Drabble: One character visits the other’s grave.
Title: [2] – Breathe Me In
Pairing: 2Jo / Changjoe
Rating: PG 13+ / M
Summary: It’s been two months since Byunghun left. No.2 of the Drabble Masterlist

Today was different. From waking up, to getting ready and making his way down the street to the same florist he had always visited this time of year. He told himself he would be used to it by now.

Yet it had only been two months.

Setting a slow pace, Jonghyun holds two white roses, his lips set in a thin line. Two months had passed, and yet it felt considerably less. Almost like the coming and going of the tide. Or the way a nomad camps in one place, before quickly moving to another. His fingers fumble with the paper wrapped around the roses, sighing softly as he crosses the road.

The walk was always one of the hardest things to do.

Jonghyun decides that he was going to add another rose with each passing month, and when it had been a year, he’d change the color of the flower, and start all over again. It was a simple gesture, and he always remembered how Byunghun commented on all the different colors of their surroundings.

Byunghun.

The very name made Jonghyun’s heart swell slightly. It had created a lump in his throat as his mind began to flood with memories, with fantasies. If he wasn’t so stupid, then he would be with Jonghyun now. He’d be laughing, smiling.

He’d be holding Jonghyun close at night.

Jaw tight and fingers curling tighter around the roses he held, he had managed to find his way into the graveyard, taking the quickest way through to the far end. It took Jonghyun all of his strength to finally walk up to the small gravestone, with nothing but a name, a date, and a ‘we will remember you’ etched into the stone.

“Hi, Byung.” Jonghyun kneels down, setting the roses against the cool stone.

Two months without a reply, without a “Hi Jonghyun,” back. The younger knew that the grief wouldn’t disappear. Not for a while, anyway.

“Things are back to normal I suppose,” Jonghyun begins, taking a seat by the tombstone and looking out toward the countless others that littered the area. “The others have gone back to their routine, and your bed is still the same way that you left it. Well, we tidied up all your clothes…” He reaches down, grabbing a few blades of grass, before pulling them up off the ground, giving his fingers something to do as he muses on what to say next.

“It’s kind of quiet now, since there’s no piano playing in the mornings anymore…And we always have more milk than normal. Remember that, Byung? You always used to drink all the milk, hoping you’d get taller then we’d all laugh when we didn’t believe you.”

Jonghyun laughs softly, smiling to himself before picking more blades of grass.

“I miss you, Byung.” His throat becomes parched all of a sudden, his voice lowering almost to nothing but a whisper. “I miss you so much. I miss how you’d come into my bed sometimes cause I was always warmer than the blankets on your bed. How you watched me when I came out of the shower, thinking I didn’t notice. And your stupid smile. God, your stupid smile…I woke up to it once…You were smiling about how I tangled my legs with yours in my sleep, how you were so close that you didn’t even have to move to kiss my nose. And how about that time when you threw water on me to wake me up? And how you took me into the kitchen when no one else was around to give me a good morning kiss?”

Tears well up in Jonghyun’s eyes, and he looks up toward the sky.

“Why are you looking up, Byung?”

“It helps me, so I don’t cry.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“If I look up, the tears won’t fall, silly.”

Jonghyun laughs again at the memory, and his body betrays him, a single tear rolling down his cheek. He gives another look to the tombstone, placing his hand onto it and he closes his eyes, hoping the crying would stop before he headed back home.

It had taken him a solid ten minutes to calm down.

But before he left, he placed one quick kiss to the stone, and set a keychain next to the roses.

The keychain was a milkbottle.