Chapter Text
Up, down, shift the weight, snap.
The commands didn't format themselves neatly in his head; they bounced around his skull, loud and frantic, keeping time with the heavy thud of his bare feet on the blue vinyl mat.
"Alright, Lee Minho! You can do better!"
His trainer’s voice tore through the ambient hum of the gymnasium, raw and demanding. Minho didn't look toward the bench. He couldn't. His lungs were burning, a tight, shallow rhythm of ragged breathing that he forced his ribs to contain.
Move. Jump. Get higher.
He watched the blue chest protector in front of him, tracking the slight tilt of his opponent’s shoulders, waiting for the split second the other boy tensed to launch.
He leaned back, dodging a swift, high kick that whistled past his chin, but the sudden momentum twisted his uniform. The heavy, stiff cotton of the sleeves ground hard against his forearms.
A sharp, familiar fire flared across his wrists.
The coarse friction dragged directly over the raw lines he had carved into his skin just the day before, making his vision white out at the edges for a terrifying fraction of a second.
Fuck.
"Guard up, Minho!"
The shout jolted him back. He forced his hands up, blocking a follow-up jab with his forearms, the pressure sending a sickening sting straight through his fresh wounds. He ignored it. He had done this thousands of times. The pain was just noise.
Losing wasn’t an option. It wasn't something he allowed to exist in his world. He had spent too many late nights sweating through his clothes, won too many trophies, carried too much expectations from his family to slip up here.
"Ten seconds, Minho! Just resist it now!"
Ten seconds. The smart play was to step back, lock down his defense, and let the clock run down. But Minho didn’t actually know how many points he had scored. He never looked at the scoreboard while he was inside the perimeter; he didn't care about the numbers. He only focused on making the next second look flawless, throwing every kick with absolute precision.
The win was just a consequence of that.
He could do it better. He knew he could hit harder.
His opponent started to press forward, clearly thinking Minho was about to stall to protect a lead. Minho didn't retreat. Instead, he met the advance with pure, unchecked aggression.
A familiar, dark rage twisted in his stomach as he glared at the boy opposite him. It wasn’t hatred for his opponent; it was a vicious, suffocating anger at his own body. He had spent weeks obsessing over every single meal, counting every gram of food, working himself to the bone just to be thinner, smaller, to force his weight down into a lower category than this. And he still felt too heavy. Still felt like a disaster under the white fabric.
He let all of that frustration explode into his legs.
He offered a half-feint, lifting his knee just enough to trick the other boy into thinking the kick was going high. The opponent shifted his guard upward, leaving his torso completely uncovered. Minho jumped, turning his hips mid-air, and drove his heel straight into the center of the blue chest protector.
The impact echoed off the gym walls. A loud, satisfying crack of plastic and canvas. The other boy stumbled back, gasping for the air that Minho had just knocked clean out of him.
The buzzer wailed through the room. Time was up.
Minho lowered his leg, his thigh muscles trembling violently from exhaustion as he finally glanced up at the scoreboard.
RED: 14
BLUE: 3
A massive win. There was no question, no doubt about who owned the mat today.
The referee caught Minho’s wrist, lifting his hand toward the ceiling. As his arm was held high in front of the clapping crowd, Minho let his shoulders drop. The tension in his chest loosened just enough for him to take a full, unchecked breath.
The final verdict resonated in the air, and the moment the referee lowered his arm, the taut thread holding Minho together snapped.
All the pressure built up in his chest deflated. His shoulders, rigid as stone throughout the entire match, finally slumped. His legs, which had nowhere left to draw strength from after weeks of jumping rope and starvation, gave out completely. Minho let himself fall backward onto the blue mat, surrendering to gravity.
He lay there motionless, his broken, ragged breathing rising and falling in violent spasms. With his eyes fixed on the high, distant ceiling of the gymnasium, he watched the flicker of the fluorescent lights through a thick layer of sweat. The freezing surface of the mat against his back was the only thing keeping him tethered to reality, a brutal contrast to the fire still burning in his lungs.
The echo of the applause blurred as firm footsteps stopped beside him. His coach stepped into his line of sight, cutting a dark silhouette against the glare of the ceiling.
Looking down at him, with a brief nod that was worth more than any speech, he offered a hand.
"Good job, kid. As always."
As always.
Minho let out a hoarse sigh, reaching his arm up, careful not to let the sleeve of his dobok slide down too far, and accepted his sabonim’s firm grip to pull himself up. The world tilted for a second as he regained his footing, but he forced his knees to lock. He wasn't going to stagger in public.
His coach handed him a bottle of ice-cold water. Minho took it, his fingers pressing into the condensation-slicked plastic, and drank in deep gulps. The cold water stung his parched throat, but it was enough to quell the bitter, sour taste rising from his stomach.
He capped the bottle. Straightened his spine. He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead to push away the damp strands of hair and adjusted the collar of his uniform. The process was almost a reflex. In a matter of seconds, the exhausted Minho drowning on the mat vanished, and the flawless composure snapped back into place, cold and perfect.
With a measured pace and his back straight, he began walking toward the hallway leading to the locker rooms.
As he walked away from the noise of the arena, the murmur of congratulations and the bustle of the other competitors began to fade behind him. In that short walk, submerged in the relative silence of the corridor, Minho allowed himself an extraordinary luxury: forgetting. He managed, if only for one blessed minute, to block out the thought that this was only the beginning. He managed to silence the certainty that, the moment he crossed that door, the truce would end and he would have to shoulder the usual weight all over again, maintaining the brutal standards, the perfect grades, and the relentless expectations by which he had learned to survive all this time.
The air in the locker room was thick with the suffocating scent of stale sweat and industrial bleach, but to Minho, it was just sterile emptiness. He bypassed the open benches, ignoring the distant echoes of other competitors, and made a straight line for the furthest bathroom stall. The deadbolt clicked shut with a sharp, metallic snap.
Alone.
He leaned his forehead against the cold, painted steel of the door, his eyes falling shut as he allowed his lungs to seize. His hands were trembling violently. Gripping the collar of his dobok, he peeled the heavy, sweat-soaked cotton off his shoulders, a sharp hiss escaping his teeth as the stiff fabric dragged relentlessly over his forearms.
In the harsh, unforgiving glare of the fluorescent light, the damage was undeniable. His body had become a brutal map of jagged red lines and fading purple bruises, some earned on the mat, but the most severe meticulously...
He traced the raised edge of a fresh cut with a shaking fingertip. It stung, a sharp, grounding bite of pain that sliced through the dizzying fog in his head.
No one could ever see this. It was his grotesque little secret; just his.
As he swapped his dobok for his school clothes, his brain immediately, ruthlessly, spiraled back to the numbers. The calculations never stopped. Stepping onto the scale felt like waiting for an execution, the floor threatening to open up and swallow him whole if the number shifted even a fraction too high. He was starving, running on absolutely nothing but adrenaline and terror.
It really wasn’t just about the weight class anymore, but he wanted to believe that it was.
It was about the desperate illusion of control. If he could control the numbers, maybe he wouldn't completely shatter.
“You’re always so busy. You’re never around to help with the house, to spend time with the family. You need to get your priorities straight, Minho.”
His mother’s voice from the night before echoed viciously against the bathroom tiles, her tone sharp with that familiar, slicing disappointment. It didn't matter that he had just secured another gold medal. It didn't matter that he was bleeding himself dry to maintain the absolute perfection of academic and athletic dominance. To them, perfection was not an achievement, it was the bare minimum.
Minho pushed himself away from the door and stepped out of the stall, moving toward the sinks with a big long sigh. He turned the faucet, letting the icy water run over his wrists, biting into his raw cuts before he cupped his hands and splashed his face.
He gripped the edges of the porcelain sink and stared at his reflection in the mirror.
The face looking back at him was terrifyingly flawless. Sharp, composed features, dark eyes, not a single hair out of place. He looked untouchable. If anyone bothered to look closer, they might see the fractured, exhausted boy suffocating behind the glass, but they wouldn't. People only saw the outside.
He reached for a paper towel, drying his skin with slow, deliberate presses. With every second that passed, he locked the panic back inside its cage, burying the starvation, the bleeding wrists, and the crushing inadequacy deep in his chest. He straightened his spine, let his eyes go completely dead and calm, and practiced a polite, asymmetrical smile.
Minho grabbed his bag, turned his back on the mirror, and walked out the door to face the lights.
The auditorium was a sea of stifling heat and low murmurs, packed to the absolute brim. Minho navigated the narrow gaps between the rows of velvet seats, his posture perfectly straight, though a quiet, contradictory friction warred inside his chest. He wanted to be recognized; he craved the absolute certainty of being known, of being placed above the rest. Yet, at the exact same time, he tried to force himself to believe that he was invisible, that the people surrounding him didn't actually waste their thoughts on him.
But the heat burning into the space between his shoulder blades told a different story.
He didn't need to turn around to know his parents were watching.
Their eyes felt like a physical weight, tracing the line of his spine with a familiar, clinical scrutiny. He had spent his entire life being observed, inspected, and measured from a microscopic distance, where every blink was evaluated and every breath was judged.
He finally found his row and slid into a seat next to a few classmates. To anyone else looking on, these people were Minho’s friends. Minho knew that they probably believed they were his friends, too. But, internally? He harbored a cold, detached doubt. He wasn’t actually sure. He had never been entirely sure about anyone, or anything, in his life.
Up on the brightly lit stage, the principal stepped up to the podium. As the microphone clicked on, a heavy, expectant silence blanketed the room. Minho knew exactly what was supposed to happen today, yet the predictability didn't stop the sudden, icy shiver that raced down his skin. His pulse picked up, thudding with a frantic velocity that he could feel prominently in his chest, then higher, vibrating against the tight skin of his neck.
To keep from unraveling under the lights, he curled his fingers, burying his short nails into the fabric of his uniform trousers, pressing hard into his knees.
Inhale. Exhale.
He locked his mind onto the basic mechanics of breathing, desperate for a tether.
Then, the reading of the awards began.
Minho forced his chin up, his eyes open and fixed forward, deliberately ignoring the suffocating tightness tightening around his ribs. The presenter read the first category, a name echoed through the speakers, and it wasn't his. Minho knew logically that this was only the first of many, but the physical constriction in his lungs refused to let go.
As the ceremony stretched on, a blur of names was read aloud. Minute after minute passed, and his name still hadn’t been called. With every single accolade announced, Minho felt the agonizing shift of heads around him, people turning in their seats to sneak glances at his profile. He wasn’t even a senior yet, but the heavy, watchful eyes of the upperclassmen made it impossible to stop his muscles from tensing into rigid stone.
Finally, the principal cleared her throat, a small, knowing smile playing on her lips. She began a new sentence, her voice echoing into the rafters as she explained that the administration had been forced to clear a unique, singular space on the program today. A necessity to present multiple honors at once, because this particular student simply seemed to possess no limits.
Instantly, the atmosphere in Minho’s radius turned hyper-acute. He felt the collective weight of dozens of eyes pivoting toward him, so heavy and demanding that a sudden, toxic wave of panic crested in his throat. If this isn't me, he thought, his vision blurring slightly at the edges, I will never survive the shame.
Technically, he knew he was the only mathematical possibility up there. But the dark, irrational part of his brain, still clawed at him with a vicious question, but what if? What if he had slipped up? What if, this time, his absolute best hadn't been enough to keep up? And if that was true, if the unthinkable had happened, then who the fuck was the one who had taken his security away from him?
His downward spiral was cut off at the tracks.
"Please come up to the stage, dear Lee Minho."
The tension in his spine snapped. Minho exhaled a breath that tasted like iron, a fresh wave of shivers tracking down his lower back as he stood up and stepped out into the aisle. He walked up the wooden stairs toward the stage to receive his mountain of awards, but his brain didn't register the quantity. He hadn’t even been listening to the individual titles. He didn't care about the specific names etched into the metal; he only cared about the overarching fact of his dominance. He cared about being the anomaly, the one allocated above the crowd, the standard of flawless, untouchable excellence.
He reached the center of the stage and shook the principal’s hand, his lips automatically curving into a polite, perfectly symmetrical smile.
There was no rush of euphoria. He didn't feel the vibrant, dizzying happiness that any other student in his position would have felt. As his fingers closed around the cold, stacked edges of the plaques, he didn't feel happy at all.
He just felt relieved.
His eyes darted down, quickly scanning the engraved plates in a rapid, clinical sequence: Highest GPA. Arts. Music. Athletics. Academic Performance. Leadership.
Before he could step back into the shadows, the principal gently adjusted the stand, gesturing to the microphone, and asked if he would say a few words. After all, he was the president of the student council, and the crowd was waiting.
Step up to the podium. The microphone caught the sharp, micro-flicker of his breath, amplifying it for a fraction of a second before Minho forced his voice into its default setting, smooth, steady, and entirely unbothered.
He didn't look at the crowd. He looked directly at the front row.
His father sat with his arms crossed, his posture as unyielding as the marble pillars lining the auditorium walls. As Minho delivered the opening lines of his rehearsed speech, his father gave a single, firm nod. It was a calculated gesture of approval, the exact kind reserved strictly for these moments, a reward unlocked only by top marks and heavy gold medals. Beside him, his mother’s eyes remained fixated on him, cold and watchful, inspecting his delivery for the slightest hint of a stutter.
Minho looked away, tearing his gaze toward the dark exit doors at the back of the hall. He knew the trap of his own mind all too well. If he allowed himself to fixate on them, if he let his thoughts spiral into the terrifying necessity of not failing, the pressure would crack his composure. He would end up ruining the script entirely.
When his mouth finally closed on the last polished sentence, a thunderous round of applause erupted, filling the vast space of the auditorium. Minho stepped down from the stage, the heavy weight of the plaques tucked against his ribs like a shield.
As he walked down the center aisle toward his row, he let his eyes drift over the sea of uniforms. He dropped an easy, practiced smile toward a cluster of underclassmen; their wide, worshipful expressions were a familiar currency. But just as he reached his section, his gaze snagged on a student sitting near the edge. A boy with a reputation, someone known across the campus strictly for being a troublemaker in the dorms.
Minho didn’t know the details of the boy’s record. After all, Minho didn’t live on campus; he was a day student who went home to a silent house every evening. But the suffocating coldness of his parents’ estate often drove him to linger in the dorm lounges long after classes ended, hiding out under the pretense of council paperwork until he eventually learned things he wasn't supposed to know.
On the other side of the crowded row, Han Jisung was leaning back, completely incapable of pulling his eyes away from the scene.
It frustrated him. Usually, whenever their paths crossed in the hallways, Minho either looked right through him or looked away entirely, treating Jisung like background noise. But this time, Minho’s eyes didn’t skip past. They locked. Making him feel something so profound and unknown.
For a suspended, heavy second, they crossed looks across the expanse of the row. Jisung caught a fleeting shadow in the depths of Minho’s stare, something dark, fractured, and intensely raw that didn't match the pristine glare of the stage lights. It didn't make any sense. Jisung felt a sharp prickle of irritation at his own fascination; it was completely ridiculous to be this puzzled by something so lame. He was just looking at the school's flawless masterpiece, wasn't he? There shouldn't be anything else to see.
"God, I'd give anything to be fucking Lee Minho," a classmate muttered a few seats down, his voice heavy with a bitter sort of envy.
"Don't waste your time," another shrugged, not bothering to look up from his phone. "The guy is just gifted. There's no point in comparing us to him."
Jisung nodded along automatically to the chatter, his eyes still tracing the sharp line of Minho’s shoulders as the elder finally took his seat. He’s just gifted, Jisung repeated silently to himself. The words felt hollow, entirely inadequate to describe the strange, restless pull currently expanding beneath his ribs, a quiet, unnameable curiosity that he wasn’t ready to understand.