A/N: This is not the end of this story yet.

Kyungsoo had been overreacting.

He overreacted with his worry prior to joining the group of members and your coworker Anna who was hard at work reading the display signs around the various spots of interest. She felt like a tour guide with as much as she seemed to be talking and your arrival with Kyungsoo went mostly unnoticed.

That didn't stop him from pointedly ignoring you though. He stood just out of arm's reach of you, walking quickly ahead of you down the stone pathways that lined the outside of the Abbey and very close to Chanyeol and Junmyeon who snapped pictures and laughed and joked with each other. The group moved quickly. A bunch of fit young men who regularly exercised was no match for the hundreds of steps needed to trek around the mountaintop churchyards. The mountain breeze had been chilling your bare legs for an hour now and you began to feel the cold seeping deep inside your bones as you shivered and rubbed your own arms for warmth when you simply couldn't stand it anymore.

There was the occasional question from someone in the group and you gritted your teeth to keep them from chattering as you answered in as level a voice as you could, feeling even more like you were actually working today than you had felt all week. After all, translating for just one person wasn't quite what you had ever been tasked to do. Making love to that one person while you two had been left alone was even less so.

You watched the back of Kyungsoo’s head as he laughed at something Chanyeol said. You knew with the way his head was thrown back in laughter that his teeth and gums would be on full display as his eyes closed tight into little moons up high on his shiny round cheeks. His efforts of keeping away from you had settled in well. He was enjoying himself with his friends and you kept to the back of the group, enjoying the astonishing views keeping as far away from the edge as you could when things began to get a little too scary up here.

You shivered and roughly rubbed away the goosebumps on your arms before a sudden and overbearing warmth covered your back.

“Dummy, why didn't you wear something warmer. I thought everyone knew mountains were cold.”

The voice came from behind you, low and teasing and you turned to look up into the soft smile of Oh Sehun. The warmth was from his jacket, which smelled like him and felt like the sunshine itself with as warm as it made you feel. You were flooded with gratitude and your genuine smile reflected it.

“Thank you Sehun,” you gave him a little bow of your head as you quickly pulled your arms through the too-long sleeves of his coat. Did all men’s coats smell so wonderful or was this merely an attractive man thing? He responded to your smile with a tiny bump with his hip against yours as you both walked and the impact, though small enough to not do much, the actual hit caught you off guard and sent your feet stumbling.

Stumbling toward the edge.

Stumbling over the edge. To your certain death.

You saw the edge of the walkway closing in and despite the railing that would surely keep you from going over, that didn't stop the small yelp of terror that came out of your lips.

Rather than fly right off the edge, you opted to just drop. It was a gut reaction intensified by your fear of heights. The floor below your feet was preferable than a certain fall off the cliff to your death on the rocks below and when your knees hit the rocky walkway below your feet they did it hard. You followed with your hands, feeling a stinging in your flesh as the heels of your palms scraped the rocks just as hard as your knees did.

“Oh .”

There was a fuss now. Sehun moved down to reach for you, yanking you up with strong arms wrapped tightly around your waist, hooked under your arms and you felt lifted into a standing position just as quickly as you had fallen.

“. . Sorry,” Sehun swore quietly under his breath and he bent down in front of you now, his focus down on your knees with worried pulled together brows and a frown on his face. “I didn’t mean to make you fall, I hardly even touched you.”

Your heart was still racing from the very idea of going over the edge and you rubbed your hands together, brushing some of the dirt from the ground off your palms.

“I...thought I was going to fall off the mountain,” You mumbled, feeling just a touch of the encroaching embarrassment that bubbled just below the surface of your skin. He looked up from where his fingertips brushed against your skinned knee with wide eyes and parted lips before looking off toward the edge of the walkway.

From where you stood, it was easy to see now that the edge was at least 15 feet or more from where you had taken your little tumble.

“You thought I would push you off the edge?” His voice was closer as he stood up straight and looked back into your eyes. “That edge way over there?”

“I know,” You grimaced as the heat flooded your cheeks. “I panicked.”

His eyes watched your face for a moment before his lips pulled into a definite frown.

“You thought that I would do that though?” His voice took on a wounded tone and you felt his soft hands reach for both of yours as he broke the hold he had on you with those hurt eyes and looked down at the scrapes on your hands.

He moved both of your hands up, closer to his face and you watched the purse of his lips that preceded the soft wind you felt as he blew off stray bits of dust still on your hands. His warm fingers brushed away imaginary dirt for longer than necessary and you could feel the guilt of your overreaction settling heavy inside your belly.

“Sehun, I didn’t think that… I’m just…scared of heights and I panicked.” The frown on your lips mirrored his before he pulled his bottom lip in between his teeth and bit down.

“You got hurt.” He said softly and you looked down at the tiny scrape that was tinged red now on the palm of your left hand. “I’ll see if anyone has any medicine. Maybe they sell some at one of the shops in the town.”

You could feel it then.

A gentle urging in the back of your mind. A nagging like the brush of a hungry cat against your legs as you busied yourself in the kitchen. Only this nagging came from further away. The distant sound of a car alarm that sounded just familiar enough to sharpen your ears to, on the off chance that it could be calling for you.

It took you less than a second to find the source.

Big brown eyes on that pretty face you had memorized down to the placement of those tiny moles spread like constellations against the tapestry of his brown skin.

Kyungsoo stood at the head of the group, a chattering and giggling Chanyeol at one side, a sightseeing Junmyeon posing for a photo; fingers in a V, bright smile in place as he cheesed for his own cell phone attached to the end of a selfie stick and right in the middle, ignoring the spectacularly breathtaking, once-in-a-lifetime view in front of him, Kyungsoo stood to face you, staring at the moment shared with Sehun.

He stood too far away to intervene. But just far enough away to overreact and misunderstand.

The loose grip with which Sehun held both of your hands was easily broken and he didn’t even deepen his pout when you pulled your hands away.

“It’s fine. Doesn’t even hurt.” you forced a smile on your face and you forced your eyes to stay trained on the person standing in front of you instead of the person staring daggers into his back from meters away. Or were the daggers missing Oh Sehun and landing on your chest?  

A bathroom sign caught your eye and you nodded ahead toward it, pulling Sehun’s attention from your hands to sweep around behind him where you indicated.

“I’ll just go wash them off. I’ll be right back.”

The industrial cheap soap stung when it hit the small scrapes in your skin but you scrubbed just the same and by the time you were done the crowd around the bathrooms had thinned some. You could see the backs of the group further up the pathway that lead to the top.

Up up up to the toppity top....where the gravity pulled harder against your limbs and the winds blew fiercely against your back, working together to bring you down. Working together for your demise.

You pulled out your cell phone then, finding the bench that sat beside the bathrooms to be more comfortable than a trek that went any higher. You were certain that Anna could handle the translations for the group that might be needed up there.

A quick group text, letting everyone who needed to know that you weren’t much for heights and would be waiting when they returned to level grounds and you found your headphones and your music collection perfect for the hour or two before they all returned.

You were only half surprised to feel the warmth of a hand over your shoulder about an hour before the group was due to be back down from the top. You were half of that half surprised to look up into the big brown eyes of Do Kyungsoo with his lips parted and his chest heaving with the efforts of his rushed trek up and then back down again in record time.

“Kyungsoo.” Your half surprise tinted his name with a disappointed tone and instantly brought his lips closed and made him clench down hard on his jaw. “You didn’t have to rush through it. I was fine down here waiting.”

He was warmer than you were and when he sat down beside you on the bench by the bathrooms he leaned into you. You welcomed his warmth less than his presence itself and you listened to the steady breathing of his lungs in and out as you watched his profile in silence and waited for some meaning to come of this.

After a moment his hands were on yours and he pulled your hands up to his face, palms up for a quick examination. His eyeballs ticked over the scrapes with a slight tinge of blood and his round fingertips lightly touched the exterior of where the tiny wounds lie.

“Does it hurt?” The question whispered over the steady din of noise from the groups of tourists. Over the shouts of merchants selling souvenirs and wares and it reached your ears with a gentle nudge. It wasn't demanding or judgemental as you half expected it to be. It wasn't questioning about the origin of the injury or of just what you thought you had been doing with that other man, no this question was a soft and steady drizzle of rain that merely watered the garden and provided the plants with just enough moisture to wet their leaves and ripen their fruit.

“No.” You answered honestly. The sting had long since vanished and your own question burned in its place.

“Are you upset?” You didn't even wait for a pause for it for fear of losing your nerve.

Kyungsoo looked ahead, unseeing, at one of the most breathtaking views you had ever personally witnessed with your own two eyes. And he saw none of it. He inhaled a deep breath and exhaled slowly through his lips before he slowly shook his head back and forth and looked at you out of the corners of his eyes.

“No.” He said softly, letting the syllable sit heavy in his mouth and shape his lips into the most perfect little circle for just a split second, just long enough for your eyes to drift down and linger over those lips. He inhaled another breath to speak again and finally broke the eye contact he had been holding with you.

“I was, for about two seconds.” He bit down once on the inside of his lip out of habit before continuing.

“I let him get to me, Sehun....but I wasn't like I could just come and cause a scene here. Baekhyun, he...he had been avoiding me since down at the parking, but that guy is incredibly insightful. I guess he figured out what was going on and he cornered me and forced me to climb up with him…” He was fidgeting with his fingertips, picking at the skin around his cuticles absentmindedly as he spoke to you in that soft warm voice of his. The voice that made you lose your mind a little.

“And besides.” Kyungsoo inhaled again, as if his quiet words, no louder than the hum of a butterfly's wings in the small space between your heads on this private bench, actually needed this much oxygen to get out. “Besides...do I even have the right to be upset?”

Somehow this small concession stung worse than when you first fell and scraped your hands against the rocks.

It was the truth, yes, but the sting was sharp like that cheap, burning soap that killed the bacteria harbored deep within your fresh wounds.

“What right do I have...right?” The serious expression on his face that pulled his eyes far away from yours and them deep over the horizon that he looked toward had the opposite effect on your attention. You couldn't force your gaze away from his face as he spoke. As sharp as that sting felt, you still couldn’t pull your attention away.

“We both know this thing has an expiration date.”

It was your turn to inhale a deep breath. Because the air up here was thinner and because these things once said out loud had a way of making your lungs that much more ineffective. You were certain that the blood that flowed through your veins, carried oxygen deprived blood cells to oxygen-deprived organs and certainly something was going to give soon.

The lump in the back of your throat, the one that felt heavy and thick and choked you when you tried to swallow it back down was your first sign of trouble.

Thankfully the breath was deep enough and with your eyes closed, you no longer had to witness the pain you were certain that you saw on that beautiful face. That face that should know only love and only joy.

In that moment that you kept your eyes closed, the lump in your throat dissipated enough for you to swallow away the remnants, enough for Kyungsoo to release his hold he still had on your hand and clear his throat of any lingering emotions he might have been experiencing.<