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No one talks about how the forest grows teeth.
They appear slowly, the way frost does—patient, inevitable, as though the cold has simply decided to take a different shape. Sharp white nubs pushing from bark like something waking after a long sleep, splitting through roots, gleaming wet between fern leaves like warnings that have grown tired of being ignored.
The older the grief, the deeper they grow, the more elaborate their architecture. Some trees have entire maws now: jawbones etched into heartwood, molars the size of fists cushioned in beds of dark moss, canines curling upward toward canopy where the light goes to die. The oldest ones, at the forest's deepest center where even the birds stop singing, have teeth layered upon teeth—cathedral rows of them, beautiful and terrible, arranged with patience that suggests intention.
Kids dare each other to touch them. The brave ones get close enough to feel the heat radiating off the enamel, the strange pulsing warmth of a living that is only pretending to be still. No one ever does it twice. A girl named Yuna pressed her palm flat against one the summer she was nine and came home unable to remember her own name. She could only cry, inconsolably, for three days—for a grief no one recognized as hers.
The town learned. The town always learns, eventually. That's the nature of living beside something that consumes.
Jisung doesn't go into the forest to be brave. He goes because his mother is buried somewhere beneath the trees. Or maybe within them. Or maybe she has become them, her grief transmuted into root and bark and those terrible gleaming teeth.
It's hard to say what the forest does with the dead. The town has theories but no certainties, and certainty is the only currency Jisung wants—the only thing that could make him stop standing at the edge each night, staring into the dark and listening to the wind off the mountain sound too much like her voice calling his name.
He knows what his guilt is. He has always known. It lives in last weeks—the way he had stopped answering her calls in the final months, not out of cruelty but out of cowardice he still cannot fully name, the way hearing her tired voice had become a thing he had to prepare himself for, and how sometimes he hadn't prepared himself in time, and let the phone ring, and told himself he would call back, and sometimes didn't. The way he had been in another city when she was hospitalized, studying for an exam that would never matter, because he had convinced himself he had more time, because she had looked so much better at his last visit, because hope is the most treacherous thing a person can carry. He had told himself there would be other mornings. He had been wrong in the irreversible way that cannot be argued with, only carried.
He was twenty when she died. He is twenty-three now. The weight has not decreased. It has only become more familiar, the way chronic pain becomes familiar—not better, just woven in.
People leave flowers at the treeline and come back a week later to find the blooms already gone, already folded into the soil, already becoming something wordless and dark and hungry. Grief works differently here than it does in other places. It doesn't soften with time. It takes root.
He texts Minho at 1:03 in the morning without thinking. It's the only name his fingers know how to reach for.
are you awake
The reply comes in less than a minute.
I'll meet you by the edge
And he does. He always does. That's something about Minho that Jisung has never been able to adequately explain to anyone—the steadiness of him, the way he shows up without asking you to justify the need that called him. There is no performance in it. He simply comes.
Minho is already there when Jisung arrives.
He's leaning against the last streetlight before the treeline, collar turned up, one hand holding a flashlight he hasn't switched on yet. He doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't ask if Jisung's okay, because they both know the answer, and pity would only make the wound pulse harder. He just looks at Jisung the way he always does—like he's taking inventory. Like he wants to make sure all the important parts arrived.
"Still sure?" he murmurs, when Jisung stops beside him and faces the dark.
He's not teasing. That's another thing about Minho that people who don't know him always misread—what looks like remove, like the careful architecture of distance, is actually the most precise form of attention Jisung has ever been on the receiving end of.
"No," Jisung says. The word comes out smaller than he intends it to. "But I need to."
Minho nods. Just once. He clicks the flashlight on and follows him in.
The edge of the forest smells like iron and turned earth and something older underneath—the way old churches smell like the prayers that soaked into the stone over centuries. Minho's flashlight cuts into the dark and the dark swallows it, thinner than it should be for how powerful the light is, as though the shadows here have weight and mass and a preference for what they reveal.
They keep to the trail for the first five minutes. Jisung can feel the exact moment they step off it—not because he decides to, but because his feet simply do, drawn by the same invisible pull that has haunted him for three years. Like the forest has a current, and his grief is the tide it uses to drag him in.
The deeper they go, the more the forest feels wrong in ways that resist description.
It's not just the teeth—though those are worse here, larger, older, entire root systems that have calcified into something that resembles a spine, vertebrae the size of gravestones pressing through the earth in long, curved rows. It's the air, which thickens like syrup, pressing against his skin the way pressure drops before a storm. It's the trees, which lean in incrementally, canopy closing overhead like hands folding in prayer, or in threat. It's the path they came from, which disappears behind them—not overgrown, not hidden, not gradually consumed by undergrowth, but simply gone. Erased as cleanly as a thought you had and lost and can no longer remember having.
Jisung's breath starts to shorten. He can feel the treeline behind him the way you feel a door click shut in a room with no windows.
He knows the stories. Everyone who grows up near this forest knows them. How the forest doesn't feed on weakness—it feeds on guilt. On the specific, festering guilt of the love you didn't give in time, the words you withheld, the calls you let ring out, the mornings you slept through that you would only later understand as mourning. The species of grief that has curdled over years into something you cannot forgive yourself for feeling. How it brings up what you can't bear to see the way bile surfaces—involuntary, acid, inescapable. How some people come out hollow-eyed and trembling, repeating someone else's name like a rosary, the names of the dead worn smooth on their lips with use. How some people don't come out at all.
He thinks of his mother's laugh—sudden and enormous, embarrassing in the way only deeply joyful things are—and he keeps walking.
"You're okay," Minho says quietly, beside him. Not a question. Not reassurance, exactly. More like a fact he is choosing to insist on.
He's not afraid. Jisung has been watching him, cataloguing the way Minho moves through the dark, and there's nothing in his posture that resembles fear. It's something stranger. Something that looks—uncomfortably—like familiarity. Like he's walked here before. Like he knows the way the dark leans.
Jisung wants to ask. He doesn't.
They walk until the trees begin to whisper.
It is not wind. It is not the percussion of branches, not any friction of leaf against bark that could be misread as language. It is language—full-throated and deliberate, rising from the roots like groundwater, saturating the air until it is all Jisung can hear, until the hiss of it is indistinguishable from his own thoughts.
He freezes when he hears his mother's voice.
It is exactly right. That is the worst part—not distorted, not monstrous, just her: sharp and tired and worn at the edges the way she always sounded in the evenings, when the day had already asked too much of her and she hadn't complained once, because she never did, because she had spent the whole of her adult life deciding her exhaustion didn't count. She says his name the way she did when he'd forgotten to take the laundry out—exasperated and fond in the same breath, a voice that expected him to be better and loved him anyway and would love him anyway, permanently, without condition, and he had known this and still let the phone ring.
The sound of it opens something in his chest the way a key opens a lock that has been rusted shut for years.
He thinks: I'm sorry. He thinks: I should have called. He thinks: I was there at the end, I held your hand at the end, please let that be enough. He thinks: I don't know if it's enough. He thinks all of this simultaneously, the way grief always arrives—not in sequence, but in a flood, every version of his failure present at once.
Then another voice follows, threading beneath his mother's like a second instrument joining a melody, and this one makes Jisung go very still.
It is Minho's voice—but not Minho as he is now. Younger. Stripped of the careful, patient steadiness that defines him, stripped of every layer he has spent years constructing, down to something unguarded and raw and trembling with the kind of vulnerability that a person learns to excise from themselves after it has been used against them enough times.
You always leave. The voice seeps out of the bark, out of the soil. Everyone does. You will too. You always do.
Jisung whips around.
Minho has gone completely still. His flashlight hangs loose in his hand, its beam falling across the root-teeth rising from the ground in their crooked rows. His face is a portrait of controlled composure—and so familiar to Jisung that he can read, beneath it, exactly how it is failing: the slight working of his throat, swallowing something sharp and serrated; the stillness of his hands that comes not from calm but from the concentrated effort of not letting them shake.
"Minho," Jisung says. His voice comes out raw, wrong, too loud for the listening dark. "That's not real. It's not—"
"I remember," Minho says.
Not to Jisung. To the trees. Soft and certain, the way you speak to something you've been dreading meeting again and have finally run out of ways to avoid.
And Jisung sees it then.
Behind Minho: a gap in the bark of the oldest tree, wide and gaping as a wound, filled from edge to edge with teeth. But beyond the teeth—between them, within them—shadows moving with the logic of memory rather than light. Images surfacing like photographs developing in real time. Minho at nine years old with his knees split open on pavement and no one coming. A woman's back as she turns away, receding down a corridor until she is a suggestion of a figure and then nothing at all. A man's voice careening down an empty hallway, the particular quality of its echo telling Jisung everything about how large and hollow that house must have been. And then—barely visible, at the very back of it, the image that the forest seems to reach forward most eagerly to show—a rooftop at dusk, and a boy who couldn't be more than thirteen standing at its edge with his arms wrapped around himself, whispering something too quietly for the town to hear: I won't cry this time. I'm done crying this time.
The forest is showing him everything.
Every wound Minho ever decided was too small, too shameful, too private to deserve acknowledgement. Every version of himself he buried rather than mourn. Every door he shut and quietly bricked over and told himself was necessary, was survival, was just how things were.
The forest is laying Minho open like a wound it has been waiting to revisit.
"Minho—" Jisung steps forward, and the roots erupt.
They surge through the soil with a sound like breaking bone, curling around his ankles with a grip that is almost gentle and entirely unyielding—the pale root-flesh smooth as scar tissue—pulling him back, pulling him down, dragging him inch by inch away from Minho as the trees moan around them. A low, guttural sound that reverberates in Jisung's chest cavity, less like cracking wood and more like a stomach digesting something it wishes it hadn't swallowed.
"No—" He claws at the roots, panic flooding his chest cold. "No, let go, let go—"
Minho turns toward him. The movement is wrong—too smooth, too deliberate, like something wearing Minho's body and still learning the mechanics of how he moves.
His eyes are not his.
They are hollow and overfull at once—too bright with something that isn't light, the pupils swollen until they swallow all the colour. They are the eyes of something that has been watching from inside Minho for a very long time and has finally been given permission to look out.
"Why are you still here?" The voice is Minho's voice assembled from wrong parts, a translation that lost something crucial in the crossing. "You should've run. Everyone runs."
The words are designed like a blade, aimed with precision. The forest has already mapped the structure of Jisung's specific fear and is pressing its thumbs into the exact places where the walls are thinnest. He feels them land. He feels them try to take root the way everything else does here.
But underneath the way they try to sink in, he feels something else.
The specific and stubborn shape of knowing. Knowing Minho's hands, how they look when he's actually afraid. Knowing the particular quality of Minho's silences—which one is protective and which is afraid and which is the kind of exhausted that comes after fighting with yourself for too long. He knows the sound of Minho's laugh when something genuinely surprises him versus when he's performing ease. He knows which of Minho's jokes are jokes and which are armour repurposed as humour. He knows because he has paid attention, carefully, for years, because Minho deserved to be known and no one else seemed to be doing it. He knows. He knows.
"You're not him," Jisung says. His voice his steadier than he expects it to be. He plants his feet against the drag of the roots, against the heaving earth. He looks directly into those bright, hollow eyes. "You are not him. You're what he's afraid of. There's a difference."
Minho blinks.
The forest shudders—a single, total convulsion, like something vast flinching.
Something passes across his face, quick and full-bodied. The brightness gutters and goes out. His knees buckle, and he pitches forward, and Jisung catches him—barely, awkwardly, stumbling under the sudden weight—and holds on. The roots release all at once, the way a fist opens when the will goes out of it.
They stand there tangled together in the dark.
Minho's hands find the front of Jisung's jacket and he is gasping—dragging air in like a man surfacing from deep water—and Jisung has his arms around him as tightly as he can manage, which is not tight enough, which will never be tight enough.
"Don't listen," Jisung says, his mouth pressed against Minho's hair. "Don't listen to what it says. It doesn't know you. It only knows the shape of your pain. It's been sitting with it so long it's started to think it is you. It isn't."
"It showed me—" Minho voice breaks on the words, the crack hairline-thin and devastating. "Everyone leaves. Everyone always—what if I make them? What if I'll always be—"
"You won't," Jisung tells him. The certainty in his voice surprises him, but he follows it without flinching, because it is the truest thing in him right now and he will not abandon it. "I'm telling you. You won't. Because you have me, and I'm not going anywhere, and you're allowed to believe that."
The moment stretches. The trees creak.
Then something in Minho's face does the thing it almost never does—opens, just slightly, at a seam only Jisung knows how to find.
"Okay," Minho says, barely audible. Like a door, long stuck, finally unlatching.
And that, more than anything, is what enrages the forest.
The sound it makes is not a scream so much as a rupture—the earth beneath their feet splitting with a crack that resonates up through Jisung's soles and spine and teeth, and new teeth erupt from the fissures in spirals, dozens of them, pushing up through the broken soil like flowers in horrible bloom, white and luminous and shaking with what can only be described as rage.
The trees groan and shudder, branches cracking against each other, the canopy writhing overhead like a storm seen from inside the eye. The air thickens until breathing requires intention. The dark presses in from all sides with physical weight. The whispers rise to a chorus—a hundred voices, a thousand, all of them speaking names, and none of them speaking from now, all of them from before, all of them the accumulated language of grief left too long to rot in the dark.
The whole world pulses with something very close to feeling.
It is not a feeling that will tolerate them here.
Because grief does not like being left behind.
"Run," Minho says against his ear—his voice entirely his own again, rough and urgent and warm. "Jisung. Now."
They run.
Jisung doesn't know how the forest lets them go. Maybe it grows tired. Maybe grief has a limit, even here, even in the place it has claimed entirely for itself. Maybe the promise he made carved a path that the dark couldn't fully close over. The trees press in on both sides as they sprint through them, roots cresting the soil like the backs of animals surfacing from black water, teeth gleaming in the peripheral dark. Minho runs ahead and Jisung follows the sound of him—his footfall, his ragged breath, the rhythm of him—and behind them the forest screams and screams in voices they both recognize and will spend the rest of their lives trying to remember were not real, were only the wound dressed in the voice.
They don't stop until the canopy breaks apart above them and reveals a sky with actual stars in it. Until the airs shifts from thick purposeful dark into the clean cold of an ordinary night and Jisung can taste rain on it—real rain, the kind that falls without meaning anything. The teeth are gone. The whispering is gone. Ahead of them, between the last trunks, streetlights blink their steady amber, indifferent and gorgeous, the most beautiful things Jisung has ever seen.
He falls to his knees in the dirt at the forest's edge. A moment later, Minho drops beside him.
They breathe. For a long time, that is the whole of the world—the two of them kneeling in the cold, just breathing, listening to the ordinary sounds of the town reminding itself of its own existence: a car passing somewhere distant, the low hum of electricity in the overhead wires, a dog's bark tapering into silence.
Then Minho says, quietly, staring at the cold ground between his hands: "I think the forest feeds on the parts of us we're still too scared to love."
Jisung turns his head.
Minho is looking at nothing in particular, his profile cut clean against the ambient glow of the streetlights, his expression wearing the particular arrangement that means he's already said more than he planned to and has decided, against his own better judgement, not to take it back.
"Which part is that?" Jisung asks. "For you."
Minho looks over at him. His jaw works slightly. In his eyes there is something vast and exhausted and terribly, carefully honest, and he holds Jisung's gaze for long enough that the answer becomes obvious without being spoken.
Everything, he doesn't say. I am still so frightened of loving everything.
But his hand moves across the cold ground between them and finds Jisung's hand, and his fingers lace through.
Jisung holds on. He looks up at the gap of sky the treeline frames—small and irregular and full of stars, the same stars his mother would have been able to name, because she had been the kind of woman who learned the names of things just to have them, just to keep them—and he thinks of her laugh. Sudden and enormous and embarrassing in the way only beloved things are. He thinks of the laundry he used to forget and the calls he should have made and the exam he sat instead of sitting with her, and he thinks: I know. I know. I know. And: I'm sorry. And then, quietly, like a thing he's been practicing for three years and is finally letting himself feel: I know you know.
The forest behind them is silent now. Whether it is only waiting, or whether it has conceded that some things are beyond its reach—that there are forms of love which, once spoken, become too solid to be swallowed—Jisung can't know. He decides it doesn't matter.
He faces the amber glow of the streetlights, and he holds Minho's hand in both of his own.
For just a moment, despite everything, he lets himself believe that love might be the one thing grief cannot digest after all.
That it might be the one thing that breaks the teeth.
It might not be.
But tonight, it is enough.
twt: @neme_sisK