Chapter Text
Then maybe we could write a song - Chay said, clad in an all-black outfit his hair parted, he looked taller, stronger, so beautiful, it made Kim’s heartbeat double, he felt his face smile at the only one who could make him emote, he heard himself say -yes of course-. Chay laughed, the sound like a song Kim would like to compose every day of his life, -okay, then I’ll be leaving first- the beautiful boy before him said as he turned around and started walking, rapidly putting distance between the two of them, Kim could feel cold dread, NO! he couldn’t leave, not now that he smiled at Kim again, -No! wait, wait, wait!- he shouted, running after the only one he has ever loved, but he didn’t turn, he continued walking, and Kim, he was dying, he felt as if everything burned, as his body gave his all to catch his only hope in love, at last, it was no good, he fell to the ground tired, dry-heaving and broken, crying for Chay, Chay, Chay, CHAY!
He woke up.
It’s been happening for a while now, these nightmares, they change, sometimes he turns around when he heard Chay cry, that day was he left him in front of his building, in his dream he goes to comfort Chay, kneels on the ground ready to plead with his only love, ready to beg, to explain to him why he’d done all of this, but he never gets to say anything, because Chay pushes him into a void that has materialized behind him, in this nightmare he falls, but never hits the ground, and above him Chay watches him scream, but does nothing to help, he just looks at him, with sad eyes, and whispers words that Kim can hear clearly - Was it worth it P Kim?-
No, Kim thinks, it wasn’t.
His ceiling greets him, plain and white, the paint there pristine and untouched, Kim wants to put bullets through it, make it as damaged as he is, but the last time he did that he hit a pipe, and if he tough his nightmares where bad, leaving him drenched with sweat and in need to change the bed sheets, well then the fucking bullet holes in the pipe right above his head made him change not only his sheets, but his god-dammed mattress, it was degrading to have to call the manager of the building soaked and angry, still shaking from the nightmare he had, and to have to explain the holes in the ceiling made him want to shoot another bullet, this one right between the eyes of the incompetent man that was asking such stupid questions, but he already had to worry about his apartment flooding, he was not going to add blood and a dead body to the mix, doing that meant a clean up crew that specializes in such particular affairs, and he drew the line at him having to explain the holes in his ceiling to his nosy brothers that keep pestering him about coming back to the compound now that his music career was in a stand still.
Its been two years since he has released a song, before that in the first four years without him, he wrote many, all of them sad and depressing, all of them about lost love, and his dreams of being forgiven, about memories lost to time, regrets, and people that once knew each other but now were just ghosts, hunting each other in the dark recesses of their minds, at least that was his experience, Chay…he has trapped him in this everlasting feedback of emotions Kim never wanted to feel, before him his songs were about self discovery, his need of freedom and his impending doom, still all tragic, but more existential in the artsy sense of the word, they were good, good enough to garner him a following and a deal with a record company that the family didn’t own, good enough to have his classmates entranced by them and enamored with his image when he decided to grace them with his presence, good enough to grant him a sure way to become the tutor of the one creature his infamous mafia training didn’t prepare him for.
It was still dark outside, an hour only suited for ghost and lost souls, sitting on his balcony Kim though it was fitting for him to be awake, accompanied by the darkness of the sky and the sounds that the Bangkok night brings, the moon his only light, its been this way since he was a small child, after his mother died he used to spend hours looking at the moon, bathing in its glow, his mother used to love the night -at night the truth comes out my little prince, there is no harsh light, just the soft glow of the moon- she used to say to him as they walked in the mansion's garden, it used to be just the two of them, Kim supposes it wasn’t the healthiest thing for his mother to keep his 10 year old son awake at such hours of the night, but it felt right, at daytime she attended to Thankun, who for some reason didn’t want to go out of his room, he knew his brother had gone away for some days, his mama said something bad happened to him, but no body ever said what, Kim didn’t ask, but he knew in some that in some way he had lost his eldest brother.
He remembers when he lost Kinn too, they had been close, closer than he and Tankhun had been at the time, they both liked music and had a similar sense of humor, he knows rationally it was because Kinn wanted to humor his kid brother, but he still likes to think it was because Kinn has always been more childish than what he leads on….it doesn’t matter anymore. They were sitting on the grass playing with their guitars when P Chan came to them and said -Young master Kinn come with me, Khun Korn wishes to see his second eldest son- he watched as his brother tensed up, and quickly adverted his eyes when Kinn caught him staring with what must have been a scared expression, it's not like they feared their father, but they knew by now that he wasn’t the man they thought he was, not after he discarded their eldest brother like a broken doll that he played with and put back on the shelf before it was too broken, Kim was scared though, he didn’t want the bad thing that happened to Thankun to happen to Kinn, but before he could say anything his brother was already standing
-Hey Sinatra, take my guitar with you? I might take a while-
-mhm, do I put it in your room?- Kim asked, worriedly looking at his brother, who with all the bravado a 16-year-old could muster smiled charmingly at him
-Nah, I think it would be better if you keep it for a while, you can give it to me the next time we play together-
With that he turned around and left without looking back, Kim still has the guitar to this day, its in its case, stored in the closet of the spare room that functions as his at home gym, wrapped around it a pink feather boa that has seen better days, both of them with a light layer of dust that seems to always find its way into the closet, next to it a small box that used to be white and now is yellow around the edges, inside of it his mother’s favorite jewelry box stays pristine as the day she last opened it, he remembers that day the most, it was supposed to be his birthday, some how he found himself walking the night before next to the carp pond his mother insisted they needed to have, at that time it was but a hole in the dirt, no water, and no carps in sight, still under construction, very much unfinished, he watched as his mother smiled at the open wound his father’s men made on the surface of the earth and said - you know my little prince, sometimes something beautiful can come from the unlikeliest of places, I know you still don’t see it, but some day there would be a pond were there’s only dirt now, and on it life will thrive, and you and I will get to see it under the moonshine-
Suffice it to say that never happened, she died the next day as Kim held her lifeless body while crying for help, it arrived too late, and then the earth had another wound, but this one wouldn’t be thriving with life, when they covered her casket Kim knew then and there that he was truly and irrevocably alone, that night, not even the moon came out to greet him as he wept next to the freshly laid cement of the carp pond his mother promised they would see together. The next time he visited the carp pond he had a black eye, two bruised ribs, bloody knuckles, and a hatred for his father he never knew he could be able to foster within himself, three years had passed since his mother’s death, he hadn’t had time to cry much since, he had been training, practicing -Come on Kimhant, do you want to be a coward, don’t you want for your mother’s killer to pay?, you were so useless then, come on son, FIGHT!- today he had finally done it, he was cover with blood, dried by the time he arrived to the main house, he had gone alone, as per his father’s instructions, he slaughtered a whole family, he had also killed himself in the process.
That night he took his clothes off near the pond, folded them neatly, and submerged himself in the water, it was surprisingly clean, at least they were getting their money's worth on the cleaning department, Kim will commend them for it, his mother would have liked it, at least that’s what he thought while under the surface, looking up he could perceive the moonlight, but he couldn’t hear a thing, he felt safe, for the first time in years he felt at peace, for a striking second he thought he saw his mother looking down at him from the edge of the pond as if he were one of the carps she longed to see, -oh my little prince, what have you done?-. He shoot up from the water, and a terrified scream stopped him from killing the carps around him, Tankhun stood there, clutching his chest while looking at Kim as if he were an apparition, which for once he will concede, was an appropriate reaction to the scene his brother must have witnessed, after some tense seconds of his brother looking at him as if he could read him like an open book, he seemed to still, and with a clarity, he had not seen on his brother since before his kidnapping he said
-I miss her too…if you ever feel like…-
-I'm fine Khun- he said getting up from the pond and putting his clothes back on, not looking at his eldest brother he warned -not a word about this- he didn’t wait for a response, he walked as fast as he could without running, he took a shower and got in his bed, he slept waiting for the nightmares to arrive, but they never did, he slept like the dead, no night terrors, nothing, he didn’t dream either, but at this point he doubted he could have dreams that his father wouldn’t be able to find a turn against him, he preferred not to dream, at least not while he slept. He drew the line when he was 17 years old, by then he had killed more people than the number of years he had been alive, he had found that music made it all a little bearable and he resolved that if he ever had any chance to save even a small part of his mother’s little prince he will do it, so he left, and just like before, he didn’t lose sleep over it.
He started to have nightmares two years back, the time without Chay had been brutal, but the constant surveillance that he had implemented made it somewhat bearable, he had plenty of bodyguards on his payroll following him, and for four years he had eyes on him, he knew his weekly schedule, found out pretty easy that Kinn pulled some strings to get him into a good university, undoubtedly guided by Porche, who for the pictures the bodyguards send him, seemed to be getting increasingly more subdued around his little brother, still as loving but more settled; Kim remembers the first photo that he got of the Kittisawat brothers, it was just a photo, but he remembers almost being able to see them move in the small piece of photography paper, he could almost hear them laugh, they were smiling, and hugging, they were happy, poor, broken, beaten, but happy and together, much has changed since he got that photo, but at least they remain.
The sun was slowly rising in the horizon, its light mocking Kim with its brightness, the moon slowly loosing its appeal to the brighter celestial being, it was almost poetic in the cruelest sense how much Kim could relate to the moon, at first the thought came as a way to self flagellate, to make himself bleed without making a mess of his hardwood flors, but the more he thought about it, the more he found himself finding comfort in the idea that was supposed to make him feel inadequate and a failure, he found that he could not hate something that Chay had given him, even in his sorrow he is still so generous, much like the moon reflects the sun’s light and shines bright at night, he reflects the emotions his sun has given him and projects them in his darkness, he is an acclaimed artist now, the songs Chay inspired in him his most famous ones to this day, all of them except the one Kim send to him, his intended audience of one proven to be the harshest critic of them all, Kim stopped reaching out after that.
He is back in his bed now, the sun high in the sky, the sound of the AC only perceptible in the dead quiet of the apartment, he is awake, of course, he is, his training and his life as a busy artist had made him unable to sleep at day time, the sunlight filtering through his light curtains reminds him of that day, the last day he saw him, he was graduating form university, the black robe looked good on him, he was taller than Kim, even if the couldn’t be certain how much taller he was now, Kim knew that he was, his face was sharper, the baby fat lost to the time, his shoulders were wider, he looked sturdier, like if Kim were to tackle him to the ground he would be able to take it, even, maybe, if the videos of him training were to be believed, he could maybe, provably, if Kim went easy on him… maybe he could pin Kim to the ground and cover him with his body, Chay would be heavy, his new stature and added muscles would ensure that.
He felt a shudder rack his body, and warmth pulled between his legs, but he will ignore that for now, it won’t last either way, not when he remembered the chilling way Chay looked back at him, he remembers the cold like a bucket of ice water that travel through his spine, he could not be looking at him, he was far away enough to be inconspicuous to even the highly trained bodyguards, but after some soul constricting seconds he could see Chay’s lips moving, the message clear as the sky had been, -STOP- so Kim did, he stopped following Chay, stopped keeping track of his schedule, stopped sending his bodyguards, stopped asking for photos and videos, stopped writing music, stopped his social appearances, stopped living, stopped breathing, he just stopped existing, after last time’s horrible outcome he resolved he would follow Chay’s lead, those WIK went on hiatus and Kimhant Therapanyakul became a recluse, only to leave his cave to chase the scent of blood, because Chay said to stop, because he ordered him to.
Since that day he watched his only sun turn his back on him and walk away the nightmares started, he has no will to write, and the songs that before overflowed from his heart wouldn’t come anymore, because Kim no longer had one, it was a new experience for him, figuring out he had one after being so sure he was just a tool, a piece of flesh constructed by his father to bring chaos and destruction, forged with fire by his mother's death and honed to deadly sharpness by his own volition, a machine of war, the youngest and most dangerous son, to then find out in the most gut-wrenching way you were still a human after all, the irony of him being his executioner is not lost to him, he destroys everything around him, his only regret, was to have to watch Chay burn to ashes as well.
He was in the main house, or he thinks is the main house, it looks off somehow, all the important fixtures were there, but nothing seemed right, he hasn’t been here in months, but still he thinks he could recognize the mansion he grew up in even after his father’s death, Kinn is a traditionalist he didn’t move things just because he wanted to, Tankhun? definitely, but not Kinn, he walks, and the doors at the sides of the hallway he was walking on move rapidly, like if he were on a train, he arrived at a door that opened by itself, and what awaited inside left him breathless.
Everything was white, except for Chay lying in a pool of blood, he ran, and kneeled beside him, the blood soaking his white pants, this close to him, he could see the baby fat in his cheeks, the soft edges to his body, he looked like the Chay form his past, the Chay he was allowed to hold, he tried to see were all the blood had come from, but it only served to smear the both of them with Chay's blood, he cried, his eyes filled with tears didn’t allowed him to see a man that had appeared in front of them, until Kim heard the sound of shoes stepping on tacky blood, his legs were clad in pin stripped expensive looking pants, the color a dark shade of blue, the shoes that were carelessly soaking in Chay's blood looked to be equally expensive in a warm brown color, only a little of the man’s ankle could be seen, a luxurious looking sock covered the skin there, the color the exact same as the suit, it spoke of sophistication and attention to detail, mafia, Kim though, he looked up ready to dismember the bastard that had killed the only soul that deserved to live, but he stopped dead in his tracks, the man looking down at them was Chay, much more taller, stronger, deadlier, his voice was dark and steady when he spoke -Look what you made me do P Kim- the Chay above him said, a dagger dangling from his fingers, Kim’s name written on it.
He woke up.