“Jongin.”

Jongin is startled by the sound of his own name. He looks up from where he's been sitting on the floor to see Kyungsoo's face appear in the balcony doorway.

“I lied,” he said quietly. “I do want you here.”

Jongin smiled and stood. Kyungsoo stepped back as Jongin came outside. Then he went and sat on the floor once more, this time next to Sehun. Jongin joined them, opting to sit on Kyungsoo's other side instead of next to Sehun.

He was a little curious as to what Sehun said, but that wasn't much of a concern.

“Sehun said… he said you know Chanyeol.” Kyungsoo looked up at Jongin with wide, wet eyes. “Is that true?”

Jongin nodded slowly. He wasn't sure what he could even say. Finding out that Chanyeol and Kyungsoo were step brothers was a little strange for him, especially after doing a little math and figuring out that Kyungsoo's death happened at some point after he'd met Chanyeol. He knew Chanyeol when Kyungsoo had been murdered. Yet Chanyeol had never mentioned anything of the sort.

“Is he still pining after that annoying kid Baekhyun?”

Jongin nodded again. Chanyeol was very possessive of Baekhyun, and they were ‘just friends’ or ‘just roommates’ to most. But Jongin knew after only a week of knowing them what that possessiveness really was.

Which made him wonder how much Baekhyun knew about Kyungsoo or his death.

“He's not that annoying,” Sehun piped in.

Kyungsoo snorted. “Yeah only when he opens his mouth.”

“But he never stops talk—oh.”

“How did you meet Junmyeon?” Jongin didn't know what came over him as he asked the question. But the more this dragged on, the more nervous he felt, as if they were right about to walk into a trap. Or a more fitting simile, like they were sitting ducks.

“What does that matter for?” Kyungsoo snapped. “I told you to stop asking about him. I won't tell you who he is.”

“I already know who he is.”

Kyungsoo looked surprised for a second, and then, just looked angry. “I told you not to get involved. And what do you do?! You get involved.”

“Hey,” Sehun chides. “I told you he had something to tell you and you promised not to get angry.”

“Well I lied!”

Sehun pouted slightly. “I thought we were friends now, Kyungsoo. Friends don't lie to each other.”

Kyungsoo looked at Sehun and Jongin tried his best not to interrupt the little moment they were having since he felt left out at not knowing how they ‘were friends now.’ But the moment Kyungsoo looked away and started bawling into his palms, his eyes met Sehun's, his own panic mirrored in them. Neither of them expected the sudden change in emotion, but Jongin felt stupid for not realizing it could happen. It had happened plenty of times before. His own first interaction Kyungsoo had ended in such a way, with Kyungsoo talking to him sweetly and then shutting him out almost immediately when he said the wrong thing.

They could do nothing but embrace Kyungsoo's cold, shaking body. He tried to speak up a bunch of times through the tears but each attempt only resulted in him crying harder. Eventually, the sobbing died down. Both of them were curled around Kyungsoo's figure on the dirty floor of the neglected balcony, their foreheads resting against Kyungsoo's cheeks. Kyungsoo didn't stop shaking even after he stopped crying.

“I don't want anyone else to get hurt. Especially not because of me.”

“Kyungsoo—”

“No matter how nice he looks and acts he's not. He can change in seconds.”

“We—”

“Especially if you try and confront him about something… like I did. He doesn't like not getting what he wants. He doesn't like the image he's created for himself to be shattered.”

They stayed silent this time. In case Kyungsoo wanted to continue. There was no point in being interrupted over and over again when it was likely that Kyungsoo probably didn't even hear them with how frantic he was getting.

“That was my mistake. That's what got me and Luhan killed.”

How can you possibly comfort someone who's dead?

“Oh, Luhan,” Kyungsoo exhaled a heart wrenching sound before he began sobbing again.

There's nothing you can say to comfort someone dead.

Jongin and Sehun continue to hold him as he cries. It's not much—they can't bring him or Luhan back to life, nor do they have a way to bring the two together in this afterlife stage—but it's all they can do right now.

Every once in a while, they look up at each other over Kyungsoo's messy head of hair, almost perfectly in sync, eyes locking automatically, and Jongin can see the reassurance in Sehun's eyes.

As long as they're in this together, everything has to be alright. It just has to.

----

It became sort of a routine. They went down on Kyungsoo's worst nights. They talked to him, never about Junmyeon. Jongin told him stories about Chanyeol. Kyungsoo laughed the hardest at the story of how Chanyeol and Baekhyun almost got him kicked out of his dorm, but he was also interested in how Chanyeol's studies were going. They brought him some mixes Chanyeol made or songs he had written and recorded.

“He comes here sometimes,” Kyungsoo admitted once.

Jongin and Sehun shared confused expressions. They urged him to go on.

“He stands outside the door. I can feel him. I know it's him. But he's never tried to come inside, never even jiggled the door handle. I can't blame him though, it's not like I went out into the hallway to let him know I was still here either.”

Jongin was surprised. He didn't want to doubt that Kyungsoo could feel his stepbrothers presence sometimes, and he already knows that Chanyeol knows that it's Kyungsoo's apartment. But Chanyeol had never seemed to be the kind of person to hide his emotions very well. He was always bouncing off the walls if he was excited, his thing for Baekhyun was a secret to no one, if he was ever angry he wasn't shy about letting who he was angry at know exactly what he thought of them, proved by his rudeness towards Junmyeon in the warehouse and when the professor had Jongin cornered about the summer trip.

So it seemed to Jongin, maybe the reason that Chanyeol was always so open about most of what he was feeling was because he put all of his effort into hiding one particular emotion—grief. But Jongin had seen it. He'd seen it that day, when Chanyeol had told him that he knew who had murdered his brother.

----

“I met him once, Professor Kim, just once, before Kyungsoo died. That’s how I know he left because of a person and not because he wanted his space. Then…” Chanyeol sighed loudly.

“Chanyeol it’s—”

“No, just… just let me get it all out please? I never even told Baekhyun the whole story. He’s my best friend, I know I should, even though it’s been so long since the fact. But he’s seriously considering signing up for the play now that Junmyeon is promising him the lead part even before the auditions. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t want to understand, that this guy’s dangerous. He doesn’t care because as far as he knows, Junmyeon’s just a ty professor, and the play would look great for future castors.”

“How’s forcing yourself to tell me about it, going to help Baekhyun?”

“Can we just think of this as practice maybe? I want to talk to him tonight.” Jongin nodded. “Thank you. Really, Jongin, it means a lot.”

Guilt rose up Jongin’s throat like bile and he struggled not to choke. Wouldn’t the truth just hurt more?

“Once, when I was visiting—after he died—I guess I wanted to just feel...something. His presence maybe, I don’t know how to say this.”

“Like his ghost?” Jongin contributed quietly.

“I wouldn’t say ghost, exactly, but I guess that’s close enough. I guess I do believe in dumb stuff like that though.”

Not so dumb.

“I saw him again. He was arguing with two of Kyungsoo’s friends. I knew them but… I didn’t really know them, you know? The same way they knew me, as Kyungsoo’s brother, but they didn’t know anything about me other than that. I hadn’t talked to them after all of it. There was no funeral, the police had told us so late, our family… there was no way we could have managed to have a funeral and deal with people saying how sorry they were. And none of us knew Luhan well enough to go to his funeral, or even know if he had one. So I hadn’t seen them since the few times I had when Kyungsoo was alive. They were insisting that he was going to get caught eventually. He was just so smug. He turned to look right at me, and he said ‘if I planned on getting caught for a double homicide, then I would have gotten caught,’ then he looked back at them and said ‘if your friends mattered even a little in the grand scheme of the universe, it wouldn’t have been so easy to get rid of them.’”

Jongin couldn’t believe that Junmyeon was cocky enough to go around admitting what he’d done. Nor could he possibly imagine how Chanyeol would have felt in that moment. If it were Jongin, he might have gone insane right there and then.

“I tried to say something to him. But my mind was all over the place. I started stuttering, tripping over every word. I wanted him to know that I’d never stop trying to get him arrested. But he didn’t care. He told me that no one that mattered would believe me, and even if they did, they wouldn’t do a thing about it. There was no evidence. He’d made sure of it. Even if there were more than just three testimonies, me and his friends, the police had his back, and there wasn’t a single piece of DNA found in the apartment. He had a whole forensics team to clean up after him.”

“Once he left, Jongdae and Minseok talked to me. We exchanged numbers, just in case any one of us ever came across anything that could put junmyeon behind bars and get justice for Kyungsoo and Luhan. We haven’t spoken since. I’m sure you can guess what that means.”

Jongin is surprised at the level of emotion that Chanyeol releases towards him and promises himself he will never bring up these memories for Chanyeol ever again. He had already told Chanyeol that he himself had only found out about the murders because he had heard some rumours once he’d moved in and asked the landlord. But he’s still not sure if he should just confess everything.

He hopes Chanyeol will forgive him if it ever comes to Jongin having to tell him the truth.

----

Sometimes, Kyungsoo didn't want to see them, so they'd just leave, but not before making absolutely sure that they couldn't convince him to let them stay.

Jongin was a little endeared that Sehun was putting so much effort into this, but he didn't ask why. It was nice the way it was. They were no longer keeping anything from each other and keeping Kyungsoo distracted together secured their bond in a way that neither of them could have imagined happening in such a short time.

Without Sehun, Jongin doesn't think he could have gotten through this year at all.

So I usually write the very end of the last chapter (aka the very end of the story and in the case of this story, what I mean is the epilogue) before the last few chapters and I just finished writing it before editing this chapter and posting it and yall are gonna KILL me....

Comment and let me know what you think is going to happen in the next chapter (the last chapter of the main story line) and in the epilogue too if you want to think farther ahead.

Thanks for reading!