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The last thing Jisung said aloud was Minho's name.
Whispered, raw, and frayed at the edges like torn cloth—Minho—and then silence descended like snow, muffling everything that came after. The word had scraped its way out of his throat as though it cost him something vital, something irretrievable, and when it faded into the cold air, it took his voice with it.
After the accident—after the sirens and the smell of burning rubber and the way the world had folded in on itself like a house of cards—after the hospital with its fluorescent cruelty and the trembling days of not knowing whether Jisung would ever open his eyes again, the doctors offered their careful platitudes. They said it might come back. That trauma sometimes folds the voice inside, like paper creased too many times along the same line. That it might take time to unfold, to smooth out the damage, to coax sound back into a throat that had forgotten how to shape it.
That was months ago.
And the birds haven't sung since.
⸻
It starts gradually, the way winter comes—so subtle you don't notice until you're already cold.
At first, Minho talks enough for both of them, filling the silence with short, quiet sentences that hang in the air like breath on glass. Updates about mundane things—the mail, the weather, what he's making for dinner. Jokes that land in the emptiness and dissolve without Jisung's laugh to catch them. Useless facts about cloud formations and the migratory patterns of swallows, anything to keep the quiet from becoming absolute. But with every passing week, the silence accumulates like sediment, layering itself between them, and he begins to understand its weight. It isn't empty. It's sacred, in a way he can't quite articulate—a temple built from all the words Jisung can no longer say.
And so Minho begins to match it. Not out of fear. Not out of pity, though grief sits heavy in his chest like a stone he can't swallow. But he does it out of something deeper and more elemental: reverence.
If Jisung's voice is gone, stolen by trauma and locked behind teeth that refuse to part, then Minho will offer his stillness in return. A sacrifice. An act of devotion.
⸻
Instead, they write, and in the writing, they discover a new kind of language.
Little notes folded into each other's palms like secrets. Scribbled song lyrics in the margins of books, fragments of poems they once knew by heart. Sketches passed across the table like offerings left at an altar, each line like a prayer, each shadow a confession.
It becomes its own grammar—intimate and honest in ways their voices never quite managed. There's no need for preamble, no awkward pauses or fumbling for the right words. Just ink on paper, charcoal on napkins, the quiet scratch of pencil against the backs of receipts.
Minho draws cats—small, round things with long whiskers and expressions too human. Jisung draws forests, dense and tangled trees that seem to breathe on the page. They both draw each other, over and over, as though trying to memorize the shape of the person across from them, as though afraid one day they'll forget.
At first, Jisung's art is gentle. Tender, even.
Hands. Eyes. Rooms full of music, guitars leaning against walls, sheet music scattered like fallen leaves. Birds perched in trees that no longer sing, their beaks open in silent hymns.
Then, slowly—so slowly Minho almost doesn't notice—the sketches begin to change.
The lines turn jagged, uncertain. Branches twist like ribs, like the architecture of something alive and dying all at once. Shadows lengthen in unnatural ways, pooling in corners that shouldn't exist. A figure begins to appear at the edges of the drawings—small at first, barely more than a smudge of charcoal in the periphery. A silhouette standing at the border of the page, watching. No face. No features. Just presence, heavy and wrong, like the feeling of being followed on an empty street.
Minho says nothing.
Not yet.
He tells himself it's just Jisung processing things, working through the trauma the only way he knows how. Art as exorcism. But his stomach tightens every time he sees the figure, and he begins to dread the moment Jisung passes him a new drawing.
⸻
It worsens, the way fever does, slow and then all at once.
One morning, Minho wakes to find a note on his pillow, placed there sometime in the night while he slept. The paper is cool to the touch, and for a moment he just stares at it, unwilling to unfold it, knowing somehow what's inside will change things.
When he finally does, his breath catches.
No words.
Just a drawing of their bedroom—rendered in perfect, meticulous detail. The window with its crooked blinds, the dresser cluttered with books and half-empty water glasses, the way the light falls across the unmade bed. And in the reflection of the mirror hanging on the wall, barely visible but undeniable—
The figure.
Closer now.
Watching them sleep.
Minho's hands shake as he folds the paper again, creasing it until the image is hidden. He looks at Jisung, still asleep beside him, face slack and vulnerable in the early morning light, and feels something cold settle in his chest.
Another time, days later, Jisung slides him a folded napkin during lunch. They're sitting at the kitchen table, the same one they've shared meals at for years, and Minho is halfway through a sandwich when the napkin appears at his elbow. When he opens it, he freezes, the bread turning to ash in his mouth.
Two boys at a kitchen table. A familiar one. Their one.
One is unmistakably Jisung—the slope of his shoulders, the way his hair falls into his eyes.
The other is almost Minho. But something is wrong, subtly and terribly wrong. His eyes are too wide, pupils dilated until there's barely any iris left. His hands are too long, fingers stretching toward Jisung like spider legs.
And behind them, barely visible through the window—
The figure.
No longer at the edge. No longer watching.
Reaching through the glass.
⸻
That night, Minho finds Jisung in bed with the covers pulled up to his chest, eyes wide and wet with unshed tears. He's shaking, whole body trembling like a wire pulled too taut, and when Minho enters the room, Jisung doesn't even turn to look at him. Just stares at the wall as though he can see through it, as though there's something on the other side that only he can perceive.
Minho climbs in beside him, heart hammering against his ribs, and the mattress dips under his weight. The room is too quiet. Even their breathing seems muffled, swallowed by some invisible presence.
Jisung doesn't move. Doesn't blink. His eyes are glassy, reflecting the dim light from the hallway in strange, fractured ways.
But when Minho reaches for his hand, Jisung grips it like a lifeline, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. His palm is clammy, cold, and Minho can feel his pulse racing beneath the skin.
They don't sleep that night. They lie there in the dark, listening to the house settle around them, every creak and groan magnified into something sinister. And thought neither of them say anything—though they can't say anything—Minho knows they're both thinking the same thing.
Something is wrong. Something has been wrong for a long time, and they've been pretending otherwise.
⸻
In the morning, Minho leaves a note on the windowsill where the first light will touch it, where Jisung will see it as soon as he wakes.
Did something come back with you?
From that day?
The words feel inadequate, too small to contain what he's really asking. But he doesn't know how else to say it. How do you ask someone if they've been followed home by something that isn't quite real? How do you give shape to a fear that has no name?
When he returns home after work, the apartment feels different. Colder. The air tastes metallic, like the moment before a storm. And on the wall beside their bedroom door, written in charcoal in Jisung's hand—
I think it followed me from the day I stopped speaking.
The letters are shaky, some of them smudged as though Jisung's hand had trembled while writing. Minho stands in front of the message for a long time, reading it over and over until the words stop making sense, until they're just shapes, just marks on a wall.
⸻
Minho burns the drawing with the mirror that night.
Not because he's afraid—though he is, more than he's willing to admit—but because he's angry. Because whatever this thing is, whatever has attached itself to Jisung like a shadow he can't shake, it doesn't get to steal his voice and haunt him too. It doesn't get to take everything.
He watches the paper curl and blacken in the sink, flames licking at the edges until only ash remains. The smoke rises in thin, grey tendrils, and for a moment he thinks he sees shapes in it—a face, perhaps, or something like one—but then it dissipates, and there's nothing.
That night, the house feels colder. Drafts that weren't there before slip under doors and through cracks in the windows. The air itself seems to hold its breath.
Like it noticed.
Like it's watching back.
⸻
The drawings stop after that.
Minho doesn't ask why. He knows why.
Because they've both started hearing things now. Soft footsteps when no one's moving, padding down the hallway in the dead of night. The whisper of birdsong that vanishes as soon as you turn to listen, leaving only silence in its wake. Something brushes the backs of their necks in the dark, feather-light and wrong, like fingers that aren't quite there.
The figure doesn't need to be drawn anymore.
It's here, woven into the fabric of their days, present in every corner they don't look at, every shadow that falls in the wrong direction.
⸻
But Jisung still draws one last thing.
He leaves it on Minho's chest the morning of the first frost, when the world outside is white and crystalline and the windows are etched with ice. Minho wakes to the weight of it, a single sheet of paper resting over his heart, and for a moment he's afraid to look.
But when he does, something in his chest breaks open.
It's them. Older, perhaps, or maybe just different—lines around their eyes that weren't there before, hair a little longer. Hand in hand, standing beneath a tree full of birds, their branches heavy with wings and song. The sky above is bright, washed in colours that seem almost impossible—golds and pinks and the kind of blue that only exists in memory. There's no figure. No shadow. Just sunlight, spilling over everything.
Jisung has written something beneath it in careful, deliberate letters:
I want to stay. Even if it's quiet. Even if I never speak again. If you're here, I'll stay.
Minho reads it three times before his hands stop shaking, before his vision clears enough to see properly. He reads it until he's memorized every curve of every letter, every stroke of the pen.
Then he writes back, his own handwriting messier, urgent:
Then I'll be quiet too. I'll wait. I'll fight it with you.
He pins it to the wall above their bed, next to the drawing, so they can see it every morning when they wake. A promise. A vow.
⸻
Later that night, after they've eaten dinner in companionable silence and washed the dishes side by side, after they've brushed their teeth and changed into pajamas and gone through all the small rituals that make up a life together, the floor creaks in the hallway outside their room.
A slow, deliberate sound, like something testing its weight, learning how to move through their space.
Minho doesn't get up. Doesn't reach for the light. His heart is pounding, and every instinct screams at him to look, to confront, to do something—but he doesn't.
He doesn't need to.
Instead, he turns toward Jisung, who is already looking at him in the dark, eyes wide and luminous. He reaches out and touches their foreheads together, feeling the warmth of Jisung's skin against his own, the slight dampness of nervous sweat.
"You're still here," Minho whispers into the space between them, so quiet it's barely sound at all. "You're still here."
Jisung's hand finds his in the dark and squeezes. Once, twice, three times. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.
They stay like that, breathing together, existing in defiance of whatever waits in the hallway, whatever has been following Jisung.
And then, in the hush before morning, just as grey light begins to seep through the blinds, just as the world begins to wake—
The birds begin to sing.
twt: @neme_sisK