Echoes I never tried to become
Summary: You loved San exactly as you were for years. Same loud laugh, same poetry books, same quiet way of listening with your whole body. Never changed a thing. Never chased.
Genre: angst, slow burn, unrequited love, emotional hurt, heartbreak, pining
Warnings: emotional manipulation, gaslighting, descriptions of sobbing/breakdown, internalized self-hatred, themes of being reduced to a replacement
The snow fell heavier now, February 14th, 2026, turning Seoul into a monochrome wound. Each flake felt like a fresh cut against Y/N's skin as she sat on the fire escape, breath fogging in violent little bursts. She couldn't go inside yet. Inside there were walls that had heard her laugh for him, bedsheets that still smelled like his skin, books with his marginalia that once felt like love letters. Out here, the cold was merciless and clean. It hurt exactly as much as it should.
She had loved San with every quiet, bleeding inch of herself since the winter of 2019, it was the first time he looked at her like she really mattered.
Not dramatically. Not with grand gestures or playlists or late-night confessions under neon signs. Just steadily, relentlessly, the way blood keeps moving even when the heart is screaming. She never performed for him. Her laugh had always cracked too loud at the wrong moments. She'd always curled into Murakami novels and cried at the parts about lost love. She'd always tilted her head when someone spoke, because it felt like the only way to catch every fragile word before it fell. That was her. Unchanging, Unapologetic.
And then he lost the woman who wore those same habits like expensive perfume and suddenly Y/N's entire existence became a haunting.
He came to her in pieces after the brakeup, raw, unraveling, beautiful in his ruins. She stitched him back together with soft words and warmer hands, never asking for credit. He started staying longer. Touching her more. Kissing her like drowning men kiss air. And every time his fingers traced her spine, every time he whispered her name into the dark like it was holy, she felt the dangerous bloom of something she hadn't dared name in years.
The night they finally broke the last barrier between them was suffocating. August heat pressing against the windows, cicadas screaming like they knew what was coming. He arrived wrecked from the dance rehearsals, eyes bloodshot, voice cracked. They barely spoke before mouths crashed together, desperate and clawing. Clothes torn away like they were burning. His hands shook as they mapped her body, not with reverence, but with starvation. He moved inside her like he was trying to outtun something chasing him. She arched into every thrust, every bitten-off groan of her name, telling herself this was real. This time it was hers.
After, she curled into the hollow of his chest, skin slick, heart hammering so hard she thought he'd feel it cracking open. His arm draped heavy across her waist. His breathing slowed. And that suspended silence, with fairy lights sleeding gold across the ceiling, she let herself imagine forever. Just once. Just for a heartbeat.
She paid for it in blood.
He kept returning, September, October, the slow poison of almost-love. He'd show up at 2 a.m. with whiskey on his breath and guilt in his eyes, pull her into his lap, bury his face in her neck and inhale like he could still find someone else there. She let him. Every time. Let him fuck her like therapy. Let him leave before dawn without promises. She swallowed the ache until it lived permanetly in her throat, a second heartbeat.
Until the night he finally spoke the truth.
October 31, the dance room smelled of coffee gone cold and heartbreak reheated. The city glittered beyond the glass windows like it didn't know people were bleedong onside. She'd brought food. Sat quietly while he started doing a choreography that looked like apologies set to movements. When he finished with the choreography, she gathered ecery scrap of courage she had left and let the words fall.
"I'm here. San-ah. I'll wait. However long it takes, I'm not leaving you."
He stared at her, really stared. Them something fractured behind his eyes, sharp, ugly, final.
The laugh that came out of him was small and shattered.
"You know what's killing me?" his voice cracked like thin ice. "Watching you become her. Every single day. The laugh that's too loud just like hers. The way you pause on the exact lines in books that used to make us fight at 3 a.m. The head tilt, the way you listen like the world could end and you'd still want my next word. It's torture, Y/N. You're not even trying to hide it anymore. You're wearing her like a fucking costume and every time I look at you I'm stabbed all over again by the woman who actually loved me enough to leave when I couldn't give her everything. You're the knife I can't stop twisting in my own chest."
The air left her lungs in a soundless gasp.
Something inside her ruptured, violent, wet, irreparable. Not just her heart. Her entire sense of self. She felt it tear away in strips. The girl who laughed freely, the one who read voraciously, the one who listened with her whole body. All of it retroactively poisoned. All of it recast as mimicry, as cruetly.
She wanted to scream until glass shattered. Wanted to claw at his face and make him see, really see, that she had been this way since before he knew her name. That her laugh had echoed through empty lecture halls long before he ever told a joke. That she'd dog-eared the same pages in The Savage Detectives when she was nineteen and alone. That she tilted her head because her hearing was shit in one ear from a childhood fever and she'd never told anyone because it felt too vulnerable.
Instead, the scream lodged in her esophagus like broken bone.
She forced her mouth into the shape of understanding. The smile came anyway small, trembling, practised to perfection.
"I get it," she whispered, voice so steadyit terrified her. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to... hurt you more."
His shoulders dropped. Relief, actual relief.
"Thank you. For... getting it. You always do."
She nodded. Stood, collected her bag with hands that didn't shake, how... she didn't know, walked out.
The elevator descent felt eternal. Each floor a fresh level of hell.
Outside, the snow had thickened into a blizzard. She didn't open her umbrella. Let the cold soak through her coat, her sweater, her skin. Walked until the studio lights disappeared behind her, until her teeth chattered so hard they hurt.
In the narrow alley behind a closed cafe, where the CCTV blinked blindly. She finally broke.
She slid down the brick wall, knees hitting slush, coat ruined. The first sob ripped out of her like vomit raw, guttural, animal. She pressed both fists to her mouth but couldn't stop it. Wave after wave of sound she didn't recognise as her own. Chest heaving so violently she thought she might crack a rib. Tears freezing on her lashes, snot running, ugly and unstoppable.
She cried for the girl she'd been, for every year she'd loved him silently. For the nights she'd touch herself whispering his name like prayer. For the morning she woke up believing he might finally choose her. For the moment he looked at her like she was the wound instead of the bandage.
She cried until there was nothing left but hollowed-out echoes.
And even then, the snow kept falling soft, indifferent, burying everything.
The days after February 14th, blurred into something gray and mechanical.
Y/N went to work, she smiled at her clients soft, attentive. The same practised gentleness she'd once given San without thinking. She nodded when they cried, she handed them tissues. She said things like "That must feel really heavy" and "You're allowed to feel everything you're feeling right now," while inside her own chest there was only a cold, echoing vault where feeling used to live.
She stopped listening to music that reminded of him, which was almost everything.
She stopped reading at night because every page felt like evidence against ger. She kept the books he'd touch anyway faced down on the shelf like criminals waiting for sentencing. Sometimes she'd run her thumb along the spine of the one he'd left the most notes in, feel the slight ridge of his handwriting through the cover and hate how much she still wanted to know what the ink said.
February became March, the snow melted into dirty slush, then disappeared. Cherry blossoms came early, obscene in their optimism and she avoided every park, every riverside path, every place where petals might fall like fake apologies.
One Tuesday in late March she found herself standing outside his building.
She hadn't planned it. She's been walking home from the subway after a long shift, looking up at the twenty-third floor like it might give her permission to hurt less.
The doorman recognized her. Gave her the small, sad smile people give when they know too much.
"He's not in," the man said quietly. "Been at the studio most night lately."
Y/N modded, thanked him, turned away before the tears could arrive,
Ske walked until her legs burned, until she reached the old bridge over a small tributary of the Han where college kids used to drink cheap soju and pretend the future wan't terrifying. She sat on the same bench she and San had once shared at 4a.m. after a late-night ramen run. Back when touching knees felt revolutionary.
Tonight the bench was empty except for her.
She pulled her knees up, rested her forehead against them and let herself remember, really remember, without trying to rewrite it. The way he used to hum absentmindedly while cooking eggs in her tiny kitchen.
The way he'd fall asleep mid-sentence sometimes mouth open like a child.
The way he'd once traced the scar on her left knee from a childhood bike crash and asked, very seriously, if it still hurt when it rained.
She wasn't lying now either,
The scar still didn't hurt when it rained,
What hurt was everything else.
A sob clawed its way up her throat smaller this time, more exhausted. She let it come. Let it shake her shoulders once, twice, then die quietly against her sleeve.
She stayed on the bench until the city lights began to thin and the first commuters appeared, heads down, earbuds in, already carrying tomorrow's weight.
When she finally stood her legs were numb. She didn't cry again on the walk home.
At her door she paused, key in hand. Looked at the chipped green paint she'd always meant to fix.
She didn't fix it that night either.
Instead she went inside, kicked off her shoes, walked straight to the bookshelf.
One by one, she pulled down the books he'd touched.
Murakami, Rilke, the poetry collection with the cracked spine, the essay anthology where he'd written this line saved me once in the margin of page 147.
She carried them to the kitchen table. Sat. Opened the first one.
She didn't read his notes.
She read her own underlines instead, the ones she'd made years before she ever met him. Faint pencil, slightly slanted because she always wrote with the notebook on her thigh. Sentences she'd chosen when she was nineteen and lonely and convinced no one would ever stay.
She read them like they were hers again.
When she finished the last book, dawn was bleeding pink through the blinds.
Her eyes stung, her throat was raw. But something small and stubborn flickered behind her ribs, not hope, not yet. Just recognition.
She had loved him with evetything she had.
She had never once tried to be anyone else.
And maybe... maybe, that was enough proof that she had been real.
She closed the last book. Stood. Carried them back to the self.
This time she turned them spine-out, no more hiding the titles.
She didn't know if he would ever see it.
She didn't know if she wanted him to.
But she left the light on in the living room anyway.
Just in case the city ever decided to be kind again.
