“What are you doing?” Minhyuk asks again, sitting up properly this time, tugging the covers around his waist.

“You… my name… your back” Kyung seems to be unable to string together a proper sentence right now, but he thinks Minhyuk understands what he’s referring to anyway, because his hands instinctively reaches behind to touch his lower back.

“…You saw?” Minhyuk’s voice sounds somewhere between angry and perplexed, or maybe he’s just mostly confused. Kyung’s not too certain what he himself is feeling right now either.

“Is that why you didn’t want to tell me who’s on your skin? Because it’s my name?”

There’s a long sigh from Minhyuk, who sinks like a string puppet with its strings cut loose, and Kyung stands up, grabbing his clothes and leaving the room, because he doesn’t know what else to do.

It hurts, he thinks, trying to wipe away his never ending stream of tears as he storms out of Jaehyo’s place. Kyung’s not sure where he’s going, having only just worn his clothes back so he won’t be running around the streets indecently, until he finds himself in a familiar district, the bustle of the cafes still open at this hour a sound he had been used to hearing back when he had stayed here.

Jiho opens the door after the second knock, Kyung having decided that it’s only polite to knock instead of just keying in the passcode since he’s not here to pick up his things.

“Kyung? What’s wrong? Why are you here? Why are you crying?”

At Jiho’s flood of questions, Kyung’s vision blurs again. He ends up hiccupping and sobbing the whole time Jiho leads him into the living room, too choked with tears and unclear emotions to say anything.

Jiho had brought him some water and tissues, but he sits a little far off, and Kyung feels the distance between them now, in more than just the physical sense. It’s not surprising, he supposes, what’s with them having been actually properly broken up for a while now (a short while, but long enough). What is surprising, however, is how unaffected he is by the realization that they’re now a bit more distant. Kyung sips a bit of the water when he’s finally calmed down, Jiho just patiently waiting for him to talk.

“I… I wasn’t thinking when I came here, I just kind of… walked and found myself here,” Kyung says, wondering if Jiho will understand what he means.

(He hadn’t intended to come find Jiho in a moment of weakness, but here he is anyway.)

“What happened before you started walking around?” Jiho calmly asks. Rather than answer immediately, Kyung stalls, observing the face he used to be so familiar with, still the same features but with a slightly different expression, now without the dark eye circles that had always plagued Jiho’s handsome face.

(He looks different. He looks better.)

“…I stormed out of Jaehyo’s place. There’s a guy, Jaehyo’s flat mate. He… he has my name on his body. I just found out today.”

Jiho raises an eyebrow at the revelation, curious, “So… there’s another person who has ‘Park Kyung’ on their body, like m– But why do you have to storm out of Jaehyo’s place ‘cause of it?”

(Was Jiho going to say “like me” before he cut it off? Why? …Maybe, just maybe… Jiho doesn’t have Kyung’s name on his chest anymore?)

Kyung pauses to consider his thoughts and feelings about the question Jiho had asked, before he answers, “I don’t know, actually. I don’t know why I just stormed out of the house after I realized he had my name on his body, but… He had been hiding it from me, even though I had explicitly asked him whose name he has on his skin before. So I guess when I realized that he’s been deliberately going out of his way to hide the information from me, I felt… I felt…”

“Hurt?” Jiho supplies, and Kyung nods.

(Who is this person in front of him, talking to him calmly and rationally? And where has his old Jiho gone?)

A few moments of silence passes, before Jiho speaks again, voice cautious, “Have you, you know, asked him why he did it? Why he had hidden the information from you?”

(The thought hasn’t occurred to him.)

Hearing Jiho’s question, Kyung vaguely recalls him just accusing Minhyuk of not telling him that Kyung’s name is imprinted on his lower back (or maybe insinuating, rather than outright accusing). He hadn’t really asked the other guy why he hadn’t revealed the information to Kyung.

(, this Jiho is too logical. Is this really the Woo Jiho he knew?)

“No, no I didn’t,” Kyung mutters, and rubs a hand down his face, feeling suddenly bone-tired.

Jiho lets him sleep on the couch (because they’d never bothered getting an extra bed or even an extra mattress back when they had lived together). Kyung’s overcome with the strange feeling that this is some repeating cycle that he’s not fully aware of but had become caught in anyway: getting upset, running out the house, and landing on some person’s couch for the night.

Maybe he’s just an insect trapped in a spider’s web, and hasn’t realized it yet, he thinks, wondering for the first time whether the tangle of relationships dictated by the names on people’s skin is really just part of some bigger ploy that he’s not aware of. Maybe it’s the wicked hands of fate, Kyung smiles bitterly, drifting off to uneasy rest.

(Or maybe there’s nothing such as fate, only human actions and self-fulfilling prophecies.)

He wakes up to find three missed calls, and a single text message. Half dreading and half wondering whether Minhyuk might have been the one who had called and sent the text, Kyung hesitates opening it. But when he eventually clicks on the flashing icons, they all read Jaehyo. “What happened?” is the short message on his phone, and Kyung’s tempted to just call his friend, just spill everything, until he realizes that it’s only 5.43am. Outside, the sky is