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Taeyong glanced sidelong and found Jongin already looking at him. He mustered a smile, just a small one. Jongin’s was much wider. He even looked excited. Taeyong couldn’t understand that level of optimism. He was confident but they were far from safe. They needed a miracle. He could almost hear the commentators.
Kim and Lee need to pull something special out here.
Only a perfect dive will do it.
Maybe this will be the last time we see this veteran pair.
Taeyong shook his head, blocking it out. He avoided looking around himself too much. He needed to focus. They were given the signal to move, and he stepped forward. Next to him, Jongin did the same. They were always so perfectly in time. Jongin was good at keeping them that way. He looked after Taeyong, played the hyung even when he didn’t have to.
Jongin hauled Taeyong out of the archery team’s apartment yesterday evening, when the sky was still bright outside. Taeyong had no idea how he’d even found out he was there. He supposed he hadn’t been particularly discrete. He’d gone, with only token reluctance.
“We need an early night,” Jongin had insisted, and Taeyong didn’t fight him. “You can see him after,” Jongin had added with a sly smile, and Taeyong didn’t fight him on that either.
The height was nothing. Taeyong was confident that he had a soft landing waiting for him at the bottom. The venue, though, the number of eyes on him, he would never get used to that. This was so much bigger than the World Championships. This was miles beyond the Asia Games. The rings decaled onto the side of the hoarding in front of the pool seemed to taunt him, to direct him towards a false target.
He had one target. It was a long way down, it seemed, but that didn’t bother him. Other people found the height intimidating, and scary. Taeyong had never been able to get over the irony of the fact that jumping backwards off a 10m height was the only time he wasn’t scared.
He turned, and so did Jongin.
And he faced the back wall.
The back wall of this aquatics centre looked very much like the back wall of their training pool at home. Facing that wall, he could be there.
He stretched his arms out.
A miracle.
This had to be a showstopper.
Next to him, Jongin stretched his arms out too.
He strained his ears and heard it, the number on the exhale.
And jumped.
Two and a half twists, tight turn and turn, coning his body like a cigarillo, spin, spin, sp- Two and a half somersaults, tumbling over his folded self, his arms holding his legs straight, toes pointed. Arms out.
Water.
“How do you do it?” A quiet whisper in a dark room. There was another bed in the room but it was empty. The rest of the archers were out, celebrating a win. There would be other wins before this Games was over.
“The height never bothered me,” Taeyong said, reaching out to trace barely-visible lips with his fingertips. “Heights are about the one thing that doesn’t scare me.”
As they kissed softly in that dark room, Taeyong was terrified.
It was just happy circumstance that the one thing that calmed Taeyong’s roiling anxiety was this thing that he was better at than most anybody else in the world.
Most.
He wasn’t better than Jongin. He was just as good as Jongin was. That’s why they made the perfect partnership. They slipped into the water at exactly the same moment, and Taeyong found that he could breathe again, exhaling heavily two metres down and hanging there for one quiet moment before he swam for the ceiling lights.
The cheers hit his ears as he broke the surface.
“Don’t look,” Jongin called to him over the water. Taeyong’s eyes slipped traitorously towards the big screen but then back to Jongin, who was holding his gaze, smiling at him still.
Now that he knew what it was to be in love, Taeyong felt that maybe he had always been a little in love with Jongin. It was impossible not to be. He couldn’t have dreamed of a better partner. He knew that Jongin loved him too in his way. It was in everything he did. They spent all day together, every day, syncing up their movements so they did the most innocuous things in time with each other. He could have tricked his mind into thinking that he was in love with Jongin if he wasn’t so awfully, transparently in love with somebody else, now.
He heaved himself out of the pool.
He felt Jongin before he saw him, a familiar arm clamping down across his shoulders as Taeyong scrubbed at his face. He let himself be led to the showers, and padded back to the cool-down pool behind Jongin after stooping to pick up his towel. He only let himself look at the screen when he reached Jongin, who was now doing the same.
“Any second,” Baekhyun said behind them. Taeyong didn’t look at him. He was afraid he’d cry if he did. He couldn’t bear to see any disappointment when the scores appeared.
Please, he thought. For four years he hadn’t thought about anything else; eight years, even. Ten. Longer. He’d been diving his whole life, and with Jongin for most of that. His throat was so dry he was afraid he might throw up.
“Breathe,” a shaky murmur, a chuckle in Taeyong’s ear as he struggled to get enough air into his lungs. The comedown was just as intense as the act itself, and he was seeing stars.
“Have you got,” he gasped, “any water?”
An amused laugh in the dark, and a bottle of water pressed into his hand, fingers entwined for just a second. Bodies entwined completely. Taeyong couldn’t recall the last time he’d been like this with somebody, so together. It was new and terrifying, but not the same kind of terrifying that everything else in his life was. Not terrifying like the build up to the heats would be when they started in a few days, or the walk up the stairs to the platform. It reminded him of being in the water, metres down, at peace in the wake of the diving high but knowing he would have to surface soon. A happy terror.
“You should go. Jongin is nice but I think he might kill me if you’re tired at practice. Can I see you tomorrow?”
Taeyong pouted. “After, yes. But I want to stay here. You just won a medal.” There should be a party; there was one, somewhere. They’d skipped it, for this; slipped back to the empty apartment while the rest of the archery team toasted their gold medals.
Doyoung was still wearing his. Taeyong had asked him to wear it. He was wearing only that gold medal when he’d taken Taeyong apart.
“9.5,” a voice cut through the static.
“9.0.”
“A cool 488, for the Korean team,” and that was the last thing Taeyong heard before he was bundled into a hug so tight that he couldn’t hear anything at all. Jongin’s familiar body pressed to his own, and then Baekhyun’s, wrapped around them both. Jongin was crying. Taeyong thought he might be too. Shock. He was in shock.
“Silver,” Baekhyun said raggedly into their awkward three-way hug. “That’s silver, at least.”
Silver. At least. He was dizzy.
Taeyong disengaged, and looked wildly around. Jongin and Baekhyun were still hugging each other, and there was a camera in his face, but Taeyong couldn’t see any of them. He couldn’t even see the scoreboard, to make sense of the rest of what was up there. He could only see one person, way up in the crowd.
Clapping. He was clapping. Taeyong brought his own hands together too, and they were in sync. All the way across the stadium, he matched Doyoung’s rhythm. These whole games, there had been an inevitability to them, a rhythm that Taeyong had never found anywhere else but at the top of a platform. An instant connection, a chemistry that he couldn’t remember ever sharing with another person he wasn’t diving with. He hadn’t been able to hide from it, not since the opening ceremony when they’d found each other by chance in that crowd, to breakfast every morning since, to late nights curled up on Doyoung’s Olympic Village bed, or hand-in-hand on rare excursions into the city on downtime. To right now, clapping in time across a crowded aquatics centre, like there was nobody else here.
Jongin grabbed him by the shoulder and he was drawn into another tight hug while the cameras watched.
Something was happening. Something different.
“Gold!” Jongin shouted in his ear. “They didn’t- we won!”
Gold. Another thing he shared with Doyoung, now. Taeyong’s heart was beating so hard he thought he might injure himself.
“Gold,” he repeated.
“Gold,” Jongin was fully crying. Cameras flashed all around them. Taeyong dragged him into a tight embrace.
“Show me again,” Doyoung was beaming at him with pride, forearms braced on the balcony of the diver’s apartment while the place descended into carnage through the doors behind them.
“You have one,” Taeyong said shyly. He fished his medal out of his pocket again, and passed it across to Doyoung. “You have two.”
“I don’t have a medal for diving,” Doyoung said, taking the thing and inspecting it like he’d never seen one before.
Taeyong watched him fondly. He watched the little frown of concentration that Doyoung wore when he really looked at a thing, or paid attention to it. He frowned at Taeyong a lot.
“I don’t think they make them special for every sport,” Taeyong said gently, taking the medal back. Baekhyun would come for it soon, once everybody had finished taking selfies with them. Nobody wanted to lose their medal because they’d left it in a club, so Baekhyun would hand them over for safekeeping before he joined them later.
“Will you come out with us?” Taeyong slipped the medal around his neck and took his phone out, turning on the camera. He turned his back to the view, and gathered Doyoung into him. Doyoung hesitated. “What?”
“Nothing,” Doyoung leaned into him, and smiled his adorable, gummy smile at the camera while Taeyong took picture after picture of them together: smiling, pouting, finger hearts, making a heart with both of their hands- Doyoung hesitated again. “Sorry,” he said, and joined his fingertips to Taeyong’s. Taeyong didn’t say anything. He suspected he knew what Doyoung was thinking. He knew the rumours that this picture would spark.
“I don’t have to post them,” Taeyong assured him. “If you’re uncomfortable.”
“Post them if you want to post them,” Doyoung insisted. “Not posting them would be even more uncomfortable.”
For the first time in his life, Taeyong realised that he wasn’t the most frightened person in a situation. But Doyoung was bearing with it.
“Talk to me,” Taeyong said, his fear finally catching up with him. There were days left of these Games. They would go home tomorrow. The Archery team was already gone. They’d left this morning and left Doyoung in a hotel in the city, hanging on for one more night to see Taeyong dive. Taeyong wanted to see the inside of that hotel later. But maybe this was the end of it. Maybe this Olympic bubble was all that was keeping them together.
“I don’t want this to be a one time thing,” Doyoung said, turning to face the view again. Taeyong hadn’t been expecting that. He blinked.
“It’s not,” he said. This wasn’t what he’d been expecting at all. Truthfully, he hadn’t allowed himself to think past the end of the games but he was certain that he was in this, whatever it was. He would take whatever Doyoung would give him. This was new for him, but it was solid. Real.
Doyoung’s lips tugged into a smile. “Lots of athletes meet at these things and they break up right after. And you can always tell, from those pictures. They didn’t mean it.”
Taeyong took his phone out, a little numb. He opened the photo slider. He held it out to Doyoung, skimming through picture after picture of them, not just from today. It had been two weeks of constant company in every spare minute they could find. Taeyong would struggle to hide how he felt, even if he wanted to. He’d told Doyoung he loved him before he’d ever gone into the pool for his final dives. “I mean it,” he said.
“I’ve never been in love before,” Doyoung said, zooming in on Taeyong’s face in one picture, of them out in the city one morning when they were both given a rest from training.
Taeyong asked, quietly. “What about now?”
Doyoung met his eyes, and the fear was gone. “Now I think I can’t say that any more.”
Taeyong was notoriously private about his private life, even amongst the diving team. He never dated publicly, and he had never returned any of the advances of people who got close to him at work, or new teammates who didn’t know better. The others had no such reservations. Jongin had been casually sleeping with one of the springboard divers for months; he was curled up with Taemin now, on one of the couches inside. Jongin was the only person in that team who even knew Taeyong all that well. The group in the apartment behind them had never so much as seen Taeyong kiss anybody.
As he backed Doyoung into the partition between their apartment and the next, as he crashed his lips into Doyoung’s with such messy intensity and feeling and love, the team could no longer say that that was true, either.