A quarter to three… Where are you, Byun Baekhyun? Chanyeol peers out the window of their hotel-room onto the garishly illuminated streets of night-time Beijing, scowls, closes the blinds and sighs. It’s three o’clock in the morning in the overcrowded capital of a country whose language they barely speak, and his group-mate and best friend of six years, Byun Baekhyun, is nowhere to be found. Exhausted from a day of incessant interviews, meetings and performances, just as they were about to call it a night, Baekhyun decided that he had to roam the city or run mad. Unbeknownst to their managers and members and against Chanyeol’s vehement opposition, he snuck out the building while the latter was showering, leaving behind no more than a scrap of paper on which had been scribbled with a hasty hand Don’t worry, I’ll be back. Cover for me. I have to. I can’t breathe otherwise.

This is not the first time Baekhyun has disappeared into foreign darkness. When their schedule has been particularly taxing, their day spent servicing the fancies of those who like a colouring book would fill the outlines of EXO’s nine members with whatever hues may please their palates, never minding the underlying tints of the persons who inhabit them, he’ll don his black mask and baseball-cap and, affecting anonymity, slink into the night. Chanyeol never asks where he’s been or what he’s done. He doesn’t want to know – know why he had to go, whom he might have seen, why he can’t breathe when they’re alone together – he can’t afford to…neither of them can.

He crashes onto his bed, his long limbs overtaking its edges, and stares at emptiness. Gradually fatigue subdues anxiety: his eyes grow heavy, his breathing even, his heartbeat sluggish as he surrenders to unconsciousness. He dreams of nothing – or so he thinks. Abruptly something encumbers his lower body, something heavy, something warm, something…human. He opens his eyes and there is the prodigal returned to the fold, if a little too near it for comfort. Baekhyun stares at him a few seconds, his expression at once elated and downcast, then curves his fine fingers over Chanyeol’s dumbfounded face and softly sweeps them along his features, lingering on the younger’s mouth.

Chanyeol observes him closely – the dilation of his pupils, the slight contraction of his modestly-proportioned eyes, the reddish glow in his habitually pale cheeks, the added flush and fleshiness of his naturally plump lips – and reconsiders his plan of attack. “Byun Baekhyun,” he starts with an even baritone, “are you drunk?”

Amazingly, the elder bursts into laughter. “I don’t know. Am I?”

Chanyeol’s temper darkens in time with his tone. “You’d better be. Get off.” No response. He draws in a palliative lungful of air and repeats, “Baekhyun-ah, I’m not playing. Get off.” But the elder only burrows further into the younger’s lap, tightening his grip on Chanyeol’s hips where he bestrides him. His nostrils flaring to double their size, Chanyeol grits his teeth and growls, “What the hell sort of game is this?! I said GET OFF!” He flings his arms at his rider to push him away, but Baekhyun grabs his wrists mid-air and pins them to either side of Chanyeol’s face, pitching his own so near it, the younger’s stomach heaves at the stench of alcohol that promptly engulfs him.

“Don’t want to,” Baekhyun hisses, his air indomitable. “Do you hear me? I don’t want to.”

Chanyeol checks. In their six years of acquaintance, through five of which they’ve shared a room as well as a living, he has never known the elder so impassioned, so utterly implacable. Something must have happened. Something bad. His blood chills at the thought. I should have gone after him. I should have told the managers. “Baekhyun-ah, how much did you have to drink?” he probes carefully, retuning his voice to reconciliation.

Baekhyun tilts his silvered head and puckers. “A little…or a lot...depends on how you measure it.”

By the glass, not the bottle. “Why? What happened?” Chanyeol pursues, armouring himself for the worst.

Baekhyun winces, yet replies, “Nothing. Just felt like it. Can’t I do that?”

“What? Drink?”

“What I feel like,” he returns, his puppyish eyes drooping piteously to afford him the look of a wounded animal. “Can’t I do as I feel…sometimes?”

Chanyeol’s chest tautens, yet his manner remains impassive. “Depends.”

“What on?”

“What you feel.”

The elder bites his reddened lips and draws them to the younger’s, who turns away his face in time for them to catch his neck instead, then shudders at the contact. “Remember that time on stage I took you by the nape and huddled up to you?” Baekhyun whispers in his ear, all the while rhythmically brushing his lips against Chanyeol’s jawline, so that the younger’s circulation inverts. “You were so nervous behind that laughter; I could have kissed you on the spot.”

That time… What was it they were celebrating? The conclusion of a concert? The reception of a prize? Chanyeol can scarce recall anything that happened before or after that instant when he playfully walked up to Baekhyun, and the elder, with a look that was an invitation, clutched him by the collar and pressed their foreheads together, while he kept him at bay with weak hands and an even weaker heart. He laughed then and clapped as though they’d made some clever joke on the world, though he knew, as he had from the moment they’d set eyes on each other, that the joke was on them. “What the hell are you saying?” he snarls, playing at obliviousness.

Baekhyun is unconvinced. “I’m saying that you wanted it,” he asserts, his lips never leaving Chanyeol’s jawline. “You’ve wanted it. You want it and that’s never going to change, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself otherwise.”

Chanyeol can feel resentment flare up his chest like heartburn. He doesn’t want to want him, he never has. He doesn’t want a life of stolen glances and contraband caresses – to be the laughing stock of society and the disgrace of his house, to lose all they’ve slaved and suffered for to achieve if and when the truth got out. But when he looks at him, thinks of him, comes within breathing distance of his scent his heart distends so that he thinks it will erupt. Rooming with him, he’d hoped, would desensitise him to Baekhyun. If the antidote is extracted from the very poison it is meant to counteract, then surely these five years of cohabitation should have purged him of the elder’s venom. Why, then? Why does it keep getting worse? “Get off me now, while I’m still being nice. You know I could make you.”

Baekhyun resumes his earlier position, for once towering over the Tower, puts the tip of his tongue to his incisor and smirks. “Yes, you can. And yet, here we are, the nail pinning down the hammer – why is that, Park Chanyeol-ssi?”

Feebly Chanyeol glares at him, his voice as he speaks too mild for menace. “You always go too far.”

“And you never go far enough. Aren’t we made for each other?”

“Not for each other, the same as each other – and that doesn’t work, it can’t…not for me, at any rate.” 

Baekhyun sniffs and arcs an eyebrow as matter-of-factly he retorts, “You’d be surprised at how well it works, when you know how to operate it.”

At this the younger’s armour cracks. “Byun Baekhyun, what are you saying right now?” he asks evenly, allowing the elder the benefit of the doubt, though it costs him the balance of his sanity to do so.

Baekhyun looks him dead in the eye. “Practice makes perfect and you know I’m a perfectionist.”

At this the younger’s armour shatters. He grips Baekhyun by the waist, flips him over and pins him down, as should the hammer the nail. “What sort of practice? With whom?” he seethes. 

“Omo, omo, are you jealous, Park Chanyeol-ssi?” Baekhyun cries, feigning surprise, the corners of his mouth twitching as he works to repress his amusement. 

But Chanyeol’s long past playfulness. His entire system’s wound so tight, he can scarce unclench his jaws to say, “Answer me. What did you do, when and who with?”

Dauntlessly the elder declares, “A bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of everything.”

Chanyeol’s stomach churns, his insides an upheaval, the sickness swelling up his chest so that briefly he’s sure he’ll retch. Baekhyun’s coquettishness, the openness of his manner, his hands that always seek the warmth of others, most often that of their members, that woman he had to bow and beam at the two years they were together, all of these he can forgive. A woman he could forgive, but wasn’t he supposed to be his only man? “Why? Why didn’t you wait?”

Baekhyun smiles bitterly, so bitterly, Chanyeol’s mouth sours. “What for – you? That doesn’t work, remember, when we’re both made the same? Why should I have waited for something that was never going to happen?”

“Because it’s wrong!” he hisses, his voice and features contorting in chorus and with them his heart.

“What part of it? Doing it with a man? Or doing it with one I don’t love? The one I love won’t do it with me, so –“

“So you just go around sprea – sleeping with the first one you come across on the street?!” Chanyeol interjects, no longer able to quell his anger.

Again that unembroidered expression. “Not on the street, in a building.”

“Who was it? Someone I know?” Chanyeol persists, fearful of the answer, though not half as fearful as he is of ignorance.

“Maybe,” Baekhyun allows, his mien unreadable.

Chanyeol wrings his eyes and exhales. There’s no managing him when Baekhyun gets like this; he’ll madden a man before he defers to him. “Byun Baekhyun,” he warns in a low rumble, “I am not in the mood for this, any of it. Who was it?” 

True to his infuriating form, Baekhyun keeps at it, “Can’t tell you that, sorry.”

It occurs to Chanyeol that Baekhyun’s evasiveness could be the product of one of only two things: dishonesty or protectiveness. He wouldn’t lie about this, no matter how hurt or drunk or desperate he was, not about this. That means… “That close?” he verifies, the sickness swelling further up his throat. “Is he that close?”

Baekhyun averts his gaze, for the first time showing signs of remorse. “Too close,” he mutters and Chanyeol swallows back bile. 

“When did it happen?” he presses on, now determined to drag out of him every last detail. “That night you stayed out and came straight to the set?”

Baekhyun shakes his head, his air growing glummer by the question. “No, that night I was with family. When we were in Spain.”

Thunderstruck, Chanyeol gawps at him a second. Spain? What is he saying? We never left each other’s side. It was straight to the locations and then straight back to the house. “What? For the teasers? But you never left the house and there was no one there, apart from me, you and… You’re kidding, right?” he challenges, his laughter hysterical. “Do Kyungsoo?!”

But Baekhyun doesn’t laugh. His eyes sag, his teeth press down on his lip, his chin juts out and faintly tremors. He says nothing – the loudest nothing he’s ever said.

No. Not Kyungsoo. Sehun? I could believe it; God knows he wouldn’t put up a fight. Yixing-ge, even Jongin, but not Kyungsoo…right? His tone flattened by incredulousness, he reconfirms, “Byun Baekhyun, are you listening to what you’re telling me right now? You slept with Do Kyungsoo?”

“And if I did?”

“That’s not possible.”

“No, it isn’t,” Baekhyun concedes, false contrition giving way to true wickedness.

Chanyeol squeezes his eyes and sighs so loudly he practically screams. “Will you just stop it already?!”

“Will you just make me already?!” the elder ripostes, his expression so wanton, Chanyeol nearly does.

“It’s wrong,” he proclaims, all the time shaking his head to divert his mind from the quaking of his conscience.

Baekhyun bristles. “Why? Because we’re men?”

“Because we’re men, because we’re brothers, because it’s wrong.”

“You are not my brother, Park Chanyeol,” Baekhyun refutes, his seven months’ seniority over the younger suddenly stripping him of his usual suppleness. “You are the man I love. But if I’m not yours, then let me go – go and find someone who doesn’t care how wrong it is or might be.” Panting, he claws at his chest. “I’m burning. I won’t fall asleep tonight, unless I –“

Chanyeol stems his speech with his mouth. He kisses him as though Baekhyun were the cure and he the afflicted, as though his very survival depended on the elder, even while knowing that this kiss will be their undoing. “God damn you!” he snarls at him, crushing his forehead against Baekhyun’s as the elder once did. “Why do you have to be so –“

“You make me,” Baekhyun whispers in accusation, eagerly nuzzling his face to Chanyeol’s. “You made me like this, so take responsibility and fix me. And if you can’t, just break me already, just do it… just do it, Chanyeol-ah.”

Break you? He withdraws his face from Baekhyun’s and briefly studies him: a visage as changeable as the seasons, now male, now female, now wicked, now kind, softer than by rights it ought to be, yet insufferably poignant – the eyes, the nose, the cheeks, the lips, even to the tip of his chin, all moulded for sin. He knows that he mustn’t commit it, that the price may prove steeper than either one of them could suffer, but the want in the elder’s stare, and the need that burdens the bodies of both, and the years, all those years of denial – denying himself, denying Baekhyun, denying their hearts – dare him, so that finally, he cannot deny. He brushes back the frosted hairs from the elder’s brow, and meeting his gaze as never before, says: “I don’t break the things I love.” The smile that reanimates Baekhyun’s arrested features, he knows he won’t forget if he should live to be one hundred.

He kisses him again, gently now, fully savouring the supple sweetness of his mouth. The tartness of alcohol is all but gone from his tongue; Chanyeol can only taste its warmth, its inebriating wetness – he wants to lap at it forever, yet the urge to know more of him, to sense more, at last prompts him from Baekhyun’s lips to his willowy collar, while his hands tug at his shirt and promptly rid him of it, leaving Baekhyun’s silvered hair beautifully tousled. “What’s next?” the elder goads, smiling at Chanyeol as only he can.

Chanyeol requites the gesture as he prognosticates, “A bit of this, a bit of that, a bit of everything.”

The rims of Baekhyun’s mouth twist into a dissolute smile, yet his grin gives way to a gasp as the younger’s textured tongue glides from his neck to his s, calling them to attention. His pale chest heaves as Chanyeol intermittently and nibbles at them, so that the younger is tempted to drive him over his limit by this effort alone. By now the elder’s need is as evident as the younger’s. He reaches for Baekhyun’s jeans and painlessly s and removes them, then pauses a moment as he takes in the image of his newly-titled lover in his ness. He’s seen it all before – not just Baekhyun, but all the others, when they’d shower together at the end of a practice or a concert – but never like this. He’s amazed at the elder’s arousal, though not half as amazed as he is at its fuelling effect on his own. He touches a teasing finger to the tip of the elder’s and Baekhyun jolts and whimpers. He wants to torment him further, as he did with his chest, to cause him to his limits without overstepping them, but his own resistance is waning and he knows that to hold back much longer would drive him mad. He pulls off his shirt and Baekhyun sighs.

“Damn, you’ve gotten fit!” he reviews, his teeth scraping his plump lower lip in approval. “You used to look like a noodle.” 

Gratified, Chanyeol pursues, “And now?”

Baekhyun scans the younger’s slick muscled arms, arches an eyebrow and offers, “Soba?”

They laugh.

Laugh…you make me laugh, like an idiot, when it all gets too much. Byun Baekhyun, I wouldn’t have made it without you, you know that?

Appraisingly Baekhyun tilts his head, his expression abruptly reverential. “You were beautiful then, you’re beautiful now,” he says and smiles at Chanyeol so that the younger’s pulse quickens even above his blood.

He sweeps his long fingers from Baekhyun’s clavicles to his small navel, the neutrality of his form, so discrepant to his own flagrant masculinity, as ever, enthralling him. “It’s you who’s beautiful,” he mutters and kisses him again.

“Wait here,” Baekhyun says and slips out of the bed to retrieve his backpack. He opens it and takes out a small black flask. Chanyeol doesn’t have to enquire after its contents – discreetly he’s done his fair share of research over the years. The theory he’s mastered, but in practice…

It suddenly occurs to him that Baekhyun’s carrying the lubricant may very well mean he’s made use of it in the past. The prospect is unbearable, but he’d know himself largely to blame if that were indeed the case. I shouldn’t have waited this long when I knew it was only a matter of time… That night, after that concert, if I’d gone up to him again and this time pulled him into me instead… He shakes his head and ruefully smiles at the realisation of this being the greatest regret of his young life.

Without a word to Chanyeol, Baekhyun uncorks the bottle and spreads the clear substance on his dainty fingers, then proceeds to prepare himself, while the younger observes him in dumb astonishment. As he watches Baekhyun’s first discomfited expression turn gradually euphoric at his own touch, Chanyeol thinks that he has never seen anything quite so in the whole of his life. The scene at once stimulates and frustrates him – he wants to be the one to draw that face, that voice out of Baekhyun. He wants to be the one to please him. He approaches the elder, takes his hand and carefully replaces it with his own.

Baekhyun is surprised at his daring, at his knowhow, yet easily allows the exchange. “You have to –“ he begins to instruct, but Chanyeol checks him with a kiss.

“I know. I’ve done my homework…since a while back,” he assures, to the elder’s wry amusement. Then, hesitantly, probes, “Baekhyun-ah, have you really done this before?”

“Mm…though not with anyone in particular. I’ve told you,” he pants, his breath hastening at Chanyeol’s progression, “p-practice makes p-perfect…and you know how I am about practicing with s-strangers.” With this Baekhyun throws back his head and curving his hips to Chanyeol’s assiduous fingers lets out a loud moan. Harshly he bites his swollen lips to stifle his voice, embarrassment tinting his fair face from the crests of his cheeks to the tips of his earlobes.

“Don’t,” Chanyeol whispers, grazing at the elder’s mouth until it loosens. “Don’t hold back your voice – I want to hear you.” The only one, he rejoices inwardly, I’m the only one who’s ever heard this, the one who’s ever seen it, the only one who’s ever felt it. The only one.

“Enough,” Baekhyun says and starts away from the younger’s hand. “If you keep doing that, it’s not just my voice I won’t be able to hold back.”

Chenyeol grins at him, self-satisfied.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk, so smug,” Baekhyun sniffs and shakes his head, now regaining his composure. He runs his tapered fingers the length of the younger’s torso, halting at his hips, then wraps them snugly about him, while Chanyeol’s body jerks, the blood draining from his brain and rushing all to his head.

“Baekhyun-ah,” he gasps, straining to dam its advance, as the elder works him nearly to completion, “not like this. I want to feel you…inside.”

Baekhyun’s hand arrests. His eyes flutter in sudden self-consciousness. Wordlessly, he retakes the flask and hands it to the younger, then settles on his back. Chanyeol reopens the bottle and daubs the lubricant onto his hand. It’s cold – must be so unpleasant each time until he gets used to it. He applies it first on himself, then the elder, and waits for a sign. Allowing another into one’s body, Chanyeol cannot even conceive of it. And yet, for me… Baekhyun breathes in deeply and nods. Slowly, slowly, let him get used to you, no matter how much it hurts – better you than him. Carefully, he enters Baekhyun, clenching both his teeth and his eyes at the pressure that’s unlike any he’s ever experienced. This is impossible. It’s too much. He pauses to relieve them both and winces as he opens his eyes to find the elder’s face distorted in suppressed agony. “Baekhyun-ah,” he mutters helplessly, “what should I –“

The elder shakes his head and tightens his grip on Chanyeol’s lower body. “Keep going,” he whispers breathlessly, “I’ll get used to it. Just…don’t stop.”

“Are you worried I won’t want to again, if it’s too difficult?”

Baekhyun looks away and Chanyeol is certain there is something glistening in his eyes. Softly he kisses them, the tip of his nose, the curve of his mouth. “The difficulty is…I want you too much. I’ve wanted you too much, and that’s not going to change, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself it might. I know it hurts, but I have to move now, or my voice won’t be the only thing I can’t hold back.” Without awaiting the elder’s permission he drives himself fully into him. Baekhyun whimpers and digs his nails into Chanyeol’s . He doesn’t mind the pain, he even welcomes it; it’s too light a penalty for the pleasure of Baekhyun’s embrace. Gradually they find their rhythm, as Chanyeol grows ever attuned to Baekhyun’s responses. He attends to him constantly, engaging not only his lower half, but his mouth, his collar, his chest, while Baekhyun writhes and whimpers beneath him, further inflaming the younger.

“There, right there,” he entreats, his voice both a cry and a whisper, “harder…do it harder.”

Chanyeol obeys readily, wringing his eyes of the sweat that rivulets down his temples and brow, the whole of his body. For the first time in his life, he knows what it means to be fire. Regret turns to relief as he realises that his younger self, the self that rejected Baekhyun that night with a false clap and a still falser smile, could never have borne this burden – the burden of having him, of loving him and receiving his love. He presses his wet brow to the elder’s, as he still wishes he had that night, and looking him full in the eye, confesses, “I love you…always have.” Baekhyun tightens around him, and at last, the two stop holding back.

Spent, they lie silent a while. Baekhyun never blinks. He stares at Chanyeol as if frightened the younger might vanish, if he were to let him out of his sight, however briefly. It won’t heal that quickly; will it, Baekhyun-ah? Chanyeol wipes a lingering bead of perspiration from the elder’s smooth brow. “Why Kyungsoo?” he asks abruptly, taking them both by surprise.

Baekhyun smirks, cunning but kind. “’Cause he’s the one you like best.”

Puzzled, the younger frowns. “You’re the one I like best.”

“As a lover, yes; but he’s your favourite brother.”

Chanyeol hangs his head and chuckles. “You’re a cruel man, Byun Baekhyun. I forget that sometimes when I look at those eyes.”

Baekhyun takes him by the chin and angles his face so that their stares again collide, and smiling at Chanyeol as only he can, says, “And you’re a kind one, Park Chanyeol. Aren’t we made for each other?”