Oasis (A KaiSoo Fanfic)

Chapter 7 | No One

To you, the person who is reading or listening to this story, it may seem like life in a cancer hospital is fairly laid back. You get your Chemo, go to a few therapy sessions and then you're pretty much free to do whatever your dying heart pleases. But (and this may be partially my fault) it's not exactly like that. The committee that essentially ran our day-to-day lives came to the conclusion that, even though it may never come to any use to us, getting an education while hospitalized was important. Why? I have no idea. It wasn't like they made us sit through 45-minute classes on the history of Korea or the structure of an atom, but they did drag us on educational field trips once every two weeks so that we could get some fresh air and "expand our mental horizons," whatever that meant.

One week, they sent us to The Samsung Museum of Art. There were too many of us to send at one time, so they had developed a system: load a floor of us onto a bus, ship us off to the museum for two hours and then bring us back. It wasn't the world's most efficient system, but it cut down the amount of kids per trip from 194 to about 24, give or take a few people. 

This also made it inevitable that Kyungsoo came as well when it was my turn to go. Not that I minded it, though. I didn't mind having him around at all anymore actually. In fact, I preferred having him near me over having him away from me. Yeah, yeah, it sounds odd coming from the me I've described to you so far, but trust me, I was just as confused about my feelings for him at that time as you may be right now.

"Are you excited, Jongin-ah?" he asked me, his voice relatively quiet and soft but beaming with happiness.

"Am I excited to learn about art?" I said, pretending to think for a second. "Oh, yes, I'm thrilled. So thrilled, in fact, that I barely slept last night." He laughed at me and clicked his seatbelt on, moving around in his seat before he finally stopped and got comfortable.

"Alright, has everyone found a seat?" Joonmyun asked as he looked around at the crowd of us, standing at the front of the aisle by the driver's seat. "Good. Okay, now listen up. It will take approximately an hour and a half to get there, maybe two depending on the traffic. So, if you brought your phones or other devices that can entertain you, I suggest you use them. There is a bathroom in the back, but it's very small, so you'll just have to manage. Any other questions I need to address?" He waited for someone to speak up, but when no one did, he nodded and took a seat at the front diagonal from the driver. Then, in the next few minutes, the bus took off down one of the many roads that would take us to the museum. Luckily, I charged my MP3 player the night before, so it was more than able to endure an hour and a half of staring out a window (along with the occasional nap or two.)

"Yah," Kyungsoo said from beside me, gently nudging me to get my attention. I stopped what I was doing and turned my head in his direction. "Are you feeling caring today?"

My face scrunched up a bit. "What?" I said.

"You know the old saying, 'Sharing is caring'?" he said, clearly trying to explain to me what he meant but only ceasing to baffle me even more. "Aish, just give me this," he said after a second, batting his hand at me and taking one of my earbuds from me.

"You could have just asked for that," I said, slightly surprised that I wasn't more upset.

"I did, but you didn't give me an answer," he said, tilting his head to the side a bit in order to put the bud in his ear.

"Wait, that's what you were trying to ask me?" I said, twisting the upper half of my body and facing him a bit more. "If you could listen to music with me?" He just nodded, his pupils moving to the corners of his eyes to look at me. "Well, in that case, you suck at asking people for favors."

"Yah!" he said as he chuckled and hit my arm, causing me to laugh as well. "You're so mean..."

"Only to you, hyung," I said smugly, allowing myself to sink down in my seat. I felt his fatal glare of disapproval and could only find it in me to laugh again.