𓍢ִ໋🌷͙֒

There it was. That tone again.

Plastering a fragile smile onto your face, you forced yourself up from the living room couch and turned to face him, your eyes still heavy and reddened. “Hi,” the word came out weaker than you’ve liked. You padded into the kitchen space, trying to deflect. “How was wo—”

“You’ve been crying?” he interrupted immediately, his eyes locking onto your face. He let out a shaky exhale—you couldn’t tell if it was born of irritation or some lingering, buried sense of worry. “Again?”

The lump in your throat returned, heavier this time, joined by a knot in your stomach that stole the air from your lungs. Yunho wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t blind. But the voice in your head insisting that nobody cared was stubborn. Unyielding. Even after promising yourself thousands of times that you’d speak up—that you’d finally let him see the hurricane in your mind—the second the opportunity arose, your brain slammed on the emergency brakes. “What are you talking about?” you muttered, “I was just—”

“For God’s sake.” Yunho rolled his eyes, taking in your clearly broken-down posture. “Will you ever just talk to me?” He sounded angry, or maybe that was just the distortion of your own defence mechanisms. “Do you think I’m an idiot? Your eyes are all red and puffy.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” the words slipped out, you swore they did, cold and definitive. You took a step back, intending to disappear into the darkness of the bedroom, but you didn’t even make it half a step when Yunho’s hand, still chilled from the outside air, clamped down on your shoulder, keeping you in place.

“What happened?”

Panic clawed its way up your chest and neck, squeezing tight. Total silence fell over the kitchen, though your ears were ringing with the frantic thud of your own heartbeat. You hated that question, or maybe it was more a fear of it? “Nothing.” You forced your voice to remain flat. You failed. “Let me make you something to eat.” Avoiding his gaze, you reached past him for the grocery bag.

Yunho laughed once, short and humourless. “Right. Same answer as last week.”

You stiffened, your fingers wrapping tightly around the paper handles of the bag. “I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

Desperate for a distraction, you began pulling plates out of the dishwasher, unpacking them just to give your trembling hands something to do. “Can you just drop it?”

“No.” The answer came so fast, so sharp, it forced your eyes up. Yunho dragged a heavy hand down his face, a gesture of pure exhaustion. “No, I can’t just drop it.”

“I said I’m fine.”

“You are very obviously not fine.”

“Why does it even matter?” The question slipped out before your brain could filter it. Next came a total silence, heavy and suffocating. Yunho just stared at you, his face freezing but you couldn’t quite get the emotion behind it. You looked away, regretting the words the instant they tasted real. “Forget it.”

“No. Explain that.”

Your chest tightened, the pressure built until it finally burst. “Because what difference does it make?” you snapped, the sudden volume surprising even yourself. “You knowing doesn’t magically fix anything!”

Yunho’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle twitched in his cheek. “So that’s it? You just cry by yourself until you can’t breathe, and then pretend nothing happened?”

“You wouldn’t understand.” The moment the words left your mouth, you wished you could violently pull them back.

Something painful flashed across his face. “Wouldn’t understand?” Yunho repeated, his voice rising for the first time. “No, actually, I don’t. I don’t know what you mean because you never tell me anything.”

Your eyes burned fiercely, a fresh wave of tears threatening to spill. “Because I’m tired!”

“So am I!” The admission hit harder than any physical violence ever could. You flinched, and Yunho looked away as if he needed a second to calm down, shaking his head. “I’m tired of guessing what's going on in your head,” he confessed. “I’m tired of waking up and wondering if today’s gonna be a good day or a bad day. I’m tired of watching you fall apart and pretending I don’t see it, because every single time I ask, you shut me out.”

The room felt microscopic, and the walls were closing in, trapping you both in the wreckage of the conversation. You wrapped your arms tightly around yourself, trying to hold your shattering pieces together. “Then stop asking.”

Yunho stared at you. For a fleeting second, the anger completely vanished, leaving him looking genuinely, deeply hurt. “Do you really want that?”

You opened your mouth, but no sound came out. Your throat was completely closed up. Because the truth was: no. You didn’t want him to stop. You wanted him to ask. You wanted him to keep asking. You wanted someone to finally notice—but you just didn’t know how to survive the vulnerability of being seen.

Yunho let out a slow, defeated breath, the fight leaving his shoulders.

“That’s what I thought.”

And there they were. Tears, again.

You sniffled, blinking rapidly as if it could somehow stop them from spilling over. “What difference does it make if you know? It’s not your fault I feel like this. It’s not anyone’s. It’s all on me.” You dragged a trembling hand through your hair, gripping the roots just to feel something grounding. “Do you really want to fucking listen about what it’s like?” The words tore out of you, broken in half by a sob. “To wake up every single morning wishing you could just disappear? Wishing everyone would just forget you ever existed so you could stop being a burden?” Yunho took a sudden step toward you. Instinctively, you flinched and stepped back, leaving his hand hovering in the air near your waist, desperately wanting to steady you, but you kept moving out of reach until your lower back hit the hard edge of the kitchen counter. You couldn’t handle being touched in this satate. You were trapped by the room, and trapped by your own skin.“Do you know how hard it is?” you cried, the act of being fine completely breaking now. “Just getting out of bed every day? Taking four different fucking medications just to stay stable, and still feeling like absolute shit anyway?” Your chest throbbed with ache. Every single breath felt too sharp, like your lungs were getting cut open. “I’m trying,” the confession came out small, and pathetic in your ears. You hated how weak you felt when you met Yunho’s eyes for a brief moment, before looking away again. “I’m trying so hard.” Another sob tore violently through your throat, robbing you of air. “And it’s never enough.”

For the first time since he’d walked through the front door, Yunho didn’t interrupt. He didn’t argue. He didn’t demand that you talk to him, and he didn’t roll his eyes. He just stood there, completely paralysed, listening.

Because maybe, after all this time, you were finally saying something.

“And then you come home,” you choked out, gesturing wildly to the space between you, “after I’ve been sitting in my own rot all day, and you demand answers like I have any!” You let out a harsh laugh, though it sounded far more like another sob. “I’m so tired.”

Yunho took another cautious step forward, his hands half-raised. “Hey—”

“No!” You shook your head violently, the movement making the room tilt. “No, don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t look at me like that.” Your chest heaved, desperate for air that wouldn’t come, lungs refusing to work under flood of tears.

“Like what?”

“Like you care!” The silence that followed felt endless, it swallowed the whole space between you. You immediately wished you could yank the words back into your throat, but it was too late. Once the words started, they refused to stop. “You don’t get it,” you choked out.

“Then explain it to me.”

“Why? So you can tell me it’ll get better? So you can give me some hollow promise that you’re here for me?” Your vision blurred into a smear of kitchen lights and shadow. “Look at me!” You spread your arms wide, gesturing to your trembling, broken form. “Look at me,” your voice broke to a whisper, “I’m miserable all the time. I can’t keep my shit together.” You pressed a fist hard against your sternum, right over your aching heart. “I take medication every single day and I’m still a complete disaster.” You swallowed against the burn in your throat, pushing through the final, terrifying truth. “And you know what the worst part is?”

Yunho didn’t answer. Looking at him, you weren’t even sure he could breathe, let alone speak.

“I’m trying so hard,” you wiped angrily at your face with the back of your hand, but it was a useless, desperate gesture that only smeared the hot tears further across your cheeks. “I’m trying,” you whispered again, the repetition sounding more like a plea to the universe than a statement. “And for what?” You didn’t let him speak. If you stopped now, the momentum would die, and you would dissolve into nothing. You let out a bitter, ugly laugh. “For what, Yunho? So I can swallow my meds, force myself to go to work, come home, pretend I’m absolutely fine, and then wake up to do it all over again? Is that the grand prize?”

“That’s not what this is about,” he interrupted, his voice dropping low as he looked at tears restlessly falling down your cheeks.

“Then what is it about?”

His jaw tightened so hard the muscle along his cheekbone twitched. He closed the small distance between you, his eyes locked onto yours. “You won’t talk to me.”

A sharp, hysterical laugh escaped you before you could stop it. “Because there’s nothing to say!”

“That’s bullshit,” the sudden, whip-crack sharpness in his voice made you flinch, shoulders violently jerking backward. For a fraction of a second, a flicker of pure guilt crossed Yunho’s face at your reaction. But the softness vanished as quickly as it came, swallowed by a wave of frustration. “No,” he said, his voice steadying, “I’m serious. That’s absolute bullshit.” You could only stare at him, your hands gripping the countertop behind you so tightly your knuckles turned white. “You cry when you think I’m not looking,” he said, taking a deliberate step closer. The cold air from the outside still clung to his jacket. “You lock yourself in the bedroom for hours.”

Another step.

“You barely sleep. I lie awake and I listen to you toss and turn until the sun comes up.”

Another step.

He was entirely inside your space now, the warmth of his body a direct contrast to the icy panic flooding your veins. “And every single time I ask you what’s wrong, you look me dead in the eye and tell me it’s nothing.” You hated how right he sounded. You hated the absolute, undeniable logic of his words, and more than anything, you hated him for being the one to hold it against you.

“What difference would it make if I told you?” you cried, your voice pitching higher.

“Maybe I’d know how to help.”

A ragged laugh tore out of you, loud and mocking. “Help?” The word dripped with a bitter, venomous disbelief. “That’s funny. That’s really funny, Yunho.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

You looked away, unable to hold his gaze any longer. You focused instead on a small scratch on the kitchen cabinets. “Nothing.”

“No. Say it.” The kitchen suddenly felt microscopic. The walls were pressing in from all sides, trapping the two of you in a space that lacked oxygen. You could feel your heartbeat throbbing violently in your throat, choking you. “Say it,” he demanded again.

Your eyes burned fiercely, a fresh wave of tears blurring the sight of his socks on the floor. “You really want me to?”

“Yes.” The answer came instantly. No hesitation or fear.

So, you gave it to him. You took the most toxic, deeply rooted fear in your soul and you threw it directly at his chest. “You don’t love me anymore.”

The silence was immediate. It was a violent and suffocating, sucking any remaining air out of the room.

Yunho just stared at you. The anger on his face completely froze, his features slackening into an expression of total, uncomprehending shock. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Say it again.” His voice was frighteningly calm now. The storm had suddenly vanished, replaced by quiet that made your instinct scream at you to run.

You swallowed past the lump in your throat. “You don’t love me.”

His laugh was short, sharp, and completely humourless—a sound that made you flinch worse than his yelling had. “Wow.”

You felt tears spill over your eyelashes, tracing burning paths down your face and onto your neck. But you couldn’t stop. The floodgates were shattered, and your broken brain was running the script it had spent months writing in the dark. “You come home because you don’t have anywhere else to go,” you sobbed, gesturing vaguely to the apartment around you.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, dragging a hand over his face.

“You stay because it’s easier than leaving.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“You stay because you’re used to me!” By then, his eyes were shining, glassy tears finally gathering in them. You looked at them and felt a sick twist of validation. “You stay because it’s a habit.”

“You really believe that?” he asked, his voice cracking on the last syllable.

You didn’t answer. Because the truth was: yes. You did. Every single day, that was the reality your mind constructed for you, and standing here, broken and exposed, you couldn’t tell the difference between the delusion and the truth. Yunho’s head dropped for a second, his chin pressing against his chest as he let out a long, ragged breath. When he looked back up, something about him had changed. It wasn’t love, and it wasn’t the fiery anger from before. It was hurt. Ugly, bleeding hurt.

“So every time I’ve tried to help you—”

“Yunho—”

“No!” His voice rose, cutting you off completely, echoing off the walls. “No, we’re doing this now. We are doing this right fucking now.” The volume of his voice made you stand straight up. Your stomach dropped, making the first hit of nausea hit you. “Every single time I’ve sat up with you until three in the morning,” he started, his hands shaking as he began to count on his fingers, throwing the evidence of his love between you. “Every single doctor’s appointment I drove you to.”

“Stop,” you whispered.

“Every prescription I ran to pick up because you couldn’t face the outside world.”

“Please.”

“Every fucking panic attack where I held you until my arms went completely numb!” His voice shook violently, the tears finally spilling over his eyelids. “And you think I did all of that because I was bored? You think I did that out of habit?”

Tears completely blinded your vision, turning him into a broad, trembling silhouette. “I didn’t mean—”

“Then what did you mean?” The question hit like a slap across the face. Yunho stepped closer, “What exactly do you think I am? Some kind of martyr? A heartless asshole who just plays house because it’s comfortable?”

You opened your mouth, but nothing came out. Your vocal cords were paralyzed.

Yunho laughed again, and it made the blood in your veins go cold. The sound was terrifying in your ears. “Do you know what the worst part is?”

You wished he would stop talking. You wanted to cover your ears, to scream, to crawl into the floorboards—anything to make him stop. But he didn’t. Not anymore.

“The worst part is that none of this is ever enough.”

You flinched. Immediately. The words struck you in the chest, echoing the exact, terrifying thought you had spoken only moments before: And it’s never enough. The second you moved, regret flashed across Yunho’s face. He blinked, looking down at his own hands as if shocked by the weapon he had just used. But it was too late. The syllables had left his mouth. The damage was done.

“Oh,” you whispered, the sound barely clearing your lips. “Oh.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he said quickly, taking a step forward, his hand reaching out instinctively.

“But you meant it.”

“No, I didn’t—”

“You did.” Fresh, hot tears spilled down your face, your defenses completely crumbling into ash. “You finally said it.”

“For fuck’s sake!” Yunho shouted, running both hands through his hair.

“You finally admitted it,” you choked out, your voice small, trembling, entirely defeated.

“I didn’t!” His hands shook as he dropped them to his sides. “I am so tired of everything I do being twisted into proof that I don’t care about you! I am so tired of fighting a voice in your head!”

You let out a sharp, bitter laugh through your tears. “And I’m tired of feeling like a fucking obligation!”

The words hung between you. Heavy. Ugly.

Obligation.

Yunho went completely, terrifyingly still.

An obligation. Not a partner. Not a girlfriend. Not the person he loved. An obligation. Something to be checked off a list. A burden to be carried.

You saw that one land. You watched the word hit him, saw the way his shoulders subtly dropped, the way the last remnants of fight drained out of his posture, leaving him looking entirely hollowed out.

Good, a small, vicious part of your brain whispered. You wanted it to hurt.

And the very second that thought crossed your mind, a wave of self-loathing washed over you. You hated yourself for it. Because suddenly, this wasn’t about defense anymore. You weren’t trying to protect your heart; you were actively trying to wound his. Just like he had tried to wound yours.

The realisation made you feel sick, a knot tightening in the pit of your stomach.

Neither of you spoke. The apartment felt impossibly quiet now, the silence heavy with pieces of everything you had just smashed. The hum of the refrigerator felt too loud.

Then, Yunho looked away. He couldn’t even look at you anymore. He stared at the kitchen floor, his voice dropping until it was very soft, entirely devoid of the anger that had sustained him. “I don’t know how to love someone who refuses to believe they’re loved.”

The remaining breath left your lungs in a sharp gasp. It didn’t hurt because it was cruel. It hurt because it sounded undeniably, fundamentally true. And that truth cut so much deeper than any shouting ever could.

“I’m trying to protect you from this,” you whispered, your hands curling into fabric of your shirt, right over your aching heart.

“By pretending nothing’s wrong?” Yunho asked as he finally looked back up, his eyes dull. “By letting me guess every single day what kind of mood I’m walking into?”

“What am I supposed to do when I can’t even trust my own head?” you cried, the defense finally dropping entirely, leaving only the raw, terrified human underneath. “How am I supposed to tell you what’s wrong when everything feels wrong?”

“Tell me that,” Yunho pleaded, a single tear tracking down his cheek. “Tell me you’re scared. Tell me your head is lying to you. Don’t look at me and tell me I don’t love you. Don’t erase everything I am because you’re hurting.”

You swallowed hard, the final truth rising up from the darkest corner of your mind. “I’m terrified that one day you’re going to wake up and realise I’m just too much. That the medication isn’t working, that I’m a disaster, and that you’re going to leave.”

Yunho let out a broken, shuddering breath, shaking his head. “And I’m terrified that one day I’ll come home… and you won’t be here at all.”

You froze. Your entire body went rigid, every muscle locking up as the air in your lungs turned to ice. You couldn’t breathe. You couldn’t blink.

Because he wasn’t just talking about you packing a bag and leaving him.

He was talking about that.

The dark, quiet corner of your mind that you never, ever spoke out loud. The place you retreated to on the worst days, where the urge to just stop existing became too much. You had thought about it. More than once. You had stood in the bathroom looking at the pill bottles; you had laid in bed wishing your heart would just forget to take its next beat. You wanted it. God help you, there were days you wanted it so badly just to make the noise stop. But you were terrified of that desire—terrified of how seductive the emptiness felt, terrified of what it meant that you were losing the will to fight your own skin. You had kept that horror buried so deep, hidden beneath layers of deflection and forced smiles. You thought it was your secret. Your private shame. But as you stared at Yunho, the absolute panic in your chest gave you away. Your pupils dilated. Your jaw slackened just a fraction, a tiny, involuntary gasp escaping your throat. Your hands, still pressed against your chest, began to shake violently.

And Yunho saw it.

He didn’t just hear your silence; he watched the exact moment the realisation registered on your face. He saw the guilt that flashed in your eyes before you could mask it. He saw the confirmation.

The look that crossed Yunho’s face in that microsecond was the most horrifying thing you had ever witnessed.

The last remaining color completely drained from his skin, leaving him a sickly, ghostly pale. His eyes widened, turning completely hollow, as if he were already looking at a corpse. The breath he took got caught in his throat. He hadn’t actually known. It had been his worst, most irrational fear—the nightmare that kept him awake at night. But seeing your reaction? Seeing the truth written plainly in your terrified eyes?

It turned his nightmare into a reality.

“Oh my god,” the words were barely a sound, just air scraping over his throat. He took a half-step back, his knees visibly trembling, as if the weight of the truth had broken his legs. “Oh my god. You... you actually...” He couldn’t even finish the sentence. The anger from before was gone, replaced by terror. He looked at you like you were slipping through his fingers right that second, like if he took his eyes off you for even a moment, you would vanish.

The realisation that he knew—that he had looked inside your head and seen the darkest thing you were hiding—finally broke the last of your strength. Your knees buckled, the energy entirely draining from your body, and you sank directly to the floor. You pulled your knees up to your chest, wrapping your arms tightly around yourself, bury your face in your shirt as a fresh wave of tears took over.

Yunho watched you collapse. He took a step forward, his hand twitching as if to reach down and pull you into his chest, but he stopped. He saw the way you were curled into yourself, and he knew if he touched you right now, you would only pull further away. Slowly, he lowered himself to the floor. He sat a few feet away from you, his back leaning against the opposite kitchen cabinets, his long legs stretched out in the space between you. He didn’t try to cross the gap. He didn’t offer a hollow promise that everything was going to be okay. He just sat there in the quiet aftermath of the storm, breathing the same heavy air, refusing to leave you alone.

The silence didn’t heal anything. It didn’t sweep away the wreckage, and it didn’t patch the tears in the fabric of whatever was left of you. It just stayed, breathing heavily alongside both of you.

Eventually, Yunho shifted. The movement was slow, and stiff, as if his joints were made of lead. He dragged a trembling hand down his face, his fingers pressing hard against his skin as if the touch might somehow clear the paralysing shock still stuck behind his eyes. He stared blankly at the edge of the counter, then down at the pattern of the floor—anywhere and everywhere except directly at you.

You stayed curled in on yourself, your forehead pressed against your knees, small and tucked away in your own body. Minutes passed. Or maybe it was only seconds. Time didn’t feel like it belonged to either of you anymore; the clock had stopped the moment the truth was laid bare.

Then, quietly—so quiet the words barely cleared the barrier of your lips—you spoke.

“Did you get the milk?”

Yunho didn’t move his head, but his eyes tracked toward the sound of your voice. The simple question seemed to travel an impossible distance through the space between you just to reach him.

A beat passed. The hum of the refrigerator filled the space between you.