A/N: I can't apologise enough for this delay. I don't even know whether there is anyone around still reading this. I tried my best to write something that could live up to all of your expectations and mine... but I am afraid I failed miserably at this. I realised that no matter how much I try this ending is not going to be good enough for me. So I just wrote. There are just a couple more chapters to go, and they are almost all completely written.

Baekhyun’s breath hitches in his chest and the smallest of sobs escape him.

Kyungsoo shakes his head as if to dislodge some fuzzy memories. Baekhyun finds himself unable to even look him in the eyes.

“I made you paper cranes, I slept with you under a bed, I allowed you to see little bits and pieces of our time together ….  But you never remembered, you never did, and every single day you walked out of that door  I thought, maybe I never really mattered to him. Maybe I never did….” 

Baekhyun shakes his head at this. 

“When I… left the outside world with the single-minded determination to find you, somehow I never thought for one single second finding you would be the easy part. I have been through so many Centers, been at the mercy so many Examiners, some were easy to manage and some brutal enough to make me wish for death. After I had been brought back from near death enough times I told myself that I was invincible,  I told myself that I could keep going and going and going till I finally found you and that nothing or no one would be capable of breaking me now. “ Kyungsoo says. He sounds like he is pushing out words that had been stuck inside him for too long. 

“I didn’t realise, I didn’t think for one single second that I was yet to meet the most brutal of all Examiners I had survived. I didn’t think for one single second that I would experience a depth of pain  I never had before, not during all those trainings in my childhood, not during all those years in the Centers. And, more than anything else, I never thought that you would be the one, that you would be that person to hurt me in that way…”  Kyungsoo’s voice catches on something and breaks a little, but he doesn’t sound angry or accusing. He sounds like the same matter-of-fact boy Baekhyun had fallen in love with a long time ago. 

“But I couldn’t give up. I couldn’t.”

“You should have. You should have…. Kyungsoo.” Baekhyun says, apologetically, tears he had thought he had all cried out the past few days returning to his eyes. “I’m… I’m broken now….”

Kyungsoo looks at him now., shaking his head. There is a strange light in his eyes. 

“Maybe to you, I didn't matter that much, but you mattered to me, you mattered to me so much. You told me once, how I had nothing of my own, I had nothing except for what one boy had given me, and you were right.” Kyungsoo says, his voice clear.  “You were right…. You were everything I had ever had, everything I could hold to myself and think this is mine, and I - I wanted to say goodbye. I wanted to say Goodbye, Baekhyun. I was happy for having known you.” There is the smallest of a smile clinging to the edges of his lips.

The tears that had been welling in Baekhyun’s eyes, spill out, gush out, cascading down his face on to Kyungsoo’s shoulder as Kyungsoo silently wraps a hand around him to pull him closer. 

Through the haze of tears, Baekhyun’s mind flashes back to something. 

….They are both laying side by side on Kyungsoo’s vast balcony, staring at the sky, with emptied mugs of hot chocolate lying beside them. Kyungsoo points at the full moon… but Baekhyun can’t seem to look beyond Kyungsoo’s hand, with his firm, square-tipped fingers that have touched Baekhyun in ways he didn't think was possible. Baekhyun reaches out and grabs that hand, curling into the touch he turns to face Kyungsoo. Even though Kyungsoo is right there, Baekhyun feels the strangest sensation in the bottom of his stomach: a sense of mourning and intense longing for some anticipated future loss. 

Kyungsoo looks at him questioningly. 

“Someday….” Baekhyun whispers. “Someday, when we no longer care for each other, when we no longer like each other and we go our separate ways…. you are going to look for me in an