When he woke up, Chanyeol had a cephalalgia. It burned his head, flashing white behind his eyes, pain soaring up to the brain. Torrid aseptic smells had infiltrated his nostrils.

The man looked around the room, a wretched feeling in his heart, the broken pieces seeming to pierce his lungs and un-enable him to breathe. The walls, furniture, flooring, blankets, everything was a blinding alabaster shade. Feathery pillows supported Chanyeol’s gray matter, with crispations gathered in a bunch underneath him.

Men in long jackets with perfectly pressed trousers entered the niche. One (coiffed blonde hair and globular spectacles perched on his nose bridge) held out his metacarpus to Chanyeol, offering words of attempted-assuagement in a cloudy voice.

‘It’s good to see you finally awake,’ the solacing was lost in sugar-coated grins all around. ‘We were beginning to wonder when you’d ever rouse again.’

Chanyeol blinked, eyelashes delicately grazing the deep bags now formed in a gentle dip underneath his dusky-browns. Air was passed between the man and the other beings in the room, a smokey trail of desperation and lost sleep. The medics shifted, exchanging slight glances in anticipation.

‘Where’s Baekhyun?’ he managed to choke out, aqua pura seeming to burn behind his optics. The name felt like a thousand needles protruding from tender skin, prickling sensations left in his throat.

At the sight of the doctors biting their lips uncomfortably, Chanyeol began to pull himself up, rustling the blankets lain across his torso and gripping the bed handles for support.

‘Mr. Park, it really would be best for you to stay down, your head - it isn’t fully healed yet -’

‘Where is he,’ Chanyeol deadpanned, eyes lost of the familiar luster they once held. He eased back against the cushions, sighing as tension was released from rigid muscles. The fire still blazed in behind his lids. Distracting white flashes, set in bold patterns of swirls and curly-Q’s, splattered across the image placed before him, blocking any view of said icon. A yawn seeped through Chanyeol’s lips as he slid down in his cot, bunching sheets in tight fists that eased up once the throb of the increased motion of pressure was acknowledged.

‘It’s probably a better idea to wait on that information,’ the doctor spoke again, engulfing the doorknob in his pale mitts and quietly motioning for his colleagues to depart. Once again, Chanyeol found himself alone in the room, the blankness of said space almost unbearable.

He took the opportunity to sort out his thoughts as soulless eyes studied the images flickering past on the television screen in a recess of his joint. The last thing he remembered was coffee, Kyungsoo. Baekhyun too, as was expected, although Chanyeol chose to shove that theorization far, far away from himself. The very image of his grinning, bantam infatuate sent Chanyeol into a mental frenzy so intense he grew dizzy. Quiet whispers of memory wormed their ways into Chanyeol’s remembrance, leaving him breathless with images of Baekhyun and himself, lounging together on stifling summer evenings in front of the broken-down fan, wind fluttering gentle strands of hair and poorly attempting to dry perspiration gathering against Adam’s apples. It was these very nights that our pair resolved to taking secret, late-night dips in the neighbor's’ pool, stripping themselves of useless cloth and disposing of the garments in surrounding bushes. Soft kisses passed between slick, dripping bodies was not uncommon, fingers hopelessly entangled in saturated fringes. Those moments, Chanyeol could see stars shimmer in Baekhyun’s exquisite cocoa eyes, and the beating of his heart proved incomparable to any other.

Tears began to sparkle against Chanyeol’s lashes as he dispelled the mnemonic.

After all, some things just weren’t meant to be thought of twice.