They meet on a snowy winter morning, in the middle of a crowded bus-stop in Seoul, with the air around them freezing cold and with a wind that bites at any exposed skin it can reach.

Chanyeol has his nose stuffed into the fabric of a thick, woolen scarf, trying to shield himself from the prickling breeze, and he taps his foot on the pavement to the beat of whatever song plays through his earphones, too tired to sing along or even hum like he usually does. He has an exam to get to in just under half an hour, and the bus has yet to arrive. On top of that, he’d gotten barely a blink of sleep the night before, too nervous to go to bed, head stuck in textbooks and notes and flashcards, growing more tired and aggravated by the second.

A short boy with long, light-brown bangs that sweep over his eyes moves to stand next to him in the crowd, and their elbows brush together for a fleeting second, just long enough for Chanyeol to notice the slight shiver of the stranger’s frame. When he looks down, as subtly as possible (which, in Chanyeol standards, is basically the opposite of subtle), he immediately notices that the boy isn’t wearing any gloves, and that it leaves his hands exposed to the freezing temperature, with the skin blushed a dark pink, cracked slightly at the knuckles. He frowns sympathetically, and, before he really thinks about what he’s doing, Chanyeol finds himself slipping off one of his gloves and waving it in front of the shorter’s face.

“Take this.”, he mutters, a wave of steam oiling out of his mouth and disappearing in the air between them as he breathes.

The boy stares for only a moment before accepting the offered glove, slipping it onto his right hand with a grateful smile that somehow manages to make Chanyeol forget about how cold his newly-exposed hand feels without the added fabric.

“Thank you.”, the boy tells him, in a melodic sort of voice that has no place in the middle of a loud bundle of people at 7 in the morning, where it can’t be heard properly at all. Chanyeol wishes he weren’t so tall, so his ears could be closer to the boy’s mouth.

He smiles nonetheless, hoping it doesn’t give away how tired he feels, wondering if he could be even half as radiant as the other boy seems to do effortlessly. When he feels a warm weight pressing against his side, gaze snapping away from where he’d been staring at the stranger’s face for probably too long to be socially acceptable, Chanyeol notices that they’ve been pressed closer by the growing crowd of people waiting to board the bus that had, in the few minutes of him not paying attention to anything but the person next to him, arrived unnoticed.

When they board the already full bus, he automatically seeks out the shorter and makes sure to stand next to him. In his head, Chanyeol tells himself that he’s doing it so that he could get his other glove back. In his chest, where his heart stops for a beat and then starts working faster than it has in a very, very long time as he finds the other boy and their eyes meet immediately, Chanyeol knows that it’s for a different reason entirely.

///

It is exactly five days later that Chanyeol sees him again, on the same bus stop, at the same ungodly time of morning, in equally bad weather conditions that would call for a day spent inside- wrapped up in thick blankets and with steaming cups of tea to accompany a movie marathon- unless you’re a college student, in which case you’re stuck between two strangers at a bus stop, freezing your fingers off because your roommate decided to steal your new gloves two days earlier.

He smiles at the ground, looking from the corner of his eye at the boy who seems to notice something in Chanyeol’s general direction, making his way towards him with odd, skip-like steps that make him look like an excited child.

“It’s you!”, the same warm, melodic voice that has been stuck in Chanyeol’s head for the better part of this weak, says.

When he looks up, the boy is smiling up at him with a rectangle-shaped grin, showing off a pair of small, gloved hands with a look of pride on his blushed face.

“I didn’t forget them today.”, he jokes, not noticing how Chanyeol’s hands are stuffed deep into his coat pockets to shield them, albeit unsuccessfully, from the biting cold.

He smiles, wider and less tired than the last time they’d met, and nods in approval. Words are usually his strong point, even though he trips over them when too excited, sometimes stutters when nervous, and talks loudly at inappropriate times (the last one has been kindly pointed out, several times, by his roommate and best friend), but Chanyeol can’t think of a single thing to say right now.

The boy is smiling up at him, still, unfaltering and stunning, and Chanyeol’s forgotten how to do anything else but stare.

“Is your face cold?”, the boy asks him, sounding amused and worried at the same time.

Before Chanyeol can think to answer that yes, his face is freezing because the wind has decided to blow right at them this morning, he feels a pair of warm hands cupping his cheeks, thumbs rubbing in slow circles just underneath his eyes. He thinks, in the few moments it takes for his cheeks to turn from freezing to scalding hot, with a blush that’s probably spreading rapidly all the way up to the tops of his ears, that the pain in his chest is the result of a severe medical condition he’s never known about until now. Because this can’t be normal- it stops for a moment, and then it beats so hard he can feel the pulse vibrating painfully in his ears.

The boy’s toothy grin is gone, replaced by a small, shy-looking smile that reaches his eyes in a way that makes them crescent-shaped, the skin at their corners crinkling into tiny crow’s feet. Chanyeol stares at it for a long time before he remembers to look away, not noticing the amused glance that he receives in response.

When they get on the bus that morning, the boy seeks him out among the other people, looking over their heads with wide, curious eyes before they land on Chanyeol’s gaze, looking straight back at him. Chanyeol quickly gets used to the weird things his heart does whenever they look at each other during the entire half-hour-long commute.

///

“What’s your name?”

Chanyeol looks up from his phone, back leaning against a light-post just a few feet away from the bus stop’s benches, and his eyes land on the shorter frame of the boy he’s been thinking about for the past week. They haven’t seen each other for a while, and he’s tried to get used to the disappointment of waiting every morning for a familiar face, only to board the bus alone and feeling oddly rejected, without the addictive feeling of his heart stuttering inside his chest at the sight of crescent-eyes and a wide smile.

Now, though, he relishes in that feeling as it comes back tenfold.

He smiles easily, reaching out for the boy’s hand and shaking it. “Park ChanYeol.”, he mutters into the chilly air between them, squinting through the steamy cloud that fogs his view of the other boy for just a few moments before dissipating.

The boy smiles wider at him, squeezing his cold fingers around Chanyeol’s palm, and they leave a tingle in their wake as the two boys pull away, a bit reluctantly, from a handshake that lasted a bit longer than one usually might. Neither comments on that fact, or the fact that they’ve managed to shift closer together, so that there is roughly a foot between them and Chanyeol has to crane his neck to meet the other boy’s gaze.

“I’m Byun BaekHyun.”, the shorter boy tells him.

They stand there, a few feet away from a crowd of people waiting for the bus to arrive, and even though there are so many of them even this early in the morning, some talking loudly, some passing by, all Chanyeol can see is him.

///

Chanyeol is running late to the bus stop. He’d forgotten to set an alarm the night before, too busy trying to write an essay due by the end of the week, and then he’d woken up to the sound of his roommate rummaging around in his closet for a clean shirt to wear. After that, it was a blurry mess of flailing limbs trying to push themselves through clothes and out the door in time to reach the bus in time and avoid being even more late.

He crosses the street and notices a figure leaning against the lamp-post, the same place he and Baekhyun had talked the day before and, smiling, Chanyeol approaches, already recognizing the short frame and long, unruly hair swaying softly in the morning wind. He reaches out a hand, poking Baekhyun in the side and making him jump with a yelp that sounds too much like a startled puppy noise.

“Aish, pabo!”, Baekhyun scolds him, rubbing his chest to calm down, before using his hands to slap Chanyeol wherever he can reach.

Chanyeol laughs, grinning down at the flailing mess of arms trying to get him back for the scare and forgetting all about the morning’s unfortunate events. He always seems to magically forget about everything else when Baekhyun is involved. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t register the bus until the other boy pulls him along to board, and he wonders, briefly, if he’d been caught staring for who knows what time since their first encounter.

“Have coffee with me on Saturday.”, Baekhyun says, making it sound like a done-deal rather than a request or a question.

If Chanyeol is completely honest with himself, he’ll say that it is, in fact, a done-deal. How could he even imagine saying ‘no’, anyways? The thought alone seems laughable at best.

He nods, maybe a bit too enthusiastically, not even taking a few casual moments to think it through and avoid looking overly-eager.

Baekhyun hums in approval, smiling up at the taller boy, and murmurs a satisfied, “Good.” before moving on to talk about a new drama he’s gotten into these past few days and how he has to watch it because it would be a sin not to, and he lets Chanyeol complain about school for as long as he likes, and Chanyeol thinks that he really needs to get his heart checked out as soon as possible because it’s acting all kinds of strange again.

…

When Baekhyun kisses him on Saturday night, after they’ve spent the entire day together, walking around and drinking coffee and forgetting about school and work and everything that isn’t just the two of them, Chanyeol realizes that maybe his heart doesn’t have a serious health condition. He thinks, when Baekhyun’s hands find his cheeks and draw his face closer, warm lips moving against his under the flickering glow of a bus stop streetlamp, that it might have known they’d end up here from the very beginning. Maybe it’s just been struggling to get closer to Baekhyun ever since they first met, beating against its confines and making him feel choked-up and flustered, trying to speed up the moments leading up to this.

He grins into their kiss and wraps his arms tighter around Baekhyun’s middle, lifting him off the ground until he’s giggling, tip-toes hovering an inch above the snow beneath them.

Baekhyun’s hands are cold when they curl around the back of his neck, fingers playing with curly, dark strands of wind-messy hair, but he doesn’t have the mind to hiss at the chill running down his spine. He’s warm all over, spreading from the very bottom of his heart and out to the tips of his fingers, and he feels close to bursting with it.

He feels the words before he thinks to say them, and it’s too early to do that anyways. Someday, soon, he will. But right now he’s content with telling Baekhyun in every other way, by smiling against his lips and bringing him as close as possible, unable to pull even a hair’s breadth away.