strawberry planes
dahyun/dino, g, ~3500w
chan's learned several things over the past ten years of living with kim dahyun.

Dahyun's always been a crier. She's also always been the girl who flew paper planes through his open window on summer evenings with strange, almost undecipherable drawings on their wings, inked in and weighing them down; the girl whose door he knocked on every morning because she was always oversleeping her alarm and running out of the house with her backpack ped as they booked it to the bus stop.

Chan's learned several things over the past ten years of living next to Kim Dahyun. One of the more trivial things - never tell her how much you've grown since summer started (his growth spurt after eighth grade resulted in her refusing to talk to him for a month). Two - she cares more than you'd expect. And even though Dahyun's likes (he always saves her the strawberry flavored snacks) and dislikes (he does his best to help her with her math homework) have practically become second nature to him, he's never learned what quite to do when she starts to cry.

He has a girlfriend, she hiccuped when he first came into her room, arms full and aching due to all the study materials he lugged over. He stood there in the doorway for a minute, frozen, arms still aching, and wondered whether it'd be better to backpedal back to his house or stay paralyzed before a crying Kim Dahyun.

Chan in a breathe. Puts down the study materials on the foot of Dahyun's bed. What did his mom usually do whenever he cried? (which was not often. really.) Across the room, Dahyun chokes out a watery sigh and it sounds so painful that he can feel a tightness in his own chest, threatening to crush his heart. This must be what heartbreak sounds like, he thinks, and he remembers how warm his mother's hand felt against his shoulder as he cried against her when he didn't make the high school dance team the first time around.

"Hey," he whispers, working up the courage to put an arm around her shoulders, stiffly. She hiccups again and he hopes he doesn't sound as awkward as he feels. "It's okay."

Dahyun leans her head against his shoulder. In all their ten years of being neighbors, Chan's never done anything but watch as she cried her eyes out - whether it be from scraping her knee on the concrete or because the girls she thought were her friends had told the rest of their class that her feet smelled like cheese. It's kind of a weird feeling - having Dahyun's face so close to his, her tears pressed into his shirt - that makes his ears heat up not unpleasantly, but in a way that makes something in his gut feel like it's doing flips, the kind that Minghao likes to include in his routines.

"I'm such a mess," she laughs a little, in between her tears. Her eyes find his for a moment before she settles back against his shoulder. "But thank you, Chan."

He blushes. She always says that, even when all he does is listen to her cry.








A summer evening. It's been a few months since Dahyun last cried - probably the longest drought in all the years they've been neighbors. She's been trying to get his attention for the past twenty minutes from where they're both sitting at their desks facing their open windows of their respective houses, even after Chan texted her that he wouldn't look up until he finished his practice exam and she her math tutoring homework.

He's in the middle of the last section of the test when a paper airplane lands in his booklet. He does his best to glare ("You're never going to be intimidating to me," she always laughed when he tried. "I'll just remember how you peed in the sandbox in first grade.") but she's just smiling at him expectantly when he looks up, chin resting against her palms, waiting.

No use to ignore her now. Chan sighs and unfolds the plane, the wings decorated with stripes this time, pink and green, like she had too much time on her hands. On the blank space of the paper is a question and two answers with checkboxes drawn next to them.

Do you like being Kim Dahyun's neighbor?

He draws in a new checkbox with the option Lee Chan cannot answer this question right now because he's in the middle of a timed practice test and throws it back over. It almost hits Dahyun in the forehead.

He's on the last question when a new plane arrives. You're no fun ): is written on the inside. He shakes his head, guilt-tripped into scribbling in another note before throwing the plane back.

Then why does Kim Dahyun hang out with me? ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

By the time Chan finishes grading his test, Dahyun's window is closed. He wonders if she's gone downstairs to eat dinner with her family when his dad calls him down to eat. After lingering for a moment, he decides to leave his window open, just in case Dahyun sends the airplane back, setting his calculator on top of the loose leaf papers on his desk to make sure the evening breeze doesn’t blow them away.








Two weeks before school starts again, they're sitting on the couch in Dahyun's living room with sweating ice cream bars in their hands ("I call the strawberry one!" Dahyun had called from where she was flipping channels, and Chan just rolled his eyes and yelled back an exasperated, "I know, I know!"), staring at the television screen without processing whatever images were flashing before their eyes. It's too hot to focus on anything - like the summer homework that Dahyun hadn't started until this week even with her parents' constant nagging that Chan could even hear sometimes through his open window. They were supposed to be working on that, which is why Chan even came over in the first place, but after an hour in Dahyun's un-air conditioned house, whirring fan doing nothing to fight the heat, even Chan couldn't keep concentrating on helping an easily distracted Dahyun solve for x.

Dahyun catches a dribble of ice cream ungracefully by sticking out her tongue a good two seconds before actually reaching the site. Chan makes a face at her about it and she kicks him in the shin in response.

As he's thinking about how much his shin is stinging, Dahyun starts talking. She never was good at holding prolonged silences, always being the first one to fidget or concede whenever they gave each other the silent treatment. "Mingyu works at the convenience store now. He was the one who recommended this ice cream to my mom," she says, very matter-of-factly, and Chan wonders if the girl sitting next to him is really the same girl that had cried her eyes out several months ago over the boy she's talking about now without even batting an eyelash.

"Oh," he replies, not quite sure what to say. He glances at Dahyun out of the corner of his eye. She's glancing back at him in the same way, and they make eye contact through their peripherals. Chan looks away quickly, blinking away the strain of shooting a sideways glance her way.

Dahyun finishes the last bit of the chocolate shell of her ice cream bar. "I don't like him anymore. Or, at least not like that," she confirms, answering Chan's silent question. "I was pretty surprised, you know? But it wasn't awkward at all."

"That's good," he says, admiring how she was so honest and open about it all, as always. Dahyun tended to have whirlwind crushes on seniors that she'd only spoken to a few times at most, that ultimately ended with her crying her eyes out and getting over it to the point that she'd ask Chan why did I like him so much, anyway? a few months later. Dahyun pops the rest of her ice cream bar into and gets up to throw the stick away. Chan, suddenly self-conscious about still having half his bar remaining, starts eating faster.

When Dahyun settles back on the couch again, they go back to blankly watching whatever's on early afternoon television in relative silence - Chan trying to polish off his ice cr