TT

Nobody was sleeping. The lights in the practice rooms stayed on well past midnight most nights, and the vending machine on the third floor had been out of energy drinks for four days straight because nobody had time to file the restock request.

There had been seven girls when the show ended.

By January, there were only six.

Nobody talked about it anymore.

That didn't mean anyone had forgotten.

Iroha learned choreography before lunch, every time, like her body simply refused to forget once it had been shown.

Yunah looked effortless no matter where the cameras pointed, the kind of performer who made difficult choreography seem easy.

Minju never seemed to have an off day, not once, not even the day her ankle had been taped so tight she couldn't feel her toes.

Moka danced like she'd been born in front of a mirror, every angle already calculated before she'd even thought to move.

Wonhee, despite training for barely any longer than Y/N, somehow understood every correction the moment it was given, filing it away and never needing to hear it twice.

Then there was Y/N.

Y/N could sing.

Everyone agreed on that. Producers went quiet in a specific way when she hit a line clean, the kind of quiet that meant something. Even the vocal coaches, who complained about everyone, didn't complain about her.

But nobody debuted anymore on vocals alone.

The industry wanted performers. It wanted sharp angles, synchronized movements, expressions that reached the back row of a stadium and stayed there.

It wanted six girls who looked like they'd trained together their whole lives, not five who had and one who'd been thrown in a month before the deadline with barely enough time to learn where the mirrors even were.

Every missed step became a viral clip. Every mistake became a headline. She'd stopped reading the comments two weeks ago.

The words still found her anyway.

Someone mentioning a post they'd seen online. A staff member forgetting she was standing nearby. A trainee repeating something they'd read without realizing she was within earshot.

So when the choreographer bit his cap in frustration, jaw tight, eyes flicking to the clock like it owed him something, she just apologized.

She took every correction, even the harsh ones, because she knew that if she didn't perform well on debut, the backlash would be far worse than anything people were already saying.

So she charged forward, because there wasn't another option she could see.

Three sprained ankles in two weeks. Knees permanently bruised, a deep purple-yellow that never quite faded before the next injury layered over it.

Feet covered in blisters she'd stopped bothering to count, then stopped bothering to treat, because there wasn't time between one rehearsal and the next.

"Again. Y/N, are you even listening? Turn right first. The transition should be smooth. Don't bend and then turn." The choreographer's voice was clipped, controlled in the specific way that meant he was trying very hard not to shout.

She tried again. Made the same mistake.

He laughed — not a real laugh, the kind that came out when there was nothing else left to do with the frustration.

"Take five," he said, already turning for the door, already reaching for air he clearly needed more than she did.

Y/N went to the water cooler and slid down against the wall instead of drinking, knees pulled to her chest, feeling something in her chest cave in slowly, quietly, the way it always did when no one was watching.

Why couldn't she do something so simple? Everyone else had it. Everyone else's bodies just — knew.

She put her face against her knees and let herself break, just for a second, just because there was no one left in the room to perform for.

Was she even worth it?

Could she actually do this?

Maybe she should just leave. Maybe that would be easier for everyone

The practice room door opened.

She barely looked up.

Another staff member, probably.

Instead—

White sneakers.

Loose grey sweatpants.

A black hoodie with the sleeves pushed to his elbows.

Someone stepped inside like he belonged there.

Because he did.

James.

She'd seen him before.

Never spoken to him.

Just...

Passing glimpses in hallways.

His name in choreography credits.

Staff greeting him first.

She knew he was around her age.

She knew he'd choreographed parts of their debut title track.

Beyond that...

Nothing.

She wiped her face fast, the back of her hand rough against her cheeks, and scrambled up, bowing before she'd even fully processed that he was actually in the room.

"안녕하세요, 선배님."

He gave a small bow back, unhurried, like he hadn't just walked in on her crying on the floor of a hallway.

Up close, he looked tired.

Not the kind of tired that disappeared after a night's sleep.

The kind that settled behind someone's eyes and refused to leave.

"You okay?"

She blinked.

Nobody had asked her that all week.

"...Yeah."

He looked at the tissues in her hand.

"...Sure."

She laughed once.

It sounded awful.

"Yeah — it's just debut pressure." She forced the smile up, the one she'd gotten good at over the last month, the one that didn't reach anywhere close to her eyes.

"Oh. You're debuting in ILLIT, right?"

"네, 선배님."

"That's good." A pause, like he was searching for something just out of reach. "What was your name again?"

"Y/N, 선배님."

"Ahh. The one with the good vocals, right? I've caught a few rehearsals."

"네, 선배님." She answered, flustered now, heat rising in her face for reasons she couldn't entirely name.

"There's nothing to be flustered about," he said, simply. "If everyone were good at everything, there wouldn't be practice at all."

"네, 선배님."

He watched her for a second longer than felt comfortable, like he could see something underneath the polite answers, something closer to the floor she'd been sitting on a minute ago.

He glanced at the choreography sheet lying abandoned near the speaker.

"...This section."

She nodded.

"It's mine."

Another nod. He looked at her and back at sheet as if considering something.

"Come tonight."

She frowned.

"...Excuse me?"

"Room Three. Seventh floor."

He shrugged like it wasn't a particularly important decision.

"I'll help you clean it."

Her eyes lit up before she could stop them. She started bowing, the words tumbling out faster than she could organize them — thank you, thank you, 감사합니다 —

He just waved a hand, cutting off the flood of gratitude before it could really start.

"I don't want your debut to be harder than it already is, okay?" His voice dropped slightly, quieter now, more serious. "You already have enough people looking for a reason to tear this group apart. Let's not give them more ammunition."

Something in his tone — flat, almost clinical, like he was stating a fact rather than offering comfort — made it land harder than if he'd said something kinder. Like he understood, better than most people around her seemed to, exactly what she was up against.

She smiled wider than she had in weeks. "네, 선배님." This time, there was something like hope in it.

"감사합니다, 선배님." She bowed the full ninety degrees, the kind reserved for people who'd just done something you didn't know how to properly thank them for.

By the time she straightened up, he was already gone, the door clicking shut behind him with a quiet, final sound.

For several seconds she simply stood there.

The room felt strangely quiet.

"...Y/N?"

She turned.

The choreographer had come back.

"...Ready?"

She looked toward the door James had disappeared through.

Then back at the mirror.

"...Yes."

And for the first time since the company announced the debut date—

She believed it.

Around seven he disappeared and came back with two bottles from the vending machine — a sports drink for himself, milk tea for her. He set it down beside her without a word.

She looked at it, then at him. "You're doing this on purpose."

"The tea's the point?"

"You've done it twice now."

"You like it."

"That's not—" She stopped, because she wasn't entirely sure what the actual objection was. That he remembered. That the first time could have been an accident and this one very much wasn't. He waited, unbothered, while she worked through it, and in the end all she managed was, "...Thanks."

"You said it."

"Don't make me regret it."

He smiled — barely, the kind that lived mostly in the corners of his eyes — and turned the music back on.

By Thursday the instructors had stopped pretending they weren't using the two of them as a demonstration. "Again," one of them called to the younger class, then pointed at Tomoya and, a beat later, at her. "Show them."

"We're in the middle of practice," she said.

"You've been in the middle of practice for six years."

Neither of them moved until he sighed first, which she resented, because it meant she had to follow him or look like the difficult one. The younger dancers straightened the moment they crossed the floor — she caught one of them whisper those are the scary seniors to another, who giggled, who got elbowed for it.

"We're terrifying," she murmured to him.

"I've heard."

"They're staring at you."

"They're staring at you. You look like you might correct someone."

"I might."

The music started. Eight counts, sixteen, the partnering section where the choreography didn't actually require touching — just sharing space, crossing paths, trading positions without collision. She moved half a step left because she already knew how far he'd travel on the turn. He delayed an entrance by less than a beat because he'd caught her weight shift before she'd finished making it. Neither of them looked at the other to confirm it. They didn't need to.

The instructor let the music run out, then nodded once. "Good." A pause. "Do you know why that worked?"

Neither answered.

"You trust each other. You don't even think about it anymore."

She opened her mouth to say something and found nothing came. Tomoya looked faintly uncomfortable, which was the closest thing to agreement he was going to offer out loud. The instructor dismissed the class, and one small girl walked past clutching her water bottle, looked up at the two of them, and said, entirely to herself, "I want someone who knows me like that," before wandering off before either of them could react.

Back in Studio B neither spoke for almost five minutes. She was tying her shoe. He was pretending to reorganize a bag that didn't need it.

"That was weird," she finally said.

"It was."

"I don't like children."

"They like you."

"They're wrong."

He laughed — quiet, real — and she threw a towel at him without looking. He caught it without looking either.

"Show-off."

"I've practiced."

"At catching towels?"

"At you throwing things."

For a moment — just one — everything felt exactly the way it always had. And that, somehow, hurt more than if it had felt different.

Friday arrived quietly, which was almost disappointing. She'd expected the universe to signal something — rain, a delayed train, anything that acknowledged the week had reached the part where ordinary things should start behaving differently. Instead the cherry blossoms outside the station had begun opening, and people stood underneath them taking photos, and two elementary school boys argued over whose turn it was to be goalkeeper, and the city continued existing with its usual complete confidence. She wondered whether cities ever noticed when someone left. Probably not.

She spent the afternoon at the academy anyway, half out of habit and half because staying home felt worse. The younger classes were rehearsing for the spring showcase, and she sat at the back of the observation bench watching eight-year-olds miss their counts and get told, kindly, to try again. It should have been soothing. It wasn't, particularly. She kept catching herself listening for a second set of footsteps in the hallway — the specific rhythm of someone arriving exactly ten minutes after she did — and every time the hallway stayed just a hallway, something in her chest dropped half an inch. She told herself this was ordinary. She wasn't especially convinced.

Saturday, her phone buzzed at one-thirteen. Are you free.

For what.

The dots appeared and disappeared twice before he finally sent: packing.

Why am I helping you pack.

Because you'll complain if I forget something.

She stared at that for a second too long before typing, ...That's manipulative, and getting back a single yes that she hated because it worked anyway.

His house smelled faintly of cardboard. Boxes sat stacked in the hallway, and his mother greeted her warmly before disappearing into the kitchen and leaving them alone with an open suitcase. Dance clothes, practice shoes, a stack of neatly folded T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, and four hoodies.

"You're taking four hoodies."

"So?"

"You're moving to another country. They sell hoodies there."

"I like these ones," he said, as though that settled something.

"That's terrible reasoning."

"It worked. I packed them."

She sighed dramatically and declared herself surrounded by incompetence, and he pointed out — correctly, infuriatingly — that she'd come voluntarily. Packing took less than an hour, mostly because it turned out he'd already finished before she arrived; she only discovered this once she caught herself refolding his charger cables, which had been, in her opinion, folded wrong.

"You didn't need help," she said. "You lied."

"I omitted information. I knew you'd reorganize it."

"You planned this."

"I did," he said, entirely without shame, and she shoved his shoulder hard enough to rock him sideways. He called it violence. She called it deserved.

That was when she noticed the passport on the table — dark blue, a boarding pass tucked halfway inside, Monday, 9:40 a.m. printed along the edge in a font too small to be that final. Her eyes lingered a fraction too long. He noticed her noticing, and without saying anything, turned it face-down, as if covering it might postpone what it said. She appreciated the gesture more than she meant to.

They didn't meet on Sunday. Not because they couldn't — there just wasn't anything left to do. She spent most of the afternoon pretending to study, and at five she opened their chat and scrolled all the way up without meaning to: October, the footwork argument, voice notes, corrections, a photo of a bruised knee, a blurry shot of Studio B's broken vending machine, a message from months ago that just said your turn is still late, and her own reply, shut up. She smiled at her phone and locked it.

He texted first that evening. Don't forget practice tomorrow.

You're leaving tomorrow.

Yes.

And you're reminding me about practice?

Obviously.

Idiot, she sent, and got back, I know, which was somehow the correct answer.

Monday arrived too bright for how she felt about it. Studio B stayed mostly empty of dancing — neither of them had much left in them, and the instructors seemed to understand without needing it explained. People drifted in through the evening: friends, teachers, younger students, someone with snacks, someone else with a card. Everyone talked around the departure instead of about it — exam schedules, the showcase, a joke about not forgetting Japanese convenience stores once he was famous, an instruction to call his mother and eat vegetables. Advice piled up like coats by the door. Tomoya accepted all of it with the same small nod.

She mostly watched from the corner. Not because she felt left out — because everyone else was saying goodbye to someone they knew, and she was saying goodbye to someone whose footsteps she could recognize in a hallway without looking up, and the difference felt too large to explain to anyone in the room.

By half past eight the academy had emptied, and the last instructor clapped Tomoya on the shoulder. "Don't waste the opportunity."

"I won't."

"We'll expect to see you on television."

"I'll try."

"No," the instructor said, smiling. "We expect."

"...Okay."

Outside, the evening had turned cold again, and they walked home slowly, neither one in a hurry to reach the intersection where they always split. The city glowed familiarly around them — restaurant signs, traffic lights, a convenience store humming under fluorescent light — and everything looked, unbearably, exactly the way it always had.

At the crossing they stopped. Left for him, right for her, the same as six years of Tuesdays and Thursdays before this one.

"I'll see you tomorrow," he said.

"Yeah. Don't oversleep."

"I set three alarms."

"Set four."

She almost smiled and then didn't. He lifted a hand; she lifted hers back; he turned left and she turned right, and neither of them looked back — until exactly twelve steps later, when they both did, at precisely the same moment, and caught each other in the act.

"You looked," he called across the intersection.

"So did you."

"You looked first."

"That's circumstantial."

He laughed. She laughed too, and for one small ridiculous second the heaviness of the whole week lifted. Then the light changed, cars rolled between them, and by the time the road cleared he was already halfway down his street. She watched until he disappeared before she let herself go home.

She barely slept. At 6:18 a.m. her phone buzzed — awake? — and she answered yes immediately, only for him to text back liar a minute later.

How do you know?

You type differently when you've just woken up.

She rolled her eyes at the ceiling and told him he was insufferable, and got the expected I know in return, and smiled despite herself as dawn spread slowly over Fukuoka outside her window. In less than three hours he would leave, and for the first time in six years, Tuesday would belong to only one of them.

The airport was louder than she expected — not emotionally, just literally. Announcements every few minutes, suitcases rattling over polished floors, a child complaining loudly about being hungry, coffee machines hissing somewhere behind the check-in counters. It felt impossible that other people could be having entirely ordinary mornings inside the same building.

She spotted him before he saw her. His parents stood beside him with two suitcases and a backpack, his passport tucked under one arm, and he looked — infuriatingly — exactly the same. Same grey hoodie he'd worn a hundred times. Headphones around his neck. Hair slightly messy like he'd run a hand through it in the car. Nothing about him looked like someone leaving home, which felt like a small betrayal of the occasion.

He turned and found her immediately, lifted one hand. She lifted hers back. Neither of them smiled yet.

His mother reached her first and hugged her, softly, and said, "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For being with him." When she frowned, unsure what she'd actually done, his mother just smiled the quiet way adults smile when they know something the kids haven't worked out yet. "I think you did."

Someone called his father to the counter, and the adults drifted off without discussing it, giving the two of them space so naturally it looked almost accidental. They stood side by side at the huge windows, watching planes taxi under a grey morning sky, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.

"You overslept," he said finally.

"I was awake. I was acting."

"You weren't convincing."

"You believed me."

"No," he said, then, after a beat, "...you're lying."

"About what."

"That you don't hate me."

She looked down at her shoes. "...I don't." An overhead announcement rolled through Japanese, then English, then Korean, and the word Seoul drifted past them both like something neither had agreed to acknowledge yet.

"You packed four hoodies," she said, because it was easier than the alternative.

"I did."

"You've learned nothing."

"I've learned Korean. I know seven phrases now."

"Congratulations. Can you find a bathroom yet?"

"That's phrase four," he said, and she laughed despite herself, and for one impossible minute they sounded exactly like themselves.

Passengers travelling to Seoul... His name wasn't called yet. It didn't matter — the announcement still felt aimed at them personally. His father glanced over: not yet, but soon. Tomoya shifted his backpack higher on one shoulder.

"I'll call. Probably late — I don't know the schedule yet."

"I know."

"You keep saying that."

"Because I do." The silence that followed sat differently than the ones before it. He rubbed the back of his neck — a habit she'd watched for six years, usually meaning he was hunting for the right words — and finally said, "I'm glad it was you."

"What was?"

"The calls. The messages. Studio B." He shrugged once, frowning slightly, like language itself had let him down. "If it hadn't been you, I don't think—" The sentence dissolved before it reached anywhere. She understood it anyway.

Final boarding would start soon. His parents picked up the larger cases; his father looked between the two of them and said only, "I'll meet you inside," before walking off far enough to leave them alone.

She looked at his face properly then, trying, absurdly, to memorize it — the faint scar near his eyebrow from the time they were eleven and he'd walked into a barre because he was watching choreography instead of where he was going, the piece of fringe that never sat where it was supposed to, the shadows under his eyes from a month of preparation. Things she'd seen a hundred times that suddenly felt fragile.

"I bought you something." He pulled a small notebook from his backpack — plain, black cover, nothing special — and held it out.

"What is this."

"You always steal paper from mine."

"...That's true."

"Now you have your own."

She turned it over, opened the first page, and found, in his small handwriting, tucked into the top corner: Your turns are still late. The laugh that came out of her was half already crying.

"You're unbelievable."

"I know."

"I hate you."

"I know."

"...Liar," she added, and he said, quieter, "...maybe."

The final boarding call sounded again. He looked toward the gate, then back at her. "I should go."

She nodded and didn't move. Neither did he, for a few more seconds, while people rolled suitcases around them and someone muttered an apology for brushing past that neither of them registered. Then she stepped forward — not far, just far enough — and pressed a flat hand against the center of his chest, exactly where she'd hit him outside her house weeks before. Not a slap this time. Just there, against the steady, too-fast beat under his hoodie.

He looked down at her hand, then back at her face, and said, very quietly, "Hey."

That was what undid her. She closed the last few inches and wrapped both arms around him, hard, like momentum alone might be enough to keep him from leaving. For half a second he froze — neither of them had ever done this before — and then his arms came around her, one across her shoulders, one at her waist, firm and certain in a way that had nothing hesitant left in it. Her forehead found the space under his chin. His hoodie smelled like laundry detergent and the studio, and she was already missing the smell before she'd even let go of him.

He began to sway, almost without meaning to — the small side-to-side rhythm dancers fall into when there's no music left to follow, the kind of thing six years of adjusting spacing quietly teaches two bodies without either of them noticing. She hadn't known they fit like this. Neither had he. Somehow that made it worse.

A tear slipped free before she could stop it, then another, warm against his shoulder. She pressed her face down harder, embarrassed, and he only held on tighter.

"It's okay," he murmured into her hair.

"No, it isn't."

"I know."

She could hear his heartbeat through the fabric between them — fast, steady, alive — and wondered if she'd remember exactly how it sounded. She probably would.

"I don't know what Tuesdays look like now," she admitted.

"They'll probably still look like Tuesdays."

"You know what I mean."

"...Yeah."

"I've seen you every Tuesday and Thursday since we were ten. I don't know how not to."

He didn't answer right away. Studio B had always operated on one certainty — that she would eventually walk through the door, three minutes late, sometimes irritated, sometimes holding out a drink she'd insist wasn't for him before handing it over anyway. He'd never really imagined the room without her in it. Now he had to imagine an entire country without her, and it felt, distantly, like choreography missing a count.

"You'll still tell me when I'm wrong," he said instead.

"Constantly."

"I know."

"I'll get worse without you correcting me."

"You'll deserve it."

She laughed, wet and unconvincing. "You're making this very difficult."

"I wasn't trying to."

"I know." Another tear went, and she hated crying in general and hated it in front of him specifically — he'd never once seen her cry, not through broken wrists or lost competitions or bad exam results. Apparently airports didn't count toward her usual discipline.

"I'll miss you," she said, so quietly she wasn't sure it had actually left her mouth.

"I'll miss you too." No hesitation. No embarrassment. Just the plain, uncomplicated kind of truth neither of them wasted often.

A polite cough. His father, a respectful distance off. "We have to go." Not now, not immediately — just, soon. Tomoya nodded once and didn't let go, and neither did she, until she finally loosened her grip, not because she wanted to but because she'd run out of reasons to keep pretending time had stopped moving.

He looked down at her — her eyes red, a damp patch on his shoulder where she'd been crying.

"Sorry," she said, glancing at it.

"It's washable," he said, and she laughed for real this time, short and wet and disbelieving, and called him an idiot, and he agreed. She reached up automatically and straightened the front of his hoodie, brushed invisible dust off one shoulder, adjusted the twisted strap of his backpack — small practical things she'd done a thousand times after practice without thinking. Today she thought about every one of them, and when there was nothing left to fix, she hated that most of all.

He opened his arms again, questioning, and this time she didn't hesitate. The second hug was shorter and no less important — quieter, like punctuation instead of a sentence. When they stepped apart she missed the warmth immediately.

He picked up his backpack. "Practice," he said.

"What?"

"Don't stop."

She rolled her eyes through the last of the tears. "As if I'd let you get ahead."

"There you are," he said, and she understood — he hadn't wanted to leave her crying, he'd wanted to leave her arguing, which felt, in its own strange way, kinder.

"If you start slacking because nobody's correcting you, I will fly to Korea and embarrass you in front of everyone. I mean it."

"I know," he said, and then, before she could change her mind about letting him, he turned and walked toward security.

She watched him reach the line, remove his headphones and watch, disappear behind the scanner, and reassemble himself on the other side. He looked up, found her across the crowd, raised one hand. She raised hers back. He smiled — small, almost invisible, the kind that mostly lived in his eyes — and then rounded the corner and was gone.

She stood there long after, while the airport carried on exactly as before: announcements, footsteps, coffee, suitcases rolling past. The world had absorbed his departure with remarkable efficiency. She hadn't.

That evening, without really deciding to, she went to Studio B. The lights were off. She let herself in and stood in the middle of the room, and the silence was different from any silence she'd known there before — no music leaking from the room next door, no repeated counts, no shoes squeaking against the floor. She looked toward the corner where his bag always used to sit. It looked emptier than a corner should be able to look. She realized, with more clarity than she wanted, that rooms remember people the way habits do — not literally, but her eyes would probably keep expecting to find him there for a while yet.

She plugged her phone into the stereo, pressed play, and danced alone.

Three nights later, at 11:47 p.m., her phone lit up. Tomoya Calling. She picked up before the second ring.

"...Hi."

A pause. Then: "Everything's huge."

"What is?"

"Everything."

"The buildings?"

"No."

"The people?"

"No. Just — everything," he said, and she laughed despite herself and told him he'd become incredibly descriptive.

"I'm tired," he admitted. "Had Korean lessons."

"How's that going?"

"Difficult. I know seven phrases now."

"Still just the bathroom one you're proud of?"

"I can introduce myself too," he said, with something close to dignity, and she told him she was impressed, and meant it a little.

"How's training?"

A longer silence this time. "Hard. I thought I worked hard before. I didn't."

"You do," she said.

"I don't."

"You do," she said again, and he made a small sound that was almost a laugh. "You sound like you."

"I know."

"Show me the choreography."

"It's midnight. I'm in the dorm."

"So?"

He sighed the long-suffering sigh she recognized from six years of getting her way, and a moment later the picture on her screen jolted and steadied as he propped the phone against something and stepped back to dance — just a little, just enough to show her. Even through the shaky camera she could see it: sharper, cleaner, something in the way he carried himself that hadn't been there in September.

"There," he said, looking expectantly at the screen.

She tilted her head. "Your left shoulder lifts before the turn."

"It does not."

"It does."

"...I knew calling you was a mistake," he said, and she told him no, he hadn't, and he admitted, after a pause, that he hadn't.

The conversation drifted after that — convenience stores, dorm food, a trainee who snored, an instructor who terrified everyone by speaking too quietly to be interrupted. She told him about Studio B, about the showcase coming up, about the instructor who'd accidentally started counting in Korean and confused half the beginner class. He asked, at one point, whether anyone had taken his usual spot by the mirror, and she said no, not yet, and didn't tell him that she'd caught herself glaring at a first-year who'd wandered too close to that corner of the room, as though the space itself still belonged to someone. He told her about a choreographer who made the trainees run a routine forty times before he'd even comment on it, and about how his roommate talked in his sleep in a dialect nobody else in the dorm could place. Small things. None of it mattered particularly, and all of it did, in the way that ordinary details always end up mattering more once the person telling them is far enough away that you have to ask instead of simply noticing for yourself. Neither of them noticed an hour pass, and then another, until she yawned loudly enough that he heard it down the line.

"You should sleep."

"You first."

"I'm not tired."

"Liar."

"...Maybe," he admitted, and the silence that followed was comfortable in the exact way six years had built it to be — the kind that no longer needed filling.

Before she let him hang up, she said, "Your eight count's still late."

He laughed. "It isn't."

"It is."

"Goodnight," he said, instead of arguing further, which she took as a kind of concession.

"Goodnight."

The call ended, and her room went quiet again. She set the phone on the nightstand and lay there a while, thinking about how Korea was hundreds of kilometers away and Studio B would still be waiting on Thursday, how for the first time in six years only one set of footsteps would cross that floor. Tomorrow would probably hurt. The day after probably would too.

But at 11:47 p.m., over an argument about a shoulder and a complaint about dorm food, the distance had turned into something she could actually measure — not in kilometers, but in phone calls, in corrections, in Tuesdays that no longer happened together and conversations that somehow still did.

"No."

"Then why are you talking to me. We don't do this."

"I have a question."

"Is it about the project."

"No."

"Is it about my test score, because if this is you gloating about the five marks again I will end you."

"It's not about your test score."

Ian closed her locker and turned to face him fully, arms crossed, the expression of someone bracing for either a prank or a catastrophe. "Okay. Go."

He had rehearsed this. Not the words exactly, but the shape of it. Hypothetical. Detached. Clinical, the way he approached everything else.

"Hypothetically," he said, "if someone's brain stopped functioning correctly around a specific person — not in a medical sense, more of a — processing interruption — what would that indicate."

Ian stared at him.

"What."

"It's a hypothetical."

"Seonghyeon."

"It's for a — psychology thing. For a project."

"You don't take psychology."

"It's an elective."

"You don't take electives. You take AP everything and then complain there's no time left for electives." Ian's expression was shifting, slow and dangerous, into something he recognized immediately and hated. "Whose brain."

"Nobody's. It's hypothetical."

"Whose brain, Seonghyeon."

"I told you—"

"Oh my god."

"It's not—"

"OH MY GOD."

A passing freshman flinched. Seonghyeon considered, briefly, walking directly into traffic.

"Keep your voice down."

"You came to ME." Ian's voice had not gone down. If anything it had found a second, more delighted register. "You, Eom Seonghyeon, who has called me — direct quote — 'aggressively unserious' to my actual face, came to ME for advice about a girl."

"I did not say there was a girl."

"Your face says there's a girl. Your entire — " she gestured vaguely at all of him, "—posture says there's a girl. You're standing like someone's about to grade you."

"I am not—"

"Is it Y/N."

"No."

"It's Y/N."

"I didn't say a name."

"You didn't have to. You came up to me at her locker, near her friend group, at the one time of day I'm reliably alone, and asked me — using actual scientific vocabulary, unbelievable — why your brain stops when you're around a specific unnamed person." Ian was grinning now, fully, the kind of grin that meant several years of payback were about to be collected in one conversation. "Seonghyeon. Oppa. My friend. My academic nemesis. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me."

"If you tell her—"

"Tell her what? There's nothing to tell. You said hypothetically."

"Ian."

"I'm going to think about this every single day for the rest of my life."

"Ian."

"I might frame it. I might get it tattooed."

He considered his options. He had several. None of them were good. He went with the only one that had ever reliably worked on anyone in his immediate circle.

"I'll have Keonho propose to you."

Ian stopped smiling.

"…What."

"In front of everyone. Cafeteria. Full production. He's done it before, he'll do it again, he thinks it's funny." Which was true. Keonho had once fake-proposed to a vending machine for a bet and meant it more sincerely than most people meant their actual proposals. "You know what happens to people he does that to."

Ian's face went through several stages of horror in rapid succession. She had, in fact, watched what happened to people Keonho fake-proposed to. There had been a girl in tenth grade who still couldn't walk past the east stairwell without an escort. There had been an Instagram account dedicated entirely to cataloguing the incident. There had been actual, real, documented violence.

"You wouldn't."

"I would."

"You're bluffing."

"Try me."

A long silence. Ian's jaw worked. Somewhere down the hall a bell rang for a class neither of them moved toward.

"Fine," she said, with the air of someone surrendering a war, not a battle. "Fine. I won't say anything. But I'm holding onto this forever, and you owe me, and someday I will collect."

"Acceptable."

"You're the worst."

"Noted."

Ian sighed, long and put-upon, and leaned back against the lockers like the conversation had personally exhausted her.

"Okay. Fine. You want actual advice or you want me to just stand here and watch you suffer, because honestly either works for me."

"Advice."

"This is going to cost you emotionally."

"I'm aware."

Ian studied him for a second, the teasing dropping out of her face for the first time since he'd started talking, replaced by something more careful. More real. It was, briefly, unsettling.

"Y/N doesn't really care about flowers. Or grand stuff. She'd probably find it embarrassing, actually, all the loud public stuff people do." Ian shrugged. "What she cares about is — small things. Stupid things, almost. Whether someone actually pays attention."

"Pays attention to what."

"Everything. Anything." Ian counted it off like she'd thought about this before, which, knowing her, she probably had, idly, the way she thought about most things — half-distracted and somehow still arriving at the right answer. "Like — her favorite food. Not the obvious one. The one she actually orders when nobody's watching and she thinks no one's keeping track. Whether someone remembers that. Whether someone walks her to school without her having to ask, or waits for her after class instead of just leaving because technically he could. Whether someone notices when she's having a bad day before she says anything."

He said nothing.

"She's not into being chased," Ian continued. "She's into being known. There's a difference. Anyone can chase someone. It takes way less effort than people think. But noticing — actually noticing, every day, the boring stuff, the stuff that doesn't get you anything — that's rare. That's what gets her."

Seonghyeon turned this over slowly, methodically, the way he turned over everything.

"That's it?"

"That's it. It's not complicated. It's just—" Ian shrugged again. "Most people don't bother. It takes effort to remember someone's favorite snack is the weird seaweed chips instead of the regular ones. It takes effort to walk somewhere you don't need to walk just because someone else is walking there too. Most people would rather buy flowers. Flowers are easier."

"I don't buy flowers."

"I know. That's literally what I'm telling you. You're already failing in the easy direction, might as well succeed in the hard one."

He didn't have a response to that.

Ian pushed off the lockers, hitched her bag up her shoulder, the conversation apparently concluded as far as she was concerned. "Anyway. Good talk. I'm never going to stop thinking about this, by the way."

"You said you'd let it go."

"I said I wouldn't tell her. I never said anything about letting it go." She was already walking backward down the hall, grinning again, fully recovered. "See you at lunch, Seonghyeonie. Try not to short-circuit."

He watched her go.

⸻

He didn't think about the conversation again.

He told himself this several times over the next two days.

With decreasing conviction.

With, by Wednesday night, essentially zero conviction.

By Thursday morning he had developed what he chose to think of as a plan and what an outside observer would have called a complete personality collapse executed over the course of forty-eight hours.

The plan was this: leave four minutes earlier than usual.

That was the whole plan.

"Traffic," he told his reflection.

His reflection did not believe him either.

He did not examine, closely, why his route — which had been efficient and direct and entirely indifferent to Y/N's street for the better part of two years — now bent itself three houses out of the way to walk directly past her front gate.

He arrived at 7:42.

He stood there.

At 7:44 he checked his phone for something to do with his hands.

At 7:45 he checked it again, despite there being nothing new to check.

At 7:46 the front door banged open and Y/N appeared mid-crisis, one shoe on, the other in her hand, bag sliding off her shoulder, hair half-dry and clearly losing a battle against both gravity and time.

She did not see him immediately.

She was too busy yelling back into the house.

"I CAN'T FIND MY OTHER SOCK—"

A muffled response from somewhere inside.

She hopped, jammed the second shoe on, lost her balance, caught herself on the gate, and looked up.

Directly at him.

She froze.

He froze.

"…Why are you here."

"I live here."

"You live three houses down."

"This is the route."

"This has never been the route."

"It's a route."

"It is not your route." She squinted at him like he was a word problem that didn't add up. "You don't even walk past here. You cut through the lot by the convenience store. You've cut through the lot by the convenience store every single day since the seventh grade."

He had not anticipated her having the route memorized.

He filed this away too, immediately, against his will, somewhere in the rapidly overcrowding part of his brain currently labeled things I know about Y/N that I cannot explain knowing.

"I felt like a change."

"You felt like a change."

"Yes."

"You. Eom Seonghyeon. Felt like a change. To your walking route. The same walking route you've used for six years."

"People change."

"You alphabetize your snacks."

"That's organization."

"You once recalculated the bus schedule because it was four minutes off the printed timetable and submitted a complaint."

"It was incorrect information being publicly distributed."

"You felt like a change," Y/N repeated, flatly, the way someone repeats evidence back to a suspect right before an interrogation really gets going.

"Are you walking or not."

"I'm deeply suspicious is what I am."

"Walk faster, you're going to be late."

"Don't redirect me—"

"You're already late."

"I'm ALWAYS late, that's not new informa—" She checked her phone, swore under her breath, and abandoned the entire line of questioning in favor of speed-walking down the sidewalk while still mid-sentence about something else entirely.

He matched her pace.

Without thinking about it.

Without deciding to.

His legs simply did it, the way his body had apparently started making unilateral decisions without consulting the rest of him.

"—and THEN," she was saying, with the specific outrage of someone building toward a thesis, "my mother has the AUDACITY to tell me it wasn't even the good cereal, like I don't know my own cereal, I have been eating that cereal since I was FOUR—"

"Mm."

"Don't 'mm' me, this is a crisis."

"It's cereal."

"It's PRINCIPLE."

"You're being loud."

"I'm being CORRECT."

A woman walking a dog gave them a wide berth. Y/N did not notice. Y/N was still talking, hands moving now, fully gesturing through what appeared to be a closing argument regarding cereal ownership rights, and somewhere underneath the part of his brain tracking midterms and group projects and the seventeen other things he should have been thinking about, a much quieter part of his brain was doing something else entirely.

Cataloguing.

Cereal: the kind with the cartoon bear. Specifically not the one with the toucan, which she apparently considered a personal insult.

Shoelace: fraying. Left shoe. Would need replacing within the week, by his estimate.

The way she said "principle" like it was a complete legal defense.

He did not say any of this out loud.

"You're not listening," she accused.

"I am listening."

"What did I just say."

"Cereal. Toucan. Injustice."

She blinked. "…Okay, fine, you were listening."

"I'm always listening."

"You're never listening, you usually just say 'mm' until I stop talking."

"I'm listening today."

She gave him a look — the suspicious one again, narrower this time, like she was recalibrating an instrument that had given an unexpected reading. He kept his face very carefully blank, the expression he used for tests and disappointing relatives and situations requiring maximum plausible deniability.

It apparently worked, because she shrugged and kept walking, already moving on to the shoelace, then the alarm clock that hadn't gone off, then a tangent about Kya's older brother's terrible taste in shoes that had nothing to do with anything but that he listened to regardless, filing it all away with the same compulsive precision he applied to everything else in his life that actually mattered.

By the convenience store — the one she apparently frequented, the one with the seaweed chips, the spicy kind, not the original, currently out of stock for the third week running according to the rant she launched into completely unprompted — he had compiled a list longer than he was comfortable admitting to.

He said none of it.

He just kept walking.

At the school gates she peeled off toward her building with a half-wave, already mid-sentence to Ian, who had appeared from nowhere with the specific energy of someone who had been waiting.

"Seonghyeonie!" Ian called, far too brightly, far too pleased with herself. "Nice walk?"

"Don't."

"I didn't say anything."

"You said plenty."

"I said two words."

"You said them with your whole chest."

Y/N looked between them, suspicious for an entirely new reason now. "What is happening."

"Nothing," they said, simultaneously, in the exact wrong tone for nothing to be happening.

Y/N's eyes narrowed further. "You two are being weird at each other."

"We're always weird at each other," Ian said smoothly, already steering Y/N away by the elbow. "It's our whole dynamic. Academic rivalry. Mutual disrespect. Very normal."

"It's deeply unhinged is what it is," Y/N muttered, allowing herself to be steered, throwing one last suspicious glance back over her shoulder before disappearing into the crowd.

Ian did not look back at him until Y/N was fully out of earshot.

Then she turned, slow, grinning, the grin of someone who had just watched a controlled experiment succeed beyond their wildest expectations.

"So," she said.

"Don't."

"You took the long route."

"It's not the long route."

"It is objectively the long route. I have seen you do the math on shorter routes. You once explained to me, unprompted, the most time-efficient way to walk to the bus stop, complete with a diagram."

"That was for a different purpose."

"What was today's purpose?"

"Walking."

"Just walking."

"Yes."

"To her house."

"To school."

"Via her house."

"It's a public sidewalk."

Ian put a hand over her heart like she'd been wounded. "Seonghyeon. My academic nemesis. My friend. I am so proud of you I might cry."

"Don't cry."

"I might. This is a milestone."

"Go to class."

"You walked her to school."

"I walked in a direction that happened to overlap with her walking to school."

"That's the same thing."

"It's not."

"It's the exact same thing, you're just describing it like a legal document because you're embarrassed."

"I am not embarrassed."

"Your ears are red."

He had not, in fact, been aware that his ears were doing anything. He resisted the overwhelming urge to check.

"It's cold."

"It's March. It's sixty-eight degrees."

"I run cold."

"You do not run cold, I've seen you in PE class"

"Class," he said. "Now. Both of us."

"Fine." Ian was still grinning, infuriatingly, walking backward toward her own building with absolutely no intention of letting this go, ever, possibly for the rest of both their lives. "But for the record? Seaweed chips. Spicy. The store two blocks down restocks on Fridays at four."

He stopped walking.

"How do you know that."

"I pay attention too," Ian called back, already too far away to properly threaten. "I'm just better at admitting it."

⸻

He spent the rest of the day failing to focus on anything that wasn't her.

Midterm review: attempted, abandoned after eleven minutes.

Group project outline: reread the same paragraph four times, retained none of it.

Lunch: he sat with Keonho and Loius (a year younger but towered over both the boys easily), nodded at appropriate intervals during a story involving a raccoon, a vending machine, and what Loius swore was a genuine sighting of a ghost, and absorbed approximately none of it, because Y/N was three tables over laughing at something Kya had said, head tipped back, completely unaware that he had stopped midsentence to watch her do it.

"—and then the vending machine just ATE my money, hyung, like it personally wanted to ruin my—are you even listening—"

"Mm."

"You're not listening."

"I'm listening."

"What did I just say."

"Vending machine. Ghost. Personal vendetta."

Loius squinted at him, the exact same look Y/N had given him an hour earlier, and Seonghyeon had the brief, uncomfortable realization that he was apparently developing a tell, and that everyone around him was cataloguing it faster than he could manage to hide it.

By the final bell, he had given up pretending the day had gone normally.

He packed his bag.

He told himself he was leaving.

He found himself, four minutes later, standing by the front gate, bag over one shoulder, doing absolutely nothing except existing in a location with excellent sightlines to the main doors.

He checked his phone.

Nothing new.

He checked it again anyway.

A group of girls walked past, slowed, whispered, sped up again. He didn't notice. He was watching the doors.

Keonho found him first.

"Why are you just standing here."

"Waiting for someone."

"Who."

"Nobody."

"You said someone."

"I misspoke."

Keonho looked at him for a long moment, then at the doors, then back at him, the gears of his very straightforward brain turning very slowly toward a conclusion that was, for once, entirely correct.

"You're waiting for Y/N."

"I'm waiting for the bus."

"You don't take the bus."

"I felt like a change."

Keonho's face did something complicated.

"Go away, Keonho."

"If you forget me for a girl just remember I was your first girlfriend hyung." He said in a fake crying voice earning a kick to his kneecaps from Seonghyeon.

He did not look up

He kept his eyes on the door.

He saw her before she saw him — Kya beside her, mid-conversation, bag slung over one shoulder, the same fraying shoelace from that morning still threatening to give out entirely. She spotted him at the gate and stopped walking for half a second, surprised, before catching herself and continuing forward with her usual aggressive nonchalance.

"You're still here."

"I'm waiting for the bus."

"You don't take the bus."

"Everyone keeps saying that like it's relevant."

"It IS relevant, you live a four minute walk away, why would you ever need a—" She stopped. Studied him. The suspicious look again, sharper this time, like she was finally putting something together and didn't entirely trust the math. "You walked me to school this morning. And now you're at the gate. After school. Doing nothing. Waiting."

"For the bus."

"You don't take the bus."

"I might today."

"You're being insane."

"I'm being efficient."

"You are being the opposite of efficient, this is the least efficient version of you I have ever witnessed, and I watched you recalculate a bus schedule for fun—"

"Are you walking home or not."

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again, clearly preparing another round of interrogation, then seemed to think better of it, shaking her head like she'd decided arguing further wasn't worth the energy.

"Fine. Whatever. Weirdo."

She fell into step beside him.

He matched her pace without thinking about it.

Again.

He was going to have to do something about that eventually.

Just not today.

He had forty-seven unread messages in the group chat. Martin had sent the project outline three times. Keonho had sent a voice note that was almost certainly just him narrating his own lunch. James had reacted to something with a thumbs down.

He read none of it.

He put the phone down and stared at the ceiling and his brain ran for exactly forty seconds before going quiet again.

He found this deeply irritating.

She came at noon.

He heard her before he saw her — the particular cadence of her footsteps on the stairs, the knock that wasn't really a question.

"You're awake."

"Observant."

She let herself in anyway. Sat in the chair by the window and started scrolling through her phone like she had nowhere better to be, which he was fairly certain was not true.

"You need to eat."

"I ate."

"What did you eat."

"Things."

"Name one thing."

He hadn't eaten anything.

She gave him a look that said she knew that, pulled something from her bag, set it on his nightstand, and went back to her phone.

Banana milk.

He looked at it.

Looked at her.

She wasn't looking at him.

His brain, which had been running at a low irritating hum since he'd sat up that morning, went completely quiet.

He noticed this the way he noticed everything — immediately, precisely, and without knowing what to do with it. The hum was just gone. The list. The forty-seven messages. Martin's outline and the English essay and the laundry and all the other things stacked neatly in the back of his skull waiting to be processed.

Gone.

There was just the room. The window. The particular way the afternoon light came through at this angle and sat in her hair without her seeming to notice.

He drank the banana milk.

She didn't say anything about it.

He didn't say anything about it either.

When she left twenty minutes later the hum came back immediately, picking up exactly where it had stopped, and he sat with his empty banana milk and the return of his own brain and felt, obscurely, like something had been taken from him.

He wrote it off as leftover fever.

It was the only reasonable explanation.

He went back to school on Thursday.

Everything was normal.

His brain was back at full capacity by first period. The list was running. He had mentally reorganized his study schedule twice and composed a reply to Martin's outline in his head before second period even started.

Normal. Everything was fine.

Then lunch arrived and the cafeteria filled and he was sitting with Juhoon and Martin going over the project outline when she appeared at the edge of his vision.

Y/N.

Moving through the cafeteria with the particular efficiency of someone on a mission, Ian trailing behind her saying something she was clearly ignoring. She cut through two groups of underclassmen without breaking stride, arrived at his table, and set something down in front of him without preamble.

Banana milk.

Again.

"You look pale," she said. Not sitting down. Just standing there with her arms crossed, looking at him the way she looked at homework she found disappointing. "Are you eating properly?"

"Yes."

"Name one thing you've eaten today."

"Y/N."

"One thing."

"I had breakfast."

"What did you have."

"Food."

She stared at him.

He stared back.

"Eat the banana milk," she said finally. "And something with actual nutritional value at some point today. Not chips. Not whatever Keonho convinces you to get from the vending machine. Real food."

"I'm aware of how nutrition works."

"Debatable." She glanced at Martin. "Make sure he eats."

"On it," Martin said, without looking up from the outline.

Traitor.

She gave Seonghyeon one last look — the specific one that meant she was holding him personally responsible for whatever happened next — and turned to leave.

She didn't leave.

Ian had apparently said something funny, because Y/N stopped two steps away and turned back with a laugh still on her face, half-distracted, reaching over to steal a chip from Juhoon's tray while she finished listening. Just standing there. Not looking at him. Existing in the general vicinity of his lunch table while the cafeteria ran its full volume around them.

His brain stopped.

Seonghyeon put down his pen.

The cafeteria was loud. It was always loud — four hundred students, metal chairs scraping, overlapping conversations, someone three tables over having a disagreement about something that kept escalating. Martin was saying something about the project deadline. Juhoon was defending his chips. The fluorescent lights were doing what fluorescent lights always did.

He heard none of it.

There was just her. Laughing at something Ian said. Completely unaware of him. Taking up approximately zero percent of his immediate space and somehow accounting for a hundred percent of his attention.

His brain, which had been running perfectly fine all morning, had simply stopped.

He noticed this.

He did not like it.

"Seonghyeon." Martin.

"Mm."

"The deadline."

"Friday." He said it automatically. His eyes didn't move.

Y/N finished laughing, said something back to Ian, and walked away.

The cafeteria came back all at once. Volume, movement, Martin's voice completing a sentence he'd missed the first half of, Juhoon's ongoing chip defense. All of it returned with the particular abruptness of someone turning a volume knob back up.

Seonghyeon picked his pen back up.

Looked at the outline.

Wrote nothing.

He had a new explanation ready. Crowded room. Residual fever. Low blood sugar — he hadn't actually eaten much today, she wasn't wrong about that. There were several reasonable explanations and he was prepared to cycle through all of them indefinitely rather than look directly at what had just happened.

He opened the banana milk.

He did not think about it.

Fifth period ended and the hallway filled and he was standing in line for assembly with Juhoon beside him narrating something that had apparently involved a raccoon and a convenience store, and Seonghyeon was listening — mostly — and his brain was running and everything was completely fine.

Until it wasn't.

She was maybe four meters away. Standing with Ian and Kya, all three of them slightly off to the side of the main crowd, Y/N saying something that made Kya cover her mouth mid-laugh. She wasn't looking at him. She had no reason to look at him. She was just standing there existing, uniform slightly rumpled at the collar, hair pulled up the way she always wore it on days she was running late, completely absorbed in whatever story she was telling.

His brain stopped.

Not gradually.

Not with warning.

Just — stopped.

The hallway, which had been five hundred people and noise and movement and the compressed chaos of a school day, became very far away. Not gone. Just distant. Like someone had turned down the volume on everything except the small radius of space around her.

Juhoon was still talking.

Seonghyeon heard none of it.

He was aware this was a problem. He was standing in a crowded hallway staring at nothing in particular — not even looking directly at her, just aware of her the way you were aware of a light source, peripherally, without having to look — and Juhoon was going to notice eventually and say something deeply unhelpful.

He looked away.

Deliberately. Consciously. The way you looked away from something bright.

His brain started back up.

The list. Martin's outline. The midterm review. Juhoon's voice filtering back in mid-sentence, raccoon still apparently a central figure.

He did not look back.

He also did not stop being aware of exactly where she was in the hallway for the remaining four minutes before the assembly doors opened.

He found this deeply, profoundly, specifically irritating.

That night he lay in bed and did what he always did with things he couldn't categorize.

He tried to take it apart.

There was a pattern. He was not someone who missed patterns. She came into a room and his brain went quiet. She left and it started again. She stood four meters away in a crowded hallway not looking at him once and the entire school disappeared.

It wasn't the fever. He was better. It wasn't exhaustion or low blood sugar or any of the reasonable explanations he'd tried on for size over the past four days.

It was just her.

He stared at the ceiling.

His brain, currently running at full capacity with no Y/N in the vicinity to interrupt it, offered him seventeen different frameworks for analyzing this information and he rejected all of them.

He didn't want a framework.

He wanted his brain back.

The one that worked correctly. The one that ran clean and constant and didn't develop mysterious system failures in the presence of someone who showed up uninvited, stole his food, scolded him about nutrition, and then had the audacity to make an entire hallway disappear just by standing in it.

He wanted that brain.

He was fairly certain he was not getting it back.

The ceiling was the same. The room was the same. Everything was exactly as it had always been except for the specific quality of the quiet, which was different now — not bad, exactly. Not good. Just there. Just something that had settled somewhere in his chest without asking permission and didn't appear to be leaving.

He closed his eyes.

He did not think about it.

He also did not think about how much easier the quiet would be if she were here.