Chapter Text
--- It wasn't the sound of shattering glass that awakened something inside him, but the sound of her words as she uttered them with deadly coldness, as if she had been waiting for this moment for months. The café where they used to sit every Thursday was as crowded as ever. The smell of bitter coffee rose from small cups, and the evening light seeping through the windows drew long shadows on the wooden floor. Pedri sat across from her, stirring his cold coffee that had long gone cold, while her sparkling brown eyes looked at her phone more than they looked at him. "Alejandra, is there something you want to tell me?" He asked in his usual quiet voice, that voice everyone said belonged to a nice young man, and that she would later say belonged to a cold man. She raised her brown eyes to him for a moment, then sighed as if his very question was a burden on her. "Pedri…" she began, her words weighing like stone, "I don't know how to say this, but… I can't go on like this." He felt his heart stop for a moment. No, not entirely. Perhaps it was beating faster. He felt it in his throat, in his temples, in the tips of his fingers, which began to tremble slightly. "What do you mean?" She finally placed her phone on the table. Her round face, which he was used to seeing smiling, was now rigid, like a plaster mask. "You know what I mean, Pedri. These two years have been… beautiful, really. But I can't. Our life is boring. You are boring." The words entered his ears like small arrows, but he didn't raise his voice, didn't object. He just kept looking at her with his wide, innocent eyes, those eyes he believed were the reason she fell in love with him. "Boring?" He repeated the word as if hearing it for the first time. "Yes, boring." She cut in quickly, as if she had been waiting for a chance to empty everything inside her. "You work at the bank from nine to five, then you go home, have dinner with your family, and sleep. And on weekends, you help your mother at the restaurant. Where's the fun? Where's the adventure? Where… is the life?" He lowered his gaze to his cold coffee cup. He saw his reflection in it: the face of a twenty-four-year-old, soft and gentle features, large innocent eyes that made him look younger than his age. He suddenly felt that this face was lying to the world, or maybe the world was lying to him. "But I love my life," he mumbled, words only heard by him and Alejandra, who let out a short, warmthless laugh. "That's exactly the problem, Pedri. You love your monotonous life. But I can't. I met Fernando." He raised his eyes to her quickly. The man's name was like a slap. "Fernando? Who is Fernando?" She smiled a small smile, a kind of pitiful triumph on her face. "It doesn't matter who he is. What matters is that he's not… cold. He surprises me, takes me to crazy places, dances with me until dawn. I feel alive with him, Pedri. Alive." He tried to swallow his saliva, but his throat had gone dry. "Tell me you're joking." "I'm not joking." She stood up from her chair, gave him one last look. It was a look of pity, not love. "I'm sorry, really. But I can't waste my life waiting for your life to become exciting. Maybe if you were different… if you were bold, if you were…" She didn't finish her sentence. Perhaps because she knew she had hurt him enough, or perhaps because she couldn't find the words to describe what she wanted. The result was the same: Pedri's small, quiet heart, which had never known how to love except honestly and gently, was now shattering into a thousand pieces. "Alejandra…" he whispered, but she had already picked up her bag. "Goodbye, Pedri." And she walked away. She didn't look back. She didn't cry. Nothing remained except the sound of her heels fading bit by bit, and the sound of the empty coffee cup still between his hands. He sat there, in the same café, his usual spot, for a time he didn't know how long. People came and went, the light shifted from gold to orange to deep blue. And his mind kept repeating the words: "boring," "cold," "not good enough for her." When he finally left, the streets of Barcelona had swallowed the day's heat, replaced by the damp evening cold. He stood in front of the café for a moment, breathing the air he thought would make him feel free, but he only felt emptiness. He could have gone home. To his small room in his family's house, where his mother Rosy was surely preparing dinner, his father reading the newspaper, his brother Fer talking loudly about the football match he'd watched. He could have slept, cried into his pillow as he hadn't done since childhood. But something drove him in the opposite direction. He didn't think about it. His feet moved on their own, taking him where he had never gone before. Toward the neon lights twinkling on the horizon, toward the city's pulse he had only experienced from afar. Toward the nightclub "Elpra" — Barcelona's underground legend. --- The legendary man, Ferran Torres, was busy as usual. He stood behind his own DJ booth, that slightly elevated platform that resembled a throne of glass and light. Wearing a tight black shirt that hugged his broad shoulders and sculpted chest as if made for him alone. Ferran was enjoying — if that term was accurate — the way women looked at him from every corner. His greenish-hazel eyes stared at the crowd with evident boredom, though his true emotions were well hidden under layers of beauty and mystery. His long lashes fluttered whenever he turned his head toward the turntable, his sharp nose looking like a classical sculpture in the strobing laser light. The light beard adorning his jaw gave him a dangerously masculine look, while his attractive lips were permanently set in a sarcastic curve, as if laughing at the whole world. His tall body, stretching eighty-five centimeters above the meter, moved with strange fluidity to the loud music he created. His bronzed, tan skin sparkled under the falling lights, as if carved from copper and gold. Ferran wasn't just a DJ at the club. He was the reason most of these people were here. There were girls in very short dresses, standing directly in front of the booth, raising their hands to the sky trying to catch his attention. There were other girls sending bottles of champagne to his control room. And there were also the envious, admiring glances mixed together thrown at him by men. But Ferran didn't care about any of them. His only concern was the music, the pulse he created, the escape it gave him. His quiet, reserved personality was a thick wall between him and the world. No one knew anything about his real life. No one knew where he slept, or what he did when the music ended, or why his eyes held that dark shadow even when he smiled. He was a womanizer, as everyone described him. But the truth was, Ferran didn't chase women; they chased him. And he sometimes kissed some of them, touched some of them, disappeared with one every now and then. But he had never loved. At least, not the way people know love. That particular night, Ferran was at his peak. The place was packed with people, heat almost suffocating, their sweat glistening under the red and blue lights. He mixed songs with extraordinary skill, moving from pounding electronic music to hot Latin rhythms, raising heartbeats one moment and lowering them the next. And suddenly, during one of his rare moments when he raised his eyes to scan the crowd, his gaze met something strange. In the far corner of the club, far from the booth, far from the lights seeking Ferran's attention, sat a young man on one of the black leather sofas. His face didn't look like the club's usual patrons: neither drunkenly hysterical, nor looking for a girl, nor even following the music. He was just… sitting. His wide brown eyes staring into space, his full lips fixed in a perpetual pout. On any other night, Ferran wouldn't have noticed him. But tonight, he felt something unusual about this face. Perhaps because he looked lost, and perhaps because his eyes carried that kind of sadness that cannot be faked. But Ferran quickly looked away. He had no time for crying strangers. --- Pedri entered the club as if entering another planet. The lights blinded him, the sound nearly ruptured his eardrums, and the smell — the mix of perfume, sweat, alcohol, and tobacco — churned his stomach. He stood at the entrance for a moment, adjusting to the chaos around him. He felt out of place here, like a stray cat who wandered into a wolves' party. He didn't know why he came. Perhaps because he wanted to do something unusual, something not "boring." Perhaps because he wanted to prove to himself first, then to Alejandra, that he wasn't that quiet boy who only knew the bank and the restaurant. Or perhaps he just wanted to forget. He headed to the bar. His relatively short body (only one meter and seventy-two centimeters) disappeared among the tall crowds. He pushed his way with difficulty until he reached the long wooden bar, shouting for a glass of whiskey in a voice barely audible in the roar of the music. The bartender, a handsome smiling young man, looked at him in surprise. Perhaps because he wasn't used to seeing such innocent faces in a place like this. But he brought the glass without asking. Pedri took the first sip and felt his throat burn. The second sip was easier. The third sip made him breathe deeper. And the fourth sip… made him start looking around. And there, on the platform, he saw him. Ferran Torres. Pedri had never seen him before, but he knew immediately that this man was something different. Because in the midst of all that chaos, among all those intertwined dancing bodies, among all those twinkling lights — Ferran was the center of everything. He was like a black hole, everything drawn toward him. Pedri stood there, his glass half full, his eyes fixed on this strange man with the light beard and muscular body. He saw how the girls rushed to stand before him, how they waved at him, how one of them — a long-legged blonde — had climbed onto the platform and started dancing directly in front of him, trying to catch his attention. Pedri felt something strange. Not jealousy, of course. Why would he be jealous of a man he didn't know? But it was something like morbid curiosity, or perhaps admiration mixed with envy. This man had everything Pedri lacked: confidence, boldness, attention, presence. Pedri drank his glass entirely and ordered another. With every new sip, his body grew lighter, his inner voice that had been repeating Alejandra's words ("boring, cold, not good enough") grew fainter. And with every sip, Ferran became clearer in his eyes, more attractive, more… mysterious. Pedri wasn't gay. He had never thought about it. But he wasn't sure of anything now. His heart was shattered, his mind was confused, his body was numbed by alcohol. He watched how Ferran kissed a girl on the platform — not a passing kiss, but a deep, sensual kiss that made the girl nearly melt in his arms. Then he left her and moved to another, as if collecting women's hearts like trophies. Pedri felt a strange disgust. This man was arrogant, provocative, disgusting. Then why couldn't Pedri take his eyes off him? Pedri was confused. Deeply confused. So he drank more. --- Pedri didn't know when he left the club. He remembered stumbling in his steps, that the cold air of Barcelona's streets slapped his face after the suffocating heat inside the club, that his head was spinning, that his stomach was rebelling, and that he sat on the curb — sat there like a stray dog, his back against a cold wall, his legs stretched out on the dirty asphalt. It was perhaps three in the morning. The street was almost empty. Some cars passed every now and then, some distant sounds of laughter or fights, and some orange streetlights making everything look like an old movie. And Pedri started crying. Not quiet, polite crying, but ugly, childish crying, sobs emerging from his chest like small trapped animals, abundant tears streaming down his soft cheeks, his small nose reddening and running. "I'm not cold…" he mumbled in broken words, "I'm not boring… she… she just doesn't understand…" He rubbed his eyes with his fists like a child, then sniffled, then cried again. It was a pitiful sight. A twenty-four-year-old, wearing a simple shirt and ordinary pants, sitting on a dirty curb in Barcelona, crying as if the world had ended. And suddenly, he heard a voice. It wasn't a friendly voice. It wasn't a sympathetic voice. It was a sarcastic voice, deep, distinctive. "Beautiful sight. Really. If there was a festival for the prettiest criers, you'd have won first prize." Pedri slowly raised his head, his swollen red eyes trying to focus on the figure standing before him. There he stood, Ferran Torres. He had taken off his black jacket and now wore only a black shirt, sleeves rolled to his elbows, revealing muscular forearms etched with veins. Smoke from a cigarette curled between his attractive lips, and his hazel-green eyes carried that enchanting mixture of boredom, sarcasm, and hidden curiosity. Ferran's height towered over the seated Pedri. He looked like a black tower of muscle and arrogant beauty. Pedri couldn't utter a word. His mouth was slightly open, his tears still drying on his cheeks, his nose running, his lips trembling. Ferran exhaled his cigarette smoke slowly, then dropped the butt to the ground and crushed it under his black shoe. "Are you alive, or are you just a statue of a weeping man?" Ferran asked in a quiet but sharp voice. Pedri swallowed his saliva. It was the first time he'd heard this voice up close. It was deep, slightly resonant, carrying a hint of contempt that wasn't entirely intentional — perhaps just his way of speaking. "I…" Pedri began, his voice hoarse from crying and alcohol, "I… I don't know…" Ferran raised one eyebrow. That raised eyebrow had humiliated hundreds of women before. "You don't know if you're alive? That's deep. Philosophical at three in the morning on a curb. Great." Pedri tried to stand, but his body betrayed him. He swayed, then fell to his knees, then braced his hands on the ground. It was an embarrassing sight that made even Ferran, with all his coldness, silently groan. "I need… help…" Pedri whispered, but his words were barely clear. "I need help?" Ferran repeated sarcastically. "That's a bit cliché. Usually, girls ask me for help, and the help is usually in the back room. But you…" He looked Pedri up and down, his eyes examining his small, slender body, his childish face, his tearful eyes. "You're not a girl, that's clear." Pedri rolled on the ground until he was sitting on the curb again, his back to the wall. He looked at Ferran with his tired eyes, and then suddenly — perhaps because of the alcohol, perhaps because of despair, perhaps because of momentary madness — he said the sentence that changed everything: "Hit me." Ferran paused for a moment. For just one moment, the sarcasm disappeared from his face, replaced by pure astonishment. He raised both eyebrows, opened his mouth slightly, then closed it. "What did you say?" "I want you to hit me." Pedri repeated, his voice clearer this time. "Punch me in the face. Kick me in the stomach. Whatever. Just… make me feel something other than this." Ferran stood silent for seconds. He stared at this strange young man with his greenish eyes, trying to understand what he'd heard. Was it a joke? Was it a trap? Was this person too drunk to be coherent? Then Ferran groaned. A long groan, feigning boredom with deadly coolness. "Listen here, you idiot…" he began in a soft but sharp voice, "I'm not gay. And certainly, I wouldn't prefer a stupid boy's ass over a beautiful girl's cunt." The words weren't necessarily cruel, but they were cold. Cold as the music Ferran created, cold as Alejandra's eyes when she told him "you're boring." Pedri's small, innocent brown eyes widened. He forgot for a moment that he was drunk, forgot that he'd been crying minutes ago. He felt something hot fill his chest, not sadness this time, but… anger. He frowned, his full, pouty lips deepening further, his small nose wrinkled with clear disgust. "I'm not gay either, you arrogant bastard!" Pedri shouted in a voice he didn't know he possessed. "And I didn't mean that! And I won't allow you to touch me, even over my dead body!" Ferran paused for a moment, surprised by the reaction. Then he laughed. A short, dry laugh, but genuine. "Then what did you mean?" Pedri exhaled nervously. "I meant I wanted to fight. Just. Anyone. So I could forget…" He lowered his voice, sadness returning to his eyes, "So I could forget what happened." A moment of silence stood between them. Ferran watching Pedri, Pedri looking at the ground. The sound of a distant car whistle cut the silence, along with the sound of two people passing on the opposite street. Then Ferran shrugged. "If you want to fight someone, go to another bar. Find some drunks. I don't have time for this." And Ferran turned to start walking away. Pedri didn't know why he did what he did next. Perhaps because the alcohol was still working in his system, or perhaps because something about this strange man made him feel safe — yes, safe, despite all his rudeness and coldness. Pedri stood with difficulty, swayed, and then started following Ferran. "What are you doing?" Ferran said without turning around. "Following you." "Why?" "Because I… forgot where my house is." Ferran stopped. He slowly turned his head, gave Pedri a long look. Pedri stood there, swaying like a tree in a storm, his wide eyes fixed on Ferran as if he were the only lifeline. "You forgot your house?" Ferran repeated, not without surprise. "And my phone… my phone's battery died," Pedri added quietly. Ferran exhaled deeply. He could have walked away. He could have left this stupid lost boy to his fate. It wasn't his business. He didn't know him. He owed him nothing. But something — perhaps Pedri's innocent gaze, perhaps his hoarse voice, perhaps just boredom — made him stay. "So you're stupid, drunk, and lost. Three great qualities in one person." "I'm not stupid," Pedri mumbled stubbornly. "Yes, you are. Because only stupid people sit on the curb crying for help and then refuse it when it comes," Ferran said, then turned and walked again. But this time, he walked more slowly. And instead of walking away, he headed in a different direction from his original one, moving toward a narrow alley between buildings. And Pedri started following him again. He walked behind Ferran with unsteady steps, his eyes fixed on his broad back, on the way the muscles of his shoulders moved under the black shirt. Why did this man walk with such confidence? Why did the whole world seem to revolve around him? And as they walked, Pedri's foot caught on something — a raised stone, or a crack in the pavement, or perhaps just his own treacherous feet. Ferran heard the stumble, turned instinctively — and in that same second, Pedri fell forward, not onto the ground, but into Ferran's embrace. Ferran stretched out his arms automatically and caught Pedri's small body before it hit the ground. For a moment, for fractions of a second, their bodies were pressed together. Ferran felt an unfamiliar warmth, something soft trembling in his arms, a different scent from the women he was used to. And Pedri felt something he had never felt before. Ferran's arms were strong, surrounding him like two iron walls, his muscular chest was hard but warm, and his scent — the smell of tobacco, rich cologne, and leather — overwhelmed his senses. They stood like that for a moment, Pedri's brown eyes looking into Ferran's green ones from very close range. Ferran's eyes were deeper than they'd seemed from afar, holding shades of amber and honey, framed by thick, long lashes. And for the first time, Ferran's eyes weren't sarcastic. They were… neutral. As if he didn't know what to do. Before either of them could utter a single word — "Gunfire!" The sound of bullets came from very close range. One shot, then another, then screams, then the sound of a car engine revving violently, then the light of bright headlights rushing toward them at insane speed. Ferran didn't think. He didn't make a decision. His body moved before his mind. He grabbed Pedri by the collar violently, the young man colliding with his chest again, but this time there was no time to feel anything. Ferran grabbed Pedri's wrist — his slender wrist that looked so small between Ferran's large fingers — and started running. Ferran ran fast, his athletic, muscular body moving with surprising lightness, dragging Pedri behind him like a frightened shadow. Pedri followed, not because he wanted to, but because he had no choice. He felt his feet moving, felt his lungs burning, felt his heart beating at a speed he had never known. But he also felt something else. He laughed. Yes, Pedri started laughing. A hysterical laugh, unexpected, rising from his chest like a fountain. He couldn't stop. He was running behind this handsome, strange man, under the faint moonlight and in the shadow of bullets still echoing behind him, and he was laughing. For the first time in hours, in days, in months — for the first time in a long time, Pedri felt alive. He felt his hot blood running through his veins, felt his heart pounding strongly, felt his lungs filling with cold air and then expelling it loudly. He felt Ferran's strong fingers pressing on his wrist, pulling him into the unknown, into somewhere he didn't know. And Pedri held Ferran's hand tighter and started running faster. This was the happiest moment of his life. They ran together, Ferran pulling and Pedri following, through narrow alleys, under intermittent streetlights, over winding pavements, through the back streets of Barcelona that Pedri had never seen before. Ferran didn't know where he was running. He didn't know who was shooting, or why. All he knew was that he was dragging behind him a stupid, miserable, beautiful boy