Archive of Our Own

If love is a placebo, contempt is the bitterest cure. Tonight, I am alone again, protecting what little dignity I have left at the cost of my own breath. If I am going to collapse, let it be in the anonymity of this forgetting.

...

At this point, Luka can't even remember what started the argument with his boyfriends. They never fight — or at least, never like this, never with this much fury and aggression. Ivan and Till had seemed to conspire against him, and that had made him even angrier. Honestly, it had felt like a personal attack. Though again, he really can't remember what caused it.

He had gone to take refuge at Hyunwoo's apartment — his childhood best friend — because he genuinely couldn't stand to look at either Ivan or Till. He needed to calm down. Hyunwoo had said he could stay whenever he needed. That was really kind of him.

Luka sat on the edge of the guest bed, watching the city lights filter through Hyunwoo's curtains. The silence here was different from the silence at home. It wasn't a shared silence — it was a silence imposed by distance.

"Here, some water." Hyunwoo appeared in the doorway, setting a glass on the nightstand. "You should try to sleep, Luka. Things will look less... catastrophic in the morning."

"Thanks, Hyunwoo," he replied with a smile that never reached his eyes.

When his friend stepped out, Luka reached into his bag for the small leather case that held his pills. His fingers searched the bottom of the fabric once, twice, three times. The emptiness hit him like a bucket of ice water.

He searched desperately through every pocket, unable to find the little case he always carried as a precaution. He must have left it on the kitchen counter — or maybe the study. It didn't matter where it was. What mattered was that it wasn't with him.

He curled in on himself, unsure what to do. It wasn't exactly early, and his apartment wasn't particularly close to Hyunwoo's. Even if he managed to get there, he'd left his keys behind. He'd literally left with only the clothes on his back and his phone — and only because it happened to be in his pocket. He was pretty sure he would have forgotten that too, otherwise.

He pressed his lips together. He could delay the medication until tomorrow, but he'd have to deal with it quickly before it was too late and his condition started getting worse.

He drank the glass of water and went to find Hyunwoo to ask if he could borrow something to sleep in.

"Hyunwoo?" he called softly.

"Something wrong? You look... paler than usual, if that's even possible."

"I forgot my things..." Luka admitted, sitting stiffly on the sofa. "My pills. My keys. Everything. Do you have something I could borrow to sleep in?"

Hyunwoo nodded, though his expression showed a concern Luka decided to ignore. After receiving an old t-shirt and a pair of comfortable pants, Luka returned to the guest room. He changed mechanically, but sleep wouldn't come. He was too anxious, and he hated that. He missed his home, his bed, his pajamas, his sheets — and above all, he missed the warmth Ivan and Till gave him at night so he wouldn't get cold.

He frowned, squeezed his eyes shut, and forced himself to sleep.

He managed a light, fragmented sleep, but woke abruptly in the middle of the night. The silence of Hyunwoo's apartment felt like a physical pressure at his temples. A cold sweat covered his forehead and his chest felt strangely heavy — a familiar tightness that made him sit up with difficulty. The digital clock read 3:15 AM.

His heart gave an uneven lurch. His body, it seemed, wouldn't forgive the missed medication. He knew he couldn't wait until morning, much as he wanted to.

"Just one call," he thought, hand trembling as he reached for his phone. "I'll just tell them to forget the fight, that I need them to bring the case to Hyunwoo's door. I don't have to see them."

He dialed Ivan's number, knowing his boyfriend tended to sleep lightly — or perhaps was still awake. The ringtone sounded, long and anxious, until finally there was a click.

But before Luka could say a single word, the sound of a car's speakerphone filled his ear. What was Ivan doing in the car at 3:15 AM? The question crossed his mind for a brief second. Was Ivan looking for him? Was he driving through the city streets, regretful, trying to catch the trace of his perfume or the shine of his hair under the streetlights? A spark of hope — small and fragile as a match in a storm — ignited in his chest.

But that spark was snuffed out cruelly before he could even whisper a word.

"...and you'll see, Ivan. Any moment now he's going to call pretending he fainted or had an attack from the stress of the fight."

Till's voice didn't sound worried. It sounded exhausted. Luka squeezed his eyes shut, feeling the phone burn against his ear. They weren't looking for him out of love — they were escaping the weight of the argument, and he was still the villain of the story they were telling each other to feel better.

"He'll pretend to be sick... it's his specialty."

Till's words echoed in his ears. So that was what Till thought. He pressed his lips together and held his breath, continuing to listen through the line. What came next only finished destroying his heart, as if it were a placebo.

"Luka knows how to push our buttons," Ivan added. His voice — normally Luka's refuge — now sounded like a verdict. "He'll play the victim until we forget why we were angry in the first place."

He hung up. He would rather disappear into this silence than be the cause of their contempt — though it seemed he already was.

He lay there listening to the buzz of the phone after hanging up, feeling the cold of the early morning seeping through his skin. So that was it. In their eyes, his pain was nothing more than emotional marketing. Every time he was suffering, they only saw an actor rehearsing his best performance.

He tucked the phone under his pillow and curled up, hiding his face in his arms. If they were waiting for a collapse to apologize, he wouldn't give them the satisfaction. If his body was going to fail, it would do so in the dark, where no one could accuse him of "acting."

...

He spent the next four days surviving as best he could. His body was screaming, desperately begging for his medication. He'd been medicated his whole life — he had always been so sickly that this was genuinely the first time he'd been without his pills. He didn't know how much longer he could hold out before collapsing.

He hadn't heard anything from Till or Ivan, and it hurt. He had at least expected a good morning message from Ivan — Till was far too proud — but nothing. He really seemed to have managed to exhaust both of them.

Luka hugged himself, feeling the cold rising from his bones. If he was being completely honest, he wasn't afraid of dying — but he didn't want to die carrying the feeling that Ivan and Till apparently didn't care about him. His eyes filled with tears. Oh, there he went again, crying like the crybaby he was.

"It's my specialty," he repeated in a bitter whisper, closing his eyes as the ceiling of the guest room began to spin. "If I give up now... I'll just be the villain they said I was."

He felt a sharp pang — an electric cold that ran up his left arm. Hyunwoo knocked softly at the door, but to Luka, the sound resonated like thunder in the void of his consciousness. He couldn't answer. His lips were sealed by pride and exhaustion.

He heard a woman's voice, and noticed the persistent knocking on the door. It sounded like it might be Sua. What was Sua doing at Hyunwoo's place? And since when had Sua and Hyunwoo even known each other? He couldn't remember anything that might have connected them — Sua had a very closed circle, and Hyunwoo wasn't the type to give his address to just anyone.

The thought flashed through his mind like lightning, then sank into the fog of his suffering. Maybe it was just his imagination, another one of his mind's games to keep him from feeling so alone while the electric cold devoured his chest.

But what he heard were footsteps — and the sound of a key turning in the lock. That was real.

"Luka!" This time Sua wasn't elegant or calm — it was a scream of pure, total horror. She burst in, followed by a pale Hyunwoo who held a lit phone in his hand.

"He's been like this for days..." Hyunwoo's voice trembled as he approached the edge of the bed. "He refused to call anyone, Sua. He let himself die here." The truth was Luka couldn't hear them well — his ears, spent, caught only the hum of white noise, and his eyes gave out.

He felt the touch of desperate hands on his cheeks, but the warmth felt foreign, like something that no longer belonged to him. Ah... maybe if he finally died, he would manage to make Ivan and Till happy. They wouldn't have to carry him anymore. Wouldn't just the two of them make a good couple?

Sua didn't let herself be swept away by tears. While Hyunwoo lifted Luka's limp body toward the car, she was already dialing. Her fingers struck the screen with trembling fury — something worse than calling an ambulance: calling the root of the problem.

Ivan's phone rang three times before his voice, flat and distant, came through the other end.

"Sua? What do you want? We're working on—"

"Shut your mouth for once in your life, Ivan!" she cut him off, angry enough to attempt reasoning with her brother. "Luka is dying. We're taking him to Central Hospital. If you want your last image of yourselves to be that cowardly silence you've been keeping for four days, you can stay exactly where you are."

She didn't wait for a response. She hung up. She tossed the phone onto the dashboard as Hyunwoo started the engine and pulled out of the building.

...

The hospital was a place full of fluorescent lights, the air saturated with the smell of antiseptic — strong enough to make you dizzy. Luka was taken straight to the emergency room. Hyunwoo, meanwhile, sat motionless in the waiting area, his hands still carrying the cold sweat of his friend, staring at a fixed point on the wall and remembering he needed to tell Hyuna what had happened. Sua was another story: she paced back and forth like a caged animal. The sound of hurried footsteps echoed down the hallway at that very moment.

Ivan and Till arrived, appearing at the end of the corridor breathless, their clothes disheveled and their eyes full of a confusion that turned to panic the moment they saw the look on Sua's face.

"Where is he?" Till asked, his voice breaking on the first attempt. "Sua, tell us what happened."

Sua planted herself in front of them. She was clearly the shortest person in the room, but in that moment she seemed to fill the entire hallway.

"What happened is that you're both negligent," she shot at them, her eyes fixed on Ivan, who seemed to have lost all his usual composure. "...And Luka is an idiot." She sighed, pressing a hand to her forehead. "Luka has been without his medication since the day you fought. He spent four days slowly collapsing in a room that wasn't his while he waited for a message you never sent."

"Without his medication?" Ivan went pale, stepping back as if struck. He started to protest, but the memory of the day of the fight flooded in — Luka had walked out without taking anything. He even remembered seeing the case on the kitchen counter. He hadn't done anything to get it to him. He was a terrible boyfriend.

"But... he always carries his case. We thought he'd left with everything he needed. We thought he was just... taking space." Till's voice was broken.

Hyunwoo returned to Sua's side a moment later. "Hyuna and Mizi are on their way too," he said quietly, without looking at Ivan or Till.

Silence fell over them. Everything was too tense for anyone to say anything more.

Ivan was the first to break. It wasn't dramatic — not the kind of collapse you'd expect from someone of his build and demeanor. It was something much smaller, and for that very reason, much more devastating. He sat down in a plastic waiting room chair, elbows on his knees, face buried in his hands, and simply stopped containing what he'd been carrying for the last four days.

Till remained standing a few seconds longer, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the floor, as if willpower alone could hold him together. It didn't work. He sat down next to Ivan without a word, and when Ivan instinctively reached out for his hand, Till took it with a pressure that said everything neither of them could articulate.

Sua looked at them for a moment. Something in her expression wavered, but she said nothing. She crossed her arms and looked away toward the hallway, as if the fluorescent lights were easier to bear than the scene in front of her. Hyunwoo still wasn't looking at them.

Ten minutes passed, or maybe twenty. Time in hospitals always distorts in a particular way, as if even the clock hands are waiting for news. That was when the sound of quick footsteps and the unmistakable murmur of two familiar voices broke the quiet of the hallway.

Hyuna arrived first, with Mizi practically on her heels. Both were out of breath, as if they'd run from the parking lot.

"How is he?" Hyuna asked directly, turning to Hyunwoo — clearly the most functional person in the room at that moment.

"Stable, according to the last update," he answered, his voice still a little muted. "But he'd gone four days without his medication. I don't know how long before we hear anything more concrete."

Mizi exhaled slowly. Her eyes moved across the room, past Sua and Hyunwoo, and finally landed on Ivan and Till. Ivan's eyes were red and he was making no effort to hide it. Till kept his gaze down, but the tension in his body was that of someone carrying too much weight.

Mizi didn't say anything. She sat down on Till's other side with the same naturalness as someone sitting beside a friend in a storm — without asking if she could, simply because it was the right thing to do. Till turned his head toward her, and for a moment, his expression dropped all its usual armor.

"We didn't know," Till said, and it sounded less like an excuse and more like a confession. "We didn't know he didn't have the case."

"I know," Mizi replied quietly.

"That doesn't fix it," he added.

"No," she conceded. "But it doesn't mean you're monsters. It means you made a very big mistake and now you have to carry that."

Hyuna, meanwhile, had approached Sua with the caution of someone who recognizes another person at their limit.

"Are you okay?" she asked, voice low enough that it was just for her.

Sua opened her mouth, closed it, and finally shrugged with a gesture that was more exhaustion than indifference.

"Luka is an idiot," she said at last, her voice slightly hoarse. "An idiot who let himself die in silence because proving them wrong mattered more to him than asking someone for help."

Hyuna nodded slowly. "That's very him."

"Too him," Sua murmured.

Ivan raised his head for the first time since he'd sat down. His eyes were dry now but red, and he had the expression of someone who had been mentally retracing every moment of the last four days looking for the exact point where everything went wrong.

"The case was on the kitchen counter," he said, to no one in particular. "The day he left. I saw it. And I didn't do anything."

The silence that followed was different from the one before. Less tense, heavier. The kind of silence that doesn't ask to be filled.

It was Hyunwoo who finally spoke, without lifting his eyes from the floor.

"Luka didn't call either," he said, with a calm that wasn't coldness but exhaustion. "He had four days to dial any number and he didn't. So if you're going to hand out blame tonight, make sure you save some for him too."

It wasn't forgiveness. It wasn't an absolution for Ivan and Till either. It was simply the truth, said by someone who had lived it up close and was too tired to dress it up.

Nobody responded immediately. Mizi had her eyes fixed on her hands. Ivan had sunk his head between his shoulders again.

It was Hyuna who broke the silence, with that precision of hers for asking questions at exactly the moment when nobody wants to answer them.

"Wait," she said, looking at Sua. "How did you find out Luka was in trouble? He was at Hyunwoo's place, not yours."

Sua opened her mouth, but Ivan spoke first, his voice still muted.

"She's the one who called us. Both me and Till," he said, without looking up. "Sua was the one who told us Luka was in the hospital."

Mizi frowned slowly, following the thread.

"Right, but..." she looked at Sua, then at Hyunwoo, then back at Sua. "How did you know he was in trouble if he was with Hyunwoo? Did Hyunwoo call you before anyone else?"

The silence that followed was of a completely different nature from the one before. Narrower. More specific.

Hyunwoo didn't answer right away. Neither did Sua. They exchanged a glance — very brief, the kind that tries to look casual and doesn't quite manage it.

"We know each other," Sua finally said, with a bluntness so complete it was almost a provocation. "Hyunwoo knew I'd want to know."

"Since when do you know each other?" Mizi pressed, her curiosity genuinely puzzled rather than malicious.

"For a while," Hyunwoo added, in his usual neutral tone.

It was technically an answer. It explained nothing. And from the way Sua looked away toward the ceiling exactly half a second later, it was clear that neither of them had the slightest intention of elaborating.

Till, who had been watching the exchange with his arms crossed, let out something that wasn't quite a laugh.

"Yeah, now that you mention it..." he said, looking at Hyunwoo. "Since when are you two so close? Sua doesn't let anyone near her and Hyunwoo is practically a hermit. What is this, some kind of secret society for hating Ivan and Till?"

Sua looked at him with the expression of someone who has just heard something between absurd and exhausting, but didn't respond. Hyunwoo exhaled slowly through his nose, not bothering to add anything.

Till opened his mouth to push further, but Ivan put a hand on his arm. He said nothing. The gesture alone, with the weight of everything that had happened that night, was enough.

Till closed his mouth. Let his arms drop. It wasn't the moment, and he knew it — even if it cost him to admit it.

Somewhere down the hallway, a door opened. The footsteps of a doctor in a white coat approached the waiting room, and everyone, without exception, looked up at the same time.

...

The room smelled of medicine and recycled air. Luka took a moment to remember where he was. The white ceiling and fluorescent lights didn't offer many clues at first, but the steady beeping of the monitor beside him oriented him before he could finish being disoriented.

He was alone.

That, for some reason, was the first thing he registered. Alone, in a hospital room, with an IV in his arm and a dry mouth and his chest still feeling a little heavy. Hyunwoo wasn't there. Sua wasn't there. Nobody was.

Good. He supposed it was what he deserved.

He tried to sit up slowly, but his arms didn't respond with the firmness he expected. So he stayed propped on his elbows, staring at the ceiling with an expression he'd have liked to be indifferent — and probably wasn't.

The door opened.

He didn't need to look to know who they were. He recognized them by the sound, by the weight of their footsteps, by the particular way silence changed texture when Ivan and Till entered a room. He looked anyway, because looking away would have been too obvious.

They looked undone. That was his first impression — clear and involuntary. Ivan had dark circles he didn't remember ever seeing on him, and Till was wearing yesterday's clothes, which for him was almost a declaration of emergency. Both stopped in the doorway for a second, as if they needed permission to enter, or as if they were afraid Luka might shatter if they moved too quickly.

Luka felt something tighten in the center of his chest. He ignored it.

"Well." His voice came out exactly the way he had rehearsed it mentally — flat, light, almost bored. Almost. "I didn't know this counted as a real emergency. I thought I was just acting."

His voice trembled on the last word. Just a little. Just enough.

Till closed his eyes for a second. Ivan said nothing.

Instead, Ivan crossed the room. Slowly, without looking away from Luka, as if any sudden movement might break something already very fragile. He sat on the edge of the bed carefully, and then, without saying a single word, wrapped an arm around Luka's shoulders and drew him in.

Luka tensed immediately.

"Let go of me," he said, his voice still trying to be cold and managing less and less of it. "Ivan, I'm telling you to—"

Ivan didn't let go. He didn't pull tighter, didn't say anything — he simply stayed there, steady and quiet, cheek resting on Luka's hair, as if he had all the time in the world and no intention of moving.

And Luka, who had spent days being more stubborn than his own body, who had chosen silence over asking for help and pride over common sense, felt something give way somewhere behind his sternum.

It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't the collapse he might have expected from himself. It was simply that his hands found the fabric of Ivan's shirt and held on, and his shoulders — rigid for so long — surrendered all at once, and the air he exhaled sounded too much like a sob to pretend it wasn't.

Till moved closer from the other side, slowly, and sat in the chair beside the bed without touching him yet — as if respecting something that was still very new and very broken.

"You heard the call," Till said quietly. Not a question.

Luka didn't answer. Let him take it as he wanted.

"I know because you hung up," Till continued, his voice stripped of all its usual irony. "You called and hung up without saying anything, and I took too long to understand why."

Ivan squeezed his shoulder, barely.

"The case was on the counter," Ivan said, his voice hoarse. "I saw it when you left. I didn't do anything."

Luka squeezed his eyes shut.

"Stop," he murmured.

"No," Ivan replied, with a softness that left no room for negotiation. "Not yet."

Luka didn't answer Ivan. He kept his eyes closed and his fingers curled in his shirt, listening to the rhythm of the monitor as if it were the only steady thing in the room.

Till was still in the chair. Luka could feel his presence from that side — that specific warmth Till radiated even when he said nothing, even when he was being difficult, even when Luka would have preferred not to recognize it.

"I was the one who spoke first," Till said, so quietly Luka almost thought he'd imagined it. "In the car. I started it."

Luka opened his eyes slowly.

Till had his gaze fixed on his own hands, elbows on his knees, his back slightly curved — not his usual posture, not the way Till normally occupied space. He looked smaller like that. He looked, for the first time in a long while, genuinely lost.

"I was angry," he continued, as if reading a report about something that had happened to someone else. "And when I'm angry I say things that sound more like what I want to believe than what I actually think. And what I said..." He stopped. Pressed his lips together. "I didn't mean it, Luka. Not a single word."

"Till," Ivan said quietly.

"Let me finish." Till looked up then, and Luka saw what he'd been hiding since they walked in. Eyes too bright. Jaw tight with the effort of containing something already dangerously close to the surface. "I heard you hang up. That night, after Ivan accidentally answered, I heard you hang up and I said nothing. I convinced myself it was better to wait, that you'd call when you were ready, that..." His voice broke at the end — clean and without warning, like a dry branch. "I convinced myself I could wait. And you almost..."

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.

Luka looked at him. For days he'd been constructing a version of Ivan and Till that he could hate, or at least keep at a distance — a version built from those words heard in the dark of early morning. But Till sitting like that, hands clasped too tightly and voice broken at a point he clearly hadn't planned, didn't fit that version.

"You're an idiot," Luka said, his voice still wet.

Till let out a sound too uneven to be a laugh and too brief to be a sob.

"Yeah," he admitted.

"Both of you are," Luka added, looking at Ivan too.

"Yeah," Ivan repeated.

Luka exhaled slowly. He released Ivan's shirt — not to pull away, but to make room — and extended his free hand toward Till with a gesture that cost him more pride than he was willing to admit.

Till took it immediately. He rose from the chair and sat on the other edge of the bed carefully, as if Luka were something that could break — which was ironic given the circumstances. He pressed his forehead against Luka's temple without saying anything more, and Luka felt the last of the tension in his body dissolve in a way that had very little to do with medication.

The three of them were there, in a hospital room that smelled of antiseptic, with a monitor beeping in the background and fluorescent lights with no romance in them whatsoever, and Luka thought he probably should say something important — something worthy of the moment.

Instead, he closed his eyes.

He didn't get to hear Ivan's response. The cough arrived without warning, pulled from somewhere deep in his chest without asking permission. The first fit bent him forward, abrupt and involuntary, and the ones that followed were no better — a chain of shudders that stole the air before he could recover it, burning in his throat and filling his eyes with tears that had nothing to do with crying.

"Luka—" Ivan sat up immediately.

"Wait, I'll call—" Till was already on his feet.

"No," Luka managed between fits, his voice wrecked, one hand extended toward them in a gesture that tried to be authoritative and probably wasn't. "I'm... fine. Get out."

Neither of them moved.

"Get out," he repeated, with more force than he should have been able to muster, pushing away Ivan's hand that had gone instinctively to his back. "I don't want you to see me like this."

"We've seen you like this before," Till said, with a calm that was completely new and completely steady, sitting back down on the edge of the bed as if Luka hadn't said anything. "Many times. And we stayed then too."

Ivan said nothing. He simply put his hand back on Luka's back, slowly, tracing gentle circles that didn't ask permission but didn't demand it either. Just there.

Luka wanted to protest. He had the words formed — something about dignity and not needing to be treated like glass — but another fit of coughing cut him off, and somewhere between the third and fourth one, he didn't have energy left for pride.

He let himself go forward, forehead nearly resting on Ivan's shoulder, while the coughing wore itself out in gradually spaced waves. Till had put a hand on the back of his neck at some point Luka didn't quite remember, with a soft, steady pressure that wasn't trying to do anything more than remind him it was still there.

When the last fit passed, the room fell silent except for the monitor and Luka's labored breathing trying to normalize.

"See?" he said, his voice completely ruined. "I'm fine."

Till exhaled through his nose.

"Completely fine," he replied, in a tone that was more relief than sarcasm.

Ivan handed him the water glass from the nightstand without a word. Luka took it without protesting — which in itself was a significant concession — and drank slowly, feeling the burning in his throat ease just enough.

"Mañana hablamos," Luka repeated when he could, handing the glass back with a precision that was trying to recover some composure.

Ivan pressed a kiss to his hair, so soft it barely counted.

"Tomorrow," he agreed.

Till said nothing. He simply laced his fingers with Luka's on the blanket, with the same naturalness of someone doing something they've gone too long without doing and which suddenly seems like the simplest thing in the world.

Luka looked at the two of them a moment, eyes still bright, voice still broken, chest still heavy.

He closed his eyes.

This time, nobody went anywhere.

...

The doctor spoke for several minutes about rest, hydration, and treatment adherence, in the flat professional tone of someone who has given the same speech hundreds of times. Luka nodded at the right moments with the expression of someone who is technically listening and also counting the seconds until they stop talking.

Ivan and Till listened for all three of them.

When they finally handed over the discharge papers and left them alone, Luka sat up on the bed with the intention of getting dressed by himself, and with enough energy to attempt it exactly once before his legs decided not to cooperate.

"Don't say anything," he warned, before either of them could open their mouths.

Neither of them said anything. Till simply stepped forward and offered his arm with a naturalness so studiously casual it was almost convincing. Luka took it without comment — which in Luka's language was practically a declaration of love.

Ivan collected the few things on the nightstand, and that was when Luka saw it.

The leather case was there — small, worn, completely familiar — placed on the nightstand as if it had always been there. Luka looked at it for a second longer than necessary.

"We picked it up when we went for clothes for you," Ivan said, without looking at him, folding something with excessive concentration for how simple the task was. "It's complete. Nothing missing."

Luka didn't respond. He reached out and took it, feeling the familiar weight of the leather between his fingers, and slipped it into the pocket of the hoodie Ivan had brought without being asked.

"Good," he said, in a voice that was trying to be indifferent and sounded, in spite of everything, a little hoarse.

The walk to the car was slow. Luka didn't ask for help but didn't refuse Till's hand on his back as they crossed the hallway, or the deliberately unhurried pace Ivan set without making any comment about it. Outside, the air was cold and smelled of wet city, and Luka closed his eyes for a second when it hit his face, just breathing it in.

In the car, Luka took the back seat. Till sat beside him without being asked, with the same silent logic as always, and when Ivan started the engine and the warmth of the vehicle slowly filtered through, Luka felt something in his chest loosen in a way that had nothing to do with medication.

He rested his head on Till's shoulder almost without realizing it, the way you do something out of habit rather than decision.

Till didn't move. He didn't say anything. He just raised his hand slightly and rested it over Luka's, which lay between them on the seat, and stayed like that.

Through the rearview mirror, Ivan glanced at them for a second. Then turned his eyes back to the road.

Nobody spoke the entire way home, and it was the most comfortable silence Luka could remember having in a very long time.

Luka was looking out the window with his cheek resting on Till's shoulder. The city at that hour had something unreal about it — too quiet to be daytime, too bright to be nighttime. An in-between state that felt strangely familiar.

When they reached the building, Ivan parked. The three of them stayed still for a moment, as if getting out of the car would make everything more concrete.

"Let's go," Till said finally.

The stairs were slow. Luka said nothing about the pace the other two set — deliberately unhurried, deliberately disguised. He was grateful for it, even if he didn't say so.

When Ivan opened the apartment door and the familiar smell of the place hit him, something in his chest settled into a space that had been empty for days.

Home. His things. The same couch, the same lamp, the same controlled disorder the three of them had built without planning it.

Ivan disappeared into the kitchen without a word and came back with a glass of water and pills counted with a precision that left no room for argument. Luka took them without protesting — which was itself a fairly clear indicator of how much energy he had left for pride.

The shower was long and hot. Ivan sat on the edge of the sink with his phone in his hand, staring at the screen with a concentration that fooled no one. Luka didn't tell him to leave.

When he came out, Till was already in bed with his back against the headboard and the expression of someone who has been waiting for a while without wanting it to show. Luka settled between them with the slowness of someone still negotiating with their own body, and for a moment the three of them simply existed in the same space, with the bedside lamp casting low light and the quiet of the apartment wrapping around them.

It was Luka who spoke first.

"What did I say?" Not exactly a question. More like a piece he needed to place in order to keep going.

Ivan and Till exchanged something above his head — very brief, the kind they'd been perfecting for years.

"Where do you want to start?" Till said.

"From the beginning," Luka said. "Because honestly I don't remember what started it all. I just remember that at some point you were both against me and I left."

Till exhaled slowly.

"Yejun's birthday," he said.

Luka blinked. The name took a second to land.

Yejun was the younger brother of someone Ivan knew from work — someone who had appeared on the periphery of their lives over the past year and who, for reasons Luka had never fully understood, he genuinely couldn't stand. Nothing concrete had happened, no specific incident — there was simply something about the way he talked and occupied space that irritated Luka in a way he couldn't rationally justify, which made it more irritating still.

Yejun's birthday had been a dinner — twelve people at a restaurant Luka would have liked under any other circumstances — and it had been on the calendar for weeks.

"I called Ivan that morning telling him I wasn't feeling well," Luka said slowly, reconstructing something he had filed away.

"Yes," Ivan confirmed, with careful neutrality. "And I told Till we probably wouldn't be able to go. And Till went to check on you. And found you perfectly fine on the couch watching a show with an entire bag of snacks."

Luka didn't respond.

"You weren't unwell," Till said, without accusation but without softening it either. "And it wasn't the first time. In March you cancelled dinner with Ivan's parents saying you had a migraine and two hours later you were on a video call with Hyunwoo, perfectly cheerful."

"I get the pattern," Luka cut in, his voice a little tense.

"Then you understand why we reacted the way we did," Till said.

Luka closed his eyes for a moment. Yes. He understood. He'd understood even that day, somewhere beneath the anger and the feeling of being attacked — he had known Till was right, and that was precisely why it had hurt so much.

"I use my condition as an excuse," he said, with a voice that had nowhere left to hide. "When I don't want to do something and I don't know how to say so, I pretend to feel worse than I do. It's easier than admitting I just don't want to go."

"Luka," Ivan said, with a voice that wasn't reproach but something closer to fond exhaustion. "You can tell us you don't want to go somewhere. We've been together three years."

"I know," Luka said.

"So why?" Ivan asked.

Luka took a while to answer. Outside, somewhere on the street, a car passed with its music too loud and then silence closed back in.

"Because if I say I don't want to go," he said finally, "you have to decide whether to go without me or stay, and either option makes me feel bad. If you stay, I feel like I'm holding you back. If you go, I feel like you're leaving me. It's simpler to be sick. That way nobody has to choose."

The silence that followed was one that didn't ask to be filled.

Till was the first to speak, and when he did, there was no edge in his voice.

"That's probably the most honest thing I've heard you say in three years," he said.

"Don't repeat it or I'll deny it," Luka said.

"Luka," Ivan said, turning toward him enough for his voice to be completely direct. "Next time you don't want to go somewhere, say so. We sit down together, decide together, and nobody has to pretend anything. Okay?"

Luka stared at the ceiling.

"And what you said in the car," he continued, shifting angles with the precision of someone who had been waiting for the right moment. "That I was faking being sick. That I knew which buttons to push."

Ivan closed his eyes briefly.

"We said it with the anger of having figured out the pattern and feeling stupid for not seeing it sooner," he said. "It wasn't fair. And we knew that even while we were saying it."

"You thought it," Luka said.

"In that moment," Till admitted. "With that specific anger, yes. And it was wrong. Because even though the pattern exists, you're not a manipulator, Luka. You're someone who doesn't know how to ask for what they need and found a twisted way to avoid the problem." He paused. "Which is different. Even if the result is equally frustrating."

Luka sat with that for a moment.

"How generous of you," he said, with a tone that finally had some of its usual texture.

"I know," Till replied, with the same dryness. "I'm being extraordinarily patient tonight."

"And what you heard on the phone," Ivan said, softer now, "I'm going to keep apologizing for as long as it takes. Because you hung up without saying a word and spent four days believing that was all we thought of you. And it isn't. It never has been."

Luka didn't respond immediately. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling with the expression of someone letting something land slowly, without rushing it.

"Next time I'm actually unwell," he said finally, "I'll call. It doesn't matter who I've fought with."

"That," Till said, "is completely non-negotiable."

"And next time I don't want to go somewhere," Luka continued, with a tone that was starting to have something slightly dangerous in it, "I'll say so. Even if it's uncomfortable."

"Perfect," Ivan said.

Silence.

"Although," Luka added, "for the record, I genuinely cannot stand Yejun, and that's not going to change."

"Nobody asked you to like him," Till said.

"Just not to fake a cardiac episode to avoid him," Ivan added.

"Technically I never reached cardiac episode status."

"Technically you came very close," Till replied.

"For completely unrelated reasons that have nothing to do with Yejun, so that point doesn't count," Luka said.

Till looked at him with an expression caught between exasperation and something that looked a lot like relief — the kind that only appears when something you were afraid of losing is still there, just as difficult and just as theirs as always.

"You're exhausting," Till said.

"And yet," Luka replied, closing his eyes.

Ivan turned off the bedside lamp. The darkness settled slowly, familiar and weightless, and Luka felt the warmth of the two of them beside him as something he'd been denying himself for days and which was now simply there — without drama, without conditions.

...

Three days later.

Luka had developed a very specific opinion about bed rest, and it was that it was a form of torture designed specifically for people who didn't know how to be still — which included him in a way he'd never had to confront quite so directly.

He couldn't go out. He couldn't do anything that required physical effort, a category in which the doctor had included things Luka considered completely reasonable and which apparently were not. He could read, watch shows, exist decoratively on the sofa. That was approximately it.

Ivan and Till had taken the days off without discussing it.

That, more than anything else, was what Luka kept turning over in the quiet moments. Not the gesture itself — he knew it, recognized it, it was part of the vocabulary the three of them had built over years. But the ease of it. Without asking if he wanted it, without making it a negotiation, simply rearranging their schedules as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Because for them, it was.

Luka was still learning that for him it could be too.

The afternoon of the third day found them on the large sofa, the three of them in a configuration that had evolved without anyone planning it. Luka was lying down with his head in Ivan's lap, his legs over Till, who had accepted them with the same stoicism with which Till accepted most of the minor inconveniences of living with Luka. On the television there was something none of the three were really watching.

Ivan had a hand in Luka's hair, moving it absently and completely unconsciously — the kind of gesture done without knowing you're doing it. Till had his phone in his hand but hadn't looked at it in several minutes, his gaze somewhere in the middle distance with the expression that in him meant he was thinking about something and had no intention of sharing it unless asked directly.

Luka was staring at the ceiling.

It was a perfectly ordinary ceiling. He knew it by heart — every small irregularity, every shadow the lamp cast at different hours of the day. He had spent a lot of time looking at it over the years, in slow mornings and sleepless nights and on days when his body decided that moving wasn't an option.

He had never looked at it quite like this.

With Ivan breathing steadily above his head and Till being a solid, constant weight against his legs, and the apartment smelling of coffee made an hour ago that nobody had finished, and the afternoon light coming through the half-open blinds, Luka thought that the problem with placebos was that they worked until they stopped working.

And what he had here was not a placebo.

It was simply, without ornament or drama, the real thing.

He didn't say it out loud. It wasn't the kind of thought you said aloud — or at least not yet, not that afternoon. Maybe later, in one of those moments when the words arrived without being called. For now it was enough to know it.

On the television, someone said something that made no sense because none of the three had been paying attention, and Till let out a brief, involuntary laugh.

"Are you watching this?" he asked Ivan, without moving.

"I have no idea what's happening," Ivan admitted.

"We've been watching for forty minutes," Till said.

"I know," Ivan replied.

Luka closed his eyes. "Turn it up," he said.

Till turned it up. Ivan didn't stop moving his hand through Luka's hair. Outside, the afternoon went on with total indifference to what had happened the week before — the way afternoons do, the way all ordinary things do, without waiting for anyone to be ready before simply being ordinary again.

Luka was more grateful for that than he could have explained.