Chanyeol first notices the signs during lunch break when he unexpectedly catches Yixing discreetly staring in the direction of Kyungsoo’s lunch table, which is undoubtedly shared with Chanyeol’s best friends. Curious, Chanyeol lowers his head, and subtly follows Yixing’s gaze…

… only to find Baekhyun staring in his direction.

He inhales sharply, but thankfully softly, as Chanyeol quickly returns his eyes to his lunch tray, allowing his half-eaten plate of kimchi jeon to fill his field of sight. He takes a small bite of it and raises his head, only to find Lu Han looking at him puzzledly. Something wrong, Soo? Chanyeol shakes his head at Lu Han’s unsaid question and jerks his chin at the boy’s own plate of haemul jeon. Lu Han rolls his eyes, but he gets Chanyeol’s intention and promptly resumes eating and stealing bits of Jongdae’s yangpa jeon.

Ignoring Jongdae’s roar of yah stop stealing my jeon you thief! at Lu Han, Chanyeol chews on another piece of his jeon and turns to look at Yixing instead. He’s no longer looking in Baekhyun’s direction. Instead, his eyes are on his handphone that’s hidden between his thighs, fingers flying across the screen. From Chanyeol’s position, he can’t see the name on Yixing’s phone screen, but it’s obviously none of the people who are sharing his table; Yixing never texts any of them unless he’s away. And it’s this bit of information that has Chanyeol having an inkling of who Yixing’s mysterious receiver might be, but he’s not absolutely sure.

Yixing finishes his business with his handphone a few seconds later, surprising Chanyeol when Yixing looks up and immediately makes eye contact with him. Chanyeol jumps in his seat, startled by Yixing’s movements, and he quickly breaks the gaze, returning his eyes to his jeon… where a pair of chopsticks is currently busy picking up a rather large piece of it. Someone is stealing his jeon. Chanyeol’s eyes instantly narrow.

And in the midst of trying to snatch back that precious piece from Lu Han, while unintentionally causing an all-out table war of stealing one another’s remaining jeon (Yixing’s jeon is kimchi yangpa-flavoured), Chanyeol forgets about Yixing’s matter.

---

The weird scene of Baekhyun looking in his direction during that lunch resurfaces in Chanyeol’s mind when Kyungsoo suddenly brings it up during their fourth break of their seventh tutoring session. (Chanyeol doesn’t see a point in trying to think of a reason to tell their friends when Yixing, Lu Han, and Jongdae have somehow accustomed themselves to letting him go every Wednesday and Friday without questions.)

“Baekhyun has been staring at me a lot recently.”

Chanyeol stops checking Kyungsoo’s—his—math homework and looks up. “How so?”

Kyungsoo taps his pen against his nose. “He thinks he’s subtle and discreet, but I know when he stares at me because it’s kind of the same feeling I get whenever I cross the courtyard to get to the gates back when I was in my body.” A thoughtful expression flits onto Kyungsoo’s face. “It’s the same feeling of being watched, but only by different people because Baekhyun’s feels like he’s searching for answers, while the courtyard one felt like that person’s just looking.”

At the mention of Kyungsoo knowing that he’s being watched whenever he walks across the courtyard to go home, Chanyeol unconsciously gulps because um, I’m that person you’re talking about. Of course, there could be someone else who has their eyes on Kyungsoo (not because Kyungsoo’s good-looking or anything), but Chanyeol’s pretty certain that he’s the only one who peeks at his ex best friend after school from a window in the hallway of the third-year classrooms. Thank goodness though, for it seems that while Kyungsoo knows, he doesn’t know who’s watching him. Chanyeol doesn’t think he can handle this right after finding out that Kyungsoo had felt his eyes on him. He sure as hell doesn’t want to admit that he’d always thought that Kyungsoo looks good-lo–

“Yixing’s been sneaking glances at me, too,” Chanyeol blurts out, effectively halting his straying thoughts and forcing himself to come back to the present where Kyungsoo isn’t walking across the school courtyard and Chanyeol isn’t watching him from a window. He slaps himself for good measure, pretending that Kyungsoo isn’t judging him for his sudden and random act of self-pain. “And, he’s been texting a lot more lately.”

“Texting who? Dae? Lu?”

“Neither. And he’s not texting me either,” Chanyeol says. He starts tapping his pencil against his chin, subconsciously trying to match the frequency of Kyungsoo’s pen which is still tapping on his nose. “You know how Xing doesn’t text the people he’s with, and how he doesn’t text when he’s with people. But he’s been doing that with us. Not stopping even though Lu and Dae have complained about it.”

Kyungsoo’s brows furrow as he frowns. “That’s strange. Xing’s never like that.”

“I know! And although I’ve only been friends with him for almost eight weeks, I feel like I’ve known him enough to realise that this texting thing is out of character for him,” Chanyeol exclaims, pointing his pencil at Kyungsoo who knocks it with his pen, directing the head of the pencil in another direction. “And, I caught Baekhyun staring at me during lunch last week.”

Chanyeol never knew his brows could furrow so deeply, but somehow Kyungsoo manages it and lets Chanyeol discover yet another amazing feature of his countenance. “Did you realise that because you felt him staring at you, or did you, like, follow Xing’s gaze or something?” Kyungsoo asks while wrestling the pencil out of Chanyeol’s hands because the boy wouldn’t stop pointing the pencil at Kyungsoo and how rude is that? “Because I caught Baekhyun looking in your direction and I followed his eyes to find Yixing staring right back at me. Or I think he was.”

A groan leaves Chanyeol’s mouth when Kyungsoo successfully pries the pencil out of his hands and tucks it on his ear. The glare that Kyungsoo shoots at him prevents Chanyeol from daring to retrieve the pencil, and so he deflates and throws his torso onto Kyungsoo’s stout study table. Suppressing the urge to blow a raspberry, Chanyeol suggests instead, “What if they were looking at each other?”

“It’s possible,” Kyungsoo hums. He sets his pen down, placing it at the spine of his opened math textbook. “I still think they know what happened after we fell off the stairs.” He looks at Chanyeol. “What do you think, is it time to give the jig up and ask them if they know anything?”

“Are you saying…”

“Yeah, I… I might want to let them know that we’re not in our own bodies, and that we probably need their help to return.”

Chanyeol doesn’t register inhaling a sharp breath, but the way Kyungsoo tilts his head and looks at him tells him that he might have done so. Also, the next question that Kyungsoo carefully asks seems to tell Chanyeol that Kyungsoo knows.

“Chanyeol, are you… Don’t tell me that you’re– that you don’t want to go back to being Chanyeol?”

That Kyungsoo knows that Chanyeol is reluctant.

The silence from Chanyeol’s end is telling, and echoes his supposed thoughts loud and clear within the walls of Kyungsoo’s own bedroom. Kyungsoo’s expression is telling, too, of how shocked he is, how disbelieved he is, and how his thoughts are, presumably, opposite of Chanyeol’s. Kyungsoo wants to return, that much Chanyeol knows since Day 1. And Chanyeol does want to go back to being himself, too. It’s just– It’s just that he doesn’t know when he stopped wanting to. Since when did Chanyeol stop thinking about returning? Since when did he get used to being Do Kyungsoo?

Since when did Chanyeol become satisfied and content with living someone else’s life? And why? Why has he come to be happy living as Kyungsoo, and not Chanyeol?

Chanyeol doesn’t have answers, not at all. His mind is blank, save for that very thought of him not exactly wanting to go back to his own body, to his own reality. And it’s with this empty head does Chanyeol finally reply to Kyungsoo’s question.

“I think so.”

He pretends to not think about how Kyungsoo had read him so clearly just now even though they haven't been friends for six years. Chanyeol pretends to not realise that he thinks he reads Kyungsoo like a semi-opened book nowadays, too. These are frightening thoughts, revelations that will do him no good but only add on to his reluctance of wanting to return.

And so Chanyeol wills himself to not think. It's hard.

---

Kyungsoo cancels their ninth and tenth tutoring sessions, and by default all future sessions as well. Chanyeol bites back a frustrated groan as he reads the text he just received.

Soo ^^: I’m cancelling the tutoring sessions for this week, and also for future sessions as well.

Chanyeol: why???? iiiiiiii,iiiiiiiii

Soo ^^: I feel that we no longer need them. We’re capable of completing our homework on our own, and definitely capable of keeping our grades afloat with whatever we’ve been teaching each other.

Chanyeol: but what if i cant? what if i cant do mr seos english homework, or if i screw up a pop quiz????

Soo ^^: I have hope that you won’t.

Chanyeol: but….

Soo ^^: We both know that we haven’t been checking our respective homework for at least three weeks now. And in our recent sessions it has been less tutoring and more chatting. It’s not very productive for either of us, and I can think of a million other things I could be doing with the hours of our tutoring sessions.

Chanyeol: but…….

Soo ^^: There are no ‘but’s, Chanyeol. I hope you understand.

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