“It’s simply a way of looking at things,” says Baekhyun as he twirls the stem between two fingers. There’s pollen sticking to his hair, and Yixing only notices because the strands are bright red and everything pops out against them. Sitting under the tree, he seems more lazy than usual, letting out a yawn that must be more exhausting than not yawning in the first place. Yixing is mystified. He doesn’t speak another word. Instead, he brushes some petals off his lap.

There are two things about the garden. Though it smells like rose petals and hay fever, there’s also a takoyaki stand just by the gates, which sometimes makes the place smell like battered octopus. And there’s that tree. It’s the biggest around, towering above the whole place, branches reaching out to cover the roads surrounding it. They sit against the base of it in spring. By summer, the leaves have already collected in the gutters.
Yixing sees the first of them fall in early may, floating down to the ground just in front of him. It lands on his left shoe. The whole tree is an evergreen, but he’s not bothered to move when he’s sitting at the base of it with Baekhyun, so the leaf stays there.

"Was that the first of the season?" asks Baekhyun, flipping the page in his notebook. It's always been right by them- the messy binding, sewn by hand. The notes about picking up milk from the supermarket later. The notes describing the flowers in bloom. Yixing, like the sap he is, finds it incredibly charming.

"Yeah," he says, looking at Baekhyun's profile. He doesn't expect it when the eyes widen and look back to him, mouth agape.

". Wow. Okay, you need to go home. I feel sick. I've got a shift now."

"Wait, what-"

"Just go, Yixing, please."

He doesn't return to the park, even now- he's bringing the post in, wearing a dressing gown his aunt sent him from a market back at home. He leafs through the envelopes quickly, only finding bills, until at last there's a postcard of a sunny street. There are dried blossoms between the cobblestones and a few people in the frame, just continuing with their lives. 'OSAKA, JAPAN' it says in kanji on the bottom right. Yixing turns it over.

'For Xing’s eyes only,

Hey, sorry I never told you I was leaving! I won't be back for a while... But anyway, you should text me when you can. I already miss you.

The people here are nice, but I miss korean food. I wonder if it was the same for you when you left China. I don’t get homesick easily, though, and the place is stunning.
There are blossoms everywhere. You'd really like it.

Lots of love, Baekhyun'.

It doesn’t occur to him that he never told Baekhyun his address until he’s waiting for the kettle to boil.

Later that evening, he looks at the shoe rack as he passes through the hall, and only sees his own shoes there. It’s been so long since someone visited. Suddenly the cream walls seem so lonely. He goes back to bed, waiting for the sky to go dark again. It takes hours.

Yixing is a romantic, which has proven to never be a blessing; always a curse. When the sky glows in the morning, the colour reminds him of how Baekhyun’s hair lights up under street lamps. When he walks to work in the mornings, as he passes under the trees up the road and they’re in bloom, he thinks that Baekhyun would like this. Would thrive, maybe. He’d write something about it in his notebook and clamp the pages back together with the same old bulldog clip. He’d make Yixing happy on purpose.
This just isn’t meant to happen. It’s been two weeks since he’s gotten the postcard, and Baekhyun won’t even open his messages. He stops taking hay fever medicine.

There’s the hanahaki disease, which has never been real. But Yixing sort of gets it, like understanding, though his lungs flare up from his allergies more than anything else.
Baekhyun is long gone; seven weeks. And though there’s no petals clogging his airway, the sight of them kills Yixing anyway.
He just wishes something could’ve happened between them. They had stayed there for a whole spring, in the grass, until it grew around them.

It takes him another two weeks to head back to the park, there’s a certain relief that comes with early july- the tree is mostly bare. He notices this as he walks in by the gates, and nobody seems to be around. Just him and this tree that’s been wilting. The only leaves remain on the highest of the branches, looking like a receding hairline. Yixing walks over with caution, as if there’s a reason to be worried. There’s nothing around, the only heat comes from the sun, and it scorches the back of his neck. He slings his bag down next to the roots and sits. The grass seems to be drier than usual, though he’s never spent a summer in here so he doesn’t know if it’s normal. The place smells like his own sneezes and the takoyaki stand.

“Yixing…?”

His eyes focus again, seeing a figure before him, and he already knows. His hands tremble as he reaches forward for Baekhyun’s shirt- a baggy onepiece one- and suddenly there’s weight in his lap that feels like thighs, and some sort of shocked sound, and he doesn’t even think.
Baekhyun looks much the same, just tanner now from his trip, and his hair’s dyed dark brown. A leaf falls on the arch of his back, which Yixing brushes off with a hand that ends up holding his waist.

“You never said anything,” Yixing says, and he’s not being held, just holding. He feels that loneliness again. That detachment. “You never even told me you got back.”

“I’m here,” Baekhyun replies, absolutely dazed. His movements are as lazy as Yixing remembers- the hand resting on his nape, the other on his jaw, all slow. Baekhyun’s eyes don’t unfocus, but they lack the ability to look at specific things, like he’s dumbstruck. It’s still just as slow as anything else. After all this time.

Yixing smiles into the kiss. Another leaf falls from the tree.
He’s as nice as he can be to Baekhyun after all.
But that doesn’t mean that Baekhyun deserves it.

Just as suddenly as Baekhyun leaves, he bounces back, and brings movie tickets and waiters’ tips and couple cellphone charms. Though this confuses Yixing, he goes with it, and it’s almost like may never even existed. In mid july, a dozen leaves remain on the tree. Baekhyun pulls Yixing closer with each one lost, which makes him dizzy and disoriented. He doesn’t understand how things can flip so easily and how he doesn’t mind it.
He loves when Baekhyun clings to him, because he loves Baekhyun.
Sometimes you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.

Occasionally, when they meet up for dinner, Baekhyun looks like he’s risen from the dead. When Yixing asks, he says he’s tired from studying so hard. They both know he doesn’t give two s about academics. It all goes westward.

The biggest problem is the Osaka thing. Biggest, as in, Osaka isn’t involved at all. Problem, as in, Baekhyun’s a liar and it hurts Yixing a lot.

When they go to the takoyaki stand, Yixing makes out the silhouette of three leaves on the tree, and frowns. Baekhyun carries the takeout containers back to his house, but they end up switching because he almost gets second degree burns from holding them for too long. Yixing laughs and bumps their shoulders together. He, too, almost gets second degree burns as his hands threaten to scorch through the styrofoam.

“It doesn’t take that long to open a door,” he says to Baekhyun, who’s fiddling with the keys. Yixing’s right anyway. It’s almost crazy how much time passes before the door finally swings open to the white walls of Baekhyun’s hall. He drops the keys in the basket and shrugs.

“Well, you open it next time then,” Baekhyun says.

He sits on Yixing’s lap when they’re finally eating, and then turns awkwardly to say something, eyes skittish.

“We really have to talk, Xing,” he says, putting the greasy and/or empty box on the coffee table. This is it, Yixing thinks, this is how they end. He imagined himself crying by now. Instead, he looks back at Baekhyun, probably mirroring the worried expression.

“Do we?” he says weakly.

Baekhyun nods. “I haven’t told the whole truth.”

Yixing gulps and wonders how long it’ll take to get over the fact that Baekhyun probably cheated on him- but there’s no way to tell. As the cliche goes, a pit forms in his stomach, and it swallows him up- his internal organs, his skin, his blood- until he’s left with a love for Baekhyun and nothing else. Not all things can change. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to.

“I never left.”

Yixing blinks. “Never left where?”

“Here. I never went to Osaka.”

“Oh… Where did you go?”

“Nowhere,” Baekhyun says, and it ing stings. “I just couldn’t see you.”

“What do you mean-”

“Well, it’s not that I couldn’t, it’s that I couldn’t bear to.”

The walk back to the park afterwards is silent. There’s half a meter between them on the sidewalk, and things are just as bad when they’re in front of the tree again. Two leaves.

“There’s not much time to explain,” Baekhyun says, pushing his hands deeper into his coat pockets. It’s cold again- the sun went down long before they even got to his house. They’re both looking up now, necks craned.

“Yet you made us walk here.”

“Trust me, Xing,” don’t call me that “I have to be here. You won’t believe me otherwise.”

Yixing could argue, but he’s always been passive, and besides- Baekhyun’s probably right.

“So you see this tree?”

• A nod.

“...Well. It’s sort of… well. I’m it, basically.”

Yixing blinks. “You’re telling me you’re a tree?”

A nearby cicada stops buzzing, which makes things feel even quieter, the only sound being the rustling of flowers in the wind. Baekhyun sighs and closes his eyes. “I am, actually. I know it’s totally unbelievable, what with my youthful complexion,” he pauses to laugh at himself. “But I’m actually really old. Like, I can’t even remember. At least a century old, probably tens of them.”

“Baek, I honestly want to believe you, but-”

“You have to listen, I already told you there’s not much time. Basically, I don’t know why, but there’s this really ing terrible curse. Every may, when I start losing my leaves, the first person to make contact with one dies. Dies, Xing.”

“You’re just ing with me now, this isn’t some disney movie.”

“You’re going to die. I can’t really say much else, but I’m so sorry, so so sorry. As soon as the last leaf-”

“Stop it,” Yixing says, going cold now, because Baekhyun isn’t even smiling, just looking so sure of himself. He has sympathy, probably for himself, not even looking over. Refuses to. “Stop lying, Baek.”

“I’m really not lying, just trust me on this one. I couldn’t see you when I realised what was going to happen, so I pretended to go to Osaka. I’m so ing sorry, I should’ve stayed-”

The last leaf floats downwards, and they hadn’t even noticed until Baekhyun caught something moving in the distance, another black silhouette.

He grabs the lapels of Yixing’s coat and pulls him in.
When they kiss, Yixing can’t help but trust him, and love him, and that’s just how it is. Not how it’s meant to be- he doesn’t believe anyone should be as sad as he is right now. It’s all so fast, the hands in his hair, lips against his, Baekhyun’s watery eyes that are still fluttered shut. He thinks they can pull through.

On july 28th, half past nine in the night, Zhang Yixing dies.

The following may, when the first leaf falls on Baekhyun’s head, he sighs.

About time.