Chapter Text
They make the promise at twenty-two, on a night so ordinary it almost disappears later.
It isn't raining. There's no music playing. No celebration, no heartbreak. Just the dull glow of a single lamp in Phuwin's living room and the sound of traffic leaking in through a half-open window.
They're sitting on the floor because the couch is already covered in laundry neither of them feels like folding. Cardboard boxes from dinner are stacked near the door, one of them slightly crushed. The air smells faintly of fried garlic and something sweet they can't quite identify.
Pond is scrolling through job listings on his phone. Phuwin is half-listening, half-working on something for class, laptop balanced awkwardly on his knees. They've reached that part of the night where conversation drifts without urgency—future plans spoken aloud not because they need answers, but because silence feels unnecessary between them.
"I don't think I want to get married young," Phuwin says suddenly, eyes still on the screen.
Pond hums. "Yeah. Same."
A pause.
"My parents keep asking," Phuwin adds. "Like there's a schedule."
"There's always a schedule," Pond says. "Graduate. Job. Partner. House. Everything in neat little boxes."
Phuwin snorts. "I'm bad at boxes."
"You live out of a suitcase," Pond points out.
"That's temporary."
"So was college," Pond says, not unkindly.
Phuwin finally looks up at him. Not searching, not intense. Just thoughtful.
"What if we mess it up?" he asks. "Like—what if we do everything right and it still doesn't work?"
Pond shrugs, eyes still on his phone. "Then at least we'll know."
Another pause. Longer this time.
Pond speaks again, tone casual, like he's talking about the weather.
"If we're still single at thirty," he says, "we could try."
Phuwin blinks.
He turns fully now, laptop forgotten.
"Try what?"
Pond hesitates—not because he's nervous, but because he's choosing his words.
"Dating," he says. "I guess."
There's no smile. No tension. No dramatic shift in the air. Just the quiet hum of the fan overhead and the distant sound of a car horn outside.
Phuwin processes this the way he processes everything important: slowly, seriously.
"Why thirty?" he asks.
Pond thinks about it. "Feels... far enough away to be fair. Close enough to matter."
Phuwin nods once. "And if one of us isn't single?"
"Then nothing," Pond says immediately. "It doesn't mean anything unless it works for both of us."
Phuwin considers that.
He thinks about how long they've known each other. About how easy Pond's presence feels. About how there has never been pressure between them—only consistency.
"It wouldn't be because we failed," Phuwin says. "Being single, I mean."
"No," Pond agrees. "It'd just be where we ended up."
Phuwin exhales, slow. He closes his laptop and sets it aside, not looking at Pond when he speaks.
"Okay," he says. "That seems... reasonable."
Pond nods. "Yeah."
That's it.
No laughter. No teasing. No acknowledgment of how strange it is to schedule a possibility like this. They simply return to what they were doing before—Phuwin reopening his laptop, Pond scrolling again.
The promise slips quietly into the space between them, unnoticed and unprotected.
They don't mark it.
They don't revisit it.
They don't tell anyone.
In the years that follow, life happens the way it always does—unevenly, imperfectly.
Jobs change. Cities shift. Relationships come close and then drift away. Through it all, Pond and Phuwin remain what they have always been to each other: familiar, reliable, unexamined.
And somewhere along the way, without either of them realizing when, thirty stops feeling fictional.
The promise does not.
It waits.