It was early in the morning and the sun hasn’t come out yet. Everyone and everything is still asleep. Thick morning fog is present and the visibility isn’t less than miserable.  And if you looked closer, your eyes might be sagacious enought to spot a silhouette shrouded in the blinding mist.

Tao is sitting on a wooden bench. He has earphones plugged in, connected to his phone with music playing. He isn’t really paying attention to the series of melodic tones of the orchestra – in fact, he only uses the music to cut himself off from the outer world. It’s the same thing that he did yesterday, and the thing that he will do tomorrow.

He is waiting for someone.

And he has been waiting on this one bench for a handful of years now. Every single day, at the same time, always wearing the same expression. It never used to be happy, but now as if he lost the little something he had left. Why hasn’t he ended all of this yet, he doesn’t know. Maybe because somewhere deep down, he still hopes for a miracle to happen.

This place is a remarkable one. It is the place where his path crossed with Sehun’s for the first time, and it brings back way too many memories. Sometimes they make Tao laugh. Sometimes he cries. But his heart aches during both.

Nothing really changed, his father is still long gone, coming back home once or twice a month to turn the monotonous routine upside down, and his mother still being both wretched and violent. Bruises never stopped appearing, tears never stopped falling.

 No one asks because no one knows.

Jongin is running.

Most of the time, he is too lazy to get up for a morning run, yet today he felt like it. Be it crazy as it sounds, something back in his mind told him that he should go.

There are times when Jongin feels like dancing until passing out, just to clear the mess that’s going on in his head, and there are times when even breathing seems like something that cannot be done properly. It’s so tiring, so frustrating – it’s just hard.

He misses Sehun so much.

He misses Sehun so damn much, and he can do absolutely nothing about it. It’s not like he hasn’t tried – he has, and the failure makes him feel even more miserable. Jongin isn’t familiar with this kind of feeling. The feeling of a mother without her child, yin without yang, butterfly without its wings. And even though quite some time has already passed, there’s not a day that Jongin would go throught without thinking about Sehun once.

Whether the feeling vanishes as time goes by – the answer to this question scares him. It scares him because although his brain denies it, he knows the answer. Jongin knows it won’t.

It will last.

Not much to his surprise, he’s out of breath. He is covered with sweat that a hand wipes away, pushing aside the springs of his hair, wet and sticky. Jongin unscrews the bottle’s lid he’s been running with and gulps down some water.

Only then he notices a lonely boy sitting on a bench.

Luhan sometimes strolls in the park when he feels like being suffocated by the monotonous atmosphere at home. It’s not that the suffocating feeling is something rare to him, but a man can take only so much.

Soonkyu is there with him as a company, taking Luhan’s condition in consideration. She can’t help but see the change in him and be terribly worried. Luhan still had a little time left, yet he looked like an already dead body walking. The way he spoke, walked, breathed – it was lifeless. Sometimes she asks whether Luhan wants to speak about it, about his affliction – and his answer is always no – but she never insists, and Luhan appreciates that.

He feels so weak – he is weak and he has no will to do anything that’s unnecessary. It’s not only about his fragile body, it’s his mind, too. It has also already resigned.

It’s full of Sehun and memories of Sehun, both good and bad ones – Luhan cherishes them all. Being nosalgic is one of the side effects of dying, Luhan as aware, but he has already coped with the fact that he’s not given the same amount of time as others are. The desire to live is long gone. Because life without Sehun isn’t the life he wants to live. 

A human knows when his time is about to come to an end. It’s a strange feeling that doesn’t go away, that lingers in the guts. Luhan has one for a couple of days now. He knows today is his last one.

Yet Soonkyu doesn’t know. She leads him to the nearby bench to sit down not to tire himself too much, spotting a lonely boy sitting on a bench and a breathless one standing nearby.

The last person to appear is Kyungsoo. He’s surprised to see people so early in the morning, yet he doesn’t think about it too much and moves on. The book in his hands isn’t the book he would usually carry around. He doesn’t do that anymore. Instead, it’s a thick textbook with physiology. Kyungsoo, as pexpected, studies medical science.

He is not happy.

He hates it, he hates to look at tussies through a microscope, he hates to touch cold pale corpses. He hates it all. But even if he quitted and ran away, even if he really became a writer, he still wouldn’t feel happy. Not completely.

It was hard before, he’s had hard times before, but the misery is twice as torturing as it was before. Two people, two lovers, one season. There are times when Kyungsoo thinks he can’t continue on like this, yet he does.

Sometimes he dreams of Sehun. Sometimes it’s a beautiful dream of them being happy, and for a little while, Kyungsoo feels happy and complete as well. The crash comes right after he wakes up and realises it wasn’t real. His heart feels hollow again.

Sometimes he finds himself beside Sehun during their last day. There’s snow as far as one’s eye can reach, tiny snowflakes getting tangled in his and Sehun’s hair and eyelashes, Sehun lying in Kyungsoo’s arms as he whispers the little tiny words with a great meaning. Everything feels so real; the cold, white clouds of steam coming out of their mouths, tears. Kyungsoo often wakes up in the middle of the night. The tears that trickle down his cheeks are real, and so is the throbbing pain that makes his throat and chest tighten. It’s like going through it all over again.

And even though he spends the rest of the night crying, sobbing and cursing, he is thankful. Thankful that altough it was just a dream, he was able to spend the little time with Sehun. Thankful for not forgetting his face and voice. Golden hair and violet iris.

It’s devastating, but it’s all he has.

 „Soonkyu, could you bring me some water? I’m thirsty.“

The girl doesn’t look all too happy, yet she complies and with an unsure nod gets on her way to the nearest supermarket. A thought of Luhan smiling warmly at her just a moment ago lingers in her mind.

The four of them do notice each other’s presence and even without exchanging glances, they feel somehow close, somehow bonded. It’s like an instinct, a feeling when you don’t know why but you know it’s just that way. And right then, something bizarre happens.

It’s small and brief, yet still elegant and breath-taking and it casts a tiny shadow on the ground. The four of them gaze at it, astonished and longing. There are smiles mixed with salty tears, happiness mixed with pain, pleasant feeling mixed with the uncertain one.

A black butterfly is soaring on the sky.

Tao puts down his earphones and hears the harmonization.

For Jongin, the sun rises once again.

Luhan slowly exhales his last breath and with a smile dancing on his lips gets into the Paradise again.

And Kyungsoo, Kyungsoo hears the jingle bells on the sky laughing. 

The end.