A cloud rolled lazily across the countryside sky. You’re washed out today, Baekhyun murmured to himself. His head lay on top of his arms; he blinked sleepily.

His friends joked that the real reason he liked skygazing so much was because he had no one to play with, but that wasn’t necessarily true. He had Eli but Eli was always trying out some hapkido move without a sensei to teach him and ending up in the hospital. So yeah, he had no one to play with.

But really, it made him feel at ease, sky gazing.

His parents had moved out of Seoul because they didn’t have the kind of paycheck that allowed them a piece of the sky in the city, they had said. Baekhyun hadn’t wanted to move away from Kai and Zelo and Taemin, but grown-ups never listened. He grew to like it out here, though, where the sky was free. And it was everywhere. He could open his windows in the morning and see nothing but the tip of the adjacent hill, and then clouds all around. Sometimes one of those clouds even came in through the window and Baekhyun considered asking it to come through the front door next time, because he liked having company over.

He stayed and watched the sky morph colours into the sunset; it was dark before he went home.

-0-                                     
Chanyeol lay on top of one of the clouds in the stratosphere. Lay on was a comparative term because he was the cloud and the cloud was him; or rather, this particular cloud was part of him. He named it Dubu a long time ago because when he first came here, he thought clouds were soft like tofu and would taste the same; but they didn’t. (He had checked when there was no one looking. It took eighty-seven and a half years of waiting for that moment where no one was looking and Chanyeol and Sungeyol had eagerly bitten off a pieces of their clouds. Chanyeol said Dubu tasted like sunlight. Sungeyol said his tasted like pizza.)

The veterans said there was nothing much to do here except for get a job at the printing mill, but Chanyeol had known no other life to make this one dull by comparison. He had been here a very long time.

He spent most of his time on Dubu. Dubu was a fun cloud. Chanyeol could entertain guests on it or tickle it until it started wriggling or race it against the other clouds.

Chanyeol had just turned over to lie on his back and count the stars above him when his cloud hit something. And then started shrieking. Chanyeol sat up quickly and looked around; after a while he realized what this was and groaned.

A snowball hit him on the head before he could duck and then he and his neighbor Sungyeol were having the most violent snowball and stardust fight in the history of the Eastern hemisphere.

Sungyeol ran out of breath before Chanyeol did. Neither of them actually had to breathe but Sungyeol had been sent to earth in the nineteen hundreds and apparently, the memory of needing to breathe never really leaves you.

They lay on Dubu together, making mocking miniatures of each other’s ears with Dubu’s mist until it was dark and Sungyeol had to go for his shift at the printing mill.

And that was when Chanyeol happened to flip over and peer down below.

-0-

You’re washed out today.

The words drifted past him like breath of air. Chanyeol had heard some of the veterans tell him that they were over 6000 feet above the earth, and Chanyeol had looked at his feet and decided that 6000 of those would indeed be a very far way down. However, the boy on the ground who had told him he looked washed out today seemed closer than life. It was like Chanyeol could reach out and smooth the wrinkles across his forehead; and he knew he could but also that he wasn’t supposed to. No one was supposed to reach out to the people below. Not even the veterans who had been down there, lived a lifetime and now looked over their loved ones.

You weren’t even supposed to have a cloud which was transparent enough for you to see people down there. It meant your cloud was low on water and if he didn’t drive it to a hemisphere where it was raining, it’d dry out. No one ever recovered from drying out.

Suddenly realizing that Dubu had been thirsty all this while and he had been too busy playing to notice it; Chanyeol jumped up and drove Dubu into the territory Sungyeol had once told him was called England. It was bound to rain there sooner or later.

It rained sooner rather than later and he could visibly see Dubu fluffing up. Chanyeol breathed a sigh of relief.

After he was done petting Dubu and making cooing noises and apologizing profusely- Sungyeol had given him more than a couple of raised eyebrows at his relationship with Dubu, but then again, Sungyeol had no right to raise eyebrows at anyone. It was then that he remembered his manners. Thanking the person who had saved Dubu the only polite thing to do.

On the way back, Dubu wanted to play with the gust of north wind and Chanyeol couldn’t refuse Dubu after almost letting him dry out. They were carried over the ocean, where sailors pointed to them and smiled, and over lands where children likened them to horses and cotton candy and lands where no one ever looked up. Chanyeol had made a new friend in the same breath of north air that Dubu was infatuated with. He and Amber got along pretty well. Chanyeol had met so many types of girls in his cloud-life that nothing really surprised him anymore. Least of all Amber. She was all fun, constantly racing her cloud against his—and winning, but Chanyeol hoped to get lucky soon—and building cloudcastles and stealing away bits of cloud from the neighbors. You weren’t supposed to do that, but Amber did anyways and no one seemed to mind because the cloud castles they made were open for everyone to lounge in.

It was one day when the sun rose and he was still on Amber’s cloud when she told him about the time she almost dried out because of a human she had seen on top of the mountain. They were drinking something that made Chanyeol want to spin Dubu in circles in the sky.
‘He was climbing the Highest!” She told him, eyes wide with delight.

“I thought that couldn’t be climbed. Climben. Gotten on top of. ” Chanyeol said drowsily, waving his finger in a circle to show that his thoughts weren’t coming out straight.

“No but he was, and everyone around him said he couldn’t do it, but he tried. He climbed and climbed and climbed and it was so cold. He was out of food and I used to shield him from the sun and rain and-“ Amber lowered her voice. “He started talking to me.”

Chanyeol laughed throatily. He raised the bottle of honey concoction. “Amber, this stuff makes us weird.”

Amber punched him in the gut to make him shut up. It was only then he realized that she was dead serious because her punches normally hit harder than that.
“He talked to me. He was looking at my cloud and saying something but I couldn’t hear it properly and I couldn’t see what he was mouthing because my cloud was so thick.”

“So you let yourself dry out.” Chanyeol said slowly. Amber grimaced and looked down at her own bottle.

“But by the time I was dry enough to hear him, he was gone. I don’t know whether he made it back or made it to the top or anything.”

“And you never checked if he was up here?”

A sigh. “What are the chances?” Chanyeol secretly agreed that the odds were pretty gloomy, but he still hugged her and told her that she had all eternity to find him. As long as she didn’t do something dumb like dry out, she would no doubt see him one day.

But later as he mulled over Amber’s story in his head, he remembered his own near-drying incident and almost yelped in shock.

He had never thanked the boy.

The next morning, Chanyeol woke up more excited than he had in a long time. He felt like those people who worked at the printing mill felt. Like he had a purpose. Dubu was sluggish and slightly green today—Chanyeol was dead sure that Amber’s honey concoction was to blame—but he had made up his mind.

 Amber watched him from her cloud. She sent a piece of her cloud trailing after him in the common promise of you can give me that when we meet again.

The piece of cloud trailed after Dubu all the way to the Eastern hemisphere.

-0-

I hope you guys liked it. Don't worry, there's more Baekyeol interation in the later chapters. :D