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“Only You (And you Alone)”

tw’s// thriller, angst, teacher!au, psych-teacher!momo x literature-teacher!jihyo, mental health decline, car crash/ depictions of accidents, slightl violence, trying a new writing style hope u enjoy!//

Hirai Momo was born in Kyoto, to a family that never had much, but never let their daughters feel the weight of that. Her parents worked the kind of hours that left marks.. not bruises, but something quieter. The permanent fatigue behind her father's eyes when he came home at night. The way her mother's hands had aged twenty years ahead of the rest of her. The particular silence of people who have decided not to complain. Momo watched all of it.

She watched and she absorbed and somewhere in the process of absorbing, she developed a hunger she couldn't name for a long time. Not for money or comfort or any of the things her parents were sacrificing themselves to give her. Something stranger. She wanted to understand why.

Why people suffered quietly. Why they lied to the people they loved. Why some broke under pressure and others walked through fire and came out the other side looking almost untouched.

While other children dreamed of fame, of stadiums and crowds, Momo read. Novels, essays, academic journals she was far too young to fully comprehend, she read them anyway, turning the unfamiliar words over in her mouth like stones, wearing them smooth. The more she learned about the human mind, the more she needed to know. It was less like a passion and more like a compulsion. Even then.

She excelled in school the way serious, quiet children do, not by being the loudest or the most liked, but by being relentless. While her classmates celebrated exam results going out to drink, Momo was already studying for the next one. She didn't think of it as sacrifice. It was simply the only thing that made sense to her.

At the age of twenty-one, she completed a master's degree in Psychology. Her professors were surprised. She was not.

She kept going.

Six years of research, publications, late nights that blurred into early mornings. At twenty-seven, she earned her doctorate in Forensic Psychology. She had traveled further from that Kyoto kitchen table than she could have mapped as a child, and she knew it, and she was proud of it.

And yet, there was a feeling she couldn't quite place. Like arriving at a destination and discovering it was only a waypoint. Like standing in a room she'd spent years working toward and finding that something in the architecture was incomplete a door that opened onto a wall, a window facing nothing. She didn't tell anyone. She wasn't sure she had the language for it.

---

The call came on a Tuesday afternoon. An unknown number. A voice she didn't recognize offering her a position at a prestigious academy in Seoul, full faculty, her own courses, competitive salary. They had reviewed her portfolio, they said. They wanted her.

Momo spent three days convinced it was a mistake. Then she spent two weeks unable to sleep, turning the offer over and over in the dark. Leaving Japan meant leaving everything familiar. Her city, her language, the specific comfort of streets she had always known. Her family.

But something in her recognized the moment for what it was. Some doors only open once. She accepted.

At twenty-eight, she moved to South Korea and joined the faculty as a Psychology professor. She had worried, in abstract, that the transition would be difficult, it was a new country after all.. a new language she had studied but never lived in, colleagues who didn't know her.

Yet she loved it from the first week.

She loved the students most of all. The way they argued in her classroom, the way a well-placed question could visibly rearrange something behind their eyes. She loved the work of it, the daily construction of something she hoped would outlast the semester. For the first time in years, the incomplete feeling faded.

She had no way of knowing she was already walking toward something. That Seoul was not the destination either. That it was only the place where everything would begin to come apart.

---

Her colleagues described her as brilliant. Her students called her demanding, then inspiring, then both at once (which to her, was the highest compliment, she thought, that a teacher could receive.) What they didn't see was the cost of it.

Momo had always had a tendency to fixate on what she couldn't explain. It was the engine of her academic success and the source of her private exhaustion. She could not let a question rest. She could not choose not to understand something. The compulsion that had driven her through degrees and dissertations and publications didn't stop running just because the workday ended. It followed her home. It followed her to bed.

In Seoul, it grew louder.

There were nights she stayed up until four in the morning reading research papers she had no professional reason to read, simply because something had snagged in her mind and wouldn't release. There were evenings she stood at her apartment window watching the city breathe below her, the lights running gold and white across the Han River, and she would catch herself thinking: “I am content. I am exactly where I should be.”

And then the thought that followed it, quieter: “Aren't I?“

She always answered yes. She was almost always sure she believed it.

—

The literary and arts club had been dormant for three years before the new semester began. When the administration announced it was reopening, with expanded funding, new faculty advisors, the news moved through the building with the particular energy of something people had been waiting for without knowing it.

The organizational meeting was held on a Thursday afternoon in late September. Rain against the windows. Coffee gone cold on the conference table. Six faculty members, two administrators, and a slideshow that kept losing the projector connection.

That was where Momo met Park Jihyo.

She was the other advisor. Art department, she said, when they went around introducing themselves. She taught painting and contemporary visual culture and had the kind of stillness about her that Momo found immediately disorienting, not blankness, not reserve, but genuine ease. Like she'd made peace with taking up space.

Momo noticed she'd made an error in her projected event calendar about thirty seconds after the presentation began. She waited until Jihyo had moved to the next slide.

Then she said, clearly enough for the room to hear, "The spring symposium date conflicts with the national arts council review. You'll need to move it." Jihyo looked at her. The expression on her face was unreadable for exactly one second, and then it shifted into something that was either amusement or challenge, Momo couldn't tell yet.

"That's correct," Jihyo said. "Thank you, Miss Hirai. I'll update it."

After the meeting, in the hallway, while they were gathering their things: "You could have told me afterward," Jihyo said. "Instead of in front of everyone."

"It needed to be corrected."

"That's a very psychologist answer."

"Is that an insult?"

Jihyo considered it with what seemed like genuine thoughtfulness. "No," she said finally. "Just an observation."

She smiled then not politely, but like something had genuinely pleased her, and walked toward the elevator, and Momo stood in the hallway for a moment longer than was necessary before following.

What came next was not sudden. That was the thing she would return to, later, when she was trying to make sense of it. It wasn't a lightning strike. It was weather — the slow accumulation of fronts, pressure building over weeks.

Coffee, first. Comparing syllabi, then drifting into actual conversation. Then longer conversations. Dinners that lasted until the restaurant wanted them to leave. Messages at midnight, at one in the morning, the specific kind of message you only send when you've stopped editing yourself.

Momo had been in love before, or something close enough to it. She knew the vocabulary. What she wasn't prepared for was the way Jihyo made her feel still.

She was a person who had never been still a day in her life. Her mind ran constant commentary, analysis, catalogued behavior, searched for patterns, questioned conclusions. Around Jihyo, it quieted. Not into numbness, but into something more like attention. Like her whole self was pointed in one direction and content to be there. She found the sensation faintly terrifying and entirely welcome.

Jihyo, for her part, seemed to find Momo's relentlessness fascinating rather than exhausting. She would listen to Momo's lectures about cognition and behavioral theory and then cut through to the center of whatever Momo was actually trying to say with one question, unhurried, perfectly aimed. She had the artist's ability to sit inside ambiguity without trying to resolve it. Where Momo needed answers, Jihyo needed form.. the shape of something, even if the interior of it was unknown.

They were different in ways that should have made closeness difficult, yet It made it feel inevitable instead.

Months into it, on an ordinary evening in February, Momo watched Jihyo sleep on her couch with the particular feeling of someone who has stopped being surprised by happiness and started being afraid of it. This is too good, said the clinical part of her mind. Something this consistent, this undisturbed, prepare for disruption.

She told the clinical part of her mind to be quiet. It listened. For a while.

Until that night.

—

The cold that February had been extraordinary. Not weather-cold but the other kind, the kind that seeps through walls and settles at the base of the spine and makes the world feel contracted, reduced. Momo had taken to keeping the lights on longer than necessary. She hadn't examined why.

They were sitting in her kitchen late on a Wednesday. Rain again, Seoul had been rainy all winter, a persistent grey softness over the city. The coffee was hot, and Jihyo was in the middle of a story about a student who had submitted an abstract expressionist painting of what she claimed was the concept of waiting, and Momo was laughing, and everything was ordinary.

And then it wasn't.

It happened without transition. Jihyo stopped mid-sentence. Not trailing off, not distracted — stopped, like something had been cut. She was looking at a point behind Momo's left shoulder, and her face had changed entirely. The ease was gone. Something had replaced it that Momo recognized from clinical literature but had never seen on someone she loved.

"Jihyo?"

Nothing. Her eyes didn't move.

"Hey." Momo reached across the table and touched her hand. "What is it?"

Jihyo blinked. Once. The kind of slow blink that looks like someone returning from a very long distance.

"Don't you feel them?" she said. Her voice was different. Lower, strained, like the words were effortful.

"Feel what?"

Jihyo swallowed. She looked at Momo then — really looked, the way she always did, that full attention — but it was wrong somehow. Tilted. "Them," she said.

"Who?"

"The ones who are watching."

The kitchen was exactly as it had been thirty seconds ago. Same light. Same rain against the glass. Same coffee going lukewarm between Momo's hands. And yet something had shifted in the quality of the air in a way that Momo could not have quantified and therefore could not acknowledge.

"Jihyo, baby." She kept her voice measured— a voice she knew how to use, a professional voice, and she hated herself a little for reaching for it now. "Talk to me. What's happening?"

What happened next was fast. Jihyo stood so suddenly that her chair skidded back and her arm swept across the table and the mug went over, and the coffee —hot, still very hot— spread across the surface and over the edge and across Momo's arm, and the burn was immediate and real, a sharp white pain that Momo absorbed in silence because Jihyo was standing with both hands pressed over her mouth like she was holding something in, and her eyes were wet, and she was shaking.

"Don't call me that," she said. The words came out strange, compressed. "Don't say it like I'm—"

"Jihyo, you're not—"

"I'm not crazy."

The words cracked in the middle. Her hands came down from her mouth and she was crying now, quietly, the way people cry when they've been practicing not crying for a long time.

"I know that," Momo said.

"You don't believe me."

"I believe that you're frightened. Tell me what's happening."

"I've been trying to—" Jihyo stopped. Started again. "They follow me. I can feel them. I've been able to feel them for months and I didn't say anything because I knew— I knew how it would sound—"

"Who follows you?"

"I don't know." A breath, ragged. "I don't know who they are. I just know they're there."

Momo's arm was still burning. She would have a scar. Months later, she would trace it sometimes without meaning to. "We'll figure this out," Momo said. "We'll figure it out together. Whatever it is."

Jihyo looked at her, and Momo felt the look before she understood it. There are looks that lodge themselves somewhere behind the sternum and stay there. This was one of them. Jihyo's eyes were full of something that was not quite grief and not quite apology.

"You'll see them eventually," she said quietly.

"Huh?"

"I've been watching it happen to people. There's a point where you start to see, and once you—" She shook her head. "Momo. When you understand, it'll already be too late."

"Jihyo—"

"*It'll already be too late to run.*"

Then she was moving. Past the table, past Momo, through the kitchen doorway, and Momo scrambled after her —a chair hit the floor, she didn't look back— calling her name, and Jihyo had already reached the front door and wrenched it open, and the cold came in like a wall, that extraordinary February cold, and Jihyo was already on the stairs, and Momo was behind her still calling her name.

They came out onto the street.

It was past midnight. The road was quiet. Momo remembered, afterward, the particular quality of the silence, no wind, no voices, the rain finally stopped, the street slick and black and empty.

She remembered seeing headlights, very far away.

She remembered the space between one breath and the next.

The sound of impact.

The way the light moved.

She closed her eyes, praying, hoping she was okay. She didn’t wanna look, the thud was too graphic.

After a few seconds and an audible groan from Jihyo, she opened her eyes.

And then she was standing in the street, and the road was empty, and Jihyo was not there, and no truck was there, and the road was blank and undisturbed in every direction, and Momo stood in the middle of it in her socks —she had forgotten her shoes— and the silence was total.

She stood there for a long time.

Waiting for something to be real.

---

The worst part was not watching her disappear. It was that the world decided she had never existed.

---

It should have been simple to find her. Momo kept telling herself that in the first hours, then the first days: there would be an explanation. Jihyo had run, had taken a cab, had gone to a friend's apartment. There would be a phone call in the morning. There would be a reasonable answer.

There was no phone call.

Momo went to the administration office on Friday morning, before most of the building had arrived, and asked for contact information for Park Jihyo in the art department.

The woman at the desk looked at her pleasantly. "Can you spell the name?"

She did. Twice.

The woman looked at her screen for a long time. "I'm not finding anyone by that name."

"She's been here since the fall semester. Art department faculty, she teaches—"

"I'm not finding a record. Is it possible you have the department wrong?"

It was not possible. But Momo thanked her and walked away and sat in her car in the parking structure for forty-five minutes before she was able to drive.

She went through every channel she could access legitimately. HR records, faculty directories, the course catalog from the past two semesters. She searched Jihyo's name in every combination she could construct. She found nothing, and then she found nothing again, and then she went back and looked more carefully and still found nothing.

She filed an access request for the administrative databases. When it was pending too long, she escalated it. When that moved too slowly, she stopped waiting for permission.

It took her eleven days to convince a graduate student she vaguely knew to loan her his access credentials. She told herself it was a temporary measure.

She searched for three hours and found nothing.

There was no Park Jihyo. No employment contract, no tax filing, no building access card, no email address in the faculty system, no class rosters. She searched the public records databases she had clearance to access through her old forensic psychology consulting work. Nothing. Not even a registration of the name at this address, in this city, in any capacity that left a bureaucratic trace.

She hired a private investigator who took her money and came back two weeks later with an apologetic expression and a folder that contained nothing she hadn't already found herself.

Her colleagues, when she asked, looked at her with an expression she recognized and hated. The careful, neutral look of people deciding how much concern to show. Park Jihyo? In the art department? Heads shaking slowly. I don't think I know that name. Are you sleeping enough, Momo? You look tired.

She stopped asking her colleagues.

She paid someone she shouldn't have paid to get her further into records she shouldn't have been in. She reviewed the security camera footage from the building for the past six months, looking for Jihyo's face.

The footage from September through February showed nothing she was looking for.

She kept watching it anyway.

---

The mug was still in her apartment. She had not touched it — had moved around the kitchen in a wide arc to avoid it, had not washed the coffee stain from the floor, had left the chair where it had fallen that night. Evidence. She kept reminding herself that it was evidence. That the broken piece of ceramic near the refrigerator proved that something had happened in this room. That she had not invented it.

The scar on her arm proved it too.

She pressed her thumb to it sometimes, in faculty meetings, under the table where no one could see. Reminding herself: this is real. This happened to you. You did not invent this.

She slept badly for months, then worse, then hardly at all. She lost six kilograms without intending to. She caught herself checking the space behind her shoulder in elevators, in empty hallways, in her own apartment at three in the morning when the city was quiet and the shadows at the edge of her vision seemed to move.

She made an appointment with a psychiatrist and cancelled it.

She made it again and sat in the waiting room for twenty-five minutes reading a magazine she didn't absorb a word of, and then walked out.

She went back to the clinic the following Tuesday and stood outside the glass doors for almost an hour, watching the people who went in and out, and thought about what it would mean to open that door. What she was confirming if she walked through it.

She went home.

She taught her classes. She prepared her lectures with the same care she always had. Her students noticed nothing. Or if they did, they didn't say so.

Teaching was the only thing that held the center of her. When she was in the classroom, the investigation could wait, the question could wait, the arithmetic of the impossible could wait. For fifty minutes at a time, she was only who she had always been: a woman who understood things and was good at helping others understand them.

She came home afterward and went back to the evidence and the open tabs and the growing document on her laptop that she titled, with grim precision, WHAT I KNOW.

What she knew filled eleven pages and proved nothing.

What she knew was that she had met a woman and loved her and lost her and could not find a single official record that she had ever existed.

What she knew was that her own mind was the only archive.

And what she knew, quietly, in the part of herself that was most honest and most afraid, was that Jihyo had been right.

Something was there. Had been there. Maybe for longer than she'd realized.

She could feel it at the edge of things now. The slight wrongness of a room she'd just entered. The sensation of gaze on the back of her neck in empty spaces. The way a silence could turn, in certain hours, from absence into presence.

She understood, with the clarity of someone who has spent her life studying the mind, that this could be explained. Grief disrupts cognition. Extreme stress produces paranoid ideation in otherwise healthy individuals. She had spent two decades learning that the brain's distortions are not signs of weakness — they are the mind trying to survive.

She understood all of this.

And she was no longer sure it explained what was happening to her.

---

She was in her office on a Thursday night in late spring, the building mostly empty, the city below running its lights across the dark, when she stopped moving entirely. Stopped typing. Stopped thinking.

She sat very still, the way she had learned to sit when something was approaching that she needed to receive without flinching.

She looked at the document on her screen.

She looked at the reflection of the room in the darkened window behind her monitor.

There was a question she had been refusing to ask. She had been refusing it for months, building her alternative explanations around it the way construction workers board up a sinkhole, putting barriers around the perimeter and hoping no one falls in.

The question was not: did any of this happen?

The question was: if it happened, what the fuck does that mean?

If Jihyo had existed —and she had, Momo knew it in the layered wordless way that people know what is true— then her disappearance was not a disappearance in any ordinary sense. Records don't simply not exist. Entire people don't simply not exist. What she had found, at the end of months of searching, was not absence.

It was erasure.

And you don't erase something unless it's been there.

Which meant Jihyo had been there.

Which meant what Jihyo said, that night in the kitchen with her hands shaking and her voice cracked down the middle, might have been—

Momo closed the laptop.

She put her hands flat on the desk.

Outside, the city was vivid and indifferent and very far below her, and the room was reflected in the window dark, and she sat in it, and she tried very hard not to look at the place to the left of her own reflection, at the edge of the glass, where the shadow was doing something that shadows didn't do.

She tried very hard not to look.

She looked.

---

She had spent her entire life learning how the mind breaks down.

She had never once considered that the mind might be the last thing to know.

#Spotify #wlw #gxg #twice x reader #kpop #lesbian #momo x fem reader #momo x jihyo #mohyo #twice momo #momo gxg #jihyo angst #angst #park jihyo #hirai momo #momo twice #hirai momo angst #twice momo angst #twice jihyo angst

coffee--spill

When u get this, list 5 songs u like to listen to, publish. then, send this ask to 10 of your favorite followers

I'M SO SCARED OF LIKING MUSIC IDK WHY STOP

Um, my favourite songs change often so the so no songs I like to listen to have basically no correlation to each other honestly

Edit: lowk wanna edit this and just put songs from Epic.

4-f4ll3n-4ng3l

Uhm uhmm @yumemirui @loversbruises @el1as1sd3ad @utt3rly-s3lfish @deusben @acicadahumsitshymn @isteelthestarsfromthenight idk anyone else

el1as1sd3ad

Fuck okay thats hard…

Aight now tags… @loversbruises @yumemirui @yanshiho @y0ur-valent1ne @nagis-hopes @jirai-haruhi @divineasteria @inf3cted-c0rpse @illrabidraccoon @utt3rly-s3lfish @princespousal @filthprince ( its more than 10 but leave me alone idc )

yanshiho

EEK HAPPY TO BE ONE OF THE FAVS !!

(IGNORE HOW THE EMBEDS ARENT WORKING, IM RLLY RLLY STUPID AND CANT FIGURE IT OUT SINC EI DONT USE SPOTIFY) AND AS FOR FOLLOWERS THATS HARDD @mochachaniscooked @gogols-venom @y0ur-g0r3-wh0r3 @yourlocaldumbmutt @fawnedupon @wonderkat-jirai @hearts4pips @randomfriendlyloser @stqrrin + MORE ITS HARD TO CHOOSEEE

randomfriendlyloser

thiS just made my screen LAG SO HARD is my phone getting too old what the shit

@agepoyolo @sleepymeowzidol @mochachaniscooked @sillyseob @timeangel @spookthelilguy @nico-flo @nolabelspart03 @lycorislacerations @too-deep-for-moss @landmine-dancer @ourscarygirl @coherent-thoughts-needed @96princessxx @indignant-isaac @npddove @yunyunkina @reverievelvet @fayonette @mochiifrappe @ny4n-s0d4 @themorbiddarling @actuallyvicfromptv @remuswilleatyourfetus @empress-azrae1 @afterdarkafternight @written-by-music @hrrrt-stops-beating1128 @st4rrl1ghtwastaken @swirled-with-ink @psypher-17 @mocha-minnie @npddove @kitcat-is-an-aro-ace @niitroglycerin @about-that-teenie-girl2 @incandescentlamp @lotusangel222 @pingu-stelle @weeping-begonia2 @tiredkibty @aplatonickevinspencer @cvitelandmine @imissmyfictionalwives @y0ziimisii @fungusing-myself @wizardingdaughterofathena @nito-not-found