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If someone asked Night, he would probably laugh first. It would be a short, dry sound that caught in his throat, followed by a quiet sigh that tasted more like surrender than amusement. After that, he would say nothing at all. He would just look, one simple glance that carried far more than words ever could, a look that lingered for a heartbeat too long, as if the answer lived there in the silence between his lashes and the slow rise of his chest.
Yearning.
For Night, it was not an idea. It was a place. A room he had lived in for so long that its shadows felt familiar and its silence almost comforting. In his mind it was small and dim, with light that never fully reached the corners, the air thick with the echo of unspoken words. It was that soft, aching sadness of walking too far away from home and realizing, halfway down the road, that he did not know when he would be allowed to go back. It settled under his ribs, in the spaces between his breaths, in the way his fingers curled in on themselves when he watched someone love too bravely. It lived in the way his shoulders tensed whenever someone mentioned love as if it were simple.
So, when he looked at Aii now, at the way Aii pretended to be light-hearted while his eyes gave him away, Night understood. Instantly and completely. The music and chatter around them faded to a low hum in his ears as he watched that careful brightness on Aii’s face. There was a particular look people had when they were in love with someone, they were not sure they were allowed to want. A way the gaze lingered, a way the smile faltered for half a second too long. Night recognised it the way one recognised their own reflection in a dark window, blurred yet unmistakable, even when no one else in the room did.
Not Koon, who sat there unaware of the way his own heart was already leaning toward Aii, shoulders angling just slightly in his direction, voice gentling without his knowledge, too cautious and too slow to notice the shape of his own feelings.
And certainly not Way.
Way, who laughed too loudly, spoke too bluntly, and had no idea what it was like to stand at a distance and love someone quietly for years. Way, who filled rooms without trying, who knocked things over with his presence alone. Way, who was the very reason Night knew yearning so intimately in the first place.
Before Way, longing had been just a word. After Way, it became the way Night learned to breathe.
Twenty-three years.
If he said it out loud, even Night thought it sounded absurd. Ridiculous, even. Impossible. Who loved someone that long, that quietly, that deeply. Yet when he traced his memories back, all the way to the beginning, he realized it had never really been a choice. It had never felt like something he decided. It had always felt like something that simply was, like the color of his eyes or the tone of his voice.
In every memory he had of childhood, Way was there. Not just present but illuminated. Not in the loud, obvious way people fell for someone, but in the small, unexplainable details that stayed when everything else faded. The curve of Way’s smile when he scored a point in some meaningless game. The spark in his eyes when he laughed at something no one else found quite as funny. The way he knocked his shoulder against Night’s as if closeness was the most natural thing between them, as if Night’s space belonged to him.
From the moment Way entered his life, something in the world seemed to shift. It was as if the universe, quietly and without warning, had threaded their fates together and never bothered to loosen the knot. As if it had decided that Night would carry Way’s shape inside his heart before he even learned what longing meant. Sometimes, when Night thought back, he could almost see it, that invisible thread looping around their small wrists as children, tying and tightening with every shared secret and every shared afternoon.
They grew up sharing the same dream without ever speaking it aloud. Music was not just something they liked. It was the echo of who they were becoming. Way fell in love with the drums, wild and vibrant and loud, the sticks blurring in his hands as he chased every beat. Night fell into the warmth of strings, into the grounding pulse of the bass that thrummed against his ribs. Together, they became rhythm and melody, noise and harmony, opposites that somehow fit until it felt strange to imagine one sound without the other.
Life kept pushing them closer.
Koon followed soon after, slipping into their orbit as if he had always been meant to be there. With him, their dream solidified and became something they could touch and chase and breathe. Suddenly, what used to be fantasy became reality. Rehearsal rooms instead of playgrounds. Stages instead of empty parking lots. Sweat, laughter, music and exhaustion all tangled together in a way that felt like belonging. Their days were marked by set lists and call times, by hoarse throats and sore fingers, by shared meals eaten half asleep in backstage corners.
And Night found himself standing exactly where he had always wanted to be. Not behind Way. Not beneath him. Beside him.
Beside Way, sharing a life, a dream, a stage. Living in the warm glow of Way’s presence. Breathing the same air during late-night practices when the room smelled of dust and electricity, and early-morning gigs when the world outside still felt half asleep. Watching Way lose himself in the music in a way Night found painfully beautiful, head tilted back, lashes low, mouth tugged into a real smile that no one else seemed to notice.
Sometimes he wondered if this was when he fell in love. Not a single moment, but the accumulation of all of them. The thousand tiny pieces of Way he collected without meaning to. The laughter. The closeness. The way their lives twined together so naturally that it felt wrong to imagine them apart. It was like watching the tide come in. Slow, inevitable, and impossible to pinpoint where it truly began.
Twenty-three years was a long time, but Night had never known a version of himself that did not love Way.
Even now, with heartbreak creeping under his skin like frostbite, the memories of those years glowed warm inside him. It was a soft, dangerous warmth, the kind that kept a person from realizing just how deep the cold had already set in. Loving Way had never been a choice. It was simply the story his heart had learned to write from the very beginning, the script his chest followed even when everything else had changed.
Standing beside Way onstage, heart full and bass humming against his chest, the lights hot on his skin, the crowd a blur of faces and sound, Night had felt, for a brief, fragile moment, that the universe had been right to intertwine them.
He just had not known then that some threads tightened only to strangle.
The most absurd part, the part Night could never quite make sense of, was that he still did not know why that gravity existed between them. Why his heart, out of all the people in the world, had chosen Way. Why the years seemed to fold themselves neatly around the shape of Way’s presence. Why, like a plant straining toward the faintest slant of sunlight, he always found himself leaning in Way’s direction without ever being asked.
He did not remember choosing Way. He simply remembered needing him. Needing his voice, his warmth, his attention. Needing the careless weight of his arm slung over Night’s shoulders. Needing the way Way said his name, quick and rough, as if he had every right to it. Needing things friends should not need, let alone want, from each other. Needing more, long before he understood what more even meant. The feeling was instinctive, almost biological, like breath or pulse. Something coded into him, something that sat in his bones and refused to leave.
It was absurd because they were nothing alike. Not even close.
Night was gentle in ways that felt almost old-fashioned. He smiled easily. He listened deeply. He held the world with soft hands, fully aware of the risk that he might bruise them in the process. He moved quietly, careful not to disturb more than he had to. People liked him because he made rooms feel safer, brighter, easier to breathe in. Because he was the kind of person hearts settled around naturally, the way-tired bodies fell into soft beds.
Way could not have been more different.
He had a sharp tongue and a sharper stare. He spoke too honestly, too quickly, often carelessly, words tumbling out of him before thought could catch up. He irritated strangers within minutes and friends within ten. He pushed boundaries without noticing and rolled his eyes at things that mattered to others. His presence was loud and restless and abrasive. He took up space wherever he went. He was someone people had to learn to tolerate.
Night never had to learn.
He would have preferred not to use that word, but there it was. He tolerated Way without effort, without thought. He accepted him as he was. Unlike others, Night never flinched, never recoiled, never hesitated when it came to him. Way’s sharpness slid off him like rain off glass.
People noticed. They always did.
Friends, classmates, even Koon, who had known them long enough to voice what strangers only wondered about, would ask, half curious and half incredulous:
“Why do you put up with him?”
“What do you even see in Way?”
“You are too nice for someone like him, Night.”
“You could choose anyone. You know that, right?”
The words would hang in the air, and Night would laugh, shrug, look away. No matter how many times he heard those questions, Night never had an answer that satisfied anyone. How could he, when he did not understand it himself.
He only knew that Way’s sharpness did not scare him. The rough edges never cut him the way they did others. Beneath the sarcasm and careless jabs, Night sensed something softer. Something vulnerable and raw and unfinished. Something that flinched at kindness and hid behind mockery. Something he wanted to protect even when he knew he should not.
It was not logical. It was not even conscious. It was simply gravity.
An invisible tether pulling him closer, even when Way gave him a hundred reasons to stay away.
Night could have spent a lifetime trying to unravel why his heart had chosen the one person most capable of breaking it, but the truth would have remained the same. He loved Way because he did, because something in Way fit with something in him in a way no words could fully capture. Like two mismatched pieces that still somehow locked together.
The real absurdity was not that he loved Way, but that he loved him without a single explanation strong enough to break free of his chest. It was the kind of love that rooted itself deep, unseen and undeniably alive. The kind of love that grew in the dark and learned to live there. The kind of love that destroyed people quietly.
Even if Night had not realized, he was already on his way to ruin, even if he tried now to untangle the logic, to pull apart the roots of why he fell, why he stayed, why he still loved Way with a devotion that bordered on foolishness, he knew it would be too late. Far too late.
Hearts did not listen to the tidy explanations people offered them. They did not care for reason or caution or the gentle warnings of friends. Night’s heart certainly never had, no matter how hard he tried to make it.
He had carried feelings for Way for so long that they had begun to feel like a second skeleton beneath his skin, a quiet structure holding him upright even when everything else felt unsteady. Something more than friendship. Something deeper and warmer and far more dangerous.
Way had noticed that, of course. Way always noticed when it came to Night.
Night had never been able to hate him for the way he toyed with the truth, for the way he pushed and nudged and pressed exactly where Night’s defences thinned. Way had a talent for finding the fault lines in his composure, the precise places where his voice faltered and his heart stuttered. He did it with a smirk, with a question that cut too close, with a look that lingered just long enough to unravel Night’s restraint. Sometimes it felt like Way could see straight through him, past the easy smile and gentle jokes, to the bare, beating thing underneath.
Eventually, the confession had come out. Not gently, not gracefully, but in a burst of emotion he had tried so desperately to keep hidden. It had spilled from his mouth before he could cage it back, raw and trembling, his throat tight, eyes burning.
He remembered every second of it as if it were yesterday. The tightness in his chest. The trembling in his fingertips. The way Way’s attention sharpened like a blade, cutting through every distraction in the room until Night felt pinned in place.
And how Way had said yes.
Not with warmth. Not with softness. Not with anything that resembled the tenderness Night’s heart had been aching for.
Way had agreed with a smug tilt of his lips and a teasing glint in his eyes, as if he had won something, as if he had cornered Night into admitting a secret he had known all along. It was the smile Way wore when he got under someone’s skin. The smile of victory, not affection.
Yet it struck Night like sunlight.
He had wanted, desperately and painfully, for it to be one of Way’s real smiles. The soft ones he only ever gave behind the drum set, when the beat took over and his guard slipped. The rare ones that carried warmth rather than arrogance. The smiles that made Night believe in gentleness, in the possibility that something kind could exist between them.
He took what he was given, because for that single moment, hope had sparked inside him, bright and reckless. A tiny flame that spread through his chest so quickly it left him breathless.
Before he could question why Way had said yes.
Before he could think about consequences.
Before he could recognize the danger.
He had let that spark ignite everything. He had let himself burn. He had mistaken the fire for warmth, because he had not known then, could not have known, that some flames were meant only to consume.
“Lose a buddy but get a boyfriend. I'd say that's a bargain.”
Night still remembered saying that to Koon. It had been a teasing line, tossed out with an easy grin, the kind of casual advice someone gave without considering the weight of it. He could still hear his own voice, light and joking, see the way Koon had rolled his eyes. He had never imagined it would come back to haunt him, echoing through his own chest like a cruel reminder of how naïve he had been.
Somewhere along the way, Night had started believing his own words. He had started thinking that love was worth any risk, any fall, any wound.
That had been his first mistake.
His second had been allowing Way’s yes to become a promise it was never meant to be.
From the very beginning, their relationship had felt uneven. Night gave and gave, pouring tenderness into every small gesture. Making sure Way ate when he was too distracted to care. Waiting up for him just to hear how his day had gone. Softening his affection so it would not overwhelm Way, smoothing the edges of his own need. Trying to make himself easy to love, even though Way had never actually asked for that.
Way, in return, gave the bare minimum. Scraps of attention. The faintest hints of warmth. Always just enough to keep Night tied to him, but never enough to make him feel held.
Each time Way offered him even a fraction of affection, Night’s heart lit up like a match in the dark. A small spark. A fleeting smile. The brush of fingertips at the back of his neck. A lazy arm around his shoulders when the room grew too loud. He took all of it as hope, as something he could cling to.
Between those moments there was only silence. Distance. Words that cut more deeply than any outright argument could. A coldness that pressed against Night’s ribs like winter.
It astonished him, the way someone you loved could make you feel lonelier than being alone ever had.
On some nights, lying awake and listening to Way breathe beside him in the dim light of the room, Night felt a hollow ache that made him question everything. How could being with the person he loved make him feel so painfully unwanted. How could closeness feel so much like distance disguised as warmth.
Even then, he never blamed Way. Not at first. Not ever, not really.
He told himself that Way was inexperienced, that he did not know how to love yet. He told himself that Way would grow into it, slowly and eventually. He told himself that all he needed to do was be patient.
But patience hurt when it stretched too thin.
There were moments, small and sharp and unforgettable, when it felt as if Way was not just drifting away emotionally but stepping directly on Night’s heart. Not deliberately, perhaps. Not thoughtfully. Just carelessly enough that the bruise remained. A careless joke. A thoughtless dismissal. A long silence after Night had opened himself up a little more than usual.
The worst part was the realization that rejection might have left him with more peace than this ever would.
He had always told himself that the worst Way could say was no. A clean cut. A simple wound. Something that could be tended to. But he had been wrong.
Way had said yes, and in doing so, he had inflicted a far deeper kind of pain. A cruel, invisible wound that bled slowly, quietly and endlessly.
No would have been mercy. Heartbreak delivered with tenderness that was just sharp.
But heartbreak delivered with hope was devastating.
Way’s yes had not been love. It had not even been kindness.
All Night truly knew was that the person he had loved for twenty-three years had finally chosen him. He had not understood then that this yes would break him so much more thoroughly than a no ever could.
He knew it was too rooted now, too deep beneath everything else, for him to simply cut it out and walk away. Whatever he felt for Way was not a crush he could shrug off, not some fleeting infatuation that might fade once reality set in. It had grown through him, curled around every quiet part of him, woven itself into the way he thought, the way he breathed, the way he measured his days.
Breaking this cycle would mean breaking himself. Night had never been very good at choosing himself.
He told himself to be careful sometimes. To pull back. To breathe. To remember that hearts bruised easily.
The truth was that he had been too far gone for far too long to save himself now.
Every time Way did the smallest thing that could be mistaken for affection, barely a gesture, barely a moment, it kept the fire alive. A lazy arm thrown over his shoulders on the couch. Fingers brushing the small of his back as they moved through a crowd. A half-asleep text at two in the morning asking if he had eaten. A hand on his knee under the table, brief and thoughtless but searing all the same.
None of it was grand. None of it was steady. Yet each small moment landed in Night’s chest like proof that he was not entirely wrong to stay. He hoarded them in his memory the way some people kept useless things they could not bring themselves to throw away, too attached to let go. He turned them over in his mind on the bad days, polishing them until they gleamed brighter than they ever had in reality.
Then there were the other times. The ones that gutted him.
The times Way pulled away abruptly, turned cold, turned sharp, turned impatient. The conversations that ended with Night staring at the floor, trying to swallow words he wished he had never said. The moments when the space between them stretched long and silent, a cold wind Night had no idea how to shield himself from. Those were the moments that made him feel ridiculous for hoping, foolish for reaching, small for wanting.
It felt like standing in front of a door that kept closing just as he reached it. Over and over. Never quite shut. Never quite open.
Just when Night thought this was it, this was where it ended, Way reached for him again.
Sometimes it started with a stare from across the room, those deep brown eyes catching his and holding him in place. Something unreadable flickered there, something intense, something Night, hungry for reassurance, mistook for care. For want. For something close to love.
Then came the whisper.
Way leaned in, close enough that the warmth of his breath skimmed along Night’s jaw, close enough that their foreheads almost touched. The world around them blurred and fell away. The words he murmured were rarely tender. They could be a tease, a complaint, or nothing meaningful at all. The closeness transformed them. Proximity turned them into intimacy, into possibility, into something that felt like a promise dropped into Night’s shaking hands.
It was a tether. A softness sweeping across his cheek that contradicted every harsh word, every cold day before. Something that slipped beneath his ribs, curled around them and pulled.
Heat bloomed under his skin, slow at first and then all at once, spreading from the point of contact down his neck and through his chest and into the tips of his fingers. It left him dizzy and unsteady and flushed with warmth, boiling as if his whole body were reacting to a promise that did not actually exist.
He told himself not to read too much into it. He told himself that Way was simply like this, hot and cold, near and far. He told himself he should know better by now.
Yet when Way’s breath was this close, when his voice dropped low, when his eyes softened for half a second, all Night could think was,
Maybe this time is different.
Maybe this means something.
Maybe he is coming closer, not just pulling me back.
It worked. Those fleeting thoughts, so far from reality, were always enough to make him stay. Enough to silence the part of him that recognised the hurt. Enough to drown out the loneliness with one rush of borrowed warmth.
The manipulation and the cruelty, everything that should have driven him away, were folded into a story he told himself. He decided it was Way’s own twisted way of trying to love him back.
He named it hope.
Even when he found himself suspended between burn and thaw, Night allowed himself to be led in gentle circles by the same hand that kept opening and closing around his heart, never fully holding, never fully letting go.
As long as Way kept reaching for him, even in fragments, Night could not bear the thought of pulling away first. It felt, somehow, like betraying his own love.
He said it freely, with trembling honesty, the three words that spilled from him without permission because they were the truest thing he had ever held for someone else.
I love you.
Way never said them back. He listened. Sometimes he smiled. He acted affection so well that it felt like truth. He touched Night as if he were treasured. He looked at him as if he were wanted. But never with those words. Not once.
You are mine.
That was as close as Way came. A world of implications, a thousand words that sounded like love without actually being love. A thousand gestures Night, soft-hearted and starved, convinced himself were enough.
He told himself that maybe love unspoken was still love. That maybe Way felt it but did not know how to say it. That maybe the warmth was real, even if the word was not.
Or maybe, and this was the thought Night never dared to touch for more than a heartbeat, the silence was the truth. That Way did not love him but gave just enough to make Night believe he might someday.
Hope, small and bright and merciless, kept him waiting. Even when he should not have. Especially when he should not have.
So if someone were to ask Night why he understood Aii so well, he would not flinch. He would not hesitate. He would simply offer a small, knowing smile, the kind that carried the weight of years behind it, and say that he understood Aii better than anyone else in the room.
Because he did.
He understood the need, that trembling and foolish and unstoppable need, to be chosen. He understood the way your hands shook when you handed your heart over, still beating, to someone who might not want it. He understood the risk Aii was willing to place on twenty-one days, the way Aii stacked his heart on fragile hope and waited to see whether it broke or bloomed. Night knew that gamble intimately. He had lived inside it far longer than Aii had.
He understood why Aii stood at the edge of uncertainty and still stepped forward, as if the fall would hurt less than standing still. When you loved someone, even pain felt like movement, like proof that something inside you was still alive.
He understood Koon too. He understood the hesitation and the fear and the instinct to protect a heart that did not yet understand itself. Night could see exactly why Koon did not let his heart rule. Once you did, you were no longer in control. Once you did, someone else held the power to ruin you.
Night knew this better than anyone.
It was the reason he had said those words to Koon, lightly and jokingly and far too casually for the truth buried beneath them. He had meant it as a tease, a throwaway line, but the moment it left his mouth, his eyes betrayed him and pulled, without permission, toward Way. As if his body remembered something before his mind did.
The truth was simple and cruel.
What Aii was risking for twenty-one days, Night had been risking for twenty-three years.
He understood yearning because he had lived in it. He understood heartbreak because he carried it quietly, like a bruise beneath his ribs. He understood devotion because it had been both his blessing and his undoing.
Night knew exactly why he let Way destroy him, why he let Way take him apart piece by fragile piece. It was not because he enjoyed the pain. It was not because he was weak or naive or blind.
It was because Way gave him just enough to make hope feel real.
A soft look here. A half-smile there. A kiss that lingered a second too long. A whisper that curled against the shell of his ear like a promise he could not stop believing.
Those small, scattered spoons of affection, barely scraps, barely crumbs, kept Night alive in ways he could not explain. They made him believe there was something worth holding onto, something worth waiting for. When Way’s eyes softened, just a little, just enough, Night felt seen. He felt wanted. He felt chosen.
Even if the choosing lasted only seconds.
That was enough to anchor him. Enough to make him stay. Enough to make him endure everything else Way did, intentionally or not, that ruined him.
Loving Way was Night’s quiet tragedy. A devotion built on fragments, a heart sustained on crumbs, a life lived between moments of warmth and long stretches of cold.
So when he watched Aii throw himself headfirst into a love he was terrified of losing, Night found himself thinking, with a tired tenderness he would never say aloud,
Yes. I understand.
I understand exactly.
And I hope you survive it better than I do.