Archive of Our Own

“Hey, let’s go to the planetarium.”

Leehan’s voice was barely a ripple in the quiet of the living room, but to Taesan, it sounded like a sudden crack of thunder.

Taesan didn't look up immediately. He kept his fingers wrapped around the mug of tea he’d been stirring for the last ten minutes—long after the honey had dissolved, long after the liquid had gone lukewarm. He was focusing on the rhythmic, metallic clink of the spoon against ceramic because it was easier than looking at the couch. It was easier than looking at the way Leehan’s knitted blanket swallowed his frame whole these days.

“The planetarium?” Taesan finally asked, his voice rough. He turned his head, letting his gaze settle on his fiancé.

Leehan was propped up against a mountain of pillows, his pale face illuminated only by the gray, late-afternoon light filtering through the sheer curtains. He looked fragile, like spun glass, but there was a stubborn spark in his eyes that Taesan hadn’t seen in weeks. On his left hand, the simple silver band they’d picked out six months ago slipped slightly down his knuckle—he’d lost weight, and the ring sat loose now, a constant, quiet ache in Taesan's chest.

“Yeah,” Leehan said, a small, lopsided smile tugging at the corner of his lips. He lifted his own left hand, the silver catching a stray beam of light. “We haven’t been since the night we got engaged. I want to see the stars, Taesan. The real fake ones.”

Taesan swallowed the lump in his throat. He wanted to say no. He wanted to say it’s too cold outside, your white blood cell count is too low, the doctor said you need to rest. The practical, terrified part of his brain was already screaming a list of logical objections.

But then Leehan shifted, and a soft, wheezing sigh escaped his chest, and Taesan realized with a sudden, suffocating clarity that resting wasn't what Leehan needed right now. He needed to live, even if it was just for an hour.

“Okay,” Taesan murmured, setting the mug down with a soft click. “Okay, let’s go.”

The city outside the car windows was a blur of neon signs and headlights, washing over them in waves of blue, amber, and red. Taesan drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other reached across the center console, his fingers loosely but securely intertwined with Leehan’s. Leehan’s skin was cool, his thumb lazily tracing the edge of Taesan’s engagement ring.

Neither of them spoke. They didn't need to. The hum of the heater and the low murmur of an ambient indie playlist filling the car felt like a protective bubble, shielding them from the reality waiting for them back at the apartment—the pill bottles, the appointment calendars, the heavy, unspoken countdown.

When they arrived, the planetarium was mostly deserted, a massive concrete dome looming against the twilight sky.

Taesan moved deliberately. He walked around to the passenger side, opening the door and offering his arm. He adjusted the thick woolen scarf around Leehan’s neck, tucking it in gently, his fingertips lingering for a fraction of a second on the soft skin of Leehan’s jawline. Leehan leaned into the touch, closing his eyes for a brief moment, soaking in the warmth.

“I’m okay,” Leehan whispered, though he leaned heavily against Taesan’s side as they walked toward the entrance. “I promise. I won’t break.”

“I know you won’t,” Taesan lied softly, tightening his grip around Leehan’s waist just a fraction more.

Inside the theater, the world shrank.

They took two seats right in the center, tilting the plush chairs back until they were staring straight up at the massive, dark void of the dome. The air was cool and smelled of old dust and faded velvet. Apart from a quiet elderly couple a few rows back, they were entirely alone.

Slowly, the ambient lights began to bleed into a deep, midnight blue.

A low, cinematic hum resonated through the speakers, vibrating right through the soles of their shoes. And then, with a soft, sweeping illusion of motion, the stars flickered to life above them. Thousands of tiny, brilliant pinpricks of light scattered across the artificial sky, mapping out constellations that had existed for billions of years.

Taesan didn't look at the sky.

In the dim, celestial glow of the projector, he looked at Leehan.

The blue light washed over Leehan’s sharp features, casting soft shadows beneath his cheekbones and highlighting the gentle curve of his nose. For a moment, in this light, the sickness seemed to recede. The pale, exhausted tint of his skin was replaced by something cosmic, something ethereal. Leehan’s eyes were wide, reflecting the galaxy above like two still pools of water.

“Look, Taesan,” Leehan whispered, his voice trembling slightly as he pointed a finger upward. “There’s Cygnus. Remember? The swan.”

Taesan looked up briefly, tracing the cross-shaped constellation, before his eyes drifted right back to the man beside him. He reached across the armrest, finding Leehan’s hand again. He squeezed it, lifting it up to press a soft, lingering kiss against the silver ring on Leehan’s finger, and then against his cold knuckles.

“I see it,” Taesan murmured, his chest tightening so hard it physically hurt to breathe.

Leehan turned his head on the headrest, his gaze meeting Taesan’s. In the artificial starlight, a single tear slipped down Leehan's cheek, catching the blue glow before disappearing into the fabric of his scarf. He didn't look sad; he just looked incredibly, profoundly tired, and incredibly in love.

“They stay there forever, don't they?” Leehan asked, his voice dropping to a fragile whisper that barely carried over the ambient music of the show. “Even when they die, their light keeps traveling. Someone else gets to see them.”

Taesan felt a tear of his own sting the corner of his eye. He didn't let it fall. He couldn't. He needed to be the gravity holding Leehan down right now. He shifted in his seat, leaning across the space between them until his forehead rested gently against Leehan’s, their breaths mingling in the cool air of the theater.

“Yeah,” Taesan breathed, his hand coming up to gently cradle Leehan’s cheek, his thumb brushing away the moisture there. “They stay.”

It was exactly eight months ago.

They had gone to the aquarium on a rainy Tuesday evening, right before closing, when the crowds had thinned out to almost nothing. Leehan had been obsessed with the idea of seeing the deep-sea exhibit at night, his eyes wide and bright, his skin flush with the vibrant, radiant health that Taesan now realized he had taken entirely for granted. Back then, Leehan’s laughter didn't end in a raspy catch; his shoulders were broad and steady beneath his denim jacket, and he walked with a light, effortless bounce in his step.

Taesan had dragged him away from the main glass tunnels, pulling him by the hand into a small, secluded viewing alcove. It was a private corner of the exhibit, illuminated only by the deep, pulsating indigo glow of a floor-to-ceiling tank filled with bioluminescent jellyfish and slow-moving, silver-scaled fish.

Leehan had pressed his hands against the glass, utterly fascinated, completely oblivious to the way Taesan’s heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. Taesan had reached into his pocket, his fingers wrapping around the small velvet box, his palms slick with a nervous sweat that felt entirely foolish given how long they had been building a life together. But looking at Leehan then—bathed in that deep ocean light, looking like something beautiful and untamed—Taesan had been struck by a profound, terrifying sense of permanence. He didn't just see a boyfriend, or a partner. He felt forever stretching out in front of them, as deep and unmappable as the sea itself.

When Leehan turned around, blinking curiously at the sudden silence behind him, Taesan was already dropping down onto one knee.

Leehan’s breath had hitched, his hands flying to his mouth, his eyes widening in a beautiful, chaotic mix of shock and pure joy.

Taesan had swallowed hard, clearing his throat, determined to get the words out exactly as he had practiced them in front of his bathroom mirror for weeks.

“You know,” Taesan had started, his voice trembling just enough to make Leehan’s eyes well up instantly, “I read somewhere that people who love fish and the ocean are always looking for depth in everything they do. They say fish lovers don't just float through life—they want to dive into the deep end, they want to understand the currents, and they never settle for the surface. They’re fiercely loyal, and they build their own quiet worlds underwater.”

Leehan had let out a wet, choked laugh, a tear spilling over his lashes as he nodded, his eyes locked entirely on Taesan’s.

Taesan had reached up, taking Leehan’s left hand in his own. The velvet box sat open between them, the simple silver band catching the shifting, oceanic light of the tank.

“I used to be afraid of the deep,” Taesan whispered, his gaze unwavering. “But with you, I’m not afraid of how far down it goes. I’ll swim across the deep ocean with you. Leehan, will you marry me?”

Leehan hadn't even let him finish rising to his feet before he threw himself forward, pulling Taesan up by his jacket, burying his face into the crook of Taesan’s neck and sobbing a breathless, ecstatic yes, yes, a million times yes.

The silver ring on Leehan’s finger is the exact same one from that night, but it sits differently now. The hand holding it is thinner, the skin more translucent.

Leehan is still looking at him, his forehead resting gently against Taesan's, their breaths shallow and mingled. The artificial starlight above them blinks silently, a stark contrast to the deep ocean of their past.

“You’re thinking about the aquarium,” Leehan whispers, his voice a soft, intuitive murmur. He doesn't need to ask; he knows the look on Taesan’s face better than anyone.

Taesan doesn't deny it. He just leans in a fraction closer, the tips of their noses brushing, his thumb tracing the sharp line of Leehan’s jaw. “I am.”

“Do you regret it?” Leehan asks, the question so quiet, so fragile, that it almost gets lost in the ambient music of the dome. “The ocean got a lot darker than we thought it would.”

Taesan’s grip on Leehan’s hand tightens until their knuckles turn white. He looks straight into Leehan’s eyes, refusing to let the shadows of the theater obscure the absolute certainty in his own gaze.

“Never,” Taesan breathes against his lips. “I told you. I’ll swim across the deep ocean with you. I don't care how dark it gets.”

Leehan smiles, but it is a small, heavy thing that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. Instead, he turns his head back toward the dome, watching the projection of a swirling, violent nebula repaint the dark canvas above them in shades of deep violet and burning magenta.

“You know,” Leehan starts, his voice dropping into that quiet, rhythmic cadence he only uses when he’s trying to ground himself. “When you’re hooked up to an IV pole for ten hours straight, you have a lot of time to look at a screen. The hospital Wi-Fi is terrible, but it turns out Wikipedia pages about astrophysics load pretty fast.”

Taesan doesn’t move. He stays shifted on his side, his cheek pressed against the plush headrest, watching the way the purple light catches the edge of Leehan’s profile.

“I looked up stars,” Leehan continues, his fingers twitching slightly against Taesan’s palm. “The dying ones, mostly. I wanted to know what actually happens to them. There’s this thing called a white dwarf. It’s basically what happens to a star like our sun when it runs out of fuel. It loses its outer layers, and all that’s left is this incredibly dense, hot core. It doesn’t have any energy source left to burn. It’s just... cooling down.”

He pauses, taking a shallow, careful breath. The sound of it is a sharp reminder of the fluid building up in his lungs, but he pushes past it, his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“But because it’s so dense, the carbon inside it gets crushed under immense pressure. Scientists found one a few years ago—well, a cosmic remnant of one. They named it BPM 37093, but astronomers just call it Lucy, after the Beatles song.” Leehan turns his head back, looking directly into Taesan’s eyes, his expression impossibly tender. “Because the core crystallized. It turned into a diamond, Taesan. A diamond the size of Earth, floating in the middle of nothing. A star that ran out of time, but left something indestructible behind.”

Taesan feels a cold ache expand behind his ribs. He knows exactly what Leehan is doing. He’s trying to dress up the terrifying, ugly reality of his diagnosis in the romanticized armor of the cosmos. He’s trying to give Taesan something to hold onto when the light finally goes out.

“Leehan—”

“Let me finish,” Leehan whispers softly, squeezing Taesan’s hand with the little strength he has left. “There’s one more. I read about spaghettification. It’s a real scientific term, I swear. It’s what happens if you get too close to a black hole. The gravitational pull on your feet is so much stronger than the pull on your head that it stretches you out into a long, thin string of atoms.”

A tiny, breathless laugh escapes Leehan’s lips, though it sounds more like a sigh.

“I kept thinking about that during the chemo weeks. When the nausea got so bad I couldn’t tell where my body ended and the bed began. I felt like I was being stretched across the universe, pulled apart by gravity I couldn’t see. But then I’d look across the room, and I’d see you asleep in that terrible vinyl armchair, with your jacket folded up under your head.”

Leehan’s gaze softens, his eyes reflecting the slow, mesmerizing rotation of a simulated galaxy.

“And I realized that if gravity can pull things apart like that, it can also hold them together. Binary stars—two stars that are bound to each other, orbiting the same center of mass. Even if one of them goes supernova, even if one becomes a black hole, the other one stays in its orbit. They’re locked in. They never truly lose each other’s pull.”

Leehan reaches up, his thin, pale fingers brushing against the side of Taesan’s neck, right where his pulse is jumping erratically.

“We aren't in the aquarium anymore, Taesan,” Leehan says, his voice cracking slightly on the vowels. “The water got too deep. But up here... there is no bottom. There’s just us, orbiting each other in the dark.”

It was three months after the proposal.

The sky hadn't been filled with stars that afternoon; it had been a drab, heavy gray, spitting a miserable mixture of sleet and rain against the glass windows of Taesan’s office. He had been staring at beats, his mind drifting toward dinner plans, when his phone had violently vibrated across the desk.

The screen had flashed Sungho.

Sungho never called during work hours. Sungho sent voice notes, or rapid-fire texts full of typos. The mere sight of his name vibrating with such clinical persistence had sent an immediate, icy spike of adrenaline straight through Taesan’s veins.

When he answered, Sungho’s voice hadn't been its usual booming, cheerful self. It was thin. Terrified. Fraying at the absolute edges.

“Taesan. You need to get to St. Jude’s. Right now.”

“What? Why? What happened?”

“It’s Leehan. He collapsed at the studio. He—Taesan, he coughed up blood, a lot of it, and then he just passed out. The ambulance is here. Just get there.”

Taesan hadn't grabbed his coat. He hadn't locked his computer. He had run. He remembered the feeling of the freezing rain hitting his bare arms as he sprinted through the city streets, unable to find a cab, his chest burning with a frantic, animalistic panic. He had broken every traffic rule, squeezed himself into a crowded subway car, his heart hammering a frantic, echoing rhythm against his ribs: Please let him be okay, please let him be okay, please, please, please.

When he burst through the sliding glass doors of the emergency room, the smell of antiseptic and sickness hit him like a physical blow. Sungho was sitting in a plastic chair in the waiting area, his hands buried in his hair, Leehan’s discarded jacket clutched in his lap.

Then came the waiting.

Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Seven thousand two hundred seconds of absolute, suffocating purgatory.

Every time the double doors to the restricted ward swung open, Taesan would jump to his feet, his eyes wild, searching the face of every passing nurse and doctor for a shred of information. But they passed him by like ghosts. Sungho had tried to hand him a paper cup of water, but Taesan’s hands were shaking too violently to hold it. He had spent those two hours pacing a precise four-step perimeter near the triage desk, convinced that if he stopped moving, if he let his guard down for even a single second, whatever was trying to take Leehan away would win.

Finally, a doctor with tired eyes and a clipboard had stepped through the doors, calling out Leehan’s name.

The diagnosis hadn't been fully mapped out yet—they spoke in terrifying, clinical hypotheticals about masses, white blood counts, and immediate oncological transfers—but the bottom line, the only phrase that managed to pierce through the roaring in Taesan’s ears, was: “He’s stable for now. You can see him.”

When Taesan walked into the curtained cubicle, the sight had nearly broken him. Leehan was propped up on a gurney, a plastic oxygen cannula tucked into his nose, his skin a horrific, translucent shade of gray. There were dark bruises already forming on the back of his hands from the IV lines. He looked so small against the starched white sheets, stripped of his own clothes and wrapped in a faded hospital gown.

But when Leehan saw Taesan, his eyes had flickered with that familiar, heartbreaking warmth. He had reached out a trembling hand.

Taesan had crossed the room in half a step, dropping to his knees beside the bed, burying his face into the side of Leehan’s mattress while his hands desperately gripped Leehan’s arm, verifying that he was still warm, still solid, still here.

They had talked quietly. Taesan had relayed what the doctors said, keeping his voice carefully leveled, trying to play the role of the anchor even as his own anchor was slipping into the abyss. He told him the treatments would start, that they would figure it out, that it was just a hurdle.

But Leehan had just stared at him, his gaze heavy with an old, ancient sorrow that didn't belong on the face of a twenty-something boy.

“Taesan,” Leehan had whispered, his voice raspy from the oxygen. He reached out, his weak fingers catching the edge of Taesan’s jacket sleeve. “Taesan, if I die—”

“No.” Taesan had cut him off instantly, the word tearing out of his throat like a snarl. He flinched away from the syllable, his chest heaving. He couldn't even let the sound of it exist in the air between them.

“Taesan… listen to me,” Leehan had tried again, his eyes swimming with a fragile, exhausting persistence. “We have to talk about—”

“No, Leehan,” Taesan had interrupted, his voice dropping into a fierce, trembling register, his eyes burning as he looked straight into the face of his fiancé. He gripped Leehan’s hand tighter, pressing it against his own chest right above his racing heart. “Lots of things can happen in this hospital tonight. They can run a hundred more tests, they can give us a thousand terrible names for whatever this is. But your dying is not one of them. I won't let it be.”

Taesan’s breathing is shallow, his chest aching with the ghost of that old, terrifying panic. He looks at Leehan now, under the fake stars, realizing that the fierce defiance he had weaponized in that hospital room has slowly, agonizingly turned into a quiet, desperate preservation. He hadn't stopped the darkness; he had just learned how to hold Leehan's hand through it.

Leehan is still watching him, his hand soft against Taesan’s neck, his thumb soothing the tight, strained muscle of his jawline.

“You always were so stubborn about that,” Leehan whispers into the dark, a faint, melancholic smile playing on his lips. “You wouldn't even let the word exist in the same room as us.”

“I still won’t,” Taesan says.

The words are not loud, but they possess a dense, unyielding weight that seems to cut through the cinematic sweep of the planetarium's background track. In the dim, artificial starlight, his jaw is set in that same rigid, fiercely protective line it had taken on in the sterile emergency room months ago. Time has worn his body down—there are dark shadows of exhaustion permanently etched beneath his eyes, and his shoulders carry a constant, heavy stoop from weeks of sleeping upright in uncomfortable hospital chairs—but the core of him remains entirely unchanged.

Leehan doesn’t look away. His hand stays resting against Taesan’s neck, his fingers remarkably steady against the frantic, rhythmic thudding of Taesan’s pulse. “Taesan, look at the sky up there. Even the oldest stars have a lifespan. It’s just physics. It’s just the way things are put together.”

“I don’t care about physics,” Taesan breathes, his voice dropping into a rough, splintered register. He shifts closer, closing the final inch of distance between them until their shoulders are pressed tightly together, the thick wool of their coats brushing. He reaches up and wraps his fingers around Leehan’s wrist, not to pull his hand away, but to hold it perfectly in place against his skin. “I don’t care about white dwarfs, or diamonds, or whatever else you spent your afternoons reading about to try and make me feel better about this. I'm not a scientist, Leehan. I’m just the guy who asked you to swim across the ocean with him.”

A faint, breathless sigh ripples through Leehan’s chest. The sound is slightly wet, slightly rattling—a quiet indicator of the fluid the doctors had warned them about—but he keeps his eyes locked onto Taesan’s. “You’re being stubborn.”

“I’ve always been stubborn about you,” Taesan replies. A single tear finally betrays him, slipping hot and fast down his cheek, but his gaze never wavers. He looks at the loose silver band on Leehan’s finger, then back up to the fragile, beautiful curve of his fiancé’s face. “You told me tonight that binary stars stay locked in each other’s orbit, even when one goes supernova. You think you’re prepping me for the end. You think you’re giving me a neat little cosmic metaphor to leave behind so I can sit in that apartment alone and look at the ceiling.”

Taesan leans his forehead against Leehan’s again, his voice dropping to a fierce, desperate whisper that feels entirely private, completely hidden away from the rest of the dark theater.

“But if you’re a star, then so am I. And if you think I’m just going to sit back and watch your light cool down into a diamond without pulling me right down into the dark with you, you’re wrong. I am still holding on. I am still fighting for every single breath you take. So don’t give me the universe, Leehan. Don’t talk to me about what happens after. Just stay here. Just be here with me right now.”

Leehan’s eyes close, his long eyelashes casting delicate, trembling shadows against his pale cheekbones. He lets out a shaky, uneven breath, leaning his full, fragile weight into Taesan’s touch. The stubborn, defensive spark in his eyes softens, melting into something profoundly vulnerable, something that looks entirely like surrender.

Above them, the planetarium projector slowly begins its final transition, the brilliant magenta and violet of the nebula fading away into a deep, velvety midnight black, leaving only the tiniest, most resilient pinpricks of light scattered across the artificial sky.

It was five months ago, in that golden, brief interlude after the engagement but before the first sudden cough—a window of time that Taesan now guarded in his mind like a holy relic. The apartment had smelled of burnt toast and hazelnut coffee. The table was entirely buried beneath a colorful avalanche of wedding magazines, printed spreadsheets, fabric swatches of midnight-blue velvet, and scrawled-on napkins that Leehan had saved from various cafes because he liked the font of their logos.

Leehan had been sitting cross-legged in one of the wooden chairs, wearing an oversized gray sweater that swallowed his hands, a smudge of black ink from a cheap ballpoint pen slashing across his left cheekbone. He looked so vibrant then. His skin possessed that healthy, sun-kissed glow of someone who spent his weekends running along the river, and his laughter was a loud, unburdened sound that bounced effortlessly off the exposed brick walls of their dining area.

"Okay, hear me out," Leehan had said, pointing the back of his pen aggressively at Taesan, who was leaning against the counter with a mug between his palms, watching him with a soft, helpless grin. "An outdoor wedding in October. Specifically, the second week. The leaves will be exactly that deep, burnt orange color, but it won’t be cold enough for people to complain about wearing suits. And—most importantly—the humidity will be low, which means my hair will actually cooperate for the photos."

Taesan had chuckled, walking over to press a kiss right onto the ink smudge on Leehan's cheek before pulling up a chair beside him. "October? That gives us less than a year to plan, Leehan. My mother is already sending me five-page emails about guest lists and catering options. If we tell her October, she’s going to fly here and physically drag us to a tasting menu by Tuesday."

"Let her," Leehan had laughed, throwing his head back, his entire body radiating an easy, infectious energy. He reached out, grabbing Taesan’s wrist and pulling his hand onto the table, his fingers slotting between Taesan’s with a familiar, effortless pressure. "We'll tell her it's non-negotiable. October twelfth. It's a Saturday. It’s perfect."

"Why the twelfth?" Taesan asked, leaning in closer, his eyes dropping to the way their matching silver bands caught the morning sunlight filtering through the kitchen window. They were bright, unmarred by the scratches of hospital railings or the dullness of neglect. They looked brand new. They were brand new.

"Because," Leehan had murmured, his voice dropping into that softer, sweeter tone he reserved only for the moments when he was being completely, unironically sentimental. "The twelfth is exactly five years since the night you found me hiding from the rain under the awning of that record store, and you offered me half of your umbrella even though you were already soaked through. I kept the receipt from the vinyl I bought that night, Taesan. It’s in my desk drawer. I’m going to tape it to the inside of my vows."

Taesan’s heart had done a slow, heavy flip in his chest. Back then, that feeling was pure, unadulterated happiness—a sweet, dizzying realization of how incredibly lucky he was. There was no undercurrent of grief, no shadow of a countdown hanging over the date. October twelfth wasn't a deadline; it was just a beautiful Saturday in their infinite future.

"Fine," Taesan had whispered, leaning across the scattered papers to press his lips gently against Leehan’s. "October twelfth it is. Now, where are we actually putting all these people? Your dad wants a traditional hall, and you want to get married in the middle of a forest."

Leehan broke the kiss with a triumphant grin, tapping a specific printout on the top of the pile. It was a photograph of an old, converted glass greenhouse on the outskirts of the city, its high, arched iron frames overgrown with wild ivy and surrounded by ancient maple trees.

"Look at this place," Leehan had said, his eyes shining with a creative fervor. "It’s the best of both worlds. It has a roof, so your mom won't worry about rain ruining the linen, but it’s completely transparent. When the sun goes down, it’ll feel like we’re standing right in the middle of the woods. We can hang thousands of tiny fairy lights from the ceiling. It’ll look like..." He paused, searching for the word, his fingers tracing the glass structure in the photo. "It’ll look like a glass box full of stars."

Taesan didn’t look down at the printed photo of the greenhouse. Instead, he just looked at Leehan.

He watched the enthusiastic bounce of Leehan’s shoulders as he talked, the way his fingers animatedly traced the shape of the iron frames on the paper, his voice full of a bright, unbothered cadence that felt like a shield against the rest of the world.

In that moment, leaning over the cluttered kitchen table with the smell of hazelnut coffee rising between them, Taesan didn’t just see a wedding; he saw a lifetime. It came to him in a sudden, vivid rush of domestic images, so clear and tangible he felt like he could reach out and touch them.

He imagined their future apartment—the one they’d upgrade to once they finally saved up enough. There would be a massive, meticulously cared-for fish tank sitting in the sunniest corner of the living room, the water humming a low, soothing lullaby while colorful scales darted through the artificial coral.

He saw their refrigerator, no longer neat and sparse, but completely covered in the chaotic mosaic of their shared days. There would be torn scraps of notebook paper scrawled with Leehan’s terrible, deeply researched space puns ("Are you a black hole? Because you're irresistible"), held up by mismatched souvenir magnets. And right beside them, Taesan would stick his own messy fragments of staff paper—hastily jotted down musical notes, melodies that only came to him in the middle of the night when Leehan was breathing softly against his chest.

He saw the quiet, ordinary mornings of five, ten, twenty years into the future. He saw their bathroom sink. Two toothbrushes finally sharing a single, slightly chipped ceramic cup instead of being packed into separate travel bags. Matching navy-blue towels hanging side-by-side on the rack, soft and faded from years of being tossed into the same wash cycle. He saw Leehan grumbling about running out of toothpaste, wearing a faded sweater that had grown thin at the elbows, still looking at Taesan with those same wide, star-reflecting eyes.

It was all so beautifully, boringly normal. It was a future built on the quiet foundation of forever, a certainty so absolute that Taesan felt an overwhelming wave of warmth expand in his chest, anchoring him deeply to the wooden chair beneath him.

"Hey," Leehan said softly, breaking the silence. He stopped tapping the paper, his head tilting to the side as he caught the dazed, helpless look on Taesan’s face. The ink smudge on his cheek crinkled as his smile softened into something deeply tender. "Earth to Taesan. You went somewhere else just now. Do you hate the greenhouse?"

Taesan swallowed against the sudden fullness in his throat, reaching across the swatches of midnight-blue velvet to cup the side of Leehan’s vibrant, warm face.

"No," Taesan murmured, his thumb brushing over the ink stain. "I love it. I was just thinking about our refrigerator."

Leehan let out a bright, ringing laugh that shook his entire frame, the sound bouncing off the kitchen tiles and warming the drafty corners of the room. He leaned back into Taesan’s hand, his eyes crinkling into two crescent moons of pure affection.

“I’m marrying a weirdo,” Leehan declared, shaking his head with mock solemnity. He picked up his pen again, using the cap to lightly poke Taesan’s ribs. “Who thinks about appliances and groceries when they’re supposed to be visualizing the floral arrangements for our reception? You’re supposed to be debating white roses versus eucalyptus, Taesan, not cataloging the inventory of our imaginary fridge.”

Taesan didn’t flinch away from the pen. He just grinned, his fingers lingering on Leehan’s jawline, soaking in the solid, radiant warmth of his skin. The sun had shifted, casting a long, golden block of light across the wooden table, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air between them like tiny, earthbound satellites.

“Says the guy who’s obsessed with the ocean and space!” Taesan shot back, his voice thick with a playful, unburdened fondness. He leaned his elbows on the table, invading Leehan’s space until their noses were barely an inch apart. “You’re literally trying to plan a wedding that looks like a glass box full of stars. If anyone is the weirdo here, Leehan, it’s the guy who can’t decide if he wants to be an astronaut or a marine biologist, so he settles for turning our actual life into a sci-fi fantasy novel.”

“It’s called having a vision,” Leehan sniffed loftily, though the betraying twitch at the corner of his lips gave him away. He dropped the pen onto a swatch of midnight-blue velvet, his expression softening into something so intensely sweet it made Taesan’s chest ache with a fierce, possessive joy. He reached up, his fingers twisting into the fabric of Taesan’s shirt, pulling him just that fraction closer until there was no space left between them at all.

“And besides,” Leehan whispered, his breath warm against Taesan’s mouth, “the ocean and space are the exact same thing. They’re just two different kinds of vast, beautiful dark that nobody has fully figured out yet. It’s comforting.”

“Why is that comforting?” Taesan asked, his own voice dropping into a quiet, reverent murmur as his hands found Leehan’s waist, holding him steady in the sunlight.

“Because,” Leehan breathed, right before closing the distance to press their lips together in a slow, lingering kiss that tasted faintly of sweet hazelnut coffee, “it means no matter how far we sail, or how high we fly, we’ll never run out of room to explore. We have forever to get lost in it.”

Taesan blinks, the transition pulling a quiet, involuntary ache from the center of his chest. He looks down at his hand, still tightly gripping Leehan’s thin wrist. The silver ring sits loose on Leehan's finger, a quiet testament to how much the physical world has eroded around them while they weren't looking.

October twelfth.

Their supposed wedding was in exactly four months.

Four months from today, they were supposed to be standing in that converted glass greenhouse on the outskirts of the city. Taesan was supposed to be adjusting the collar of a crisp black suit, his hands shaking not from terror, but from a dizzying, beautiful anticipation. Leehan was supposed to be laughing under a ceiling draped in thousands of tiny fairy lights, his hair cooperating with the low autumn humidity, a crumpled record store receipt from five years ago tucked safely into the breast pocket of his vest.

Instead, the greenhouse reservation had been quietly canceled over a tearful, whispered phone call Taesan made from a hospital hallway three weeks ago, while Leehan was asleep under the heavy sedation of his third round of chemotherapy. The midnight-blue velvet swatches were still sitting in a cardboard box by their apartment door, untouched and gathering dust.

Taesan turns his head slowly on the headrest, his gaze settling back onto his fiancé.

Leehan hasn’t moved. His forehead is still resting gently against Taesan's, his breathing a shallow, delicate rhythm in the dark. He looks so small beneath the heavy wool coat, his features carved out of the shadows by the artificial starlight. He knows the timeline just as well as Taesan does. He knows what month it is. He knows the exact weight of the four months hanging silently in the air between them.

“Four months,” Leehan whispers into the dark, his voice so quiet it’s almost lost to the ambient music of the cosmic show. He doesn't open his eyes, but a small, infinitely tender smile touches the corners of his lips—the very same smile from the kitchen, only tired now, worn thin by the gravity of the present.

“We would have looked really good in those suits, Taesan,” he murmurs softly.

Taesan swallows the sharp, burning lump in his throat, his hand moving up from Leehan's wrist to gently cradle his cheek, his thumb brushing against the cold, fragile skin.

“We’re still going to look good,” Taesan says, his voice carrying that same stubborn, unyielding weight, refusing to let the timeline dictate the space they have left. “I don't care about the greenhouse, Leehan. I don't care about the fairy lights. If I have to marry you right here under a ceiling of fake stars, or in that terrible white hospital room with an IV pole as our witness, I will. The date belongs to us. Not the calendar.”

Leehan slowly opens his eyes, the deep pools of his pupils reflecting the tiny, glittering pinpricks of the simulated galaxy above. He looks at Taesan, truly looks at him, searching the fierce, desperate certainty in his fiancé's face.

For a long, cinematic moment, the universe around them seems to slow to a crawl—the ticking of the clock, the progression of the disease, the encroaching shadows of the theater all fading into background noise. There is only the steady, grounded pull of their shared orbit, holding them fiercely together in the vast, beautiful dark.

A soft, breathless chuckle escapes Leehan’s lips, the vibration of it small and warm against Taesan’s forehead.

“What if I became an astronaut and became part of the Artemis mission?” Leehan asks, his voice drifting upward into the dark dome as if sending the thought straight to the moon.

Taesan doesn’t blink. He keeps his gaze locked entirely on Leehan’s face, tracing the faint, playful curve of his mouth. It’s a defense mechanism, he knows—Leehan shifting back into his world of grand, cosmic distractions because looking at the reality of the next four months is too heavy, even for him. But Taesan doesn't pull away. He leans into it, letting his thumb stroke the sharp line of Leehan's cheekbone.

“The Artemis mission?” Taesan murmurs, his tone catching that quiet, familiar rhythm of their old banter, though it’s laced with a deep, modern ache now. “They only take the absolute best, Leehan. People who can survive extreme gravity and space walk for hours. You can barely survive me taking the blanket on a cold night.”

“Hey,” Leehan protests weakly, his eyes fluttering open, bright with a sudden, mischievous glint in the blue light. “I have excellent endurance. I survived your cooking for four years, didn't I? That should count for at least a year of NASA training.”

Taesan lets out a quiet, rough sound that’s half a laugh and half a sigh, burying his face for a brief second into the soft wool of Leehan’s scarf. “Yeah. Fair point.”

“Think about it,” Leehan continues, his voice dropping into that dreamy, fascinated cadence he used when talking about the aquarium or the greenhouse. “The Orion spacecraft... launching straight through the atmosphere, leaving all of this behind. Just breaking past the clouds until everything down here looks like a tiny, perfect marble. I’d be up there, orbiting the moon, looking down at the city, trying to find our exact apartment window.”

He shifts his hand, his weak fingers tangling tighter into Taesan’s shirt, pulling him just a fraction closer.

“And I’d know you were down here, looking up at the night sky, waiting for me to pull back into the atmosphere.” Leehan’s voice softens, the playfulness melting away into something incredibly fragile, something that sounds like a quiet plea wrapped in a sci-fi dream. “If I went that far, Taesan... would you still wait for the splashdown?”

Taesan’s chest tightens, a sudden, fierce wave of emotion crashing over him. He looks at Leehan’s pale, cosmic profile under the simulated stars, understanding the unspoken truth beneath the question. If I have to leave this earth before you do, will you still look for me?

“I wouldn't just wait,” Taesan whispers against Leehan’s temple, his voice cracking slightly but filled with an absolute, terrifying certainty. “I’d join the ground control team. I’d be the guy on the radio, keeping tabs on your oxygen levels, counting down every single mile of your orbit. You wouldn't be up there alone, Leehan. I don't care how many miles of empty space are between us. I’m staying on your frequency.”

Leehan lets out a long, shaky breath, his eyes closing again as he presses himself closer into Taesan’s warmth, the silver ring on his finger pressing firmly against Taesan’s palm. Above them, the projector spins lazily, charting the distant, cold path of a spacecraft through the dark.

“I’d name a moon after you, you know?”

Leehan’s whisper is a tiny, fragile thread of sound, but it carries clearly over the cinematic swell of the planetarium’s music. He doesn’t open his eyes, but the lopsided smile returns to his lips, small and fiercely stubborn.

Taesan’s throat tightens so sharply it feels like swallowing glass. He presses his forehead closer against Leehan’s, his own eyes shutting tight against the burn of hot tears. “You can’t just name a moon, Leehan. There are strict international astronomical regulations for that. You have to submit it to a committee.”

“I’m an astronaut on the Artemis mission in this scenario, Taesan. I have leverage,” Leehan murmurs, his voice growing a little slower, a little heavier, the physical toll of the evening catching up to him in quiet, incremental waves. “I’d find some undiscovered little satellite orbiting Jupiter or Saturn. Something small, and quiet, and fiercely loyal to its planet. And I’d tell NASA it’s called Taesan. No negotiation.”

“A moon?” Taesan asks, a rough, wet chuckle escaping his chest. He opens his eyes, looking at the pale, beautiful curve of his fiancé's face in the fading blue light. “Why a moon? Why not a whole planet? Or a constellation?”

“Because planets are too loud,” Leehan whispers, his eyelashes fluttering open, his gaze instantly finding Taesan’s in the dark. The reflection of a thousand artificial stars glints in his pupils. “Planets have atmospheres, and weather, and too many things going on. But a moon… a moon just stays there. It’s a constant. It reflects the light of something else, and it never breaks its orbit. It’s just… quiet. And steady. Like you’ve been for me every single day in that hospital.”

Leehan’s hand moves, his thin fingers slowly tracing the line of Taesan’s jaw, his touch as light and weightless as cosmic dust.

“Every time the room got dark, and the machines started bleeping, I’d look over and see your shadow in that chair,” Leehan breathes, his voice cracking slightly, dropping into a register of absolute, unfiltered vulnerability. “You were my moon, Taesan. Holding the gravity together when I felt like I was floating away into nothing. I’d name a moon after you. Because you kept me grounded.”

Taesan catches Leehan’s hand, trapping the cold fingers against his cheek. He turns his head slightly, pressing a deep, lingering kiss into the center of Leehan’s palm, right where his life line folds, holding onto the physical sensation of him with everything he has left.

“Then you better stay in orbit,” Taesan says, his voice thick with a desperate, unyielding command. “Don’t you dare go making me a monument in the sky, Leehan. I don’t want to be a moon in the dark. I want to be the guy sitting at the kitchen table arguing with you about fish tanks and toothpaste. I want the real thing.”

Leehan looks at him for a long, quiet moment, the space between them filled only by the soft, rhythmic sound of their breathing. Slowly, Leehan nods, leaning his head back down against the headrest, his fingers tightening around Taesan’s with the last of his strength.

Above them, the planetarium projector begins its slow, final arc, the stars shifting in a massive, sweeping motion across the ceiling, mimicking the infinite, patient turning of the earth.

The warmth of the Sunday kitchen and the frantic panic of the first emergency room visit had both settled into a tense, exhausting baseline of medical tests, biopsies, and waiting rooms. But that afternoon—the afternoon of the official oncology consultation—the air in the hospital corridor had felt entirely different. It was heavy, stagnant, and smelled strongly of institutional floor wax and old coffee.

They were sitting side-by-side on a vinyl bench outside Room 304. Leehan was wearing an oversized knit cardigan that Taesan had bought him for his birthday, his hands completely buried inside the long sleeves. He looked pale, yes, but he was still smiling, still trying to distract Taesan by pointing out a typo on a laminated safety poster across the hall.

Taesan, however, couldn't smile. His right leg was bounced in a relentless, anxious tremor, his elbows resting on his knees, his eyes locked onto the handle of the doctor's office door. He felt like a prisoner waiting for a jury to walk back into the courtroom.

Then, the door opened. A nurse with a gentle, overly sympathetic expression nodded at them. "The doctor will see you now."

The office was small, crowded with medical reference books and anatomical models. Dr. Choi, a middle-aged oncologist with a kind, deeply exhausted face, didn't look at his computer screen when they sat down. He looked directly at them, his hands folded neatly over a thick manila folder on his desk. That was the first sign. The first crack in the dam.

"Thank you both for coming in," Dr. Choi began, his voice dropping into that measured, carefully calibrated tone doctors use when they are about to alter someone's universe forever. "We received the final pathology reports from the bone marrow biopsy and the chest scans we ran last week."

Taesan reached out under the desk, his hand blindly searching for Leehan's. Leehan met him halfway, his fingers cold but slipping instantly into Taesan’s grip, tightening with a surprising, sudden strength.

"I'll be direct with you," Dr. Choi said, opening the folder. The white pages inside looked entirely ordinary, just black text and columns of numbers, but to Taesan, they looked like a death warrant. "The masses we located in the mediastinum and the irregular blood counts are indicative of an aggressive form of lymphoma. It's advanced, Leehan. We're looking at Stage Three."

The word lymphoma didn't land like a bomb. It landed like a heavy, suffocating blanket, cutting off the oxygen in the room.

Taesan felt the world tilt. The sounds of the hospital—the distant page over the intercom, the hum of the fluorescent lights, the rustle of papers—all receded into a high-pitched, deafening roar in his ears. His chest tightened so hard he couldn't draw a full breath. He stared at the doctor's mouth as it kept moving, explaining treatment protocols, chemotherapy cycles, survival statistics, and survival rates, but the words were just empty noise. Stage Three. Advanced. Aggressive.

He turned his head slowly to look at Leehan, his heart breaking into a thousand jagged pieces at what he saw.

Leehan wasn't crying; he was just staring at the manila folder on the desk, his face completely blank, his skin draining of whatever little color it had left until he looked like a statue carved out of marble. His lower lip trembled, just a tiny, microscopic fraction, before he bit down on it, hard. The knuckles of the hand gripping Taesan's were stark white, the silver engagement ring catching the harsh overhead light.

"We want to start the first round of aggressive chemotherapy on Monday," Dr. Choi was saying, his voice finally piercing back through the fog in Taesan's brain. "We need to act quickly to stay ahead of the progression."

"Monday," Leehan repeated. It was the first time he had spoken since entering the room. His voice didn't sound like his own—it was hollow, paper-thin, stripped of all the music and life that usually filled it. He didn't ask about the side effects. He didn't ask if it would hurt. He just looked up from the folder, his wide, terrified eyes finally meeting Taesan's.

In that single, agonizing look, the entire future they had spent months building on napkins and wedding magazines crumbled. The fish tanks, the space puns on the fridge, the matching towels, the glass greenhouse in October—all of it was violently sucked into a black hole, leaving behind only the cold, terrifying reality of a hospital bed.

The walk out of the clinic was a blur of linoleum and fluorescent lights that felt entirely endless.

Once they stepped through the heavy glass doors of the oncology wing, the silence between them became deafening. It wasn’t a peaceful quiet; it was a loud, roaring void that filled the space between their shoulders, heavy with the weight of the words Stage Three and chemotherapy.

They made it as far as the parking garage before the gravity of the room they had just left seemed to catch up with them. The air in the concrete structure was cool and damp, smelling faintly of car exhaust and rain. Taesan stood by the passenger side door of their car, his hand frozen over the door handle. His fingers were shaking so violently he couldn’t press the unlock button. His chest was heaving in short, shallow bursts, the roaring in his ears getting louder and louder until he felt like he was suffocating.

How are we supposed to go home? he thought, a desperate, wild panic clawing at his throat. How are we supposed to look at the wedding magazines? How am I supposed to protect him from this?

Before he could spiral any further, a soft, familiar weight settled over his trembling hands.

Leehan had walked around the hood of the car. He didn’t look like a patient who had just been given a terrifying diagnosis; his face was still pale, but his expression had smoothed out into something impossibly serene. He gently pried Taesan’s fingers away from the cold metal handle, enveloping Taesan’s large, shaking hands into the warm, oversized sleeves of his knit cardigan.

“Hey,” Leehan whispered, his voice steady, carrying a strange, grounding quiet that immediately cut through the static in Taesan’s head. “Look at me, Taesan. Take a breath.”

Taesan looked up, his eyes wide and fractured with an agonizing mix of terror and helplessness. He stared at his fiancé, his mind screaming a single, frantic question: How are you so calm about this?

It felt entirely backwards. It was supposed to be the other way around. Taesan was supposed to be the anchor, the one pulling Leehan into his arms and promising that everything would be okay, that they would fight this and win. He was supposed to be the strong one. But his own knees felt like water, his chest completely hollowed out by fear, while Leehan stood there in the gray light of the parking garage, looking at him with an absolute, unshakeable tenderness.

“It’s just Monday,” Leehan said softly, a tiny, reassuring smile touching the corners of his lips. He squeezed Taesan’s hands, his silver engagement ring pressing firmly against Taesan’s knuckles. “We’re just going to come back on Monday, and they’re going to give me some medicine, and we’re going to start fixing it. That’s all. We can handle Monday.”

“Leehan…” Taesan’s voice broke entirely, a choked, desperate sound tearing out of his throat as he finally collapsed forward, burying his face into the crook of Leehan’s neck. He wrapped his arms around Leehan’s waist, holding onto him with a terrifying, white-knuckled grip, as if he could physically shield him from the cells mutating inside his body.

Leehan didn’t flinch. He just held him back, his hands coming up to cradle the back of Taesan’s head, his fingers gently threading through his hair, rocking him slowly in the quiet of the concrete garage.

“I’ve got you,” Leehan murmured against his ear, his voice unfaltering, entirely calm in the face of the storm. “I’m right here. We’re going to be okay.”

They stayed like that for a long time, held together by nothing but the desperate strength in Taesan’s arms and the quiet, impossible rhythm of Leehan’s breathing. The parking garage hummed around them—the distant screech of tires on concrete, the low echo of an engine starting three floors up—but inside the small circle of their embrace, time had completely stalled.

When Taesan finally pulled back, his face was wet, his throat tight with a burning, swallowed grief. He looked down at Leehan, searching the smooth, unbothered lines of his face. He wanted to understand it. He wanted to steal whatever secret armor Leehan was wearing so he could put it on himself.

"How?" Taesan breathed, the word raw and desperate, slipping out before he could stop it. "How are you doing this right now? He just said—the doctor just said—"

"I know what he said," Leehan interrupted softly. He didn't let go of Taesan's hands. Instead, he led him toward the passenger side, opening the door and gently guiding Taesan to sit down on the edge of the seat, leaving his feet resting on the concrete floor. Leehan knelt down in front of him, completely unbothered by the dusty ground, resting his forearms on Taesan’s knees.

He looked up, the gray light of the garage catching the deep, clear amber of his eyes.

"When we were in that room," Leehan said, his cadence dropping into that slow, deliberate pace he used when he was trying to untangle a heavy thought, "and he was using all those big, terrible words... I felt like I was falling. Like the floor had just opened up right under my chair."

He paused, reaching up to gently brush a stray, damp lock of hair away from Taesan's forehead. His touch was warm, solid, and entirely real.

"But then I looked at you," Leehan whispered, a small, genuine smile finally breaking through the pale canvas of his face. "And I saw how terrified you were. Your leg was shaking so fast, and you were holding my hand so tight I thought you might actually break my fingers. And I realized something, Taesan."

"What?"

"I realized that if we both start drowning at the same time, nobody is looking at the horizon," Leehan said, his voice cracking just a fraction, the first hint of his own hidden fear finally peeking through the armor. "You’ve spent the last three months keeping track of every single detail for us. The guest lists, the budget, the catering, the dates. You've been carrying the whole weight of our future on your shoulders because you wanted everything to be perfect for me."

Leehan leaned forward, pressing his forehead against Taesan’s knee for a brief second before looking back up, his eyes shining with a fierce, brilliant light.

"So, if you need to break down right now, you break down. If you need to be terrified, be terrified. I'm calm because one of us has to hold the floor steady, Taesan. Monday is just a day. We’ll get in the car, we’ll drive here, and we’ll face it."

Taesan stared at him, the roaring in his ears slowly fading into a quiet, aching reverence. He reached out, his hands trembling as they closed around Leehan’s face, pulling him up until their lips met in a kiss that tasted of salt, rain, and an unbreakable, terrifying devotion.

The memory of the parking garage dissolves into the cold, quiet present of the planetarium.

The heavy, metallic hum of the projector overhead fills the silence that follows, a stark contrast to the ghost of that rainy hospital garage. The blue light of the artificial galaxy has shifted, painting the two of them in long, deep shadows.

Leehan’s head is still resting against the plush seat, his eyes fixed on a slow-moving cluster of stars near the apex of the dome. He looks smaller now than he did in that oversized cardigan months ago—more translucent, more fragile. The serene armor he had worn so effortlessly in the parking garage has worn thin, chipped away by months of nausea, radiation, and the terrifyingly steady march of the calendar.

Slowly, Leehan turns his head on the headrest. The reflection of the fake stars in his eyes looks less like an unshakeable universe now, and more like a quiet, desperate plea.

“I really want to be an astrophysicist,” he says, his voice dropping into a register so soft, so raw, that it barely carries across the inches between them. He swallows, a fragile, uneven breath rattling in his throat. “There’s still time, right?”

The question hangs in the dark air of the theater, heavy and devastating.

Taesan feels his entire chest cave in. It is a question built on a heartbreaking contradiction—a dream born from the long, agonizing hours spent hooked up to an IV pole, a future conceived in a place where futures were being stolen. He looks at Leehan’s pale face, at the loose silver band sitting on his finger, at the faint tremor in the hand resting on the armrest.

Every logical, medical reality in Taesan’s brain screams the truth. The doctors hadn't spoken about time in years during their last appointment; they had spoken about comfort. They had spoken about weeks, maybe months. They hadn't spoken about university applications or career paths.

But looking into Leehan's eyes, Taesan remembers the parking garage. He remembers the boy who had held the floor steady for him when his own world was fracturing.

Taesan shifts, unbuckling his seatbelt so he can lean entirely across the space between their chairs. He takes Leehan’s cool hand in both of his own, squeezing it with a fierce, deliberate pressure, bringing it up until it’s resting right against his own cheek.

“Yeah,” Taesan breathes, his voice thick, fighting past the suffocating weight in his throat. He doesn't let his gaze waver. He forces his eyes to remain perfectly clear, perfectly certain, refusing to let the darkness of the theater swallow the lie. “There’s still time, Leehan. We’ll buy the textbooks. I don't care how thick they are, or how much they cost. You can clutter up the whole apartment with diagrams of black holes and white dwarfs.”

A single tear escapes Leehan’s eye, tracking slowly down his temple and disappearing into his hair. His lopsided smile returns, but it’s trembling, fragile as a pane of glass. “You’ll have to help me study. The math looked really hard.”

“I’ll learn the math,” Taesan promises, his forehead coming down to rest against Leehan’s, his thumb smoothing over the fragile skin of his fiancé's wrist, right over the slow, quiet thud of his pulse. “I’ll learn all of it. We’re going to get you that degree. Just keep looking at the stars, okay? Just stay right here with me.”

Above them, the planetarium projector continues its silent, indifferent rotation, spinning a web of light across the ceiling, while below, they hold onto each other in the dark, orbiting a future they are forcing to exist, if only for tonight.

Leehan nods slowly, his forehead sliding against Taesan’s with a soft, friction-filled warmth before he tilts his chin back up toward the apex of the dome. His breathing has slowed, settling into a heavy, rhythmic pattern that syncs almost perfectly with the low-frequency hum of the projector.

“You know,” Leehan murmurs, his voice carrying that dreamy, far-off quality again, the one that made him sound like he was already halfway to the clouds. “There’s this one other thing I read. It’s about the way we see them.”

Taesan stays right where he is, half-leaned over the armrest, his fingers still woven tightly through Leehan’s. He watches the blue light trace the delicate line of Leehan’s throat as he speaks. “The stars?”

“Yeah,” Leehan whispers. “When a massive star finally reaches the very end of its life, it doesn’t just disappear. It goes out in a supernova. It’s this incredibly bright, beautiful explosion of light and energy—so bright that it can outshine an entire galaxy for a few weeks.”

He reaches up with his free hand, his fingers lazily tracing a constellation that Taesan can’t name, his loose silver ring catching a glint of violet from a simulated nebula.

“But the sad part is the distance,” Leehan continues softly, a faint, thoughtful smile touching his lips. “Because they're so many light-years away, by the time that beautiful, brilliant flash of light finally travels across the dark and reaches Earth... the star itself has already been gone for thousands of years. We’re standing down here, looking up, pointing at how pretty it is, completely oblivious to the fact that we’re just looking at a ghost. We're loving something that already ended a long time ago.”

He lets out a tiny, contented sigh, his hand dropping back down to rest over Taesan’s chest, completely untroubled by the mechanics of the universe he’s describing. To Leehan, it’s just another fascinating, melancholic piece of trivia he unearthed during a lonely Tuesday in the oncology ward—a bit of cosmic poetry to pass the time.

And Taesan doesn’t catch it either.

His mind is too busy cataloging the solid weight of Leehan’s hand against his ribs, too focused on the promise he just made about textbooks and university courses, too stubbornly anchored to the four-month countdown to their wedding. He doesn't see the parallel. He doesn't realize that right now, sitting in the dim luxury of the planetarium, he is doing the exact same thing—basking in the radiant, beautiful warmth of a boy whose horizon has already been violently shortened, loving a future that is already slipping away into the past.

“That’s why you have to study them,” Taesan murmurs, leaning down to press a soft kiss right against the crown of Leehan’s head, inhaling the familiar, comforting scent of his shampoo. “So you can tell the live ones from the ghosts.”

“Yeah,” Leehan breathes, his eyes closing as he sinks deeper into the plush fabric of the chair, his grip on Taesan's fingers remaining loose but entirely unbroken. “The live ones.”

It was two months ago, right in the thick of the second chemotherapy cycle.

The apartment had smelled permanently of rubbing alcohol, boiled water, and the metallic, stale tang of a home transformed into a makeshift hospice. The dining table was no longer buried under wedding swatches; it was lined with neat rows of amber plastic pill bottles, a plastic kidney basin, and a daily log sheet where Taesan meticulously noted down every milliliter of fluid Leehan managed to keep down, every hour of sleep, every spike in temperature.

It was a Tuesday night, around three in the morning. The city outside the windows was dead, wrapped in a heavy, humid summer fog, but inside, the air was thick enough to choke on.

Leehan was sitting on the bathroom floor, his back pressed against the white tiles, his knees pulled up to his chest. He was wearing a faded t-shirt that hung off his collarbones like a sail on a broken mast. He had just spent the last forty-five minutes throwing up nothing but dry, painful bile, his whole body wracked with tremors that sounded like dry leaves scraping against pavement.

Taesan was on his knees beside him, a damp washcloth clutched in his trembling hand, his eyes bloodshot and wide with a frantic, sleepless mania. He reached out to wipe Leehan’s forehead, his movements jerky, driven by an overpowering, desperate need to fix something, to do something useful.

But Leehan had gently, weakly, pushed his hand away.

He didn't do it angrily. He did it with that same quiet, maddening serenity that had been haunting Taesan for weeks. Leehan leaned his head back against the wall, closed his eyes, and let out a long, slow breath. "I'm okay, Taesan. Go back to sleep. It’s over for tonight. I'm fine."

I'm fine.

The phrase hit Taesan like a physical blow to the sternum. Something inside him—some fragile, overstretched wire that had been holding his entire sanity together four months—snapped with a clean, terrifying pop.

"Stop saying that," Taesan said, his voice dangerously low, a raw, ragged edge scraping against the bottom of his throat.

Leehan didn't open his eyes. He just kept his face turned toward the ceiling, his expression entirely smooth, completely unbothered by the gravity pulling them down. "Saying what? I really am okay now. The nausea passed. Just go rest."

"Stop saying you're fine!" Taesan suddenly roared, the sound exploding out of his chest, violently shattering the three-a.m. silence of the apartment. He stood up so fast his knees hit the edge of the sink, sending a plastic cup clattering into the basin. His breath was coming in ragged, shallow gasps, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. "Stop acting like you're just dealing with a minor inconvenience! Stop looking at me with that stupid, calm face like we’re just waiting for a bus!"

Leehan’s eyes snapped open then. For the first time in months, the serene, cosmic mask slipped, replaced by a sudden, sharp flicker of shock. He stayed on the floor, looking up at Taesan from the tiles, his thin fingers curling into the fabric of his sweatpants.

"Taesan—"

"No! Don't 'Taesan' me!" Taesan yelled, his voice cracking violently as a torrent of repressed, suffocating terror finally broke through the dam. He began pacing the narrow width of the bathroom, his hands flying to his hair, tugging at the strands until his scalp burned. "You're shedding weight every single day. I can see your ribs through your shirt, Leehan! Your hair is coming out in clumps on the pillow, your white blood cell count is practically nonexistent, the doctors are tossing around terms like 'refractory progression,' and you’re sitting there telling me you’re fine? You’re reading Wikipedia pages about stars? You’re making jokes about the hospital Wi-Fi?"

Taesan stopped, slamming his palms flat against the cold porcelain of the sink, his reflection in the mirror looking like a stranger—pale, hollow-eyed, completely unhinged by grief. He turned back to Leehan, his chest heaving, tears finally spilling over his lashes in hot, angry tracks.

"I am spiraling, Leehan! I am drowning in this ocean we promised to swim across, and you're just floating on the surface like nothing is happening! Why aren't you angry? Why aren't you screaming? Why am I the only one in this room who is absolutely terrified that you are going to die?"

The words cut through the echoing violence of the bathroom like a sudden drop in cabin pressure.

“I’m not dying, Taesan.”

Leehan’s voice wasn’t loud. It didn't match the jagged, screaming air in the room. It was quiet, steady, and terrifyingly solid. He didn’t move from his spot on the tile floor, but he uncurled his legs slowly, his movements deliberate, as if he were trying not to startle a wild animal.

Taesan let out a harsh, wet sound—a cynical, broken laugh that choked on its own breath. He pulled his hands off the sink and faced Leehan fully, his chest heaving, his eyes wild with the sheer frustration of a man trying to scream at a wall of fog.

“How can you say that?” Taesan breathed, his voice cracking on the syllables, raw and bleeding. He pointed a shaking finger down at the plastic kidney basin, then out toward the rows of amber bottles on the kitchen counter. “Look around you! Look at this apartment! Look at your hands, Leehan! You are disappearing right in front of me, and you’re still lying to my face? I’m the one reading the charts! I’m the one talking to the nurses when you’re asleep! Don’t look at me and tell me you’re not dying when every single day is a countdown!”

Leehan didn’t flinch. He gripped the edge of the bathtub, and with a slow, agonizing effort that made the muscles in his neck strain, he pulled himself up to his feet. He swayed for a second, his balance precarious, but he refused to let himself fall.

He took two steps forward until he was standing right in front of Taesan, invading the frantic, volatile space Taesan had built around himself.

“Because I’m not,” Leehan said, his amber eyes blazing with a sudden, fierce intensity that Taesan hadn’t seen since before the diagnosis. The serene, detached mask was entirely gone, but it hadn’t been replaced by fear. It was something much more dangerous: absolute, unyielding conviction.

He reached out, his thin, pale hands coming up to grab Taesan by the fabric of his shirt, right over his heart, pulling him down until they were eye-to-eye.

“You think I’m calm because I’ve given up?” Leehan whispered, his voice trembling now, the emotion finally cracking through the surface like an earthquake splitting open stone. “You think I’m reading about the universe because I’m looking for an exit strategy? Taesan, I am fighting for every single milliliter of water I keep down. I am fighting every time I force myself to swallow those horse pills that taste like poison. I am fighting when I look at the calendar and see October twelfth staring back at me!”

A single, hot tear spilled over Leehan’s lashes, tracking rapidly down his hollow cheek, but his grip on Taesan’s shirt only tightened.

“I am not a ghost yet,” Leehan breathed, his forehead coming forward to press violently against Taesan’s chest, his shoulders finally beginning to shake. “My heart is still beating. My lungs are still drawing breath, even if it hurts to do it. I am alive right now, in this bathroom, at three o'clock in the morning. And as long as I am standing here holding onto you, I am not dying. I am living. So stop mourning me before I’m gone.”

The violent tension in the bathroom shattered, leaving only the raw, bleeding silence of two people who had pushed themselves to the absolute brink.

Taesan stood frozen, the frantic, angry heat draining out of him all at once, replaced by a cold, hollow wave of immense shame. He looked down at the top of Leehan’s head, at the way his thin shoulders were trembling against his chest, at the white-knuckled grip Leehan still had on his shirt. Leehan wasn't a brick wall of serenity. He was just a boy trying to keep his head above water, and Taesan had just dragged him under.

Slowly, almost fearfully, Taesan brought his arms up, wrapping them completely around Leehan’s fragile frame. He pulled him in until there wasn't a single inch of air left between them, burying his face into the soft, messy strands of Leehan’s hair.

“I’m sorry,” Taesan choked out, the words ragged, breaking apart in his throat as he squeezed his eyes shut. A heavy sob finally tore out of his chest, making his whole body shudder. “I’m sorry, Leehan. I’m so sorry. I know you’re tired... I know you’re doing everything you can.”

Leehan didn't pull away. Instead, he let out a long, shuddering breath, his forehead sinking heavier against Taesan’s collarbone, his grip on Taesan's shirt loosening just enough to let his hands rest flat against his chest.

“You’re tired, too,” Leehan whispered.

The words were soft, stripped of all the anger from a moment ago, returning to that quiet, intuitive cadence that always knew exactly where Taesan was hurting. Leehan slid his hands up, his cool palms cupping the sides of Taesan’s neck, his thumbs brushing against the wet, heated skin of his cheeks.

“You haven’t slept a full night in months, Taesan,” Leehan murmured, forcing Taesan to lift his head so their eyes could meet in the harsh bathroom light. “You wake up every time I move. You look at me like you’re trying to hold my cells together with your bare hands. It’s okay to be exhausted. It’s okay to be scared. But you don't have to carry the universe by yourself.”

Taesan let out a shaky, broken breath, leaning his face into Leehan’s left hand, his lips brushing against the loose silver band on his finger. The anger was completely gone, leaving them both entirely exposed on the cold tile floor, two months away from a wedding that was slipping through their fingers, just trying to survive the night.

“I just don't know how to lose you,” Taesan breathed, the honest, terrifying truth finally slipping out into the quiet air.

“You’re not losing me,” Leehan said, his thumb wiping away a fresh tear from Taesan’s cheek with an absolute, unshakeable certainty. “We’re still swimming, remember? Even if it’s dark.”

The low hum of the projector begins a deep, bass-heavy rumble as the house lights slowly, incrementally start to bleed back into the edges of the room—a soft, amber glow meant to signal the end of the show. The simulated universe above them is shrinking, the deep nebulae folding back into the darkness.

“We should probably head out,” Taesan murmurs, his voice thick with the residue of the past. He releases Leehan’s hand gently, leaning back into his own chair to unbuckle his seatbelt, his joints popping from sitting in the same tilted position for so long.

Leehan lets out a quiet, tired sigh, nodding as he slowly grips the armrests. He moves with a careful, deliberate hesitation, waiting for the brief spell of dizziness that always hits him when he changes positions to pass. Taesan is already on his feet, reaching over to wrap his hands under Leehan’s elbows, anchoring him, offering his body as a solid, immovable weight to lean against.

“I’m okay,” Leehan whispers out of habit, but he doesn't pull away. He lets Taesan help him up, his legs slightly shaky beneath the heavy wool coat.

They stand together in the aisle, the theater completely empty around them now. Taesan begins to reach for Leehan’s scarf, intending to loop it tighter around his neck before they face the biting night air outside.

But just as his fingers touch the wool, a sudden, brilliant streak of pure white light cuts across the fading dome above them.

It isn't part of the regular loop. It’s a rogue animation—a single, cinematic shooting star, tearing through the artificial darkness with a vibrant, sparkling tail before burning out at the very edge of the concrete horizon.

Both of them freeze.

Leehan’s eyes widen, catching the final, brilliant flash of the streak before it vanishes into the amber twilight of the house lights. A genuine, unburdened spark of boyish wonder flares across his face, lifting the exhaustion from his features for one beautiful, fleeting second.

“Taesan, look,” Leehan breathes, his hand flying up to catch the lapel of Taesan’s jacket. “A shooting star. Even in a fake sky.”

Taesan doesn’t look at the ceiling. He is looking at the way the light danced across Leehan’s eyes, the way his lopsided smile returns, small and tentative but entirely alive.

“Did you make a wish?” Taesan asks softly, his voice dropping into the quiet space between them.

Leehan turns his head, his gaze shifting away from the empty dome to meet Taesan’s. The amber lights of the theater cast a warm, golden glow over his pale skin, making him look less like a cosmic ghost and more like the boy from the kitchen table, the boy from the record store awning. He looks down at his own left hand, his fingers curling slightly so the loose silver engagement ring presses firmly against his skin.

“I don't need to,” Leehan whispers, his thumb reaching out to lazily trace the edge of Taesan’s coat sleeve. “My gravity is already right here.”

Taesan feels a profound, aching warmth expand in his chest, cutting through the four-month countdown, through the statistics, through the dark ocean they are still navigating. He doesn't say anything. He just steps closer, intertwining their fingers once more, gripping Leehan’s hand with a quiet, fierce permanence as they turn together toward the exit signs.

They walk slowly up the carpeted incline of the aisle, their footsteps muffled by the heavy fabric beneath their shoes. The double doors of the theater loom ahead, a sliver of the brightly lit, sterile lobby visible through the glass panes. Beyond that lobby is the cold June night, the parking lot, and the drive back to an apartment that feels less like a home and more like a recovery ward.

But right now, in the threshold between the simulated universe and the real world, Leehan pauses.

He stops just before the heavy push-bar of the exit door, his shoulder resting lightly against the padded wall. He’s breathing a bit heavier now, the short walk up the aisle taking more out of him than he’d ever admit out loud. He looks back over his shoulder one last time, casting a lingering glance at the darkened dome behind them. The projector has finally shut off entirely, leaving the ceiling a blank, curved expanse of gray concrete.

The magic is gone. The stars have turned back into a ceiling.

"Taesan," Leehan says softly, his eyes reflecting the warm, ordinary halogen lights of the lobby corridor.

"Yeah?" Taesan steps into his space, instinctively shielding him from the draft coming off the exit doors, his hands reaching out to adjust the collar of Leehan’s wool coat.

"When we get home..." Leehan starts, his voice carrying a quiet, tentative weight. He hesitates, his thumb rubbing small, nervous circles against the back of Taesan’s hand. "Can we put the wedding swatches back on the table? Just the velvet ones. I want to see how the midnight blue looks under the kitchen light."

Taesan’s hands freeze on the lapel of Leehan's coat.

For months, they had avoided that cardboard box. It sat by the door like a monument to a future they were too terrified to look at, a silent reminder of the October date that was rushing toward them faster than they could handle. But looking at Leehan now—noticing the stubborn, quiet spark in his eyes that even the chemotherapy couldn't completely wash away—Taesan realizes something.

Leehan isn't asking to pretend. He isn't hiding behind space puns or cosmic trivia anymore. He's asking to live in the space they have left, to look at the future they chose, even if the timeline has shifted.

A slow, genuine smile cracks across Taesan's face, the tight knot of anxiety that had been sitting in his chest since they left the hospital garage finally loosening, if only a fraction. He leans down, pressing his forehead gently against Leehan’s, letting his eyes close as he breathes in the familiar warmth of him.

"We can put them on the table," Taesan whispers against his skin, his voice thick but entirely steady. "We can clear off the pill bottles for an hour. We'll look at the velvet, and we'll figure out the flowers, and I'll let you tell me exactly how many fish tanks we're going to squeeze into the living room."

Leehan lets out a soft, breathy laugh, his hands coming up to rest against Taesan’s chest, feeling the solid, rhythmic thud of his heart. "Three. At least three."

"Deal," Taesan murmurs.

He takes a step back, his hand sliding down to grip Leehan’s fingers, locking them together in a tight, unyielding hold. With his other hand, Taesan pushes open the heavy theater door, stepping out of the dark and into the light, ready for whatever Monday—or October—has waiting for them.

It was five years ago. Long before the rows of amber pill bottles, before the gray concrete parking garage, and before the heavy silence of Room 304. They were twenty-one, completely broke, and utterly convinced that the city belonged to them.

It was a crisp, biting late-October night, and they had snuck onto the rooftop of Taesan’s cramped, fourth-floor apartment building. They didn’t have chairs, so they had dragged up a heavy, moth-eaten wool blanket, spreading it over the rough, gravel-strewn asphalt. Leehan was lying flat on his back, his head resting carelessly in Taesan’s lap, his cheeks flushed bright pink from the autumn wind.

Taesan was leaning back on his elbows, his fingers absentmindedly tangling in the thick, messy strands of Leehan’s hair. Down below, the city was a chaotic, roaring grid of yellow taxi cabs and neon billboard lights, but up here, the sky was a deep, velvet expanse of midnight blue.

“Look,” Leehan whispered, pointing a gloved finger up toward a faint, flickering point of light dancing just past the edge of a water tower. “That’s Vega. It’s part of Lyra. It’s one of the brightest stars in the sky, Taesan. Even with all this smog, you can still see it.”

Taesan looked down at him, a soft, helpless smile pulling at his lips. Leehan’s eyes were wide, completely full of that brilliant, untamed wonder that had drawn Taesan to him in the first place. He didn’t care about the cold concrete biting through the blanket, or the fact that they had to wake up for early classes in four hours. He was just happy to be looking up.

“You’re ridiculous, you know that?” Taesan murmured, his thumb lightly stroking the smooth, healthy line of Leehan’s jaw—unmarred, glowing with youth and the easy warmth of a boy who had nothing but time. “Who memorizes star charts on a Tuesday night?”

“People who want to understand the scale of things,” Leehan replied loftily, though he shifted closer, burying his nose into the fabric of Taesan’s oversized jacket to escape the wind. He reached up, taking Taesan’s hand and pulling it down to his chest, holding it right over the strong, steady, unbothered rhythm of his heart.

“The universe is so huge, Taesan,” Leehan said softly, his voice clear and full of life, entirely untouched by the raspy weight of illness. “It’s kind of terrifying. Stars burn out, galaxies collide, and everything is constantly moving away from everything else.”

He turned his head slightly, his amber eyes locking onto Taesan’s with a sudden, fierce intensity that made Taesan’s breath hitch. In the quiet dark of the rooftop, five years before they would ever hold a silver ring or hear a staging diagnosis, Leehan squeezed his hand with the absolute, unbroken strength of a boy who believed in forever.

“But down here,” Leehan whispered, a tiny, perfect smile touching his lips, “none of that matters. As long as we’re looking at the same sky, we’re in the exact same place.”

Taesan leaned down, his heart swelling with a love so immense it felt terrifying in its own right. He pressed his lips to Leehan’s forehead, then to the tip of his cold nose, before settling against his mouth in a slow, lingering kiss that tasted of cheap convenience-store cocoa and the crisp October air.

“How long are you going to keep dragging me up to cold rooftops to lecture me about astronomy?” Taesan teased softly against his lips, his arms tightening around Leehan’s waist, holding him securely against the spinning of the earth.

Leehan laughed, a bright, ringing sound that echoed into the open night, completely oblivious to the countdown that the universe had already set for them. He tangled his fingers into Taesan's shirt, pulling him down into the warmth of the blanket, his eyes reflecting the vast, beautiful dark above.

“I’ll love you just as long as we’re under the stars.”

Taesan’s chest rose and fell in a slow, peaceful rhythm that matched the quiet of the night. Hearing those words from Leehan didn’t feel like a heavy promise back then; it felt as natural and effortless as the autumn breeze sweeping across the roof. At twenty-one, the phrase as long as we're under the stars sounded like an eternity. It didn't sound like a deadline.

"Just as long as we're under the stars, huh?" Taesan repeated, his voice a soft rumble in his chest that Leehan could feel where his head rested. He shifted slightly, pulling the edge of the frayed wool blanket higher up around Leehan's shoulders to block out the sharpening chill. "That's a pretty long commitment. What happens if it rains and we can't see them?"

Leehan let out another soft, muffled chuckle, his breath puffing into a tiny cloud of white mist in the cold air. He rolled onto his side, propping his chin up on Taesan’s chest, looking up at him with an expression of pure, unadulterated mischief.

"They're still there, dummy," Leehan said, reaching up to lightly tap the tip of Taesan's nose with a gloved finger. "Clouds don't erase the universe. Even if it's pouring, or foggy, or if the city lights are so bright they bleach the whole sky white... the stars don't move. You just have to remember they're waiting behind the dark."

Taesan caught Leehan's hand, trapping the small, bundled fingers in his own, bringing them to his lips to kiss the rough fabric of the glove. He looked into Leehan’s eyes—wide, clear, and blissfully free of any shadow of pain. There were no dark circles under them yet. There was no pale, translucent fragility to his skin, and his hair was thick and unruly under the knit beanie he wore.

He was just Leehan. Whole, radiant, and completely his.

"Alright," Taesan whispered, his gaze softening into something so deeply devoted it almost scared him even then. "Then I guess I'm stuck with you."

"You are," Leehan agreed softly, his playful tone shifting into something sweeter, more grounded. He leaned up just enough to press a quick, warm kiss to the underside of Taesan’s jaw, before sinking his weight back down, completely content to use Taesan as his mattress. "No escape. Even if you get tired of my lectures."

They lapsed back into a comfortable, heavy silence. Below them, a siren wailed somewhere on the main avenue, a distant reminder of the frantic, moving world they had temporarily stepped out of. But up on the gravel roof, under a scattering of faint, silver pinpricks that had traveled millions of years just to touch them, they were perfectly still.

Taesan kept his fingers moving through Leehan's hair, watching the way the dim ambient light of the city caught the subtle, dark strands. He didn't know about the hospital rooms yet. He didn't know about the midnight blue velvet swatches that would sit in a cardboard box, or the four-month countdown that would feel like a weight on his chest.

The future wasn't a threat. It was just a vast, open sky, waiting for them to explore it together.

The front door clicks shut with a soft, metallic thud that feels heavier than usual.

Two weeks have passed since the planetarium, and the June heat outside has turned thick and stifling, but inside the apartment, the air is cool and perfectly still. Taesan sets his keys down on the entryway console, noticing immediately that the usual chaotic clutter of the apartment has been smoothed away.

The laundry basket that had been overflowing by the closet is empty. In the kitchen, a neat row of freshly washed dish towels hangs over the oven handle, smelling faintly of lavender detergent.

A quiet, relieved smile touches the corners of Taesan’s mouth. He must have had a good day, he thinks, a rare, fragile sense of ease settling into his chest. After weeks of watching Leehan lose battles to exhaustion, the sight of a completed chore feels like a massive victory. Taesan checks his watch—it’s barely four in the afternoon. Leehan is likely resting, completely drained by the effort of running the washing machine.

Wanting to keep the outside world away from their sanctuary, Taesan takes his time. He slips out of his work shoes, heads straight into the bathroom, and turns on the shower. He lets the hot water wash away the grime of the city, the stress of the commute, and the constant, background hum of anxiety that never truly leaves him. He changes into a pair of soft, worn-out sweatpants and a clean cotton t-shirt—the kind Leehan always likes to rest his face against because it smells like home.

Stepping quietly into the bedroom, the curtains are drawn, plunging the space into a peaceful, amber twilight.

Leehan is lying on his side, buried beneath the heavy wool blanket they’ve kept on the bed despite the summer heat. His back is turned to the door, his frame looking remarkably small beneath the covers, curled into that familiar, protective crescent shape he always takes when he’s deeply asleep.

Taesan smiles softly, crawling onto the mattress with practiced, weightless precision so he won't shake the frame. He slides under the blanket, the cool fabric adjusting to his body heat as he settles his frame right behind Leehan. He moves closer until his chest is just brushing against the soft cotton of Leehan's shirt, his arm reaching out to wrap loosely around Leehan’s waist.

He waits.

It’s an unwritten rule of their entire five-year relationship. No matter how deeply asleep Leehan is—no matter if he’s sedated from the medication or entirely exhausted from a long day—his body possesses a stubborn, instinctive radar for Taesan. The second Taesan settles into the mattress, Leehan always stirs. He’ll let out a tiny, contented sigh, shift his hips backward to lock against Taesan’s, and nudge his head back until his hair brushes right under Taesan’s chin. It is his subconscious gravity, always pulling him back to center.

Taesan waits for the shift. He waits for the lopsided, sleepy murmur.

But Leehan doesn’t move.

The silence in the bedroom suddenly feels very loud. The arm Taesan has draped over Leehan’s waist doesn't feel the slight, instinctive twitch of recognition. There is no tiny, breathy sigh. Leehan remains perfectly still, his back completely passive against Taesan’s chest, the fabric of his shirt cool beneath Taesan's palm.

“Leehan?”

He doesn’t pull his arm back. Instead, his fingers twitch against the cotton of Leehan’s shirt, his palm pressing a fraction firmer against the side of Leehan's ribs, looking for that rhythmic, comforting rise and fall that he has tracked every single night for four months.

Nothing.

The fabric beneath his hand is still. The small, curved back resting against his chest carries a terrifying, hollow passivity that Taesan has never felt before. It doesn't feel like sleep. Sleep has a weight; sleep has a warm, heavy hum. This feels like an empty room after the windows have been left open to the wind.

Taesan’s heart misfires, a sudden, violent thud that echoes loudly in his own ears, cutting off the oxygen in his lungs. The ease from the clean laundry, the warmth from the shower, the soft light of the afternoon—all of it is violently ripped away, leaving him stranded on a sheer, vertical cliff of pure terror.

"Hey," Taesan whispers, his voice cracking, dropping into a frantic, breathless rush as he shuffles backward on the mattress. He pulls his arm away from Leehan’s waist, his hands suddenly trembling so violently he can barely control his own limbs. "Hey, Leehan. Wake up. Stop playing."

With a jerky, desperate movement, Taesan reaches over Leehan’s shoulder, grasping his upper arm and gently, fearfully pulling him backward so he rolls onto his back.

Leehan’s body moves easily, offering no resistance, completely weightless.

As his face turns toward the dim amber light filtering through the curtains, Taesan’s entire universe fractures.

Leehan’s eyes are closed, his eyelashes casting long, still shadows across his pale cheeks. His features are entirely serene—completely smooth, free of the tight lines of nausea and the exhausting weight of pain that had haunted his brow for weeks. The lopsided, stubborn little smile isn't there, but his lips are slightly parted, frozen in a soft, peaceful expression, as if he had simply stopped in the middle of a quiet thought.

On his left hand, resting loosely over his stomach, the silver engagement ring catches a dull glint of light from the window.

"Leehan, please," Taesan chokes out, a raw, animalistic sound tearing out of his throat. He scrambles to his knees, throwing his entire weight over the mattress, his hands flying to Leehan’s face. He cups the pale cheeks, his thumbs desperately brushing over the skin, searching for the heat that had been there just two weeks ago under the planetarium lights.

The skin is cool. Not freezing—not yet—but stripped of that vital, stubborn spark that made him him.

"No, no, no, Leehan, look at me," Taesan gasps, his vision instantly blurring into a hot, blinding sheet of tears. He presses his ear violently against the center of Leehan’s chest, right over the faded graphic on his t-shirt, pushing down so hard the mattress creaks beneath them.

He listens.

He strains past the roaring of his own pulse, past the distant sound of traffic outside, past the absolute, suffocating silence of the apartment. He waits for the thud. He waits for the slow, regular, unyielding rhythm that had kept him grounded in the hospital chairs.

But the chest beneath his ear is a silent, darkened theater. The projector has turned off.

The laundry was done. The apartment was clean. Leehan had held the floor steady until the very last chore was finished, until the apartment smelled like lavender and home, and then... he had simply let go of the gravity.

Taesan collapses forward, burying his face into the crook of Leehan’s neck, his large frame shaking with a violent, uncontainable grief that shatters the quiet of the bedroom. He wraps his arms around him, holding him with the exact same white-knuckled grip from the hospital garage, trying to force his own heat, his own breath, his own heartbeat into the quiet body beneath him.

But the universe doesn't bend.

Outside the window, the June sun begins its slow, indifferent descent, casting long, golden shadows across the floor, while inside the dark, Taesan holds onto his moon, completely oblivious to the world, left behind in the orbit of a star that had already gone out.

— Epilogue.

The wind that sweeps across the grassy hillside on October twelfth carries the sharp, bitter edge of autumn. The sky is a vast, scrubbed-clean expanse of pale blue—not the heavy, simulated twilight of the planetarium, and not the polluted neon-gray of the apartment rooftop. It is just an ordinary, indifferent sky, clear enough that if one were to look closely after dark, the stars would show up right on schedule.

Taesan stands at the edge of the path, his hands buried deep inside the pockets of his black wool overcoat. The material is heavy, but it doesn't do much to block out the chill that seems to have taken up permanent residence in his bones over the last four months.

He walks slowly, his leather dress shoes clicking against the stone walk before sinking into the damp, morning-cooled turf. He stops where the earth flattens out, right before a simple, clean slab of light gray granite.

The inscription is short. It doesn't mention the text-heavy oncology folders, and it doesn't list the credits he needed for a degree he never got to finish. It just has his name, his dates, and a small, deeply etched constellation at the bottom—Lyra, with Vega shining right at the apex.

Taesan exhales, a long, white cloud of mist rising from his lips and drifting away in the wind.

"Hey," he says softly. His voice is thicker than it used to be, rougher around the edges, but it still carries that quiet, steady cadence that Leehan always used to ground himself against.

He doesn't stand. He lets his coat bunch around his knees as he sits directly on the grass, crossing his legs and leaning his shoulder against the side of the granite stone, just the way he used to lean against the armrests in the theater. He reaches out, his large, calloused palm resting flat against the top of the smooth marker. The stone is freezing, completely stripped of any human warmth, but Taesan doesn't pull his hand away. He just leaves it there, anchoring himself to the only piece of Leehan left in the world.

"The apartment is too clean," Taesan murmurs, looking out over the rolling valley below the cemetery hills. "I try to leave things around, you know? A coffee mug on the counter, a book left open on the sofa. But every time I come home from work, it just feels... empty. Like a hotel room. I bought the midnight blue velvet swatches, by the way. They're still sitting on the kitchen table. You were right—they look really good under the overhead light. They look exactly like the sky we saw."

He pauses, swallowing hard against a sudden, sharp lump in his throat. He reaches into his right coat pocket, his fingers wrapping around a small, square piece of heavy cardstock. It feels heavier than a brick.

He pulls it out slowly. The edges are slightly creased from where his thumbs have spent weeks worrying at the corners, and the white paper is smudged with faint ink stains. It’s the speech he was supposed to read today, at two o'clock in the afternoon, in front of sixty people who were supposed to be throwing flower petals and drinking champagne.

He unfolds it with trembling fingers, the crisp rustle of the paper sounding incredibly loud in the quiet valley.

"I tried to rewrite them," Taesan confesses, his eyes blurring as he stares at the neat, blocky handwriting on the page. "After June... I thought I should say something different. Something about how much it hurts, or how unfair the math was. But every time I tried to change a word, I just kept hearing you tell me to stop mourning you before you were gone. So... I'm just going to read what I wrote when you were still sitting on the couch making fun of my handwriting."

He clears his throat, a hot tear finally breaking free and tracking slowly down his cheek, freezing instantly in the autumn wind. He looks at the stone, his thumb lightly tracing the carved lines of Lyra.

"Leehan," Taesan reads, his voice cracking on the first syllable but holding its ground. "I used to think that the world was something you had to build with your hands. I thought if I worked hard enough, if I planned every single detail, I could keep us safe from the dark. But you showed me that the universe doesn't care about our guest lists or our budgets. It just keeps moving."

He stops to draw a shaky breath, his eyes dropping to the final paragraph on the page—the lines he had written five years after a cold rooftop night, completely oblivious to the fact that they would become a permanent boundary line.

"You told me once that stars don't disappear just because the clouds move in. You said they're always waiting behind the dark. So this is my promise to you today, on October twelfth, and for every single day after. I don't care how dark the sky gets, and I don't care how long I have to walk through this city alone. I'm going to keep looking up. I'm going to buy the books, and I'm going to learn the math, and I'm going to find the live ones."

Taesan’s hand drops to his lap, the paper fluttering slightly in the breeze. He tilts his chin up, his wet eyes searching the pale, clear blue of the daylight sky. The stars are invisible right now, hidden behind the blinding glare of the afternoon sun, but he knows they’re there. He knows the mechanics of it now. He knows the distance.

"I'll love you," Taesan whispers, his voice dropping into the quiet grass, a fierce, unbreakable vow that echoes out into the vast, open universe. "I'll love you just as long as we're under the stars."