--

The auditorium is surprisingly cold and quiet now that it’s just the three of them. The quietness is to be expected. People usually bring body heat and noise, and crumbs to leave behind even when there is clearly a ‘do not eat or drink in the auditorium’ sign outside the main doors. The air conditioning gets stamped out, erased from their environment, but right now it swirls around them and makes them want to wrap arms around each other, more than usual. There are three boys. One is very young, the youngest, and on the surface he is the most naive. He is only eighteen, and as naive as he is, he’s learned to be an adult already. Or he at least knows how. The boy with his arm curled around the eighteen-year-old’s waist is older, twenty two, and holds him close as if he’ll run away if he thinks of letting go. This one is not really a boy, he’s too old to be a boy, but his face betrays his age on his best days. He only looks tired, and ragged on others. The last one is the tallest, but not the oldest, and he stands a little ways behind them, giving them space that they don’t need. He is the one who holds the curtain back for them so that they can look out onto the empty plane of the auditorium stage. Kris, they call him, one of his many names. Kris rolled off his tongue before he thought it through, and so he became Kris, and he’s been Kris since the three of them met. Autumn day, a young kid wearing a thick knitted hat on his way to school, eyes red and wet. His name is Oh Sehun. There’s someone holding his hand, someone a little taller although that would all change once the growth spurt hit, leading him with hurried steps. This is Lu Han. Kris will never know what happened for sure that day, but it would lead into the future, because he remembers Lu Han from the playground back in China as soon as he sees him, eyes trailing from teary-eyed Oh Sehun’s small fingers to Lu Han’s, up to his face. So we meet again his mind had told him. He’d heard that in a movie. It sounded nice, but Kris only managed a small. “Oh. You,” when Lu Han had nearly bumped into him. Kris snaps back into the now. It almost seems colder here than in the past, on a truly chilled day in the fall, when they were children and were swaddled in coats and scarves. Lu Han is just as he always is, pushing Sehun along, pushing him forward, hand now pressed into the youngest’s back. “Go on,” he says. Sehun hesitates, as he always does. There’s a side to him that is somewhat terrified of making mistakes. He freezes up too easily, so there are times when he forgets to smile, afraid that it will be lopsided or that something will be lodged in his teeth and others will laugh at him. Sehun is a carefully calculated self experiment, and Kris always worries. Lu Han pushes him forward. “Go,” he says. Sehun, the new university student, steps forward in his blue jeans and loose t-shirt, and waits for Lu Han to turn the music on.

--

“A friend of mine hurt his waist pretty bad.” Kris exhales, a white puff of smoke in the night air. Sehun watches it fade. “That sucks.” “He’ll be out of practice for a while, at least a week,” Sehun says. “Teacher’s orders.” “You sound pretty worried.” “I have other friends besides you, hyung,” he laughs. “And Lu Han.” Kris laughs, too, lips clamped around his cigarette, but his laughter melts into the air the way his smoke does. It vanishes. Sehun has other friends. This was never a novel thing. Kris and Lu Han are two people he lives with, the ones who love him; they are friends, but they are more than that, too. He doesn’t know what ‘more’ means with anyone except Lu Han. There are things that they have to keep from Sehun. “I was supposed to dance with him at the next competition,” Sehun sighs, reminding Kris once again of reality around him. “You’ll get someone else, though, right?” “He won’t be as good.” “How do you know that?” Sehun deadpans. “I’ve known everyone in the studio for at least year now,” but he breaks into an easy chuckle. “Maybe he’ll surprise you,” Kris suggests. Sehun had been expecting him to say that. “Maybe,” Sehun mumbles. “Maybe I just don’t pay close enough attention.” Sehun drops the words slowly, like falling papers out of the hands of someone who’s been nearly knocked over. He looks at his toes, points them like he learned in the fourth grade, and nods. It’s always difficult to do with sneakers on, but Sehun likes challenges, even stupid ones. “That’s probably it.”

--

“Did you do that?” asked Baekhyun, thinking about taking a picture with his pretty new iPhone (Sehun hates him for it; his phone sucks).

Sehun, tall and thin and breathing in cancer fumes from a cigarette, tossed the stick to the ground before stomping it out with his foot. “No,” he said. He cast Baekhyun a you’re just stupid look again. A famous look between the two of them. It was also the face Sehun used when he was just tired, or if the sun was in his eyes.

He took a moment to step back and admire it, though, as if he had been the one to spray the words “EVERY LIVING CREATURE DIES ALONE” onto the abandoned building’s wall.

“Depressing,” Baekhyun added. The flash on his phone went off. Sehun winced.

“You’re fucking weird.”

“Well, so are you,” said Baekhyun, pocketing his phone.

Sehun flexed his toes and then cracked his fingers. The sound always bothered Baekhyun. He was tired; they both were. Sehun couldn’t even remember why they came here today. Their favorite getaway in this tiny dot in the city had been vandalized, and not by Sehun. They might have to find a new spot to smoke and break things (Sehun brought girls and boys here, too, when he wanted some private time; only three times had Baekhyun walked in on something frisky). This place had the best wifi connection, though, despite being thoroughly cut off from the rest of the world. And Baekhyun needed his wifi. “I don’t know why I put up with you, hyung.”

The look on Baekhyun’s face, unchanged from it’s pleasant expression before, was replaced by sunglasses that’d been sitting on Baekhyun’s head since the afternoon they’d spent in the park eating salted crackers and oreos with iced tea. It wasn’t very hardcore like Sehun wanted to believe he was, but that was something he’d let slide. Baekhyun said nothing.

The walls looked like sad, greyed out once pink curtains that had been ripped. Maybe like wallpaper, but too much like cloth. It was the size of a garage, or at least that’s what the two of them thought. Neither Baekhyun nor Sehun had ever had a garage before. They would have liked to have been able to say that they had. That, and a nice fence to keep a dog from running out and chasing everything. Easy life.

But here they were, sitting on the two navy blue armchairs they’d found in here that Baekhyun had meticulously cleaned so neither of them would die of some terrible infection. There they were.

“Wikipedia isn’t even that reliable,” Sehun commented as he looked over at his friend, eyes torn away from his phone. He was texting a girl from the last cram school he’d been to before quitting. Her eyes were really something. But her eyes weren’t here and Baekhyun was. Sehun craved attention.

Baekhyun shrugged and opened his bottle of coke. Sehun would never admit it, but he always thought Baekhyun was cute when he stared absentmindedly into a computer like this, eating or drinking on the side. That wouldn’t have been cool to admit, and Sehun had a shitty rep to maintain. He’d just watch, instead.

He ignored his phone and rethought his plans about meeting up with this girl. He wouldn’t have even remembered her name if he hadn’t had it programmed into his phone, tacked onto her number.

“It’s still interesting,” said Baekhyun. “Did you know that a maple syrup production farm is called a sugarbush?”

Sehun deadpanned at him, but Baekhyun’s eyes were still focused on his screen. His mouth was still open, too.

“Sometimes it’s called a ‘sugar shanty.’”

“Hyung.”

“Maple trees are usually tapped between 30 and 40 years of age—oh, sorry.”

“You’re so fucking weird.”

“I had pancakes this morning,” Baekhyun defended. “With maple syrup. I was curious.”

“You’re always curious,” sighed Sehun. He leaned his head back, letting the precariously placed cap on his head fall off when he touched the back of the armchair. Baekhyun still got nervous when Sehun’s hair grazed the material; as if he thought Sehun would break out into the worst case of head lice ever. Humans are the only host of this specific parasite, Baekhyun had read once, about head lice. Gross.

“There’s nothing bad about being curious,” Baekhyun reminded him. “Can you sit up now?”

Sehun smirked, but Baekhyun couldn’t see.

This time they were flat on their backs on Baekhyun’s floor. Sehun went to Baekhyun’s house far more often than Baekhyun went to Sehun’s house. “It’s always dirty as fuck,” Sehun had defended, although it was more of an insult. “Sometimes I clean up,” but usually he just couldn’t be bothered. Baekhyun knew that too well. Sehun was tired of picking up after his family. His mother was always squawking on the phone and ignoring him, his brother had taken refuge at college, and his father was off on some business trip. The only person who cared about Sehun was away all time, or was a person named Byun Baekhyun, or his grandparents.

Baekhyun’s house was nice and clean and sometimes Sehun would unintentionally sleep over. That’s what Baekhyun thought at first: that Sehun wasn’t doing it on purpose. When he started noticing that Sehun had turned his phone on silent so he could miss his mother’s half-assed calls (she only called because she had to), Baekhyun realized otherwise.

He almost couldn’t blame Sehun. Baekhyun’s mother was more of a mother to him that his had been for a long time, and Baekhyun knew that more than anyone.

Sehun exhaled deeply, Baekhyun thought he had fallen asleep, and let his head roll into Baekhyun’s shoulder.

“What are you reading this time?” he asked, tired. He made Baekhyun jump a little, or just twitch.

“Comets have been observed since ancient times and have traditionally been considered bad omens,” he read.

“More useless stuff, to be honest.”

“Maybe, but it’s interesting.”

“Well, that’s your thing.”

“And your thing is . . . nothing.”

Sehun sighed, breath tickling Baekhyun’s shoulder through his thin white t-shirt. “You know better than anyone that I’m not going anywhere in life.”

“You could if you wanted to. Don’t you want to?”

“Honestly,” the younger boy turned onto his side and tossed a lazy arm over Baekhyun’s stomach. “I still have no idea what I want.”

“So that means you could want to go somewhere in life after all, then. You just haven’t decided yet,” Baekhyun scrolled further down on his phone. The etymology of ‘comet.’ Cometes. Latin. Literal meaning: long hair. “There’s still hope for you,” he added in before forgetting what they were talking about.

Long fingers tickled his side. He let out a soft grunt, almost a stifled laugh but more uncomfortable than anything. “Hyung, you’re too nice to me.”

“Someone has to be.”

He kept reading. Sehun fell asleep with his face buried into Baekhyun’s neck. Baekhyun kept reading until words about comet tails and meteor showers and orbital characteristics bored him.

Baekhyun opened the door to the sounds of frustrated grunts in Mandarin. Not what he was expecting today. The sounds were paired with the image of Sehun being fucked so hard into the pool table they’d commandeered from some creep last week that it was shaking.

“Really? We just got that!” Baekhyun shouted.

On his back, Sehun twisted his neck so that he could just barely see Baekhyun. “Hyung, get out!”

Suddenly frantic, Baekhyun tugged on the door handle and slammed it so hard on his way out that dust erupted from the corners of the threshold. His eyes widened when he heard what sounded like Sehun climaxing on the other side of the door. Maybe he should just go home.

No. This had happened before. This was not the first time and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Baekhyun had as much of a right to be in their hideout as Sehun did.

Plus, this was actually a little funny.

He replayed the sound of Sehun orgasming in his mind. And laughed until the door was thrust open into his face, almost smacking him into the wall. The Chinese guy with dark, shadowed eyes who’d been fucking his best friend ran off without so much as looking at Baekhyun. The door was wide open, and soon it was just the two of them when Sehun emerged, fixing his belt.

“Say nothing,” he warned. That wasn’t about to stop Baekhyun.

“I didn’t know you knew Chinese, Sehun.”

“Shut up.”

But Baekhyun had been possessed by a fit of giggles. He wished that he knew how to speak Mandarin for the sake of imitating the way Sehun sounded when he’d opened that door. Ridiculous. Lewd. Straight out of a porno. “You’re really something, you know?” They walked back inside, but Sehun was quiet. When he finally turned around to say something, Baekhyun saw how red his face was.

This wasn’t good.

“Sehun—”

“Can you just drop it?”

“It’s—it’s okay, I know you just have to let it out sometimes.”

“Oh really, you know?”

Still red and nothing but caged anger, Sehun pivoted on his heel and pushed himself toward the door, pushed himself past Baekhyun who tried to put himself in the way. He tried to apologize, but when he opened his mouth Sehun only said one thing.

“Fuck off.”