*Chapter 3;

It was already eight in the evening; three hours since Baekhyun left Chanyeol alone.

Baekhyun had simply forgotten about his stepbrother holding up the shop on his own, too preoccupied spending time with his friends to notice that the sky was darkening outside of the dim PC Room. Only when both Jongdae and Sehun got calls from their parents did Baekhyun exit the game program and check the time.

"Hey, you okay? You look like you just saw a ghost." Jongdae smirked, "Shaking in your pants after I beat you twice in a row, huh?"

Baekhyun snorted, obviously trying to play it cool as panic rose to the tip of his ears. As nonchalantly as he could manage, he walked out of the PC Room with his friends and waved them off, thankful that they were going the other way and not in the direction of the flower shop. Once Jongdae and Sehun were out of sight and out of mind, Baekhyun whisked around and sprinted like he was running for the opposite goal. If he didn't run faster, he thought he'd lose sight of it forever.

"Chanyeol!" he yelled once he got to the empty, dark shop. He wasn't there. He wasn't in the back watering the flowers or organizing the potted plants by color. Even the work apron was gone, and so was the rose bouquet.

Baekhyun locked the shop as fast as he could and raced down the streets. With a brain like Chanyeol's, he couldn't have gone very far on his two feet, nor was there a possibility that he could have been kidnapped. He ran to every open store he came by and asked each shopkeeper if they had seen some tall, dumb-looking guy pass by, but they all shook their heads. At a crossroad, he stopped to catch his breath, wondering if he should file a missing person report with the police in case something did happen to Chanyeol and he was just wasting time looking in the wrong places.

Leaning against the telephone pole, he was seconds away from thumbing in the emergency number when he saw someone tall and dumb across the street. Baekhyun kept quiet to avoid catching Chanyeol's attention, so the idiot wouldn't start running across the street without waiting for the green light. When he got to the other side, he noticed that the boy was sleeping on a park bench, the bouquet of roses held tight to his chest. Someone had passed by earlier to put a newspaper over the boy, which made him look even dumber, like some boy who got rejected.

"Chanyeol," he huffed, "Park Chanyeol!"

Startled, the taller male stood up with a sway, rubbing his eyes with one hand. With the sleep still crusted along his inner eyelids, he looked overjoyed to see Baekhyun again. "B-Baekhyun!"

The smile, however, disappeared when Baekhyun slapped him hard across the face. "Baekhyun..." he mumbled softly, lower lip quivering as he held one hand up to his reddened cheek.

"I told you to stay at the shop!" Baekhyun yelled, the veins in his neck standing straight out when anger took over any amount of pity he initially felt for the other boy, "Are you ing stupid or something? Do you not understand me when I say to just stay in one ing place? What if something were to happen to you?!" Then it would be all my fault.

Chanyeol chewed on his lower lip and cautiously handed the bouquet of roses to Baekhyun, who threw it on the ground.

"You can't understand anything I say, do you? Well, I wish you were never born." For a split second, his heart wrenched in his chest as he saw hot tears coil in Chanyeol's eyes. He convinced himself that there was no way he could understand the malice behind his words, and Chanyeol was only crying like the baby he was because he didn't want to be scolded. Baekhyun turned around and pressed the button for the crosswalk lights again.

I wish you were never born.

Baekhyun sighed, staring at the blank pages of his homework as if the answers would magically write themselves down. After Chanyeol moved in, studying had become a chore. He couldn't concentrate because Chanyeol always watched dramas in the living room with the volume turned up high. Whenever Baekhyun said something about how distracting it was, his mother always took Chanyeol's side anyways.

Tonight, she wasn't here because she had yet a third job to work until midnight, which meant that Baekhyun had to make dinner and bathe Chanyeol before bed. He solved dinner with ramen (Chanyeol only ate the noodles because the soup was too spicy for him), but he wasn't looking forward to bathtime because, ick, he had to bathe a grown man.

Pulling the door open, he walked out to the living room and found Chanyeol curled up in a Pororo blanket too small for him, a tub of ice cream held between his crossed ankles. He was watching the drama, Secret Garden, so intensely that Baekhyun almost felt bad when he turned the television off.

"I'm doing my homework right now and I can't concentrate because of you," he muttered, tossing Chanyeol his notebook and pencil that were on the coffee table, "You do your homework, I'll do mine."

Thankfully, Chanyeol wasn't the type to argue, so as soon as Baekhyun gave him something else to do, he was focused on it.

In the middle of his studying, he thought Chanyeol had gone to sleep because it was quiet outside, so when he gave himself a ten minute break to drink some water, he found the boy huddled over the table, counting numbers on his fingers. For what it was worth, Chanyeol had more ambition than Baekhyun had with studying. Even if he couldn't learn addition so easily, he at least tried everyday until he'd get one question right out of a hundred.

"You're hopeless..." Baekhyun sighed as he walked past Chanyeol, "Hey, Yeol, let's take a bath."

Taking a bath for Chanyeol was like the best adventure of the day, while it was a chore for Baekhyun to wash him everywhere, and by everywhere, he meant everywhere: behind the ears, between his legs, and under his pits. He wore the red rubber gloves his mother used to wash dishes when he scrubbed Chanyeol's hair, making retching sounds everytime his hands would slide over a forbidden area.

"Ah, Baekhyun, soap!" Chanyeol whined, squeezing his eyes shut when the suds stung them. "Baekhyunn!"

"Shut up!" he huffed in a thick, country accent, hosing his stepbrother's face down until Chanyeol was sputtering for air. "You have to be thankful you have a brother like me to take care of your stupid ," Baekhyun muttered while massaging Chanyeol's scalp with shampoo, having pulled up a chair behind the tub to make the job easier. He sighed, pulling off the gloves so he could lather his hair a little better with his bare hands. After a while, the strain in Chanyeol's neck loosened and Baekhyun figured he had fallen asleep again.

If he was asleep...

"I didn't mean to yell at you earlier," Baekhyun hesitantly murmured, "I was just so angry that I had to keep worrying about you on top of all the other things I needed to worry about. I thought you were just there to ruin my life. You kind of are..." He trailed off, leaning over to catch a glimpse of Chanyeol's closed eyelids and twitching lips. He rolled his own eyes. "But you're too stupid to even know what you're doing wrong..."

His fingers slipped over some fleshy scar right above Chanyeol's ear, something he happened to miss since he always washed his hair with gloves on before. The scar was long and thick, running from the back of his skull to his ear. Touching it sent shivers down Baekhyun's spine.

"Clumsy idiot."

After bathing and dressing Chanyeol, Baekhyun carried the half-conscious Chanyeol by his arm, dropping him on the living room couch with a blanket tucked around him. He was so tired that he didn't want to go back to studying, so he closed his textbooks again and turned off the desk lamp. Just when he was about to go to bed himself, he saw a piece of paper wedged under his door, something he had overlooked when he pulled it open before.

It was poorly folded and looked like a page torn out of Chanyeol's math notebook.

Jumping sideways onto his bed, he rested his head on a pillow and unfolded the thick note to find a message written inside in poor, but endearing handwriting:

Byun Backhin

Park Chanyeol

I'm sorry...

Author's Note: I think it's about time I left an author's note! Thank you for reading this far! I'm thankful for every one of your comments that you leave because it inspires me to write faster updates! ^^ Yes, as most of you guys have suspected, this is an angst fic and I guarantee those with a weak heart will shed some tears, puhahaha. I recently got into Baekyeol, so this is my lame shot at writing something for them. Please leave some feedback? I'd love to hear what you think so far!