Fix you • Chanbaek

fourteen • christmas

Warning: lots of angst

Christmas, a year ago

Baekhyun was standing in front of an old coffee machine that produced loud and wierd sounds while producing coffee. He thought that it probably woke up all the patients on that floor.

He took two cups of coffee, silently walking away. It was Christmas morning, 2 a.m.

The hospital halls were empty and creepy, with only few nurses that were working late night shifts sitting behind pults, doing whatever they had to do.

There was a Christmas tree in the hospital lobby, joined by various decorations, playful lights and Santa Claus statue with fake grin plastered on his face. All those things were put there in order to create some holiday spirit and cheer people up, but in Baekhyun's opinion, not even all light and sparkles of this world could cheer up those who were dying. Or their families.

Walking down those halls, Baekhyun felt lonelier than ever.

He entered a room where he found who sleeping figures, one on a couch under the window and the other in a hospital bed, with bunch of tubes and strings that Baekhyun couldn't name attached to him.

Baekhyun placed one coffee on a coffee table next to his mother, that fell asleep in those ten minutes that he was gone. She was exhausted, just like him, and he didn't mind her sleeping. She needed it.

He sat on his chair next to Kyungsoo's bed, and leaned back in it, sipping the hot beverage.

Kyungsoo looked peaceful. His face was expressionless and his eye bags swollen and purple, but in Baekhyun's eyes, it was still his brother just like he was for all those seventeen years.

That was it.

The days were counted. He didn't know the exact date that would soon be written on his brother's gravestone, but they all knew that day was near.

It was like counting down the days to some event. When you count down the days to some happy event, they usually pass horribly slow.

But when it something you don't want to wake up to, it comes before you realize it. It always comes before you are ready.

Probably because there is no way to get ready for it.

Baekhyun could still remember that day clearly.

It had all started few months ago.

"Soo, can you help me out with this?" Baekhyun yelled from the basement, struggling to lift up the boxes with his mom's old stuff that she wanted to throw away.

Kyungsoo appeared not two minutes earlier, walking down the stairs in his flips flops.

"Hold it on that side." Baekhyun instructed him, and Kyungsoo grabbed it where he had told him.

"One, two, three, up!" Baekhyun counted down, but the weight didn't move for a centimeter on Kyungsoo's side.

"What the hell, Soo?" Baekhyun furrowed his eyebrows. Kyungsoo was as strong as him even though he didn't do sports.

"I'm tired, can't you wait for dad?"

"How can you be tired when you've been doing nothing the whole weekend!" Baekhyun groaned, looking away from Kyungsoo. He didn't notice that his brother was starting to look paler and paler every day and that he barely ate anything.