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Minho doesn’t tell him at first.
How could he?
How do you say, don’t love me too much, or I’ll turn to stone?
How do you explain that affection doesn’t soften you—doesn’t unmake the ache—but calcifies it instead? That every gentle touch seeps deeper into you, solidifying until even breath begins to echo inside a hollowed chest? Until warmth becomes weight, and love becomes a quiet kind of erosion?
It isn’t something you confess between movie times and drink orders. It doesn’t belong in the flickering hush of a theater lobby or between bites of fries at midnight.
So he doesn’t say it on the first date or the second. He nearly says it on the third—almost. They’re walking home from the little jazz bar Jisung likes, shoes scuffing pavement as laughter spins in loose spirals between them. The night is soft, aimless—stretched like silk, slow like honey.
Jisung leans in too close, grinning, the kind of grin that makes his eyes crinkle at the corners, and says, “Do you always look this sad when you laugh?”
Minho almost breaks.
But he just shakes his head.
Smiles.
And swallows the truth like a stone, tucking it tightly between his ribs. A secret folded sharp and small enough to pierce.
The first time Jisung kisses him, it’s instinct.
A moment drawn too long. A breath held too close. They’re on Minho’s couch, both still laughing when it happens—just a shift in gravity, a look held a second too long, and then: lips on lips.
No warning. No hesitation. Just a collision as natural as breathing.
It feels like memory.
Like something borrowed from another life—one where Minho isn’t slowly turning to stone.
And he lets it happen.
Of course he does.
Because Jisung’s mouth is warm and alive, and Minho wants to remember what it feels like to be wanted before he forgets what softness is.
But when Jisung pulls back, breathless and beaming, Minho’s gaze drifts downward.
There, blooming from the curve of his thumb and threading through the crease of his palm, is the first sign.
A bloom of stone—pale, fine-veined, like frost climbing glass.
He hides it behind his back. Smiles too tightly.
Jisung doesn’t notice.
Not yet.
Time passes.
The kind of time that moves not in hours but in small permissions: a longer kiss, a shared blanket, a hand held too long.
More kisses follow. Hesitant at first. Then bolder.
Minho is cautious. Always cautious. He never lets himself fully fall.
But love finds its way in. It trickles through seams like water slipping into stone. It lingers in the places Minho forgets to guard.
One night, he forgets to look.
They’re on the floor of Jisung’s apartment, surrounded by half-eaten takeout and crumpled napkins, soy sauce packets scattered like fallen petals. The light is dim. Music hums from a speaker—gentle, wordless.
Minho says something quiet, something unbearably soft, and Jisung laughs—not because it’s funny, but because it’s honest—and leans in to kiss him.
When they part, Jisung’s gaze drops.
His smile falters.
“Min,” he whispers.
Minho follows his eyes.
Two of his fingers are marble-gray now, streaked with faint gold veins like sunlight tried to take root and failed.
Not a trick of light. Not a metaphor. Just stone.
Real.
Jisung stares like something inside him has snapped loose. Slowly, he reaches out, brushes his thumb across the changed skin—cold, unyielding.
“What… what is that?”
Minho exhales. His voice is quiet. Steady.
“A curse,” he says. “Mine.”
He tells him everything.
No theatrics. No mythology. Just the truth, bare and unadorned.
He doesn’t know when it started—only that once, years ago, he kissed someone and came away less soft than he’d been before. Just a little colder. A little quieter. Something small but vital turned still beneath the skin.
It doesn’t hurt. Not in the way injuries hurt. There’s no blood. No sting.
But it takes.
Every kiss. Every touch. Every flicker of closeness. It chips something away. Freezes it. Preserves it in stone, like the body is trying to protect what the heart cannot afford to lose. Like some part of him decided long ago that love was too dangerous to leave unguarded.
There was no spell. No pact made beneath moonlight in a forest clearing. No bargain struck at the edge of magic.
Just this quiet, cruel law etched into his bones.
Love me, and I calcify.
Jisung doesn’t speak.
He just listens.
And when Minho’s voice finally trails off, when the last syllable hangs like a thread pulled loose from the air, Jisung stays still. His eyes stay fixed on Minho’s hand—the one still resting in his lap, streaked with pale stone and fading warmth.
Then, slowly—carefully, like he’s touching a living relic—he cups it in both of his own. His thumbs trace over the lines of Minho’s palm like he’s reading them for the first time, looking for something he might have missed.
“You should’ve told me,” he whispers, voice barely holding together.
“I wanted to,” Minho says, and his breath stirs the space between them.
Jisung’s grip tightens slightly. “But you still kissed me.”
Minho nods, gaze steady. “I didn’t want to live untouched.”
The words settle between them like snow. Quiet. Inevitable. Irrevocable.
Jisung closes his eyes.
And doesn’t let go.
Jisung tries after that.
God, he tries.
He learns how to speak without lips. How to love without ruin.
He writes devotion into the margins of Minho’s life: notes folded into coat pockets, soup left warming on the stove for nights when Minho is too tired to ask for it, playlists strung together of songs that say stay in every imaginable key.
He smiles through the quiet grief blooming in his chest, even when it aches like a bruise he keeps pressing just to feel something. He pulls away when Minho leans in, even when his whole body is screaming to close the distance. He kisses the air beside skin. Pretends it’s enough.
He touches Minho like something sacred. Like a relic carved from breath and silence. Like he’s memorizing what warmth feels like before it leaves for good.
With reverence. With restraint. With hands that tremble no matter how still he tries to keep them.
Minho lets him.
He doesn’t ask for more. Doesn’t press. Just watches Jisung like he’s watching the last light drain from the day.
For a while, it works.
But love has never been neat.
It leaks.
It spills from Jisung in sighs that catch at the end, in glances that last too long, in fingertips that linger where they shouldn't. It seeps through every careful gap, every line they tried to draw between feeling and survival.
It builds—quiet and slow—like rain pooling in the eaves.
And one night, when Minho looks too tired—too still, too far away to reach—Jisung forgets himself.
Just for a second.
One unguarded breath. One instinct too old to unlearn.
He leans forward and kisses Minho’s shoulder. Bare skin, cool with sleep. A kiss not meant for ceremony or longing, but for anchoring. For reminding. For being.
Minho gasps.
A quiet, fractured sound—like something snapping inward.
When they look, his forearm is stone to the elbow.
The transformation is seamless. Terrifying in its beauty. The skin glitters faintly in the light, veins of pale gold catching the edges like sunlight through frost.
Jisung crumples.
His body folds in on itself like paper caught in rain and collapses. He presses his face to Minho’s chest and sobs—not the way people do in movies, but the way people do when they’ve finally broken something they can’t fix.
Minho wraps the arm that’s still warm around him. Holds him tight, close, steady.
And says nothing.
Because there is nothing left that words haven’t already failed to save.
“I can’t watch you disappear,” Jisung says one night, voice splintered, thin as glass stretched to its breaking point. His hands are clenched in the hem of Minho’s shirt, fingers trembling with the effort of holding on. “Not for me. Not like this.”
They’re sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped in quiet, the kind that comes after days of pretending things haven’t changed. Minho's movements have grown slower, his breath shallower. When he leans, it’s more of a sway. When he speaks, it's with the careful restraint of someone aware of how little time is left.
Minho reaches up with what warmth he has left—one hand still his, the other already heavy, stilled beneath the skin. He cups Jisung’s cheek, thumb brushing along the bone like he’s memorizing it for the last time. His touch is soft, reverent, almost unreal.
“You’re not making me disappear,” he says, low and certain, like truth spoken through a fog. “You’re making me feel.”
Jisung’s eyes are glassy. He shakes his head, sharp and desperate. “You’re choosing to break. Every time I get close, every time I forget and—God, I’m ruining you.”
“No,” Minho says, and he leans forward, pressing their foreheads together, breath fluttering uneven between them. “You’re reminding me I still have something to lose.”
He pulls back just enough to see Jisung’s face, and his smile—small, tired, and devastatingly tender—ghosts across his lips.
“So let me break,” he whispers. “Let me break in your arms.”
Jisung’s breath catches, mouth opening like he might argue, but nothing comes.
Because what argument can you make against a love that keeps choosing you, even as it crumbles? What do you say when someone asks not for rescue, but for witness?
He doesn’t say anything at all.
He just pulls Minho close and holds him tighter, as if that alone might slow the stone. As if arms could make a promise stronger than fate.
And for that moment—for the space between breaths—it almost feels like it might.
The next morning, Jisung kisses him.
Not by accident. Not because he forgot.
But because he remembers.
Because he wakes with the weight of Minho’s breath still faint against his shoulder and knows—knows in his bones—that this is not a life meant to be lived in caution.
He sits up slowly, turns to look at Minho still curled in the blankets, eyes half-lidded, expression soft in a way Jisung has only ever seen in early light.
And he leans in.
Kisses him.
Fully. Like a confession. Like surrender. Like war.
He kisses him knowing what it will take.
Knowing what it has already taken.
He does it anyway.
Because this—this—is the only language they’ve ever truly shared. The only act wide enough to hold all the things they’re afraid to say out loud.
Not a weakness.
But defiance.
A kind of devotion that doesn’t beg to last, only to matter.
Because love, for them, is not about preservation. It’s not about sealing the edges, keeping things safe and unbroken. That kind of love is for porcelain dolls and sealed letters.
Theirs is messier. More mortal. Built on borrowed time and all the things that ruin you beautifully.
It isn’t about keeping anything whole.
It’s about choosing each other anyway.
About being here—while they still can.
Winter comes early.
The days shrink. The air sharpens. Everything feels quieter, like the world is bracing for something it can’t name.
Minho walks slower now. Each step deliberate, as if he’s afraid of leaving something behind. His limbs are heavier than they used to be, breath catching at the top of each inhale like it’s clinging to the last of his softness. The stone creeps inward, inch by inch, like a tide that never forgets what belongs to it—claiming elbows, then ribs, then the slope of his shoulders.
But he’s still here.
Still present in the way his eyes find Jisung’s across a room.
Still warm at the center, where his voice lives, where memory hasn’t yet frozen over.
Still kisses back, even when it takes effort.
Still smiles, faint but full.
Still says, “Thank you,” like it’s a prayer meant for no one but him.
And when the air is quiet enough—when the light hits just right and he still remembers how to form the words—
he whispers,
“I’d rather be a statue in your arms than live untouched.”
When the stone reaches his jaw, Minho’s words come halting.
Distant.
Slurred like dreams half-remembered—fragile things, dissolving even as they’re spoken.
They spend their days near the window now, where the light moves slow and golden and kind. The world outside grows quieter as winter deepens, frost etching itself across the glass like ghostwriting.
Jisung reads aloud. Poetry. Folklore. Stories with sharp teeth and soft hearts, full of wolves who only wanted to be held and monsters who learned how to love. He reads even when Minho’s eyes are closed, when his breathing is shallow and his lashes stay still against his cheeks—because he knows Minho is still listening. He feels it in the way Minho’s head tilts ever so slightly toward the sound, the way something in his chest rises just a little when Jisung’s voice falters.
Sometimes, Minho smiles—barely. A flicker. A ghost of what it used to be, traced along frozen lips.
Sometimes, he doesn’t.
And Jisung reads anyway.
It happens on a winter morning.
The world outside is hushed, held in a breath of frost. Trees stand cloaked in white, branches bowed under the weight of silence. Light spills through the window in soft gold ribbons, catching in the edges of dust and stillness, the way it might in a chapel.
Minho hasn’t moved in hours.
His chest rises—barely. A slow, faltering lift, then stillness.
Jisung sits beside him, unmoving, except for the tremble in his fingers where they rest lightly over Minho’s stone hands. There’s no warmth left to feel, but he holds them anyway, like the memory of touch is enough to tether him here.
He leans forward, rests their foreheads together.
The contact is cool—unfeeling—but it doesn’t matter.
“I know,” he whispers. “I know this is the last one.”
Minho doesn’t nod.
Can’t.
But his eyes are still open, and for a moment—just a moment—they shine. Faint. Steady. Full of that quiet, brilliant light Jisung has loved for as long as he’s known it.
He kisses him.
Soft.
Steady.
Final.
And when he pulls away, Minho is still.
Not shattered.
Not broken.
Just still.
His back rests against the chair, head turned gently toward the window, lips parted as if caught mid-thought. A sculpture rendered not in marble, but in love—grief given form, grace given weight. A boy who let love undo him, piece by piece, and never turned away.
Jisung lowers his head to Minho’s shoulder.
Breathes.
Lets the silence settle like snowfall.
Then—quiet as prayer—Jisung lowers himself to Minho’s stone hand, bends until his lips meet the unmoving surface.
He kisses it gently.
Again. And again. And again.
As if repetition might fill the space where heartbeat used to live.
Until the light shifts.
Until the warmth fades from the floor.
Until all that remains is the echo of a boy he loved beyond reason and the stillness he made holy.
“I hope you’re in there,” Jisung breathes.
“I hope you can hear me.”
And with one last kiss, one final breath—
“You were loved. Every piece of you.”
twt: @neme_sisK