Chapter Text
It was a quiet Tuesday night, as Wonyoung remembers.
Or maybe every Tuesday had only sounded quiet ever since.
Wonyoung can’t even really remember what they had planned for dinner that night. Only that she set the table for two like she was used to.
She remembers lighting up the vanilla candle Yujin always insisted on buying for their apartment because “home should smell like a home.” The wick had burned so low by then that the melted wax had begun to drown the flame, only leaving behind the faint scent of vanilla and soft smoke.
She still remembers moonlight spilling through the living room windows. Remembers the steady hum of the air conditioner she forgot to turn off in the corner.
It’s funny if you really think about it.
Over a year later—she can never seem to remember what she’d eaten for lunch the day before, but she will always, always remember that stupid AC and how it was set at 23 degrees (because her lover had said anything below was too cold for Wonyoung and anything above it was too hot for herself).
Sometimes she wishes she would have remembered to turn it off instead.
Their apartment had never felt colder.
Across from her, Yujin sat on the edge of the couch with her hands folded so tightly together in her lap that Wonyoung figures that her knuckles must have long since turned white.
It was hard to really make anything out with only the moon as your source of light.
Yujin looked—
Dear God.
This, Wonyoung remembers like a recurring fever dream she was never afforded the luxury of ever forgetting.
The love of her life looked like someone who had been carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders for so long that it seemed as if she’d forgotten what it felt like to be able to stand up straight.
How could she not have noticed? She would come to ask herself that often months after that night.
Wonyoung remembers the way her heart lurched into the pit of her stomach before either of them could even utter out another word. One look at Yujin’s bloodshot eyes was enough of a tell. Wonyoung had spent enough time around the girl to know that they were standing on the edge of something that would leave neither of them the same.
“What… what do you mean by saying that?”
She hears her swallow more than she sees it.
“Won.”
It was truly so strange.
Yujin had said her name millions of times over the past eleven years. When they first met at thirteen and fourteen. When they became best friends. Then, when they became girlfriends.
Knows the softness in which she whispers it against Wonyoung’s forehead before leaving for work. The warmth in it when she would murmur it half-asleep into her hair at three in the morning.
But Yujin had never uttered her name like that.
Afraid, guilty, and exhausted.
Like she was really about to give it all up.
“I…” Yujin looked down, her shoulders rising with every breath. “I’m sorry.”
The words came out cracked.
“I don’t—” She shut her eyes tight, as if doing so would make everything hurt a little less. “I don’t think this is working anymore.”
Wonyoung didn’t understand then—maybe she still doesn’t now. Or perhaps understanding had never ever been the problem. Maybe she had noticed the distance long before that day and simply refused to see it, choosing instead to call it exhaustion, bad timing—anything but what it truly was. Anything but the possibility of it, because admitting that time had changed them meant admitting that love, no matter how earnest, had never been immune to it.
At the younger girl’s silence, she continues.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” her voice becoming smaller and smaller. “We…”
She paused, finally willing herself to meet Wonyoung’s eyes, only for her tears to blur her vision before she could truly see her.
Yujin kept inhaling like she was trying to steady herself, but every breath shuddered on the way out. Tears slid down her face soundlessly. She never bothered wiping them away. It was almost cruel, Wonyoung thinks now, how beautiful she still looked with swollen eyes and trembling lips. As if heartbreak wasn’t supposed to visit her this early and in this way in her life.
“I don’t think I’ve been good for you. I don’t think I have been for some time now.”
Yujin’s words that night felt too impossible to bear, settling between them and pressing against every wall. Suddenly, their five-hundred-square-foot apartment felt too small to hold on to what they were about to lose.
A dozen pleas crowded the back of Wonyoung’s throat that night.
I love you. Please don’t do this. We can fix it—we always do.
They rose in her instinctively, every word desperate to be spoken, but each and every one of them died the moment she looked at the older girl again.
Wonyoung took everything in. She let her eyes linger, trying to remember every part of her that she could before grief had even the slimmest chance to rewrite her. The tremble she couldn’t even think to hide. The tears that caught the moonlight just enough to make them glisten. She remembered how cold Yujin’s hands were—and still, her fingers found their place without hesitation, settling over Yujin’s as naturally as they had for seven years. It was like neither of them had yet taught their hands how to let go.
“When did you decide,” She asked quietly, her thumb absentmindedly brushing over Yujin’s knuckles, “that I wasn’t someone you could lean on anymore?”
Yujin never did answer her question. Not that night.
Her fingers only tightened around Wonyoung’s. It felt as though she was trying to apologize with a touch she no longer believed her words were capable of carrying.
“Won,” She whispered instead. “We’ve been ignoring it for months.”
Wonyoung searched Yujin's face for even the smallest trace of uncertainty, for anything that might tell her this was a mistake they could still undo. But there was none. All she found was guilt and grief, woven so tightly together that they looked far too old to have been born that night.
"We've been together for seven years," she said, her voice soft enough to break. Her hand tightened around Yujin's without thinking, as though she could keep her there by memory alone. "Don't you think we can figure this one out too?"
For some reason, Yujin wouldn’t answer much of any question she asked that night.
Instead, her thumbs swept gently across Wonyoung's knuckles the way they always had—slow, absentminded strokes that had spent years calming her without either of them realizing it.
It would have been easier if she had simply pulled away. If she had let go—made leaving look even a little less like love.
Instead, her hands slipped from Wonyoung's and slowly traced their way up her arms before coming to rest against her cheeks, cradling her face with a tenderness that felt almost unbearably cruel.
Only then did Wonyoung realize she had been crying too.
The realization only makes her cry harder. Her voice shook as violently as her shoulders; she couldn’t breathe—her heart couldn’t take it.
“I wouldn’t know what to do if I lost you.” Wonyoung would whisper.
I love you. Please don’t leave.
Yujin’s forehead rested briefly against hers.
“You could never lose me.”
Wonyoung closed her eyes at the words.
“Baby…” Her voice fractured beneath the weight of the name. “I already am.”
The apartment fell unbelievably still. So still that Wonyoung could hear her own heart come undone, each beat cracking a little louder than the last. Then came the sound of Yujin's stifled sob, and somehow, that was enough to know hers was breaking too.