"You're a pain." Yixing says the words under his breath, knowing the person he's saying them to is barely listening to him and that he doesn't really mean it.

"I'm so sorry, Yixing. So sorry." Yifan keeps apologizing, sentences fusing into one in a mess of jumbled words that basically say he's sorry. They flow out of his mouth without his control, his brain registering the hands that soap his body to remove the stench of vomit from his skin as he sits on the tub in Yixing's bathroom. He knows he should be embarrassed but this is Yixing, his best friend and the only person he can run to so he says just that. 

"You're the only one left." And as soon as the words–though garbled–leave his mouth, sobs start to rack his chest and the gentle hands stop from moving on his front to caress his back instead. Unconsciously he keeps repeating the words with tear streaks running down his cheeks, the same ones Yixing has just washed minutes ago. He hears the other speak but he can't really understand what his best friend is saying, they're just a clump of syllables that his brain cannot process correctly but Yixing's voice is soothing–it always has been–and that's enough to calm him down. The hands on his back only move to his chest again when he's stopped sobbing, resuming their work to cleanse the rest of his body before opening the shower again to rinse off the soap suds.

Yixing watches Yifan as the taller male sits cramped in his bathtub, head supported on the side of the tub as he washes off the remaining bubbles from the elder's body. His heart constricts when he sees his best friend like this. The usual cool and collected Yifan, broken into pieces and painful to restore but he doesn’t mind the wounds the shards cut into his skin. He looks at the head lolling over the side of his tub and reaches for it, knowing what the other means and how heavy those few words are.

You are the only one left.

It has been a month since Yifan's mother died, the only close relative he has left. Lung cancer. If you ask Yixing he'll say he saw it coming. Not that he's psychic. It's just that the woman smoked two packs a day. It was bound to happen.

If he had not been there to look after Yifan, his best friend might have gone down the same path. He remembers snatching a lit stick from the taller one's lips when he saw him smoking by the entrance of his new apartment, the elder telling him he got tired of waiting and didn't know where the spare key was. Yixing begged him then to stop smoking, that it's bad for his health, that there are other ways to cope with stress–healthier ones. Yifan tried, very hard. He started schooling himself not to smoke when Yixing is around. Slowly, he weaned himself off the nicotine and five weeks later he learns of his mother's illness. He wasn't sure then–still isn't sure until now–if he wa