Poster credits goes to the lovely chickinnaestyleaniya :)

Every time you take the train it feels different, he thinks as he stands amidst the bustling crowd, cold puffs of air coloring the air around him white. It’s different when you are going away and different when you are coming back, it’s different when you practically fly out of your compartment with your backpack and land, laughing hysterically, among a group of friends waiting for you and it’s so very different when you are standing alone in the cold, pushy crowd trying to wave over a taxi because there is nobody to pick you up. 

Girls passing by glance over at him, their brisk steps slowing down, blinking a few times at his impressive height and impassive face, and then immediately scan the area around him as if sniffing out for a possible girlfriend standing next to him. A small smile lifts the corner of his thin lips as he thinks that they are looking for the wrong person -  if it was up to him, if things had worked out it would have been a boy standing next to him, not a girl.

A boy with bright smiles and fluid limbs, and an air of a 10-year-old fascinated with the whole world in a grown man’s body. The thought makes him smile some more and the girl standing next to him with way too much pink luggage blushes furiously. The Hello Kitty name tag on her bag reads ‘Luhan’ and he wonders what she is doing here. It’s a little town where everybody knows everybody and their grandmother and he has only been away at college for one year.

Luhan is sneaking looks at him from the corner of her doe-eyes and opens and closes a few times almost forming words but hesitant and cautious. It reminds him of another new comer to town, has it been 9 years since then already?

 There is a flash of white in front of his eyes, trickle of water down his spine and the colour pink – broken pieces of a jagged memory that he had stomped down into a dark corner of his head. It takes him by surprise, the absolute grief he feels at the mere thought of it. He abruptly turns around ignoring the soft “Jeogiyo” uttered by Luhan and walks away, the snow flecks settling on him- light, imperfect and white.   

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His welcome home is all about shrill squeals, tight hugs, high pitched yips and wagging tails and the occasional whack to his head. He laughs and pulls his elder sister’s hair while the youngest has already started digging through his backpack looking for goodies. His mother hugs him quietly and he watches his underwear flying in the air over her shoulder as Dara digs through his bag and Bommie stands next to her with a scrunched up face.

“How can you touch that stuff? Do you have any idea where those have been? Plus you never know what you might come across…” she wriggles her eyebrows and makes suggestive expressions. Jongin ignores her and the flying underwear, instead focusing on lavishing attention on JJanggu and Monggu who are climbing all over each other to at his face. Something else crashes into his back and clings on to him whacking him repeatedly on his head.

“Urgh, damn u, Beakhyun, get off- get off, you freak. MOOOOOOOM, get him off!”

“Awww weee lil Jonginnie – still calling for your mom.” Beakhyun smushes his cheeks and drags and pulls his poor facial muscles into forming weird faces as Jongin slaps at him to get off his face. “Look at you all tall and tan and fugly. And you still hit like a girl.”

Baekhyun changes his mind about the ‘girl’ part when Jongin flips him off his shoulder and he is laying on the ground in a painful heap, with one of Jongin’s smelly socks laying on his face. “College has taught you new tricks.” he groans in a pathetic way as Monggu starts stomping all over his tummy.

Taeyeon peeks out of one of the rooms and there is little Taeny wriggling in her arms. “Welcome home, freak.” Beakhyun immediately shoves off Monggu and stands up brushing himself down and trying to smile at Taeyeon, who takes as much notice of him as she would of a speck of dust underfoot. “Where’s you other one third?”

Jongin is careful to keep him face impassive as he walks over to pick up a gurgling Taeny from her.

“I don’t know.” He just got back and there are already too many things about this place that brings back memories he really doesn’t want brought back. But of course Baekhyun can never keep his mouth shut, especially not when Taeyeon is around. Jongin can’t believe that he is friends with this stupid idiot.

“Sehun-ah said he is taking the train back. How come you don’t know Jongin-ah? I bet Sehun called you first and you just didn’t pick up-again. That idiot calls at the stupidest time- last time it was when he was in the shower.” Baekhyun shudders at the memory.

“Shower?” Bommie wriggles her eyebrows at him and Taeyeon finally deems to glance at Baekhyun. Jongin turns away from the disgusting levels of happiness Baekhyun reaches at this glance and smushes his face against Taeny’s inhaling her soft baby smell.

There used to be a time when he got those calls too – when Sehun called when he was drunk or when he was studying or when he was taking a 10 minute break from dance practices or when…just whenever he felt like it – but not anymore. Part of him thinks it’s better that way because he…he can’t...it was so wrong and the other part of him flinches at how much he doesn’t care how wrong it all sounds.

Taeny looks at him, two-teethed smile and all, as if she knows what he is thinking of and pushes his face against the window. There’s snow piled up everywhere, even dusting the window that Taeny is slamming his face against gleefully (that kid was freaky strong), and it’s all so white. One look at his old tire-swing that looks burdened by the snow sitting atop is all it takes and everything comes crashing back and his stomach feels like a chemical reaction gone wrong. A flash of white, high-pitched laughter and the colour pink.

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His welcome home is quite and calm, like it always is. His sister peeks out of his room when his bag thumps the ground saluting him with two fingers and his mother later finds him in the kitchen and pokes at his hair – she doesn’t like the new color. It’s as if he had not been gone for a whole year but as if he just had one of his sleepovers at Jongin or Baekhyun’s house.

But two days of being back home and Sehun is already exhausted of it all. There are photos on the wall that he can’t really remove no matter how violently he stabs at them, the clothes Jongin had left behind  from when he stayed over, the middle school science project they did together and the high school graduation photo with flowers in their arms Jongin’s head on his shoulder. There is that mug in the kitchen that his mother set aside for him that says “I’d rather bend than break” with a picture of Squidward on it for some reason and there’s the Christmas sock his older sister has already hung over the fireplace with Jongin’s name on it. And then there’s the question “Did you go to visit Jongin yet? I hear he got back yesterday.”When Sehun really can’t stand it anymore, he dons his coat and braves the cold outside – maybe coffee will help.  

The loneliest place in the world is not when you are sitting alone in the middle of a loud, laughing crowd who all seem to know each other or walking in to the cafeteria and not knowing where to sit. It is not your home when your footsteps echo because there is nobody but you around, and it is not at the edge of the pier where you dip your feet in the water and watch the sunset, all by yourself. No, the loneliest place in the world is your heart.

Those dark, hidden crevices that nobody or nothing can fill. The little fractured bits that, when you are flipping randomly through your memories, suddenly hit you with a gasping awareness of its presence- breathtaking and black. Sehun kicks at a pile of snow in his way, he is almost there.   

Christmas time is possibly the worst time in the whole year to pretend those little lonely places don’t exist. Everything is suddenly so white and pure that you start to see things even more clearly and there are no places to hide; and there is just so much noise – the jingling bells, the laughter, the crumple of shopping bags, the carols – it’s like the whole world is set out to remind you how quite is it inside your heart.

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There is a burn in his stomach and a sting behind his eyes as he watches Kyungsoo narrate another story about the antics of the kindergarteners he teaches. He had jumped at the invitation to hang out at the café they all used to frequent back when they bunked school. He had missed the ajhumma who runs the place berating them when their voices rang with laughter a little too loud. He doesn’t realize until he gets there that what he really wanted was not a day out with Kyungsoo (who he sees twice a week back at uni anyway) but that familiar mop of brown hair and kittenish eye-smiles. As he laughs at the story of a kid who painted an owl with huge eyes when they were asked to draw their class teacher and Kyungsoo kicks him violently under the table, for the first time in a long time he lets himself miss whines for bubble tea, well-timed aegyo and white, white skin.

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Somebody bumps into him and he looks down to see a little girl in an elf costume scurry to catch up with her mother after throwing him an aggravated “Oppa, why are you in my way. ” Across the street Kyungsoo and Jongin are laughing hysterically and kicking at each other- much like he and Jongin used to, sitting in the same place, because Jongin had ridiculed his love for Justin Bieber. Sehun catches a falling snowflake and squeezes it in his palm until he can’t see its whiteness anymore and walks away, no longer feeling like coffee will help.

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“JONGIN! Jongin-ah!”

“Comiiing!” he shouts back, exasperated. He drags another t-shirt off his body because it’s not right either- not when it’s the t-shirt he wore when he went to his first dance team audition with Sehun.  The rest of the pile lying on his bed isn’t right either; everything has too much sehun, sehun, sehun woven in to the threads. Nothing is right for their customary Christmas  Eve dinner at the Oh household and Jongin is so angry at himself because he starting to understand what this is. And he feels like the whole year he spent trying NOT to understand this is all wasted.  

He reaches for a Shinwah High Tigers sweatshirt and shakes his head because it was what he wore when – Taeyeon’s head pops up from his doorway all of a sudden and he shrieks and swats at her with the t-shirt as if the flimsy clothing can fend off any attackers.

“I did NOT just scream like a girl ok? I did NOT. If you tell that to anybody I will deny, deny, deny! I will also tell about that time in high school when you went through a whole I have a crush on SooYoung phase.” his voice is still a little shaky and out-of-breath.  

Taeyeon calmly observes her fingernails in minute detail. “Maybe Baekhyun is right and you ARE the fourth girl in the family.”

Jongin smacks her again with the shirt. “Oh, and suddenly you know he exists.”

“I have always known that he exists. How long has he been hanging around here anyway giving me those puppy-dog eyes? More than 4 years? And he gives these looks to Tifann- it’s HILARIOUS.” Baekhyun does give Taeyeon’s husband, who is overseas most of the time on business, the nastiest looks he can manage and yes, they are HILARIOUS but Jongin is not going to admit that now.  “But anyway here-” Taeyeon produces something she had been hiding behind her back and throws it at him. “It’s... Its’ new... Nothing you have worn before. It was part of your Christmas presents but- but I had the feeling you needed it much sooner.”

There’s a knowing look on her face that is scarily similar to the face Taeny made even as she was torturing his face that day. She is looking at him as if she understands, as if it’s not wrong, as if it’s all ok to be this way. The bad chemical reactions in his stomach stop for a second and a lump gets lodged in his throat instead. He smacks her again- this time with the new white sweater she has given him, but it’s soft and gentle, almost just a pat and she smiles back like she knows this is his way of saying thank you.  

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“Oh, Jonginnie! I missed seeing you around here.” She has Sehun’s eye smile but her lips are not so thin. Jongin missed her too; she used to come to all of his dance showcases even as his own mother couldn’t make it. “Go on up, Jongin-ah. He just went up to his room to get something. SEHUN! Sehunnieee. Jongin’s here,” she shouts up the stairs. “I don’t know where he disappeared to. I thought he’d be all over you by now seeing as how you didn’t meet for a year.” She laughs at her own joke and Jongin tries to arrange his expression in to a suitably honest-looking one. It hurts his face. Jongin looks up the staircase that he knows all too well. He has raced Sehun up them to play video games, he has stumbled up them with Sehun drunkenly whispering “shh, your parents will hear.”, he has cried there clinging on to Sehun that one time he injured his back and couldn’t dance anymore. This is, however, the first time he is climbing them with stray snowflakes still clinging to his hair and his heart thundering furiously.

The first thing he notices is the way Sehun has grown so tall since last Christmas. The second thing he notices is the sudden return of the furious chemical reactions in the bottom of his stomach when Sehun doesn’t immediately burst into a sunny eye-smile and cling to him like the koala he secretly is. He also absently notices that his hair is now white blonde - it seems to suit him perfectly, there is just something about Sehun and white.

Sehun stares at him straight-faced as ever and Jongin just has so much to say but he doesn’t know where to start from. He isn’t sure whether he even understands the things he has to say. Maybe he should start with an apology. But before he can even open his mouth Sehun sighs loudly and turns his back on him. Jongin’s mind goes through several levels of sheer panic before Sehun turns around- tossing him a game console and plopping down on the ground next to his old Play station. Jongin looks down at the object as his brain tries to catch up and sees the burnt plastic in a corner from that one time when they wanted to experiment with cigarettes in high school.

“Well, are you coming or not?” Sehun looks over his back with raised eyebrows. Jongin blinks before scrambling to sit down next to him.

They race each other at Mario carts for the next hour and Jongin can’t help but sneak glances at Sehun- lithe, white and beautiful. Sehun’s knee knocks against him from time to time as he concentrates with his tongue sticking out from a corner of his mouth and it’s all so heartbreakingly familiar. Not a word is spoken even when Sehun’s sister comes to call them down for dinner but his stomach feels the most peaceful it had been in a long time.

Dinner is a boisterous and loud affair with 5 members of the Oh family and 6 of the Kim’s. Jongin tries not to notice that Sehun has picked a spot far away from him and instead tries to feel sad for Monggu and JJanggu. They would usually lounge under the table happily lapping up everything Jongin and Sehun took turns in sneaking under the table. But today, with them sitting so far apart, they have keep running back and forth between the two and this is the third time Sehun’s older brother, Jonghyun has accidentally kicked Jjanggu.

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After dinner comes that dreadful time that Sehun has anticipated for days now -he is forced to sit next to Jongin and flip through their old photo albums while the elders coo at them and try to catch up at the same time. This would usually be the time they made fun of the way they looked like in middle school but today Jongin is silent, bending towards him as he flips through the album. In every photo they have taken together there is a little space between them that should not be there. That infinitesimal amount of space – the hair’s breadth that separates their pinkies from linking as they lounge together on the bleachers, the inch between their heads as they lean towards each other and smile at the camera, Jongin caught on camera looking at Sehun or Sehun captured gazing at Jongin while Jongin smiles at Kyungsoo – that makes Sehun see miles where there are just mere inches.

As soon as he thinks he can slip away unnoticed enough he pushes an album off his lap and slips out of the back door. He doesn’t think Jongin will follow him but when he does, it hurts too much to see him stand there bathed in the glow of the porch light.

“Sehun-ah...”

“Was it ok?” Sehun’s voice comes out harsher than he expected and he shoves his hands in his coat pocket and balls them into fists. “Was it- was it ok for you, this past year? Was it ok this way- without me? And the way I felt about you?” Jongin is dumbfounded. “Didn’t it hurt at least a little to let go so easily, Jongin-ah?” his voice breaks on the last syllable and he turns around abruptly and walks away.

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Taking off in the opposite direction Sehun that walked away in without telling anybody was probably not very wise but Jongin couldn’t care less right now. Everything hurts and everything is so cold and white.

There are two boys having a snowball fight in a garden he passes by and it takes him back 9 years to when he was a newcomer to town and everybody wanted to bully the kid with a dark skin and weird nose.

Things changed though, on the day he came across a boy squatting on the ground watching a line of ants as if he was mesmerized by it. Jongin was cautious and was going to slip away quietly but the boy had said “You can come and watch too.” without even looking up.  And Jongin had, hesitantly, fearfully until his knees cramped and until he started to be mesmerized by it too. When the boy looked up finally Jongin had been mesmerized by that bright eye-smile and slight lisp too. “I’m Oh Sehun. I live way over there. My omma knows your omma and I have seen you around.”

“Oh” was all Jongin could manage before the boy had looked over Jongin’s shoulder and said a quiet “I suggest you run”. He had stood up suddenly (and Jongin had been fascinated by the way he moved-as if he was nothing much more than a kite tugged up by the wind)  and taken off at top speed, all dusty pants and awkward limbs. Looking back Jongin had seen a group of older boys who particularly liked pushing him around closing in on them before stumbling over his legs in his haste to join Sehun. Jongin was small for his age but fast and soon they were running side-by-side. And suddenly they were both laughing; because running away wasn’t so scary anymore, it was fun when you had someone running with you.

The present-day Jongin comes to a slow halt when he realizes that he is approaching the curving hill top where this all took place.

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Sehun knows where he is walking to; but he doesn’t have the energy to make himself stop. He feels like laughing at how ridiculous he is being right now but there are frozen tear tracks on his face that won’t let him. The masochist in him leads his legs steadily to the place where it all started and ended.

He remembers it so well.

December last year, the day after Christmas when he was still a little hung over from the champagne they had snuck out while nobody was watching. They were all supposed to meet up here to go get hot chocolate together but Baekhyun and Chanyeol had bailed to go watch some cheesy Christmas movie and Kyungsoo was out with his girlfriend. It’s cold here, the top of the small hill that was always their favourite meeting place. He is just about to call Jongin and ask why the hell he is late when a ball of snow explodes on his back, spraying white from either side of his face and he shivers violently because there is ice-cold water trickling down his spine. He whirls around swearing even as he bursts out laughing because this means war.

The laughter dies on his lips when he sees Jongin, though. The light of the streetlamp gives him an ethereal glow, and there is white snow clinging on to his eye lashes. His hair is a mess and the sweatshirt Sehun gave him for Christmas is too big for him but his smile is big and smug. And suddenly after all those years of holding it in check Sehun suddenly wants and wants and wants. Maybe it’s his hangover, maybe it’s the way Jongin smiles at him then or maybe it’s the memory of a million other times he smiled at him like that but it makes him feel reckless. For a wild, perfect moment his lips meet Jongin’s laughing, pink lips.

But perfect moments are much like the white snowflakes, they don’t last. Instead Sehun is left with a moment he can’t ever take back and a flabbergasted Jongin who looks like the whole world just tilted on its axis. A range of emotions flit through Jongin’s face -  surprise, shock, a dawning understand and finally fear.

A flash of white in front of his eyes, trickle of water down his spine and the colour pink.

Jongin looks up startled as Sehun’s face appears over the curve of the hill, and his face is shiny with tears. Sehun looks equally startled to see him there. It’s funny, how they walked away in 2 different directions but ended up coming to the same place.

Jongin remembers another night like this- sneaking up behind Sehun who looked strangely elegant in the glow of the snowy night, impatiently kicking at the ground and blowing puffs of air that looked so, so white. He remembers the coldness of the snowball on his fingers and the whiteness of it against Sehun’s hair, and the childish pitch of Sehun’s laughter. And he remembers the feeling of having the world pulled out from underneath his feet because of Sehun’s thin pink lips.

A flash of white, high-pitched laughter and the colour pink.

He can hear bells ringing somewhere far away, it must be nearly midnight. That night, it had suddenly made sense of all the times Sehun picked the same classes as he did every year, why he always sat closer to Jongin than their other friends, why he cried the hardest when Jongin injured his waist, why he was always the first to apologize when he and Jongin fought over something. And Jongin had been so scared -  so scared of what this meant for their  8 year old friendship, what it meant for him, what people would say if they had seen that, and most of all he had been terrified of how much he had liked that moment. And so he had turned and run away, even as he saw Sehun’s face crumple. He had returned to college early the next day and had been terrified to pick up his calls or even read any of Sehun’s texts because he doesn’t know what to say about that night or about the way he just ran away. That fear does not fade but he manages to push down the memories and not picking up Sehun’s calls go from being a hard decision to being second nature.

But looking at Sehun now, standing alone framed in white snow suddenly he feels stupid for ever being scared of this, of them. Sehun is Sehun: Sehun means running together laughing, Sehun means dancing, Sehun means getting drunk for the first time together, Sehun means losing at every existing video game, Sehun means copying for the Calculus finals, Sehun means witty comebacks and deadpan looks, Sehun means hours spent together in detention, Sehun means the gentle pats on his back as he cries about his waist, Sehun means growing up, Sehun means all of this teen years, Sehun means whines and aegyo and white skin and Sehun means everything.

His tumbling tummy settles as Jongin bends down and carefully packs a bit of snow in to a ball. Sehun is watching him, still quiet but now with curiosity gleaming in his eyes.  Jongin smiles as he takes aim and throws the packed snow and Sehun doesn’t move away. It flashes white in the air as it explodes on his chest. Sehun looks astonished for a few seconds before he bursts out laughing: the very same laugh Jongin had been missing for the past year, big and white with his eyes curled into tiny half-moons. Jongin laughs with him as he watches Sehun approach him with small steps. He is looking at him like he understand, like he still will forgive him this time too as he always does and Jongin has never felt this thankful in his life. He remembers this so well, the flash of white, the cold and those pink lips, but the bursting bubble of happiness in his chest is telling him that this time around his memory is going to have a whole different ending.

Or maybe no ending at all, if the way Sehun’s white hair blows in the wind at Jongin’s face and the warm tangle of their hands is anything to go by.