"What if I don't come back?" Chanyeol asked and tried not to sound as if he was trying to provoke an argument. He didn't want to show just how much the whole situation bothered him. His mistake had caused the whole awkwardness after all. He was the one who had somehow gone overboard because he didn't know himself any longer just what he was trying to do.
"You'd be on your own if you got caught," Xiumin said and obviously still avoided his gaze. "We have to leave before the border closes, so if you're not back in time, there's nothing we can do."
Chanyeol had single-handedly ruined everything.

District 3, the place he had always known as 'home'. He had assumed that they would never go there. The risk was too high because there were too many people who knew Chanyeol and the fact that he had been sentenced to death before. Also, there was always the chance that he would just run away or sabotage a job that inclided anyone he knew personally. If he was the boss, he wouldn't have come. But Kris probably was more trusting than he could ever be and here they were.
Chanyeol had no idea what to do. He couldn't possibly stay but the familiar streets and their smell were just too tempting. No matter how great his opportunities outside were, only here he felt as if he actually belonged.

It was obvious that this job had never meant to include him. The others had come here before, so he didn't even need to explain anything about the infrastructure, most Special Districts were more or less the same anyway. Instead he was told that he was to stay away from any crowded places and that he would have to be back before sunset.
Why Kris had suddenly decided to change their next destination to District 3, Chanyeol didn't know, at least not for sure. He never meant to complain about anything because he knew that there was no turning back. Any thought about his family he just tried to blank out, not because he didn't care any longer but because he couldn't have changed anything anyway.

His sister he tried not to mention at all around the others. Each of them had something they didn't want to talk about and for him it was her. Anything else of his past he didn't mind sharing but she was different. By himself he could imagine her to be alive and well and maybe already outside the district, leading a normal life like the heroine in a daily drama. It was all he wanted for her and without anyone to question him, he almost reached the point where he fully believed his hopes. She was in his heart, untouched and safe.

Him being the foreigner who needed a translator of course helped a lot. Xiumin and Luhan, the only ones he could have proper conversations with, were incredibly understanding towards anyone who wanted to avoid a topic, obviously because they both kept more than enough secrets themselves. No one really had the time to bother with Chanyeol's left behind family. On the contrary, the only issue was always just the two. Whenever they suddenly left without any further explanation, he noticed the tenseness. Tao complained, Kris seemed worried, Lay was oblivious. There was no one he could have asked about it but he figured that he wasn't the only one who thought that something about them was odd.
In the end it was probably because he didn't really expect it, that it affected him so much when Xiumin suddenly mentioned his sister. Xiumin never wanted to know much about Chanyeol's life in District 3. He translated whatever the others wanted to know but it was mostly Luhan who was curious about Chanyeol's childhood. Around Xiumin he always just talked about the present and he liked it that way because it was less troublesome. It was as if they had this silent agreement that in each other's company they simply didn't have a past.

But Xiumin knew about his sister and Chanyeol had been drunk and sentimental during that one damn evening  a few weeks ago that had ruined everything. He had talked about their childhood and about how she was easily the sweetest girl he ever met and it had been as if he was being flooded with all the memories he had tried to shut in over months. There had been her arguing with her father about staying in the district and her keeping that old fire-extinguisher in her room. "See?" she had said back then. "I can take care of myself. You don't need powers to live here, so why should I leave everyone I love just to be around those normal freaks?" He had seen the sister of his memories bleeding and wimpering again and he just... Just...

He shook his head to get rid of the thought as he hurried along the familiar back alleys that probably wouldn't ever change. His mind was a mess but just to follow those old shortcuts he had followed since childhood calmed him down a lot. Outside he always got lost, always stumbling over his own feet, but here he knew the rules. He knew the alleys that were always empty and how to avoid running into anyone he didn't want to meet. This was his turf, the only home he had known in over twenty years.

He figured that his parents probably wouldn't live in the same house any longer, not after that horrible night, so he immediately went to his paternal grandparents' apartment. It was in a shabby building only two blocks away, so it was usually there they went whenever there was a problem. Chanyeol's father had gone there whenever his wife decided to throw him ou and around there the Kang family members also always built up their ice rink in winter and... He didn't actually want to think about ice.

Once the house was in sight, he suddenly felt doubtful whether he really should have come. What if the situation was even worse than anticipated? What if none of them were all right? They probably thought that he was already dead, so who was he to suddenly come back? No matter how much he wanted to stay, he couldn't and he hated the thought of having to say goodbye again.
He pondered for what felt like an eternity and was about to turn back, when his sleeve caught fire.
"Oh, dear, I'm so sorry," a voice behind him shrieked and there was a noise of clacking heels coming closer. "I have no idea how that happened. I'm so sorry, really, I must have mistaken you for someone else."
He felt sick. And happy and nervous and stunned when he shook his arm and snorted, "I hope it's not your son you confused me with but someone who actually deserves this."
It probably was too much to expect a witty retort, but he didn't think that he would shock his mother so much, she not only dropped her handbag, she also set fire to it and the whole pavement around them.

There were so many things he had wanted to say but as he sat in his grandparents' living room and listened to his grandmother shouting commands into the phone while his mother kept his hand as if she was too afraid to let go, he felt numb.
"I don't care if her husband comes or not, as long as you bring Yura," his grandmother yelled, probably at his father. "Yes, it is important and yes, when I say 'right now', I mean it. Just how often do I need to repeat myself before you understand? I can't believe I raised you into such a blockhead."
Barely anything had changed, whether it was his mother's temper or his grandmother's verbal abuse. The house smelled the same, sitting on the old couch felt the same and the same pictures were in their cheap golden frames. Only the black-and-white one of himself on the family altar and the picture of his sister in a bright dress standing next to a guy he had never seen before hadn't been there when he had paid his last visit. His sister was married to a Special Citizen as the loyal soul she was, he heard. She probably couldn't bear to leave after all.

And suddenly he felt out of place at home, as if his family suddenly lived in a completely different sphere. He was touched, yes, but by far not as overwhelmed as he thought he would be. All this time he had thought that he was still the same, that he wouldn't ever change but now that he was in the place he had left behind, he realized that something about him was different.

"Oh my, was there anyone you could talk to? To think that you were alone in that strange country all this time..." his mother gasped, still not letting go of him. He knew what she was thinking, he had grown up with the same prejudices. Everyone bought the goods Chinese merchants brought but still hated them for being foreign. The whole slave trade also wasn't anything he could have been proud of, so he didn't even mention that bit. Not everything about it was bad and he had been incredibly lucky, but to explain that wasn't easy.

"Do they even have proper food? You look like a stick," his grandmother asked with a frown before she went to the kitchen to get him some scraps and he answered that he of course missed her home cooking. It wasn't completely wrong either, he really did miss it, but he didn't have the heart to tell them that the districts further from Seoul usually had much fresher and nicer food and that Chinese markets sold everything. For a while he had eaten mangoes at least once a day, simply because they were cheap and available and because it seemed like a dream to him. As a child he had never had opportunities like that.

"How could you just break our hearts like that?" his sister wailed as he held her in his arms. She was pregnant and her husband stood in the door with a straight face, like the embodiment of a typical husband in District 3. Men who found wives always looked like that, full of strength and determination. His wife met her supposedly dead brother and he looked threatened. Right. Because strong men had to father the future generation with the aid of any female available.

He didn't mean to compare his old and his new life because he knew that there wasn't much time before he had to leave. But the more relatives poured in to break out into tears because their beloved child was back, the more obvious it became that he couldn't stay. He loved them all and he couldn't even put into words how glad he was to see that they were well, but this world didn't need him. To this society he was like unnecessary ballast and what he had never realized as he was living in District 3, suddenly seemed weirdly obvious to him: Right from the start he had never had a chance to fufill his stupid dream of an own family. His father maybe was a bit of an exception because he found an excentric wife, but Chanyeol ultimately was bound to become one of the losers of society who had to watch stronger men get all the females. Marriage usually wasn't about love but about conquest and every relationship between all the males who were left behind existed out of practicality. He had met dozens of desperate men from other districts over the last months and he had always looked down on them a little, never really aware that he probably was just like them. To break out had been that one big chance he had been given and now that he was back he finally fully appreciated it.

"You should stay," his sister said after taking him to the side. His family was about to turn his return into a party. Different relatives produced food from mysterious sources. "I mean, this is where you belong and we all missed you so much. I'm sure there's a way."
He didn't know what to say, not only because she seemed to realize how impossible it was herself, but also because he had thought to ask her to come with him instead. To her there was no need to stay in captivity. It was too dangerous, even if her husband could break stones. And anyway, how many broken stones could a family possibly need? Why were useful powers so unpopular among Special Citizens? The Chinese maybe were weaker in comparison but without useful powers like the one Lay had for example, Chanyeol probably would have bled to death under the attack of showy and aggressive Koreans.
"Or do you have anyone waiting for you?" she asked when he kept quiet. "They have more women over there, don't they?"
"They do but that's not it," he muttered and tried to get back to the centre of the party, but she held him back.
"There is someone," she stated, as if there wasn't even a need for him to confirm her suspicion, and searched his gaze. It had always been much to easy for her to figure him out. "Oh, my, that's wonderful! Is she- I mean, can we meet her? Did she come with you?"
"That's not it," he said once more as he turned away to talk to someone else.

There was someone, in a way. 'She' was there and 'she' could have talked to his family. Like his mother 'she' was strong and out of control and he was sure that his grandmother would claim to dislike 'her', as she usually did with any outsider whom she ultimately found a place for in her heart.
The problem was that 'she' didn't wait for him, at least not because 'she' wanted to.

Right from the start he had preferred Xiumin over Luhan but for the longest time he had believed that they simply had more in common as people from the same country. Xiumin pampered him out of pity and Chanyeol felt more comfortable around someone without a Chinese accent. It made perfect sense, so he didn't even question his attachment, not even when he got along with everyone else just fine. Luhan was easy-going, faithful in his translations and less prejudiced, Lay got used to explaning things through gestures, Tao actually was a lot more agreeable whenever Xiumin wasn't around and Kris apparently was a communication genius, so they almost had something like a conversation before, with bits of Korean, Chinese, gibberish and makeshift sign language. And yet, no matter how comfortable he felt around them, Chanyeol always somehow liked Xiumin, his patience and his occasional evasiveness and brutality a little better.
He told himself that it was just friendship and the loneliness of being so far from home. Whenever Xiumin and Luhan left him behind to disappear without a proper explanation, he thought he only felt bad because he had no one to talk to. That he felt hurt whenever Xiumin unintentionally made a harsh comment about Special Citizens, he didn't actually connect with Xiumin as a person at first but with himself feeling offended as part of a group.
Yes, he cared about Xiumin but it had never seemed particularly unusual to him.

It was that evening when they came back from the job in District 54 in Sinuiju, north of Pyongyang in the northern half of Korea, close to the Chinese border. That place was easily the worst one Chanyeol had ever gone to. He heard that centuries ago, the whole country had been divided and that the people in the north had lived under horrible conditions. They only became whole again when the first Special Districts in the south had already been built, the result being that the new districts in the north were said to have the harshest living conditions in the entire country.
Under normal circumstances they wouldn't have gone there because neither Chanyeol nor Xiumin could fake to be natives, so they didn't even have that advantage. The people living there also usually weren't very healthy. But their buyer apparently wanted something exotic, something even rarer than slaves with powers from the south of the Korean Peninsula. He was willing to pay, so they went.
It went considerably well. Xiumin almost killed two slaves, Kris had his hand broken and Chanyeol's leg was bleeding, but none of those things were tragic or impossible to mend, so they celebrated their success.

They all had too much to drink that night, though all to varying degrees, so none of them acted all that normal to begin with. Luhan for example just kept laughing at everything and everyone around him, whether it was the glass shards he stepped into because someone had dropped a bottle, Lay muttering incomprehensinle words, possibly swears, as he tried to pull them out or Xiumin who caused Luhan's arm to be covered in frost as he clung to it like a worried mother. At least to Luhan all of that seemed hysterical.
Lay meanwhile seemed all right, at least until he started to sing what Tao (with the aid of Xiumin, the unreliable translator) called 'songs for old ladies'. Before that Lay not only saved Luhan but also Kris who had dozed off and was floating over the kitchen table. Lay pulled him down and cleaned away the broken glass but after that he, like the others, apparently lost his mind.
The whole craziness made Chanyeol wonder whether the most sober one wasn't him. He was pretty sure that he had at least as much to drink as them, and yet he neither felt disoriented, funny nor overly excited about anything. Whether Koreans in general were heavier drinkers than the Chinese or whether the people in District 3 just were more desperate to forget about their worries, he didn't know. But it was a fact that it definitely took much more to knock him out. The only thing the alcohol really did to him, was that he felt somewhat melancholic.

If Xiumin hadn't mentioned his sister, nothing would have happened. Or so he liked to think.
He couldn't even remember how the topic came up. One moment they sat on the couch and were appalled at the living conditions in District 54, then they argued about the best type of stew (Xiumin apparently thought that meat was the perfect main ingredient for anything and Chanyeol had always thought of meat as something so precious and rare, it seemed like a shame in his eyes to throw it into soup) and before he knew it, he was sobbing. It was probably the food. He might have mentioned his sister's kimchi stew and Xiumin might have asked whether he missed it. Whatever it had been though, once he was past that one barrier, he couldn't think straight any longer. His worry spread like cancer cells in his body and he felt as though he was slowly drifting into insanity as he kept talking and realized how old all his memories were. His sister, just like everyone else he kept in his heart, had become an outdated version.
That Xiumin was still next to him he probably wasn't fully aware of any longer at that point, as he kept sinking into a puddle of fears and self-pity. It was as if he accidentally trapped himself in his own head, when the touch of cold fingertips on his face startled him.
"You shouldn't be unhappy," Xiumin slurred as he tried to pull up Chanyeol's cheeks to produce a grimace. It took Chanyeol a few seconds before he understood what Xiumin was trying to do but in the end he had to laugh.

"Why is it that your fingers are always cold?" he asked in exasperation and took Xiumin's hands in his. He half expected to be pushed away because 'he was too warm', as Xiumin usually claimed. Xiumin avoided most physical contact to anyone, a little like a figurine in a snow globe. He could be seen and was still alone in a white hazard.
"Cause I'm cold," Xiumin said and frowned, as if the whole thing really was odd. "I'm always cold. See?" He took Chanyeol's hand and made it touch the part of his neck right under his ear, literally the only other part of his body apart from his face and his hands that usually wasn't covered in layers of clothes. And something about that knowledge really was odd. Chanyeol meant to snort but somehow he couldn't.
"Do you like being cold?" he asked and knew how stupid he must have sounded. But somehow it wasn't about words any longer anyway. It was about the way Xiumin's pale skin felt and about a feeling Chanyeol assess because it wasn't among the patterns he knew.
"I hate it," Xiumin said quietly.
And even then Chanyeol knew that he must have sounded even worse, creepy even, or cheesy, but the words just left his mouth before he could stop them. "I can make you warm," he said.

Afterwards he liked to think that he had been too intoxicated then, but that was not more than an excuse. Thoughts had been rushing through his mind in a vividness he hadn't known before and that he still clearly remembered. It was as if he finally understood something important, something he had always looked at from the wrong angle.
All this time he had thought that 'romantic love' was something only some people would ever achieve, people like his parents who had been lucky and who had married because they were in love. Some couples might have found 'love' as well at some point but certainly no one in those relationships between left-behind males. To Chanyeol it was never chiefly 'romantic love' he aimed for, but 'family love', the only love he had ever met and that he wanted to preserve.
This feeling was different because it was immediate and not rational. He didn't care about his future, there was just the present. Maybe it really was that simple.
But just when he wondered whether this kind of togetherness maybe wasn't what he should have been longing for much earlier, at least Xiumin woke up from his trance. They were so close, Chanyeol could feel the cold crawling over his skin while Xiumin's cheeks were flushed.
"This," Xiumin muttered as he jumped up in utter horror. "This isn't right. This is not what you want."

And although they stopped whatever could have happened, the moment just destroyed everything. Chanyeol had no idea just what wasn't right or what it was Xiumin thought he didn't want. At first he didn't even think so much about it, apart from that vague feeling that he overstepped something like a border in his own depiction of his future. But Xiumin began to ignore him permanently and Chanyeol ended up being confused.

Plan A, to find a wife and build up a family with her.
Plan B, to find anyone available to stop being lonely.
Plan C, to die lonely.
Life in District 3 was that simple for a man and Chanyeol had always aimed for A. Anything lower would have felt as though he was giving up before he tried. B and C were only minimally different to him because he connected neither with 'love', neither included children after all. But suddenly he wasn't so sure any longer.

Xiumin avoiding him made him realize one thing: He hated it. He hated it so much, he felt incredibly helpless because he couldn't just force them to go back to being the way they had been. Xiumin was stronger and more wilful after all. Whatever he didn't want, wouldn't be.
Chanyeol had no experience with feelings like that. The love for his family, the awkwardness around the first girl he liked, the friendship for guys he had known since childhood, that weird loyalty for the others on the ship, nothing was like this feeling he suddenly had.
For the first time in months he was with his family and all he could think of was how much he would have liked Xiumin to be there to make it all right again.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Okay, first, I'm sorry that my updates are so irregular...

And seriously, this chapter not only is more than twice as long as usual, it took me days to write. I already had 3k words when I decided that they were no good and started from scratch. So, sorry if this is too messy/unclear/long.