Chapter Text
So Kim is stalking him.
Again.
For the last two days Chay has been catching Kim lurking, just in the corner of his eye. He’s gone by the time Chay actually turns his head to look at him directly.
At first, Chay was annoyed. Kim had stayed away since Chay never responded to the song - Chay’s song he might add - and Chay likes it that way. Life without Kim is… simpler.
So when Kim showed up again, standing in the lobby of the compound and sticking out like a sore thumb for once, Chay turned up his nose and walked right past.
Since then, Kim has been on his tail. Chay’s caught him at the compound, at his school, on the busy shopping street with Ohm. At first, Chay assumed something big was going down, but Porsche has been cool as a cucumber, and Chay hasn’t tripped over any dead bodies. Yet.
Honestly, Chay is sick of it.
“You can come out now, Kim,” Chay finally calls out loud to the room one day. He’s taken over one of the unused sitting rooms in the compound for his studying, and Kim has been quietly lurking out in the hallway all morning. The staff look nervous whenever they bring Chay study snacks, and Chay refuses to let Kim get in the way of the tiniest bit of camaraderie Chay has built up with them over the last six months.
Kim doesn’t come when called.
Chay is already just. So over this. Whatever this is. Now that he’s acknowledged the elephant in the room, it should at least have the courtesy of acknowledging him back.
Chay stands and stalks out into the hallway where he catches Kim looking openly surprised.
That probably should have been Chay’s first clue that something is wrong. Kim never lets anyone catch him off guard.
“Kim, what are you-” he continues, but then…
“I thought my name was Wik,” Kim cuts him off, eyebrows furrowed.
That should have been Chay’s second clue, but he blazes right past it.
“You can be whoever you want to be today,” Chay says through gritted teeth, “but go do it somewhere else.”
A series of emotions passes over Kim’s face, and Chay reads: confused, crestfallen, distraught, and then resigned.
But who knows what’s actually going on in Kim’s head.
Apparently Kim doesn’t know either.
“I don’t know who I am,” he says quietly.
Anger bubbles up inside Chay. It’s an unusual emotion for him, but one that he’s been experiencing a lot recently. His normal operating procedure is to just quietly accept his fate, but a lot of things have been changing recently and he’s one of them.
“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing,” Chay snaps, “but leave me out of it.”
Kim’s inscrutable face is back, and as the mask slides back over Kims’ face, Chay thinks it’s the first time in this conversation that anything has felt familiar.
“Okay,” Kim says quietly.
Chay storms away and doesn’t turn back to see what Kim does next.
He tells himself he doesn’t care and he almost believes it.
He doesn’t see Kim again in the following days, but even so he’s never far from Chay’s mind.
He doesn’t know why Kim would want to come back. Chay has nothing of interest left to give. When Kim doesn’t show up again, Chay assumes Kim has moved on once more.
Apparently, this is never a safe assumption to make.
As usual, when Kim comes barreling back in, he’s unexpected, uninvited, but not entirely unwelcome.
Chay doesn’t ditch his guards often, but he’s been antsy since seeing Kim again, and he just wants to clear his head and get some fresh air. He wants to feel like he’s on familiar footing again, so he sneaks out of the compound one night and goes back to his old neighborhood.
He briefly stands outside the gate of his old house, but doesn’t go in. He doesn’t actually need anything, he just wants to be somewhere where he understands the world around him.
Admittedly, walking the streets of his old neighborhood, familiar as it is, would have been a better idea at 1PM than 1AM, but Chay has never claimed to be a clever boy.
He realizes later than he should that the person following him down the side street probably isn’t also looking to see if the neighbor’s friendly cat is out. Chay picks up his pace, and the figure following behind him also picks up his pace, and Chay curses himself for being an absolute dumbass.
But as he’s hauling said dumb ass down one alley and then the next, the probable-mugger gets closer and closer and then, suddenly, a shadow moves. And the mugger stops moving.
Kim has him on his back, arms pinned, his jaw is in Kim’s hands and Chay knows that all he has to do is twist and-
“Kim, stop!”
In the dim light, Chay can’t tell who looks more scared, the mugger - shit, he’s just a kid actually - or Kim himself.
That’s what finally clues Chay into the fact that something is actually wrong with Kim.
He’s frozen over Chay’s would-be-mugger, eyes wide, like he doesn’t even know how he got into that position. He looks… afraid.
All three of them are locked in place, waiting for something to happen. Chay realizes he has to be that something if they’re going to get out of here without any bloodshed.
He pulls Kim off the kid, and luckily Kim goes easily enough even though his limbs move stiffly. The other guy looks even younger than Chay, and is practically shitting himself in fear.
“Don’t do that again,” Chay scolds him, putting his own body between the two of them, pushing Kim further down the alley. He’s tempted to apologize to the kid, but also he was definitely about to try and steal Chay’s wallet so Chay just adds, “Stay in school!”, and drags Kim away.
Kim follows him pliantly. Too pliantly. When Chay turns to get a good look at him, he still has that dazed, shellshocked look about him, like he’s been the one attacked instead of doing the attacking.
“What is going on with you, Kim?” Chay turns and demands once they’re many blocks away.
Kim stares at his hands, and Chay notices they’re shaking slightly. “I didn’t know I could do that,” Kim says softly, voice devoid of emotion.
Chay thinks back to the six bodies piled up in Hum Bar and is about to call bullshit, but the thing is-
The thing is, Chay knows what Kim looks like when he’s lying now. And this isn’t it. It’s too emotional, too vulnerable, too scared.
So this time, when Kim says, “I don’t know who I am,” Chay believes him.
Chay brings Kim back to his old house just a few blocks away and notices how Kim looks around it warily like he hasn’t spent hours in the yard or on the couch with Chay and a guitar just a few months ago.
Chay sits him down at the kitchen table and asks him to explain it again, from the beginning.
“The first memory I have is from a week ago,” Kim starts. “I was in some recording studio, surrounded by mail.” He pulls out a piece of paper from his pocket and lays it flat on the table. “Most of it was fan mail for someone named Wik, but I was holding this one in particular.” There are weird symbols on the paper written in pink gel pen. It looks like something a wannabe witch on Twitter would dream up.
Chay reaches out for it and then stops, hand midair just a few inches away. “Is it safe?”
Kim shrugs. “I tested it on one of the guys in the big building you live in and nothing happened.”
There’s the ruthlessness Chay has come to expect from Kim. Somehow it comforts him just a smidge, even as he winces thinking about which poor fool Kim tested it out on.
Nothing happens when Chay picks the piece of paper up, but he can’t make heads or tails of it either.
“Okay,” he says, setting it down. “What happened next?”
Kim hesitates for a moment, like he doesn’t know if he should say the next part. But he glances between the paper and Chay and makes up his mind. “I couldn’t remember my name, or where I was or anything, but-”
He pauses, looking up at Chay through his bangs, and Chay is momentarily offended with how lovely he looks, even now.
“But I knew I needed to find you.”
Chay… doesn’t know what to do with that information.
“Say more,” he demands instead.
“I knew how to find you,” Kim says, “I knew you’d be in that big building, and everyone just let me walk in. But you didn’t seem to know me at first, and I don’t actually know you, so I just watched you for a few days.”
That would explain those first few days of obvious stalking at least.
Kim looks down at his hands and makes an odd face. “You know they’re doing crime there, right? Like you don’t seem to be involved, but you know-”
“Yeah, I figured that out,” Chay says, taken aback but amused by the honesty. “Thanks for the heads up though.” He’s definitely not used to being more informed than Kim is. “That’s going to be a whole other conversation though.” Chay tries to get them back on track. “I told you to skedaddle, but you were obviously still around. Where have you been the last few days?”
Kim looks at the table guiltily.
“You might as well just say it,” Chay tells Kim with a sigh, “clearly you’re here now.”
“There are cameras all over the big building. And everyone just lets me do whatever I want. Do I work there? Some other girls on the street when you were shopping the other day called me Wik and asked for my autograph, so I assumed I was the musician with the fanmail.”
Chay resists the urge to hide his face in his hands. “You are,” he confirms. “The idol, I mean, you don’t really work at the compound. So you went from stalking to, what, watching me from the security room?”
Kim looks relieved by the first part, and squirms awkwardly at the second. “They were very accommodating,” Kim says. “You should tighten security if they just let anyone come in and watch you, no one even tried to stop me.”
Of course they didn’t, Chay thinks.
“So you saw me sneak out and followed me here?”
Kim nods. “You should be more careful,” he says, rubbing at a stain on Chay’s kitchen table instead of looking at him. “Anyone could have been following you.”
They’re both silent for a minute, thinking about the boy in the alley and Kim’s hands on his neck.
“I didn’t know I could do that,” Kim says quietly.
Chay doesn’t want to go there.
“What do you mean you remember me?” He changes the topic, “Do you remember how we met?”
Kim shrugs, still examining the table instead of meeting Chay’s eyes. “I remember your face, and how to find you, and that I can trust you,” he admits, “I was hoping you could tell me the rest.”
That sends him reeling. Kim trusts him? That must be some cruel side effect of the curse.
“I can’t,” Chay snaps off without thinking. “I don’t know who you are either.”
Finally Kim’s eyes on him again and he looks… crushed.
“We’re not…?” Kim starts to say, then stops.
“We’re not anything,” Chay confirms.
“Oh,” is all Kim manages to utter. They stew in that rejection for a minute.
For the first time ever, Kim looks small. Something inside Chay’s chest twinges sadly.
“Can you just tell me what you do know?” Kim asks. His voice is soft, it’s an actual request and not a demand. “And then I’ll go, I promise. Sorry I bothered you.”
It’s the sorry more than anything that compels Chay to compassion.
“You’re Kim Kimhant Theerapanyakul,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “the third son of the major family.”
He sticks to the basic facts he knows. Kim’s brothers and his father. He was raised in the mafia but left to pursue his music. He just graduated school, but Chay doesn’t know what project he’s working on now.
“So I’m not mafia anymore? I don’t hurt people?” Kim asks, looking relieved.
“Um, no,” Chay admits awkwardly. “You still hurt people.”
“Oh.”
This Kim is much worse at hiding his feelings than the real Kim. Chay can practically see him slide a mask of indifference on to hide that he’s upset. Chay can tell this conversation isn’t going the way Kim hoped it would, although what someone can hope for when they’ve got amnesia is anyone’s question.
Chay sighs deeply, and tries not to feel compassion for how confusing waking up in this world is. Chay himself woke up thrown in the deep end of the mafia world not too long ago, and he felt like he was drowning every day even with all his memories.
“Look,” he says, scratching the back of his head, “just look through your phone or something? Read your emails, check your texts, see what’s in your browser history. That’ll tell you who you are better than I could.”
Kim pulls a phone from his back pocket and just hands it to Chay like he didn’t just say it’s a window to his soul, but Chay takes it anyway. It’s low on power, and Kim either doesn’t let notifications go to his lock screen or just doesn’t have any.
“What’s the passcode?” he asks as the number pad pops up.
Kim shrugs. “How would I know?”
Fuck.
Of course Kim doesn’t have facial recognition set up, he’d be too paranoid of someone using the copious pictures of him on the internet to break through that security feature. He always angled his phone away from Chay when he opened it while they were together, and Chay politely didn’t snoop, much. The best he can do is guess that it’s an eight-digit code instead of four digits.
He tries Kim’s birthday, and then the date of Wik’s debut, and then is kindly informed by the phone that he has three tries left until it wipes itself clean.
Paranoid shithead.
“Unless you’ve got some muscle memory or something, I don’t think we’re getting this open.”
Kim shrugs again and pockets the phone like he already thought that might be the case.
“What about your apartment?” Chay asks. He’d been there a few times when they were… acquaintances, and it admittedly seemed a little sterile, but surely there are enough clues there about who Kim actually is to keep this Kim busy for a bit.
Kim blinks at Chay dumbly.
Chay’s heart sinks a little. “You don’t know where that is, do you?”
“Not a clue,” Kim snarks back. Clearly he’s starting to get a little annoyed by all the reminders of what he doesn’t know.
Chay tries not to take it personally, and reminds himself that he doesn’t have to help Kim.
“I don’t have to help you,” he reminds Kim too, because he likes having all his cards on the table.
Kim’s icy exterior melts away like Chay’s just dangled him over a fire pit. What’s left in its wake is just Kim looking… scared. And young.
Chay has spent a lot of time admiring Kim on a pedestal, and then a lot of time convincing himself he could stand just as tall as Kim before being knocked back down to earth. Seeing Kim like this, Chay thinks there was never a pedestal in the first place. Kim’s not even that much older than Chay, and he looks dangerous and beautiful, sure, but he also just looks like a lost kid. If Chay saw him on campus, he would offer to help him find his next class because clearly he’s out of place and doesn’t know where to go next.
Kim says nothing, just stares at the wall behind Chay sadly and Chay hates how lovely he is.
“Fine,” he groans. “We’ll crash here until morning, then we’ll go to your place. I know the address.” He memorized it when Kim first told him, and he still remembers it even though he’s tried to purge most Kim-related information from his mind.
Then Kim has the audacity to smile at him, and Chay has to turn on his heel before he does anything stupid.
Chay makes Kim sleep on the stupid pullout couch where his stupid legs dangle over the end, and in the morning he doesn’t make him any breakfast.
Instead, he makes Kim buy him breakfast from a bougie cafe Chay’s friends post on instagram about sometimes. Chay is extra petty and orders the largest size and an extra shot, but Kim pays the upcharge without blinking.
“What do you like?” Chay asks Kim while he’s ordering.
Kim looks over the menu like it’s written in another language. “I don’t know,” he says eventually.
Chay sighs and orders him a plain drip coffee. Black. Like his soul.
After, while they sip their expensive drinks, they pour over the contents of Kim’s wallet together.
There’s not much there. A driver’s license confirms that Kim’s name and birthdate are what Chay thought they should be. A handful of shiny credit cards that are made of something heavier than plastic, and… a loyalty card to another coffee shop Chay took him to, back when they were something. Chay only took him there once but the card has eight little stamps marked.
He remembers how he enthusiastically prattled on to Kim about the joys of a free coffee, back before he knew that Kim’s family owned half of Bangkok. He must have sounded like a fool.
“This is just trash,” he tells Kim, leaving it to the side as he puts the rest of his cards back into his wallet.
Kim frowns as Chay does, then grimaces when he takes a sip of his coffee.
“I don’t think this is my order,” he says, wrinkling his nose.
Chay sighs and passes over his sweet monstrosity. Kim takes a sip and his face lights up so brightly it’s a wonder he doesn’t capture the attention of everyone in the room. Chay certainly can’t look away.
He steals Kim’s coffee in retaliation and changes the subject, asking Kim where he’s been crashing if he hasn’t been home.
Kim looks abashed again, and it’s not cute. “There was a couch in the security room,” he says. “No one bothered me once I kicked them out, so I just…slept there. They brought me clothes and food too, and didn’t ask any questions.”
Yeah, after hearing what Chay’s heard whispered amongst the staff about the youngest brother, he’s not surprised. The newer guards have a betting pool for if he’s going to try and overthrow Kinn, but the staff who have been around the longest claim he’s a sweet boy and like doting on him when he comes home.
“And you didn’t ask them questions?” Chay asks.
Kim looks down and studies his coffee intently. “I didn’t know if I could trust them.” He looks up then at Chay through his lovely eyelashes and Chay hears yesterday's words, I remember that I trust you.
Chay closes his eyes and counts to ten. It’s going to be a long day.
When they get to Kim’s apartment, he thankfully pulls out a set of keys so they don’t have to go begging to the doorman. They have to try each one to actually get in, but they do eventually make it into Kim’s apartment with relative ease.
They both stand awkwardly in the doorway and Chay realizes they’re both waiting for the other to take the lead here. Technically, Chay’s been in Kim’s apartment more than Kim has right now.
They might as well cut to the heart of it. Kim never let Chay into his bedroom. Chay assumes that’s where he’s keeping all his secrets, so that’s where he takes Kim first.
“Have at it,” Chay gestures to the room.
Kim starts poking around, but Chay doesn’t know what to do with himself. Surely he’s not welcome to Kim’s most intimate things, he’s just, like, the guide.
His eyes twitch over to Kim’s closet, but no, he’s not going to go digging to see if he recognizes any Wik outfits in there. That would be weird and he’s barely even a fan anymore. It used to mean the world to him, and now it doesn’t. It’s as simple as that.
Then Chay spots Kim’s jewelry box and the necklace he wore in his debut music video and Chay can’t not look. He’s only a man.
“What’s that?” Kim asks, coming over after Chay squeaks a little too loudly.
Chay drops the necklace like it’s on fire. “Nothing!”
Kim raises one eyebrow and picks up the jewelry, twisting it over in his hands to examine it from all angles. “Does this mean anything to you?” he asks, like he knows Chay knows something and he’s just waiting to see if Chay will admit it too.
There’s probably no point in pretending. “You wore it in your first music video,” Chay admits. “A few of us fans spent ages trying to find where you’d gotten it. Eventually we decided it must be bespoke because we couldn’t find a source. There are a couple replicas online now, but they only came out after you wore it.”
Kim looks up at Chay through those illegally lovely eyelashes again. “So you’re a fan?”
“I used to be.” Chay leaves it at that.
Kim must sense that there’s something more there, but he doesn’t pry for more information.
“Where does that name come from anyway, Wik?”
“Oh, gosh, okay, hold on, you’re not going to believe this.” Chay scrambles around until he finds a notepad and pen, then writes out the letters like Kim did for him on that first day. He shows it to him, KIM, and then flips it one hundred and eighty degrees, so it spells WIK.
“Oh,” Kim says, looking down at WIK then flipping it to KIM, repeating the pattern a few times. When he looks up at Chay, there’s a light in his eyes that Chay doesn’t normally see. “That’s pretty clever isn't it?”
Chay doesn’t have the heart to tell him that no, it’s really not very clever at all. “Yeah, P’Kim,” he says instead.
Kim smiles genuinely as he flips the paper WIK to KIM, KIM to WIK a few more times, and Chay tries very, very hard to not find it endearing. He does not succeed.
“Can you show me the music video?” Kim asks eventually when he’s had his fill of amusement from his own name.
Kim cries when he hears his own debut song, just the way Chay cried the first time he saw it too. It stirs a lot of conflicting emotions in Chay, too many to name.
“I made this?” Kim asks Chay, wiping away the few tear tracks from his cheeks. “I- how?”
“Hold on, you had a great interview where you talk about the process, just let me pull it up.”
Chay has made many a friend sit through whole afternoons of Chay’s favorite Wik media, he knows just the right order and combination of music videos and interviews and pictures to make anyone into a fan. He never thought he’d give someone a Wik crash course again, and definitely didn’t think he’d have to give it to Wik himself.
It is absolutely the most gratifying time he’s gone through this song and dance though. He doesn’t actually have to sell Kim on Wik at all, he just soaks it all up with awe and delight. It brings back a lot of memories for Chay, about the sheer joy Wik’s music brought him back when he needed it most.
He shows Kim fanart, and tells him about the inside fan memes, and bemoans that he never got really good tickets to a Wik concert. Kim listens with rapt attention and asks all the right questions, and his eyes sparkle with delight the whole time.
It’s almost like it was before, when their tutoring sessions would go far past the scheduled end time, because their conversations flowed from one topic to the next with ease and exuberance.
But then Chay’s phone autoplays the next video on Wik’s YouTube, and Why Don’t You Stay pops up.
Chay shuts it down.
“That’s all there is,” he says, recognizing that his voice has gone cold, and that his barrier is back up. Kim senses it too, and quietly drifts off to go investigate his bookshelves.
Thankfully he doesn't prod.
Which is good. Chay doesn’t want him to prod. He doesn’t.
There’s nothing left to fix anyway.