#gd x reader

11:08 P.M.

The hands glow faintly in the dimness like a silent sentence. You stand in the middle of the hallway with your fingers still clenched desperately in the fabric of Jiyong’s suit, while your human mind refuses to comprehend the cruelty of what he has just told you. Your entire world, everything you have only just learned to believe in, has been stripped down to fifty-two merciless minutes…

“That doesn’t make sense,” you whisper desperately as hot tears begin streaming uncontrollably down your cheeks. “Jiyong, none of this makes any sense. Why do you have to leave? What did you do that was so terrible? You only saved me. In the forest and today on that platform... I was falling beneath a train. If you hadn’t been there, I would be dead. Why is Heaven punishing you for saving my life, for refusing to stand there and watch me die?”

Jiyong looks down at you. His face is impossibly pale, his sharply defined features motionless as if carved from cold marble, yet such immeasurable pain lives inside his large, dark eyes that your chest tightens at the sheer sight of it. Slowly, with a tenderness that makes your tears stream even harder, he places both warm hands on your trembling shoulders.

“Y/N... my duty was never that simple,” he says, his voice quiet, unsteady, and filled with a deep, surrendered sorrow. “A guardian angel is meant to protect a human life from the shadows, to guide it gently without taking control of it. We can delay danger, turn someone’s attention, create a small coincidence that places you one step away from harm... But we aren’t permitted to force fate into a different shape simply because our own feelings make its course unbearable... What happened in the forest was the first time I crossed that boundary completely. I manifested, touched you, and left enough of my energy inside you to tear open the veil between our worlds and Heaven warned me then. But today proved what it already feared... I’m no longer capable of guarding you with the distance and detachment my existence requires. Loving you has made it impossible for me to remain the kind of guardian angel I was created to be...”

“But I would’ve died without you!” you cry, your voice breaking as you strike his chest with your fists, weakly and helplessly, not wanting to hurt him but unable to hold back the violent despair ripping through you. “Do you hear me? I would be dead! Did Heaven really expect you to just stand there and watch while that train killed me?”

Jiyong catches your wrists gently before drawing you firmly against him. His warmth closes around you like an impenetrable shield, sinking through your clothes and skin until the violent trembling of your body eases. You press your face against his chest and hear the erratic beating of his heart beneath your cheek, so fast and painfully human that the sound frightens you even more.

“I would save you again,” he answers with such absolute, chilling certainty that your breath catches. “Even if I knew the price would be a thousand times higher. Even if I knew I would cease to exist the moment I touched you. I will never apologize for choosing your life, Y/N. I’m grateful that you’re breathing, that your heart beats, that you stand here in my arms instead of lying beneath that train. I’m sorry for only one thing...” His voice lowers, and you feel his breath tremble against your hair. “I’m sorry I allowed us to become something Heaven would never permit us to keep…”

You shake your head desperately, still pressed against his chest, refusing to accept the finality of his words. The two choices he described race through your mind, twisting together until one possibility rises above all the others. The second path—the human life. The chance that he could refuse to return and remain here, in your world, where you can still see him, touch him, and hear his voice.

You pull back and look directly into his eyes, your fingers tightening around his shoulders. “Then don’t go back,” you blurt out wild, desperate hope rising in your voice. “Do you hear me, Jiyong? Don’t return to Heaven, forget them and choose a human life here, with me. Stay in my world… You don’t have to be my angel to protect me, you can be an ordinary man. We can live an ordinary life. We’ll figure it out together. Just...please don’t leave me...”

For one brief, devastating second, a flicker of pure longing breaks through the grief in Jiyong’s face. You see the image your words create inside him. Mornings in this apartment, his shoes beside yours in the hallway, his hand reaching for yours without fear of celestial punishment, a life measured not in eternity, but in ordinary days he would finally be permitted to call his own.

Then the hope vanishes beneath a smile so deeply tragic that a cold shiver moves down your spine.

“Y/N, you don’t understand the cost,” he whispers, his voice trembling despite his effort to control it. His long fingers trace your cheek and catch another hot tear with his thumb. “If I refuse to return after midnight, Heaven will strip me of my immortality and cast me into the world as a mortal man, but the price of that rebellion is complete oblivion... Every memory that connects me to you would be erased. A second after midnight, I wouldn’t know your name, I wouldn’t remember your childhood, the bathroom where you cried when you were fourteen, your favorite song, or this night, I wouldn’t understand why the sound of your voice feels like the only peace I have ever known...”

“And Heaven offers me no guarantee of where that human life would begin. I could wake up confused, stripped of all memory, on a street in an unfamiliar city, hundreds or thousands of miles from this apartment. I could open my eyes in a country I’ve never seen, surrounded by people I don’t know, with no inkling of what I once was. And as an ordinary man with no memory of you... I might never find you again. I could live an entire human life without ever knowing that you exist...”

His gaze holds yours with such intensity that you feel as though your heart stands still. His refusal to become human is not born from cowardice or fear of pain. It has nothing to do with losing his immortality, his wings, or the celestial power that has defined him for centuries. He is afraid of only one thing, a world in which you remain alive somewhere beneath the same sky while he no longer knows your name.

He places one hand against the back of your neck and speaks words that shake the very fabric of your soul.

“I would rather spend the rest of your life standing unseen by your side, unable to touch you or answer when you call my name, while remembering every moment we were given... than become an ordinary man who passes you on the street one day without realizing he just walked past his entire world...”

You remain frozen in his arms. There is such unbearable devotion and sacrifice inside those words that every argument disappears from your mind. You understand him. You understand that what he feels for you is so immense that he would willingly endure an eternity of silence rather than risk losing the knowledge of who you are. Yet the understanding brings no comfort. It only makes the pain more unbearable, because either choice rips him away from you in a different way…

[3rd person POV]

With every loud tick of the clock in the hallway, Jiyong feels his remaining time dwindling. His hold on the physical world is weakening, and the warm light beneath his skin is slowly fading. He takes Y/N gently by the hand and leads her back into the living room, where only the small orange lamp in the corner remains lit. They sit together on the floor with their backs against the couch, exactly as they did during the most beautiful of their stolen days.

Y/N is crying, her body shaking at quiet intervals with sobs she can no longer suppress, and Jiyong knows there are no truthful words of comfort left to give her. No promise he makes will survive the next hour. No reassurance can change the fact that the future has narrowed into two different forms of loss. So he remains close, his knees touching hers, and allows the silence between them to hold everything neither of them knows how to say.

For several long moments, they simply look at each other. Jiyong studies every detail of her face with the desperate intensity of someone standing before a painting that will be destroyed at midnight. The faint line of the healing cut on her forehead, the redness around her eyes, the tiny tremble of her lower lip whenever she tries to stop crying, the way her damp hair clings to her cheek after the rain. He knows all of these details already... He has watched them change throughout her life, but tonight, for the first time, his celestial memory feels fragile.

His wings slowly unfurl behind him...

Snow-white feathers stretch into the dim room with a soft, weary rustle, filling the shadows with celestial light despite the deep new wound left by the subway. The damaged wings tremble beneath their own weight, their once immaculate shape broken by scars, missing feathers, and the darkened mark near their base. Y/N looks at their ruined beauty through her tears, but this time she doesn’t immediately reach for them, she looks back at him instead.

The question in her eyes is no longer whether she can touch his wings. It’s about whether she is allowed to cross the final distance between them…

Jiyong lifts one hand to her face. His fingers brush across her damp cheek, tracing the path of her tears before coming to rest beneath her jaw. There is no celestial distance left inside him, no carefully controlled calm, and no cold obedience. There is only the vulnerable hesitation of someone who has spent centuries loving her in silence and who now has less than an hour to show her what that love has always meant.

Their faces draw closer.

[2nd person POV]

There is nowhere left to retreat and nothing left to protect. There is no reason to hide behind human caution, social expectations, or celestial distance. Every rule that has held the universe in its cold, impersonal balance for countless ages now lies shattered across the worn carpet of your living room. Barely a few fragile inches of autumn air remain between your faces, but even that narrow space burns beneath the heat radiating from his body.

You see every delicate curve of his lips and feel the desperate, erratic pounding of his heart beneath the palm you press against his chest. It beats with such desperate force that it no longer seems to belong to an eternal being. His hand remains beneath your jaw, his thumb trembling slightly against your skin, and in his large, dark eyes, for the first time, you see complete and defenseless surrender.

Jiyong hesitates… It lasts only a breath, but you feel the entire weight of his existence inside it. The final instinct of an angel who has spent centuries obeying the distance between your worlds. The fear that even now, after breaching every law that once defined him, wanting you too openly might somehow cause you pain.

His gaze drops to your mouth, and you see him fighting the same longing that almost brought your lips together only days earlier. This time, there is no reason to stop. So you close the space for him. Your fingers slide into his soft hair, and you lean forward until your mouth brushes his. Jiyong’s breath catches and then his mouth meets yours completely. At first, the kiss is so careful that it barely feels real. His lips rest against yours with unbearable tenderness, warm and impossibly soft, as though he is trying to learn the shape of you without disturbing anything fragile. There is no urgency in him, no hunger that tries to take more than you are ready to give. Only wonder, only the aching disbelief of someone who has watched your lips form thousands of words from the shadows and is finally permitted to feel them against his own…

His fingers tighten almost imperceptibly against your face. You feel him pull back, not because he doesn’t want you, but because restraint was the only language he had ever known. You refuse to let him disappear behind it again. Your hand moves deeper into his hair, drawing him closer, and you kiss him back with everything you have been too frightened to admit. That small, unmistakably human invitation shatters the last of his control.

The kiss deepens. His other hand settles against your waist and draws you closer until there is no distance left between you. His lips move against yours with quiet, aching devotion, carrying the crushing weight of centuries spent waiting in silence. Every night he guarded your sleep, every frightened breath he calmed without being able to tell you he was there, every word he had wanted to speak while you cried into an empty room, every moment he stood one step behind you and longed to become someone you could turn around and see. It’s all there…

You feel it in every trembling movement of his mouth, in the way his fingers hold your face as though you are the most precious and fragile thing he has ever touched, and in the soft, wounded sound that catches deep in his throat when you press closer.

Then his wings begin to move... The white shapes rise behind him with a deep, trembling rush of feathers. Slowly, carefully, they fold around your back and shoulders, closing around both of you until the room, the unforgiving clock, and the entire world beyond him completely disappear.

The first feathers brush over your arms with the softness of warm silk. Others settle across your back, curving protectively around the shape of your body. You feel every individual touch, the fine tips grazing the bare skin near your neck. The larger feathers resting against your shoulders with a gentle, comforting weight. The subtle shifting of each one as Jiyong breathes, every inhale causing the shelter around you to tighten almost imperceptibly and every exhale allowing the feathers to soften against you again.

Their warmth sinks through your clothes and skin, surrounding you from every side until it feels as though you are held not only inside his arms, but within the deepest, most guarded part of his soul. You have been embraced before, but never like this…

Never with this overwhelming certainty that the person holding you has known every version of you. Every weakness, every mistake, every frightened and lonely part you had tried to hide from the world. He has seen the child beneath the blanket, the heartbroken girl on the bathroom floor, the exhausted woman who convinced herself she had to carry everything alone, and the terrified body trapped inside the wreckage of a car. And he chose every single one of them.

Inside the shelter of his wings, you feel impossibly complete. Loved not only for the woman you are now, but for every version of yourself he silently protected along the way. His love surrounds you so fully that for one breathtaking moment, there is no fear left inside you. No loneliness, no doubt. Every empty place within you feels flooded with the light and tenderness of someone who has spent your entire life searching for a way to reach you.

You recognize this warmth. It’s the warmth that found you beneath your childhood blanket when you were afraid of the dark. The warmth that stayed beside you on the cold bathroom floor when your heart first broke. The warmth that reached you through the ruined metal of your car and held your fading life within the darkness. Only now it has a body… It has hands, a heartbeat, a name, and lips pressed tenderly against yours.

Jiyong kisses you again, deeper this time, and the feathers surrounding you shiver in response. The sound rustles like thousands of autumn leaves moving through a forest, soft, vast, and alive. His celestial essence reacts to every touch between you, experiencing its greatest joy and its deepest destruction at once.

When he finally pulls back enough to breathe, he doesn’t leave you. His lips remain close, brushing your lips with every uneven breath. His forehead rests against your own, and his wings stay firmly wrapped around you.

“Remember this…” he whispers.

Before you can answer, he kisses you again. It’s slower now, a lingering press of his mouth that feels like a promise neither of you is permitted to make. His fingers move from your cheek into your hair, holding the back of your head with aching tenderness while his thumb strokes the skin behind your ear.

“Remember how my wings feel around you…” he murmurs against your lips when he draws back barely an inch. “Remember their warmth... Remember my voice,” he whispers between slow, trembling kisses. “Remember my hands, my warmth, and the way I’m holding you right now...”

His lips find yours again, deeper this time, and the snow-white feathers wrapped around your body respond with a quiet, restless shiver. You feel every single one of them against your back and shoulders, every soft tip, every gentle shift, and every wave of supernatural warmth flowing from them directly into your skin.

“Remember that you are loved, Y/N,” he breathes against your mouth, his voice breaking beneath the weight of everything he is trying to force into these final minutes. “You are loved completely, without hesitation, without conditions, and without a shred of regret. Nothing Heaven does to me after midnight can ever change that...”

Your tears mingle between your lips, warm and salty, but neither of you pulls away. Jiyong kisses them from the corner of your mouth and then presses another trembling kiss to your cheek, directly over the trails they left behind.

You tighten your arms around him, one hand still buried in his hair while the other moves across his back beneath the trembling base of his wings. You want to memorize him too... The heat of his skin beneath your palm, the movement of his muscles when he pulls you closer, the faint pulse at his throat, the softness of his hair between your fingers, the way his breathing breaks whenever your lips find his again.

Jiyong looks into your eyes, his mouth still brushing yours with every unsteady breath, and the grief reflected in his expression makes your heart contract with a sharp, agonizing ache.

“Whatever happens after midnight,” he whispers, “lock this moment deep inside you as the one thing Heaven couldn’t take from us…”

Your breath catches, but before another sob can escape your throat, he kisses you again.

This kiss is deeper, more desperate, filled with everything he has left. His devotion, his sorrow, his gratitude that you are alive, his terror of losing you... Every emotion he was never meant to possess and every choice he would make again without regret. You cling to him with desperate human strength, pressing your body against his as though you can force him beneath your skin and keep the universe from tearing him away.

You try to memorize everything at once. The softness of his lips, the warmth of his breath, the faint, familiar scent clinging to his skin, the way his hands tremble as they cradle you, the low, broken sound that escapes him when you kiss him with all the love you no longer have time to hide…

His wings remain closed around you. They never loosen, not when the kiss gradually softens, not when your lips burn with the intensity of his touch, yet still refuse to leave his, not when he presses small, trembling kisses to the corner of your mouth, your cheek, your closed eyelids, and finally your forehead.

You stay inside their shelter as he rests his forehead against yours, your bodies still pressed together and your breath slowly mingles in the narrow space between you. The feathers move gently against your back with every small shift, as though his wings are trying to memorize the shape of you too.

“Please don’t cry, Y/N,” he whispers, although his own voice is dangerously close to breaking. “Whatever happens, nothing can erase what you mean to me... Nothing can change the fact that I know every part of you, that I’m holding you in my arms right now, and that you know exactly how completely, hopelessly, and eternally I love you...”

“I don’t want a memory,” you whisper, your lips brushing his with every broken word as you wrap your arms even more tightly around his neck. “I want you, Jiyong... I want to see you, I want to touch you... How am I supposed to live in a world where I know you might be somewhere close, but I can’t hold you, speak to you, or hear your voice? That would be the cruelest thing Heaven could do to either of us.”

Jiyong doesn’t answer. There is no response he can give without turning hope into a promise he lacks the power to keep. He only gathers you more firmly against him and buries his face in your hair.

His wings remain around you, their warmth still immense, but beneath it, you begin to notice the faintest change. A subtle weakness. A small tremor passes through the feathers more frequently than before, like the first warning that the strength holding this sacred shelter together is failing.

Neither of you moves…

You remain in his lap with your arms around his neck, held inside the only place that has ever felt completely safe. You desperately force yourself to remember every soft shift of his feathers, every breath against your hair, every beat of his heart, and every slow movement of his hands along your back…

[3rd person POV]

Tick... tock... tick... tock...

The sound is merciless, mechanical, and cold. Jiyong doesn’t look at the hands of the old clock above the cabinet in the hallway. He doesn’t need to... His weakening essence feels every millisecond he has left in this world. Heaven’s countdown continues with mathematical precision, untouched by pleading, grief, or love.

The warmth inside his wings begins to fade. Y/N is still curled against him, protected inside the shelter of his feathers. Her fingers remain tangled in the fabric of his shirt, gripping him so tightly that her knuckles turn white. Her face is hidden against his neck, and her entire body shakes with quiet, exhausted sobs she can no longer suppress. Again and again, as though trapped inside a feverish prayer, she whispers the same words.

“Please reconsider... Jiyong, don’t go back, stay with me...choose humanity... Don’t leave me alone in the dark...”

Every honest plea strikes him more painfully than any punishment Heaven could create. He knows that a single act of surrender to the human path would strip him of everything he has ever been. He could become mortal, he could have hands capable of holding her without breaking celestial law, a voice she would always be permitted to hear, and a life that belonged to him rather than to Heaven.

But he could lose every memory that gives those things meaning. He could wake without knowing her name, unaware that somewhere in the same vast world lives the person for whom he once destroyed eternity. Until this moment, that possibility seems more terrifying than any sentence Heaven could impose.

But with every repetition of her broken request, another truth moves through him. If he returns as the invisible guardian he once was, he will remember everything, but she will remain haunted by a love she can never touch. He will hear her speak into empty rooms and be forbidden to answer. He will watch her reach instinctively toward his fading warmth, unable to place his hand inside hers. He will keep every memory, but he will condemn her to live with the certainty that the person she loves is always near and forever beyond her reach.

For the first time, Jiyong wonders whether preserving his memories is truly an act of devotion, or simply a final, selfish refusal to let her go.

The final minute before midnight begins…

Jiyong tightens his wings around her one last time. The feathers press closer against her back and shoulders, wrapping her in every trace of warmth his fading essence can still produce. He wants her final memory of him to be safety. Not punishment, not loss, not the cold silence that will follow…

He lifts one exhausted hand and places his warm palm against her tear-streaked face. With gentle pressure, he tilts her face upward until her eyes meet his. Such profound devotion, grief, and love fill his dark eyes that her sobbing falls silent.

His pale lips part.

For the final time before Heaven takes his voice from her, he speaks her name. There is nothing celestial or perfectly composed left in the sound. It’s the voice of someone breaking beneath the weight of everything he cannot promise.

“Y/N...”

The old wooden clock in the hallway begins striking midnight with heavy, metallic blows.

Three

Two

One...

[2nd person POV]

With every toll of the clock, the shelter around you begins to change. The feathers resting against your back tremble violently. Their warmth weakens one by one, fading from burning celestial heat into the gentler glow of sunlit fabric, and then into something barely stronger than your own skin. You tighten your arms around Jiyong and press closer, trying to hold both him and his wings together through force alone.

But the edges of his tall figure are already dissolving inside your embrace. His body becomes translucent, like smoke rising above a dying flame. The warm white light beneath his skin dims, flickers once, and begins to disappear. His wings remain around you for as long as they can…

The feathers against your shoulders turn into fine threads of pale light beneath your fingertips. You feel each one vanish separately… A large feather resting along your spine loses its comforting weight and dissolves into warmth. The fine tips against your neck disappear next, leaving the cold air of the room to brush against the skin they protected only seconds before.

With every strike of the clock, more of the shelter falls away. You desperately reach for the feathers, trying to catch them between your fingers, but your hands close around fading light.

The wings that had shut out the entire world begin to open, not because Jiyong chooses to release you, but because they are no longer solid enough to remain wrapped around your body.

“Please,” you choke out, clinging to him. “Please!” Jiyong’s palm is still pressed against your left cheek, his thumb moves across your skin one final time, so faintly that you almost imagine it.

Then the twelfth strike falls... The final feathers vanish from around your body, and the cold reaches you all at once.

The solid resistance beneath your arms disappears, and your hands fall through empty space. Your fingers close against your own chest as your entire body folds forward into the place where Jiyong had been sitting. You are holding nothing but cold air... Nothing remains inside the room.

The orange lamp in the corner casts its light over only the worn carpet and the abandoned couch. Jiyong is gone... He has vanished so completely that it seems impossible he was ever inside this apartment, impossible that the weeks filled with light, warmth, and miracles were anything more than an elaborate dream created by your wounded mind after the accident.

You collapse into a tight ball on the floor, pressing your face against the carpet in the exact place where he sat only seconds ago, where the faintest trace of his scent still lingers. A quiet, broken whisper escapes your mouth.

“Jiyong...”

Nothing answers. No voice moves through the silence, and no familiar silhouette appears beside the window. There is only the absolute, grave-like stillness of the human world.

Then, after several endless seconds of pure darkness and despair, something makes your eyes fly open. A deep, gentle warmth settles over your right shoulder, exactly where his hand so often rested when he wanted to calm you. It spreads slowly across your back like the memory of a blanket, easing the violent trembling of your body. There is no one there, the room is visibly, undeniably empty, but you close your eyes and cling to the warmth as though it is the final piece of him the universe has permitted you to keep.

Perhaps he is standing behind you, silent and invisible, exactly as he once believed he would. Perhaps it is only the last trace of celestial energy his touch left within your soul. You don’t know which possibility is true. You know only that the warmth remains after everything else has been taken. And for one final moment, it feels like being held by his wings again…

You remember Jiyong’s calm, quiet words from the previous evening, when he stood in the dimness of your room and reminded you that you had to enter that office completely alone, relying only on your own human strength, experience, and intelligence. He promised he wouldn’t help you, that he wouldn’t influence the minds of the people on the selection panel, because this battle belongs to you. And you do exactly that. Even though your palms are cold with nerves, your throat is completely dry, and your stomach is tightening into that familiar, painful knot, you straighten your shoulders, take a deep breath, and step inside to face the committee.

The interview is incredibly demanding, far worse than the worst-case scenarios you had imagined. The members of the selection panel sitting across from you in cold leather chairs behind a massive table ask complex, carefully constructed professional questions. They test your responses under pressure, watch your body language, and analyze every word you say. For one brief second, you feel the old panic trying to sink its teeth into your chest, stealing the air from your lungs. But then you suddenly find an unexpected, profound certainty somewhere inside yourself. The sentence Jiyong so gently reminded you of from your past rises inside your mind like an impenetrable shield. ‘You’ve survived worse. You can survive this too.’

You repeat it silently between breaths like a sacred mantra. And it works. Your nervousness gives way to cool, focused professionalism. Your arguments are logical and precise, delivered with a calm, convincing fluency. When you finally leave the room after an endless, exhausting hour and say goodbye to the members of the selection panel, who nod at you with approving smiles, you know you’ve done it. You handled everything completely on your own. Your first monumental, triumphant step back toward your daily routine and a successful life is complete. You feel impossibly strong, as though you had just won the greatest battle of your life.

As the elevator carries you down into the vast marble lobby and you step outside the building, an intense wave of loneliness washes over you. Your first instinct, the most natural human part of you, is to share that overwhelming relief with him. You want to see his reaction. You want to hear his deep voice telling you that he’s proud of you. You turn your head and search the glass-covered lobby, the quiet corners beside the large planters, the benches, and the entire open space in front of the building, where a light drizzle is falling lazily onto the gray pavement.

He isn’t there…

It isn’t the first time you’ve felt his absence over the past two or three days. A persistent, creeping, deeply uncomfortable suspicion begins to settle inside you that Jiyong is slowly pulling away. He no longer appears in your apartment as often as he used to. His presence feels less tangible, the warm supernatural energy that once radiated from him somehow growing weaker and colder, and his velvet voice sounds quieter whenever he speaks, as though it’s reaching you from miles away. You tell yourself that this must be the natural process he warned you about, that the trace of his celestial energy within your soul is simply fading as your human body recovers from the trauma of the accident. You try to find comfort in that explanation. You tell yourself it’s right, that you’re returning to normal and he’s retreating into his original role as the invisible shadow behind you.

You have no idea how deeply, tragically, and innocently wrong you are. You don’t know that Jiyong has been enduring a terror beyond anything the human mind could imagine. The Higher celestial order has issued its final warning. Your shared days, your quiet evening conversations, the moments of laughter in the kitchen, and the intimate touch of your fingers against his wings have made the bond between you too powerful, too human, and too dangerous to the balance of fate. He has been ordered to stop visiting you, to retreat immediately, and to let you continue along the mortal path intended for you. Yet he cannot bring himself to tell you. He knows how fragile your mind still is after the accident, and he knows that if he admits Heaven is forcing him to leave, you’ll experience it as another devastating betrayal, another abandonment by the entire world. So he suffers in complete silence, withdrawing into the shadows and tearing his own celestial essence to pieces so you can continue sleeping with some sense of safety.

Unfortunately, your journey home from the interview leads you directly into the worst of the afternoon rush hour, when the entire city transforms into a swarming human hive. A cold autumn rain has begun falling outside, sending hundreds of cold, exhausted, and anxious people rushing underground into the subway to escape the weather. You descend the long escalator toward the platform and are immediately struck by the heavy, claustrophobic, and aggressive atmosphere.

The station is packed almost beyond capacity. An unbearable roar surrounds you from every direction, the echo of hundreds of hurried footsteps on concrete, loud conversations, ringing phones, the rustle of wet coats pressing together, and heavy, overheated air mixed with the smell of dampness and underground dust. The enclosed space, the lack of air, and the growing chaos around you suddenly awaken the dormant parts of your trauma that still haven’t healed.

In a single second, your mind throws you back onto that dark road through the forest. The noise of the crowd twists into the terrible sound of your car’s metal frame tearing apart. A burning weight settles inside your throat and makes it impossible to swallow. You try to take a deep breath, but your lungs refuse to obey. The air around you seems to lose all oxygen and harden into liquid steel. A massive, paralyzing panic attack crashes over you. The sounds surrounding you merge into one deafening blur that tears painfully through your ears. The world loses its sharp edges. Your head begins spinning violently, and all sense of space disappears. You can no longer tell exactly where your feet are, and the floor beneath you seems to sway like the deck of a ship caught in a storm. All you see are blurred lights and gray human silhouettes. You don’t realize how close your disorientation carries you to the safety line at the edge of the platform, directly above the dark, deep tracks.

A low, ominous rumble rises from the black tunnel in the distance as an approaching train rushes toward the station at terrifying speed. The sharp beams of its headlights cut through the darkness and hurtle rapidly toward the platform. You aren’t standing there because you want to take a risk. There is no trace of suicidal intent or a desire to end your life. Your body has simply failed beneath the force of the panic. You stand frozen, gasping for breath with your eyes wide open, and at the worst possible moment, someone in the rushing crowd slams hard into your back while trying to push forward.

You lose your balance. Your shoe slips on the smooth, rain-soaked edge of the platform, and you stumble into empty space. Your face turns downward toward the deep darkness of the tracks, where hot air and the smell of burned oil rise toward you.

The train is only a few yards away, its braking wheels screaming against the rails as sparks fly from beneath the massive weight of rushing steel, heading toward the place where you are falling. The entire upper half of your body is already hanging above the tracks, and gravity is pulling you down.

Jiyong is standing in the crowd only a short distance away. He has been watching over you from the shadows the entire time, following from afar and seeing the panic begin to consume you, but the order from Heaven forbids him from revealing himself or interfering with the course of events again. When he sees your body lose its balance and fall from the edge of the platform directly into the path of the oncoming train, the purest and most terrible horror any celestial being has ever experienced flares in his eyes. He knows the rules. He knows with absolute, frozen certainty that if he fully manifests and physically catches you now, he will breach the final boundary Heaven has placed before him. There will be no turning back.

In the last fraction of a second, he desperately tries to plant a warning in the instincts of the man standing closest to you, urging him to notice and reach for your coat, but there isn’t enough time, because human reflexes are too slow and you’re already falling. The train is too close. Your body is poised above the tracks…

In that moment, Jiyong stops caring about Heaven. He stops caring about his immortality, his celestial home, the laws of the universe, or the very survival of his own essence. You are the only reality that matters.

A split second before your body drops beneath the wheels, the space around you is flooded with the familiar, searing heat. A tall figure bursts from the crowd with impossible speed. Jiyong fully anchors himself in the human world, his strong arms closing around your waist as he pulls you back onto the safety of the platform with uncompromising force.

The train screams past only inches away, the violent rush of air whipping through your hair and throwing dust into the station, but both of you crash onto the floor safely away from the platform’s edge. For the dozens of people surrounding you, Jiyong appears for a few brief seconds as an ordinary tall man in a white suit who has somehow emerged from the crowd and saved a falling woman. People turn toward you, someone cries out in shock, but as the doors of the train open and confusion surges through the platform, Jiyong allows his presence to fade from their perception again. A moment later, he is nothing more than a shadow to them once again.

You remain on the floor of the station, curled tightly inside his arms. Your face is pressed against his chest, and you hear his heart beating with a frantic rhythm you had never heard from him before. For the first time in that long, terrifying minute, you begin to feel safe again. The panic doesn’t disappear instantly, but his warmth gives you something solid to cling to. Your breathing slowly becomes less broken, though your body continues to shake violently. You close your eyes and breathe in his familiar scent, overwhelmed with relief that he saved you, still unable to understand why Jiyong’s body is trembling so uncontrollably or why such absolute, grave terror is radiating from him.

[3rd person POV]

Jiyong holds Y/N so tightly that the air leaves her lungs, but he doesn’t register the force of his own embrace. His arms have become an instinctive, desperate cage around the one life just torn from the jaws of moving steel. Above his shoulders, in the immaterial layer hidden from ordinary human sight, an apocalypse is unfolding…

A silent flash of cold violet light cuts through the stale air of the station. Heaven’s anger doesn’t arrive with thunder, but with crushing pressure. Jiyong feels a blade of celestial judgment pierce between his shoulder blades. The deepest and most destructive wound he has ever suffered tears open across both wings. The snow-white feathers surrounding it blacken instantly, splitting and falling through the intangible world like burned ash. The warm white light that has radiated from his essence for centuries suddenly dims. It retreats deep inside him like the final flame of a candle snuffed out beneath a hand.

Then he hears the judgment. It enters his mind with the weight of a vast iron bell, cold, final, and beyond appeal.

By physically intervening against death for a second time and breaching the approved course of mortal fate, he had broken the balance beyond repair. He may remain on Earth in this weakened, incomplete form until midnight, long enough to finish what he has begun and say goodbye. But when the final hour ends, he must choose between two paths from which there is no escape.

The first path is submission. At midnight, he can return to the celestial realm and accept the judgment placed upon him. He will remain Y/N’s guardian angel, but under an absolute condition. He will never again be permitted to reveal himself, speak to her, or touch her. He may continue guiding and protecting her only through the smallest invisible interventions allowed by Heaven, but he can never again pull her back from death or breach the approved course of her fate. He will become the silent presence he once was, watching over her without ever being known. The one mercy offered by this choice is memory. He will remember every second they shared. He will remember her laughter, her name, and the intimate touch of her fingers against his wings. He will endure an eternity of silence, but the memory of her will remain locked safely inside him.

…or he can choose the second path. He can refuse the command to return and remain in the human world. As punishment for that final rebellion, he will be stripped of every trace of celestial power. Heaven will take his wings, his immortality, and the memories that connect him to his angelic existence. He will forget Y/N completely. He will forget her face, her name, and every single moment he spent secretly protecting her throughout her life.

Heaven offers him no guarantee of where that human life will begin. He could awaken far from her apartment, in an unfamiliar city or on a street he has never seen, as an entirely new man who would have no idea what he once was. And as an ordinary human being inside an enormous, chaotic world, he might never find her again. He could live an entire mortal life while she remains a stranger he passes one day, never realizing that he once destroyed his Heaven for her.

Jiyong receives the cruel verdict in silent, paralyzing despair. Slowly, he helps Y/N rise from the floor and grips her hand with a near-painful intensity. His palm is burning hot, but his expression becomes empty and cold, surrendered to the deepest grief in existence.

“Let’s go home, Y/N,” he whispers. His voice sounds impossibly tired, muted, and sorrowful, and a dark sense of dread immediately pierces her heart. “I’ll take you home...”

The journey from the loud, dark depths of the subway station back to the surface and through the city becomes the longest and most painful stretch of Jiyong’s existence. He leads Y/N by the hand through the cold autumn rain, which has grown heavier. Ropes of icy water strike the pavement, bouncing off the hoods of passing cars and pooling in deep puddles on the black asphalt. Jiyong opens an umbrella above her and draws her close beneath it, as though he can still protect her from the rest of the cruel world for a little longer.

Throughout that endless walk, he knows this is the last time he will ever guide her home like this. These are the final minutes in which Heaven still permits him to remain visible by her side and feel the warmth of her hand inside his own. Y/N remains entirely unaware. She watches the pavement carefully so she won’t step into the water and occasionally lifts her eyes toward him with such pure trust and relief that the sight destroys him from within.

Inside that silent agony, Jiyong decides he must remember every seemingly meaningless detail of the journey. His mind works like a desperate painter trying to preserve an image before the flood washes it away. He watches the way her small fingers hold his burning palm and the way she tightens them whenever a loud car passes, silently checking that he’s still physically there. He listens to the distinct softness of her voice whenever she says his name... Jiyong... Each time the word reaches him, it feels like sweet poison. He memorizes the way her entire body presses closer beneath the umbrella, how her shoulder brushes his chest, and how she begins trembling again from the cold and lingering shock, prompting him to draw her even closer. He wants to lock the scent of her wet hair, the touch of her damp coat, and the rhythm of her footsteps deep inside his celestial memory, because he knows the choice waiting for him will destroy something, no matter which path he takes…

[2nd person POV]

When you finally reach your building, unlock the heavy front door, and climb the stairs to your apartment, an unusual, suffocating silence settles over the space. You remove your wet coat, slip off your shoes, and turn toward him. Jiyong remains standing beside the door with the umbrella propped in the corner, simply watching you.

He is unnaturally, frighteningly quiet. He hasn’t said a single word since leaving the station, not even when you try to tell him how much his presence helped you breathe again on the platform. His face is paler than usual, his sharply defined features appearing as if carved from cold marble, and something reflected in his large, deep eyes sends a chill down your spine. It isn’t his familiar, melancholic angelic calm. It’s a profound, surrendered, painfully human grief, carrying a fear and despair unlike anything you’ve ever seen in him before.

Your gaze travels over his figure, and the relief you felt after being saved vanishes in an instant. A dark premonition replaces it, piercing your chest like a shard of ice. You take two steps toward him, lift your hand, and carefully place your palm against his chest. Beneath your fingers, his heart beats quietly but impossibly fast.

“Jiyong?” you whisper, your voice trembling in the silence of the hallway. “Why are you so quiet? Did something happen in the subway? Are you furious because you had to save me again? I know you warned me, I know you said you must never breach that boundary if my life is ever in danger again. I’m sorry you had to do it... The panic completely paralyzed me in that crowd, and then someone pushed me. But you saved me... We’re here, we’re home. Why are you looking at me like that? You’re scaring me...”

Jiyong doesn’t pull away from your touch or avoid your eyes. His burning palm rises slowly, and his long fingers move across your face with unbearable tenderness, tucking a loose strand of hair behind your ear before coming to rest against your left cheek. The touch burns, yet such profound and surrendered sorrow radiates from it that hot tears immediately well up in your eyes.

Angels are bound to truth. A direct lie goes against the very fabric of their existence, and in that moment, Jiyong would give anything to shield you from the pain that is about to come. He wants to tell you that everything is fine, that he’ll return tomorrow, and that nothing between you has changed, but he cannot force those words past his lips... Silence can no longer protect you. He has to reveal the ultimatum Heaven has placed before him.

“Y/N...” he begins, and his voice is so unsteady, so filled with hidden despair, that your knees buckle beneath you. You clutch the front of his suit with your free hand to keep yourself from collapsing onto the floor. “You need to listen to me very carefully. What happened on that platform was the final boundary. I violated the highest prohibition an angel can cross. My role as your guardian... ended in that moment. It was taken from me.”

Your mouth falls open in shock. Your heart stumbles violently in your chest, and you shake your head in disbelief. “What...what does that mean? What are you talking about? Taken from you? Where would you go?”

A profound sadness deepens in Jiyong’s gaze. His thumb gently wipes away the first tear that spills down your cheek.

“It means I only have a few hours left,” he answers with an absolute, chilling gravity that makes your head spin. “Heaven has given me until midnight to say goodbye to you. When the clock reaches twelve, I have to choose between two paths... I can return and remain your guardian angel, but I’ll never be allowed to show myself to you again. I won’t be able to speak to you or touch you, and I can never again pull you back from death. I could still guide and protect you only in the smallest invisible ways, but to you, I would become nothing more than a silent shadow. I would remember us, but you would never see or hear me again. Or...” His voice breaks slightly, and pure terror flashes through his eyes. “I can refuse to return and remain in the human world. But Heaven will strip me of my wings and make me mortal. They’ll erase every memory I have of you. I would forget your laughter, your face, and your name... I could awaken somewhere far away without knowing who I was before, and as an ordinary man, I might never find you again. Those are the only choices I have, Y/N. And I have until midnight...”

Your reality shatters for the second and final time into thousands of sharp shards. Your fingers release his shirt as hot tears flood your eyes, and you turn in confusion, horror, and despair toward the wall above the hallway cabinet, where a large, old wooden clock hangs.

Its loud, rhythmic ticking suddenly sounds like the cold blade of a guillotine, cutting away the final seconds of your stolen, borrowed happiness one by one. The hands on the clock are merciless. They shine faintly in the darkness of the hallway, marking the exact, cruel amount of time you have left together…

11:08 P.M.

Jiyong begins visiting you every day. He isn’t with you constantly, and you don’t have him hovering behind you like an inescapable shadow. He learns to respect your space and your human nature. Sometimes, he appears for only a few minutes, materializing in the dim hallway when you wander, exhausted, from the kitchen, placing a hand on your shoulder to steady you before disappearing again. Other times, he spends a long autumn evening with you, sitting on the edge of your couch with his long, slender legs stretched out before him, simply listening.

And you talk. For the first time in months, you let go of the heavy mask of the woman who always has to hold it all together, and begin telling him about the most ordinary, insignificant details of your life. You tell him what went well during your day, and how annoyed you were by the sour-faced delivery driver who handed you a package without a smile or even a hello. You talk about the deepest wounds from your childhood, about what you once wanted to do before the daily routine and adult responsibilities swallowed you whole, and most of all, about why the accident in the forest has left you feeling so painfully lost and empty.

He already knows most of those stories and memories, often better than you do. He has watched you your entire life, seeing you grow, cry, and laugh, yet he lets you speak as though he’s hearing every detail for the first time. He sits in the shadows, his gaze fixed on your face, listening without interrupting. He understands that this time is different. This time, you aren’t speaking into an empty room. This time, he can actually answer you. His quiet, thoughtful words fill the space between you and make you feel as though every emotion you carry within you has meaning.

Jiyong helps you gradually find your way back to life, but he does it with extraordinary care and never makes decisions for you. When you sit on the floor in front of him, exhausted and uncertain, asking how to handle work and university, he never gives you direct instructions. He doesn’t tell you exactly what choice to make. Instead, through his unwavering presence and calm voice, he reminds you that you’re strong enough to make those important decisions yourself, because you always have been. He is only the anchor. You are still the one holding the helm.

𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬

The first major test of your newfound courage comes when you must return to the world outside. After weeks spent isolated inside your apartment, you need to travel into the city again for the first time. The thought of public transportation still makes your limbs go weak and your heart pound, but Jiyong promises to go with you.

You stand at the bus stop, shaking from head to toe as the bus pulls up to the curb. Jiyong is right beside you. The other passengers rushing toward the doors can’t see him, of course. They brush past him as though he’s nothing more than a current of warm autumn air, and the sight sends a strange, surreal feeling through you. You board together and sit in the very last row.

You have to be careful not to speak to him aloud. To everyone else on the bus, you’re simply a pale woman staring through the window, and the seat beside you appears empty. So you remain silent, communicating only through brief glances and the slightest shifts in your expression as you watch his reflection in the rain-streaked glass. Jiyong sits beside you without allowing his shoulder to touch yours, but the immense supernatural warmth radiating from him keeps the rising panic from swallowing you completely. He accompanies you to the place you’ve been so terrified to face, remains nearby during your first step back into your job, and walks with you through the long, quiet night whenever too many thoughts keep you awake and the city sleeps beneath the glow of streetlights.

𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬

So that the days are no longer filled only with the weight of fear and trauma, unexpectedly gentle, comforting, and humorous moments begin slipping between you as well. Jiyong may be a celestial being, but your human world genuinely fascinates him and occasionally leaves him completely bewildered.

One afternoon, while you’re tidying up the kitchen, you turn toward him with a hidden smile. “Jiyong? I need to ask you something... and I want a completely honest answer.”

His figure manifests beside the kitchen counter. “Angels aren’t supposed to lie, Y/N. You already know that...”

“Right,” you say, narrowing your eyes in exaggerated suspicion. “Have you seriously watched me my entire life? Even during the...embarrassing moments? Like when I was a child and danced in front of the mirror with a hairbrush, or when the most embarrassing things imaginable happened to me in high school?”

Jiyong freezes. An unexpectedly human expression crosses his usually composed face, and you burst out laughing. His lips curve into a smile so pure, boyish, and suspiciously innocent that you couldn't possibly trust it. “Maybe I looked away for a second during some of those moments...” he says, unmistakable amusement lacing his voice. “But your hairbrush dancing was genuinely impressive.”

“That’s terrible!” You throw a dish towel at him with playful outrage, but Jiyong catches it with one graceful movement and places it back on the counter beside him. “Since you were always so close, you could’ve at least warned me about some of those awful dates in college. You knew those guys were jerks... Why didn’t you intervene?”

Jiyong leans back against the counter, folds his arms, and gives you an unwavering, perfectly calm look. “Heaven assigned me to protect your life, Y/N. Not your taste in men.”

You laugh out loud, and the sound fills the entire kitchen. It’s the most beautiful moment you’ve experienced in weeks, a moment when you suddenly forget every fear and simply enjoy talking to the one who knows you better than anyone else in existence...

You also gradually discover that despite his immense power and extraordinary abilities, Jiyong has never physically handled some of the most ordinary human tasks. He understands how modern technology works after watching you use it for years, but handling it himself is another matter entirely. He studies the microwave panel with suspicious concentration, and when you ask him to turn on the television, he stares at the remote as though it might be a dangerous cursed object from another realm. To a being as impossibly pure as him, human life is a complicated and fascinating labyrinth of tiny details that he’s only now learning to navigate by your side.

And when the hardest nights return, when the nightmares refuse to leave you alone and sleep remains out of reach for hours, Jiyong sits on the edge of your bed. He knows how much you love music. He has heard your favorite song on the radio countless times, watched it accompany you through so many moments that he knows every note by heart. So he hums it softly until your breathing settles and slumber finally takes you. His velvet voice gradually drowns out the noise and fear inside your mind, the melody cradling you like a warm tide until your eyelids grow heavy and you slip into deep, peaceful sleep.

As your worlds continue to intertwine, the nature of your touch begins to change as well. The accident in the forest blurred the rules between you. Physical contact is no longer out of reach, and as long as Jiyong isn’t using his power to drag you back from death or alter the course of your fate, he can allow the warmth of his celestial energy to flow through his human form and directly into you.

At first, those touches are incredibly small, cautious, and filled with wonder. Sometimes, it’s only the gentle pressure of his warm palm resting on your trembling shoulder while you sit at the table in the evening. Sometimes, his long fingers gently sweep an unruly strand of hair from your face so you can see more clearly. When a headache begins throbbing in your temples after hours of reading or staring at a screen, he notices before you say a word. He sits beside you, slowly runs his fingers through your hair, and rests his warm palm against the back of your head until the pain begins to dissolve beneath his touch. Sometimes, he silently wipes a tear from your cheek when you mourn the life you had before. And whenever you need the deepest possible reassurance, you simply place your hand in his open palm.

Every time his skin meets yours, the same powerful wave of comforting warmth washes over you, and in those moments, you finally understand the truth. You’ve felt that exact warmth during the most painful moments of your life. You felt it in the bathroom when you were fourteen. You felt it at night when you cried beneath the blanket as a little girl. You felt it whenever you needed comfort and reassurance most... Back then, veiled by human blindness, you had no idea where the warmth came from or who it belonged to. Now you know.

Jiyong never allows you to lose yourself in those moments of closeness without reminding you of the cruel reality with a seriousness that sends chills down your spine.

“I must never do it again, Y/N,” he tells you one evening while you hold his hand and study his profile, the precise curve of his lips and the perfect line of his nose. His voice is impossibly firm. “What happened in the forest was a single moment when I breached the highest boundary. If your life is ever in danger again, you can’t rely on me to pull you back from death a second time. My wings may not survive another intervention. You have to rely on the people around you, on your instincts, on paramedics... If I cross that boundary again, Heaven will act, and there will be no turning back...”

At first, you try to joke about it, hoping to lighten the oppressive atmosphere that has suddenly settled over the room. “So you’re telling me I should look both ways extra carefully the next time I cross the street because my guardian angel is officially off duty?” you ask with a faint laugh.

But Jiyong doesn’t smile. He turns his face toward you, and the gravity reflected in his eyes is so deep and chilling that your smile immediately vanishes from your face. You realize he never jokes about this topic, not even for a second. He knows something you aren’t allowed to know. He knows that a second violation would force Heaven to pass judgment.

𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬

Outside, a deep, heavy silence settles. The autumn rain has finally stopped, but the air beyond the windows remains cold and saturated with the scent of damp earth and fallen leaves. You sit together in the living room, where you deliberately leave the main light off. The only glow comes from the faint orange light of a small lamp in the corner and the flickering shadows of tree branches dancing across the walls in the wind. The atmosphere is impossibly intimate, quiet, and fragile, as though the entire world temporarily shrinks to the size of this one room.

Jiyong sits on the floor with his back against the edge of the couch, where you’re curled beneath a warm blanket. You study his profile, the flawless, sharply defined line of his jaw and the pale skin that seems to pulse with its own faint light in the dimness. He looks exhausted, and fatigue radiates from him in waves. It’s the heavy weariness of a being who has carried the burden of secrets and celestial consequences for far too long.

Then it happens. Without warning and without a sound, the air in the room suddenly grows warmer. Jiyong’s damaged wings slowly unfurl behind him with a soft rustle. Their snow-white feathers shift gently in the shadows, reflecting the faint orange glow of the lamp, but Jiyong doesn’t turn his head. He allows them to appear simply because he’s too exhausted to keep them hidden behind the veil of immateriality any longer. Or perhaps because, somewhere deep within his soul, he no longer wants to hide anything from you.

You stare at the torn beauty of his wings as your heart pounds violently against your ribs. Every feather, every ragged edge, and every deep scar cutting across their white expanse fill you with pain and the overwhelming urge to comfort him. Even though he always assures you with a gentle smile that the wounds and scars don’t hurt very much, you don’t believe him.

Carefully, you lower your feet from the couch and sit on the floor a short distance away from him.

“Jiyong...” you whisper, as though afraid of disturbing the intimate silence between you. “Can I...can I touch them?”

Jiyong’s entire body visibly stiffens. His shoulders tense, and the tips of his wings twitch before drawing closer to his body, instinctively shielding against an unfamiliar human touch and possible danger. Slowly, he turns his face toward you, and for the first time, you see uncertainty and hidden fear in his eyes.

“Wings aren’t an ordinary part of the body, Y/N,” he says, and you hear the concern in his voice. “They aren’t like human skin or hair... They’re an extension of my angelic soul, my connection to eternity... They feel every small sensation, every emotion, and every touch with an intensity beyond anything you know. There are no words to describe it... Angels don’t willingly allow another being to touch their wings, they’re our greatest vulnerability.”

You look at him with your fingers hovering only a few inches from the nearest white feathers. You hear his warning and understand the weight of his words, but the desire to be closer to him, to share his pain, and to return even a fraction of the care he has given you throughout your life is stronger than any fear.

“I know,” you whisper sincerely, holding his gaze. “But I don’t want to hurt you, Jiyong. I just...I just want to feel them. Will you let me?”

Jiyong watches you for a long, breathless moment. He sees the sincerity in your eyes and feels the beating of your heart. After several seconds that feel like entire lifetimes, his shoulders finally relax. Slowly, he closes his eyes, and his wings unfurl again, surrendering themselves to your hands. He gives you permission and does something no angel is ever meant to do. For one moment, he places his greatest vulnerability into the care of a mortal.

Carefully, with your breath caught in your throat, you reach out and lightly brush your fingertips across the undamaged feathers along the upper edge of his wing. A powerful, visible tremor immediately ripples through Jiyong. His entire body shudders, his jaw tightens, and a faint spark of pure energy flashes from his fingertips onto the floor. The feathers beneath your touch are impossibly soft, smoother than the finest velvet, yet they radiate so much warmth that your skin begins to burn. It feels as though you aren’t touching feathers at all, but life in its purest form. You slowly move your hand lower, feeling Jiyong’s breathing become heavier and less controlled beneath your human touch. Every movement is intensely intimate for him, not in a way that feels impure, but in the most vulnerable and sacred sense imaginable.

Then your fingers move deeper into the structure of the wing until they stop just above one of the larger scars. It’s a raised, dark line where the feathers are missing and the skin beneath them is rough and damaged. Carefully, you trace your fingertip directly along the scar, your chest tightening as the thought flashes through your mind that all of this was borne because of you.

Jiyong’s eyes fly open, and his hand closes around your wrist with unexpected speed and strength. His grip is firm, but there is no trace of aggression in it. He doesn’t stop you because he wants to hurt you or force you away. He stops you because your touch upon the mark of his deepest transgression is emotionally too powerful for his angelic essence to endure, causing his hand to tremble against your skin.

You look down at his hand and then back at his face. There’s barely any distance left between you. You feel his quick breath against your lips, see the faint trembling of his mouth, and recognize the deep, unspoken longing warring with everything celestial within him. You realize with absolute certainty that Jiyong trusts you in a way he has never trusted anyone in all his eternal existence. He has shown you his failures, revealed his pain, and allowed you to touch them…

“Does it hurt?” you whisper, your voice thick with compassion as your eyes drift toward the newest scar. “The scars... they still hurt, don’t they, Jiyong?”

Jiyong slowly loosens his grip around your wrist, but his hand doesn’t fall away. Instead, his warm fingers slide into your palm and intertwine firmly with yours. He looks at you with a smile so unbearably sad and filled with such profound tenderness that your head spins and a painful pressure settles inside your chest.

“Only when I remember why they were earned...” he answers.

Your faces draw dangerously close in the dim room. You see the faint gleam on his soft lips and feel the attraction between you becoming almost tangible, his entire presence pulling you closer and closer. Everything inside you is screaming to erase the final distance between you, to kiss him and surrender to the supernatural heat radiating from him, something so pure and innocent yet impossibly captivating.

But in the final second, Jiyong stops himself with every fragment of will he possesses. His wings quietly retreat into invisibility, the glow around you gently fades, and the unfinished moment suspended between you leaves such intense tension in the air that you can no longer breathe. You both know that if you breach this final boundary, there will be no turning back.

[3rd person POV]

As the new week begins, changes unfold in Y/N’s life that Jiyong watches with deep, hidden pride and a growing chill in his chest. Those borrowed days, filled with quiet conversations, nighttime walks, and moments of laughter in the kitchen, have restored her strength. Her mind is healing. The frightened, broken woman who once feared her own reflection is slowly fading, and the ambitious, determined version of herself that Jiyong has always known is returning in her place.

Y/N receives an extraordinary opportunity. She’s invited to the most important job interview of her career, one she had pursued even before the terrible accident in the forest. Jiyong stands in the doorway of her bedroom and watches as she nervously adjusts the collar of her crisp white shirt in the mirror, brushes her hair, and rehearses her answers. She’s beautiful, full of life, energy, and determination.

She turns toward him with a small, nervous smile. “You’ll stand by my side in that office, won’t you? You’ll stand beside me the way you sat with me on the bus? I need you to bring me luck, Jiyong. I can’t do this without you...”

Jiyong looks at her, and a quiet, profound sadness flickers in his eyes. He takes one slow step toward her, his figure almost translucent in the morning sunlight.

“I can wait outside, but I can’t stand beside you in that office, Y/N,” he says, his voice steady even though the refusal hurts him. “I can’t influence the people making that decision, and I don’t want my presence to become something you rely on to succeed. That interview is yours. You have to walk into that office alone, and you’re strong enough to do it…”

For a moment, Y/N’s shoulders slump with disappointment, but then her face clears. She steps closer, looks directly into his eyes, and the most beautiful, warmest smile he has ever seen appears on her lips.

“That’s okay,” she says quietly but with complete certainty. “You don’t have to come inside with me. I don’t need you to help me answer. It’s enough to know you’re nearby, waiting for me in the hallway or outside the building. Just knowing you’re somewhere close is more than enough to give me the strength to do this on my own.”

In that moment, Jiyong feels something inside his celestial essence shatter permanently. He watches her smiling face, the pure human faith and devotion she places in him, and realizes the terrifying truth with sudden, chilling clarity. He no longer protects her only because it’s his heavenly duty. He no longer watches over her simply because the higher order and the laws of the universe appointed him as her guardian centuries ago. Those cold, impersonal obligations of Heaven suddenly mean nothing. He once protected her life as a mere duty, but now... now he protects a life he desperately wants to become part of with his entire being. He wants to be the man waiting for her outside the building. He wants to be the person she laughs with when she gets the job. He wants to live her ordinary human life beside her...

And in the exact instant Jiyong finally admits that forbidden desire to himself, an icy, paralyzing pain spreads across his back, targeting the very base of his invisible wings. It isn’t a new wound, not yet... It’s the unmistakable pressure of Heaven turning its full attention toward him, a warning that the borrowed time he has been given beside her is running out…

“I’m Jiyong, your guardian angel.”

The words keep echoing through your mind like a voice inside an empty, cold cathedral. When Jiyong speaks those words aloud, it feels as though time stops around you. The world outside, that rational world governed by the laws of physics, medical diagnoses, police reports, and logical explanations, suddenly loses all meaning. You’re standing face-to-face with something that contradicts everything you’ve ever been taught. Your rational mind, accustomed to hard facts from university textbooks and the daily routine, immediately begins fighting against the revelation. It’s too absurd, too unreal, too much like a fairy tale... Angels belong in thick religious books, Renaissance paintings displayed in galleries, or sentimental movies made for hopeless romantics. They don’t exist in the real, modern world.

“An angel? My angel?” you repeat in disbelief, your lips barely managing to shape the words in the cold air of the room. Your voice is weak and hoarse after your earlier breakdown and panic. “That...that’s completely ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense, Jiyong,” you whisper, speaking the name he gave you aloud for the first time. “You’re making fun of me, aren’t you? Who sent you here? Is this some kind of sick joke? A hidden camera? Or have you just been watching me and trying to manipulate me, knowing I’m vulnerable after the accident?”

Jiyong doesn’t move. His slender figure remains calm, serene, and still as stone. The light from the streetlamp filtering through the half-open blinds cuts sharply across his cheekbone, and there isn’t even the slightest hint of amusement, sarcasm, or deception in his dark, deep eyes. There’s only an endless, profound, almost heavenly calm that instinctively stops your racing thoughts and makes you simply listen.

“It isn’t a joke, Y/N,” he says, his voice so pure and clear that goosebumps break out across your skin. It’s the most beautiful sound you’ve ever heard, like the notes of a piano weaving a quiet melody through an empty space. “I know how difficult this is for you to believe. Your world measures everything by what it can see, touch, or explain through some established equation. But there are things in heaven and earth that human eyes simply can’t perceive until every rule separating those worlds is broken.”

You swallow hard, fighting the bitterness and dryness in your throat. The fear that you’re losing your mind has lessened since the sharp memory from the forest returned, but your logical side is still desperately trying to save you from falling completely into the unknown. You begin firing pointed, rapid, almost aggressive questions at him as though you’re an investigator conducting an interrogation, determined to catch him in a contradiction or a carefully constructed lie.

“Okay, okay, let’s assume I believe you for one second,” you blurt out, gripping the fabric of the couch behind you to keep your hands from shaking, your legs already too weak to support you. “If you claim you’ve been protecting me all this time, why have you never shown yourself to me? Not even once in my entire life? And why the hell can I see you now? Why are you haunting my dreams? Why do I see you across the street and in the hallway mirror? It doesn’t make sense... If you’re an angel, you’re supposed to be an invisible presence.”

Jiyong releases a quiet, almost imperceptible sigh, and a pensive shadow crosses his face as though he’s considering how to answer all your questions. He takes one small, careful step across the carpet but immediately stops when he notices your body tense. He decides not to invade your space or frighten you any further.

“I’ve protected and guided you since the first day you drew breath in this world,” he answers quietly, and the sheer weight of sincerity in that sentence sends a chill down your spine. “That you have never seen me before is one of the highest laws governing my existence. We aren’t supposed to interfere in human lives in ways that reveal our presence. Our task is to remain in the background, a shadow, a gentle current of air that subtly nudges your path when danger is near... A small delay, misplaced keys, a coincidence that people confidently dismiss as luck or fate...”

He tilts his head slightly, and his dark gaze softens as he watches your trembling body. “You asked why you can see me now. It’s because the accident in the forest changed everything, Y/N. You were truly dying inside that wrecked car... The thread of your life was snapping, and indirect guidance wasn’t enough anymore. There wasn’t enough time. I had to breach the highest boundary between our worlds. I had to fully manifest in human form, physically tear apart the twisted metal of the door, and take you into my arms... The moment I touched you to save you from certain death, our worlds collided and bled into one another. I left too much of my own celestial energy within your body and soul. Your human perception was shattered by something powerful enough to open your eyes to what was always meant to remain hidden... That’s why your mind can no longer shut me out. That’s why you see me in your dreams, reflected in windows, and sitting across from you on the bus. Your perception has become attuned to me, like a radio accidentally picking up a signal it was never meant to receive. Does that make more sense?”

“And will it...will it stay like this forever? Will I never be free of it?” you ask quietly, terrified by the thought of never having another ordinary day without glimpsing an angel’s shadow somewhere around you.

Jiyong looks away for a moment, his gaze drifting toward the darkness outside the window. His jaw tightens, and you see the muscles along his neck tighten as though he’s struggling with a secret he isn’t permitted to reveal. He doesn’t tell you that the higher celestial realms are already aware of what he’s done. He doesn’t tell you that his choice has sent ripples of anger through the celestial realm, or that your ability to see him has become a dangerous disruption within the order of the universe that will eventually have to be resolved.

“It isn’t supposed to last forever,” he says at last, trying to keep his voice calm and steady despite the faint tension you sense beneath it. “As your body and mind recover from the shock of the accident, the imprint of my energy might begin to fade. Your perception may eventually return to what it was before, and I... I might become nothing more than an invisible presence behind you again. There’s no need to fear that you’re losing your mind.”

You shake your head, your thoughts churning like a violent storm. “You keep talking about saving me during the accident. But what about before that? Did you ever save me before, during all those years, or did you simply stand at a distance and watch me live?”

“I’ve protected you more times than you could ever know,” he answers without a moment’s hesitation, his certainty absolute. “From things large enough to destroy you, and countless smaller dangers you never had the chance to notice...”

But the deep-seated, skeptical part of your mind continues to gnaw at you. You need something tangible because your brain is still desperately trying to find another logical explanation for this impossible situation. A stranger could have learned your name from police reports. He could have discovered where you live. He could have followed you since the hospital. Maybe he’s simply an intelligent and dangerous stalker playing a cruel psychological game with you. Maybe he’s someone who took advantage of your vulnerability and isolation after the accident so he can control you...

“I don’t believe you,” you say firmly, even though your quiet, trembling voice clearly betrays your words. “Can you prove it? You claim you’ve known me since my first breath. If that’s true, tell me something no one else in this world could know. Not a police officer, not a doctor from the hospital, not some stalker scouring online forums, no one... Tell me something about myself that only I know.”

For the second time that evening, Jiyong smiles so faintly that you almost miss it. It’s a smile filled with extraordinary tenderness, deep nostalgia, and complete understanding of your human fear. He takes two slow steps across the carpet. This time, you don’t retreat or throw anything at him. The soothing, supernatural heat radiating from him holds you in place like an invisible, protective anchor.

“When you were exactly seven years old,” he begins, his voice wrapping around you like the softest blanket, “you became terrified of the dark after the older boys who lived nearby told you a frightening story about a monster lurking beneath your bed. For an entire month, you refused to sleep unless the hallway light was left on... Then one night, your parents turned it off because they decided you were old enough to sleep like a big girl. You hid completely beneath the blanket, held it tightly over your mouth, and quietly sang the old children’s song about the stars that your grandmother had taught you so no one in the house would hear. You sang it through your tears until exhaustion finally lulled you to sleep... Do you remember? You never told anyone about it, not even your closest friend, because you were ashamed that you were already a big girl and still afraid of monsters beneath your bed.”

Your eyes widen in shock, and your breath catches in your lungs. Even you had almost forgotten that moment. It had been buried beneath layers of childhood memories, far beyond anyone else's reach. But he continues. His voice grows more intense, deeper, and thick with emotion.

“When you were fourteen, a boy from your class broke your heart for the first time,” Jiyong continues, his gaze holding yours, heavy with shared pain. “He was your first real crush, and he laughed at you in front of the entire class and humiliated you. You came home, fell apart, locked yourself inside the bathroom, and turned on the water in both the sink and the bathtub full blast so the noise would drown out the sound of your crying. You wept with such desperate pain, your face pressed against the cold blue tiles, until there were no tears left and you could barely breathe. You thought you were completely alone in that bathroom, abandoned and betrayed by the entire world... But I was sitting on that cold floor beside you, Y/N. I held my hand a fraction of an inch above your trembling shoulders to guard you, and all night, I wished I could take that painfully human heartbreak from you and carry it myself...”

A large lump forms in your throat again, and fresh tears immediately well in your eyes. This time, they aren’t tears born of fear, or the terror of losing your mind. They’re tears of such pure, profound emotion, unlike anything you’ve ever felt before...

“And before every difficult exam at university, or that major job interview last year that landed you the job…” Jiyong continues, taking another small step closer until you can see the light reflected in his pupils, “…whenever you stood outside the closed door with sweaty palms and your whole body trembling with nerves, you always did the same thing. You closed your eyes, took three deep breaths, and quietly repeated the same sentence to yourself like a mantra. ‘You’ve survived worse. You can survive this too.’ You repeated it until your heartbeat finally slowed. And during the exam a few weeks ago... that slip of paper at the bottom of the cloth bag? You didn’t choose the one question you knew by pure chance, Y/N. I gently guided your hand because I knew how exhausted you were after those weeks, how close you were to collapsing, and how much you needed that success for your own confidence and peace of mind...”

Now you’re crying openly, warm tears streaming freely down your cheeks, and you have neither the strength nor the desire to wipe them away. Everything suddenly falls into place with overwhelming and almost painfully perfect clarity. All those strange moments when it felt as though unexplainable miracles were happening around you. The constant, quiet sense of warmth and safety that accompanied you even through the worst moments of grief and anxiety after the accident. It was all him. All that time...

You look at him through the veil of your tears, swallow past the lump in your throat, and ask what suddenly becomes the most important and profound question of your entire life.

“How...how long have you really known me, Jiyong?”

Jiyong takes one final step toward you and stops within arm’s reach. The gentle warmth radiating from him feels like the heat rising from sun-soaked stone in the dead of winter. He looks at you in a way that steals your breath and makes the entire room disappear around you. His lips move as he answers with an absolute, haunting sincerity that shakes your soul.

“Longer than you’ve known yourself..”

In that moment, your entire understanding of the world turns upside down. You realize something both beautiful and terrifying. In every moment of your life when you sat curled up in the corner of your room, convinced that you were completely alone, forgotten and abandoned by the entire world, you weren’t alone at all... Someone had always been there with you. Someone whose devotion had become strong enough to push him beyond the boundaries he was meant to obey...

“I want more proof,” you whisper after a long moment of silence. “I want to see something real. I don’t want to see you only as an ordinary man in a white suit. Show me...show me what you truly are...”

Jiyong immediately goes still, and for the first time, a sudden flash of hesitation and uncertainty appears in his eyes. An angel’s wings are the most intimate and vulnerable part of their existence. They reflect their purity, their purpose, and, in Jiyong’s case, the condition of his wings reveals every time he has rejected a boundary Heaven placed before him for your sake, every private act of devotion and rebellion he has carried out through your life...

“Y/N...that isn’t a good idea,” he whispers, clear concern threading through his voice. “Human eyes aren’t meant to see our true nature, and my wings...my wings aren’t what you would expect from an angel and—”

“Please,” you insist, raising your hand toward him even though you still don’t dare touch him. “I need to see it. I need to know that all of this is true.”

Jiyong watches you for an endless moment. He sees your desperate need for certainty, your vulnerability, and your yearning to believe. Slowly, he realizes that he cannot refuse you.

He draws in a deep breath as though preparing for the most difficult act of his existence, then slowly closes his eyes. The shadows of your room suddenly erupt in a silent, dazzling glow of soft white light. It doesn’t blind you. The light is alive and pulsing, carrying such an overwhelming wave of supernatural warmth that every trace of tension leaves your body... Then, behind Jiyong, an enormous shape begins to form within the luminous glow, and the sight steals your breath.

Vast wings unfurl from his shoulder blades. But they aren’t what your grandmother described when she told you stories about angels during your childhood. They’re something entirely different. You didn’t expect perfection, but the reality still hits you deeply. His wings are made of snow-white feathers, but the plumage is wild and uneven, torn roughly in countless places.

When you take a step closer, the light reveals the shocking truth. Thin scars and deep wounds crisscross the entire span of his wings. In some places, the feathers are missing completely. In others, they grow in strange, chaotic clusters as though Jiyong’s body has been desperately trying to heal after brutal injuries. And near the base of his left wing, the newest scar gleams, raw and inflamed, a fresh mark left by the night he pulled you from the wreckage and breached the highest boundary between your worlds.

You gasp in horror and cover your mouth with your hand. “My God, Jiyong...” you whisper as fresh tears spill over. “Who...who did this to you? Who hurt you like this?”

Jiyong remains completely still with his head slightly lowered, his wings quivering with exhaustion in the dim room. When he answers, his voice is quiet and filled with quiet resignation.

“No one hurt me, Y/N,” he says. “This isn’t the work of an enemy. It’s the consequence of my own choices.”

“Your choices?” you repeat in confusion, carefully reaching out even though your fingers are trembling uncontrollably. You long to touch the scarred feathers, but fear still holds you back.

“Every scar you see was created when I refused to accept a boundary Heaven had placed before me and protected you in a way that went beyond what was permitted,” he explains quietly. “Not every mark came from something as devastating as the accident in the forest. Some came from moments when danger was already in motion and I altered its course regardless. When I delayed an event that would have placed you in harm’s way. When I redirected someone whose presence would have changed your life for the worse. When I intervened even though your path was meant to unfold differently... Gentle guidance is part of what I was created to do, but changing the course of fate for one mortal is something else. Every time an angel bends the deeper laws of the universe for one specific human life, his essence pays the price. Heaven doesn’t need to punish me with a whip. My own wings carry the weight of every line I chose to cross...”

You stare at the vast, damaged beauty before you and feel such profound pain and gratitude inside your heart that no human word, no matter how rich your language, could ever express it.

“I...I always thought angels had beautiful, perfectly pure wings,” you whisper, unable to look away from the newest wound near the base of his wing. “In all the church paintings... angels are always flawless.”

Jiyong slowly opens his eyes and looks at you with a gentle, understanding smile. You must look completely terrified and still filled with disbelief.

“Perfect wings belong to angels who have never guarded anyone worth ruining them for...”

𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬

[3rd person POV]

The night deepens, and the room is once again wrapped in quiet, peaceful shadows. Eventually, exhausted by the sheer weight of emotion, by the shock, and by the truth she was forced to carry, Y/N falls asleep on the couch. For the first time in many days, her breathing is deep, calm, and even. The rigid anxiety that held her captive since she returned from the hospital has finally vanished from her face. She sleeps like a child, protected by the gentle warmth Jiyong continues to maintain around her.

Jiyong sits on the floor beside her with his back against the edge of the couch, in the exact spot where she had sat crying only hours earlier. He has already hidden his wings back within the intangible world, but the newest scar still burns beneath his skin like living fire. Yet that physical pain is nothing compared to what he’s experiencing inside his own mind...

He watches her peaceful face as dark, heavy thoughts race through him. Throughout Y/N’s entire human life, he managed to respect the safe, invisible distance that separated them with perfect self-control. He watched her from afar, remained her quiet shadow, and never allowed himself to crave her recognition. It was enough that she was alive. It was enough that she was safe.

But these past several days, during which the accident has allowed Y/N to perceive him fully, have proven far more dangerous than all the years that came before. This is no longer merely a silent duty. For the first time, Jiyong knows what it feels like when Y/N truly speaks to him and looks directly at him. He knows what it feels like when her gaze, even when frightened and confused, meets his eyes. He has heard her screams, witnessed her tears, and felt the painfully human need for closeness, understanding, and truth inside her. Those brief but intimate conversations, and the awareness in her gaze, have awakened something an angel is never meant to feel. A desire to become part of her world. A desire to be more than a shadow, to become a man who can take her hand and remain beside her.

Angelic existence is built on cold detachment. Angels are expected to surrender their personal will, dreams, and desires. Every second Jiyong spends listening to her breathing, every word exchanged through the veil separating the human and celestial worlds, adds more weight to the scales of judgment awaiting him. He can feel the uncompromising pressure of the heavenly order gathering above him like storm clouds. He knows the celestial spheres don’t forgive mistakes, especially not those that threaten the balance of mortal fate.

By giving her rescuer a face and a name, Y/N had disrupted the chain of events that was supposed to follow. She was meant to forget. She was meant to continue living with the belief that she had survived through impossible luck, not with the certainty that her guardian angel had wept for her.

And that is the greatest danger of all. Jiyong knows that the powers above are watching him closely. Every return to this apartment, every word he speaks to her, and every moment he allows her to see him compounds his transgression. He knows he should stop coming immediately. He should retreat into the shadows, allow his energy to fade as he told her it might, and let her forget him so she can return to her ordinary life. That would be right. It might save both of them. If he leaves now, Heaven might still allow her mind to heal and let forgetfulness wash over her. She could become the ambitious woman who balances work and university again, and the memory of him might fade into nothing more than a distant dream.

He reaches out and allows his fingers to hover a fraction of an inch above her face. He can feel the warmth radiating from her skin. Seeing her sleep so peaceful and safe for the first time since that terrible night in the forest makes his angelic resolve crumble into dust. An eternity without her suddenly feels like an endless, empty hell filled with cold darkness. What is celestial perfection compared to one quiet breath from the woman who survived because of him? What is the purity of his wings when their scars are all he has ever considered truly valuable?

He knows he is violating everything. He knows he is risking his place within the Heavenly Order, but as he looks at her sleeping face, he understands that he can’t leave her world just yet. Even if the consequences destroy everything he has ever been, he has to return tomorrow evening. He can’t leave her alone with her dark thoughts and fears. Her loneliness frightens him more than the anger of the entire Celestial Court. If he must be punished, then let it be for protecting her too much, rather than too little.

“One more day,” he whispers into the silence of the room, his voice carrying the weight of a sorrowful, resigned promise. “Just one more day, Y/N.”

He already knows he’ll make the same promise again tomorrow. Each time he does, he brings his judgment closer, but inside this quiet room, where her peaceful breath is the only reality that matters, he no longer cares. He has become an angel falling toward Earth, and there is no turning back…

A hospital. The realization flashes through your mind, but your heavily dulled brain still can’t piece together how you got here. Slowly, with enormous physical effort, you open your right eye. The left side of your face feels swollen and heavy. The ceiling above you is made up of dull white square panels, and a heart monitor beside your bed beeps in a steady, monotonous rhythm. A clear tube runs from the back of your left hand to a plastic IV bag, its contents dripping into your veins one drop at a time. Every deeper breath hurts unbearably, as though sharp shards of glass are lodged inside your chest, but the pain feels muted and distant. Your body is under the influence of strong painkillers.

“Oh, you’re awake, good morning, Y/N,” a quiet, calm voice suddenly says from the doorway. You shift your eyes in that direction as far as the plastic brace around your neck allows. An older woman in a white doctor’s coat approaches your bed with a paper file in her hands. She has kind, wrinkled eyes and a tired but deeply reassuring smile. She quickly checks the glowing monitor, shines a small light into your pupils, and gently places her hand on your forearm to check the pulse at your wrist.

Your throat is dry and parched like a desert, your lips are cracked, and your tongue feels far too large inside your mouth. You try to speak, but all that comes out is a hoarse, barely audible sound that doesn’t resemble any of the words you’re trying to say. The doctor reacts immediately. She gives you a plastic cup containing a little lukewarm tea, carefully supports your head, and helps you take two small sips. When the warm liquid finally soothes your throat, your first question, strangely enough, isn’t about how serious your injuries are, whether you’ll recover, or what happened to your car... Your mind is rigidly fixed on one thing, on one warm white light and one particular face from that rainy night.

“Who...who was he?” you whisper, your voice trembling with both weakness and urgency. “That man...the man who pulled me out of the car... Where is he? Is he okay?”

The doctor looks at you with an understanding, sympathetic expression. It’s exactly the kind of look experienced doctors reserve for patients who have just survived a severe, life-threatening trauma and shock, and believe they saw something that wasn’t really there. She gently adjusts the white blanket around your shoulders.

“Try to rest. You were incredibly lucky,” she says in a calm, soothing voice, almost as though she’s speaking to a small child. “Your car is beyond repair after the impact with the tree, but you suffered a concussion, two broken ribs, and several cuts on your forehead and hands from the shattered glass. None of your injuries are life-threatening now, and with enough time and rest, they should heal completely. You’re safe here...”

“You don’t understand,” you insist, ignoring her reassuring words. You try to lift yourself off the bed, but a sharp, shooting pain immediately tears through your chest, forcing you to hiss and collapse back against the pillows. “I was dying in that car... I was trapped and I couldn’t breathe. There was smoke everywhere, but then... then the light appeared. It was so bright, this warm white light, and there was a man inside it. I remember his face perfectly. He held me in his arms as though I weighed nothing. He pulled me out of the car and laid me down on the grass... Who was he? Where is he now? I want to thank him. I wouldn’t have survived without him.”

The doctor releases a quiet sigh, sits down in the chair beside your bed, and rests the file containing your medical records on her lap. Her smile is now filled with patient sadness.

“Y/N, I need you to listen to me carefully. There was no one like that at the scene of the accident,” she says quietly, her voice firm but not unkind. “Emergency services were called by a woman who drove past around ten or fifteen minutes after you crashed. She noticed tire marks on the road and broken bushes along the edge of the forest. When she climbed down the embankment toward your car, she found you lying on the grass a short distance from the wreck. You were completely alone... She immediately gave you first aid, she held your hand and kept talking to you until the paramedics arrived. She didn’t see another man anywhere nearby, and neither did the paramedics or the police officers who arrived shortly afterward.”

You shake your head in confused desperation, even though the movement sends another wave of throbbing pain behind your eyes. “That’s impossible... It can’t be! That light... It wasn’t coming from another car. It was soft and warm and white, and it filled the entire wrecked cabin... And that face above me... That man spoke to me and knew my name. I heard him inside my head. I couldn’t have made all of that up!”

The doctor gives you a sad smile, reaches out, and places her cool palm over your trembling wrist. “What you’re describing can happen after severe accidents and traumatic experiences. You went through profound shock, lost blood, and suffered a concussion. When the human brain faces an immediate, potentially fatal threat and begins to lose consciousness, the body releases a huge surge of adrenaline and activates defensive chemical processes. The mind tries to protect itself from pain and terror by creating whatever it needs to survive. The warm white light, the feeling of complete safety, hallucinations, or distorted memories of an unknown rescuer...those may have been your mind’s ways of keeping you calm until real medical help arrived. The woman who found you was already there when you were lying outside the car, so the most likely explanation is that you somehow managed to get yourself out before losing consciousness. Adrenaline can make the human body do extraordinary things. It can give you strength you never knew you had.”

“By myself?” you breathe in disbelief as a huge lump forms in your throat. You remember the heavy, deformed metal of the door wrapped around you like a merciless steel vise. How could you possibly have escaped from it with broken ribs and blood pouring from your forehead? How could you have opened a door twisted around the trunk of an oak tree?

“The human body is capable of incredible, almost superhuman things when it’s under extreme stress and fighting for survival,” the doctor says with a firm nod. She rises from the chair and gently touches your shoulder. “Try not to think about it now. You need to sleep, rest, and give your body time to recover. A nurse will add something to your IV for the pain and to help you relax so you can sleep peacefully.”

You nod because you no longer have the mental or physical strength to argue with her. The doctor checks the flow rate of the IV one last time, then quietly leaves the room. The heavy door closes behind her with a soft click, leaving you alone in the oppressive silence, or at least you think you are alone.

You turn your head toward the window, where the cold gray light of the approaching day is beginning to filter into the room. It must be very early in the morning. You lift your right hand, which trembles weakly under the influence of the medication, and carefully press your fingertips to your cheek, touching the exact place where you felt that warm, firm, protective palm on the rainy night of the accident...

The doctor can talk about chemical reactions inside your brain, and science can offer thousands of logical explanations for how the human mind behaves under shock... but you can’t deceive your own body or your own senses. That warm touch was too real. That face, those deep eyes belonging to the man who held you as though you were the most precious thing in the world, were far too vivid to be nothing more than a figment of your imagination...

You’re terrified that you’re losing your mind. You’re terrified of the emptiness and cold he left inside you after suddenly disappearing, but somewhere in the deepest part of your frightened soul, you know someone was out there in the darkness…

𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬

Returning home from the hospital several days later doesn’t bring the relief you’d hoped for. It only means that the walls of your own apartment, which once felt like a safe and beloved refuge after long days filled with work and university lectures, have transformed into a silent, cold, impenetrable prison. Your physical wounds slowly heal with each passing day. The bruises across your chest from the seat belt gradually change from deep purple to green and yellow, and the stitches in your forehead no longer pull as painfully whenever you move your eyebrows, but something inside you has broken deeply and irreversibly. The stable, organized, successful world you worked so hard and methodically to build shattered into dust within a single second on the wet asphalt. And now, for the first time in your life, you’ve lost the ability to put it back together. You’ve lost control.

Your ability to function normally in everyday life is gone. You have to take a medical leave of absence from work because the mere thought of sitting at your desk, opening your laptop, communicating with people, and pretending everything is fine sends a paralyzing wave of physical and emotional weakness and nausea through you.

The same goes for university. The lectures and seminars that used to be your priority and a source of personal pride have suddenly become a distant, foreign, and completely meaningless world. You can’t focus on a single line in your textbooks. Whenever you open one, the black letters begin to blur together before your eyes, and your mind immediately and uncontrollably races back to that dark forest and the sound of tearing metal.

The nights are the worst of all. Sleep, which is supposed to be your best remedy and refuge, becomes your most terrifying enemy. Every evening, you watch the hands of the clock move relentlessly forward with a knot of fear and anxiety in your chest. You delay the moment when you’ll have to turn off the lamp on your bedside table and be left alone with your thoughts. And when complete exhaustion finally forces your eyes shut, the darkness doesn’t calm your mind. Terrifying nightmares swallow you immediately, as though summoned at will. Over and over again, with brutal regularity, you relive the same moment inside your head. The violent skid, the roar of water spraying from beneath the tires, the flashes of the forest, and the hard, final impact against the old oak tree...

But those dreams are different from what the doctor described. In them, you remain trapped inside the wrecked car for much longer. The acrid smoke from the airbag suffocates you, the cold night creeps beneath your skin, and you scream desperately and soundlessly for help that no one can hear. Then, at the exact moment when you’re about to die and finally surrender inside the nightmare, the entire scene suddenly changes. A soft, pulsing, warm white light appears, and the same strangely familiar male face emerges from it. He leans over you, his features tight with pure, profound despair and pain. You can see his soft lips moving quickly and urgently, but the sound of his voice can’t reach you clearly. It feels as though you’re trapped inside a thick glass bubble or deep beneath the surface of the water. You hear only broken, muffled fragments of words distorted by echoes as they resonate frighteningly through your mind.

“...please...Y/N...stay...don’t close your eyes...stay with me...”

Every time, you wake from the nightmare with a sudden, painful jolt through your entire body. Your heart pounds wildly against your ribs as though you’ve just been running for your life, and your skin is soaked in a cold sweat. You sit curled up in the complete darkness of your bedroom, gasping for breath, and even in the cold, you can still feel that incomprehensible, burning warmth against your left cheek as though his hand is still there.

Over the following weeks, the trauma of the accident begins to merge dangerously with complete social isolation, loneliness, and total emotional exhaustion. Fear starts dictating the uncompromising rules of your new life. You discover that you can’t leave your apartment. Even the sudden sound of a car braking beneath your windows or a horn blaring in the street makes you flinch violently, your breathing quickening as you hide your face in your hands. Once, after ten days behind locked doors, you manage to gather enough courage to walk downstairs and cross the road to the small store on the corner, but it ends disastrously. In the middle of the pedestrian crossing, the sound of an approaching engine triggers such a severe and unexpected panic attack that you remain frozen in the middle of the street as though your feet have been fused to the asphalt.

You can’t breathe. Your throat closes, and you’re unable to take a single step forward or backward while impatient drivers lean on their horns around you. Sobbing loudly and shaking all over, you eventually retreat to your apartment, lock the door behind you, and don’t cross the threshold again. You have food and other necessities delivered, but you don’t even want to see the couriers. You wait fearfully behind the door until they leave the bags on the mat and walk away, then quickly drag everything inside. You’re losing control of your life, of your own body, and, most terrifyingly of all, of your own mind.

You don’t just see the mysterious man from the accident in your dreams. You begin to catch brief glimpses of him while you’re awake, in broad daylight, fully conscious and completely certain that you aren’t asleep...

It begins subtly, like a slight distortion in your vision. One afternoon, you’re sitting at the kitchen table, absentmindedly stirring a cup of tea that has already gone cold, when you glance tiredly out the window at the street below. He is standing on the opposite sidewalk, right in the middle of the rushing crowd of people wearing coats. He has no coat or umbrella despite the light rain. He’s wearing only a simple, perfectly tailored white suit with a white shirt and a pale blue tie, and his face reflects the light in an unnatural way. His intense gaze is directed straight up at your window, directly at you. Your heart stops in that instant, and your breath catches in your lungs. You blink quickly several times, rub your eyes with your palm, and look at the same place again. The sidewalk is empty... People continue walking by, but the man is gone. No one is standing there anymore…

A few days later, it happens again inside your apartment, which frightens you even more. In the dim evening light, you walk past the large mirror in the hallway and, in your peripheral vision, see another figure in the clean glass beside your own pale reflection and the dark circles beneath your eyes. He’s standing just behind you in the dark corner of the hallway. His slender silhouette is clearly outlined in the shadows, his head slightly tilted to one side and his lips parted as though he’s about to speak to you. With a loud, panicked scream, you spin around, ready to defend yourself, but there’s nothing behind you except the empty, silent, cold hallway. No one is there...

You begin slipping into pure paranoia and terror at the possibility of your own insanity. You see him standing beneath the yellow glow of a streetlamp when you’re unable to sleep again and find yourself staring desperately out the window into the darkness. He stands there as still as a statue, the heavy raindrops seeming to bend strangely around his body, his large, deep eyes shining in the darkness of the night. And when an approaching medical appointment finally forces you to take a nearly empty evening bus, you sit curled up in the very last seat. As the bus passes beneath a dark railway bridge and the interior lights flicker out for a single second, he’s suddenly sitting across the aisle from you. He’s there in all his tangible beauty, leaning against the window and watching you with such an impossibly deep gaze that you can’t breathe. When the bus brakes sharply at the next stop and shock makes you look away for a second, the seat is completely empty again when the lights come back on.

It’s always the same. He disappears. One second he’s there, so unbelievably real that you can see the exact shape of his fingers and the texture of his pale hair, and the next, not even the smallest trace of him remains.

That’s when the darkest fear a person can experience finally consumes you. The fear that your sanity is slipping away irreversibly. That the mild concussion the doctor dismissed so easily in the hospital was actually serious damage to your mind. That you’re hallucinating, losing your grip on reality, and that your mind, completely destroyed by trauma and isolation, has created an imaginary man whom it now projects into the world around you like a broken film reel determined to ruin you...

You desperately try to find something rational to hold on to. Anything, even the smallest piece of evidence that could prove you aren’t insane and that it really happened. You spend long hours and entire days sitting at your laptop beneath a blanket, your eyes burning from the harsh light of the screen. You search the internet, local news sites, police reports, discussion forums, articles about accidents from that particular night, and stories about other crashes along that stretch of road looking for local legends or rumors of anything supernatural connected to it, but you find absolutely nothing...

Eventually, in a moment of desperation, you force yourself to do something that costs you the last of your remaining pride. You pick up your phone and, with trembling hands, dial the police station that investigated your accident in the forest. In a quiet, shaking voice, you speak to the tired, bureaucratic officer on the other end of the line. You ask whether another witness might have been added to the report later, whether the woman who called the ambulance had mentioned anyone else, perhaps a man who had been near your wrecked car before she arrived...

“The investigating officer clearly recorded in the official report that the woman who called in the accident was the first person at the scene and that she was alone,” the cold voice on the phone replies without the slightest trace of human interest. “There was no one else there. The road was empty at the time. Your case has officially been closed as a single-vehicle accident with no third-party involvement. Have a good day.”

When you set the phone on the table, it feels as though someone has thrown you without warning into deep, freezing water with no way back to the surface. No one has confirmed your memory. The entire world is telling you with absolute certainty that you’re insane. That the most beautiful, intense, and comforting moment of your life, when someone held you with limitless tenderness and saved you from certain death in the darkness, was nothing more than a figment of your sick mind, a hallucination born inside your damaged brain. And that finally breaks you.

You’re sitting on the living room floor with your back nearly pressed against the edge of the couch and your knees pulled tightly to your chest. Printed articles about the accident are scattered around you, along with your laptop showing an open search page and your phone, which has remained facedown since the call with the police like a silent death sentence hanging over your sanity.

The room is dim, and the only source of light is the streetlamp outside, which casts long shadows across the opposite wall through the half-closed blinds. Those shadows look like fingers reaching for you. You feel impossibly exhausted, and the fatigue is no longer just physical. It’s a deep mental numbness caused by the constant battle with your own mind. Every second you spend wondering whether the things around you are real or merely another illusion causes physical pain.

Something suddenly breaks inside you. The strong barrier you’ve been desperately trying to build to keep yourself from collapsing finally cracks. The first tear slides down your cheek, hot and salty, and more quickly follow. You bury your face in your hands, and your body shakes with quiet, hopeless sobs. You cry for the ordinary, carefree life you still had only a few weeks ago. You cry out of helplessness, knowing that no one is listening to you, that no one believes you...

“I can’t do this anymore,” you whisper into the dark, empty room, your voice sounding impossibly weak and lost. “Please... enough. Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to keep seeing things, I just want to know what’s real... God, I don’t even know what’s real anymore...”

Your sobs fill the room for a moment. Then, right at the lowest point of your breakdown, the silence suddenly changes. You don’t hear a sound, no footsteps, not even the creak of your old floorboards, but the air around you transforms in a single second. The bitterly cold draft that always seems to linger inside the apartment suddenly disappears.

You feel it. The same unmistakable, profound, supernatural warmth that surrounded you beside the ruined tree on the night of the accident. It flows through the room like a warm wave, immediately warming your freezing toes and trembling shoulders. Your heart misses a beat, and you stop crying in shock. Slowly, with your breath trapped deep in your throat, you lift your face from your hands.

He is standing in the middle of the room, less than six feet away from you. This time, he isn’t a fleeting glimpse in a mirror or a shadow across the street that disappears the moment you blink. He’s standing there... tangible, tall, and completely real. The light from the streetlamp outside filters through the blinds and falls directly across his flawless face. He’s wearing the same white suit and white shirt, his pale hair slightly disheveled, and his eyes are fixed on you with such unbearable intensity that your head begins to spin.

He doesn’t disappear... You stare at him for five seconds, then ten, and he’s still there. Pure panic takes over. Your mind, trained by the logic of the world around you, immediately begins screaming that this is the definitive end, that you’ve finally lost your mind completely.

“No! No, go away! Just leave me alone!” you scream hysterically, your voice breaking into a pitch you’ve never heard from yourself. Instinctively, you try to crawl backward, but your back hits the couch, and you begin kicking your legs in shock as though trying to push away an invisible threat. Your hand strikes a heavy, decorative glass vase on the low table. Without thinking, you grab it and hurl it toward him with all your strength.

The vase flies through the air, heading directly for his chest, but a second before it can hit him, something incomprehensible happens. It suddenly loses all its momentum in midair and slows as though it has struck a dense layer of invisible gel. Then it simply drops soundlessly onto the carpet at his feet. It doesn’t shatter. It only rolls harmlessly to one side.

“Stay away from me! Who the hell are you?” you continue screaming as tears stream down your face again and your entire body shakes uncontrollably with anxiety. “Why are you following me? Why do I keep seeing you in my dreams? What do you want with me? You...you don’t even exist! You’re only in my head! I’m insane!”

The man takes one small, careful step toward you and slowly raises his hand in a calming gesture, his palm facing up. But when he sees how deeply frightened you are, how wildly you’re breathing and how tightly you’re pressing yourself against the couch, he immediately stops. An expression of such profound, agonizing pain crosses his flawless face that it looks as though your screams have physically driven a knife straight through his heart.

“Y/N...please,” he says quietly, and then it happens. The sound of his voice... low, velvety, melodic, impossibly clear, and trembling with endless tenderness and understanding. Your entire body jolts. The sound acts like a key turning inside a heavy lock in your mind, releasing a memory that every rational explanation has tried so hard to bury. A sharp, crystal-clear flashback of the night of the accident explodes inside your head.

Your mouth falls open in shock. Your hysterical screaming suddenly stops, and you can only stare at him as you struggle to breathe. The fear that you’re losing your mind evaporates in a single instant, replaced by a stunning, overwhelming realization.

“That...that was you,” you whisper, your voice barely more than a breath. “You aren’t a hallucination? You were really there in the forest. You pulled me out of that car...”

He continues watching you without looking away, and tears shine in his eyes. They don’t fall, but they’re there, hidden deep in his gaze. He slowly lowers his hand to his side. He understands that he can’t remain silent any longer. He sees how deeply his quiet presence has been destroying you, how isolation and fear of your own insanity have been tearing you apart from the inside out. He realizes that his silence and his attempt to obey the rules are hurting you far more than the uncompromising truth ever could.

“Yes,” he answers aloud, his voice brushing over you like a warm breeze. “It was me, Y/N. I’m the one who was supposed to protect you from the shadows without you ever knowing I existed... I’m sorry I frightened you so badly.”

A deep silence settles over the room. The warmth radiating from him calms you enough for your frantic heartbeat to slowly return to normal. You stare at him, at the supernatural being standing in the middle of your ordinary living room on your worn carpet. Suddenly, everything begins to fall into place... all the strange coincidences, the unbelievable luck throughout your life, the bus you missed, the tapping on the window, the question you drew during your exam... It was all him.

Your heart is still pounding, but this time it isn’t from fear. It’s awe in the presence of something far beyond human understanding. You lift your eyes to him, swallow the bitterness in your throat, and ask the question that has been hanging in the air since the first second of your shared existence.

“Who... who are you?”

He looks at you, and for the first time, a small smile appears on his face. It’s so impossibly warm that a shiver runs down your spine. His lips barely move, but you notice even that subtle motion.

“I’m Jiyong, your guardian angel.”

During the day, you sit in an office where your fingers dance mechanically across the keyboard, answering endless emails from demanding clients, answering phone calls, and dealing with operational issues that might not fulfill you on a deeper level, but reliably pay your bills and provide you with stability, which is the most important thing in your current situation.

And even when your workday ends, your day certainly doesn’t. You quickly close your laptop, throw your heavy handbag over your shoulder, and rush across the city to university with a cup of half-cold coffee already in your hand. Studying for a degree while working full-time is an incredible strain that takes its toll in the form of constant sleep deprivation, but you aren’t someone who gives up easily. You like the feeling of having everything firmly under control, of knowing that your life is clearly heading somewhere and that every sleepless night has a purpose. Maybe this degree will help you find a job that truly fulfills you one day, instead of merely paying the necessary bills... The world is actually a pretty great place.

Today, however, is more demanding and stressful than most. Heavy, leaden clouds have been gathering above the gray rooftops of Seoul since early morning, warning that autumn has finally taken complete control of the city. You spend the entire afternoon nervously glancing at the clock on your phone, and time seems to drag on purpose. Complicated definitions, historical dates, and graphs keep spinning through your mind like a broken record. Tonight, you’re facing the most difficult and important exam of the entire semester...

The professor who teaches this course is known throughout the university for his absolute unwillingness to compromise, his cold attitude, and his habit of failing students over even the smallest, most insignificant details. You haven’t slept properly all week because of him. Every free moment, every short lunch break, every journey on the subway or bus, and every late hour of the night has been spent with your head buried in thick, heavily underlined textbooks until your eyes began to burn.

When you finally leave the company building and arrive on campus, the university corridors are quiet, gloomy, and filled with cold air. The atmosphere outside the examination room is so tense it could be cut with a knife. A small group of your classmates has gathered there, all of them pale and nervous as they frantically flip through their notes one last time. You stand silently by the window, shifting your weight from one foot to the other, your palms sweating and an unpleasant, tightly drawn knot in your stomach preventing you from taking a deeper breath. When the professor finally opens the door and calls your name in a cold voice, your heart stops for a second. You take a deep breath, straighten your shoulders, and step into the room, where the ticking of the wall clock sounds like the countdown to an explosion...

And then something happens that, in that moment, feels like an absolute, genuine miracle. When the professor asks you to approach his desk and reach into a cloth bag filled with small slips of paper bearing the numbers of the exam questions, your fingers pause for a second, seemingly of their own accord, guided by some unknown, gentle impulse or a warm breath of air. Your fingertips brush against the first three folded slips and pass them by before reaching for one specific piece of paper hidden at the very bottom of the bag. When you pull it out and unfold it, such an enormous weight lifts from your chest that your head begins to spin. It’s the only question out of all fifty that you know flawlessly, down to the smallest detail. The same question you happened to talk through out loud in your kitchen last night while making yourself a cup of herbal tea to calm your nerves.

Your initial anxiety disappears instantly. You speak fluently, confidently, and with complete understanding. The professor, who usually interrupts students with biting remarks, merely nods in quiet approval and discusses the subject with you as though he’s speaking to an expert on his own level rather than a frightened student.

Fifteen minutes later, you leave the examination room with a wide smile and the highest possible grade recorded in the university system. The feeling of pure relief is completely indescribable. All the enormous tension, fear, and exhaustion that had been building inside you for weeks suddenly vanish as though someone had waved a magic wand. When you walk down the stairs and step through the university’s heavy wooden doors, you feel unbelievably light, free, and full of renewed energy, as though you could fly.

At that moment, your life is simply wonderful. Everything at work is finished, the greatest academic nightmare of the semester is finally behind you, and an entirely free weekend stretches out ahead of you without a single textbook waiting to be opened. As a reward, you decide not to go straight home and collapse into bed, because you deserve at least one small, modest celebration.

Your feet carry you toward the small, cozy Italian restaurant on the corner that you’ve been planning to visit for months, but never had enough time for because of your constant rushing. The restaurant is filled with warm light and the scent of roasted garlic, basil, and freshly baked dough. You sit at a small table by the window, order your favorite pasta with Parmesan and a glass of Coke Zero, and slowly savor every sip and every bite with complete enjoyment. You aren’t in a hurry. You watch raindrops begin to drum against the glass and observe the people outside quickly opening their umbrellas and burying their faces inside the collars of their coats as they rush toward the tram. A deep warmth settles inside you at the knowledge that you don’t have to rush anywhere tonight, and that you’ve managed to do it all.

You have no idea that this small, seemingly spontaneous dinner and your decision to remain in the city center for another hour aren’t entirely your own. You don’t know that your path has been gently and invisibly guided ever since you struggled to find your keys that morning. If you had driven home immediately after the exam, you would have crossed the city’s main avenue at the exact moment a reckless truck driver ran a red light and crashed into a line of cars. Because of your well-deserved dinner, you have no idea that such a terrible accident ever happened. To you, it’s simply a beautiful, ordinary evening that unfolds exactly as you hoped it would.

When you finally leave the warm restaurant at around ten o’clock, the mild rain has transformed into a heavy, freezing downpour. Streams of cold water lash wildly against the dark pavement, and powerful gusts of wind immediately try to rip the umbrella from your hands the moment you attempt to open it. Laughing and muttering a quiet curse, you fold it again and run toward your older car parked along the edge of the dimly lit street. You quickly unlock it, slip into the cold interior, and slam the heavy door shut behind you with a loud sigh of relief. The sound of the rain immediately softens, transforming into a heavy, rhythmic drumming against the metal roof above your head. You shake the droplets from the shoulders of your coat, slide the key into the ignition, and turn it. The engine comes to life with a familiar, quiet rumble, and you immediately turn the heat and fans to the highest setting so the fogged windshield can begin to clear.

You have roughly a thirty-minute drive ahead of you before you reach your home in the suburbs. The route is divided into two parts. The first section follows a narrow, poorly lit road, while the second continues through wet but clear and well-lit city streets. The first section has no streetlights at all and cuts through several miles of dense forest. It’s your usual route. You drive it every day, so you feel as though you know every turn, every rise, and every old tree along the roadside by heart, and you’re convinced that even if someone covered your eyes, you could follow the road safely from memory alone.

As soon as the final streetlights disappear behind you and you enter the complete darkness of the forest, you turn on the radio to break the silence and monotony of the nighttime drive. After a brief crackle of static, your absolute favorite song begins to play through the speakers. It’s an energetic, melodic song that you’ve never been able to listen to quietly. With a broad smile, you twist the volume knob sharply to the right. The atmosphere inside your small car feels perfect in that moment, almost magical. Warm air flows from the vents, the success of your exam still glows inside your chest, your stomach is full of wonderful food, and a familiar voice from the radio makes you smile. You begin to sing out loud, your fingers tapping carelessly against the leather steering wheel to the beat of the music as you simply allow yourself to ride the wave of pure, almost childish happiness brought on by a day that has gone exactly right. You’re unbelievably happy, full of life and plans for tomorrow.

Perhaps that’s exactly why, blinded by the rush of endorphins and comfort, you briefly lose the level of caution that driving through a storm at night requires. The wet, black road ahead of you acts like a slick mirror, chaotically reflecting and breaking apart the sharp beams of your headlights. The trees along the road form an impenetrable dark wall, and the wind tears branches from them and throws the debris onto the pavement. The speedometer shows a slightly higher number than would be safe in such heavy rain, but you feel as though everything is firmly under your control, as though the world is at your feet and nothing bad could possibly happen.

Then you enter a long right-hand curve that slopes sharply downhill into the valley. At this exact point, a clogged drainage ditch filled with fallen leaves has allowed a vast, deep pool of standing water to spread across the asphalt. In the darkness and behind the dense sheets of rain, it’s impossible to see until barely a second before your front wheels hit it at full speed. The car instantly loses all contact with the road and begins to aquaplane.

Everything that follows unfolds in a terrifying, strangely slow motion, as though someone had pressed a button inside your mind. The steering wheel suddenly becomes light and completely loses all resistance in your hands, as though instead of controlling a machine weighing more than a ton, you’re steering a small boat across a violent and raging river. The car immediately slides into a wild, uncontrollable skid. Your singing stops in that very second, replaced by a sharp, icy rush of pure adrenaline and unbearable fear that surges through your entire body like an electric current, from your fingertips through your heart and all the way to the roots of your hair. Your heart slams painfully against your ribs. Instinctively, in blind panic, you make the worst possible mistake a driver can make in such a situation... you slam your foot down on the brake. The tires completely lose what little grip they have left on the slippery surface, and the car begins to spin uncontrollably around its own axis like a crazed carousel.

The world beyond the windows transforms into a chaotic blur of black darkness, spraying water, and falling rain. The beams of your headlights slice rapidly across the tops of ancient oak trees, then the wet ground, then the dark sky, and then the dense forest again... Desperately, you try to correct the skid, turning the steering wheel in both directions, but the laws of physics are a million times stronger than any ounce of human effort you possess. The car flies sideways off the road at full speed, crashes through a low wall of bushes that gives way with a sharp crack, and slams directly into the massive trunk of an old oak tree on the driver’s side with devastating force.

The terrible, deafening sound of tearing and deforming metal erupts around you, followed immediately by the sharp explosion of shattering side windows. The impact is so violent that it throws your body toward the door with enormous force, even though the seat belt holds you firmly in place. The white airbag bursts from the steering wheel with a loud crack, inflating and collapsing within seconds, filling the entire cabin with harsh, hot smoke and the chemical smell of burning material.

Then everything becomes completely silent. A heavy, grave-like silence disturbed only by the quiet, rhythmic hiss of steam escaping from the ruined radiator and the slow metallic clicking of the one surviving indicator light blinking uselessly into the emptiness of the forest.

You remain completely trapped inside the demolished metal box that used to be your car. The entire left side of the vehicle has been pushed nearly a foot into the cabin by the impact. Twisted sections of the door and dashboard have closed around your legs in an instant, pinning them beneath the steering wheel and leaving you completely unable to move. Every attempt to breathe or shift even slightly sends such a sharp and paralyzing wave of pain through your body that nausea rises in your throat. The pain is especially severe across your chest, where the seat belt has probably saved your life by preventing you from flying through the windshield, but has also likely broken or severely bruised several of your ribs. Something hot and sticky runs down your forehead. A thin stream of blood slowly fills your left eye, burning as it creates a warm trail along your cheek and down your neck, staining the collar of your shirt.

You’re completely paralyzed by shock and helplessness. The pure joy, pride, and absolute happiness you had felt less than a minute ago have been erased within seconds and no longer hold any value, not now. All that remains is raw fear, despair at the approaching end, and an overwhelming desire to live...

The rural road is completely deserted at this late hour and in such terrible weather. You know no one may drive past until early morning... During the impact, your phone flew from its holder on the dashboard and now lies somewhere deep on the floor beneath the passenger seat, buried beneath shards of glass and completely beyond your reach. You feel the cold night air and raindrops slipping through the shattered windows and crawling beneath your skin as your muscles begin to stiffen and tremble uncontrollably.

Your consciousness begins to fade beneath the combined effects of severe shock and blood loss. The edges of your vision slowly but steadily darken, leaving only a dull, muted sensation inside your head. You know that unless someone helps you immediately, you won’t survive until dawn in the cold and rain with injuries like these.

Is this really how it ends? A final, desperate thought flashes through your fading mind. Alone in the middle of a dark forest after everything? With so much still waiting for me? With so much of my life still ahead of me?

Through your half-closed and impossibly heavy eyelids, you see the thick, stinging smoke from the airbag begin to move strangely inside the destroyed cabin. It isn’t caused by the wind or a draft from outside. It’s as though the darkness, cold, and mist surrounding you are beginning to physically part, pushed aside by some enormous and invisible force that has just entered the scene of the tragedy.

Then the light appears. It isn’t the harsh, aggressive yellow glare of another car’s high beams, the kind of light that would blind you and force you to close your eyes. It’s a soft, pulsing, impossibly warm white light that flows through the entire ruined interior like liquid. The freezing cold that held you in its deadly embrace only a moment ago instantly retreats beneath the force of the glow and loses its power... From within the dazzling white mist, the silhouette of a man slowly emerges...

𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬

[3rd person POV]

The rules that have bound Jiyong’s heavenly existence and defined his very being for countless millennia are absolute, rigid, and merciless. He’s never allowed to reveal himself to Y/N in either his true form or a human one, nor is he ever allowed to let her hear the sound of his voice. He’s never allowed to touch her unless it’s a direct part of the heavenly plan approved for her final departure from this world... But as Jiyong stands beside the wreckage of Y/N’s car, he knows that no plan matters anymore, not now... He sees the rapidly weakening spark of her life and feels her soul beginning to drift slowly and irreversibly toward nothingness. He understands that no ordinary, indirect, or invisible intervention can free her from this twisted metal coffin... If he doesn’t use physical force now and violate every law of the universe, Y/N’s heart will stop long before human help can reach this place.

And so, without the slightest trace of hesitation, he shatters the laws he has protected for centuries. The deformed driver’s door, which human rescuers would have to spend an eternity cutting away from the mangled vehicle with hydraulic tools, tears open with a loud metallic screech as though it’s made of nothing more than thin paper.

𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬𐃬

[2nd Person POV]

You feel a touch... Suddenly, without warning, a palm rests against your cold face, which is wet with rain and blood. It’s so unbelievably warm that the sensation immediately dulls every sharp pain in your body. The unbearable pressure in your chest disappears, as though an invisible and perfectly secure shield has wrapped itself around you. Someone lifts you into his arms with great care, his strength unwavering and immense, yet filled with limitless tenderness. You feel him pull you from the crushed wreckage of the car with absolute respect and care, carrying you out into the safety of the night.

The only thing you’re capable of doing is weakly opening your right eye, the one not filled with blood from the wound on your forehead, and drawing in a deep breath. The face leaning over you inside the warm white glow is the most beautiful face you’ve ever seen in your life. The man has impossibly delicate yet striking features, flawless skin, and soft lips moving quickly in desperation. And his gaze, those deep eyes... Centuries of silent loneliness and overwhelming, paralyzing fear are reflected inside them. Fear for you, for your life...

“Y/N...please,” you hear his voice. It isn’t an ordinary human voice passing through your ears, but rather something you hear somewhere inside yourself, resonating directly in the deepest part of your frightened mind, low and melodic, trembling with pure, genuine desperation. “Look at me, stay with me, please. You can’t close your eyes yet. Do you hear me? Just a little longer, please... Don’t leave me here.”

You want to answer him and ask questions because dozens of them are screaming desperately through your mind. Who are you? How do you know my name? Where did you come from? But your lips can only tremble weakly and soundlessly in a futile attempt to speak. You feel him lower you onto the wet grass a short distance from the road, beneath the safe shadow of the tall forest. The grass beneath your body doesn’t feel cold at all because your entire body is still surrounded by the strange, comforting warmth of his presence. For a moment, one thought passes through your fading mind. Maybe this is what death looks like, maybe this is what the end of your existence feels like...

When he’s close to you, it feels as though the warm white light flowing from him surrounds both of you. In the distance, through the relentless roar of the rain and the rustling of the trees, you begin to hear the quiet hum of an approaching engine, gradually growing louder. Help is finally coming.

The man presses his warm palm against your cold forehead one last time, as though he’s trying to transfer every remaining piece of his strength and will to live into you through that single gesture.

“You’re safe now... Everything’s going to be okay,” his voice whispers inside your mind, filled with such deep, surrendered gratitude that it would break the heart of anyone capable of hearing it. “I have to go now, Y/N, but I’m here. I’m always here...”

The white light around you begins to fade rapidly, the warm touch disappears completely from your face, and the cold of the night returns for one brief second before the final echo of his trembling voice pulls you into the deep, merciful darkness of unconsciousness…

''Come onnnn y/n, your nose has been stuck in that book for a week now. Don't you want to see more than just paper and words??''

Your expressed annoyed exhale of a sigh was confirmation for Sarang that she won this argument. Sarang did have a point though, at this rate dust was building up along the binding edges of the book.

''Ok, ok. One hour that's all you get from me, then I really had to get back to studying''

You can tell right away that whatever Sarang had planned was not going to get you back to the dorm in an hour.

With a sly grin your friend agrees. ''Deal''

What you were in for was unclear, but it was already intolerable. Sarang dressed you as if you're a doll, clearly having more fun with this. Outfits from your closet was an immediate no-go, tossed to the side as though you were banned to wear them. Sarang thought you can do better than that so instead she dressed you in clothes from her closet.

''Ahhh see you look gorgeous''

An attempted suppressed snicker managed to escape your lips, to you this was not something you could pull off. The dress was colored red, the silk material gently hugged your waist, and a string stayed by your hips slightly riding up the dress to tease an exposed area of your thighs. It was an hot dress, you could admit that, but not for you.

''Um, Sarang? I don't think this dress is really...me.''

Sarang repeatedly tousled your hair, trying to work with your uptight pony tail. ''Ugh it's your damn hair. Watch.'' She loosens the hair tie, letting your hair fall to your shoulders.

At this moment You ultimately saw her vision. Your long hair rested on your shoulders and elegant breasts, the length of your neck now exposed. This was a new revelation, never in a million years could you imagine wearing something like this. ''Woah''

''See girl you look hot!''

You were lost in the reflection starring back at you. Sarang wanted to add one more touch before she was done, she stood behind you & placed a necklace agains't your neck waiting for approval. ''Hm??''

The pendant was stunning. The jewelry hung down and sat in between your breast, red roses spiraled along the thin metal. ''This must be some bar if I'm going there looking like this''

''Oh it's for sure high end, not some sleezy bar. You'll love it. It's time to let loose girl! have some fun, you know what that is right? and plus..when was the last time you has sex?''

''Ugh Sarang!''

She holds her hands up in defense. ''I'm just saying. Now let me get dressed and then we can partyyyyy''

Sarang wore a dress polar opposite to yours, an olive green colored one. The dress was promiscuous like yours, which seemed to be the theme tonight. She stated loudly and proudly her goal tonight was to get some dick, she doesn't beat around the bush. All you wanted was to get a nice buzz from some drinks & still have a clear head to study. That is if you made it back to the dorm at a decent time.

Typically you despised driving in the city because of the traffic, but neither of you felt safe riding in a cab dressed as you were. Thankfully the bar was not too far. Sarang remained focus on herself aiming to make a straight wing with eyeliner, the car ride made that difficult.

''Ah ssibal, y/n come on, I know you don't drive much but you're making me mess up''

Driving in heels took skill, a skill you did not have. You had forgotten to grab a spare pair of shoes to drive in on your way out, this was the consequence.

''Sorry ,sorry driving in heels is fucking hard.''

''Just don't kill us ok? hey, hey look there's the bar! you see the pink lights? thats it!''

The rain illuminated the neon bar lights making it hard to miss but finding a parking spot seemed unfeasible, this place was packed. Sarang kept guiding you in different directions for a spot but it led you nowhere. Ultimately there was an open spot a block down from the bar, it was better then nothing so you quickly parked.

''God I forgot how hard it is to find parking in this damn area''

Sarang still seemed determined to get her makeup right that she doesn't convey a response. You wore lighter makeup, mascara and lipstick would suffice.

''Ok, do I have lipstick on my teeth?'' She smiles widely at you.

There was no obvious stain of lipstick on her teeth that you saw. ''Nope''

Satisfied with your answer, Sarang closes the overhead car mirror. ''You ready?''

Ready to drink? yes. Ready to walk up hill ,in heels, in the rain to the bar? no. Conveniently Sarang had a jacket to cover the two of you as you both ran up hill, but that wasn't to much of a savior cause even once reaching the entrance, there was a long line.

''Oh come on seriously''

There was a covering along the building where the line began and ended so you both were able to take shelter there from the rain, but so far this night was not giving you the break you expected.

''Y/n relax. I told you I would get us in & I will. Wait here.'' She hands you her jacket that was previously being used as an umbrella and struts over to the bouncer.

From where you stood, you couldn't hear what she was saying but whatever it was worked. The bouncer visibly smiled & held the door open for Sarang, she quickly waves you over. You don't get a chance to ask what she had said to get in due to the exceptionally loud music playing, you couldn't hear a thing. Sarang guided you to what seemed like the back of the bar but it was hard to tell, the floor was crowded.

The lights started to dim and the music subsided to just a beat you can feel echoing through your body, you had no idea where Sarang was guiding you but it defiantly seemed like she knew her way around. This area of the bar seemed more private, it was still crowded but defiantly not as loud. The both of you end up at a booth large enough for four people. there were options for two seated tables but shr obviously didn't plan to drink alone tonight.

''Ok pick a drink, I want to get wasted as fast as possible. I recommend bokbunja-ju'' Sarang was already looking at the drink menu, but you were still taking in your surroundings.

The men were striking. Black slick back hair and luxury pieces hanging from their wrists. And the women, dressed identical to you and Sarang. So much for standing out.

''Hello? Y/n what are you getting? don't tell me you changed your mind about drinking.''

''Hm? oh no sorry I am, I am'' There was nothing on the menu you recognized or that sounding appealing, each beverage crowded the menu with names and brand's you never heard of before. You felt lost.

Sarang's polished finger nail pointed to a wine insisting you order that one, a sweet beverage sounded good at the moment and you can count the plums as a fruit for the day. ''Sure why not.''

''Great!''

There were no waiters in sight, you had no clue how to order your drinks. ''Um how do we-''

''We have to go up to the bar, there's no waiters here silly. Let's go!''

Before you knew it she was dragging you across the dance floor, men and women's sweaty bodies grazed you as you passed by. It was slightly suffocating. You now knew for sure you weren't going to dance.

''Annyeonghaseyo. Can I get a glass of bokbunja-ju', and my friend here will get- what are you getting again?''

''Maesilju''

''Right. And she'll get an glass of Maesilju''

While the bar tender starts on each of your drinks, Sarang was already scouting the wave of people. And you, were eyeing the bar tender making sure he doesn't do anything funky to the drinks. You were too paranoid for your own good.

''Eh y/n , you into our bar tender or something?''

''Hmm? oh no just making sure he doesn't ...mess with our drinks''

Sarang audibly sighed, not hiding her annoyance. ''Hey relax ok, they're not going to mess with our drinks..I promise. Scout out some hunks with me yeah?''

This was obviously not up for discussion so you entertain her idea. You've been out of the dating pool for a while now so you wouldn't even know what to do if you did find someone. These men were all exceptionally handsome but so far no one stood out to you.

It wasn't long before your drinks were served and luckily this time around the dance floor wasn't as crowded.

''So did anyone catch your eye?''

''Honestly no. Sarang i'm not here to get laid, I'm here to blow off some steam and drink''

''And you know another way you can blow off some steam? ...sex!''

''Sarang I don't know-''

''oh come on, when was the last time you had your cheeks clapped??''

Her wording completely shocked you, you couldn't help but to gasp. ''Sarang!''

'' I'm just kidding, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Here drink your little drink and once you got the alcohol googly eyes on I'm sure you'll find someone'' Sarang brings the drink to your lips, the sweet aroma immediately hitting your senses.

At this point you were already half way in it, might as well go all the way. Without a second thought you down the glass, the liquid grazed down your throat smoothly. This was a dangerous beverage.

''Wooo atta girl!''

One glass turned into two, then three. Before you knew it those googly eyes Sarang mentioned took over your vision. All the polished men from before now looked like an appropriate mate. Sarang on the other hand was not nearly as much of a lightweight as you, she had a slight buzz after having the equal amount of drinks as you. Nevertheless, her spirits seemed to have quickly lifted when she rushed back to the booth with her fourth drink in hand.

''Oh my god y/n you'll never believe what happened''

You were never an obnoxious drunk nor an obvious drunk, but would get intoxicated fast. Your talent was maintaining a complete conversation and the person being oblivious to the fact that you're under the influence. This frequently worked in your favor

''Hmm?''

''Ok so. I went to get another drink right and-''

''Another drink? isn't that your fourth one''

''Shut up. So I went to get another drink and there were some good looking fellas seated by the bar, they called me over & we did a little flirting here and there. Anyway I told them I have another beautiful lady with me so they invited us to the their table!!''

You nearly spit out your drink. ''What? oh I- I don't know Sarang, I'm kind of still scouting for a guy and I don't even know what they look like-''

''Oh girl trust me. Once you see them, you'll be salivating''

As unsure as you were, you knew Sarang wasn't going to drop it. So you follow her, through the sweaty wave of people ,across the dance floor. And that's when you spot him. His sexy stature , the chic jewelry on his ear's, the way his ringed fingers tapped against the table. You watch as each digit tapped the furniture, idea's of what those fingers could do to you swirled in your mind.

'''Gentleman. I'm back and brought my friend! This is Y/n.''

''Hey. I'm Taeyang. This is Seunghyun, Daesung and Jiyong.''

The one named Jiyong watched you with a sly slime. Your attention was still fully focused on his fingers, Sarang had to nudge you to focus.

''Oh- annyeonghaseyo''

''Cute. Come sit, what do you ladies drink?''

You were uncertain it was best to have another drink, yet Sarang answered for you anyways. The bar tender approached the table and drinks were ordered, it made you wonder what was so different about their table that they didn't need to go up to the bar themselves. It was obvious this was an upscale establishment, a large percent of business men or women drank here so they must be a somewhat of an importance.

The seat was chosen for you, which seemed to be the theme of this night. The man called Jiyong insisted you sit by him. Although you couldn't complain, he smelt a mixture of cigarettes and high end cologne. You were intimated and wet all at the same time. It has been an embarrassingly amount of time since you've had sex, and the attraction to this man was immediate.

''So what are you two doing here on this lovely night?'' The man introduced as Seunghuyun spoke next, It was obvious he was the eldest of the group. Seunghyun seemed less eager to score, and held a sense of nurturer over the guys.

''Well this one over here needed to be socialized, her nose has been in her book all week now''

''Ah you're a student?''

'' I am ''

''What are you studying''

''Pre-med''

The men hummed an approval. Personally you preferred not telling people you were studying to become a doctor, cause once that's out there is a certain sense of responsibility and matureness people expect from you. And sometimes you just wanted to let loose and be..you.

Daesung handed out the drinks once they arrived at the table, a little voice in the back of your mind was telling you not to drink it, that you hadn't seen the bar tender make them, anything could be hidden in this liquid. You stared down the drink in front of you, your mind convincing you you'll see some kind of powder at the bottom or bubbles that aren't supposed to be there. But nothing.

''You ok?''

You almost forgot there was an incredibly handsome man sitting next to you. You cant act a fool. This was the first you've heard his voice, and it was just as captivating as him.

''Hm? oh ye just.. thinking.''

''What about?''

Does he really care?

''Um I'm just-'' You didn't want speak of your debilitating anxiety to a stranger or embarrass Sarang. Although, your friend was already one step ahead of you. Her hand was caressing Taeyang's chest under his shirt as she spoke to him and if she got any closer she would be on his lap. Doesn't seem like she was paying any attention.

''Just the drink, I wish I could have seen the bartender make it in case- just in case he did something to it. I know it sounds stupid''

''Not at all. Here let me take a look''

Jiyong takes the glass to examine it, he swirls the liquid around before surprisingly taking a sip. ''Hmm nope just fine''

''Ah ok'' That came out more as a nervous chuckle than a response. God that was hot.

''Here, taste'' His finger dipped into your drink. With his pinky now coated in the liquor ,Jiyong grazes his finger along your bottom lip then pumps his pinky in and out of your mouth slowly at least twice. You were unsure what came over you but you allowed your tongue to swirl around his digit as he did that.

''Very nice. See now if something was put in your drink, we'll both be fucked up''

As if that moment wasn't the hottest thing ever, Jiyong moves along and turns his attention back to his friends leaving you a heaping , hot, wet mess. This was something you hadn't felt in a long time and you were unsure how to handle it, all you knew was that your body was ready for him to take you right here and now on this table, in front of everyone.

''Oh that's straight up bullshit, yeah the song itself Ji came up with on the spot but together we wrote the rest and figured it would be better as a song of mine. I didn't steal anything ''

Song? ..they're Idols?

Daesung was undeniably the maknae of the group, the men relentlessly teased him. This made you wonder how they would act towards you once they knew of your age ,with you being only 24.

''Ok, ok I'm just teasing you. You know you and your nose are the talent pushing this group through''

Obviously pleased with this compliment, Daesung traces the outline of his nose. ''Well, you know what they say about big noses.''

This evoked a fit of laughter from the guys, the joke was evidently commonly used between the group. Your curiosity was piqued, you wanted to ask more of their career but what stopped you was the thought that maybe they're just like you, wanting to be treated as normal and not have any expectation to act a certain way. You can respect that. But Sarang obviously couldn't

''So you guys are like singers?!'' She was no longer seconds away from being on Taeyang's lap, she was now officially placed on his thighs.

''More like a group, we're called Bigbang.'' He seemed amused by her cluelessness ''You've never heard of us?''

''Oh nahhh. I'm in pre-med also, I don't have time to be involved in the latest Idols. But what they say about you Oppa's are true, you're incredibly sexy''

Looks like Sarang found her target for the night, and he seemed equally interested. Your pick however hasn't made another move on you since the provocative finger bit he did. Perhaps he was waiting for you to do something but your flirting game was at a minus zero these days, you had no clue what to do.

The conversation went on around you, but your focus was on Jiyong. Jiyong...god you wanted that name to scream from your mouth. This was an opportunity you couldn't miss, this pull towards him was an unfamiliar feeling. No one has made you so wet before that you're having to clutch your legs together. And he was just as turned on as you, his boner was hidden under the table so you side eye it, his dick visibly twitches against the fabric of his pants.

The line that was about to be crossed couldn't be taking back, this was something completely out of character for you but the urge was to overbearing. Your body responded over the mind, your hand reached below the table and hovered over his bulge. Jiyong doesn't react, as if daring you to move forward, doubting you will. But you do. You place your hand down firmly on his dick, he jolted in response clearly surprised.

That was the response you were hoping for. The move was a clear tease, you rub him maybe two, three times before taking your hand away. His poker face was perfect, the group nor your friend noticed what was happening below this table. You hoped it stayed that way.

Jiyong spoke softly, barely audible. ''What are you trying to do to me?''

Talking was not your forte, your previous burst of boldness now dissipating. ''Oh um I-''

He leaned in closer now, his leg touching yours but his eyes remained forward. ''Can you handle me?''

Oh god

''Cause if so, I want you. I want you screaming my name while I fuck you'' His hand trickled down to your thighs, the coldness of his rings leaving goosebumps along your skin. The brim of your underwear was slowly being pulled down to allow his finger to explore.

Your breath was caught in your throat. Was he really going to do this here?

Jiyong coated his finger with your moisture before pulling out. ''You're already wet for me, good'' The napkin that was previously under his silverware was now being used to wipe your wetness from his finger.

The suddenness of his actions was obvious on your face, while he stayed completely stoic. You hated how easy you were to read.

''You ok y/n?'' Sarang slid her napkin over to you. ''You're sweating.''

Oh god really, sweating?? so much for being discreet. ''Oh yes. I think maybe I just drank too much is all'' The napkin wiped away your current sweat but it kept on coming.

''I have something that will help you'' Daesung leaned forward trying to keep this conversation as private as possible. ''It will take the edge off and give you a more satisfying buzz''

A small bag of colorful circled pills slid across the table. ''We were going to wait to do these later but, if you guys are joining us then-''

''Hell yeah we will'' Sarang grabs the baggie from the center of the table, without asking what the pill was she takes one out and holds it in her hand. ''I'm ready when you are.''

The baggie of drugs were passed from person to person till it reached you and Jiyong. He took a pill out for both of you but you were hesitant, you had no idea what these were & drugs was not something you ever involved yourself in.

Jiyong turns to face you, his chocolate eyes soften asking for his trust. ''With me?''

When you said nothing ,he tossed both pills into his mouth. The rest of the group follows. But him taking two worried you, regardless of what the drug was.

''Jiyong!''

His hand grasps your face pulling you towards him, before you can interject, your lips connect to his. You can feel his tongue dancing with yours before placing one of the pills in your mouth. Once he felt the extra pill leave his mouth, Jiyong pulled back. ''Now swallow''

You obeyed.

''Damn y/n looks like you found your player for the night. Here drink some water, you look like you're about to collapse''

This entire time your throat has been intensely dry and you had no idea until the cold liquid splashed down your throat. The bottle was almost completely finished. ''So what- what did I just take? it's- it's not going to make me trip right?''

You were surprised by their laughter. Clearly you were wrong.

Jiyong folds over the baggie and shows you the left over pills, they individually had their own color and design on them. Some smiley faces and others flowers or rainbows, This didn't help you any.

The attempt to play it cool failed right away, the worry was evident on your face. This was undeniably not everyone's first time. Sarang though, surprised you. She always had an extroverted party girl nature yes, but you never thought drugs was something she would do. But Sarang rolled with it and eventually you had to also, you weren't going to ask when it was going to hit or how long it was going to last, even though the unknown was eating away at you.

Instead you stayed hydrated and snacked on the bar nuts, hoping this concoction would help the same way it helps with alcohol. As time went on it was hard to tell if the pill was hitting the others, they were all acting intoxicated before the drug was even taken. But when you glance at Jiyong beside you, his chocolate eyes were as vibrant as ever, almost shinning.

And when he smiles at you his teeth glowed. ''You ok y/n?''

You wanted to touch him, you needed to touch him. Once again your body reacted before the mind, you reach up and caress his face. If everyone at this table wasn't as high, that might have looked strange. But to you, your hands were warping through the glow of his gorgeous teeth. ''You're so..handsome''

Jiyong's vision was just as yours. He would swear on everything that you were an angel, a halo floated above you illuminating your hair. ''You're an angel''

The mixture of the drug and previous alcohol made you feel almost invincible, as if any of your actions will not have consequences. So with that mindset you grasp Jiyongs hands and guide them under your dress so he can feel how wet you still are.

You whisper. ''I need you to fuck me''

Jiyong abruptly stood knocking over the jar of nuts & bottled of water. The attention of the group was elsewhere, Sarang tongue was down Taeyang's throat and the other two had left the table minutes ago, just no one noticed. Within a second you were being dragged across the dance floor once more, this time the flashing lights were appealing. The green, blue and pink lights distorted into rainbows spread across the whole establishment.

I Hope it doesn't rain.

The bathroom was not far, but as a result of the drugs it felt a mile away. Ji holds open the hefty door and inside the room was dimly lit & barely visible. Red string lights illuminated the room but was of no hope. You couldn't see a thing.

''This Is.. the bathroom?''

The sound of the door locking echoed through the almost empty room, there was one stall and a singular sink. The mirror is what caught your attention though, there were all sorts of writing on the glass. Some crude, some sexual, even nice ones. You couldn't read the words though, they all distorted and mixed into different shapes and colors.

An playful idea struck you. The red lipstick was still positioned in your bra, your emergency stash. You pull out the rouge stick and think of what to say. It didn't matter anyways, words were nothing but shapes to you now.

''Did you just take that out of your bra?''

''Mmh''

''That's hot.''

You bend over onto the sink to hold yourself steady, to you it seemed you were writing this beautiful quote onto the mirror but in reality it was complete gibberish.

''I hope some girlies come in here and see this so it will make their day.''

Jiyong comes up behind you pressing himself against your ass, his hands placing themselves on your hips. ''I've wanted you alone since the minute I saw you.'' His boner from before returned, sticking you.

''Oh yeah?'' You match his gaze in the mirror. Hunger was obvious in his eyes.

Jiyong reaches over and grips your wrist, shaking the lipstick from your hand. The makeup clanks agains't the metal of the sink as it falls. ''Let me fuck you''

Your legs spread for him, accepting him. This was a new territory to you, as confident as you may seem, this was something you would remember and be embarrassed about the very next day. Hook up culture was not your thing.

Jiyong pant's fall to his knees as he centers himself, your hand's were pinned by his again't the sink. The urgency, the need, the dominence was a major turn on. He moved you where he pleased, touched you where he pleased and he was about to take you as he pleased. You're dripping from his touch.

''I would hate to ruin this dress'' His hot breath scorched your neck. ''You look ravishing in it''

Streaks of red were forming on your hand from his grip, a reminder of tonight, a mark of a stranger in a bar.

''Take it off me, I want you inside me''

That was all the permission he needed, the stitches of the dress slightly tore making the outfit slip off your body in one swift motion. You can hear a hitch in his breathing once you were exposed to him.

''Holy shit you're sexy'' His hand urged your body down so that your legs spread more for him.

It was painful but the pleasure you were about to endure would be worth it.

''I don't have a condom''

''I don't care''

Without warning he enters but doesn't move, giving you time to adjust.

''Fuck Jiyong''

''God you feel so good. and You're still so wet.''

You feel yourself expanding for him, your body naturally letting him in. From a glance in the mirror you can see how his once slick black neat hair is now tousled. You wondered what his body looked like.

''Ji? ''

''Hmm?''

''Take off your shirt''

His chuckle was warm. While still inside you Jiyong removes his shirt revealing his tatted body. You eyed each one, from what you can see in the mirror, the wording moved and swirled.

''I'm going to move now.'' His thrusts started steady, your hands were free but his grip when to your air pulling your head back. ''Look at me''

You catch his gaze making his thrusts relentless. The intense pleasure was overwhelming making you claw at the sink.

''Fuck. Say my name'' The muscles in his arms flex with each movement.

''Jiyong! god go faster i'm close''

A suddens sense of emptiness overtakes you, Jiyong pulled out. ''I want to see your face"

He turns you to face him. You take this opportunity to look at his body fully, his tattoos still remain illegible but it's his dick you focus on. His member was as large as it felt inside you, it honestly surprised you that you were able to take it.

Jiyong was pleased you were checking him out. A smirk stayed placed upon his face. ''Like what you see?''

A simple nod was all you were able to respond.

Jiyong's finger assertively points to the sink behind you. ''Sit''

You obey.

He places himself in between your legs once more. Your lips were an inch away from touching his, Jiyong held this teasing pose before kissing you. This kiss was far from the ravishing one from before. This was gentle, longing , desperate. A new side of him that you would like to get to know more of.

The kiss left you breathless, his chocolate eyes remained on yours while entering. The same feeling of euphoria returned, your orgasm was seconds away and so was his.

''Fuck I'm close'' His dick twitches inside you as his speed picks up.

A sudden warmth expels inside your lower half, muffling your moan was of no use. The is the feeling you've been yearning for all night. ''Ahh Jiyong!''

One last squeal of his name is what he needs. You feel his cum enter you as his thrusts falters. ''Shi- t .

You both take a moment to catch your breaths, Jiyongs sweaty hair still hung from his forehead. You graze your hand throughout his locks. He was so handsome.

''You ok?''

You nod. The high of both the well waited for orgasm and the drug still lingered. Once Jiyong pulls out you're able to hop down from the sink, you can already feel the bruise forming on your ass cheeks.

You were the last to dress, the scribbled on mirror was fogged over by your body heat but you tried your best to catch a glance of the bruises.

''Did I hurt you?''

''Hmm? oh no, you did hurt my dress though'' The partially ripped dress laid pathetically on the floor.

''What? no I hardly touched it, look'' Jiyong attempts to prove his point but once he gets a closer look, theres a very obvious tear in the back. ''Shit''

''it's fine really I will-''

''No let me pay for the repair, please.''

As manipulative as it sounds, if he were to pay to get Sarang's dress stitched. you would see him again. You wanted to see him again.

''Um sure, ok''

''Great, let me give you my number.'' Neither of you had a pen, but your lipstick still remained in the sink. He uses that instead & writes his number on your arm. ''There, give me a call we'll meet up and get your dress fixed and ..maybe get lunch afterwards?''

Score

You smile. ''Yeah I'd like that''

''It's a date then. I am going to head back out there. The guys are probably looking for me, it was nice meeting you y/n''

Jiyong places a departing kiss upon your cheek before leaving. As your high died down, the reality of what you did hit you. It was a mixture of happiness and worry. But the feeling of his lips still lingered on your body and so happiness overweighed the worry. You could't wait to see him again.