Apologies for making Baekhyun and Chanyeol out of character. I promise, I'll get to their true personalities. 

And apologies for being a bad author and constantly breaking the fourth wall...my bad~

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. 

-Fyodor Dostoevsky

Baekhyun woke up so dizzy that he couldn't sit up to feel the floor. The room looked like it was melting around him, his hand the only thing solid.

"Lay," he croaked.

Yixing grunted from the mattress on the ground. 

"Lay, I'm dizzy."

There was a shuffling noise, and Yixing rose to his feet. "Where're your meds again?"

Baekhyun put a hand on his face, fingers gently massaging his closed eyelids. "My desk."

Yixing chuckled. "Why'd you leave it there?" Pills rattled around in the plastic bottle, and warm hands pressed a small capsule into Baekhyun's mouth, followed by a thin stream of water. Baekhyun swallowed thickly, his other hand gripping tightly to his sheets.

"Do you want the oil?"

Essential oils. Baekhyun mumbled an affirmation, and Yixing dabbed a tiny bit on Baekhyun's forehead. "You'll be okay. Do you need the trash can?"

"Not this time. What time is it?"

"Six-oh-three. You'd have to get up soon to go to work anyways."

Baekhyun nodded. 

He lay there, one hand lying next to his head and the other rubbing a sweat-soaked blanket. New week, more issues. Baekhyun had had four dizzy spells and a headache nearly every day the week before, a record amount. The week ahead wasn't promising any better, and thinking about that didn't help.

Nor would the medication. Baekhyun already knew that medicine couldn't cure what he was suffering from--he wasn't sure anything could--but it could treat the side effects.

Eventually, he hauled himself out of bed with Yixing's help to get dressed for school.

It was a ridiculously cold day, and Baekhyun wrote down his day's activities on Post-It as he walked. Teach. Meet with the chairman. Take the 5:45 bus (run!) to school. Don't forget to buy breakfast! Day ends at 9. He scrawled in a happy face, just for good measure, though it ended up looking more like a killer clown. Baekhyun stared at it, then folded the paper up and tucked it into his pocket. For a moment, it seemed like hands were reaching up from the cracks in the pavement, and Baekhyun blinked them away.

The substitute teacher's assistant, Chanyeol, was already waiting outside the gates. His head was down, studying something on his fancy smartphone. 

"Oh, Chanyeol!"

Chanyeol looked up at the sound of his name, and he waved at Baekhyun as he approached. "Am I early?" he asked, glancing up at the school with its dark windows.

Baekhyun rested a hand subtly on the fence to steady the spinning that had started again. "A bit," he said, smiling. "Usually, I open the school up, and the teachers come after."

"I see." Chanyeol nodded, then scratched the back of his neck sheepishly. A silver bracelet glimmered for a second underneath his black gloves, and Baekhyun felt a small pang of envy. "What time is good, then? For tomorrow."

"I'd say...maybe just after seven?"

"Got it."

Chanyeol watched quietly as Baekhyun fumbled with the keys to the school, the latter feeling like a mouse hiding from a hawk. The taller man's eyes seemed to bore into his back, though when Baekhyun finally opened the door and met Chanyeol's eyes, he was smiling.

Baekhyun opened his mouth to speak, then froze, eyes caught on a shadow in the corner of the courtyard. It seemed humanoid, a faint blob that moved with startling likeness to a human. 

F . Not now.

He hadn't hallucinated in years. Of all the times...

Chanyeol seemed to have noticed something, and he glanced over his shoulder. "Baekhyun?" he said, moving in closer. "Are you okay?"

Baekhyun stuttered something unintelligible, then forced as wide a grin as he could manage. "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Come on. We've got a whole school to light up." He ushered the now-concerned Chanyeol into the building, casting one last look at the empty courtyard.

Of all the evil things Chanyeol had seen in his life, children were by far the worst.

As the last of the miniature devils left the classroom, Chanyeol leaned against the whiteboard and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He never expected an assassination to involve teaching fourth graders how to do math, and he could say with finality that he would never be a teacher. Not that he could. Killing didn't usually look good on résumés.

Speaking of which, Chanyeol hadn't yet figured out the best way to follow through with his mission. He had spent the past few days trying to decipher all that he could from his sparse communication with the commissioner (in between vocabulary lessons to unruly children). Being a murderer meant having a rather flexible set of morals, but Chanyeol always asked for a motive when he carried out a killing. It was a sort of reconciliation with his own mind.

This time, he hadn't gotten one, and it shook him a bit. So did the money.

Money or what was left of his humanity? A burning question.

Chanyeol picked up the trash left behind by the kids and made a sweep across the room. For what, he wasn't exactly sure. He stopped in front of the window, which gave him a good view of the courtyard and the children running home. 

That morning, Baekhyun had looked quite afraid of something, enough to trigger the defense mechanism in himself. At first, Chanyeol had thought the teacher was onto him. 

He realized pretty quickly that Baekhyun was looking over his shoulder.

Chanyeol was never inclined towards the supernatural or the religious, but his mind went to the horror movies his father used to watch late at night.

The substitute teacher, someone with the surname Wink (a funny name, Chanyeol thought), cleared his throat. 

"I need to get home quickly, so if you could just...I don't know, check in or something. I don't know what protocol is here," Wink said, packing up his binder and smoothing down the shirt that threatened to tear over his potbelly.

Chanyeol smiled. "Of course. I'll take care of it."

Wink hurried out, checking his watch the whole time.

Chanyeol patted himself down, checking to make sure that the few things he had brought were on his person. Phone, keys, Swiss Army knife, wallet, the thin chain inside his pants that could wrap around his knuckles quickly. Analog watch with the hands that made tiny huffing noises when he listened in dead silence. Belt with the hidden needle. 

He took one last look across the room, then stopped. A kid's pencilcase was left on a chair, probably forgotten in the hurry. Chanyeol picked it up, checked the inside quickly for the weapons he had become accustomed to finding, and rezipped it. There had to be a lost and found somewhere.

Baekhyun was sitting at the table in the teacher's lounge, throwing a pen up in the air and catching it. He flinched when Chanyeol opened the squeaky door, and the pen dropped down on his head. "Ow."

Chanyeol peered around. "I, uh, a kid left this in the room."

Baekhyun stood up and gestured for the Hello Kitty pencilcase, endearingly out of place in the hands of the tall and dark substitute assistant. "I'll leave it here, and you or Mr. Wink could pick it up in the morning. I think it's Casey's."

Chanyeol's eyes were wide. "You know whose it is?"

"I know everyone who goes through this school," Baekhyun said. A little flicker of pride appeared in his chest. 

"That's impressive."

"One of the few things I can do," Baekhyun said with a chuckle.

Chanyeol scrunched up his nose. "I doubt it."

Baekhyun found himself staring at the taller man's face for a little too long, and he turned away quickly, slapping himself mentally. 

Chanyeol either didn't notice or pretended not to. "Am I allowed to go?" he asked, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb.

"Yup. You're a sub, so there isn't much for you to do."

Chanyeol hung around a few moments more, then stepped fully inside the teacher's lounge. "Hey, when you're done, do you want to grab ice cream across the street?"

Baekhyun looked up, surprised. "I--sorry?"

"I mean, if you're busy then I don't--"

"Oh, no, I just--sure, that'd be nice."

Chanyeol grinned. "Great. I'll treat you."

Baekhyun felt himself getting more and more confused. "W-what's the occasion?" he asked, trying to put a joking edge to it.

Chanyeol shrugged. "You look pretty stressed, and ice cream never hurts." 

The assassin felt the emotional distance he had tried to put between him and his target disappear, trickling out into some invisible drain and then pouring when Baekhyun smiled.

"I'd like that," the teacher said. "Thanks."

Baekhyun was just as surprised as Janice the ice cream store owner when Chanyeol admitted to never having cookies and cream anything.

"Where did you grow up?" Baekhyun asked, half out of surprise and half out of the need for small talk.

"In Highmont," Chanyeol said, carefully screening out the other answers he could've given. "But I wasn't a big sweets kid."

Baekhyun shook his head in mock disappointment, tapping his spoon on the colorful hightable.

He was a lot more relaxed out of school, Chanyeol noted, watching Baekhyun make jokes and crack himself up and eat ice cream so fast that he gave himself a sticky ice cream mustache. They both laughed, and Chanyeol instinctively reached out with a napkin to wipe it off. Baekhyun face turned bright red, and Chanyeol checked himself.

"Sorry," he said, waving a hand. "My, uh, little sister does that too, and it's a habit now." Not that he had a sister anymore, but that was a life detail for later. Like right before Baekhyun died.

"Oh. Okay." Baekhyun wiped his mouth quickly, face still somewhat resembling a strawberry. "I'm an only child, so I don't..."

"Gotcha."

They left when the streetlights started coming on, every other light flickering ominously or not turning on at all. Chanyeol insisted on walking Baekhyun home, and the two were quiet.

Finally, about a block away from his home, Baekhyun stopped. 

"I can go myself from here," he said, giving Chanyeol a slight bow. "Thanks for today. I haven't had ice cream in a while."

"Anytime." Chanyeol sighed. "I haven't been on a date in a while, either."

Baekhyun stiffened, drawing his eyes up to Chanyeol's face slowly. The taller man raised an eyebrow, then burst out laughing. 

"I'm just kidding," he said, scratching the back of his head. "Although, if that's what you want to remember it as, I have no problem with it."

This time, Chanyeol looked serious, and Baekhyun sputtered a bit before managing an "Okay" and running.

Chanyeol watched Baekhyun disappear before he turned to go home, cursing the strange knotted feeling that had started in his gut.

Just two more days, Chan. That's all the time you can take.