A/N: Still flashback~

They were at his old school, sitting on the floor in the home classroom with their legs crossed and laughing as they took turns spinning an empty Milki's bottle in the center. Taeyeon was there with her sparkly Japan-inspired make up that Kibum had helped her put on, Youngjae beside her, handsome and mischievously humorous as usual, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to show off his buff arms. There were a few other people too, but he almost never focused on them.

It was Kibum's turn to spin, and his heart took a leap as he waited for the bottle to stop moving. It pointed to Youngjae, and after a brief moment of confusion on his part the whole company erupted in laughter.

Two guys? That would be ludicrous.

Being the closest female around, Taeyeon leaned over in his stead.

Her lip gloss was sticky and had an artificial berry flavor to it, but her smiling lips were soft and pleasantly full on his, like they always had been.

But something was different this time.

To his right, Arisa materialized in that pastel dress she had worn on the day of multiple disasters when Jinki had yanked him out of danger's way – and everybody's respective Hogwarts houses had ceased to be a mystery.

Youngjae kissed her. Her laughter trilled, a joyous, crystal sound.

Arisa took a spin and the bottle pointed to Kibum. She blushed, her eyes glistening warmly beneath the long lashes. As her face came up to his, her skin dewy and perfectly free of blemishes, he found himself looking forward to the kiss. When it happened, the feeling was similar to the one he had shared with Taeyeon, yet different. He was satisfied, but somehow alarmed, too.

Were those people supposed to be in the same room?

Kibum took his turn, and the bottle pointed to the person who definitely hadn't been present before – Jinki.

He didn't move.

They looked at each other silently, as if waiting for something. That something turned out to be Taeyeon, who made the choice for Kibum by pulling him close and pressing their lips together again.

Then, Taemin appeared, and Taeyeon joked that it would be ‘weird to kiss her brother’ and told him to ‘start anew’.

The neck of the bottle stopped spinning in front of Jinki. Would Taemin have to kiss Arisa, then?

With a coarse laugh, he crawled over to his best friend and, placing both hands on the floor to keep his balance, planted a confident kiss on Jinki's full lips.

As Kibum stared in both horror and shock, Taemin pulled away and grinned.

“You're really good at this, hyung,” he said matter-of-factly, as if Jinki had just showed him something innocuous, like the right way to stand on his head or an effective method of peeling potatoes.

“That's against the rules!” Kibum cried, overflowing with indignation. “Didn't we decide that kissing guys is weird?!”

Everybody looked at him.

“No, that's what you decided,” Taemin answered brashly. “Nobody said it was a rule.”

“But it was always a rule! Wasn't it?!”

Kibum addressed the question to Jinki, hoping that he would somehow take his side. But his friend only smiled, his gaze falling coyly to the floor. His Adam’s apple bobbed, but that was it – Kibum was alone in his protest.

Then Jinki got Arisa, and the pause between the initial reaction and the kiss itself was even more terrible for Kibum then it had been a minute ago with Taemin. That kiss had been disturbing and wrong in more ways than one, but this… Nausea-inducing. Stomach-churning. Sickening like a hot drink with too much sugar in it.

It was a betrayal from every side.

Even though Jinki was supposed to make the first move, it was Arisa who knelt in front of him, crushing her pretty dress, and, taking the boy's blushing face in her tiny hands, guided him to her lips.

Kibum didn't want to see, but his eyes were riveted to the pair against his will. In a way, it was like watching himself getting stabbed in slow motion.

The whole room applauded, as if that kiss was the highlight of the day for everyone.

He felt himself springing up to his feet. He couldn't take it anymore.

“Stop it! Just stop!” he yelled.

Arisa turned around, and Jinki looked up at Kibum.

“Isn't it what you wanted?” Jinki asked with a smile that was something between bitter and sorrowful.

“Is it? I don't know! I'm not sure it's the way.” Kibum was confused now. He had no idea what his own words meant.

“Maybe it's not what it's cracked up to be,” the other boy said pensively – and returned to kissing Arisa.

The last thing Kibum remembered was himself letting out a shriek so exasperated that it sounded more like a bird's cry than any noise a human could make.

He sat bolt upright in his bed.

The bird-like noise had not just been a part of his dream – it was there in real life, and it was coming out of an actual bird, a crow from the sound of it, perched on a branch somewhere below his window.

Kibum dropped on his side with a groan, pulling the blanket over his mouth. It was Sunday, and getting up too early would be a waste of it.

If only the bird stopped its croaking.

“Nice voice, you prick,” he grumbled through his attempt to fall asleep again.

The door of his room opened.

“Did you say something, darling?” his mom chirped.

“Can you close the window? Like, completely.”

“Why, are you cold?”

“Stupid bird won't shut the hell up.”

He heard her fluffy slippers shuffle closer, and the croaking became muffled now.

“Today is not when you should say ‘hell’, Kibum.”

“You just said it yourself.”

Mrs. Kim sighed.

“Yes, I really did… My little voice of reason.”

“I'm not little.”

“To me, you always will be.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed and gently swept Kibum's tangled hair away from his face.

“Mommy will pass by the supermarket after church. Do you want anything?”

The boy's eyes flew open and he lifted his head from the pillow.

“Can I go with you?” he asked suddenly.

Knowing how much her son was fond of sleeping in, Mrs. Kim was deeply moved by his noble impulse.

“Sure, my darling.”

And she was going to put a kiss on his forehead, when Kibum sprang out of bed and ran to the bathroom with astonishing urgency.

On his thirteenth birthday, Kibum had been gifted a little silver cross to wear around his neck, so that he could be ‘closer to God’ at that very complicated period of his young life. (He had actually wanted a sewing machine of his own.)

He had kept it in the small wooden box it came with – until the following Monday when, ready to leave his room in the morning, he turned around and marched back to his desk to retrieve the box. He put the cross around his neck and hid it under his shirt.

The first thing Kibum saw when he climbed to the floor where his classroom was, were Jinki and Taemin, sitting on the bench in the hallway. To be exact, Jinki was sitting on the bench, and Taemin was chilling on his lap. The older boy's hands were locked over the younger's waist, and he was watching something that Taemin was showing him on his phone. Just when Kibum approached, the two burst into laughter, completely absorbed in their world.

No. We're not thinking about the dream, Kibum convinced himself, passing the boys unnoticed.

He hoped it would get better as the day progressed.

Only it didn't.

At the big break, Taemin complained that he was ‘tired’. Not because of the classes, though – the activity that had depleted him so was simply eating the banana that his mom had packed for him. So, he passed the half-eaten fruit to his very own food-finisher – Jinki. Meanwhile, Taemin also noticed the bun that his best friend had bought at the convenience store in the morning and got curious about its taste.

“M-m-m. What's inside?”

He liked it.

“Cream cheese.”

“It's really good,” Taemin nodded approvingly.

By the time Jinki turned around to speak to Kibum, the latter was already clutching the cross beneath the collar of his shirt in silent prayer.

“Wanna bite into my bun?” Jinki asked matter-of-factly.

Kibum's eyes flickered between the offering and his friend's face. Some cream was stuck to the side of his mouth.

“I-I have to go,” Kibum stammered as he bolted to the door.

He struggled to figure out what bothered him throughout the first part of the day. The kissing between Jinki and Arisa he had been forced to watch had distressed him the most in the dream from the other night, but nothing felt off when he saw the two exchange greetings before the first lesson started. Now, it was seeing Jinki and Taemin together that rubbed him the wrong way.

After the cream cheese bun situation, Kibum decided to face the problem and find its source. What he found was a little unusual: watching them being their embarrassing, but otherwise normal nonchalant selves, he felt that he had wronged them somehow – as if he was responsible for the mess his subconscious had generated.

It's not that he forgot about the whole Arisa talk – he remembered, oh, too well. He had been bitter and perplexed over it throughout Saturday, had somewhat accepted it by the Sunday afternoon and by the evening of the same day, had reasoned that in some way it might be for the better. If he acted weird around Arisa, it was because he liked her, if he acted weird around Jinki… well, it meant nothing, because he – again – liked Arisa!

Overall, Kibum was not one hundred percent sure about it. Maybe things would have been even better if he had never spoken to Jinki at all.

His friend was too considerate for his tender young feelings to drop any hints around his newly official crush, and Kibum, who had dreaded getting any unwanted ‘help’ from Jinki on the romantic front, let himself breathe freely, as most of the week had passed without any changes between the three of them. Apart from Kibum trying not to be too morose on a couple occasions, everything was just as usual: Arisa was sweet, Jinki was nice to everyone — and Taemin was an annoying little .

The school life was busy too. They had the tests that Jinki excelled at uniformly, and Kibum – rather selectively. In the midst of that, Mr. Kim started a poll to select the literary work for the play to be based on that year. As long as it wasn't “Romeo and Juliet”, Kibum would go with anything. Too much baggage attached to that one.

'Is he really not gonna mention it at all?', Kibum wondered, idly watching Jinki lead the soccer ball up to the gate of the opposing team – to which Kibum, in fact, belonged, so he was probably supposed to be doing something about that, instead of lightly nibbling on his nails like he had no place to go.

If that was true, then Jinki was truly beyond tactful. He had spoken his mind once, must have noticed how Kibum shrunk into himself for an instant, and let it go.

Urgent variations of “Come on, Jinki, get them!” came from everywhere as the boy raised his foot for the final, victorious strike.

Maybe tact was not such a useless thing, after all. Maybe it was worth learning. It surely was an admirable trait – even though developing it looked like an awful lot of work.

Jinki kicked the ball and watched it fly toward the gate with an open mouth: with a loud clang, it hit the side of the metal frame and fell back onto the field miserably, to the disappointed moans of his teammates.

Kibum circled his hands around his mouth to yell a sarcastic “Fighting, Lee Jinki!”

Before responding to that, Jinki turned around to make sure that the teacher was looking the other way. Then he flipped the bird at Kibum, and they laughed at each other from the different sides of the field.

Well, maybe tact is just not as fun.

It was not Kibum's style to chat while changing. He focused on what was in front of him, folded his clothes neatly and took no longer than five minutes in the shower.

But this time there was a disruption. Jinki came close and shook the sweat off his hair like a dog after bath. Then he grabbed the collar of his drenched shirt and pulled it off.

“Kim Kibumibum. Kim Ki Bum Bum.” Kibum sighed. “Do you like karaoke?”

He turned to his friend. In the periphery of his vision, Jinki's smooth chest glistened with perspiration. His bare shoulders were rather wide.

Kibum focused on the face.

“Do you always shake your sweat at people?”

“Only when there's enough sweat to shake,” Jinki replied childishly.

“Why are you never not wet?” Kibum demanded.

“I'm not never not wet.” Jinki ran a hand through his – very wet – hair. “And it's only because I'm manly and virile.”

Kibum scoffed as Choi Minho, who actually looked the manly and virile part, slapped his buddy's as a prank.

“You really don't need any more coleslaw lunches.” Jinki didn't seem to care much about the unspoken rule of focusing on the face.

Kibum shot a look.

“But I totally need your opinion on my personal diet.”

“Touché.”

Unfortunately, Jinki took the conversation to the common shower.

Tact, anyone?

“We need to discuss something important, though.”

“Like how your girlfriend dumped you for a less humid guy?”

“Ha-ha. Very smart.” Jinki couldn't really pull off the snark. He was just funny. “No, we need to discuss whether or not you can sing.”

Kibum could sing quite well, in truth. Sometimes he was even great, and back in the day he would often score more than 90 points at the karaoke room. Taeyeon had been less consistent: her good days would be very good, and then at times she would be shockingly, recklessly off-key. She did have a good sense of rhythm, though, and had often been happy to beat the tambourine while Kibum was singing – when she wasn't dancing along, that is.

“Maybe I can,” he answered mysteriously. He didn't want to brag, but he also didn't want not to brag.

“Good. Because we're going today after class.”

“Okay.”

Jinki made a pause.

“My parents fell in love while singing together, by the way. I think there is some magic in that... Like, you see the person in a different light. That kind of thing.”

Kibum let water get into his eyes. Arisa is going too.

He knew that he shouldn't be surprised. Jinki just couldn't help being a helper.

Arisa said she was feeling adventurous that day. While Kibum's own life was not some thrill ride, especially not after everything had imploded so painfully, even through his limited experience he knew that “adventurous” coming from the mouth of Arisa and, say, Taeyeon, almost certainly had different meanings. Taeyeon hadn't been some kind of delinquent, no – she just hadn't announced her adventurous moods walking out of the school gate at three in the afternoon.

Arisa was referring to the three cans of apple cider that Jungmi had brought with her in a cute non-transparent bag with stars on it, for discretion. Her elder sister had forgotten to get rid of them before the big clean that their mother had scheduled for that day and asked the youngest of the family for help, she said.

“Sure, we can do that. If Kibum can handle it.”

Jinki said that last part annoyingly enough to earn him a pinch on the .

“Ouch!”

“So, can you handle it?” Jungmi asked, turning around with an ironic spark to her eyes.

Kibum straightened bis back and quipped that he could handle anything.

As long as it's about the alcohol. The other stuff – he wasn't as sure as he had been before.

The girls led the way to their favorite karaoke place, which was tucked away in a basement of a narrow two-storied building, also housing a pool game room and a barbeque restaurant on the ground floor. Jinki purposely held his breath as they passed its fragrant doors. He couldn't afford to splurge on food, but that boy just always seemed to be hungry.

Kibum hadn't told his merry friends the whole truth about his relationship with alcohol. It wasn't technically a half- truth, either - in that it was more like a blatant lie.

In reality, he and alcohol barely had a relationship. Kibum sort of got the social point of it, could sort of function under its influence, but still struggled to see why everyone else was so crazy about the way it made them feel.

It made him feel a bit uncertain about where his feet were going. A bit weak at the seams. Tingly, too. He laughed louder.

But, mainly, it made him weak, and there was little good about that.

He tripped on the stairs, almost pinning Jungmi to the wall as he kept himself from falling.

“How has the handling been going?” she teased with a knowing smile.

She didn't seem intimidated by him whatsoever. He was glad to have noticed that.

Kibum locked arms with her as they descended further, as if she were Taeyeon and he - his old self.

He didn't sound too well that day. The others complimented him, but he heard his voice wobbling all over the place, like it was also struggling with a staircase of its own. It was disappointing.

Arisa's singing voice was almost exactly what he had imagined. It was pleasant and uncontrived. It strained slightly when the high notes got too demanding, and it couldn't drop lower than a certain tone. But, within her range, she sounded lovely. Because she cared about the lyrics and the emotions in them, and sang with her whole body, making each story her own. Confident. Pure.

Watching colorful circles of light dancing, floating through her long wavy hair, Kibum dissociated. He remembered deciding not to be attracted to her anymore after she was all over Jinki at the chicken restaurant.

How much control did anyone really have over such decisions?

He murmured along to the chorus, his eyes following the delicate contours of her body, rocking gently to the music.

Was Jinki seeing her ‘in a different light’, too?

Kibum turned to look at him.

The boy was swaying left and right on his bench in perfect abandon, with his eyes closed, singing his heart out – but not into the remaining microphone that lay silently in his lap. He let Arisa shine.

Kibum reached into Jungmi's secret booze bag to take one more sip, although his cheeks were already getting warm.

The machine gave Arisa 87 points, but everyone agreed that she deserved more.

Looking straight at Jinki, she said that she wanted to try singing a duet. The boy's face lit up.

“Excellent idea!” he cried, sliding his glasses back on – and passed his microphone to Kibum. When Arisa, who, if she felt any disappointment, had hidden it expertly, was busy scrolling through the catalogue, Jinki gave Kibum a grinning thumbs-up.

What an absolute dweeb.

They sang a song that was, ironically, a story about a couple who were happy after breaking up with each other.

Then, Jinki cleared up his throat and started to sing.

It was some ballad that grownups loved, something about the wind and the pain of parting, and premonitions. Kibum had had no particular premonitions about Jinki's singing. He hadn't been warned that the sound of his voice would be so vibrant and clear, that the lyrics would begin speaking to him… that the very air in that stuffy little room was going to change.

Was it the cider?

Everybody else seemed to be unaffected by the drink. (Unfair.) But they were definitely affected by the air coming out of Jinki's lungs, transformed. Arisa was holding her breath, perhaps forgetting to release it, and Jungmi had hushed her tambourine, because the boy at the microphone needed no help. She listened attentively.

And Kibum wanted to drink more. He was beginning to feel stupid and giddy, and wanted to feel even stupider and giddier. He knew that he would hate it – but at least he would be feeling something definite.

He wasn't even sure if he was having fun.

Weak at the seams.

Jinki's singing was so perfect that it was almost a relief when the last poignant note left his mouth and he pouted that he got only a measly 94. Back to his nerd shtick.

The girls picked up the microphones and opened the latest hit chart. Jinki plopped next to Kibum to catch his breath.

“Is there anything you can’t do, man?” he said into his friend’s ear.

Kibum knew that Jinki wasn’t being sarcastic. His back straightened and his legs crossed again, by themselves.

“Math and physics? I at those,” Kibum replied without shame, feeling all powerful after being so overpraised.

Jinki puckered his lips. The yellow letters of the menu titles flickered, reflected in his eyeglasses.

“Yeah, you do,” he concluded upon a moment’s reflection. He leaned closer. “Do you know any of those songs?” The boy asked in a low voice, nodding at the screen.

“Yeah.”

A loose strand on top of Jinki’s crown created the apple effect again. His hair just refused to be smooth, as if it was mocking him.

“How?” Jinki asked, turning his face to him. His eyebrows were raised in genuine awe.

Kibum leaned closer, too.

“It’s very simple,” he whispered back confidentially and paused. Jinki nodded, waiting for the rest. “I just don’t live under a rock.”

Kibum had foreseen the – well-deserved – elbow coming his way, and held the cider can over the floor so that his pants would be spared in case of a disaster. Jinki’s warm, dry fingers took it out of his hand. He pressed the can to his lips. His Adam’s apple did the familiar jump as he gulped down the remaining drink.

An image from his dream flashed through Kibum’s mind, Arisa kissing Jinki on his unprotesting plump mouth. What utter rubbish.

“What are we gonna sing?” Jinki’s face assumed a half-earnest, half-playful expression.

“I don’t know, do we have to?”

“Um, duh?”

Of course, they did.

Jinki said that he was thinking about trot, apparently meaning it.

“What? No, I don't know that old people stuff.”

Kibum waved his hand in the air to show just how little of that old people stuff he knew.

But his friend was prepared.

“Your grandma told me everything about your singing sessions in front of the telly.”

It was lucky that they were sitting in the semi-dark: Kibum felt himself flush with embarrassment.

“I'm surrounded by traitors,” he muttered, pushing his bangs away from his eyes.

In truth, he was a little bit ashamed of being outed as a lover of something so “uncool”, but he was feeling too euphoric to care about his image. He cared about Jinki's magical buttons of laughter: Kibum didn't have to contrive something witty to make them work. All he needed to do was to say something sarcastic, but not too heavy, or something just a little similar to the childish jokes and puns that Jinki so lovingly endorsed, add a straight face as a cherry on top, and he would laugh.

And Jinki didn't just laugh. He bloomed into laughter, the smile first touching his eyes and then spreading to his whole face. Kibum could already tell which parts of it would be lined with wrinkles years from now. It couldn't be prevented: Jinki scrunched his face up so generously, lived every moment of fun so thoroughly, it was hard to imagine him ever changing.

And he bloomed now – the contrast between Kibum's flat tone of voice and his overly dramatic words was just the right combination to make his eyes crinkle.

It encouraged him, too.

“I even know which song you like the most.”

Kibum rolled his eyes for the sole purpose of Jinki's amusement.

“It starts with an M.”

He tapped Jinki's hip with his hand and hiccupped.

“Stop it.”

His friend found it hilarious.

“Come on, you know you want to sing it with me.”

Maybe he did.

Kibum didn't put his hand away just yet, and Jinki, who reached for the remote to add that one song to the queue, didn't seem to mind.

He dug his fingertips into the fabric of boy's trousers, feeling so comfortable with their physical closeness, almost unexpectedly for himself.

He could do the same things that Taemin did, because he was just as liked and accepted. Because Taemin wasn't that special.

Kibum wanted to be special.

God, I think I'm actually drunk.

Jinki had picked “Monalisa”, the old-timey song that Kibum had used to dance to in his red flannel pajamas years ago. He had to play hard-to-get a little, to make Jinki turn around and physically pull him up by both hands before handing him the microphone and actually wrapping Kibum's limp fingers around it.

When the song began, Jinki threw his arm around Kibum's shoulders as if to cement the fact that he had nowhere to run now. (Not that Kibum would rather be anywhere else right now.)

It was surprisingly fun. Neither of them cared about hitting any notes this time, all they did was fool around and sing at each other in weird voices. Then they began dancing, not even looking at the screen anymore. Jinki showed off his excellent “old people moves” skills, and Kibum did not fall far behind.

The girls clapped along cheerfully in the background, Jinki laughed while he sang, and once he even grabbed Kibum's hand with his free one and twirled him, and the boy felt dizzy with joy and the energy surging through him.

No, really. For a change, he wasn't thinking of how he was being perceived and what he was supposed or not supposed to be doing, and not having flashbacks to Taeyeon and his other life. Then and there, in that slightly stuffy karaoke room, it just didn't matter.

He liked how Jinki's grip around his hand was firm and secure, but caringly so, like he was keeping his friend from being swept by a gust of wind that was about to come out of nowhere.

Kibum felt cheesy and very stupid and giddy at this point, and he didn't want to let go.

They all ran out of change before Jinki and Arisa could sing together.

“Next time,” she said, her eyes becoming small as she smiled, subconsciously copying him.

“Definitely,” Jinki nodded.

He didn't notice how her lips parted to say something else, because Kibum blew some air into his ear, and he chased him up the stairs to retaliate.

It was a little strange that Arisa, who had to go home in the same direction as Jinki, chose to walk with Kibum to the bus stop, and even more so, considering that Jungmi also went to the subway.

Kibum was yawning his face off, his euphoria dimming and flowing out of him minute by minute. He was too limp overall to analyze any circumstances – or to fix his skewed collar.

Arisa spoke first.

“You're gonna see him on the weekend, are you?”

“Whom?” Kibum yawned.

His brain was in the slow mode already.

“Jinki.”

The name rolled off the girl's tongue like a delicate piece of music. A secret.

Kibum had made no plans to meet Jinki yet, but now that she said it, of course, he needed to see him. What was he supposed to do until Monday? Just hang around his room and make art? Nope. He needed to take Jinki somewhere, to sit in the sun and maybe not even talk. To hear his laughter.

He forgot that a beautiful girl was standing next to him with a sense of importance in her dreamy brown eyes.

“Can you give this to him, please?” she murmured, stretching out her hand.

She was holding a piece of colored paper, folded neatly into a tiny envelope. Arisa had the best stationery, always kept people asking where she was getting all that cute stuff.

Kibum didn't feel like taking it. He accepted it automatically, without saying anything. It was hard to focus on the present: a part of his mind was still singing “Monalisa” at the karaoke room.

“Just… tell him to read it when he's alone, okay?”

Her voice echoed weirdly through Kibum's mind. Was he asleep?

On the bus, he thought he had a picture of Arisa's face in his memory, her expression vaguely pleading, like she was entrusting him with her whole life and wanted him to understand it.

Then it went away, and he wouldn't have thought about it at all, if only, after falling into bed fresh out of shower (his trusting, oblivious mother hadn't even commented on his hot cheeks and tousled hair), he hadn't opened his eyes for a moment. As they slowly focused on a small yellow object lying on the floor next to his chair, the memories came back.

The note was real, and it was his problem now.

“God, I'm so tired,” he groaned into his pillow, and in a few seconds his mind shut down.

The light in his room was still on, and another object remained clutched in his sleeping hand – his old silver cross.

It was a sweet thing to wear, but it just hadn't helped him much. And Kibum wasn't sure anymore if he minded.

A/N: Hello readers! I am back in my home country, and I needed some time to adjust. Thanks for reading and subscribing, let me know your thoughts and I hope you enjoy your weekend. You worked hard, now it's SHINee time! - L.