At least in part, S does know that. He knows that it isn't why J hasn't been playing much here, and he knows there was a long stretch of time back in Seoul when his playing didn't seem to hold J back at all. If anything, for a long while there, he believed that they motivated each other. It wasn't a competition yet because there was room for them both to succeed; there was only encouragement between them instead. One thing that did strike him about that last awful night was the decade-old story that J told, a resentment that S never knew existed, one of so many little things that made him reconfigure his view of their entire past relationship. So he did know, but he's not sure he still does, not entirely. It didn't seem worth the risk of being wrong, not least when there are other things that J has to contend with that have been holding him back.

And he feels so ridiculous, crying for reasons he can't even entirely pinpoint, that feeling only making him cry more. For a moment, he doesn't say anything, because he doesn't completely trust himself to, needs to try to regain at least a little of the composure he so abruptly lost. "Even then," he confirms when he does, nodding against J's shoulder, achingly guilty even just in saying so, though he still thinks it just makes sense. "I figured it would be there for you, if you ever got back to it. And I didn't want to. Not for a long time. Not really."

It's one thing he still hasn't talked about, not where it concerns that particular detail. For weeks after he got out of the hospital and returned to the apartment that had once been theirs, he couldn't so much as touch their piano. Just looking at it was painful. When he did play again at last, it was for J's sake — the sonata that had been stolen from him, a promise to keep going for both of them. It still wasn't what it used to be. "But I miss it," he admits, voice tiny, almost a whisper. "I miss how it used to feel."