Prompt: "They hate each other but a mutual friend goes missing and they must find them together"

Pairing: Baekhyun/Kyungsoo

Words: ~1300

“Where the is Yixing?” Joonmyun hollers out to the room, marching through the hallway door. He sends a glare towards Baekhyun, who’s tapping away at his phone, laughing every now and then as stupid pictures pop up on the screen that have usually been sent by Chanyeol. Joonmyun steals the phone, snorts at the goat in a miniskirt that Baekhyun has been staring at, and drags Baekhyun by his ear off the couch.

“He even left his phone on the kitchen bench… What the heck did I do to deserve looking after a bunch of non-self-sufficient s like you?” A pause.

“You’re finding Yixing, Baekhyun, seeing as you’ve got nothing better to do.” He sends a secondary glare to Kyungsoo, who is mindlessly flicking through television channels, the noise in the room deafening and definitely enough to wake up a sleeping Jongin. Joonmyun didn’t like waking up a sleeping Jongin - it was near enough to a death sentence.

“You too, Kyungsoo.”

Kyungsoo shoots daggers at Joonmyun, but nevertheless slowly claws his way off the couch. He sniffs a couple times, stares at Baekhyun with disdain, and flicks the television off. Joonmyun breathes a sigh of relief as the pair stalk their ways through the doorway, grumbling as they pull on their shoes. Joonmyun gives the car keys to Kyungsoo, and Baekhyun makes to complain about it but he’s silenced by a well-timed sniff from Joonmyun. No one likes upsetting Joonmyun.

“Where do you think he got to?” Baekhyun asks, as he sits shotgun in the car, pulling his seatbelt across his waist. Kyungsoo shrugs, turning the keys in the ignition and pulling out of the driveway. He groans as he notices the heavy traffic, for there is always heavy traffic, and touches his index finger and thumb to the bridge of his nose and squeezes. He turns to Baekhyun, eyes wide, then narrowing.

“If you decide you want to speak loudly or even if you want to whisper for this entire drive, I might just have to send you to your untimely demise, Baekhyun,” he says seriously. “I could, in fact, kill you.” Baekhyun nods, smile falling to a frown as he stares out the window. Kyungsoo was, in fact, the evilest member of the group, given his strange internet history and nightly sleepwalking. Baekhyun was sure Kyungsoo was a reincarnation of some sort of malignant and slightly neurotic bog witch, although that didn’t cover the fact that he cried through sports anime.

Baekhyun becomes very well acquainted with the leather lining of the car door, dragging his finger across the material as his eyes scour the streets. It’s hot, too hot in this company car, because Kyungsoo refuses to put the air conditioner on, let alone wind down a window for him. Baekhyun, however, knows it’s better not to tempt the devil. Kyungsoo has always followed through on his many threats directed at Baekhyun in the past, and he doesn’t want to push his luck.

“There!” Kyungsoo points, and Baekhyun’s eyes flip up to the windscreen. He notices the murky water and the overgrown grass, and his face pales. Murder, he thinks. Kyungsoo is out for murder. Kyungsoo notices his change of features and grimaces. “What? It’s actually Yixing’s favourite spot to hang out.”

As if on cue, Yixing can be spotted running amuck on the small tuft of grass by the river, arms flapping about in the wind. He trips, landing face-first in the dirt, and quickly gets up again, back to his ridiculous arm flapping. Was that a butterfly? Irrefutably, it occurred to Baekhyun, Yixing was chasing a butterfly. Baekhyun lets out a small sigh of relief, unaware that he has been holding his breath.

“The are you doing?” Kyungsoo calls out the window, pulling into a parking spot. Yixing’s head snaps up, looking embarrassed, and he gives Kyungsoo a sheepish laugh. Baekhyun jumps out of the car and runs to Yixing, brings the taller into an awkward hug, takes his hand, and runs them both down towards the river. He smiles at Yixing, dragging him to the edge of the water, and sits.

“I’m so glad we found you,” Baekhyun says, relieved smile gracing his lips. “I was 96.4% sure that Kyungsoo was out for blood and wanted to dump my body in the river, never to be seen or heard from again.”

“Oh,” Yixing says, looking thoughtfully across the water. “Kyungsoo wouldn’t do that to you, would he?” Baekhyun shoots him an incredulous look, and Yixing shrugs, wrapping his fingers around the grass by his left foot and tugging gently, bringing up a couple of blades and tossing them out into the river.

“I suppose you’re only happy because if he did try to kill you, now you’ve got a witness.”

Kyungsoo lets out a chuckle behind them and Baekhyun’s blood runs cold. He jumps up to his feet, throwing Kyungsoo an embarrassed grin, before attempting to run back to the car. Kyungsoo, however, has other ideas.

“You really think that way about me?” he asks begrudgingly, grabbing the sleeve of Baekhyun’s flannel shirt and throwing him back on the ground. “You really think I want to murder you?”

Baekhyun doesn’t know how to respond. Kyungsoo was roughly the same height as him, but also about ten times stronger, which made Baekhyun think that maybe there was something else to his whole reincarnation theory, and rather than bog witch Kyungsoo was some kind of swamp wizard concerned in the dark arts.

“Err… yes?”

Kyungsoo chortles at him, slapping him hard on the back. Baekhyun is surprised as Kyungsoo’s laughter gets louder and louder behind him. He cracks a smile as Kyungsoo stoops to his knees and finally falls over, his black jeans knee thick in mud. Suddenly, Kyungsoo lurches over Baekhyun in his laughter and tumbles right off the riverbank into the freezing water below.

“.” Baekhyun curses.

Kyungsoo surfaces in the water, still laughing. He doesn’t seem to want to stop, and Baekhyun begins to laugh with him. Yixing looks slightly confused at the pair, but holds a hand out for Kyungsoo to take in an attempt to drag him back to shore. Yixing, however, looses his footing just by the edge and goes slamming down into the river too, right on top of a wet and ridiculous looking Kyungsoo. Baekhyun howls even louder, until the pair in the water decides the more the merrier.

The three boys roll about in the murky water, much to the amusement of a few onlookers who happen to walk through the park. When Kyungsoo’s finally decided enough is enough, he drags Baekhyun out of the water by his ear, and tugs at Yixing’s shirt. They all sit by the banks and attempt to dry themselves off as much as possible before piling into the car.

“Joonmyun’s not going to like this,” Baekhyun says, reclaiming his passenger-side seat and staring out the window. Yixing claims the backseat and stretches his legs over leather, sighing in content. When Kyungsoo finally climbs in, last, and turns the keys, Baekhyun thinks he can see the ghost of a smile make its way across the short boy's lips. This, to Baekhyun, is almost completely unfathomable. What happened to the brooding owl-eyed boy he had come to hate love?

“You had fun, right?” Baekhyun whispers, and Kyungsoo side-eyes him, smile dropping from his face as he attempts to look neutral.

“If you talk loudly again, or if you say anything to the others about this, your wish may very well come true.”