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Here's what Do-yoon was thinking.
On the stage, pinned between an audience of three bodies, only one of them still breathing, he read the note again and again.
He didn't want evidence. Seil kept his secrets on his person and the universe had arranged itself so that Inha would snatch his bag by the strap, spill it all out on the floor. If everyone else returned and demanded that he turn out his pockets, grabbed him by the wrist and pried his trembling fist open one finger at a time, he didn't want the note there. The words on it were just for him. So he read it again and again, then tore it into little pieces and scattered it among the debris. He repeated it to himself in his head the entire night so that he could always remember it.
The thing about memory and tragedy is that they actually go quite poorly together.
By the time he'd gone to the hospital, been x-rayed, been ferried into surgery for the fracture in his spine and learned all about his broken ribs and fractured hip and how long all of it would take to heal, and passed out for a broken-by-nurses twelve hours after it all, it had already started to slip. When he woke up, he couldn't remember the exact wording, if Gyu-hyuk had said this or that. The pure terror of forgetting made him hold on all the more selfishly.
They were Gyu-hyuk's last words and he hadn't been brave enough to share them with anyone else, just Do-yoon, so Do-yoon had to cherish them properly. He turned them over all day long, whenever the room was quiet, going over them slowly, tenderly, like running his fingers along a page in a book.
The act of remembering creased the page, faded the ink. Sometimes he couldn't remember if he'd accidentally added a line, if Gyu-hyuk had said it differently.
Laid up in his hospital bed he warred often with himself over whether or not to fulfill Gyu-hyuk's last request.
But whenever he thought about it, there was this great pressure on his chest like he was being crushed again, like he'd really never escaped that rubble, like he was supposed to have died down there and ruined everything up by clawing his way out of the debris. Why did Gyu-hyuk save him just to leave him like that? Saving Gyu-hyuk had been his only solace. Now instead of getting to be a hero for one brief moment, he was just a failure and a liar.
He turned away Masquerade when they tried to visit, and Youngie and Inha acted like they'd never known him, so his only visitors were Seil and Hyesung.
Seil tried to tell his truth to the world, but it didn't matter. The authorities ignored it. WBS ignored it. He dragged his trial out into the public and people talked, but it was just aimless hate, aimless judgement. It became a playground for people who would never really understand any of it and just got to have their fun being cruel. What was the point of the truth?
Every barb he saw online just coiled those secrets tighter in his chest.
Gyu-hyuk's secret became his. It snaked around his own truth and hugged it tight, became so interwoven that he was sure he couldn't tell one without the other spilling out behind it. There was still so much he'd wanted to tell Gyu-hyuk and now it would stay inside him forever.
He really did try to imagine a future where he moved on, where he told the truth, where he did all those noble things he aspired to.
But he didn't get the chance.
Hyesung ended up making the decision for him. The media circus afterwards was too painful for Do-yoon to look at, to listen to. He covered his eyes and ears and tuned out his better senses, focused everything down to the easy touch of his fingers on that letter.
It filled his mind.
He sometimes wished that he'd kept the note, damn the consequences. Or that Gyu-hyuk had never written it at all. Or that he hadn't found it. Or that Gyu-hyuk had texted it, posted it, taken the choice out of Do-yoon's hands. Why had he trusted a traitor like Do-yoon?
He repeated it line by line, blocking everything else out, just trying desperately to grasp at Gyu-hyuk again, to understand intimately what he was thinking and feeling in those final moments, if the nightmare Do-yoon was living right now was the exact one Gyu-hyuk was running from.
So, that's why Do-yoon didn't leave a note.