Kim Jongin was a three year old innocent little baby when his mother took him to one of her school’s dormitories, where her friend lived. He was used to running along the huge campus while his mother ran along busily, tending to him and keeping up with her classes. Everyone cooed over him and even the most disapproving professors had a soft spot for the little boy, or so he was told by his mother. He didn’t remember a lot — he was just so young — but he did remember how terrified he felt when he was separated from his mother.

 

It was a ten floor building with two grumpy elevators, which fascinated him. His home didn’t have an elevator and he lived on the second floor, so the dormitory was this huge thing for him, with loud metal boxes that carried you up and down. When they were leaving her friend’s room, Kim Jongin ran ahead, called for the elevator, which came right away from the seventh floor (they were on the eighth), and he got in. His mother was right behind him but dropped Kim Jongin’s water bottle, and in that crucial two or three seconds it took for her to bend down, get the bottle and stand up, the elevator doors started to close. (someone had called it down)

 

“Mom! Mom! MOM! MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!” Kim Jongin screamed nonstop as the horrible doors closed in his face. His mother saw that the other elevator was on the ground floor, knew she couldn’t wait for it and ran down the stairs after her son. At every floor she heard him, still screaming for her. It didn’t stop. Not even for a second. When she finally caught up to him on the second floor, he was all alone on the elevator, still screaming his tiny lungs out, all red in the face, snot running down from his nose, hands clenched tight, and refusing to let anyone take him out of the elevator.

 

His mother had told the story many times over the years but Kim Jongin never got tired of listening to it. Childhood stories were the best.

 

“You must have been so cute,” Seulgi said after Kim Jongin finished.

 

“I was,”

 

“How very humble,” Jongdae said from his single couch.

 

“Don’t listen to him,” Baekhyun said to Kim Jongin. “He looked like a toilet brush,”

 

“Okay,”

 

Even though he knew he and Kim Jongin were close, it still startled him — just how close he sounded. And was he imagining things or could he really feel the man next to him? Like … some sort of energy pull?

 

“Hey, I heard that!” Jongdae yelled, outraged. Why, Baekhyun didn’t know. 

 

Seulgi snorted loudly. “He meant for you to hear.”

 

“Whose cousin are you ? Why do you always take his side?”

 

“Because I love him,” Seulgi said simply. “And he’s hot.”

 

“Are you?” Jongin whispered.

 

Baekhyun spluttered and then giggled, turning his face away even though he knew Kim Jongin couldn't see him.

 

Jongdae, on the other hand, seemed unimpressed. “Don’t you love me, too?” he asked his cousin.

 

There was a pause. And then, “Eh,” was Seulgi’s answer, as if she was expressing what she thought about examining twenty four different shades of the same color.

 

“Eh?”

 

“Eh.”

 

And that started another insult match between the Kim cousins. Baekhyun turned to Jongin. “Do you have any problems with getting into elevators?”

 

“Umm, actually a bit, yeah,” said Jongin. “But not because of the horrible experience — it’s because I watched this scary movie when I was a kid. And I was with friends — all boys, so I had to pretend like I wasn’t scared and had to finish the whole thing. I think all of us did that actually.”

 

“Pretended like you weren’t scared?”

 

“Yeah. We thought not being scared was being brave and everything. The whole movie was about people getting killed by a ghost in an elevator, I think. I just remember being scared less. At that time, we lived on the sixth floor, but for a long time I used the stairs whenever I was alone. And now if I get into an elevator late at night, I get kinda nervous.”

 

Baekhyun hummed, finding himself wanting to hear more. Kim Jongin’s voice had a strange calming effect. He couldn’t figure out how to describe it.

 

“Do you have any fears like that? Something you hate or can’t do because of a scary movie you watched a long time ago.”

 

“I … never watched a scary movie,” Baekhyun confessed, himself suddenly realizing the fact for the first time. “Growing up I didn’t get much free time, and when I did I watched whichever movie was hitting big. I do remember posters of this girl coming out of a tv though. Her face was covered with her hair and she was wearing a white dress.”

 

If Kim Jongin was surprised by how Baekhyun never got to watch a scary movie, he didn’t show. He spoke in a calm and thoughtful manner. “Yeah, that movie is called Ring. I watched it, can’t remember the plot, though, maybe it’s a good thing that I can’t remember. I do remember sleeping in my sister’s room that night — she made me watch it!” he added excitedly. “Yes, she came to my room and said that she really wanted to watch the movie but was too scared to do it alone.”

 

Baekhyun smiled. It must be nice to have a sister with whom you were close enough for her to just demand Kim Jongin to watch a scary movie together. For the millionth time in his life, Baekhyun wondered if his life would have been different if he had a sibling. Or at least a close cousin, like the way Jongdae and Seulgi had each other.

 

He cleared his throat, shook his thought away for a moment, and asked Kim Jongin, “Why did she want to watch if she was so afraid?”

 

“Well, it was popular,” Kim Jongin said. “And she was curious. She wanted to see it, the only problem was that she couldn’t watch it and then go to the bathroom alone at night. I had to go with her.”

 

“Really?” Baekhyun must have sounded too surprised because Kim Jongin chuckled before answering.

 

“She wanted me to stay by the door but didn’t want me to hear her pee — as if we never lived together and didn’t hear each other all the time. But I kind of understood why it felt awkward since it was so silent during the night — you could just hear it so clearly. So she would talk over the sound, tell me to close my ears, but then ask me if I was there and get really frustrated if I didn’t answer her right away. So I would tell her that I can’t hear her if I close my ears — like, what did she want me to do, right? That was when our parents, finally giving up on sleeping, would come and get us.”

 

“And they didn’t get angry?”

 

“No?”

 

Baekhyun tried and failed to understand how small Kim Jongin’s home was, if they could hear each other go to the toilet, like it was normal. And his parents would hear their children and come to get them, in the middle of the night. Baekhyun didn’t even know what his parents would have done if he interrupted their sleep because he was too afraid to go to sleep alone, not that he never had nights like that. But that was a whole lot of to open up to a total stranger, no matter how daring he felt in the darkness.

 

He cleared his throat again. “Sounds fun,”

 

“It was.” Kim Jongin said, and then added after a second, “I once jumped on my dad’s and nearly broke it.”

 

“WHAT?”

 

Kim Jongin seemed to like Baekhyun’s reaction. “Yeah,” he said happily. “It was raining very heavily, the sky kept rumbling and when the lightning flashed, followed by these monstrous thunders, I ran to my parents’ bedroom, screaming the whole time — guess I screamed quite often. Bet my neighbours loved that.

 

“Anyway, I rush in and jump, and land on … my dad. My foot, well, you know.”

 

Baekhyun winced, and ignored the urge to pat his own .

 

“He yelled so loud,” Kim Jongin laughed. “My mom woke up screaming thanks to him. My sister then came in screaming. And my dad said his was broken, Mom got angry at him for saying ‘’ and I think I was in shock cause I had never heard him say that before. Obviously I had heard it at school — I think I was seven or eight. And my dad kept saying he needed ice, and my mom was still angry at him but she did go and got him ice. Well, she threw it at him, and took me and my sister to the living room so that we could sleep together.”

 

Baekhyun imagined a little boy on the bed, eyes going wide as his father said ‘’, and a beautiful woman smacking the father and carrying away her children. It sounded loud and annoying but … fun. “And then what happened? Did your father come to the living room, too?”

 

“Yeah, he did. Apologized to us for speaking like a ‘caveman’, as she called him. We all slept in the living room that night. And I realized that when I wasn’t alone, I could actually enjoy the lightning and the thunder. They weren’t scary at all.”

 

“Did you - did you sleep on the floor?” Baekhyun asked, maybe a touch too eagerly. He had seen people sleeping on the floor together in dramas, and they had all looked so snug and happy.

 

“Yes?”

 

“Must have been nice.”

 

“It was. We talked for the whole night, at least that’s how it felt for me. We were really excited that night — my sister and I.”

 

“Thunderstorm has a way of giving you energy,” Baekhyun had had a night of his own like that, except he was alone the whole time.

 

“It’s just so loud,” Jongin said.

 

“Yeah,” Baekhyun agreed. “And I like how when the lightning hits, for a second, everything is revealed.”

 

“And the smell,”

 

“Oh yes, the smell —”

Baekhyun opened his mouth again to shortly tell Kim Jongin about the night he woke up from the sound of the sky coming down, when he realized that the shouting which had filled the room was no longer ringing around his ears. He gulped. 

 

“When did you two stop talking?”

 

Jongdae’s sniggered, the nasty bastard. “Does it matter?” he said. Not being able to see him just made him even more punchable, something Baekhyun didn’t know was possible.

 

“We couldn’t find it in our hearts to interrupt, you see?” Seulgi picked on, her voice sounding no less amused than Jongdae’s. “You two were in your own little bubble.”

 

“To be honest, Seulgi, we could have been stabbing each other and I don’t think they would have noticed.”

 

“That’s nothing. We could have gone to war and they would have just kept on talking.”

 

“A zombie apocalypse —”

 

“Let’s not forget the alien invasion—”

 

“Or the ever so common terrorist attack —”

 

“A whole century could have passed —”

 

“We could have been choking—”

 

“Or drowning —”

 

Baekhyun closed his eyes and prayed to the gods and demons for a swift and painless death. If there was one thing the Kim cousins were better at than clawing each other's eyes out, it was preying on people together and feasting upon the flesh and shame they gathered. But this (apparently) was his lucky night — the Kim cousins got interrupted when the door opened halfway through.

 

“Jongdae, you here? Have you seen Baekhyun? I heard he came.”

 

“Kyungsoo!” Baekhyun would know that voice anywhere. Always low and straight to the point.

 

“Close the door, close the door!” Jongdae snapped. “I’m gonna go blind.”

 

Kyungsoo closed the door. “Why are you all in the dark?”

 

“Alcohol in the air,” Kim Jongin explained.

 

“Cause my cousin’s a dastard,” Seulgi said calmly.

 

“And my super smart cousin, whose medals and trophies couldn’t fit in this room, used a stapler on her finger to see if it would go through.” Jongdae said, just as calmly. “Last week.”

 

“And you did it right after me!” Seulgi bellowed.

“O-o-okay.” Kyungsoo cackled. “That sounds about right, yeah,”

 

“There was a dead body,” Baekhyun said, stretching his arms above his head. “Come join us. How have you been?”

 

“You would know how I’ve been, you dip,” Kyungsoo said, apparently not at all concerned about a dead body, even if Baekhyun had lied, “if you cared enough about me to crawl out of your hole once in a while.”

 

“Did you know?” Baekhyun said to Kim Jongin. “That Kyungsoo used to windows when he was a kid? Just stand and , , , that’s all he did.”

 

Well, Baekhyun had reasoned, if he was going to have his life ended by Kyungsoo, like he always knew it would, the least he could do was take one last on him. But then the night really proved to be his lucky one — the door opened again and a girl, whose voice Baekhyun didn’t recognize, spoke.

 

Baekhyun covered his eyes with his wrist. For some reason he didn’t want to see … stuff, not just yet. And he wished that Kim Jongin was doing the same thing.

 

“Seulgi?”

 

“Unnie?”

 

“Seulgi!”

 

“Unnie!”

 

There was a great deal of squealing and the sound of hurried footsteps. “Come in, come in,” Seulgi kept saying. “Hello, hi, hello, yes, hi! Just sit down or lay down, we’re telling stories! That’s my cousin Jongdae. Those on the floor are Baekhyun oppa and Kim Jongin, he’s Kyungsoo oppa’s friend. This is Kyungsoo oppa by the way. Do Kyungsoo. Okay, okay, close the door, you can introduce yourselves later,”

 

“Not that we’ll remember,” a girl said. “I swear I drank a whole factory,”

 

“And yet she can still walk in those heels,” a guy said proudly.

 

Baekhyun listened to nervous greetings and people crawling on the floor, looking for a place to settle down. Fortunately nobody came near enough for him to feel annoyed.

 

After something of a silence was settled, Jongdae cleared his throat importantly and said, “So, who hated how the Game of Thrones ended?”

 

The whole room groaned, but Baekhyun managed to catch Kim Jongin’s little laugh.

 

 

---

I bought a new flower last week. Googled how to take care of it, and it said my flower needs lots and lots of sunlight. It's been gloomy and rainy ever since. Yep.