He stares at himself in the mirror, after showering, upset and more than a little shaken.

Kyuhyun swims because he doesn’t know how to do anything else, the same way Ryeowook accepts this and keeps the trepidation in his gut from ever manifesting. It’s frustrating to know that somehow, he doesn’t know what good enough means or why he needs so much approval when all he wants to do is to give up.

“Kyuhyun?” Ryeowook calls out, snapping him out of his reverie, and suddenly Kyuhyun feels anger bubble in his chest and it is all-consuming, relentless in its rising, so he throws the towel on his shoulder to the floor for fear that he would hurt Ryeowook if he did not take it out on something else.

“Why?” He says as he nearly tears up. “How can you be so calm about this?” How can you pretend that nothing happened, that swimming isn’t the most important thing in your life and I could have helped you stopped hurting, I could have, if only --

Kyuhyun rarely carries his heart on his sleeve. There has only been one exception, and it is whatever concerns Ryeowook. It’s always, always about Ryeowook. And when has it never been that way?

He warns himself, on a regular basis, to be careful lest he falls too fast and too hard until he can no longer bear the weight of jealousy – a thousand insecurities bought at the price of talent and acknowledgment. Ryeowook should have no worries regarding jealousy – he should already know this by heart: Kyuhyun will never look at anyone else, except, perhaps…

Besides, if envy can kill one of them, it is Kyuhyun who feels the brunt of it all too keenly. Because he knows; he knows: he has not always been the first and only person in Ryeowook’s heart.

He feels guilt, all too well, and it tastes bitter in his mouth – bitter, and damning.

“I’m sorry,” Ryeowook says, although Kyuhyun wants to laugh and know what he means by that.

“It was necessary,” Ryeowook continues, calmly picking up the towel from the floor, folding it in his lap and putting it on the bench without looking at Kyuhyun.

“Necessary,” echoes Kyuhyun, and somehow he feels that it doesn’t add up to anything, anything at all.

“When you had an accident a few months ago, when we thought it was nothing serious,” Kyuhyun finally says, voice cracking and eyes turning to look at the floor, “did you ever think about letting it heal?”

Ryeowook’s expression morphs into something extremely distressing, and when he speaks, it’s stilted, as if tasting foreign words, unsaid half-truths, letting it roll around his tongue before the sound escapes. “No.”

Kyuhyun takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes as if to deny everything, from Ryeowook’s sad smile and his fisted hands and his pale cheek, to Siwon’s mouth sealed in a tight line and his body shaking with barely controlled sobs when he thinks that no one’s looking, and he shudders.

“I thought so,” he whispers, and walks out of the room, afraid that if he looked back, he would never be able to leave. He cannot begin to understand the weight of it all without losing an integral part of himself in the process.

Above all things, he is only sixteen.