(21) THE COOLDOWN

A week passes with no word of Chanyeol’s whereabouts, but Baekhyun is pretty much calmed down for the most part. He’s still undoubtedly worried, but he knows that Chanyeol’s smart enough not to let something bad happen to him.

The antique shop was still in ruins. Nobody was allowed close to the shop after the incident due to ‘dangerous remaining substances’ that could cause harm. It was pretty much charred and melted black, considered a dark void within the line of shops. For safety precautions, nearby shops closed down as well and relocated elsewhere, courtesy of the government.

The shop owner was taken in for questioning two days later, but Baekhyun was not aware of this.

Without his job and Chanyeol at his side, Baekhyun sulked at home all day. There was really no one to talk to, because Kyungsoo wasn’t exactly as talkative as the giant and decided that Baekhyun needed space rather than comfort. They stayed within a decent distance of one another though. Far away enough for personal space, but close enough for Baekhyun to casually drape his legs across Kyungsoo’s lap every once in awhile. Baekhyun missed the touch of another person. He missed Chanyeol, though he wouldn’t say it.

Sunny saw it too and eventually forced Baekhyun and Kyungsoo out of the house. She hated seeing them so unproductive and absolutely hated the way Kyungsoo took advantage of Baekhyun’s withdrawn state to stay home and not go out.

“I don’t want to leave Baekhyun at home alone.” Was all he said before sitting next to Baekhyun and leaning against the other boy ever so lightly.

Kyungsoo looked uncomfortable. He forced himself to be close to Baekhyun in hopes that he would make him feel better, no matter how much it pained him to do so. The boy’s sadness was his sadness, it wasn’t like he didn’t care and was actually using him. It just made Kyungsoo feel a little better to stay home and be with someone he felt at least a twinge of attraction towards. He felt safer with Sunny or Baekhyun than out in the world.

He is, however, still not used to the physical contact. Sunny frowns when he sits back down and opts to sitting herself, tapping the arm of her chair to turn on the TV and change the channel.

The news channel, to be exact. Sunny figured that something would be happening in the dome. It's been a while since something really big had happened, and she has a small feeling that something just might.

She watches as pictures of two boys appear on the screen, along with a low quality video clip of them on a roof.

"There they are again," she says, crossing her legs. "Those two boys from faction F. It's been awhile since they've been on the news. I wonder what happened this time?"

Kyungsoo thinks that they look undoubtedly familiar. Dressed in all black with shaggy unkempt hair, the two of them pushed one another around until the camera zoomed out to reveal a third person, awkwardly standing on the side. He held his hands straight down by his pants and scooted back every time the military looked his way.

“Hey… Isn’t that-”

“Chanyeol…” Baekhyun breathed out. His eyes were glued to the screen and tensed whenever the camera didn’t have the lanky boy in view. “W-Where is that place?”

“Looks like somewhere in faction C. They're dancing around on top of a bike shop.” Sunny added in.

Kyungsoo watched the two boys push each other around more and more until the one with blonde hair ed his hands forward towards the other. He saw the tanned boy’s hair blow back until he was lifted off his feet, as if by an invisible force, falling back and plummeting for the concrete below. Something got stuck in Kyungsoo’s throat as he tried hard to breath normally. Watching the boy fall triggered something inside of him. Gasps rang out and he didn’t know if it was from the TV or from his own lips.

Before he could see any guts spilled out over the pavement, he disappeared, with a black puff of smoke. He was just gone.

Leaning forward in his seat, Baekhyun was already turning up the volume when the camera was frantically trying to find something to focus on, panning up to see the blonde boy standing boredly and picking the crud out of his fingernails. He looked as if he did nothing wrong and waved at the camera with a grin on his face.

His happy expression was lost though, with another puff of smoke behind him. The tanned boy that had disappeared had suddenly gotten back onto the roof and boy, did he look mad. The small grimace on his face was replaced by a sudden smirk before he too, pushed his friend off the roof.

The blonde boy didn’t poof away like the other boy had, but rather, floated towards the ground. Dirt flew around by the mysterious gusts of wind and some of the bikes toppled over in their racks.

He was unhurt as well.

“How did he…” Baekhyun gasped, watching as he jumped back onto the roof with ease.

Their glowing eyes were unseen by the blurry camera. The two boys began to push at one another until Chanyeol came running towards them, face twisted into a worried expression as he pointed at the men in white standing down below them.

The blonde nudged Chanyeol a bit and gave him a soft smile as the boy nodded his head anxiously, taking a step back before trying to calm his fast beating heart. Chanyeol had his eyes closed while he flexed his arms a bit, folding both hands out in front of him before a small spark appeared in his palms. Wisps of fire shone in the irises of his eyes and he tossed aside his fear of fire to unleash all of the power that was building up in him. Chanyeol’s hair looked brown in the light of the flames and even though he was being viewed through the screen of a TV, Baekhyun’s body instinctively moved back as if he were going to get burned.

The fire blazing around Chanyeol manifested into a giant ball of flames, igniting into an even brighter spark until the sky was purely orange from its golden rays. The more Chanyeol stood there, the more his flames morphed into some sort of number, a symbol maybe. It looked like jagged lines and a couple of dots, but before he was able to piece two and two together, the flames dissipated. Chanyeol slumped to the floor, holding his chest with a pained look on his face.

“Chanyeol, he- Is it okay? What’s happening to him?” Baekhyun shook Kyungsoo with enough vigor to give the boy whiplash, and Kyungsoo had to pry the boy’s hands off of him to be able to say that he didn’t know either.

The more time went on, the more Chanyeol seemed to suffer. His choked screams were barely audible under the startled voices of the news anchors, but Baekhyun and Kyungsoo were still able to see him clawing at his head and ramming his fists against the roof. The bright image in the sky was nowhere in sight and the two boys that were with him both looked at one another while trying to get ahold of Chanyeol. They argued for a bit before Chanyeol’s powers began to act up again and the camera zoomed out to get the entire bike shop as the top part exploded almost, fire up towards the sky to create a very familiar scene. The phoenix was hovering above the boys’ heads and the tanned one had jumped over the two to shield them before Chanyeol’s fire had rained back over them, completely engulfing the bike shop below.

Nobody knew what to think. It looked as though the fire had killed them, instantly turning them to ash so that their bodies would never be found again.

“Ch-Chanyeol! Chanyeol, he... Oh god, Kyungsoo what- What do we do?!” Baekhyun was unleashing his anxiety out on Kyungsoo and Sunny without caring that nothing he was saying was making any sort of sense at all.

“Baek- Baekhyun! Calm down.” Kyungsoo roared, pinning Baekhyun down with the best of his abilities to keep him somewhat sane. “The tanned one got them out of there. He-”

“But how do you know?!” Baekhyun screamed, his voice cracking at the end. “They could be dead for all you know! Chanyeol could be dead a-and he… He’s gone… Kyungsoo! Chanyeol’s gone, I can’t. Chanyeol, he…”

“I know because, I just do.” Kyungsoo could have said anything besides what his gut told him. From what they saw, those boys were nothing more than a pile dust by now.

“If that tanned one could vanish and appear like some kind of magician,” Sunny butted in, “then I think he would, technically be able to get them out of there. But it’s just a guess.”

Baekhyun had forgotten that they were special, so of course they had some sort of plan up their sleeves. It took him a minute to process Sunny’s words, calming his heart that threatened to give him a heart attack any second.

If the blonde one was able to use use wind to push things around, and Chanyeol was just an exploding ball of insanity, then that meant that the tanned one had a power too. Nobody could just disappear and reappear like that in real life, so he had to have been able to get them out of there in the blink of an eye. They made it out right before the fire had gotten them, or so Baekhyun was trying to tell himself. Those two, were familiar and Baekhyun had to rack his brain a few more times before the memories had washed over him again to give him insight. The bratty mouthed blonde headed kid stuck out like a sore thumb for his insane obsession over the weirdest things. And then there was his partner in crime during the flu season. How could Baekhyun have forgotten how much havoc they caused before Lay had gotten his power?

“Those kids… That’s, Sehun a-and the tanned one was Kai…” He whispered with a faint sigh of relief. “Kyungsoo! They’re here! Our friends are here!“

Seeing the bike shop set ablaze made Kyungsoo think back to the tanned kid once more. He was the kid that would always randomly pop up when Kyungsoo least expected it.

“Baekhyun, we need to go there, now.”

Sunny looked back at Kyungsoo and sat up properly in her seat. “Over there? There’s going to be so much military, they’re going to swarm you guys. And you don’t have chips, so no. It’s not safe.”

“But Sunny!” Kyungsoo protested, hands curling up into fists.

“We need to go.” Baekhyun said quietly, already running back to his room without listening to what Sunny said. He came back with two jackets and while tossing one over to Kyungsoo, he stuffed his wallet into his pocket and even had grabbed Sunny’s keys on the way back. “They’re our friends, and Chanyeol is there. I need to see him.”

“Wait.”

Sunny stood up and took her time heading down the hall and to her room. Baekhyun was too antsy to be patient, so he ended up releasing all the pent up energy to Kyungsoo.

“That was Chanyeol’s phoenix, if you didn’t realize it.” He huffed, running his fingers through his hair.

“And that weird symbol before that?” Kyungsoo pressed on a bit too eagerly.

Baekhyun chuckled bitterly, looking down at the TV even though the screen was black. “It was a signal, and in Chinese at that. I bet Sehun thought of the brilliant idea to spell ‘meet here’ in giant flaming letters in the sky. What an idiot... ”

Kyungsoo couldn’t process why someone would go and make a signal like that so obviously in the sky. And in Chinese too? Other people were bound to be able to read Chinese, it wasn’t like they were the only ones.

“Just hope that nobody else is bilingual, since we’re only supposed to be able to understand the same language anyways.” Sunny strolled out into the living room with something dangling from her hands. The shiny metal glinted under the flourescent lights, swinging back and forth until Sunny had presented her hands up to the two of them.

Her palms opened to reveal tiny pendants attached to thin chains, extending her hands forward towards them. “Scissors for Baekhyun and rock for Kyungsoo. Hurry up now, I want to see if they look good.”

The two of them looked at one another before obeying and clipping the necklaces around their necks. Kyungsoo had looked towards Sunny and saw something similar around her own neck, except hers had a flat square hanging in the middle.

“What is this supposed to be, some sort of joke?” Baekhyun twirled the tiny pair of scissors between his pointer finger and thumb, cringing when Sunny swooped in to whack him over the head.

“It’s rock, paper, scissors you twit!” She scolded him. “I gave you scissors because you have a sharp tongue, damn kid.”

Kyungsoo rolled the metallic rock around in his fingers and thanked Sunny, giving a small smile when Baekhyun did the same. The three of them were matching and Kyungsoo liked how warm his chest felt with the simple piece of jewelry secured around his neck.

"Kyungsoo, you're rock. Because I know that you're really strong. Even without your memory, you managed to stay strong." She smiled, and Kyungsoo smiles as well, bashful and blushing. Baekhyun chuckles.

"What?" Kyungsoo asks. Baekhyun shakes his head.

"You won't understand the irony. Not yet, anyway..." He laughed a bit more before heading off towards the front door. Baekhyun was unaware of the small woman trailing after him and was startled when she pulled him back into the house.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Sunny asked curiously, standing with her hand propped up on one hip.

“Uh, to get Chanyeol? And the other two, I guess.”

Sunny shook her head and closed the door, pulling Baekhyun and Kyungsoo back towards the dining room table, turning the TV back on to pick up right back where it left off. The military was everywhere, as if they had suddenly multiplied tenfold within the short amount of time that they had the TV off. Some were cleaning up the bike shop while others patrolled, ordering pedestrians to clear the way as they sealed the area off with yellow tape and much more men in white with giant guns. The look Sunny gave Baekhyun almost challenged him to say something against what proof she showed him.

“We’ll go in an hour. The others will probably be there already, but I guess if it makes you feel better or whatever.” Baekhyun grumbled, sulking back to his room.

Taking that as a sign of defeat, Sunny hobbled over to the couch before collapsing against the armrest, beckoning Kyungsoo over with a tired flick of her wrist.

“Take care of him. I figured you two would have to go, though I didn’t think it would happen so soon.” There was sadness in her eyes, but a faint smile still lingered on her lips as she looked over to the shelf with their pictures. “I didn’t get to take a picture with you guys. All four of us, I mean."

Kyungsoo felt something prickle in his eyes and before he knew it, he was stuttering out some sort of reassurance for Sunny.

“You won’t need to, because we’ll be back,” Baekhyun wandered back into the living room and sat himself down on top of the armrest. “And we can take all the damn pictures t