Baby // Bttm bangchan oneshots

however long - chansung

writer: This is a guest account so idk

In his first life, Jisung falls in love with Chan silently, and watches as he slips gently from his grasp.

It's a binder of lost moments, loosely bound together by fraying tape and rusted metal rings, and the final pages are left blank, but not by Jisung's intentional design. Jisung never realized he wouldn't have any more moments left to be pressed onto white sheets.

Jisung cautiously flips a page and they're in middle school. While most students are off to the side by the crowded swings, and Jisung's got a seventh sense trained on Chan; the older boy is off and rowdily playing soccer while Jisung prefers the cool of the shade, but they reconnect at the end of recess, linking pinkies and swinging their arms wildly into the oncoming student traffic, and this is when Jisung first feels something gentle in the rise of his chest.

Flashforward to high school and Chan's got his first boyfriend, a kind toothy boy by the name of Minho, and Chan is entirely smitten. The sight of hushes kisses against lockers and stolen moments behind the bleachers have Jisung flinching without meaning to, and Chan starts to feel a little distant even when he's pressed against Jisung's side, warm and comfortable and solid.

It's a Sunday morning when Chan arrives at Jisung's doorstep, entirely too cheerful for having broken up with Minho earlier that week, and Jisung can't quite believe his eyes.

Chan's a bit bashful.

"He's a sweetheart, he really is, but we didn't- uh, how should I put it–" Chan purses his lips, and Jisung longs to kiss the cherry gloss off of them. "–we just didn't click. It's really not a big deal."

Jisung invites him in to bake afternoon cookies.

Another flash of the camera and Jisung is in his second year of college when he realizes that he isn't in love with Seungmin, and it chokes him up far more than it affects the other. Seungmin's a perfect gentleman really, and Jisung cries snot into the hem of Seungmin's collar. Seungmin sends him off with a smile, and promises to keep in touch.

(Years later, Jisung attends the wedding of Seungmin and Changbin, and he knows he's got a lifelong friend.)

Chan and Jisung don't meet up on campus as often as they did when they were fresh-faced and enamored by their newfound freedom in college. Their friend groups divide harshly down the center; Chan forgets Tuesday breakfast plans, and Jisung stops picking up Chan's calls in favor of a drunken Friday night at the bar. Chan graduates college and they lose touch, and it hurts more than Jisung wants to admit, but he knows he never had Chan, not really. There's never an official end, but one day Jisung forgets to text Chan, and Chan forgets to text Jisung, and months pass without contact. Jisung finally graduates college and moves into his own apartment, and he painfully considers putting Chan on a housewarming list, but decides against it at the last minute. Jisung taps and likes the occasional post on Chan's social feed, but he hardly looks to see who Chan is with anymore. Jisung finally loses his phone on a rainy Tuesday morning, and never bothers to grab Chan's number from any of their acquaintances.

The sun still rises in the east, sets in the west, and Jisung continues forward.

He doesn't cry, and he never did, because Chan was never his to begin with. There's no love story, but Jisung's still in love, and there's only a few chapters of them that Jisung can salvage from the course of his life.

It's also not dramatic, like a scene where the brokenhearted runs through the rain, screaming up to the heavens when they finally reach a train station with no approaching train. Chan slips away in the dead of night, when the sun is just rising to flare the sky in a somber warm tone, and Jisung never fully realizes Chan's gone until he's at a cafe. Jisung is somehow years down the road and yet no further along, and Chan's seated beside a golden boy, one who makes Chan light up in ways that Jisung remembers he once could.