VIII

Lighthearted

“I don’t like cucumbers,” Baekhyun says, fidgeting under Jonghui’s stare. “So stop looking at me like that.”

Jonghui moves her gaze to the pile of cucumbers he has picked out with his chopsticks, which lay in a neat pile on his napkin. They continue to pile higher and higher as Baekhyun picks out more from his food, until he’s very sure that every piece of cucumber is gone.

“You’re such a child,” she mutters, shaking her head but smiling at the same time, “If you don’t like it, just eat it. It won’t kill you. Besides, cucumbers don’t even taste that bad. It’s one thing to dislike a vegetable that has a distinct taste to hate, but cucumbers are basically tasteless. How can you hate cucumbers that much?”

“I don’t like the smell of cucumbers,” Baekhyun insists, “Don’t make me eat them!”

“I’m not! You’re picking them out, aren’t you?”

He wrinkles his nose at the cucumbers again, and when Baekhyun’s sure every single piece of cucumber has been picked out, he pushes the pile aside and finally begins to eat. Jonghui’s already nearly finished by then.

They eat lunch in silence, but it’s a companionable one and Baekhyun spoons the rest of his food down, cucumber-free. Jonghui sits across from him, face in her hands and legs swinging underneath the table like she always does when she’s bored or when she’s thinking, though Baekhyun is already used to the feeling of her feet tapping gently against his legs and he doesn’t think much of it.

Jonghui clears the table after they’re finished and Baekhyun does the dishes. At noontime — or a bit after that — is normally when he sits on the couch and reads and Jonghui writes whatever she’s writing on the laptop. When he dries off the last dish and retreats into the living room, however, Jonghui is closing her laptop and setting down her earphones. Her eyes ghost over him.

“I’m going to sleep for a while,” she announces, “I feel sort of tired today.”

“Oh.” Baekhyun lets his arm and his book drop limply to his side. “Uh, okay, I guess. I’ll read by myself.”

“Okay,” Jonghui agrees quietly. When Baekhyun looks at her, and she does look extremely tired. He can’t tell where the sudden exhaustion came from, or why she looks so tired all of a sudden, but it’s no lie and Jonghui walks slowly into her room, the door shutting with barely a noise behind her. Baekhyun stares at the closed door for a while more before ripping his gaze away and bringing it down to his page, though for some reason, he can’t concentrate.

Jonghui’s gone again, he thinks to himself, which means… Which means he’d spend the whole afternoon thinking again and again, and perhaps over thinking every single thing until he was even more confused than the beginning. Baekhyun groans to himself and tries to read his book, but it proves virtually impossible (and he’s used to the steady keyboard clicks from Jonghui; it’s awfully silent without).

After a while of staring blankly at the pages, watching as the words blurred together, Baekhyun sits up from the couch and tries to clear his mind. Despite the quietude, everything still feels hectic in his head.

He lets the question he has been avoiding all day resurface; Chanyeol’s words from the day before. He had expected Chanyeol to elaborate — which he sort of did — but Baekhyun still can’t understand it or wrap his mind around it. There’s too many questions that lead to other ones: if he had been human once, why did he forget all his memories? What had happened to him that made him chose to forget them? Baekhyun couldn’t even imagine anything as terrible as wanting to forget everything. That was cowardly, and he certainly wasn’t cowardly — was he?

I’m not, he tells himself stubbornly, Of course I’m not.

But then why had he chosen to forget?

Baekhyun shakes his head. He doesn’t want to think of it even more. Asking Chanyeol more is probably the most direct solution (and perhaps the only solution; the only thing he’s doing is going around in circles).

Still, that doesn’t help him, and he spends the whole afternoon overthinking everything and trying to come up with theories of why it happened (and how it happened without him being a coward). He lays on the couch staring at the ceiling, mind drifting through the infinite possibilities, and in the end, Baekhyun falls asleep too.

***

The first thing Baekhyun hears when he wakes up is the sound of things hitting each other. It’s not a sound that he can actually describe, but he sees Jonghui placing a small bottle into the drawer. Pills. Medicine. Jongdae often takes vitamins in the morning from a bottle, and that’s what it sounds like. Baekhyun squints at Jonghui, who hasn’t seemed to have noticed him yet. It definitely sounds like medicine.

“Are you sick?” he croaks as he pushes himself up, “Is that why you were so tired today?” Baekhyun makes a face. “Is it infectious? I don’t want to be infected.”

Jonghui whirls around, wide-eyed and looking like a child caught with one hand up in a jar of cookies. “No!” she exclaims. “Those were vitamins.”

“Weird,” Baekhyun mutters, though he doesn’t think about it twice. “Why does Jongdae always take his vitamins in the morning? He’s so weird.”

She gives a laugh, though it sounds kind of nervous. “Right…” she glances at him. “Uh, my brother’s just odd.”

Slowly, Baekhyun sits up from the couch. He still feels lightheaded from sleeping, and Jonghui blurs into two separate people before his eyes. She looks slightly better than before, but her face is still extremely white and she looks both tired and perhaps slightly malnourished. Which is ridiculous, because Baekhyun eats with her all the time and she doesn’t exactly neglect her meals.

“Are you sure you’re not sick?” Baekhyun asks again, “You look really tired right now, you know? Fever? No, your face would be red if you had a fever.”

Jonghui shakes her head at him. “I’m fine,” she insists, “Just really tired. I don’t think I slept really well last night, that’s all.”

I didn’t either, Baekhyun’s tempted to say, because of darn Chanyeol. Still, he’s not the one who looks utterly exhausted and pasty and sick, so he swallows the words back down. “Well, sleep better tonight,” he grumbles before standing up. “What time is it now?”

“There’s a clock behind you,” she laughs, “You should know by now.”

Sheepishly, Baekhyun turns around to look at the clock. Four twenty five, it reads.

The realization dawns on him. “I’ve been asleep for three and a half hours?” he demands, “Why didn’t you wake me? If I sleep too long during the day, it’ll mess up my sleeping at night…” He trails off when he sees Jonghui. For some reason, it’s getting harder and harder for him to chastise her. Baekhyun can probably go on nitpicking every single thing Jongdae does wrong (not that he actually dares to do so, because it’s Jongdae after all), but for some reason, he can’t find it in him to say anything to Jonghui. Awkwardly, he clears his throat. “Well. I guess you were asleep too. What are we going to do for the rest of the afternoon?”

Jonghui scans him. Slowly, she makes her way to the sofa, where she sits down beside him. “You know,” she says, completely ignoring what Baekhyun said (which he finds annoying, still), “You’ve changed a lot since you first got here. Or maybe you just got more comfortable with us? I don’t know if you’re willing to tell me, but why exactly were you in Korea? Family dispute? What happened to you?”

Baekhyun stares at her, unmoving and trying to process the words. Jonghui meets his gaze firmly like she always does — calm, ridiculously collected and so Jonghui.

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