Work Text:
The first rule was not to fall in love.
When Dee was a teenager, about 15 or 16 years old, he experienced the feeling of caring for someone so freaking much for the first time. He was all giggly about a guy in his parallel class, who had glasses and a classic boy band-middle parted-like hairstyle as all the cool boys had back then - and have now once again. He liked the way he dressed and that he was good with math and sports, what was enough for a puppylove like this. He liked that he was laughing with his eyes closed and his mouth open, he liked that he was honest, or at least he thought he was, when he confessed after a short time of pining, because his grandma told him to not wait for an opportunity which maybe never will appear. So he did. And lost his virginity to him no 30 minutes later in the schoolyards tool shed, without him kissing him on the mouth once while doing it and because Dee didn’t know better, he didn’t ask for one too.
After that it happened again once, twice, maybe five times, before he realized, that maybe he was thinking they were in a relationship with this guy, but this guy never thought about it like that even once and preferred to act all straight and cold in front of his friends, while he himself never once had the chance to act like anything but himself once in his life. And so he experienced his first heartbreak and decided that it is better to not fall in love at all. Not after loving his parents and losing them left him traumatized, not after loving a guy, who was seeing totally different than him regarding their relationship.
So he came up with rule no. 1. And sticked to it.
Then he moved out. Left his grandma for education and even though their distance wasn"t even 10 kilometers, it felt like 1000 and Dee realised that not falling in love felt lonely when there wasn"t even someone to love. So he knew he needed to find himself some friends and soon understood, as soon as he get to know Kao that friends are a safer space than lovers and so he shielded himself a while from growing feelings he experienced with a senior at the university and tried to not project his situation onto that of the two boys he watched on TV every week. He and Ter weren"t like the two boys from Sotus - he knows that better now than he did then, but back in 2016 he tried to talk himself out of it, at least briefly, and just focus on his friendship with Kao and his studies, so he came up with Rule No 2.
Rule No 2: Stick to your friends and not to BL fantasies.
It was hard to tell if he sticked to this one more than to rule no.1 but he tried. 8 years long he received mixed signals from Ter, gazes, smiles, simple touches which maybe meant something, maybe meant nothing at all and Dee learned to enjoy every second of it. Sure he shouldn’t, but he thought as long he just stayed on the sideline and did nothing but to take what he got, there was nothing wrong about it. He found ways for himself to compensate when the desire became too strong, when the wish to hold, to kiss, to touch Ter became too urgent and so he started to have casual hook-ups once in a while and after one, two, three years recognized he never even kissed one of those people. And because he started with it, and his rule no. 1 and 2 were thrown into the dumpster quite quickly, he decided that this would be Rule No. 3.
So Rule No. 3 was to not kiss anyone, until he can be able to kiss the person he truly loves.
And since he already forget Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 1 was the quite opposite to Rule No. 3 it didn"t matter that he was thinking of dozens of ways in which Dr Ter could be the one he would give his first kiss to.
Now, eight years later Wandee was very sure about one thing. The person he loves was not Ter. Not anymore, because running after someone for eight years was nothing anybody should experience. Nobody should feel compelled to bend over backwards for someone for years, to hide every shadow side, to only do what is asked and not to say no until the "not saying no" to the person has burnt itself so deeply into you that it is no longer possible, no matter how hard you fight against being obedient.
So Dee couldn"t say no. Old habits die hard and when Ter was nice to him again, something in his brain switched off. It"s called muscle memory...or call it stupidity. He hadn"t been able to say no when he"d been standing in the doorway. To nothing and now? Now he stood here thinking about the past while the flickering of the candle - the exact 42 candles for every day he and Yak had been in their fake relationship - mocked him because at over 30 he was still no smarter than his 16 year old self.
Dee shouldn’t have fallen in love.
And look at him now. Heartbroken again. Because nobody made the effort to ever listen to him. Not the boy in the school. Not Ter, when he told him that he liked him, just for him to tell him too, when it’s to late. Not Yoyak, when all he would have to do would have been to wait for a moment. For an explanation. For an excuse. For a kiss he was ready to give him, as soon as he was back from japan and the other would have won his match.
To a first kiss, which he was ready to give him after he had returned from Japan and Yoyak had won his fight.
To a beginning, because this could have been the silly romance that wasn"t Sotus, but the one series he and Yoyak had seen on TV on their first night.
But Dee shouldn’t have stuck to a BL fantasy but to his friends from the start.
The rising room made his eyes tear up even more as he blew out the 42nd candle because there was no 42nd day left as he slowly sat back up and looked at the food sitting at the table, momentarily catching himself at the absurd thought of what to do with the extra food now as he thought about how there was only one rule he hadn"t broken.
And when he touched his chest, waiting for the cold metal smoothing his pain and there was nothing to feel but the fabric of his dumb costume, he couldn’t help but understand, that this, this should have been the one thing he should have changed. Because Yak should have kissed him, instead of the necklace, which is gone now with all the soft touches of his lips. With all the maybes and the couldbes and the perhapss that would no longer be anything.
Because they never listened.
Because they never waited.
Because they always ended it before it could start.
Because Dee just wanted to be good. Be polite. Be pleasant. Be anything. And made things worse with it. With his patients, whom he perhaps couldn"t help, but couldn"t admit it to himself. With his parents, whom he had lost. With Ter. With Kao, whom he had to drag into his disaster again and again. With Yoyak, because he always pulled him a step to far, regardless how young he was. Why did he expect a college student in his early 20s to understand him?
For a moment, he exhaled violently. Tried to breathe the disappointment, the anger, the guilt out of his body while his face felt like it was burning.
Yoyak had his right to be angry, to be hurt, to leave. In each story, he would be the young man who was betrayed and drawn into something, who was taken advantage of by an older guy. But where was Dee"s right? On his story? On his pain?
Eventually he shakingly blew out the last candle on the table, tasting the salt of a tear on his lips, where he should have tasted Yoyak today, while in his head the 4th rule build its castle in his mind.
The last rule was not to fall in love.