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...
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We let ourselves have this moment, just to cry. Just to exist in this unbearable, suffocating, overwhelming grief that has sat between us for years like a wound that never healed. And then, when the weight of it threatens to pull us under completely, we let ourselves have another moment to recover—to gather up the shattered pieces of ourselves, to press trembling hands against tear-streaked faces, to try, somehow, to breathe through it.
If I spoke about those letters out loud, if I tried to string together a single word about them, I think I would break all over again. I think the sobs that have barely stilled in my chest would claw their way out with a vengeance, violent and unforgiving. Because those letters—those fucking letters—ripped me open in ways I never expected. They were beautiful. They were painful. They were reminders of everything I had lost and everything I had somehow still managed to hold onto. Seo's was a poem, delicate and rhythmic, every line crafted like he had bled it onto the paper, like he had ripped open his ribcage and poured his heart into ink. Kim's was meticulous, the words woven together with precision, logical and analytical, yet still so heartbreakingly vulnerable. It was like he had dissected his own emotions, arranged them neatly, and yet still couldn't hide the raw, bleeding tenderness behind every sentence.
And Yang's—fuck. Yang's broke me.
It wasn't just long. It was devastating. It was a window into a past I had somehow managed to forget, moments I never knew had mattered so much to him. He had written about change—the slow, inevitable shift from the sweet, bright-eyed boy he had been to the sharp, cunning man he had become. And worse, he had written about how he didn't know how to go back. How the selfishness, the vanity, the cold detachment had become so deeply ingrained in him that he wasn't sure he even knew who he was anymore. Eight years of his life spent becoming someone else, and now, even if he wanted to, he wasn't sure he could reverse it. Wasn't sure he could claw his way back to the version of himself that hadn't yet been tainted by loss, by grief, by anger.
And then he told me something I had never known.
Apparently, I had been his anchor. His inspiration.
He had loved the way I dressed, so he had tried to dress that way too. Had loved the way I spoke, the way I carried myself, the way I existed in the world. And so he had tried to emulate me, piece by piece, little by little, until he had shaped himself into something that mirrored me. He had wanted to be like me. And I had never fucking known.
There had been so much love in his words—so much love I hadn't even realized he had harbored for me. He had written that Soobin and I had been like a big sister and brother to him, that we had been there for him in ways I don't even remember. That we had pulled him through moments he hadn't thought he would survive. And then Soobin died. And I was blamed. And in that single, earth-shattering moment, he lost everything.
He had only been sixteen.
Sixteen and grieving, sixteen and lost, sixteen and watching the two people he had loved most in the world disappear from his life in the blink of an eye. And it had scarred him. Permanently. Left a gaping wound inside of him that he had never quite been able to close. And now—now he didn't know how to go back. Because without Soobin, kindness had started to feel foreign. Selflessness had started to feel like an impossible thing. Without her, there had been no one left to teach him how to be good, how to be soft, how to be the person he once was.
