Chapter Text
Jinsol learns early that the universe does not like ownership.
It starts when she’s five.
Her favorite pencil disappears first. A stubby yellow thing with a chewed eraser and her name written too big on the side. She leaves it on the kitchen table. She is very sure of this. She goes to the bathroom. She comes back.
Gone.
She cries, of course. Her parents help her look under the table, behind the refrigerator, inside places pencils do not belong. Nothing.
The next day, a different pencil appears in her backpack. Not hers. Sharper. Cleaner. A tiny star sticker near the tip.
Her mother laughs. “Maybe you borrowed it from a friend.”
“I didn’t,” Jinsol insists.
Her father ruffles her hair. “You just forgot.”
Jinsol does not forget.
It keeps happening.
Socks vanish one by one. Hair clips disappear only to be replaced by unfamiliar ones. A marble she swears she buried in the backyard is suddenly on her desk, except it’s not the same color. Her sketchbook goes missing and returns with a pressed flower she’s never seen before.
Her parents stop searching.
Instead, they tell stories.
“Maybe you have a house spirit,” her mother says lightly.
“Or a very polite ghost,” her father jokes.
White lies. Soft ones. The kind meant to soothe a child’s imagination.
But Jinsol grows.
And the universe does not stop.
By middle school, she starts documenting it. Dates. Objects. Times. She tests things. Leaves coins in obvious places. Hides them carefully. Sometimes they stay. Sometimes they vanish.
Sometimes something else appears in their place.
Always small. Always harmless. Always personal.
Once, it’s a ring that fits her finger perfectly.
She does not wear rings.
Once, it’s a folded note with no writing, just a crease like it’s been held too tightly.
Her parents still thinks she’s imaginative. Her teachers think she’s distracted. Her friends think she’s joking when she tells them.
Except Kyujin.
She was in the same after school club, dancing. She was a year younger then Jinsol, but that has never stopped her. Kyujin was energetic, mature in a way that sometimes Jinsol feels like she's the younger one, and she listens. Always has.
“That’s creepy,” Kyujin says one day, sitting cross-legged on Jinsol’s bedroom floor. “But kind of cool?”
Jinsol lies on her stomach, chin on her arms. “It’s not cool. It’s annoying. I want my stuff to stay mine.”
Kyujin hums. “Maybe it’s someone else’s stuff too.”
One, she is not crazy.
Two, if the universe is messing with her, then she’s allowed to mess back.
She starts calling it “the exchange.”
“That’s stupid,” Kyujin says, sitting on the classroom windowsill while Jinsol scribbles in her notebook instead of taking notes. “Sounds like a video game mechanic.”
“Exactly,” Jinsol says, tapping her pen dramatically. “I lose an item, I gain an item. Equivalent exchange.”
Kyujin squints. “That’s Fullmetal Alchemist.”
Jinsol gasps. “You get me.”
The disappearances are… annoying, mostly. Not tragic. Not scary. Just irritating in the way only her things seem to vanish.
Her favorite hoodie disappears before PE. A week later, a hoodie appears in her locker. Same size. Same warmth. Different smell. Laundry detergent she doesn’t recognize.
She sniffs it suspiciously.
“This one’s fancy,” Kyujin says. “Smells rich.”
“Shut up,” Jinsol mutters, but she keeps it.
Sometimes the universe has bad timing.
Once, Jinsol loses her phone charger the night before an exam. She panics, tears her room apart, then finds a charger plugged into the wall in the morning.
Not her charger.
Still works.
She stares at it, bleary-eyed, and says, “Okay. Thanks. But next time warn me.”
The universe, rude as ever, does not respond.
⸻
She tries experiments.
She leaves things behind on purpose.
A pen on the bus seat. A bracelet on the school bench. A notebook in the library. Sometimes nothing happens.
Sometimes she gets something back days later.
A pen with a smiley face etched into it.
A bracelet too big for her wrist.
A notebook with a single folded page in the middle, blank.
“Maybe someone likes you,” Kyujin teases.
Jinsol scoffs. “Then they should return my stuff properly.”
But she keeps the items in a box under her bed.
Just in case.
⸻
The exchange gets… playful.
One day, Jinsol loses a hair clip shaped like a star.
She’s annoyed for exactly three hours.
Then she opens her pencil case and finds a different star clip inside. Slightly bent. Scratched. Like it’s been worn for a long time.
She laughs out loud.
“Are you kidding me,” she says, holding it up. “You couldn’t find the same one?”
She clips it into her hair anyway.
It fits perfectly.
⸻