KIMCHAY - Traitors and Lovers

Chapter 3

Kim was here. Chay felt his airways start to close up involuntarily as the older man stared up at him with a look of betrayal, but also something else indescribable to him.

It had been four years since Kim stopped showing up to their secret rendezvous, four years since a fifteen-year-old Chay sat for hours on end, surrounded by a pool of slowly wilting flowers, waiting for someone who would never arrive. Four years since the prince was found by his father's head bodyguard, crying in the rain at the realisation he would probably never see his only friend again and then subsequently being locked in his chambers by his father until his tears relented and he behaved like a man.

In all those years he tried his best to put the fae boy out of his head by making new human friends but was never successful in his endeavour. None of them could make him laugh until he felt all the air leave his lungs like Kim did, none of them could sing a lullaby to Chay in a voice gifted by the goddesses when he was sleepy, like Kim did.

None of them could make his heart flutter as if it were a butterfly intent on escaping his chest cavity with a simple, platonic touch, like Kim did.

He had long since filed those fluttery feelings as his pubescent-teenage mind, and body, trying to find a way to express itself but having nothing and no one else to fixate on since he only ever spent time with the fae prince.

Not that any of that mattered now anyways with the dagger heavy in his hand and the boy-now-man he thought he would never lay eyes on again staring up at him with a face he barely recognised. Porchay didn't think that his own appearance had changed much since the last time they met (with the exception of his height) but Kim...

Kim was different.

His hair was long enough to just lightly brush his shoulders, additionally, his baby fat had disintegrated leaving behind defined cheek bones and a defined jawline. As Chay had noticed previously, he had really filled out since he had last saw him and had acquired a multitude of tattoos, but his bulging muscles and new ink weren't what drew the human's attention but instead the scars littered around them that stretched all across his torso and even his neck. What happened to you Kim?

 

The deafening cheers from the crowd surrounding them subsided, replaced by his father's booming voice. "The time is now son; all fear is vanquished!" He roared and the lords broke into shouts louder than even their previous ones. Although the comment was in direction to himself, Chay knew it was not meant to appease him, only to create entertainment for the spectators to his imminent transformation into a murderer.

Despite his father's comment, Porchay had never looked away from Kim once, his for-knowledge of the undeserved pain the other man would endure at his hands clawed at him from the inside out, splitting him open. But despite every cell in his body screaming at him to stop his own movements, he slowly raised the dagger to the other's pale throat with quivering hands and unshed tears forming in his eyes.

They stayed in that position for an indeterminable amount of time, Chay standing tall above the man who had once promised, many moons ago, that he would always protect Chay. Perhaps fae prince should've been protecting himself from Chay all along. Maybe he was, maybe that's why he left.

 

But then Kim smiled. Not a malicious smirk filled with hatred, but a sad smile that brought back memories of two boys huddled on a bed of petals under the cover of dusk.

4 years previously

 

Porchay had once again had a fight with his father over his lack of interest in the art of war, however this time had been different.