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It hits Kitae, sometimes, when he's doing something tedious. It leaves him breathless - the ache. He's started working at a small company and the first thing he wanted to do was text Wan, a simple I started my first job today.
He doesn't though. Not because he can't, but because it won't matter, because Wan's gone, disappeared like early morning mist after the sun emerges over the horizon. He feels like he's screaming into the void, except he can't even hear his own voice, but his lungs constrict and his breath runs out.
He shakes it off, plasters on a smile lest someone asks why he suddenly looks like the rug has been ripped out from under him. Except that it has, and every single time he thinks about Wan, he's reminded that he's teetering on unstable ground.
He ignores it most days. Life goes on. Day after day, month after month, until it turns to years and he can't remember the lilt of Wan's voice anymore except how his eyes crinkled when he smiled at whatever stupid joke Kitae made.
Kitae tries to move on, he really does. He dates, briefly, breaks up even quicker because the only hand he wants to hold ran away from him and changed his number and dropped out of existence just as quickly as he materialised.
Instead he hangs out with his friends, gets drunk, goes on dates that go nowhere, sleeps with people who look like Wan but aren't. Kitae wonders how he looks now, four-five-six years after he last saw him. Has he grown a little taller? Has he filled out or gotten smaller? Is he eating well? Fuck, is he alive? That thought makes his breath hitch and his shoulders hunch.
Maybe he's just dumb, Kitae thinks of himself. Maybe he's clinging to someone who didn't actually want him, saw him as a mistake. Mayne that's why he ran away, except no, Wan wouldn't have. Kitae knows him better, knew him once, if at all, really.
So Kitae sleeps around, waters his plants, works on his game, and looks for Wan every few months - grants himself one day of frantic searching before he locks it all away again for the next six or so months.
Kitae thinks, lugubriously, bitterly, hopes that Wan is out there, somewhere, and someone loves him, cares for him, holds his hand and tells him he's beautiful, comforts him when he's upset, just as he deserves. Oh how he wishes that someone was him instead.
It's a thought that keeps him up at night, fingers digging into palms to stop himself from raging at the injustice, how unfair it is that someone gets to love Wan when he isn't allowed to, wasn't even given the opportunity to.
It's then, in the midst of mindlessly scrolling through blogs, in the middle of an anxiety riddled day with renewed fears of abandonment, of not feeling good enough to be kept that he finds him.
And Kitae hoards, gobbling drawing after drawing, word after word, staring at him until the times is right, until days turn to months turn to years turn into one day, one hour, one minute, one second, and Kitae feels warmth scorch from the tips of his fingers, up his arm, feels aflame.
He's here, and it only took seven years.