. Dismissing him, Kyungsoo crosses his arms, thinking, but he draws a blank. “I don’t know. What is it going to look like?”
Chanyeol seems confused. Slowly, he turns around to look at the machine – at the legless chair and the two unequal metal bars sticking out from it at odd angles, joined to the chair with the aid of duct tape – and scratches his head. “Uh… like a machine…?”
“A flying one?” Kyungsoo smirks, and, even though the joke is on him, Chanyeol laughs. Both of them chuckle together for a moment, before Kyungsoo shrugs and spares the machine another glance. “I don’t know, Chanyeol. Just name it ‘Bungeoppang’ if you want to eat it so much.”
Silence dawns upon them. Kyungsoo feels slightly uncomfortable at the lack of reaction, at how Chanyeol seems a bit dazed, his mouth open in his usual distracted expression. Then, suddenly, he smiles. Kyungsoo might never know if he’s the only one who thinks like that or not, but it always seems to him that, when Chanyeol smiles, it’s like the sun rises inside of him, and he suddenly becomes colorful and radiant.
“That’s a really good name!” he compliments matter-of-factly, propping his arms on Kyungsoo’s thighs, letting his head fall to Kyungsoo’s lap. Kyungsoo groans in distaste, but, subtly, he presses his legs closer together, so to give Chanyeol’s head better support. “You’re going to change your mind about it when it’s finished. You’ll definitely want to fly with me. Definitely.
Kyungsoo rolls his eyes, fingers finding Chanyeol’s hair almost unconsciously, threading through the thick strands of dark brown hair. “You should probably get up from the floor,” Kyungsoo mutters, but he doesn’t really mean it.
“Dun’ wanna,” Chanyeol mumbles, lips touching Kyungsoo’s clothed thigh oh-so-slightly. “’tis comfy here.”
Bungeoppang, the flying machine, lies forgotten. For now.
For the following weeks, the flying machine is all Chanyeol and Kyungsoo talk about. Every conversation starts with a status report from Chanyeol – “So, I went to LIII’s roof and grabbed the bike! It’s not as bad as I thought it was!” or “So, Miss Jung told me more about aerodynamics or something and I decided to add a moving bar to the pedals,” or “So, noona told me she can ask a friend if their father can help me to, like, weld the wings to the seat! How’s that?” – and ends with Chanyeol making a promise about their supposed trip together to Seoul.
“We can climb to the top of that super duper tall tower,” Chanyeol says, a dreamy look to his face, while Kyungsoo and Yura, Chanyeol’s older sister, exchange a skeptic glance over the top of his head. It’s close to dinner time, and both Kyungsoo’s parents and Chanyeol’s should be home soon; the scent of Kyungsoo’s stew and Yura’s fried rice merge in the small space between their buildings, mingling with innumerous smells of innumerous meals being cooked in the vicinities. The small sliver of sky that can be seen from Kyungsoo’s window is a gentle navy blue, and there are no stars.
“Isn’t Seoul made entirely of super duper tall towers?” Kyungsoo asks as he does his homework, notebook propped on the window, pencil spinning between his fingers.
“Yeah, but there’s one that super duper hyper dyper tall,” Chanyeol reinforces, and Kyungsoo can see Yura laugh to herself while maneuvering the wok in the kitchen. “I bet that if we climb all the way up that one, we’ll be able to see the sea! How’s that?”
“Sounds exciting,” Kyungsoo says, with no excitement to his voice.
Eventually, Chanyeol goes as far as skipping school to do some odd jobs and so earn money to pay for the welding – that’s when Kyungsoo realizes he’s being serious, and that he should be worried instead of humoring him. After all, it’s called flying machine, which implies that Chanyeol has intentions of making it fly, eventually, and the damages caused by that might end up being much more serious than a carbonized curtain.
“If you want to leave so much,” Kyungsoo asks him one time, when the sun is about to set and both of them are on their usual roof again, and Chanyeol is on the ground with Bungeoppang, fixing and building it and not sparing a glance to Kyungsoo. “Why don’t you just sneak out? You know… by foot?”
“Tiresome,” Chanyeol answers simply, holding a needle between his teeth as he attaches fabric to his machine’s wings. “Seoul is far from here. Also, I’m scared to bump into bad stuff in the way.” As he lifts his head to the sky, his lips form a grin, and his fingers take the needle to pierce carelessly the white sheets. “There are no drug dealers in the sky.”
Despite himself, Kyungsoo chuckles. He’s soon to sober up, though, worry biting him on the edges and making him restless. “But seriously,” he abandons his notebook on the concrete and walks down to where Chanyeol is sitting, crouching beside him. “You should give up on this. You know… if this falls, you’ll be seriously hurt. You might—” the words don’t come out. “—you might never walk again.”
Finally, Chanyeol looks at Kyungsoo. Finally, his hands halt still, black with grease and bruised from all the work, and his eyes meet Kyungsoo’s, wide, but blank. “But it won’t fall,” he says simply, voice uncharacteristically quiet and unemotional. Kyungsoo cringes when he realizes he knows that voice – it’s Chanyeol’s hurt voice.
“But what if it does?” He insists, adamant.
“It won’t,” Chanyeol insists back. “It’ll fly. You’ll see. I’ll show you when it’s done.”
“You can’t be serious, Chanyeol,” Kyungsoo pleads, brows furrowed in frustration.
Chanyeol doesn’t answer. He silently goes back to work, attaching the ‘moving bar’ – the rudder – to the bike’s handlebar, instead of its pedal, as it had been Kyungsoo’s suggestion. It’s then that Kyungsoo realizes how much he fueled this, how he let Chanyeol feed the fantasy of taking him to Seoul in a home-made monstrosity, and he gets angry. Angry at himself, angry at Chanyeol. Angry at Seoul. Angry at the dark, miserable place where they live, so dark and so miserable that it drove Chanyeol into dreams of flying away. Dreams that could possibly end him.
Without a word, without a glance, and without even making a sound, Kyungsoo flees.
In a place with so few space for so many people, it’s hard as it can be to avoid someone, but, somehow, Kyungsoo manages to avoid Chanyeol for several days. He’d close the curtains in the morning, during breakfast, and leave early for class; then, in the afternoon, he’d do homework first, locked away in the laundry room, and avoid the main room at all costs. Well, it doesn’t seem like Chanyeol is desperate to see him either; he’s probably working in his elaborate suicide plan.
Kyungsoo’s stomach tightens unpleasantly when he thinks about the machine.
He shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t be ignoring his neighbor, his best friend, as he walked towards self-destruction. He should be trying to talk Chanyeol out of this. Convince him that the risk is too big. That they can run away by foot, if he wants to, and Kyungsoo will tag along and eat bunggeoppang with him and climb to the top of the tallest tower in Seoul and look at the ocean, a mirage of it at least, from kilometers and kilometers of distance. He should be trying to save Chanyeol from his own deranged ideas, again, not closing his eyes and turning his back to him when he might be needing Kyungsoo’s aid the most.
He knows he shouldn’t be doing this, but… he’s scared. He’s scared Chanyeol will be hurt again. He’s scared nothing he’ll say will convince Chanyeol. He’s really, really scared, because the worst he has seen Chanyeol do so far was to almost set fire to his own house, a very vague ‘almost’ even, and he already panicked so bad he almost jumped the distance between their windows, so he doesn’t think he can stomach to see Chanyeol piloting his wonky creation straight towards a twenty-story fall to death.
Kyungsoo is definitely going to be sick, no matter what happens.
A week becomes two, which becomes three, and Kyungsoo might’ve started to feel lonely, but the joint looks even grayer and darker than usual to him. The water seems to drip even louder on his umbrella, as if to make the silence left by Chanyeol’s absence worse, and the lights on the street seem dim and yellow, pathetic attempts to reproduce the solar light.
Then, one day, as he’s making his way back home from classes, he meets a familiar figure standing near the barbershop.
“Jongin!” Kyungsoo exclaims when he sees his old friend standing there, well dressed in cotton pants and a t-shirt and trainers. He makes his way towards him, barely dodging Mr. Shim and his bucket full of fish, and notices how tall Jongin seems to have grown overnight. “Long time no see! How are you?”
“I’m okay!” Jongin says, smiling, but the smile falters. “I mean, not right now. This is really important.”
“Jongin!” Jongin’s father screams from the barbershop. “Come help when you’re done out there!”
“What is it?” Kyungsoo asks as Jongin assures his father he’ll be right back. “You look nervous. Also, since when do you help in the barbershop?”
“Since a while ago, but it doesn’t matter right now,” Jongin dismisses possible further questions. “You’re friends with Chanyeol hyung, right? From Miss Jung’s class.”
Kyungsoo’s face falls at the mention of Chanyeol’s name. He wonder if Jongin notices it. “Yes, I am,” he answers, because things might be a little shaky between them right now, but he and Chanyeol have a history together, and Kyungsoo would be damned to let that be to waste after saving Chanyeol’s ass more times than he can count. “Kind of. Why?”
“Well,” Jongin bites his lower lips uneasily. “I was at the roof just now, playing with Sehun, and we saw Chanyeol climb up to CVI… and he had this weird bike thing with him…”
Kyungsoo has never climbed up Block CVI. He has never had to, until he decided to befriend the most moronic guy in the whole Asian continent and had to run all his way up to the roof to save him from doing something stupid.
But he does know where Block CVI is, generally speaking, and he understands why Chanyeol chose it specifically. It’s one of the outermost buildings, a component of the limit between the joint and the nearby streamlet; Chanyeol probably thought that, starting from there, he’d be able to fly all the way across his old home, right into the limits of Seoul.
When Kyungsoo realizes how well he can read Chanyeol’s intentions, he grits his teeth and increases his speed.
This is all his fault. If he hadn’t ignored Chanyeol, maybe he’d have given up. If he hadn’t listened to him when he first talked about the machine, maybe none of this would be happening. And perhaps – perhaps if Kyungsoo weren’t so mean to Chanyeol, he wouldn’t be so serious in proving him wrong. Perhaps if he appreciated Chanyeol more, he wouldn’t have to jump off a building to try to prove a point to his own goddamn best friend.
Kyungsoo has never reached the top of a building so fast.
And, sure enough, there he is. The Bungeoppang looks surprisingly more monstrous when ready; a mess of faded colors and rust, its wings stained in beige circles, crooked beyond belief. Beside his creation, Chanyeol stood tall, with a proud grin on his lips.
“So you came, after all!” There’s a faint hint of malice in his voice, but it drowns amidst the genuine excitement. “I thought you were mad at me.”
“I am,” Kyungsoo retorts immediately.
“Well, I thought you were too mad at me to care,” Chanyeol shrugs, and it hurts Kyungsoo that he thinks, that, it really, really hurts. “I’m glad you aren’t, though.” He’s wearing a jacket, an old denim jacket that fits him ill around the wrists, and swimming goggles on his forehead. “Wouldn’t want my best friend to miss my biggest feat.”
“Chanyeol…” Kyungsoo calls out weakly, stepping forward hesitantly. People are starting to sprout in the neighboring roofs – other children, of all ages, glancing at both of them with curiosity. “Can I ask you to please, pretty pretty please, don’t do that?”
Chanyeol hums, pretending to be in deep thought about the subject. “No,” he concludes finally, grinning his toothiest grin as he inches closer to the Bungeoppang. “I want to show you that I can do this. I’m not a little kid, you know.”
“I know you’re not, Chanyeol,” Kyungsoo’s face is stony, and his voice is steady, but he’s bubbling with anxiety. “But this is dangerous. You might die, Chanyeol. Like, die for real.” He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know what he can do to make Chanyeol just understand. “You don’t want to die, do you?”
“I won’t die,” Chanyeol cuts him dryly, putting his goggles on and turning around. “And if I do…” his voice wavers, fades to silence. He takes a deep breath, the denim stretching over his back. “And if I do, what’s that to you? It shouldn’t matter much. After a while, some cool new neighbor will move in and he’ll be a much cooler friend that me anyway.”
Chanyeol’s words hit Kyungsoo like punches, one after the other. They knock the breath out of his lungs, and bile rises up his throat.
So that’s what Chanyeol thought about him?
So that’s how he seemed to Chanyeol?
To Chanyeol? To his best friend? To the one person that made Kyungsoo feel like living in the noisy, overpopulated mess that was their joint wasn’t that bad after all?
To the person that Kyungsoo liked the most?
He’s too stunned to react fast enough. The unsaid words lodge his throat as Chanyeol climbs onto the seat of his machine, and turns around to bid goodbye to Kyungsoo. There’s not a hint of sadness, or remorse, or even fear in Chanyeol’s face; it gleams with manic energy, his smile electric and desperate.
“Watch me,” he says. And he starts pedaling.
It happens vertiginously fast, like frames of a film. First frame: Chanyeol pedaling, and the children in the rooftops with their mouth open in amazement. Next frame: the machine starts to plane, and everyone makes an impressed ‘ooooh’ sound as Chanyeol laughs in excitement. Next frame: Chanyeol is leaves Block CVI’s roof, and descends in a straight line towards the center of the joint. Next frame: screams. The machine is gone from their sight. Next frame: a bang, a scream, a long, loud crash.
And silence.
Kyungsoo doesn’t move from where he’s standing on the roof, looking too calm to have just watched his best friend, Chanyeol, Chanyeol, the most important person in his life fall from the rooftop in front his very eyes. The silence grows steadily into a cloud of mumbles, and Kyungsoo recognizes Oh Sehun, Jongin’s friend, peeking at where the Bungeoppang must have had its final collision. He also recognizes Baekhyun, who he hasn’t met in about a month, pointedly looking away from the ground, a hand over his mouth like he’s trying not to vomit.
“Where is he?” A small girl asks.
“I think he’s dead,” a small boy says.
“The bike is over there,” another boy states.
“Isn’t that an arm?” Kyungsoo starts to feel faint.
Until one voice, sudden and sharp and louder than the others, shouts over the whispers.
“He’s moving!”
And it’s all it takes. In a second, Kyungsoo is bolting down the stairs, across the streets, searching for his friend.
Turns out that Chanyeol’s flying machine of nonsense happened to crash right on the grid protecting the temple near XXI, the same one people used to believe to be haunted. It’s a hell of a place to get to, as Kyungsoo has to climb up to the first floor of any buildings around there and hop over the rails to get on the grid and not beneath it, and it’s also littered with all sorts of disgusting residues. Including a rusty, wonky, now broken flying machine.
And a big, wonky, possibly broken human.
Chanyeol is sitting up when Kyungsoo finally gets around jumping over the rails. He has taken his goggles off, and looks positively stunned, as well as very dirty.
“I—it did fall!” he exclaimed in childish surprise as Kyungsoo approached him, walking calmly, step by step. “How did this happen? I was sure it would—ow, my leg—I was sure it would fly.” While talking, Chanyeol feebly gets up, not seeming to have broken any bones. Kyungsoo doesn’t stop waking. “Well, at least the wings kinda helped me in the end. I floated a little, so I didn’t really turn to pancake or anything. It’s really like a hang slider, right? See, I told you so—”
Kyungsoo shuts him up by punching him square on the face.
The next few hours are chaos. Kyungsoo and Chanyeol beat the shit out of each other, and the kids on the rooftops start cheering, and suddenly their parents arrive and drag them away, screaming angrily and pulling their ears and bruising them even more. Then, they go to Mr. Choi’s hospital, and even there their parents don’t stop screaming at them and apologizing profusely at each other. Then, finally, both of them are dragged to the Do family apartment’s, where they get screamed at some more and, finally, locked together in the laundry room.
“And you won’t come out till I say so, so you better apologize!” their mothers scream almost in unison, slamming the door shut and clicking the door locked. From inside, Kyungsoo can still hear his mother apologizing to Chanyeol’s mother, who apologizes back in return. Then, he hears something about eating noodles at the Park residence, and his stomach grumbles angrily as the voices fade to silence.
Complete silence.
The sun has set sometime between them entering the hospital and departing from it, and the laundry room is completely dark, save for the faint slivers of light that ooze from neighboring apartments. To Kyungsoo’s left, coiled on the cold tiles of the floor, Chanyeol shifts a little.
“How’s your eye?” Kyungsoo asks in a quiet voice. It barely breaks the silence. Chanyeol shifts again.
“It hurts,” Chanyeol mumbles.
Kyungsoo nods. Sounds about right. “And… your leg?”
A sniff. “It hurts too.”
Typical Chanyeol. No matter what just happened between them, if it was a minor conflict or major conflict or no conflict at all, Chanyeol always behaves in the same crazy, confusing, and yet moronically simple pattern. It should piss Kyungsoo off, that Chanyeol is being so dismissive of Kyungsoo’s attention when the latter is just trying to be nice, but, instead, it’s pleasantly familiar, and he relishes in the feeling.
“I’m sorry.” Kyungsoo says it first, like he knew he would. “For punching you.”
Silence. A shuffle or fabric as Chanyeol fidgets a little. “It’s okay,” he says, finally. “I’m sorry for scaring you. And not listening to you when you said I’d fall.”
Kyungsoo smiles to himself. It’s always good for his soul to hear Chanyeol apologize for his mistakes. “It’s fine. I’m sorry for being mean to you,” he adds, trying to milk out more of Chanyeol’s submissive, regretful side. “And for ignoring you for a week.”
“Three weeks,” Chanyeol corrects him, voice glum. As if Kyungsoo hadn’t been counting. “But it’s okay.” A pause. Brief silence. “I’m sorry for trying to force you to go to Seoul with me,” is what Chanyeol says next, and Kyungsoo frowns. “When you don’t want to.”
That… didn’t go like Kyungsoo had planned. With practiced ease, Kyungsoo finds himself on the dark, and climbs off the stole he’s sitting on to join Chanyeol on the floor, right by him side. “I do want to go to Seoul with you,” Kyungsoo says. It’s more like he doesn’t mind having to go, but… “It’d be fun. I just… didn’t want you to get hurt trying to get us there, you know.”
Chanyeol is warm beside him, like a nice flannel blanket, or a cup of hot tea in the winter. The sparse light illuminates only the contours of Chanyeol’s face, but, even in the dark, his eyes seem moist. “We should go someday, then,” he says, offering Kyungsoo a small smile.
“We should,” Kyungsoo agrees, letting silence dawn upon them for a moment. Outside, the noises from chatter, from music, from diverse TV channels showing people distant realities, they all added up to the constant buzz of the neighborhood; a distant sound both of them hated, but were used to.
“At the rooftop,” Kyungsoo starts off, voice firm, but words carefully picked. “When you said that… about me not minding you dying.” He has to clear his throat to go on, clear it from the lump threatening to form there and choke him. “It really hurt me.”
The silence acquires sudden weight. It’s almost like Chanyeol’s warmth wavers. Almost like Kyungsoo can hear Chanyeol’s thoughts.
“I’m sorry.” Chanyeol’s voice barely comes out. He sniffs. Kyungsoo closes his eyes. “I… you were ignoring me, and I…”
“I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have,” the words leave Kyungsoo’s lips in a hurry. Stop crying. Please. “I was really cold to you.”
Another sniff. Chanyeol’s shoulders shake a little. “I really like you,” Chanyeol blurts out, voice still tiny and choked and so unlike him. “And I’m scared… because I think,” a sniff. A cough. “I think—I know you don’t like me as much as I like you.”
Kyungsoo’s admittedly tough heart breaks in a million of pieces, as if it had been it that had fallen from the rooftop of Block CVI, and not Chanyeol mounted on his crazy invention. Kyungsoo knows he’s a cold person, knows that he isn’t soft and excitable and radiant like Chanyeol, but he has never minded it, because he thought it gave him immunity against this kind of thing.
Well, apparently, it doesn’t.
“Look,” he hastily gets up, moving to kneel in front of Chanyeol’s folded legs, and his hands blindly find Chanyeol’s cheeks, lifting his face for their eyes to meet. His eyes and nose are noticeably red, and there are tears rolling down his face, as well as pooling in his eyes. “Out of everything, this is what I’m the sorriest for. I’m sorry for being so cold to you all the time. I’m sorry for not being more appreciative towards you.” Kyungsoo bites his lip. Why does his chest hurt so much? “You’re a complete nutcase and extremely stupid, but you’re my best friend, and I love you, stupid or not stupid. So, yeah.” He feels awfully embarrassed to have used the word love. God, he hopes Chanyeol won’t notice that. “I’m sorry.”
The look Chanyeol has in his eyes now is familiar; glazed over, distracted, slightly dreamy. Mouth slack, lips parted, no particular expression. He’s letting a particularly complex piece of information sink. Or relishing in the warmth of Kyungsoo’s confession. For this once, it’s hard to tell, even though their eye contact remains intact during the whole time.
Then, just as Kyungsoo is trying to wordlessly guess what Chanyeol is thinking, Chanyeol lifts his head up and plants a soft, chaste, sweet kiss on Kyungsoo’s lips.
Well.
Call Kyungsoo foolish, but he had not expected that.
“Sorry,” Chanyeol says, but, judging from his small smile, he’s not sorry at all. “Does that mean we’re cool now?”
Kyungsoo is a bit lost, but he won’t let his confusion take the best of him. He’s not Chanyeol. “I guess so,” Kyungsoo says, licking his lips absent-mindedly. He notices that his hands are still on Chanyeol’s cheeks when he starts to feel a telltale warmth radiating from under his palms, and he lets them fall to his sides. “Now we just have to wait till my mom lets us out. I’m sorry for this, by the way.”
“No problem,” Chanyeol grins, cleaning the snot off his face with the sleeve of his filthy, smelly jacket. “Sit down?”
This time, Kyungsoo knows exactly what Chanyeol is thinking. He does as told, sitting with his legs parallel to the floor, leaning his back against the wall, and patting his lap to grant Chanyeol permission. It’s not long before Chanyeol lies down, and Kyungsoo’s fingers automatically find Chanyeol’s hair to pet. It’s organic, it’s natural for him to do that, and it makes Chanyeol hum in contentment as his warmth seeps through the fabric of Kyungsoo’s pants, and the steady rhythm of his breathing helps Kyungsoo to relax.
And maybe… maybe, just like this is natural, the kissing thing can become natural too. It hadn’t been bad, after all; it had just caught Kyungsoo unprepared. Actually, it felt quite nice, if Kyungsoo can recall well the brief sensation of Chanyeol’s warm lips against his. Yes, he wouldn’t mind doing that again in the future.
Maybe they can kiss again when they go to Seoul together. Maybe they can hold hands while eating bungeoppang, laughing as they remember the flying machine, and kiss when they reach the top of the tallest tower in Seoul. Maybe Chanyeol can lay down on Kyungsoo’s lap as they admire the sea from afar – and then, maybe Chanyeol can suddenly take off, fly above the buildings in Seoul, and take Kyungsoo in an adventure across the night sky, near the stars Kyungsoo sees so seldom, towards the full moon and a new world of adventure.
When Kyungsoo realizes what he’s thinking about, he almost laughs out loud. He’s starting to think exactly like Chanyeol.