So Don't Regret

ft. Lee Chaerin & EXO // for -chroronoa

Narrator's POV

Every day, Lee Chaerin wakes up to find a new sticker on her window.

Today, it's a red machine man whom she takes to be a Power Ranger, except it looks messy, like someone had drawn an outline and decided to color it in with red Sharpie before giving up and just leaving it like that. It's also huge and takes up a good quarter of a pane.

Chaerin sighs. It'll be a pain to take off, especially if it rains later in the day. It had taken her a good two weeks to scratch off the gunky collection back in April, when the rain had been nearly constant.

She flips off her window. She knows it won't be seen by the perpetrators, but it makes her feel better nonetheless.

- - -

She's not even a yard away from her front porch when she's suddenly attacked by a long-limbed bush-haired entity.

"Hey noona!" aforementioned entity yells. "Didya like our present today? Yixing drew it himself, y'know. Was it pretty?"

Chaerin shakes herself free (a rather simple task, given that she's still a good head taller than him). "No. it was ugly as hell, actually."

She almost feels guilty when she sees the stricken look on the boy's face, but really, she doesn't have time for this. School starts in twenty minutes and she hadn't thought to budget time for a group of persistent brats.

She feels absolutely guilt at all when the stricken look slides off the boy's face and he shrugs. "Sehun made it ugly with his coloring, probably. We shouldn't have let him touch it. But it was his sticker-making kit and he probably would have bit us if we didn't let him do something. Why does he even bite, though? Like, everyone tells him that that's not nice and he still does it."

Taking advantage of his momentary distraction, Chaerin quickens her pace. She doubts that Chanyeol will follow her to the bus stop, because it's somewhat far away and her parents had decided to move to the middle of goddamn nowhere and it takes forever to get anywhere, including to goddamn school, which she has to get to or else her douchebag of a teacher will use that as an excuse to lecture her in "responsibility" again.

"Hi, noona," says someone softly from about waist-level, and Chaerin jerks out of her thoughts (and almost her skin). When she looks down, she's greeted with a mop of dark hair and large inquiring eyes.

"Hi, Jongin," she says, almost resignedly. Jongin, at least, she can deal with. Jongin isn't old enough to try and be "cool" like Kris, isn't as bratty as Sehun, and isn't as straight-out crazy as Chanyeol.

Who, as she saw when she glanced back, was now wandering in someone's yard, staring straight up at the trees.

"What is he even doing," she wonders aloud to herself.

Jongin glances at Chanyeol too, and then mumbles something about windows and falling.

"Falling off what?" Chaerin asks him.

Jongin shrugs and mumbles something about trees, which Chaerin snorts at. The mental image of Chanyeol, all wild-limbed and wild-haired and still missing teeth, scrambling up a tree trunk was a bit more than absurd.

"I didn't think he climbed trees."

Jongin shakes his head. "He makes me climb them."

"Jongin-ah! Chanyeol-ah!" someone calls from behind, and Jongin turns around with a wave and a "bye, noona."

As he walks away, Chaerin glances at his torn jeans. Then she thinks about the tree right outside her stickered window and wonders if she should tell her parents about a possible security hazard.

- - -

Chaerin wants to kill whoever came up with the idea of "school".

She'd actually made it in time to the bus, even with the severe derailment of Chanyeol. That hadn't saved her from a "caring" lecture from her calculus teacher, who had told her that she would need to test better if she ever wanted to do good on the college entrance exams.

All she can think of are the twelve little boys who run around, climbing trees and making stickers and how they don't have to worry about grades. They don't have to worry about getting into college, about taking a test that could determine if you work in a cushy office job or end up on the streets.

Except that, in a few years, they'll be worrying about that too. They'll be older and jaded and deal with the jeers of people when they aren't first, when they aren't even in the top half of their class. They won't be running around anymore. They won't climb trees or have sticker-making kits anymore.

(she pictures twelve zombies in a dulling house and thinks no, never)

Sometimes, Chaerin hates the world.

- - -

When she gets home from school, she sees Minseok and Luhan playing soccer on their lawn. There are a gaggle of girls across the street, whispering and pointing. Chaerin rolls her eyes at them.

"Hey noona," Minseok calls. "Wanna join us?"

She shakes her head, because she has homework and other things she needs to do right now.

"You sure?" Luhan asks. He sits on the ground, starts untying his shoe. "I'm beating Baozi so hard right now. I can take on both of you."

"No you can't," Minseok scoffs. He kicks the ball at Luhan's unprotected shin, eliciting a yelp, and just smirks while the other boy stink-eyes him to death. "One point more isn't a smackdown."

"Considering it's double what you have, I'd say it is," Luhan retorts, rubbing his slightly bruised shin.

Chaerin glances at her backpack, at her watch, and thinks what the hell. "How about I verse both of you?"

(she knows she'll regret this later, when she's up past midnight trying to read three books at the same time. now, though, with the wind in her hair and the sun in her eyes, she only can think this is worth it)

- - -

She wakes up the next morning to a gel cling that spells out "noona iz best" plastered over the Power Ranger from yesterday. It's backwards from her point of view and the entire thing is lopsided, with the "iz" about an entire inch lower than the other two words, but it's still one of the most beautiful things she's ever seen.

("hey noona! sehun got a cool gel-making set yesterday. didya like it?)

(fin.)

(unnamed1demannu); 

yeah so idek what this was
i changed a lot; sorry about that. plot bunnies didn't go the way i wanted them to go. also, i didn't involve all of the exo characters because otherwise it would have been a fest of "person 1 did this, then person 2 did this, then persons 3 4 and 5 laughed while person 6 fell asleep and persons 7 and 8 killed a duck" or something like that. also, apparently i can't do comedy without it ending in angst or pure crack?
also this was a huge rush job. that's why it isn't nearly as long as most of my other stuff and why it probably like heck too.