IV

Confusion

“Your brother,” Baekhyun repeats dumbly.

“My brother,” Jonghui gasps. She’s clutching her shirt around her chest and Baekhyun still can’t decide whether she’s panicking or excited. “Remember? I thought I told you about him. Kim Jongdae.”

Kim Jongdae sounds frightfully similar to Kim Jongin and Baekhyun doesn’t really have the best memories of Kim Jongin (it also sounds like Kim Jonghui and the first thing that comes to mind when he thinks of the name is smiling, which annoys him). “So… what’s wrong with your brother being here?”

She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “He’s going to kill us both.”

In a flash, Baekhyun has jumped to his feet and is alert. “What? Is your brother some kind of murd—”

“He’s going to be so mad at me,” Jonghui continues to lament, and Baekhyun has to admit it’s both amusing and confusing seeing her like this. She’s normally very calm. “I thought he wasn’t coming back until next week and I was going to explain you to him but now he’s downstairs and he’s going to be so mad at me when he finds you here. Oh my goodness. What am I supposed to do?” By now, she’s more or less talking to herself than to him. Baekhyun stands awkwardly in the middle of the room, unsure of what to do or say (of course, there’s always the option of dreading what will happen when he meets Kim Jongdae, who sounds terrifying).

“Where… is Jongdae right now?” he finally asks, tentatively.

Jonghui glances at her wrist watch. “He should be here in less than three minutes. I hope the elevator jams or something.”

“Three minutes?” He’s not sure where the panic comes from, so maybe it’s infectious from Jonghui because the aspect of meeting Jonghui’s brother in three minutes is actually quite frightening. “But…” Fumbling for words, Baekhyun realizes he’s too tongue-tied and shocked to speak. “Isn’t this your home? Why would he come here?”

“I live with him,” she groans, “He’s just on business trips a lot. And technically, this is his house.”

They stare at each other in complete silence. Baekhyun’s torn between laughing at how panicked Jonghui looks and figuring out why she looks so panicked when she’s normally so composed— something’s definitely going to go awry when Jongdae returns, judging by how Jonghui’s acting, but he can’t quite place a finger on what.

“Three minutes isn’t quite enough time to—”

There’s the sound of keys and the front door clicks open. Jonghui’s hands fly up to and her eyes widen comically.

“I’m so screwed,” she whispers, “That wasn’t even three minutes.”

“Jonghui!” someone calls.

“Is this the brother that you said is going to kill us—”

“Hi!” she shrieks back, “Give me a second!”

Baekhyun stares at her. “What do I do?” he asks and for some reason, he finds himself whispering also. Jongdae seems to be a terrifying person. And in the past couple of days, he’s pretty sure that he’s had enough of terrifying. All the terrifying that he missed in his years living as an angel seems to have caught up to him.

“Stay here,” Jonghui tells him, giving him one last nervous smile and slips out the door. It closes quietly behind her, leaving Baekhyun still standing shell-shocked in the middle of the room. He contemplates hiding under the bed or sitting on it and decides with sitting on it in the end because hiding under it looks terribly uncomfortable.

Outside, he can hear muffled voices and he tries to imagine what Jongdae looks like. It’s a hard image to pinpoint— on one hand, anyone remotely related to Jonghui can’t possibly look scary— but then again, the way Jonghui talks about his brother paints him as someone quite frightening in Baekhyun’s eyes. He settles with the latter just to prepare himself.

A minute passes. Then two. Baekhyun begins counting, but he hasn’t even reached ten when the door of his bedroom flies open.

Jongdae does not look scary.

There’s dead silence between the two of them as Baekhyun stares at Kim Jongdae, sizing him up. Jonghui comes flying down the hallway, but she stills when she sees them. The tension in the room is so thick that Baekhyun fears that something is going to break because of it (and he’s pretty sure the thing to break is going to be Jonghui).

Jongdae isn’t very tall (he faintly recalls Jonghui telling him that her brother was around his height, which now proves true) and he looks fairly slim. He’s still wearing a long beige coat that hangs open, a bag in hand as if he never had the time to put his belongings down when he got back. There’s a flinty look in his eyes.

“This is Baekhyun,” Jonghui introduces, tentatively.

“Oh?” Jongdae asks, lifting an eyebrow at Baekhyun.

Despite Jongdae not looking the least bit scary, there’s something about him that intimidates Baekhyun. Perhaps it’s the aura around him, or perhaps it’s how skeptical and slightly mad he looks. Jongin hadn’t been fully confident when he’d been speaking to him, but Jongdae’s gaze is downright assertive. That, and the fact that Baekhyun can easily tell that he and Jonghui are siblings just by looking at their faces— they have the same lips, the same nose and the same intense way of staring (except the fact that the tilt on the corner of Jonghui’s lips makes it look like she were always smiling, but somehow, with Jongdae, it is very obvious he isn’t smiling at the moment).

“I’m Baekhyun,” he hears himself say robotically. “Hi.”

He sees Jonghui cringe in the background.

Jongdae looks unimpressed. He doesn’t say anything for a very long time, though when he finally does, the words are fast and harsher sounding than than Korean. It’s another language Baekhyun can’t quite place his finger on.

He sees Jonghui giving a nervous, wavering smile in the background as she pushes past her brother and steps into the room. Jongdae’s still glaring when he puts a hand in front of Jonghui as if to stop her from getting any closer.

“He’s been on a business trip in China,” Jonghui tells him, but the stutter is obvious in her voice. “That was hi in Mandarin.”

Baekhyun squints at Jongdae. “Does he not speak Korean?”

“No, I said ‘you’re in idiot’ in Mandarin,” Jongdae asserts. His Korean is fluent, Baekhyun realizes. “What are you even doing here?”

“Jongdae—”

“You,” he grumbles, turning to Jonghui, “Jongin told me everything. You’re also an idiot. Gosh, I came back a week early because of this.”

She gives him a sheepish smile, fingers tapping against her thighs again. It’s a habit that she does when she’s nervous, Baekhyun has realized in the past eleven days— the more nervous she is, the faster she taps. She’s tapping very fast at the moment and not quite meeting Jongdae’s eyes. If he hadn’t been caught up in the middle of it, he would’ve found it highly amusing. But now that he’s Jongdae’s target, it’s not quite as fun.

“And you.” Jongdae’s eyes look positively murderous and Baekhyun freezes where he’s standing, suddenly afraid to breath. “I’m going to kill you.”

One thing Baekhyun has noticed in his time on Earth is that his previous confidence and (somewhat reckless) courage has been draining away steadily. He’s sure that Jongdae’s destroyed whatever of that he has left, because he doesn’t have the courage to look the other in the eye fully. Also, Jongdae’s threat actually sounds real and Baekhyun’s unsure of what would happen if he were killed. Would he return? Disappear from the world?

Jonghui raises her hands in a pacifying gesture but Jongdae pushes her behind him again. However mad he looks, his movements are still gentle with her. “How long have you been here?” he demands to Baekhyun, who has recovered slightly from the shock.

“Eleven days,” he says as calmly as possible while trying to hold Jongdae’s gaze. It’s unnerving, to say the least and the other’s eyes are smouldering. Baekhyun’s head blanks. He can’t remember anything that he faced that he was actually scared of, but Jongdae is the first.

“What kind of person takes advantage of a girl living alone? Goddamn it, should I just send you to a homeless shelter or something if you can’t find someplace to stay?”

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