Chapter Text
After the bloodbath at Yok’s – everyone in the compound carefully refers to it as “the incident at the bar”, eyes darting around as if wary of Chan’s ghost reporting their indiscretion to Khun Korn – Porchay decides that he’s had enough. Enough of the deaths, the violence, the constant shapeless danger overtaking his life. Enough of Porsche and everyone else deciding that he’s too young, too naive to be told what he needs to know in order to protect himself.
They didn’t give him a single warning about the minor family’s plans. They thought the bodyguards were sufficient protection. Clearly, they’re not.
He’s been having nightmares, too. Nothing like the mild heart-pounding fear of running late for his exams that used to characterise his more unpleasant dreams, no. He now dreams of being run down by someone wearing his own face, intent on killing him. Dreams of being kidnapped, a gleaming knife miraculously appearing in his palm and yet not having the guts to shove it into his kidnapper’s chest. Dreams of a growing mountain of corpses, all bodyguards who died for him. Dreams, once, of Kim pointing a gun between his eyes outside his apartment building, and pulling the trigger with a sharp bang.
At least three mornings a week, he wakes up drenched in sweat and shaking, hardly able to breathe.
He’s had enough.
At his request, Korn – “Come on, no smile for your Uncle Korn?” – manages to get him a place to study nursing at Hong Kong University. He doesn’t bother asking how. Korn also rents him a nice, spacious apartment close to his faculty, and hires him a language tutor fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin and English who will follow him from Bangkok to Hong Kong. Reporting to Korn the entire time, no doubt.
He would have asked Kinn for all this, since he’s the head of the family, now. But for all that Porsche has tried to shield him, he knows how to handle adults who need to feel in charge – “Chay, bring me a beer,” “Chay, did your brother give you more pocket money this week?” “Not so hard with the cotton swab, Chay!” – and he knows Korn is less likely to go off the handle about Porsche constantly going against his wishes for the minor family, if he feels like Porchay is under his control.
Korn tells him that he doesn’t have to thank him for all of this – Porchay is his nephew, after all.
Porchay thinks the man is being a bit too heavy-handed.
It doesn’t matter. He puts the absolute mess that has been his life for the past few months out of his mind. Scraping all the shattered bits of himself together, he focuses and manages to grind through his final exams, then spends the summer learning Chinese and brushing up on his English. He loses a full day over the song Kim sends him, nearly catatonic with grief, but otherwise he manages to hold himself together quite well, he’d say.
Finally, in late August, he boards his flight to Hong Kong. Only Porsche and Kinn are at the airport to see him off, their bodyguards not even lurking in view.
September arrives like silent boots on a dusty concrete floor, and Porchay sinks into the steady beat of university life.
He’s careful about how close he allows his classmates to get, not wanting to drag them into all the mafia bullshit the same way he was. He’s pretty sure his apartment is bugged to hell and back, and that there are bodyguards watching him at all times, in addition to his tutor that he meets weekly.
Still, he doesn’t actually notice any shadows tailing him outright, and whenever he and Porsche call they don’t talk business. He can almost pretend that everything’s normal, that everything’s fine, and he is just a run-of-the-mill overseas student longing for home and his hia.
And his mother, now. He’s still not quite sure how he feels about her, exactly, but talking about how much she’s improving makes Porsche happy in a way he hasn’t been since Porchay can remember. So Porchay keeps his mouth shut, and smiles and nods while his brother chatters on with grin-crooked eyes.
Porsche doesn’t say it outright, but Porchay can tell that his hia is glad that he’s left Bangkok. For all that the family seems to have settled into some sort of harmony – they both call Korn “Uncle” when they see him, and Porsche and Kinn have wrangled the main and minor families into running smoothly – they’ve both grown up needing to recognise trouble when they see it. He doesn’t know if anyone else had noticed it – Kinn, maybe – but Porsche’s shoulders were always a hint too tense whenever he bumped into Porchay within the compound. They’re both thoroughly trapped in Bangkok’s dark underbelly now, with no escape.
Porchay doesn’t think too hard about whether his decision to study nursing means he intends to go back to the family after university. It doesn’t matter anyway, Korn will drag him back the same way he doesn’t allow Kim to stray too far. Although it keeps him overseas for at least five years, Korn was immensely pleased by Porchay’s degree choice. It will be of benefit to the family, while also ensuring that he will not compete with Kinn for leadership like he could if he, for example, chose business.
A year passes by just like this, calm as an empty swimming pool in the early morning hours. He stays in Hong Kong through the summer, not quite ready to go back into the viper’s nest, even though he misses his hia like an open wound festering in his chest.
He does get a bit tired of feeling watched even in his own bedroom and washroom, though, so the next academic year he secures a spot for himself in one of the student halls. Just for the dorm experience, he tells Korn. It’s only for one semester; he’ll decide whether he can afford another semester after he gauges Korn’s reaction to what the man will no doubt perceive as a weak attempt at escape.
Porsche hints at and half-says things on their next call. From what Porchay manages to infer from that, Korn spent the family dinner after Porchay broke the dorm news being indulgently amused. The man also doesn’t follow up with any countermeasures, so Porchay decides he’s free to book himself a spot for the next semester as well. He does periodic sweeps of his dorm room when his roommate is out, the way Arm and Pol taught him to, and he never finds any bugs, so he’s happy enough on that front.
Everything’s well and fine. His grades aren’t brilliant, but they’re steady and safely average, especially considering that he originally planned to study music, and English and Chinese are his second and third languages. He’s quite proud of himself, actually. There’s really something to be said about not feeling constantly hunted by debt collectors and then the mafia, that makes a person achieve things much more easily.
So everything’s going well, and parts of him feel settled like never before.
Until one day, his deserted fan twitter account lights up with texts from one of his oldest fandom friends.
Yo chay ur at hku right
One of wiks asia tour stops is hk!!!!!
And the venue is way smaller than the one here so youll be SO CLOSE to him even if u get a seat in the very back
It would be a lie to say that he hasn’t hungered for the texture of Wik’s voice over these two years. He misses the clean emotion that used to shiver through his bones when he listened to Wik singing, uncomplicated by everything that later happened between himself and Kim. The longing is almost visceral, a never-diminishing withdrawal symptom, sharp under his skin.
He texts back a simple thank you and puts down his phone.
Then he puts his hands over his eyes, and just breathes.
It’s been two years. And despite how packed his days have been, how he tries his damnedest not to think about Kim, he still does, occasionally.
They were both so young. Porchay himself, even more so. Sometimes he thinks about that stillborn morning on the sofa, his insistent “I love you,” and wants to scoff at himself. What did he know of love?
(Too much. He wishes he can forget.)
He used to think it was true that Kim never loved him, that he was just a pawn in his game against Korn, exactly how the other boy implied. Which, now that he’s had some time and experience manoeuvring around Korn, almost seems fair enough, especially when Kim has had to slog through that bullshit his entire life.
But he’s had two years to consider the uncharacteristic hoarseness in Kim’s voice in that thrice-damned video, two years to dig out memories of the way Kim’s eyes stayed heavy on his back every time they met, the way Kim almost seemed… overwhelmed, sometimes.
Though, whether Kim loved him or not does not actually matter.
The crux of the problem was trust.
Kim never trusted him, from the beginning to the end. And all of his trust in Kim was built on lies that crumbled way too easily.
It doesn’t matter anymore, and yet it does, painfully. He just wishes he can forget, wishes to go back to the plain adoration he had for Wik, his talent in songwriting and his siren voice. He doesn’t know if that’s even possible anymore.
Out of simple curiosity, he tells himself, he looks up Wik’s concert.
It’s on a Monday night, and the price is decent, if a bit higher than average. The venue isn’t even too far; there’s a bus that’ll get him there and back to a stop a mere five minutes walk away from his hall.
He lets the matter sit for weeks. The majority of the tickets are sold quickly, and then sales gradually slow to a trickle. People are probably trying to figure out if they can attend on a Monday, especially for those coming from further afield than Hong Kong.
And then, around a month before the concert, he gets drunk on a night out, half on purpose, and finally buys a ticket.
A dark silhouette prowls onstage, accompanied by the ear-piercing screams surrounding Porchay in the pit. Then the lights come on properly, and he finally sees Kim for the first time since he watched Kim sing his song through a phone screen, tears blurring his vision.
Kim has only become more beautiful since then. The lines of his face have become more angular, his shoulders broader, his whole being somehow more solid. There’s a sun-bright grin on his face, a light to his eyes as he starts to sing that’s all too familiar.
Porchay didn’t know Kim had cut his hair short – he wouldn’t, of course, he’s blocked all of Kim and Wik’s socials since that video, and back in Bangkok he had gone out of his way to avoid him on the rare occasions that Kim visits the compound. Even the opening song he’s singing right now is a song he’s never heard before; no doubt Wik has released a dozen new songs in the two years that Porchay had withdrawn from the fandom, since he’s able to hold a solo tour with his own setlist.
Kim’s short hair makes him look more put together, grown up in a way he didn’t seem to before. There’s a phantom sensation coming from Porchay’s fingers, of running them through Kim’s long, unstyled hair, silk-soft. He kind of misses Kim’s long hair. He wonders if Kim cut his hair short because he felt like he’s grown out of that stage of his youth.
Abruptly, he’s glad for the anonymity that being in the pit provides him, standing in a sea of people and their glowing phone screens. The pounding bass rumbles through his throat like a heartbeat. His eyes are burning.
So he closes his eyes for a bit, letting himself focus on Wik’s lovely voice, on his own delight at listening to Wik sing again. He doesn’t let himself think too hard about what any of the lyrics mean, and when he opens his eyes again, he’s a bit more composed.
Wik is leaning towards the crowd, cradling the mic stand. His eyes sweep across the audience, and for a split second – but no. Porchay is stood in the dark, among the surging crowd with their phones raised above everyone’s heads.
Porchay laughs lightly at himself, and then just settles into the concert, letting the enthusiasm of the fans all around him buoy his spirits, clean and plain. He hasn’t felt joy like this in a while.
Wik takes breaks every now and then, sharing anecdotes and cracking jokes for the audience like Kim never does – or did, Porchay supposes he wouldn’t know – and it’s easy, almost. Wik and Kim were never the exact same people in his head, and he can almost pretend that he’s just here for Wik the artist, as one of his many faceless fans.
He manages to get through more than an hour like this, simply enjoying the new Wik songs, in such abundance. Maybe – maybe after he gets home, after he thinks about it some more, makes sure it’s not just unwise impulse – maybe he can consider looking Wik up. Adding to his long abandoned Wik playlist.
Maybe.
And then after a solely guitar-accompanied song that’s clearly written for his fans, Wik takes a deep breath –
“This song is for you,” Kim says, looking straight into Porchay’s eyes for a few long, stretching seconds. And he starts strumming the chords for his song, the one that– the one that–
Beyond the high-pitched whine ringing in his head, he hears someone say to their friend amid the cheers and screams, that this song wasn’t on the setlist for Taipei.
He manages to stand still for one verse, trembling, until Kim sings the chorus, voice gone hoarse again, eyes dark and heavy on his, staring straight at him –
Why don’t you stay?
– And with whispered excuses to the crowd, Porchay jostles his way out of the stadium.
Big is waiting for him right outside the hall. “Khun Porchay,” the man greets.
Porchay winces at being called that – he hasn’t been Khun Porchay in two years – and the bodyguard falls silent. He strides over to a corner and Big follows, the few staff stationed here outside giving the two of them curious looks.
“Are you my security detail, or Kim’s?” Porchay asks in a low voice.
“Khun Kinn assigned me to Khun Kim permanently, especially in his capacity as the singer Wik,” Big says, which means Kim must have told Big to intercept him.
He holds in a sigh. “What is it, then?”
“Khun Kim would like to speak to you.” Big is eyeing him warily, like Porchay might bite his head off for being the messenger. Idly, he wonders what the bodyguards’ gossip among themselves says about his and Kim’s relationship.
Porchay gives him a weak smile. “And if I refuse?”
Big hesitates. “Khun Kim’s exact words were, ‘Ask Chay if he would stay and wait for me.’”
Rusted anger rises in his chest, familiar and gentle as the tide. Porchay takes a deep breath, and tucks it all away.
It is nearing ten thirty at night, and Porchay still has class tomorrow. “I’m going back to my hall. He can come find me if he wants to.”
“Ah. May I accompany you, then, Khun?”
Porchay sighs out loud, this time. “Yes, but not looking like that,” he says, waving at Big’s full set of standard Theerapanyakun bodyguard suit, even if he is lacking the pin that denotes the family. “Lose your jacket and roll up your sleeves, or all the fans who catch a glimpse of us will figure out I have one of Wik’s bodyguards following me while he’s on duty.”
“Perhaps a car…?” Big trails off when Porchay shakes his head. It’s kind for the man to offer, but Porchay will actually crawl out of his skin if he’s trapped in a Theerapanyakun car, especially tonight.
So Porchay finds himself sitting side by side with Big on the bus, Big having transformed into a remarkably rakish impression of a young office worker letting loose after work. The sterile white of the bus lights surround them even as yellow street lamps and various colored signs slowly wink past the windows like an uncoordinated light show.
In the silence between them, Big finally volunteers, “Khun Kim has been… worse, after you left.”
Porchay doesn’t reply.
He wonders how many hands Kim is clasping in tonight’s send-off session. He wonders if the fans have ever figured out that the calluses on his palms aren’t just from his guitar.
He wonders what made him say yes to speaking to Kim again.
To his surprise, he’s noticeably taller than Kim now, even with Kim’s platform shoes. He gives Kim a weak smile as the older boy walks up the concrete path to him, steps unsure.
“Chay.” From Kim’s mouth, his name sounds like a revelation, like devastation.
And then Kim stumbles over his own feet.
A short bark of laughter is shocked out of Porchay’s mouth; Kim is biting at his lips, looking mortified, frozen a few steps away from Porchay.
Porchay sighs softly. He raises an arm and beckons Kim over.
Kim’s eyes are wide with a hint of disbelief. His face screws up for a moment, like he’s about to cry, and then he’s staggering up to Porchay. Kim stops right before him, and in the smallest voice that Porchay has ever heard from him, asks, “Please, can I…?”
He doesn’t actually know what Kim’s asking permission for. He nods yes anyway.
And then Kim is in his arms, face buried into the crook of his neck. His arms circle Kim’s waist with space to spare; he wonders if he’s grown more than he thought he did, or if Kim has just lost that much weight.
There’s a bittersweet taste on his tongue, and a years-old knot loosening in his chest. He buries his own face into Kim’s gelled hair, ignoring the way it scrapes gently against his skin, overwhelmingly sensitive.
And he finally honestly admits to himself that he’s missed this, almost too much to bear, missed the smell of Kim in his nose, missed the new way the other boy fits against his body. Missed Kim’s ambition, his cold competence, the gentle glow that unfurls when he’s focused on his music in the studio, and the ever-present, quiet hint of violence in the back of his eyes when he’s not smiling as Wik.
Missed all of Kim – all the parts of him that aren’t just Wik. All of a sudden it seems like the fucked up tangle of their past, their lives and families, doesn’t matter either. He’s missed this. He wants this.
As he holds on, his fists scrunch up the fabric of Kim’s cotton t-shirt.
Kim is mouthing something against his neck, fuzzy and slightly ticklish. After a while, Porchay figures out it’s his name. Kim is crying, as well; Porchay can feel Kim’s tears and makeup smearing against his skin, wet and warmly viscous.
Porchay draws back from the hug, murmuring, “Hey, hey. It’s okay,” while Kim shakes his head stutteringly.
He cups a palm under Kim’s elbow and guides them to sit down along the raised ledge holding the flower beds that decorate this area, their knees knocking together. It’s still the tail end of winter, and the bugs and insects that usually haunt the shrubbery shouldn’t be out for blood yet.
Kim has stopped crying, eerily quiet. He won’t meet Porchay’s eyes, but his fingers are tightening almost painfully against Porchay’s back.
He gently extracts his arms from around Kim, and Kim’s head lowers even more. Porchay sways his leg against Kim’s to stop him from overthinking, and quickly digs out his water bottle and a packet of tissues from his bag.
“Come on, your makeup will get into your eyes at this rate,” he says softly while he wets a tissue and holds it up to Kim’s face.
Kim looks at him for a long, quiet moment. And then he tilts his head slightly, his small face fitting into Porchay’s palm like it belongs there.
As he gently swipes the makeup off as best as he can with just water, the moles on Kim’s face become more visible, sending tiny hooks into Porchay’s chest and tugging.
The mole near the inner corner of Kim’s eye. Two, on his nose. Then his cheekbone, and his cheek. Another, near his hairline. Familiar, endearing, unending. He did spend an entire morning tracing Kim’s moles with his eyes, a long time ago.
It crashes into him, like a rock thrown into a delicate koi pond – a huge splash, rippling out in circles.
Porchay takes a deep breath, and makes his decision.