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PART Ⅰ: THE FREQUENCY OF LONELINESS

Chapter One: Hazel

The apartment was the kind of small that required a certain philosophy to inhabit comfortably.

Hazel Harper had developed hers over two years: she did not accumulate things that could not be carried in a single trip. She owned seven books at a time — no more, no fewer — rotating them out of a secondhand shop on the corner of Mangwon-dong where the owner, a woman in her seventies named Choi Soonim, had taken to setting aside anything that arrived with a faded English spine. She owned two mugs, one good coat, and a microphone that cost more than her monthly food budget, which told you almost everything about her priorities.

Her name was Hazel Harper and she was twenty three old and she could not sleep.

This was not a new condition. She had been an insomniac since childhood — since the particular night she was eleven years old and had lain awake listening to her parents' voices travel through the thin walls of their house in Portland, Oregon, all the way to the kitchen, where they discussed quietly and with great civility the dissolution of their marriage. There had been something about that night — the specific quality of their voices, low and careful and trying so hard to be kind — that had stayed with her like a frequency she could never quite tune out. She had been listening for something ever since. She was never sure what.

She had come to Seoul on a language scholarship. She stayed because Seoul at night felt like it understood her.

There was a particular hour — somewhere between 1 and 3 a.m. — when the city changed its face. The daytime crowds dissolved. The glow of convenience stores became something almost sacred, those little rectangles of fluorescence standing sentinel against the dark. The Han River bridges reflected their lights in the black water below, doubling themselves, becoming twice as beautiful and half as real. Drunk businessmen helped each other home like two-legged creatures that had forgotten how to be singular. Couples sat on the steps of closed restaurants and talked too softly to overhear. Delivery scooters moved through empty intersections like small ships.

Hazel loved all of it with a ferocity that surprised her. She loved that she could walk home from the convenience store at two in the morning and feel the city still breathing, still pulsing, still very much alive. She loved that Seoul did not require her to explain why she was awake. The city itself was always awake. It understood.

She had started the podcast eighteen months ago, almost by accident.

She had not intended for it to become anything. She had a decent microphone — bought with a summer's worth of tutoring money because she loved the weight and specificity of good audio equipment — and an account on a small hosting platform, and an inability to sleep, and one night in November she had simply pressed record and started talking. She talked about the rain. She talked about a noodle shop on her corner that closed at midnight and always left a light on in the kitchen, and how she had begun to find that light comforting in a way she could not entirely rationalize. She talked about loneliness not as a complaint but as a weather condition — something you dressed appropriately for rather than tried to prevent.

She posted it at 2 a.m. She titled the podcast Sleepless in Seoul and did not attach her name or face to it.

She had expected nothing. She had received, within a week, forty-seven messages from people who could not sleep.

The podcast grew slowly, the way honest things tend to grow — without strategy, without a plan, through the word-of-mouth of exhausted people who had found something in the dark that felt like company. By the time Hazel was a year in, she had a small but devoted listenership of perhaps eight hundred people. They sent voice notes. They sent confessions. They sent small and enormous things: breakup stories, immigration anxieties, the particular grief of missing dead grandmothers, the particular loneliness of loving someone who did not love you back, the specific relief of admitting out loud, in the dark, that you were not entirely fine.

She aired the ones with permission and kept all the others with the same care she imagined a priest might keep confessions — private, weightless, given somewhere safe.

The format was simple. Hazel spoke for ten minutes at the top of each episode — the city, the hour, whatever was in her head. Then she played a selection of listener voice notes, anonymized, their voices unaltered. Sometimes she responded gently. Sometimes she just let them breathe in the air between her observations.

She ran it on Tuesday and Friday nights.

She had never missed an episode.

She had also never told anyone she did it.

Not her best friend Mira, who was a graphic design student with opinions about everything and would have had opinions about this. Not her university friends, who would have been supportive in a way that required performance. Not even her mother back in Portland, who would have worried about her being awake at 2 a.m. talking to strangers. It was hers — entirely, completely, privately hers — and she had grown fiercely protective of that.

On the particular Tuesday night that begins this story, Hazel was sitting cross-legged on her narrow bed with the microphone on its small stand before her, a cup of barley tea on the windowsill going cold. The window was open a crack despite the October chill, because she liked the sound of distant traffic in her recordings — a specific quality of ambience, urban and alive and quietly insomniac.

She had been talking for eight minutes about the smell of autumn in Seoul — something she had missed entirely in the abstract of missing seasons, which turned out to have their own personality in this city, their own particular combination of ginkgo and rain and the ghost of summer's humidity still faintly present — when she queued up the first voice note.

It was from someone new.

She knew this because she had a small enough listener base to recognize the regulars: the woman in Busan who called herself Insomniac No. 4 and sent notes about her divorce, the student in Daejeon who reported on his nighttime conversations with his plants, the middle-aged man in Itaewon who spoke about his adult children with a tenderness that made Hazel's throat tighten reliably every single time.

This was a new voice.

It was a man's voice, low and careful, and there was a quality to it that she noticed immediately — not what he said, which was simple enough, but the way he said it. Like someone choosing his words very deliberately. Like someone who was used to speaking carefully and was choosing to stop.

"I found this podcast," he said, "and I'm not sure why I'm sending a note. I don't do things like this."

A pause.

"I've been awake for forty hours, more or less, and I'm in a hotel room in a city that isn't mine — which is most of them, these days. I can hear the city outside the window. I don't know if that's comforting or not. It's something. It's better than silence."

Another pause, longer.

"I heard you talking about the rain. I like rain."

That was all.

Hazel stared at the audio file for a moment before playing it on air. She pressed her thumb against her chin, the way she did when she was thinking. Then she smiled slightly — not broadly, but with the particular warmth she felt when someone arrived at the podcast for the first time and couldn't quite explain why.

She played it. She spoke afterward, not directly to him, but in his general direction, the way you might speak to a cat that had wandered in from the cold and was deciding whether to stay.

"Forty hours is a long time to be awake," she said. "I hope wherever you are, the rain finds you."

She did not think about it again for three days.

Chapter Two: Juhoon

The hotel room was in Singapore.

He remembered that much: the specific quality of the air conditioning, and the view from the window, which was glass-and-steel architecture rising out of tropical air. He had been in Singapore for four days and had seen none of it except through car windows and the back of a venue. He had performed to forty thousand people two nights ago and had come offstage and sat in his dressing room in silence for twenty minutes before anyone noticed he had not moved.

His name was Kim Juhoon, though the world knew him as JH, which was the name his management had given him when he was eighteen and Cortis debuted and he had been too young and too grateful and too terrified to have any opinion about it. He was twenty-six now, and the name still belonged to him, but it fit differently than it used to — like a coat he had been wearing long enough that he no longer noticed its weight, until suddenly he did.

Cortis was five members. They had debuted six years ago with a song that climbed to the top of the domestic charts in three days and the international charts in seven, and the trajectory had never really stopped. There were award shows and world tours and stadium concerts and brand deals and reality shows and fan meetings and interviews and photoshoots and schedules that arrived as printed documents and were treated as binding law. There were people who knew what time he woke up and what he ate and when he was tired, and none of them were the people he wanted to know these things.

He had sent the voice note on a Tuesday night in Singapore, having found the podcast entirely by chance — someone in a fan forum he occasionally browsed anonymously had linked it in a thread about things that helped with tour insomnia, and he had clicked through without much expectation and found himself listening to a woman's voice talk about rain in Seoul, and something about it had made him go very still.

Not because it was remarkable. It was quiet and sincere and not especially profound, and yet it made him feel, for the first time in what felt like months, like he was in a room with a person rather than a production.

He sent the note. He did not know why. He did not usually do impulsive things. His life had very little room for impulsive things.

He was asleep before the episode aired, but he found it the next morning on his phone, sitting in the back of a van on the way to a press event, earbuds in, while Martin read aloud from his phone the schedule for the following day with the tone of someone performing a dramatic monologue, and James leaned his head against the window with his eyes closed in the way of a person who had decided the morning was happening to someone else, and Juhoon pressed his thumb against the volume dial and listened to a voice say, quietly and without drama: I hope wherever you are, the rain finds you.

He had to look out the window because he was not sure what his face was doing.

He was the quiet one, in Cortis. This was known. It was, in fact, documented — fan wikis detailed the members' personalities with the clinical precision of naturalists cataloguing wildlife, and Juhoon's entry noted that he was thoughtful, reserved, rarely the first to speak in group settings, occasionally given to silences that other members had learned to interpret. He was not the one who told stories at variety show appearances. He was not the one who produced comedic chaos in reality show footage. He was the one who, in their most famous concert film, could be seen standing at the edge of the stage between songs, looking out at the audience with an expression that the internet had been trying to name for four years. Some called it melancholy. Some called it intensity. One particularly long and earnest forum post had called it the look of a man remembering something he hasn't experienced yet.

He had read that once, at three in the morning, and had felt uncomfortably seen by a stranger on the internet.

He had good people around him, which was not nothing. James, the oldest, carried himself with the steadiness of someone who had spent years learning how to survive pressure without making a performance of it — sharp in rehearsal, unexpectedly patient in private, the sort of person who noticed when someone was quiet and chose not to embarrass them for it. Martin, their leader, possessed a warmth that expanded to fill whatever room they were in; loud when the moment called for it, perceptive when it didn’t, with an instinct for people that made the others trust him almost automatically. Seonghyeon moved through the world with a quieter kind of intelligence, observant and dryly funny, the kind of person who seemed to be thinking three conversations ahead while still listening carefully to the one in front of him. And Keonho, the youngest, all restless energy and impossible charisma, had the unnerving habit of throwing himself entirely into whatever fascinated him that week — choreography at three in the morning, a melody half-finished on his phone, a sudden conviction that everyone else needed to hear it immediately.

Together they formed a strange, functional balance: Martin pulling people outward, James keeping them grounded, Seonghyeon watching everything, Keonho feeling everything at full volume. It should have been chaotic. Somehow, most days, it worked.

He loved them, genuinely and without reservation — four people he spent most of his time with. But even with them, there was a version of himself that Juhoon kept folded away — the version that woke up sometimes in hotels and genuinely could not remember what city he was in, or what day it was, or what he wanted, or when he had last wanted something for himself rather than for the work or the group or the schedule.

He did not know the words for this. He had tried, sometimes, with therapists his management arranged — two of them over three years, careful and professional and bound by something that made him feel like his honesty would be processed and filed. He had stopped going. He had not told his management he stopped going.

He was not unhappy. He wanted to be clear about this, even in the interior monologue of his own thoughts: he was not unhappy. He loved the music. He loved performing. He loved, genuinely and without reservation, the members, he spent most of his time with. His life had meaning and beauty and more material comfort than he had any right to expect from a childhood in a small apartment in Incheon, where his father had worked at a factory and his mother had cleaned offices and they had been careful — always careful — with small amounts of money.

He was not unhappy. He was simply not present. There was a version of him that moved through schedules and performed and gave interviews and attended meetings, and then there was the rest of him, which seemed to exist in a parallel frequency — awake at wrong hours, looking at cities through glass, reaching for a quality of aliveness that he could feel just at the edge of his awareness, like a song he couldn't quite hear.

He started listening to Sleepless in Seoul on a Sunday. By Thursday of that same week he had listened to every episode in the archive — forty-three of them, going back eighteen months — and was waiting for the next one with a specific anticipation that felt strange and clean, like something he hadn't felt in a long time.

He sent another note the following Tuesday.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 44 — TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"I listened to your old episodes. I don't know if that's a normal thing to do — probably not, since you said in one of them that you had been surprised anyone found them at all. I found them.

The one from February, where you talked about watching a couple argue on the subway at midnight — I listened to it three times. Not because it was sad. Because you made it sound like something worth paying attention to.

I'm back in my own city now. My own, if a city can be yours. I've been in seventeen cities in four months. Ours is starting to feel less like mine.

I don't know what to do with that."

Hazel played it at 2:14 a.m. and sat with it afterward the way she sometimes sat with the notes that arrived already broken open, that required no interpretation because they had interpreted themselves.

She spoke carefully.

"To the caller from Singapore," she said — she had remembered the time zone from the metadata — "welcome home. I think cities can be yours and not-yours at the same time, the way people can. We don't own the things we love. We just keep coming back to them and hoping they'll be in the same place when we do."

She paused. Then: "I'm glad you listened to the old ones."

She was not sure why that felt important to say.

Chapter Three: The Shape of Insomnia

October in Seoul moved like a slow exhale.

The humidity released its grip. The air sharpened. Leaves on the ginkgo trees along the streets of Mapo-gu turned simultaneously yellow and fell simultaneously, coating the pavement in something that looked, at night under the streetlamps, like scattered coins. The Han River grew quieter as the evening joggers grew more bundled, more determined-looking. The convenience stores installed their portable grills outside and the smell of sizzling street food joined the more permanent smells of the city — diesel and autumn leaves and the particular undertone of a city built and rebuilt and layered with decades of itself.

Hazel's apartment was on the fifth floor of a building that had no elevator and this seemed fine to her because she had read once that the Japanese had a concept for the value of inconvenience, and she had adopted it without fully investigating whether the source was accurate. The apartment had a single large window that looked out over the street, and in October, with the window cracked and the radiator muttering under the sill, the room had a warmth that she associated with rightness — a word she had stopped apologizing for using, since it seemed to describe things more precisely than its alternatives.

She had three lectures on Mondays and Wednesdays, two on Thursdays. She was studying linguistics with a focus on Korean language acquisition. She worked twelve hours a week at a café three blocks from campus that was owned by a Korean-Australian couple and played exclusively 1970s American soft rock, which created a specific cognitive dissonance she had come to love. She tutored a high school student in English on Saturday afternoons. She read. She walked. She produced, with devotion and care, a podcast that nobody knew she made.

Her best friend Mira Shin was the sort of person who occupied space with full commitment, which Hazel admired and found slightly exhausting. Mira was doing her MFA in graphic design and had opinions about everything from typeface kerning to the moral obligations of carbohydrates. She was one of those people whose love for you expressed itself as constant attention — she noticed things, pointed them out, made you feel seen in a way that was sometimes wonderful and occasionally felt like being held under an affectionate but somewhat relentless magnifying glass.

They met for brunch on the first Sunday of November at a place in Yeonnam-dong with good eggs and better coffee and the kind of lazy weekend crowd that felt like a reward for having made it through another week.

"You look like you didn't sleep," Mira said.

"I didn't."

"Again."

"Still. It's a continuous condition."

"Hazel."

"Mira."

This particular exchange had recurred approximately four hundred times across three years of friendship, and they both understood it to mean: I love you and I'm concerned and I know and I'm fine and are you sure and yes.

"I was up late," Hazel said, which was true and not the entirety of the truth.

"Doing what?"

"Reading. Listening to the city. Thinking."

"You think too much."

"You've mentioned that."

"It's like a full-time job you do for free," Mira said, wrapping both hands around her coffee. "All that rich interior life and no one to invoice."

Hazel laughed. "I'm practicing."

"For what?"

"For when someone turns up who deserves it."

Mira looked at her over the rim of her mug with an expression that Hazel recognized as the precursor to a Speech About Love. She had received many of these speeches. They were delivered with genuine affection and were not wrong, exactly, but they tended to locate Hazel's approach to romance as the primary obstacle, which she found reductive.

"You know what your problem is?" Mira began.

"I romanticize things," Hazel said.

"You romanticize things. You build entire emotional architecture around hypothetical people and then when actual people appear — with their actual human mediocrity and their specific flaws — they can't compete."

"That's not entirely true."

"The guy from your research seminar."

"He chewed with his mouth open."

"Hazel. That's a human flaw. That's not a disqualification."

"It's not the chewing, it's what the chewing suggested about his fundamental relationship to the world."

Mira put her mug down. "See, that. That. That right there is what I mean. You want to be in love like people are in love in films. You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie."

The phrase landed more accurately than Hazel appreciated. She picked up her coffee.

"That's a little harsh," she said.

"It's not harsh. It's said with complete love. You have this incredibly specific idea of what it's supposed to feel like — this thing that happens somewhere below the ribs and doesn't require explanation — and you're waiting for it in a world made of people who are just doing their best."

"I'm not waiting for anything impossible."

"You're waiting for the feeling, not the person. You've told me yourself that the feeling is the thing."

Hazel considered this.

"The feeling comes from the person," she said finally. "Or it should. I don't think I'm wrong to want it from the right one."

"I'm not saying you're wrong," Mira said. "I'm saying it might arrive in an unexpected package. Or with the mouth open."

"There are limits," Hazel said, "to unexpected packages."

Mira laughed. It was an argument they had been having in various forms for three years, and neither of them had conceded anything, which was perhaps the correct outcome.

What Hazel did not tell Mira — what she had not told anyone — was that she had begun to think about the anonymous caller.

Not in the way you think about someone you know. She knew nothing about him. She had no name, no face, no geography beyond the inferred Singapore and the single detail of a hotel room and a city that felt not-quite-his. She had his voice and his words and the particular quality of his silences, which were not awkward but considered — the silences of someone who was used to thinking before he spoke and had decided, for the duration of these notes, to let the thinking happen in front of her.

She thought about him the way you think about a song you have heard only once, that you cannot fully reconstruct but cannot stop reaching for.

He had sent four notes in four weeks.

They were not confessional in the way many listener notes were — raw and uncontrolled and arriving in the small hours smelling of tears or alcohol or both. His were more like letters. Formal at the edges and honest in the center. He asked questions sometimes that he did not expect answered, or that he answered himself, in the next breath. He mentioned — once, briefly — that he was a public person. He did not elaborate. The word he used was exhausted, and he used it the way someone uses a word for the first time after having suppressed it — with the relief of a thing finally said.

She had played three of his notes on air. She had kept one — too private, too unguarded, too much like finding an open letter — and had sent him a direct message through the podcast's anonymous portal instead:

I received your note. I didn't play it on air — it felt like it belonged to you more than the night. I hope you got some sleep.

He had responded four hours later, which meant it was very early morning wherever he was.

Thank you. I think that's the first time someone has handed something back to me instead of taking it.

She had read that and sat with it for a long time.

Chapter Four: Juhoon's Nights

November found Cortis in Seoul.

They were between legs of a tour — three weeks in which Juhoon was scheduled for individual promotional activities, two group variety show recordings, a photo shoot for a luxury watch brand, a fansign event, and a studio session for new material. This was a light schedule, relative to what had preceded and what would follow. His manager, Park Jiyoung, who had been with him for four years and communicated primarily in calendar invites and the occasional concerned glance, had told him he had evenings free this month.

Evenings free, for Juhoon, had begun to mean: earbuds in, lying on the floor of his apartment in Hannam-dong — he always preferred the floor to the bed when thinking, something about the flatness of it, the way it pressed back — listening to Sleepless in Seoul.

His apartment was a kind of performance in itself. It was beautiful and carefully designed and had been selected by a management company on the basis of several practical criteria, and it contained everything he needed and almost nothing he had chosen. There were plants, which were his — six of them, arranged by a window that faced north and therefore required exactly the kind of low-light species he had researched with a specificity that would have surprised anyone who had not seen him approach a problem he actually cared about. There was a bookshelf of novels. There was recording equipment that lived in the second bedroom, which had become the room where he actually existed, which told you something about him.

He did not think of himself as lonely. He thought of himself as alone, which was different — or should have been, and sometimes wasn't.

He lay on the floor on a Tuesday in November and listened to Episode 46.

Her voice was distinct. He had been thinking about this in the way that people who appreciate audio quality think about voices — technically, with genuine admiration — because there was something in it that functioned like a key in a lock. It was warm without being performed. It had a cadence that moved between thoughtfulness and humor with such ease that the humor felt like a natural weather condition rather than an attempt. She was, he had decided, someone who had spent considerable time listening to things, because she spoke like someone who understood that the silence around words was as important as the words themselves.

He knew nothing about her. He had tried, once, to find the podcast's origin and had arrived at a hosting platform with no personal information attached. He had not tried harder. There was something about the anonymity that felt necessary — a container for honesty that depended on its sealed quality. He had spent six years being known by the wrong parts of himself. The relief of being entirely unknown was so profound it had begun to feel like oxygen.

"Tonight," she said in Episode 46, "I want to talk about insomnia as a spiritual condition."

He smiled at the ceiling.

"I don't mean spiritual in the organized-religion sense, though I'll take it wherever it finds me. I mean it in the sense that 3 a.m. is perhaps the only hour when your brain stops negotiating with you. All the performance stops. All the version of yourself that you carry for other people — the competent one, the together one, the one who has answers — that person goes to sleep, usually, around midnight. And what's left is something more raw. More true, maybe. More afraid."

"Insomnia is a gift, in that sense. Not one you asked for. But it takes you somewhere most people don't go very often."

She paused, and he heard — very faintly — the sound of traffic through an open window, some distant city-breath.

"You are most yourself when you are most tired. Someone told me that once. I've been thinking about it for three years."

He sent her a voice note that same night, at 1 a.m., sitting in his second bedroom with the recording equipment off, just his phone.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 47 — TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"The episode about insomnia. I wanted to respond, which I don't usually want to do. I want to respond because you said something that I've been trying to say for about two years, and you said it much better than I could have.

The person who shows up at 3 a.m. — I've been thinking of that person as a failure. As evidence that something hasn't worked, hasn't held. I've been trying to get back to the other version — the one with answers, like you said — and not succeeding, and feeling the failure of that.

What if that's the wrong frame? That's the question I'm sitting with.

What if the 3 a.m. version is just the one who hasn't given up on being honest yet?"

Hazel listened to the note three times before airing it.

She aired it without comment at the end, which was unusual for her — she always responded, always let the notes land in a bed of conversation. But this one she let stand alone, and closed the episode with just the sound of her city in the background, and the quiet.

Her listener numbers were not large. But several people in the comments that week mentioned the final voice note specifically, with the vocabulary of people who had been surprised by something true.

One person wrote: who is that. I need to know who that is.

Hazel sat with that comment for a long time, in the dark, with the city breathing through her window, thinking: so do I, actually. So do I.

PART Ⅱ: PARALLEL FREQUENCIES

Chapter Five: Near Misses, or the Geometry of Almost

A map of Seoul in November would show, if you overlaid the movements of two people, a geometry of almost.

It would show Hazel walking from her apartment in Mangwon to the café on Wednesday mornings, earbuds in, hands in the pockets of her good coat, passing the ginkgo trees that had dropped their coins on the ground and were now bare-armed against the pale sky.

It would show Juhoon, on the same Wednesday, leaving the Cortis practice building three blocks north of that same street, head down, cap pulled low, moving to a van that waited at the corner.

It would show them at the same convenience store — the one on the corner with the handwritten sign in the window that said 참깨라면 입고 ("sesame ramen back in stock") in marker that had faded to the color of old blood — Juhoon at 11:45 p.m. on a Thursday, Hazel at 12:30 a.m. on the same Friday morning, after recording Episode 48.

It would show them at a coffee shop in Hongdae that they both frequented: Juhoon with a manager and a hat, Hazel with a linguistics paper and a highlighter, on different days in the same week in November, sitting in the same corner seat by the window because that seat had the best light and both of them knew it.

It would show parallel trajectories in a city of ten million people that kept bending toward each other without touching.

This was not fate, exactly. This was Seoul — layered and dense and full of coincidences that only became legible in retrospect, when you were trying to reconstruct the story of how two people's lives had arranged themselves into an inevitability. At the time, neither of them knew the other's face. They knew only: voice. Word. The specific quality of night silence on a podcast. The sound of a city breathing through two separate open windows.

Mira had a theory, which she shared over tteokbokki on a Friday evening in November.

"You are emotionally attached to a stranger," she said.

"I'm not attached," Hazel said. "I'm interested. There's a distinction."

"You brought him up in three separate conversations this week."

"I bring things up when they're interesting."

"You said he was perceptive. You described the quality of his silences." Mira pointed with her fork. "You described. The quality. Of a stranger's. Silences."

"He's a podcast listener who sends thoughtful notes."

"He's a man whose voice you have developed feelings about."

"I have appreciation. Not feelings."

"Those are the same thing and you know it." Mira leaned back. "You know what this is? This is just two neuroses knowing they are a perfect match. You are a person who falls in love through words and voices and cannot sleep, and he is apparently also a person who cannot sleep and speaks carefully and sends voice notes to anonymous podcasts at 1 a.m. You are two broken clocks that happen to ring at the same time."

"That's not romantic," Hazel said.

"I didn't say it was romantic. I said it made sense."

"They're the same thing."

Mira looked at her with the expression of someone watching a person walk directly into a glass door with great intentionality. "At least admit you're interested."

A pause. A piece of tteok, chewed. The sound of the restaurant around them, loud and warm and smelling of chili and sesame and the specific comfort of a Friday night.

"I'm interested," Hazel said.

"Progress," Mira said.

What she did not say — what she would not have known how to say, even to Mira, even to the air — was that the interest had begun to feel like more than curiosity. It was the kind of interest that colonized small moments: a Tuesday evening when she was editing audio and heard his voice again in playback and had to stop for a moment and just listen. A Thursday morning when she woke and found a new note in the podcast inbox and lay still before opening it, feeling something that lived adjacent to anticipation — that pleasurable dread of something you want very much and are afraid of in proportion to how much you want it.

She had begun to think of him as someone she knew. Which was insane. She knew nothing. No name. No face. No age, with certainty. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, based on voice and affect — a voice that had lived in it long enough to know its own register, that wasn't performing anything except occasionally, when it grew careful, a kind of self-consciousness.

She had begun to think of him as someone she was going to recognize when she met him.

This was, she acknowledged to herself in the 3 a.m. clarity she had described on air, possibly insane.

It was also possibly the most honest thing she had felt in two years.

Chapter Six: What Juhoon Was Not Saying

He had begun to wait for Tuesdays and Fridays in a way that reorganized his sense of the week.

This was not something he had planned or particularly welcomed. He was a person who had spent six years trying to limit his dependencies — not from coldness but from the particular knowledge that came from learning, repeatedly, that the things you leaned on in this industry had a habit of shifting or withdrawing or turning out to be contractual rather than real. He was not cynical about this. He had simply become careful.

And yet he was waiting for a podcast.

He had not told anyone. Not the other members, not his manager. It was not the sort of thing that required concealing — there was nothing shameful or dangerous about it — but telling someone would have made it legible, and he was not sure he wanted it legible. He wanted to keep it where it was: private, warm, entirely his.

In mid-November, Cortis recorded an episode of a variety show that required the members to answer questions about their current obsessions. The format was designed to produce revelations: rapid-fire, performed spontaneity, the warm chaos that made good television.

Martin had said: "I'm genuinely obsessed with this one tteokbokki place in Mapo. I went four times in one week. The owner recognized me on the third visit and said nothing, which I respected deeply."

James had said: "Old American road movies. The ones where nothing happens for forty-five minutes and then everything happens at once." He had delivered this with the slightly sideways smile of someone who understood exactly how that sounded and was comfortable with it.

Seonghyeon had said: "I've been learning to make bread. Not well. The bread is a problem. But I think there's a metaphor in the bread somewhere and I'm not ready to give up on it." This had produced thirty seconds of the other members laughing in a way that was entirely genuine, and which would be the clip most replayed from the episode.

Juhoon had said: "classical music" and "a plant care forum I found." Both true. Both safe.

He thought of the podcast and did not say it.

He sent a voice note that Tuesday:

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 49 — TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 16 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"There's a specific version of loneliness that I think is particular to being surrounded. I want to talk about it but I'm not sure you can talk about it without it sounding like a complaint, and I don't want it to sound like a complaint, because I know how lucky I am. I say that not to preface a complaint but because it's actually true. I know how lucky I am.

But there's a version of loneliness that isn't about being alone. It's about — you're in the room and you're present and you perform presence very well, you've been doing it for a long time — but something in you is watching from the other side of the glass. You're watching yourself perform the being-there and you can't find your way back in.

I don't know if that's loneliness or something else. I don't know what to call it.

But I wanted to name it somewhere. Even if I couldn't name it properly."

Hazel sat with this one for a long time.

She played it toward the end of Episode 49, and when it ended she did not respond immediately. She let the city fill the silence. A distant motorbike. A few drops of rain against the window. The radiator's underbreath.

"That's not a complaint," she said finally. "That's a map. You just drew a map of something most people can't find words for."

She paused.

"I've felt it too. That being-on-the-other-side-of-the-glass thing. I think it's not loneliness exactly. I think it's the cost of performing yourself so reliably that you forget there's a self underneath the performance. And then 3 a.m. comes, or a stranger's podcast comes, and the performance falls away, and you remember you're still there."

Another pause, longer.

"You're still there," she said. "I just want to say that. Whatever you haven't been able to name — it's still there."

Juhoon listened to this on a Wednesday morning, in the van, on the way to a press junket, and did not trust what his face was doing for a full thirty seconds.

Keonho, seated beside him, glanced over.

"You good bro?" he said.

"Fine," Juhoon said. "Something in the podcast I'm listening to."

Keonho waited. He was good at waiting.

"It just — said something accurate," Juhoon said. "About something I hadn't managed to say myself."

Keonho nodded slowly, with the particular acknowledgment of someone who has known you long enough to understand that you do not need the response to be verbal.

"What podcast?" he said.

"Nothing you'd know," Juhoon said. "Small."

Keonho turned back to his own window. The van moved through Seoul in the grey morning light.

"Those are the good ones," he said.

That same evening, Cortis had a free night, which was rare enough that it functioned as an event.

They ended up at Keonho's apartment — the largest of the members' individual spaces, with a kitchen big enough for five people to occupy without anyone having to stand in the hallway — because Keonho had announced at 7 p.m. that he was making jjigae and anyone who arrived before eight would be fed and anyone who arrived after eight would have to explain themselves.

Everyone arrived before eight.

Martin arrived first, which was characteristic: he was constitutionally early and had spent six years pretending this was coincidence. He came in already wearing the particular expression of someone who wanted to be useful and was calibrating how to offer it, which was also characteristic, and set about chopping garlic with the focused pleasure of someone who had found a task at exactly the right moment.

James arrived second, with two bags of convenience store snacks arranged by what he described as "emotional logic" — the sweet things first, the salty things after, something fizzy at the end — and was immediately interrogated about the system by Seonghyeon, who arrived thirty seconds later having apparently been waiting outside the building for James so they could enter together, which neither of them acknowledged.

Juhoon arrived last and was greeted by the specific comfortable noise of four people who had been in each other's company for six years: overlapping conversations, someone's music from a phone, the sound of a spoon against a pot.

He sat on the floor by the low table — his preferred position, always the floor — and accepted a beer from Martin and felt something release in his chest the way it only released in rooms that did not require anything of him.

"You look like you're thinking," Seonghyeon said, dropping down beside him with the sudden gravity of a person who has decided the floor was the correct choice all along. He was eating something that crinkled.

"I'm not," Juhoon said.

"You have the face."

"What face."

"The one where you're working something out but you don't want to be asked about it." Seonghyeon considered this. "It's very identifiable. The fans have a name for it."

"The fans have a name for everything."

"They do," Seonghyeon agreed cheerfully. "It's a whole system. Very organized. Slightly frightening."

From the kitchen, Keonho said something that made Martin laugh loudly enough that James looked up from his phone with the expression of someone who had missed a joke and was deciding whether to ask. He did not ask. He put his phone away and came to sit at the table instead, and the five of them arranged themselves in the loose geometry of people who had long ago stopped being deliberate about where they sat in relation to each other, because the proximity had become its own language.

Juhoon ate. He listened. He let the room be a room.

Later, when the jjigae was finished and the conversation had moved through the schedule and an argument about whether a recent music video director's creative choices had been interesting or pretentious (James: interesting. Martin: both. Seonghyeon: pretentious is the new interesting. Keonho: quiet, smiling, refilling everyone's bowls), Keonho sat down beside Juhoon against the wall and the room reconfigured around them into two conversations — Seonghyeon and James falling into something about a game, Keonho drifting to the kitchen with the dishes.

"You sleeping?" Martin said.

"Getting there," Juhoon said, which was true in the literal sense of getting there, as in: closer than before, as in: something had been helping.

Martin looked at him for a moment. He had a way of asking the second question without asking it — of letting the silence run past the easy answer and wait for the real one.

Juhoon looked at his beer.

"I found something," he said finally. "That helps. With the nights."

Martin waited.

"Just — a thing I listen to. Someone talking about the city." He paused. "It sounds small."

"Small things," Martin said, "are usually the actual things."

Juhoon looked at him.

"You say things like that and then everyone wonders why you're the leader," he said.

Martin smiled, the small real one that didn't make it to stages. "Go to sleep at a reasonable hour for once in your life, Juhoon."

"I'll try," Juhoon said.

He did not, entirely. But he tried, which was more than he had been doing.

Chapter Seven: December

December arrived with the earnestness of a season that knew its own significance.

Seoul in December decorated itself with the kind of commitment that suggested the city had opinions about joy and was going to express them regardless. The streetlamps grew halos. The department stores on Myeongdong put up lights that could, from a distance, be mistaken for the grid of a small city that existed only at night. The Han River park installed warming tents where people sat and drank coffee and looked at the illuminated bridges and felt, for a few hours at a time, that the world was manageable.

Hazel loved December in Seoul with the specific love of someone for whom Christmas had always been more about the idea of the season than the execution of it — the philosophical proposition of warmth, the aesthetic of candlelight and cold air, the old cultural memory of the concept of home gathering itself around you even when you were technically a foreign student in an apartment with a radiator that expressed its mood through sound.

She was, in December, also developing a problem.

The problem was that she had begun to find herself narrating the city to the anonymous caller. Not out loud — not in messages, she was careful about that — but internally, as she moved through it. Standing on the Mapo Bridge watching the evening lights multiply on the water, she thought: he might like this. He said the river made him think of time passing differently. Walking through the Christmas market in City Hall Plaza, smelling cinnamon and roasted chestnuts, she thought: he mentioned once that cold weather in cities felt cleaner than cold weather outside of cities. He's right. This is clean cold.

She had not even realized she was doing it until one Thursday morning she had woken up and thought: I wonder if he uploaded anything new and then corrected herself, because he did not upload, she did, and he sent notes, and the distinction was important because it maintained the appropriate structure of their — not relationship. Their correspondence. Their exchange.

She was catastrophically interested in a stranger.

She held this information in both hands, examined it, put it away.

Then she took it back out.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 52 — FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3 [HOST, HAZEL]

"It's raining in Seoul tonight. I know that's not news — it rains here more than people imagine, and it does something beautiful to the city at night, the way the lights double in the puddles, the way sound travels differently. Tonight I walked home from the river and it was raining lightly, the kind of rain that doesn't require an umbrella so much as a philosophical adjustment.

I've been thinking about proximity lately. About the way you can be close to something — geographically, emotionally — and still not be touching it. There's a word in Korean, 그리움 — geurium — which doesn't translate cleanly but gestures toward a longing for something absent. A missing that's also a kind of love. You don't miss something you didn't love. The missing is evidence of the love.

I think about that word sometimes at 3 a.m. when the city is very quiet and very present and still very far away at its edges.

I think about it when I wonder about people I don't know and won't meet. Whether the missing is its own form of connection.

I don't have an answer. It's just the question I brought with me tonight, and I thought you might want to keep me company with it."

He sent a note on the same Friday:

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 53 — TUESDAY, DECEMBER 7 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS, PLAYED WITH PERMISSION]

"I heard the episode about geurium. I know that word. I've known it for a long time without knowing it was a word, which is its own kind of strange comfort — learning that the language already has a container for the thing you've been carrying around formless.

I want to tell you something. I'm not sure I'm going to, but I'm going to get close.

When I listen to this podcast, I feel like I'm in a room I recognize. Not a room I've been in before. A room that feels like mine, or what mine could feel like, if I had built it myself. Does that make sense?

I spend most of my time in rooms other people built. Beautiful rooms. I'm not complaining about the rooms. But they weren't mine.

This is the only place I've found in a while that felt like I could breathe differently in it.

I don't know how to thank you for that without making it strange.

So I'll just say: thank you. And I'll be here Tuesday."

Hazel listened to this note four times before Episode 53 and then spent twenty minutes sitting in her apartment with the lights off, in the specific way of someone who has received something that requires processing time, who is afraid of being moved but is moved anyway.

She played it near the end of Episode 53. She did not speak after it. She played the sound of the city instead — three minutes of rain and traffic and Seoul at night — and let it end there.

In the comment section, which she read on Saturday mornings with a cup of tea like someone reading the newspaper of the previous week's emotional weather, someone wrote: if that man is listening, the room is yours too.

She almost responded. She did not.

She thought: I know.

Chapter Eight: January — The Distance Between Frequencies

January brought Cortis to Europe.

Twelve days. Germany, France, the Netherlands. The particular cold of a European winter that operated differently from Seoul's — drier, less personal, the light failing by four in the afternoon in a way that felt almost apologetic.

Juhoon sent voice notes from Hamburg, from Paris, from Amsterdam. He did not note the cities, but she could hear the difference — the ambient sounds, the specific acoustic quality of old architecture, something in the background hum that read as elsewhere to her trained ear.

She played them all. She was, by now, responding to him directly in her hosting sections — not by name, not with attribution, but in ways she suspected he recognized, because he responded to those responses in his next notes, and the conversation had developed a recursive quality, a back-and-forth built from episodes and voice notes like a correspondence conducted across weeks and mediated by a quiet hour and a small audience of insomniacs.

In Hamburg, after the second night's show, James found him on the roof terrace of the hotel — an impractical roof terrace for January, but both of them had been spending enough years in climate-controlled interiors that cold outdoor air had acquired a value beyond temperature.

James handed him a bottle of water without preamble and leaned on the railing beside him.

They looked at the city for a while.

"You were different tonight," James said eventually.

Juhoon glanced at him.

"Different how."

"Present." James said it without inflection, matter-of-fact, the way he said things that he had thought through already and didn't need to dramatize. "Like you were actually in the set and not — the other thing."

Juhoon was quiet for a moment.

"The other thing," he said.

"The thing you do sometimes where you're there but you're also clearly somewhere else. The fans call it your concept. It's not your concept." James looked at him. "So whatever it is — good. Keep it."

He did not ask what had changed. This was the thing about James: he had very good instincts about what questions were his to ask and which ones belonged to you, and he moved between those categories with a precision that Juhoon had come to rely on without ever saying so.

"It's nothing big," Juhoon said.

"Okay," James said.

"I've been listening to something. That helps."

"Good," James said again. He straightened up, finished his water. "Amsterdam tomorrow. Try to sleep before three."

He went back inside. The city spread below in its winter darkness, and Juhoon stood in the cold for another ten minutes thinking about a voice in Seoul and a window that was probably open even now, talking to the night.

In Paris, Seonghyeon knocked on his hotel room door at 11:30 p.m. and asked if he wanted to walk somewhere. This was how Seonghyeon processed new cities — by moving through them at night when the performance layer had been removed and the city was just a city.

They walked for forty minutes and Seonghyeon talked about the album they were supposed to start recording in March and the specific feeling of having an idea for a bridge section that he couldn't yet describe to anyone because it existed in his head as a texture rather than a sequence of notes. Juhoon listened and contributed occasionally, and Seonghyeon paused once outside a lit patisserie and took a photo of it and said: "Do you think anyone is happy in there right now?"

"It's closed," Juhoon said.

"The light is on."

"Bakeries prep overnight."

Seonghyeon considered this with genuine satisfaction. "So somewhere right now someone is making something. In the dark. For other people to find in the morning."

Juhoon thought, unexpectedly, about a podcast uploaded at 2 a.m. He did not say this.

"Yes," he said. "Exactly that."

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 56 — TUESDAY, JANUARY 11 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"I'm in Paris. I know that sounds like a sentence that should come with a different tone — a lighter one, I mean, the Paris-is-Paris tone. I don't have that tone right now. I have the other one, which is: I'm in Paris and I missed the entire city except through a car window, and it's midnight, and I'm in a hotel room, and I'm tired in a way that I can't sleep off anymore because it's not in my body. It's somewhere else.

I heard your episode about geurium. I wanted to say that I have been missing you lately.

Not you — not you specifically, I don't mean — I mean the frequency you're at. The room you described. I go back to Seoul and I think: the podcast is there. She's there. Somewhere in the city is that voice, and the open window, and the rain.

I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been."

Hazel paused the audio file.

She pressed her hand flat against her sternum, where something was pushing against the inside of her ribcage with a pressure that wasn't quite pain.

He had said her.

He had caught himself and corrected to the frequency and the room but the word had come first, undirected and true: you.

She pressed record.

"To the caller who's been to seventeen cities," she said, and then stopped, because she had just identified him aloud, had given him a name — even an unnamed name — on air for the first time, and that felt significant, felt like a door opened between two hallways, and she needed a moment.

She pressed on.

"You said homesick for a place you've never been. I wrote that down. I might need to give it back to you sometime, because I think it's the most accurate thing anyone has sent me in fifty-six episodes."

A breath.

"The room is there. The frequency is here. Come home when you can."

She did not understand, hearing herself say it back in editing, why come home had felt so natural. She deleted it twice and reinstated it twice, and then left it, because it was true, and editing out true things for comfort was exactly the habit she was trying to break.

Chapter Nine: February — Falling, Which Is Not the Same as Landing

February was when Hazel admitted it to herself.

Not to Mira. Not on air. Just to herself, on a Wednesday morning in her apartment, standing at the window with her tea, watching the street below where a man was trying to fold a broken umbrella against a stubborn wind, looking at the specific shade of winter sky that had no color really but managed to be beautiful anyway.

She was in love with a stranger's voice.

She was not going to do anything about this, obviously. You could not do anything about this. The entire construct of Sleepless in Seoul depended on its anonymity — for him, for her, for the listeners who sent things at 2 a.m. that required the dark to say. The moment she reached through the format for him specifically, the magic collapsed. More than that: it would be a violation. He had come to the podcast because it was safe, because nobody was looking, because the room could hold him without requiring him to be held.

She was not going to do anything about this.

She was just going to know it. Quietly, in the way you know things that you can't change — with the specific accommodation of the true insomniac, who understands that not everything requires resolution, that some things you simply carry through the dark hours and watch them change shape under different lights.

She turned from the window and put the cup in the sink and went to her desk and opened her laptop and began planning Episode 59 with more than usual care, because the care was what she could give him, and she was going to give it.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 59 — FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18 [HOST]

"I've been thinking about what it means to know someone.

I mean this in the smallest, most specific sense: not the legal sense, not the biographical sense, but the — interior sense. To know someone's interior weather. The specific way they think around a problem rather than through it. The way they laugh when something surprises them versus when something delights them. The rhythm of their silences.

We talk about knowing people in terms of facts. We know their histories and their allergies and their preferences. But I think there's another kind of knowing that lives somewhere else — somewhere below facts, in the register of presence. You've either been in the room with someone's actual self or you haven't. Most of us are in the room with the version people bring to rooms.

I think the voice is different. The voice, in the dark, at an hour when the performance has stopped — I think the voice is closer to the actual self than most things we're given access to.

I know things about some of you that I couldn't name. Can't put in a sentence. But I know them. In here."

She pressed her hand to her sternum.

"That's enough. That's more than most people get."

He sent a note that same Friday, which was unusual — his notes typically came between episodes, not on the day of one.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 60 — TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"I heard tonight's episode and I'm not sleeping anyway so I thought I'd send this now.

You said the voice in the dark is closer to the actual self. I've been thinking about that for three hours. I've been thinking about the last time I felt like my actual self in a room. Not the version I carried in. Not the version required.

I think — I'm almost sure — that this is it. These notes. Tuesday and Friday.

I don't say that because I want to make it strange. I say it because you said honesty was the reason for the hour, and I'm trying to practice. The actual-self practice. It's harder than it sounds.

I'm working up to something. I'm not there yet. I want you to know that I am, though. Working up to it.

Also: it snowed last night in Seoul. I stood on my balcony for a long time. I thought about something you said three episodes ago about how cities look honest in the snow, how they can't hide their shapes. I think I've been hiding my shape for a while. I'm trying to stop."

She did not play this note on air.

She sat with it in her inbox for three days, and then sent a message through the portal:

The snow is still on the rooftops on my street. The city looks exactly like you said — honest. Like it got tired of the performance too. I'm glad you're here. Tuesday and Friday. I'm glad it's you.

His response came at 11:47 p.m.:

I'm glad it's you too.

PART Ⅲ: THE WEIGHT OF BEING KNOWN

Chapter Ten: March — What the Fans Noticed

Fame had its own ecosystem, and within that ecosystem there were people — a specific subset, dedicated and observant and possessed of a collective intelligence that operated like a distributed computer — who noticed things.

The fan community that had gathered around Cortis over six years was vast and internally differentiated, with its own hierarchies and dialects. There were casual listeners, there were dedicated followers, there were the people who attended every available fan event and the people who tracked schedules and the people who ran analysis accounts and the people who maintained collaborative wikis of increasingly granular detail.

And there were, in March, several of these people who began to notice something about Juhoon.

It was not one thing. It was a collection of things, and the collection was only visible to people who paid very close attention to the pattern of things rather than the things themselves. It was the fact that since approximately October, Juhoon had developed a habit of using the word frequency in interviews when asked about his emotional state — not often, but repeatedly enough that someone catalogued it. It was the fact that he had said, on a music show in January, when asked what he listened to when he couldn't sleep, that he listened to "a podcast" with an expression that was unusual for him — not guarded, not performed, but private in the way of someone protecting something soft. It was the fact that his most recent lyrics, which he had written for the new Cortis album, contained images of open windows and cities at night and a specific phrase — the room I recognize — that a dedicated enough reader would have recognized as a paraphrase of something that appeared, if you knew where to look, in an obscure episode of a small anonymous podcast called Sleepless in Seoul.

The fan who made this connection was a twenty-year-old in Daegu named Kim Soojin, who ran an analysis account with eight thousand followers and had the methodical patience of someone who genuinely found the puzzle interesting for its own sake.

She posted her analysis on a Thursday in March with appropriate caveats — this is speculative, this might be nothing, I am not trying to start anything — and the analysis was, methodologically, excellent. It laid out the pattern clearly without conclusions she hadn't earned.

The post received twenty-three thousand likes in four hours.

The comment most frequently made was a variation of: who is the podcast person.

Hazel was entirely unaware of this.

She had eighty-eight thousand listeners as of March, which was still small in the landscape of podcasts but had been growing steadily, and she still had not told anyone who she was. She had received press inquiries twice, from small music blogs who had written about the podcast's unique format, and had declined both times. She was, in some ways, well-positioned to be found — a foreign national in Seoul, an English-speaking podcast about the city, a distinctive voice — but she had structured the anonymity carefully, and the fans who arrived at Sleepless in Seoul through the analysis post found: a voice, episodes, and an inbox.

They sent thousands of messages in three days.

Most of them were kind. A few were not. Most asked versions of the same question — is JH from Cortis the anonymous caller — with varying degrees of tact. One sent a ten-paragraph analysis of voice note acoustic patterns that was genuinely impressive and reached the correct conclusion.

Hazel read all of them on a Saturday morning with her tea going cold, and by the time she reached the end of the inbox, the tea was room temperature and something in her chest was very loud and confused and frightened.

She knew the name. Everyone in Seoul knew the name. Cortis had released their latest album six weeks ago and it had been on every playlist and every café speaker and every subway advertisement for a month and a half, and Hazel had listened to it — she had listened to it three times, actually, because she had good taste in music and the album was genuinely exceptional — and she had not — had not once — connected—

She opened the fan analysis post on her phone.

She read it very carefully.

She read it again.

She turned her phone face-down on the table.

She sat for a very long time in the specific silence of someone who has just been handed information that reorganizes everything and is not yet sure in which direction.

Chapter Eleven: What She Knew and What She Didn't

She did not tell him.

This was important. This was the decision she made within the first hour, sitting at her table with the overcast March light coming through the window. She did not reach into the inbox and say: I know who you are now. She did not send anything. She sat with the information and let it settle and tried to understand what it meant to her.

What it meant, initially, was terror.

Not because he was famous — or not only because of that, though the fame was large enough to require some processing on its own. But because the analysis post had made something visible that she had been keeping carefully unexamined: she had feelings. Real ones. Not the interesting-intellectual-aesthetic feelings she had been willing to admit to. The kind that rearranged your priorities and made you think about a person at 3 a.m. in the way you thought about something whose absence would actually cost you something.

She had those feelings about a person she had never met, whose voice she knew and whose face now appeared on her phone screen if she looked him up, which she had, once, briefly, before putting the phone down again.

He was exactly what you would expect. Which was not the point. The point was that the voice she knew was the voice of someone who existed in the world in a way that was vast and surveilled and managed, and she was an anonymous podcast host in a fifth-floor apartment in Mangwon, and the distance between those two lives was not merely geographic.

She thought about what Mira had said, months ago: you don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie.

She thought about the specific way his voice had said I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been.

She thought about her own voice saying come home when you can and the word she had deleted twice and reinstated twice.

She thought: this is what it is. You fell in love with a voice in the dark, and the voice turned out to belong to someone, and someone turned out to be real, and now you have to figure out what to do with that.

She pressed record.

She did not tell him what she knew. She recorded Episode 61 as she always did — the city, the hour, the state of things — and she played two listener notes that were not his, and she spoke for seventeen minutes and recorded three minutes of Seoul breathing at the end.

She uploaded it at 2 a.m. on Tuesday.

She lay down afterward and stared at the ceiling with her heart beating strangely.

He sent a note three hours later.

[LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS, NOT AIRED]

"I heard tonight's episode. You sounded different.

Not bad different. Just — like something had shifted. Like you were speaking from slightly further back.

I notice things like this. I've been listening long enough now that I know your voice the way you know someone's footstep pattern. I know when you're tired and when you're uncertain. Tonight you were uncertain.

I hope you're okay. I hope whatever is making you uncertain is the kind that resolves rather than the kind that stays.

I'm in Seoul. I've been here for three weeks now, which feels like a long time by my standards. I've been thinking about — I've been thinking about a lot of things. About what it would mean to —

I'm not going to finish that sentence yet.

But soon."

She read this in bed at 5 a.m. and thought: I know.

She wrote back:

I'm fine. Still here. You don't have to finish the sentence yet.

She pressed send and put her phone face-down and made herself sleep.

Chapter Twelve: Mira Figures It Out

The thing about Mira was that she was relentlessly perceptive, and this was both her greatest quality and the thing that made her difficult to hide things from.

She showed up at Hazel's apartment on a Wednesday evening in March with groceries and the specific energy of someone who had been assembling evidence all week and had now arrived to present it. Hazel let her in without particular apprehension, because she had been telling herself she was fine.

She was not fine.

"Sit down," Mira said, depositing groceries on the counter and taking off her coat with the purposefulness of someone who had not come to cook but was using the groceries as context.

"I live here," Hazel said.

"Sit."

Hazel sat.

Mira pulled out her phone and laid it on the table between them, screen up. The fan analysis post was on the screen.

Hazel looked at it for a moment.

"How did you find that," she said.

"Because I follow eight Cortis fan accounts, as anyone with good taste in music does, and this has been everywhere this week." Mira sat down across from her. "And because I remembered you said the podcast listener spoke with a deep tired voice and was on tour a lot and was probably a public figure and said I'm surrounded by people and I'm completely alone."

A silence.

"And?" Hazel said.

"And," Mira said, "his voice on the recent album documentary is — Hazel, his voice is—"

"I know," Hazel said.

The silence that followed was the kind that Mira had learned, over three years, to give space to.

"How long have you known?" she said finally.

"A week."

"And?"

"And I'm processing it."

"That's a word," Mira said. "Let's try different words."

Hazel looked at the table. Outside, the rain that had been threatening all day finally arrived, a sound against the window that she had been using as emotional texture for eighteen months and was now simply grateful for because it gave her somewhere else to direct her attention.

"I think I'm in love with a voice," she said. "And the voice has a face, and the face is—" She gestured helplessly.

"Famous," Mira said.

"That's the smallest part of it."

"What's the largest part?"

"The largest part is that I don't know how to—" She pressed her hands flat on the table. "When I didn't know who he was, it was clean. It was just — two people in the dark, being honest with each other. I didn't have to think about what it meant or whether it was possible or whether he was performing some private version of himself for an anonymous podcast the way people perform everything else."

"Do you think he was?"

Hazel was quiet for a moment.

"No," she said. "I don't think he was. That's the thing. That's why I'm — that's the problem. I don't think it was performed. I think he came to the podcast because it was the one place nothing was required of him."

Mira looked at her friend with the particular gentleness she kept under all the opinions.

"So what are you afraid of?" she said.

"That it was never about me," Hazel said. "That it was about the anonymous room. That I was just the container for something he needed to put somewhere."

"And if that's not true?"

"Then I'm afraid of it being true in a different direction — that it was me, specifically, and that when he finds out who specifically I am, I won't be—" She paused. "He lives in a world I can't imagine. People follow him. People study him. People have feelings about him that go on for paragraphs. I am a person in a small apartment in Mangwon who runs a podcast that eighty-eight thousand people listen to, which is a lot but is nothing compared to—"

"Stop," Mira said.

Hazel stopped.

"You are not nothing compared to," Mira said. "You are a specific person who a specific person sends voice notes to at 1 a.m. in hotels in European cities. You are the room he described. You are the frequency. He said that — you told me he said that."

"Mira—"

"He said it. Not to JH-the-idol's hypothetical future girlfriend. To you. To your voice. To the you that talks about the city at 3 a.m. and says geurium correctly and lets the silence mean things."

Hazel blinked. Something was happening behind her eyes that she was going to prevent from becoming tears, because she was a person who cried rarely and in private.

"He doesn't know it's me," she said.

"He knows more about you than most people who have had coffee with you," Mira said.

This, Hazel thought, was possibly true. It was also not an answer to the problem. It was, if anything, the description of the problem from a new angle.

"I don't know what to do," she said.

Mira reached across the table and put her hand over Hazel's.

"I know," she said. "But here's the thing. You don't have to do anything yet. He's still sending notes, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"So keep going. Keep being the room. And trust that something is going to happen that makes the next thing clear."

Hazel looked at her friend.

"That is completely uncharacteristically soft of you," she said.

"I have depth," Mira said. "It's a whole thing."

Chapter Thirteen: The Album

The new Cortis album was called Seventeen Cities.

Juhoon had written three of the twelve tracks on his own, which was unusual — he had always contributed to the group's songwriting but not in this quantity, not with this specificity. The album's B-side had a song called The Open Window that was quieter than anything he had released before, almost uncomfortably personal, and the music press had noticed this and commented with varying degrees of insight. One review had called it "a departure into interior territory." Another had called it "JH's love letter to insomnia." A third, more perceptive, had noted that it sounded like "the documentation of something that happened rather than the invention of something desired."

Juhoon had read that review in the back of a van and thought: yes. That's exactly right.

The lyrics contained a line that his co-writers had questioned — not critically, but with the curiosity of people who wanted to understand the reference — which went:

I heard your voice and it was coming home to a place I'd never been but always known

He had kept it because there was no version of it that felt less true, and the alternative was writing something that sounded like a love song but wasn't, and he had enough of those.

He had been thinking, all of March, about the unfinished sentence.

He had said: I've been thinking about what it would mean to—

And stopped himself.

What he had been thinking about, and what he had not sent into the voice note, was this: what it would mean to reach through the podcast's anonymous format and say something direct. To ask — carefully, with appropriate respect for the container they had built — whether there was a way to be in the same room that wasn't mediated by audio files and inboxes.

He had been thinking about this since February.

He had not done it yet because he was not sure of the grammar. Because there was something that worked only in this specific dark-and-anonymous space, and to dismantle it in pursuit of a more conventional kind of proximity seemed like a risk that required certainty he didn't have. He was afraid that knowing would not improve on not-knowing. He was afraid that the version of themselves they had built in the dark, without faces, without the weight of the world either of them moved through — that version was fragile, and he had never held anything fragile well.

He was also, and this was the true thing underneath all the others, afraid that he was wrong. That the feeling was one-directional. That she was a podcast host who treated all her dedicated listeners with this specific warmth and that he had misread the warmth as directed.

He had listened, more than once, to the episode where she said: I know things about some of you that I couldn't name. He had turned the phrase in his hands. He had wondered if he was in the some of you or if he was flattering himself.

On a Tuesday in late March, after listening to Episode 63 and sitting for twenty minutes on the floor of his apartment — his good floor, the flat honest floor — he sent a note that was the closest he had come to finishing the sentence.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 64 — TUESDAY, MARCH 29 [LISTENER VOICE NOTE — ANONYMOUS]

"I want to tell you something, and I want to tell it carefully, because the space we've built — the Tuesday-and-Friday space — is the most honest one I've had in years, and I don't want to damage it by asking it to hold more than it was designed for.

But I think I have to. I think I have to try.

I've been listening to your voice for six months. I've been sending you things I don't send anywhere else. And the person who sends those things — the one at 3 a.m. on hotel floors and apartment floors and in cities I couldn't locate on a map afterward — that person feels more like me than the one I carry around the rest of the time.

I don't know you. I know your voice and the way your mind moves and the city you live in and that you're awake at 2 a.m. and that you love rain and that you said geurium once in a way that I've been carrying with me ever since.

I think that's knowing.

I think I want to find out if I'm right.

I don't know how to ask this appropriately inside the format we have. So I'm going to ask it here, and if it's wrong, you can keep this note out of the episode and I'll understand: is there a way to be in the same city without the microphone between us?"

She listened to this voice note alone, at 1:30 in the morning, on a Tuesday, the city audible through her window.

She listened to it twice.

She pressed both hands against her face for a moment, covering her eyes, taking a breath.

Then she opened the portal, and wrote:

I think there's a way. But I need to tell you something first. Can we talk in here — in writing, just the two of us, before we talk in the same city? There's something I know that I should have told you sooner, and I want to tell you before it tells itself.

He responded twenty-three minutes later:

Yes. Tell me.

PART Ⅳ: THE COST OF BEING SEEN

Chapter Fourteen: What She Told Him

She wrote it carefully.

She had drafted it three times in a document before she sent it through the portal, and the three drafts showed the stages of how you tell someone something true: the first draft was too apologetic; the second was too clinical; the third, which she sent, was simply what had happened.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — HOST TO ANONYMOUS LISTENER — MARCH 29, 2:14 A.M.]

I've known for three weeks. A fan community made a connection between your voice notes and some things you've said in other contexts — I won't explain the chain of reasoning, but it was thorough and I believe it. I didn't come looking. It came to me. And then I went still for a while because I didn't know what it meant and I didn't know how to say it and every time I thought about opening this window I— I want to be honest about why I didn't tell you immediately: I was afraid. Not of who you are. Of what it might do to the thing we built here if the weight of who you are walked into the room. This space has worked because neither of us has had to carry the rest of ourselves into it. And I didn't want to be the one to end that. I still don't know if this is the end or the beginning of something. I know that I should have told you when I found out. I know that sitting with it for three weeks while you sent me notes was not entirely honest, even though I wasn't performing anything — everything I have said to you has been true, is true, will continue to be true. I'm sorry I waited. Tell me what you need.

She pressed send. She sat. She put the kettle on, because she was a person who dealt with large emotional moments by making tea, which was not the most sophisticated coping mechanism but was thermally reliable.

She was on her second cup when the response came.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — ANONYMOUS LISTENER — MARCH 29, 3:07 A.M.]

How long have you known. I know you said three weeks. I mean — which version of what I said. Which notes. How much.

She understood the question. She typed:

All of it. I've kept it from air when you asked. Everything else I've heard.

A longer pause this time.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — 3:24 A.M.]

I need a few days. Not because I'm angry. Because I need to think. Is that okay.

Yes, she wrote.

The room is here. I'll be here.

Three days became five.

She recorded Episode 64 on Tuesday as scheduled, because the podcast was not contingent on him, had never been contingent on him, and the eighty-eight thousand people who listened deserved her full presence regardless of the specific state of her own heart. She talked about March and the way seasons in Seoul were opinions rather than facts — March insisting it was spring while wearing winter's temperature like borrowed clothing. She did not mention anything personal. She played four listener notes, none of them his.

She uploaded at 2 a.m. and sat in the quiet afterward and thought about a man she had never met in a city she shared with ten million people, sitting somewhere in the dark, deciding.

He listened to Episode 64 on a Wednesday morning, alone, in his apartment, lying on the floor.

He listened to it twice.

He thought about the three weeks she had known and not said. He turned it over carefully, looking for the thing that would make him feel betrayed — looking for the performance, for the manipulation, for the evidence of a game he had been inside without knowing.

He could not find it.

What he found instead, when he was honest about what he found: someone who had received knowledge that would have broken the container, and had sat with it and been afraid, and had chosen to keep the room exactly as he had left it rather than dismantle it in a moment of revelation. That was not manipulation. That was a specific kind of care — the kind that cost the person doing it something rather than nothing.

He listened to her voice in Episode 64 saying: March in Seoul insists on things.

He thought: I know that voice. He had known that voice for six months. He had told that voice things he had never told a room of people or a therapist or the oldest friend he had in the world. The voice had not changed when what lay behind it changed.

It was a million tiny little things, he thought — and the thought arrived not as a sentence but as a weight, a collection, the accumulated mass of Tuesday and Friday and Singapore and Paris and Seoul in the snow and the room I recognize and come home when you can — and when you added them all up, they were the shape of something that meant: we were supposed to be here.

He sent a message through the portal on Friday morning.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — FRIDAY, APRIL 1]

I'm not angry. I want to be clear about that first. I've been thinking about what it would feel like to have someone know something about me and choose to keep the room safe rather than do anything with the knowing. I've been in situations where people knew things about me and the knowing immediately became something they used — for access, for leverage, for content, for the feeling of being adjacent to something. I've been around that for six years. You knew. You sat with it for three weeks and you kept Tuesday and Friday exactly as they were, and you kept the voice notes private when I asked, and you said things on air that were directed at me without ever making it about me in a way that cost me anything. That's not nothing. That's the opposite of nothing. I want to ask you something: do you listen to the music? Not in a — I'm not asking for approval. I'm asking because I'm trying to understand what you knew before you knew who I was. How much of what you thought you understood about me was correct. Because I'm afraid that what you actually heard in the voice notes and what gets performed in the other context are so different that I'm asking you to believe in the voice without the face and I don't know if that's fair.

She read this twice and then put the phone down and thought for a long time.

Then she typed:

I listened to the album three times before I knew. I thought it was about insomnia, which it partly is, and about the loneliness of travel, and about something I recognized from the podcast but didn't connect. The open window song — I had feelings about it that I was trying not to articulate. The voice in the notes and the voice in the music are different in production and context and purpose. But underneath both of them: same person. Same rhythm. Same silences. I'm not in love with your work. I'm in love with a man who lay on hotel floors in European cities and sent me notes about not being able to sleep.

She stared at what she had written for a long time.

She sent it.

She put the phone face-down.

Her hands were shaking very slightly, which was unusual, because she had good emotional regulation as a general rule.

The response came eleven minutes later.

I'd like to be in the same city without the microphone between us. I know I asked before, and things were different then. I'm asking again. Is Saturday okay.

Chapter Fifteen: April — The Other Side of the Glass

The place he suggested was a small coffee shop in Yeonnam-dong that he had described, three months earlier in a voice note, as one of the only places in Seoul where he felt invisible enough to think. He had not given the name. He had described it precisely enough that she had found it — the one with the green door and the records on the walls and the table by the second window that caught the light in the late afternoon.

She recognized it immediately because she had been there twice.

She arrived seven minutes early and sat at the table by the second window and ordered a coffee with both hands wrapped around the cup, because her hands were still doing the slight thing from the night before, which she was attributing to general circumstance and not specifically to what she was about to do.

It was a Saturday in April. The cherry blossoms along the streets had peaked and begun to fall, which meant the streets looked like what April believed about itself, and the light was doing the thing it did at four in the afternoon in this city where it came in at an angle that made everything look like it was being remembered rather than currently occurring.

She was watching the door.

He came in at 4:08.

She knew him immediately, and not from his face, which she had looked at exactly once before putting the phone away. She knew him from the quality of his attention — the way he scanned the room not with the alert defensiveness of someone used to being recognized, but with a specific looking that was clearly searching for one thing. That particular searching stillness. She had heard it in his silences. She knew it in his body.

He found her.

The moment was nothing like what the movies would do with it — no swelling music, no clean emotional detonation, no dialogue landing with practiced weight. It was simply a man and a woman looking at each other across a small coffee shop for the first time, and the look containing everything that a voice contains: recognition. Relief. The particular terror of having finally arrived somewhere you have been trying to reach for a long time.

He walked to the table. He sat down across from her.

They looked at each other.

"Hi," she said. Her voice was exactly as it sounded on the podcast — warm, careful, with that slight husk of someone who was being honest in real time.

"Hi," he said.

His voice. She had listened to his voice for six months in the dark, and now it was three feet away from her, directed entirely at her, in a room that smelled like coffee and old records, with the April light coming in at the right angle for a thing that was happening that mattered.

It was like coming home to a place she had never been.

She knew that was too much to think within the first fifteen seconds of meeting someone. She thought it anyway.

He had not known what to expect. He had run through versions in his head, the way he ran through scenarios before anything high-stakes — concert openings, media appearances, meetings where the thing on the table was larger than the thing being said. He had imagined various configurations of the meeting: awkward and tender, or formal-becoming-warm, or the particular disaster of reality failing to match six months of constructed feeling.

She was not what he had imagined, and she was also exactly what he had imagined, which was the confusing thing — the way you could know something from a voice so well that the face was simultaneously a surprise and an inevitability.

She had red-chestnut hair and dark eyes and she was holding her coffee cup with both hands wrapped around it in a way that suggested she was cold or nervous or both, and she was looking at him with an expression he recognized from the podcast in a way that was strange, because this was not a face he had heard before. But the expression — that combination of directness and restraint, the thing that opened and then carefully managed the opening — that he knew.

"I listened to Episode 64 four times," he said, because the first thing that came out of his mouth might as well be true.

"I know which part you listened to," she said.

"The March one. The seasons-insisting."

"That was for you."

"I know."

A pause. The coffee shop moved around them — two students at a laptop, a couple near the window, the record player on the counter spinning something old and warm.

"I want to say something," he said, "and I want to say it before we figure out the rest of it, because I think the rest is complicated and I want to say the simple thing first."

She waited. She was good at waiting. He had known this about her.

"When I listen to your voice," he said, "I feel like myself. Not the self I carry around. The one underneath. The one that's still there."

She looked at him for a moment.

"I know," she said. "Your notes do that for me too."

"I know," he said. "You said so. Episode 59."

They looked at each other, and then — simultaneously, and with the slight inevitability of two people who have been circling the same frequency for six months — they both smiled. Not the big public smile she had seen in photographs. A smaller one. The real one.

They talked for three hours.

This was not romantic in the cinematic sense, which was perhaps the most romantic thing about it — no confession scene, no dramatic crossing of the room. They talked the way people talk when they have been saving things up: with the relief of a pressure released, conversation flowing in multiple directions at once, looping back, going deeper. He talked about the tour with the specificity of someone who had been waiting to describe it to someone who would actually hear it. She talked about the podcast the way she had never talked about it to anyone — the things she chose, and why, and what the listener community meant to her.

He knew the specific episodes. He had opinions about her editing choices. He quoted a line back at her from six months ago, word for word, and she looked at him with an expression that was surprise and also not surprise.

"You have a very good memory," she said.

"I have a very good reason," he said.

And she looked at the table and then back at him and they understood each other.

She walked home at seven in the evening through the April streets with cherry blossom petals on the pavement beneath her feet, and she called Mira.

"Well?" Mira said.

"He knows the episodes by number," Hazel said.

A pause.

"Hazel," Mira said.

"I know," Hazel said.

"You're okay?"

"I'm more than okay," she said. "I'm — I'm something without a clean name."

"Geurium?"

"No. The opposite. The thing geurium is the missing of. The presence. The having-arrived."

Another pause, different quality.

"Good," Mira said. "I'm very, very glad."

"Me too," Hazel said.

She kept walking. The petals fell. The city held her, as it always had — generous and awake and indifferent to the enormous things that happened quietly inside it, as enormous things always do.

PART Ⅴ: THE COST OF BEING FOUND

Chapter Sixteen: Public

Hazel had been naive in exactly one respect, and it was a large one.

She had believed — had allowed herself to believe, in the specific hopefulness of the first weeks, when everything was contained and careful and new — that the fan community's theory about the anonymous caller had been speculative enough to remain speculative. Unconfirmed. A theory among theories.

She had underestimated, significantly, the collective intelligence of eight thousand observant people with time, search tools, and genuine investment.

The photograph was taken on their third Saturday meeting, at a different café — one further from Juhoon's usual territory, in a quiet alley in Seongbuk-dong that neither of them had been to before. It was a single photograph, slightly blurred, taken from outside through glass. It showed two people at a table: a young man whose face was partially turned away but identifiable to anyone who had been looking, and a young woman with red-chestnut hair and both hands around a coffee cup.

It appeared on a fan forum on a Sunday morning.

By Monday it had appeared on three Korean entertainment news sites.

By Tuesday it had been picked up by international K-pop coverage.

By Wednesday Hazel had been identified.

The identification was not difficult, in the end. She was a foreign student at a specific university. Her voice was on eighty-eight episodes of a podcast that a large number of people were now searching with the specific intention of finding. Someone found a faculty photo of her from a university event. Someone cross-referenced her voice with the podcast. Someone matched the podcast's general Mangwon geography to the area of the photograph.

The comments were varied. This was the diplomatic way to say it.

Some were warm: she sounds incredible, I've been listening all week. Some were curious: the podcast really is beautiful, you can understand why he likes it. Some were protective of Juhoon in a way that was explicitly hostile toward Hazel: she obviously knew who he was the whole time, this is a manipulation. Some were simply the undifferentiated noise of mass attention, which had no particular content but a quantity that made the podcast inbox unsustainable.

Hazel's listener numbers went from eighty-eight thousand to four hundred thousand in four days.

She did not upload an episode that week. She could not.

She heard from Juhoon's management first — a call from Park Jiyoung, who was professional and efficient and did not make it hostile but made it very clear that the situation required management on multiple fronts, and that the company's position was that both parties should refrain from public statement until a strategy was developed.

She heard from Juhoon second — a message through the portal, which felt, in the circumstances, like someone choosing a room they trusted over one they had been handed.

I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. I'm sorry this came at you this way. Are you okay.

She was not okay. She was the specific kind of not-okay that came from having your quiet careful life suddenly made visible and contested and treated as a narrative by people who had no knowledge of its actual content.

She wrote back:

I'm managing. How are you managing.

They want me to not respond publicly. I disagree. But I understand the argument for it.

What do you want to do?

she wrote.

A pause.

I want to tell them it was real and tell them to be kind to you. I don't know if that helps or hurts.

What Juhoon was not writing to her, because he could not say it without it becoming something he wasn't ready to name, was that the week after the photograph had been the worst one in recent memory — not because of the news cycle, which he had lived through versions of before, but because Martin had knocked on his door on a Tuesday evening and sat down on his couch with the specific expression of a leader who had been quietly watching something develop for months and had now decided that watching was no longer the appropriate posture.

"I listened to it," Martin said.

Juhoon did not ask what.

"The whole archive," Martin said. "I started from the beginning on Sunday." He paused. "She's good, Juhoon. She's really good."

"I know," Juhoon said.

"I listened to the notes you sent her."

"I know."

Martin was quiet for a moment. He had a quality when he was being honest that was different from his performance of honesty — a stillness, something that stopped reaching for effect. It was the quality Juhoon trusted most in him.

"The one from Paris," he said. "About being homesick for a place you've never been."

Juhoon said nothing.

"I didn't know you felt like that," Martin said. "I've been here the whole time and I didn't know."

"It's not — it's not something I could have said in a room," Juhoon said. "That's the whole thing. That was the whole point of it."

Martin nodded slowly, like someone processing the logic of a feeling he hadn't been equipped to receive before.

"Okay," he said. "I get it." He looked at Juhoon directly. "She's real. What you were doing in there was real. I just wanted to say that out loud, because I think you need someone to say it who isn't on the other side of a screen."

Juhoon looked at his hands.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't thank me. Fix it." Martin stood up, with the efficiency of someone who had said the thing and was not going to dilute it by staying too long. "Also Seonghyeon went down a three-hour rabbit hole of the podcast and now he keeps quoting it at me in context. That's on you."

Despite everything, Juhoon laughed.

It was the first time in a week he had laughed at something real.

She sat with this for a while.

Let me think, she wrote.

Chapter Seventeen: The Betrayal She Hadn't Expected

The version of the story that became dominant — the one repeated and reframed across entertainment news cycles and fan forums and social media comment threads — was that Hazel had knowingly pursued a famous person through the guise of an anonymous podcast, had cultivated a relationship while maintaining false ignorance of his identity, and had used the podcast as a platform to launder proximity into intimacy.

This version was wrong. It was also extremely coherent and emotionally satisfying as a story, which made it difficult to displace.

What the version got wrong — what the version necessarily elided — was the order of things. Which was the entire point. She had not known. She had built the room before he arrived. She had fallen in love with the voice before the face, and the face had been a discovery, and the discovery had frightened her before it had done anything else.

The version did not know this. The version had access only to a photograph through a coffee shop window, and a podcast that now had four hundred thousand listeners going through it looking for evidence of design.

She understood, in a way she had not before, what it was to have your interior life narrated by people outside it. She had a new and bone-deep sympathy for what Juhoon had been trying to say in November about the glass — the one you stood behind watching yourself be interpreted.

She also understood, in a way she had not anticipated and did not know how to frame yet, what it felt like to wonder about the version of the story that was wrong.

Not the public version. The private one.

The question she had asked herself in the beginning and then set aside: had the anonymity been the point, or had she been? Was she the room, or was she the person?

She knew, in her honest 3 a.m. self, what she believed. But knowledge and fear coexisted. They had always coexisted in her — she was a person made of careful knowing and still-present fear, and she had made her peace with that most of the time.

Most of the time.

She sent him a message on a Thursday, twelve days after the photograph.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — THURSDAY, APRIL 21]

I've been thinking about something, and I want to say it clearly because I think we owe each other clarity in proportion to how much we've owed each other honesty. I don't want to be someone you're settling for. I don't mean that the way it sounds at first — I don't mean settling as in compromise. I mean: I don't want to be the version that was safe and anonymous and required nothing from you except what you chose to give. I don't want to be the podcast. I want to be the person. But I'm also — I'm afraid that the podcast was the person, and that the person is not separate from it, and that when the podcast becomes four hundred thousand strangers looking for a story, the person inside it gets — smaller. Less distinct. I am afraid of being less distinct. I know who you are now. I knew before, but now I know it differently — I know it the way the world knows it, which is a lot of information and very little of it true. And I'm afraid that the world's version of you is going to be the version I'm dealing with now, and not the man on the floor in Singapore who sent me a note about rain. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me what's actually happening in there. Not the version that gets managed. The floor version.

The response came two hours later, which was fast by his standards — she had learned the timing of his thinking.

[PORTAL MESSAGE — THURSDAY, APRIL 21, 11:52 P.M.]

The floor version is this: I am frightened that you are going to decide that the distance between our lives is not crossable and that the math is wrong and that I am too much — not as a person, but as a thing to be attached to in the world. I am frightened that the month the world spent narrating us has cost you something you didn't choose to spend. I am frightened that you heard the voice and the voice was enough, and then the voice got a body with a world attached to it, and the world is not what you signed up for. I do not know how to make the world smaller. I have been trying to do that for six years. I have not succeeded. What I know: the man in Singapore is the same one who sat across from you in the café. He had different things to carry around him, but he's the same. The floor version and the performance version are the same person in different weather. You have met both. You know which one is which. I'm not settling. I'm the opposite of settling. I have spent six years in rooms built by other people and you were the first room I walked into that felt like mine. You asked me to tell you what's actually happening in there. That's what's happening in there. Tell me what to do next.

She read this four times.

She sat in the quiet of her apartment with the city breathing through the window and the radiator muttering under the sill and the April darkness holding everything at arm's length except the thing it couldn't hold, which was this.

She had told Mira she was afraid of being the container. She had been.

She had told herself she was afraid the anonymity had been the point. She had been.

And now she had his words on a screen at midnight — the first room I walked into that felt like mine — and the fear was still there, the way fear is always still there, but it was smaller than the other thing, which was this:

She believed him.

She typed:

Come to Friday's episode. Not on air. Just come to where I am. I'll leave the window open.

Chapter Eighteen: Friday

He knew the neighborhood but not the building. She sent him the address through the portal at 10 p.m. on Friday, with a message that said: fourth floor. The light will be on.

She had considered, on the way home from campus that day, what she would say. She had arrived at: nothing prepared. Prepared things were a performance and she was done with performances, was actively evacuating them from her life. She was going to be exactly who she was in the dark at 2 a.m. with the microphone and the open window, which was the truest version available.

She set up for recording at midnight — the usual spot, the usual microphone, the window open to April. She pressed record and began talking about the city.

She talked for twelve minutes. About rain in Mangwon. About the cherry blossoms that were finished now, turned to leaves that didn't announce themselves, just quietly continued. About loneliness not as a weather condition this time but as a language — something you became fluent in, that let you recognize when someone was speaking it, that created the specific grammar of understanding between two people who had been practicing in the same room.

She heard the buzzer at 12:23 a.m.

She pressed pause. She went to the intercom and let him in and stood at the open door of her apartment while he came up the stairs — fifth floor, no elevator, and she heard him take them with a deliberateness that told her he was not rushing. Either because he was tired or because he understood that this moment, like the good moments, required a different pace.

He appeared at the top of the stairs.

He was wearing an ordinary coat. A hat he hadn't bothered to pull low, because it was 12:23 a.m. and the building was empty. He looked — she searched for the word and found it exactly: himself. The floor version. The one underneath.

She stepped back. He came in.

She had tidied the apartment, which was not its usual state, which was comfortable-and-lived-in; she had returned it to comfortable-and-lived-in after tidying it and then deciding that tidying it was itself a performance. The microphone was on its stand. The window was open. The radiator was doing its thing. The city was audible in the specific way it was audible on eighty-eight episodes of Sleepless in Seoul, which he knew well enough to have described it once as sounding like a city that had made peace with being awake.

He stood in the middle of the room and looked around.

"It's exactly like I imagined," he said. "Smaller."

"Everyone says that," she said.

"I'm not — I mean it as a compliment. It fits you. It fits the voice."

She looked at him standing in the middle of her small exact apartment and thought of all the things he had said in the dark, in the private portal messages and the voice notes and the episode where he had said I think I might be homesick for a place I've never been and she had thought: I know exactly what you mean.

"Sit down," she said. "I was in the middle of recording."

He sat on the edge of her bed — the only available sitting surface — with the particular care of someone who was trying not to displace anything. She sat back in her chair and looked at the microphone and then at him.

"Can I keep going?" she said.

He looked at her steadily.

"Yes," he said.

She pressed record.

SLEEPLESS IN SEOUL — EPISODE 67 — FRIDAY, APRIL 29 [HOST]

"It's after midnight. The city is doing its city things — delivery bikes, a distant siren, the specific wet-street sound of cars on wet asphalt after rain.

I have something to tell you, and I'm going to tell it as directly as I know how to, which means I'm going to start in the wrong place and find my way to the right one.

Six months ago, someone started sending voice notes to this podcast. I don't know if you remember. Some of you do, based on the comments. He was a man who couldn't sleep — which is how most of you found me — and he spoke carefully, the way someone speaks when they are afraid of using more words than they mean. He talked about hotels and cities and the specific loneliness of being surrounded. He asked questions he answered himself.

Over six months, I fell in love with his voice.

I want to be clear about the order of operations: I fell in love with a voice, and then a voice note became a written message, and a written message became a café on a Saturday, and a café on a Saturday became someone sitting on the edge of my bed at 12:30 a.m. while I finish recording.

I know that some of you have been part of a story about us that has gotten a lot of things in the wrong order. I understand why the wrong order felt more like a story. I understand the grammar of suspicion. I've felt it myself — the particular fear that a thing you love was built rather than found.

But I want to say this clearly, into the microphone, for the record, for the night:

It was built. Everything good is built. You build it one small honest thing at a time, until you look at what you've made and realize it has the shape of something that feels like home.

It was also found. Because you don't get to choose which voices reach you through the dark, or which ones fit the exact shape of the missing place in your chest.

Both things are true. Both things were ours.

I'm not going to say his name. He can introduce himself if he wants to. But he's here, and this room is his too, and I wanted you to know that some things that start in the dark end up in the light, and the light doesn't change them — it just lets you see what was already there."

She stopped recording.

The silence had a particular quality — the specific silence that follows the truest thing you've said in a room.

She looked at him.

He had been very still while she spoke. His hands on his knees, his head very slightly bowed. The specific stillness she recognized from his silences on the voice notes, when something had landed and he was in the process of receiving it.

He looked up.

His face was doing something she hadn't seen yet — hadn't seen in the photograph or the café or the three hours of talking or the twelve days of distance. Something that had come unstuck.

"You said it out loud," he said.

"Yes."

"On the podcast."

"Yes."

"To four hundred thousand people."

"Plus the ones who don't listen live and will find it Saturday."

Something moved across his face that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one — the relief of something long-held finally put down.

"I didn't know if you were going to do that," he said.

"Neither did I, until I did."

He stood up. He was not particularly dramatic about it. He crossed the three feet of apartment between the bed and the recording chair with the care of someone who had been practicing arrival for a long time.

He stopped just in front of her. Close enough to see the small scar above her left eyebrow that she had mentioned, three episodes ago, in the context of a childhood story about a bicycle. Close enough to be in the room rather than adjacent to it.

"I want to say something on the record," he said.

She looked up at him.

"Say it," she said.

"My name is Kim Juhoon." He said it with the slight formality of someone who had not said his name unperformed in a very long time. "I'm from Incheon. I'm twenty-six years old. I cannot sleep in hotels and I have six plants and I prefer the floor to the bed when I'm thinking, and I've been in love with a podcast host since November, which is not something I expected to be able to say to her face."

He paused.

"Also," he said, "your apartment is exactly what I imagined."

"You said it was smaller."

"I said it was smaller than I imagined. That's not a criticism. I'm bad at scale."

She laughed — surprised, real, unguarded in the way she was only at 2 a.m. when the performance had fallen away. He had heard that laugh in exactly one episode when she had forgotten herself describing a pigeon that had walked directly through a café with the confidence of someone who had made a reservation. He had listened to it three times.

He reached out and took her hand.

The city breathed through the window. The radiator muttered. Somewhere below, a delivery bike turned a corner and was gone.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi," she said.

PART Ⅵ: AFTER MIDNIGHT — THE SHAPE OF HOME

Chapter Nineteen: May

May arrived, as it always does, with the quality of a season that has remembered what it was supposed to be.

The tree at the corner of Hazel's street — a ginkgo that had been bare in November and gold in October and bare again in February — was fully green now, deeply and specifically green, the particular green of something that has been through winter and has come back with the knowledge of having come back. The evenings were long and warm and the city was doing what it did in spring, which was to believe in itself with renewed enthusiasm.

Three things happened in May.

The first was that Hazel's listener numbers stabilized at two hundred and forty thousand, which was not the four hundred thousand of the scandal's peak but was triple what she had before, and the quality of the listener base had improved in the way that things improve when the casual observers move on and the genuine ones remain. The comments section was, largely, full of people who had found the podcast for the wrong reasons and stayed for the right ones — who had come looking for a story and found something stranger and quieter and more honest than a story.

The second was that Juhoon appeared on a podcast interview — a different one, a music industry one — and was asked about the past month and gave an answer that became, briefly, the top trending clip in the entertainment category for four days:

"I listened to a podcast for six months. It helped me sleep, which sounds simple. It was not simple. I think sometimes you find the frequency of a person before you find the person — you understand what they are before you understand who they are. That's what happened. And I think it means that when you arrive at the actual person, you already know them in the most important way."

The interviewer had asked whether the podcast in question was Sleepless in Seoul.

He had smiled with the small real smile and said: "I think you already know that."

The clip received fourteen million views.

The third thing was that Hazel finished recording Episode 72 at 1:45 a.m. on a Tuesday and turned the microphone off and found Juhoon asleep on her bed — not having planned to be, but simply having been there since eleven and having drifted off somewhere in the middle of Episode 71's playback editing, which she took as a compliment of the highest order: to fall asleep somewhere was to trust it.

She stood in the doorway of her own bedroom and looked at him sleeping and thought about the million tiny little things. The voice note from Singapore. The conversation about geurium. The Paris hotel room. The floor at 3 a.m. The green door in Yeonnam-dong. The sound of him coming up five flights of stairs at 12:23 a.m. on a Friday night in April, not rushing.

It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant they were supposed to be here. Not in some predestined cosmic sense. In the sense that people build inevitabilities from choices, from frequencies, from the specific habit of being honest in the dark until the dark becomes something you can live in together.

She turned off the overhead light. She sat in her recording chair with the window open and the city breathing and wrote the first paragraph of Episode 72 by hand in the notebook she kept for drafts:

Tonight I want to talk about home as a verb.

Epilogue: Sleepless in Seoul— Episode 75

TRANSCRIPT — TUESDAY, JUNE 7 — 2:08 A.M.

"It's raining in Seoul tonight. I know I've said that before. I say it every time it's true because it's always true in a slightly different way, and tonight it's the warm summer rain that arrives without warning and doesn't particularly care whether you have an umbrella.

I've been doing this for almost two years. Seventy-five episodes. I started talking into a microphone at 2 a.m. because I couldn't sleep and I liked my city and I needed somewhere to put things, and what I found was that a lot of you couldn't sleep either, and needed somewhere too, and that the somewhere could be shared.

I want to say something I haven't said in exactly this way before.

Thank you. For being awake with me. For sending voice notes at 1 a.m. and trusting the dark with things you hadn't said out loud. For the woman in Busan who called herself Insomniac No. 4 and who I know is listening tonight because she told me she always does. For the student with the plants. For the man in Itaewon who misses his kids in a way that makes my throat tight every single time. For everyone who arrived at this podcast looking for something and found a different thing than they expected.

Some of you found love here, at least one of you has told me. Some of you found the word for what you were feeling. Some of you found permission to not be okay, which is a different and equally important thing.

I found something too.

I want to talk about what I found, briefly, at the risk of making something private public in a way it isn't quite ready for — but the risk feels worth it because the people who listen at 2 a.m. are the people who can be trusted with the soft things.

I found that love arrives in the order it arrives. Not when you plan for it. Not in the form you're prepared for. It arrives in voices before faces, in honesty before names, in the specific recognition of a silence that fits your own silences.

I found that being known — really known, below the version you carry around — is not a disaster. It is, it turns out, the thing we were all awake looking for.

I'm still looking for a lot of things. I'm still awake at 2 a.m. with the window open. But I am looking in the right direction.

The frequency, if you're listening, is still on.

Come home when you can.

Sleepless in Seoul will be back Friday. Keep the window open. I'll be here."

[FROM THE PODCAST INBOX — RECEIVED TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 2:31 A.M.]

[NOT AIRED — KEPT]

"I'm here. I heard the episode. I heard all of them, every single one, and I will keep hearing them for as long as you keep making them. The frequency is still on. I'm still on it. Come find me in the morning. I'll make coffee. — J"

[RESPONSE — SENT 2:34 A.M.]

"The window is open. Good night. — H"

THE END

Author's Note on the novel's epigraph:

The line "It was a million tiny little things that, when you added them all up, meant we were supposed to be together" is adapted from Sleepless in Seattle (1993, dir. Nora Ephron). This novel is written in admiration of Ephron's belief that love is specific, cumulative, and — above all — worth the waiting.

Sukuna stands a few steps away with his hands loosely in his pockets, already resigned to the fact that this is just who you are. You see a cat, and you stop functioning. 

He can’t help but watch you with a mix of exasperation and a bit of amusement that’s almost close to fondness, mostly because you look so stupidly happy, and that tends to completely override anything else he might think about your sudden, public abandonment of him.

You’re absolutely thrilled when the cat, after a moment of intense, green-eyed staring, allows you to gently extend a finger and touch it. You instantly start a non-stop, ridiculous stream of mushy nonsense, completely forgetting you're technically in public. When it headbutts your hand with surprising force, you burst out laughing, like this might be the best moment of your day. In fact, it probably is, judging by the bright smile on your face.

This is, of course, the exact moment when a stunning woman decides that today is her day, and Sukuna is the ultimate jackpot. Her eyes quickly scan his physique, the imposing height and the lines of his tattoos, like she’s already mentally rearranging her life to make him the centrepiece of it.

Clearly, she likes what she sees, and misinterpreting his relaxed, nonchalant posture as availability, she saunters up to him with a bold confidence that’s kinda admirable because it takes guts, but in this specific situation, it’s deeply, deeply misguided.

“Well, hello, handsome,” she practically purrs, tilting her head smoothly like she’s already got him. “You look far too interesting to be standing here by yourself.”

Sukuna doesn’t even glance at her, keeping his eyes glued to you crouching on the pavement, scratching a grumpy-looking stray cat behind the ear like it’s your actual job. Your shoulders shake when you start giggling again, and he just watches the curve of your cheek and the shape of your smile, not offering the woman even the slightest bit of his attention.

"Hey," she tries again, moving closer and smiling at him brightly, but it’s obvious she’s surprised by his silence. “You’re going to make me work for it, aren’t you?”

“Not interested,” he responds bluntly, sounding more bored than anything else. He wouldn’t have bothered answering at all if she hadn’t crossed that invisible line and stepped directly into his space.

Then, as her perfectly sculpted brows lift in offence, Sukuna finally grants her the smallest fraction of his attention. He gives her a brief and unimpressed glance, a look he usually reserves for minor inconveniences.

Instead of pointing or turning fully toward her, he merely tips his chin toward the space past her shoulder, as though even the effort of gesturing properly would be giving her too much.

“That one’s mine.” 

The woman turns, and what she finds is not what she was expecting.

Her eyes land on you, crouched in an oversized, slightly faded hoodie, with messy hair from the wind and your bag nearly dropping on the dirty pavement, completely oblivious to what’s happening. She watches you for a few seconds, and then she scoffs with open, patronising judgment.

“Really?” she asks in blatant disbelief. “You could do so much better.”

He lets out a slow, almost audibly patient breath, like he’s about to explain that fire is hot to a remarkably slow child.

“I already have.”

The woman stiffens, caught off guard by such a sudden, harsh, and frankly crushing rejection. She opens her mouth again, glancing back at you, and her lips tighten right before she’s about to make a biting comment about your clothes, your slightly awkward posture, or the foolishness of softly cooing at a stray cat without a care in the world.

“Careful,” Sukuna says in a deceptively light tone, slightly lowering his head, while his eyes are dead serious. Even with his hands still in his pockets, his posture signals that if she makes one more insulting remark about you, it won't end merely with her wounded pride. “You’re already leaving.”

That gets through. She mumbles something low and unintelligible under her breath, walking away quickly as her bruised dignity scrambles to catch up with her retreat.

Sukuna turns his full attention back to you, because as far as he’s concerned, the entire interaction is already finished and irrelevant.

You stand up a moment later, dusting off your hands as you hurry over to him, beaming like you have genuinely discovered the meaning of life.

“You saw that cat?!” you ask, full of excitement, grabbing his arm. “He let me pet him!”

“I noticed,” he replies in a tone notably softer than it had been a moment ago.

You look up at him, tilting your head, and your smile slowly turns suspicious. “You look smug.”

“I am,” he confirms effortlessly, and the corners of his mouth curve slightly into a smirk.

You narrow your eyes at him. “And why is that?”

“Because,” he answers, grabbing the sleeve of your hoodie and pulling you firmly against his side, “you’re busy befriending a stray, and the universe keeps trying to hit on me.”

You snort, and a joyful laugh breaks through as you slide your hand into his, lacing your fingers together.

“How rude of it,” you comment, leaning your head against his shoulder.

“Terribly.”

“So... got her name?” you ask playfully, knowing the answer already.

“No.” His voice drops to a low, husky rumble as he rolls his eyes at your teasing. “Didn’t care.”

“Good.”

You start walking, immediately launching into a detailed monologue about how the cat definitely needs a name, some warm milk, and maybe some basic medical check-up. Sukuna walks beside you, gently rubbing the back of your hand with his thumb and listening to your enthusiastic chatter as if it was the most fascinating thing he’s ever heard in his life.

asshole!sukuna can’t help but crack a smile. he’d had about ten girls come and slap the fuck outta him today. they were all old flings desperate to get their get-back, but that was hardly the point. you were this new thing entirely, a soft thing that seemed sweet regardless of if he was notorious for being a cunt or not. 

“what’s y’ name, sweetheart?” 

asshole!sukuna decided he wanted to see you again after that. you’d caught his interest, which doesn’t happen often. he asks for your number. your instagram, your snapchat, everything. it was kinda pathetic how eager he was to get to know you, but you handed them all over anyway. your friends warn you after the fact that he’s definitely not good news, but you can’t help but want to see where this goes after only dating squares for most of your life. 

asshole!sukuna takes you on a date the very next day, and you were pleasantly surprised at how chivalrous he was. he pulled out your chair at the small hole-in-the-wall restaurant he took you to, he paid for everything, and even more surprisingly, made you feel comfortable. you talked for hours about everything and anything. 

you learned that asshole!sukuna had a lot of hobbies. he played guitar, drums, did a fair few building sketches in the art room with his friend geto when he had time, and had a real connection to film. all of which were things you found extremely attractive, and he could tell, because the next time you two went out he took you to his dorm and showed you his musical endeavors. 

“you’re like... super talented, it’s really attractive.” you smile gently, sitting at the foot of his bed, watching as he finishes up a love song he’d been learning for you. 

“yeah, y’ think so? gonna come to all my gigs when i’m a famous musician?” 

“will i get a backstage pass?” 

“oh, absolutely.” 

asshole!sukuna had officially swooned you after about five dates. he'd mustered up the courage to ask you to be his at that same restaurant he’d taken you to on that first date, and the rest was history. you and sukuna, the couple everyone of his mates envied due to how perfectly you two fit together. 

“how the hell did a guy like you bag a girl like her. yr' gonna destroy the poor thing.” geto teased while they were smoking up one night. 

asshole!sukuna could only reply with, “god, don’t you just hate jealous, hating ass motherfuckers?” 

asshole!sukuna loved to not so subtly brag about you to literally anyone he talked to. (which wasn’t many, but still.) 

“eugh, you’re buying lunch? my girlfriend made me food today, fucking loser.” he’d laugh at the dining hall when gojo and geto sat next to him with a greasy burger and fries. they just gave each other a look, smiled, and rolled their eyes. 

“hm? nah, can’t tonight. me and my girl are getting hot pot. have fun drinking your problems, tho.” he’d turn toji down, turning his nose up at the idea of bar hopping like he wasn’t the most frequent man along the strip a few months back. 

“a two man? i’m not bringing my girl around your little one and done situation, don’t ask me that shit again.” he’d laugh in jogo’s face, hating the idea of his precious baby being around a sleaze bag like him. 

asshole!sukuna always puts you first. his frat’s planning something big, another fundraising night where they really care about attendance, and he’s meant to be there early to help set up. but out of the blue, you’ll send him a text just to say that you've had a slightly shitty day, and boom, he’s suddenly nowhere to be found. his phone’s off, car’s out of the driveway, and he’s at your door with your favorite food and that pissed look, how dare the world have the nerve to bother you. 

asshole!sukuna likes to keep you very close to him when you’re out and about, with either an arm at your waist or his fingers intertwined with yours, he’s most comfortable when you’re right there where he can see you. that way, if anything were to happen, you’d be there for him to protect.

asshole!sukuna lets you get away with absolutely everything. 

“ryo, can i draw on you? like, draw on your back while we watch a show or something?” 

“sure, baby.” 

“ryooo, can i braid your hair?” 

“of course, love.” 

“hey, ryomen? could you drive me to my friend’s house? she lives on the other side of town, though.. it’s okay if you don’t want—” 

“no, no. let’s go, sweetness.” 

“ryo, you smell.” 

“shower with me then, baby.” 

with anyone else, asshole!sukuna would have either yelled or broken their jaw for even thinking they could ask him such questions. but with you? the princess gets what the princess wants or whatever the saying he made up in his head was.

asshole!sukuna fucking hates when people talk over you. it’s a common occurrence due to your soft-spoken nature, you’ll be in the middle of saying something, and someone’ll cut in with whatever thing they think is funnier or more worth listening to. sukuna never lets it slide. “she was talking, dickhead.” he’d scoff, shutting them up and earning a shy, thankful smile from you, as you continued with what you were saying, far more important than whatever that clown had to yap on about anyways. (in sukuna’s mind, at least.) 

asshole!sukuna spends a shit ton of money on you. you almost always go against the idea, but he just can’t help it... when he sees your eyes light up when you see something you like at the mall, he physically can’t resist. he’ll bookmark the product, then order it online to come to your apartment the next day. 

“ryo... why do i have another package?” you whine over the phone, earning nothing but a chuckle from the other end. 

“could tell you wanted it, so just enjoy it, sweet thing. you deserve all the fruits of my labour.” 

“you don’t work? isn’t it your parents’ mon—” 

“semantics. just enjoy, baby.” and he hangs up the phone, grabbing his keys to drive to your place and see how you like the new gift. he thinks it was a new dress? couldn’t be sure, it was hard keeping up with the millions of notifications from the post office. 

asshole!sukuna remembers everything about his girl and makes sure you’re always getting exactly what you want. if he’s out getting dinner before driving to your place, he’ll stop at five different places if that meant getting your order perfectly correct. local maccas has a broken ice cream machine? he’s driving to the next location to try his luck there. one place doesn’t have the kind of noodles you like? he’s making his way to the closest chinese place to see if they do. he is the embodiment of “if he wanted to, he would,” and it’s all worth it seeing your face light up when he holds up the paper bag with a smile. 

“your favourite.” 

“oh my god? this is the place out of the city? how did you—” 

“don’t worry about it, angel.” 

and that was another thing, ashole!sukuna  didn’t let you worry about anything. your place felt too messy? he was over there turning on mlp equestria girls and helping you clean. you wanted a home cooked meal? he’s at the store buying the ingredients. you needed help with an assignment? he’s pushed back his own work to sit down and help you smash them out. 

asshole!sukuna is so overly territorial when it comes to functions. he doesn’t know, there’s just something about people drunk and horny all around you that ticks him off. he’ll always have you either sat next to or on his lap at frat parties. you stick to him regardless, but he has to make it obvious to all the fuckwits blatantly staring at you that you are indeed, his. 

if they don’t get the hint the first time and are still gawking after his mild pda, asshole!sukuna would up the ante. he’ll take you off to some hallway or, if the guys are being particularly sleazy, he’ll kiss you right there. his lips trailling up and down your neck while he stares them dead in the eye, challenging them to look away. 

“ryo... people are looking!” you whisper nervously. 

“let them, sweetheart. you’re too pretty not to stare at.” he grins against your neck, sucking and biting at your soft skin. 

by that point, they always look off. whether that be due to his death glare or the realisation that you’re not going anywhere anytime soon was beside the point. 

asshole!sukuna gets embarrassingly hard at the smallest little things with you. you’ll just be sitting on the couch together and you’ll start scratching his back or head, boom, hard. when you’re sitting next to him in the library and you’re biting your pen, boom, hard. even when you’re just laying in bed, tired from the day, he’ll lay next to you and just sigh. 

“how the fuck do you just look like that. you make it so hard to keep my shit to myself.” he groans as his arms snake around your waist. 

“jeez, i can feel that thing poking into my back... what did i do now?” you smile sleepily. 

“i wish i knew. seems like one look at you and i pop a boner.” he admits, a little embarrassed. 

“can i help you out?” 

asshole!sukuna loved how willing you were to service him, but preferred it the opposite way round. sukuna would spend hours between your pretty thighs if he could, sloppily kissing and sucking at your cunt with dazed eyes, loving nothing more than the pretty moans and groans he could pull from your throat. 

“fuck yeah, y’ like that, baby? you like my tongue, hm?” he’d tease with his mouth full, pumping two fingers in and out of your soaked pussy as he dragged you closer and closer to your orgasm. 

asshole!sukuna knew how wet his filthy words could get you, and he abused that knowledge each and every time he needed you prepped and ready for him. 

“y’ think you can take me, baby, yeah? think you can take this fat cock?” he’d taunt, slapping the thick head against your cunt as your slick coated the pink, glossy skin. “fuckkkk, pretty pussy’s beggin’ t’ get drilled.” 

“what’s that? you need me? well, isn’t that fuckin’ cute. beg a little more and maybe i’ll give you what you want.” 

“be a good girl n’ say please and it’s all yours, angel.” 

asshole!sukuna was massive, but you always took him so well. “you can do it, baby. i know you can.” he’d coo in your ear, lining up the monster of a thing. 

“one, two, fuckkk.” 

asshole!sukuna saw stars every time he’d push in, letting go of a long, pornographic moan as he began to thrust slowly in and out of your tight entrance. the look on your face as your eyes rolled back in pleasure made coming in less than a minute extremely hard, but the intense need to make you finish first overrode any sort of selfish desire to fill you up to the brim in the first few minutes. 

asshole!sukuna loved missionary the most because he could see your pretty face. he enjoyed a bunch of freaked-out positions, but nothing could beat watching your pupils dilate and your lips quiver the second you finally came, his name on your tongue as you let go of the tension building in your tummy. 

“y’ gonna come, baby? y’ gonna come on this cock?” he’d grunt, slamming his member deeper and deeper the louder your cries got, faster and faster until— “fuck, ryo! m’ cumming!” you’d stutter, your insides spasming on his cock, drawing out his own orgasm with one final pound, filling you up with hot ropes of his seed. 

asshole!sukuna was the king of aftercare. words that were filthy before, now soft and caring. 

“you okay, baby? did i go too hard on ya?” he’d ask through tired pants, standing to grab the wet wipes in the side drawer to wash your messy parts off. 

“you want me to order something? anything you want, love. i’ll get you anything and everything.” 

“c’mon, sweetheart. drink some water.” 

asshole!sukuna never made you feel small after intimacy, in fact, sometimes you enjoyed the aftermath more than the mindblowing sex. 

“m’ okay, ryo. just wanna cuddle.” you’d admit shyly, reaching for him to come back to bed. 

his eyes would soften and he’d plop down next to you, pulling you into his lap. “anything for you, angel.” 

sure, sukuna was an asshole, but he couldn't even dream of mistreating you, his biggest exception.

“love you, baby.” 

“love you too, ryo.” 

a/n: i wrote this semi off my face so excuse any bad word or structural choices 💘

Ashveil is a detective.

That part is non-negotiable. It’s printed on his card, etched into his reputation, whispered about in places that smell like smoke and bad decisions. He finds things—people, truths, sometimes missing pets, sometimes missing Aeons, though it depends on how generous the pay is and how annoying the investigation would sound.

Ashveil also takes odd jobs.

That is not advertised on his card.

These include jobs like tailing someone’s ex to confirm if they’ve really moved on. Odd jobs like pretending to be someone’s long-lost uncle. Odd jobs where he has to act like a child’s parent for a parent-teacher conference.

He’s done it multiple times—in fact, parent-teacher conferences are easy. You sit, you nod, you pretend to care about spelling tests and quiz bees. You mirror concern just long enough to look convincing. And you don’t think too hard about why the real parents aren’t here.

He’s filled in all kinds: parents who were “too busy,” parents who “forgot,” and parents who decided money was easier than being there for their children.

Ashveil does the job well. It’s not difficult. Caring is easy to fake when you’re good at reading people. So when he takes this commission, he’s not expecting anything new.

It isn’t the same school he’s gone in before, but it might as well be. Same kind of hallways. Same chairs that look like they were designed more for aesthetics and not for humble adults’ comfort. Same posters about responsibility and growth and trying your best, all slightly crooked, all clearly printed by someone who believes very deeply in children.

It’s a different school, but it is the same routine—walk in with the kid, exchange pleasantries with the teacher, and pretend this is a normal arrangement that makes sense in a functioning universe.

He is prepared for all kinds of things.

He is, however, not prepared for you.

He hasn’t even fully stepped inside the room when he stops abruptly. The child he’s supposed to be acting as a parent for bumps into his back with a soft thud.

“Mister?” comes a small, confused voice from behind him.

Ashveil barely hears it because you’ve looked up.

You’re sitting behind your desk, sunlight catching just right on your face, expression open and friendly instead of wary or tired. He registers the room only distantly—the tables, the chairs, the walls filled with all kinds of drawings—because all of it fades around the simple, convenient fact that you are there.

“Oh, hi,” you say, smiling. “You must be a parent?”

Ashveil stops thinking.

No—correction. He thinks too much all at once.

Pretty, his brain supplies, unhelpfully. And then immediately after: young. Not in a way that undermines you—you’re just younger than he expected. Younger than any teacher he’s ever dealt with on jobs like this.

Most of the time, it’s men with tired eyes and coffee-stained ties, or older women with clipped voices and the air of someone who’s raised three children, taught thirty classes, and buried their patience somewhere around the previous decade. Women who could, very feasibly, pass as his grandmother.

You are none of that.

Ashveil realizes he’s been standing in the doorway too long.

“…yes,” he says finally, stepping inside like nothing happened. “I’m Adi’s father.”

Behind him, the kid relaxes. In front of him, you gesture toward the chairs, still smiling. And Ashveil sits, posture straight and expression composed—doing his best to look like a man who absolutely did not just fall a little in love at first sight. The kid drops into the chair across him, legs swinging.

“Hello again,” you say. “Thank you so much for coming in today.”

You’re really friendly, Ashveil thinks distantly. And something in his chest flutters at the sound of your voice, light and warm, and for a second he wonders if he misjudged how long it’s been since lunch.

He ate, though. A lot, in fact, so this can’t actually just be hunger.

“Yeah,” he says, clearing his throat and forcing his brain back into place. “It’s no problem. I need to be there for my child, after all.”

He straightens a little in his chair. He just needs to pretend like a real, good father. It’s easy. He’s played more complicated roles for worse pay.

You beam at him anyway, like he’s just said something incredibly meaningful.

“Thank you for being here for them,” you say, and the sincerity in your voice makes his stomach do a slow, unpleasant flip. Then you glance down at your notes, blissfully unaware of the damage you’re causing. “I’d like to start by saying Adi is a joy to have in class.”

Ashveil hums, nodding along. Of course you’d say that—that’s usually how these meetings start. Compliment first, then slide into the concerns. He knows the pattern like the back of his hand now. Still, he finds himself leaning forward, like this matters more than it’s supposed to.

He listens. Mostly.

The problem is that while you’re talking, his attention keeps drifting—not away from you, but toward you. Your face, your expressions, the way your brows knit slightly when you’re choosing your words carefully. He realizes that staring is impolite, so he looks away for a second before looking right back again.

The kid kicks his shin under the table. Ashveil ignores it.

“They’re very imaginative,” you continue, flipping through your notes. “They’re a little distracted sometimes, but they mean well.”

“Don’t we all,” he says without thinking.

You look up at him, and for a moment, he wonders if he’s said something wrong. But then you laugh, genuine.

“I suppose that’s true,” you say. “Adi especially.”

Your smile lingers and Ashveil realizes he’s staring again. He forces his gaze back to neutral, and nods like a man who looks like he absolutely has his life together and is not sitting in a chair meant for someone else while pretending to be a parent to a child he technically just met.

And he did. He got a call last week asking for his services—if he could act as someone’s father for a parent-teacher meeting—and he agreed in exchange for, well… some candies. A whole bag of them actually. The client was a child, after all, and food is food; Ashveil isn’t the type to waste things like those.

It’s not written on his card, but he does remember putting posters with his assistant here and there about his services, printed and taped in various locations—bulletin boards near corner stores, a community center corkboard, some phone booths, and even the back wall of a laundromat.

He would’ve expected calls like those coming from tired guardians, maybe even older siblings. What he hadn’t expected was a small, hesitant voice asking if he could “stand in” just once. Just for a meeting. Just so someone would be there. So now here he is.

It’s fine, he tells himself. He’s done stranger things for less.

“This is my first time meeting Adi’s father,” you say, smiling. “You, I mean.”

That smile of yours is a goddamn problem.

Ashveil nods once, a little too quickly. “Right,” he says.

“You’d be surprised how often no one ever comes,” you continue. “During parent-teacher conferences, it’s usually just me and Adi. So… seeing you here today really puts my mind at ease.”

Something warm and sudden and unfamiliar tightens in Ashveil’s chest. He drops his gaze to his lap before he can stop himself.

“Work,” he says, flustered. Then he pauses, clears his throat, and tries again. “My work. It—uh, it tends to take up most of my time.” He exhales through his nose, glances up at you, then away just as quickly. “That’s why I couldn’t come before. Not because I didn’t— I mean— I wanted to, but you know, it just— yeah.”

Smooth, he thinks sarcastically. He risks another look at you then, brief and cautious, like checking for damage. You nod, accepting it without question, and that somehow makes it worse.

“But I’ll make time,” he adds, the words tumbling out before he can reconsider them. “From now on. I mean—when there are meetings like this. Or events. If he needs someone there, I can— I will come.” He shifts in his seat, posture straightening like that might pull him together. “I’ll figure it out.”

Your face lights up.

Ashveil’s brain stalls completely. He looks at the wall, the desk, at Adi, or just anywhere that is not your face because if he keeps looking, he’s scared he’s going to say something else he can’t take back.

“That makes me really happy to hear,” you say. Then, brightening further, “Oh—actually, that reminds me. In a few weeks, we’re having Parents’ Day.”

You explain it—games, activities, parents and kids together, laughter filling the school. Ashveil hears pieces of it, but most of his attention has slid sideways, locked onto the kid across from him.

Adi is staring at the floor now, shoulders tucked in, feet planted flat like he’s bracing for something.

Ashveil swallows.

“It would mean a lot if you could come,” you finish, expectant.

He looks at Adi. Then back at you. Then down again.

“Yeah,” he says, then winces internally and forces himself to try again. “I’ll be there. For Parents’ Day, I mean.”

Adi’s legs kick forward instantly, swinging again, faster this time.

Ashveil exhales, long and quiet, and tells himself that this reaction is completely unreasonable, and absolutely not your fault.

Even if it feels like it is.

“That’s wonderful,” you say, clearly delighted.

Ashveil nods, a little stiff, like moving too much might undo whatever fragile promise he’s just made. “Yeah. Uh… good.”

“Well,” you add gently, closing your notebook, “thank you again for coming in today.”

“Of course,” Ashveil says immediately, then clears his throat. “We should… We’ll get going.”

He stands, gesturing for Adi to follow. The kid hops down from the chair, still buzzing, legs kicking once for good measure.

At the door, Ashveil hesitates just long enough to regret it, then turns back. “I’ll see you on Parents’ Day,” he says, voice steadier than he feels.

You smile again. “I’ll be looking forward to it.”

And then they’re gone, the door clicking shut behind them.

Adi keeps pace beside him for exactly three steps before the question bursts out.

“Are you really coming, mister?”

Ashveil makes a face without meaning to, eyes flicking up to the ceiling like the answer might be written there. He slows, sighs, runs a hand over his face.

“…yeah,” he says finally. “I’ll be there.”

Adi lights up instantly—eyes wide, grin stretching across his face—only for it to flicker, uncertainty creeping back in just as fast.

“But,” the kid says, smaller now, “I don’t have anything to pay you.”

Ashveil snorts softly and reaches out, ruffling Adi’s hair. “Nah. It’s free of charge.”

Adi blinks up at him. “Really?”

“Yup,” Ashveil says, grinning, sharp and toothy. “Just make sure you put in a good word for me with your teacher, alright?”

“Okay!” Adi beams. Then he tilts his head, curious. “Do you like my teacher, mister?”

Ashveil hums, thoughtful, eyes drifting back toward the classroom door as if he can still picture you, smiling like you hadn’t just completely unraveled him.

“…yeah,” he says at last. “They’re really pretty.”

© 2026 kominigiru.

That was only a few things you could do, the list could go on. 

So when you'd asked him if he could pick up your order from a restaurant from the other side of the city that he lived closer to, and he said he couldn't, waiting for you to add a “please.” You just said, “okay” and sent another guy to get it for you since you were too lazy to drive there yourself. 

When he finds out, he's flabbergasted and comes over that very night with all your favorite snacks and sweets to make up for it. You answered the door and shrugged when he apologized, expression disinterested, not upset at all as you said, “It’s not like we're dating. Don't worry about it.”

That was a physical blow to his ego. How could you just use the line he used on other women all the time when they wanted more, on him? Now he was determined to make you want him. 

And you did. But only for his dick. Something your toys could not replicate unfortunately. But he's sure when the line of shiny, new replace-all-men androids are released and customizable, you'll dump him for a less bothersome, unfeeling robot to match your personality. 

He never felt as…used as he did with you. You'd only call him over when you wanted release, using him like a fucking stress ball except instead of squeezing it in your fist, you were milking his cock with your snug cunt. On top of that, you'd lay him out completely. 

The sex is incredible, really. He puts you through the mattress and you love every second of it. You do the same to him, riding him until the wheels fall off. But what makes his eye twitch is how easily you get up after, barely a limp in your step as you gather your scattered clothes and go clean up, telling him to see himself out. 

Since the universe wants to make an example out of him, perhaps give him some karma for all the times he's wronged people, he realises he's in love with you when you snap for the first time at him. Gloriously too, over him having you worried sick because he got into a motorcycle accident even after you fucking told him your arrangement is over if he keeps that death trap that could turn him into a human crayon. 

Naturally, he sold all of his beloved bikes and asked to be your boyfriend instead. 

Things were going great but he had to make himself useful out of fear that you'd just get rid of him like an old shoe you once loved then threw away when it got worn down. He became your handyman, mechanic, electrician, plumber, chauffeur, chef—the works. It's a good thing he's a quick learner. 

Still, that nagging feeling that you'd never really have any need for him in your life always loomed over him like a dark, pregnant cloud. And you weren't perfect as much as he liked to think you were. You had bad moods, you didn't like people in your space all the time, you were snappy on some days. That was fine, he had his shitty moments too. 

What made him call it quits was when you broke things off because you were stressed from work, your family was on your back about their expectations despite barely helping you build yourself up to where you were now and you were having a bit of an existential crisis, overthinking your entire life. 

One of the decisions you made during that time was ending your relationship with him. It fucking hurt, stabbed him right in the chest as a thousand sharp needles but he grit his teeth and beared it. If it was meant to be, you'd have another chance. 

Though it sucked ass that you had many mutual friends who now had to plan hangouts with either you or him like you were coparents who just divorced and were sharing custody of their children. If you met, all hell would break loose, especially that early in the split. 

For everyone's sake, you and Sukuna shared a wordless agreement that neither of you could be friends with an ex after a break up. Couldn't stand existing in the same space as someone you gave so much to just to act like there was no intimacy, no history between you. It made your stomach turn to think about. 

Thankfully, once you ended things, all the shops and places in the city you'd both frequent never saw either of you. You never see flashes of pink amidst the busy crowds and he never hears your contagious laughter amongst the patrons at a restaurant. 

So imagine your horror and surprise when six months after that faithful day, you run into him on the street while you're on your way to your third date with a decent guy who'd never be him but that was okay. You weren't looking for another gut-wrenching heartbreak. 

Much to your dismay, he looks better than ever. But so do you. Time does heal all wounds, you suppose. He's glad the dark circles and apathetic expression he wore for the first three months are nowhere to be found as he smirks down at you and you're relieved that you're not running on two hours of sleep, caffeine and sheer spite anymore. 

Sukuna whistles at the sight of you in your coat, hair all lustrous and silky in the streetlight, face aglow, eyes bright and lips tinted a sultry red that matches the clinging dress you're wearing inside, heels bringing you up to his nose. You always did clean up so nice on a date night, blowing him away even now when this wasn't for him. That didn't mean he couldn't appreciate it from an outsider's perspective even if that reminder did sting a bit.

You begrudgingly think that he looks good too. He's got a fresh cut, the sides of his head tapered, strands akin to bristles that'd tickle your fingers and neck whenever he'd nuzzle his face there, the longer hair at the top pushed back, making his carmine eyes look sharper with a gleam of mirth in them, the tattoos decorating his face hiking up with the quirk of humor on his lips. He's on his way for drinks with Choso and Yuji, their weekly family meet up.

Despite the bored, unimpressed expression on your face, the man has known you for long enough to see the slight flare of surprise in your gaze and the traitorous flutter of your lashes when you take in the button up and jeans he's got on, a chain you gifted him sitting pretty on his neck. 

“Sorry,” he apologises in the least remorseful tone possible, smirk widening when your eyes narrow. There's that emotion he always fought to see when he was courting you. “Is this the part where I turn and run away?” 

Rolling your eyes in that arc that's imprinted in his mind—along with the way you'd drag the first syllable of his given name when you were annoyed but still very much in love with him and the kisses you'd press to his cheek randomly which would give him whiplash—you sigh. 

“We're adults, Sukuna,” you say and ouch, that hurts. He was wishing for a “Ryo” but that's a privilege he lost so he'll endure it. “We'll just go our separate ways and that's the end of it.” 

Lips thinning to hold back his instinctive protest like clenching his fist and pulling on a needy dog's leash so it doesn't break off and run free to tackle you, he nods. “Okay. Have a goodnight.” 

That should've been the end of it but to your annoyance and his delight, you set off in the same direction.

“Are you serious?” You hiss, assuming he's following you. 

Hands stuffed in his pockets so as not to reach out and brush away that unruly strand of hair that always curls on your forehead, kissing your eyebrow like they're long lost lovers, he shrugs with a helpless smile, puffing out a chuckle. 

“I'm not being a creep. My destination is on this route, baby,” he assures you, tucking his lips into his mouth at his blunder when you cut him a glare for the endearment. 

“Whatever, just shut up and walk faster so I don't have to see your face every time I look to my left,” you tell him with a dismissive wave. 

He scoffs in absolute refusal, coral tresses dancing with the breeze as streetlights cast his face in warm light, softening his ink and sharp features. Eyelids lowering, he casts you a flat look from the corner of his eye that's knowing and lazy.

“And leave you to walk all the way by yourself, looking like that? You know there's sleazy bastards around here,” he drawls matter-of-factly, glancing down at your shoes and exhaling through his nose as he shakes his head.

It's the same sadistic pair that would leave you limping with blisters by the end of the night. He'd massage your heels when you got home, your legs thrown on his lap as he scolded you about wearing them again while you just said, “Beauty hurts, Ryo.” 

“Tell me you brought a spare pair,” he almost pleads as he looks to the heavens for guidance because his ex-girlfriend is still a masochist. 

“No, I don't need them.” 

“Sure.” 

“You're free to leave if they're bothering you.” 

Somehow he convinces you to come to his car parked nearby as he remembered that he never took your backup heels out of it and you didn't even realize they were missing because you had so many pairs. And yet you still choose these evil ones. 

Once you put them on, your relief was instant as you groaned and Sukuna's ears went pink from how mildly sexual it sounded. 

Then, because your date was running late and the restaurant happened to be just across the street from the bar your ex was going to, he invited you to sit with him for a bit. 

Yuji and Choso are over the moon to see you, having missed you. Their friendship with you was more of a sibling dynamic than anything and they kept in touch even after you broke up with their older brother. 

“Got a date tonight, huh? You're gonna knock his socks off!” Yuji exclaims, ever your cheerleader, the sides of his eyes crinkling with excitement as he clinks his glass against yours, rosy cheeked already. 

Sukuna snorts which you ignore but Choso's gaze flicks to him for a second then comes back to you. They're having a private conversation with their eyes for sure which Yuji is oblivious to. 

“I don't know. It's not my first date with him so he's seen me all dolled up before,” you chuckle lightly, taking a sip of your mocktail since you didn't want to drink in front of a certain someone and spew your thoughts. 

“Well,” Choso starts and there's something scheming in his eyes. “You know what they say about the third date.” 

Oh. That was not something you'd ever expect him to say. He's always a bit reserved, never this blunt. You let out a surprised laugh, smiling behind the rim of your glass.

Yes, maybe you will let your date have you tonight. It's been too long and you were a bit starved, even catching yourself considering the coworker who was old enough to be your dad. 

“We'll see,” you reply playfully, causing Yuji to flush and Choso to shake his head in amusement. 

Sukuna however does not find you amusing in the slightest. Which is funny because he'd always laugh, even reluctantly when you made a dumb joke that pulled a grin from him. 

He finds it so lame that he stands and excuses himself, saying he's going outside for some fresh air. And as soon as he's gone, his brothers’ heads turning in unison like meerkats until the door shut behind him, they huddled together, eyes on you. 

“I knew it!” Yuji whisper-yells in glee, startling you as you never took him for the conspiring type. “He's still in love with you despite how he insists he isn't.” 

You blink. “He isn't and even if he was, I'm over him.” 

Choso arches a thin brow, eyes tracing over your face for even a crack in your resolve. It's unnervingly slow and his eyes are more compelling because of the purple hue around them. 

“Really?” 

“Really.” 

Eyeing you for a beat more, he relents and leans back in his seat with a shrug. “Okay, good. I can finally get on his ass to move on now ‘cause he keeps turning down my offers to set him up with someone new.” 

Straightening at that, both men latch on to the action and you want to shrink away but refuse. “What does that have to do with me?” 

“Just that seeing you moving on tonight was the push he needed to finally let go.” 

Here you thought you had healed. Your heart didn't flip when you saw him earlier. Butterflies didn't swarm your tummy. You could look at him without regret but hearing that he was only about to let go of you didn't sit right with you. 

Maybe you were selfish but you wanted him to hold on. You were holding on too. Stupidly. As if you didn't break things off on a whim. It hurt how easily he accepted it. If he put up more of a fight, you may have had the chance to scare him off entirely but he just upped and left simply because you asked him to. 

Admittedly, it stung that he didn't fight for you but you know deep down that it would have driven you away if he pressed on a matter that you were adamant about while you were in a fragile state. He showed you he loved you by letting you go. 

But he was about to do it again, no fight like the brawls he'd get into before you met, no anger like the one that would simmer in his eyes when his loved ones were hurt, no yelling when he took off with disrespectful pricks. He had that fire in him but he never used it to burn you, just warm you—engulfed you in an embrace of coral pink and glimmering crimson. 

“Good for him,” is all you can say since there's nothing else you want to admit. 

Both men study you then go back to filling you in on their own relationships as they can see that you need the distraction. Yuko and Yuki are their girlfriends and you're familiar with both women, adoring how well they suit the brothers. 

A buzz from your phone alerts you that your date has arrived at the restaurant so you bid the boys goodbye and head outside. 

Sukuna’s just about to walk in when you step out. His jaw clenches when he watches you exit with the chime of the overhead bell. 

“Enjoy your date,” he tells you, though there's an underlying bitterness in his tone that makes it come off more than he's cursing the man and his firstborn child. 

You don't let it provoke you as you nod curtly, feeling a tad bit uncertain about your choices now. A man who was clearly smitten with you was waiting for you and yet you were here, lingering just a second in case the one you left asks for you back. 

Shoving down those ridiculous thoughts, you go to walk away, heels clicking on the gravel when he calls out to you, brows lowered like they did when he notices something is off with you. 

“You okay?” 

“Never better.” 

There's a flash of frustration that creases his forehead briefly before he steps forward, the scent of his cologne, aftershave and soap dizzying you as his shadow falls over you. 

“Don't give me that. Here, let me fix your coat. It's all skewed. Can't have you making a bad impression,” he fusses like he used to fix the collars of your shirt before you both left for work in the mornings, steady hands smoothing out your shoulder pads and adjusting the lapels. 

“Wouldn't want people thinking I have bad taste when they see my ex all disheveled,” he mutters slyly after, making it about him to get a reaction out of you.

Breath hitching, it feels like his rough, calloused palms are skimming over your bare body, breasts tightening from the mere graze, full and heavy as your nipples pinch, pebbling. 

Arching a rosy brows in suspicion, the familiar, discerning spark in his scarlet irises threaten to shatter you into pieces as he hums, a low, guttural sound that thrums all the way from your chest down to your clit, heat pooling in your lower belly and seeping between your thighs. 

“Sure you're good?” He reiterates his earlier question, fully aware that you aren't if the white hot flash that blows your pupils wide and your hooded eyes are anything to go by. 

“I'm the best I've ever been,” you breathe. 

Gaze raking over you, it's agonizing as it drags up and down the length of your body like he's got x-ray vision. And maybe he does because his eyes catch alight and he moves before you can stop him. 

Deft fingers slide down the sensitive side of your glittery—thanks to your body butter—neck and sweep across your collarbone, goosebumps pricking your smooth skin. Two hook onto the dip of your neckline and tug it forward, his gaze dropping down to the valley of your breasts, warmth licking at the corners of his vision at the lace hugging the swells of your chest. 

Accusatory eyes find yours, squinting as that fury you were secretly longing for sets his irises alight, the hunger in them overshadowed by it. 

“The red set you wore for my birthday?” He grits out between clenched teeth, seething like the bubbling hot lava in your stomach, heart climbing up your throat. 

“I just wanted to see if my girls are good,” he says in a way that'd make people think you had kids together. They'd be horrified if they knew that's how he referred to your tits, occasionally pulling at your shirts to look down at them and sigh dreamily like a perv while you laughed and pushed him away. “And you're dressed up in my gift for some fucker who'll probably slip it in the wrong hole?” 

Face on fire as passerbys avert their gazes, your own ire rises at that as you pull away. “It was your gift but that's long over now.” 

He juts his jaw at the restaurant. “Yeah? Then why are you here and not running along to your dinner reservations? Wouldn't wanna be late, would you?” 

Bristling, you glower, chin raised and nose cocked in defiance that he'd always kiss off. “Don't get cocky, Sukuna. Your brothers told me you're only just now moving on so I simply pitied you enough to see how you're doing before I leave.” 

The air grows cold after you say that, but he graces you with a scorching heat from the darkest, angriest expression you've ever seen marring his harsh features. Though marring would be the wrong word as he's still so fucking handsome. 

“Just because they think I haven't been with anyone else, doesn't mean it's true. You of all people should know that I don't go yapping about my personal life like that.” 

Your breathing ceases. “So you've been with other people?” 

It's his turn to be insolent, staring at you down the line of his nose. “What if I have? It's none of your business, right?”

Jaw flexing, you nod. “Right.”

Turning on your heel, you walk in the wrong direction. “Hey! The restaurant is that way.” 

“I know, you fucking prick!” The vitriol in your voice halts him in his steps, the livid click-clacks of your heels nearly deafening. “I'm going to your car to get my heels in case you use that to try and see me again. Or worse, give it to one of your flings thinking it's theirs.”

“Great going, genius. You don't even have my keys,” he growls, marching after you. You think he's jogging now as his footfalls get faster and you hate that satisfaction loosens the knot in your chest at the fact that he's giving chase. 

Gunshots and grenades could not hold a candle to the shouts and concerningly colourful expletives that left you both, ringing out into the night air as you stomped to the car. It was the anxiety-inducing kind that promised nothing good was about to come from it and the bystanders who were unlucky enough to witness the verbal sparring steered clear of you both as if you could draw your weapons and fight at any moment without any regard for the innocents nearby. Some even had the cops ready on speed dial. 

Fortunately for them, Sukuna argued with you into his passenger seat since he apparently “ruined your mood” so you canceled the date, the back and forth continuing all the way to his penthouse, ending in a fistful of kisses in the elevator as the numbers ascended, lips smacking and saliva swapping with aggressive hair pulls, harsh breaths and moans that sounded like you hated yourselves for doing this. 

That didn't stop either of you from fumbling with his key card, cussing when the jarring, incorrect beep would cut through your pawing hands trying to get each other's coats off. When it eventually opened, you almost fell through the doorway with a squeaky yelp but he banded a burly arm around your waist, pulling you flushed to him and chuckling. 

“Still a clumsy thing, huh?” 

“Fuck you.” 

“That's the idea.” 

A hasty trail of clothes lay strewn on his polished floors, his pants and your dress hanging like drying laundry on the railing of his stairs that lead up to the bedrooms.

Of course, Sukuna doesn't make it easy for you. Not after you hurt him by kicking him out of your life at the time he'd be needed the most. 

The lace of your panties are soaked with your slick as he ruts his cock against your slippery folds over the fabric. You're spread out under him on the bed, clutching his sheets so you don't claw at his inked body with your manicured nails for being a fucking tease. 

“Now, now, don't pout, baby,” he coos mockingly, enjoying torturing you too much with his blushing cock lined with veins and topped off with a dark pink tip, bubbling with pearls of precum at the slit.

Your thighs are hooked over his parted thighs that are digging into the mattress as he rocks back and forth between your legs, grinning at how the sopping cloth clings to your slit with your wet, pussy eating up the lace to feel more of him. 

“Sukuna, if you don't put it in, I swear—”

“You're gonna leave me again?” His voice loses its lightness, the edges sharpening like his gaze strikes you in the chest. The hurt swirling in his irises has a lump gathering in your throat. 

“Maybe I will,” you find yourself stubbornly saying. “But if you want to chafe your cock by rubbing it over my panties all night then by all means, carry on. Just don't complain when it burns when you shower.” 

A huff leaves him at your pathetic excuse and he grips your hips, dragging you closer as he grinds between your swollen lips. “I'll be fine.” 

The underside of his cock runs down your folds with slick, slightly muted rustles and a gasp kicks out of your chest when his tip nudges your clit. He angles his hips to let it happen over and over again until you're breathless and whining from the tingling friction tickling your lower belly. 

The lips of your cunt nestle his cock, wavering with each back and forth buck of his hips. You lift your own for more, elbows aching from where they're pressed into the bed to hold you up. 

“Ryo, please,” you concede, using his name and your forgotten manners to hit him where it hurts. 

It does the job as he tears off your flimsy underwear with a biting rip at your hip, your plump flesh recoiling when the cloth snaps and sags then sails in the air to land on the floor like a fallen soldier. 

“I thought you liked those!” You lament, mourning the loss of one of your favorite sets. 

Clicking his tongue, he scowls at you. “Lost its appeal when you were about to wear it for someone else.” 

You purse your lips to suppress a smile at that. Contrary to his belief, you haven't slept with anyone since the breakup so that's the reason you're so worked up about him doing so. 

That reminder has you frowning and he cups your chin, lifting your gaze to his. 

“I haven't been with anyone either,” he clears your doubts which makes you wonder if you said all that out loud. But Sukuna's always been good at reading your thoughts. 

“What makes you think I've been celibate?” You huff at the confidence in his voice. 

“For one, you're freshly waxed which I'm honestly offended about. My girl likes a trim and a low taper fade,” he answers so seriously and you have to stifle your laugh as your eyes narrow. 

Being the little shit he is, he pats your pubic mound solemnly, palm petting your smooth, bare skin like he's comforting it after it was violated by your wax lady. 

“And two,” he adds, going to demonstrate. 

A sexy deadpan paints his face as he slides a hand between your bodies, coating it in your pooling slick and pushes it into your puddling hole which for all its arousal puts up telling resistance of someone who hasn't fucked anyone in a while. 

Say, six months. 

The stretch burns slightly which embarrasses you as it is only one finger. Drawing it out, he lifts it to the light, webbing the slick between his fingers like an artist admiring his work. Then he sucked them clean. 

“Looks like I have to fuck you nice and slow first, huh?” 

“So you don't come quick?” 

“You fucking infuriating woman,” he cusses and you laugh. 

Though you wish you could say you took him as easily as the last time, you couldn't. But you were a trooper even when he dipped his tip in and you felt so full, asking if he put it all the way, earning an apologetic smile and kiss to the cheek from him. 

Even when the backs of your eyes burned, when you were overwhelmed about feeling well and truly stuffed, when the pain caught in your stomach and had you scratching at his abdomen—you took it like a champ. 

He did well too, all his muscles pulled taut so he didn't bully the rest of himself into you, face pressed into your neck to ground himself in your yummy scent while his own surrounded you along with his weight, warmth and soothing voice.

“That's it, baby. Let me in, slow and steady,” he murmurs, thumb rubbing at your clit so your cunt flutters and sucks him in deeper, stretching to accommodate an old friend. 

The stinging pain eased into a delicious fullness that had you bucking up to get more of him inside you and he gladly obliged. 

A tremble rolled through you as he sinks all the way in, shuddering groans falling from both your mouths, lips brushing. Head spinning, a wave of pleasant dizziness washes over you as his cock throbs inside you, hugged by your gooey, molten walls. 

Puffing a laugh against your lips, he presses a sweet kiss to them. “Look at them getting reacquainted, hmm? Oh, I missed her.”

You loll your head to the side, looking up at him through half-lidded eyes and cocking a brow when you see he's fixated on how he's splitting you open on his cock, base kissing the outline of your slit. He gives you a sheepish smile when he sees you caught him. 

“I'd say I missed you too but you didn't miss me.” 

You glare at him for that as you both know you won't admit it now. 

At least not yet, Sukuna thinks. 

“Such a good girl. Always taking me well,” he praises in a low, mind-melting whisper, thrusting short, quick thrusts to get you used to it. “So fucking good. So good for me, baby.” 

The pressure of his shaft within you is hot and sweet, saliva pooling in your mouth as you watch him pull out and push back in with a breathy groan as you whimper from the loss then moan as he fills you to the brim once more. 

It's slow and deep then fast and hard, alternating in the most delirious, rhythmic pace that makes the room sway, your mind sweeping away into a whirlpool of warmth, steam permeating within your body. Bracing your hands on his forearms, you hold onto the only solid thing so you stay afloat and don't get pulled under. 

A fluffy haze blankets the room, heavy, thick and flaring with each obscene squelch, slap of sweat-slicked skin, airy sigh, wanton moan, guttural groan and low grunt that spills into the toasty air. 

Sukuna is all over you, mouth latching onto your nipples, sucking hickeys into your flesh, biting at every inch of skin he can sink his teeth into, kissing you wet, bruising and messy, licking the whimpers that drip from your lips and humming in approval when you suck on his tongue, cunt fluttering around his cock and drawing his orgasm closer. 

You were an untamed wildfire and he was both gasoline to worsen you and cool water to douse you. Each thrust in fanned your flames while every drag out snuffed it out only to breathe life into it again with the following snap of his hips. 

“Still mine after all this time, hmm?” 

“No,” you denied through a wavering voice.

It was from his pelvis grinding against your clit and the brush of his chest against your breasts that had branches of dazzling electricity spreading through your body and making you shudder from the friction, not his words. 

“No?” His brows crease as he fucks into you deeper, pushing the moans out of your chest, low and raspy. “Who's pussy is this?” he asks in a grouchy tone, overly possessive and you let out a throaty giggle at that. 

You'd always told him how cringy you found that dirty talk line and he'd jokingly say it to pull laughter from you during sex like right now. He can't even stay in character, thrusts slowly as he laughs too, the sound vibrating through you. 

“Hmm, it's mine but I'm willing to share,” you purr, ducking your head and biting at his peck, feeling it yield beneath your teeth as he moans, fingers tracing the dark, intricate markings lining his tan skin. 

“I can live with that,” he breathes, both of you breaking into panting laughter after, the atmosphere lighthearted and intimate before you're lost in the sea of feeling and the desperate, urgent drag of your bodies once more. 

Rays of silvery moonlight spill into the dark of his bedroom, the celestial body a peeping tom to how the big, scary tattooed man puts you in every single position he can think of—missionary, prone bone, doggy, mating press, full nelson and so on—giving and giving while you're taking and taking. 

You don't take it lying down, of course, making him take just as much as he's giving as you take him in cowgirl, reverse cowgirl, lotus, amazon, and much more. Hell, the full moon must've been blushing from all that it saw, cursing its curiosity as the erotic noises from the lovers deafened it. 

Over and over again, the building pressure in your lower belly bursts into sparkling, tingling flames as you come, a shiver wracking through your body, melting into a boneless heap of languid heat on the bedding. Sukuna does too, many times, that tingling in his groin rising up his cock and spilling hot, sticky come inside you, white spots flashing behind his eyelids.

Sukuna can feel it coming before you even move, before you even think about doing it as you're laying on his chest, cheek squished to his pec, the steady rise and fall of his breaths to lull you as if the gods carved him out just for you to have somewhere to rest when the world becomes too much or when you just want to feel cared for. 

You're always like this after sex, at least when you two became an official couple two years ago. It was like the established relationship let you, slowly, open up and show that you were no stranger to the human desire for love too. 

And he was so ready to give it to you, wholly. So when you're all soft, pliable and floating on the cloud of your bliss, he simply stares at the ceiling, hoping the contentment in his chest lasts even if you decide to leave him. 

To call this a mistake. To say it was just a way to go out with a bang. To break his heart that finally started beating properly just a few days ago all over again. 

Maybe he was never made for softness, for gentle love but fuck, you made him so tender and fond, spinning his insides until they were sweet and fuzzy like cotton candy. There is strength in being soft and he learnt that with you, having to be the safety net that catches you when you plummet from those unreachable heights you stand at so nothing can hurt you. 

Sniffling tears him out of his thoughts and he freezes, the fingers combing through your tousled hair to detangle the knots from your rendezvous pausing. He doesn't speak, doesn't pry, doesn't even breathe as he feels his skin dampen from liquid that isn't drool or sweat. 

It's your tears. 

You're crying. 

Arms wrapping around his trimmed waist, you cling to him with a hug that shocks him from how vulnerable and tight it is, like he may flee if you don't hold on, like he's the mountain you're standing at the edge of.

“I'm so sorry, Ryo,” you apologise wetly and he knows it isn't because you called him an idiot earlier or for saying you'll leave him again, both of you aware that you weren't serious. 

It's for breaking up with him and it twists his heartstrings into a ball of aching pain that makes it hard to breathe, one he can't untangle as easily as your messy strands. 

“It's okay,” he whispers but his eyes burn as he knows it fucking isn't. The way your bottom lip juts out, fat tears welling in your eyes when you look up at him, chin propped on your flat palms on his chest, tells him you're well aware. 

“Shut up,” you hush him, looking up to try and stem the waterworks so you can carry on. “I got caught up in my head. Wanted to get rid of everything so I could focus on the main problems at hand.”

“I was having doubts about whether I deserved you or not, on whether you deserved me,” you admit, brows scrunching. “My parents pressuring me about finding someone they chose and constantly putting me down about not choosing the career they wanted me to have became too much.”

“I had to let you go so I wouldn't grow to resent you like I was starting to resent them. I couldn't do that to you. Now that I've let go of trying to meet their expectations and pleasing them, I wanted to let you know,” you tell him. 

You weren't expecting him to take you back or whatever sappy romance movie plot would end with. You made your bed so you'd lay in it. You just wanted him to know as he was one of the many people in your life, from the found family you built, that told you to stop letting your parents rule you. 

It took pushing him away to do that and you weren't cruel enough to ask him to come back after all that damage. 

With a heavy exhale, he lets go of the tension that had locked up his body, absorbing your words. Then his hand came up, thumb swiping away your tears as he took in your red-rimmed, puffy eyes, glassy gaze, the raw, unfiltered version of the tough woman he fell for. 

The one who built herself up out of spite, became successful out of pettiness, was self-sufficient so she'd never have to ask her parents who treated raising a child as a transactional affair as if a baby could sign a contract to agree to it. 

“Are you doing better now?” is the first thing he asks and you want to cry more because he's still looking out for you despite it all. 

A wobbling smile pulls at your lips as you nod with a shaky breath. “Yeah, I am. Finally got rid of all the clutter in my life,” 

While you couldn't cut off your parents completely, you set strict boundaries that you wouldn't be shy to show them the consequences for if they crossed them. They had behaved so far. 

A proud thing tugs at the corners of his mouth at that. So you actually did it. “More room for the things you want now?” 

He wants to ask if there's room for him but stops himself. Fucking you had already turned into something slow and tender that felt awfully close to making love and now you're cuddling, having a heart-to-heart. 

He's already behaved in enough ways tonight to show you how pathetically in love with you he still is. How it's probably never going to go away and linger like a scent that's always around like that time Yuji spilled fabric softener in the laundry room and the lavender, baby powder fragrance is still there. 

You're his greatest love and that'll remain true no matter how this ends. 

With a shaky breath, you nod. “Yeah.” 

So he pulls you closer, further up his body with his hands on your hips then slides them up to your face, cupping it and pressing kisses from your jaw that tightens when you're upset with him, to your cheeks that warm when you're flustered by his teasing, forehead that creases when you frown to hide your amusement, nose that wrinkles when you disagree and finally, a soft, sleepy one to your lips that fix to scold him when he does something stupid. 

“My”—kiss—”sweet”—kiss—”girl.” 

He rests his forehead against yours, eyes sliding shut. “I'm so happy for you.” 

“Thank you,” you murmur, softening further as your lips quiver to ask a question that sits heavy on your tongue. “Are you doing better now?” 

A beat of silence envelops the room, only the distant sounds of car honks, far away music from nightclubs and laughter from neighbors returning home, drunk and happy breaking the quiet. 

“You did hurt me. But I knew it was gonna come eventually. From the moment we met, you seemed to have everything figured out. I never thought I'd fit into your frame, you know? I was the only thing that could be replaced as easily as you toss out junk and garbage.”

The urge to shake your head and refuse is hard to resist but you do, letting him say his piece. 

“So when you wanted to break up, I let it happen because I thought that nothing I would say could change your mind. It sucked. A lot. But the time we spent apart helped me heal and start seeing a therapist so I could get over that feeling.” 

He smiles at you then. “I'm doing much better now. The insecurity was easy to work through once I realized that it stemmed from me and also how I took the way you lived your life too personally.” 

“Don't blame yourself when we both know I had a lot to do with it too. I never asked you to do stuff because I didn't want you to have something to throw back in my face like my parents do. I should have loved you the way you wanted to be loved like you loved me in the way you knew I would appreciate.”

Your accountability, as always, has the last of his slight resentment towards you seeping out of his body with his content sigh. 

“Guess we both needed therapy, huh?” you chuckle and he nods. 

It's quiet again and then you rip off a bandaid. 

“If you're not going to see anyone soon, do you think that maybe we could hook up again?” 

Rearing back, he nearly hits his head against the headboard but your hand shoots out and stops him as he blinks at you incredulously, lip curling in disgust. 

“Are you fucking serious?” 

That's just the reality check you need. What were you thinking? Sitting up, you shake your head. 

“No, forget it. That was inconsiderate of me to ask.” 

You move to climb off him, wanting to spare your crumbling dignity and flee before he can reject you again but he catches your wrist and pulls you back. 

Saying your name in a stern, indecipherable tone, he holds your gaze, expression unreadable but angry. 

“Asking me to be your fuck buddy after all we've been through? Are you fucking kidding me?” 

Drawing you closer, his gaze bores into yours. “If we're doing this again, I'm going to be your boyfriend again. Don't insult me further by trying to make me a damn toy.” 

Gaping, your mouth opens and closes as your brain glitches. Shit, you were just about to unintentionally make him feel used again when he just fucking told you he'd felt that way for a long time! 

“I—No, I thought that'd be easier. I didn't want to try and date again after all I put you through—”

“Baby,” he calls out, reeling you in. “We have too much history to go back to being friends with benefits. I want to be your boyfriend again and in a few years, if you want, your husband.”

There's no going back now. You've shown him that you do need him, do want him in your life. He's not going to hold that over your head like a pawn. He's going to wear it like the badge of honor it is. His Nobel Prize. 

Watery eyed again, you choke on a sob, nodding vigorously as you hug him. “Okay. Thank you for giving me another chance, Ryo.” 

“Don't mess this up,” he jokes. 

“I'll try not to.” 

“I won't leave either way,” he rumbles. “Happy anniversary by the way,” he wishes you as it is the day you abruptly broke his heart that is now finally mended.

Chuckling, you hold him tighter, kissing his neck and shutting your eyes, the last piece of your desired life finally slotting into place. 

“Happy anniversary, Ryo.” 

note: i am still on a little break but like always, i wrote this on a whim at 3am

۶ৎ "Have you ever felt... muted, my lady?" he asked during one of his frequent, uninvited visits. You struggled to grasp his meaning until he leaned in closer, his scent like crushed violets and ozone. "As if the world around you is muffled by a heavy shroud? As if you are standing just out of reach of a great, thrumming music?"

۶ৎ "I... no," you responded, your voice wavering with uncertainty. "I mean, aside from the constant fatigue and the bouts of insomnia, I feel fine. I suppose I just have a weak constitution." You truly believed your own lie, unaware that your "illness" was merely your magic choking under the weight of the iron.

۶ৎ It drove his senses to the brink of madness to see you so oblivious. You thought him eccentric, perhaps a bit macabre because of his humor, but he saw the truth: the iron was poisoning you, masking the vibrant creature beneath. If he could only strip that metal away, he knew you would see colors that didn't exist in the human spectrum, smell scents a hundred times more intoxicating, and feel a touch... far more sensitive than any mortal could endure.

۶ৎ But Flins could not touch the iron. The one time his fingers had brushed the chain by accident, his reaction was so violent—a searing, visceral rejection—that his human glamour nearly shattered. He had felt his true, jagged form threatening to rip through his skin, a revelation that would have ended his game far too soon.

۶ৎ And then there was the selfish core of his obsession. He claimed he wanted you to be free, but in reality, he wanted you to be his. He wanted to witness the moment your eyes adjusted to the blinding brilliance of the otherworld, his world, but more than anything...

۶ৎ He wanted to finally touch you. He craved the sensation of your warmth against his unnaturally cold, porcelain-slick skin. He wanted to taste the impossibility of your lips and finally inhale your true scent—not the floral notes of your shampoo, but the heady, wild musk of the Fae blood singing in your veins.

۶ৎ He fantasized about marking you, leaving bruises with his lips that would bloom like dark flowers on your skin. He wanted to watch you squirm beneath him as he introduced you to pleasures no human man could ever conceive, pushing your mind into a blissful, static-filled void.

۶ৎ He wanted to possess you so thoroughly that your thoughts would become a monologue of his name, until his scent was the only air you breathed. And then, an opportunity arose—one as dangerous as it was perfect.

۶ৎ The forbidden fruit. Fae fruit.

۶ৎ He knew the legends were true: a full human who consumed the fruit of his homeland would spiral into a permanent, hollow madness, their soul effectively burned away by the intensity of the magic. The pure power running through their blood would act like a lethal intoxicant, leaving them either a mindless puppet or a corpse.

۶ৎ A human... a complete human would break. But you were not whole, and that was the gamble he was willing to take. There was only one thing in existence that iron magic could not suppress.

۶ৎ Fae magic at its most primal, ingested source. Once inside your body, the fruit's power would be so overwhelming that the iron would no longer be able to mute your spirit. You would either succumb to his every command, or your dormant side would wake with such ferocity that you would rip the necklace off yourself just to stop the internal pressure.

۶ৎ When you finally tasted it, the reaction was more exquisite than he had dared to hope. The scent of you—the real you—erupted, filling his senses like a thousand gardens blooming in an instant. He watched, enthralled, as gold and silver sparks flickered in your pupils while your human consciousness struggled to process the influx of power.

۶ৎ "Oh, how terribly unkind of me," he murmured, his voice a low purr as he caught your swaying form. His arm coiled around your waist like a serpent, steadying you. "To have offered such a delicacy without explaining the... profound effects."

۶ৎ "Wha..." You could barely draw breath. Your nervous system was screaming, every nerve ending firing at once, but the epicenter of the agony was your throat. The skin beneath the iron was turning a violent, angry red. With a surge of strength you didn't know you possessed, you shoved him back, gripping the edge of a heavy table for support. "What the hell did you give me?" you demanded, your voice trembling with a fury he had never seen.

۶ৎ It felt as though something inside you was trying to claw its way out, to shred your skin and manifest in the air. "Fuck..." Your voice cracked. The pain was astronomical. Even the friction of your clothes against your skin felt like tongues of flame. "It burns! It hurts!"

۶ৎ You reached for the necklace, but the moment your fingers touched the metal, it felt like grabbing a live wire. The iron was fighting the magic now, and you were the battlefield.

۶ৎ "Ah, yes. My poor, Milaya¹," he whispered. In less than a heartbeat, he was behind you, his body pressing yours firmly against the table, pinning you in place. "I would tear the very sky asunder to finally bring your true self into the light." He began to speak in a tongue that sounded like grinding stones and melodic glass, a language you couldn't understand but which vibrated in your very marrow. His voice seemed to fill the room, the walls, the very air in your lungs, making escape an impossibility.

۶ৎ "Stay away..." you gasped, but it was a pathetic, broken plea. Your fingernails dug into the wood of the table until they almost bled. You knew it was the necklace; you knew he wanted it gone. But the defiant, human part of you clung to your grandmother’s warning, even as your skin felt like it was being flayed alive by the awakening power within.

۶ৎ "I see," he began, and that soft, polite smile of his twisted into a glint of teasing and cheekiness you had never seen before. You could have sworn the thunder began to manifest outside at his very whim, the cold rain dropping furiously against the windows as if the sky itself were weeping in anticipation. "You are incredibly stubborn; I admire that, but..." His long, cool fingers hooked beneath your chin, tilting your head back until his eyes found yours—eyes that drank in the human fury he seemed to enjoy so much. "Take it off."

۶ৎ Your hand flew instinctively to the necklace, ignoring the searing, white-hot sensation against your palms. It was as if your soul—that fragile, lingering part of your humanity—could no longer ignore the gravity of his command. It was as if the magic now roaring through your blood had no choice but to obey or tear your very vessel apart.

۶ৎ And then... it happened. The sharp, discordant snap of the iron breaking filled the room like a gunshot, and then...

¹Milaya (Милая): My sweetheart/my dear (femenine).

²Dushamoya (Душа моя): my soul (femenine).

︵ . ︵﹒︵୨ ꒰ Obsession ꒱ ୧︵ . ︵﹒︵

The world had become far too much.

The sound of the rain was no longer a rhythmic patter, but a thunderous, rhythmic drumming that vibrated through your very marrow. The rush of your own breath sounded like a gale, and the frantic staccato of your heart against your eardrums was deafening. Even the colors of the room had sharpened into something jagged and blinding; it was as if the light you had perceived with human eyes had been a mere imitation—viewed through dirty, clouded crystals that could never hope to capture the true, searing brilliance of the world.

You could no longer bear the weight of it. Your pulse raced with a terrifying velocity, and the scent of the wet earth from the cemetery outside—mingled with the sudden, heady musk of your own awakening essence—swirled into a sickening vortex. It made you nauseous, a physical vertigo that threatened to shatter your mind. Your human vessel was finally fracturing under the strain, unable to contain the raw, ancient power of a soul that had been caged for far too long.

"Hu...rts..." The word was a broken sliver of sound, barely a ghost of a whisper, but it was more than enough for his perfect, predatory ears to catch.

It was then that you felt it—the ghost of a soft, lingering kiss pressed over the bridge of your nose. His lips were unnaturally cold, yet as soft as the finest silk. His fingers, which had been anchoring your chin, slid upward to cradle the salt-slicked skin of your cheek. You were crying, the tears hot and heavy, though you hadn't even realized when the first sob had broken through.

"Please focus on me, Dushamoya²," he murmured, and then came that sensation again—the ghost of those soft lips pressing against your feverish skin. It felt as though your body had become a blank, open page, every touch so vivid it seemed to pierce through the surface to brush directly against your raw nerves. You couldn't have known how utterly hypnotized he was, how deeply he was reeling from the sheer, intoxicating reality of having you finally unchained.

The scent of your true kind was rising from you now, drowning out the world. He listened to the frantic drum of your human heart—a mere vessel for the brilliant, unearthly soul you carried. His eyes, like twin pours of molten sunlight, traveled down to your throat where the iron had left its mark. The sight of that angry, weeping redness taining your skin made him furious; it was a sacrilege that such a horrendous thing had ever been permitted to touch you.

Flins stared at you, watching your eyes remain squeezed shut, your eyelashes clumped together with the weight of the tears still rolling down your cheeks. Yet, the agony was no longer tearing you apart; it had begun to melt into a heavy, rhythmic thrum. "Open your eyes, my dear."

"I can't..." you replied, your voice a fractured thing. Everything was still far too loud, far too bright. "I feel too much... everything—what have you done to me?"

You felt one of his long, unfairly elegant fingers hook behind your ear, brushing your hair aside to fully expose the ruined skin of your neck to his gaze.

"My apologies," he began, his free hand finding its way to the first button of your shirt. You felt the fabric shift under his graceful movements as he worked the fastenings, eventually peeling the collar back to expose the curve of your shoulder. Goodness... the skin was a scorched crimson, and he could still smell the lingering, bitter tang of the iron. He wanted to scrub every trace of it away—to erase anything that reminded him of the moments when you weren't entirely his. "Allow me to make your senses finally focus on one thing."

He tilted your head back with a slow, cat-like grace. First came his breath against your skin, unnaturally cold and smelling of winter air; then, the velvet softness of his nose brushed that sensitive hollow of your throat. Your body instinctively surged, wanting to both recoil and lean into him. Finally, his lips met your skin—damp and impossibly soft—pressing directly into the bruised path where the iron had damaged you only moments ago.

"...?!"

It wasn't painful. Instead, it was as if a phantom feather had brushed your skin—as if the unnatural coldness of his lips was simultaneously a soothing ointment for your bruises and a trail of liquid fire ignited within your nerves.

He felt it instantly: the sharp, sudden tension in your frame before the involuntary surrender of your body into his hands. A teasing, predatory smile curved his lips as his nose explored the column of your throat. With a bold, possessive movement, he took the soft skin of your neck into his mouth, sucking with an intensity that made his intentions agonizingly clear. And then, he heard it.

"Ngh...!"

That soft, broken sound—an involuntary whimper that made him want to turn you around and tear you apart right there on the table.

"I dont want you to open your eyes," he whispered, his voice vibrating against your skin as he admired the blooming redness of his most recent mischief. He pressed a kiss into the hollow of your ear—that agonizingly sensitive spot—eliciting a shuddering reaction from your body. One of his hands moved to shield your eyes, keeping you submerged in darkness, while the other anchored you in place, exactly where he wanted you. "You aren't yet ready to see the world as it truly is."

He lashed his tongue against your skin in a slow, deliberate stroke, and your back arched instinctively. In this newfound sensory overload, you could hear the thrum of his heartbeat—steady and ancient—and then, that smell.

It was an intoxicating musk that seemed to coax your senses out of hiding. You couldn't tell if the scent belonged to you or to him, but it made your head spin. Even though your mind was a chaotic blur, your body was reacting with a primal urgency to something you didn't yet fully understand.

You felt the biting cold of the table as your elbows leaned over the wood, your chest pressing against the surface to steady yourself. The sensation helped ground you in the darkness, making it feel as if all your remaining senses were attuned solely to him—to the precision of his touch, the soft intent behind his kisses, and the way his tongue explored the line of your neck. His kisses trailed downward to your shoulder, where he caught the skin in a sharp, sudden nibble.

"You..." He pressed a final, lingering kiss to your shoulder, right beside his most recent decoration—a flush of pink that was already deepening into a dark, telltale mark. "You make me want to stop playing the gentleman, my love. You make me want to force the night, the moon, and every star beyond the sky to watch as I become a sinner just for you."

When he finally uncovered your eyes, lifting you until you were perched upon the table, the world rushed in. The swirling magic within you had finally begun to settle, cooling into a steady hum. Everything was impossibly bright, but now you noticed something more: a deep, ethereal blue aura clung to him like a shroud of quiet fire, the very manifestation of his ancient soul. His hand reached out, a single finger poised to brush the bruised, angry skin of your throat, but...

Slap!

Perhaps you weren't entirely in your right mind, or perhaps the Fae blood in your veins had finally woken up with a vengeful spark. You didn't care that he was clearly something far beyond human; you lunged forward, fist bunching in the fine fabric of his clothes, hauling him so close that his intoxicating scent nearly drowned you.

"I don't know what the hell you think you’ve done to me," you began, your breath ragged and hot against his face. The heat wasn't just blooming in your cheeks; the lingering ghost of his kisses felt like a brand on your skin. "But you’re going to finish exactly what you started, and you’re going to do it now. Then, you’re going to explain what the fuck is going on before I lose my temper."

Flins studied your face, captivated by the volatile cocktail of fury and determination. He saw the desire you were trying—and failing—to hide, and the part of you that was still utterly terrified by the crumbling of your reality.

"I will," he whispered, his hand lingering over the cheek where he had earlier wiped away your tears. He was incredibly serious now, his voice a low, sacred vow. "I promise."

"You better." you retorted, refusing to let go, your forehead pressed against his as you breathed over his lips.

A slow, teasing smile curled his mouth. He was clearly savoring the way you were now unashamedly demanding to be consumed by him and his flames. "Whatever am I going to do with that mouth of yours?" He began to trail kisses along your jawline, his lips following the delicate curve until they fell back onto the sensitive skin of your neck, where the redness was already starting to fade as your body’s new, accelerated healing took hold.

He pressed one last, lingering kiss there—a deep, possessive mark that made your back arch deliciously, forcing a sound from your throat that sounded dangerously like a moan.

"Such an unashamed lady," he murmured. His hand pressed against your chest, guiding you back until you rested on your elbows. He looked down at you, relishing the defiant hunger in your eyes as the marks of his kisses bloomed across your skin like dark, bruised roses in the moonlight.

You watched as he finally drew his gloves off, cast aside as if the mere barrier between his skin and yours had become an unbearable sacrilege. It was as if he physically needed to feel the feverish heat of your pulse against his own preternatural cold, direct and unyielding.

You weren't sure what was more devastating: the suffocating, torturous slowness with which he began to undress you, or the way he systematically tested every soft, aching curve of your body. His touch sent tremors through your frame, forcing your back to arch against the hard wood of the table as he drove your mind and soul toward a jagged edge. All the while, the remaining magic of the fruit continued its work, peeling back the mundane film from your eyes until you finally began to see the world as your true self always should have—vibrant, terrifying, and beautiful.

He stole a lingering kiss that seemed to draw the very breath from your lungs. You could still taste the phantom sweetness of the forbidden fruit in his mouth too as he swept you up, his powerful hands anchoring beneath your thighs to carry you toward his bedroom. Your arms wound tightly around his neck, grounding you as his kisses made you lose all track of time and the fading world outside.

It felt as though he had physically transported a piece of his snowy, ancient homeland into the room with you. The air grew sharp and charged with the scent of frost and magic as the bedroom door clicked shut, the sound final and heavy.

And you knew, as his gaze locked onto yours with a terrifying, blue-fire intensity, that you couldn't escape anymore.

The moment the last of his clothes touched the floor, it was as if your newly awakened senses snapped into a singular, sharp focus: him.

Inevitably, your eyes traveled downward, lingering for just a heartbeat, and you felt a fresh wave of heat creep as rapidly toward your hairline as he gracefully climbed into the bed with you. Flins didn't miss the deepening flush or the way your gaze had stuttered over his form; as he settled between your thighs, he offered only a knowing, dark glint in his eyes, choosing to let the observation pass without a word—for now.

His lips claimed yours, and you responded with a hunger that felt entirely natural, yet terrifyingly potent. Perhaps it was the way his unnatural body made your own feel everything ten times more intensely, or perhaps it was the raw intimacy of the way he held your hand, anchoring you as he began to sink inside. He moved with a torturous slowness, as if he wanted you to feel every agonizing second he had spent waiting to finally savor you, until at last, he was seated completely within you.

"Ah...!" You couldn't stifle the sound that escaped your lips, muffled against his mouth. Your back arched instinctively, a visceral reaction to the sheer, overwhelming tide of pleasure that no human touch could have ever provoked.

He shifted his weight onto one elbow, while his other hand clamped firmly onto your waist, keeping you exactly where he wanted you. He began to move, a rhythmic, purposeful glide that made the world tilt on its axis. As his breath brushed against your ear, he whispered a string of low, melodic words in that ancient language you still couldn't understand, though your soul seemed to hum in recognition.

"You feel divine," he murmured, pressing a kiss over that aching, sensitive spot on your neck and stealing another sharp gasp from your lungs. You could hear a soft, dark laugh escaping his lips, a sound of pure, predatory triumph as he watched your body squirm beneath him. "I could spend an eternity unraveling you, and it still wouldn't be enough to satisfy my hunger over you, my treasure."

You tried to respond, you truly tried to... but between the sensation of his skin against your, him deeply buried over you and... and the way the world around you seemed to react so naturally to what was happening in that room, the way you felt the room slightly colder, the way a soft unexplainable wave of electricity traveled through your skin, touching all of your soft spots at once and the way he was so natural in taking you, drinking you in, tasting every one of your reactions as if those were the better jewel he ever got.

"More... Ng—Ah! Don't you dare stop," you breathed out, the words half-command, half-moan. Your mind was a blur of mindless heat, but you still found the strength to sink your hand into the deep blue, silky strands of his hair, giving a sharp, impatient tug to bring his lips back to yours. "Is that all you have? More—ah!"

His hand on your waist slided unashamedly over your lower back, exploring lower until his palm covered the cheek of your ass. Then he began to move as if he wanted to steal every sound you could produce, not from your mouth, but from your soul instead.

"Oh, Celestia..." A low, shuddering groan escaped him as he gave in to the rush, his body vibrating against yours with a terrifying tensity. His voice was dark, heavy with a desire that felt thick enough to touch. Even with your heritage finally surfacing, you felt small, caught in the storm of a soul far older and hungrier than your own. "At this rate, the deads will rise from their tombs just to witness you, my unashamed, beautiful treasure."

It wasn't until you were suspended over the very edge of the abyss, your senses sinking into a deep, crushing wave of pleasure, that you realized you could barely take any more. Thick tears—born of feeling too much, of being too carefully handled and too thoroughly possessed—welled in your eyes. But his lips never let them fall; he kissed your cheeks with such a desperate, worshipful devotion that the intensity with which he was taking you felt almost like a holy contradiction.

Then, the world finally shattered.

As he buried himself deep within you with a final, soul-shattering stroke, his glamour—that perfectly crafted mask of magic—flickered and broke. And you saw it...

Wings.

They weren't solid, but made of a raw, pulsing light—a celestial bleed of deep violet and electric blue that carved through the shadows of the room. They were massive, terrifyingly beautiful, and humming with a power that made the very air vibrate.

Your body was ruined, trembling and spent, yet your hand moved on its own. You reached out, fingers ghosting against that impossible light. The contact didn't feel like feathers or skin; it was a violent jolt of pure static, a rhythmic thrum that centered right in your chest. The wings arched under your touch, fluttering with a sharp, sentient shiver—as if his very soul was recognizing yours—before the light snapped shut. In a heartbeat, the brilliance was gone, swallowed back into the darkness as if they were never there, as the facade settled once more.

His weight remained heavy and warm over yours as the sheer scale of the night’s events finally began to settle into your bones. Your eyelids felt leaden, barely fluttering open when you felt the ghost of his lips against the corner of your mouth.

A Fae… All this time, that was his secret.

You forced yourself to look at him one last time before surrendering to the pull of the dark. Those beautiful pools of light—his eyes, stripped of their human mask—stared back at you with a terrifyingly pure devotion. His fingers, cool and steady, tucked a few stray strands of hair behind your ear with a tenderness that made your heart ache.

"You have a lot to explain..." you managed to murmur. Your voice was a mere rasp as he shifted, moving his body beside yours with a fluid grace that proved he didn't feel even a hint of the exhaustion currently crushing you.

"Rest, my dear," he whispered. His lips pressed against your forehead, a touch so soft it felt like a benediction, as he pulled you flush against his side. "Let the night take you once again."

As if his words were a literal enchantment, your consciousness began to slip away against your will. The manic rush of the fruit had finally bled out of your system, leaving only the hidden side of the moon—the part of you you never knew existed—to finally shine bright into the silence of the room.

───── Dr. Ratio 𖦹

☆  Grand, symmetrical, detailed builder.

☆  While he doesn’t have the time to accompany you to play Minecraft often, nor is the game in his scope of heavy interest, he likes to start large projects, see it come to fruition, and revel in the result.

☆  He’s fine by himself — the curiosity of a scholar extends even in games. However, he does delegate tasks to you if asked, ranging from collecting blocks to building alongside him.

☆  He doesn’t have any problems helping you with yours, either. He somehow memorizes which blocks goes with which, you never have to open the internet for another gradient inspiration ever again. You never have to look anywhere else at all, really.

☆  Circles are no problem, redstone is child’s play, and he has an eye for details to fill empty spaces. 

<veryratio>  I urge you to keep your composure after what I’m about to tell you. <cosmicreader>  what? <cosmicreader>  WHAT <cosmicreader>  WHAT IS IT???

His blocky character enters your screen, with a sense of foreboding as he makes the effort to meet your character’s eyes with his.

<veryratio>  Your circle is exactly a block off on one side.

He slowly (comically so) turns to the build behind him. The walls of blocks stand tall and the craftsmanship is something to be applauded for. Through the windows, the shaders make the sun hit just right.

<cosmicreader>  ratio <cosmicreader>  RATIO <veryratio>  I’m sorry. <cosmicreader>  TELL ME URE JOKING <cosmicreader>  PLEASE <cosmicreader>  NOOOKJAHSJLHLAS cosmicreader left the game.

You return with your building stripped down to the base, and he tells you that the ratio (pun not intended but you poke fun at it anyways) of blocks has been corrected. 

───── Aventurine 𖦹

☆  A wildcard through and through.

☆  Wherever you are or whatever you’re doing is what he wants, too. But there are times that he sneaks off, adding hours into his playtime, without giving out a hint of what he’s been doing.

☆  When he returns, he doesn’t hold back on praise towards your efforts. Isn’t this a rare item? Good job getting it. The building is looking great so far, keep it up. You got me a cat, just like the ones I have? Thank you!

☆  It’s one part sincerity and another part distraction from the way materials keep disappearing from your chests without notice. Whether or not you confront him about this is up to you — if you do, he says something along the lines of investments and stuff he should definitely keep in work spaces, and off your space.

<cosmicreader>  so <cosmicreader>  let me get this straight <thegoldentouch>  i know i know <thegoldentouch>  i need you to really take the grandeur in <cosmicreader>  THE REASON WHY I HAVE MISSING MATERIALS <cosmicreader>  IS BECAUSE

You close the chat window and give the freakishly large casino another once over, and you stare in both exasperation and begrudging awe. After all, the word “CASINO” written in redstone lamps flicker on and off in a nice pattern. In the corner of your vision, his character keeps switching between looking at you and looking at his masterpiece.

<cosmicreader>  you took <cosmicreader>  TWENTY ONE (21) TWO ONE <cosmicreader>  stacks of redstone dust from me <thegoldentouch>  dont worry <thegoldentouch>  the slot machines inside are all functional <thegoldentouch>  you can get it all back and more by playing a few times <cosmicreader>  ???????????????????????? <thegoldentouch>  i adore you so much you know that <cosmicreader>  AVENTURINE.

───── Anaxa 𖦹

☆  He doesn’t appear like a massive hoarder, but he somehow has everything. 

☆  Enchanted books, useless or not, are kept — even if it’s already overflowing two approaching three chests of his… all of the same kind. 

☆  He has sand and blaze farms solely to fuel his potion collection. The nether realm is his domain and he’ll traverse even the scariest (read: ancient city) land to get what he needs. 

☆  Automatic farms are generally within his expertise. While he agrees that it can sometimes dampen the experience, his focus is more on the complexity of some — like auto teleportation devices that you can’t figure out the mechanism behind. 

☆  He gives you what you ask for not because he’s all that generous, but because he simply has too much. You’ve never seen him run out of anything, ever. 

<cosmicreader>  anaxa <cosmicreader>  you are the best professor ever and i think you’re so smart and admirable <anaxagoras>  what do you want. <cosmicreader>  i need kelp <cosmicreader>  like <cosmicreader>  a shit ton of them. picture 30 stacks <anaxagoras>  ? okay <anaxagoras>  check chest 51 to 53. i might have some leftovers from my last build.

The chest number makes you swear under your breath, but all of it are thankfully numbered and paired with a tagged item frame. 

<cosmicreader>  ‘leftovers’ ?????? <cosmicreader>  YOU HAVE A HUNDRED STACKS OF KELP

You close the chest and pray to the aeons (he’ll definitely smite you for this) that your eyes are playing tricks on you, both for your sanity and his. You open the chests again, the count does not change.

<cosmicreader>  okay damn <cosmicreader>  heres a tall order then <cosmicreader>  do you have 8 silence armor trims <anaxagoras>  check chest 142. <cosmicreader>  excuse me <anaxagoras>  i have 27, if i recall correctly. <cosmicreader>  EXCUSE ME