As difficult as it's been, having his own passion for music wane, watching J spend so long feeling unable even to touch a piano at all, in a way, S is grateful for that distance. Their relationship never existed without music before they wound up here, after all, and music was at least part of what ended it the first time around. To have come back together without it, both of them thinking they never would have that back, and to have rebuilt something even stronger, is deeply reassuring, and means more than he would know how to say. Nothing ever would have changed things for him anyway, but at least they both have seen firsthand now that it isn't a necessary facet of what they share. J chose music over him before. It's nice — and moving — to know that J would choose him now even without music in the picture at all.

And if it aches a little to consider J needing to feel safer when he plays, it's not as if S can't understand why that would be so. Nodding, it's his turn this time to lean in and press a soft kiss to the corner of J's mouth, brief but tender. "If you do, then I'll be here," he murmurs. He doesn't add that he would have assumed the opposite, that J wouldn't have wanted him to be a part of any playing he did at all, not wanting to circle back to how terribly they misunderstood each other. Although he knows perfectly well now that there was far more going on that last night in Seoul than he was remotely aware of at the time, it's hard not to have been haunted by the way it ended when they played together then, how J couldn't even finish the piece without getting angry and rejecting him again. Of course, after everything, S could only assume that, if J played again at all, he wouldn't want to share it anymore. Again, and as with so much else, it's nice to have been wrong.

"We can try something like this again," he suggests, still staying close, careful to keep his voice low. "You can come around at closing, play when no one else is here. Just the two of us."