Donghae was strangely silent throughout the first two memories they ventured through and removed. Eunhyuk didn’t quite know why it bothered him so much. Despite how down Donghae seemed, at the very least, he had made a conscious effort to try and reach out to other people. If anything, he'd been pretty warm and friendly around him, as much as he possibly could. Having Donghae walk about in a sort of daze made him uneasy. Well, it was probably for the best, he told himself sternly. It would remind him that they were meant to be professionals about all this – they were not friends.

He had done just fine these years by himself. 

As it was, the two memories they traversed weren’t much to speak of. The first had them in a rather standard high school, teenage-Donghae, brown hair a mess, leaning against a locker as he talked to a cherubic-looking girl. Sneaking a peek at her schoolbooks told Eunhyuk that her nickname was Sulli. “Hey, can I borrow your Literature assignment?” Donghae asked the girl, “I can’t get started on mine and you know how much of an Mr Han is.”

“Sure, but last time, okay?” Sulli responded, holding out the slip of paper.

Donghae took it, grinning, dropping down into a crouch as he pulled out his file. “You’re a lifesaver.”  

“Where’s Minho? Ugh, he’s always late because he doesn’t share Biology classes with us. I wish he were with us,” Sulli continued, stacking books into her arms.

Donghae, who was scribbling something in horribly illegible Hangul on his own paper, glanced up. “Trust me, he’s just as sad as you are.”

“Mm?” She blinked quizzically at him. “Oppa, don’t tease. Why’d you say that?”

“Oh, because he likes you – that’s why he always hangs around,” Donghae responded, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. Then he blanched. Sulli’s mouth fell open. He jumped to his feet and waved his hands frantically. “I mean, like a friend! Not romantic like! No way, not Minho!”

“Not Minho what?” The man in question, looking a little softer around the edges than the mature adult Eunhyuk had seen him as, had arrived, looking from the horrified Donghae to the shocked Sulli. He cocked his head like a confused puppy. “What’s with your faces?”

“I’m not interested in you that way, Minho,” Sulli said curtly, drawing up to her full height and clutching her books tightly to her chest. The sweet quality of her expression was replaced by cold distaste. “You should know I’m already dating an upperclassman anyways, so if you’re just hanging around me to get my attention, you can kindly stop.”

Skirt swishing, she stomped away from the two boys. Minho stared after her, looking utterly off-balance. Donghae looked like he wanted to run for the hills. Eunhyuk arched an eyebrow at the real Donghae, who only bit his lip and fiddled with his shirt buttons. Weird. He'd been expecting some sort of horrified reaction, or embarrassment not...that. “What…just happened?” Minho managed.

“Rejection?” the memory-Donghae hazarded.

“No, how’d she know I – you told her?” Minho gaped, accurately reading his expression.

“It wasn’t intentional! It just slipped out!”

“You’re such an idiot,” Minho groaned, resting his forehead against the locker. “I told you not to tell anyone!”

As the bickering began, Donghae tugged at his sleeve. “You can erase it,” he said flatly.

Eunhyuk stared at him a long moment, trying to figure out what on Earth was going through Donghae’s head. Why was he so worried? Then he made a gesture, and everything crumbled apart around them.

*

The second memory was almost a carbon copy of the first. Only this time, Donghae and Minho were university students, Donghae looking much more polished – he’d evidently figured out how to use a comb – as he beamed brightly at a rather attractive girl, who merely raised an unimpressed eyebrow at him. The girl was stretched out on the grass of the university’s lawn, Donghae standing over her, casting a long shadow. She made a rude gesture at him, stretching her arms out, twisting her hips. 

“Come on, I’m not Minho, but you can look happy to see me, Yuri,” he said with a laugh, flopping down next to her. She snorted again. Donghae pulled out some of the strands of grass absently and dropped them teasingly on her face, making her squawk and whack him with her palms. The ease between them suggested his initial suspicion that they were dating was off-the-mark. 

“What makes you think I’d be happy to see Minho as well?” she said with a smirk.

“Because you like him and he likes you,” Donghae said, in that familiar ‘it’s-the-most-obvious-thing-in-the-world’ tone. Then he went pale and swore under his breath. Someone evidently had an issue with keeping things secret. Eunhyuk found it entirely amusing, and actually somewhat cute. God, he sounded like he'd adopted some runaway puppy and not a grown man. He wanted to punch himself in the face. 

Yuri stared at him for several long seconds. Then she said with a sudden gentleness, “Minho likes me?”

“No?” Donghae lied blatantly.

Resting her hands on her stomach, she shook her head a little, eyes drifting across the sky. She seemed to be turning the thought over inside her head. “I always suspected a little… I didn’t want to say anything and make things awkward… But I also wanted to let him down easy.”

“You don’t like him back?” Donghae asked.

“Oh, Minho’s a sweet guy. But he’s not my style,” Yuri told him. She sat up abruptly. “Damn, I can’t lay around knowing this now. I’m going have to nip this one in the bud. No point in him trailing me around like a lovesick puppy.”

“Maybe that’s not the best idea!” Donghae cried, now looking utterly panicked. But Yuri had already gotten to her feet and sprinted off, yelling something about finding Minho. Donghae dropped his head into his hands. “!”

Again, the present-day Donghae tugged at Eunhyuk’s sleeve, and repeated the same monotonous phrase. “You can erase it.”

So he did.

*

In hindsight, he really should have guessed a lot earlier what was wrong. He had been looking at a mirror image of himself, after all. That toneless voice, the apathetic gaze, the face he didn't want to make eye-contact with in the mirror... But as the grass beneath their feet withered and floated away on the breeze as they were swept into another memory, all Eunhyuk could think was I wish Donghae were behaving like himself again.

It was a silly thought, since he’d barely known Donghae a few days, and yet he was absolutely certain that this lifeless husk was not how Lee Donghae was meant to be. The conviction in his thoughts made him more than a little anxious. 

The third memory was in Donghae’s university years – this time Donghae had stupidly informed Minho’s girlfriend that Minho was planning to break up with her and she’d thrown her couple bracelet at Minho’s face – and played out so much like the first two that Eunhyuk was starting to get worried that they’d entered some sort of endless recurrence of time. That would not be healthy for him, and Eunhyuk preferred to be on the spectrum of "morose" rather than "murderous". Not that he was morose, of course. Donghae’s mood seemed to sink even lower in this one, considering the fact that it had started with him and Minho having a great time goofing off. But it too had to go, just like all the others.

By the time they traipsed through the fourth memory of Donghae getting stage fright during a class presentation and informing the teacher that he and Minho had prepared the entire, six-month long project the night before – Eunhyuk turned to the man beside him and said bluntly, “You are absolutely crap at keeping secrets.”

Donghae’s lips twitched a bit. “It just all comes out! I mean, it was obvious that he didn’t like the way she acted and it just seemed natural to say it, like me telling you – I know what you’re doing!”

“Me?” Eunhyuk said with faux innocence. A grin was starting to spread across his lips at Donghae’s affronted face.

“You think you’re so smart; I’m not that easy to manipulate,” Donghae said sulkily.

“Damn, and I thought I could use my medical degree for something actually useful,” Eunhyuk joked, stuffing his hands into his pockets as the memory around them came apart like an unwrapped present.

“You don’t want to be a doctor?” Donghae asked curiously, reading between the lines.

Eunhyuk shrugged, watching the faces of those erased go eerily blank, like someone had smudged their features right off. That always disturbed him. “Cliché, but yeah. It’s not terrible, but I never dreamed about it or wanted to be one as a kid. My mum thought it would be a stable job. I wanted to make her happy.”

Donghae cracked a genuine smile then. “Least you’re good at it. I had to do accounting, and I at it. Too many numbers.”

“Good? I was crying my way through med school – everyone had it so easy!” Eunhyuk whined, not caring that he sounded like a bratty five-year-old. He even felt a little vindicated in it. The shared pain of trying to get through a university course you despised broke down all barriers, and suddenly they were complaining louder than the old women who sat in front of him on the bus. 

“And then pretended they weren’t studying a bit and were just that good,” Donghae groused, jumping off from where he’d been perching on one of the desks. Not a moment too soon; the desks vanished around them, taking the faceless strangers with them.

“And whining that they couldn’t make it into SKY,” Eunhyuk continued, skipping aside when two of the classroom walls crashed down into the room, leaving a gaping void on two sides of the room.

“s,” Donghae said decidedly.

“,” Eunhyuk agreed. They grinned at each other with surprising warmth, and once again, that resistance in Eunhyuk's heart cracked a little more. There was something reassuring in the feeling of you too? I thought no one but myself…

Then they were falling backwards into the void.

*

Eunhyuk found himself sprawled stomach-down on the hard-wooden floor of a middle school practice room. Groaning, he sat up, resting his weight on his palms, and rubbed his sore belly. Evidently Donghae's subconscious did not believe in graceful landings on feather pillows; suffering built character, apparently. Turning his head, he felt disoriented and tried to figure out which way was up. Finally, he managed to make his head stop spinning long enough to sit himself down cross-legged on the floor, massaging his temples. Donghae crawled over to sit beside him, looking similarly queasy.

“How do you do that every day?” he complained, “Can we throw up in our memories?”

“Your mind, you have the power,” Eunhyuk reminded him. Donghae made a pained sound and flopped back down onto the floor. Eunhyuk looked around, picking at the school uniforms they were both wearing. How many embarrassing or bad middle and high school memories could one person have? Probably too many, he thought, thinking of his own rather colourful history. Thank God Donghae wasn’t visiting his memories. He quietly prayed all his teachers had conveniently forgotten he'd existed. Hell, he'd wipe those memories for free! 

A group of teenage boys with instruments were talking amongst themselves, pouring over some papers clutched in teenage-Donghae’s hands. Drums, guitar, Donghae was standing beside a keyboard and playing out some chords and pointing to his scribbles…

“You were in a band?” Eunhyuk asked in surprise. The melody Donghae was playing was surprisingly good. Unrefined yes, but there were makings of something more underneath it, that with a little polish, could be something worthwhile. It made him want to move, not some immature composition mimicking the latest ballad or dance single.

“Yeah,” Donghae said, looking a little embarrassed. “I sang and played the keyboard. I’m not the best singer or anything, but I could carry a tune, you know, but I wasn’t great, but –”

“Hold on,” Eunhyuk said, raising a weary hand. “You said something stupid to Minho about singing, didn’t you.”

Donghae blinked. “How’d you know?”

“Wild guess,” Eunhyuk deadpanned.  

Donghae’s eyes narrowed. “Are you being sarcastic?”

“Me? No. I’m the most un-sarcastic person I know.”

“Oh, off.”

“Language, we are surrounded by little thirteen and fourteen-year-olds!”

“This isn’t real.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Who’s the stupid one now?”

“I… Shut up!”

Eunhyuk shoved Donghae’s shoulder, who snickered at the terrible comeback. A gummy smile stretched across his face – he had been smiling more today than he had in over two years, and it made his face physically hurt from lack of practice. It was a pain he found he could live with. He leant his back against a steel filing cabinet and observed the proceedings with an interested eye. Puberty appeared to have struck Donghae a hard blow, because his face was sweaty and greasy-looking, with an unfortunate smattering of acne. The other boys looked similarly gawky, with ugly early 2000s haircuts and styling.

Ah, middle school, Eunhyuk thought fondly, recalling the utterly hideous pair of spectacles he’d had to wear back then.  

There was a knock on the door, and Minho stuck his head in, beaming. “Hey, hyung!”

Donghae hit a wrong note in his scales, and said with a noticeable hint of irritation, “What is it, Minho?”  

“I was just thinking…” Minho said slowly, causing one of Donghae’s band members to snigger. Donghae shot him a glare, and walked over to Minho, their voices still faintly audible. “I really want to join the band, hyung!”

“You can’t play an instrument,” Donghae said a little impatiently, “Minho, we need to practice this new song I wrote, it’s the first one I’ve composed –”

“But I could learn!”

“What, right now?” Donghae snapped, and this time he did not stop the faint swells of laughter from the other boys. “Minho, you’re a football player. That’s what you’re good at. This isn't your thing.”

“I could be your manager,” Minho insisted. He had clearly latched onto the idea, worrying at it like a dog with a bone.

“We don’t need a manager, this isn’t a teen movie,” Donghae responded, edging back towards his instrument. Eunhyuk felt sorry for Minho – he clearly wanted to spend more time with his friend, but was failing miserably at finding