Not the phone call. Not the police station. Not the funeral with no body, no ashes, no proof, just a framed school photo on a wooden stand and a line of white chrysanthemums wilting beneath fluorescent lights.

It was the morning before all of it, the stupid, normal, careless morning I kept returning to like a loose tooth I couldn’t stop worrying with my tongue. The kind of morning no one respects because nothing in it announces itself as the last. The sky had been pale and thin, the kind of washed-out blue that made the apartment buildings look flat and tired. My uniform collar had been crooked. I remembered that because Kyung-jun had noticed it before I did, had clicked his tongue like I was personally embarrassing him, and reached over to fix it with fingers that were too rough for something so small.

“You go out looking like this?” he’d said, like he was disgusted, like his ears weren’t turning red because we were standing close enough for me to smell the mint gum on his breath.

I’d swatted his hand away even though he was already done. “You always act like you’re my stylist.”

“Someone has to. You dress like you lost a fight with your closet.”

“You dress like you bully mirrors.” He had laughed then, sudden and loud, head tipping back a little, sharp teeth flashing under the weak morning light. Kyung-jun always laughed like he expected the world to flinch from it. Like joy, for him, was another kind of threat.

Then he had walked backward down the sidewalk, hands shoved into his pockets, his schoolbag hanging off one shoulder, too big and too broad and too careless for the narrow street. He had smirked at me when I told him to hurry up before he was late.

“You worried about me?”

“No. I’m worried your teachers might finally realize you’re a lost cause.”

“Liar,” he’d said, pointing at me like he’d caught me doing something embarrassing. “You’re obsessed with me.”

I’d rolled my eyes. He’d grinned wider. And then he’d turned around. That was it. That was the last clean thing. The last version of him I had before the world split open.

By lunchtime, he wasn’t answering my texts. By the end of school, his phone went straight to voicemail. I told myself he was being annoying. I told myself he was probably sleeping through class, probably fighting with someone, probably doing that thing where he saw messages and decided responding too fast made him look pathetic, as if I didn’t already know exactly how pathetic he could be when no one else was watching. I sent him a voice message calling him an asshole. I sent three question marks. I called once, twice, five times, then stared at the screen until the letters of his name blurred into a dark little wound.

The call from his grandmother came at 7:42 p.m.

I remembered the time because I spent months staring at it in my call history until the phone replaced it with a date, and then I stared at that too, as if time itself had done something wrong by moving.

When I answered, her voice was not a voice at first. It was breath. A broken, shallow sound, like she’d been running though I knew her knees hurt too much for running, like she was holding the phone with both hands and still couldn’t keep it steady.

“Halmeoni?” I said, already standing. She said my name once. Just once. And everything inside me went quiet.

There are certain kinds of fear the body understands before the mind does. My hand tightened around the phone until the edges dug into my palm. I could hear the television playing in the living room behind me, some variety show with canned laughter bursting too brightly through the walls. Outside, someone’s scooter whined past the building. Somewhere, a dog barked and barked, sharp and ordinary, furious at nothing.

“What happened?” I asked.

She tried to answer. I heard her inhale. I heard the wet, trembling catch of her mouth opening and closing around words that would not come out right.

“Kyung-jun,” she said. My heart kicked once, hard enough to hurt.

“What about him?”

“He’s gone.”

For one stupid second, I thought she meant he had left the house. I thought she meant he had stormed out after an argument, that he had been rude, that he had slammed a door, that he had done what he always did when something pressed too close to the soft places he kept hidden. I almost felt relief. I almost said, I’ll call him. I almost said, He’ll come back.

Then she said, “His whole class.”

My fingers slipped on the phone. “What?”

“They’re gone. All of them,” she whispered, and then the whisper broke, and suddenly she sounded very old. Older than she had that morning. Older than she had ever sounded pouring me tea, scolding Kyung-jun for eating too fast, pretending not to notice when he sat too close to me at the table and stole fish from my bowl. “The school called. The police are there. No one knows—no one knows where they are.”

I do not remember getting my shoes on.

I remember the floor tilting. I remember my bedroom doorframe under my hand. I remember saying his name, not to her, not really, but into the apartment, into the air, into whatever part of the world had swallowed him. I remember my mother asking what was wrong from the kitchen and the way I could not look at her because looking at another living person would make it real. I remember my throat closing so tightly that my first sob came out silent, my whole chest convulsing around nothing.

Then sound returned all at once.

“No,” I said, and it was ugly. Small. Childish. “No, no, no, no, no.”

His grandmother was crying. I had heard her cry once before, softly, when Kyung-jun got into a fight so bad he came home with his cheek split and blood dried black beneath his nose. She’d cried in the kitchen where he couldn’t see, wiping her eyes with the back of her wrist before turning around and yelling at him for being an idiot. That cry had been tired. Worried. Human.

This was different.

This was an animal sound trapped in an old woman’s body.

“I’m coming,” I said.

I don’t know how I got there so fast. I must have run the whole way because my lungs burned by the time I reached the building, and my legs felt strange under me, too light and too weak, like they belonged to someone who had already fallen. His grandmother opened the door before I knocked. Her hair was loose from its usual careful bun. One side of her cardigan had been buttoned wrong. She looked at me, and whatever strength she had been using to stay upright simply left her.

I caught her before she hit the floor.

For a moment we stood there in the doorway holding each other like two people caught in the same wave, her hands clutching the back of my hoodie, my face pressed into the powdery smell of her shoulder. She was crying into my hair. I was crying into her cardigan. Neither of us said his name, because his name had become a door we could not open without falling through.

Inside, the apartment looked exactly the same.

That was cruel too.

His shoes were still by the entrance, kicked sideways because he never put anything away properly unless his grandmother threatened to hit him with a slipper. His jacket hung on the back of the chair. A half-empty bottle of banana milk sat on the table, the straw still punched through the silver top. His grandmother had made stew. I could smell it on the stove, warm and rich and untouched, the scent filling the little apartment like an insult.

“What did they say?” I asked, wiping my face with my sleeve because my hands were shaking too badly to do it properly.

She told me what she knew. It was almost nothing.

The class had left school. The school said there had been a planned activity, but no one could confirm the location. The bus driver had been found unconscious at a rest stop with no memory after a certain point. Phones were dead. The GPS data stopped at the same time for everyone. No ransom. No accident reports. No bodies. No wreckage. Just an entire class folded out of the world like someone had taken scissors to the day and cut them cleanly from it.

His grandmother kept repeating, “He would have called me.”

And I kept saying, “I know.”

Because he would have.

He was careless with teachers and cruel with classmates and loud enough to make strangers turn around in restaurants, but he called his grandmother if he was going to be late. Not always politely. Sometimes it was just, “I’m not dead, stop nagging,” before hanging up. But he called.

He would have called me too.

Even if it was only to be annoying. Even if it was only to send a voice message saying, “Yah, why are you blowing up my phone like a psycho?” Even if he pretended not to like it. Even if he made me want to throw my phone at a wall.

He would have answered.

After a while, I went to his room.

His door creaked the same way it always did. His grandmother kept telling him to fix it, and he kept saying he would, and then he never did because Kyung-jun lived as if every tiny responsibility was a personal attack. The room smelled like him. Laundry detergent and cheap cologne and something warm beneath it, sweat and skin and the ghost of him pressed into the sheets. His desk was messy. Textbooks open and abandoned. A pen without its cap. A receipt from a convenience store crumpled beside his keyboard. His bed was unmade, blanket twisted from the morning, pillow dented where his head had been.

I stood there staring at it until the room blurred.

Then I crawled onto his bed and broke.

Not prettily. Not the kind of crying that belongs in dramas, with tears shining silently under soft lighting. I cried like my body was trying to reject the truth before it could settle inside me. My mouth opened around sounds I could not control. My fingers twisted in his blanket until the fabric burned my knuckles. I pressed my face into his pillow and breathed him in so hard it hurt, as if there might be enough left of him in the cotton to keep him real. As if he was hiding in the smell of his own bed. As if grief was a thing I could outsmart by refusing to lift my head.

At some point his grandmother came in. She did not tell me to stop. She sat on the edge of the mattress and touched my hair with trembling fingers.

“He loves you,” she whispered. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“He’s coming back,” I said into the pillow. The words were muffled. Wet. Desperate enough to humiliate me if anyone else had heard them. His grandmother’s hand stilled.

Then she said, very quietly, “Yes.” But she did not sound like she believed it.

Six months later, the police asked the families to hold funerals.

They did not use the word ask at first. They dressed it up in gentle voices and official phrases, grief counseling language and practical advice, all those careful, padded words adults use when they have run out of answers and want their failure to sound kind. They said the investigation would remain open. They said search efforts would continue if new evidence appeared. They said absence of bodies did not erase hope, but the human mind needed ritual, closure, a place to mourn.

Closure.

I hated that word so much I felt it in my teeth.

The funeral hall smelled like flowers and polished wood and too many people breathing in one room. Every missing student had a framed photograph. Every photo had a black ribbon in the corner. Kyung-jun’s picture was one from school, his tie slightly loose, his expression caught somewhere between bored and irritated. He looked like he might step out of the frame just to complain about how ugly the photo was.

I stood in front of it for a long time.

People moved around me in dark clothes. Mothers collapsed against fathers. Fathers stared at the floor with red eyes and clenched jaws. Someone wailed from the far end of the hall, a raw sound that rose and fell until it became part of the air. The classmates’ younger siblings stood confused and frightened at the edges, dressed in black too big for them, holding white flowers they didn’t know what to do with.

Kyung-jun’s grandmother held my hand so tightly my fingers went numb.

I did not cry at first.

I couldn’t.

I stared at his face until the edges of the photograph sharpened unnaturally, until I could see the tiny strand of hair falling near his eyebrow, the slight curl of his mouth like he was about to say something mean. I kept thinking, he would hate this. He would hate the flowers. He would hate the crying. He would hate people looking at him like he was something sad and finished. He would lean down to me and mutter, “Why does everyone look so ugly when they cry?” and I would hit his arm and he would grin because he got the reaction he wanted.

Someone guided me closer with the incense.

I looked at the portrait.

My knees gave out.

It happened so suddenly that I didn’t feel myself falling until hands caught me under the arms. The sound that came out of me did not feel like mine. It was too loud. Too torn open. It scraped through my throat and filled the funeral hall, and I hated myself for it because Kyung-jun would have teased me, would have called me dramatic, would have said, “Yah, you trying to make my funeral about you?”

And then I cried harder because for one second I heard his voice so clearly I turned my head, looking for him. There was no one there.

After that, time became something I survived rather than lived in.

I graduated.

People said that like it meant something. Like walking across a stage and receiving a paper could close the year behind me. Like the world had not kept moving with a hole in it. I packed my things for university in the city and found one of his hoodies at the back of my closet, black, oversized, the sleeves stretched because he always yanked them over his hands when he was bored. I sat on the floor holding it for almost an hour. It barely smelled like him anymore.

That was the day I understood why people begged ghosts to haunt them.

For a while, I went to his grandmother’s every weekend. Then every other weekend. Then when classes got heavy, once a month. She never blamed me. She said I had to live. She said Kyung-jun would be angry if I didn’t.

“He’d say something awful,” she told me once, pouring tea with hands that had grown thinner. I smiled because she was right.

He would have called me stupid for crying. Then he would have sat beside me and nudged my knee with his until I leaned into him. He never knew what to do with softness when anyone could see it. He acted like tenderness was something embarrassing that happened to other people. But in private, when his room was dim and the city lights cut pale lines across the walls, he would hook a finger through mine and pretend it was nothing. He would rest his chin on top of my head and complain that I was heavy even though he was the one pulling me closer.

A year passed.

Then more.

His case became one of those strange tragedies people talked about in low voices when documentaries needed content. The missing class. The impossible disappearance. The cold case with no bodies and no ransom and no answers. Sometimes people at university brought it up without knowing I had loved one of the boys in the photos. I learned to sit very still when they did. I learned how to hold a pen without breaking it. I learned how to say, “Yeah, I heard about that,” in a voice calm enough to pass as indifference.

But at night, I still checked.

News articles. Police updates. Forums filled with theories so cruel and stupid I wanted to reach through the screen and shake strangers by the throat. I checked unidentified patient lists once. I checked hospitals after disasters. I checked because hope had become ugly inside me, not bright, not pretty, but stubborn and half-starved, dragging itself across every empty day with bloody hands.

I did not believe he was alive in the way happy people believe things. I believed because the alternative was a room I could not enter.

The day I saw him again, it was raining.

Not hard. Just enough to turn the sidewalks dark and make the city smell like wet pavement and exhaust, the kind of cold spring rain that clung to hair and lashes. I had left class early because the lecture hall felt too tight, too full of other people’s bodies and pencil scratches and bright laptop screens. My head hurt. My coat was thin. I stopped outside a convenience store to buy an umbrella I didn’t need, mostly because I wanted something to hold.

The bell above the door chimed when I stepped out. Across the street, an old woman stood beneath the awning of a pharmacy.

For a moment, I noticed only her. Small frame. Gray cardigan. Plastic bag hooked over one wrist. Hair pulled back in a careful bun. My body recognized her before my mind did.

Kyung-jun’s grandmother.

Everything inside me went quiet in that same terrible way it had when she called.

She looked older. Smaller. The rain made the sidewalk shimmer between us, headlights dragging long ribbons of white and red across the wet road. People passed in both directions, umbrellas bobbing like dark flowers. A bus groaned at the curb. Someone laughed behind me, bright and careless.

Then someone stepped out of the pharmacy behind her.

Tall.

Too tall.

Black hair damp at the edges. Shoulders broad under a dark jacket. One hand holding the door, the other wrapped around the strap of a bag like he was still learning how to use his own fingers. His face was thinner than it used to be. Sharper. The lines of it cut deeper, cheekbones more pronounced, jaw tight in a way that looked less like arrogance now and more like something wired beneath the skin. There was a pale mark near his temple. Another at his throat, half-hidden by his collar. His mouth was the same.

That was what destroyed me.

Not the height. Not the shoulders. Not even the eyes.

His mouth.

The same mouth that had smirked at me under the weak morning sun. The same mouth that had called me a liar, a brat, a psycho, pretty when he thought I was asleep and couldn’t hear him. The same mouth I had kissed in stairwells and behind school buildings and once in his grandmother’s kitchen when he was supposed to be taking out the trash.

It opened slightly.

He saw me.

The city stopped making sense.

For a second, neither of us moved.

His grandmother turned, following his stare, and the plastic bag slipped from her hand. Oranges rolled across the wet pavement, bright and absurd, one bumping against the curb and stopping there like the world had chosen that tiny detail to prove it was still real.

Kyung-jun stared at me as if I was the ghost.

His eyes were darker than I remembered. Not in color. In depth. Like something had been carved behind them and left open. The boy I loved used to look at the world like he could beat it into giving him what he wanted. This boy looked at me like he had crawled through hell and found my face at the exit, and now he was afraid that if he blinked, the devil would laugh and take me back.

I stepped off the curb without looking. A car horn screamed. Someone grabbed my sleeve and cursed, but I tore free, because the only thing my body knew was his name. It broke out of me before I reached him, loud enough that people turned.

“Kyung-jun!”

His whole face collapsed.

His jaw trembled once, hard, like he hated it. His eyes went wet so fast it looked painful. He took one step toward me, then another, and then I was running, shoes splashing through shallow puddles, rain needling my face, breath tearing out of my lungs in broken pieces.

He caught me so hard it hurt.

His arms came around me like a lock. One beneath my shoulders, one around my waist, lifting me off the ground with a rough sound punched from his chest. I hit him and held on. My hands clawed at the back of his jacket, bunching the fabric in my fists, searching for proof under layers of cloth and rain and impossible time. He was solid. Warm. Shaking. His hair brushed my cheek. His breath struck the side of my neck, ragged and uneven, and then his face was buried there, pressed so hard against me it felt like he was trying to disappear into my skin.

“You’re here,” I sobbed. His fingers dug into my back. “You’re here, you’re here, you’re here—”

“Shut up,” he said, but the words broke in the middle.

I cried harder.

His body jerked around a breath that was almost a laugh and almost a sob, ugly and strangled and nothing like the boy who used to laugh like a weapon. He set me down but didn’t let me go. His hands came up to my face, rough palms cupping my cheeks, thumbs dragging beneath my eyes as if tears offended him personally. He looked at me with a kind of panic I had never seen on him before, not even in old fights, not even when blood ran from his nose and he grinned through it because losing scared him less than being seen as weak.

Now he looked terrified.

His eyes moved over my face too quickly. Forehead, mouth, jaw, hair, eyes again. Like he was counting pieces. Like he had to make sure time had not taken anything from him. His thumb caught on my lower lip. He swallowed.

“Yah,” he whispered. “Why are you crying so ugly?”

A laugh tore out of me, half-sob, half-hurt.

I hit his chest with both hands.

It should have been harder. I meant for it to be harder. But the second my palms struck him, I felt bone beneath jacket, the unfamiliar sharpness of him, and my hands curled instead. His chest rose under my fingers. He was real. He was breathing. He was looking at me with rain caught in his lashes and tears sliding down his face like he was furious at them for existing.

“You died,” I said, voice splitting. “You died. They had a funeral. I had to stand there and look at your picture. I had to—”

His mouth twisted.

“I didn’t die.”

“You were gone.”

“I know.”

“You were gone.”

“I know.”

His voice snapped on the second one, not at me, not really, but because something inside him could not stand the words either. His hands slid from my face to the back of my head, fingers tangling in my rain-damp hair with no gentleness left. Not hurting. Holding. Possessive in a way that would have made me shove him before, would have made me tell him I wasn’t something he owned.

But his hands were shaking. He pressed his forehead to mine. His breath came hot against my mouth. “I tried,” he said.

The rain kept falling.

“What?”

His eyes shut. For one second, his face changed completely. The street vanished from him. The pharmacy. His grandmother. Me. He was somewhere else. Somewhere bright and cruel and endless.

“I tried to come back,” he said, so quietly I almost missed it under the hiss of tires on wet asphalt. “Every time.”

Every time.

The words dropped between us like something with teeth.

I wanted to ask. I wanted to know. I wanted to peel the truth out of him with my bare hands and also never hear a single word of it. Because whatever had happened to him lived in his face now. It lived in the way he flinched when a car horn blared again. It lived in the way his hands tightened on me when someone brushed past too close. It lived in the hollow under his cheekbones, in the swollen exhaustion around his eyes, in the strange, feral stillness of his shoulders.

Kyung-jun had always been restless. Always moving, tapping, leaning, shoving, laughing, picking fights with the air if no one else volunteered.

Now he was too still.

Like if he moved wrong, something would start over.

His grandmother was crying behind him. Quietly at first, then not quietly at all. I looked over his shoulder and saw her with one hand over her mouth, eyes fixed on us, the abandoned oranges bright around her feet. She looked like someone watching the dead return and not trusting God enough to thank him yet.

Kyung-jun noticed me looking and turned his head slightly.

“Halmeoni,” he muttered, voice rough. “Stop crying. People are staring.” She made a choked sound that might have been a laugh if grief had not ruined it.

“You awful boy,” she sobbed. “You awful, awful boy.”

His mouth trembled.

Then his face hardened like he hated that too, hated being seen, hated that his grandmother’s love could touch him where everyone could watch. He pulled me against his side without asking, one arm clamping around my shoulders, his palm spread wide over my upper arm like he had no intention of letting the city test him. He bent, picked up the bag with his free hand, then snapped at a man who had stopped too obviously nearby.

“What are you looking at?” The man looked away immediately. I almost cried again because that was him. That was my Kyung-jun, cracked down the middle and still somehow capable of being an asshole to strangers.

His grandmother wiped her face with a trembling hand. “We should go home.”

Kyung-jun did not answer right away.

His arm tightened around me.

I felt it before he said anything. The conflict running through him, sharp and silent. Grandmother. Me. Home. Hospital appointments, police questions, recovery, missing years, a life that had apparently returned without asking him if he knew how to live in it. His jaw worked once. His eyes flicked down to me.

I knew that look.

Not exactly. Not anymore. But enough.

He was asking without asking, because asking made him vulnerable and Kyung-jun would rather swallow glass than sound like he needed anything.

“You can come with me,” I said. His grandmother looked at me. Then at him.

Kyung-jun’s face closed too fast. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You never do.” His eyes flashed, and for one second, beneath the trauma, beneath the rain, beneath the impossible years between us, the old irritation sparked alive.

“Still annoying,” he said.

My throat tightened around something almost like a smile.

“Still ugly when you lie.”

His gaze dropped to my mouth.

The air changed.

It was not soft. Nothing about him was soft right then except the way his hand moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck, fingers sliding under my hair, warm against rain-chilled skin. His eyes held there, on my mouth, like he had dreamed of it so often the real thing had become dangerous. Like touching me had already ruined him and kissing me might finish it.

“Kyung-jun, go with Y/N, call me when you want to come home” his grandmother said gently.

He blinked, jaw flexing but nodding. Then he looked back at me.

“You still live in the city?”

I nodded.

“Alone?”

I nodded again.

His expression sharpened immediately. “Of course you do. Stupid.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“You’ve been missing for two years and you’re already insulting my life choices?”

“You made bad ones while I was gone. Not my fault.”

I stared at him through tears. His mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not quite. More like the ghost of one pressing against a bruise. Then his face crumpled again, so quickly that I barely saw it before he pulled me in and kissed me.

The first touch was not careful. It was desperate enough to frighten both of us.

His mouth found mine with a sound that disappeared into my breath, and for a second there was no street, no rain, no grandmother pretending not to cry while watching us like her heart was being torn apart and stitched back together in the same moment. There was only him. His hand at the back of my neck. His other arm locked around my waist. His mouth hot and trembling against mine, tasting like rain and salt and something ruined. He kissed like someone proving a point to the dead. Like he had argued with the universe for two years and finally gotten his hands on the evidence.

I cried into it.

I couldn’t help it. Tears slipped between our mouths, wetting his upper lip, and he made a low, broken sound that would have embarrassed him if he had been whole enough to care. He pulled back just enough to breathe, forehead still pressed to mine.

“Don’t,” he rasped. I shook my head, unable to stop. “Don’t cry like that,” he said, but his own voice shook so badly the command fell apart. His thumb dragged over my cheek again, rougher now, almost angry. “You think I can handle that right now?”

A laugh scraped out of me. “Sorry my crying is inconvenient for you.”

“Yeah. It is.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

His eyes closed. For the first time, he smiled. Small. Real. Devastating.

“I missed you too.”

My apartment looked different with him inside it.

That was the first thing I noticed when I unlocked the door hours later, after his grandmother made us come back so she could feed him first, after she pressed food on me too with shaking hands and watched Kyung-jun eat like every bite was proof, after police called twice and he ignored the second call until his grandmother slapped his arm and told him not to be rude to detectives. After he packed nothing because he had nothing from before except the clothes he’d come back in and a phone the police had given him that he kept staring at like it belonged to someone else.

He stepped into my place and made it smaller.

He had always done that. Taken up too much space. Filled rooms with shoulders and noise and bad attitude. But now there was a strange caution to him, a pause at the entrance as his eyes moved over everything: the narrow hallway, the shoe rack, the kitchen light I had left on, the stack of textbooks on the table, the blanket folded over the couch. His gaze snagged on ordinary objects like he expected them to change while he wasn’t looking.

I closed the door behind us. The click made him flinch. Only slightly but I saw it.

His head turned fast, eyes cutting to the lock, shoulders rising before he forced them down. The movement was so controlled it hurt worse than if he had jumped. Kyung-jun, who used to slam doors just to make people look at him. Kyung-jun, who used to grin when someone startled. Kyung-jun, who used to fill silence before silence could make him think.

I pretended not to notice.

“You can shower,” I said quietly. “I have towels. Clothes might be—”

“I’m not showering.”

I looked at him. His mouth set. I understood too slowly, then all at once.

He did not want a closed bathroom door between us. He did not want water loud enough to hide sounds. He did not want to be alone in a room with steam on the mirror and no way to see what was coming.

“Okay,” I said.

His eyes narrowed. “Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you feel bad for me.” I held his stare for a second.

Then I kicked off my shoes and walked past him. “Fine. Stay dirty.”

His brows twitched.

There. A spark.

“Yah.”

“What?”

“You got mean.”

I put my keys on the counter. “You were gone for two years. I had to develop a personality.”

“You already had one. It was bad.”

I turned around.

He was still by the door, hands hanging at his sides, looking too large and too lost for the little entranceway. The overhead light carved shadows beneath his cheekbones. His hair had dried messily, falling over his forehead in dark pieces. Without rain between us, without the shock of the street, the changes in him were harder to ignore. He was thinner than before, stripped down to sharper edges. His wrists looked too bony where his sleeves rode up. There were marks near the inside of one elbow. Medical. Old bruising faded yellow-green under the skin. His lips were dry from biting.

My throat tightened. He saw me looking. Of course he did.

“What?” he snapped.

“Nothing.”

“Liar.” The word landed between us differently than it had that last morning.

You’re worried about me?

No.

Liar.

I looked away first because if I didn’t, I would cry again, and he had already told me he couldn’t handle it. I went to the kitchen and filled a glass of water. My hands felt strange around the cup, clumsy and too careful. Behind me, I heard him move at last. Slow footsteps. Then nothing. When I turned back, he was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the wall near my desk.

At the photo. I had forgotten it was there.

It was small, tucked into the corner of the mirror, half-hidden behind a postcard and an old university schedule. A picture from before. One of the only ones I had printed. Kyung-jun in his school uniform, scowling at the camera because I’d taken it without warning, one hand reaching toward the lens like he was about to snatch my phone. Behind the fake annoyance, there was a smile beginning in his eyes.

He stared at it for so long the glass nearly slipped from my hand.

“That’s ugly,” he said. His voice was flat. I walked over and held the water out. He didn’t take it.

“Take the water.”

“I said it’s ugly.”

“I heard you.”

“Why’d you keep it?” The question was too sharp. Too defensive. He still wasn’t looking at me. I lowered the glass slightly.

Because it was the only thing I had that looked alive, I thought. Because after the funeral, every official photo made you look dead. Because sometimes I woke up and couldn’t remember your voice right away, but I could look at that picture and remember the exact insult you threw at me after I took it. Because forgetting one tiny thing about you felt like killing you myself.

I said none of that.

“You owed me money,” I said instead. His head turned. I shrugged. “I needed evidence.” For half a second, he only stared. Then the sound that came out of him was almost a laugh.

It broke before it could become one. His mouth twisted, his eyes shining too bright again, and he turned away like I had done something unfair by making him feel a normal thing. His hand came up, rubbing roughly over his face.

“Fuck,” he muttered. I stepped closer. He tensed.

I stopped.

The space between us suddenly felt alive. Full of everything we had not been able to say across two years and whatever nightmare had held him. Full of every unanswered call, every birthday he missed, every night I fell asleep with his hoodie twisted in my hands. Full of every time he must have woken inside that game and realized it had started again. Full of the fact that I had mourned him in black while he was somewhere dying in ways I could not imagine.

“What happened?” I asked.

He went very still.

The apartment changed with the question.

The refrigerator hummed. Rain ticked against the window. Somewhere upstairs, a chair scraped across the floor. Ordinary sounds, thin and harmless, gathering around us as if they too were waiting.

Kyung-jun’s hand dropped from his face.

For a while, he said nothing.

Then he walked past me to the couch and sat down heavily, elbows on his knees, head bowed. The posture did not suit him. Kyung-jun sprawled. Kyung-jun took space. Kyung-jun leaned back like the world had been built for his comfort. Seeing him folded forward like that made something cold slide beneath my ribs.

I sat beside him, close enough that our knees touched. He looked at the contact. Then at me. His knee pressed harder into mine.

“We didn’t go to some class trip” he said.

“I know.” His eyes flicked up. “The police said the trip records were fake,” I said. “Or planted. Or something. They never explained it clearly.”

He scoffed. The sound was automatic, bitter. “Of course they didn’t.”

“What happened?” His hands clasped between his knees. His fingers tightened until the knuckles went pale.

“You won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

His mouth curved, but there was no humor in it. “Always so confident.”

“Kyung-jun.” The way I said his name made him look at me, like the sound of his name in my mouth pulled something in him loose.

His gaze dropped again, this time to my hands. They were folded in my lap, gripping each other too tightly. After a second, he reached over and pried them apart with rough fingers. Not gentle, exactly. Kyung-jun had never been good at gentle in a way that looked clean from the outside. He hooked his hand around mine and held on. Hard.

“There was a game,” he said. The room seemed to tilt. “Some fucking game we used to play in high school. Not like—” He stopped, jaw flexing, and let out a humorless little breath. “Not some phone game. Not a joke. We woke up in a youth center. It looked real. Felt real. People died.”

His thumb dug into the back of my hand.

“They died, there was a winning team, and then it started again.”

I did not move. I barely breathed. He kept staring at our hands as if my fingers were the only reason the room was still here.

“At first we thought… I don’t know what the fuck we thought. We didn't remember we had played it over and over until they pulled us out. Bodies started dropping and everyone started acting like animals, and every time we got close to figuring something out, it reset.” His voice thickened. He swallowed hard. “You die in there, you feel it.”

My stomach turned.

“You died?” His silence answered before he did. He laughed once. It was horrible.

“Many times.”

The air left me. He looked at me then, eyes sharp with something almost angry, like my fear hurt him and he wanted to punish the room for making me show it.

“Don’t look like that.”

“How am I supposed to look?”

“Not like that.”

“Kyung-jun—”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” he snapped. The words cracked through the apartment. I flinched. He saw. His face changed. The anger vanished so quickly it frightened me, leaving something raw and young underneath. He let go of my hand as if he had burned me.

“Shit,” he muttered. “I didn’t—”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.” His jaw clenched. He stared at the floor. “Don’t say that when it’s not.”

I swallowed.

That sounded like him too. Mean little mouth. Brutal honesty when softness would have been easier. But beneath it, something had shifted. Before, he snapped because he wanted control. Now he snapped because control was all he had left, and even that kept slipping.

I reached for him slowly this time, giving him space to pull away. He watched my hand like it was dangerous. When my fingers touched his wrist, his eyes shut. Just once. Briefly. But the breath that left him shook.

“I thought you were dead,” I whispered. His hand turned under mine, fast, catching my fingers before I could move away.

“I thought you forgot me.” The words were so quiet I almost didn’t understand them. Something inside me tore open all over again.

He looked furious at himself the second they were out, eyes flashing, mouth hardening like he wanted to shove the sentence back down his own throat. But it was too late. It sat between us. Small and naked and bleeding.

“You thought what?”

He stood abruptly.

I startled, looking up as he paced two steps away, then back, then stopped because there wasn’t enough room in my apartment for whatever was moving through him. His hands went to his hair, pushing it back from his face.

“It was two years,” he said. “I don’t know. In there, time was fucked. Sometimes it felt like days. Sometimes forever. Every time it started again, I remembered less at first. Faces got blurry. Voices got—” He cut himself off. His throat worked. “I kept trying to remember yours.”

My eyes burned.

He turned on me suddenly, pointing like he was accusing me of something.

“Your laugh was annoying as hell. That helped.”

A broken sound slipped out of me.

“And your face,” he continued, voice roughening around every word, “because you always looked at me like you wanted to hit me.”

“I usually did.”

“Yeah. I know.” His mouth twitched, then trembled. “I kept thinking, if I forgot that, I’d really die.”

I stood. He watched me, breathing harder now, shoulders rising and falling beneath his jacket. I crossed the little space between us. For once, he did not make a joke. For once, he did not move first.

I reached up and touched his face.

His skin was warm. Real. Slightly rough beneath my palm. A tiny muscle jumped in his jaw. His eyes stayed on mine with a desperation so intense it felt less like looking and more like being held down by it. The old Kyung-jun would have smirked. He would have said something filthy or stupid or mean to cut the tension before it could cut him.

This one only stood there and let me touch him like he needed it more than pride.

“I didn’t forget you,” I said. His lips parted. “I tried,” I whispered, and that hurt him; I saw it land. “Not because I wanted to. Because everyone kept telling me I had to live. They said I had to move on. They said I was young, that you’d want me to be happy.”

His eyes darkened.

“I would not say that.”

I let out a watery laugh. “No. You’d say something awful.”

“I’d say if you got some ugly boyfriend while I was gone, I’d haunt you.”

“There were no boyfriends.” His whole face changed. The relief was so fast, so violent, that he looked away from me as if I had caught him doing something obscene.

I should have teased him.

Before, I would have. I would have laughed and said, What, were you worried? I would have poked at him until he snapped, because that was how we loved each other then, with teeth and stupid little wounds neither of us meant to make deep.

But now I only watched the tendons in his neck shift as he swallowed.

“No one,” I said. His gaze came back slowly. “I couldn’t,” I admitted. “Not when I still—”

The word love hovered at the back of my throat, too bright, too enormous for the small room. Kyung-jun stepped into me before I could finish.

His arms went around me with a force that stole my breath. He bent over me, face pressing into my hair, one hand splayed between my shoulder blades, the other locked low at my waist. He held me like the world had already taken me once and he was not stupid enough to trust it again. His body was shaking. I felt it everywhere we touched. A tremor running beneath muscle and bone, down his arms, through his hands, into me.

“I’m not leaving,” he said. It came out harsh. Almost like a threat. My cheek pressed against his chest. His heart beat too fast under my ear.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” His hand tightened. “You don’t. You go to class, I’m going with you. You go buy water, I’m going. You go to the bathroom—”

I pulled back enough to look up at him. “Absolutely not.”

His eyes were wet again, but his mouth curled. “Why? Shy now?”

“You’re insane.”

“Yeah,” he said, and the smile vanished. “Probably.”

The honesty hit harder than any joke.

His gaze moved over my face, slower now, not counting pieces this time but memorizing them. There was hunger in it, yes, but not simple hunger. Not the easy, cocky kind he used to wear when he wanted me to blush. This was deeper. Worse. A need scraped raw by terror. He looked at my mouth like he had imagined it in the dark. Like he had survived on memory until memory wasn’t enough, and now that I was here, breathing in front of him, his body didn’t know how to be anything but starving.

“Kyung-jun,” I whispered.

“What.”

“You need sleep.”

He gave me a look. “Wow. Romantic.”

“You look like you’re about to collapse.”

“I’m fine.” I stared at him. He stared back. Then his jaw tightened. “I said I’m fine.”

The room filled with all the things that sentence could not hide. The dark crescents beneath his eyes. The way he stood too close to me and still looked afraid the distance might grow. The way he kept glancing at the door even though he had checked the lock twice. The way his fingers flexed whenever there was a sound in the hallway.

“You don’t have to be,” I said.

His expression went cold so fast it was almost impressive.

“Don’t start.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m saying you can sleep here.”

“Obviously.”

“On the couch.”

His face offended itself.

“The couch?”

“Yes.”

He looked at the couch, then back at me as if I had personally betrayed him. “After two years, you’re putting me on the couch?”

A laugh burst out of me before I could stop it. His eyes caught on it. The anger in his face fell fast. For a second, he just stared, and the room softened around the edges.

“What?” I asked, wiping under my eye. His mouth pressed into a line.

“Nothing.”

“Liar.” He looked away, but not fast enough. Color had risen faintly along his cheekbones. I touched his sleeve. “What?”

“Your laugh,” he muttered. My chest hurt. He still wouldn’t look at me. “Still annoying,” he added, weaker, voice shaking slightly.

I stepped closer and wrapped my arms around his middle. He let me. More than let me. His body folded around mine almost instantly, chin dropping to the top of my head, hands finding my back again. He exhaled like he had been holding his breath since the street, since the game, since the first time he woke up and realized dying had not freed him.

“We can share the bed,” I said into his shirt. “But only sleeping.”

“Who said I was thinking anything else?” I tilted my head back to look at him. His brows lifted, almost like before. Almost. “What?” he said. “You think I’m some kind of pervert?”

“I think you’re you.”

“Exactly. So, yes.” I shoved his chest. He caught my wrist and pulled it back around him.

“No,” he said. The word was quiet. My breath caught. He looked down at where my hand rested against him, fingers curled in his shirt. “Don’t move away yet.”

There was no joke after it. No smirk. No insult to cover the soft underbelly of the request. So I didn’t move.

I stood there in the middle of my apartment, wrapped around the boy I had buried without a body, feeling his heart slam beneath my palm as if it was trying to make up for every beat I had missed. Outside, the rain kept threading silver down the window. The city moved on unaware, cars passing, people laughing under umbrellas, neon signs bleeding color into puddles. Somewhere in that same city, police reports were being written. Families were being called. A whole class was being returned to a world that had already mourned them and moved their desks and packed away their uniforms.

But inside my apartment, time narrowed to the shape of his hands.

After a while, he let me lead him to the bedroom. He hesitated in the doorway. I felt it through his hand before I saw it. The slight resistance. The way his fingers locked around mine.

“It’s just my room,” I said.

His eyes swept over the bed, the window, the closet, the lamp, every shadowed corner. “I know.”

“You can leave the door open.”

His mouth tightened. “I’m not scared.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I’m not.”

“I know.”

He glared at me, but it was ruined by exhaustion. “Stop agreeing with me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m some injured dog you found in an alley.” My eyes moved over him before I could stop them. The bruises. The scars. The hollowed exhaustion. The boy still standing because falling would mean trusting the floor. His gaze sharpened.

“Don’t,” he warned.

I looked back at his face. “Okay.”

He waited, suspicious. I squeezed his hand once and turned down the blanket. He watched like the bed might bite. Then, very suddenly, he said, “I want to marry you.”

My hands froze on the blanket. The silence afterward was enormous. I turned around slowly.

Kyung-jun stood in the doorway with his shoulders tense and his chin lifted, defensive already, like he had thrown a punch and was waiting for one back. His face was serious in a way that made my stomach drop. No teasing curve to his mouth. No theatrical arrogance. Just those dark, damaged eyes fixed on me with too much certainty for the soft yellow light of my bedroom.

“What?” I whispered.

“I said I want to marry you.” My heart lurched so hard it was almost pain.

“You just came back from being kidnapped and tortured.”

“Yeah. I noticed.”

“Kyung-jun.”

“What?” His voice rose, sharp with embarrassment now, with fear disguised badly as irritation. “You want me to wait? For what? So some counselor can tell me my feelings are a trauma response? So people can say I’m unstable? I already know I’m fucked up. Congratulations. Still want to marry you.”

I stared at him.

He rubbed a hand over his mouth, angry at himself, at me, at the room, at whatever had made the words come out before he could dress them in cruelty.

“I’m not saying tomorrow,” he muttered.

“That’s surprisingly reasonable.”

His eyes flashed. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

I looked down at the floor, my vision blurring, my heart thumping so loud I'm surprised he hasn't complained about it yet. “I’m just...trying not to cry.” That shut him up. His face shifted again, the anger breaking at the edges.

I stepped toward him carefully. He did not step back. When I reached him, I touched the front of his jacket, smoothing nothing, fixing nothing, just laying my hands there because I could. Because once, for two years, I had only been able to touch cotton that no longer smelled like him.

“You can want that,” I said. His throat moved. “Cause I want it too. But you also need to heal.” His expression hardened. I held his jacket tighter before he could pull away. “And I’m not saying that because I don’t want you. I’m saying it because I do. I want you alive. Actually alive. Not just back.”

The words hit him somewhere deep. His eyes lowered. For a long moment, he said nothing. Then, in a voice so low I felt it more than heard it, he said, “I don’t know how.” I closed my eyes. There it was.

The thing under everything. Under the jokes. Under the snapping. Under the possessive hands and the marriage demand and the way he kept looking at me like I was the last piece of shore after a shipwreck.

I stepped into him and wrapped my arms around his neck. He bent immediately, face dropping to my shoulder.

“We’ll figure it out,” I whispered.

His laugh was bitter against my skin. “That sounds stupid.”

“Yeah.”

“Like something people say when they don’t know shit.”

“Probably.” His arms tightened around me.

“Say it again.” My eyes burned.

“We’ll figure it out.”

His breath shook. Again, I thought he might say. Again, like a boy asking for one more story before sleep. But he only held me, silent and trembling, until the worst of it passed through him.

When we finally lay down, he didn’t take off his jacket at first. He lay on top of the blanket, stiff as a corpse, eyes open and fixed on the ceiling. I lay beside him in the dim light, listening to the rain soften against the glass. The space between us was only a few inches, but it felt cruel.

“You can come closer,” I said.

“I know.”

He didn’t move.

I turned on my side. His profile was sharp in the dark, lashes lowered but not closed, mouth tense. He looked like he was bracing for something. A vote. A scream. A body hitting the floor. The start of another loop.

I reached out and touched his hand. His fingers closed around mine so fast it hurt.

“Sorry,” he muttered immediately, loosening his grip by force.

“It’s okay.”

He turned his head toward me. “Stop saying that.”

“Then stop apologizing.”

“I didn’t apologize.”

“You literally just did.”

“No, I didn’t.” I smiled despite everything. His gaze dropped to it. The room stilled again.

Slowly, as if sudden movement might shatter whatever fragile thing had survived between us, he turned onto his side. His hand came up, hovering near my face. Waiting. That, more than anything, made my chest ache. Kyung-jun had never hovered. He took, grabbed, pulled, crowded. He tested the world with his hands and dared it to complain.

Now he waited. I leaned into his palm. His breath caught.

There was something unbearable about being touched by him after so long. Not because it was new, but because it was familiar in a way my body had almost convinced itself it invented. The rough pad of his thumb beneath my cheekbone. The warmth of his palm. The faint tremor he could not quite hide. His eyes kept moving over me, over and over, like he was afraid sleep would steal the details.

“I used to think about this,” he said.

My throat tightened. “About my bed?”

“Don’t ruin it.” I almost laughed. He brushed his thumb across my cheek. “About your face. Your voice. Stupid things.” His mouth twisted. “You yelling at me. You pretending you weren’t jealous. You getting mad when I bought you coffee because I said your taste was childish.”

“You said only babies drink sweet coffee.”

“You did drink sweet coffee.”

“I still do.”

He stared at me.

Then, very softly, “Good.”

The word broke me more than it should have.

Because it meant I had stayed real in some tiny way. Because it meant the world had not taken every version of us. Because sweet coffee, crooked collars, ugly crying, stupid insults — they had survived too, buried under horror, waiting for him to come back and be cruel about them.

His hand slid to the back of my neck.

“Come here,” he said. It was not really an order. I moved closer anyway.

He pulled me into him, under the blanket this time, his body curling around mine with desperate heat. He was bigger than I remembered. Or maybe I had made him smaller in grief so I could survive the size of missing him. His chest pressed against my back, knees behind mine, arm locked across my waist. His breath stirred the hair near my ear. The whole bed seemed to hold its breath with us.

For a while, neither of us spoke.

Then, barely audible, he said, “I thought I’d never do this again.” My fingers covered his hand on my stomach. He turned his palm upward and tangled our fingers together.

“I’m here,” I whispered. His forehead pressed to the back of my neck.

“Yeah,” he said. A minute passed. Then another. His breathing did not slow. I knew he was afraid to sleep.

Maybe he knew I knew, because his hand tightened once, warning me not to say it. So I didn’t. I lay there in the dark with his body wrapped around mine and let silence do what words would ruin. The city lights shone through the curtains in thin silver lines. Rainwater tracked down the window like veins. His heart beat against my back, too fast, too alive, and every time it stumbled into a harder rhythm, I squeezed his hand until it steadied.

Sometime, when my eyes began to shut slowly, his mouth brushed the nape of my neck. Not a kiss, not quite. A touch. A check. A prayer he would deny making.

“You better not disappear,” he murmured, voice thick with exhaustion. My eyes filled again. I turned carefully in his arms.

He resisted for half a second, then let me face him. His eyes were half-lidded, dark and ruined and still so painfully him that I could barely stand it. I touched his cheek. He leaned into it before he could stop himself.

“You disappeared first,” I whispered.

His mouth twitched faintly.

“Yeah,” he said. “My bad.” A laugh broke out of me, quiet and wet. His eyes softened. Then he kissed me again. This one was slower.

Not less desperate. Never that. The desperation was still there, threaded through his fingers in my hair, in the way his body shifted closer, in the way he breathed against my mouth like every inhale had to pass through me first. But there was something else under it now. Recognition. Grief. The ache of two people touching across the grave everyone else had already built.

He kissed me like he was tired of dying. Like he was angry he had lost time. Like he loved me so much it had nowhere clean to go, so it came out in trembling hands and bitten-back sounds and his forehead pressed to mine afterward, his eyes shut tight.

By four in the morning, the room has stopped pretending to be night and has not yet become morning.

It is that strange, thin hour where the dark turns gray at the edges, where everything feels suspended and unclaimed, where the city outside my window has gone quiet enough that I can hear the building breathing around us. Pipes knock faintly behind the walls. Rainwater gathers at the window ledge and drops in uneven little taps against the metal frame. Somewhere far below, a car passes through the wet street with a soft hiss, tires dragging through puddles, then fades until there is nothing left but the low electric hum of the refrigerator and Kyung-jun’s breathing beside me.

Not sleeping. He has been lying beside me for hours with his eyes open. I know because I have been awake for all of it.

At first, I pretend not to notice. I lie still beneath the blanket with my hand trapped in his, my fingers numb from how tightly he keeps remembering I am there. Every few minutes, his grip changes. Not loosening exactly. Testing. His thumb presses into my knuckles, then slides over them as if counting. His palm warms mine, then tightens again like something inside him startles awake without warning. Once, when the pipes groan too loudly in the wall, his whole body goes rigid beside me, the muscles in his arm locking so suddenly that my wrist aches. He does not move after. Does not speak. Does not explain. He just stares at the ceiling as if something has written instructions there in the dark.

I watch him through half-lowered lashes.

His face looks worse in the almost-morning. The shadows are gentler, but somehow less forgiving. In the yellow lamp glow, he looked wounded. In this hour, he looks haunted. Like whatever brought him back forgot to return all of him. His hair is messy against my pillow, black strands falling over his forehead, and his eyes keep fixed upward, dry and too dark, the skin beneath them bruised with exhaustion. His mouth is slightly parted. Not soft. Not relaxed. Ready. As if breath itself is something he might need to fight for.

Every now and then, he blinks too fast. Like he is trying not to see something. Or trying not to sleep because sleep is where it waits. I understand it slowly. Not as a thought at first, but as a coldness spreading beneath my ribs. The game had nights.

The dying would not have waited politely for daylight. The fear would not have given them neat hours to survive in. There must have been dark rooms and locked doors and hallways too silent to trust, clocks crawling toward whatever time meant death, classmates whispering and accusing and waiting for the announcement that would ruin someone. There must have been the terrible moment before sleep, when exhaustion became a trap. When closing your eyes meant surrendering the one piece of control you still had. When waking might mean relief, or blood, or another beginning.

And now he is here, in my bed, in my apartment, in a world that insists it is real because the blanket is soft and the rain is wet and my hand is in his.

But if he sleeps—If he wakes up somewhere else—I turn my face into the pillow to hide the way my mouth trembles. Kyung-jun notices anyway. His head shifts on the pillow. His eyes move to me. Immediate.

“What?” he asks. His voice is rough from disuse and too much staying awake. It scrapes through the dark quietly, but the sharp edge of him is still there, stripped down and hoarse.

I shake my head once.

His fingers tighten around mine.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Act like I’m stupid.”

I look at him then.

He is already looking at me so hard it feels like being held under light. The old Kyung-jun would have smirked after saying it. Would have made some cutting little comment, something ugly enough to make me roll my eyes and forget the tenderness underneath. This Kyung-jun only watches me with a kind of brittle intensity, as if my face is a language he has been studying in the dark for two years and he still cannot trust his own translation.

I swallow.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Dangerous.”

It should be funny. It almost is.

The word comes out faintly, more habit than joke. There is no real bite behind it. He looks too tired to sharpen himself all the way. Too raw to hide under the familiar shape of cruelty. His thumb moves once over my fingers, dragging across the same place again and again until my skin tingles.

I let the silence settle. Then I begin to sit up. It happens fast. Too fast. Before I have even pulled my hand from his, Kyung-jun is upright.

The blanket twists around his waist, his hand clamping around my wrist, not enough to hurt but hard enough to stop me cold. His eyes are wide in the dim room.

Scared. It flashes across him nakedly before he can kill it.

“Where are you going?”

The words are quiet, but there is something terrible under them. A crack. A drop. A boy standing on the edge of losing the room, the bed, the girl beside him, the proof that this has not been another cruel loop designed to let him breathe before choking him again.

I freeze. My heart squeezes so hard my own fear forgets what it was doing.

“I’m not leaving.” His grip does not loosen. I say it again, softer. “I’m not leaving, Kyung-jun.”

His eyes flick over my face, then to the door, then back. His breathing has changed. He is trying to make it quiet, trying to force it down before I can hear how uneven it is, but I can hear it. I can feel it through his hand on my wrist. Each breath comes like it has to push past something lodged in his chest.

“Then where?”

“I want to take a bath.”

He stares.

I wet my lips. “I thought it might help. My nerves feel…” I stop, because the lie is not fully a lie, and that makes it harder to say. My nerves are ruined. My body feels wrung out, hollowed by shock and crying and the impossible weight of having him beside me again. But that is not why I am getting up. “The warm water might help.”

His gaze stays on mine. The room holds still. He knows.

Maybe not exactly. Maybe not the whole small, careful plan forming in my head — the salts under the sink, the big tub I used to love because it made my apartment feel softer than it was, the heat loosening his muscles, the steam making the room warm enough that sleep might creep up on him without feeling like a trap. But he knows there is something gentle in it, and gentleness is the thing that scares him most right now.

His throat moves.

“I’ll come with you.” He says it like he expects me to argue. I don’t. I nod.

Something in his face loosens so slightly I would have missed it if I had not spent two years keeping every piece of him alive in my memory. His fingers slide from my wrist to my hand. He does not apologize this time. Does not pretend he was not afraid. He just holds on and gets out of bed when I do, moving too carefully for someone his size, like the floor might shift if he trusts it too much.

My bedroom feels colder once we leave the blanket behind.

The apartment is dark except for the lamp near the couch and the faint blue wash of city light through the windows. We walk barefoot through the hallway. His hand stays locked around mine. Not romantic in the simple way it used to be when we would walk home after school and he would pretend he was holding my hand only because I was “slow” and “needed supervision.” This is different. His palm is damp. His fingers are cold. Every step he takes beside me feels measured against the possibility of waking somewhere else.

At the bathroom door, he stops. Just for a second. I glance back.

He is looking into the little room with a wariness that makes my chest ache. My bathroom is not frightening. It has never been frightening. It is small but pretty, tiled in soft cream, with a narrow window above the tub and a shelf crowded with bottles I always mean to organize. There is a separate bathtub tucked against the far wall, wide and deep, curved like something made for quiet. I bought eucalyptus salts once because the packaging looked calming and expensive, even though I knew I would probably only use them twice. A little wooden stool sits beside the tub with folded towels stacked on top. A candle I have never lit sits near the sink, dusty around the rim.

It is ordinary. Sweet, even. Kyung-jun looks at it like ordinary things cannot be trusted. I squeeze his hand. He looks down at me. Just those eyes, dark and sleepless, asking something he would rather die than put into words.

“You can keep the door open,” I say. He swallows. Then he shakes his head once.

“No.” The word is barely there. Not because he wants privacy. Because closing the door means choosing to believe nothing waits outside it. Because maybe he is tired of being afraid of doors. I nod and step inside first. He follows.

The bathroom light is too bright when I turn it on, and he flinches before he can stop himself. His jaw tightens immediately, anger rising instinctively to cover the crack, but it dies before reaching his mouth. He lowers his eyes and exhales through his nose, slow and hard.

I don’t say anything. I turn on the bath instead.

The pipes groan, then water spills into the tub, loud at first, rushing and silver under the light. Steam begins to lift almost immediately, softening the mirror, blurring the sharp edges of us. I kneel beside the tub and test the temperature with my fingers, letting the heat bite gently at my skin. Too hot. I adjust the tap. The sound fills the room until there is no need to talk, and maybe that is mercy. Maybe that is why I chose this. Water can cover silence without demanding it be explained.

Kyung-jun stands behind me.

I can feel him there.

Not touching now, but close enough that his shadow falls over my shoulder. When I reach under the sink for the salts, he shifts as if the movement startles him, then stills again. I pour a handful into the water. The crystals disappear in small white swirls, dissolving into the heat, and the faint smell of lavender and something herbal rises with the steam.

I expect him to say something. Lavender? Seriously? Are we old ladies now? Or, What is this rich-person bath nonsense? Or, You always buy useless stuff. He says nothing. That is worse. I turn. He is staring at me.

The bathroom light catches the hollows under his eyes. The steam beads faintly at his hairline. He looks too tall for the room, shoulders nearly filling the space between sink and wall, hands hanging at his sides like he does not know what to do with them if they are not holding onto me. His face has gone unreadable, but not in the old way. Not bored. Not cruel.

Bare. There is no audience here. No classmates to impress. No hallway to dominate. No game to survive by being louder than fear. Just him. Just me. Just the water filling the tub between us like something waiting to be crossed. I stand slowly.

The tile is cool beneath my feet. My oversized sleep shirt clings faintly where my palms are damp from the bathwater. For a moment, neither of us moves. The water keeps running. Steam curls upward. The mirror clouds at the edges until our reflections begin to fade, two blurred figures in a small warm room at the hour when nightmares usually have teeth.

I take one step toward him. His eyes lower to my mouth. Then back to my eyes. I lift my hand and touch his cheek. He closes his eyes.

The reaction is so immediate, so helpless, that I feel it down to my bones. He leans into my palm before pride can stop him. Enough for my thumb to feel the slight tremor in his jaw. Enough for the air to leave him like he has been standing in armor too heavy to breathe inside.

I kiss him.

Softly at first.

Because he feels like something cracked that might cut both of us if I move too quickly. His lips are still beneath mine for half a second, frozen in surprise or restraint or the exhaustion of wanting too much. Then he melts.

There is no other word for it.

His shoulders drop. His hands come to my waist, not grabbing, not claiming, just landing there like he has finally found somewhere to put all the shaking. His mouth opens against mine with a sound so quiet it disappears into the rush of bathwater. He kisses me back slowly, deeply, like speed would make it less real. Like if he rushes, the moment might tear. Like he has imagined this in so many versions of hell that now the real thing has to be handled with both hands.

My fingers slide into his hair.

He shudders.

The sound he makes then is almost nothing. A breath caught too low in his chest. It goes through me anyway, warm and painful, and my eyes sting behind closed lids because this is the boy I mourned and the boy who came back and the stranger made out of everything that happened while I was not there to hold him.

When I pull back, his eyes stay closed. His forehead rests against mine.

“Don’t stop,” he whispers. It is not seductive. It is ruined. I kiss him again because I cannot answer without breaking.

This time his hands tighten, but still not with the old carelessness. He holds me like someone trying to remember gentleness from another life. His thumbs press into my sides through my shirt. His breath shakes into my mouth. I feel him keeping himself still, feel the strain of it in every line of his body. Want and grief and terror have tangled so tightly inside him that none of them know their own names anymore.

I draw back just enough to touch the hem of his shirt. He opens his eyes. For a second, I see the question there. Not refusal. Not embarrassment. Permission. I give him time to pull away. He doesn’t. So I lift the shirt slowly.

The fabric rises over his stomach, his ribs, his chest. I keep my eyes on his face because this feels too tender to watch like discovery, too sacred to turn into anything else. His arms lift when I need them to. His breath catches when the shirt passes over his head. His hair falls messily back into his eyes after, and for one fleeting, devastating second, he looks like the boy from before, annoyed and beautiful and too proud to admit he likes being touched.

Then I see the marks.

Not all of them. Not clearly. The bathroom is warm and bright and full of steam, but my mind refuses to take him apart like evidence. Still, there are things I cannot miss. Faint bruising near one shoulder. A thin healing line along his side. Small round medical marks near the inside of his elbow. The sharpness of his collarbones where they never used to be so sharp. The places where his body has been maintained, restrained, neglected, returned.

My hands still. His gaze drops to them. Then to my face. A muscle jumps in his jaw.

“It’s ugly,” he says. Quiet. Flat. Like he has already decided what I am allowed to think. I step closer and press my mouth to the center of his chest. His entire body locks. Under my lips, his heart slams once, hard.

I stay there for a moment, my hands resting carefully against his sides, feeling the heat of him, the breath he is holding, the life beneath skin that was supposed to be gone. When I lift my face, his eyes are shining again, but his mouth is twisted with something angry and helpless.

“Don’t do that,” he says.

“What?”

He looks away.

“Make it worse.”

I touch his jaw and bring him back to me.

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“How?”

His throat works.

“You make me want to live,” he says, and looks furious the second the words leave him. The bathroom seems to go silent beneath the water. I stare at him. He stares back like he wants to fight me for hearing it.

Then his face crumples at the edges, not enough for anyone else maybe, but enough for me. Enough that the boy who once called love embarrassing stands half-undressed in my bathroom at four in the morning and cannot hide the fact that survival has left him more frightened than death did.

I reach for his hands. He lets me.

“You are alive,” I say.

His fingers curl around mine.

“For now.”

The words are barely audible. Cold slides through me.

I want to argue. I want to say no, no, don’t say that, don’t put it in the room. But I understand too well what he means. Not that he wants to die. That he does not trust life to hold. That every time something good appears, he expects the lights to change, the announcement to play, the game to start again.

So I do not correct him. I lift his hand and press his knuckles to my mouth. His eyes shut.

“You’re here now,” I whisper. He breathes out unsteadily. “For now,” I add, because maybe that is the only truth his body can accept. His eyes open. Something in them softens, breaks, stays. I let go only long enough to take off my shirt.

His gaze follows the movement, but it does not feel like being looked at in the way I remember from before, when he would stare too long just to make me blush and then grin like he had won something. This is not that. This is quieter. Reverent in a way he would hate if I named it. His eyes move over me and stop, not hungry or careless, but stunned by proximity. By trust. By skin and breath and the fact that I am standing in front of him, not a memory he had to fight to keep, not a face blurring at the edges of some nightmare loop.

Just me. Real enough to be cold in the steam. I reach behind myself to unclasp my bra. His hand moves before he thinks, then stops halfway. Waiting again. That almost undoes me.

I finish it myself, letting the straps slide down my arms. The air touches me, warm and damp. I do not cover myself. Because he looks as if any sign of shame would kill something fragile in him. Because this is not about being seen beautifully. It is about being seen safely. It is about telling him with my body what words keep failing to prove.

I am here. I trust you. You can be here too.

His eyes lift to mine. There is no smirk. No comment. No old, sharp joke to ruin the softness before it can touch him. He only whispers my name. And it sounds like something he said in the dark to keep from disappearing.

I turn off the water. The sudden quiet is enormous.

Steam drifts around us, softening the room until the edges blur. We undress the rest of the way without speaking, speech feels too rough for what is happening. Clothing falls in small, ordinary sounds. Fabric against tile. A soft scrape. The whisper of a drawer opening when I take out two towels and set them within reach. We do not look away like strangers. We do not stare like lovers about to become reckless. We simply make space for each other’s vulnerability and try not to crush it with our hands.

When I step into the tub, the heat takes me by surprise.

It closes around my ankles, my calves, then my thighs as I sink down carefully. My body, wound tight for hours, resists it at first. Then the warmth reaches my hips, my stomach, my ribs, and something inside me loosens so suddenly that my eyes fill again. I turn my face away before Kyung-jun can see.

Too late. He sees everything now. He steps in after me.

For someone so tall, he moves slowly, lowering himself into the water behind me with a careful breath. The tub is big enough, but still, he fills it. His knees bracket mine. His body settles against the curved porcelain, and for a moment he holds himself away from me, as if the last inch matters. As if even now he thinks restraint is proof of goodness. Or control. Or survival.

The water shifts around us. Warmth rises. My back is almost touching his chest. Almost. Neither of us breathes properly. Then his hands come to my waist. He pulls me back.

My body slides through the water until I am flush against him, back to his chest, his legs around me, his arms folding over my stomach like gates closing. Heat surrounds me from every side: the bathwater, the steam, his skin, the trembling breath he releases against my shoulder. His chin lowers to the curve where my neck meets my shoulder. For a second, he just holds me there. Not kissing. Not talking. Holding.

His body shakes once. Then again. I cover his forearm with both hands. The water rocks gently against the sides of the tub.

“You’re warm,” he murmurs.

The words are so small I almost miss them.

I close my eyes.

“So are you.”

His arms tighten.

“No,” he says, voice rough. “I mean… you’re warm.”

Like that is proof too.

Like in the game everything had become cold eventually. Floors. Skin. Fear. Dead hands. Reset mornings with fake sunlight and no real warmth. Like the mind can be trapped somewhere so long it forgets the simple fact of another living body.

He presses his nose into my hair and inhales.

Not in that teasing way he used to do when he would complain about my shampoo and then bury his face in my neck anyway. This is different. He breathes me in like a person starved of air. Like scent is memory made physical. Like the lavender in the bath and the soap on my skin and the faint trace of rain still clinging to my hair are all anchors he can tie himself to before the world starts drifting again.

“I forgot your shampoo once,” he says.

My fingers still against his arm. His mouth is near my ear, but his eyes are not on me. I can feel it. He is staring at the water, or through it, or at something that is not in the room.

“In there,” he continues. “I remembered your face. Your voice. The way you used to look at me like you were deciding if prison was worth it. I would look at the pictures I had of you in my phone, rewatch the videos over and over until I thought I'd be sick of your voice or laugh, but I never did,”

A breath that is almost a laugh leaves me. His mouth brushes my temple, not quite a kiss.

“But the shampoo—” He stops. His throat moves against my shoulder. “I couldn’t remember it. It was such a stupid thing. I knew it was sweet. I knew I used to say it gave me a headache. I knew I liked it. But I couldn’t remember exactly.”

My chest hurts so sharply I press his arm harder against me.

“I thought that meant you were going,” he says.

The water feels suddenly too hot.

“Like pieces of you were getting taken. First that. Then maybe the way you looked at me. Or the way you felt against me. Then one day I’d wake up and know I was waiting for someone, but not who.” His voice thins. He swallows and presses his mouth to the side of my head, hard, as if stopping himself from saying more might physically hurt less. “I got scared.”

Kyung-jun saying scared is worse than crying. It is the bravest thing I have ever heard him do. I turn in his arms.

The movement makes water spill against the sides of the tub, a soft slap against porcelain. His hands loosen just enough to let me shift, then tighten again the moment I am facing him. I settle between his legs, knees tucked around him, water lapping at my ribs. His face is close now. Too close for hiding. Steam clings to his lashes. His hair curls slightly damp at the ends. His eyes are red-rimmed, furious with himself and still unable to stop.

I touch his cheek.

“You remembered enough.”

His jaw tightens.

“You don’t get it.”

“Then tell me.”

He looks away. I wait.

The old Kyung-jun hated waiting. He would fill silence by force, slash it open with mockery, make someone else uncomfortable before discomfort could settle on him. This Kyung-jun sits in the water with me at four in the morning and lets silence gather because there are no jokes strong enough to carry what he has brought back.

When he speaks, his voice is lower.

“At night, it was worse.”

My thumb stills against his cheek. He looks past me, toward the tiled wall.

“The game had rules. Times. Votes. Executions. People screaming at each other like screaming made them less likely to die.” His mouth twists. “Everyone got ugly. Me too. Maybe I was already ugly, so it wasn’t a big change.”

“Don’t.”

His eyes flick to mine. I do not look away. His expression shifts — irritation, old and familiar, rising for half a heartbeat — then it fades because he is too tired to pretend he does not understand why I stopped him.

He exhales.

“At night, you’d sit in a locked room with someone, not knowing if they'd kill you while you were passed out. We didn't even sleep, we just dropped the second the clock turned 12. Sometimes, before it was midnight and everyone had hid I would hear crying through the wall. Or someone praying which was stupid cause God had clearly not been there to save us...” His gaze drops to the water. “Sometimes you woke up and someone right next to you was dead.”

My throat closes. The water ripples between us.

He drags his wet hand up my back, not sensual, not searching. Grounding. His palm settles between my shoulder blades. His fingers spread there.

“One time,” he says, and the words come slower now, like each one has to be pulled through something thick, “I knew I was going to die. It was already happening, and all I could think was that I hadn’t said it to you.”

The room blurs. His eyes return to mine.

“I love you.”

The words land without performance. No smirk. No defensive bite. No embarrassment twisted into cruelty. Just truth, raw and plain and almost violent in its openness.

“I love you,” he says again, as if the first one might not count if he does not carve it deeper. “I loved you before. I loved you when I was acting like a piece of shit. I loved you when I picked fights over stupid things because I liked when you looked at me. I loved you when I said you were annoying. I loved you when you cried at that movie and I pretended I wasn’t watching you instead of the screen. I loved you when I didn’t say it because I thought saying it made me look weak.”

His mouth tightens.

“I was so fucking stupid.”

I shake my head, tears slipping silently now, warm down my face despite the steam. He wipes one away with his thumb. His hand is wet, so it does nothing except smear more warmth across my skin.

“I regret that,” he says. “More than dying. I swear to God. Every time I thought it was over, that was the thing. Not the pain. Not them. Not even being scared. It was you, standing somewhere outside all of it, not knowing. Maybe thinking I didn’t love you enough. Maybe thinking I was gone with all those stupid words still stuck in my fucking mouth.”

A sound breaks in my chest. He leans forward and kisses my cheek where the tear fell. Then the other. Then my forehead.

Each kiss is slow. Careful. Heavy with something that makes my hands tremble against his shoulders. He is not trying to lead us anywhere. Not trying to turn the moment into heat because heat would be easier than grief. He is kissing me like apology can be physical. Like love, if repeated enough against skin, might erase the silence he left behind.

“You don’t have to regret it,” I whisper. He stills. “You’re here now.” His eyes close. My fingers curl at the back of his neck. “You’re here,” I say again, because he needs it more than he needs air. “And I know. I knew then too.”

His eyes open. I swallow around the ache in my throat.

“I knew you loved me.” His face changes. It twists, almost in pain. I hurry before he can look away. “Not because you said it. You didn’t. Obviously.”

A broken little breath leaves him.

“But you’d walk on the outside of the sidewalk and pretend it was because I was too dumb to avoid cars. You brought me medicine when I had a fever and left it at my door. You remembered what convenience store drink I liked but made fun of it every time you bought it. You fixed my collar. You called me annoying when I cried but stayed until I stopped.”

His eyes are full now. He looks furious at them.

“So yeah,” I whisper. “I knew.”

For a moment, his face is so open I almost cannot look at him. Then he pulls me into him.

Water surges around us, spilling over the edge in a small wave that neither of us cares about. His arms lock around me, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other spread over my spine, pressing me against him until there is no space left for grief to sit between us. My face fits into the crook of his neck. His skin is hot from the bath, damp beneath my cheek. His heartbeat hammers against my chest.

“I’m going to say it all the time now,” he mutters into my hair.

I close my eyes.

“Okay.”

“You’ll get sick of it.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. You’re like that.”

“I’m really not.”

“You are.” His voice shakes. “And I don’t care. I’ll say it anyway.”

His mouth finds my shoulder. A kiss. Then another, higher, against the curve of my neck.

He kisses like someone counting places he thought he would never touch again. Shoulder. Neck. Jaw. Temple. The corner of my eye. My forehead. He kisses the tears before they can cool. He kisses my hairline and breathes there, raggedly, like he has found shelter beneath my skin.

“I love you,” he says against my temple. My hands slide up his back. “I love you,” he says again, lower. The words tremble through him. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

I begin crying harder, silently at first, then not silently. My shoulders shake. He holds me tighter immediately, one hand cupping the back of my head, fingers threading through wet hair. He does not tell me to stop this time. Does not say I look ugly. Does not panic at the sight of it. He just presses his mouth to my forehead and takes every sound like punishment he has decided he deserves.

I pull back enough to look at him.

“You don’t have to earn staying,” I say. His brows draw together. “You don’t have to say enough perfect things to make up for being gone.”

“I wasn’t gone by choice.”

“I know.”

His eyes flash.

“No,” he says. “You don’t.”

The words hit harder because they are not cruel. Only true. His hand slides from my hair to my cheek, holding me still, not forcefully but with a desperate focus that makes my breath catch.

“I tried to get out,” he says. “I tried so many times. I wasn’t just sitting there thinking about you like some sad drama lead.”

A tiny laugh breaks through my tears. His mouth curves for half a second, then disappears.

“I fought. I lied. I threatened people. I did stupid things. I did smart things too, sometimes.” His expression darkens. “I hurt people. Sometimes because I had to. Sometimes because I was scared and angry and didn’t know what else to do. And then it would reset, and they would look at me like nothing happened, and I’d forget what I’d done, or what they’d done, and everyone just kept… starting again.”

His breathing roughens. My hands tighten on his shoulders.

“Do you know how crazy that makes you?” he whispers. “Looking at someone eating breakfast after you watched them die? Hearing someone laugh after they begged? Wondering if this time they’ll kill you first, or if you’ll do it to them because you remember something they haven’t remembered yet?”

My stomach turns. He looks down.

“I wasn’t good in there.”

The confession falls between us quietly. The bathwater laps against my back.

I think of the boy he was before. Cruel, yes. Sharp-tongued. Violent. A bully when he wanted power and attention. Someone who laughed at fear because fear in other people made him feel larger. I think of what a place like that would do to him. A game built out of suspicion and death. A world where being mean might feel like armor. Where guilt would reset but memory would not always be merciful enough to vanish completely.

I touch his face again. He flinches at the tenderness, barely.

“You’re here with me now,” I say.

His eyes close like the words hurt.

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” I whisper. “It’s not.”

His lashes lift.

“I don’t know what happened in there yet. I don’t know what you did. I don’t know what was done to you.” My voice shakes, but I keep going because he deserves truth more than comfort dressed as lies. “But I know you came back carrying it. And I know you’re telling me instead of pretending nothing happened. That has to mean something.”

He stares at me for a long time. Then his face crumples.

He fights it. His mouth presses tight. His chin trembles once. His eyes shine and his brows pull together like anger can still hold the pieces in place if he just hates himself hard enough.

“I don’t want to be like before,” he says. My heart gives one hard, painful beat. His hand drops to the water, fingers flexing beneath the surface. “I don’t mean—” He stops, frustrated, searching for words he has never had practice using. “I’m still me. I’m not going to come back all nice and polite and bowing to every bastard who looks at me wrong.”

Despite everything, my mouth trembles toward a smile. His eyes catch it. A faint spark answers, then dims.

“But with you,” he says. “I don’t want to waste time being a coward.”

“You were never a coward.”

He gives me a look.

Even traumatized, exhausted, naked in a lavender bath at four in the morning, Go Kyung-jun can still make disbelief look insulting.

“I was,” he says. “With you, I was. I acted like wanting you didn’t scare the hell out of me. I acted like if I made you mad first, you couldn’t see how bad I had it. I picked fights because if we were fighting, at least you were looking at me.”

“You were terrible at romance.”

“I know.”

“You once threw a snack at my head because I said another boy was cute.”

His eyes narrow faintly. “He was ugly.”

“He was a kid.”

“He breathed through his mouth.”

I almost laugh again.

This time, he watches it happen with something like wonder and grief mixed together, like my almost-laughter is a thing he wants to put somewhere safe.

Then the softness returns to his face, solemn and stripped bare.

“I don’t want to do that anymore,” he says. “Not the stupid parts.”

“You’ll still fight with me.”

“Obviously.”

“Obviously,” I echo, and the corner of his mouth moves.

“But not like before.” His thumb traces the wet curve of my shoulder, absent and careful. “Not leaving things unsaid because saying them feels embarrassing. Not acting like I don’t care when I do. Not making you guess if I love you.”

My throat tightens. He leans forward, pressing his forehead to mine.

“I love you,” he whispers again.

I close my eyes.

The words are beginning to change the room. It doesn't erase the two years of death and impossible loops and police files and empty funerals. But it changes something. Making the bathroom warmer than the water. Making the dark outside the window less endless. Each time he says it, the silence that lived between then and now loses one small inch of power.

“I love you too,” I whisper. His breath catches. As if he did not know. As if the whole night has not been built from it.

His hand comes up to my neck, palm warm and wet, fingers curving carefully beneath my jaw. He kisses me slowly. So slowly the kiss becomes less a kiss than a place to rest. His mouth moves against mine with a tenderness that feels learned in pain. There is no hunger pushing it forward, no urgency except the urgency of staying. I can taste salt on him. Tears, maybe mine, maybe his, maybe both of ours until it no longer matters.

When he pulls back, he does not go far. His nose brushes mine.

“You really kept that ugly picture?” I let out a tiny, watery laugh. The old shape of him flickers there, fragile and familiar.

“Yes.”

“Should’ve picked a better one.”

“You wouldn’t let me take better ones.”

“Because you take pictures like someone’s grandmother.”

“Your grandmother liked that picture.” His mouth softens at the mention of her. For a moment, he looks down at the water.

“She cried a lot?”

The question is almost too quiet. I nod. His jaw tightens.

“I was all she had,” he says.

I touch his arm.

“She still has you.”

His eyes close.

“Yeah.”

But it does not sound like relief yet. It sounds like a debt. Like another person he came back to wounded by his absence. Like living has given him everyone’s grief to hold in his hands.

“She never gave up,” I tell him.

He opens his eyes.

“Neither did you,” he says. I look away before I can stop myself. His hand catches my chin, gently but firmly, turning me back. “Don’t.” I blink. “Don’t act like it was nothing.”

The words settle heavily. I try to swallow, but the ache will not move.

“You had the worse part,” I whisper.

His eyes harden.

“No.”

“Kyung-jun—”

“No.” This time there is anger in it, but not at me. At the unfairness. At the years. At the idea that pain must be ranked before it is allowed to matter. “You buried me.”

I stop breathing.

His face changes as he says it, like the words have shown him a picture he cannot bear.

“You stood there,” he says slowly. “At some funeral with my picture. People saying I was dead. You had to—” His voice breaks, and he looks away, but his hand stays on me. “Don’t tell me that was nothing.”

The bathroom blurs.

I remember the white flowers. The black ribbon. His school photo. His grandmother’s hand crushing mine. The way my knees vanished beneath me. The ugly sound I made in front of everyone. The shame of crying for someone who should have been there to mock me for it.

“I hated you a little,” I admit. His eyes snap back to mine. I wipe my cheek with the heel of my hand, but it is useless. Everything is wet in here. My face, my hands, the air itself. “Not really,” I say quickly. “Not in a way that made sense. I just… you were gone. And I didn’t know where to put it. Everyone kept looking at me like I was sad, and I was, but I was angry too. Because you left me with all this love and nowhere to put it. I couldn’t call you. I couldn’t yell at you. I couldn’t tell you I missed you. I couldn’t even be mad at you properly because everyone thought you were dead, and you’re not supposed to be mad at dead people.”

Kyung-jun stares at me. The water cools around us by degrees, but neither of us moves.

“I was mad that you weren’t there to be awful about your own funeral,” I whisper.

His mouth trembles.

“I would’ve been awful.”

“I know.”

“I would’ve said the flowers were tacky.”

“They were.”

“And that everyone looked like shit.”

“They did.”

His eyes shine.

“And I would’ve told you to stop crying.”

I nod, tears slipping again. “Yeah.”

He leans forward and kisses them.

“I wouldn’t now,” he whispers against my cheek. My breath catches. He kisses the other cheek. “I wouldn’t.” His mouth rests at my temple. “I’d let you cry,” he says, voice raw. “I’d probably be useless, probably say something stupid. But I’d stay.”

I close my eyes and fold into him.

He holds me like he is trying to prove it retroactively. Like he can somehow go back to that funeral and stand beside me, alive and warm and scowling, and undo the black ribbon on his own picture. Like if he keeps his arms tight enough now, he can reach every version of me who slept in his hoodie and woke with his name already hurting in her mouth.

The bathwater is no longer as hot.

Steam fades slowly from the mirror, revealing us in blurred fragments. His shoulder. My hair. His arm around my back. The curve of the tub. Two faces too close together to see clearly.

Kyung-jun notices the change before I do.

“You’re getting cold.”

“I’m okay.”

He gives me a look that is pure, exhausted disdain.

“You’re shaking.”

“So are you.”

His mouth tightens. Neither of us moves.

Then, after a moment, he says, “Can we stay a little longer?”

I nod immediately. His relief is quiet but visible. A small loosening around his eyes. A deeper breath against my hair.

We shift again so I am back against his chest, his arms around me beneath the cooling water. I turn the hot tap on with my foot, just enough to warm the bath again, and he huffs softly behind me.

“What?” I ask.

“You’re weirdly skilled at that.”

“I’ve had years of practice surviving without you.” The words slip out before I can soften them. His arms tighten. I feel his mouth press against the back of my head.

“Don’t,” he murmurs.

“I’m sorry.”

“No.” His voice is low. “Say things like that. I need to hear it.”

I stare at the water. It shimmers under the bathroom light, broken by our breathing.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whisper.

“You think not hearing it makes it better?” I say nothing. His chin settles on my shoulder. “I need to know what I missed,” he says. “Even if it makes me feel like shit. I need to know you were here. That you kept going. That you hated me a little.” His breath trembles. “That you loved me anyway.”

My fingers trace the back of his hand under the water.

“I loved you the whole time.” His chest rises sharply against my back. “I hated that too sometimes,” I admit. “It felt pathetic. Like everyone else knew how to move forward and I was still standing in your room waiting for you to come home.”

His lips touch my shoulder.

“Not pathetic.”

“You would’ve called it pathetic before.”

His silence lasts long enough to answer.

Then he says, “Yeah.”

I close my eyes.

“I was an idiot.”

“You were seventeen.”

“I was an idiot at seventeen.”

“Still are a little.”

His mouth brushes my skin, and this time I feel the faintest smile there.

“Careful.”

The word has no threat in it. Only memory. Only the softest ghost of who he was before the world took him apart. The quiet stretches.

For the first time all night, his breathing begins to slow. Not sleep. Not yet. But the rhythm changes. His chest against my back rises and falls less violently. His hand stills over my stomach, fingers splayed, thumb resting near my ribs. The heat, the salts, the water, the dark hour turning slowly toward dawn — all of it begins to gather around him. Not forcing rest. Inviting it.

His head lowers until his forehead rests against my shoulder.

“I don’t want to wake up there,” he says.

The sentence is so soft I almost think I imagined it. My eyes open.

The bathroom is dimmer now, or maybe my eyes have adjusted. The light above us hums faintly. Outside the little window, the sky has begun to turn the color of watered ink.

“You won’t,” I say.

His hand tightens.

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” I whisper. “I don’t.” He goes still. I turn my head enough that my cheek brushes his hair. “But if you wake up scared, I’ll be here.” His breath shakes against my shoulder. “And if you wake up and you don’t know where you are, I’ll tell you.”

His fingers curl against my skin.

“And if you wake up and think it was a dream, I’ll be really annoying until you believe me.”

A faint, broken sound leaves him. Almost a laugh. Almost a sob.

“Promise?”

I turn in his arms again.

The water moves around us, warmer now, softer. I cup his face in both hands. His eyes are heavy but terrified beneath it, exhaustion dragging at him while fear claws him awake. He looks at me like a boy at the edge of a dark room, refusing to step in unless someone promises to hold the door open.

“I promise,” I say.

His eyes search mine.

“Say my name,” he whispers.

“Kyung-jun.”

His face tightens.

Again, his eyes say.

“Kyung-jun.”

His hands come up over mine, pressing them harder to his cheeks.

“Again.”

“Kyung-jun.” His eyes close. The breath that leaves him is not relief exactly. But it is close.

I lean forward and kiss his forehead. Then the bridge of his nose. Then his mouth, gently enough that he does not have to kiss back if he is too tired.

He kisses back anyway. Because he is Kyung-jun. Because even broken, he reaches. Because need has always been the most honest thing about him, even when he used to dress it up as arrogance. When I pull away, his eyes stay closed.

“I love you,” he murmurs.

“I love you too.”

His mouth moves faintly. “Good.”

I almost smile.

“Bossy even half-dead.”

His eyes open a sliver.

“Not half-dead.”

“No?”

“No.” His hand slides to the back of my neck, heavy and warm. “I came back.”

My throat tightens.

“Yes,” I whisper. “You did.”

He looks at me for a long moment, and something in his gaze settles. Enough that when I shift back against him, he lets his head fall to my shoulder again. His arms close around me beneath the water. The world narrows to heat and breath and the slow pale line of dawn growing behind frosted glass.

He does not sleep yet. But he rests. And for Kyung-jun, for this hour, for this first night after the dead gave him back, that is enough. His lips move against my shoulder one last time.

“If I start acting like an asshole again,” he murmurs, voice thick and fading, “hit me.”

I turn my face toward his hair.

“I already do.”

A faint breath touches my skin. This one is almost a laugh.

“Yeah,” he whispers. “Harder next time.”

Then he goes quiet.

Held against me in cooling bathwater, his heartbeat steadying slowly at my back, his fingers still tangled with mine beneath the surface like even rest has to be learned through touch. I stay awake with him as the night thins. I keep my hand over his. I keep breathing where he can feel it. And when the first gray light of morning slips into the bathroom, soft and uncertain and real, Kyung-jun is still there.

A sense of heaviness settles atop your body, aching as though it has been carrying the weight of far too many days for far too long.

Your eyelids flutter open languidly, the effort of rising from the darkness of sleep too much to take. For a moment, you sit still, staring at the tender rays filtering in, but it offers no warmth, only a pale reminder of things that once felt brighter.

Feeble shadows dance across the walls, reflecting off the surface of the floors.

In the dulled haze of the scattered sunbeams, the light is neither enough to pierce through the darkness of your dismal dreams nor your despairing reality.

The beautiful, soft, and serene sunlight doesn't touch your heart any longer, for even if it did, it wouldn't change a single thing.

It feels like a lie, that sunlight.

It promises warmth, but it doesn't deliver.

Your chin quivers and you bring your fingers to your face, rubbing your eyes in an effort to physically hold back the tears. Wanting to close your eyes for just a second, even that small release of tension only makes you more aware of the pressure in your chest.

Only when warm hands envelop your own to gently pull them away do you turn to its source.

Jun-Hee's brown eyes are the first thing you see and shielding your heart, you remain strong, holding his gaze.

It brings you comfort, but also trepidation, as you focus on his irises, a rich, deep hue contrasting that of the soulless, colorless shade of murky white imprinted in your subconscious.

Death was staring at you through his eyes in that vivid nightmare, and instead of running away, you had run toward it.

You both sit completely still in one another's presence for a couple more minutes before the familiar lump lodges its way in your throat the longer you look at him and circling through a million what-if's.

It's too much.

Too much to keep pretending that things will get better.

No longer being able to ground your thoughts or steady your breaths, your hands fall from his and you rise on shaky feet, walking in a non-linear line seeking escape.

The silence swells again and you step forward, feet carrying you toward the door, each movement mechanical.

There's no destination in mind, no plan. Just the thought that perhaps if you walk long enough, if you move far enough, you can outrun whatever's holding you here.

But deep down, you know that you won't.

You know that you can't.

As you pass a mirror hung up on the adjacent wall, you stop short in your tracks.

You swallow, then blink at your reflection in the mirror, barely recognizable to your own self, splatters of blood dotted across your visage and eyes devoid of hope.

It makes you physically hurt.

It makes you want to scream out loud.

Instead, you bite down on your lip hard enough to draw blood and swipe at your own face, each pass more aggressive than the last.

No matter how hard you press, the streaks merely smear, yet refuse to disappear completely.

You wonder if this is how it will be once this is all over.

Try as you might, you can't imagine in the slightest ever being able to rid of the gruesome memories.

The tears.

The blood.

The deaths.

The world outside continues on, unchanged, while you remain stuck in this place, trapped in the moment between yesterday and tomorrow.

At the next raise of your hand, Jun-Hee winds his fingers around your wrist and tugs it down tenderly but still firmly enough that it brings you back to your senses.

The familiar rage and hurt bubble inside your chest and you force it down, bottling your emotions as you have always done.

Wordlessly, Jun-Hee throws open the room's door and drags you along on a path straight to the bathrooms.

He turns your shoulders, facing you away from the wall length mirrors, back pressed against the counter of sinks.

The light flickers overhead as you hang your head, silent sobs wracking your body. Jun-Hee stands in the doorway, heart twisting in his chest at the sight of you. For as long as he has known you, your strength had always been something he admired. But now, you were breaking, and he felt helpless.

"Seol-Hwa," he whispers, voice thick with emotion. "Please."

Your shoulders shudder as you look up, eyes swollen and red. The weight of everything you couldn't say crushes you, too heavy for words.

With determination, Jun-Hee crosses the threshold to stand in front of you, bending down to eye level and ever so gently reaching forward to cup your face in his hands. His touch is steady, even as he fears you would pull away hearing your breath hitch at the contact.

"Look at me," he murmurs, low and even. "I want you to see your reflection of yourself as I see you. Deflect all your pains, your worries, and your fears onto me. In my eyes, there is only you."

Tears make their descent down your face so you shakily inhale, trying to stop the streaming rivulets. Jun-Hee gingerly steps ever closer, thumbs brushing over your cheeks to trace the lines of every drop.

"I—I don't know how to fix it," you choke out, voice trembling. "No one can."

As your tears continue to fall unbidden, Jun-Hee sighs and reaches around you for a stack of paper towels, dampening them with cool water before softly wiping your face as if he were erasing the pain one swipe at a time.

Rather than pulling away or flinching, you surrender to the tender touch, breath slowing just a little with each movement. You can't help but to stare, the course of your nightmare haunting you even when awake.

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"It's—" you pause, not knowing how to approach it. You decide if you didn't start, Jun-Hee wouldn't have to learn of the ending. "It's nothing."

"It's not nothing if it has you like this."

You shake your head, lips pressed into a firm line.

"Was it a bad dream?"

Hesitantly, you nod, tears brimming on your waterline once more. "In it...you left." It was neither of your faults, yet the words come out laced with bitterness yet also chock-full of longing, of pain, and of regret. "You left...and I was all alone."

Jun-Hee pulls you into a tight hug, tucking your head beneath his chin. He didn't have answers. He couldn't make it disappear. But he could be here. He could hold you.

"Is that what you're afraid of?" One hand comes to nestle the back of your head, patting softly in reassurance. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."

Wrapping your arms around him, you rest your ear against his chest, finding solace in his beating heart signaling life, chambers of sound echoing your feelings for him.

"The future seems far too bleak to give us a choice to stay."

"In any circumstance, even if I had to leave, I would always come back to you, Seol- Hwa."

[ ʙᴇғᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴀsᴛ ᴠᴏᴛᴇ ᴄʟᴏsᴇᴅ, ᴘᴏʟɪᴄᴇ ᴜsᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴇɪʀ sᴋɪʟʟ. ᴅᴜʀɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇ ɴɪɢʜᴛ, ᴘᴀʀᴋ ᴊɪ-sᴏᴏ, ᴀ ᴄɪᴛɪᴢᴇɴ, ᴡᴀs ᴇxᴇᴄᴜᴛᴇᴅ ʙʏ ᴍᴀғɪᴀ. ᴀʟʟ ᴘᴀʀᴛɪᴄɪᴘᴀɴᴛs, ɪᴅᴇɴᴛɪғʏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴀғɪᴀ ᴀɴᴅ ʙᴇɢɪɴ ᴛᴏ ᴠᴏᴛᴇ. ]

The monotonous announcement drones on soporifically, seemingly mocking Yu-Jun's cries that nearly mask every single word like knives probing at the still-open wounds in his heart.

You can barely bring yourself to watch even after the others have left the scene one by one as Yu-Jun holds Ji-Soo's limp body in his arms behind the previously impenetrable door now split down the middle, a parallel to their parting.

"This can't be..." Yu-Jun intones in despair, shaking his girlfriend's shoulders to no avail. "I still need you here with me..."

Recognition comes at you in full force, causing you to stumble back, clutching at the doorframe in reliance as your head spins, the same exact words you had said to Jun-Hee in your nightmare reverberating in the dark recesses of your mind, echoing far too loud in the vicinity of the now empty hallway.

Sensing the movement, Yu-Jun glances over, a flash of surprise to see you still there, before it's gone and replaced by utter grief.

Pulling yourself together, you hesitantly approach. Even as you kneel down next to the two, you're met with no resistance nor reticence as you had expected.

"You don't have to stay. No one else did." Yu-Jun's voice is muffled as he pulls Ji-Soo ever closer, hunching over with his head against her own.

"I know I don't have to, but I want to," you emphasize.

At this, he looks up, confused. "I don't understand. I'm not someone who should be on the receiving end of kindness."

"That doesn't mean you deserve this," you gesture around, noticing somberly as his hands tighten, clutching at the fabric of Ji-Soo's now crinkled white shirt. "None of us do."

"Maybe I do." Yu-Jun stares straight forward at the wall, focusing on nothing. "Maybe this is karma for everything I've done wrong."

"We're people. Everyone makes mistakes. It's part of being human."

Yu-Jun chuckles darkly. "Tell me, what kind of mistake is this game then?"

"A fatal one."

There's a long stretch of silence between you two before he speaks up. "I'm sorry." You're taken aback by the sudden admission of regret, unable to hide your reaction. Yu-Jun clears his throat awkwardly before addressing you with sincerity. "My friend group, me included, haven't always been the nicest to you or yours and even though I knew it deep down, I never owned up to it. On behalf of them and myself, I want to apologize." His breaths come out ragged with so much still to convey between every intake of air. "In case—" he glances down again at Ji-Soo in his arms and brushes away stray strands of hair from her face. "—I don't get the chance to say the things I've saved to say."

"Do you have words that you regret never having said?"

"Three. Only three."

You can guess what it is without confirmation from the way Yu-Jun's lips quiver, eyes filled with unshed tears.

"Stay alive for her."

"I don't know if I can."

"You will," you respond with certainty, rising back on your feet.

"How are you so sure?"

"Are there not people you still want to save, including yourself?"

Realization finally makes its way onto his face. "H-How did you figure it out? T-That I'm a doctor?" The words come out in broken stutters.

You pull out your phone and turn it around, showing the resurrection screen. "It's hard to recognize those against you, but it's even harder to recognize those with you. We shouldn't let one another down."

Yu-Jun opens and closes his mouth, struggling to find the right words to say. "I feel as though I've already disappointed so many. A second chance is not something I deserve."

"Rather than saying you don't deserve things, prove that you do."

"Do you...not have any desire to reserve revival for yourself? "

"I could, but that defeats the whole purpose of this responsibility assigned to us in saving the innocent. Doctors place the needs of others before their own. Is that not what we are now?"

Yu-Jun's entire demeanor shifts from reluctant to resolute, from hopeless to hopeful. "I'll do my best so that no more sacrifices will be done in vain."

A faint smile adorns your face, acknowledging the partnership wordlessly. "Whatever happens, don't forget to protect yourself even as you're protecting the others."

Yu-Jun makes a sound of affirmation as you turn to leave. "Wait—"

You look back over your shoulder. "What is it?"

"You're a really good person, Seol-Hwa, just as Jun-Hee has always said. I see why he likes you so much."

Faltering, the corner of your lips imperceptibly curl downward. "We're best friends. He's obligated to say that."

"I don't think feelings are an obligation."

"Feelings never do well in a life or death situation."

"Do you have words that you regret never having said?" Yu-Jun uses your own verbatim against you.

Your eyes waver but you tamper down your emotions, refusing to let them show. "I had a dream last night where I said the words I've always wanted to say and Jun-Hee and I still wind up, over and over again, at only one ending sequence."

"And that ending is?"

Swiveling your head back around to hide the tears wanting to fall, you whisper quietly before walking away, "The same as your's."

Despite Yu-Jun declining to join, the rest reconvene in the deserted warehouse, as barren and cold as you were feeling.

Everyone is on edge, warily eyeing one another, no longer trying to hide the smallest ounce of suspicion.

Yoon-Seo speaks up next to you, words curt as she crosses her arms across her chest. "What's the reason for calling all of us down here?"

If it was possible, Kyung-Jun is even more patronizing, walking back and forth in the center with his head held high. Haughtily, he turns to the group. "Do you all not know or are you pretending not to?" He smirks. "Park Woo-Ram, that bastard, the one who deceived all of you was the Mafia. Just who was the only person to pinpoint that?" Throwing his hands up in a show of bravado, he motions for applause. "Me."

Solely, Seung-Bin claps, always one to grovel at his leader's feet. "Of course, it's no one else but you with the great hunch." His positive countenance morphs to one of disdain, transitioned so seamlessly, that it makes you wonder if he has ever displayed a genuine expression. "I can't say the same for you lot of Police. Whoever you all are, you could learn a thing or two from Kyung-Jun."

The person in question waves him off to the back and steps forward, hands in his pockets. "Hear that? If you want to catch the Mafia, do as I say."

Beside you, Jun-Hee deadpans, "Do what?"

"You'll take turns saying who you think is guilty and I'll pick for you."

Whispers grow amongst your classmates and you can sense the growing frustration directed at a single player.

Scoffing, Jun-Hee shakes his head in disbelief. "Who are you to decide? It's up to all of us."

"There's not enough collective intelligence for us to do that. Did you all forget how and why I nearly died last night? Who other than me is definitely a Citizen?" Kyung-Jun strides the length of the room as he scrutinizes everyone in turn, shaking his pointer finger in succession but ultimately drops it as he reaches you. Seeing your mien of indifference, he pivots back around, leaving his next words hanging in the air. "I think the rest of the Mafia members are hidden among those who voted for me yesterday."

"That doesn't mean anything," Na-Hee defends.

"Oh really?" Kyung-Jun whirls back around, fixating on Na-Hee and clucks his tongue at her. "On the contrary, it means everything. For the fact alone that you all sided with the opposition to rid of me. What clearer evidence is there?"

"How were we supposed to know?" Jun-Hee states clearly. "Don't judge based on one round where no one had the slightest clue."

"Then, what should I assess you on?" Kyung-Jun retorts. "Voting is the entire point of this game to figure out who's who."

"Your logic is shit if that's all you use to reason with," Jung-Won admonishes.

"You bitch—"

So-Mi cuts in abruptly, changing the topic of conversation for the time being. "What about Ji-Soo then? Why kill someone so randomly without the need to?"

"Who cares about intention when you yourself could die?"

Behind him, you can see Jin-Ha and Seung- Bin look at one another briefly, weary looks on their faces at Kyung-Jun's words, message loud and clear: Friendship amounts to nothing when it comes to survival.

Yeon-Woo timidly voices from the back. "So, Ji-Soo wasn't the Doctor then?"

"Read the notification carefully," Eun-Chan murmurs to his friend. "She was a Citizen, but that doesn't mean Yu-Jun is."

“Yesterday," Da-Bum adds, "the Police used their skill, so why didn't the Doctor?"

Mi-Na bites at her nails. "Right, because then Ji-Soo would still be here."

You catch sight of Yu-Jun outside through the metal bars across the window opening and once your eyes meet, he hangs his head in shame, walking away forlornly, no longer wanting to listen any further.

No one else notices the exchange and you breathe out on a long exhale, just as much guilty.

"Don't you all think it's weird?" So-Mi's question draws the interest of those next to her. "On the third floor, it was just Ji-Soo and Yu-Jun alone. How come only one of them made it out alive?"

Mi-Na looks over at So-Mi with a gasp. "Could Yu-Jun be a Mafia?"

"Damn," Jin-Ha intones. "If that's true, he really took his girlfriend's life."

In order to not compromise the chance of survival, although knowing that couldn't be farther from the truth especially after seeing the aftermath of the two, you bite down on your tongue to keep peace.

"She did always give him a hard time, what with telling him off and her short temper..." Yeon-Woo trails off.

"Enough of this useless talk that serves no real purpose in pressing matters." Despite the silent resistance, Kyung-Jun still mongers fear in the rest. "I'll single out someone as I see fit."

"How funny! He thinks he's actually in charge," Jung-Won mutters under her breath.

"This one." He spurns her and focuses on Jun-Hee, gesturing condescendingly. "You can tell when he did all that he could to safeguard Woo-Ram."

"Anyone would've done so to save someone who we thought would be a Citizen," you spit out. "Haven't we all been betrayed by someone we trusted?" Kyung-Jun's eyes slide over to yours, jaw clenched, not missing what you alluded to. "If it wasn't you against him, would you be able to say there wasn't even a one percent chance where you couldn't believe him?" His eyes don't leave yours, watching intently your effort at justification. "In the end, we're just victims of a killer."

"Seol-Hwa's right," Na-Hee agrees meekly. "We shouldn't vote just because of a wrong guess."

"Then, let's vote for the right guess this time: Jun-Hee."

"Don't you know about presuming innocence? Stop insisting when you don't have proof." You glare him down. "This isn't a witch hunt where we vote on the basis of who we dislike most."

Kyung-Jun steps toward you and you can feel Yoon-Seo grab your elbow to pull you back but you don't budge even as he bends down, tilting his head to the side, gazing steadfastly at you. "Do you have evidence then?" He fixes you with a challenging stare, reversing your words. "We can't defend based on who we like most."

"You want evidence?" He falters as you merely smile without any real happiness behind it. "I have it."

The hum of the old computer fan is the only sound in the small, dimly lit basement before the clicking of keys fills the silence, rhythmic, almost hypnotic.

Jung-Won's fingertips run across the keyboard, eyes locked on the screen, face bathed in the pale glow of the monitor. She wasn't aware of those standing behind her, too focused, too intent, to notice the interest of the rest, and the trepidation of yours.

"We can get the entire Mafia crew in one go if I manage to pull this off."

From the shadows of the basement, the sound of Seung-Bin's foot tapping repetitively against the floor echoes incessantly. "This is useless. Can't you work any faster than at the rate of a turtle?" His voice breaks the stillness of the room, laced with frustration.

"You're also useless. You have no right to speak," Jung-Won berates, tone sharp as she adds to the tension.

You see the screen flash and spring up from your seat next to Jun-Hee atop a half broken wooden bench discarded in the room. "Do you see anything?"

"I thought I would but..." Jung-Won spins in her chair to face you, "it's all deleted. The files are completely wiped—everything on the drive."

"That can't be." You refuse to even entertain the thought that someone else could've chanced upon this room, especially not after the weird circumstance in which you found it. "Look again." Grabbing Jung-Won's arm a bit too tightly, you urge her to scour the different file locations.

An uneasy silence hangs in the air as you both turn toward the computer once again. Your eyes bat nervously from folder to folder, trying to find something—anything—but the cursor only blinks in emptiness, mocking your desperation.

"It's not that," Jung-Won says aloud as she clicks around, clattering growing louder in defiance. "Any remaining content on here wasn't formatted properly from the start. Whoever had access to this in the first place made sure no else would after them. All traces are erased."

You can't answer right away. Jung-Won's gaze is fixed, but her fingers had slowed. The screen blinks once, twice, before the folder she'd been trying to open vanishes entirely.

A chill runs down your spine.

"It's not... it's not possible..." you whisper, words in tatters. You reach for the mouse but the screen flickers then blacks out entirely as a faint row of red text flashes in the corner.

Deleted: System Error.

The room goes deathly still.

You squeeze your eyes together tightly, stomach in knots and heart plummeting.

"Han Seol-Hwa," comes Jin-Ha's voice. "Were you trying to fool us all? Bring up nonexistent evidence? Nice team-play, Mafias."

"It's not like that! They knew of it beforehand. We're too late!" you shout back, knowing full well evading this accusation just became that much more difficult.

Jin-Ha is about to open his mouth again to reproach you, but one look from Kyung-Jun shuts him up immediately despite his growing displeasure at the newfound tandem. The latter studies you, gauging. "Are you doing this for yourself or for someone else? This whole thing was only brought up because I cornered Jun-Hee earlier."

"Let's calm down and consider the situation first." Yu-Jun sends you what he thinks is a look of support, but even in his encouragement, you can sense that worry outweighed it.

"Don't think you're off the hook either, girlfriend murderer," Kyung-Jun warns Yu-Jun.

"Did you, or did you not, know that this place would have bird's eye view of everything because you were planning to rid of evidence from the beginning?" Jin-Ha corrals you into another corner and you can sense Kyung-Jun holding himself back from going rouge on him.

Jung-Won is by your side in an instant, hands around your shoulders. "You're even dumber than you look."

"Yah!"

"If that was her intention, why would she willingly bring us all here? Unless you've been lobotomized, in what world would someone expose themselves if they're at fault?"

"Whatever," Kyung-Jun concludes, and you look away, expecting him to vote for you without doubt as his finger taps at his screen with finality. "My intuition has never been wrong."

Before the intercom can even announce his choice, Jin-Ha steps in between him and the door, eyes shifting from you to Kyung-Jun and back, equal parts in disbelief and anger. "Have you gone crazy? What are you doing?!"

Seung-Bin stands stunned, looking between the two.

"Didn't you two say that I had a great hunch a few moments ago and everyone should take note?" Kyung-Jun shoves Jin-Ha aside, the shorter of the two bumping into the wall with a thud before a finger is jabbed into the middle of his chest. "Get to learning, bastard."

"Aish shibal!"Jin-Ha curses after his leader's retreating back as Seung-Bin drags him along, the three exiting ultimately with unanimous votes, choices conformed to Kyung-Jun's.

As Mi-Na and Eun-Chan turn to leave as well, you grab at them in a rush. "I really am a Citizen." At their unconvinced looks, you double down. "I'll prove that I am. Please, at least give me until the end of today."

With their evidently remaining suspicions, Eun-Ha comes to your aid. "I trust her. If there's one person who I'm most certain is a Citizen, it has to be Seol-Hwa." She reaches out her hand and gives yours a light squeeze even as your own shakes against hers.

[ ɢᴏ ᴋʏᴜɴɢ-ᴊᴜɴ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

[ sʜɪɴ sᴇᴜɴɢ-ʙɪɴ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

[ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊɪɴ-ʜᴀ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

"I'll be able to restore a few files if I spend a bit more time familiarizing myself with this interface," Jung-Won declares resolutely and you, once again, feel guilty for harboring doubts against her. "I can at least promise this."

"Yes, guys," Na-Hee adds on. "We can vote before night falls once we've all calmed down and have more sound reasoning."

Da-Bum nods in agreement. "We'll know for sure by then. Let's not jump to a decision."

Eun-Ha nudges Mi-Na and Eun-Chan on either side of her, before turning around to motion at Yeon-Woo with her head. They all relent, albeit reluctantly, and as Eun-Ha follows them out of the room, she turns back to give you a half smile in silent support.

So-Mi merely smirks and leaves with everyone else aside from your immediate group, her steps light, your distress her happiness.

You plop back down on the bench and cover your face with your hands. "This is a disaster."

Hyun-Ho scoots in beside you and pats you on the head comfortingly.

"Don't give up just yet." Dong-Hyun fiddles around with the multiple outdated TV's on the opposite wall. "We won't either."

"Da-Bum," Jung-Won calls. "Did you by chance bring a laptop with you?"

"Yeah, why?"

"I need all the help I can get. With your assistance, we should be able to regain lost footage at the earliest an hour before midnight."

"Is that possible? To restore everything?" Da-Bum questions.

"Of course not everything, but if we try our best, clips from the third floor hallway where the incident happened last night is completely doable." Jung-Won is entirely confident as she notifies the group chat while Da-Bum rushes off to get the additional device needed.

Their efforts on behalf of you warm your heart, yet deep down, you can't bring yourself to bask in the momentary peace.

Saving yourself will mean losing Jun-Hee.

The city lights on high above the rooftop cast a backdrop of white behind Jun-Hee, the stark contrast against his black hair like a shining halo.

When he turns to look at you, you can't find it in yourself to hold eye contact, instantly drowning anew in the visions of your nightmare, slipping beneath a blanket of white, the color of surrender.

You wrap your arms around yourself as the frigid night air bites against your skin, and noticing your shivering, Jun-Hee scoots in noticeably closer, pressed against your side in an attempt to offer warmth.

"Is it difficult for you?"

"What is?"

"Giving me your full support, trusting me— believing me without doubt."

Jun-Hee pulls your head onto his shoulder and leans his own against yours. "It's the opposite. You make it easy. I can entrust you with my life."

"Even if all the evidence is evading me?"

"Even then."

Closing your eyes, you let the rise and fall of his shoulder as he breathes calm you. "Why do you trust me so much?"

"I know the kind of person you are, and I know your heart."

"If everyone were to lose their trust in me, as long as you still believe in me, I don't need anything else."

"I'll always be by your side."

"It's weird," you begin. "Not once have I ever thought about my biggest fear, but every night since we have been here, the scent of death keeps lingering, both in my reality and subconscious. I can't rid of it."

"Anyone would say the same."

"Would you?"

"My only fear is that I won't be able to protect you until the end."

You raise your head only to find him already looking at you.

"Is it selfish of me to say that I'm scared? I know the possibility of making it out of here is close to none, but to imagine myself dying, I simply can't." Unabashed, you find yourself crying, tears falling down in twin trails against your cheeks. "I don't want to go like this."

"Who says you have to?" Jun-Hee's right hand cups the side of your face and with his thumb, he brushes away the teardrops cascading down, a mirrored reflection of the morning. "I would never let you die. Until my last breath, I'll make sure you're safe."

"You should always put yourself first, Jun- Hee."

Pulling his hand away from your face, he cradles both of your hands in between his and tightens his own around them.

"Don't you know that I would die for you?"

Shaking your head, you try to get him to rescind his words. "I'm not someone of importance you should sacrifice yourself for."

He smiles lightly. "To me, no one is more important than you—not even my own self."

Your breath catches in your throat and you swallow around the lump forming. "Promise me we'll go home together once this is all over."

Jun-Hee's eyes waver with uncertainty but ultimately nods. "I promise."

"You know it would never be home without you right?"

"Neither without you, Seol-Hwa."

"Then, you can never leave me here alone, if you aren't with me."

"How cute," Jun-Hee suddenly intones and you're taken aback at the fond way he says it. "You think it's possible for me to quit you." He slides off of the bench you two are sitting on, before kneeling down in front of you. From his pockets, he dangles a braided red string between his fingers as he looks up at you, the glimmer of stars reflecting in his eyes. "I wanted to give you this for our friendship anniversary but more than ever, there's no time like the present."

"You've kept this with you the whole time?"

Jun-Hee nods, fiddling with the thin strands to tie around your wrist. "I recently went to Jejudo with my parents and this really kind elderly craftsmen told me these can serve as wish bracelets, granting what the wearer most desires in their hearts." He rotates the woven strings around and you see a small white jade flower charm, its center hollowed-out, dangling from the middle. A snow flower. Your namesake. "The harabeoji said to me, with the brightest smile on his face, that I looked like I had a hidden wish but seemed far too skeptical for his liking. To my surprise, he gifted me with two and told me that sometimes, luck comes only once in a lifetime."

Grinning, he presses the textured string into your outstretched hand and you settle his forearm in your lap, wrapping the bracelet around the opposite wrist you were wearing yours on. His charm is the piece that completes yours, a simple solid sphere—a perfect match.

"I heard that until your wish comes true, the string shouldn't break prematurely, or it will never come to fruition."

"That's what the harabeoji reminded me of too, but I believe ours will be granted." "Do you really think that luck only comes once in a lifetime?"

"I don't know about that, but what I do know is that I must've used all my luck in order to meet someone like you." Jun-Hee runs his thumb over the inside of your wrist where the stone pendant rests against your pulse point, a line leading to your heart. "You're my once in a lifetime person, Seol- Hwa."

A few hours later and your unease has yet to settle, not even at the confirmation text from Jung-Won alerting to her success.

"I think it's safe to say that we'll have the most important of clues as evidence." After a final flurry of movements, Jung-Won stretches her fingers. "There. It's done." She points to the screen and those closest to her promptly swarm the monitor to see. "With the time limit I had, I was only able to bring back the film from yesterday, but that should be more than enough to figure out who entered the room where Yu-Jun and Ji-Soo were."

Before you even have the chance to breathe a sigh of reprieve, smoke starts rising from the console as sparks fly, only briefly at first and then heightening into a full blown flame.

Jun-Hee grabs the nearest fire extinguisher and douses the system unit, but all that remains in the fallout is charred metal. You stare at the black matter, the futility of it ridiculing.

Kyung-Jun touches the box only to recoil at the heat that singes his skin. It's beyond saving and he can only chuckle. "As if murder wasn't enough, you all want to add arson to your list of crimes too? Was this a ploy in hopes that we would all burn down? Is that it?"

"Guys—" Eun-Chan interjects, pointing a shaky finger at the monitor in the corner of the room everyone ignored up until now. "What the hell is that?!" At his question, the screen lights up with colored strips of static that steadies into clear footage, the pool coming into view.

Except, it isn't the only thing visible.

Long dark hair masks the face of an otherworldly figure standing eerily still in the middle of the scene, hands at her sides. For some inexplicable reason, you feel like you've seen her before.

"Seol-Hwa's right..." Na-Hee utters, panic-stricken. "There really is a ghost..."

At that, you suddenly remember the photo you still had in your possession. Drawing it out of your skirt pocket, you briskly extend it toward the group, directing them to focus on one particular individual. "I think... there's something other than us here. She— that apparition—must have something to do with the game."

"Stop with your nonsense," Jin-Ha chastises. "You all must've faked this video to rid of skepticism."

"You idiot," Jung-Won retorts. "Look at the live stamp. It's filming in real time. I know using your brain isn't something you tend to do, but at the very least, tell me your eyes work."

"Whatever this may be," you start, eyeing everyone in succession, "will you just simply go along with it and play the game until we all perish? What if you win? Do you think you can actually make it out of here alive?" Your voice rises, both in exasperation and resentment. "Is it possible for any of us to be the same afterward?" Shaking your head, you fix the rest with a steely glare. "Get a grip! If we find the correlation between every cryptic piece of information, we might finally be able to break free of this illusion."

Without waiting for a response or agreement, you dash off toward the pool, and as you arrive, to your astonishment, the rest ended up following.

Aside from your friend group, Eun-Ha, Na- Hee, and Yu-Jun, the remaining ones do nothing to help. While you search high and low for the right angle the footage could've been captured from—even a glimpse of a hidden camera—the clock ticks by, drawing ever nearer to the hour of death.

"Time's almost up," Kyung-Jun reminds. "Are you all abandoning the poll then?"

"How about we vote in a different way?" Jun-Hee suggests.

So-Mi runs one hand through her hair as she stands akimbo. "I know you mean well, but we don't have enough time to think of another plan. How are we to do it?"

Kyung-Jun casts her aside carelessly and she stumbles, sending him dirty looks from behind his back. "Do you think we're foolish enough to go along with your idea once again? After your last one nearly ended us all? What bullshit are you spewing now?"

"Listen to him first and then decide," Jung-Won reasons, and that settles it for the time being, her intelligence holding weight.

"We have sixteen votes between all of us, and the basis for execution is by the majority. So, why don't we divide the remaining votes equally?"

"Aren't you just trying to save yourself at this point?" Kyung-Jun questions. "You've already received three. Why not take one for the team?"

"I would gladly do it as a last resort."

Jung-Won steps in before pessimism calls for drastic measures. "If I understand this correctly, you want for us to try splitting our choices in order to force a tie?"

"Yes." Jun-Hee's validation draws both curious and concerned murmurs from the group. "If we do so, it will guarantee that all of us will vote without abstaining, and that one person won't be fixed as a target. It'll bypass all the rules we've learned of so far."

"But, who will be one the one to receive the other half of the votes?"

"I will."

"Are you out of your damn mind?!" Kyung-Jun outstretches his hand, almost as if to convince you otherwise, but withdraws when it occurs to him the setting, opting to clench it at his side instead, the vein on his neck visible even under the dim lights.

"Why?" you press. "You all suspected me from the get-go, did you not?" That stuns everyone into silence, unable to refute. "I won't blame anyone. This is my choice."

[ ᴊɪɴ ᴅᴀ-ʙᴜᴍ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ʜᴀɴ sᴇᴏʟ-ʜᴡᴀ. ]

[ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴏʜ ᴊᴜɴɢ-ᴡᴏɴ. ]

[ ɪᴍ ᴇᴜɴ-ᴄʜᴀɴ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ɴᴀᴍ ʏᴇᴏɴ-ᴡᴏᴏ. ]

[ ɴᴀᴍ ʏᴇᴏɴ-ᴡᴏᴏ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ɪᴍ ᴇᴜɴ-ᴄʜᴀɴ. ]

[ ᴀʜɴ ɴᴀ-ʜᴇᴇ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ʜᴀɴ sᴇᴏʟ-ʜᴡᴀ. ]

[ ᴏʜ ᴊᴜɴɢ-ᴡᴏɴ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ʜᴀɴ sᴇᴏʟ-ʜᴡᴀ. ]

[ ʟᴇᴇ ʏᴏᴏɴ-sᴇᴏ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ʜᴀɴ sᴇᴏʟ-ʜᴡᴀ. ]

[ ʙᴀᴇᴋ ᴇᴜɴ-ʜᴀ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

[ ʜᴀɴ sᴇᴏʟ-ʜᴡᴀ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

[ ᴋɪᴍ ᴅᴏɴɢ-ʜʏᴜɴ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ʜᴀɴ sᴇᴏʟ-ʜᴡᴀ. ]

[ ᴊᴀɴɢ ʜʏᴜɴ-ʜᴏ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

[ ᴄʜᴀ ʏᴜ-ᴊᴜɴ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ sᴏ-ᴍɪ. ]

[ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ɪs ᴀ ᴍɪɴᴜᴛᴇ ʀᴇᴍᴀɪɴɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴠᴏᴛᴇ. ]

[ ᴄʜᴏɪ ᴍɪ-ɴᴀ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ sᴏ-ᴍɪ. ]

[ ᴋɪᴍ sᴏ-ᴍɪ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ʜᴀɴ sᴇᴏʟ-ʜᴡᴀ. ]

[ ᴠᴏᴛɪɴɢ ɪs ɴᴏᴡ ᴄʟᴏsᴇᴅ. ]

Never has the stretch of sixty seconds felt so long as it did waiting for the follow-up announcement.

But, nothing comes.

Tears of happiness and shrieks of excitement ring through as everyone gathers into group hugs, exclaiming words of congratulations, but soon enough, the first flicker of red lights overhead remind you that it is too good to be true.

It is always too good to be true.

[ ᴀs ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ʜᴀɴ sᴇᴏʟ-ʜᴡᴀ ʀᴇᴄᴇɪᴠᴇᴅ ᴛʜᴇ sᴀᴍᴇ ɴᴜᴍʙᴇʀ ᴏғ ᴠᴏᴛᴇs, ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ ʜᴏʟᴅ ᴛʜᴇ sᴇᴄᴏɴᴅ ʀᴏᴜɴᴅ ᴏғ ᴠᴏᴛɪɴɢ ᴡɪᴛʜɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ɴᴇxᴛ ғɪᴠᴇ ᴍɪɴᴜᴛᴇs. ᴛʜᴏsᴇ ᴡʜᴏ ᴅɪᴅ ɴᴏᴛ ᴄʜᴏᴏsᴇ ᴇɪᴛʜᴇʀ ɪɴɪᴛɪᴀʟʟʏ ᴡɪʟʟ ᴠᴏᴛᴇ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ. ɪғ ʙᴏᴛʜ ᴘʟᴀʏᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ sᴛɪʟʟ ᴛɪᴇᴅ ʙʏ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇɴᴅ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ sᴇᴛ ᴛɪᴍᴇ, ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴏɴᴇ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ ᴇxᴇᴄᴜᴛᴇᴅ. ]

Da-Bum's consternation only serves to intensify the collective panic as the lights dim into obscurity. "We can't just all die here!"

The blaring may drown out the screams, but the horrified looks on everyone's faces ceases to fade, guises set deeper by the shadows casted.

Kyung-Jun points a finger at Jun-Hee while taking steps backward, already set to flee. "I knew it! It should have ended with him!"

Eun-Chan's phone nearly drops out of his hold. "Only five of us should vote right? Aside from myself, Yeon-Woo, Mi-Na, and Yu-Jun are also included. Anyone else?"

"Jun-Hee needs to recast his vote too," Da- Bum recalls. "He voted for Jung-Won earlier."

Jun-Hee turns to you, uttering so lowly you can barely tell if he was talking to himself or to you. "That means you already received one less vote..."

“What do we do?!" Mi-Na cries out.

Without hesitation, So-Mi condemns you while looking you dead in the eyes.

"Kim So-Mi!" Jun-Hee shouts angrily, but it's already too late.

She strides toward you and chucks your phone straight into the very bottom of the pool before yanking the school photo out of your hand, your grip having already gone limp long ago.

Tearing it into shreds, she proceeds to fling it upward into the air above, the pieces raining down on you like joss paper they burn for the dead.

"I thought it was odd when she talked about things that didn't exist and dragged us into this mess. It was going to be her anyway. Just do it!"

"This isn't right and you know it!" Jung-Won pushes her away from you, but all you can do is stand stunned, the sirens resounding far too deafeningly in your ears.

"Fuck!" comes Seung-Bin's agitated voice. "Vote for anyone, godammit!"

"All of this happened because of me," Jun-Hee addresses the group. "Choose me... because I'm the Mafia."

Only then do you snap out of your reverie, turning to him with urgency. "What are you doing? Why are you saying something that isn't true!"

He slights you and barrels on, eyes lifeless and fixated aimlessly. Consequent words that fall from his lips are too toneless, too flat, and too run-of-the-mill, for it to be an admission—all it is is a rehearsed cover up act. "I tricked you into giving up your phones so that it would be impossible to win. Any footage left remaining, I also deleted. If we had the time, I could go on and on about the truths I have hidden and the lies I have told. All I wanted was to survive, but killing people to do so...I cant bear it anymore."

"So he confesses in the end." Kyung-Jun scoffs. "It seems I'm right again."

Disregarding your surroundings, you move toward Jun-Hee and clutch at his hand, the warmth from earlier on the rooftop having dissipated. "I can't let you do this!" you sob out, choking over your words before they can even form. "If you're doing this to protect me, then break the promise you made to yourself. Break it over and over again. I'd trade it all, including myself, to keep you, please..."

It finally dawns on you that in exchange for not smashing the promise into a thousand pieces, your heart is the one that's shattered into a million pieces.

Jun-Hee at long last slides his eyes over to yours, and through your haze of tears, you can see him holding his own back from falling.

You hide your hurt, your disappointment, and your heartbreak, and he pretends he doesn't notice.

His eyes trail over every feature of your face, etching it into memory, and you feel your heart strings snap one by one as he looks at you like it's the last time he ever will.

"You promised! That you would be here for as long as I need you. I still need you, Jun-Hee..."

[ ᴄʜᴏɪ ᴍɪ-ɴᴀ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

[ ɪᴍ ᴇᴜɴ-ᴄʜᴀɴ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

Pounding footsteps grow fainter and fainter as the others run to safety, leaving everything else behind thoughtlessly.

[ ɴᴀᴍ ʏᴇᴏɴ-ᴡᴏᴏ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

[ ᴄʜᴀ ʏᴜ-ᴊᴜɴ ʜᴀs ᴠᴏᴛᴇᴅ ғᴏʀ ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ. ]

[ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴏsᴛ ᴠᴏᴛᴇs ʀᴇᴄᴇɪᴠᴇᴅ, ᴋɪᴍ ᴊᴜɴ-ʜᴇᴇ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ ᴇxᴇᴄᴜᴛᴇᴅ. ]

Against the growing distance, you hold on until you can't anymore, until Jun-Hee's fingertips are no longer with reach, slipping away from you.

As you get pulled farther and farther away, the jade stone charm dangles in your peripheral vision and you make a wish.

One last chance at a saving grace.

Please, always come back to me.

When your tears distort the image of Jun-Hee in front of you, all you can feel is the bracelet still wound around your wrist, colored like the red string of fate, tethering you to him.

You cling to the string that feels like it's unwinding, holding on to the millions of fraying threads stretched between you two, keeping it from severing.

Gradually, he wanes from view and all that's left is a carmine inferno in your vision.

Perhaps that harabeoji was right after all.

Luck does only come once in a lifetime.

And that, is the greatest misfortune of all.

𝟬𝟲 : 𝗕𝗟𝗔𝗖𝗞 𝗛𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗧𝗦 | 𝟬𝟴 : 𝗦𝗛𝗢𝗨𝗟𝗗’𝗩𝗘, 𝗖𝗢𝗨𝗟𝗗’𝗩𝗘, 𝗪𝗢𝗨𝗟𝗗’𝗩𝗘