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Jeong-yo should shut the door. He should close it and stuff his ears with his old headphones then try to get some sleep before the inevitable dawning of a new day springs up on them.
He should. He doesn't.
He leaves his door ajar, slightly. He has to — what if sometime while he's avoiding the truth, while he tries to block out the drunken muttering of his father, something goes wrong. He imagines it before he can stop himself. His father lying alone in their cramped home, empty bottles surrounding him, needing his help as he choked, or something similar.
The something similar is the part that gets him every time. The vagueness of it. The number of ways a person could need help that Jeong-yo hadn't thought of yet.
Choi Jeong-yo needed to be ready. He had to — otherwise he would truly be alone in this world. He didn't like to think of such a world and preferred his father very alive despite how it didn't seem to be a priority for his father himself. He didn't care about that. He just couldn't be alone. Couldn't be the last one standing in their small family. Couldn't bear to think of it even if his father's words and the resentment he had learned to live with in his father's gaze was cutting. Was wearing down on him in the way water wears down stone — slowly, without drama, without any single moment you could point to and say that was when it got bad.
He sank down on his bed, sighing as he does so, his father's voice floating through the gap in the door.
"You're pitiful, you know."
Jeong-yo blinked. He knew that. He didn't need Hyeon-cheol Hyung to tell him that, to try to make him understand. After all, Choi Jeong-yo had been pitiful since the day his mother died. Since she slumped and lost consciousness and eventually her life at the competition.
He didn't go to that memory. He kept his eyes on the ceiling and let his father's voice come through the door and didn't go anywhere near it.
His father's voice cracked. Jeong-yo heard him pause. Heard him swallow, gulping down the only crutch he'd been able to fall into after the death of his mother. "I'm pitiful too."
Predictably his father started sobbing. "We're both pitiful."
Jeong-yo closed his eyes and tried to get some sleep.
He failed.
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Moments later he was in front of his old piano, at his mother's music store where shadows of her still lingered even years later. The smell of the place hit him first the way it always did — wood polish and something older underneath it, something that had no name except hers, except before. He had never been able to decide whether coming here helped or didn't. He came anyway. He always came anyway.
He sat on the bench and put his hands in his lap and didn't play.
The piano was the same one she had taught him on. Small, upright, its keys slightly yellowed at the edges in the way old pianos yellowed, the way things went when they were loved and used and then left. He had not played it since. He sat in front of it regularly, the way you visit a grave — not because it changed anything but because the alternative was pretending the person had never existed, and Choi Jeong-yo was not capable of that even when it would have been easier.
He thought of the competition. Just the edges of it — the way the room had smelled, the particular quality of the light, the sound of applause that had seemed to come from very far away. He thought of it the way you probe a bruise to confirm it still hurts, quickly, without pressing too hard. It did. It always did.
The piano in front of him blurred slightly.
He thought of his father's voice through the door: we're both pitiful. He thought of how his father was right about one thing, at least. He thought of all the ways he had arranged his life around the fact of being pitiful — the line he'd drawn between himself and stages, the careful distance he kept from everything that had once felt most like him — and tried to find the version of himself that was okay with this. That had made peace with it. He had been good at finding that version for a long time.
He sat in the music store and breathed in the smell of wood polish and something older and eventually went home.
His father was asleep when he got back. Jeong-yo covered him with the blanket from the couch and went to bed.
He was so pitiful.
---
He thought about that now.
The open crowd that Pi-o was leading them toward. The stage. And God — there was a piano on the stage, of course there was, and Jeong-yo could feel his sachets rattling, his fingers growing cold and numb at the thought of playing in front of an audience again. After everything.
His mind flashed back to that day. The day that was both the happiest day of his life and his worst memory. The day he had gained a friend in Kang Pi-o — without knowing it then, without having language for it, only understanding much later what it had been — and the day he lost his mother.
No.
He couldn't. He couldn't do this. Something bad was bound to happen, and the universe had proved to him clearly and repeatedly and without mercy that he did not in fact belong on a stage despite how everyone liked to crow about how talented he was. It just wasn't for him. It had never been for him. It was for people whose presence on a stage didn't cost someone else everything.
He looked at Kang Pi-o.
Selfless, kind Kang Pi-o — and God, that was a thing it had taken him time to understand, that the sharpness was a surface and underneath it was this, was someone who had put up with him at every slight turn, who had tried everything, who had never once done what every sensible person would have done and simply let Choi Jeong-yo be. Jeong-yo shook his head. His eyes were blurring. He had to tell Kang Pi-o the truth of it, even if the consequences would be painful. He could handle painful. Choi Jeong-yo had been handling painful his entire life and he was still standing.
Even if the result was losing this. Even if Kang Pi-o looked at him and finally understood what everyone else had eventually understood — that Choi Jeong-yo was not worth it. Was not worth any of it at all.
He had been born to be lonely. His father had left in every way that mattered while still being present. His mother had left in the only way that was permanent. And maybe today Kang Pi-o would leave too. Maybe he would see, clearly and finally, what Jeong-yo already knew about himself — and Jeong-yo would handle that. He would go home and sit in front of the piano in his mother's music store and not play, and he would handle it.
But the thought of it — of Kang Pi-o joining the league of everyone who had left him intentionally or unintentionally — caused his chest to rattle in a way he couldn't account for. The organ in his chest thumped faster in a rhythm so painful it hurt to breathe. It was different from the other leavings. He didn't want to examine why it was different.
"Getting on stage is hard for me. This is hard for me."
He said it and watched Kang Pi-o's face and prepared himself. Stilled his breathing. Arranged himself into the shape of someone who had known this was coming and had made peace with it, which he had, which he hadn't, which he was still deciding.
Kang Pi-o watched him. Probably trying to soften the blow. Jeong-yo felt the waiting like a held note — the particular suspension of a chord unresolved, everything in the room paused on a breath.
"Listen."
Kang Pi-o walked closer to him. Not away. Closer — like reeling him in from the fiery waves, from the waves that threatened to drown him in their depths. Jeong-yo watched and he listened, watched as Kang Pi-o continued speaking even though he already knew what would come next, had heard it so many times in the past few days. Kang Pi-o telling him, every single time before they practiced — aware that Choi Jeong-yo, like some weakling, required the performance because he was indeed a weakling.
He knew what was coming.
The knowing did not prepare him. It never did, and he had stopped expecting it to. He had stood in front of this moment many times and it always arrived larger than he had prepared for, always took up more room in his chest than he had left available, and he was trembling slightly now in a way he hoped Kang Pi-o couldn't see — his hands, the ones he'd kept cold and numb since the stage came into view, the ones that had not touched keys in front of a crowd in so long they had almost forgotten what it felt like.
Kang Pi-o said it like a vow. An oath. He said it in a way that Choi Jeong-yo — who had his hopes broken so many times, who had grown used to broken pledges the way you grow used to an ache you've stopped expecting to resolve — had no choice but to believe. The air he used in saying it. The steadiness. Like he had already accounted for every reason Jeong-yo might not trust this and said it anyway, certain enough for both of them.
"Focus on me only. Forget about everything else."
Choi Jeong-yo stared into the eyes of Kang Pi-o.
The noise of the passing crowd, of the organisers setting up the stage, drowned out. The cold in his fingers was still there but it was further away now, receding, the way sounds recede when something closer demands all your attention. He thought of his father's voice through the door. He thought of the music store and the smell of it and the piano he sat in front of and never played. He thought of his mother's hands on his, years ago, showing him where to put his fingers, her voice saying like this, watch, like this — and how he had watched, and how he had learned, and how none of that had been enough to keep her here.
He thought of nothing else except the fact that he might not even mind it — to be pitiful again, to be the person who needed this said to him before he could walk onto a stage — if it kept Kang Pi-o as he was now. If it kept them both like this.
The hope arrived enormous and terrible, too large for his chest, pressing against his ribs from the inside. He had not let himself hope like this in years. He had been careful. He had drawn lines and stayed on his side of them and arranged himself around the understanding that certain things were not for him — stages, first places, people who stayed — and now Kang Pi-o was standing in front of him saying focus on me only like it was simple, like it was a thing that could just be said and believed, and Jeong-yo was trembling and he couldn't stop and the hope was so large it frightened him because he knew, he knew what happened when you let hope get this big.
He thinks. He thinks.
Choi Jeong-yo breathes. He breathes and he dares to hope that for the first time in his life, someone would stay.
He hopes even if he already knows that it's a lie.