“Chanyeol-ah… Chanyeol-ah… Yah, Park Chanyeol, where did you put the –“ He hangs his silvered head, sniffs and chuckles. The room is vacant. There’s no one there. He glances at his roommate’s fortnight unused bed and sighs in pride-tinged longing. Filming in Shanghai has kept him these few weeks from the dorm and Baekhyun. A leading man at last and for a proper film this time. But where the hell did you put that jump-drive? He rummages the younger’s bedside-table a second time and mutedly grunts at its reconfirmed absence.

It’s a week to their winter 2015 return and of EXO-K’s six members three are away, scrupulously seeing to their unscrupulously-timed individual schedules – Junmyeon promoting his movie, Kyungsoo and Chanyeol filming theirs. Baekhyun will soon be joining them as the newest inductee in EXO’s Actor Line. And a Qing prince, no less. But first, they must tend to the needs of their Aeries and there’s nothing that nourishes those quite so wholesomely as a proper comeback. Greedy girls, he smiles indulgently at the thought of their insatiable fans, where would we be without them?

Nigh on four years have passed since their debut, nearly three since their ascension to trend of trends, their company’s and industry’s top-sellers, their country’s representative idol-group. Three years later, three members fewer, Baekhyun clenches his eyes, shakes his head as he reflects. They’ve come farther than they’d have dared dream aloud, thrice the distance twelve-year-old Byun Baekhyun had dreamt on paper when he wrote of Byun-B and the million followers he’d one day acquire. Everything’s changed…have we? He’d like to think they haven’t, yet knows all nine of them have. These days when he looks at his hyungs and dongsaengs, they seem to him as much strangers as family. He knows them by heart, yet at moments barely recognises them at all. Men in the making, some of them already made. He misses their truer smiles, their blinder smiles, their milk and honey smiles, the smiles of boys who only thought themselves men. I don’t feel like one, though, not really…not just yet. 

He peers at his watch – a quarter to midnight. We have to be up and ready at half past six. That’s enough of nostalgia for one night, then…water and sleep. Quietly he climbs down the stairs and into the faintly-lit kitchen to find it vacated of his two youngest brothers, if not of the dishes they used for their late-night snack. He snorts and smiles, as ever too tolerant of their irresponsibility, then clears the table and takes out from the cooler the curative water he keeps for calming his habitually agitated stomach. As he starts back to his room, unexpected song diverts him from his path. To the one Jongin shares with his closest group-mate, Kyungsoo, the door is slightly opened. Baekhyun peeps through the crack and his puckered mouth unfurls into a proud beam. His back to the elder, his ears dressed in headphones, his fingers snapping to the beat, Jongin is busily practicing his singing, tirelessly playing and replaying his lines, with each attempt ringing a note truer in both tenor and technique. Everything’s changed, hasn’t it, uri dongsaeng? EXO-Kai, vocalist. Keep this up and we’ll be fighting over parts by next year.  Gratified, he rests his temple against the doorframe and continues spectating.

“History repeating itself, Hyung?”

Baekhyun starts and tremors at the words, at the coolness of the voice and the heat of the breath that invades his ear as it speaks, at the arms that barricade his body where they stretch towards the wooden frame, leaning against it, and the firmness of the form that’s lightly pressed against his back.

“What?” he hisses whisperingly, his face unmoving whilst his gaze shifts rightward and Sehun’s sculpted profile held an inch from his.

The younger’s stare strays not a millimetre from its mark – Jongin – as he returns, “You’ve been here before, haven’t you? Different dorm, same door. Were you hoping for a sequel?”

The elder’s limbs petrify, though his heart doubles in industry. He tells himself that his ears, his mind are deceiving him, that Sehun couldn’t possibly mean what his speech suggests, couldn’t possibly have seen him that night when the slit was so small, the hallway so dark, Baekhyun so careful, and Sehun so utterly immersed in his activity. With this counterfeit conviction for a brace, he spits, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but let go. I just heard him singing when I came down for a drink and listened for a bit, that’s all.”

Sehun spikes an eyebrow, breathes out understatedly. “Yes, you were down for a drink that night as well – must have still felt sick from all that ginger ale. What was it you heard that made you come to his door then, I wonder. No one was singing, I’m sure.”

“Sehun-ah –“

“The bottle,” he interjects, the tip of his tongue characteristically lapping at the rim of his plump ruddy lips, his pupils at the corners of his catlike eyes, and Baekhyun flinches at their veiled intensity.  

Flustered, he chases, “What?”  

“You dropped it, right outside the door. That was careless of you, though understandable, given the shock of seeing your two youngest dongsaengs –“

 “Stop it!” Baekhyun feebly intervenes, his voice reduced to a nervous murmur, lest he should attract Jongin’s notice.

“But you didn’t,” Sehun calmly retorts, his sidelong stare like a metal skewer piercing ever deeper the elder’s psyche. “You didn’t stop. You kept watching us. Why?”  

What’s the point denying it? It only makes you look more pathetic. Grudgingly Baekhyun confesses, “I don’t know.”

Sehun is unappeased. “That’s not true. You wouldn’t have kept it secret all these years, if you didn’t. The thing that made you stay and watch was the thing that made you come into my room and bite me in my sleep. The same thing that made you kiss me back –“

“I did not kiss you back!” Baekhyun refutes indignantly. He’ll own his crimes, such as they are, but not this, not when the perpetrator’s doing the accusing.

The younger smiles but almost pityingly. “Yes, you did, very tenderly. That was why I decided to wait, you know. You were tender when you should have been mad, or at the very least impassive. That meant you cared, it meant you wanted to be kissed by me. You’d wanted to long before that night and you’ve wanted to ever since.”

Baekhyun grits his teeth, glowers, gustily exhales. It’s all too much! Indulgence has its limits and this hyung-like-maknae has been overstepping them with increasing indecency. It doesn’t matter that he’s right when he hasn’t the right to be. “You’re insane,” he hisses in as low and frigid a voice as he’s even known himself to produce. “You stayed in my room even though I specifically told you to get out. You slept beside me, hugging me, and then kissed me when you woke up. I had nothing to do with any of it and I want nothing to do with any of this. What happened with you two that night was…none of my business. We were a week away from debuting and I wasn’t going to let the games of two randy teenage boys ruin everything we’d all worked years for, so I kept shut. You should thank me and get out of my way. I mean it, Oh Sehun. Get out of my way.”

“Go on, then,” the younger whispers defiantly, shocking the elder’s system anew. “I’m not stopping you…Hyung.”

Resolutely Baekhyun turns around and jolts a third time at the proximity of Sehun’s face, removed not three whole inches from his own. Who are you? he questions inwardly as he scans the younger’s features, so utterly transformed though scarcely altered. In as few as three years he’s grown so masculine, Baekhyun feels ever more diminished by comparison. His stature, his bearing, the oppressive potency of them, of the most minute of his gestures, the drip-drip-drip of the toxin Baekhyun has been battling these four years to expulse from his body. Where are you, Sehunnie? His small eyes grow and flutter in search of the boy, his honeyed-milk-scented Sehun who used to provoke such tenderness in him. Gone. A man made, while I’m still wavering.

“Aren’t you going, Hyung?” the younger goads, his cheeks rounding even as his eyes compress. “Or do you need a little push?”

Baekhyun stands still. He means to move, to leave, but something anchors him. Behind him is Jongin, like a dented vinyl still singing the same song, the same lines repeatedly; before him, Sehun, now seeping his poison where he ought to be dripping it. He’s been here before, between his desire and that of his two youngest brothers, between his curiosity and his conscience, between the one he wants and the one who’s wanted by him. In the middle…I didn’t think there was room enough for me here. Sehun-ah –

Sehun measures him a moment longer, his gaze a gauge of the elder’s grit. “Alright, then; I’ll give it to you, the push you need.” He wets his lips, the elder’s appetite, and promptly tends to both. This kiss is nothing like that night’s – nothing tender, nothing moderate, nothing sweet. It isn’t make-believe manhood that spurs Sehun as he takes the elder’s face with one hand, his waist with the other, his tongue with his, marking each and all with his newer scent, his truer scent, the scent of a man freshly-minted. Baekhyun hazes at it, his mind dulling in time with his senses’ heightening. He lets himself be kissed to the fullest, uncaring of anything save the younger’s touch, taste and temperature. Their bodies meld and Baekhyun feels himself harden as Sehun’s hand slips down his back and the small of it onto his rear. It’s madness, he knows, but he’s long past sanity. He wants it all, to be handled, to be driven by him, to soak in that fragrance until it poisons him wholly.

Abruptly something grazes his collar. Even in his trance he recognises the supple warmth of it – Jongin’s fleshy lips as they flutter up his neck to the base of his jaw and lightly nibble at it. His skin crawls at the contact, though whether in repulsion or added excitement he cannot determine. He wants to stop him, yet fearful of dissuading Sehun in the process, allows Jongin to continue at will. To Sehun’s forcefulness, Jongin is the antonym, his touch almost overly gentle; Baekhyun is unnerved by it. They kiss him all over, their hands, mouths and bodies simultaneously stirring him to overstimulation as they free him of his jumper and undershirt. Thinking aloud, he mutters, “This is mad. I don’t even know what to call this.”

Sehun knits his delicate fingers through the elder’s still daintier ones, smiles. “Love. Why else would we have let you in? Or do you think a moment’s whim could’ve made us risk this much? We love you, Hyung. Right, Jongin-ah?”

Jongin rests his chin on the elder’s bare shoulder, his arms belting his curved waist, and sighs, “Mm, love.”

“That doesn’t make this right,” Baekhyun counters, his skin further prickling at Jongin’s embrace.

“Doesn’t make it wrong either,” Sehun retorts, his air condensing at the sight of the pair. “There’s something in the middle, you know, between right and wrong. That’s where we live, Jongin and I. We want you – here, with us, we want you.”

“How does it end?” Baekhyun enquires, more of himself than of the two younger men.

With his free hand Sehun the elder’s flushed cheek, with his eyes both Baekhyun and Jongin. “We won’t know unless we start.”

“Hyung,” Jongin murmurs, calling the elder’s face to his. Softly he cups it and for the first time kisses him full on the lips. Baekhyun’s body slackens. It feels too odd – as forced as Sehun’s touch felt natural. He nuzzles his nose and smiles at him so sweetly, Baekhyun decides that this boy is still just that – a man but a child, if more honey than milk. He grips the tips of his tapered fingers and leads Baekhyun into his room. Sehun follows them, undressing as he goes.

He settles on the edge of Jongin’s bed, spreads his legs wide and sits Baekhyun between them. History repeating itself? No, not quite. At that time I only wished it were me instead of Jongin. The two of us alone, just me and Sehun, how would that be? His chest constricts at the thought, at the impossibility of his ever realising it. They loved each other before they loved me. I can only ever be in the middle. If I want the man, I’ll have to bear the boy as well. Honeyed poison, isn’t it sickening?

Sehun takes his chin and angles his mouth to his. He kisses Baekhyun anew and the elder’s knotted chest begins to heave. I don’t want him. I don’t want him, I only want you. Please. Baekhyun combs his fingers through Sehun’s silken hair, clutching at its roots, and half turns in his seat so that their stares finally meet. “Oh Sehun,” he whispers as low as thwarts even the former’s fully hearing him and gravely shakes his head, his small eyes wide with pleading.

Sehun is unsurprised, but awareness only sours his speech as he mutters, “We can’t do that, Hyung, you know we can’t. Jongin, he’s –“

“And I can’t do this. I want you, Sehun-ah – you, not him.”

Sehun glances at Jongin as he strips in slow-motion, the better to accommodate the pair’s exchange, and winces. He presses his brow to Baekhyun’s and breathes out painfully. “I loved him first. He’s only doing this for me, to ease my conscience, so that I don’t feel as much of a bastard for wanting you like this. He’s the same as you, Hyung; to keep me, he’ll lose himself. Why? I didn’t mean to love you; it was only ever going to be me and him, that’s what I thought when we met at fourteen and for three years after that I was sure of it. Everything changes. I saw you…I don’t think I’d ever wanted anyone quite so badly, not even Jongin. Why? You changed us, you changed me, you changed everything, but you wouldn’t change yourself. Five years…I waited as long as I could, until my body grew, until my scent unsweetened. I can’t wait any longer than this. I have to have you now, but if I do…without him… Loyalty, there’s nothing I value more, you know that. I can’t betray his.”

The middle, I’m not the one who’s trapped here, am I? It’s you, Sehun-ah, between me and him.

“Hyung,” Jongin intervenes, his tone a deal less childlike than Baekhyun would have cared to hear. “I’m a selfish one, you see. If I weren’t, I’d have let him go a long time ago. There’s something to be said for transparency and I’ve never met anyone quite as sheer as our Sehun-ssi. I knew he wanted you the moment you came into our view. We were together then, you see. I was there, watching my lover fall in-love with another. I might have hated you if things had turned out differently, but you make it hard on a man, you know. I wasn’t lying when I said I loved you – I do, in my own way, and I know you feel the same. But neither of us is here for the other’s sake. You’re here because you want Sehun, and I’m here because I don’t want to admit I’ve lost him. Five years…I held on as long as I could, longer than I should have done.” He takes his shirt and slips it back on, from his trouser-pocket removes a clutch of sachets and throws it on the bed. “Tonight he’s yours. Tomorrow night, and every night after that, you’ll have to fight me for him.” He peers at Sehun with his trademark look of provocation – a look habitually reserved for the stage – and, against his will, Baekhyun’s breath shortens at it. “Right, Sehun-ah?” he confirms, for once not affecting but asserting his authority.

In the span of two second the younger’s expression mutates from distress to renewed desire, and Baekhyun realises that the middle is Oh Sehun’s position of preference. He may incline towards a certain end on occasion, but never fully renounces the other. Greedy maknae, Baekhyun reflects indulgently, where would you be without us?

“Tonight, yours; tomorrow, fight for me,” Sehun summarises familiarly, and the three smirk in chorus. 

 Jongin makes for the door, but before leaving his rock and scissors to their crushing, turns and wryly counsels, “Hyung, cheon-choennhi, mm? He can be a handful, our maknae; I’d use both mine if I were you.”

Soundlessly Sehun sniggers, while Baekhyun strives to make his gulping likewise inaudible.

“Sehun-ah,” the elder tentatively probes when they’ve been left to their devices, “why didn’t you –?”

Sehun shakes his coppered head, cutting short his speech. “Not tonight. We don’t have time for it. I’ll tell you what you want to know, but not tonight. You heard him; it’s war from tomorrow onwards. Tonight I want to love you in peace…cheon-cheonhi.” He prompts Baekhyun to his feet whilst himself remaining seated, s his jeans and shortly rids him both of the outer layer and the one underneath, exposing in full his fair, dimly feminine figure. Baekhyun feels himself redden from temples to toes. He’s been seen in the past, by Sehun, by the others – seen, though never studied, never dissected as the younger now does him. He spreads his long fingers against the elder’s flushed chest and slowly sweeps them the length of his supply slender torso, all the way down to his . Baekhyun gasps and trembles, his pouty lips intermittently parting and puckering, his hands in reflex so that his overlong nails bite into their soft palms; he’s grateful for the pain, it keeps him grounded, sane. Sehun teases him a time, his conical eyes growing evermore cattish, his tongue, as always, visibly tasting the crook of his ripe mouth – a sight that fuels the elder even above the younger’s skilful teasing.

Suddenly he rises from the bed and pushes Baekhyun onto it, propping himself on his hands as he hovers atop him – more in promise than in peril. “I don’t think you’re one for over-gentleness, are you, Hyung?” he verifies, the approval in his face denoting his aversion to the same. 

With residual hesitancy Baekhyun bites his lip, momentarily averts his gaze, then levels it to Sehun’s as he says, “Yours is as much as I need.”

At the elder’s inciting coyness the younger sniffs and arcs his slanted eyebrows. “Genius idol indeed.” He moistens his mouth and presses it into Baekhyun’s, readily meeting his need, and as his reply grows in elaboration, so does the latter’s inquisitiveness. He touches his hand to Sehun’s moulded abdomen, and reversing the younger’s trajectory, his upper body from naval to neck, his fingers like metres retaking his altered measurements. Sehun smiles at his patent veneration, but Baekhyun can’t be bothered with concealment. He grips Sehun by the nape and pulls him into another kiss, swapping sweetness for pungency.

“I have to prepare you,” Sehun reminds the elder, impatience itching at his hips.

Baekhyun blanches at the prospect, his body tautening mechanically, yet promptly nods as he recalls Sehun’s proficiency in readying Jongin; the latter’s rapid transition from acceptance to ecstasy. He turns on his belly and arches his back, jerking and panting as Sehun’s lips unexpectedly close on its base, his warm textured tongue tracing the dent of his spine from root to tip. “Are you scared?” he whispers a dare in the elder’s ear.

Baekhyun swallows, breathes in strenuously. “Should I be?”

“A little…though not of me.”

Before Baekhyun can reason for this last, the younger’s oiled finger breaches him. It clutches at his throat, the overwhelming foreignness of the sensation surging up his stomach like the ginger-flavoured bile of that rocks and scissors night, the night that started everything…or rather ended it. He locks his jaws and presses together his lips to keep from retching. How could this probing ever turn into pleasure? he wonders as Sehun introduces a second digit with remarkable accuracy. The discomfort is considerable, yet Baekhyun marvels at the younger man’s ability to spare him the least measure of pain. With unusual patience Sehun relaxes him, steadily familiarising himself to the inner workings of the elder’s body. Gradually the sickness dissipates, though something of strangeness remains, the pleasure still pending. Baekhyun wonders how their first time might have gone for Jongin, when both he and Sehun were so young and unskilled, and for once blesses his damned indecision. Boys playing at men…it must have been agony. No sooner does he think the word than his body convulses with its opposite, drawing out his voice as Sehun finds and duly keeps to his sensitive spot. Baekhyun buries his face in the sheets to muffle his moans, as the younger works him to pleasure the likes of which he could never have conceived. It swells from his core to his tensed extremities, all but robbing him of his consciousness. A nudge shy of his losing it, Sehun suddenly retracts his fingers and carefully replaces them in pursuit of his own oblivion. Baekhyun winces but only briefly. The strain is greater, on his mind, on his body. Inside. He’s inside me. He wrenches his eyes and pants into the pillow. It smells of Jongin.

As if to relieve him of the thought, of his guilt, the younger again withdraws and turns him onto his back. Baekhyun’s interjected breath catches altogether at the sight of Sehun where he looms over him, his broad chest heaving rhythmically, his flushed lips parted with panting, his dark eyes raw and ravening. They bore into him, rooting out the remnants of his conscience, and soon the rest of Sehun follows suit. Baekhyun contracts and loudly cries as the younger relocates his prostate, the force of his fingers nulling with that of his flesh as he steers himself ever deeper into the elder.

“I can’t anymore,” Baekhyun whimpers breathlessly and reaches for his , now desperate for release. He feels to be disintegrating, his body unravelling bit by bit, and he wants it done – done before he’s undone by it. But Sehun intercepts him, pushes back his hand and takes him in his own instead, if a fraction too forcefully. Baekhyun at once moans and flinches, spurring the younger to further severity.

“Don’t do that,” he warns, his tone shockingly domineering, “not when you’re with me.” He fastens his fingers about Baekhyun, readjusts their hips and promptly droves both to the brink of unconsciousness.

“Still scared?” Sehun breathes into his lips as he reclaims them, his eyes on the elder’s all through the kiss.

Gaspingly Baekhyun replies, “A little.”   

“Of me?”

“Of myself.”

The younger’s mouth coils against his, exultation making brilliant his features. “Told you so. But this is only the beginning, you know. Tomorrow night you’ll scare yourself a little more, and every night after that, more and more, until you’re absolutely terrified.”  

Tomorrow night and every night after that. Baekhyun rekindles at the prospect, his overfed body whetting anew and newly startling him with its gluttony. But then he recalls Jongin – the end Sehun won’t release even whilst grasping at him. “What about the war?” he asks in a bitter-sweet mutter, greedily tightening his hold on the younger’s poised hips.

Slowly Sehun re-enters him, touches to Baekhyun's first his brow, then his lips and cattishly grins. “I’ve already won it.”

Baekhyun requites the gesture and keenly inhales, not merely the younger's, but his own heady scent – the scent of a man made.