“I want my menace back,” I whisper. “The girl who flirts with danger and steals the last piece of bread to make me pout. I want the light that makes the rookies walk taller. I wantyou.”
She blinks fast.
“What if this is me too?”
“Then we learn her,” I say, because I owe her respect, not nostalgia. “But we don’t let him be the gravity that decides where you fall.”
We hold each other’s gaze for a long beat that feels like the edge of a roof. Then she nods once, a queen agreeing to be a girl in front of one person.
“Okay.”
I make her tea that tastes like grass and mercy. She drinks it and makes a face that almost qualifies as alive. We go to the range and I set up targets I know she can hit and one she can’t so she’ll have to swear at me. She hits them all, because of course she does, and when I tell her so she flips me off without looking over, which I choose to accept as progress.
At dusk, I find her on the outer wall, hair unbraided, the wind trying to decide whether it’s going to be rain. She doesn’t notice me until I’m beside her. The mark under her collar warms. The bond hums a note I can’t hear with my ears.
“Say his name,” I say, not gently, not cruelly. Just… asking her to stop making the quiet do the talking.
She swallows.
“Taeyang.”
The sound hangs between us like the first chime after a storm. It hurts. Good. Pain that announces itself can be treated. Pain that hides makes ruins.
“Again,” I say.
“Taeyang,” she says, steadier. “I hate you. I miss you. I hate that I miss you. I am so angry I could set the garden on fire and then pretend the lantern did it.”
I snort.
“That would foolno one.”
“I know,” she says, and for the first time in weeks her mouth tips like she recognizes me.
We stand there until the torches light and the wall learns how to be warm. She tucks her hands under her arms to keep from pressing the mark and I let her borrow my silence so hers can rest. When the first drops fall, we go inside.
In my bunk, later, I lie on my back and stare at the slats above me and whisper to the wood because the gods have enough to do:
“Bring her back to me, please. Or bring him forward. Or teach me how to hold the version of her that hurts without losing the one that shines.”
The building doesn’t answer. The night breathes. In the bed below, Yuna turns over and the frame creaks like a tired thing. I press my knuckles to my lips and taste salt.
“Come back to me,” I whisper finally—not to her, not to him, to the girl who once tied flowers into my hair and made the world less cruel by refusing to be. “Please.”
Because I am losing her by inches, and I don’t know how to stop it, and rage is easier than grief but less honest.
In the dark, I add a line I will never admit:If you love her, Taeyang, be brave. If you can’t, let someone be enough to keep her warm until she forgets your name.
Unspoken Scars
Jisoo
If I could go back, I would let the world burn before I letthathappen.
But time is a door that only opens one way, and I am the fool who learned to pick locks after the house was already ash.
Seori lives. Breathes. Laughs again in a way that makes the old corridors remember light. Her father walks the gardens at dusk; her mother rules with a hand that can be both blade and balm. I helped bring that ending about, and still the stitch I made in the tapestry runs crooked. My betrayal sits under my skin like bad thread: tug it and everything aches.
She looks at me differently now. Not cruelly. Not even cold. Just… carefully. Like I’m a shard in a child’s pocket—useful, dangerous, not to be gripped without thinking. I accept it. Some mercies are earned by not asking for more.
