Work Text:
Finding You….
Everyone said the last year of high school was supposed to feel different. Like something in the air would shift, like you'd wake up one morning already nostalgic for a life you were still living.
For Qin, it just felt quieter.
Every evening, in that dead hour when the sky couldn't decide between orange and gray, he walked the same narrow street to the tutoring academy. The sign outside buzzed faintly, its white light half-alive. Students spilled in and out around him ..... laughing, complaining, dragging their feet as though the weight of upcoming exams had gotten physical. Qin moved through them the way water moves around stone. Present. Separate.
It hadn't always been like this.
There was a time, not so long ago, when his phone felt heavier in his pocket. When he'd check it without meaning to, when his steps home felt lighter without him understanding why. When conversations would replay in his head at two in the morning like songs he hadn't asked to memorize.
That time had a name.
Tiw.
Tiw was loud in the way Qin wasn't ..... persistent, warm, the kind of person who walked into a silence and immediately started furnishing it. He'd chased Qin with a sincerity that felt almost reckless. Morning texts. Waiting by the classroom door. Small, deliberate gestures that found the gaps in Qin's walls and worked at them quietly, like water wearing down stone.
And Qin had let him. Slowly. At a cost he hadn't fully understood until he was already paying it.
It had taken everything in him to open even a fraction of himself ..... to believe, just a little, that maybe someone could stay.
But the moment Qin finally stepped forward, Tiw had already stepped away. No warning. No explanation that held together under any real scrutiny. Just a new name, a new smile, a new person standing exactly where Qin had been starting to think he might belong.
That was enough.
Enough for Qin to close the door quietly and decide ..... not bitterly, just practically ..... that whatever that feeling was, whatever people dressed up in songs and movies and called love, it simply wasn't built for him.
"Oi." A hand waved lazily in front of his face. "You're doing it again."
Qin blinked. Tong was leaning against the wall beside him, wearing the particular expression he reserved for Qin ..... half-irritated, half-entertained. Kim stood on the other side, scrolling through his phone with the focused serenity of someone who had achieved genuine peace with the world's chaos.
"Doing what," Qin said.
"Staring at that crack in the wall for five minutes."
"It's a good crack."
"It's a crack, Qin."
Qin shrugged. Kim, without looking up, said, "Leave him. At least he's not being sarcastic at us."
Tong clicked his tongue. "You two are genuinely no fun."
They were waiting outside their classroom while the corridor filled around them ..... overlapping voices, shuffling feet, the occasional dramatic groan of someone remembering they hadn't done the reading. Ordinary sounds. The kind that blurred into background noise after a while.
Everything was normal.
And then someone shouted, and it wasn't.
"Hey ..... give it back!"
Laughter came spilling after it, the loud, unrestrained kind that doesn't care who hears. Qin's gaze moved before he'd decided to move it.
Two boys came tearing down the corridor, one of them holding a shoe above his head like a prize. Behind them, half a step back and breathless, was the one they'd stolen it from. His hair was soft and a little messy, that looked like it had given up on staying neat and somehow landed somewhere better. It shifted when he ran, catching the fluorescent light overhead.
He was chasing them, but he wasn't actually angry. That was the thing. His face was already halfway to laughing, like his body hadn't gotten the message that he was supposed to be annoyed.
"Give it back, you idiots!" But there was a grin underneath the words, barely suppressed.
"Come get it then!" The boy with the shoe glanced back and ran faster.
They swept past in a rush of movement and noise ..... and then, just for a moment, he slowed down. Maybe he was catching his breath. Maybe the polished floor shifted under his foot. It was a small thing, barely a pause.
But in that pause, he laughed.
Not for anyone. Not loudly. Just ..... naturally, the way people laugh when something is genuinely funny and there's no reason to perform it. His whole face went soft with it. His eyes curved. For a fraction of a second, he was completely unguarded.
Then he was gone, disappearing into a classroom down the hall, the sound of them fading back into the noise of everything else.
Qin stood very still.
There was something happening in his chest ..... a flutter, light and uneven, like his heart had briefly lost the rhythm it had kept so carefully for months. He pressed his lips together, almost a frown, like he could push it back down through sheer will if he caught it early enough.
This was stupid. He didn't know that person. Hadn't even gotten a proper look. A stranger running past in a hallway ..... that was all that had happened.
And yet the feeling sat there anyway, unhurried, unbothered by his objections. Like something deciding to take root in soil he'd salted on purpose.
"Qin." Tong's voice again. "You good?"
He didn't answer right away. His gaze was still on the empty stretch of corridor where the three of them had been.
"…Yeah."
It came out quieter than he intended.
Kim glanced up from his phone ..... actually glanced up, which meant something. "You sure?"
"I'm fine," Qin said.
And maybe he was. Maybe it was nothing. A blip. The kind of thing the brain does when it's bored, finding patterns and significance in things that don't have any.
He turned back to the wall.
The crack he'd been staring at was still there. Same length. Same shape. He looked at it and felt nothing ..... no mild interest, not even the flat comfort of something familiar to fix his eyes on.
He looked away.
The rest of the evening should have been ordinary.
The corridor settled back into itself ..... voices layering over voices, footsteps, the distant scrape of chairs from inside classrooms. The disruption was over. Everything had resumed its usual shape.
Qin hadn't.
That boy wouldn't leave him alone. Not the memory of him, anyway. It kept replaying with an insistence that had nothing to do with Qin's permission ..... the way he'd been running, already half-laughing before he'd even caught up to them. That brief, unguarded moment when he'd slowed down and his whole face had just... opened.
Qin tried to redirect himself. He listened to Tong complain about the assignment load. He watched Kim scroll. He stared at the flickering light above their heads until it blurred. But his thoughts kept drifting back the way water finds the same groove ..... soft hair, breathless laughter, that particular warmth that had no business lingering this long.
It was irritating. More than irritating. It was the kind of thing he had no framework for anymore, which made it worse.
"Come on, we're gonna be late," Tong muttered, pushing off the wall.
Kim pocketed his phone with a quiet sigh. "First session and we already look like idiots."
Qin said nothing. He fell into step with them anyway.
The classroom was only a few doors down. Students were already filtering in ..... some hurrying, some barely moving, wearing the collective expression of people who had calculated exactly how little effort they could get away with. Qin followed absently, his mind still half-elsewhere.....
And then he stopped.
There he was.
Front row. Settled between the same two boys from the corridor, leaning slightly sideways toward one of them, shoulders loose, completely at ease ..... like he'd been sitting there for years, like he belonged there the way furniture belongs in a room.
Qin stood in the doorway and didn't move.
He couldn’t….
The classroom noise kept going around him, but it softened somehow, blurred at the edges. Not dramatically. Not in a way that would make sense to describe. Just ..... everything else became less specific, and he became more.
Up close, he was somehow more real than he'd seemed in the corridor. The messy softness of his hair caught the overhead light, strands falling naturally across his forehead in a way that looked effortless because it probably was. His skin had that easy brightness some people just carry, that makes them look awake even when they aren't trying. One of the boys said something and nudged him with an elbow, clearly teasing, and he reacted immediately ..... swatting back, pulling a pout that lasted maybe half a second before collapsing into a grin.
Unfiltered. Easy. Like joy was just his natural resting state.
Qin's breath snagged somewhere in his chest.
He knew, on some level, that this was ridiculous. He was standing in a doorway staring at a stranger because of a laugh he'd seen for three seconds in a hallway. He was aware of how that sounded. But his chest had tightened anyway, his heartbeat suddenly loud and slightly wrong, faster than it had any reason to be ..... like his body had decided to respond without running it by him first.
Heat crept up his neck. He could feel it reaching his face before he could do anything about it, that tell-tale warmth spreading across his cheeks whether he wanted it there or not.
He just stood there.
Staring.
How long, he couldn't have said.
"Qin."
Nothing.
"Qin."
Still nothing.
"Oi."
A sharp nudge to his shoulder and the world snapped back ..... the noise, the movement, fifteen students shuffling into seats around him.
Tong was staring at him like he'd genuinely started to worry. "You planning to live in the doorway or what?"
Kim had both eyebrows raised slightly. "That's the third time today."
Qin swallowed. He rearranged his expression into something that resembled normal. "I wasn't....."
"You were," Tong said immediately.
Qin exhaled. "Let's just go."
He stepped inside.
And for a few seconds that felt longer than they were, he had to walk past him ..... close enough to catch the details he hadn't been able to see from the doorway. The faint crease beside his eyes when he smiled. The way his fingers tapped lightly against the desk as he talked, unconscious and unhurried. The sound of his laughter up close, quieter now, almost private.
Qin kept his eyes forward.
He didn't look.
He knew, with a certainty that unsettled him more than anything else had today, that he absolutely could not.
Two desks behind. That's where Qin sat.
Tong dropped into the chair beside him, still muttering about something. Kim settled in quietly on the other side. The classroom was doing what classrooms do ..... bags hitting floors, chairs scraping, voices dropping to the low murmur that meant everyone had accepted, more or less, that they were staying.
Qin stared at the front of the room like a person who was absolutely fine.
His heart hadn't gotten the memo.
It was still going too fast, still slightly off-rhythm, and no amount of staring at chalk marks on the board seemed to be fixing that. He tried anyway. He picked a faint smudge near the left edge and committed to it. He was very interested in that smudge.
It didn't work, because two rows ahead, that guy ..... he didn't know the name yet, but the boy ..... existed with an energy that was genuinely difficult to ignore. He'd turned sideways in his seat to talk to his friends, shoulders relaxed, completely unbothered by the world. One of them said something and nudged him; he shoved back without looking, the way you only do with people you've known long enough to be careless with. Then he smiled at whatever came next.
Qin looked away.
Quickly.
Too quickly, probably.
He pressed his fingers against the edge of his desk and focused on the solidity of it.
What is wrong with me.
Not a question, really. More of an observation. His chest was still unsettled, his pulse still louder than it had any business being in a quiet room over absolutely nothing.
The teacher looked up from the attendance sheet. "Alright. Let's begin."
Names went down the list. Qin answered his without really hearing himself do it, his voice on automatic while the rest of him was somewhere else entirely. He didn't usually pay attention to attendance. It was the most routine part of any class ..... names called, voices confirming, the whole thing over in two minutes.
But he found himself listening.
Waiting, even, without fully understanding what he was waiting for.
"Tong." ..... Here. "Kim." ..... Present.
One by one. The list moved forward.
Then ..... a brief pause came. The faint sound of paper shifting.
"Duang."
"Here!"
Immediate. Bright. The kind of voice that doesn't bother dimming itself for a classroom.
Qin's head came up before he'd decided to move it.
That was the voice from the hallway ..... the one that had carried more laughter than actual words, the one that had sounded like it was always half a beat away from a joke. Hearing it again did something he wasn't prepared for. It landed somewhere specific, somewhere he didn't have a name for.
And now there was a name to go with it.
Duang.
He turned it over silently. Once. Twice. Not sure why he felt the need to, only that it seemed important to confirm it was real.
What happened next was stranger still.
He felt ..... happy. Quietly, privately, in a way that made no logical sense whatsoever. A small warmth somewhere in his chest, like an ember catching. It lasted only a second, but it was there, and it was genuine, and that was exactly what scared him about it.
He frowned at his desk.
This is stupid.
There was no argument to make for this feeling. He didn't know this person. He'd watched him run down a corridor for ten seconds and now his chest was doing things at the sound of his name during attendance. It was embarrassing really. It sounded irrational.
And yet some part of him, quiet and treacherous, wanted to smile.
He noticed that. The wanting. And it stopped him cold, because he genuinely couldn't remember the last time something had made him want to do that ..... not as a reflex, not as performance, but just because something small and ordinary had landed somewhere warm.
After Tiw, things had gone flat. That was the only word that fit. Not shattered, not devastated ..... just flat, like someone had turned down the volume on everything until the signal was barely there. He'd waited for the proper grief to arrive: the tightness, the tears, the 2am wreckage people wrote songs about. It never came. Qin somewhere knew this would happen cause he couldn’t remember the last time he cried. He'd waited long enough that eventually he stopped waiting, and eventually after that he stopped noticing he wasn't feeling much of anything.
It was manageable. Clean, even. Easier than the alternative.
So, what was this, then? Why was his heart loud again? Why did one name, called out from an attendance sheet, make him feel like something had shifted in his chest ..... not painful, not calm, just present ..... in a way he'd almost forgotten things could?
At the front of the room, Duang had already moved on. He'd turned back to his friends, whispering something that made them duck their heads to muffle their laughter. Completely unaware. Untouched by whatever he'd accidentally started two rows behind him.
Qin watched for a second longer than he should have. Then he looked down at his notebook and picked up his pen and wrote nothing.
The rest of class passed the way classes pass when you're not really there ..... words spoken, notes taken, time moving through him rather than with him. None of it stuck. He couldn't have told you afterward what had been taught.
That night, when he finally closed his eyes, it came back without asking.
The corridor. The running. The laugh that wasn't for anyone. That brief, unguarded moment when Duang had slowed down and looked like the most unself-conscious person in the world.
This time, in the half-dark behind Qin's eyelids, he didn't just pass by. He almost turned. Almost looked back.
Qin woke up with his pulse still quick and a name sitting quietly in the back of his mind, unhurried, like it had decided it lived there now.
Duang.
Something in Qin's routine shifted after that day. Quietly, in the way that changes do when you're not ready to admit you're making them.
He started arriving early.
Not conspicuously early ..... not early enough for Tong to notice and make it a thing. Just earlier than before. Earlier than he had any reason to be, if he was being honest, which he wasn't particularly interested in being.
The academy was different in those stretches before it filled up. The hallways still had space in them, sound still had somewhere to go. Footsteps echoed instead of getting swallowed by noise. Qin would take his usual spot near the corridor outside their classroom and stand there with his bag and his coffee and absolutely no agenda whatsoever.
He didn't call it waiting. The word implied you were expecting something, and he wasn't. He was just ..... there.
Early.
For no particular reason.
One morning, Duang came in slightly late, a little breathless, his hair doing its usual thing, smiling before he'd even registered what his friend was waving at him about from inside the classroom. He laughed at whatever it was before he reached the door.
Qin looked away. But not quite fast enough to miss it ..... that same warmth, rising before he could think to stop it.
After that it became habit. A quiet, unspoken, entirely private habit.
He never approached him. Never manufactured a reason to be nearby. He simply ..... noticed. Collected details the way you collect things you don't mean to keep, small and unimportant until suddenly they aren't.
The way Duang greeted people first, always. A quick hey and that easy smile, like friendliness wasn't something he switched on but something he simply ran on. The way he moved through a room without leaving anyone feeling invisible.
One afternoon Qin watched him come back into the classroom carrying a small paper bag. One of the girls near the window took it quickly, quietly, with the particular embarrassment of someone who'd needed help and hadn't wanted to. Duang had already turned away ..... not to be cool about it, Qin thought, but because he genuinely didn't think it was worth anyone's attention. Like helping was just the obvious thing to do and making it a moment would have been the strange part.
Another time, one of his friends announced dramatically that he'd forgotten his homework. Duang didn't tease him for it, just laughed and dug through his bag and slid his notes across the desk. Copy it fast. There was no hesitation. No performance. The notes were already moving before the sentence finished.
And then there were the smaller things. The ones that caught Qin most off guard, maybe because they were so specific ..... so him and nothing else.
The way he bounced slightly on his feet when something excited him, like his body needed more room than he was taking up. The way his face moved through expressions quickly, a pout dissolving into a grin in the span of a second. The way he laughed without editing himself, like he'd never learned to be careful about it, never decided that joy was something you should ration.
It was a lot. It was ..... bright, in a way Qin had no real defense against.
He wasn't sure when looking for those moments became the shape of his mornings. It had happened gradually enough that there was no single point he could identify, no day he could point to and say there, that's where it started. One day it just was ..... Duang's laugh somewhere in his peripheral vision, and Qin already turning before he'd decided to.
The warmth that had started as something unfamiliar, something he kept examining with suspicion, had stopped asking for his permission. It had settled somewhere quiet and deep, and it stayed there, and eventually Qin stopped being surprised to find it.
He noticed he was smiling one afternoon ..... not because someone had said something funny, not as a response to anything in particular. Just because Duang had done something small across the room, some ordinary gesture Qin had probably seen a hundred times by now, and apparently that was enough.
He held that realization for a moment. Turned it over.
He had fallen in love with someone he had never spoken to. Someone who had never looked at him twice. Someone who, in all likelihood, didn't know he existed.
By any reasonable measure, that should have felt absurd. Embarrassing, even. The kind of thing you'd cringe at if you heard it about someone else.
But sitting with it, Qin found that it didn't feel wrong.
It felt, strangely, like something that had already been true for a while. Like he was simply the last one to be informed.
"Okay, that's it."
Qin surfaced from his thoughts to find Tong staring at him with the particular expression he wore when he'd decided something was his business.
Kim had put his phone down.
That was the part that actually worried Qin.
"What," Qin said. Not quite a question.
"You." Tong crossed his arms.
"That's not a sentence."
"You've been acting weird."
"I always act like this."
"No," Kim said, with the calm certainty of someone who had been paying quiet attention for longer than Qin had realized. "You don't."
Qin said nothing. That was, unfortunately, a kind of answer.
Tong leaned in, dropping his voice in a way that was not even slightly subtle. "You've been coming in early."
"So?"
"You keep zoning out in the middle of conversations."
"I'm thinking."
"You were smiling," Tong said, like this was the most damning piece of evidence yet. "At nothing. At the wall."
Qin opened his mouth, found he didn't have anything, and closed it again.
Tong's eyes narrowed. Then, very deliberately, he followed the line of Qin's gaze ..... traced it from where Qin was looking now, backward, to where Qin had been looking before he'd been interrupted.
Front row.
Qin realized what was happening about two seconds too late.
"Oh," Tong said.
The word came out slow. Knowing. The kind of oh that contained an entire conversation inside it.
Kim glanced over. It took him considerably less time.
"Ah," said Kim.
The heat hit Qin's face all at once. He looked down at his desk. "Stop."
Tong let out a breath of a laugh, quiet and genuinely disbelieving. "There is no way."
"There is no way," he repeated, as though saying it twice would help him process it.
"Qin." A pause. Qin could feel him grinning without having to look. "Are you telling me that you ..... you specifically, of all people on earth ....."
"Don't."
"..... like him?"
"I said don't."
Qin kept his eyes on the desk. His jaw was tight. His heart was doing the thing again, loud and uneven and completely unhelpful, and some small irrational part of him was worried they could hear it.
Kim said nothing, but when Qin glanced over against his better judgment, there was a slight curve at the corner of Kim's mouth that he wasn't bothering to hide.
"I don't," Qin said. Flatly. Firmly.
Tong raised an eyebrow. "You were smiling at him from across the room thirty seconds ago."
Qin's breath caught.
He genuinely hadn't noticed he was doing it.
"You've been doing that a lot," Kim added, quieter. Not unkindly.
The three of them sat with that for a moment. The classroom noise continued around them, indifferent.
Qin looked back at his desk. He didn't have an answer ready, which almost never happened, and the absence of one felt louder than anything he could have said. How was he supposed to explain this?
He barely had the language for it himself ..... the way someone could walk through a corridor laughing at nothing and somehow rearrange something in you without even trying. Without even looking at you. Without knowing your name.
That was the part that sat heaviest. Through all of it ..... the early mornings, the stolen glances, the warmth he'd stopped being able to talk himself out of ..... Duang had never once looked back.
Qin exhaled slowly.
"It's nothing," he said.
Tong didn't push further, which was almost worse. He just leaned back in his chair with the expression of someone filing information away for later.
The word sat there in the quiet between them, and Qin looked at it honestly for what felt like the first time.
Nothing.
Even he didn't believe that anymore.
Few Days Later….
Tong noticed it first.
Not the staring ..... that had become almost unremarkable by now. Not the quietness either, because Qin had always carried a certain stillness with him. It was something else. Something underneath.
The sadness.
It was subtle enough that most people would have missed it entirely. It lived in small places ..... the way his gaze lingered a half-second too long before he caught himself and looked away. The way his shoulders sat on certain days, like he was carrying something he hadn't put down in a while. The way he smiled, on the rare occasions that he did, like he was only allowing himself part of it. Like letting the whole thing exist was a risk he hadn't decided to take yet.
Tong didn't say anything immediately. Neither did Kim. They just watched.
It was an evening after class when it finally came up. The academy had mostly emptied, the noise retreating until only a soft, distant hum remained. Outside the windows, the sky had already started to darken. Qin was still at his desk, not doing anything in particular, just sitting the way people sit when they're somewhere else in their head.
Tong leaned against the table beside him. Kim stood nearby, and his phone, notably, was in his pocket.
"You're sad," Tong said.
Qin looked up. "I'm not."
"You are."
"It's nothing."
"You don't have to do that with us," Kim said. Quieter than Tong, but somehow it landed harder.
Qin looked down at his hands. A moment passed.
"I don't even know him," he said finally. The words came out more honest than he'd meant them to ..... softer, unguarded. Like they'd been waiting for a door to open.
Tong didn't jump in. Didn't crack a joke. Just waited.
"I've never talked to him. He's never talked to me." Qin let out a small breath, something caught between a laugh and a sigh. "He probably doesn't know I exist."
"But you like him," Kim said.
It was not a question.
Qin didn't answer. He didn't need to. The silence said it clearly enough, and none of them pretended otherwise.
Tong shifted, scratching the back of his neck. "Then tell him."
Qin looked up. "What?"
"Tell him."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because it's not....." Qin stopped, exhaled. "It's not that simple."
Kim stepped in before Tong could push further. "Then don't tell him directly." He paused, thinking. "Write it."
Qin blinked. "Write what?"
"What you feel," Kim said. "Everything you feel. Everything you can't get out loud."
Tong's expression shifted, something clicking into place. "Okay ..... that's actually not bad."
"It's stupid," Qin said immediately.
"It isn't," Kim replied.
"What's the point? He won't even know it's from me."
Tong leaned forward slightly, and his voice was different now ..... no edge to it, no performance. "Maybe that's the whole point. You don't have to worry about what he thinks. You don't have to be afraid of getting it wrong or ruining something or whatever it is you're afraid of." He paused. "You just ..... say it. For yourself."
Kim nodded. "You let it out."
Qin looked between them.
It was strange, the idea. Completely foreign to how he usually operated. But underneath the strangeness was something else ..... something that felt, almost against his will, like relief.
"What do I do with it after?" he asked quietly. "After I write it."
Tong's mouth curved. "Leave it for him."
"Where?"
"His locker," Kim said.
That landed somewhere specific in Qin's chest.
"Every week," Tong added. "Same day. Same place."
"No name," Kim said.
"No pressure," Tong finished.
Qin sat with it. The idea was unreasonable. It was the kind of thing he would have dismissed without a second thought a year ago, before any of this. Before Duang had run laughing down a hallway and rearranged something in him.
But he thought about the weight of it ..... all the things he felt that had nowhere to go, that just accumulated quietly inside him, getting heavier. Watching from across the room and not being able to do anything with any of it.
"Just writing?" he asked.
"Just writing," Kim said.
That night, Qin sat at his desk with a blank piece of paper in front of him and didn't touch it for a long time.
He didn't know how to start. Didn't know how you took something that had been living in your chest for months and made it into sentences. He stared at the paper until the blankness of it started to feel like a challenge.
Then he picked up the pen.
Hi there,
I don't know you.
You don't know me either. I'm not even sure you'd recognize my face if I walked past you right now, which ..... if I'm being honest ..... is part of what makes this so strange to write.
I've been watching you for a while. I know that sounds worse than I mean it. I don't mean it strangely. I just mean that you're the kind of person who's hard not to notice ..... not because you're loud, or because you try to be seen, but because there's something about you that makes the air around you feel different. Lighter, maybe.
I saw you once, running down the hallway after your friends had stolen your shoe. You were already laughing before you caught up to them. That was it. That was all it took, apparently, because something shifted in me right then and it hasn't shifted back.
Since then I've noticed things I didn't mean to. The way you always say hi first. The way you gave your notes to your friend without thinking twice about it, like generosity was just your default setting and not something that required a decision. The way you brought that paper bag back for the girl by the window and immediately turned away, because making her feel seen was the point and making yourself feel good about it wasn't.
I don't know what you're like when no one's watching. I don't know what makes you tired or what you think about when it's quiet. I know almost nothing about you, really. Just these small pieces I've accidentally collected, like things you find in your pockets and don't remember picking up.
But here's what I do know.
Before you, I had gotten very good at not feeling much. Something happened, a while ago, that made feeling things seem like a bad investment. I got quiet about it. I got careful. I stopped waiting for things and stopped expecting things and told myself that was fine ..... that some people are just like that, and I was one of them.
And then you ran past me in a hallway, laughing, and I felt something move.
I'm not writing this because I expect anything. I'm not even sure I'll leave this where you can find it. But I needed to put it somewhere outside of myself, because carrying it quietly is getting heavy, and you looked like the kind of person who deserved to know ..... even anonymously, even from a stranger ..... that you make someone's mornings better just by existing in them.
So, Thank you, I think. For laughing the way you do. For being kind without announcing it. For being, without seeming to try very hard, exactly the kind of person that makes other people want to try harder.
You don't know me.
But I'm glad I know you. Even just a little. Even just like this.
Xoxo-
The handwriting wasn't neat. The words weren't arranged the way he would have wanted them to be. He read it back once and felt his face go warm at nearly every sentence.
But he folded it anyway.
Monday morning….
Qin arrived earlier than usual, earlier than anyone else had any reason to be there, the hallway quiet enough that his footsteps had an echo.
Qin stood in front of the lockers with the folded letter in his hand and his heart going at a pace that was genuinely embarrassing.
This is stupid.
He reached forward. Slipped it through the gap.
And walked away without looking back.
The day moved slowly after that. Qin kept his eyes forward, away from the front row, away from Duang entirely. He sat through two classes and barely registered a word of either.
Then, between sessions, he saw it.
A familiar figure at the lockers ..... unhurried, casual, the usual easy way he moved through a space. He opened his locker the way he always did. Reached in for something.
And paused.
Qin stopped breathing.
He watched Duang pull the letter out slowly, look at it for a moment with an expression Qin couldn't quite read from where he was standing ..... confusion first, then something softer, more curious. He unfolded it carefully.
Read.
Qin couldn't hear anything. Couldn't feel the floor beneath him or the noise of the corridor around him. There was only this ..... Duang standing at his locker, reading something Qin had written alone at midnight, and the horrible, suspended silence of not knowing what would happen next.
Then Duang smiled.
Not a performance of a smile. Not the big, easy grin he wore when his friends were being ridiculous. Something smaller. Private. The kind of smile that happens before you decide to let it, when something catches you off guard in a way that reaches somewhere real.
He read it again.
Qin felt the warmth move through him all at once, from his chest outward, sudden and complete.
That was because of me. Duang smiled because of me….
Just the thought of Duang smiling because of Qin made Qin feel like he was on cloud nine…
So, it became a routine.
Every Monday, he wrote a new letter. Another piece of something Qin had been keeping in the dark, carefully folded, left in the same place. And every Monday, without fail, he would find a reason to be somewhere he could see ..... at a distance, unremarkably, just another student in a hallway ..... as Duang opened his locker and found it.
The smile never got old. It was never the same twice, either ..... sometimes a quiet curve, sometimes a short surprised laugh, once a long pause where he just stood there with the letter in his hands looking at something in the middle distance, like he was thinking.
Qin never asked for more. Never left a name. Never waited for anything to come back.
He hadn't expected this to be enough.
But it was. Quietly, stubbornly, completely ..... it was. To know that he could reach someone like that, through paper and words and nothing else. To know that after all those flat, muted months of feeling like he'd put that part of himself away for good ..... he could still feel this much.
Even like this.
Even from here.
Even if he was the only one who knew.
Time moved the way it always does.
Weeks became months. Mondays came and went like a quiet rhythm Qin had built his life around without meaning to. And each week he kept writing, because it was the one thing that felt like it belonged entirely to him.
The letters changed. He noticed it himself, reading back through them sometimes late at night ..... the early ones careful and measured, maintaining a respectful distance, like he was describing something through glass. But somewhere along the way the glass had quietly disappeared, and he hadn't noticed until he was already on the other side of it.
You laugh a lot. I think it's my favourite thing about you.
Then, a few weeks later:
You helped someone again today. You didn't even hesitate. I wonder if you know how rare that is ..... to be kind without making anyone feel the weight of receiving it.
And then, one Monday in a month he couldn't remember clearly afterward:
I think you make people feel safe. Not because you try to. Just because of something you carry in you. I don't have a better way to put it than that.
Each one carried a little more of him. A little more truth. A little less of the careful armor he'd spent years building and maintaining.
And though Qin never let himself linger ..... never stayed long enough to watch fully ..... he always managed to catch enough. The small pause when Duang found the envelope. The curious glance at it before he opened it, like he was trying to solve something. The careful way he unfolded the paper, slower than you'd unfold something you didn't care about.
And the smile.
It never stopped. Not once in all those months. It was never quite the same twice either ..... sometimes small and private, sometimes a short-surprised laugh, once a long still moment where he just stood there holding the letter with an expression Qin couldn't name from where he was standing. But it was always there. Always real.
And sometimes ..... Qin told himself not to read into this, and did anyway ..... sometimes Duang would reach his locker a little faster on Mondays. Would glance around briefly before opening it. Like he was expecting something. Like part of him had started to wait.
Qin never let himself think about that too directly. It was easier not to. Safer to let it exist as a soft, unexamined thing at the edge of his mornings.
Until it wasn't.
The last session came the way last things often do ..... wearing the face of an ordinary day.
The hallway looked the same. The fluorescent lights buzzed the same. Students came and went with the same tired energy as every other evening. Nothing announced itself. Nothing gave warning.
"Today's the last day," Tong said. Casually. Like it was information and not an ending.
Qin felt it land in his chest and stay there.
Kim was watching him ..... the way Kim watched things, quietly and completely. His gaze dropped briefly to Qin's hand, where the letter was already folded.
"You're still writing one."
It wasn't a question.
Qin nodded.
He'd written it the night before. Rewritten it, actually ..... three times, maybe four. Each version had tried to say something different, and each version had ended up saying the same thing in slightly different words. He'd finally stopped not because he was satisfied but because his hand was tired and the hour was late and some part of him knew that no version would ever feel like enough.
This one felt heavier than all the others combined.
Tong leaned back in his chair and looked at Qin for a long moment. "Give it to him."
The room shifted slightly.
"What?"
"Not the locker." Tong's voice was more serious than usual, stripped of its usual edges. "To him. Actually to him."
Qin felt his chest tighten immediately, reflexively, the way it did when something came too close to the thing he'd been carefully keeping at a manageable distance. "I can't."
Kim didn't argue. Just asked, quietly, "Why?"
And that was harder to answer than a argument would have been, because the honest answer was shapeless. It wasn't a single fear he could point to. It was the architecture of a hundred smaller ones ..... all the ways it could go wrong, all the ways those smiles could turn out to mean something different than what he'd let himself believe, all the ways he could hand this fragile thing over and watch it become nothing in someone else's hands.
What if he's uncomfortable. What if he's been politely enduring it. What if none of it was ever what I thought.
"I don't want to ruin it," Qin said finally. His voice came out quieter than he intended.
Tong's expression did something it rarely did. It went soft. "You won't."
"You don't know that."
"No," Tong said, honestly. "I don't."
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was full of all the things none of them were saying.
Then Kim spoke. "This is your last chance, Qin."
Five words. Gently delivered. And they went in deeper than almost anything had all year.
"If you let today go," Kim continued, "there won't be another one."
Qin was quiet for a long time.
He thought about it ..... really let himself think about it, which he'd been avoiding. Standing in front of him. Saying it out loud. It was me. All of it. Every Monday, every letter ..... that was me. The thought made his heart beat in a way that was almost painful. Made something in him tremble in a register that wasn't quite fear, wasn't quite hope, but lived somewhere in the narrow space between them.
"…Okay," he said.
Barely audible. But said.
He arrived earlier than he ever had.
The hallway was empty. Not the comfortable quiet of an ordinary morning ..... something thinner than that. More exposed. Qin stood in front of the lockers and the sound of his own heartbeat felt unreasonably loud in all that stillness.
He read the letter one more time.
This will be the last letter I write to you. Not because I want it to be ..... I think some part of me could have kept writing forever, which is its own kind of answer. But the year is ending. And I think if I don't say this now, I never will, and I've carried quiet regrets before and I know what they weigh.
I don't know if you ever wondered who left these. Maybe you did, maybe they were just small strange things that showed up on Mondays and then stopped. But in case it ever crossed your mind .....
It was me.
I'm no one you know. I don't think you've ever looked at me directly. I sit two rows behind you and I've been watching you since the day you ran down this hallway laughing over a stolen shoe, and something in me decided, without asking, that you were going to matter.
You've been mattering ever since.
I've watched you be kind more times than I can count now. Quietly, without making anyone feel small for needing it. I've watched you laugh in a way that doesn't leave anyone out. I've watched you take up exactly the right amount of space ..... enough to make the people around you feel the warmth of it, never so much that anyone felt crowded.
I want you to know that you pulled me back from somewhere I'd been for a long time. Somewhere flat and quiet and honestly fine, the way a room with no windows is fine ..... livable, manageable, nothing particularly wrong. I didn't know I'd been in there until you made me feel the difference.
I'm not telling you this because I expect anything. I don't need you to find me or remember this or feel anything about it at all. I just needed you to know that you did something ..... that you reached someone without meaning to, without knowing, from all the way across a hallway.
I think that's worth knowing.
I think you're worth knowing.
Whoever you end up becoming ..... I hope it's loud. I hope you keep laughing like that. I hope the people in your life understand how lucky they are.
Thank you for this year.
..... Someone who saw you.
He folded it.
Held it.
Stood there in the empty hallway until standing there became something he was doing on purpose.
And then he waited.
Students began to arrive. The hallway filled gradually, in the way it always did ..... footsteps first, then voices, then the particular restless energy of people who were somewhere between arriving and beginning. Qin stood to one side and watched the corridor and felt his heart lift slightly every time a figure appeared at the far end.
Not him.
Not him.
Not him.
He told himself Duang was just running late. He was always moving at his own pace ..... that was part of him, that unhurried ease. He'd arrive any minute, slightly breathless, hair falling into his face, already laughing at something.
He'd arrive.
The minutes kept going. The hallway filled and then, as classes began, emptied again. The noise contracted. Doors closed. What had been a crowded corridor became a quiet once again, and the quiet felt different now ..... pointed, somehow. Like it was making a point.
Qin didn't move.
He watched the space in front of that locker the way you watch something you're not willing to let be true yet.
"…Qin."
Tong's voice, from somewhere behind him. Careful in a way it almost never was.
Qin didn't answer.
Kim stepped closer. "Class has started."
Still nothing. Because there was nothing to say to that. Class had started. The year had ended. The hallway was empty. And Duang wasn't coming ..... Qin knew that now, had known it for several minutes, had simply been refusing to let the knowing finish arriving.
He looked down at the letter in his hands.
The last one. The one that was supposed to be different from all the others ..... the one where he finally stopped hiding inside anonymity, finally said it was me, finally let himself be seen by the one person he'd spent a year wanting to reach.
It was just paper now.
His fingers tightened around it slowly. The edge crinkled. A small, stupid sound in the empty hallway.
Something moved through his chest ..... not the familiar dull ache he'd learned to manage, not the controlled distance he'd practiced until it became second nature. Something sharper. Something that hadn't been given permission to be there.
You won't see him again.
The thought arrived with a cruelty that surprised him. Plain and factual and devastating the way only true things are.
This was it. This was the last day and you waited and now it's over and you will never.....
Qin blinked.
His vision had gone slightly unsteady.
He blinked again, harder, and felt something that horrified him even as it happened ..... warmth gathering at the corners of his eyes. He hadn't expected that. Had not, in any version of today he'd imagined, expected that. He hadn't cried when Tiw left. Hadn't cried in the days after, all those days he'd waited for the grief to arrive and it simply hadn't. Hadn't cried through any of it ..... through the silence, through the flatness, through all those months of feeling like something vital in him had gone offline and might not come back.
But now, in a hallway that smelled like floor cleaner and chalk, over someone who had never once said his name ..... his eyes burned.
The tears didn't fall. They gathered and held, shaking at the edge of something, and he pressed his lips together and stared at the floor and breathed through it.
It didn't help.
Because with the burning came everything else. The full weight of it ..... all those Mondays, all those letters, all those mornings he'd arrived early for something he never let himself call what it was. All the times he'd watched Duang smile at something Qin had written alone at midnight and felt, privately, like that was enough. Like he could live inside that small, one-sided warmth indefinitely and be fine.
He should have talked to him.
The thought arrived now, too late to be anything but a wound.
Just once. He should have closed the two rows of distance between them just once ..... said something ordinary, something that didn't have to mean anything, just enough to exist in the same space as a person instead of a carefully maintained distance from one.
Should have given him the letter himself. Should have stood there and let himself be seen.
It was me. Every Monday. I don't know if it meant anything to you ..... I hope it meant something, I think I need it to have meant something ..... but it meant everything to me.
He hadn't said it.
He had stood in hallways and watched from doorways and folded his feelings into paper and slipped them through a gap in a locker and told himself that was brave enough. That was as close as he was willing to get.
And now the year was over and the hallway was empty and Duang was somewhere Qin would never follow, and the letter he'd finally written honestly ..... the one with his whole heart in it, the one that said it was me ..... was still in his hands.
Still folded.
Still unread.
Still his.
Qin closed his eyes.
The tears still didn't fall. They stayed where they were, stubborn and hot, pressing against the backs of his eyes like something that had been waiting a long time for a door to open.
He'd been so careful. So relentlessly, exhaustingly careful ..... with his heart, with his hopes, with the distance he maintained between wanting and reaching. He'd thought that was wisdom. He'd thought that was how you protected yourself.
But standing here now, holding a letter that would never be read by the person it was written for, Qin understood something he hadn't before.
The careful distance hadn't protected him at all.
It had just made sure he'd be alone when this part came.
He exhaled.
Folded the letter once more, smaller this time, and put it in his pocket.
Tong touched his shoulder, briefly, and said nothing. Kim stood close enough that his presence was its own kind of answer.
Qin nodded, once, to no one in particular.
And walked toward the classroom.
The hallway felt too wide. His footsteps too quiet. The locker he'd been watching for months stood unremarkable against the wall as he passed it ..... closed, ordinary, already becoming just a locker again.
He didn't look at it.
But for a moment ..... just one ..... he pressed his hand flat against the cool metal as he walked past.
And kept walking.
During 1 year….
A year passed.
Not cleanly. Not the way it happens in films, where time does something graceful and the person on the other side of it is visibly, meaningfully changed. It passed the way difficult time actually passes ..... in pieces, unevenly, with long stretches of ordinary days interrupted by moments that reminded you, without warning, that something was still unfinished inside you.
Qin told himself he was moving on. And for whole weeks at a time, he almost believed it.
He deleted the drafts he didn't need anymore ..... words half-formed on his phone at odd hours, the muscle memory of writing to someone who would never read it. He stopped tucking folded paper into his bag every Monday morning. He made himself arrive on time, which sounds like a small thing and wasn't. He rearranged the structure of his days, changed the routes he took, changed the habits that had quietly rebuilt themselves around a person without asking his permission.
He changed everything that could be changed on the outside.
The inside didn't get the message.
It started small. The way these things always do, so you don't notice until it's already become something.
Just a thought, late one night when the apartment was quiet and his phone screen was the only light in the room.
What if I could find him.
He put the thought down. Picked it up again the next night. And the night after that. And then one evening he found himself typing a name into a search bar and not stopping, and that was when small stopped being the right word for it.
He looked everywhere. Instagram, Twitter, old school pages ..... scrolling through the mutual connections he'd barely spoken to, hoping something would surface. He didn't have much to work with. A face. A name. A laugh he could still hear exactly, which should have faded by now and hadn't. He clicked profiles that almost looked right, held his breath for a second, understood, and moved on. He typed the name so many times it started to look wrong on the screen.
He found nothing.
It should have been enough to make him stop. Anyone else would have stopped. Would have taken the nothing as an answer and done something reasonable with it.
But Duang refused to become just a memory. That was the thing Qin couldn't logic his way around. Everything else from that year had softened with distance ..... edges blurring, details loosening, the way things do when you're no longer living inside them. But not this. This stayed sharp. Stayed specific. Stayed exactly as heavy as it had ever been, like it hadn't received the news that time was supposed to dilute it.
He'd be doing something completely ordinary ..... waiting for a train, sitting in the back of a lecture hall, walking a street he'd walked a hundred times ..... and then without warning he'd be back there. A hallway with flickering lights. A boy running and already laughing. A letter folded in his own handwriting, sitting in his pocket, never delivered.
He'd come back to the present a few seconds later, or maybe longer ..... he could never tell. The train would be there. The lecture would have moved on. The street would look exactly the same.
And he would feel, each time, the particular exhaustion of losing something over and over again that you only lost once.
"Qin."
He looked up. Kim was standing in the doorway with his arms loosely crossed, wearing the expression he wore when he'd been thinking about something long enough to decide to say it. Tong was sitting on the edge of the desk, quieter than usual, which meant he already knew what Kim was going to say and had decided not to be the one to say it.
"You're still thinking about him," Kim said.
It was not a question. Not quite an accusation. Just the particular certainty of someone who had been watching someone else long enough to know.
Qin didn't answer. There wasn't much point.
Kim exhaled and stepped further into the room. "There are nineteen million people in this city, Qin." He let that sit for a moment. "Nineteen million. Forget about him. He's ….. history."
History. Such a clean word. The kind of word that implied something was finished, categorized, filed away somewhere it couldn't reach you anymore.
Qin looked down at his hands.
He thought about agreeing. It would have been easier. It would have moved the conversation somewhere more manageable and maybe let everyone, including himself, believe it a little. But the words didn't come, because saying them would have required a dishonesty he was too tired for.
"I can't," he said.
Kim frowned. "Why?"
Qin was quiet for a moment. Not because he didn't have an answer, but because he had too many answers and none of them were the kind that survived being said out loud without sounding like too much.
"You didn't even know him," Kim said, gently. Like he understood that, and was still saying it anyway, because it was true.
"I know." Qin's mouth curved very slightly ..... not quite a smile, not quite the opposite. "That's the worst part."
He paused. Tried to find the shape of it in words.
"I didn't just see him," he said finally. "It's not like I just ..... noticed someone and got stuck on them. It's that....." He stopped. Started again. "Before him, everything was quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Just ..... flat. Like something had been turned way down and I'd stopped noticing because I got used to it."
Tong hadn't moved. Kim was listening in the way Kim listened ..... completely, without filling the silence.
"And then he was there," Qin continued, his voice lower now. "And suddenly everything was ..... present again. Everything was loud again. Not in a bad way. Just there, the way things are when you're actually inside your own life." He exhaled slowly. "I felt things I'd stopped expecting to feel. I wanted things I'd convinced myself I didn't want anymore."
He looked up.
"And then it was over. And the quiet came back." A beat. "Except now I know what I'm missing. Which is ..... worse. It's worse than before. Before, I didn't know what I wasn't feeling. Now I do."
The room held it.
Kim looked away briefly. Tong's jaw moved like he was going to say something and thought better of it.
"I tried," Qin said. Quietly. Without self-pity ..... just as a fact, the way you report something you've actually done. "I tried to move on. I changed everything I could think to change. I waited for it to get smaller." He shook his head. "But it doesn't go anywhere. It's just ..... there. Still there. The same size it's always been."
No one spoke for a while.
Because the harder truth ..... the one Kim had arrived at and Tong already understood and none of them wanted to say plainly ..... was that this wasn't really about Duang anymore. Not entirely. Duang was a person Qin had never spoken to, who had moved through a year of his life without knowing he existed, who was somewhere in a city of nineteen million people living a life that had no Qin-shaped space in it.
What Qin was holding onto wasn't a person.
It was the version of himself that had existed while feeling all of that. The Qin who checked his phone and arrived early and sat in a hallway writing letters at midnight because someone had made him want to. The Qin who had been, for the first time in a long time, fully alive inside his own chest.
That was what refused to be let go of.
That was what grief, real grief, actually looked like ..... not mourning someone you'd lost, but mourning the person you'd been while you had them.
And that kind of loss didn't have a clean solution. Didn't respond to logic or perspective or the perfectly reasonable observation that there were nineteen million people in this city and one of them was bound to matter eventually.
It just sat there.
Patient.
Permanent.
Waiting for something none of them could name.
Life had moved forward the way it was supposed to. Qin got into university ..... jazz music, which felt like the first honest choice he'd made in a while. Tong and Kim were there too, because some things just continue without requiring any decision to be made about them. On the surface, everything looked more or less right.
Some things hadn't moved at all, but he'd gotten good at not looking directly at those.
That morning was ordinary in every way that mattered.
The campus did its usual thing ..... students cutting across open spaces, someone's music bleeding out from a window somewhere, the general low-level chaos of a place full of people who were all late for different things. Qin moved through it the way he always did: headphones on, phone in hand, eyes down.
No music played. There never was. The headphones were just a way of telling the world he wasn't available, a piece of equipment for managing how much of everything reached him on any given morning.
He got to the crosswalk without really registering the walk there. The light was red. He stopped, thumb moving across his phone screen in the absent, purposeless way you scroll when you're not actually reading anything.
He didn't know why he looked up.
There was no reason. No sound that stood out, no movement that caught the edge of his vision. He just ..... looked up.
And the bottom dropped out of everything.
Across the crosswalk, on the other side of the street, stood Duang.
Not a trick of resemblance, not the thing his brain had been doing for a year where it briefly mistook strangers for someone else and then corrected itself with a quiet, familiar disappointment.
Him. Actually him. Hair a little longer than Qin remembered, softer around the edges. Same posture ..... one hand in his pocket, completely relaxed, the particular ease of someone who had never learned to brace themselves against the world. He was looking at his phone with the loose attention of someone who wasn't in a hurry.
Qin stopped breathing for what might have been one second or several.
His mind did something strange ..... not panic exactly, more like a refusal. Like the machinery of comprehension just stalled out completely, because this didn't fit into any category of things he'd prepared himself for. He had spent a year making a kind of peace with the word never. Never see him again. Never know what happened. Never find out whether any of it had meant anything on the other side of a locker door.
And here was Duang standing on a street corner looking at his phone, unaware that someone thirty feet away had just had the entire architecture of a year come apart in his chest.
The signal changed. The crowd around Qin stepped off the curb and moved forward and he moved with them, because his body made that decision before his mind caught up. He kept his eyes on Duang the whole way across. Watched him step into the crosswalk from the other side, unhurried, same easy stride.
They were walking toward each other.
Qin's heart was doing something he didn't have language for. Not just fast ..... loud, the way it gets when your body understands something is happening before you've decided what to do about it.
Duang passed him. Close enough that Qin could have said something, could have reached out, could have done any number of things that a braver or more prepared version of himself might have managed.
He did none of them.
He turned his head slightly and watched Duang continue forward and blend into the crowd on the other side, and his feet had stopped moving entirely, which he only noticed because people were having to move around him on the pavement.
Go after him.
The thought arrived fully formed, immediate, carrying the particular urgency of something that knows it's running out of time.
Go. Right now. Go.
But there was a voice underneath that one, quieter and faster: and say what, exactly. Hi, you don't know me, but I used to leave unsigned letters in your locker every Monday for the better part of a year because you laughed in a hallway once and I never recovered from it.....
His feet didn't move.
And Duang got farther away. And farther. And then turned somewhere, or was absorbed by enough distance and enough people, and was simply gone.
Qin stood on the pavement on the wrong side of the crosswalk with his heart still going and his thoughts still arriving too fast to catch and the specific, sickening feeling of a moment that had just finished closing.
Then something shifted.
Because Duang wasn't a memory. He wasn't a name from a year ago, sealed off behind the ending of something. He was here ..... on this campus, in this city, at this crosswalk at this hour on a Tuesday morning ..... which meant he was findable. Which meant the chapter Qin had been forcing himself to treat as finished maybe wasn't.
That thought arrived differently than the others.
Quieter. More careful. Like it knew it was fragile and didn't want to be dropped.
Qin ran a hand through his hair. Let out a breath that came out a little unsteady, a little close to a laugh without quite getting there.
Then he turned and started moving ..... faster, then faster, cutting across campus until he spotted them near the building entrance, mid-conversation, completely unprepared.
"Guys....."
Tong and Kim looked up at the same time.
Qin was breathless. Not from the running, or not only from the running. There was something in his face they hadn't seen in a long time ..... a kind of aliveness, wide-eyed and slightly unhinged, like someone who'd just been startled back into their own body.
"Who did I just....." He stopped. Shook his head. Couldn't do it in order. "I saw him."
Tong frowned. "Saw who....."
"Duang." The name came out different than it had in the last year ..... not heavy, not careful, not the way you handle something you're afraid of breaking. Just real. Present tense. "I literally just saw Duang. Across the street. He was right there, I walked past him, he....." Qin pressed a hand briefly to his mouth, laughed in a way that sounded slightly alarmed. "He goes here. He has to. Why else would he be....."
"Okay, slow down....." Tong stood up.
"I didn't talk to him," Qin said.
That part came out quieter. The momentum behind it dropped suddenly, like a wave that had run out of shore.
"I was right there and I didn't ..... I couldn't figure out how to....." He stopped. Exhaled.
Kim was watching him with the focused, measuring attention he brought to things that actually mattered to him. Tong had his mouth open and closed it again, reading the room.
A beat passed.
"He's here," Qin said. Quieter now. Like he was saying it to himself as much as anyone else. "He's actually here."
And the thing that was in his face ..... the thing Tong and Kim were both looking at and not quite naming yet ..... wasn't the grief they'd been watching him carry for a year. It wasn't even relief exactly.
It was hope. The specific, dangerous, wide-open kind. The kind that arrives when something you'd filed under impossible turns out to just have been not yet.
Few days later….
Freshy Night crept up on him the way unavoidable things do ..... suddenly it was two days away, then one, then Tong was knocking on his door at seven in the morning holding a schedule and an expression that meant the discussion was already over.
Qin was performing. He'd agreed to it weeks ago in a moment of weakness he still hadn't forgiven himself for. Jazz vocals, his department's slot, five minutes on stage in front of what would apparently be most of the university's first-year population. He'd said yes because the faculty coordinator had asked him directly and he hadn't been fast enough with an excuse, and now here he was, ironing a shirt he didn't care about and wishing he'd been faster.
He didn't tell anyone that Duang was part of why the whole thing felt heavier than it should have. It had been almost two weeks since the crosswalk, and he hadn't seen him again. The campus was large enough for that ..... large enough to make one sighting feel like something that might have happened to someone else, in another timeline, that Qin had simply borrowed the memory of. He'd almost started to wonder.
But almost, he'd learned, was doing a lot of work in his life lately.
The good mood had stayed, though. That was the strange part. Just seeing Duang ..... thirty seconds, no words, walking past him in a crowd ..... had done something to the quality of the days that followed. Lightened them slightly. Like proof of existence was its own kind of gift, even when you did nothing with it.
He carried that with him onto the stage.
The auditorium was full and loud and bright in the way these events always are ..... the particular energy of a large group of people who are young and together and have nowhere else to be. Qin stood in the wings for a moment and did the thing he always did before performing, which was to remind himself that the song was the point, not the audience, and that once he started he'd be fine.
He walked out. The lights were warm and slightly blinding. He found the microphone, found the key in his head, and when the opening notes came through the monitors he just ..... began.
This was the one place where everything else went quiet. It always had been. Whatever was tangled up in him on any given day tended to loosen when he sang, like the music had a different relationship with his chest than ordinary life did. He could feel the room moving with it ..... people swaying slightly, some of them singing along under their breath, that particular collective softening that happens when a song lands right.
He let himself look out at the audience. He didn't usually ..... he had a habit of finding a fixed point somewhere above the crowd and staying there ..... but tonight something made him actually look.
Rows of faces. Unfamiliar, mostly. People mid-conversation, people with their phones half-raised, people watching properly with that open expression that meant they'd been caught off guard by something they liked.
He was near the end of the song, the last chorus opening up beneath him, when his eyes moved to the left side of the auditorium and simply ..... stopped.
Duang was standing there.
Not sitting. Standing, near the edge of the crowd, like he'd arrived recently or was planning to leave soon. But he wasn't leaving. He was still. And he was looking at the stage.
Looking at Qin.
Not at the performance in the vague way people look at a stage. At him, specifically ..... the way you look when you've found what you were looking for. Their eyes met and stayed met, and Qin felt his voice almost leave him entirely, felt the lyrics nearly slip, caught them by some automatic grace and kept singing while something in his chest went completely sideways.
Duang didn't look away.
For the remaining thirty seconds of the song, they held that. Qin singing, Duang watching, the distance between the stage and the left side of the auditorium both enormous and completely irrelevant. It was the first time ..... the first time, in over a year of stolen glances and careful observation from two rows behind ..... that it had gone both ways. That Duang's eyes had found him and stayed.
The song ended.
Applause came up from the crowd, warm and immediate.
Qin stepped back from the microphone, thanked the room in a voice that came out steadier than he deserved credit for, and walked off the stage.
And then, the moment he was in the wings and out of sight, he pressed his back against the wall and stood there for a moment with his eyes closed, his heart going absolutely haywire, grinning in a way he was deeply grateful no one could see.
Tong could see him, as it turned out.
"What is happening to your face?"
"Nothing."
"You look insane."
"I'm fine."
Tong studied him for exactly one second. "Was he there?"
Qin said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. Tong let out a short, delighted laugh and Qin pushed off the wall and walked past him before it could become a whole thing.
After that night, he started seeing Duang everywhere.
Not in the obsessive, searching way of the year before ..... not the late-night scrolling and the deliberate early arrivals and the careful positioning. This was different. Duang just appeared. On the path to the music building. In the far corner of the cafeteria. Near the library entrance on a Thursday afternoon. Once, memorably, coming around a corner at exactly the moment Qin was coming around it from the other direction, close enough that they both had to adjust, close enough that Qin caught a breath and kept walking because he still didn't know what to do with his own hands, let alone a conversation.
He started to notice a pattern, though he was careful about letting himself notice it too directly.
Duang always seemed to be where Qin was going. Or where Qin had just been. And he didn't look surprised to see him. He looked ..... aware. In the way you look when you've arranged something and are waiting to see if it works.
Maybe that was projection. Qin was well aware that he had a history of turning small things into evidence of larger ones. He kept that thought nearby as a check.
But the cafeteria thing was harder to explain away. He had a different routine every day ..... different times, different entrances, the particular inconsistency of someone with an uneven schedule. And Duang had been there three times in the past two weeks, each time in Qin's eyeline, each time for long enough that it couldn't really be coincidence without coincidence working very hard.
Qin didn't let himself decide what it meant. That felt dangerous. But he also couldn't pretend it wasn't making him quietly, unreasonably, almost embarrassingly happy ..... the kind of happy he'd thought he'd mostly grown out of, the slightly ridiculous high-school-boy feeling of he might know I exist, which he was twenty years old and should probably be beyond.
He wasn't beyond it. Not even close.
Loy Krathong arrived in November the way it always did, with the smell of incense and the particular warmth of an evening that knows it's going to be remembered.
Qin had not planned to go. He had, in fact, said explicitly that he wasn't going, citing a reading he needed to finish and a general preference for not being in large crowds on evenings when he could be somewhere quiet instead.
Then Tong had mentioned the sweets.
Specifically the khanom stall near the main pavilion, the one that only appeared during festivals, the one that Qin had been known to reroute entire afternoons to reach when the occasion arose.
"I'm just saying," Tong had said, with the careful innocence of someone who knew exactly what they were doing, "the coconut ones."
Qin had lasted another four hours before appearing at the door.
And then went with Tong and Kim to the festival.
The festival grounds were crowded and warm, lit by lanterns and lined with stalls, the river nearby carrying the soft light of krathongs already set loose on the water. Qin had his food. Tong was arguing with a stall vendor about something that wasn't worth arguing about. Kim was eating quietly and watching the lanterns.
It was a good evening. Uncomplicated in a way Qin's evenings hadn't been for a while.
And then ..... with no warning, with no build-up, with none of the dramatic slowing-down that the moment probably deserved ..... Duang appeared from the crowd.
Not across a street. Not at the far end of a cafeteria. Not glimpsed from the corner of an eye.
He heard his name before he processed that someone was saying it.
Not a casual mention ..... loud, cutting clean through the festival noise, the kind of volume that made a few nearby people glance over. Qin stopped walking on pure reflex.
He turned around.
Duang was jogging toward him.
For a full second Qin's brain simply refused to organize itself properly. Because in all the times he'd catalogued over the past year and a half ..... the hallways, the crosswalk, the cafeteria, the stage ..... Duang had never once walked toward him. With purpose. Calling his name.
Did Duang even know his name?
Apparently Duang knew his name.
His heart had already made a decision about how to respond to this and that decision was loudly and immediately, which Qin was doing his best to keep off his face as Duang came to a stop in front of him, slightly breathless, with the expression of someone who had rehearsed something and was now committed to it.
Tong and Kim had gone very still on either side of him. Qin could feel it without looking.
"So," Duang said. He gestured sideways at the friend standing next to him ..... someone Qin vaguely recognized from the auditorium, currently looking like he wanted to be absorbed into the nearest food stall. "My buddy likes you."
The words landed.
Qin heard them. Understood them. Felt something in his chest do a complicated thing that he didn't have a clean word for ..... a quick, quiet collapse, like a house of cards responding to a breath. A year and a half. Letters. Mondays. A crosswalk. A stage. Thirty seconds of eye contact he'd been living off of like it was a whole meal.
His buddy.
Of course.
He kept his face completely still. He was very good at keeping his face still. He'd had a lot of practice.
But then Duang's friend made a strangled noise and stepped backward, shaking his head with the energy of someone abandoning a plan entirely, and Duang ..... without missing a beat ..... pointed at himself.
"My name is Buddy."
Qin looked at him.
Duang's ears had gone slightly pink.
Something warm and helpless moved through Qin's chest, something that took every resource he had not to let reach his face. Because Duang was standing in front of him at a lantern festival with pink ears and the most transparently terrible cover story Qin had ever witnessed, and he was ..... he was so.....
"My name is Duang," Duang said, dropping the bit, apparently deciding honesty was the better strategy now that the other one had collapsed so completely.
Qin tilted his head. Kept his voice even. "So your name is Buddy or Duang?"
Duang opened his mouth. Closed it. "Duang."
"Duang," Qin repeated. Like he was hearing it for the first time. Like he hadn't been holding that name somewhere private in himself for over a year.
"And?" he said. "What is it?"
Duang squared his shoulders. There was something almost admirable about the way he regrouped. "Would you ..... mind." He stopped. Restarted. "If I court you?"
A beat.
"No ..... I mean." He pressed his mouth together. "Duang is going to court you."
Qin raised an eyebrow.
"I changed my mind," Duang said, as if this resolved something. "I'm not asking for permission. Just ..... letting you know."
The lantern light was doing something very flattering to Duang's face and Qin was not going to think about that right now.
"Why?" Qin asked.
Duang blinked. "Why what?"
"Why me."
Something shifted in Duang's expression. The nervous energy settled into something quieter, more genuine ..... the unguarded version, the one Qin had been collecting pieces of from a distance for so long that seeing it up close felt almost too much.
"Because of the way you sing," Duang said. Simply. Like it was obvious. "I heard you at Freshy Night and I couldn't ..... I couldn't stop watching you. I've never....." He paused, searching for the word. "It felt like I'd seen you before. Like I'd been looking for you without knowing I was looking."
The lanterns moved on the water behind him.
Qin was quiet for a moment.
Then he stepped forward.
Duang's eyes widened very slightly.
Qin reached out and took hold of the front of Duang's collar ..... not pulling, just holding, steady and deliberate, close enough that Duang had to calm himself down with how close Qin was. He could feel Tong stop breathing somewhere to his left.
"Then go ahead," Qin said. Quietly. Calmly. Looking Duang directly in the eye. "And try to court me successfully."
He let go.
Turned around.
Walked.
Tong and Kim fell into step beside him immediately, because they were good at reading exits.
Behind them ..... distant, gleeful, completely unrestrained ..... came the sound of Duang making a noise that could only be described as a victory sound, something between a shout and a laugh, and Qin was fairly certain he heard his friend Jamie saying bro keep it together to absolutely no effect.
Qin kept walking.
He kept his face forward. Kept his pace even. Kept his expression where it belonged, which was neutral, composed, giving nothing away.
He made it approximately forty seconds and a reasonable distance into the crowd before he turned to Tong and Kim and the expression broke entirely.
"He asked me out," he said. It came out a little breathless. A little unhinged, honestly. "I mean ..... he asked to court me, which is ..... he asked....." Qin pressed his hand briefly over his mouth, laughed into it, got himself together, failed. "Kim. Kim, pinch me. I'm not....." He shook his head. "Tell me I'm not dreaming right now."
Kim pinched him.
"Ow....."
"You're not dreaming," Kim said, with great dignity.
Tong had both hands in his hair and was wearing the expression of someone whose investment in a long-running situation was finally, finally paying off. He pointed at Qin. He seemed to have lost the ability to form words for a moment.
"I know," Qin said.
"You grabbed his collar....."
"I know."
"Who are you....."
"I know." But he was smiling now, actually smiling, the full version he rarely let exist, and he couldn't do much about it. "He said I sing beautifully. He said he felt like he'd been looking for me."
Tong made a sound.
"He was so nervous," Qin said, almost to himself. "The buddy thing ..... did you see the buddy thing....."
"The third person," Kim said.
"The third person," Qin confirmed, and laughed again, short and warm and completely genuine.
They walked back through the festival, lanterns floating on the dark water beside them, the night warm and smelling of incense and fried things and something sweeter underneath it all. Tong talked the whole way home. Kim said very little and meant most of it. Qin listened and nodded and responded in the right places, and underneath all of it he was somewhere quiet and private, turning the evening over in his hands like something he was afraid to put down.
That night, Qin lay in the dark with the ceiling above him and Duang's voice somewhere in his head ..... I couldn't stop watching you, it felt like I'd been looking for you ..... and felt something in his chest that was so different from the weight he'd carried for the past year that he almost didn't recognize it.
Light. Steady. Real.
He was asleep before he decided to be, and he was smiling when he got there.
1 Year later…
Duang courted him the way he did everything else ..... without self-consciousness, without holding back, like the possibility of looking too eager had never occurred to him as a reason to slow down.
He learned Qin's coffee order within the first week. Showed up outside the music building every afternoon, which was when Qin had his longest practice sessions and came out looking like he'd been somewhere difficult and far away. He brought the coffee without making it a moment, just handed it over and fell into step beside him like this was something they'd always done.
He made chocolates once. Actual chocolates, clearly handmade, wrapped in paper and they were fine, imperfect and slightly uneven and the best thing Qin had eaten in recent memory, which he told no one.
He noticed things. That was what undid Qin, slowly and completely, over the months that followed. Not the grand gestures ..... those were easy to receive because they were easy to categorize. It was the small things. The way he noticed how qin arranged his spoons, how qin likes dolphin so he made one for Qin to colour in…
He stayed.
That was the whole of it, really. That was the thing Qin hadn't known how to believe was possible until it kept being true, month after month, in ordinary ways and small ones and a hundred afternoons.
He stayed.
There were moments ..... late ones, quiet ones, when the day had finished and it was just the two of them somewhere unremarkable ..... when Qin would look at Duang and feel something so specific it was almost painful. A kind of disorientation. Like two timelines sitting on top of each other, the present one and the other one, the one where he sat two rows behind and watched from doorways and folded his heart into paper and left it in a locker and told himself that was as close as he would ever get.
Duang would catch him looking and raise an eyebrow. What.
Nothing, Qin would say.
And Duang would let it be nothing, because he was good at that. Because he always seemed to understand, without requiring explanation, when Qin was somewhere that didn't need words.
If someone had told the version of Qin who stood in that hallway on the last day ..... letter in hand, vision blurring slightly, pressing his palm flat against a locker he was walking away from ..... that this was where it ended up. That the boy who hadn't known he existed would one day know exactly where he took his coffee and how to sit with him when things were bad and that staying would be the thing he was best at .....
Qin wasn't sure that version of himself could have believed it.
He was glad he hadn't stopped hoping, even when hoping had felt like the least sensible option available.
He asked Duang to be his boyfriend on an ordinary day, which felt right somehow. No occasion. No setting. They were sitting near the piano… and Qin and Duang asked at the same time to be each other’s boyfriend. And then when Duang got teary eyes Qin asked again.
"Will u be my boyfriend," Qin said.
"Yeah?" Duang said. His voice had gone different. Softer.
"That is what the word boyfriend implies."
There was a pause. And Duang replied with a “yes”
Duang held Qin face in his palm and looked at of Qin's face with an expression Qin could feel without seeing, warm and slightly overwhelmed and completely unguarded.
"Okay," Duang said.
"Okay."
"Yeah." A beat. "Obviously. Yes. What ..... of course....."
"Duang."
"Yeah."
"Stop talking."
"Yeah, okay." But he was smiling so widely it had changed the shape of his voice. "Okay."
Loy Krathong came around again the way it had before, the way good things do ..... with warmth and light and the smell of incense on cool air, the river carrying its quiet procession of floating offerings.
A year since Duang had jogged through a festival crowd to find him. A year since a collar-grab and a try to court me successfully and forty seconds of composure that had cost Qin more than he'd ever admitted.
They made their krathong together ..... Duang doing most of the decorating with the focused energy he brought to things he cared about, Qin handing over flowers when requested and mostly watching him, which was still something he hadn't gotten tired of.
They found a spot along the bank, away from the densest part of the crowd, and sat close together the way they did now ..... naturally, without negotiating the distance. The water was dark and silver, lit from the surface by dozens of small moving flames.
Qin looked at the river for a while.
Then he said, quietly, "Duang."
"Mm."
"I need to tell you something."
Something in his tone made Duang look over. He read Qin the way he'd learned to over this past year ..... quickly, carefully, with the particular attention he gave things that mattered. He set the krathong aside.
"Okay," he said. Gently.
Qin reached into the inside pocket of his jacket.
The envelope was soft at the edges from handling, the paper inside worn at the folds from being opened and refolded more times than he could count. He'd carried it for two years. Through the end of that tutoring academy year, through the long flat months after, through university and a crosswalk and a festival and a stage and everything that had come since.
He held it for a moment.
"The letters," he said. "The ones in your locker. At the academy."
The silence that followed was very still.
Duang had gone completely quiet beside him.
"That was me," Qin said. "Every Monday. For the whole year. I never ..... I couldn't sign them. I didn't know how to." He exhaled slowly. "The last one ..... I wrote it for the last day. I was going to give it to you myself. But you weren't there."
He turned to look at Duang properly.
Duang was staring at him with an expression Qin had never seen on him before. Something working through him that he hadn't finished processing yet.
"I kept it," Qin said. "I don't know why exactly. Maybe because throwing it away felt like ..... giving up on something. Even when I thought I'd already given up." He held the envelope out. "I want you to have it. It was always supposed to be yours."
Duang took it.
His hands weren't quite steady.
He looked down at it for a long moment ..... at the worn edges, the careful folds, two years of carrying in a single envelope ..... and something in his face moved in a way that made Qin need to look back at the river.
The sound of paper unfolding, slow and careful.
Qin listened to the water. The distant noise of the festival behind them. The small, intimate sound of someone reading something that had been waiting a very long time to be read.
Then Duang made a sound. Quiet. Almost nothing.
Qin looked back.
Duang was still reading, but his jaw was tight in the way it got when he was holding something in, and his eyes were bright with something he wasn't letting fall, and one hand had moved to cover his mouth while the other held the letter with a care that made Qin's chest ache.
"Duang....."
"Give me a second." Barely above a whisper.
Qin gave him a second. Gave him several. Watched him finish reading, watched him sit with it, watched him fold it again ..... gently, along the original creases, like he was learning the shape of it.
When Duang finally looked up, his eyes were wet and he wasn't pretending otherwise.
"You were there the whole time," he said. His voice was rough at the edges. "That whole year. You were right there."
"Two rows behind you."
Duang let out something that was almost a laugh and almost wasn't. "I used to wonder. About who was leaving them." He shook his head. "I used to ..... on Monday mornings I'd get there early because I didn't want to miss....." He stopped. "I never told anyone that."
Qin felt the words land somewhere deep and stay there.
"I looked for you," Duang said. "I didn't know what you looked like, I didn't know anything, I just ..... I kept thinking that whoever it was, I wanted....." He pressed his mouth together. Looked at Qin with something open and undisguised. "And then I heard you sing. And something just ..... I knew. I don't know how, I just knew it was....." His voice broke slightly on the last word. "It was you."
The river moved past them, patient and indifferent and lovely.
"You came and found me," Qin said quietly.
"You wrote me letters for a year," Duang said, like this was still arriving in him in pieces. "You wrote me....." He looked down at the folded paper in his hands. "Qin. This is....." He stopped trying to finish the sentence.
Qin reached over and took his hand. Laced their fingers together without saying anything about it.
They sat like that for a while. The festival light played on the water. Around them, people were setting their krathongs loose ..... small bright things caught by the current, carrying wishes out into the dark.
"Should we?" Duang said eventually, nodding at the krathong beside them. His voice had recovered most of its usual quality, but there was still something slightly undone in him, something Qin had never seen before and found he didn't want to look away from.
"Yeah," Qin said.
They knelt at the bank together. Set it on the water. Watched it catch the current and begin its slow, wobbling journey away from shore, its small flame holding against the dark.
Duang's shoulder was warm against his.
"Hey," Duang said quietly.
"What."
"I'm glad it was you."
Qin watched their krathong get smaller on the water. His throat felt tight in a way that wasn't bad. In a way that felt like something finally, fully arriving.
"Me too," he said.
He meant: I wrote you letters because I didn't know what else to do with how much I felt.
He meant: I stood in that hallway on the last day and I couldn't make myself leave even when I knew you weren't coming.
He meant: I carried that letter for two years because some part of me knew it wasn't finished yet.
He meant: I'm glad you came and found me too.
Duang seemed to understand all of it, because he tightened his hand around Qin's and didn't say anything else, and that was exactly right.
The light from their krathong grew small and distant and beautiful on the river, and they watched it together until it disappeared.