The Broken Dancer

The Quiet Strike

Jimin wakes before the light.

For a moment, caught between sleep and consciousness, there's a silence so complete it feels like the house is holding its breath. Then - footsteps. Slow. Heavy. Measured. The sound threads through the hallway like a wire tightening around his chest.

He doesn't move. His heartbeat surges against his ribs, a frantic drum hidden beneath the hush. The footsteps pause just outside his door. He can't see the shadow, but he feels it. It crawls beneath the crack at the threshold, filling the room. Watching, even when unseen.

Since the night of the incident, the father has changed. He hasn't raised his voice. He hasn't lifted a hand. He doesn't need to. He's replaced chaos with something worse: calculation. There are new locks on the windows now - cold, industrial ones, the kind meant to keep things in, not out. Someone stands guard near his door at night, though Jimin can never quite tell who. The father insists Jimin keep the door slightly ajar, the hinge wedged open just enough for eyes to slip through. "It's about trust," he had said. The lie had been so gentle it felt like a blade pressed flat against skin.

Jimin slides his legs out from under the thin blanket, the floorboards biting cold against his bare feet. He moves carefully - every breath, every creak of the floor, every whisper of fabric is amplified in this house. There's no privacy here. Only performance.

When he steps into the hallway, it's like stepping onto a stage. Shadows pool in the corners like watching figures. The walls seem closer than they were yesterday. Or maybe he's just breathing too loud.

The father appears without warning, framed in the doorway like a portrait that's been hanging there too long. His shoulders fill the space, his presence deliberate. His smile is slow, stretched and surgical - an expression that doesn't belong to warmth, only to someone cataloguing what hurts a person most.

"You've been quiet lately," he says. His voice is soft, almost affectionate. That's what makes it worse. "I like quiet."

The words hang between them like a hook suspended in still air.

Jimin swallows, his throat tight. "Yes," he answers. Barely above a whisper. Anything louder might sound like defiance.

The father doesn't move. He just stares, head tilting fractionally, studying him the way someone studies a locked door they already have the key to. Then, as smoothly as he appeared, he turns and walks away, leaving only the echo of his footsteps and the scent of coffee brewing somewhere far away - mundane things that feel monstrous now.

The silence after is worse than the footsteps. It's not peace. It's pressure.

Jimin waits. One breath. Two. Three. Then he crouches by the loose floorboard beneath his bed. His fingers, cold and trembling, slide under the edge of the wood until they find the burner phone. The cheap plastic is warm against his palm from where he's touched it so often in the dark, as if holding it might build a bridge to the outside.

He doesn't turn it on. He can't. Not yet. Even the faintest light would be a flare in this place.

But just touching it - feeling its weight hidden beneath the father's fortress - reminds him there's something beyond these walls.

In the hallway, the locks click into place. Somewhere above, a door closes with that soft, final sound the house has learned too well.

Jimin slips the floorboard back into position and exhales through his nose, quiet as the dead.

The house feels smaller. The shadow feels thicker. But beneath it, a single heartbeat refuses to quiet.