“Hyung..…my head hurts so much…” 

“You know you can’t drink at all! Why’d you drink anyways?” 

The cold mid-winter winds made their faces red, but masked under the security of surgical masks. The two were sitting on somebody’s front porch because Kyungsoo kept complaining about his headache so much that Suho made him sit.

Suho prayed that no one was home inside the house to see the two sitting there; a grown man with his head propped against another’s. People would think that they were, you know, gay. 

“Okay, let’s get up and hurry home. You know Manager hyung doesn’t like it when we show up back at the dorm in the middle of the night.” Suho told him while lightly pushing Kyungsoo’s head off his shoulder.

After removing his mask, his foggy warm breath lingered in the cold, and was carried away by the ferocious winds. No one else was stupid enough to be out in this kind of climate in the hour of obscurity. 

Suho sighed and stared at the flickering lamp post standing tall beside the road. He gave up on pushing off Kyungsoo who stubbornly kept putting his head back up. Now, all he could do was to wait for his headache to disperse. He wanted to count how many cars had gone by, but there were no cars. The flecks of icy snowflakes were limitless. The rate at which the lamp post flickered made him lethargic. ---

“What do you like about hip hop? You don’t even seem like the type of person to listen to that kind of music.” Suho asked, and without waiting for a response he carried on, “I don’t think you should go out again next time without Manager hyung’s permission. You’re not the only one getting in trouble you know. Maybe you can go by yourself next time and leave me alone, okay?” 

He paused and laughed at himself. “That’s really selfish of me, huh? I shouldn’t say things like that to my dongsaeng. Hell, I’d probably even go the next time you ask me to go to yet another concert or something.”

The wind abruptly died down and left the street with absolute silence. It was so quiet that one could almost hear their steady breathing. Suho looked over at Kyungsoo to realized that he was already asleep.

The main vocal looked even more vulnerable and innocent at that moment, and it made Suho want to protect him forever. It was probably a strong sense of friendship that they bore for each other, and Suho wanted to keep it that way. Something said otherwise, but he knew it was frowned upon. Feelings for the same should remain mutual. Or so that’s what he told himself. 

Out of the blue, Suho could feel a faint blush creeping across his face at that moment he looked his bandmate’s sleeping face. He tried to shake it off and tried to distract himself . 

“Hey, remember that time you stole the cat from the neighbor you used to live next to? Man, I thought we were gonna die for sure that day.“ he recollected, smiling at the memories.

“If that woman had made a dent on my car with that broom of hers, I would have made you pay double!!!” Suho sighed to himself and looked up at the sky with a solemn expression. 

“The night sky’s beautiful, huh?” he whispered.

No response from the younger man. He turned to look at his friend, and another urge came to him. Since he was sleeping, it was the perfect time to say it. That way, he wouldn’t have to bottle all this up in his own head. Maybe the words wouldn’t be able to reach his ears, but at least Suho said it to him face to face. 

“You know you’re my best friend.” Suho said softly, fixating his gaze at the lamp post.

“I love you like a brother, you know that? Since the day we were born, we were made to be together. God gave me a best friend I could count on; do you trust me like I trust you?” 

As if it were a trick of the night, the sky seemed to grow darker as it dove deeper into the void of distance. 

“Maybe a few years from now, we’d be disbanded. We’d have to part forever and never meet each other again. God forbid something happens and one of us dies.“ Suho whispered to particularly no one at all, a speech made for Kyungsoo. 

Then, he wondered, “I wonder how death feels like?” He extended his right hand, careful not to wake Kyungsoo up from his slumber, and placed his hand on top of his. 

“When I die, will you still want to be my best friend in heaven?” 

With those words, a tear slipped out of his eyes and landed on top of a thin layer of snow, melting down to the core. Wiping his eyes before any more could make its way through, he turned to look at his best friend. For a second there, he though that Kyungsoo had stirred for a moment but it was probably a hallucination made by the murky puddle of water his eyes were looking through. 

“We should probably get going now.” he decided, and gingerly moved his knees to the floor so that he could lifted Kyungsoo onto his back. With a slight pull, he successfully carried the whole weight of the younger man on his back and started to walk home. Behind him, a single teardrop rolled down the cheeks of the sleeping Kyungsoo.

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