He groans into my mouth, and I use that moment to push back, trying to take control again. But Han is stronger than he looks, and for once, he's not letting me win.
"Frustrated?" he murmurs between kisses, smirking against my lips.
I bite at his jaw...
TW: Mention of suicide, prepare for a real heavy chapter lovleys.
Listen to: Fall Aster by Failed19 if you wan't to hear Soobin's story in a song.
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Sitting at a table with the people who hate me.
The weight of their disdain is suffocating, pressing against my ribs like a vice, making it hard to breathe. The air is thick, heavy with words unsaid, with grief too unbearable to be spoken aloud. It almost feels like I'm numb—like my body has given up on feeling altogether, like my heart has decided it's safer not to beat too loudly in the presence of people who wish it would stop entirely.
The world feels frozen.
The silence is deafening, a brutal kind of quiet that wraps around me like barbed wire, each second stretching into eternity. It isn't just the absence of sound; it's the absence of everything—warmth, familiarity, the illusion that things could ever be okay again. The tension is unbearable, so thick I could choke on it, and maybe I wish I would.
Chan clears his throat, the sound abrupt, unnatural. It cuts through the quiet like a dull knife, dragging me back to the moment I don't want to be in. His hands are clenched together on the table in front of him, his knuckles bone-white, his skin ashen. He swallows, and the effort looks painful, like his grief has lodged itself in his throat and refuses to let go.
He looks hollow.
But then again, as I let my gaze drift around the table, hollowness is all I see. Sunken eyes, clenched jaws, bodies that seem smaller than they once were, like grief has devoured every ounce of strength they had left.
"I think we need to talk," Chan says finally, his voice strained, the words forced from his mouth like they're shards of glass cutting through his throat. "About the... situation. We need to fix this."
Fix this.
I look up, my eyes burning, dry as the desert. I stare at him, unblinking, as if my body has forgotten how.
"Jisung should be here for that," I say. Or at least, I think I do. The voice that comes out of me is unrecognizable, something broken, something that sounds like it's crawled its way out of hell and hasn't quite made it back in one piece.
I don't sound like me.
I sound like someone who went through the depths of hell and somehow survived.
But did I really survive?
Because I feel dead.
Seungmin leans back in his chair, the movement slow, calculated. His expression is carved from stone—so emotionless that it's almost cruel, except that cruelty would require effort. And this isn't effort. This is exhaustion. This is a man too destroyed to even pretend he can still feel anything but pain.
