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It's 3.04 am.
Kyuhyun stands in front of the mirror in his room. It's dark, save for the little stream of light spilling in from the bathroom door which was left ajar intentionally for comfort. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Ryeowook’s voice nags at him again about how sleeping with the lights on messes with melatonin, how it could even cause cancer.
He laughed it off, as always, muttering a snarky retort under his breath. Deep down, he knew Ryeowook meant well—he always did—but even the gentlest care could feel heavy sometimes.
He shakes the thought away and flips the switch on anyway, his eyes scrunching up slightly to adjust to the bright lights of his bedroom. He stares at the half mirror and the reflection stares quietly back at him, feeling both familiar and foreign.
His pale face, the small teardrop mole beneath his eye, and the curve of his jaw — fuller now than it once was — caught his attention. Someone had once told him, offhandedly, that the mole signified many hardships and emotional difficulties, but he never had the heart to remove it.
He sucks his teeth as his gaze traces the faint lines on his face and the few old pock marks that never seemed to fade. He was supposed to be the youngest of the group, and yet even he hadn’t been spared by time. The years just keep rolling by — as mercilessly as ever.
Today marks the anniversary of that day.
How many years have it been now?
He barely talks about it because it wasn't worth the trouble and sympathy that came with it inevitably. They all moved on, he moved on, or apparently so. But no one knew that he still had nightmares from that day, the sound of metal folding in his ears — so loud, so real. The night of the car accident and the scars it gave him. The years have blurred everything else—the noise, the crash, the smell of smoke—but the memory of those marks remains carved deep beneath his skin.
He knows how lucky he was to have survived.
He removes his nightshirt slowly, raising his arms and peeling the sleeves up along the way, finally letting the white cotton shirt fall soundlessly and crumples at his feet.
Little goosebumps bloom across his arms as the cold air grazes his skin. He dares himself to look at the reflection again. His gaze follows his slim fingers as they slowly trace the scars running along his ribs on both sides—raised ridges, some thin and faded, others still angry and uneven, branching like pale appendages across his skin. Some are thickened, hypertrophic, still capable of stinging and itching on certain nights.
They’re the reason he avoids fitted clothes. The reason he’s always tugging his sleeves lower or buttoning his shirts higher.
He hates summer —the idea of beach photos, tight shirts, mirrors that catch him off guard.
He hates them. Hates how they twist his reflection into something unfamiliar.
His fingertips brush over one of the larger scars along his flank. It’s cold. It’s real.
He hates it.
And he hates himself for hating it.
He’s so lost in thought that he doesn’t hear the soft creak of the door.
A quiet, familiar voice follows the faint shuffle of footsteps.
“Can’t sleep?”
He doesn’t turn around, arms hanging loosely, one hand gripping the other by the elbow as though trying to hold himself together. He had forgotten to lock his door.
“What are you doing here, hyung?” His voice comes out sharper than he means it to, followed by a sigh. “It’s three in the morning.”
The reply comes with a heave of heavy breath and familiar warmth against his back. Yesung slides his arms which settles snugly around his waist, humming a tune under his breath with his eyes closed. Kyuhyun stiffens, instinctively flinching before the weight of the embrace settles in.
“Are you alright, Kyu?”
Kyuhyun exhales through his nose, his reflection blurring faintly as his vision stings.
“It’s nothing,” he mutters. “Just can’t sleep.”
Yesung hums softly, unconvinced. “You never could, around this time of year.”
Kyuhyun lets his head drop against the warmth. The faint scent that always clings to Yesung drifts between them — a faint blend of cedarwood and clean linen— carrying with it a quiet comfort, something achingly familiar.
“I know what day it is,” Yesung murmurs, his voice raspy and close, almost a breath against Kyuhyun’s neck.
“Of course you do,” Kyuhyun mutters under his breath with a humorless laugh.
“You always pretend you’re fine,” Yesung says. “But you’re standing here at three in the morning, staring at yourself like you’re trying to find someone else in the mirror.”
Kyuhyun’s shoulders tense. A pause drags on for almost too long before he finally says something. Yesung doesn’t move, doesn’t press—just waits, the way he always does.
“It’s been years. Everyone’s over it.”
“That doesn’t mean you are.”
Something in the room tightens, the silence swelling until it feels heavy enough to crush the air between them. Kyuhyun wants to run. But part of him is afraid—afraid that if he does, there’ll be no one left when he turns around.
Kyuhyun finally speaks again, his tone quiet but jagged.
“You wouldn’t understand, hyung. You don’t know what it’s like waking up to this.” He gestures at his reflection, at the pale lines tracing his ribs. “Having to pretend you’re fine when you can’t even look at yourself without remembering.”
Yesung doesn’t answer right away. When he does, it’s with movement—slow, deliberate. He runs the pad of his fingers gently along the ridges on the pale skin, gently lifting the younger boy’s cold hands away when he tries to resist the touch. He then releases Kyuhyun just enough to roll up the sleeves of his sweatshirt.
Yesung lifts his arm fully into the light, Kyuhyun’s gaze shift not to the small stars, but higher, toward the curve of his inner forearm.
Ink gleams under the light—curved lines, black and blue with a touch of red, scattered and wrapping around his wrists and forearms. Sometimes Kyuhyun frowned at them. Most of the time, he couldn’t be bothered. But tonight, more than anything, they gave him an unexpected sense of wonder and awe.
Yesung beckons him closer, his touch patient, guiding Kyuhyun’s hand until his fingers brush against the markings. The contact sparks something sharp—almost electric. He never noticed it before. Kyuhyun's fingertips settled on the delicate, dancing figure of a skeleton, its limbs entwined with thin, wiry stems that blossomed into stark red flowers.
“I think,” Yesung says softly, “I might understand more than you think.”
Kyuhyun stares. His breath hitches. “Hyung…”
“I didn’t get these for fashion, or because I love the pain,” Yesung murmurs, voice low, his small hands soft and reverent cupped against Kyuhyun’s bigger ones as they ghost over the delicate markings.
“These are the places I tried to quiet the noise,” Yesung continues, his own gaze tracing the artwork. “You feel the lines beneath? The ones that aren’t ink.”
Kyuhyun’s breath hitched as he felt them—not the smooth glide of healthy skin, but the subtle ridges and valleys of an old injury, deliberately overlaid by the skeletal dancer and the flowers,like threads buried beneath the color. Uneven, almost alive. What he’d always thought were mere designs now look like something else entirely under the light.
He shifted his focus, his gaze drifting to another, more chaotic design: a raw, scribbled collection of jagged stars and sharp, chaotic figures. It looked like a permanent expression of anxiety, the very "noise" Yesung had just described.
Then, Kyuhyun's eyes caught the faint, pale blue mark just above the crook of Yesung's elbow. It wasn't the bold black of the others; it was a ghost-like outline—thin, jagged lines that looked strikingly like a lightning strike or a healed laceration.
He had never really understood why the older man loved marking his skin. It had always felt like one of Yesung’s small eccentricities—impulsive, harmless, another quiet quirk that made him who he was. But now, standing this close, seeing the uneven lines half-hidden beneath the layers of ink, Kyuhyun begins to understand.
Maybe it had never been about decoration.
Maybe not even about self-expression.
Maybe it had been about hiding something—softly, desperately.
A slow twist coils in his stomach when the truth settles in. Yesung hadn’t simply collected tattoos over the years. He had carved into himself long before that, trying to quiet a pain he didn’t know how to speak aloud. Trying to bleed out emotions that refused to stay contained.
And Kyuhyun feels the weight of that confession like a stone in his chest. That while he had been drowning in his own hurt for so long, he never once noticed that his hyung had been fighting a quieter, lonelier battle—marking his own skin in the dark just to silence the phantom ache inside him.
His mouth opens, but no words come out at first. His mind swirls with confusion, disbelief, a quiet shame. How had he never seen this? Years in the same band, more like family than colleagues, and yet… he had never truly looked. Not really.
“I got them to change the things that didn’t mean the same anymore.”
He lifts his thumb to a tattoo shaped almost like a bird on his forearm, tracing the design slowly.
“Scars don’t fade just because you hide them,” he says, “they just… change shape. And you can make them into something beautiful.” He looks up, meeting Kyuhyun’s reflection in the mirror.
“It’s up to us what we want to make of them.”
Kyuhyun stares—at the tattoos, at the faint scars ghosting beneath them, at the quiet strength threaded through Yesung’s low voice. For a moment he thinks he understands, thinks the ink is only a mask for whatever once hurt him. But then something settles inside him, slow and heavy and painfully clear—he got it wrong again.
Yesung had spent so long being teased, overlooked, folded into the edges of the group. People made him the easy joke, the gentle one, the quiet one who wouldn’t push back, not for real anyway. And Kyuhyun had seen it—had known it—but never quite realized how much weight Yesung carried behind that small frame and distant gaze.
It isn’t just concealment.
It’s survival.
It’s evolution.
It’s the quiet, stubborn act of moving forward when the past won’t let go.
Kyuhyun swallows, his throat dry, and finally manages to ask, voice low and tremulous, “When… when did it start? How… how could I have missed it?”
Yesung doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t seem hurt. Instead, he smiles faintly, almost wistfully, as if acknowledging a truth long understood: “It started but also stopped a long time ago. And it’s not about being noticed. It’s about carrying it, reshaping it… learning to live with it.”
Kyuhyun’s gaze flicks from the tattoo to Yesung’s face, back to the inked lines and faint scars beneath, and a quiet, aching realization settles over him.
It hurts now, in a slow, dull way, to think of how often he’d been too lost in his own pain to noticed the battles fought right beside him. Yesung stands here—older, steadier, and as someone who has weathered his own fears in silence and somehow come out strong enough to offer comfort he never demanded for himself.
“You’re not alone, Kyuhyun,” Yesung says, meeting his gaze in the mirror.“You just wear yours under cotton. I wear mine under ink.”
For a moment, the world feels very still. Then Kyuhyun’s arms drop, and he lets himself lean back into Yesung’s embrace—the weight of it both grounding and unbearably light. The clock ticks. The light hums softly above them.
The warmth of Yesung’s embrace folds around him, fragile yet unwavering, something steady enough to press gently against years of shame he never learned how to name. And Kyuhyun lets it, because for the first time in a long while, he feels the shape of something like safety.
Neither of them says another word.
Kyuhyun slowly lifts his head from Yesung’s shoulder, wiping the dampness from his eyes with the back of his hand. The contact lingers for a moment before he steps back fully, turning to face the older man. The confession was done; the shame, though not gone, felt smaller, shared.
Yesung’s expression is soft, his eyes clear and steady. He didn't try to pull Kyuhyun back into the hug but bends down instead, gently retrieving Kyuhyun’s discarded white nightshirt from the floor.
"Let's get you back in bed," Yesung says, his tone gentle but firm, the voice of someone who knew exactly how to shepherd a restless soul. He didn't ask Kyuhyun to put the shirt on himself; instead, he holds it open.
Kyuhyun watches silently as Yesung slips the cotton over his head, smoothing the fabric down his bare back. It’s a simple, intimate act—a reversal of the painful, self-examining removal just minutes before. The shirt feels soft against his skin, covering the lines he had been obsessing over, but now, the covering feels like comfort, not concealment.
Yesung then walks over to the light switch and, without hesitation, flicks off the main overhead light.
The room immediately retreats to the soft, familiar glow cast by the slightly ajar bathroom door—the narrow, comforting tether that Kyuhyun had relied on.
Kyuhyun crosses the room and sat heavily on the edge of his bed. Yesung follows, sitting beside him. He doesn't fill the silence with further comforting words or analysis. Instead, he reaches out, not to hug him or talk, but simply to take Kyuhyun’s hand.
Kyuhyun’s hand is cold, still bearing the phantom tingle from tracing Yesung's tattoos. Yesung laces their fingers together, bringing their joined hands up to his lips and pressing a soft, lingering kiss to Kyuhyun's knuckles.
“Get some sleep, Kyuhyun-ah. We've got a long day tomorrow.” Yesung murmurs, his voice now almost a lullaby. “And don’t listen to Ryeowook about the light. You leave that door open as wide as you need to.”
Kyuhyun finally offers a weak, genuine smile. "Thanks hyung. I'll try," he promises.
Yesung gives his hand a final squeeze and releases him. He stands up, but instead of walking toward the door, he circles the bed and climbs into the empty space on the other side.
Kyuhyun watches, startled. "Hyung? What are you doing?"
"It's three in the morning, Kyuhyun-ah," Yesung says simply, pulling the duvet over his chest. "I'm staying until the sun comes up. Then let’s go and get breakfast with the rest of the members, okay?"
He settles onto his back, facing the ceiling. Kyuhyun lies down too, still feeling the residual chill of the night air. He turns onto his side, facing Yesung's back. In the faint spill of light, he could just make out the subtle ink tracing the older man’s forearm, the soft rise and fall of his breathing.
He knew he’d reset by morning, slip back into the sharp tongue and easy distance that kept the world from touching him too deeply. He’d be the usual playful yet carefully controlled maknae again—barely letting anyone glimpse his vulnerable side, let alone see him cry. But here, in this quiet pocket of night, he let himself unravel—just a little. He let Yesung see the raw edges he kept buried beneath jokes and bravado.
And the way Yesung held him—steady, gentle, unwavering—made something unfamiliar twist low in his chest, something that felt too warm, too insistent to be just comfort. Something that made him want to linger in the safety a little longer, even as his mind whispered to pull away.
Kyuhyun closes his eyes, finally allowing the tension in his shoulders to relax. For the first time on the anniversary of "that day," the metallic screech of folding metal was silent.
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