Chapter 5: The Reckoning
The rain started an hour after Hyukjae fled, a soft drizzle that blurred the city’s lights into smears of gold against his window. He stood by it, forehead pressed to the cool glass, watching the drops slide down like tears. His reflection was a ghost superimposed over the cityscape. He didn’t look eighteen. He looked ancient.
His hands still felt the thrum of the refrigerator door, the shockwave from shoving Donghae. His knuckles ached. But worse than the ache was the phantom sensation—the memory of Donghae’s shirt twisted in his fist, the solid warmth of his body beneath it. The look on Donghae’s face hadn’t been hatred. It had been devastation. And something else. A challenge.
You remember.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Flashes, like faulty neon. Donghae laughing, head thrown back under the Tokyo streetlights. Donghae asleep on a plane, head on his shoulder. Donghae’s hands, sure and steady, wrapping his ankle after a rehearsal sprain. The memories didn’t feel like his. They felt like scenes from a movie he’d watched once, emotional and vivid but belonging to someone else.
He pushed off from the window. The silence in his apartment was a physical weight. It pressed down on his eardrums, filled with the echo of his own accusation: What if there were others?
He knew that was wrong. The moment he’d said it, he’d seen the color drain from Donghae’s face, a wound so genuine it was terrifying. Because the Lee Donghae he knew—his best friend, the boy he’d shared a dorm room with at eighteen—was incapable of that kind of calculated deceit. That Donghae was sunshine and clumsy honesty, not secret-keeping and affairs. So either this new, older Donghae was a stranger, or… or Hyukjae was the one who was wrong.
The thought was a crack in the ice he was standing on.
He grabbed his keys. He didn’t think. If he thought, he’d stop. He’d lock the door and drown in the confusing static of his own mind. He just moved.
Donghae’s apartment building loomed in the wet dark. His feet carried him up the familiar stairwell, past the flickering light on the second-floor landing. The door was before him, solid and painted a cheap, generic beige.
He knocked. Three sharp raps.
For a long moment, nothing. Then a shuffling sound from within. The lock disengaged with a heavy click.
The door opened. Donghae stood there, illuminated by the dim light from his kitchen. He hadn’t slept either. His eyes were shadowed, his hair tousled. He wore the same clothes from before, wrinkled and sad. In his hand, he held the folded cocktail napkin.
They stared at each other. The rain pattered softly on the hallway window behind Hyukjae.
“You came back,” Donghae said, his voice rough.
Hyukjae said nothing. He just stepped forward, over the threshold, and Donghae fell back a step to let him in. The door swung shut with a soft thud.
The air in the apartment was still charged, thick with the residue of their fight. The kitchen light was on, casting a long, stark rectangle into the living space. Hyukjae’s gaze swept over the room—the guitar, the half-packed suitcase by the bedroom door, a sweater of his own draped over a chair. Evidence of a shared life, laid out like a crime scene.
“I can’t…” Hyukjae started, then stopped. He turned to face Donghae, who was watching him, wary and unbearably tired. “The things I’m seeing. They won’t stop.”
Donghae’s throat worked. He didn’t speak, just waited.
“It feels like I’m losing my mind,” Hyukjae confessed, the words ripped from him. “Like I’m trying to hold sand and it’s all just pouring through my fingers. The me I know is the sand. And all this… this other stuff… it’s just empty space.”
“It’s not empty space,” Donghae whispered. He took a step closer. “It’s us.”
“Don’t.” Hyukjae held up a hand, a plea. “Don’t say that. It just makes it worse. It makes it a choice. Between what I know and what you tell me. And I don’t know how to choose.”
“You don’t have to choose.” Donghae closed the distance, slow, like approaching a spooked animal. “You just have to let it come back.”
“It hurts.” The admission was a choked sob. Hyukjae’s composure shattered. “It feels like my skull is splitting open. And every time I see your face in one of those flashes, it’s worse. Because you’re looking at me like…” He trailed off, his breath hitching.
“Like what?” Donghae was close now. Too close. Hyukjae could see the faint scar above his eyebrow from a childhood fall, the flecks of gold in his dark irises he’d somehow never noticed before. Or had he?
“Like you love me,” Hyukjae breathed, the truth of it hanging in the air, horrifying and undeniable.
Donghae didn’t move. “I do.”
The three words were a detonation. They stripped away the last of Hyukjae’s resistance, leaving only raw, bleeding confusion and a deep, yawning need for it all to just stop. For the pain to stop. For the noise to stop. For the terrifying, beautiful face in front of him to either become familiar or disappear forever.
He didn’t know who moved first.
Later, he would think they fell into each other. A gravitational collapse.
One second he was standing, the next he was surging forward, his hands fisting in Donghae’s shirt again, but this time he was pulling him in, not pushing him away. Donghae gasped against his mouth—a sharp intake of shock—and then he was responding, his own hands coming up to frame Hyukjae’s face, his kiss a desperate, answering pressure.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a collision. Teeth clashed. Lips bruised. It tasted of salt—from the rain, from tears, from the fury and fear of the last weeks. Hyukjae pushed forward, walking Donghae backwards without breaking the kiss, a clumsy, driven shuffle until the back of Donghae’s knees hit the bed and they tumbled onto the messy duvet in a tangle of limbs.
Hyukjae was on top, pinning Donghae down, his body moving with a practiced, instinctual rhythm that bypassed his broken mind entirely. His hands went to the hem of Donghae’s shirt, rucking it up, his palms sliding over the familiar planes of his stomach. Donghae arched into the touch, a broken sound escaping his throat, his hands gripping Hyukjae’s hips.
This was a language his body remembered. The weight, the heat, the specific way Donghae’s breath hitched when he bit at his lower lip. It was all there, etched into his muscles, a script he could perform without understanding the words.
He kissed Donghae harder, deeper, trying to drown the screaming contradiction in his head. This was Donghae. His friend. His bandmate. The boy who stole his fries and borrowed his socks and made him laugh until he cried. But under his hands, under his body, he was also someone else entirely. A lover. A destination. A home Hyukjae’s mind had boarded up and condemned.
Donghae melted beneath him, his own hands frantic, pulling at Hyukjae’s clothes, his touch fevered with a hope so painful it was palpable. This was the breakthrough. This was his Hyukjae coming back to him through the oldest, most primal connection they had.
But then Donghae opened his eyes.
Hyukjae’s face was above his, shadowed in the dim light from the other room. His eyes were screwed shut, his jaw clenched. There was no tenderness in his expression. No recognition. There was only a fierce, almost violent concentration. A grinding effort to make something happen. To force a feeling.
This wasn’t passion. It was punishment. A punishment Hyukjae was inflicting on himself, using Donghae’s body as the tool.
Donghae froze.
His hands, which had been clutching at Hyukjae’s back, went still. The desperate, hopeful energy drained from him all at once, leaving a cold, hollow dread. Hyukjae didn’t seem to notice, lost in the furious rhythm of his own attempt to remember, his mouth moving to Donghae’s neck, his hands rough and urgent.
“Stop,” Donghae whispered, the word a puff of air against Hyukjae’s ear.
Hyukjae didn’t hear him. Or he chose not to.
“Hyukjae.” Donghae’s voice was firmer now, laced with a new, profound horror. He put his hands on Hyukjae’s chest and pushed. “Stop. Look at me.”
Hyukjae reared back, breathing heavily, his lips swollen. His eyes finally opened, and what Donghae saw there shattered him. There was no love. No desire. There was a frantic, glassy desperation, and beneath that, a self-loathing so deep it was like looking into a void.
“Why did you stop?” Hyukjae panted, his voice raw. “This… this is what you wanted, right? This is how it was. Show me. Make me remember.”
The words were a dagger to Donghae’s heart. He shoved harder, and Hyukjae rolled off him, landing on his back beside him on the bed. They lay there side by side, staring at the ceiling, the only sound their ragged breathing.
“I don’t want this,” Donghae said quietly to the dark. “Not like this. Not when you’re trying to hate yourself into feeling something.”
Hyukjae turned his head on the pillow. In the half-light, his profile was sharp, unfamiliar. “I don’t know any other way.”
Donghae sat up slowly, his body feeling a thousand years old. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, his back to Hyukjae. He reached for his crumpled shirt on the floor and pulled it on, the fabric a poor shield. “Then we’re done.”
Hyukjae propped himself up on his elbows. “What?”
“We’re done.” Donghae stood, his legs unsteady. He walked to the bedroom door, leaning against the frame for support. He didn’t look back. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be your… your test subject. Your enemy you fuck to try and trigger a memory.” His voice was flat, utterly exhausted. “You were right. Maybe it is a choice. And I choose not to let you break us both.”
He walked out of the bedroom, through the living room, and straight to the kitchen counter. He picked up the cocktail napkin, now soft and frayed at the edges.
Hyukjae appeared in the bedroom doorway, his shirt untucked, hair disheveled, looking young and utterly lost. “Where are you going?”
Donghae finally looked at him. The love was still there, a constant, aching throb. But it was covered now in layers of grief and a final, decisive resolve. “To see a doctor. A specialist. The one Jessica told me about.” He unfolded the napkin, smoothing it on the counter. “I’m going to get you real help. Because this?” He gestured between them, at the wreckage in the bedroom. “This is just making everything worse.”
He grabbed his jacket from the hook by the door, shoving the napkin into the pocket.
“Wait,” Hyukjae said, taking a step forward, his voice small.
Donghae paused, his hand on the doorknob. He didn’t turn around. “I loved you,” he said, the past tense a brutal, deliberate punctuation in the quiet room. “More than anything. And I think, somewhere buried under all that fear, you loved me too. But I can’t dig you out, Hyukjae. You have to want to climb.”
He opened the door and stepped out into the rainy night, closing it softly behind him, leaving Hyukjae standing alone in the silent, haunted space that used to be theirs.
Chapter 5 Continued
The click of the latch was softer than a heartbeat. It was final. Hyukjae stared at the smooth, beige wood, his mind a perfect, ringing blank. He was alone with the hum of the refrigerator, the whisper of rain against glass, and the scent of them both lingering in the air—sweat, regret, that faint, ghostly cologne. A hollow quiet expanded in his chest, cold and vast.
I loved you.Past tense.
The words began to echo, bouncing off the minimalist walls of Donghae’s empty apartment. He looked around, really seeing it. The guitar wasn’t just leaning there; it was the one he’d bought on a whim in Hongdae, the sticker from a cafe they loved still half-peeling on its case. Donghae had joked it was a stupid purchase since Hyukjae could barely play three chords. The suitcase by the bedroom door was half-packed with Donghae’s things, yes, but nestled between the folds of a sweater was the ugly, lumpy scarf Hyukjae had attempted to knit him two winters ago. A relic.Proof.
He took a step towards the bedroom. The duvet was a chaotic swirl where they’d fallen. Where he’d tried to fuck a memory back into existence. His stomach twisted. He could still feel the desperate pressure of Donghae’s skin under his palms, the way his own body had moved on autopilot, a perfect imitation of intimacy without a shred of the feeling. He’d been an actor in a play he’d forgotten, performing the blocking perfectly while everyone else wept at the story.
He stood in the doorway, his hand gripping the frame. His knuckles were white.
Donghae’s parting sentence replayed, each word a precise cut. You have to want to climb.
Climb out of what? This was his reality.His truth. He was Lee Hyukjae, twenty-eight in body but eighteen in spirit, and his best friend was in love with a phantom version of him. That was the sane, solid ground. Everything else—the Tokyo neon, the whispered promises in dark rooms, the muscle-deep knowledge of how Donghae tasted—was just haunting. A psychological break.
But then why did the ground feel like it was disintegrating?
He walked to the bed and sat on the very edge, the place where Donghae had been. He picked up a pillow, bringing it to his face. It smelled purely of Donghae’s shampoo, the cheap, apple-scented one he’d used for a decade. A wave of pure, unadulterated grief hit him with a physical force. It wasn’t for a lost love. It was for a lost friend. For the simple, easy boyhood they’d shared that was now obliterated, replaced by this complex, aching landscape he was expected to navigate blind.
He’d shoved him. He’d accused him of infidelity. He’d used his body like a tool. And Donghae had taken it. He’d taken it until he couldn’t anymore, until he walked out into the rain to find a doctor, to fix what Hyukjae was too terrified to even acknowledge was broken.
The crack in the ice widened. A seismic shudder.
He wasn’t losing his mind. His mind was a fortress, and something real was trying to batter the gates down. Something true. The hotel room, the rain on the window, the feeling of Donghae’s hands on his waist—they weren’t delusions. They were shrapnel. Pieces of a life that had actually happened, exploding through the amnesia’s dam.
And he’d just tried to brutalize the only person who remembered it.
A choked sound escaped him. It was raw and ugly. He dropped the pillow, curling forward, his elbows on his knees. He pressed the heels of his hands hard into his eye sockets, seeing bright bursts of color. The pressure built in his sinuses, in his throat, a hot, swelling tide he’d been holding back for weeks.
It broke.
A sob ripped out of him, harsh and involuntary. Then another. They came in relentless waves, shuddering through his frame, tearing from a place deeper than confusion. He cried for the ten lost years. He cried for the man who loved him and whom he’d just broken. He cried for the phantom lover who felt more real in flashes than his own reflection, and for the terrified eighteen-year-old trapped inside, watching his entire future crumble into dust.
He wept openly, without restraint, in the silent apartment. His shoulders shook. Tears and mucus streamed down his face, dripping onto Donghae’s floor, onto his own trembling hands. He didn’t try to stop it. The dam was gone.
He gasped for air between the wracking sobs, the sound loud and pitiful in the quiet. He cried until his head throbbed, until his eyes burned, until he was hollowed out and spent. The storm passed, leaving a strange, limp calm in its wake. He was a vessel emptied of fury, of defiance, of that stubborn, childish insistence that his shrunken world was the only one that existed.
He sat there for a long time, breathing in the humid, post-rain quiet seeping through the window someone had left ajar. The gray light of dawn was beginning to dilute the darkness outside.
Slowly, he wiped his face on his sleeve. It was a gross, damp smear. He stood up, his legs feeling watery. His gaze fell on the coffee table. Donghae’s phone lay there, forgotten in his hurried exit.
Hyukjae walked over and picked it up. The screen lit up with a photo of the two of them. It wasn’t a staged promotional picture. It was candid. They were on a beach, laughing, Donghae’s arm slung around his neck, Hyukjae’s head thrown back in genuine joy. He looked older. His hair was different. He was wearing a silver ring on his right hand he didn’t own.
He stared at the face in the photo—his own face, older, utterly relaxed, utterly in love. A stranger who was him.
He didn’t know the password. He wouldn’t invade. He just placed the phone back down, careful, as if it were a holy relic.
His own phone was in his pocket. He pulled it out, his fingers clumsy. The screen was a mess of missed calls and worried texts from other members, from managers. He ignored them all.
He opened a new message. His thumb hovered over Donghae’s name. The words wouldn’t come. ‘I’m sorry’ was a pebble thrown into the ocean of what he’d done. ‘I remember’ was a lie.
He typed three words instead. He sent them before he could think.
I’ll try. Climb.
He pocketed his phone. He took one last look around the apartment—the proof of a life lived—and then he walked out, leaving the door unlocked behind him. The morning air was cool and clean, washing over his ravaged face. He didn’t know where Donghae was. He didn’t know what the doctor would say.
He just knew the climb had begun.