Warmth Like This
Khun has always been cold. It is something he’s learned to live with, since he was young, when his mother whispered words in his ear, telling him that victory was important, that he has to win, because winning is everything. Khun has long since gotten used to it as he schemes and comes up with plan after plan, all to help secure his sister’s position as Princess of Jahard. He shivers and rubs his arms absentmindedly as the temperature seems to drop even lower, halting Khun’s thoughts. He scowls, annoyed, but continues on. All of the Khun family has been raised on coldness, on ice and snow and chilly gales. Khun is no different, the meaning of affection completely and utterly foreign to him, having been raised on cold words and even colder arms.
The first time Khun can ever remember feeling warm is when Maria burst into his life, full of compassion unusual for the Khun family. Even before he has decided to help her, she often sticks around him, talking to him, filling the silent rooms with chatter. After he has resolved to help her, to cement her position as a Princess of Jahard, her warmth seems to intensify slightly, warming him even more. Khun grasps at it, desperate and deprived, until it slips out of his fingers, because his plan has worked, like his plans always do.
After Maria leaves, Khun curses the day he had ever learnt what warmth was, now ever more aware of the chill in his bones, freezing him from the inside out. The cold intensifies with every word whispered into his ear by his mother and sister, warning him against trusting others, against making the same mistake. Khun listens, swallowing each and every word until he is made of ice once more, cocky and unable to be melted. Intelligent and brittle.
Khun is cast out, but the cold doesn’t disappear. It stays with him, his constant companion through thick and thin, never changing, ever the same. Khun grows to hate the cold.
But then Khun meets a boy with warm, gold eyes and an even warmer personality. At first he resists, not wanting a repeat of Maria, not wanting to taste that warmth, only to have it snatched away. But with each time Bam calls out his name, or chatters to him, Khun feels himself melting, bit by bit, slowly but surely. Khun wonders if it’s worth resisting, if he should just let the warmth consume him.
In the end, Khun does stop resisting, and lets Bam’s warmth reach him, drag him into his orbit. But Bam’s warmth does so much more than that. No, it sets his life ablaze, burning with a ferocity and passion and loyalty Maria never had. And Khun realises. Realises something that he perhaps should have noticed sooner. Bam’s warmth is different to Maria’s. His warmth chases out the cold completely and utterly, down to his very bones.
When Bam dies, icy rage fills Khun, snuffing out the warmth, and all Khun can think is, She must pay for what she has done to him. Every time he looks at her, enjoying her life, seeming content, ice creeps up his throat, threatening to spill out of his mouth and end her once and for all. But Khun is made of ice again, and so he is patient, for ice can wait millennia, unmoving, simply plotting.
Then Bam returns, and Khun has never been more relieved, and he cannot help but once again think of the differences between Maria’s warmth and Bam’s warmth. Bam’s is far more intense, Khun notes. It burns anything in it’s path, friends and enemies alike, though it burns differently for each of them. For enemies, it burns with power and strength, willing to take them out if it means protecting those dear to him. For friends, it burns with protectiveness, loyalty and fondness, hot and blazing. Khun sometimes wonders if it is too much, if he will simply become ashes in the face of those flames. That’s ok though, because Khun would gladly let himself burn.
When Evan asks him, asks him why he continues to chase after Bam, why he does it when Bam is growing so fast, too fast, hurtling further and further away from them, Khun answers truthfully. He answers truthfully because wherever Bam goes, he will follow, and Bam will wait, will never leave his friends behind.
“Right now, I feel like the end of the world will come if Bam isn’t here.”
Khun has never known such warmth before.