how it feels to fly | jeonglix

10

The burn from when they were twelve never properly healed, and Felix still has the scar on his arm to prove it.

He wears long sleeves most days, and on the rare occasion his arms are bare and his father catches sight of the mark, Felix still avoids telling him about it. He's not sure why; it was never a thing he was ashamed of, but maybe the urgency he felt to hide it from Erin and Dan has stuck with him, even until now.

His hand runs meticulously over the uneven skin beneath his sweatshirt—a random habit he's worked up over the past few years.

"I hate Mondays so much."

Felix looks up at Jeongin through his hair. "Didn't you say like two days ago that you don't mind Mondays because you only have one lesson?"

Jeongin huffs and takes a bite from his half of the chocolate muffin. "Changed my mind."

After Jeongin finished his classes for the day, he'd appeared silently at the gate to the graveyard. But instead of taking his usual route to sit on the grass, he'd stepped up to the front door of the groundskeeper's cottage. When Felix's dad opened the door, he'd tilted his head slightly at the boy, but in the end stepped back to let him in.

That's when Felix had come in from the kitchen, with a double chocolate chip muffin on a plate and a single fork in his hand. "Oh, hey," he'd said lightly. He gave Jeongin's smart attire a small glance over, eyebrows lifting slightly in response before he met the younger's eyes again.  

"What's this?" Jeongin had asked eventually, gesturing to the muffin as they climbed up the perilously uneven staircase. 

"Cake." Of course he knew that, but for something as simple as that, the cake holds a strange amount of memories for Jeongin, and in the moment the question left his mouth before he could really think it through.

That's how they ended up where they are, upstairs sat at Felix's window, legs pulled up to their chins and the plate balancing precariously in the small space between them, but instead with two forks and the muffin split roughly in half.

Felix looks away from the window to see Jeongin staring almost wistfully at the plate.

"You okay?" he asks.

Jeongin nods, but even so he looks doubtful. "Yeah..." he trails off, and clears his throat. "Whenever we'd go on dates, Hyunjin would always buy these, mostly the muffins, but sometimes a cookie, or at Christmas it was a mince pie, and we'd go sit in the park and eat it. You know that part down the hill by that little pond?" 

Felix nods. 

"There," he confirms. "And we'd spend hours chatting about meaningless little things that slipped our mind in the day during frees, like a new psychology book he was reading, or a crime documentary he watched the night before instead of revising." He chuckles softly. "And I told him about stuff I wanted to try making, or a new place I'd decided I wanted to travel to... stuff like that."

He breaks off when he notices Felix looking at his wrists with a tender look of curiosity, "You still wear them?" Without even looking down, Jeongin knows he's referring to the five bracelets on his wrists.

"Um, yeah..." He nods. "I don't—I don't ever take them off."

Felix leans in a little closer, reaching out to gently touch them. He stops on the third bracelet, fingers lingering over the unfamiliar and less-worn pattern. "I didn't make this one."

Jeongin shakes his head. "Hyunjin did."

Felix hums, trying to hide the small pang in his chest. He tries to think of the best way to ask why Hyunjin made it, without sounding ridiculously jealous—which he's definitely not... just a little hurt. In the end he doesn't need to, because Jeongin carries on anyway.

"When we first met he struggled to pick me out from a few other kids, because of his face-blindness. Eventually he noticed that I always wore the exact same four bracelets, and from then on he said it was easy to recognise me. I rarely took them off anyway, but after that they were permanent, and always on show. He made this one in the first couple weeks of sixth form." He twiddles with the bracelet mindlessly, face falling as he drifts deeper into thought. At one point his expression becomes pained, but he snaps himself out of it so quickly that Felix questions whether he even saw anything.

"It's Halloween on Thursday," Felix suddenly mentions. "Do you have plans?"

After a moment, Jeongin shakes his head. "Not anymore."

There's a second of awkward silence, where Felix takes on the weight of what came out so casually from Jeongin. "There's always children daring each other to walk through the graveyard," he coughs. "So I normally stay inside, but we could hang out if you want."

"I think we're a bit old for trick-or-treating," Jeongin jokes. He shakes his head, "And don't force yourself to go out just for me, we can watch movies or something—doesn't matter if they're not scary, Halloween has good cosy vibes anyway."

Felix nods, pushing the last bit of cake to Jeongin's side of the plate and letting him finish it. 

"You remember, when we were younger we used to do this too? Every Friday, Dan would take us to the bakery and we'd get chocolate muffins to share?" Felix asks hopefully.

"Yeah," Jeongin hums, hesitating slightly. "We did, didn't we... I almost forgot."

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a/n: I feel like this story is so shit HAHA... but I'm stubborn so will most likely end up finishing it anyway 

🎄 Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays! :) Hope you're all as happy and safe as possible, and if you have to spend it with people who give you a shit time, although it can be hard try not to pay attention to anything they throw at you. You're amazing being who you are and you're loved :)

And I'm sorry this is really short 😬 I'm gonna try and write at least a few chapters ahead over the next week or so, because I finally have a break from alevel work x