Because each snowflake
is your each tear drop

Chanyeol opens and closes the little white box on the palm of his hands. He wonders how much a person can cry. Two days? Three weeks? A month? He chuckles to himself pathetically. What about him who’s been crying for the past two years, three months and one week?

‘They say that the only tears worth crying are the tears you can’t stop.’

“Don’t you get it? They’re making fun of you, Chanyeol!”

She yells at him loudly – but not angrily because no, she isn’t angry. More than the feeling of wanting to be mad, she’s sad. She doesn’t like how little he lets himself get treated. She doesn’t like how low and pitiful he lets himself be. Because she knows he’s more than that. He is special.

“Hey,” he says, trying to lighten up the mood.

He reaches for her arm but she slaps it away.

“They’re making fun of you, Chanyeol. Don’t you get that? They don’t treat you as a human being. They treat you as an animal and you let them do that! How long, huh? How long are you going to let them do this to you? How long?!”

She throws her hand exasperatedly before her legs weakened and she falls to the ground, her long, black hair covering her pretty but crestfallen face as she hugs her knees and buries her cries within them.

She loves him. She really does. And because of her love for him, it hurts her that he lets himself be treated in such a way he doesn’t deserve. He is kind and he is lovable. He doesn’t need them. He has her. Why does he let them treat him that way?

“Hey!” he immediately runs to her side and kneels before her. “Hey, listen to me. It’s alright. It’s alright,” he repeats over and over again, wrapping his long arms around her and feeling her shaking.

“It’s not alright, Chanyeol,” she murmurs through stifled cries. “It’s not right.”

“It’s alright,” he says nevertheless, her disheveled hair. “It’s going to be alright.”

She slowly moves her head, looking up at Chanyeol, crystal tears glistening on her warm, brown eyes and crimson lips quivering.

“Why won’t you cry?”

It hurts Chanyeol. It hurts him to see her this way because of him but Chanyeol doesn’t cry.

He looks at her face gently and lightly smiles at her. Then, he kisses her forehead and whispers, “They say that the only tears worth crying are the tears you can’t stop.”

He won’t cry for them. He would never cry for them.

She sniffles and cries harder, burying her face on his chest. ‘It’s not alright, Chanyeol. You deserve so much more. Why won’t you realize that?”

Chanyeol looks up at the sky, holding the little white box tightly in his hands. He sees billions of snowflakes falling from the sky and he muses that they almost look the same as the tears on her eyes. There are so many of them, billions of them.

He closes his eyes. “Thank you for crying those tears that I can’t cry.”

A teardrop fell but it’s not from the sky.

Eight days before Christmas.