Chapter Text
Trapped down by a force far greater than glue, Pond sat in the leathered seat of his car and waited.
He considered calling to inform he’d been held up at work, maybe a last-minute meeting, an apocalyptical emergency only he could solve or any other excuse that could account for his absence. But he was incapable of it. Even if it wouldn’t be a blatant lie.
There were indeed important matters to attend to, yet there he was, a forty-minute drive from his workplace after leaving everything behind for the very thing he couldn’t face. All because Phuwin called. And Pond always answered when he called.
No sense of responsibility or duty, no tight schedule or personal urgencies ever set in stone enough to not be altered by the whirlwind Phuwin evoked with a snap of his fingers. How could it when Pond himself was yet to find a way to become immune to his power. Years of trying and he was no better than on the first day the other man looked at him—at the time a little boy with a bowl cut and a fierce stare—and declared they would be friends forever.
Friends. Little did he know how deeply the word would cut; a sharp dagger permanently stuck right where his heart was supposed to be. Pond wasn’t sure there was anything left of it. Especially not after Phuwin departed for bigger and better things, to pursue the kind of life he was deserving of, the one Pond had no place in. Not anymore.
They were no longer kids, Phuwin’s hair was cut shorter—although his stare had only gotten fiercer—and the loud greeting ritual had been replaced by an even louder silence. Bonds rusted, what stood big and glorious grew old and abandoned—nothing more than life taking its course. Twisted, incomprehensible and quite frankly unjust to all the hopes and dreams their naïve past-selves had built together. Few things were strong enough to survive the ruthlessness of growing up. They hadn’t been one of them.
Not much remained after straying away from the path they’d promised to follow hand in hand. But one thing still hadn’t changed. Somewhere in the debris of the forsaken structure that had been left behind to decay, there persisted a solid foundation holding whatever dwelled in place. Surprisingly not corroded in the slightest.
All Phuwin had to do was call. One word and Pond would come rushing. And he had.
So, now he waited.
Pond sat and waited because he didn’t have a clue of what else to do. There was no instruction manual to follow, no guidelines or quick available research to tell you what one was supposed to do when a man you haven’t seen in two years returned. Particularly when that man happened to be the person you’ve been hopelessly and unrequitedly in love with since your teenage years. Or even before that. Pond still didn’t know exactly when his feelings for his best friend evolved from platonic to romantic. What he did know was that they had and now there he was—older, none the wiser and alone. So despairingly alone.
He found himself wishing the windshield glass could conceal his fragility from the outside world, but did anyone actually lose sleep over a random man frantically touching up his hair in the rear-view mirror? Maybe we simply spent too much time concerning ourselves with things others couldn’t care less about. Still, Pond cared—always had, always would.
He decided to part it down the middle, strands falling into his eyes from both sides, acting as the cover he so desperately urged to hide behind. Phuwin once said he liked it better that way. “It suits you,” he said, teeth in full display as his fingertips gently brushed it off his face. Pond never wore it any other way again. Not until he left, at least.
Staring too long at his own reflection began making his features seem foreign, the perks of dissociating from what you sought to stop witnessing. In this case, Pond wanted nothing more than to not be confronted with a wounded man, all tore open and bleeding as profusely as the day he last saw Phuwin. Once he came back to his senses, however, it was impossible to see anything else. Because that’s exactly what he was.
Doing his best to collect every broken piece to form an impeccable mask to present, Pond grabbed the wine—red, just how Phuwin liked it, or used to—and made his way out of the vehicle. That was enough waiting. If he bided his time for a mental green-light then he would’ve spent the entire night shielded by steel. All he could see were bright red stop signs coming from every corner, a deafening alarm ringing in his ears to add to the disastrous ambience.
It was time, whether he was ready or not.
Each step stirred another conflicting layer inside him, everything Pond had been forcing to the far ends of his brain resurfacing as if they’d just been created. Old scars could still feel as fresh as brand-new. There was no stopping it.
The restaurant was sophisticated, exactly what you would expect from someone who’d just returned from a master’s degree overseas. There was a time Phuwin preferred street vendors, “The best food in town,” he used to say with the spicy sauce dripping from the corners of his mouth. The past was the past, but as a waiter led the way to the table Pond couldn’t help but wonder what else had changed.
Who was the man who used to run in the middle of the street with extended arms, giggling and relentlessly teasing until Pond joined, ears as warm as the heat coursing through his veins? Was he still the life of any party, riding his own unpredictable roller coaster—one second dead-serious, the other bursting laughter? Had he managed to maintain the spark that lit every room he walked in, leaving you no choice but to stare?
He was about to discover.
Heart hammering in his chest, Pond flashed his best smile at the other guests—some which he hadn’t seen for as long as Phuwin—and sat down at the very edge of the table, right by the one person who had outlasted the unscrupulous tests of time.
With a comforting squeeze on the shoulder, Joong threw him one long all-knowing look of what he could only describe as pity and retrieved the bottle from his hands. There was no point in complaining, because before he could the cork was already coming off, his friend’s unorthodox technique never failing to amaze him.
“You sure need some,” Joong mocked, filling his glass. “I thought you wouldn’t come.”
And maybe he shouldn’t have.
“Where is he?” Pond asked, an attempt at nonchalant that most likely came off like the furthest thing from it.
Raising his own glass for a toast, Joong shrugged, looking over his shoulder to the other interacting guests. “Left to pick up a call, I believe.”
Pond had deliberately counted the minutes for everyone to arrive in hopes to avoid the possibility of being alone with him, but he never expected to have been the last to get there, and even less for the one person missing to be the one who’d summoned them.
Taking a generous sip, Pond gathered as much strength as he could to ask the question that had been running circles in his head from the moment he was added to a Line group named ‘Guess who’s back’.
“Do you know why he called us here?”
Joong was about to reply when his eyes diverted to the back of the room, then back to Pond with a tension that could only mean one thing. But he didn’t dare to confirm it.
“I’m sorry, this took me longer than expected!” a voice said behind him.
Not just any voice—the only one he could never erase.
It was like the room had shifted, pushing him to the bottom of a slope with nothing but destruction coming his way. Unavoidable, soul crushing wreckage preparing to bury him six feet under. And that might’ve been a better fate than some of the other outcomes he’d pictured day and night.
“We’ll soon find out,” Joong mumbled, one last reassuring tap on the shoulder before turning on a social switch. “Is that what they teach you over there—to leave your guests waiting?”
And when Pond thought he’d been engulfed entirely, there Phuwin was to prove him wrong. Walking over to the centre of the table with the heavenliest of laughs, there stood a man who had the ability to turn every impossible in Pond’s mind to the most certain of scenarios. He was rendered sightless, blinded by the only source of light that could set his entire world ablaze.
It could’ve been the daze clouding his judgement, but Pond almost believed to have seen the grin on Phuwin’s face faltering when he looked his way, laughter ceasing and trapping him further down.
“There’s one thing they certainly don’t,” Phuwin collected himself, hands on the chair as he turned everyone’s attention his way, as magnetic as ever. “At least over there they pretend to be polite,” he snarked at Joong, earning a heartfelt chuckle in return.
Pond was most likely the only who didn’t laugh, too dazed to process anything other than the absolute stomach-churning vision of the man he hadn’t seen in years.
“They’re stuck up, that’s what they are!” Joong retorted. “Don’t tell me they rubbed off on you.”
Sitting down with a finger raised to call the attention of a waiter, Phuwin simpered once more, “Not even if they tried!” leaving his lips like the confirmation he was still the same man they’d all come to know. Not an English snob who’d become as cold as the chilly weather.
Phuwin was as enchanting as he remembered. Probably even more, with his perfectly styled hair and partially opened designer shirt that enhanced the definition of his chest. Pond forced himself to look elsewhere, anywhere that wasn’t the person responsible for electrifying every inch of his being.
“Get whatever you want, it’s all on me,” Phuwin informed when the young man who’d guided Pond to the table came to collect their orders.
“Oh, how I’ve missed you,” an old classmate Pond had never been particularly close to said, cheeky smile as he searched for the most expensive dish on the menu.
And what an understatement that was, Pond thought, not feeling very hungry at all. He didn’t think he would make it through the night.
Playing with his food instead of stuffing himself like everyone else, Pond felt fuller than he had in years. His plate untouched, cutlery in hand hovering over the medium rare steak Joong ordered when he failed to get a single word out. Luckily, Phuwin had been too distracted by a distant cousin’s rant about the state of the economy to notice his idiotic frozen state.
But now he did. Gaze burning through Pond as if it were shooting lasers out of spite. He felt it without having to glance over in confirmation. It was still the same fierce stare that saw right through him, making him weak in the knees. God only knows what would happen if he weren’t sitting down.
“What about you, Pond?” someone questioned, bursting his isolation bubble. “What have you been up to? I haven’t seen you in ages!”
For good reason.
Chugging the wine left in his glass as encouragement, Pond shrugged it off, all eyes on him as if he had a spotlight over his head. “Not much. Your lives are far more interesting,” he dismissed, hoping it would redirect the conversation to anyone who actually enjoyed boasting about personal achievements.
“Don’t be so modest, man. You’re in charge of an entire department,” Joong interfered, a sharp defiance in his eyes as he looked at him. This bastard.
Unfortunately for Pond, the information captured everyone’s attention even more, elbows on the table as they leaned to inquire. Gasps of surprise, congratulatory cheers and even some opportunistic propositions of affiliations, but nothing loud or distracting enough to stop him from seeing a faint smile curling up on Phuwin’s lips. Imperceptible and ghostly unless you were looking for it. And then he realised that he was.
There went avoidance.
“I knew you had it in you,” was all the host said, filling Pond up even more to the point of nearly combusting.
Thank goodness for the wine, otherwise the blush rising to his cheeks could’ve easily been interpreted as a reaction to the praise. To anyone else he was just a tipsy man who’d had too much to drink, but Pond still lowered his head to hide the truth from the one person who wouldn’t mistake it. Not even after all this time.
Thankfully the attention quota reserved for the sideliners had been fully met, everyone returning to lively conversations about politics and other mundane matters Pond was more than glad to steer clear of.
By dessert every single guest had become too high-spirited to pay attention to anything that wasn’t the engrossing stories shared by the one and only Phuwin Tangsakyuen. The man of the century, conspicuously exhilarated by then, recounted tales of culture clashes and hard to believe incidents on foreign grounds. Rosy cheeked and with two more missing buttons—not that Pond was counting—Phuwin had the entire table wrapped around his little finger.
“You’re full of shit,” Joong said, eyes rolling back.
Pond laughed automatically, operating like a programmed machine that wasn’t really present. Because while his ears were tuned in to the retellings and back and forth interactions there was something louder echoing in his mind. After all the talking there was still something that hadn’t been answered, the very thing he was desperate to uncover.
“See—I knew you would say that! That’s why I made sure to get evidence,” Phuwin said, clumsily attempting to unlock his phone to provide said proof. “Shit, why won’t this work,” he tapped the screen, growing frustrated by not finding what he wanted.
Joong took the opportunity to check-in on his absentminded friend, a nudge on the arm and an offer of more wine Pond gladly accepted, before returning to teasing and answering the millionth question about his relationship with Dunk.
“Yes, we’re still together,” he repeated. “Of course, you wouldn’t know love if it hit you square in the face!”
Pond admired his endless patience and willpower to not be stepped all over by some of the same people who used to not so jokingly poke fun at him for being with a man. If only he had those same qualities.
“A-ha!” Phuwin jumped out of his seat, phone pointed in their direction to attest to the previous claims.
At this point he’d had enough of stolen glances and forced laughter to even pretend to not be bothered by the whole scenario. There they were, the strangest group of people, reunited for no apparent reason other than to welcome a man many of them hadn’t seen in years, and no one batted an eye? Why these many guests, why the reconnection and why now? Pond couldn’t for the life of him buy the whole “I missed you all” narrative, because if there was one thing he knew about Phuwin was that he never missed a trick. There had to be something bigger happening, and not knowing was driving him mad.
It could’ve been the lack of food and excess of liquor in his system making him lose what was left of his senses, but his mouth took control before he could stop it.
“So, why are we here?”
Blunt, colder than he would’ve liked given the circumstances and perhaps a bit too contrasting to the vibrant atmosphere to go unnoticed, but there it was—out in the open for everyone to hear.
Taken aback by the abrupt intervention, Phuwin sat back down, smile slowly disappearing on his face as every parallel conversation was cut short for people to look his way.
How smooth, Pond.
Sensing his regret, Joong jumped right in to lighten the mood, a hand on Pond’s back as support. “Yeah, man. You’ve been talking all night and still haven’t told us the big news!”
“Do tell, sir,” someone else insisted.
“Who said there were any news to share?” Phuwin asked, brows high on his forehead.
“As lovely as having dinner after so long is, we know you well enough to suspect an ulterior motive,” Joong explained, stealing the words right out of Pond’s tongue. A true blessing, because his would’ve never actually gotten out.
Taking a long sip of his wine—white, unlike he used to prefer—Phuwin regained a humorous expression, letting curiosity hang in the air for a little longer out of pettiness. Even if some things changed, others certainly didn’t.
“Then you would be right,” he confirmed when everyone began pressing him for answers.
Pond was glad Phuwin still hadn’t locked eyes with him, because then he could wear his heart on his sleeve as he pleased without having to put up a front. Not that he would ever succeed in doing so, but knowing he didn’t have to try in the first place was refreshing enough. He would rather face whatever was to come without that extra load on his shoulders.
“I called you all here for a reason,” Phuwin started, everyone’s undivided attention on him as they waited for the reveal. “Each one of you has been important to me at some point in my life—the best men I’ve met might I say!”
Fake sniffs and similar sounds of bliss resounded in the nearly empty restaurant, but Pond felt the furthest thing from joyful. There was something fundamentally wrong with the words and the entire ordeal they were in. If only he could place the pieces together to form a full picture.
With everything screaming at him to run, or at the very least cover his ears, Pond felt himself sinking deeper into the seat, hands tightly grasping his thighs as he braced for the impact.
“There is a moment in every man’s life where he needs the group of his best people right by his side,” Phuwin continued.
Now Pond’s body wasn’t the only thing sinking. With his wrenched heart bleeding in his hands he only had time to worriedly glance at Joong before everything clicked in his head.
Please don’t, don’t say it.
“Shut up, man!” Phuwin’s cousin squealed in disbelief, standing up with a hand covering his mouth.
Commotion spread through the table like an infectious disease. Pond was the only resistant to it, frozen in place as life flashed before his eyes, tears welling up in its corners as he waited for the confirmation of the last thing he ever wished to hear. This turn of events was an immeasurably worse fate than any scenario he could’ve pictured.
Rising from the chair with the recently filled glass, Phuwin put on his best smile, grinning from ear to ear as he looked around. It was only a matter of time before he crushed Pond’s world for good. He knew it.
As if he was reading his mind, Phuwin stared directly at Pond, his eyes not reflecting the gleefulness present on the rest of his face, and decided to put him out of his misery. Funnily enough, that was exactly when the real misery appeared to have started.
“That’s right,” his smile faded for a second, not going unnoticed by the one person who never failed to read him. “I’m getting married.”
It could have been the wine rushing to his head, but Pond could’ve sworn the room had just begun spinning mercilessly. In the eye of the storm, he watched as everyone enthusiastically greeted the engaged man whose gaze was still fixed on him, dark, motionless and—a third thing Pond pretended not to see—hurt.
Pond was only able to turn around when the first tear fell down his cheek, burning as intensely as the rest of his skin. Swiftly wiping it off, he gathered every bit of strength he could find to stop his lips from trembling, forcing down the cries and the acid of the rising wine. Then, in the name of love, he allowed the remaining trace of Phuwin to fully slip through his fingers.
“Congratulations,” he said, looking back fully expecting to find Phuwin’s eyes still on him.
But they weren’t.