The next few weeks were tense, and Chanyeol really tried to make it up to the alien for nearly killing him. He told him he’d make him something other than hot cocoa, and Baekhyun had adamantly refused, saying he valued his life more than Chanyeol’s pride and Chanyeol could shove his homemade beverages up his .

Chanyeol had forgotten all about the alien’s decision to look for a new room until one day he got back and Baekhyun was filling out paperwork on a clipboard. Being naturally curious, Chanyeol made sure to walk close enough to the alien that he could read the paper.

“Hey, wait, you’re still moving? I told you it was an accident!” he said, grabbing the clipboard and holding it over his head, out of Baekhyun’s reach. Much to his enjoyment, his roommate still tried, standing on his tip toes and hopping to reach it.

“Chanyeol, give it back!” he ordered, grabbing Chanyeol’s shoulder to get more height on his hopping.

“If you move out my mom will think it was my fault!” he said, putting one hand on Baekhyun’s head to hold him down.

“It is your fault!” Baekhyun replied. “Now give it back!”

“Come on, I’m starting to kind of get used to you a little bit, don’t move out. Who knows who else I could get as a roommate when you leave?” Chanyeol asked, pushing on Baekhyun’s shoulders and forcing him back onto the couch. “I’m tearing this up. If you move out I’ll never hear the end of it. I thought we established that I wasn’t going to kill you in your sleep.”

“We did,” Baekhyun said, huffing and crossing his arms over his chest. It was his signature pout pose. He stood and threw himself on Chanyeol’s bed. “You want me to stay here because you’d miss me, right?”

“Of course. Now get off my bed before I spray you with a water bottle.”

Baekhyun threw Chanyeol’s pillow, hitting him square in the face. As he watched the alien retreat up to his own bed, Chanyeol realized that he had become sort of used to him in the last few weeks. When he’d first met Baekhyun, if he’d have hit him with anything, even a pillow, he’d have probably snapped. Hell, sometimes he even found himself staring at Baekhyun’s as he walked away from him, usually in annoyance.

He was sort of used to the way Baekhyun always looked so put-together in the mornings, and the way he didn’t even own eyeliner, but his eyes looked like they were rimmed in a thick layer of kohl. His hair always looked perfect, even when he’d slept on it, and it dried perfectly. He was sort of used to muting whatever music he had going when Baekhyun took a shower, because he usually sang while he cleaned himself, and it sounded really nice.

“Is it okay if a friend of mine comes over?” Baekhyun asked, sticking his perfectly unstyled head out of the bathroom.

“An alien friend?” Chanyeol asked immediately.

“Yes.” Baekhyun glared. “And if you say no, I’m moving out.” He closed the door before Chanyeol could respond.

He was tempted to leave, but he knew that the alien wouldn’t believe him if he said it was only to give him privacy to with his friend. Baekhyun was the only alien Chanyeol had actually met, and he wondered what they were like as a whole. Would this alien look similar? It was stupid, he knew, because there were other aliens at their school, and he hadn’t run across many people who looked like Baekhyun wandering around.

Half an hour later there was a knock on the door and Chanyeol sat up in his bed, inexplicably nervous to meet Baekhyun’s friend. He was used to his alien roommate, but much less used to the idea of more than one alien in his life.

Baekhyun opened the door and grabbed the person on the other side, hugging them and squealing in excitement. Chanyeol rolled his eyes. What a girl. Baekhyun returned to the room, pulling someone behind him, and Chanyeol’s eyes bugged out of his head.

“Tao?” he said, bewildered.

Tao looked back at him, equally surprised. “Chanyeol?” he looked at Baekhyun in confusion, and back to Chanyeol. “This is your alien-hating roommate?”

“You two know each other?” Baekhyun asked.

“You tell people you have an alien-hating roommate?” Chanyeol said. Suddenly Tao didn’t look like a friend anymore. He looked like a liar. “You didn’t tell me you were an alien.”

“You didn’t ask,” Tao replied. “Does it matter?”

“Well, yeah it kind of does. You lied to me,” Chanyeol said. “I’m not friends with liars.”

Tao scoffed and rolled his dark eyes. “What a convenient excuse, Chanyeol. You were perfectly fine with me until you knew I was an alien freak, right?”

“Does Kris know?” Chanyeol asked suddenly. “Because he has the right to know that the guy he’s interested in is-“

“Yes, Kris knows. I told him weeks ago. He doesn’t care because he’s not a prejudiced piece of ,” Tao interrupted. He turned to Baekhyun, who was staring at the ground, chewing nervously on his lower lip. He spoke quickly to him in a language Chanyeol had never heard before.

“I’m not prejudiced!” Chanyeol argued. He knew in the back of his mind that the statement wasn’t entirely true, but the hateful way Tao was staring at him, like he was something disgusting and stinky that he’d stepped in, made him aggressive. “I just like to know that the people I trust are-”

“Human?” Tao cut in, arching one eyebrow at Chanyeol. “Don’t bother trying to defend yourself to me, Chanyeol. I’ve met people like you. More than you’d imagine. I know that in your mind you’re perfectly right and I’m perfectly wrong and there’s nothing that I could ever say to change that.”

“Can we just go to the library or something?” Baekhyun interjected quietly, looking very uneasy.

“Of course we can,” Tao replied, reaching out and brushing his thumb over Baekhyun’s cheek. There was a familiarity there, a sense of comfort in their touching, that made Chanyeol wonder if they were more than friends. First it was the friend on the phone, now it was Tao. Was Baekhyun the national of their planet? Tao grabbed Baekhyun’s backpack off the floor and slung it over his shoulder. “Bye, face,” he called to Chanyeol, smiling sweetly and waving.

Baekhyun spared one last glanced back toward Chanyeol. He looked sort of guilty, and Chanyeol wanted to feel the same way. He wanted to be able to blame Baekhyun for this, but he couldn’t. He took out his phone, pitying the poor fool on the other line.

“Why didn’t you tell me Tao was an alien?” he demanded as soon as Kris answered with his signature cursing out of whoever was interrupting whatever he was doing. “I found out five minutes ago when Baekhyun told me he was inviting an alien friend over and who should walk in the door but the er we’ve been hanging out with for nearly a month now!”

“Jesus, Chanyeol calm your ,” Kris snapped. “I didn’t tell you because I know you don’t like aliens. Excuse me for not wanting my best friend to hate my boyfriend.”

“You can’t be serious, Kris. You can’t date it! It’s not human!” There was a tense silence over the line and Chanyeol knew that he’d crossed the line.

“Zitao is not an ‘it’,” he said quietly. “Goodbye, Chanyeol.”

When Baekhyun came back, it was very late. The clock on the wall read four in the morning, and Chanyeol was glad that it was a Friday and he could sleep in the next day. He’d waited up for Baekhyun because he had something he wanted to say.

He stood up as soon as the door clicked shut and Baekhyun noticed him. His dark-rimmed eyes fell immediately to the floor.

“I don’t hate aliens,” Chanyeol said. “I don’t.”

Baekhyun didn’t reply. He just stood there with an unreadable expression on his face and his lower lip into his mouth in nervousness.

“You don’t have an alien hating roommate. I just..” He dragged his hand roughly through his hair and let out a deep breath. “I just don’t understand. I never even gave the possibility that aliens were real more than a passing thought, and then all of a sudden you guys were here and I just don’t get it!” His voice was becoming louder with every word. “I mean what the do you people even want!?” Baekhyun was very quiet, standing against the door to the room as though frozen. Chanyeol gritted his teeth in frustration as he stomped toward the smaller boy.

Baekhyun’s eyes widened as he approached, and by the time Chanyeol had reached the door, Baekhyun’s eyes were clenched closed and he had curled in on himself as though waiting for a blow.

“Baekhyun. What do you guys want?”

Dark eyes opened slowly, surprise filling them at the realization that he had not been hit. “Well what do you want?” Baekhyun asked in response. Chanyeol pushed away from him then, putting more space between them.

“I just want to live without the fear that I’m going to get blown up on my own planet or something!”

Baekhyun shook his head sadly, and there was pity in his dark eyes. “You thinking we’re going to blow you up is just as stupid as me having nightmares that you’re going to stab me in my sleep. I just want to live, Chanyeol. I just want to live and learn and be free to do what I want to do without being afraid that I’m going embarrass my family or something.” Baekhyun walked to the couch and slumped down onto it. “You have no idea what it’s like for me on my own planet. I’ve never felt right there.”

“And you feel right here? You feel right on a planet entirely different from where you were born, so far away from everything you’ve ever known?”

Baekhyun looked up at Chanyeol sadly. “I did at first. But I guess there’s nowhere for me I can feel right.”

“What changed?”

“I realized that people really don’t want me here.”

Chanyeol didn’t know what to say. He’d never been good with words, or even actions. He sat on his bed and pulled the pillow over his face. After a while he heard Baekhyun go up to his own bed and click his desklamp off.

It was hard to trust his own judgment anymore. Sometimes he looked at people and wondered if they were human or alien, and he couldn’t tell the difference, for the most part. There were the occasional individuals who were obviously not human. There were also humans that were so gorgeous that Chanyeol thought they had to be aliens.

One such person was Sehun, who was in one of his classes. He’d taken to asking people that he spoke with on a regular basis if they were human or not, in casual ways. For instance, he’d ask them where they grew up, and generally the aliens would admit that they weren’t human. Sehun had told him he’d been born and raised in Seoul, so he’d known he was human.

Sehun was a lot like Chanyeol, actually. After a few weeks of knowing each other, Sehun had mentioned how creepy he thought the aliens were, and Chanyeol had been relieved. He’d thought he was the only one left who hadn’t accepted them as normal. Sehun was especially creeped out by how gorgeous they all were. When he’d found out about Baekhyun, he’d referred to Baekhyun as ‘Chanyeol’s pet alien’. It was amusing for a while, but one day when Sehun mentioned it, he’d heard a sharp breath and turned around to see the back of a sickeningly familiar head retreating away from them.

Baekhyun hadn’t said anything about it, but Chanyeol had seen him every day for nearly two months. He knew the back of that head better than anybody else’s, probably even his own. He wanted to be friends with Sehun because since the whole Tao thing, Kris hadn’t spoken to him. He didn’t have any real friends besides Kris anyway, so the loss of that one made a huge dent in his social life.

“Anyway, yeah, party this weekend,” Sehun said after their class one day. “A friend of mine is hosting it, and he’s providing the liquor, so it’s even more kick .”

“Liquor?” Chanyeol asked, glancing over at him. Liquor was one thing his mother had told him to stay away from. He was supposed to keep his nose in the books.

Actually, a night of partying and boozing sounded pretty appealing.

Sehun’s friend Joonmyun was a kick friend, Chanyeol decided, and one that he was glad to have made. He had money out the , apparently, so he could afford to splurge and go all out on expensive liquor and . He’d never officially been drunk before, but Chanyeol figured as a freshman in college, it was an experience he wanted to have.

He had found a likely looking female companion for the night, ready to have that first, as well, he figured, and he was leaning all close to her and slurring into her ear when he recognized someone over her shoulder that should definitely not be at this sort of party, with at least four people he’d met through Sehun that night that he knew were openly hostile toward aliens.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, leaving her in there and stumbling over to Baekhyun. “Baekhyun! What are you doing here?” Baekhyun looked equally surprised to see him there.

“Me? What are you doing here? I was invited by-”

“Baekhyun you said?” Out of nowhere Sehun was there, and Chanyeol knew this wouldn’t be good. “Your alien roommate?” He smiled a little and the smile was not pleasant at all. A few people around them turned to look, and Chanyeol did not like the looks in their eyes. From the looks of it, neither did Baekhyun.

“You should go,” Chanyeol said to him quietly while Sehun was distracted. “Get out of here.”

Baekhyun complied immediately, and several people watched him go with expressions of anger and hate. Sehun, drunk and loud, having a good time as though the whole awkward thing had never happened, pulled Chanyeol toward the kitchen to get another drink. From there, it was few drunken steps to the middle of the crowded living room that was serving as a dance floor.

The first thing that Chanyeol noticed when he woke up at Sehun’s friends’ house, in a closet, by the look of it, wasn’t the horrible hangover. It wasn’t the smell of stale alcohol and sweat. The first thing he noticed was actually the body pressed up against him. It was decidedly not female, judging from the appendage that was pressing against his .

Luckily there wasn’t any pain coming from his , so he had at least topped. He turned around and groaned when he saw an equally Sehun waking up behind him.

“ me I wish last night hadn’t happened,” Sehun said with a groan. “If you ask for seconds I’m kicking you in the balls.”

“I didn’t even realize I wanted firsts,” Chaneyeol replied, scrambling around for his clothes. “Great. I get drunk and lose my ity to my guy friend.” He couldn’t say ‘best friend’. Kris might not have been talking to him or acknowledging his existence, but he was still Chanyeol’s best friend. Sehun cracked a grin.

“Aww, I was your first?” he asked. “That’s so cute, seriously.”

He slapped Sehun in the face with his own boxers and hastily put his clothes on.

As though his life weren’t confusing enough before, now he had a ual identity crisis to deal with, too. Unlike some of his friends growing up, Chanyeol had never been homophobic, but he’d always imagined himself with a girl. Obviously something had happened between he and Sehun that had made drunk!Chanyeol decide would be as fun as chick.

He hoped things wouldn’t become awkward between him and Sehun. If the way Sehun said goodbye by punching him on the shoulder like nothing had even happened was any clue, that wouldn’t be a problem. He desperately needed a shower. Losing your ity to a male friend would do that to a guy.

When he got back to his room, Baekhyun wasn’t there, and his bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in. Exactly why Baekhyun wasn’t in his bed so early in the morning wasn’t a mystery for long. He’d barely been in the room for ten minutes when the door opened and he turned to see Baekhyun coming into the room.

“What the happened to you?” he asked blankly, eyes widening in shock.

Baekhyun had a sling on one arm, and high up on one cheek was a purpling bruise. The way he was walking so carefully made Chanyeol wonder what other injuries he was hiding under his clothes.

“Don’t talk to me,” Baekhyun replied stiffly, limping past him toward his bed. Chanyeol grabbed him before he could pass, and Baekhyun glared at him with open hostility that left Chanyeol shocked. “Like you don’t know what happened. They were your friends!”

“My friends? What are you-“

“Yeah, the people are that party! The ones who invited aliens to it just so they could attack them for fun! They followed me, Chanyeol! They followed me when I left.” Chanyeol shook his head numbly. “I didn’t even get the worst of it because someone was walking by when they had me on the ground kicking me and they ran off.” Baekhyun slapped Chanyeol’s hand away from his arm. “I should report you,” he spat, eyeing Chanyeol like he was something disgusting.

“I had nothing to do with that!” Chanyeol interjected as Baekhyun turned away from him.

“Right,” Baekhyun replied. “Of course you didn’t.”

“Baekhyun!” Chanyeol grabbed the alien, stopping him. “I didn’t! I swear I didn’t, you have to believe me!”

Baekhyun glanced at him over his shoulder. “Then why were you at that party? If you didn’t know what was going to happen, why did you end up there?”

“My friend invited me,” Chanyeol replied quietly. Sehun. Had Sehun known? “I wouldn’t have ever..”

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Baekhyun said, and his eyes were filled with tears. “I just want to go home.”

Chanyeol let go of Baekhyun and watched the smaller boy carefully climb the stairs to his loft and collapse onto his bed.