Archive of Our Own

Moving without a sound, he made his way to the base of the perimeter wall below his second-floor bedroom window before long. He drew a slow breath through his nose. Alright. It’s been smooth so far — but now’s when it actually counts. Carefully, he wedged one foot at a time against the balcony ledge and the windowsill, bracing himself along the drainpipe as he began to climb.

He’d never thought he’d be doing this again after high school. The last time he’d snuck into a house was after the car accident on graduation night. Hadn’t he gotten caught then, too? Probably. He could still remember coming home only to find Zed already waiting in his room — somehow the news had beaten him there — and getting reamed out to within an inch of his life.

Lost in the memory, his hand slipped. He’d grabbed a bad brick, and for a split second he nearly went straight back down to the pavement. He scrambled, catching himself, and in the process scraped all four fingertips raw. A curse hissed out of him before he could stop it. Stealth was something he was actually good at — this wasn’t the kind of mistake he made. But he couldn’t help it. The alcohol still threading through his veins, combined with the unease gnawing at the back of his mind, had dulled him to something pathetic. At least he hadn’t landed flat on his ass. His tailbone wasn’t what worried him. If he’d come down on one of Alune’s potted plants, Heartsteel would’ve had to carry on as a five-piece.

He refocused and made his push for the final stretch. Just a little further — just a bit more — and his window would be within reach. He strained, arm extended, jaw tight with the effort. Then his fingertips caught the sill. With something solid to hold onto, the rest of his body followed in a single fluid motion, and he swung himself through the wide-open window.

The moment his feet hit the floor, two things registered in rapid succession: first, that window had been shut when he left the house this afternoon — and second, Yone was sitting on his bed with his arms folded.

The moment Kayn’s eyes met that dark, unhurried stare, he froze on the spot. His heart hit the floor.

“…Hey, Yone. Still up?”

“Why did you come in through the window?” Yone’s voice was even. Measured. “Like a thief.”

“Right, well — that’s a funny story—”

Kayn fumbled for words, but Yone didn’t seem inclined to wait. He rose from the bed and drove his fist straight into Kayn’s right cheek.

The side of his face blazed. Light burst across his vision. He went down before he could even cry out, and cold sweat broke along his spine as he hit the floor.

That Yone had gone for the face — that was not a good sign. There was a magazine cover shoot scheduled this week, a job Yone himself had signed off on, and he’d still punched a member in the face. Which meant he was genuinely, incandescently furious. Caught off guard, Kayn could do nothing but take each blow as it landed.

No time to recover. Yone grabbed him by the back of the neck, hauled him to the side of the bed, and kicked him in the gut hard enough to drop him to his knees on the floor. The strike hit clean — solar plexus, precisely aimed — and Kayn curled onto his side like something crushed. Then Yone’s foot came into view again. With no room left in his head for actual thought, running on nothing but the instinct to make it stop, Kayn threw his hands up.

“Wait — just wait! Hear me out!”

“Hear you out?” A short, contemptuous exhale through the nose. “Fine. Where do you want to start? Stealing my brother’s bike without permission? Using it to smash the back gate? Making a spectacle of yourself drunk in front of everyone?”

Not one item on that list was something Kayn could talk his way out of. He could taste blood. Chest heaving, he ran his tongue over his teeth — nothing broken. He found that almost offensive. Yone was a born bastard, there was truly no other word for it.

Still. He had to think. In all of Heartsteel — maybe in the entire world, even if the President of the United States personally intervened — no one could stop Yone when he’d fully lost it. Kayn’s mind clawed desperately for any foothold, and in the absence of one, it gave him back the afternoon instead, replaying peacefully across his memory like a panorama.

ㅡ

The days had been growing longer, the heat building steadily alongside them. The Heartsteel members had gathered for lunch, and the conversation had drifted to summer plans. The twins were heading back to Korea to spend time with family. Ezreal announced, out of nowhere, that he wanted to watch the sunrise from Mount Sinai and had already booked a flight to Egypt. Sett, in what he described as a significant personal commitment, was taking his mother on a cruise along the western Mediterranean. K’Sante was going hiking in Yosemite with friends.

Once you subtracted everyone with somewhere to be, two people were left without plans: Yone and Kayn.

When Kayn casually mentioned that his own trip had fallen through — he’d meant to visit Zed, but both of them had been too busy — he’d stolen a glance at Yone. He’d been waiting for something, though he hadn’t let himself name what. But Yone sat with his cup in hand, expression unchanged, and simply said he had nothing scheduled yet. Then he went quiet. When enough time passed that it was clear Yone had no intention of reconsidering or adding anything further, Kayn slipped his hand into his pocket and quietly crushed the two tickets he’d been holding there. Concert tickets — a Pentakill sixth-anniversary national tour, which had cost him no small amount of effort to obtain.

Though, the more he thought about it — Yone had always kept his private life tightly closed off. Kayn barely knew anything about him. The more rational conclusion was that Yone simply wouldn’t want to spend his vacation with Kayn to begin with. Maybe he already had plans. Maybe he wanted to rest quietly with family, away from all of this. Or maybe—

It didn’t matter. Kayn cut the thread before it unraveled further. The deeper he went, the more foolish his own feelings seemed, and that only made his mood worse. Who Yone chose to spend his time with was none of Kayn’s business.

And nursing that private, defeat-tinged disappointment all on his own — that was Kayn’s right, if he wanted it. That’s the good thing about a free country.

Then the doorbell rang.

It was Yone’s younger brother, Yasuo — and the fact that he’d shown up at the Heartsteel house in person, for the first time ever, was enough to make everyone curious. He exchanged brief greetings with the group and explained his reason for coming. True Damage’s studio had major construction starting soon, and parking would be difficult for the next few days. He’d already gotten Yone’s permission to keep his bike in the Heartsteel garage — he was just sorry he hadn’t managed to let the others know ahead of time.

“I already cleared it with my brother,” he said, nudging Yone in the side. “Sorry for not passing it along.”

Yone gave him a look that fell somewhere between resigned and unimpressed, and offered him a drink. Yasuo stayed — drawn in by the easy warmth of the room — and before long they were all spread around the table with fries scattered between them, talking for a good while about nothing in particular. The heat this summer, taxes, the new album’s progress, garage and jersey club, scrolling through Instagram, flight prices to Fiji, some London-local DJ who’d recently been featured on Rinse FM. Through all of it, Kayn could barely take his eyes off Yasuo. It was an open secret that Kayn had once quietly hoped to end up in True Damage, and that he nursed a fond, petty grudge about the way things had gone instead. So when Yasuo spotted the PlayStation sitting beside the board games in the corner of the living room and suggested a match, Kayn nearly forgot how to breathe.

Yone retreated to the studio, having seen enough. Sett and K’Sante headed out to work out. That left four of them, and they played Tekken for hours straight. Yasuo had no weak characters and no gaps in his command knowledge. Kayn was the first out of the bracket. Then Ezreal. By the finals, even Aphelios couldn’t crack the low combo strings Yasuo kept running with his main. Yasuo set down his controller and smiled — barely, but there.

“Still, I was way worse at your age.”

Whether that was Yasuo’s particular brand of modesty, it was hard to say — but playing together had done what conversation alone couldn’t, smoothing over the awkwardness between them far more effectively. Even so, every time Yone stepped out of the studio to refill his coffee cup, he’d catch Kayn and his brother high-fiving over something, and his expression would go tight in a way that suggested a toothache.

The afternoon wore on. Yasuo had beaten all three of them fairly and squarely as Kazuya, and now he got to his feet.

“I should head out. Today was great — really. Thanks, brother.”

“Stay for dinner.”

“You’ve been trying to get rid of me for the last hour. Don’t pretend.” Yasuo laughed and waved off the obligatory offer. Then he was gone, quick as he’d arrived. The house, loud all day, went quiet almost instantly.

Yone walked him out. Ezreal and Aphelios, bored now, drifted off to their rooms. That left Kayn alone in the living room, doing a half-hearted impression of tidying up before Yone got back. In the kitchen, sitting forgotten on the island counter, were the keys Yasuo had left behind with his bike.

Kayn had been aware of them all afternoon. And not just any bike — Yasuo’s bike. He moved around them with exaggerated indifference, cushion in hand, like a child in a marshmallow experiment trying to prove he wasn’t interested. His restraint didn’t last long. When he finally reached the point where he couldn’t stand it anymore — and after confirming, thoroughly, that no one was watching — he snatched the keys off the counter. He told himself it was nothing. Just one loop around the front yard. Back where he found them, no one the wiser. Rhaast had helped talk him into it, playing his usual role as co-conspirator. Kayn was weak to temptation, and Rhaast had always been good at making his schemes sound reasonable.

If Kayn were allowed a defense, he would argue that the fault lay primarily with whoever had left the keys sitting out in the open like that. The garage was dark when he slipped in, but the Yamaha superbike cut an unmistakable silhouette. He didn’t waste time admiring it — he swung a leg over, settled in, and started the engine without a moment’s hesitation.

What he hadn’t known was that the bike could hit a hundred kilometers an hour in three seconds flat. What he also hadn’t known was that he would make the catastrophic mistake of pulling full throttle while being completely unqualified to ride it. Helmetless, he shot out of the garage and straight through the back door connecting to the house’s kitchen, blowing it clean off its frame. Shards of wood and glass sprayed in every direction. Aphelios, who had come downstairs for a glass of water at precisely the wrong moment, found himself staring directly at Kayn coming through what used to be the door. Even he — stone-faced under virtually any circumstance — was startled enough to spill what he was holding.

By some miracle of reflex, Kayn managed to bring the bike to a stop before anything worse happened. He himself had come through without a scratch, which was more than could be said for the door. He was still gasping, not entirely back in his body yet. Aphelios had processed the situation faster. He calmly wiped up what he’d spilled, looked at the wrecked door frame, looked at the crumpled front fender of the bike, and delivered his verdict in the flat, toneless way that came naturally to someone who couldn’t use his voice.

[Yone finds out, you’re dead.]

That landed. Kayn’s stomach dropped. When he thought about it — yes, getting split down the middle by Yone was, logically, a more likely outcome than being torn apart by Sett, who technically owned the place. Still, some part of him wanted to escape the reality of what he’d just done, couldn’t quite believe he’d been this stupid, and asked whether it would really come to that. Aphelios looked at him like the answer was self-evident. Then, out of the solidarity that came with being a member, he offered some advice.

[Get out of here before he sees it.]

“He’s going to find out either way the second he looks at it. Wouldn’t it just be better to come clean and apologize?”

[Can you actually explain to Yone why you did it?]

“What? Obviously not.”

[Then go outside, give him time to cool down, and come up with something halfway convincing in the meantime.]

The front door opened. Every hair on Kayn’s body stood up. He scrambled through the ruined back doorway and bolted outside like a rat fleeing a sinking ship.

ㅡ

In the end, it turned out to be terrible advice. When it came to making things worse, Kayn had a talent that left everyone else in the dust — Aphelios included.

He wandered out onto the street with nowhere to go. The days had been getting longer, but not long enough to hold off the dark forever — dusk was already settling in. Shieda, you crazy bastard, Kayn. What the hell were you thinking pulling a stunt like that? He crouched on the pavement and dug his hands into his hair. And now that he was actually out here, he had nowhere to go. Who was he supposed to talk to? Not Zed — anyone but Zed. Rhaast? Worse than useless. Akali? She never read his messages... Kayn surveyed the narrow landscape of his social life and felt, not for the first time, genuinely sorry for himself.

[Why not just go straight to Yasuo?]

Rhaast suggested it. That was when Kayn thought of the bike’s actual owner. He’d only met Yasuo today, but he’d seemed like someone with a sense of humor. Maybe more approachable than Yone, at least. And besides the question of repairs — wasn’t it the kind of thing the owner deserved to know?

Kayn sent Yasuo a message and headed to the club he was known to frequent. There was a running joke that you’d need to charter a private jet to get him anywhere these days — but even as his name had grown, Yasuo hadn’t lost his love for the underground. He still made it out to small venues when he could, still put together collab nights with nobodies who hadn’t made it yet. This club, tucked below street level, was one of those places.

The red interior lighting prickled at him like a warning. It was nowhere near peak hours, but the floor was already packed — regulars deep into their third or fourth round, couples drifting in their own bubble, people whose sole purpose in life was to find the groove and never let go. Kayn slipped in just before the venue hit capacity, and was immediately met with the news that Yasuo’s set had been cancelled due to a last-minute schedule change.

He stood there, at a loss. There was no avoiding it now — he was going to have to figure out what to say to Yone entirely on his own. He found a dim corner away from the lights and stared blankly out at the people moving on the floor. They flowed like a stream that had nothing to do with him, easy and self-contained, indifferent to his existence. Inside the club, time lost its shape. The anxiety didn’t go anywhere, though. He kept lifting the glass in his hand without meaning to — just needing something to do with the restless, hunted feeling that wouldn’t quit.

Strangers approached him at some point. They pulled him toward the bar, said they were buying, and Kayn let himself be pulled without thinking too hard about why. He drank what they handed him, laughed at things he only half-heard, swayed slightly on his feet, tipped back something fluorescent pink from a cylinder glass. The alcohol drew a transparent film between him and the rest of the room, and he watched everything through it at a cool remove — strobing lights painting faces, someone licking salt off the back of his hand. Rhaast’s voice of protest floated off somewhere above the dancefloor. Kayn laughed with his shoulders, giddy and untethered. Before long the room was turning gently around him. He felt like a goldfish in a draining tank. It wasn’t far off from how he’d been feeling about himself lately — spinning around someone like a current he couldn’t break free from, nothing left but the drain waiting at the bottom.

Past midnight, he was about three seconds from being thrown out by security when someone grabbed the back of his collar and hauled him outside. Cold, damp night air hit him full in the face. He had no real sense of being held — just of being moved by something external. He was half-draped over whoever had him, feet barely cooperating, and when he eventually raised his head he found himself in the passenger seat of a car.

Even through the alcohol, his brain could work out that this was, by any measure, a kidnapping. But he had neither the coordination to open a moving car door nor any will to try, so he let fate have it and tipped back toward sleep. If he woke up short a kidney or an eye, fine. Then the person next to him spoke in a rough, dry voice, and Kayn startled back to the surface.

“Unbelievable. You’ve got no sense at all, do you? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

A low curse followed, mostly to himself. Kayn blinked, heard the voice properly, and realized it was Yasuo. The relief hit him immediately — and right behind it, a desperate urge to confess everything he’d been carrying all day. But opening his mouth right now felt like a guaranteed way to vomit, so he kept it shut.

“Do you know how worried your teammates were? Why weren’t you picking up your phone?”

Yasuo glanced over at him. Kayn had his head against the window, rattling faintly with the vibration of the car, and whether it was the cold or the alcohol responsible he didn’t seem to know himself. Yasuo took one look at the state of him and shook his head. Better to leave him alone. He reached into the back seat, grabbed a bundled blanket, and dropped it into Kayn’s lap.

Outside, the familiar streets leading back to the Heartsteel house slid past the window. Kayn spent the entire ride slumped in the passenger seat, cocooned in the blanket. The dashboard had a layer of settled dust. The footwell had ketchup packets from what looked like several different fast food chains. The car’s owner was clearly not someone who cleaned it often. Kayn dozed and surfaced and dozed again, and in the spaces between he found himself wondering vaguely what Yone and Yasuo actually had in common — what it was, beyond blood, that made them brothers.

Yasuo pulled up near the house and cut the engine. Kayn managed to reach over and crack the window. Yasuo asked, as a courtesy, if it was alright to smoke — and lit up without waiting for an answer. Smoking in the car was exactly the kind of thing that would make Yone pass out cold. The half-formed smoke drifted up and dissolved against the ceiling, leaving behind nothing but a faint, melancholy smell. Through it, their eyes met. Kayn looked back at him without resistance, trying to imagine what he must look like right now — hair wrecked, clothes crumpled beyond saving.

“Yone talks about you a lot. Seeing you like this, I think I’m starting to understand why.”

“What?”

Kayn’s head shot up, then dropped back with a groan.

“Yone talks about me? The two of you? What does he say?”

“That’s what you’re curious about? Not why?”

Yasuo blew smoke out through his side of the window. The night air seemed to do him good too.

“Yone’s a producer. He’s seen a lot of young, talented kids come through — and seen how fast they wash out the moment they hit twenty. The ones with main character syndrome. The ones who don’t know what they’re doing or what they even want.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So he’s worried about you. Says he doesn’t know what to do with you.”

Yasuo smiled. Inside Kayn’s skull, something alcohol-soaked was howling in protest.

“Kids who scrape together some flash of fame on raw talent alone, and then just stop there. The moment the demands start piling up and the work keeps growing — they bite through the leash and disappear for good. He’s seen too many of them. As a producer, he doesn’t know how to handle you. Same goes for the Heartsteel project. You know as well as anyone — working in a team is something Yone hasn’t done in a long time.”

Yasuo tapped the ash and added, as he did, that Yone shouldn’t find out he’d said any of this. Kayn tried to work out what it felt like to be relieved and pressured at the same time. At least Yone hadn’t been talking behind his back to his brother — but whether that made things better, he honestly couldn’t tell. Too much to process for a drunk. Yasuo’s tone shifted, sharpening slightly.

“So listen to Yone. And cut it out with the drinking and the stupid stunts.”

The image of Yasuo’s bike — front panel caved in — surfaced unbidden. Guilt twisted in his gut. He wanted to change the subject, and to bury the discomfort along with it, so he said the first thing that came out.

“Is Yone going anywhere for the break?”

“No idea.”

Yasuo patted his pockets for another cigarette.

“Why? Were you going to follow him if he was?”

“Would that be so wrong?”

Yasuo went very still and looked at him. With an expression that was, unmistakably, deeply entertained. Kayn felt instinctively that he’d just let something important slip — without knowing what.

“You…”

“Forget it. Never mind.”

Kayn clenched his jaw and rolled over, turning his back to Yasuo. He immediately regretted asking. His face burned with embarrassment and he had nowhere to put it. A lighter clicked beside him. The silence that settled in the car was the awkward kind.

After a long while, Yasuo murmured, as if just thinking aloud:

“You know… you’re pretty different from the people Yone used to date.”

“What did you just say?”

Kayn’s head snapped around like a reflex. That easy.

“I said you’re different from his type. The people he used to be with.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

A beat. Then, quietly, Kayn revised the question.

“What type were they?”

Yasuo smiled and turned it over slowly, sifting back through what he remembered of his brother in school. They’d lived separately since graduation, so that was as far back as his memory went. What had Yone been like? Popular, for one thing — the kind of student everyone noticed. He’d given the pledge at the entrance ceremony, received an academic commendation at graduation. If he’d only been good at studying it might have been merely annoying, but his athleticism had been equally flawless, and he’d broken regional records at competitions often enough to end up in the local paper on a near-constant basis.

The people Yone had been close to were exactly the same type. Excellent students, all of them. Put-together. Yone had brought different girls home over the years, and Yasuo had seen them watching movies together in the living room, doing homework, ordering takeout. Never the reckless teenage mistakes, never anything suspicious behind a locked bedroom door away from the adults. That kind of thing had simply never happened.

And those people had come to Yone on their own, without him having to do a thing. When they left, it was the same way — clean, undramatic. In some sense they were people who didn’t need Yone at all. People who would have gotten along perfectly fine without him. You could tear every page about Yone out of the story of their lives and the rest would still hold together. Even at the height of youth, even in the relationships that should have been the most intimate — Yone had always remained slightly outside, held at a cool remove.

“Honestly, Yone only ever dated people exactly like himself. Good grades, respectful to adults. Gentle. Pretty. Never caused trouble anywhere. Went on to stable careers after graduation.”

Kayn sniffled, drunk and sullen.

“Big chests?”

“I don’t really remember that part. Probably, maybe?”

The already low mood curdled further. If Yasuo was right, then measured against Yone’s history, Kayn didn’t have a single card to play. It was just confirmation — needlessly dug up — of how different they were, how catastrophically mismatched. Maybe if he tried harder, something could shift. The chest thing… he could probably figure something out, somehow. He had no idea what, exactly, but something.

“You like Yone, don’t you.”

There was no point pretending anymore. Kayn nodded, glumly.

“Then let me ask you something. What is it about my brother that you actually like?”

Kayn shook his head, trying to shake off the alcohol. He’d wanted to give a calmer answer here — something more measured, more adult — but it wasn’t coming out that way. Whatever snagged on the tip of his tongue came out more or less like this:

“Um… well… Yone’s like… the team mom, right.”

“Sure. He’s my brother, but theoretically speaking, I’ll allow it.”

Yasuo was adjusting the rearview mirror, looking like he had all the time in the world. But what came next threw even him.

“So, like… I feel like if I screw up, he’ll actually hit me? And get seriously, properly angry about it?”

Yasuo stopped mid-reach for his last cigarette and looked at Kayn. His expression had gone slightly unsettled.

“You’re not… into that, are you?”

“What?”

“You seem young to already be—”

“What exactly are you picturing right now?”

It clicked. Kayn went rigid.

“That’s not — no. What I mean is, even if I mess up, even if I do something wrong — I feel like Yone won’t give up on me. Like he’ll get angry and beat some sense into me if he has to, but he’ll drag me back to the right path anyway. That’s what I like about him!”

It wasn’t even coherent — barely scraps that deserved the name of feeling. But to Kayn, even that ragged, ungainly thing was love. He had no idea how different it looked from anyone else’s. The words had come out in a rush, and now a belated chill swept through the hollow they left behind. Kayn steadied himself, breathing hard. Yasuo had been listening with wide eyes, and after a moment he murmured, low, almost to himself:

“Yeah. I see.”

Kayn was in no state to judge whether that had been the right answer. Yasuo fell into his own thoughts and smoked in silence. The quiet settled back over the car. Kayn glanced sideways at his expression but couldn’t read a thing. One thing was clear, though — if any of this conversation reached Yone’s ears, an eviction notice might be waiting by morning. Wrecking the house was an oil pipeline leak. An intra-team romance was dynamite. Even Kayn could see that the combination was, at best, not great. Still, he didn’t regret it. Getting it off his chest after carrying it alone for so long was, if nothing else, a relief. Finding teammates as fun and gloriously unhinged as Heartsteel wouldn’t be easy anywhere else — but that wasn’t a problem for right now.

“This is a slightly embarrassing story.”

Yasuo said it out of nowhere. Conversations with him had no predictable beginning or end.

“Back in high school, I ran away from home with a few guys I knew. We were making our way along back roads, trying to link up with some dudes in Tokyo.”

“Really. And here you are lecturing me about causing trouble.”

“Well, it was just something people did back then. Plenty of others were doing the same thing.”

Yasuo smiled in that particular way of his — noncommittal, unreadable.

“I was genuinely sick of being home. I ran because I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do. Three days later, I got to this town — and Yone was already there. Waiting for me.”

“How is that even possible?”

“No idea. Whatever method he used, I’ve been too scared to ask, even now. Anyway, what came after was chaos. Yone drove his car into the guys who came with me.”

“What?”

Yasuo laughed.

“Yone is… hard to explain. He has a certain — compulsion, I guess. Around duty. Around what’s normal and correct.”

He said it and then went quiet, drifting back into the memory. The hour Yone had found them was the kind of hour where it wouldn’t have been strange if someone had died. The thud of the bumper catching the rear wheel of a fleeing bike. Two guys leaving the ground, weightless, before hitting the pavement. The red of the brake lights bleeding into the blood on the road, spreading across it like a carpet. Yone stepping out of the car with a golf club in his hand. The measured, hunter’s weight of his footsteps. Looking down at the two boys screaming that they were going to die, crawling to get away — his face was backlit and unreadable. Yasuo remembers that moment less as a sequence of facts than as a series of images. The nails digging into skin as he tried desperately to hold Yone back. The sound of his own voice breaking into a croak from screaming so hard. Images that can’t prove anything, that have replaced the factual record — and the result is that Yone, from that period of his life, exists in Yasuo’s memory as something close to pure terror.

“Yone became the head of our household in middle school. He had to play the adult far earlier than anyone around him — so the pressure he was under must have been… immense. And the runaway was my fault to begin with. I don’t know if any of that is enough to explain what he did.”

After that day, Yasuo had made a promise to himself that he would never, for the rest of his life, drive Yone to that point again. And now, here he was, about to offer the opposite advice to this young fool who’d gone and fallen for him.

“If you want to know how Yone feels — make him angry.”

Kayn stared at him. Even drunk, he hadn’t lost all capacity for basic judgment.

“What the hell kind of advice is that? You just spent all that time telling me your brother is a psycho.”

But Yasuo was unbothered. He’d just figured out why Yone couldn’t take his eyes off this kid.

“Yone came all that way because he was worried about me. If I hadn’t been his brother — if I’d been nobody to him — there would’ve been no reason to get that angry. The same goes for you. The more you matter to Yone, the bigger the reaction. If you didn’t, he wouldn’t have asked me to find you tonight.”

Kayn’s eyes narrowed. Yasuo’s words were like a lake thick with weeds — almost clear, not quite.

“So I think you’ll get exactly the response from Yone that you’re hoping for. Whatever that might be.”

It struck Kayn suddenly that the two of them spoke in similar ways. It was the faint, glimpsed thread of what made Yone and Yasuo brothers.

The car pulled up in front of the Heartsteel house and Yasuo parked with surgical precision along the fence line. He even got out and opened the passenger door himself. Kayn squinted up at him through the glare of the streetlights, head pounding.

“I’m going to apologize in advance. I’m really sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”

Yasuo looked genuinely puzzled. It seemed Yone, when he’d asked Yasuo to find Kayn, hadn’t mentioned the specifics of what Kayn had actually done. In any case — Yasuo’s advice to make Yone angry hadn’t meant ram his bike through the back door of the house — so Kayn had decided a preemptive apology was in order. A conscience, delivered in the most compact form available.

ㅡ

Kayn’s head snapped up. Yone had grabbed him by the collar and hauled him out of his thoughts. Somewhere along the way he’d been dragged over and dumped onto the mattress like luggage. There was solid ground beneath him now — but the prospect of more to come sent his heart dropping about a thousand feet.

Yone said, coldly: “Nothing to say? Then we can keep going.”

“…I won’t do it again!”

“That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

Kayn’s head swam. He had no idea what Yone actually wanted. What came out next would have gone better with a second’s thought — but it didn’t get one.

“What does hitting me actually change?”

“At least that mouth of yours goes quiet.”

Pinned between Yone’s legs, Kayn couldn’t move. He swung back as the hand came for his cheek, but there was nothing behind it — a child’s resistance. Fighting someone stone sober when you could barely stand was never going to go well. Rhaast murmured with the dissatisfaction of a cornerman watching his boxer go down.

[Break his nose. He’s been asking for it for a long time.]

Out of the question. Kayn couldn’t overpower Yone tonight, and he’d made up his mind to stop listening to the voice in his head. Instead, when Yone’s hand paused, he muttered through a split lip:

“They say that people who suppress a lot of things in their daily lives are prone to developing twisted kinks.”

It was a widely held opinion among those who knew Kayn that if he’d exercised even minimal control over his mouth, roughly eighty percent of the world’s conflicts could have been avoided. Most trouble arrived through speech, and knowing when to shut up was its own kind of skill — one his arrogance had never allowed him to develop.

Make him angry? Kayn was a star player in that field. The entirely misplaced provocation landed just as expected — Yone’s brow twitched. Kayn’s hand scrabbled near Yone’s collar like he was trying to grab it, and Yone brushed it off the way you’d swat away a fly. By the time Kayn lost count of how many times he’d been slapped, his ears were ringing and every breath tasted like blood. The feeble resistance was dying down. His movements had slowed considerably.

“You’re noticeably easier to deal with after a few hits. Much better.”

Yone looked down at Kayn sprawled beneath him on the bed.

“Or do you actually enjoy this?”

The remark was pointed squarely at Kayn’s crotch. Whether it was the alcohol misfiring somewhere in his brain, or the crude adrenaline of the violence itself, Kayn had gone half-hard without noticing — and with Yone sitting across his hips, there was no hiding it. Shame ignited up through his throat to the top of his skull. Or rather: the heat split in two directions at once, face and groin, because every time Kayn squirmed in protest, Yone’s weight shifted against him and drove the blood further south.

Even so, Kayn didn’t drop his gaze first. Pinned and outmatched, his eyes still burned with defiance. He spoke slowly, deliberately. If not for the flush across his cheeks and forehead, he might have looked completely sober.

“So what are you going to do about it? Keep hitting me until I cum?”

“Ha.”

Yone didn’t bother hiding his contempt as he pushed himself upright. His whole manner said he was done engaging.

“You’re very drunk. This is pointless. We’ll deal with the rest tomorrow, with the others.”

“Wait—”

Kayn wasn’t letting him go. At the moment Yone moved to leave the bed, he’d caught it — something unsettled, buried just beneath all that composure. This was a bet with unclear odds. But he was past the point of folding. Whatever came next, he had to play the hand. He lifted one leg — shoe half-hanging off the foot — and raised it at a right angle. It found its mark between Yone’s legs. Across a few layers of fabric, the contour of a member could be felt at the tip of Kayn's toes. The unexpected contact finally broke Yone’s composure — he snapped with sudden, involuntary irritation.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Heh. Funny, you seem pretty hard to get along with.”

Kayn’s foot was moving now, slow and deliberate, rubbing up and down the entire groin of him. The face looking down at him could have belonged to someone fresh off a murder. But Kayn noticed, with quiet satisfaction, that Yone was clearly rattled. He propped himself up on one arm, and ran his tongue over his split lower lip — trying to shed the fear, the tension, the weight of what he was doing.

“You’re hard too, though. Aren’t you.”

Yone had no answer. There was no answer to give. Beneath Kayn’s foot, a trapped warmth pulsed — unmistakably there. That was enough. Kayn pulled his foot back and pushed himself unsteadily upright. He moved closer to Yone, still standing at the edge of the bed, and reached for the waistband of his pants.

“I screwed up. Let me make it up to you instead. If you hate it, hit me as much as you want — kick me out of Heartsteel — just trust me once. Yeah?”

No answer came. Then again — since when had Kayn ever waited for one?