Change is a word Ryeowook is all too familiar with. He sits on the bench in the train station, staring resolutely forward even as his phone vibrates in his pocket. It’s not Siwon, no, not when Siwon is probably off in a celebratory party, getting to know his new band mates. Somehow, he feels more than thinks that he should be happy about this, but he feels the ache all too well, anyway. It could be Sungmin, but he has other friends, too, and he doesn’t stick around Ryeowook the whole time, anyway. He has places to be, girls to charm, and Ryeowook isn’t a girl, just a really good friend.

Friend. Ryeowook scrunches up his face, slouching in his seat. He’s a horrible one, in some ways.

“I thought you’d be here,” someone says, quietly. Ryeowook doesn’t have the heart to turn around to look at him. “Did you lose your train ticket?” Kyuhyun asks, teasingly, with only a touch of kindness. He doesn’t need to look like an angel this time.

“It fell in the tracks,” Ryeowook lies, the card in his pocket, “and I don’t have money so you have to treat me, Kyu.”

Kyuhyun laughs, pushing him off the bench. It’s a distraction, an insufficient one, but it’s all he has to give, for now.

“Don’t cry,” Kyuhyun says, and if he were Siwon, he would have added, it makes you look more like a monkey, but he doesn’t. It’s the face Ryeowook makes that Kyuhyun realizes Siwon will never be able to see, and he relishes in it, completely, “don’t cry.”

Ryeowook doesn’t hear him.

----------------------------------------------------------


Honesty is a good word. Fortitude is another. Kyuhyun can’t claim to be good at both.

“I kissed a girl in the staircase,” Kyuhyun says, as if reciting from memory, “it was a good kiss.”

Half-truths are best kept in closets. The only truth in it is that it occurred in a staircase, and it was a good kiss. Girl isn’t quite the right word, but it changes a lot of things. uality. Suppositions. Chances. Discrimination.

He thinks of writing a letter addressed to Ryeowook, thirty years later. Do you remember when you were fifteen and we were both a little drunk and I might have kissed you when you lay on my doormat, passed out? Would you ever forgive me for wanting more than you could give?

He forgets about it when he hears Ryeowook’s laugh, high-pitched and awkward but still so incredibly happy he wants to keep it close and replay it in his mind forever.

-----------------------------------------------------------


Kyuhyun talks too much, but there are times when he says too little, too. Ryeowook buys him a can of coffee from the convenience store, and watches him stare at it as he sips at his own juice box.

“Stop thinking,” Ryeowook says, when all he wants to say is, I can’t read you, “I get fidgety when you do.”

“I figured I had to do some of the thinking, for both of us,” Kyuhyun says, all smiles, a beautiful save, but Ryeowook thinks he can see some loneliness in it, if he tries to find it.

No, he’s too much of a coward.

------------------------------------------------------------

H-e-l-p-m-e, Ryeowook writes on the window, and Kyuhyun wipes it with the sleeves of his coat, watching the letters disappear as Siwon envelopes Ryeowook into a hug. His face is unreadable, but…

There’s no mistake about what it’s called.

Kyuhyun is a narrator in Ryeowook’s story. Nothing else, nothing more. Let him use words to relate the little things that make Ryeowook wonderful, but let him rarely be the cause.

Quiet; don’t break. Don’t break.

------------------------------------------------------------

“You’re my favorite,” Ryeowook says, sleepily, and Kyuhyun passes a hand over Ryeowook’s forehead, his hair, the back of his neck, placing a pliant kiss over where his hands linger. No, he thinks, I’m not, but instead he says: “I’m glad.”

Some things stay the same.