Work Text:
It’s raining again.
Not the dramatic kind that drums against windows like some sad indie film - just soft, steady, forgettable. The kind of rain you don’t notice until your socks are already wet.
Minho stands in the middle of his living room, holding a mug that’s long gone cold. The TV is on. Something about cooking or travel - he hasn’t really been watching. The silence had gotten too loud, so he turned it on like background noise to a life that doesn’t feel like his anymore.
He hasn’t touched the closet in the hallway since the funeral.
It’s been three hundred and seventy-nine days.
That number lives somewhere beneath his tongue. Not on purpose. It just arrives - every morning when he opens his eyes and doesn’t see Jisung’s hair messy on the pillow, or hear him humming off-key in the shower.
He thinks he hears it now.
That laugh. The sharp one that used to spill out of Jisung’s chest when Minho couldn’t fold a fitted sheet. The little curse in his dialect when he tripped over shoes Jisung always told him to move. The thump of a shoulder against a doorframe as Jisung leaned and watched him cook like it was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen Minho do.
Ghost sounds.
He puts the mug down and walks.
The hallway light flickers once as he passes. He doesn’t stop. Just reaches for the knob on the closet with a hand that doesn’t feel like it’s shaking - until it is.
The door creaks open.
Inside: old coats. A vacuum cleaner. A few cardboard boxes with fading Sharpie labels.
And one box, sitting up top. Unlabelled. Untouched. Untouchable.
He knows what it is.
He didn’t have to be told - not really. Chan handed it to him with that same broken look everyone had after the last breath. Said, “He wanted you to have this.” And Minho had nodded like he understood, even though he couldn’t feel his own feet.
He hadn’t opened it.
Not until now.
Minho pulls it down gently, fingers curling around the edges. It’s lighter than he remembers. But the weight it puts on his heart is something he can barely carry.
He carries it to the coffee table like it might break if he moves too fast.
And then he just… stares at it.
Minutes. Maybe hours.
Outside, the rain taps at the windows like it’s waiting, too.
Finally, he opens the lid.
Inside:
· A cassette tape in a plastic sleeve.
· A bundle of envelopes, tied together with string.
· One photo—creased from being handled too many times. It’s Jisung. Laughing. Wind in his hair. Sunglasses crooked. Alive.
Minho sits down.
His heart isn’t racing.
It’s slow. Heavy.
Like something sinking just beneath the water’s surface, not quite drowning - but not swimming either.
Like each thud causes a deep crack to splinter within the walls of the already broken muscle. Fractures that are unable to heal. Wounds that run too deep and wide to be anything but open crevices where the pain of a love he once thrived on, now bleeds out in black; staining the walls of his chest in globs of poisoned ink.
He picks up the tape.
On it, in familiar messy handwriting:
“For when you forget I was real.”
Minho breathes.
And for the first time in three hundred and seventy-nine days, he lets himself cry.
Not the polite kind.
This is from the depths of his soul. A part he had hastily shut off and stitched up with old thread, the emotions bulging at the seams of his poor handiwork.
The kind that says: I remember you. I still love you. And I don’t know what to do without you.
It hurts. It hurts enough he loses his breath, body wracked with heaving sobs and wails of grief that tear past his chapped and bitten lips. The space around him grasps onto these sounds, echoing them around causing a symphony of the greatest composition.
He can’t see through the tears that stream out of his eyes constantly. The sting aches as the salt water burns tracks down his face, leaving invisible scars that only he will know are there in the first place. And only he will know why.
The pain is real and raw. It’s scary in a way that he put off facing it for over a year. He knew he couldn’t live with this pain, couldn’t handle feeling this pain. The depth that it reaches its cruel claws, severing nerve endings and leaving them searing under his skin.
~
It takes him thirty minutes to find something that can even play a cassette.
Buried in a moving box he never unpacked, wedged between a tangled mess of cables and a half-used sketchbook.
He plugs it in with shaking hands.
Hits rewind, even though it’s already at the start.
There’s a click.
And then -
Silence.
For so long he thinks maybe it’s blank. Maybe it was a mistake.
Then -
A breath.
And then a voice, small and familiar and painfully alive.
“Hey baby…”
Minho’s knees fold before he even registers it.
He slides to the floor, back pressed to the couch, hand clutched around the little machine like it might vanish.
“If you’re hearing this, I guess…
well, you know.”
A laugh. Rough. Dry.
“I didn’t want to do the letter thing again. That’s what the box is for. That’s the nice stuff. The clean goodbye.
This… this is the part I didn’t know how to write down.”
Minho closes his eyes. Breathes in through his nose, out through his cracked ribcage.
Jisung’s voice fills the room like sunlight through closed blinds.
“I kept wondering if I should even record this. You already know how much I loved you, right?
God, I hope you knew.
I hope I said it enough times.
I said it too much, didn’t I?”
Minho presses his fingers to his lips. His throat burns.
“I don’t want this to be some dramatic final words thing.
But if there’s one thing I hope -
I hope you don’t let this destroy you.
Don’t let it turn you into a ghost.”
Minho’s knuckles go white.
“You’re gonna want to sleep through days. You’re gonna wake up and forget I’m gone and then remember all over again and want to
crawl out of your own skin.
But Minho… please.
Please.
Keep going.”
The tape hisses.
“I loved you with everything I had.
Even the parts I was scared to show.
And I’m sorry I didn’t get more time.
But I want you to have the rest of yours. All of it.
And I know you loved me too, god baby - I felt it every second of everyday.
Thank you, for showing me what true love was like. For showing me something so beautiful.”
Minho swallows a sob. Fails. It rips out anyway.
“You always said I was your light.
But you were mine.”
The words break at the edges—like Jisung had to pause; regather.
“So if it gets dark…
Just remember how I looked at you.”
A long silence.
And then, softer - so soft it almost doesn’t reach:
“That’s the light behind your eyes.”
Click.
The tape ends.
And Minho breaks.
Not loudly.
Not all at once.
But with a kind of grief that’s too deep for air.
That shakes silently. That hollows.
He presses his forehead to his knees, arms wrapped tight around his chest, as if he could hold himself together long enough to keep from splitting open. But he can’t, and he can feel the way his soul is shattering – dying.
Rain lashes the windows like something furious.
But inside, there’s only stillness.
Just Minho.
And Jisung’s voice, echoing in the hollows of his ribs where his heart once grew.