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A/n: Inspired by Reflection by the neighbourhood and some irl events. (highly recommend listening to the song while you read)
I.
The first time Y/n met Wooyoung, it was raining hard enough that the streetlights smeared into long yellow ribbons on the windshield, and she remembers thinking he looked like something out of a movie she hadn't seen the ending of yet. He was leaning against the wall outside the bar, unbothered by the water soaking through his leather jacket, smoking like it was the only appointment he had that night.
"You're gonna catch something," she said, because she didn't know what else to say to a stranger who looked at her like he already knew her.
"Already caught something," he said, and smiled in a way that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Long time ago."
She should have understood that as a warning. Later, she would think about that sentence a hundred different times, turning it over like a stone in her pocket, trying to find the exact moment the warning had been spoken out loud and she'd chosen not to hear it.
But that night, in the rain, it just sounded like mystery. And Y/n had always been drawn to mystery the way moths are drawn to the thing that kills them, not out of stupidity, but out of some deeper, older instinct that mistakes brightness for warmth.
They talked until the bar closed. He had a way of listening that made her feel like the only surviving person in the room, his eyes never leaving her face, like he was trying to memorize something before it disappeared. She didn't know yet that this was simply how Wooyoung loved things, completely, and then not at all, like weather.
He walked her to her car. Didn't try anything. Just stood there in the rain a second too long, like he was deciding something, and said, "I'll probably ruin this."
She laughed. "Ruin what? We just met."
"I know," he said. "I'm just telling you now so you can't say I didn't."
She gave him her number anyway.
II.
For the first few months, it was good. It was the kind of good that made her old friendships look gray in comparison, made every text notification feel like a small electric shock. Wooyoung had this gravity to him, when he was present, fully present, nothing else in the room existed. He'd show up at her apartment at midnight with a record he wanted her to hear, or drive two hours because she mentioned offhand that she missed the ocean, and they'd sit on the hood of his car at 3 a.m. watching the water do the same thing it had done for a thousand years before either of them existed.
"I don't know how to do this halfway," he told her once, tracing the line of her jaw with his thumb like he was reading braille. "I never have."
She believed him. That was the problem- she believed every word Wooyoung ever said, because he said them like he meant them, like each sentence had been carried up from somewhere true and painful, and who was she to doubt a man who bled so openly?
What she didn't understand yet, what it would take years and several versions of herself to understand, was that Wooyoung's intensity wasn't devotion. It was weather. It came and went according to laws that had nothing to do with her, laws written somewhere in his childhood or his blood or wherever it is that people learn to love like a flood, all at once, and then gone, leaving wreckage where the water used to be.
The first time he disappeared for two days, she told herself it was nothing. He came back smelling like a stranger's apartment, eyes red-rimmed, apologetic in that specific way people are when they're not actually sorry, just sorry to be caught looking sorry.
"Where were you," she said. Not really a question. More like the beginning of a habit.
"Around," he said. "I needed space."
"From what?"
"From everything." He said it like it was self-evident, like the world itself was a hand around his throat and she was just another finger. "You wouldn't understand."
She wanted to say: try me. She wanted to say: I have understood things you haven't given me the chance to explain yet. Instead she said nothing, because he looked so tired, so genuinely wrecked, that some old and stupid part of her wanted to hold him instead of hold him accountable.
That was the first brick. She didn't see it being laid. She just noticed, years later, that she was standing inside a wall.
III.
By the six-month mark, the pattern had a shape. He would vanish,a night, two nights, once almost a week, and come back changed in some small, hard-to-name way, like a photograph left too long in the sun. He wouldn't say where he'd been. She stopped asking, because asking led to fights, and fights led to him saying things designed to make the fight her fault.
"You're suffocating me," he told her once, when she'd asked, gently, if he was okay. "You think just because I don't check in every hour that means something's wrong. That's your thing, not mine."
She apologized. She doesn't remember exactly for what. She just remembers the shape of apologizing had started to feel like breathing, automatic, necessary, something her body did without asking her permission.
Her friends noticed before she let herself notice. Hani, her oldest friend, the one who'd known her since they were fourteen and stealing their parents' wine coolers, sat her down over coffee one gray Tuesday and said, "You don't laugh the same anymore."
"That's ridiculous," Y/n said, though something in her chest folded in on itself when she heard it, like a building finally admitting the crack in its foundation.
"You used to laugh with your whole face," Sarah said. "Now it's just—" she gestured vaguely at Y/n's mouth. "That. Just your mouth. Your eyes don't do it anymore."
Y/n didn't have an answer for that. She went home and looked in the mirror for a long time, trying to remember what her own laugh used to look like, and found she genuinely couldn't picture it.
IV.
There was a version of the relationship that existed only in the good nights, and Y/n clung to that version the way a drowning person clings to driftwood— not because it could hold her up forever, but because for a few minutes at a time, it kept her from going under.
On the good nights, Wooyoung would talk about the future like it was a place they were already halfway to. A house somewhere quiet. A dog. Sunday mornings that didn't require recovering from anything. He talked about these things with such conviction that she'd let herself believe, every single time, that this was the version of him that would stay. That the other Wooyoung, the one who vanished, who came home smelling like smoke and someone else's floor, who could look her dead in the eye and lie without his voice even catching, that Wooyoung was the aberration, and this one, the soft one, the one who fell asleep with his hand on her stomach like he was keeping something safe, was the real one.
She didn't understand yet that there is no real one. That people like Wooyoung are made of all their versions at once, and loving him meant loving all of them, including the ones that would eventually break her.
The bad nights got worse before they got more frequent. There was a night in October she still can't think about without her hands going cold, he'd come home late, unsteady, smelling of something she didn't want to name, and when she'd tried to help him to bed he'd shoved her, not hard, but enough. Enough that she'd sat on the bathroom floor afterward with her back against the tub, staring at nothing, waiting for the version of herself that would leave to show up.
She didn't leave. In the morning he cried. Actually cried, the kind of crying that comes from somewhere real, and said, "I don't know who that was. That wasn't me. You have to believe that wasn't me," and she wanted so badly to believe it that she did.
This is the part of the story people who haven't lived it never understand, not why she stayed the first time, but why she kept staying. It wasn't stupidity. It wasn't even really hope, not by the end. It was that leaving required believing two things at once: that she deserved better, and that better existed somewhere reachable. Wooyoung had spent a year quietly convincing her that neither was true.
V.
Winter came in gray and stayed. The apartment they shared by then, his idea, though she paid more of the rent, another detail she filed away and never mentioned, had the particular cold of a place where warmth used to live and had since moved out.
She started sleeping with her phone under her pillow, not for him, but for herself, so the buzz of it against her ear would wake her before her own thoughts did. She started, without really deciding to, rehearsing conversations with people who weren't there, arguments she'd never have the nerve to actually start, apologies she'd never get, versions of Wooyoung who explained himself in ways that made sense.
Her friends stopped calling as much. Not because they stopped caring, she understood later, but because there's only so many times you can watch someone you love disappear into someone else's orbit before it starts to feel like watching, not helping. Hani had said, the last time they really talked, "I love you, but I can't keep doing this. I can't keep sitting here watching you explain away things that don't need explaining."
"That's not fair," Y/n had said.
"No," Hani agreed. "None of this is."
She didn't call Hani again for a long time. It was easier that way. Easier to live inside the small, dim world Wooyoung had built around her, where the only two people who mattered were the two of them, where every problem could be explained by how much they loved each other, too much, too messily, too much like a fire that had forgotten it was supposed to keep people warm instead of burning down the house.
There were nights she'd lie awake next to him, listening to him breathe, and try to locate the exact moment things had gone wrong. She never could. That was the cruelest part. There was no single door she could point to and say, there, that's where I should have turned around. It had all happened gradually, the way a room gets dark — not by someone flipping a switch, but by the sun simply, quietly, going down.
VI.
In March, Wooyoung got worse in a way that finally had a name, even if neither of them said it out loud. The nights away stretched longer. The apologies got shorter, more perfunctory, like he was reciting lines from a script he'd stopped believing in. He lost weight. His hands shook in the mornings in a way that frightened her more than anything he'd ever said.
"You need help," she told him one night, the closest she'd come in months to saying something true.
"I need you to stop looking at me like that," he said.
"Like what?"
"Like I'm something broken."
"Maybe you are," she said, and immediately regretted the honesty, because his face did something she hadn't seen before, not anger, not sadness, just a kind of flat emptiness, like a window with the lights turned off behind it.
"Maybe I am," he agreed, and went out, and didn't come back that night, or the next.
She sat in the apartment those two nights and did something she hadn't let herself do in a long time: she thought about her own life. Not his. Not the relationship. Just hers, what she'd wanted before he walked into it, what she'd stopped wanting somewhere along the way because wanting things for herself had started to feel like a betrayal of him, of them, of whatever it was they were supposed to be building together.
She realized, sitting there in the dark with the streetlight painting its familiar yellow rectangle on the wall, that she couldn't remember the last time she'd made a decision that was only about her. Every choice for over a year had run through a filter: what will this do to Wooyoung . How will Wooyoung feel. Will this make Wooyoung leave. She had disappeared so slowly into the shape of his moods that she'd stopped noticing her own outline.
When he came back the second time, gray-faced and hollow, she didn't ask where he'd been. She just looked at him, really looked, the way you look at something you're about to lose, and felt something inside her go quiet and still, like a held breath finally released.
"I can't keep doing this," she said.
"I know," he said. And for the first time in over a year, he didn't argue.
VII.
The end, when it finally came, wasn't a scene. There was no shouting, no slammed door, none of the cinematic violence she'd almost expected after so long inside something that had felt, for so long, like drowning. It was quiet. It was almost gentle, in the way that amputations are sometimes gentle, necessary, clean, and still unbearably painful.
She packed slowly, over the course of an afternoon, while he sat on the couch and watched her with an expression she couldn't read anymore, because she'd spent so long trying to read him that she'd forgotten how to trust her own interpretations.
"You don't have to go," he said, at one point, quietly, not fighting for her, just noting the fact of her leaving like weather he couldn't control.
"I do, though," she said. "I think I've had to for a while."
He nodded. He didn't cry this time. That, more than anything, told her she was making the right choice, that the tears, all those months, had never really been about her at all. They'd been about him, about his own private grief, whatever it was, and she had spent a year mistaking his grief for love.
At the door, he said the only thing that ever came close to an apology: "I told you I'd ruin this. First night we met. I told you."
"You did," she said.
"Doesn't make it hurt less," he said.
"No," she agreed. "It doesn't."
She left. The hallway outside their apartment smelled like someone else's cooking, ordinary and strange, the smell of a world that had kept turning the entire time she'd been inside that small, dim room with him. She stood in the stairwell for a long moment, waiting for the grief to hit her the way she'd expected it to, the way every song and every story had told her it would.
Instead, what she felt was something closer to relief. Not happiness, she wasn't there yet, wouldn't be for a long time, but the specific, exhausted relief of finally putting down something heavy she'd been carrying so long she'd forgotten it was a choice.
VIII.
Months later, she'd hear his name from someone at a party, a friend of a friend who didn't know the history, who said it lightly, like it was just a name and not a country she'd spent a year and a half living in and finally escaped. She felt her whole body go still for a second, the old reflexes still there under the surface, waiting.
But nothing happened. The room didn't tilt. She didn't reach for her phone.
She thought, sometimes, about the girl she'd been in that apartment, the one who apologized for things that weren't her fault, who mistook being needed for being loved, who stared into black windows at 3 a.m. trying to recognize her own reflection. She didn't hate that girl. She understood her, the way you understand someone who was doing her best with a map that had been drawn wrong from the start.
She started laughing with her whole face again. It took longer than she expected, you don't just switch back on, not after that long in the dark. But it came back, slowly, the way feeling comes back into a limb that's fallen asleep: uncomfortable at first, almost painful, and then, gradually, just like being alive again.
Hani called one Sunday, out of nowhere, and Y/n picked up on the second ring.
"I miss you," Hani said.
"I miss me too," Y/n said, and meant it in a way that surprised her.
She never got an explanation from Wooyoung, not really, not one that made sense of any of it. She stopped needing one. Some people, she came to understand, are not mysteries to be solved. They are simply weather, and the only thing you can do with weather is get out of it before it takes the roof off your life.
She kept the porch light on some nights, out of habit more than anything. Not for him. Just because she liked, now, being able to see her own way home.
Synopsis: A man desperate for normalcy and his wife.
Warning: None, Tis a bit sad tho.
Tags: @uzmacchiato
The kitchen light buzzed faintly overhead, the way it always did for the first minute or so before it settled into its usual hum, and Yunho stood under it with a bag of rice in one hand like it had personally done something to offend him.
"You're doing it wrong already," (Y/n) said. She was leaning against the doorframe between the kitchen and the hall, arms crossed, one hip cocked the way she always stood when she was fighting back a smile and losing.
"I haven't even started," Yunho said.
"Exactly. You're already holding the pot wrong." She laughed, that quick huff of air through her nose. "Rinse it first. God, how many times have I told you that."
"You've never told me that. You've never told me anything about rice in your life. You always just make it while I'm doing something else."
"That's not my fault. You could've watched."
"I was setting the table."
"You were on your phone."
"I was setting the table and on my phone. Multitasking. It's a skill."
"It's not a skill, it's a personality flaw darling.” She was smiling when she said it, and he could hear it in her voice even without turning around.
"Anyway, why am I doing this again? You're standing right there."
"Because you said, and I quote, 'I could make dinner tonight, you never have to lift a finger,' and I would like to see that promise through to its natural conclusion."
"I meant like— I don't know, ordering something. Heating something up. I didn't mean plain rice from scratch, that feels like a whole other tier of promise."
"Too late. You said it. I'm not letting you walk it back now. Can let you weaponise incompetence."
"Hey! I do other housework’s, I just can’t cook. This is a trap. I want it on record that this was a trap."
"Noted. Rinse the rice."
He turned on the tap and dumped the rice into the pot beneath it, watching the water hit the grains and go instantly, cheaply cloudy, a small white storm swirling against the steel, and he stirred it with two fingers, more out of instinct than any real knowledge of what he was doing. The water clouded and he poured it out. Refilled. Poured it out again.
"How many times do I do this?"
"Until it's clear."
"It is clear."
"It's not clear clear."
"(Y/n), it's water with rice in it. It's not going to turn into glass. There's a ceiling on how clear this stuff gets."
"Don't get smart with me, just rinse it again."
He rinsed it again, muttering something under his breath he didn't fully mean her to hear, something about how this was supposedly the easiest food on earth to make and somehow it had more rules than the fucking constitution of Korea, and she laughed, a real laugh this time, short and bright, the kind that used to carry down the hall and made him grin without knowing why until he found her and asked what was funny.
"You say that about everything the first time you do it," she said. "You said pasta had too many rules. You said toast had too many rules."
"Toast does have too many rules. Apparently you can't just put bread in the thing."
"You put it in on the wrong setting once—"
"I put it in on setting six because six seemed like a reasonable, moderate number—"
"It's a toaster, Yunho, not a wine glass, you don't need to be moderate about it—"
"I was being cautious! I didn't want burnt toast!"
"You got burnt toast anyway."
"I got burnt toast anyway, yes, thank you, that's the tragedy of the story, you don't need to keep bringing it up like it's some kind of character flaw—"
"It kind of is."
"You know what, I could just look this up. On my phone. Right now. Like a normal person who needs to know a ratio."
"Go ahead."
"I'm going to."
"I'm not stopping you."
He actually pulled his phone halfway out of his pocket before he stopped, looked at it, and put it back. "No. No, I don't want to look it up. I want you to tell me, that's the whole point, that's why I'm doing this the hard way."
"That's a very strange hill to die on."
"I have several strange hills. This is one of the smaller ones."
He set the pot on the burner, clicked the gas on, and watched the blue ring catch under it with a small huff of ignition. "Okay. Now what."
"Water to rice…..you know this one babe."
"I really don't, actually."
"Yunho."
"I'm serious. What's the ratio. Is it one to one? One to two? I feel like I've seen it written down somewhere, on a bag, at some point in my life."
A pause. "It's, uh, you just cover it. Like, this much over the rice." Her hand made a small vague gesture in the air over an invisible pot, hovering an inch, maybe two, above where the water line ought to be. "You'll feel it."
"I'll feel it? What does that mean? I don't have psychic fingers, I’m not a shaman! I need an actual number."
"It's not a number thing, it's an eyeballing thing. Everyone knows this."
"Everyone does not know this. I am a functioning adult male who has successfully never once in his life made a pot of plain rice, that's how well I know this."
"Well, maybe if you'd paid attention the first fifty thousand times I made it instead of being glued to your phone at the table—"
"Okay, that's not fair, I was working—"
"You were always working. That's not even the point. The point is you're a grown man standing here measuring water like it's a chemistry experiment, when you could've just—"
"I am not measuring, I am trying very hard to not fuck it up, which, forgive me, is extremely difficult when the instructions I'm getting are 'you'll feel it,' like I'm supposed to be divining this out of the ether—"
"Don't be dramatic."
"I'm not being dramatic, I'm being precise, there's a difference, and I would like some precision applied to my dinner, please—"
"You want precision, go buy a rice cooker with the little measuring cup, I'm not a machine, Yunho, I don't walk around with exact water ratios in my head—"
"Can you stop cutting me off mid sentence and you literally just told me you know this recipe by heart, that was the whole—"
"No I can’t and I know it by feel, that's a completely different thing than knowing it by number, God, why do I have to explain this so many—"
"Because the first explanation didn't have any actual information in it!"
"Fine. Fine! You want a number so badly? Two to one. Two cups water for every cup of rice. There. Happy?"
He blinked at her. "Wait, really?"
"I don't know, maybe. Something like that."
"Something like that? You just said it like it was gospel and now it's something like that?"
"It's in the ballpark, Yunho, I'm not going to get court-martialed over half a cup of water."
"This whole time you've been acting like I'm the idiot in this conversation!"
"You are the idiot in this conversation, that's not mutually exclusive with me also not remembering the exact—"
"Okay, so which is it. Is it a feeling thing or a two-to-one thing, because those are very different pieces of advice and you've now given me both—"
"It's both. It starts as a number and then it becomes a feeling, that's how cooking works, that's how basically every skill works, first you learn the rule and then eventually you stop needing it—"
"I don't want to stop needing it, I want to make it through tonight's dinner without needing a search party—"
"You are so— has anyone ever told you you're insufferable when you're hungry?"
"You. Regularly. It's basically your whole personality some nights."
"It is not my whole personality."
"It's a solid forty percent of it."
She laughed despite herself, he could hear it, that short surprised sound she made when he landed something and she hadn't seen it coming, and for a second the whole argument deflated into something warmer, something almost fond, the kind of bickering that was really just two people who liked each other finding an excuse to keep talking.
"Pour the water up to your first knuckle," she said, after a second, in a different tone now, softer. More certain, like she'd finally located the actual memory instead of guessing at its shape. "Flat hand on top of the rice, fingertip touching the surface. Water up to the first line on your finger. That's the trick. My mom taught me that, actually, not the cup measurements, the cup measurements are what you do when you don't trust yourself yet."
"That's insane. That's not a unit of measurement, that's a- like, that's a body part."
"It works."
"It works for you, your fingers are a specific size, what if I have giant weird alien fingers, the ratio's off before I even start—"
"Your fingers are normal, Yunho, oh my God— well…….who knows!"
"Ok now im just insecure about my fingers, why’d you say that and also I'm just saying, this is not a scalable system—"
"It has fed my entire family for two generations, it has fed your 6” ass too, it is extremely scalable, put your hand on the rice."
He did, mostly to make her stop talking, flattening his palm over the surface of the rinsed rice in the pot, and dribbled water in slowly with the other hand, watching it climb the side of his own finger like a tide coming in. It felt absurd. It also, disconcertingly, felt like something his body already half-remembered how to do, some old motion sitting dormant in his hand that only needed the excuse of her voice to wake back up.
"There," she said, when the water reached the first crease of his index finger. "That's it. That's the whole secret."
"That's not a secret, that's witchcraft."
"It's not witchcraft, it's just…..it's a thing you get shown once by somebody who loves you, and then you have it forever. That's all it ever is. Nobody figures this stuff out on their own babe, somebody always shows you."
He didn't say anything to that right away. Something in the sentence sat a little strangely in the air, a weight to it that didn't quite match the size of the conversation they were having, and he glanced up at her without meaning to, some instinct in him trying to read her face for whatever had put that particular note in her voice. She was still leaning against the wall the way she had been the whole time, arms crossed, watching him with an expression he couldn't quite name.
"Okay, well, don't get weird about it," he said, mostly to break whatever this was, going back to the water. "It's rice, not a life lesson."
"Everything's a life lesson if you're annoying enough about it."
"I'm not annoying, I'm thorough."
"You bullied a bag of long-grain rice for ten minutes. Insane, by the way."
"Because the instructions I was given were vibes, (Y/n), you gave me vibes as a cooking method—"
"And it worked, didn't it? Your hand's right there, water's at the line, you're basically done!"
"I don't trust it. I want the number back. Give me the two-to-one thing again, the actual number, im not fingering the thing anymore."
"Ew don’t say it like that, I gave you both, what more do you want from me?"
"I want consistency, I want to be able to do this again next week without needing a seance—"
"Oh, don't be so bothered, it's not that deep, just remember the trick—"
"I won't remember the trick! I don't remember tricks, I remember numbers, that's the whole problem, that's why I'm standing here asking you for the eleventh time Lord—"
"Then write it down instead of yelling at me about it!"
"I'm not yelling, I'm raising my voice slightly because I would like a straight answer just once tonight—"
"It's not—" He stopped himself. Something hot rose fast up the back of his throat, aimed at nothing in particular, and he hated how much he wanted to aim it somewhere anyway. He started again, quieter, jaw tight. "It's not just your kitchen."
She didn't answer that right away. For a second, just a second, something crossed her face that didn't match the argument at all, something older and stiller, and Yunho didn't have time to figure out what it meant before his mother's voice cut through the doorway behind him.
"Yunho? What in the world is all this shouting about?"
He turned around fast, rice water still dripping off his fingers onto the tile. His mother stood in the hall doorway in her cardigan, keys still in one hand like she hadn't decided whether she was staying.
"Mom— hey. Uh sorry." He wiped his hand on the dish towel over his shoulder. "I'm just making rice, and she" — he tipped his head toward the wall where (Y/n) had been leaning the entire time — "won't give me a straight answer on the water. Keeps telling me I'll just feel it. So if you want to yell at her for me, that'd be great, honestly, back me up here."
He was smiling when he said it. He wanted her to laugh.
His mother didn't laugh.
Her face did something slow, and it took him a second too long to understand what he was watching, the way her mouth opened like she meant to say something light and simply couldn't, the way her eyes went from him to the empty stretch of wall beside the doorframe and then stayed there. One hand came up and pressed flat against the doorframe, like she needed it to hold her weight.
"Yunho," she said. His name came out of her cracked clean down the middle.
"What?" He was still smiling. He could feel it starting to slip and he held onto it anyway. "Mom, what? What's wrong?"
She didn't answer him directly. Her gaze stayed fixed on that patch of empty wall, on nothing, on the space where her son's eyes kept flicking back and forth like there was someone standing in it, and slowly her own eyes filled.
"Let her go, honey," she said, so gently it was almost unbearable to hear. "Please. Holding onto this— it's only going to hurt you more. It already is. I can see it."
"I don't, What?— Mom, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm making dinner. I'm just—"
But she was already turning, already retreating back down the hall, one hand pressed briefly to her mouth, and he heard her stop somewhere just past the threshold, heard the small broken sound she didn't want him to hear.
The kitchen went very quiet. The rice water on the burner ticked and settled.
"She's right, you know," (Y/n) said, from the wall.
Her voice had changed too. All the teasing had gone out of it. "You should let me go, Darling."
He laughed. Short, dismissive, a single huff of breath, and shook his head like she'd said something absurd, not even worth the dignity of an answer. He turned back to the stove. Turned the burner up a notch, more out of needing something to do with his hands than any real urgency about the rice. Watched the thin skin of water at the pot's edge begin to shiver toward a boil.
His hand wasn't quite steady on the lid.
"I mean it," she said, quieter now. "I'm not trying to be cruel. I just—"
"Don't." The word came out rougher than he meant. He softened it, ashamed of the edge in it. "Don't do the thing where you agree with her. That's not what tonight is."
"Yunho."
"I said don't."
He kept his eyes on the pot, on the water, which had gone from trembling to a full, steady, indifferent boil, little bubbles cresting up through the rice and popping against the surface, ordinary and small and completely uninterested in the fact that his chest had turned to something hard and hot and difficult to breathe around. He didn't look up. He couldn't, not yet, not while his face was doing the thing it was doing, jaw locked so tight it ached at the hinge, breath coming in short, careful pulls through his nose because if he opened his mouth even a little he wasn't sure what would come out. He blinked hard, fast, twice, and told himself it was the steam.
He reached for the lid again, hand a little steadier this time out of sheer stubbornness, and set it over the pot at an angle to let a little steam escape.
"You always do this," he said, to the pot, to the steam, to whoever was still listening. "You get quiet like this and then you agree with whoever's trying to talk me out of something, like it's a two-against-one thing all of a sudden."
"It's not about being talked out of anything."
"Then what is it about."
She didn't answer right away, and the not-answering sat in the room heavier than anything she could have said.
"Ask me something else," she said finally. "About the rice. Ask me something else about the rice."
"I don't have anything else to ask about the rice, (Y/n), we've covered the rice, the rice is covered, I'm asking about—"
"Yunho."
Something in the way she said his name, flat, final, a door easing shut rather than slammed, made him stop.
He turned the burner down instead of arguing further, watched the boil settle back into something gentler, more patient, and reached up without quite deciding to and rubbed at his eyes with the heel of one hand, hard, the way you do when you're trying to physically press something back down where it came from.
When he finally lifted his eyes back toward the wall, meaning to say something, anything, meaning to ask her one more small pointless question about rice he didn't actually need answered, just to hear her voice keep going a little longer, just to keep the kitchen from going all the way silent.
there was nothing there.
Just the wall. Just the doorframe, pale and ordinary in the overhead light. And on the hook beside it, where it always hung, her apron, the yellow one, faded at the ties, with a small brown burn mark near the hem from the time she'd backed into the oven door laughing at something he'd said and hadn't noticed the singe until an hour later. It hung there the way it always did. Empty. Perfectly still, because there was no draft in the kitchen to move it, because there was no one standing near enough to disturb the air around it.
Yunho stood and looked at it for a long time.
He didn't cry, not really, not in any way that would have looked like crying if someone had walked in, no sound, no shaking shoulders, nothing dramatic enough to have a name. Just a wet, quiet stillness that sat behind his eyes and refused to either fall or go away, his jaw still locked, his breath still coming careful and shallow, like if he managed it precisely enough he could keep the whole thing contained. He reached up, at some point, without deciding to, and touched two fingers to the edge of the apron where it hung on its hook. The fabric was cool. It always was. He didn't know why that surprised him every time.
Behind him, the rice had started to catch faintly at the bottom of the pot, the smell of it just barely turning, that thin scorched-sugar edge that meant it had gone a minute too long, and it was that, more than anything, that finally moved him. He turned the burner off. Lifted the lid, checked it, found it slightly overdone at the bottom but salvageable, mostly fine, the way most things were mostly fine if you caught them close enough to the edge.
He got a bowl down from the cabinet. Spooned some rice into it, more out of habit than hunger, and stood at the counter eating it plain, without anything else on the plate, because he hadn't actually planned this meal beyond the rice itself, the rice had never really been about dinner in the first place, and some part of him had always known that, even while he stood here arguing about water ratios like the stakes were real.
The first bite was better than he expected. A little stuck together near the bottom, a little dry near the top where the lid had let too much steam escape, but underneath all of that, somehow, unmistakably, it tasted like rice was supposed to taste, plain and warm and faintly sweet in the way only plain things can be. He stood there chewing slowly, in no hurry to be anywhere else, and let the quiet of the kitchen settle around him the way it did most nights, once the noise of getting through dinner had died down.
He thought about calling his mother back. He should. He knew, even standing here, that she'd left the house with something sitting wrong in her chest, something she'd probably spend the whole drive home turning over, wondering if she should have said more, wondering if she should have stayed. He thought about picking up his phone right then, dialing her number, telling her he was fine, telling her whatever version of fine he could manage to sound like over the phone. He didn't do it yet. He told himself he'd do it in a minute, once he'd finished eating, once his face had settled back into something that wouldn't give him away the second he said hello.
He carried the bowl to the sink and ran water into it, watching the last few grains spiral toward the drain, and caught himself, for just a second, listening for something, for a comment about how he never scraped the bowl properly before rinsing it, for the particular teasing note her voice took whenever she caught him doing a chore halfway. It didn't come. He hadn't really expected it to. Some nights the kitchen gave him more, some nights less, and there was no telling ahead of time which kind of night he was going to get, only the standing there afterward to find out.
He dried his hands on the towel over his shoulder and stood for a moment with his palms flat on the edge of the counter, head down, the way you stand when you're not quite ready to move on to whatever comes next. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside a car passed, headlights sweeping briefly across the ceiling through the gap in the blinds, and then the kitchen went back to being just the kitchen, quiet, ordinary, a little too well-lit for how late it had gotten.
He looked at the wall again. At the doorframe. At the hook, and the apron on it, hanging exactly where it always hung, not moving, not needing to.
"You didn't answer my question," he said quietly, to the empty kitchen. "About the ratio. I will keep asking you until you do."
Nothing answered him back. He finished the rice standing up, rinsed the bowl, set it in the rack to dry.
Before he turned off the light, he reached out, slowly, like he was asking permission from no one, and let his fingers rest against the apron one more time. Not to take it down. Just to feel it there. Cool, and still, and exactly where it should be.
Then he turned off the kitchen light, and somewhere in the dark hallway between the kitchen and the stairs, so quietly he almost didn't hear himself say it, he said goodnight, the way he did most nights, to no one that anyone else could see, and went up to bed alone.
Character(s): Kang Yeosang, Choi San, Jung Wooyoung.
Synopsis: A livestream, three friends, and a husband walking through the background all night long.
Warnings: Major character death
Tags: @uzmacchiato
The overlay reads STARTING SOON for eleven seconds before Wooyoung climbs over the back of the couch instead of walking around it, lands half on San's lap, and knocks his energy drink into the cushions.
"You're going to break my ribs one day, I swear to God—" San says, mopping up the spill with his sleeve.
"Worth it."
The stream key turns red in the corner of the frame. Three faces, one couch, a living room the camera has recorded for two years now, string lights over a bookshelf, an orange knitted throw blanket, chat scrolling to life on the corner monitor, fast and constant.
xXvoidcat: LETS GEDDID LESGO
Diddler: WE BACK
Tralalerotralalal: San looks like he's regretting every choice that led him to this couch lmao
"Hello everybody, my name is Y/n and today we are playing FNAF— no I’m joking we are shit talking. Yes I copied Markiplier, I’m desperate! welcome back" Y/n says, leaning into the mic.
"It is Thursday, it is late, and San already spilled something, so honestly we're right on schedule— oh shit the volumes too high."
"I didn't spill it, Wooyoung assaulted me. He had the option to be a normal guy and decided— no I don’t think I will and fucking parkour’s his ass into me!"
"I literally just only hugged you! well I guess fuck me for wanting to show affection towards you."
The conversation settles into its usual shape. A bad movie San watched. A conspiracy theory Wooyoung fell into. Whether a hot dog is a sandwich, litigated for the four hundredth time with the same fake seriousness. The camera holds the three of them in frame, steady, unmoving, the couch and the hallway mouth behind it and the kitchen doorway further back, half in shadow.
Twenty minutes in, a figure crosses the back of the frame.
He moves from the hallway toward the laundry room, a basket of clothes against his hip, doesn't look at the camera. He doesn't say anything. He rounds the corner and is gone.
Wooyoung notices first.
"Oh my god, is that Yeosang doing chores?" He twists around, though he's already out of frame.
"Working husband behavior. Truly an inspiration to men everywhere."
"Don't encourage him," Y/n says.
"He'll start expecting praise for basic functioning."
"No, I mean it's making the rest of us look bad," San says. "I haven't done laundry in what— "
"Please don't finish that sentence."
Cns_wth_soda: husband of the year
xXvoidcat: MEANWHILE SAN (ily man)
deep_fried_balls: hi Yeosang👋
Y/nsleftoe: can your husband fight 🗣️
Y/n’s eyes flick, briefly, toward a clock somewhere off to the side of the frame.
"Wait, why isn't he at the hospital?"
Wooyoung looks at her. "What?"
"He's on nights this week. He should've left by now, hang on— " Her voice lifts, aimed past the camera. "Love? Yeo? Aren't you supposed to be at your shift?"
No answer comes. Only the dull thump of a dryer door somewhere out of frame, water starting to run.
"Maybe he can't hear you," San offers.
"He's not deaf, he's twenty feet away."
"Babe, he's doing laundry," Wooyoung says, already reaching for his drink, entirely unbothered. "Let the man fold a shirt in peace."
The moment passes. The talk slides back into its groove. San defending a deranged opinion about pineapple on pizza, Wooyoung threatening to end the friendship over it, the chat splitting evenly and losing its mind either way.
The figure crosses the frame again about ten minutes later. From the kitchen side this time, empty-handed now, moving at an unhurried pace, aimless in the way of someone walking through a room without thinking about it. Eight minutes after that, it passes once more, back toward the hallway.
deep_fried_balls: Your husband really said let me get my steps in
xXvoidcat: he's just vibing
Destieliscannonmfs: pace yourself king
None of the three on the couch remark on it this time. The conversation continues over the top of it, someone in chat asking, again, how Y/n and Yeosang first met, an old bit trotted out every few months.
"It's actually so unserious," she's saying.
"Like there was no meet-cute, I just watched him apologize to a barista for forty-five seconds over a drink he didn't even order, he got handed some other guy’s drink and—"
A phone lights up on the coffee table, buzzing against the wood.
여상❤️ on the screen.
Behind it, past the doorway, a shape moves toward the kitchen with something bundled under one arm.
She laughs, picks it up, angles the screen toward the camera. "Oh my god, he's calling me from the other room, this is so— " She answers, taps the speaker icon. "Babe, you're literally right there, what— "
"Hey." The voice through the speaker is a little tinny, a little compressed. "Sorry— quick thing, we didn't meet at the coffee shop first. That was the second time. We matched on a dating app like a week before that."
She blinks at the phone.
"Huh?" Wooyoung snorts.
"The story you always tell. It's not wrong, it's just, the coffee shop was the second time we met. We'd already been talking for a week before that."
San laughs before she does. "Okay, that's the single most unnecessary phone call I've ever witnessed. You walked past the camera four times and you couldn't just lean in and correct her?"
"You could've just walked over here," she says, still half-laughing, mostly confused. "Why would you call me?"
A pause on the line. Not long. Long enough.
"I'm not home," the voice says. "I'm at the hospital. I've been here since seven."
The living room goes quiet in a specific way. The stream keeps running, chat keeps scrolling, but the three on the couch stop talking at the same moment.
"That's— " Woo-young starts, and doesn't finish.
"That's not funny," the streamer says, her voice smaller now.
"What's not funny?" Genuine confusion in the voice now. "What's going on?"
"You're— Yeosang, you've been walking past the camera for like twenty minutes. Doing laundry. We saw you. Are you fucking pranking us? I’m not that dumb."
xXvoidcat: wait
noodle_soup_enjoyer: hold on what
deep_fried_balls: chat is this a bit
Manewtfgs: im actually getting nervous is this scripted
"I'm not home, I had your podcast on." the voice says again, an edge entering it now. "I have not left this building since seven o'clock. Who's— who did you see?"
San turns fully toward the hallway, as if expecting to catch someone standing there. Nothing. Just the dark mouth of the hallway, a strip of light under the laundry room door. He stands up, still facing the hallway.
"He looked like you,"Wooyoung says, quiet now, all performance gone from his voice. "He was wearing your shirt. The gray matching one we have. He had a laundry basket."
Another silence on the line, longer.
"Turn on your camera," Y/n says. Her hand tightens around the phone. "Right now. Please."
The screen flickers, resolves into shaky, poorly lit footage — fluorescent hospital lighting, a break room, a vending machine humming, a whiteboard with a shift schedule scrawled in dry-erase marker. A tired face, hair pushed back, a lanyard around the neck. Ordinary. Unmistakably real.
"I'm here, baby." the voice says, holding the phone up so the room behind him is visible. "I've been here. What is going on, what did you see?"
"Someone's in the house," Y/n says.
Jesus Christ, someone is inside the home.
"Someone's been in the house this whole time. Fuck."
noodle_soup_enjoyer: CALL 911 CALL 911
xXvoidcat: get out get out get out
deep_fried_balls: im not okay chat im actually not okay
thursdaythings: this cant be real this has to be a bit right, yall fucking larping
voidwalker99: PLEASE this is so obv fake they tryna freak us out
"Woo, call the non-emergency line," Y/n says, steadier now than a moment ago. "Not 911, non-emergency, in case it’s… in case it's nothing, but I want someone coming."
"No, no I’m calling the emergency line.” Wooyoung’s own phone is already out, thumb moving.
"I'm coming home," the voice on speaker says, movement audible now, the scrape of a chair, footsteps, breathing gone quick and shallow. "I'm ten minutes out, maybe less if I run the lights. Get out of the house. All three of you, right now, go outside, wait by the street, do not go looking for anything, do you understand me? Get out. Don’t risk it."
"We're going," she says. "We're going right now, we're just— " She reaches toward the coffee table, toward her keys, and looks at San, who is already up and moving towards the camera setup, reaching for the tripod. "We're ending the stream and we're leaving."
"Good. Go. I'm on my way."
San's thumb is on the button. Chat is a wall of scrolling panic, too fast to read, half of it begging them to leave, half insisting it must be staged.
A voice comes from the mouth of the hallway.
"Where are you all going?"
It carries the same easy, unbothered tone, faintly amused, the tone of someone who thinks the others are overreacting to something small. All three turn at once.
He, IT— is standing in the doorway to the living room, one hand braced against the frame, head tilted, as if genuinely unable to understand why the room has gone so still.
On the phone, tinny and far away and utterly real, the voice cracks into something raw.
"Is he there? Is he there right now? Get out of the house— GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE Y/N—“
The thing in the doorway smiles, Y/n registers how awfully wide that smile is.
The tripod still in San's hand, forgotten, the button never pressed. The camera suddenly swings wide, catches ceiling, catches a lamp, catches the edge of the couch rushing past as all three bolt for the front door.
The frame is nothing but motion now, a smear of motion and colour. a flash of the hallway, someone's shoulder filling the entire screen for half a second. Screaming, more than one voice, none of it forming words anymore. A chair goes over somewhere off-camera with a crack.
xXvoidcat: OH MY GOD
noodle_soup_enjoyer: CALLING NOW CALLING NOW
Imyourlukefathwe: I ALREADY CALLED SOMEONE CALL FBI NOT JUST POLICE JUST FUCKING IRS OR SOME SHIT THEM WE CAN DEAL WITH SHIT LATER
thursdaythings: THATS A SKINWALKER THATS A FUCKING SKINWALKER OH GOD
67botboi: im going to get them swatted it’ll be faster we’ll explain later
Chat keeps pace with the sound, if not the sight, a wall of timestamps and phone numbers and ‘I called, someone else call too.’ The panic in the comments outrunning whatever the footage can still explain. The camera catches something, a doorframe, a wall, the corner of a picture frame, something hard enough that the audio cracks into static. The lens splits. Half the frame goes to fractured light, a kaleidoscope of ceiling and carpet and shadow, but the feed doesn't drop. It holds, wrong and sideways and full of noise, long enough for more screaming to cut through before it goes.
Then the stream ends.
LOCAL NEWS — THREE FOUND DEAD IN [REDACTED] HOME FOLLOWING VIRAL LIVESTREAM
Authorities responding to a swarm of emergency calls generated by viewers of a livestream broadcast Thursday night arrived at the residence shortly after the feed cut out. A SWAT unit, dispatched ahead of local police at the request of several callers, was first on scene.
All three occupants present at the time of the broadcast were found deceased inside the home. Police have not released the causes of death pending autopsy results, though sources close to the investigation describe the scene as "consistent with a violent struggle."
The homeowner's husband, identified as Yeosang [REDACTED], was taken into custody shortly after arriving at the residence, having been in contact with the group by phone throughout the final minutes of the broadcast. He was released after questioning; investigators cited the volume of witnesses, several hundred livestream viewers who watched the events unfold in real time, alongside verified footage of Yeosang on hospital security cameras at the time in question, as central to establishing his account.
The investigation remains ongoing. Police have declined to comment on what, or who, was seen entering the home during the broadcast, stating only that "all available footage is being reviewed as part of the active investigation."
Yeosang [REDACTED] has not made any public statements.
I write (and sometimes draw) anything and everything that intrigues me. I mostly write horror and angst, sometimes fluff. I cannot and will not write NSFW content. If you wanna request any Fic regarding Ateez, Seventeen, BTS— just drop an ask!
Was re-watching Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse and a thought occurred to me.
So there's this piece called "THE ONES WHO WALKED AWAY FROM OMELAS" by Ursula K. Le Guin.
To summerize the narrative, It presents a hypothetical city called OMELAS. In OMELAS, life is seemingly perfect, except there is a price to pay. In order for the city to survive and prosper, one child has to suffer. And I was listening to Miguel O'Hara's monologue about how every Spider-person has to have their canon event right?
So it got me thinking, what if— Spider-people's reality is the equivalent of the city of OMELAS and every spider-person is the child who has to go through perpetual suffering? I mean look at the Spiderman comics! Spider-people have notoriously suffered fate worse than death. And the one time one of them tried to break the Canon (Miguel) , their entire reality was shattered. Basically his OMELAS lost it's quality.
Am I reaching? Probably. Will I stop reaching? Absolutely tf not.
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