Chanyeol stares at the sickly white ceiling, which is more yellow now, after so many years, with small chips and cracks in the paint that leave behind a concrete grey. He tries to count the small holes, to connect them and form some kind of intelligible shape in the otherwise haphazard display, but after a few minutes his head starts to thrum painfully and he is reminded, again, of the fact that it’s five in the morning and he hasn’t slept at all. If he looked in a mirror right now, staring back at him would be a drained-looking boy with dark shadows around his bloodshot eyes, with a trembling, pale lower lip bitten so raw that its cracks aren’t even a shock anymore, the coppery taste as his tongue traces over it time and time again doesn’t even make him scrunch his nose up in disgust now.

A beeping sound comes from across the bed, where his phone lies vacant with disuse, and Chanyeol reaches for it with only the bare minimum of effort, just enough to swipe at the screen and make the beeping stop for another blissful ten minutes of blinking up at the walls. After what seems like a moment later, he swipes at the screen again and groans low in his throat, the sound coming out rougher than he’d intended and his voice cracking at the very end, making him cough a few times to get rid of the itchiness that follows.

He drags his lead-like feet across wooden floors, paying no mind to the mess of clothes tossed haphazardly over furniture or beneath his feet, not even when he trips a few times on a discarded pair of shoes or a dirty shirt that wraps around his ankle, as if telling him to pick up his mess and get his life in order for once. The coffee machine whirrs and hums along to the pulsing in his head, and Chanyeol reaches up to rub at his eyes with the heel of his palm, so hard that it leaves behind a firework-like pattern on the inside of his eyelids, as he waits for his first cup of the day to be finished. He swallows down a pill with his last gulp, frowning at the bitter taste they leave in his mouth, and walks with at least a little bit of renewed energy, back to his room.

~

The teacher walks in only a moment after he unceremoniously plops down into a free seat at the back, letting his heavy textbook thud onto the wooden table loudly, earning a few dirty looks and questioning stares from the people seated around him. Chanyeol reaches for his paper cup and blows once before taking a huge gulp of pure, black coffee, swallowing it down eagerly before sparing a glance to the man in the front of their class, who has already started to ramble on about their latest assignment that Chanyeol really doesn’t have the energy to think about at the moment. He should have ordered a large cup.

~

“Hi, um-“

Chanyeol lifts his head from the table, wiping at the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, the other reaching up to run through his messy head of hair. When he looks down, he sees a wet patch on one of the pages, and realizes, with a resigned kind of surprise, that he’d managed to fall asleep during a lecture and subsequently drool all over his textbook. The realization doesn’t rattle him too much, though, and he merely closes the book, grimacing at the way it emits a loud thud in the otherwise quiet and- now- empty room. He glances up and sees a boy, whom he’s never noticed before, looking at him with wide, worried eyes as he bites at his lower lip, pale cheeks dusted a light shade of pink that doesn’t look too bad on him. Not that Chanyeol notices.

He grunts in acknowledgement and moves to shove the book in his backpack before standing up, letting his chair screech against the tiled floor, even though the sound makes both of them cringe.

The boy fiddles with the hem of his large sweater, a few sizes too big on him, with the way its sleeves reach well past the wrists, covering almost the entirety of his hand, just up to the pads of his fingers. He’s looking at the floor now, and Chanyeol’s about to walk past him and out the door, back to the coffee shop for some much-needed elixir of life, when a hand on his arm stops him from moving.

“I saw that you slept through the lecture”, he says in a rush, looking horrified as soon as the words leave his dark, plump lips that Chanyeol is having a hard time looking away from, “I’m not judging you or anything, though! It’s hard to focus this early in the morning… I just- uh- wanted to ask if you needed to borrow the notes?”, he’s staring at the floor again, tongue poking out to wet his lips before he glances back up at a speechless Chanyeol, “We have an exam in a month and today’s lecture is gonna be a big chunk of it and, um, I thought you might need them. You know. So you could study and… not fail. Again.”

Chanyeol frowns at that, feeling defensive all of a sudden, “I didn’t fail last time.”

And it’s true. He had passed…well… barely, but a pass is a pass nonetheless.

The boy looks at him as if he knows what Chanyeol is thinking, and he’s already rummaging through his bag to fish out a pastel-pink notebook that he puts in Chanyeol’s waiting hands without the other even realizing he’d reached out to accept it in the first place. He smiles and Chanyeol has to blink a few times to make sure this is really happening, because he’s never seen this boy and now, suddenly, he’s getting free lecture notes and kind, eye-crinkling smiles, and he really doesn’t know what to do about it.

And it’s like the boy can read his mind again because, just a heartbeat later, he’s smiling wider and putting some needed distance between them. Chanyeol didn’t even realize how close they’d been standing until he doesn’t have to crane his neck down to look back anymore.

“You can buy me coffee as payback.”, the boy tells him, sounding much more confident than he looks, hands still pulling at the hem of his sweater and teeth still digging into his lower lip.

A huff leaves him without permission, and Chanyeol frowns at himself, biting the inside of his cheek to keep his lips from stretching into an unwanted, unneeded smile. Instead, he looks at the boy and crosses his arms over his chest.

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Byun Baekhyun.”

He blinks. Well… he doesn’t really have an excuse now, does he?

“I’m-“

“Park Chanyeol… I- uh- I know who you are.” 

They stare at each other for longer than strictly necessary under these circumstances- or under any circumstances other than a staring contest, really- and Chanyeol tries to fight back the small pang of guilt that settles somewhere deep in his chest at the thought of being noticed by someone he’s never even given a second thought to before. He really does owe Baekhyun a cup of coffee. Or even two, maybe.

With a sigh, Chanyeol straightens his back, listening for a satisfying pop in his spine before walking past the other boy. He sends a quick look over his shoulder, meeting Baekhyun’s curious and somehow still worried gaze, and fights back another reluctant smile.

“Come on, then. I’m buying you coffee.”

The grin he gets in response is almost worth the effort of swallowing down an uncomfortable lump that lodges itself up his throat, making it a little hard to breathe when he looks down at Baekhyun who’s walking too close to him again. Almost. He takes a step to the side and puts some distance between them- not enough to be too obvious about his discomfort, but just the right amount to make it easier to breathe.

~

Chanyeol groans into his pillow for the third time in just over ten minutes, failing to keep his thoughts from wandering to Baekhyun, who had made getting coffee with someone for the first time in his life a- surprisingly- less than excruciatingly painful affair earlier that day. They had talked for the entirety of Chanyeol’s morning break between lectures, straying from strictly school-related topics to their interests- Baekhyun plays the piano in his free time, he’d started learning it at the age of five because his parents had always been too busy with work and too worried to leave him at home unattended; Baekhyun collects cacti, of all things, and he’s very proud of this fact if his flailing arms and wide smile as he talked about them is any sort of indication; Baekhyun doesn’t have many friends, because he’s too shy to approach people, but the friends he does have are all, in his words, totally awesome and worth meeting.

“But you approached me.”, Chanyeol had argued, swallowing down a scalding-hot mouthful of coffee and blinking against the stingy tears that blur his vision right afterwards.

The other boy had picked at a thread in the tablecloth and let out a dry laugh, biting his lower lip before letting his mouth stretch into a mischievous smile.

“I guess you just seemed approachable with drool dripping onto your textbook.”, he had teased. 

At this, Chanyeol had choked on his coffee and narrowed his eyes at a laughing Baekhyun, who didn’t seem to mind the glare sent his way in the slightest as he’d snorted a few times between fits of giggles. If Chanyeol hadn’t known any better, he would have let himself think that the scene was endearing, and his heart would have actually skipped a beat at the dazzling smile adorning the other boy’s face as he looked back at him. But he had known better, of course. He does know better.

~

“What are those for?”, Baekhyun asks from the opposite side of their table, squinting at the pill bottle that had rolled out of Chanyeol’s backpack when they’d sat down a minute ago.

The coffee shop is nearly empty this early in the morning, but Chanyeol feels suffocated all the same as he tries- and fails- to get his heart to stop beating so quickly with fear. On a basic level, somewhere in the back of his mind where he isn’t as messed up as he feels, Chanyeol knows that there’s no need to be afraid of explaining. He’s known Baekhyun for almost a month and they’ve become good friends, even though Chanyeol still prefers to listen rather than talk about himself, and Baekhyun has yet to know more about him than what everyone else knows (which is, essentially, the bare minimum) even after countless attempts to learn more.

So, yes; he knows that the answer isn’t to shove the bottle back into his backpack and zip it up as if that’ll erase what had just happened, and he’s well aware that ignoring Baekhyun’s questioning look in favour of walking away to order their drinks isn’t the best solution to his issue.

But it’s exactly what he does, nonetheless. And when he comes back with two paper cups in hand, Baekhyun is leafing through his textbook, question long forgotten with the pressure of cramming for an exam that’s a week from now, and he doesn’t mention anything for the entirety of their study session (if it can be called that). Chanyeol doesn’t study at all; in fact, his eyes remain glued to the way Baekhyun’s long fingers dog-ear a page as he shifts to write something down in his notebook, pen gliding across paper and leaving a pretty, neat script in its wake, and the way he subconsciously gnaws on his lower lip when a sentence doesn’t make sense at first glance, and how he keeps running a hand through his soft, tousled hair whenever he can’t memorize something, and how his tongue pokes out between his lips when he’s really focused.

He marvels at how someone can look so effortlessly beautiful and not even know what they’re doing to the people who notice things like this and, in hindsight, he probably- definitely- should be paying more attention to the textbook opened up to a random page, sitting uselessly in front of him, than he is to Baekhyun.

But Chanyeol has always been a little self-destructive.

~

“Hello?”

“Chanyeol?”

“…What?”

Baekhyun sighs on the other end of the line, and Chanyeol can almost see the eye roll that follows every time.

“Are you studying?”

“Yes.”

“Are you really studying? Or are you just staring at your book and hoping that some of its contents will seep into your head if you wish hard enough?”

Chanyeol groans pitifully and sits back up, letting the book slide down his chest and onto the bed. How can Baekhyun know what he’s been doing for the past hour if they’re not even in the same room? He’s just about to ask the other boy, hoping to prolong the time he has before he absolutely has to look at the book again, or else risk failing- or barely passing… again- when Baekhyun beats him to it.

“Study, Chanyeol. The exam’s in two days.”

The thing is, he knows all of this. He knows that the exam is in two days, he knows that he hasn’t read even a third of the material, and he knows that failing this will not be good for him in the long run. He knows that Baekhyun is doing this because he cares, for some crazy, unexplainable reason, about more than his own grades. And he knows that he doesn’t have time to think about doing other things- like sleeping, or staring at a muted TV screen, or playing his out of tune guitar after months of not touching it, or talking to the other boy for a little while longer- but a nagging voice in his head is telling him that failing won’t come as too much of a disappointment if he knows he hadn’t studied enough to pass. But if he does study, and fails anyway, it’ll be so much worse to handle. Why should he get his hopes up for nothing? Why should he try when it’s useless?

“You’re doing it again.”, Baekhyun sounds annoyed over the phone, and there’s the sound of papers rustling and a door slamming shut before he’s speaking across the line again, “I’m coming over.”

“You’re what?”, he’s never had anyone over.

His place is a mess. There are dirty clothes all over the floors and furniture and dirty dishes in the sink and empty takeout boxes in his living room, he knows. Chanyeol scrambles out of bed and starts to clean up as best as he can, tossing laundry back into his closet and running clumsily to the kitchen, managing not to slip on the tiled floor in his socks, to wash the dishes.

"Get food.”, he gasps into the phone, hoping to buy a little more time.

Baekhyun laughs from the other end and says a quick “okie dokie” before hanging up, leaving the other boy to scrub at dirty plates and trip over his own feet trying to get his apartment into at least some semblance of order. He tosses out the takeout boxes and remembers to take out the trash instead of leaving the trashcan to overflow for another few days like he normally would, and he towel-dries the dishes and puts them away instead of leaving them on the rack until their next use, and he even makes sure the bathroom is cleaner than it has ever been since he’s been living here.

When he’s done, the place looks like there is a healthy, responsible adult who has their together living in it, and Chanyeol takes a minute to feel proud of himself. It’s not exactly a big win or anything, but it’s a start, and anything is better than nothing, right? The impressed look on Baekhyun’s face when he finally takes a look around is enough to make Chanyeol feel accomplished for the rest of the day.

~

Chanyeol forgets to take two doses, the day of the test- his evening pill because he had stayed up on the phone with Baekhyun after the latter insisted on studying with him that way; and his morning pill, in his haste to get out of the apartment after sleeping through his first three wake-up alarms and a missed call from Baekhyun. He dials the only number he’s ever known by heart, putting the phone to his ear while he weaves through the mass of people crowding the sidewalk on their way to work.

“Chanyeol?”

He bites at his bottom lip to keep from yelling out. His hands are a little shaky, with the absence of caffeine and his medication, and he feels a little lightheaded even as he approaches the steps of their school. Baekhyun is breathing on the other side of the line and his voice brings Chanyeol back to what’s happening, his hands pushing against a heavy door and walking along the hallway towards the lecture hall.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m f-fine, Baek, just”, he trips on the completely flat floor and curses at his feet, willing his voice to remain as stable as possible even as he talks through clenched teeth, “forgot my morning coffee, is all.”

There’s still twenty minutes until their exam, and he’s almost there, when Baekhyun speaks again.

“I got you a cup on my way here, don’t worry.”

The relief is sudden and heavy and Chanyeol suppresses a sound that struggles to claw up his throat, somewhere between a groan and a whimper, when he squints at the end of the hallway and sees Baekhyun waving at him, a paper cup in his hand.

He gulps the warm liquid down without a word, in record time, and gives Baekhyun a pleased smile when he wipes his mouth on his sweatshirt sleeve, tugging it down over his entire hand. He still feels a little lightheaded, and it’s probably due to low blood pressure because of his missed dosage, but the coffee helps with that, and his hands stop shaking within a few minutes. He wrings his fingers together so Baekhyun wouldn’t notice how restless they’re being, but the other boy is staring at his face rather than his hands when their eyes meet at last.

“What’s wrong?”, he’s squinting, curious and worried, always worried. Always perceptive to every little thing Chanyeol does.

Chanyeol shrugs and looks down at the floor, faking a laugh even though it comes out sounding more like he’s choking on air than anything remotely humorous. His teeth dig into his bottom lip and bite until he tastes a hint of copper, and even then he can’t help but chew on it a little, pulling so the pain distracts him from the eyes boring into the side of his head.

“It’s those pills, isn’t it?”, Baekhyun asks again, this time sounding as quiet as he had been the first day they spoke.

When Chanyeol looks down at him, he looks smaller than he’s ever been in the past month, as if he’s afraid of what the taller might say. Or maybe he’s afraid of being right about this. Or, maybe he’s one of those people who just don’t understand that needing medication to feel better isn’t a bad thing, doesn’t make you different or worse or strange; God knows he’s met more than enough of those people over the years.

“They’re antidepressants, right?”

The question makes Chanyeol frown in surprise, staring down at the other boy who keeps his eyes firmly trained on the floor for a few moments, before gathering the courage to look back at him. There’s worry in the way his usually smiling lips are pulled down into a frown, in the way his eyes shine pleadingly instead of happily, but he doesn’t look away even when Chanyeol doesn’t answer his question. His silence is enough of an answer.

“I…I used to take anti-anxiety meds in high school.”, he says softly, biting his lip for a beat as he watches Chanyeol take the new information in, his eyes widening the smallest bit in surprise even though he doesn’t say anything in response. “I missed a few doses one time, thinking I didn’t need them anymore because it had been a few months without a- um…incident? But then I started getting nauseous and irritated and it was horrible, like having the flu but ten, twenty times worse.”

Chanyeol nods slowly, sliding down the wall until he’s sitting on the cold, tiled floor, and a moment later Baekhyun sits down next to him, their sides pressing together and making his skin feel warm and jittery. It’s not as uncomfortable as he’d thought it would be- being this close to someone. Or maybe it has more to do with that someone being Baekhyun.

“I missed two doses.”, he mutters into the fabric of his sweatshirt, knees drawn up to his chest and arms resting on top of them.

The other boy scoots closer and a thin arm wraps around Chanyeol’s middle, warm hand settling on his hip with Baekhyun’s long, delicate fingers playing with the fabric of his sweatshirt there. He glances down and sees Baekhyun looking at the floor, bottom lip caught between his teeth again, making it an angry, deep pink the longer he gnaws at it.

“Don’t bite your lip.”, Chanyeol tells him, reaching out and touching the tip of his index finger to the corner of the other boy’s mouth; he doesn’t even apply much pressure, but Baekhyun stops immediately, his lip now red and cracked and wet.

“Don’t miss your doses.”, the shorter boy counters, narrowing his eyes at Chanyeol who can’t do anything but huff a laugh in response.

~

“Chanyeol?”

Said boy groans into his pillow, blinking at his too-bright phone screen and glaring at the caller ID, which displays a picture of a smiling Baekhyun with more hearts in it than Chanyeol will ever admit to writing. He brings the phone up to his ear and answers with a gruff and sleepy “What?”

“I’m coming over.”

“And you had to call and tell me- why?”, he could have gotten at least another half hour of sleep until Baekhyun arrived. He knows where the spare key is.

Baekhyun laughs from the other end and hangs up without an answer, leaving Chanyeol to nuzzle his face into a warm pillow and will sleep to come back to him again, even when it becomes apparent that it won’t. He manages to doze off, suspended between being awake and dreaming, just as the door to his bedroom swings open to reveal a grinning Baekhyun.

“The exam results are up!”, he yells instead of biding the other a “good morning” or a “sorry I woke you up and barged into your apartment at the -crack of dawn”, and he pads across the room before plopping, unceremoniously so, onto Chanyeol’s bed.

Chanyeol hums into his pillow, not even bothering to look up. He feels the other boy moving to lay down, and then a phone is shoved into his nose rather roughly, which has him blinking away the very last remnants of sleep and squinting to see what’s happening.

“You passed!”, Baekhyun tells him, before he even has a chance to find his name on the list of students.

He frowns in disbelief and checks nonetheless, finding his name somewhere in the very middle, a few slots below Baekhyun. He didn’t fail. He didn’t barely pass, either. His grade is exactly average, much like a few other people’s, and this realization has him sitting upright and grabbing for the phone to double-check.

“I passed?”, he stares at the screen like the numbers are suddenly going to change into something that makes more sense…but they remain still, even after a few silent moments, and he looks up to see Baekhyun grinning widely back at him.

He’s smiling the kind of proud smile that Chanyeol has never had directed at him before- wide and gummy and rectangular in Baekhyun’s unique way, reaching all the way up to his crescent-shaped eyes that crinkle at the corners. He looks beautiful like this, just like he had looked beautiful the day they met, and just like he looks beautiful whenever Chanyeol chances a glance.

Or maybe it’s just the fact that he’s Baekhyun, and Chanyeol has always been a little biased when it comes to him.

Whatever it is that makes him see Baekhyun as someone beautiful- even when he has leftover coffee crème in the corner of his mouth, or when he trips while walking on pavement and releases a panicked, shrill yell, or when he’s biting at the end of his pens during lectures when he’s too focused- Chanyeol is glad for it, because it makes the nagging little voice in his head stop talking for a little while, and then there’s nothing telling him what he can and can’t do.

And Chanyeol has always been a little self-destructive, after all.

He leans forward, smiling a little at the way Baekhyun’s eyes flutter closed at the proximity, as if he’d known all along that this would happen. Knowing him, and how well he knows what Chanyeol will do even when the latter hasn’t even decided yet, he probably did.

His lips are soft in the same way that everything else on him is soft, from his smile to his touch, but there are little rough patches from his nervous habit of biting on them at times, and they’re just a little bit uncoordinated in the first few moments, both too caught up in the realization of what’s happening to actually engage in it. But then the surprise gives way to a quiet noise that leaves the shorter boy’s mouth, past his soft, waiting lips and into the charged air between them, and it sounds so much like an invitation for more that Chanyeol can’t do anything except oblige.

Baekhyun kisses the same way that he speaks- uncertain at first, a little shy and hesitant, until the initial fear fades into curiosity, and then he’s kissing back with soft noises and tentative touches to Chanyeol’s cheeks, his jaw, his neck, fingers roaming over warm skin until his hands settle on broad shoulders and he climbs, a little clumsily in his haste, onto Chanyeol’s lap.

~

Love doesn’t magically cure him. It would be naïve to think that’s possible. But dealing with the dangerous thoughts that still sometimes lodge themselves into the dark corners of his mind, the little voice of doubt, the nerves and unwillingness to do anything but lay in his bed and stare at the ceiling- it’s a lot easier to do when he’s not alone.

Baekhyun barges into his room in the morning, or he simply rolls over to face him on the bed, sleepy smile always present on his face whenever Chanyeol blinks back sleep with a yawn, and never fails to remind him to take a morning dose. But, more often than not now, he doesn’t need to, because Chanyeol doesn’t feel the need to stay in bed all day as much as he used to; waking up means seeing a sleep-warm Baekhyun cuddling into the juncture of his neck and inhaling deeply, murmuring unintelligible things that sound a lot like “you smell nice” and “you’re so warm” and, after a little while, “i love you”.  

Baekhyun calls to remind him to study when they’re not already together, but now Chanyeol will tell him “I am studying” and it won’t be a lie. He’ll take breaks every now and then, but it’ll be to eat or have a cup of coffee- or tea, the one Baekhyun bought him and said it helps with relaxation- not stare at a muted TV screen or at paint chipping on walls. He’s forgotten how many stains are on the ceiling and what shape they make when he connects them at four in the morning, with bloodshot eyes and a mind plagued by thoughts because, now, he’ll strum unwritten songs on his finely-tuned guitar until sleep slithers its way to him for the night.

He doesn’t have to tell Baekhyun to stop biting his lip, because he doesn’t do it nearly as often as he used to. And when he does, whether out of nervous habit or a subconscious one, Chanyeol will lean over and press his lips there instead, and Baekhyun will hum into his mouth and kiss back just as eagerly as he had the first time.

And maybe he’s a little biased, and a little self-destructive at times still, but Baekhyun smiles up at him like he’s finally figured out what happiness feels like, and he knows he’s smiling back the same way, too.