viii.

“Chanyeol, are you in love?”

Chanyeol looked up from his guitar, wide-eyed, at the group of children sitting on the row of brightly-coloured plastic chairs in front of him. “Whatever gave you that idea..?”

Jenny looked a little uncomfortable; she tugged at the edges of her pink beanie, pulling it down over her head. “We’ve been playing and listening to a lot of love songs lately, that’s all.”

“She’s right — we have,” Sehun said, “and it’s yuck.” He pretended to stick his finger down his throat, making obnoxious puking noises. Chanyeol smiled; if he was playing more love songs lately, then he hadn’t noticed, but love could be sneaky that way. He was happy to see that most of the regulars were here today; there were a few others who were confined to their beds, and he would visit them individually after the group session was over. He was looking forward to it already — the smiles on their faces when they saw him walk through the door, carrying his special guitar with the Disney character stickers all over it.

“Well, should we get started, then?” he said brightly. “I don’t think anyone else will be joining us today, will they Victoria…?” He looked at the supervising nurse expectantly, but she shook her head.

Jenny was persistent. “Are you sure you don’t have a new girlfriend? You can tell us, you know. We won’t make fun of you.”

“No, I don’t have a new girlfriend, Jenny — or an old one, for that matter.” Chanyeol smiled and shook his head. “If I ever do get one, you’ll be the first to know about it.”

“You should go out with Jessica,” Elisa piped up, “I think she’s single at the moment. I heard her talking about it to one of the other nurses in the hallway.”

Victoria let out a snort of laughter from her seat in the back, and then she was quiet.

“Alright, that’s enough… no more trying to set me up with the hospital staff,” Chanyeol said, trying his hardest not to laugh too — having a sleep attack in front of the kids was never a good idea. They all knew he had a condition, but it still freaked some of them out. He sat with one leg crossed over the other, strumming his guitar. “So here’s an idea: why don’t we get back to the music? You’ve only got me until midday... better make use of my considerable talent and expertise while I’m here.” He smiled, plucking at the strings with his fingers. “Why don’t I play something, and then we can all sing together? No love songs this time, I promise.” He winked at Sehun as he said this.

“Play ‘Let It Go'!" Maisie said, shaking her tambourine excitedly.

“No!” Sehun yelled, “no more Frozen songs!”

“How about something from Beauty and the Beast?” Chanyeol said. “That’s the new in-thing now, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know, I’m old… you’re all supposed to keep me informed.”

They ended up having a Disney sing-along that morning — much to Sehun’s dismay, although he still joined in towards the end. After the session was over, Chanyeol beckoned Victoria over to the front of the room while he was packing up. Lowering his voice, he asked, “where's Johnny today? And Karla.” It was a question he always hated asking, but it was better to know than have it hanging over his head.

“Too ill to attend this time,” Victoria said quietly. “Karla just started another round of chemo, so she’s feeling especially bad today. She was very disappointed that she couldn’t make it.”

“Oh… I see.” Chanyeol sighed. “Well, that's a shame. Still, not a bad turn-out.” He smiled and took the maracas Victoria was holding, putting them into the box with the rest of the percussion instruments. “Okay, I’ll let you go. I just wanted to make sure they were alright.”

Victoria returned the smile, nodded and went back to herding the kids out of the recreation room. Before she could get them all through the door, Jenny hurried over to Chanyeol and said, “Chanyeol, can I ask you something..?”

“Come on, Jenny,” Victoria said, “Chanyeol’s busy. He has to go see some other people now.”

“No, it's alright... of course you can ask me something, Jenny.” Chanyeol stopped packing up so he could give her his full attention. “What’s up?”

“Why don’t you come here as much anymore?” Jenny asked. She looked a tiny bit hurt, and Chanyeol sighed and rubbed his forehead; he had a feeling this was going to come up at some point.

“There are some other people asking for my help now, too,” he said gently. “I want to be here more often, but I don’t always get what I want.”

“I just wish we got to see you more, that’s all,” Jenny said. Chanyeol put down the tambourine he was holding on the table next to him, and bent down a little to look her in the eye.

Well, you know what? I wish you wouldn’t have to see me at all,” he said. “And it’s not because I don’t like you guys; it’s because I really want you all to get better, so you can go play your own music at home.”

Jenny looked back at Chanyeol, unblinking and earnest. “Alright,” she said, with a little nod. “Thank you for coming today.” She threw her arms around his waist then, and Chanyeol stiffened a little — he wasn’t supposed to encourage physical contact — but he let her hug him for a moment, giving her a comforting pat on the shoulder. “You’re welcome, sweetheart... I’ll see you on Friday. Loving the headwear, by the way.”

Jenny smiled shyly back at him before she took Victoria's hand and left the room. Chanyeol watched her go, then sighed and went back to packing away all the instruments. He loved the kids he worked with at the hospital — even the little s like Sehun — but he always dreaded the moment just before arriving at one of their sessions, walking into the recreation room to find that maybe the head count was smaller than the time before; that perhaps one of them had suddenly become gravely ill, or worse. The hardest part, by far, was not waving goodbye to the lucky few who became well enough to go back home to their families, but knowing that the rest of them would never walk out of there at all.

This thought left him in a sombre mood for the rest of the day, but he cheered up a little at the thought of getting to see Baekhyun for their rehearsal that night. They were seeing each other more, now; not just after their usual classes, but a few other times during the week as well. It had been Baekhyun’s idea that they should spend more time practicing, and Chanyeol wasn’t against it; if anything, he was overjoyed to have a reason to spend more time in Baekhyun’s company.

Baekhyun ran a class for advanced students on Wednesday nights, and Chanyeol planned to meet him afterwards so they could make use of one of the empty rooms to practice in. He could tell as soon as he arrived that Baekhyun wasn’t himself. Chanyeol had never seen him in a bad mood before; usually he was cheerful, and even on days when he wasn't feeling the best, he still retained something of a sense of humour. Sometimes he got a little snippy when they danced, if Chanyeol wasn't giving the steps his full attention; but Chanyeol had never seen him the way he was now — quietly morose, barely making eye contact. It was obvious that something was wrong.

“Are you alright?” he asked, his brow furrowing at the look on Baekhyun’s face. “You seem out of sorts.”

It took a while for Baekhyun to even look at Chanyeol, let alone reply. “It's my wife's birthday today,” he said at last, in a voice so flat and quiet that Chanyeol barely heard him. He had something in his hand, and Chanyeol realised it was his wedding ring; he'd taken it off and was rolling it around in his palm. He stared at it for a moment in silence before sliding it back on to his ring finger.

“Oh.” Now Chanyeol felt bad for asking. “I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t… how could you have known?” Baekhyun rubbed at the stud in his nose, which he often did when he was preoccupied or nervous. Then he opened his mouth to speak, paused for a second or two, and said, “if I were to tell you that I felt responsible for her death, what would you say?”

Chanyeol blinked at him. “Um, I’d probably say 'do you want to talk about it’..?”

Baekhyun smiled with one side of his mouth; it wasn't much, but it was encouraging. “Are you sure you want to open that Pandora's box of secrets?”

“You don't really seem to be the murderous type.” Chanyeol meant this in all seriousness, but Baekhyun just laughed, if a little bitterly.

"Well, she was murdered, as a matter of fact,” he said. “But not by me.”

“You know, you don't have to talk about it if it's too hard,” Chanyeol said quietly. “I don't want you to relive the trauma unnecessarily.”

Baekhyun shook his head. “No, I want to tell you. It's so rare for me to find people I actually feel like I can talk to. Who I feel won't judge me for the role I played in the situation.”

“Okay.” Chanyeol pulled a chair over to sit next to Baekhyun and made himself comfortable, crossing his ankles in front of him. “Well, take your time.”

Baekhyun sat there for a while, silent and thoughtful, swinging his legs against his chair. He looked at the floor instead of at Chanyeol. “I’d have never laid a hand on her in a million years,” he said, when he finally spoke. “But that's just it, I guess — I never laid any hand on her. I think she craved intimacy, something I wasn't in the right frame of mind to give her at the time; and so she sought it elsewhere, from someone who wasn't me.” He scratched at his nose stud again, and then he finally met Chanyeol’s gaze. “I did love her, just… maybe not in the way she needed me to. I wasn’t there for her… physically present, yes, but emotionally absent. And I was struggling with being unwell, and sort of coming to terms with my uality at the time, which didn’t really help.”

“Did you ever tell her any of these things?” Chanyeol asked.

“She knew I was attracted to both men and women,” Baekhyun said. “I never hid that from her, and she never seemed bothered by it. But it didn't occur to me until after we'd married that maybe I preferred men. I didn't know how to tell her that, so... I didn't tell her at all. I was still attracted to her, so I didn't think it really mattered.” He leaned forward, burying his head in his hands. “I don’t know… we married young, which didn’t help. I was still very immature. I knew she really loved me, but I wasn't ready to be loved like that; I wasn't open to it. I was too hard on myself.”

“Do you want it now?" Chanyeol asked. “To be loved.”

Baekhyun lifted his head. “I’m not sure,” he said quietly, but the way his eyes flickered away suggested otherwise.

Chanyeol nodded and was quiet, unsure of what to say. Then Baekhyun continued without any prompting.

“I was too wrapped up in myself, and the thought of winning all the time. Winning, winning, winning… that’s what it was all about for me,” he said. “We competed together as teenagers, and we were good — we won first place together a couple of times — but it soon occurred to me that she didn’t have the same drive I had. She liked dancing for the right reasons — because it was fun and brought us closer — but I just wanted to win. So eventually she lost interest and decided to retire, while I kept training and competing in my own time. I started competing with a new partner; I was never unfaithful or anything, but I think that sparked a bit of jealousy in her, knowing I was getting up close and personal with another woman she didn’t know a thing about. Without dancing to bring us together, we found we didn’t have a whole lot in common anymore; there wasn’t a reason to spend a lot of time with each other. There wasn’t that tension, that dynamic that dancing together created — the fireworks. We lost that one thing that we didn’t realise was keeping us together.”

Baekhyun stared at his ring, and began twisting it around his finger again. “So anyway, around the time I found out about the MS, she started seeing another man behind my back — a colleague from her office. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, and I suppose I’ll never know. His side of the story was that she went to break it off with him, and then he flew into a rage because of it. Not pre-meditated — a supposed ‘crime of passion’. Whatever the reason, he beat her to a pulp, panicked, and then stabbed her 25 times with a pocket knife. I remember the exact number because I was so horrified by it, but also because that’s the age we were at the time, she and I — both 25.” Baekhyun paused for a moment and swallowed. “I don’t know why he felt the need to do it that many times, when once or twice probably would have done the job. The next day, he turned himself in.”

“God,” Chanyeol whispered. “That’s horrible.”

Baekhyun nodded. “Yep. So a while ago, I planned to visit the guy in prison, because I wanted some answers to questions that were bothering me… he’d been in there maybe a little over a year at that time. I tried to make arrangements for the visit, and was told that they'd found him dead only a few days before — hanged himself from the light fixture in his cell, using his own underwear. I mean, of course he did.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I wasn't planning to go there and hurl abuse at him… what good would that do? It wouldn’t bring her back. I didn't even want to ask him why he did it. The thing is, before we started drifting apart, she used to come home and tell me all about her day. At first I found it comforting, but eventually they became mundane things I had little interest in, like whatever her co-workers talked about, and what she ate for lunch, things like that. And I'd just nod and smile because I had other stuff on my mind: work, and dancing... and the fact that my body and my sense of self and my whole life as I knew it were all about to change, and how unprepared I was for that. Then she started seeing him, and she stopped telling me all those things about how her day went and so on.” Baekhyun was quiet for a moment, and then he looked up at Chanyeol with moist eyes. “And so that was why I wanted to visit him; so I could ask if she'd perhaps told him anything during those days she spent with him, which would end up being her last days. What silly stories a co-worker might've told her, and what she'd had for lunch, and if she'd enjoyed it. That was all I wanted to know.”

Chanyeol opened his mouth to finally speak, but nothing came out.

“I’m sorry.” Baekhyun reached over to grab Chanyeol’s hand, holding it tight. “I shouldn’t be talking about depressing stuff like this… life’s hard enough as it is.”

“Actually, I feel privileged that you told me,” Chanyeol said quietly, looking down at their joined hands. “I’m sure it was very hard for you to say.”

Baekhyun smiled. “It was. But you're surprisingly easy to talk to, so… it evens out nicely.” He was quiet for a while then, but he kept holding Chanyeol’s hand, and now he was the back of it — as though Chanyeol were the one who needed to be comforted, and not him.

“Maybe she had a great last day," Chanyeol said, breaking the silence. “Maybe she had her favourite food for lunch and it was delicious. S