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Boo Seungkwan is unlike anyone Lee Chan has ever met.
Three years after the Edge, he’s still brighter than the sun, a sunflower in the dark that Chan can’t help but turn to.
One year after losing him, the sunflower doesn’t wilt, even if it loses a few petals. Seungkwan stops bleaching his hair blonde and his black hair grows out wavier than before. Jeonghan claims it’s a byproduct of the nuclear fallout, that it’s only natural they would all see changes in their DNA.
He’s quieter too, tending to Mingyu’s wounds and hiding up in the lookout tower during the nights, when he thinks that no one else is watching. Seungcheol joins him sometimes—Jeonghan’s eyes look less dry the mornings after those nights, puffier and red even if he denies it.
Chan’s envious of the way the three of them seem to have carved out a space in this purgatory.
He used to be envious of Seungkwan too, of how he and Hansol smiled at each other, how they would reach for each other’s hands when the outer walls were breached. It isn’t envy that settles in his stomach now, watching the dust kick up a storm through the periscope, but something softer.
“Chan-ah.”
Chan leans forward, resting his forehead against the periscope. When he closes his eyes, he can hear Jeonghan murmuring to Mingyu, can hear Seungcheol muffling his voice in the bathroom in an attempt to drown out the sound of his heart breaking with the shower.
No one comments on the excess water use. They’ve all given up on it since Hansol.
“Hyung.”
“Come back to bed,” Seungkwan calls out. “It’s cold.”
It’s winter. They’ve been locked in this bunker for months now with no central heating or cooling and an abundance of blankets, but it is warmer when they all huddle together for it. Fitting twelve people in such a small bunker was easier than he would have expected—Jeonghan and Seungcheol squeezed into the small room with the queen bed and Mingyu; Soonyoung, Junhui, and Minghao took the den, sprawled out on the futons; Seokmin, Joshua, and Jihoon took the bunks in the hallway; and—
Well, Seungkwan and Hansol used to share one of the twin beds while Chan and Wonwoo took the other. Wonwoo bunks with Joshua more often than not now and Chan keeps Seungkwan warm.
It feels more like the opposite these days. Seungkwan as the sun and Chan as his sunflower, drifting in this new windless world.
Chan lifts his head from the mirror, meeting Seungkwan’s eyes over his shoulder. The under eye circles he’s intimately familiar with, the dry skin from the lack of humidity in the winter.
“Hyung,” he murmurs. Seungkwan nods curiously, sitting down on the bench in front of him. The projector casts the “window” over him, flickering winter trees against Chan’s favorite face. “Are you okay?”
He’s going to hang onto this forever, the face that Seungkwan makes when the trees flicker on screen. On his skin. It’s all the same, a familiar song Chan will miss when it’s gone.
It’s been a year since he lost the greatest love of his life. Chan takes no pleasure in what comes next, the purgatory they’re suspended in. In his more lucid moments, Mingyu calls him out on it, but Mingyu is just as willfully ignorant when it comes to their two oldest hyungs, falling over themselves to take care of him.
It’s such a funny feeling—the world’s at war again, as it always was, and all Chan can think of in this very moment is how it couldn’t matter less, how all that does matter is the love.
“Where’s this coming from?” Seungkwan asks, leaning forward slightly, hooking his leg around Chan’s chair. He shrugs, folding his arms on Seungkwan’s thighs, resting his chin against them. “Chan-ah?”
“Just. I missed Hansol hyung and thought of you.”
In his worst moments, he thinks he has no right to miss him. The love he had—has, the love that he has, for even death cannot take the love from him—for Hansol pales in comparison to what Seungkwan felt for him, so what right does he have to miss him? Even if they were friends, family even, what difference did it make when Seungkwan lost him first?
“I think of you when I miss him,” Seungkwan murmurs, voice shaking. His candor is not without its costs, a thorny vine wrapping around Chan’s throat. Once, in another life, Chan dropped to his knees in front of him, hands wrapped around his throat. This feeling isn’t any different, constricting and liberating all at once. “He would—when we were younger, when all this was still new, we talked about it. If something were to happen—”
“Hyung, you don’t have to—”
Seungkwan drops his palm flat on Chan’s hand, ruffling his hair. “Aigoo, Lee Chan, I know. You don’t need to feel bad about this, about us, okay? It’s—you won’t feel too bad if hyung says it was inevitable, would you?”
He doesn’t want to float down the river and miss this love when it’s gone.
“Both ways,” Seungkwan murmurs, dropping his hand to the back of Chan’s neck. He squeezes gently, fingers pressing against his pulse, nothing like the rough palms against his throat and his back against the wall, knees to the floor. “Chwe Hansol and the end. All of us, in the end. You and me.”
He doesn’t want to let it go to waste either, but he’s drifting.
“Don’t let Jeonghan hyung hear you say that,” Chan chokes out hoarsely, blinking up at Seungkwan with glossy eyes. “He’s been sleeping less ever since Mingyu hyung’s fever got worse.”
Seungkwan laughs despite himself, muted. “Mingyu hyung will outlive us all. And, really, it’s Seungcheol hyung you have to worry about.” His smile drops, fingers twisting to cup Chan’s jaw instead. “He’s been taking it harder lately.”
An understatement. The man cries in the shower and thinks those big eyes of his could hide the fear he feels. Chan worries about him just as much as he worries about them all.
“We’ll get through this,” Chan offers quietly, pressing his lips to the pads of Seungkwan’s fingers. I can’t lose anyone else, he doesn’t have to say out loud.
Seungkwan leans closer, bending in a way that must hurt his back as he rests his forehead against Chan’s, eyelashes fluttering ever so slightly. He murmurs something quietly that Chan will only remember years later, After.
That there is an after will be something harder to reconcile with. But he meant it when he said he was going to hang onto this forever.
He exhales slowly, Seungkwan inhales. Breathes him in.
(“I don’t want to grow old.”)