It was never supposed to end this way.

After everything they’ve been through, it shouldn’t be ending this way.

To have found each other as strangers, as wide-eyed, frightened children on the verge of the greatest moment of their life, to fall in love in front of public eyes, to find their lives unmistakably and irrevocably intertwined was a miracle. To love each other every day through godawful closeting and virulent hatred and far too many flashbulbs to count was a miracle. After everything they’ve been through, they ought to deserve some sort of a miraculous happily ever after.

Sometimes, when he looks back on things, there’s a small, angry part of Baekhyun that wishes he’d never met Chanyeol. If he’d just missed that audition, if he’d just stayed in bed, he never would have fallen in love with messy hair and bright brown eyes  he’s never gone a day without kissing since.

Chanyeol would have been famous regardless --Chanyeol has always been starlight-- but maybe Baekhyun wouldn’t have fallen so hard if he only ever saw Chanyeol on the other side of a screen. Maybe he wouldn’t have fallen at all if he’d never laid a hand on Chanyeol’s chest and felt his heartbeat quicken.

Most times, when he looks back on things, Baekhyun blames himself.

The very solar system revolved around Chanyeol and Baekhyun had the closest orbit, flying close enough to feel that warmth in every atom of his body. He should have been paying closer attention, should have opened his eyes and stared into the sun and seen what was happening.

The headaches could have been anything. Dehydration, sensitivity to the stage lights, overworked senses from the screaming crowds. It could have been anything. It could have been a thousand things that weren’t a cluster of spots on a curious MRI.

“Well,” Chanyeol had said weakly, his palm finding Baekhyun's as they sat side by side across the desk from Death himself, “I don’t suppose you can tease me now if I forget lyrics.”

There were other doctors of course, Baekhyun made sure of that. There were other MRIs, there were brain scans of every kind and specialists from every continent and so many trips to hospitals that frown lines became a permanent fixture on Chanyeol’s face.

“Enough is enough,” he found himself whispering to Baekhyun one night as the love of his life lay curled up next to him in bed, fast asleep. He combed his fingers through hair that Baekhyun had long since ceased caring to cut.

“Enough.”

Baekhyun doesn’t say the word cancer until the chemo has really taken hold. Chanyeol is bent over a toilet with tears squeezing from his eyes and blood splattering from his lips because he’s long since lost everything his stomach held, and Baekhyun is kneeling beside him with lips pressed to Chanyeol’s shoulder as he holds back his husband’s hair and tries to pretend it’s all just a terrible dream. The retching stops. Baekhyun reaches out to grab a towel and has to stop for a moment to let his world collapse as his hand comes away with a thick wad of Chanyeol’s hair.

“You shouldn’t have cancer,” he whispers to the floor. “It shouldn’t be you.”

It shouldn’t be Chanyeol, who has spent only twenty-seven years on this earth and has spent every single one of them improving it just by being. It shouldn’t be Chanyeol, who has captured millions of hearts and never broken one. It shouldn’t be Chanyeol, poor, sweet Chanyeol, darling, beautiful Chanyeol who has changed lives and lived his own selflessly and never asked for a thing except to be loved. It shouldn’t be Chanyeol, It shouldn’t be Chanyeol that has to come to Baekhyun one night with a lump in his throat and a razor in his hand and ask Baekhyun to take what was left of his hair.

“I look ridiculous,” he says stoically, like Baekhyun is blind enough not to notice how he wipes the back of one hand across his eyes.

“Let’s not drag this out,” he adds in words that somehow manage to be heavier than the air that carries them. Baekhyun has always been the strong one.He was the one who held Tao the night he realized that he had to leave the group in order to save himself. He’s the one who tells Chanyeol’s mother that he won’t live to see the adoption paperwork go through after all. He’s the one who slips his arms beneath Chanyeol’s skin and bones and carries him to the window seat on the days where he wants to see more than the patch of ceiling above their bed and his traitorous legs refuse to take him. But the problem is that Baekhyun hasn’t always been strong.

He was not born with an iron heart, he found it. He found it in a dorm where twelve boys then were trying to find themselves, where a boy made of stardust was wrapped in Baekhyun's blanket and telling him things he never knew he needed to hear. He found it in a hand that has always fit perfectly in his own, even when it grew and changed and stardust became a supernova that Baekhyun had always been helpless to avoid, had never even wanted to avoid.

“You know,” Chanyeol said one morning, and paused to let Baekhyun bring a glass of water to his lips and tip it back until his throat was soothed and he sounded less like mortality and more like the boy Baekhyun fell in love with. “You know, I hear Taeyeon is single again. You should give her a ring sometime, lay the groundwork for marriage number two.”

“That’s not funny,” Baekhyun blandly replied.

He picked up a fork from the tray he’d brought to Chanyeol and pressed it down into the scrambled eggs he made until they’re barely more than yellow mush. He never scrambles them small enough for Chanyeol to swallow, never makes them even close to right. “Alright, not Taeyeon then,” Chanyeol assented with a grin that barely touched his tired eyes. “Knew that was a longshot. Better pick carefully, though, I’m not going to let you replace me with just any other girl.”

“Chanyeol.”

A bony hand slid across the mattress to come to rest on Baekhyun's knee. “I’m serious. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Baek, if you’re going to have a do-over I want it to be with someone who deserves you-”

“I said it’s not ing funny!” The plate went tumbling to the floor, shattered against the wood. Through the sudden, salty haze in Baekhyun's eyes, the scrambled eggs looked a bit like a broken brain.

“You are the best, do you understand me? You were my best, you were the one great thing that was ever going to happen to me, and there is no ing universe in which I could-- in which I could replace--”

“Baek,” Chanyeol tried, voice contrite, shaky fingers trying to find purchase on Baekhyun's body to pull him closer when all they could do was beg. “Baek, I’m sorry, I-- I’m sorry. Baek, please.”

It was a long moment before Baekhyun could pull oxygen into his lungs again, could slide his hand beneath Chanyeol’s for the tiny joy of feeling Chanyeol’s ever-weakening grasp on him. Eventually he leaned forward to press his forehead to Chanyeol’s, felt his uneven breaths mingling with Chanyeol’s ragged ones. “I have loved you since I was twenty, Chan. I don’t remember how to breathe in a world without you in it."

If there’s one thing that Baekhyun learns as he watches Chanyeol die, it’s how life can be too short and too long. It can leave you far too soon, before your hair turns grey, before you even know to miss it. It can also drag on, though, when the end is drawing near, when good days go from days spent poolside in exotic places to days where the man whose last name you share can stay coherent long enough to string together the words, ‘I love you.’ Those days can be the longest in a lifetime.

When he can, those are always the words Chanyeol says. He says it over and over again, endlessly, like he’s got a million I love you ’s that are built up inside of him and bursting to get out. He says it like he had always planned on spending eternity with Baekhyun and had saved up a foreverful of love he had to hurry to pour out. There aren’t many days towards the end where he can, but those are always the words Chanyeol tries to say.

There isn’t an earthquake, at the end. There isn’t an explosion as the world collapses in on itself, like Baekhyun had always expected there to be.

It’s just a quiet afternoon and Chanyeol’s convinced Baekhyun to put him on the window seat so he can watch all the songbirds flocking to the stupid, ty birdhouse that they built together on their fifth anniversary. It’s just a quiet afternoon where Chanyeol smiles out into the sun, and Baekhyun smiles over at his sun, and the rise and fall of Chanyeol’s chest ends right there as the songbirds sing.

Baekhyun doesn’t say the word dead until two weeks after the funeral, when he’s visiting Chanyeol’s headstone for perhaps the thousandth time and grass is starting to sprout up through the freshly-turned dirt.

Park Chanyeol, 1992-2020, beloved husband and son.

“You’re dead,” Baekhyun tells the dirt. “You’re dead, you sick , and you left me here by myself.”

He isn’t alone, of course, not really, because he has his family and he has his brothers and he has a world that mourns alongside him. An empty house feels like alone, though. A side of the bed with pillows that stop smelling like anything but laundry detergent feels like alone. A room down the hall all done up with brightly-colored animals and silent mobiles and broken promises feels as much like alone as any one man could bear.

The water’s gone cold. It went cold hours ago, if Baekhyun's honest, but there’s no one here to be honest to. It’s comforting, somehow, to feel the ache start up in his body from too long spent unmoving and curled up between unyielding linoleum walls. That’s what bodies are supposed to do. They’re supposed to live on and feel things, to heal from wounds, to grow and to change and to give new life and to refuse to be conquered.

They’re supposed to live on. They’re supposed to give kisses, more kisses than Baekhyunever thought to give Chanyeol. They’re meant to reach out and a lover’s cheek, to tell him he’s beautiful, to whisper marry me every day even when there’s a place on the left hand where the fourth finger meets the knuckle that promises never to be empty again.

Baekhyun lifts his arm slowly, watching his hand rise from the surface until the gold band around his finger emerges to glisten with the water running down it. Somewhere in a field, six feet beneath new grass, is the other part of the set. Somewhere in a field, six feet beneath new grass, is the other part of Baekhyun. Strength of heart gives out and Baekhyun lets his hand sink below the surface once more, closing his eyes against the too-bright lights of the room.

“Rest in peace,” he tells the emptiness. “If you could just give me one last thing, please just rest in peace.”