Chapter Text
The next month was a performance worthy of an Oscar. They both doubled down on their pursuit of Su-ae with a fervor that bordered on mania. It was an unspoken, desperate pact to prove, to themselves and to each other, that the incident in the shed was a mistake.
Look. See? I like Su-ae. A girl. I am normal.
Eunhyuk became even more analytically present, anticipating her needs before she could voice them. Dohwa’s compliments and physical affection became more effusive, more public. They were using her as a heterosexual shield, and in the quiet moments, they both hated themselves for it. Su-ae doesn’t deserve to be someone’s shield they thought. And yet…they couldn’t comprehend their internal fight too.
They couldn't avoid each other, but they could re-erect the wall of barbed sarcasm, higher and more fortified than before. The humorous banter now had a desperate, cutting edge.
“Your dedication is impressive, Eunhyuk,” Dohwa would say, seeing him holding a book Su-ae had mentioned once, weeks ago. “Like a dog with a bone. You should be careful. You might bore her to death with your hyper-focused loyalty.”
“Loyalty is a concept you wouldn’t understand,” Eunhyuk would counter, his eyes fixed on the page, his knuckles white. “Your affections are a public fountain. You spray them on everyone. Hers are no more special than the next person’s. That’s what makes it so cheap.”
The words were for the gallery of one (Su-ae, who would just sigh and say, “Boys, please!”), but the subtext was a private, poisonous duet. Your interest in her is a lie. You’re just like me. A fraud. A scared, confused fraud.
The dam finally broke on a rainy Tuesday evening. The broadcasting club had a late meeting, and Su-ae had left early, her Jellypop phone buzzing with a sudden family matter that required her at Ra-im’s side. Again. Shim Su-ae didn’t like it but still she had to go. Eunhyuk watched her go, the familiar, bitter disappointment mixing with a new, more profound dread: the thought of being alone with Dohwa.
They sat in their usual spots, the silence punctuated by the drumming of rain against the window. It was a silence that hummed with a month’s worth of frantic, festering denial.
“Stop,” Dohwa said, his voice quiet, but it cut through the rain like a knife.
“Stop what?” Eunhyuk asked, not looking up from the mixing board he wasn’t using.
“Just stop. This whole thing. The act.” Dohwa was staring out the window, his reflection a pale ghost against the wet darkness. “I’m tired. I work three jobs, Eunhyuk. I don’t have the energy for a fourth, and that’s what this rivalry has become. A full-time performance.”
Eunhyuk’s fingers stilled on a plastic slider. He didn’t speak.
“You were right,” Dohwa continued, his voice laced with a bone-deep weariness. “About the lie. I’ve been lying to everyone since middle school. Or let’s say it wasn’t particularly a lie, i just didn’t say the truth. People see a face like mine and hand me an entire life story. ‘Oh, you must be a chaebol heir, Dohwa. Oh, your life must be so easy, Dohwa.’ It was easier than the truth.” He finally turned to look at Eunhyuk’s rigid profile. “My father is a drunk who uses my face as a punching bag. I haven’t known what a safe home feels like since my mother died. Is that real enough for you, Go Eunhyuk? Is that a note you can add to your little file on ‘Baek Dohwa: The Damn Intervener’?”
The confession, so raw and unvarnished, hung in the air. It wasn’t a bid for pity; it was a surrender. A dropping of the shield.
Eunhyuk’s carefully constructed world tilted on its axis. The file he’d built on Dohwa was suddenly not just incomplete, it was a mirror. A father’s fist. The silence of a house filled with betrayal. The performance of normalcy to a world that wouldn’t understand. He could feel pity for the misery Dohwa lives in. But strangely he felt…recognition. The connection he’d felt at the convenience store, the recognition of the smoke, it wasn’t a metaphor. It was the same fire.
He didn’t know what possessed him. A madness born of the rain, the confession, a month of unbearable tension. He stood up, walked over to the piano in the corner of the club room, and sat down. It was a piece he’d been composing, a dark, dissonant thing he would never play for his father. He played the opening now, the notes a haunting, atonal cry of confusion and suppressed rage. He played the crash of a slammed door, the icy silence of a dinner table for two when a family of three lived there. He played the sharp, percussive sound of a palm connecting with a twelve-year-old’s face, a sound that had changed the pitch of his entire world.
He stopped abruptly, the unfinished chord hanging like a noose. He didn’t turn around. “My father is a famous pianist,” he said, his voice a low, trembling echo of Dohwa’s confession. “He’s also a serial adulterer. Our house is a perfect museum of a marriage that died long ago. He hit me once, in middle school, when I threatened to expose his affair with my piano teacher. I haven't heard completely out of my left ear since. My mother, a brilliant lawyer who could dismantle any argument in a courtroom, just... exists in the same house as the man who humiliates her. They expect me to be a prodigy. I am a repository for their broken ambitions and silent screams. No one in that house is real. And I… I was so fascinated by Su-ae, by her sheer, stubborn, illogical reality. She was a truth in a world of performances. I thought I could… learn it. Or be with someone like it.”
He finally turned on the stool to face Dohwa, who was staring at him with an expression of pure shock. The golden retriever and the black cat were gone. In that room, there were just two utterly lost, deeply injured teenage boys, drenched in the half-light, their armor in pieces at their feet. Their fathers’ legacies of violence and silence were the same language. Their feelings for Su-ae, once a battlefield, were now revealed as the same, misguided search for an anchor in their chaotic miserable lives.
The space between them wasn’t filled with rivalry anymore. It was filled with a terrifying, magnetic, gravitational recognition. They were looking at each other, not as competitors, but as the only other person in the universe who could possibly understand.
Dohwa moved first. He walked slowly, soundlessly, across the room until he was standing right in front of Eunhyuk, who remained seated at the piano bench, looking up. Dohwa reached out and, with a feather-light touch that contrasted with all their previous violence, brushed a stray lock of hair from Eunhyuk’s forehead. It was an act of impossible tenderness, a silent answer to a confession no one had ever heard before.
Eunhyuk’s breath hitched. His eyes, dark and full of a lifetime of unexpressed storms, searched Dohwa’s face. He found no pity, no judgment, only the same reflection of his own beautiful, agonized ruin.
And then, Baek Dohwa leaned down, and Go Eunhyuk, the boy who was never the first to move, tilted his head up.
The kiss was not gentle. It was a collision of unshed tears, screamed silences, and a month of tortured denial. It was the taste of salt and the metallic tang of a healing split lip, a rediscovered memory. Eunhyuk’s hands, which had stormed through Chopin, flew up to grip the fabric of Dohwa’s shirt, pulling him closer, a desperate, grounding anchor. Dohwa’s hand moved from Eunhyuk’s forehead to the back of his neck, his fingers tangling in the soft hair there. For a long, suspended moment, there was no confusion, no self-loathing, no fear. There was just this. An answered question. A closed circuit. A perfect, terrifying, exhilarating resolution.
They broke apart, breathless. Their foreheads rested together. The rain hammered on the window like a frantic, approving applause.
“This is so messed up,” Dohwa whispered, his voice shaking, but a genuine, bewildered smile, the kind that created his secret dimple, was playing on his lips.
“I know,” Eunhyuk breathed, his own heart a frantic bird against his ribs. “It’s a logical mistake.”
“I think I’m… not as straight as I thought,” Dohwa managed, letting out a shaky, incredulous laugh.
A ghost of a real smile, the first true one Dohwa had ever seen on Eunhyuk’s face, flickered at the corner of his mouth. “Me neither,” he admitted, the words feeling like a liberation and a life sentence all at once. The word ‘bisexual’ was a foreign, modern concept neither of them had the vocabulary for, but the reality of it was a wave crashing over them both.
“What do we do now?”
The million-dollar question. The world outside that room was 2014 South Korea. Their fathers, their school, their reputations, the girl they had both used as a shield—it all came flooding back. The fear returned, but it was different now. It was a shared fear, a monster they could now see, standing side-by-side.
“We don’t have to do anything tonight,” Eunhyuk said, his voice finding a new, quiet solidity. He was a planner, a tactician. He could figure this out. “Except…” He hesitated, the next words a monumental struggle against his very nature. “Don’t lie to me. Not anymore. I’ll… not lie to you.”
Dohwa nodded, the gesture a solemn vow. “No more lies.” His hand found Eunhyuk’s and laced their fingers together. In their very essence finally finding that one person who got the joke, the pain, the terrifying, exhilarating, brand-new melody of their own making. The slow burn had finally, mercifully, caught fire.