I made a master list so it would be easier to read 🫶
summary: felix is your best friend morgan’s boyfriend: soft-spoken, warm, hers. he’s supposed to be off-limits, but he’s the one in your bed at 3am, whispering “stay” like you’re the mistake he’ll make twice.
Synopsis: Hae has a nightmare and looks for comfort by her Papa
Warnings: Mentions of nightmares, Hae talks about a scary shadow, nothing really described much mostly it's just cute.
A/n: Hii, so I really didn't want to make this two parts as well, but I wanted this to be a special chapter for our new Papa. I hope you enjoy this chapter <3
The entire house was quiet, all the boys had gone to bed hours ago. The only sound in the hallway was the soft hum of night lights and the faint ticking of a clock somewhere far away. In her room, Hae jolted awake. Her little body trembling, her breaths shaky and uneven.
Her nightmare still clung to her like cold fingers. She hugged Han quokka close to her chest, her small hands trembling around the plushie. Tears rolled silently down her cheeks as she looked around her room.
The walls felt too big, the shadows too dark and the silence too loud.
She whimpered, then quickly covered her mouth, afraid that even the smallest noise might bring back what she saw in her dream. After a few seconds, she slid out of bed, her bare feet quietly touching the floor.
She needed someone, someone warm and someone safe. So without even thinking, her tiny legs carried her into the hallway. Hae rubbed at her eyes with one fist, Han Quokka tucked close with the other.
She walked past Jisung’s room, past Minho’s, past Chan’s.
She was searching for one person.
“Papa…” she whispered softly to herself, testing the word, as if she wasn’t sure she was allowed to use it yet.
She finally recognized Hyunjin’s door because he had put a tiny Jinniret sticker on the frame for her. She gently reached up and pushed the door open.
Hyunjin was asleep, hair spread over his pillow, breathing slow and peaceful.
Hae padded toward him, eyes glossy with tears, voice barely above a whisper. “Papa…? Papa, can I sleep with you…?”
Hyunjin stirred, his eyebrows twitching at the sound of her voice. He blinked awake, squinting into the darkness until he saw her tiny silhouette. “Hae…?” he whispered sleepily, voice low and raspy from just waking up. “What’s wrong, sweet girl…?”
Hae sniffled, wiping her eyes. “Papa… can I sleep with you? Please?”
The word didn’t register in his sleepy brain yet, what he understood immediately, however, was that she was scared.
He lifted his blanket open without hesitation, “come here, sweetheart,” he murmured. “I’ve got you.”
Hae climbed into his bed, crawling into his arms like it was the safest place she knew. Hyunjin gently tugged the blanket over both of them, one arm wrapping securely around her back, the other hand smoothing her hair. “Nightmare?” he whispered.
Hae nodded against his chest, “it was scary… really scary…”
Hyunjin pressed a soft kiss to the top of her head. “You’re safe now,” he whispered, voice warm and soft and full of love. “I’m right here. No one can hurt you.”
Her tiny fingers clung to his shirt, relaxing only when she felt his warmth fully surround her. Soon, her breathing steadied. Hyunjin’s breathing matched hers and within minutes, they both drifted peacefully back to sleep. Hae curled against him, Hyunjin holding her protectively through the night.
---
Sunlight peeked through the curtains, casting warm gold across the room. Hyunjin slowly woke, feeling something warm on his chest. He looked down and saw Hae curled against him, Han Quokka tucked safely between them.
His heart melted instantly, but then something clicked in his memory. Her whisper from the night before. “Papa… can I sleep with you?”
His eyes widened. He lay there frozen for a moment, then slowly, a smile spread across his face soft, warm and emotional. “She called me Papa…” he whispered to himself.
His heart felt too full, his eyes stinging with happy tears. He gently hugged Hae closer, whispering into her messy hair. “Thank you, Hae… I’ll be the best Papa for you.”
He kissed her forehead softly and held her a little tighter as she continued sleeping peacefully. Hyunjin finally had his nickname and it was perfect.
---
Chan woke earlier than usual, deciding he wanted a little extra time to help Hae get dressed before breakfast. He walked quietly to her room, smiling at the thought of how excited she always was in the mornings.
He gently knocked but there was no response. He opened the door quietly and froze.
Her bed was empty.
The blanket was pushed aside, her pillow flattened from where she had slept earlier, but the room itself was silent.
Chan’s chest tightened.
Okay… don’t panic.
She’s probably in the bathroom.
Or maybe already with one of the guys…
He checked the bathroom.
Empty.
His heartbeat picked up a little. “Where did she go…?”
He moved down the hallway, checking the doors one by one.
Minho’s room? No Hae.
Jisung’s? No Hae.
Jeongin’s? No Hae.
Felix’s? Not here.
Seungmin’s? Not here either.
Changbin’s? Empty too.
The last door was Hyunjin’s.
Chan pushed it open, already starting to ask “Hyunjin, have you se—”
He stopped mid-sentence and smiled.
There, curled up under Hyunjin’s blankets, was a tiny Hae tucked safely into Hyunjin’s arms. Her cheek was pressed against his chest, one hand clutching Han quokka, the other loosely gripping Hyunjin’s shirt.
Hyunjin blinked sleepily, hair a complete fluffy mess, eyes barely open. He tightened his arm around Hae protectively the moment the door opened.
Hae lifted her head a little, eyes puffy with sleep. “Dad…?” she whispered, voice small and soft. “You okay…?”
Chan melted instantly.
The worry in her little voice, the sleepy expression, the way she clung to Hyunjin. He stepped further into the room, smiling warmly. “I’m okay, sweetheart. I was just looking for you,” he said gently. “Breakfast will be ready soon and I wanted to help you get dressed.”
Hae rubbed one eye with her fist, “sorry… I had a nightmare…” She leaned back against Hyunjin.
“So I went to Papa’s room… ’cause I was scared. Papa let me sleep here. Is that okay…?”
Chan’s grin softened even further. Not only was she safe, she had given Hyunjin his nickname and said it so casually, so trustingly, like she’d been using it forever.
“That’s more than okay,” Chan said warmly. “I’m so sorry you had a nightmare, but I’m really glad Papa was here to protect you.”
Hyunjin, now officially awake, couldn’t stop the proud, soft smile blooming across his face. Hae hugged him a little closer as if demonstrating, “he kept me safe from the bad dream.”
Chan nodded, “that’s what we’re all here for. To keep you safe.” Then he looked at Hyunjin, “Hyunjin, could you get her dressed and ready for breakfast? She clearly feels safe with you this morning.”
Hyunjin nodded immediately, “of course,” he murmured. “I’ve got her.”
He sat up, keeping Hae balanced on his lap. She wrapped her arms around his neck without hesitation and he lifted her effortlessly.
Hae talked nonstop as Hyunjin carried her, still sleepy and warm. “And Papa… the scary shadow in my dream tried to grab me… but when I came here… it went away… and I wasn’t scared anymore…”
Hyunjin listened with his whole heart. “Good,” he whispered, kissing her head gently. “I’ll always chase the bad dreams away. Always.”
Hae giggled softly, leaning into him.
When they reached her room, Hyunjin set her gently on the bed and knelt in front of her. “Let’s pick out something cute,” he said softly. Hae smiled and reached for his hand, all the fear from the nightmare gone because she knew Papa had her.
---
Hyunjin came into the dining room carrying Hae, her arms wrapped around his neck, her cheek still pressed against his shoulder from sleepiness.
The boys all turned to look, Chan, Felix, Changbin, Minho, Jisung, Seungmin, and Jeongin and every single one of them melted at the sight. They knew Hyunjin never looked this proud in the morning. He practically glowed.
Hae sat beside Felix and across from Hyunjin, her little legs swinging under the table. Chan placed a small plate of food in front of her, “Eat well, sweetheart,” he said. But Hae didn’t even look at the food, she took a big breath and immediately began talking. Like a switch had been flipped.
“So I was sleeping and then the nightmare came and there was this big shadow and it was REALLY big, like this big, Papa” She spread her arms wide.
Hyunjin leaned back dramatically, “Oh! That’s huge!”
The boys chuckled quietly.
“And it tried to GRAB me but I ran and I picked up Han quokka cause he was scared too, he was crying but I told him it’s okay because I’ll protect you”
Felix whispered gently, “Baby, eat a little, okay?”
Hae continued talking, “so then the scary shadow followed me but I went to Papa’s room and then Papa hugged me and then the shadow ran away because Papa is strong and protects me.”
Hyunjin flushed, pretending to brush imaginary dust off his shoulder. “Well, you know… Papa is very powerful.”
Changbin snorted.
Hae kept going, “and Han quokka was shivering! He was SO scared, Mom, he was shaking like this” she vibrated dramatically. “But I hugged him and told him ‘don’t be scared I’ll protect you’ because he is my best friend”
Jeongin giggled into his cup.
“AND ALSO can we buy clothes for Han quokka??” Everyone blinked.
Hae continued, “He always wears the same shirt. I don’t want him to wear the same shirt forever. I want him to have cute outfits. Like how you guys buy cute clothes for me! Then he can have pajamas and shirts and a jacket and maybe a little hat and…”
Felix gently placed a hand on her back, “Hae, sweetheart… baby… you need to eat.”
She blinked up at him, finally noticing her untouched food. “I forgot,” she whispered.
So she picked up her kid chopsticks, mouth already pouting in concentration. She tried to grab a piece of egg, but it slipped. She tried again, but it slipped again.
Her little shoulders sagged.
Felix quickly leaned in, “It’s okay, my love,” he murmured. “Mommy will help you.”
He picked up his own chopsticks and gently fed her a bite. Hae’s face lit up instantly, “thank you, Mom.” Felix melted into a puddle.
Once Hae was done eating (mostly thanks to Felix feeding her), Jisung pulled out a napkin with dramatic flair. “Appa cleaning service! Sit still, princess.”
Hae giggled as he wiped her mouth, cheeks and hands. She always giggled when Jisung cleaned her up, something about his silly faces probably.
When her hands were clean, Minho ruffled her hair softly. “All done. Good job eating.”
Chan clapped his hands together. “Okay, little one,” he said warmly. “You can go play until lunch. After lunch… we’re going somewhere.”
Hae gasped dramatically, “where??”
Seven identical mischievous smiles answered her.
“We’re not telling you yet,” Changbin said smugly.
Hae huffed, crossing her arms. “That’s not fair.”
“It’s a surprise,” Jeongin said, booping her nose.
She turned, spotted Hyunjin, grabbed his hand with both of her tiny ones and tugged with surprising strength. “Come, Papa! Let’s play!”
Hyunjin practically levitated from happiness, “Of course,” he said, following eagerly. “As many games as you want.”
The boys watched them go, Hae dragging Hyunjin to the play area, both of them already laughing.
Chan smiled softly, “she really loves him.”
Felix added, “She loves all of us.”
Jisung sighed fondly, leaning back. “I swear… this kid is going to kill us with cuteness every day.”
GENRE: Knight!Chris, Royalty!au, Historical, Fantasy, Angst, Romance, Enemies-to-Lovers, slow-burn
WARNINGS: mentions of cursed fates, divinations, death, more…
⟢ SYNOPSIS: The gods have spoken! A prophecy whispered of a Princess Royal, and her shadow-casted fate. A Commander of The High Temple Knights has sworn to protect the Empire against such darkness, yet wished to kiss doom in the same breath. A forbidden dance of two individuals who claim to hate each other unravels amidst other riddled truths. Their fates seemingly more intertwined than believed. What has the prophecy said about such matters of the heart? Cursed? Or perhaps something else entirely...?
Author’s Note: emotional constipation, level 9000 frustrations, s-tier yearning, painful downbadism (who are we kidding, it’s me, delusion personified) all the great things that make a classic imfoive style slow-burner, can be found in this new series (ooh we got enemies to lovers too!) Perhaps give it a chance?
⟢ CHAPTERS: ?/?
⟢ STATUS: COMING SOON
TEASER / Chapter 1 / ...
⟢ Taglist: OPEN — please ask to be tagged under this post or in my inbox if you’re genuinely interested! (11/50)
⟢ Updated: O5/1O/26
⊹ MAIN MASTERLIST
⟢ GENRE: Immortal!Hyunjin, Soulmate!au, Historical Fantasy, Romance, Angst, Suspense, Mature, body-swap, transmigration
⟢ WARNINGS: themes of questioning existence, gods & deities, multiverses, historical inaccuracies, mentions of death, more…
⟢ SYNOPSIS: Time keepers. Beings, that exist to keep their universe’s path intact. And, in one such reality, a certain Keeper, one who doesn’t care for his purpose, suddenly finds himself thrust into his most crucial mission yet. What follows is the discovery of emotions, and a love that defies fate itself. This is the story of a Keeper who dared to challenge destiny.
Author’s Note: This story originally took life a few years ago and had been sitting in my drafts for far too long. As I rediscovered it and expanded on the storyline I couldn’t stop imagining Hyunjin as the lead and I decided it MUST be shared! If you’re looking to read a fantasy genre with heavy romance, then I’m sure you’ll enjoy this upcoming series (hopefully)!
⟢ CHAPTERS: 2.5/?
⟢ STATUS: ON-GOING
Preface / Chapter 1 / Chapter 2 / …
⟢ Taglist: OPEN (reworked) — please ask to be tagged if you’re genuinely interested! (33/50)
⟢ Updated: O5/O2/25
⊹ MAIN MASTERLIST
⟢ GENRE: Arranged Marriage!au, Marriage of Convenience-ish, Romance, Angst, Frenemies-to-Lovers, NSFW (mdni)
⟢ WARNINGS: mentions of cheating, cursing, drinking, sex, toxic parents, more…
⟢ SYNOPSIS: Two individuals with polar opposite lifestyles are thrown into an arranged marriage for the benefit of both their families, or so they claim. One is a frivolous playboy, living off familial wealth, while the other is an overly controlling workaholic. Navigating their marriage with a business-like approach, their relationship is marked by a whirlwind of bickering, banter, and societal pressures. Amid misunderstandings, they uncover layers of unexpected qualities, eventually discovering a sweet love neither saw coming.
⊹ A High Society Collection Story
Author’s Note: The second series to my HSC world! A romance filled tale that I love love writing about. If you like a good bickering couple, gripping at the edge of your seat and maybe laughing a little at the miseries of the leads, then perhaps give this a read? PSA-This one is on the mature side so minors do not interact. Enjoy reading!
⟢ CHAPTERS: 12
⟢ STATUS: COMPLETE
pairing: college student!bangchan x college student!reader
genre: drama / angst / hurt/comfort / mystery / slow burn
status: ongoing
warnings: suicidal thoughts, implied suicide (not shown), grief/death, threatening messages, paranoia, depression, heavy angst
You meet Chan for the first time at your late boyfriend’s grave. He says he barely knew Hyunjin. On campus, your lives tangle around the ghost you’re both still grieving—until the truth about that night, and what it cost, has nowhere left to hide.
taglist: open! comment under this post to join :)
notes: very heavy chapter. please read the warnings accordingly!! if you or a loved one struggle with suicidal thoughts or self-harm pls pls contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
masterpost | next
The clock on Hyunjin’s phone says 2:37 a.m.
He’s been lying on his back long enough for the ceiling to blur, corners soft and gray in the thin light leaking past his curtains. The room smells like dust and instant ramen and your perfume you started leaving here because he said he sleeps better when the room smells like you.
He hasn’t sprayed it in days. The bottle still sits crooked on the shelf, half-buried behind an empty cup noodle bowl and a stack of sketchbooks he hasn’t opened.
The phone buzzes against his chest.
His thumb moves—automatic—until the screen wakes up and throws pale light across his face.
Unknown Number
[ 2:38 a.m. ]
you think no one knows?
He scrolls up.
Three, four, ten messages. Different days, different hours, always the same thin, needling voice.
answer me.you’re not clean.i know what you did.
Hyunjin stares at it until the words double, black on white on black.
He could block the number. He knows that. He has hovered over the settings menu more times than he can count. But it wouldn’t change the way his skin prickles when he steps outside alone. It wouldn’t quiet the thrum in the back of his skull when footsteps sound too close behind him, or when a car slows as it passes, or when the elevator doors take a beat too long to close.
He deletes the newest message instead.
The bubble slides up and disappears. Nothing feels lighter.
He drops the phone beside him on the mattress and presses the heels of his hands over his eyes until small, colorless sparks pulse in the dark.
The room is too quiet. The building hums—a refrigerator somewhere, plumbing rattling faintly, someone’s muffled TV leaking through a wall. Every sound feels like it’s happening right under his skin.
He turns his head toward the nightstand.
Your name sits there in his notifications, patiently, like it always does. The last message from you is hours old.
i’ll come over tomorrow. make u real food for once
He can hear your voice in the vowels. Can see the way you wrinkle your nose when you call his pantry “a crime scene.” The way you kick your shoes off and complain about the floor being too cold, then steal his socks and his heart.
His chest tightens, a slow, small ache, a hand closing around something hollow.
He picks up the phone again and taps into your chat.
The thread scrolls back through weeks of nothing-important:
pictures of stray cats
screenshots of dumb memes
voice notes you sent between classes
photos he took of the sky
He stops on a video of you laughing into the camera, hair messy, face too close to the lens. Someone had said something off-screen and you’d snapped your head around, eyes bright, mouth open on a half-formed insult. You’d replied to it with: look how ugly u made me.
He’d replied: pretty.
He doesn’t press play now. He just watches the frozen frame until his eyes sting.
His thumb hovers over the text box.
hey, can you come earlier?
He types it. Stares. Deletes it.
I miss you.
Types. Deletes.
There’s something I didn’t tell you. I need to tell you
That one stays on the screen longer. Letters like teeth.
His fingertip trembles. For a second, he can see it, what would happen if he asked you to come over now—your face when you arrive, the confusion folding into concern when you see him, the way you’d reach for his hands and probably call him stupid in that soft, furious voice: why didn’t you say something earlier?
He could say it all. Every piece. Every wrong turn, every fear, every shadow he’s been trying to outrun down narrow campus hallways and late-night streets. He could tell you about the way his stomach drops every time there’s a knock, about the phantom smell of metal in his nose when he tries to sleep.
He could tell you that he’s scared.
His thumb hits backspace. The sentence unspools. The cursor blinks in the emptiness.
If you know, he thinks, you won’t look at him the same.
You’ll see every ugly thing he’s touched, every choice that led here. You’ll start tracing the shape of it in his face, his hands, the way he talks. You’ll think of it when he’s holding you, when you’re choosing what to eat, when you fall asleep on his shoulder in front of some terrible drama and drool on his hoodie.
He doesn’t want that.
He wants you to remember the version of him who made you late to class because he wouldn’t stop kissing you at the bus stop. The one who walked you home in the rain and didn’t care about his shoes getting ruined. The one who bought a stupid matching phone charm because you saw it and laughed.
Not this.
The phone screen dims. He taps it awake again, afraid of being left alone even by his own battery.
Another notification blooms at the top.
Unknown Number
[ 2:45 a.m. ]
how do you sleep at night knowi–
He swipes it away without reading the rest.
Badly, he thinks. That’s how.
His gaze drifts to the other chat pinned at the top of his list.
Chan.
No new messages. The last one is over a month old.
I think we should keep some distance for now.
He had stared at that for a long time too. Never called.
Before—before all of this—there would’ve been a hundred little stupid messages in between. Complaints about professors. Voice notes of Chan singing something half-finished and rough, needing opinions. Hyunjin sending back videos with filters, drawing on the thumbnails like a child.
Now the space between their names feels like the space between buildings in winter. Wind cutting straight through, no shelter.
He thinks about calling. Just… pressing his thumb down and listening to the ring. Hearing Chan’s voice, even if it’s angry, even if it’s cold.
But he knows what will happen if he does. The words will jam up in his throat. He’ll make some joke, or he’ll say he’s fine, or he’ll lie so badly Chan hears everything anyway.
And for what?
To drag him back into this when Chan has clearly worked so hard to step away?
Hyunjin locks the phone again and lets it fall onto his stomach.
Outside, a car passes, headlights dragging a faint white bar across his ceiling. He follows it with his eyes until it disappears.
The room feels too small. He sits up, then doesn’t know what to do with his hands. Doesn’t know why he sat up in the first place.
On his desk, his sketchbook lies open to an unfinished drawing—your profile, caught quick and imperfect. The line of your nose too sharp, mouth not quite right. He stares at it and feels the slow, familiar wave rising in his chest again: the sense that whatever he touches, he ruins. Even this. Even you, eventually.
“Sorry,” he whispers to the empty room, not sure who it’s for.
The air eats the word. It’s almost like he never said it.
His phone buzzes again. This time, your name lights up.
[ 2:58 a.m. ]
i’ll come after my morning class ok? should be there around 10
A second bubble pops up almost immediately.
i’ll make that soup u like
His throat tightens.
Ten. You’ll be here around ten, standing at his door knocking with your foot because your hands are full of grocery bags, annoyed when he takes too long to answer. You’ll shove your way inside using the spare key he gave you, start rearranging his kitchen, talk about your professor or whoever else ensued your wrath that day.
He knows—it lands with a dull, solid certainty—that you won’t leave this apartment the same way you walk into it.
Will you hold him? He hopes you’ll hold him.
The thought is ugly. Selfish. It sits heavy and cold in his stomach.
He hates himself a little for having it.
He also can’t make himself move away from it.
If anyone is going to see the end of this version of him, a small, stubborn part of him thinks, it should be someone who once said, very casually in a convenience store at midnight, that she could probably love him forever if he kept buying her the good brand of instant coffee.
He unlocks the phone and types back.
[ 3:01 a.m. ]
ok.
His finger hovers over send.
He adds:
drive safe
Then sends it.
The delivered checkmark appears. A moment later, you heart-react the message.
It’s such a tiny, ordinary thing that his eyes burn.
He sets the phone face down on the desk, screen still glowing faintly against the wood. He doesn’t turn on any other lights. The dark feels like the only thing big enough.
He goes back to the bed but doesn’t lie down. Just sits on the edge, elbows on his knees, hands hanging loose between them. The city hums outside—distant traffic, a siren far off, someone shouting and laughing in the street below. Life, still moving.
He tries to imagine a version of tomorrow where he stays. Where he tells you everything, and you stay anyway. Where the unknown number turns out to be empty threats. Where the weight on his chest is something he can set down instead of something that’s fused to his bones.
Nothing comes.
All he can see is you, standing in that doorway in the morning, eyes wide, hands shaking around the grocery bags. The sound you’ll make.
He flinches at his own imagination.
“It’s better this way,” he says, and the words feel thin, like paper you can see light through.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe it isn’t. It’s the only explanation that doesn’t make him get up, doesn’t make him reach for his phone again, doesn’t make him crawl out of this small, cold decision and back into the mess of living.
He looks over at the clock on his nightstand. The red numbers blink steadily.
3:09 a.m.
Seven hours.
He lets the number sit there. Letting it be real. Letting it be a boundary in his mind he won’t have to think past.
In seven hours, you’ll be here.
In seven hours, this version of him will be over.
He exhales, a slow, shakily steady breath that doesn’t feel like relief, exactly. Just… less effort than the last one.
“Sorry,” he says again, quieter now.
To you. To Chan. To the ceiling. To the empty space where another life could have been.
He doesn’t expect anyone to hear it, and no one does.
pairing: college student!bangchan x college student!reader
genre: drama / angst / hurt/comfort / mystery / slow burn
status: ongoing
warnings: suicide, death, grief, drug use/distribution, gun violence, accidental death, stalking, harassment, manipulation, emotional abuse, deception, police/court proceedings, incarceration, hinted homophobic violence, hinted minsung, and heavy emotional themes.
You meet Chan for the first time at your late boyfriend’s grave. He says he barely knew Hyunjin. On campus, your lives tangle around the ghost you’re both still grieving—until the truth about that night, and what it cost, has nowhere left to hide.
taglist: open! comment under masterpost linked below to join :)
notes: why did i kinda cry writing this lmao. im dyyying to know what you guys think and who your favorite characters are cuz i actually can't choose. see you guys for the epilogue!!
masterpost | previous | next
Professor Jung’s office smells faintly like graphite and old paper.
It is a stupid thing to notice when you are here to tell him you are leaving, but your brain has become strange lately—fixing itself to tiny, ordinary details as if they might save you from the bigger ones. The mug by his elbow with two brushes soaking in cloudy water. The stack of sheets squared too neatly on one corner of the desk. The little plaster cast hand on the shelf behind him.
You stand in the doorway for a second too long before he looks up.
His eyes go immediately to the envelope in your hand.
Then to your face.
He doesn’t say you look terrible, though he must be thinking some version of it. You have not been sleeping. Your body feels stuffed with cotton and broken glass. Every surface of your life has started to feel provisional.
“Come in,” he says.
You do.
The office is warmer than the hall outside. Your coat suddenly feels too heavy, your scarf too tight at your throat, but you leave both on because taking them off would imply some kind of intention to stay. You don’t want to imply that to him. You don’t want to imply it to yourself.
Professor Jung watches you sit with that same unnerving levelness he always has, the one that makes you feel like he can see all the sloppy, panicked parts of you and has decided not to comment on them unless absolutely necessary.
You put the envelope on his desk.
He glances at it once.
“What is this?”
“My withdrawal form.”
Jung does not touch the envelope right away. He leans back a little in his chair instead, fingers steepled loosely over his stomach, and studies you for one long second that feels like five.
“I see.”
Your fingers tighten around the second thing you brought with you.
The assignment.
The one he pushed back across the desk weeks ago and called dead with such irritating accuracy that it made you want to hate him a little for it.
You set that down too.
His eyes shift to it.
“This as well?”
Your throat works once. “I tried.”
You look at the paper instead of him. At the charcoal study that once felt like failure in an ordinary, survivable way. Now it looks almost quaint in its smallness, this stiff, careful drawing made before the whole structure of your life collapsed in on itself.
“I know you said to redo it,” you say. “I just…” Your voice thins and you make continue. “I couldn’t fix it.”
Jung is quiet.
When you finally force yourself to look up, his expression has not changed much, but something in it has settled. Not softened. Something worse than that. Something like understanding.
He reaches out then, not for the withdrawal form, but for the drawing.
Lifts it.
Studies it again. After a moment, he sets it back down.
“I’m not really…” You say, because he doesn’t say anything and the silence between you is suffocating. “I don’t think I can do this right now.”
His gaze flicks once to the assignment. “No,” he says. “I don’t imagine you can.”
That startles you enough that you look at him.
He is still watching you with that same infuriatingly level expression, but there is something else under it now. Not pity. Thank God not pity. Something closer to recognition. The kind that makes you feel, very briefly, that he has understood more than you intended to let show.
You laugh once. Small and humorless. “That obvious?”
He shrugs. “Maybe not to most. But I’ve never been like most.”
You can’t help but smile a bit at that. At least Professor Jung was still Professor Jung.
“I’m sorry,” you say.
That finally gets a real reaction from him. One eyebrow lifts.
“For what?”
You gesture vaguely at the assignment, the office, yourself. The whole waste of it.
“For wasting your time.”
Jung’s expression goes flat in a way that is almost offended. “Don’t insult me.”
You blink.
He removes his glasses, folds them once, and sets them on the desk with careful precision.
“You brought me bad work,” he says. “That is not a waste of my time. That is called teaching.” He leans back slightly. “You are leaving because you cannot stay, not because you are lazy or unserious or incapable. Those are different failures. I don’t confuse them, and neither should you.”
The sting in your eyes gets worse.
“Thank you,” you manage.
He gives one small shrug, as though gratitude is unnecessary and slightly inconvenient. Then he taps the assignment.
“What would you like me to do with this?”
You look at it.
For a second, you see the old version of yourself—the one who would have cared so much about what happened to a failed study, the one who would have taken it home and obsessed over the shadows and the deadness of it and whether Professor Jung thought less of her now.
She feels far away.
“Throw it out,” you say.
Jung studies you for a beat, then nods.
He slides the paper into a drawer without ceremony.
You watch it disappear and feel, absurdly, a little bit like you’ve just buried something very small and very stupid beside everything else.
When you stand, your knees feel weak from sitting still so long. Jung stands too.
At the door, your hand closes around the knob.
You hesitate.
Not because you have some grand final thing to say. Because leaving rooms has started to feel heavier lately, as though every threshold is secretly asking whether you’re coming back.
Behind you, Jung says, “For what it’s worth.”
You turn.
He has already sat back down, one hand reaching for the stack of critique sheets again, but his eyes are on you.
“You were one of the better ones.”
It is, somehow, the most Professor Jung version of kindness imaginable.You nod once because anything more would make a scene of it, and neither of you would survive that with dignity intact.
“Goodbye, Professor.”
He picks up his pen.
“Not necessarily.”
And then he looks back down at the next page, leaving you to stand there for one second longer than necessary with your hand on the doorknob and your heart doing something complicated and tired inside your chest before you finally open the door and let the cold hallway take you back.
Chan does not sleep.
He lies down for an hour at some point because that seems like the sort of thing a person should at least attempt before he goes and hands himself over to the rest of his life, but sleep never comes. The apartment stays dark around him, familiar in ways that have become suddenly unbearable. The hum of the fridge. The old radiator knocking once and then going quiet. Headlights passing over the ceiling in slow, diluted bands. Every ordinary sound feels sharpened now by the knowledge that he is hearing it all for the last time as a free man.
Sometime around four in the morning, he gets up.
He showers.
Shaves.
Puts on clean clothes.
There is something obscene about the care of it, about buttoning a shirt with steady hands when his whole life is about to split open in a fluorescent room in front of strangers. But he does it anyway. He wants, irrationally, to arrive looking like someone who chose this. Not someone dragged there by panic. Not someone finally cornered.
His phone sits on the counter while he makes coffee he doesn’t drink.
He keeps looking at it.
Not because he’s expecting anything. Because your number is still there. Because your last messages still exist. Because some part of him keeps imagining the impossible version of the morning where he texts you and says never mind, I couldn’t do it, I chose myself after all, and you say okay, come over, and somehow that becomes a life he can bare to live.
He does not text.
He has already told you the truth. That has to be enough.
Still, before he leaves, he unlocks his phone one last time and stares at your contact until the screen starts to dim in his hand.
He thinks of the graveyard.
Of your face wet with tears and gone strange with horror and love and the refusal to let him turn himself into the inevitable. He thinks of the way you’d folded into him anyway when he held out his arms. The way your body still knew him despite everything. The way you said, after all that he had done, that he couldn’t leave you.
That is the sentence that stays.
That, and Hyunjin.
Chan keeps seeing him younger.
Fifteen and laughing in the convenience store.
Seventeen and asleep with one arm hanging off the mattress and paint on his cheek.
Nineteen and mean with hunger, beautiful with it somehow, tossing a peach gummy at Chan’s forehead because Chan had fallen asleep at the desk again.
Hyunjin in Chan’s hoodie.
Hyunjin by the sink.
Hyunjin saying his name like it was an argument and a home at once.
For one sick moment, standing in the kitchen with the untouched coffee cooling beside him, Chan wonders if Hyunjin would be proud of him for this.
The thought arrives and curdles almost instantly.
Proud.
As if there is anything noble about walking into a police station because you ran out of lies.
Would Hyunjin have wanted this or forgiven it or called it brave?
Chan braces both hands on the counter and closes his eyes.
Another thought follows right after, meaner and harder to survive: maybe Hyunjin hated him in the end. Maybe in those final days, as the messages got worse and the paranoia ate through what was left of him and Chan kept telling him to wait, to think, to be smart, maybe some part of Hyunjin looked at him and saw exactly what he was—a coward. A man who could ask the people he loved to hold them a little longer so he would not have to.
The thought does not leave.
It sits under his ribs all the way to the station.
The city is gray when he steps outside. Not fully awake yet, but no longer sleeping either. Delivery trucks. Office workers with paper cups. Cold biting through the seams of his coat. The world looks insultingly normal, and Chan moves through it like a ghost who still has errands to run.
He takes the bus.
That feels right, somehow.
Not a cab. Not anything private or ceremonial. Just the bus and the plastic seats and the overhead ads and the old woman two rows down eating crackers from a crinkled packet. He stands most of the way because sitting still feels impossible. Each stop feels both too slow and too fast. He keeps his hand in his pocket wrapped around nothing, fingers closing and opening. Closing. Opening.
When he gets off, the police station is exactly what it should be.
Plain.
Concrete.
Glass doors with smudges on them from a thousand ordinary hands.
No thunderclap. No sign from God. No sense of narrative significance beyond the one he has brought there himself.
At the front desk, a bored-looking officer is flipping through paperwork.
Chan stands there for a second too long.
The officer looks up.
“Can I help you?”
The question is so ordinary it almost undoes him.
He thinks of turning around.
Not really. Not in any serious, executable way. But his body thinks of it. It flashes the image across his nerves anyway: the doors behind him, the cold outside, the street still there waiting, his life not yet officially ruined. A train home. A shower. A text to you. Another day of pretending there is still time to decide. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. Ican’tdothis–
Then he thinks of Jisung on the floor.
Of Hyunjin vomiting at the side of the road.
Of you at the grave.
Of Minho’s blood in his teeth.
Of the fact that if he turns around now, none of those things go away.
Chan walks to the desk.
The officer straightens slightly, registering, at last, that something about him is wrong.
“Yes?” the man says.
Chan opens his mouth.
Nothing comes out the first time.
He swallows and tries again.
“I need to make a statement,” he says.
The officer’s expression changes. “About what?”
Chan looks at the edge of the desk, at the cheap laminate peeling a little at one corner, because if he looks at the man’s face, the words will turn human too quickly.
His hands are steady now.
“It’s about a death,” he says.
The room seems to sharpen around that sentence. The officer sets his papers down completely now. Another person somewhere farther back in the station glances up. Chan can feel the machinery of process beginning to wake around him, impersonal and inevitable.
The officer says something—Come with me, maybe—and Chan follows because that is what there is to do now.
They take him into a smaller room.
A table.
Three chairs.
A recorder.
A legal pad.
A paper cup of water he does not touch.
He sits.
Waits.
Thinks, one last time and with an ache so old it feels structural now: Hyunjin, if you hated me for this, I understand. If you needed this and I gave it to you too late, I understand that too.
Then the officer across from him clicks the recorder on and says, “State your name for the record.”
Chan lifts his head.
Draws in one breath.
“My name is Christopher Chan Bahng.”
The graveyard looks smaller this time.
Maybe because you know too much now.
Maybe because once the dead stop being simple, the places built to honor them lose some of their shape too. The stone is the same. The winter grass. The bare trees scratching quietly at the evening sky. But nothing here feels clean anymore. Not memory. Not grief. Not love. Everything has edges now.
You stand in front of Hyunjin’s grave with your hands in your coat pockets and feel almost nothing at all.
At some point the body runs out of ways to perform devastation and settles instead into this strange, suspended numbness where everything still hurts, just farther away.
The wind shifts lightly across the cemetery. Cold enough to sting the skin under your eyes. You don’t blink against it.
For a while, you just look at his name.
At the dates.
At the little dash between them that used to feel impossibly small and now feels crowded with things you will never be able to forgive the world for fitting into one human life.
You think of the burner phone.
Of the notes and numbers and strange little shorthand that meant nothing to you until they meant everything. Of the way his life split open in retrospect, every secret casting its shadow backward over memories that had once seemed harmless. The nights he checked his phone and stepped away. The tiredness you thought was school. The distance you thought was grief. The fear you mistook for withdrawal.
You know better now.
That is the cruelty of it.
Knowing better does not make anything easier to hold.
It just makes the old memories heavier.
You let out a breath and watch it fog in front of you.
“I know,” you say quietly. Your voice sounds small in the cold. “I know now.”
No answer comes back, of course. No sign. No grand spiritual disturbance in the branches overhead. Just the same graveyard stillness, as indifferent and respectful as ever.
You stare at the stone a little longer.
Then, after a pause, you say, “And I’m sorry.”
That one catches somewhere in your chest, but not enough to break you open.
Not enough anymore.
Your fingers curl in your pockets.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,” you say. “Not really. Not where it mattered.”
The numbness shifts a little at the edges.
You swallow.
“There were so many times something was wrong and I didn’t see it. Or I saw it and I didn’t understand it. Or I understood just enough to ask, and then I let you say you were fine because I wanted that to be true more than I wanted to push.” Your mouth tightens. “I thought loving you meant trusting what you gave me.”
The wind moves again, colder this time.
You keep going.
“I wasn’t there in your darkest moments.” Your gaze drops to the strip of winter grass at the base of the headstone. “And maybe you never really let me be. Maybe you had already decided I couldn’t follow you there.” A pause. “But I still should’ve known.”
Something in your throat tightens, but no tears come. You are too emptied out for tears now.
You just stand there with the ache moving quietly through you, old and bone-deep and no longer interested in spectacle.
“I keep thinking,” you say, “that if I’d loved you better, maybe…” You stop. You shake your head once and start again. “I keep thinking I should’ve been enough.”
You look at his name again, at the carved letters that used to feel like a wound and now feel like an argument you lost after it was already over.
“But I wasn’t,” you say.
Your voice doesn’t shake. That surprises you a little.
“I wasn’t enough to pull you out of it. I wasn’t enough to make you tell me. I wasn’t enough to keep you here.” Your jaw works once. “And I think maybe nobody was.”
That one hurts in a quieter way than the others.
Because it lets him off the hook a little.
Because it lets you off the hook a little too.
Because neither of those things feels as good as blame should.
You let the silence sit for a while after that.
Not because you expect him to answer.
Because you need the space to arrange the last thing properly in your mouth before you give it away.
When you speak again, your voice is lower. “I forgive you.”
You draw in a slow breath.
“I forgive you for lying to me,” you say. “I forgive you for leaving me with questions. I forgive you for not being the version of yourself I wanted to believe in.” Your gaze drifts down to the dark earth in front of the stone. “I even forgive you for making me love you.”
That almost feels like a laugh, but not quite. The numbness returns in a wave.
Gentle. Merciless.
You nod once, mostly to yourself.
“But I can’t keep carrying you like this.”
The cemetery stays quiet around you. No witness but the trees. No response but the cold.
You lift your chin slightly.
“I’m going to have to let you go now, Hyunjin.”
Your chest aches after you say it, but not with panic. Not with the old frantic need to take it back before it becomes real.
Just ache.
Plain and human and irreversible.
You look at the grave one last time.
At the boy you loved.
At the stranger he had also been.
At the life he hid from you and the one he shared.
At all the versions of him you will never be able to separate cleanly now.
“I did love you,” you say.
Then, after the smallest pause:
“I just can’t stay stagnant here with you anymore.”
The sky has gone dimmer while you stood there. Blue-gray evening settling over the rows of stone. Somewhere near the gate, gravel crunches softly under somebody else’s shoes, distant and unimportant.
You take your hands out of your pockets.
Brush them once over the front of your coat.
Then you turn and walk away.
Three months into detention, Chan has started to understand that time is not the same thing as movement.
The days still pass. That is the insulting part.
Morning count. Breakfast that tastes like salt and steam and nothing. Meetings with his lawyer given to him by the state because he could not afford one. Statements repeated until language starts to feel detached from memory. Other men moving through the same fluorescent halls with their own silences wrapped tight around them. The world keeps arranging itself into hours whether you want it to or not. But movement—real movement, the kind that suggests a life is still unfolding toward something—has stopped. Everything now feels suspended, like he has been pinned in place while the rest of Seoul keeps going without him.
The homicide charge is still hanging over him, but not in the same shape it had at the start.
That had changed the day your father agreed to take the case.
Chan had known who he was, of course. Knew because you had mentioned it once early on, in the offhand, faintly irritated way daughters mention fathers they admire and resent in equal measure. A hotshot lawyer. Sharp. Expensive. The kind of man other men lowered their voices around in courtrooms. At the time, Chan had filed it away as one more detail from a life he would never really belong in. A polished-life fact. A father who moved through the world with enough authority that people listened when he spoke.
Then everything broke open, and somehow that same man had become the one sitting across from him in a detention-center interview room, legal pad open, glasses low on his nose, saying in a calm, almost conversational tone, “You need to stop trying to confess morally and start answering legally.”
Chan had stared at him.
Your father had sighed once through his nose and tapped the pen against the margin of his notes.
“I’m serious,” he said. “You are making my job harder.”
There had been no cruelty in it. No disdain. Just a very tired, very intelligent man who had clearly spent the last several weeks trying to build a defense around someone determined to walk into punishment with his hands already tied behind his back.
Chan had not known what to do with that at first.
He still doesn’t, really.
Today, the room is the same as it has been every other time. Too warm. Too bright. White walls made older by fluorescent light. A metal table bolted to the floor. Three plastic chairs. A camera in the upper corner like a bad little moon. The whole place smells faintly of paper, detergent, and recycled air.
Your father sits opposite him in a navy coat and a tie that has loosened slightly at the throat over the course of the meeting. Chan had expected cold, or judgment, or some version of restrained fury wearing professionalism like a better suit. Instead he got a man who was brisk, yes, and too perceptive for comfort, but also maddeningly decent about it.
Once, Chan would have given everything just for a father to be sat across from him in the same room, like yours is now.
Now he closes the legal pad and folds his glasses off with one hand, rubbing the bridge of his nose for a second before looking back up.
“The prosecution is still pushing the manslaughter theory,” he says. “But they don’t have enough to make it a clean shot.”
Chan nods once.
They have had this conversation in some form before. Not enough evidence. No definitive proof of whose hand triggered the shot. The destroyed camera, which would have been the clearest answer, now only adding to the murk and the suspicion. Chan’s confession helping some things, complicating others.
Your father goes on.
“The confession alone won’t carry them on that count. It can’t. They’ll use it, obviously, but they still need to prove criminal responsibility to the court, not just hear you say you feel responsible.” He sighs. “Which you very obviously do.”
Chan looks down at his hands.
They are steadier than they used to be. That unsettles him.
“And the cannabis?”
That gets a real little exhale out of your father. Something halfway between annoyance and acceptance.
“The cannabis,” he says, “is more annoying.”
Chan almost laughs.
More annoying.
As if the thing likely to put him away for up to five years has become, in the architecture of this case, the less grand but more structurally annoying beam.
“Because they can prove it,” Chan says.
“Because they can prove parts of it,” your father corrects. “Possession and sale are easier to corroborate. Old messages. Contacts. Patterns. The phone doesn’t help you. Your own statement helps them more than it helps us on that side.” He studies Chan for a second. “I’m still trying to keep the sentence from becoming a morality play.”
Chan lifts his eyes.
Your father shrugs one shoulder.
“Judges are people. People are vulnerable to atmosphere. I would prefer not to have them decide you are trying to be punished for everything at once.”
There is something so dry and measured in the delivery that Chan actually lets out a breath that almost resembles a laugh.
Your father notices.
Does not comment on it.
Instead he glances at his watch, then back at Chan.
“We’re in better shape than we were a month ago,” he says. “Which is not the same thing as being in good shape, so don’t make that face.”
“I didn’t make a face.”
“You did make a face.”
Your father is so much like you, sometimes Chan can hardly bare it.
The guard outside the door shifts. There is a muffled voice farther down the hall. The room keeps being itself.
Your father gathers the papers into a neat stack and slides them back into the folder.
For a moment, he says nothing.
Chan waits, because he has learned by now that your father is the kind of man who does not speak just to fill space. If he pauses, it is usually because whatever comes next has been weighed first.
Finally, he looks up.
“My daughter hasn’t spoken to me much since she moved out,” he says.
Chan goes still.
Your father’s expression doesn’t change much, but something in it settles lower, into a place less professional and more tired.
“We were not…” He exhales once through his nose. “I was not easy for her to live with. She was not easy for me either. That’s usually how these things go. Fathers and daughters. A fragile co-existence."
Chan says nothing.
Your father glances down at the folder, then back at him.
“But she called,” he says. “And when she asked me to take this case, she was not subtle about it.”
Something catches behind Chan’s ribs.
Your father’s mouth twitches at one corner, not quite a smile. “I believe the exact phrasing was closer to begging than asking.”
Chan looks away.
The room has gone too warm all of a sudden.
He pictures it against his will—you with your phone in your hand, voice frayed, pride swallowed whole because this mattered enough to make you do it. You, who had every reason not to lift another finger for him, still going to the one man in your life capable of helping and asking anyway.
It is almost harder to bear than if you had come yourself.
Your father watches him take that in and, mercifully, does not linger on it.
Instead he reaches down beside his chair and lifts something Chan had not noticed before.
A folded bundle of fabric.
For one second Chan only sees color and shape. Then his breath stops.
The blanket.
The same old blanket, worn soft at the edges now, the one he had given you to sit on that first day before either of you knew what would become of one another. It looks smaller folded up like this. More ordinary. Which only makes the sight of it hit harder.
Your father sets it carefully on the table.
“She asked me to give you this.”
Chan stares.
His fingers do not move.
For a moment he is absurdly afraid to touch it, as if doing so will make something final in a way the bars and the interviews and the charges have not yet managed.
Your father glances once toward the camera in the corner, then back to Chan.
“It took some convincing,” he says mildly. “But I managed.”
Chan finally looks up.
Your father is already standing, gathering the folder under one arm. He simply nods once toward the blanket and says, “That’s all from me for today.”
Then, after the smallest pause, “She didn’t say anything else. Just that she wanted you to have it.”
Chan gives the nearest thing he has to a nod.
The door closes behind him with a soft, bureaucratic click.
And suddenly Chan is alone.
Alone with the fluorescent lights and the bolted table and the cheap chair and the blanket sitting between his hands like a wound made visible.
He doesn’t reach for it right away.
He just looks.
At the faded fabric.
At the familiar fold.
At the place near one corner where the stitching has started to fray.
There is something unbearable about how normal it looks. How domestic. How soft. A thing from a life where warmth still came in ordinary forms and love still disguised itself as practicality.
Slowly, like he’s afraid of startling something, Chan reaches out and pulls it toward him.
The blanket is warm.
Then he lifts it.
And the smell of you hits him so hard he nearly doubles over.
Not perfume or anything deliberate.
Just you.
That faint clean-warm scent of skin and home and the body he had held in a graveyard and a bed and his own hands. The scent of someone still alive in the world outside these walls.
Chan closes his eyes. Very carefully, he unfolds the blanket and draws it around his shoulders.
The gesture is instinctive.
Childish, almost.
He does not care.
The fabric settles over him with a weight so familiar it makes something inside him split cleanly at last. Three months of holding himself upright. Three months of fluorescent restraint and procedural language and steady hands and no sleep and not one single crack wide enough to let grief through.
Gone.
Chan folds forward over the table with the blanket wrapped around him and cries for the first time in two years.
It comes out of him raw and ugly and shocked by its own force, his face pressed into the crook of his arm, one hand fisted so hard in the blanket it hurts. The sound tears through the room before he can stop it, before pride can catch up, before any of the things that have kept him functioning can put themselves back together around the damage.
He cries for Jisung.
For Hyunjin.
For his aunt.
For you.
For the life he had before all of it turned into charges and evidence and consequence. For every moment he ran when he should have stayed. For every moment he stayed when he should have told the truth. For the unbearable mercy of knowing that even now, even after everything, you had thought to send him warmth.
It is the blanket that does it.
Not because it is just a blanket.
Because it smells like your neck under his mouth. Like your hair against his chest. Like the shape of a life he never got to keep.
By the time he gets himself back under control, his face is wet, his throat is wrecked, and the blanket is bunched in his fists like the only thing in the room not bolted down.
He does not let it go.
Spring has finally arrived.
Trees bud. Sidewalk cracks fill with stubborn little weeds. The air softens at the edges. Girls in lighter coats laugh outside cafés with plastic cups sweating in their hands, and somewhere in Seoul somebody is falling in love under a sky too blue for any of this.
You arrive late for the sentencing hearing.
A little too late to be invisible and a little too early to have missed anything important, which has always felt like your talent with tragedy. You slip into the courtroom through the back doors with your heart knocking too hard and your palms damp inside your sleeves and choose the last row because you cannot bear the thought of sitting any closer than that.
The room smells like paper and polished wood and old air.
It is smaller than you imagined.
For months the hearing has lived in your head as this looming, cathedral-sized thing, all towering ceilings and cinematic silence and final judgment descending from on high. Instead it is just a room. Wood paneling. Rows of seats. Fluorescent light softened by daylight coming in through high windows. People shuffling papers. A cough in the second row. The low murmur of voices that stop one by one as you sit down.
Chan is already there, of course.
He is seated at the front beside your father. Chan is in a suit, darker than anything you ever saw him wear freely, his shoulders straighter than they used to be, his face leaner. Detention has sharpened him. Or maybe suffering has. There are some differences too intimate to name cleanly.
From this far back, you cannot see every detail.
You can still tell he looks tired.
He does not look behind him. Why would he?
The hearing resumes. The clerk reads. The judge speaks. Your father rises when he needs to and sits when he does not. You catch only half of it at first because your body is too busy being terrified. Words like defendant and count and evidence move through the room in voices trained to keep emotion out of them. It almost feels insulting.
Your hands stay folded in your lap so tightly they ache.
The air in the courtroom has gone thin.
The judge begins to read the verdict.
Each word seems to come one half-second slower than your body can bear.
The finding on the homicide count is read first.
There is a long sentence about evidence. About insufficiency. About the inability of the court to determine, beyond reasonable doubt, that the defendant alone or jointly bears criminal responsibility for the fatal discharge in the manner charged. The legal language gathers itself and gathers itself until you feel like you might actually scream at the bench to stop talking and say it plainly.
Then he does.
“Accordingly,” the judge says, “the defendant is found not guilty on the charge of manslaughter.”
Even from all the way back here, you can see Chan’s shoulder slump in relief.
Then sound comes back in pieces.
Your body reacts before your mind catches up. Relief tears through you so violently it almost feels like pain. Not joy. Never that. But something close to release. Something ugly and immediate and involuntary.
Not guilty.
Not guilty.
The words echo through you in the shape of something reprieved, something not wholly lost, something that will not be buried under Jisung’s death in the exact way you had feared.
And then the judge keeps reading.
The cannabis charges come next.
These are read more quickly, almost. Or maybe it only feels that way because there is less suspense now, less room for hope to stretch. Possession. Distribution. Sale. The court finds sufficient corroboration in the records, the messages, the pattern of conduct, the defendant’s own statement. The words stack up with the calm inevitability of bricks being laid.
The judge’s voice remains even.
“On the charge of possession and sale of cannabis in violation of the Narcotics Control Act, the defendant is found guilty.”
You look at Chan.
He has not moved.
Not visibly.
But from where you sit, you can see the shift in his profile. The minute tightening at his jaw. The way he lowers his eyes once, briefly, something inside him has clicking into place not with shock, but with recognition. As if this, at least, is a punishment he already made room for long ago.
Your father says something to him in a low voice.
Chan nods once.
The judge goes on to sentencing.
He speaks of the defendant’s voluntary surrender. Of the seriousness of narcotics distribution. Of the age of the conduct, the absence of a prior record, the defendant’s cooperation, the need for deterrence, the court’s consideration of all submitted factors. The language is dry and measured and composed, and you sit there in the last row and think that no sentence in the world has ever sounded less like justice than one carefully weighed by people who will go home afterward and eat dinner.
Then it comes.
“Therefore, the defendant is sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.”
Three years.
You think, irrationally, of the seasons it contains. Three springs. Three summers. Three winters. Time enough for a face to change. For a city to alter. For grief to sour and settle and become whatever it becomes when it no longer has the luxury of freshness.
At the front, Chan is standing now because the procedure demands it.
The officers move toward him in the quiet, practiced way of men doing a job that has become muscle memory. Your father rises too, says something else to Chan that you cannot hear. Chan looks at him and nods again.
The room has begun to blur at the edges.
Not because you are crying. It is blur of another kind—the body’s old trick of distancing itself from impact when it knows there is nowhere to run.
One of the officers takes Chan by the arm to lead him away. Away, away, away from you.
Chan turns.
It happens quickly, almost incidentally, the sort of look backward a person makes at a room as he is being led out of it, not expecting anything and still unable to stop himself. His head turns over his shoulder. His gaze sweeps once over the benches, over the people gathered there, over the shape of witnesses and observers and the unimportant bodies who have come to watch the state do what it does.
And for one impossible second, you think he sees you.
You think his eyes catch on yours.
You think something in his face changes.
“Wait,” It’s a breathless word coming out of you so quiet, even you can barely hear it. “Wait–”
But he is already moving again. The officer guides him on. The moment is gone so fast you do not trust it. Maybe it happened. Maybe you only wanted it badly enough to invent it. Maybe some part of you will spend the rest of your life uncertain whether, at the very end of the hearing, Chan knew you had come.
Then he is through the side door.
Gone.
At the front, your father lowers himself back into his chair for one brief second before rising again to collect the file. He looks older from here. More tired. You think, with a strange detached clarity, that the case went exactly the way he thought it would.
You stay seated in the back until most people have started to leave.
Only then do you stand, the number still repeating softly and stupidly in your head like a bell that won’t stop ringing.
Three years.
Three years.
Three years.
__________
You wait until the courtroom has mostly emptied before you make yourself move.
Not because you are hoping for something. Chan is already gone. You know that. You knew it the second the side door closed behind him and the room kept breathing like nothing sacred had just been cut out of it.
Still, your body is slow to obey.
You gather yourself in pieces. One hand on the back of the bench in front of you. One breath. Then another. Your knees feel wrong when you straighten, as if they have forgotten the mechanics of carrying you. The courtroom around you has gone quiet in that post-proceeding way—papers collected, voices lowered, the machinery of justice already folding itself up for the next case.
Your father is nowhere in sight by the time you step into the hallway.
That is probably deliberate.
He knows you well enough to understand that there are moments in a life where even kindness becomes crowding.
The corridor outside the courtroom is cool and bright and lined with too much polished stone. Your footsteps sound smaller than they should. Everything here feels built for distance. Echo. Procedure. Clean lines and hard surfaces where grief has nowhere comfortable to sit.
You make it all the way to the front doors before you see him.
Minho is standing just outside the courthouse under the overhang, one shoulder against the wall, hands in the pockets of a dark coat. Spring has softened the air, but not enough to make the day warm. Wind keeps lifting the front of his hair and dropping it again. He looks thinner than you remember. Or maybe just more finished around the edges, as if some internal fever finally burned itself out and left him with nothing to hide behind.
You stop.
He sees you immediately.
And just like that, all the ugly new knowledge moves through your body at once. The messages. The pictures. The stalking. The way he had followed Hyunjin’s fear and fed it until it became a living thing. The way he had known you long before you knew him. The months he spent watching from the edge of your grief.
Your whole body goes guarded.
Minho notices that too. His gaze lifts, lands, holds.
He doesn’t straighten right away. Doesn’t step forward. Just watches you in that same unnerving, level way he always has, giving you the space to decide whether you want to walk away or not.
You don’t.
You also don’t move closer.
For a long second, the two of you just stand there with the distance intact, the courthouse behind you, the city moving on around you, and everything that has happened threading itself silently through the space between your bodies. Your voice comes out flatter than you mean it to when you finally speak.
“You terrorized him.”
Minho goes still.
“Yes,” he says.
You swallow.
The spring wind catches at your coat and pushes hair into your mouth. You brush it away impatiently.
“And me,” you say.
His eyes flick up.
“You terrorized me too.” You say, your voice steadier than you feel.
Something shifts in his face then.
“Yes,” he says again.
No excuse. No attempt to dress it up as grief or vengeance or justice misfiring into cruelty.
That almost makes it worse.
You let out a short, disbelieving breath through your nose.
“I thought you were just…” You stop, because even now your mind wants to reach backward and build him into something simpler than he is. A manipulator. A liar. A strange, sharp-edged friend who had somehow appeared at the exact moment your life began collapsing. “I don’t know what I thought.”
Minho’s gaze drops briefly to the stone steps between you, then lifts again.
“Probably nothing good.”
“No,” you say. “But…not that bad either.”
For one second, something tired and ugly flickers through his expression, like that distinction cuts in a place he hasn’t managed to cauterize yet. Then it’s gone.
The courthouse doors open behind you. Two men in suits step out laughing too loudly about something that should not survive the inside of a courtroom. The sound drifts past and dissolves into the afternoon traffic.
Minho pushes off the wall at last.
Not toward you. Just enough to stand properly. To stop looking like somebody waiting for a train that already left.
“I know,” he says.
The wind picks up again, cool and restless, carrying with it the city’s usual spring smells—dust, exhaust, something flowering somewhere out of sight. The kind of day that makes ordinary people think of beginnings. You stand there and think only of endings stacked on top of one another until whatever's holding them up cracks and crumbles.
You should walk away.
That is the sensible thing. The clean thing. The thing a person with fewer splinters in her heart might do.
Instead you stay where you are and say, “Why are you here?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess I wanted to see how it ends.”
The answer is so bleakly honest that for a second you don’t know what to do with it.
You stare at him.
His mouth twitches without humor.
“Turns out,” he says, glancing past you toward the courthouse doors, “it doesn’t.”
The city keeps moving around you. Somebody wheels a cart past somewhere near the curb. A bus exhales at the stop across the street. Spring sunlight glances off glass and stone and the polished metal railing at the courthouse steps, all of it too bright for the conversation you are having.
You look past him, back at the court house doors. “I guess it doesn’t.”
“I gave him the gun, you know,” You head whips back to him. He continues. “That day. I had bought it illegally. When I was moving and had some guys come in and help me clear out the house, I was scared they’d find it, so I asked Jisung to hold it for me. Just for one day.”
You stare at him.
The courthouse steps seem to tilt under you for a second, not from shock exactly, but from the way each new truth keeps revealing some older, uglier root system under everything you thought you understood.
“Why did you have a gun at all?” you ask.
Minho’s eyes flick to yours at that.
For a second, he says nothing.
Then he looks away again, out toward the street, where traffic keeps moving and strangers keep crossing and nobody here knows what kind of conversation is happening three feet from the courthouse doors.
“Because when you’re a boy who likes other boys in a neighborhood where that can get you cornered behind a convenience store or followed home just for looking wrong at the wrong person or killed,” he says quietly, “you start collecting ways to feel less helpless.”
The words enter the space between you and stay there.
There is no self-pity in them. Minho keeps his gaze on the street.
“It wasn’t smart,” he says. “It wasn’t noble. It just…” His mouth tightens. “It made me feel like if something happened, I wouldn’t have to stand there empty-handed. I don’t think I would have ever used it.”
You look at him differently then.
Because suddenly the gun is no longer just one more random piece of bad luck in a story built out of them. It belongs to a life too. To fear. To the private calculations people make when the world has taught them it can turn hostile without warning.
Minho lets out a breath through his nose.
“I never should’ve brought it into any of it,” he says. “I know that.”
Theres so much pain in his voice that you can’t help but ask. “Was Jisung...were you and him…?”
He shakes his head. “He was still figuring it all out. About himself. About me. I think he–” He cuts himself off sharply. “Well. I guess we’ll never know, will we?”
Minho glances once toward the courthouse behind you.
Then back at the street.
“Jisung shouldn’t have had it,” he says. “That much is mine. Whatever else happened in that apartment, that part is mine.”
The words settle between you, heavy and strange and impossible to put anywhere useful.
For a second, neither of you says anything.
Then Minho looks down, reaches into the inside pocket of his coat, and says, quietly, “I’m going to Japan.”
You blink.
He doesn’t look at you as he says it. His fingers are still inside the pocket, searching for something.
“I got the ticket already,” he says. “I’m taking Jisung with me.” His mouth twitches once, bitterly. “Or what’s left of him, anyway.”
Before you can figure out what to say to that, Minho adds, “But before I leave…”
He pulls something out.
An envelope.
It is old enough that the edges have softened. Creased. Handled too many times. Your gaze catches on it, drifts down to the front, and the world goes white.
Your name.
In Hyunjin’s handwriting.
You know it instantly. Of course you do. The slant of it. The way his hand always pressed a little harder on the first letter than the rest. The stupid, intimate familiarity of it hits you like something physical.
“No.”
The word tears out of you before you even realize you’re moving.
You smack his hand away hard enough that the envelope jerks sideways between his fingers.
“No. No. Minho, no.”
Minho goes still.
The envelope wavers once in the air between you.
You take a step back, shaking your head, breath suddenly wrong. “No. I was—” Your voice catches and you hate how frantic it sounds. “I was moving on.”
Inch by inch. Through the graveyard. Through the courtroom. Through the spring afternoon with Chan already gone and the world refusing to stop on your behalf.
And now this.
Minho’s hand lowers slightly.
He doesn’t put the envelope away.
“I know,” he says.
“No, you don’t.” Your whole body has gone rigid, your skin too tight around your bones.
Something in his face has gone very quiet now. Stripped bare in that ugly way people get when they know they’re about to be hated and have decided they can live with it.
“During the funeral,” he says, “after everyone left, I went into Hyunjin’s apartment.”
“No. Please, Minho.” You squeeze your eyes shut harder, like darkness might save you from the shape of the words. “I don’t want to hear it.”
Minho keeps talking anyway.
“Trying to find something,” he says. His voice is low, almost swallowed by the traffic beyond the courthouse steps. “Anything. A message, a receipt, a name. Something that would tell me what happened to Jisung or prove it was him or—” He cuts himself off with a breath through his nose. “I didn’t find what I wanted.”
You shake your head.
Your fingers are trembling now, curled uselessly at your sides, your whole body caught between wanting to bolt and wanting to hear exactly how much worse this gets.
“I found the note instead.”
The sentence lands and stays there.
Minho looks at the envelope in his hand, not at you.
“I didn’t know who you were yet. Not really. Just that there was someone he’d written it for.” His jaw tightens. “And I was angry enough not to care.”
Your throat burns.
“Minho.”
“He got to leave one,” he says, and the bitterness in his voice is not fresh now, not sharp, but old and worn smooth from being held too long. “He got a goodbye. Jisung didn’t.”
The courthouse doors open behind you. Someone exits, speaking too cheerfully into a phone, and for a second the ordinary sound feels obscene.
You stare at the envelope.
At your name.
At the paper your fingers have ached for without knowing it, all those months you stood in Hyunjin’s apartment and thought he’d gone without leaving you even that.
Minho’s mouth moves once before he says, quieter, “So I took it.”
Your laugh comes out wrong. Thin. Horrified. Not really a laugh at all.
“You took it.”
“Yes.”
“You watched me think he left me nothing.”
Minho’s face changes slightly at that.
Not enough.
But enough to make him look, for one split second, like a person standing too close to the wreckage of something he cannot undo.
“Yes,” he says again.
You want to throw the envelope into the street before you’ve even touched it. You want to take it and tear it open and never read it and read it until the paper falls apart in your hands. You want to scream at him. You want to be back in the courtroom. You want to be anywhere but here with spring sunlight on the steps and Hyunjin’s handwriting turning your vision inside out.
“I never opened it,” Minho says.
Your eyes cut to his face.
He lifts the envelope slightly, just enough for you to see the flap still sealed, still closed. Still waiting.
“I didn’t read it,” he says. “I didn’t want his words. I just didn’t want you to have them.”
The honesty of it is so brutal it leaves you without anything to say for a second.
You look back down at your name.
The letters blur from the sudden, unbearable pressure of knowing that all this time, the absence you built your grief around had not been absence at all. It had been theft.
Slowly, carefully, Minho holds the envelope out again.
This time, you don’t knock it away.
Your hand lifts and hovers there for a second too long before your fingers finally close around it. The paper is warmer than it should be from his coat pocket, softened at the corners, and so painfully ordinary that your stomach twists.
Minho lets go of it and for a moment, he just watches you.
Then, quietly, he says, “I’m sorry.”
The words do not fix his face into something easier to look at.
They do not soften him.
They do not soften you either.
They just hang there in the spring air, late and plain and far too small for what they are being asked to carry.
You stare at the envelope in your hand.
At your name in Hyunjin’s handwriting.
At the slight bend near one corner where Minho must have held it too tightly at some point, years ago now, when grief was still hot enough to feel like purpose.
You can’t look at him.
Not yet.
Because if you do, you will have to decide what shape his apology is allowed to take inside you, and you are nowhere near ready for that.
Your voice, when it comes, is flat with exhaustion. “You should go.”
There is no venom in it. That seems to hurt him more than if there had been.
For a second he says nothing. Just inclines his head once, small and accepting. He has already known this was the only ending you could offer him here on these courthouse steps with Chan gone and Hyunjin’s final words still sealed in your hand.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
He steps back.
Then turns.
You watch him start down the stairs, one hand in his coat pocket, shoulders set against the mild spring wind as if he’s already half elsewhere. Japan. Jisung. The long-delayed, private burial of a version of his life that had rotted too long in revenge.
He makes it three steps before you hear yourself say his name.
“Minho.”
He stops.
Looks back over his shoulder.
You stand there with the note pressed lightly to your chest, the courthouse at your back, the whole ruined city moving around you in soft afternoon noise.
For one second you don’t know how to say it without sounding kinder than you feel.
In the end, you don’t try.
You just tell the truth.
“I hope you and Jisung find peace.”
The words go between you and stay.
Minho looks at you for a long moment.
Something shifts in his face then—not relief, exactly. Nothing so easy. Just the brief, unguarded look of someone who has been carrying a grief so long it has forgotten how to imagine gentleness addressed to it at all.
Then he nods.
Once.
“So do I,” he says.
And this time, when he turns and walks away, you let him.
You stay on the courthouse steps until Minho disappears into the blur of the sidewalk and the crowd swallows him whole.
Only then do you move.
Far enough to sit on the low stone ledge beside the railing, out of the current of people coming and going, where the spring sun can find your knees and do absolutely nothing for the cold still lodged in you. The courthouse behind you keeps emptying itself in orderly little bursts—heels on stone, briefcases, clipped voices, the small administrative afterlife of judgment. Nobody looks at you twice. To them, you are just another woman sitting outside a building, holding an envelope too tightly.
The note feels heavier now that you are alone with it.
You turn it over once in your hands.
Then back again.
Your name is still there.
The handwriting is so familiar that it makes something in your chest go hollow and reverent all at once. You had thought, for so long, that the worst thing was that he had left you nothing. Nothing to hold, nothing to explain, nothing to prove that in the end, with all that darkness gathered around him, he had still thought of you.
And now here it is.
Not nothing.
Just withheld.
Stolen.
Delayed until the shape of your grief had already hardened around its absence.
A breeze lifts the edge of your coat and slips cool fingers under your hair. Somewhere across the street, a tree gives up a scatter of petals, pale and soft and already dying in the gutter. Spring has come anyway. Spring, rude and bright and absurdly alive, after all that winter. After graves and courtrooms and detention rooms and the slow dismantling of every version of love you thought you understood.
You slide your thumb beneath the flap.
It would be so easy.
You stare at the envelope for a long time.
At the life this would have been, once—a thing opened in a bedroom, maybe, with tears and heartbreak and some ordinary, survivable kind of ending. Not this. Not on courthouse steps after a sentencing hearing and a goodbye and a country already waiting to take one more person away from you.
You think of Hyunjin.
Not the dead boy.
Not the liar.
Not the frightened, splintering version of him Chan handed back to you at the grave.
Just Hyunjin.
Twenty-two and laughing at stupid jokes.
Warm in your bed.
Sharp-eyed and impossible and quietly carrying too much.
The boy you loved.
The boy who hurt you.
The boy who left you words after all.
And you realize, with a clarity so sudden it almost feels merciful, that if you open the note now, you will make him final in a way you cannot bear tonight.
Not because you are afraid of what it says.
Because you are.
But more than that, because once you read it, the last unopened thing he ever gave you will stop being possibility and become fact. And facts, you have learned, are not always kinder than mysteries. Sometimes they are only heavier.
Your thumb slips back out from under the flap.
You smooth the paper flat instead. Then you place the envelope in your bag.
A weight. A promise. A wound deferred by choice for once instead of by violence.
You zip the bag closed.
And for the first time in what feels like years, something about your grief belongs to your timing.
Yours.
You sit there one moment longer, hands folded loosely in your lap, looking out at the city as it moves around you. Cars pass. People laugh somewhere too far away to resent properly. The petals keep skittering across the pavement in little pale drifts, gathering in corners and cracks as if even broken things can still make a season look beautiful.
You think, distantly, that this is what remains.
The spring air against your face.
The unbearable, unglamorous fact that after everything—after all the boys who vanished in one way or another, after all the lies and graves and courtrooms and love turned costly—you are still here.
And because you are still here, eventually, you stand.
You adjust the strap of your bag on your shoulder. Feel the outline of the envelope through the leather and do not reach for it. Then you turn away from the courthouse and start walking, carrying his last words unopened beside your heart, not ready for them yet, but not leaving them behind.
The boys find a little girl alone in a park, after discovering that her parents don't take care of her they decide to adopt her. Follow the boys and Hae as they learn navigate through this new adventure together and slowly forming their own little family that feels even more complete everyday.
In every home, love looks a little different. Not all fathers start the same, and not all of them get it right—but love finds a way to stay. Dedicated to the kind of love that doesn’t have to be perfect to be real.
⌗ fatherhood ⌗ x reader ⌗ domestic life ⌗ mature themes
⤷ INDEX―
⋆ CHAN ― STILL, YOU STAY
⌞I’ll Carry It All⌝ Dad ― He carries more than he should, holding everything together for the sake of the one person who depends on him most. Loving quietly, heavily, and learning, slowly, that he doesn’t have to do it all alone.
⋆ MINHO ― TITLE ⌯⌲ DATE
⌞Love Quietly⌝ Dad ― He complains, rolls his eyes, insists he needs space—but never strays too far. Somehow, without ever saying it outright, his entire world is wrapped up in the small hand that always finds his.
⋆ CHANGBIN ― TITLE ⌯⌲ DATE
⌞Your Biggest Fan⌝ Dad ― Every moment is loud with love: cheers too big, pride too obvious, support that never wavers. In his world, there’s no such thing as loving silently.
⋆ HYUNJIN ― CHRYSANTHEMUMS
⌞I’ll Earn Your Trust⌝ Dad ― He treads carefully, unsure of where he’s allowed to stand. But love isn’t something he can keep at a distance forever, and once it’s given back, it changes everything.
⋆ JISUNG ― TITLE ⌯⌲ DATE
⌞Trying My Best⌝ Dad ― Nothing feels real yet, and somehow, everything does. Caught between fear and something softer, he’s already learning how deeply you can love someone you haven’t even met.
⋆ FELIX ― TITLE ⌯⌲ DATE
⌞Safe Place⌝ Dad ― In the quiet of sleepless nights, he builds something gentle. Something warm enough to come back to, no matter how tired, no matter how unsure.
⋆ SEUNGMIN ― THINGS DON'T STAY THE SAME
⌞I Trust You⌝ Dad ― He doesn’t say much, doesn’t push too hard, but he’s always there. Watching, waiting, trusting, even as he learns what it means to hold on and let go at the same time.
⋆ JEONGIN ― AS LONG AS I'VE GOT YOU
⌞Growing With You⌝ Dad ― He moves with quiet certainty, never rushing, never wavering. With a steady hand and a thoughtful heart, he becomes the kind of father who doesn’t just grow into the role—he understands it.
