012.
they let him in easy.
a key left on the counter. space created in their fridge. his cereal tucked between theirs like it had always been there. it was seamless. comfortable. no one made a big deal out of it. but that didn’t stop the feeling from creeping in. like he’d arrived mid-season to a show everyone else had been watching from the start.
the feeling didn’t come from them. not really.
they were warm. generous in ways they didn’t even realize. seojun always looped him in on plans, even the dumb ones. yejin never let the silence stretch too long—she’d send him a meme, a cat photo, a “you alive?” just casual enough to make it easy to answer. sen… sen had never made him feel like a burden. if anything, sen was the reason he was still standing. but even with all of that, something in him stayed slightly outside of it all.
he moved through the space quietly. he never took more than he gave. never lingered too long in the living room. always wiped down the counter after himself. they never asked him to do any of that. but it felt easier this way. safer.
sometimes he thought about what he used to have— what closeness used to feel like.
noeul. the absence came back in flashes. not always painful—just there. constant. he hadn’t heard from him in over a year. not even a message. no explanation. just a clean break. or maybe not clean. maybe it just looked that way from the outside. he stopped trying to make sense of it a long time ago. but there were still days where he wondered if it had been his fault. if he was too much. or not enough.
on those days, sen always noticed first.
he didn’t ask. he never did.
he just handed him a coffee, turned on something familiar, and sat beside him like it was the most natural thing in the world.
sen had been there through every version of him. the withdrawn one. the angry one. the one who barely spoke. he never needed explanations. he just stayed. and that was the part that mattered most.
but some nights, he’d hear sen, seojun and yejin laughing down the hall, overlapping stories, effortless in the way they fit together—and something inside him would shift. just slightly.
not jealousy. not sadness. just that quiet awareness that he was still learning how to be part of something again. still trying to unlearn what leaving had taught him.
and even surrounded by people who cared, sometimes he still caught himself waiting for the part where they’d stop..
a feather flew in from the window and came into his line of vision, it finally laid on his splayed out palm. and much to his surprise this feather was not perfect, there were barbs missing, the shape disoriented with some contusions in between but it rested on his palm calmly as if it belonged. and sen decided it did.
