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Chay has never seen the stars from the house he grew up in.
Skyscrapers and city haze crowd them out, blending the sky into a deep, dark void that glows around the edges from nightlife lights. Chay gets lost in it sometimes, laying across the table outside, staring up into the nothingness and pretending he can glimpse tiny pinpricks of light peering back from just beyond it.
Sometimes he thinks that must be how the best songs are written—from tiny, ephemeral moments of inexplicable feeling, just out of reach, somehow translated into words that only mimic shadows of the true thing.
Then he remembers that the only songs he ever wrote were built on lies, and all his flights of fancy and poetry flutter away in a flurry of self-deprecating skepticism.
The others don’t know Chay comes here. Porsche is busy these days, elevated from bodyguard to boyfriend to head of a minor mafia family.
It’s Chay’s family too, he supposes. Sometimes he still wonders how it all happened.
A lingering, gnarled seed of resentment takes root in his chest. He feels it burrowing there and gently digs it up, setting it free on the wind for someone else to claim.
Anger never suited him.
Sometimes things just happen to people. Porsche stumbled into his own happiness in the most unlikely of places. Who is Chay to resent him for that?
From the yard, the house still looks the same as the day they moved out. They left most of their things here, dark outlines of furniture and photo frames casting inky shapes across the sliding glass doors from within.
Chay misses them—not the material possessions, but the them of it. Their home.
It’s strange, now; technically their family is more united than ever. They have their mother back, by some miracle that no one seems willing or able to explain. They are surrounded by people who care, in some sense or another, for their well-being. They have money .
Oddly, Chay often finds himself missing the smallness of their life before. Of looking only toward the next semester, the next house payment. He misses the certainty and unfailing consistency of Porsche’s support, no matter what hard times they hit.
He supposes it must be different for Porsche. Porsche was the one truly paying for the schooling and the house. He was the one doing all of the work between them. Chay should be grateful they’ve ended up as they have.
He never feels safe any more, though. And he always feels alone.
Chay’s phone rings in his pocket. He realizes he’s been standing out in the yard staring at the door for a long time. He checks the caller ID as he walks toward the house.
Chay’s loneliness doubles down.
He rejects the call and goes inside. At least he gets to sleep in his own bed again tonight. Tomorrow, he’ll go back to the main house and start looking at music programs to apply to—perhaps even some that are far, far away from Bangkok and the three mafia sons who changed his life irrevocably.
He dreams of Kim’s name, listed over and over and over again in stark red letters down the length of his phone screen.
~*~
Chay’s eyes flutter open. He lies in his bed, in the dark, in silence. Some inexplicable, deep-seated knowledge in his gut tells him not to move.
After a few long, breathless seconds, he hears it.
There’s someone in the house.
Chay remains frozen. He doesn’t know what to do. There’s a logical side of his brain screaming that he needs to get up out of bed, find the gun he stole from Porsche and hid in the night table, and confront the intruder.
A stronger, more overwhelming part of him is far too terrified of being heard, of giving himself away, of being found . He stays put, body locked in place against his will, listening to the staggered footsteps stumble into the living room. There’s a quiet hiss of pain, and ragged breathing.
Chay finally gains control of himself. Slowly, painstakingly, he slides his bare feet out from beneath his comforter and sets them onto the floor. It takes him a whole minute to slide open the drawer of his nightstand. He awkwardly picks up the gun and tip-toes over to his bedroom door.
The living room has fallen silent. Chay can’t hear anything over the rhythmic pounding of his own heart in his ears.
He waits another minute before inching the door open. The small landing of the stairs is empty, both of the staircases clear. He creeps down the steps to take stock of the living room.
“Who’s there?” Chay asks, wincing at the shakiness of his own voice. He hopes desperately that he hasn’t just woken up to another half dozen bodies mysteriously dropped from the skies like that time in Yok’s bar. He aims the gun out in front of him.
The sliding door is sitting open. Chay pads over to it and slides it shut.
“I’m armed,” he warns, more boldly.
Chay hears nothing in response but the uneven, labored hiss of his own breathing. He gives the living room a last once-over before peering around into the kitchen.
Chay freezes there, braced against the door frame.
There’s a body on the floor.
How does this keep happening to him?
He stares at it in horrified silence before stumbling into the room. He keeps the gun trained forward in his right hand in case whomever it is hasn’t quite died yet, and flicks on the light.
He’s met with the sight of bloody black leather and silver hoops.
“P’Kim?!” he squeaks.
A second later, his weapon is discarded on the kitchen table and he’s on his knees by Kim’s crumpled, bruised body.
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
The kitchen light seems too stark and bright. Chay’s hands are shaking even more than before. He can’t catch his breath.
“P’Kim,” he chokes out. He runs his hand gently down Kim’s shoulder, hoping to wake him up without hurting him—hoping he can wake him up. “Hey, P’Kim. Please. ”
There’s a deep, bleeding gash along Kim’s left cheek bone, below the blooming shadow of a black eye. Kim’s hair is dirty and plastered to his face. There’s blood smeared across his mouth, and Chay can’t quite tell whether it’s coming from Kim’s lips and teeth or from something more internal and dangerous.
Carefully, he reaches up and brushes Kim’s curled, wet hair aside to better assess his state.
Kim’s lips part. A soft whisper of a groan passes between them.
“P’Kim! Thank you, thank you!” Chay isn’t sure whom he’s thanking. Perhaps Kim himself, for not being dead.
Chay’s vision is blurry.
“Come on. We need to get you up. Wake up. That’s it.”
Kim’s eyelashes flutter as Chay heaves him upward. He mumbles something, but his voice is low and hoarse and slurred and Chay can’t understand him.
Chay doesn’t want to have to move Kim twice. He guides him up the stairs and into his room at a painstaking shamble, laying him down on the bed.
“I should call the main house,” Chay realizes aloud. He’s cleaned up a lot of wounds in his time—Porsche’s long evenings at the fight club usually led to even longer nights tending to the inevitable results—but Chay isn’t sure he’s equipped to deal with the level of damage Kim has suffered.
“No,” croaks a small, hoarse voice.
Chay’s attention darts back down to Kim. Kim’s eyes are still closed, his breathing labored, but he seems to be regaining consciousness. His skin is clammy and pale.
Chay can feel his own pulse racing. He runs through everything he knows how to do in his head, all the wounds and injuries he’s treated on Porsche over the years.
“Okay,” Chay yields. “Okay, P’Kim. If you say so. I at least need to get you cleaned up. Can you sit up for me?”
Kim groans. He pushes himself onto his side and the groan cuts off with a sharp, quiet whimper.
Chay’s heart cracks a bit. He ignores it for now, brushing aside his own terror and heartbreak to focus on Kim.
“I know,” Chay soothes. “I’ve got you.”
He peels the leather jacket off of Kim’s body as gently as he can. By the way Kim hisses at the motion, he thinks there might be a few bruised ribs involved.
Chay dumps the jacket on the floor without bothering to see where it ends up.
Beneath the jacket, Kim’s previously white t-shirt is stained with dirt and blood. His jeans are not in much better shape. Chay isn’t sure how much of the blood is Kim’s.
“Who did this to you?” Chay whispers.
“Italian…” Kim slurs.
His eyes are barely open, narrow and clouded with pain. Chay doesn’t think he’s entirely coherent.
Kim reaches out with one hand, bumping it against Chay’s knee. He winces. His knuckles are raw and bruised. He takes a deep, stuttering breath, closes his eyes, and clenches his fist. His expression slackens.
“It’s okay,” Chay coos, more to himself than Kim. “You’re with me, now. You’re safe.”
He hopes his words are true. He wonders if Kim was followed. He realizes he should probably retrieve the gun from the kitchen, just in case.
“I’m going to finish getting you undressed, then I’m going to go to the kitchen to get the first aid kit. Alright?”
When Kim doesn’t respond, Chay leans forward and starts tugging at the hem of his shirt.
Without warning, a lightning-fast, iron-clad grip encircles Chay’s wrist. Chay yelps in pain. He looks up to see Kim leaning up and staring at him—or, more accurately, right through him. His eyes are dead and blank.
Chay can feel his heart in his throat. He thinks he might throw up.
“P’Kim,” he tries. “Let me help you.”
Chay knows his relationship with Kim has been tumultuous at best, fraught with lies and fear and pain. Chay loved Kim. Then he hated him. More recently, he thinks he has perhaps begun to love him again, even if that love is clouded with mistrust and heartbreak, buried away in the distance and silence he so carefully maintains between them.
But Chay has never, ever feared him.
He does now.
There’s an absence in Kim’s eyes, like something in his brain got disconnected. His grip on Chay’s wrist hurts. Chay is shaking again.
“P’Kim,” he whispers. “ Please. ”
Kim’s eyebrows tent upward. A redness swells beneath them, softer than the bruises and raw skin of his injuries. He opens his mouth, and closes it. Slowly, he leans his head back, shuts his eyes, and releases Chay’s wrist.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes. The words catch with the raggedness of his breath. Chay wonders if Kim thinks he’s talking to someone else. His own eyes are burning now.
Once the words escape Kim’s lips, he can’t seem to stop. His voice cracks and his eyes squeeze shut with the pain of wounds or regrets or some combination of both. He hugs his ribs.
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m—”
“Shhhh,” Chay cuts him off. “Tell me again when you’re feeling better. Okay?”
Kim falls silent. His breathing slows, each one deep and deliberate and haltingly controlled. His eyes remain closed, but his expression remains stuck in that tortured, broken state.
“I’m going to take your shirt off now,” Chay repeats. He can barely get the words out. His throat burns.
Kim does not stop him this time, allowing Chay to carefully uncross his arms and peel the damp fabric off of him. By the time Chay shimmies the shirt up over his head, Kim seems calmer again. He stares away from Chay—toward the wall, or somewhere beyond it, returning to the same half-conscious, near delirious state from before.
Chay gasps when he sees Kim’s chest.
There’s a massive, inky bruise across one side of his ribs. Beneath it, Chay can make out the textured dip of an old, deep scar. There are at least half a dozen such scars scattered across Kim’s body, all of varying ages and widths, interspersed between the fresh bruises and scrapes of Kim’s latest misfortune. Up and down his unbruised side, there's an uncannily uniform set of what look like small pairs of burn marks.
Chay is relieved to note that Kim doesn’t seem to be suffering from anything life-threatening—at least not visibly. There are some fresh cuts that might need stitches, but Chay thinks he can cope for now.
“I’m going to go get something to clean you up,” he murmurs.
Kim doesn’t give any indication of hearing him. His eyes are still open—barely—so Chay lets him be.
Chay returns from the kitchen with the gun and the first aid kit. He pauses in the doorway, some self-aware part of his brain floored by the sight of Kim sprawled across his bed right next to his embarrassingly expansive shrine to Wik.
Kim has drifted off in his absence. He looks much more at ease when he’s asleep, the absence of his primal panic melting away the hardness of his features.
He looks softer, but his cheeks have a slight sheen of wetness to them.
There’s a discarded pile of bloody clothes on the floor beside Chay’s mess of a bed. Kim is still wearing his shoes and his bloody jeans.
Chay sets his weapon and his medical supplies on the nightstand and carefully finishes undressing Kim, stripping him down to his underwear. It’s methodical. He’s tired. The clock behind the first aid kit reads 4:07am.
Kim wakes up with a quiet hiss when Chay begins cleaning up his open wounds.
“It’s just me, P’Kim,” Chay murmurs. He tries his best to be gentle, not to hurt Kim more than he already has been.
Kim watches him silently, barely awake. The entire house seems muffled, the world held in suspension in the small morning hours as Chay works.
Chay saves Kim’s face for last.
He scoots up on the bed and pauses with his arm reached half way out.
“I’m going to clean the cut on your cheek now,” he tells Kim. For some reason he feels the need to warn him, like he did before he removed Kim’s shirt.
Kim closes his eyes. Chay leans forward and carefully begins to clean around his cheekbone, dabbing the cut in saline solution.
He knows Kim isn’t asleep, but Kim’s eyes remain closed.
“I’m moving to your mouth,” Chay says quietly.
Chay reaches up and delicately brushes a cleaning wipe over Kim’s lips. After a few long, silent moments dabbing up dried blood, he looks up to see Kim’s eyes open again.
They stare at each other like that for some time. Something twists and churns in Chay’s chest and stomach. He procures a fresh cleaning wipe and carefully returns to dabbing it along Kim’s lips, needing something to distract him from Kim’s eyes.
Slowly, Kim tilts his head and leans in to Chay’s hand. A long, dark strand of hair falls over his face.
Chay can’t breathe. He remains as still as possible, afraid if he moves a single muscle that Kim might spook like some wild creature. He wants to trace his thumb over Kim’s cheekbone, but it would only aggravate the wound there.
Instead, he reaches forward with his free hand and softly brushes Kim’s stray hair behind his ear.
“We’re almost done,” Chay reassures him. “You’ve done great, P’Kim.”
There is one particular expression Kim makes sometimes that Chay can hardly bear. It’s the expression that first drove Chay to realize he was in love, the one that first gave him those nervous little butterflies when he saw Wik perform. Kim stares at people in a way that strips them down to their core and exposes them. He can look out over a crowd ten thousand strong and every single person present will feel he is speaking directly to them, soul to soul.
Chay feels the full brunt of that stare now—except this look truly is just for him, soul to soul, one to one, in the blackest hours of the morning, in his bed.
He feels completely naked. He focuses on Kim’s injuries, because he doesn’t trust himself to do anything else.
Chay carefully clears the last smudge from Kim’s face, and then he pulls his hands away.
“I’m going to leave you some clean clothes. You should get some sleep.”
Kim continues to watch him with sleepy, cloudy eyes as Chay packs up his first aid kit and sets out a neatly folded sweater and sweatpants on his desk.
The next time Chay looks up, Kim is fast asleep.
~*~
Chay wakes up on the sofa, sore and wondering how and why he got there. The events of the night before come rushing back at him all at once. He sits up and kicks off his spare blanket and tries not to sprint up the stairs.
He stops outside his bedroom door.
What if Kim is gone?
What if he isn’t?
Chay taps on the door.
“P’Kim?” he calls softly. “Are you awake?”
There’s a low, hoarse voice from the other side.
“Come in.”
Chay inches the door open and peeks around the frame.
Kim is sitting upright on Chay’s bed, his feet on the floor. He’s wearing the old, oversized grey sweater and sweatpants that Chay left out for him. The collar of the sweater is stretched out, so it hangs off Kim’s shoulder on one side.
He’s holding the gun that Chay left on the nightstand, examining it thoughtfully.
Chay lets the door drift open the rest of the way. He’s not sure if he can bring himself to stop staring long enough to move.
Kim’s hair looks softer than last night, as if he’s already made some attempt to comb it out with his fingers. It’s messy and loose around his face. It makes him look his age—younger and more vulnerable than the stoic, marble-faced angel he always disguises himself as.
He looks… human. Mortal .
His left eye is still bruised, but the cut across his cheekbone already looks far better than last night. The swelling redness around it has receded. Chay wonders if it will leave a scar.
“How are your ribs?” Chay manages to ask. He can’t quite stop himself from staring, unfairly enraptured by the sight of Kim in his clothes, in his bedroom.
It hurts. He thinks of lies and the jarring, icy emptiness of abandonment.
He came to me when he needed help, Chay thinks, and somehow that hurts too. But it feels like the kind of hurt that heals back stronger.
Kim leans forward and breathes in deeply, his feet stretching up to his toes and back down again. He sets the gun back down on the nightstand.
“I’ll be tender for a while. But I’ll be okay,” Kim says. His eyes find Chay’s. He pauses to search out his words before continuing. “I’m sorry for intruding on you. It won’t happen again. I’ll have your clothes cleaned and sent back to you once I’m home.”
A weight drops in Chay’s stomach. He strides across the room and kneels on the floor in front of Kim.
He wants to ask what happened. He wants to demand that Kim promise him it won’t ever happen again.
He does neither. Kim does not live the kind of life where answers always bring resolution. Chay understands that now, even if he doesn’t like it.
“Don’t apologize,” he says instead. “Thank you for coming to me. I’d rather know you’re safe.”
Kim’s lips part and he sits up straighter.
He always seems so taken aback by Chay’s love for him. It makes Chay wonder how Kim’s father and brothers usually show affection, or if they ever really do so at all.
“Aren’t you still angry with me?” Kim asks.
“Yeah,” Chay admits. “I am. But I could never be angry enough not to care for your safety, P’Kim. Do you understand? You terrified me.”
Kim does not reply.
Instead, he leans down and Chay finds himself suddenly wrapped between the warm, oversized sleeves of his own sweater.
Chay relaxes into the hug. He can’t help the smile that breaks across his face. He reaches up and wraps his arms around Kim in return, carefully avoiding any large scrapes or bruises. The tension in his chest uncoils and blooms into a heady glow.
It hurts to hold Kim again. But Chay missed this. He’s not sure if he could live with himself if something ever happened to Kim. It’s a frightening, overwhelming feeling.
“I’ve missed you,” Chay mumbles into the pooling fabric of the sweater. He’s embarrassed to feel his eyes tearing up.
Kim pulls back to look at him. Then, slowly, turns his head to scan over the wall beside them.
Chay blushes.
“That was from before I met you,” he explains. His blush deepens. “Wow, that was supposed to make it sound better but instead it sounded way worse.”
Kim chuckles and flashes a shy, lopsided smile that spins Chay’s world askew and leaves him dizzy.
Then the grin fades, tinged by some softly unearthed hint of sadness.
“Maybe sometime you can put up pictures of both of us together,” Kim suggests.
Chay can hear the fragile, carefully protected hopefulness hiding behind the words. He remembers the polaroids he hid around Kim’s apartment. He wonders if Kim is thinking of them too.
“Yeah,” Chay agrees. “I think that would be a good start.”