Rating: PG13
Prompt: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

Chanyeol’s lost a lot of things in his life.

It’s easy enough to brush it off when they’re inconsequential - like that one lego piece from the kit, the red crayon from an otherwise full pack, or the arm off his favorite action figure.  He can still put together the lego model.  He can use colors other than red.  He can play with his action figure in a new way.  And after a while, he doesn’t remember there was ever anything missing at all.

Chanyeol loses bigger things too.  When he’s a kid, he loses his teeth.  He talks funny for a while, but then new ones grow in and he runs his tongue over them incessantly until he’s had them for so long that he forgot about the teeth he’d had before.

It’s not until he’s ten when Chanyeol experiences a loss that really sticks with him.  His ferret, his beloved pet and companion through many an adventure, dies during the night.  Chanyeol cries over the loss.  His heart aches because he misses him.  He sniffles and clings to his mother’s hand as his father digs a hole in the backyard to bury him.

“Everything dies,” his mother tells him, not unkindly.  “We have to grieve and accept the loss.  You’ll be happy again.  I promise.”

Chanyeol didn’t think so at the time, but his mother proved to be right.  Once Chanyeol accepted that his ferret was truly gone forever, he moved on.  It was empowering, knowing that he could rationalize the loss and the sadness ebbed from the edges of his heart until it’s as if he’d never felt it at all.  He learns from it, accepting that loss is going to happen regardless of whether he wants it or not.  It’s best to take it as it comes and move on.

Chanyeol loses his ity at 17 to the pretty girl in his chemistry class, and then again at 19 with the star of the basketball team when he comes to terms with his uality.  Neither of them feel like a loss.  After all, it’s only an expression.  It’s simple to brush away, leave it forgotten along the roadside of life.

Chanyeol loses friends when they go to separate colleges and drift apart over time.  He loses family members he only remembers meeting once in his life.  He deals with them individually, placing them in their own compartments and locking them away to be lost with all the other lost things.

It isn’t until he’s 23 when Chanyeol experiences a loss that he doesn't think he can recover from.  It’s supposed to be easier; he has so much experience with losing things and people that it shouldn’t ache so much.  Chanyeol can’t stop the first person he’s ever fallen in love with from walking out on him.  And it hurts.  It stings and it bites and it itches like a healing wound, only it’s not healing.  He just keeps picking at it and it festers around his heart.

Chanyeol is helpless to the longing pangs that stab his chest with every breath.  Over the days and weeks and months, they get better.  It eases up until he can breathe, but only for so long.  Chanyeol stares at his ceiling at night and it will all rush back.  He’ll instinctively reach for the other side of the bed, his hand landing on cool sheets instead of a warm body.  And it hurts.  No one ever said it would hurt this much.

Chanyeol moves on, albeit not as the same person.  His loss has changed him.  He doesn’t know how, exactly, but he doesn’t feel like he’s Chanyeol anymore.  He fills his life - and those empty places where lost things used to be - with new experiences and people.  He tries to pretend that it’s fine, because in the long run, it’s supposed to be.  Loss is something that can be gotten over.

Right?

Chanyeol sits in his living room, watching as his two boyfriends wrestle with each other while they load the washing machine.  He can only see parts of it, but he can hear the laughing and the clanging of someone being knocked against metal.  Sehun and Jongin came into his life just over a year ago.  They were a pair then, and they’re a pair now, only with Chanyeol all wrapped up in them both.

Sometimes he thinks about what it would be like to lose them.  He knows that one day he will.  It’s a certainty that either through his own stupidity or death, that he’s going to lose both of them one day.  He used to think that losing his first love was the worst of it.  It couldn’t possibly be worse than the first, fresh tear in the heart where love used to dwell.

This, he thinks, is different.  Chanyeol knew coming into this peculiar relationship that many things could happen, so very many things could go wrong.  And yet he dove in head first anyway.  Sehun and Jongin.  Jongin and Sehun.  Chanyeol can’t imagine his life without them anymore.  At night, he doesn’t think about that first lost love anymore because he has a body on either side of him.  He’s caught in their embrace and it chases away every insecurity.

Chanyeol knows it won’t last forever.  Nothing does.  And he knows that when they break, when he loses them - he may continue living on, but he won’t recover.  Not from this.  Not from so much love and devotion.  Chanyeol rolls to his side and indulges in the way Sehun’s back curves against his front.  Jongin curls behind him, an arm over Chanyeol’s waist and lips skimming over the back of his neck.

Nothing lasts forever.

Except maybe the hole that these two will leave behind when they’re gone.