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w1w2 · 6 days ago

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Don’t Fly So Close To Me

Karina x Fem!Reader

Word Count: ca. 11k

Synopsis: Amid the crowded lecture halls and quiet corners of Yonsei University, two students fall into a bond neither of them meant to form. But as closeness begins to blur into something more, one of them finds herself caught between the comfort she craves and the fear she can’t outrun. Some hearts are too loud to ignore, and some silences cost more than they should.

English isn’t my first language so I apologize in advance for any mistakes.

♡ Enjoy! ♡

The dorm was too quiet.

Not peaceful quiet, in the way that makes your skin feel too tight and every sound hit too hard. The kind of quiet that creeps into your bones and makes you think about things you’ve spent months trying to bury. The kind that forces you to listen to your own thoughts.

Most of the rooms on her floor were already empty. Their doors hung open like hollow mouths, stripped bed sheets dangling at the corners, half used rolls of packing tape abandoned by the trash bins. Earlier in the week, the hallway had been buzzing, girls shouting last-minute reminders, the dragging screech of suitcases on tile.

Laughter, motion, life.

Now it was a ghost town, what was left behind felt abandoned more than finished. And she hated it.

But maybe that was fitting.

Y/N stood in the center of her room, surrounded by piles of clothes, shoes, chargers, and notebooks. Organized chaos, or so she told herself. Her suitcase sat open on her bed, half-full, with a duffel on the floor beside it. Her desk was already cleared, drawers emptied, books packed. She moved mechanically, folding shirts and pants, pressing them flat like keeping the fabric smooth might keep her heart steady. She didn’t even realize how fast she was moving until she stopped to catch her breath and noticed her hands were shaking.

It was almost over.

Just one more night here, then a train to Busan and a month at her uncle’s place near the coast. She told everyone it was for a reset, some time to think, get away from the city, be with family.

That was only half true.

She wasn’t going home, she didn’t have one. And the only person who ever made Yonsei feel like one… Well.

Y/N swallowed hard and turned toward her dresser, grabbing the top drawer by habit. Socks, underwear, pajamas. She folded them quickly, shoving them into the bag without looking. She moved to the second drawer. Shirts, more hoodies, random notebooks.

Then came the last drawer, the one at the very bottom.

It stuck slightly when she pulled it, it always did. Like even it knew there were things inside that were better left untouched.

She hesitated.

Then, with a tug, she opened it anyway.

It stuck slightly when she pulled it open. It always did, crooked on its track from the one time she slammed it shut so hard the mirror cracked above it. She told herself it was just the hardware, just poor construction. But part of her had always wondered if the drawer was holding something back on purpose.

She gave it a tug, fingers curling tightly around the handle, expecting the usual mess inside. The old shirts she never wore but couldn’t throw out, mismatched socks, the sweatpants that had lived in that drawer since freshman year. Faded, stretched, safe. The kind of forgotten fabric that came with no weight, no memory.

Her breath caught.

Tucked at the very back, like it had been deliberately buried beneath the rest, was a flash of white cotton. Soft, familiar, and heart-stopping.

She froze.

For a moment, she didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t trust her eyes. Her brain scrambled to rationalize it, tell her it was something else, a different shirt, something that didn’t matter. But even from where she stood, she knew what it was.

Jimin’s shirt.

It was crumpled into itself, sleeves twisted like it had been hastily shoved away, but Y/N would’ve known it anywhere. The fabric was worn thin in places, the collar stretched from being tugged over Jimin’s head in too many sleepy mornings, the hem curling in that way it always did when Jimin would fiddle with it during their late night conversations.

The sight of it shouldn’t have knocked the air from her lungs.

But it did.

Because it wasn’t just a shirt.

It was everything she hadn’t let herself feel for weeks, everything she’d tried to outrun. Every moment that she pretended hadn’t meant anything. And now? It was here, sitting in her drawer like a trap she’d set for herself and forgotten until it snapped shut around her ribs.

She stared at it for several seconds, unmoving, like touching it might confirm the worst. That part of her still wanted to go back, that part of her had never left. When she finally reached in, her hands moved slower than her thoughts. Hesitant, careful, like she was handling something fragile, like it might fall apart if she touched it wrong.

She pulled it out and let it fall into her lap.

The fabric was still soft, softer than she remembered. Somehow still warm, like it had been waiting for her.

Still hers.

Still Jimin’s.

She let her fingers curl into the cotton, gripping it tighter, then lifted it closer to her face. She inhaled, and just like that she was wrecked.

It didn’t smell like Jimin had just worn it. No. The scent was faded now, diluted by weeks of being trapped in the dark. But it was still there, that trace, that impossible, specific blend that Y/N had never been able to name, only feel.

Citrus and vanilla, something floral, something deeper. And something else entirely, something that didn’t exist in any bottle.

Something that was just... her.

It clung to the collar like a memory refusing to let go, and that was all it took.

Y/N sat down hard, back thudding softly against the frame of her bed. The shirt bunched in her hands as she clutched it to her chest like she could squeeze the memory out of it if she just held on tight enough, like if she pressed it hard enough, Jimin’s voice would come back, soft and teasing in her ear.

The room blurred at the edges, not from tears, but from everything inside her suddenly collapsing inward, folding in like a house made of paper.

And still, she didn’t cry.

She just held the shirt like it was the last tether she had to something real, something beautiful.

Something already broken.

Her chest felt heavy, as though her ribs had folded in on themselves, each breath thinner than the last, shallow and insufficient, like the air in the room had thickened without warning. There was a pressure just beneath her collarbone, a weight she couldn’t touch, but could feel pulsing steadily through her bloodstream. Sharp, quiet, unforgiving. Her throat ached with the kind of restraint that came from years of teaching herself not to show anything, not even when it hurt, not even when it split her open.

And still, her face remained blank.

Emotionless, controlled, still.

There were no tears, not even the sting of them. No trembling chin, no wavering breath, no release of any kind. Just that dull, suffocating silence that filled the space between her lungs and kept everything locked inside. Because that’s what she did, she held it all in. She always had, from the moment she was old enough to understand that vulnerability could be weaponized, that softness invited disappointment, that love, real, messy, terrifying love, was too dangerous for someone like her.

Even now, in the quietest version of goodbye, she couldn’t cry.

Not when she was alone in a half packed dorm room, surrounded by the remains of a year she didn’t know how to talk about, staring down the barrel of a month long exile to a town she didn’t belong to, with a plane ticket paid for by someone she barely spoke to anymore. Not when she had no one to say goodbye to, no one waiting on the other side.

She just sat there.

Motionless, back pressed against the side of her bed, legs folded beneath her like she was trying to make herself smaller, less visible, easier to forget. Jimin’s shirt sat in her lap like a wound she hadn’t noticed was still bleeding, her fingers curled into the soft fabric until her knuckles ached.

The sound that escaped Y/N’s throat wasn’t quite a sob. It was smaller than that. Less audible, more internal, like the first fracture in something ancient.

“It’s funny,” she murmured, her voice barely more than a breath, lips barely moving. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with her. I didn’t think someone like me could.”

And then, silence again.

Not the comfortable kind, no. The kind that stretches long and thin, where you start to wonder whether you’re the only one left inside your own body. The ceiling above her blurred slightly, though not from tears, and her eyes dropped to the shirt again, to the little rip in the seam near the sleeve, the one she used to tease Jimin about fixing but never did. She ran her thumb over the fabric slowly, tracing it like a map she no longer had the right to follow, and felt something shift low in her stomach, something she couldn’t quite name but had lived with for too long to ignore.

She should’ve returned it.

There were chances, so many of them. She could’ve folded it neatly, slipped it into a tote bag, brought it to her door with some half smile and said, “You left this.” And Jimin would’ve taken it, maybe smiled back, maybe said “I was wondering where that went.”

But she didn’t.

She hadn’t returned it, hadn’t let go, not really.

She kept it. Kept it the way she kept everything that scared her, hidden, quiet, buried under things that didn’t matter. Pretending it meant nothing, pretending that what they had wasn’t something she still carried in the most fragile parts of herself.

Because even though she’d told herself she walked away, even though she had turned off her phone and avoided her eyes and cut the string between them with a blade that shook in her hand, some part of her had stayed, and maybe it always would.

She let her head fall back against the frame of the bed, the edge pressing into the back of her skull, her eyes slipping shut as the fabric in her lap grew heavier somehow, as if it were carrying everything she refused to say aloud.

The memories came back slowly, uninvited but familiar, rising up from the quiet like smoke curling under a door, soft at first, almost bearable, before it filled the room. Not the loud ones, not the ones that haunted her in dreams.

But the beginning.

The quiet glances, the unexpected kindness. The sound of a name that hadn’t meant anything yet. The way time started to move differently, all because someone sat next to her when no one else ever did.

She could still remember the first time Jimin spoke to her, how it felt like being called out of hiding. And even now, with the shirt clutched to her chest and the campus emptying outside her window, she couldn’t stop herself from going back.

The first week of fall semester always carried the same predictable scent, fresh paper, overpriced coffee, and the faintest whiff of anxiety masked under new perfume. It was the season of fresh starts and empty promises, of pristine planners meticulously color-coded for two weeks before they were abandoned, of campus bulletin boards buried in fliers and orientation emails nobody read.

Students walked around with purpose, as if simply showing up early and dressing like they had their lives together could rewrite the mess they’d left behind the semester before. There was a kind of forced optimism to it all, this collective lie everyone agreed to participate in. “This year would be different.” they’d get better grades, they’d finally sleep more, drink less, care less, get over the person who didn’t text back last spring.

Y/N didn’t believe in any of it.

She arrived fifteen minutes early, not because she was trying to impress anyone, but because she preferred to claim her solitude before the room filled up. She slipped through the door with her hood still half up, chose the seat in the far back corner near the window, and set her bag down with practiced precision. Movements quiet, deliberate, invisible. The goal was always the same, don’t be noticed.

Her earbuds were already in, though no music played. It was just habit now, a convenient way to signal disinterest without having to say a word. She flipped open her notebook to the first blank page, uncapped her pen, and laid both out in front of her like armor. Her handwriting was already in the margins, sharp, small, even. Her notes always looked like they belonged to someone who cared more than she did.

The classroom itself was too bright for her taste, wide and newly renovated, with whitewashed walls and floor to ceiling windows that let in the kind of light that made people think too loudly. The overhead fluorescents buzzed faintly, like they were straining to keep up with the morning sun.

Modern art prints were framed and hung around the room, slightly crooked, mostly abstract, jagged lines, empty color blocks, ink splatters pretending to be genius. They were thematic, she guessed. A visual echo of the course’s name scrawled across the syllabus she'd skimmed in the registration portal Art and Society: Cultural Expressions in Modern Life. It sounded like a class designed for overthinkers who liked to hear themselves talk.

It wasn’t her kind of course.

Too vague, too subjective. Not enough data, not enough structure. But it was one of the only electives that fit her schedule and didn’t require studio work or weekly presentations. It counted for her humanities credit and, more importantly, it was open to students outside the arts. Econ majors like her usually avoided it, too risky, too touchy-feely, but that suited her just fine.

She wasn’t here to make friends, so she sat. Silent, distant, still, and watched the room slowly begin to fill.

Groups of students filtered in with the usual early semester energy, still clinging to summer, still dressed in tank tops and linen pants, still laughing too loud like nothing yet mattered. Some dropped their bags loudly beside chairs, some hugged friends they hadn’t seen during the break, some scanned the syllabus already complaining about the group work mentioned in paragraph three.

The front rows filled quickly, the social ones. She could already tell who would dominate discussions, who would make “devil’s advocate” their whole personality, who would volunteer for every activity just to be seen.

Y/N leaned back in her seat, eyes flicking from face to face, forming quiet conclusions she would never say aloud. She wasn’t judging, no, just cataloging. It made the world easier to survive when she knew who she was dealing with.

She barely glanced at the door when it opened again.

But she noticed the change.

It wasn’t loud, but it was instant, the subtle shift in tone, the way a few conversations dipped in volume, a collective hush so slight you’d miss it if you weren’t paying attention. But she always was.

And then came the pause.

Heads turned, not all, but enough to signal something.

She looked up, instinctively.

And there she was.

She walked in late, ten minutes past the hour, but with the kind of ease that made it look intentional, like the room hadn’t really started until she arrived. No apology, no glance toward the clock, no quickening of her step. If anything, she moved slower than the rest, as though time bent around her.

And somehow, she didn’t look out of place, not in the slightest.

She wore an oversized charcoal cardigan that slipped halfway off one shoulder, draping like it had been pulled there by the breeze outside, layered over a fitted white tee that clung just enough to suggest she hadn't rolled out of bed like the others. Her jeans were high waisted, soft denim, the kind that looked vintage but expensive, cinched perfectly at her waist with a belt she probably didn’t need but wore for style. Her black tote hung low at her side, scuffed at the corners, worn in a way that said well loved, not careless.

Her hair was long and dark, falling over her shoulders in effortless waves that, Y/N suspected, had taken no less than forty-five minutes to get just right. Slightly tousled, slightly glossy, strands tucked behind one ear in a way that framed her jaw perfectly. Her makeup was minimal, barely there liner, a soft wash of color on her cheeks, lips tinted like she'd bitten into a cherry on the walk over. Casual, but studied. Natural, but not.

Y/N knew girls like her.

Girls who turned heads without meaning to, girls who didn’t need to speak to be noticed, girls who had something magnetic in the way they existed, like they knew a secret the rest of the world wasn’t privy to. But what caught her off guard wasn’t the entrance, or the way the classroom seemed to tilt subtly in her direction.

It was how she smiled. Soft, relaxed, like she didn’t need anything from anyone.

She paused in the doorway only long enough to scan the room with a quiet confidence that made Y/N’s stomach twist for reasons she couldn’t name. She was searching, that much was clear, but not for someone in particular, more like she was choosing.

And then she started walking.

Not toward the front, where the open seats were clustered and laughter still lingered. Not toward the side row, where two girls were already waving her over, half-standing in their chairs.

No.

She walked straight to the back.

To Y/N’s row, to the one empty seat beside her.

Y/N glanced to her left, pretending to shift in her chair, her eyes flicking toward the aisle without turning her head. Then back down to her notebook, heart ticking just a little faster than before.

“Please don’t,” she thought, not even fully sure why.

The chair beside her scraped lightly against the floor.

Of course.

“Hey,” the girl said, voice smooth, threaded with a kind of warmth that didn’t ask, it assumed the greeting would be returned. She slid into the seat beside Y/N like she’d done it a hundred times before, like it was hers.

Y/N gave the smallest of nods in response. She didn’t pull out her earbuds, didn’t offer a smile or a hello. She kept her pen poised over the page, her eyes fixed forward, every muscle in her body trained in the art of disinterest.

But it didn’t seem to matter.

Because the girl just smiled to herself, like she was used to silence, like she didn’t take it personally. Like she’d already decided that Y/N was worth sitting beside.

The professor arrived precisely five minutes late, juggling a coffee cup, a leather messenger bag, and a stack of paper that threatened to collapse in his arms. He had the disheveled energy of someone who lived more in his own head than in the real world, a man built from books and chalk dust, with hair that stood up in odd directions and thick glasses that he adjusted constantly without actually fixing the tilt.

He introduced himself as Professor Song, waved off the use of PowerPoint slides like they were beneath him, and launched into a monologue about how art is resistance and culture is chaos with a heartbeat.

He spoke with his hands, broad, sweeping gestures that knocked into the edge of the desk more than once. He quoted French philosophers and underground performance artists in the same breath, scribbled phrases like “beauty as protest” and “the aesthetic of survival” across the whiteboard. Most of the students looked dazed, trying to decode what was expected of them.

Y/N didn’t flinch. She’d seen enough eccentric professors to know when to tune in and when to simply take notes.

Her handwriting was small, neat, effortlessly uniform, each bullet point aligned with surgical precision, margins untouched, no room for chaos. She wrote in black ink only, no highlighters, no doodles. Notes were for facts, not decoration. She never rewrote or revised them, she got it right the first time.

But out of the corner of her eye, she saw the opposite unfolding.

Jimin wrote like her thoughts were dancing across the page.

Purple ink, big, looping cursive, arrows that curved like vines between paragraphs. She underlined things twice, sometimes three times, added squiggly brackets and messy little stars in the margins. Her handwriting wasn’t just expressive, it was emotional, like she was already invested in ideas Y/N hadn’t even registered yet.

It should’ve annoyed her, but somehow, it didn’t. It was just different, unexpected, and alive in a way that made her stomach twist.

Halfway through his second tangent, Professor Song clapped his hands and said, “Now, let’s talk about the semester project.”

Around the room, people stirred, pages turned, phones were tucked away.

“You’ll be working in pairs,” he continued, “on a thematic presentation and written report connecting one contemporary artistic expression to its sociopolitical impact. Think big, think bold and think personal.”

Y/N straightened slightly. She hated vague instructions, no parameters, no rubric.

Then he added, as if it were an afterthought, “You’ll be working with the person seated next to you.”

She didn’t even have time to brace for it.

Jimin turned toward her instantly, that slow, easy grin spreading across her lips like it had been waiting for the right moment to arrive.

“Well,” she said, voice low and playful, “looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

Y/N pulled one earbud out, not both, just enough to acknowledge her, though her expression didn’t change. “I guess so.”

Her voice was flat. Polite and carefully neutral.

Jimin tilted her head a little, eyes narrowing, not in irritation, but in thought. She didn’t look offended. She looked curious, like she was trying to figure Y/N out with no pressure to do it quickly.

“You’re Y/N, right?” she asked. “Economics?”

Y/N nodded once. “Yeah. And you’re…?”

“Jimin,” she said, then paused. “Music department. But most people know me as Karina.”

Y/N blinked.

She knew that name, everyone on campus knew that name.

“You’re that Karina?” she asked, more surprised than impressed. “Like the festival stages and performance clips that got reposted a million times?”

Jimin gave a sheepish shrug, like she was used to the recognition but didn’t quite know what to do with it. “That’s me, unfortunately.”

Y/N raised a brow. “Unfortunately?”

“I mean…” Jimin smiled, soft and self-deprecating. “I like performing, but the stage name thing? It gets exhausting, sometimes it feels like people only know that version of me.”

There was something about the way she said it, lighthearted, but with a thread of honesty pulling just beneath the surface, that made Y/N pause.

“You can just call me Jimin,” she added, nudging the strap of her tote off her shoulder and letting it fall softly against the side of her chair. “I hate being called Karina in real life.”

Y/N didn’t respond right away. She glanced back down at her notebook, let her pen hover above the page without writing.

There was something about this girl that felt bright. Like sunlight on a window she hadn’t realized had been closed. Not warm enough to burn, not yet, but enough to make her shift in her seat, enough to make her uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t explain.

She cleared her throat, eyes still fixed on the paper.

“We should meet after class,” she said finally, her voice quieter than before. “Figure out how we’re splitting this.”

Jimin didn’t answer immediately. And when Y/N looked up, the other girl was watching her with a look that was hard to place, not judgmental, not amused. Just present, steady in a way that made Y/N want to retreat and lean in at the same time.

Then she smiled again.

“Sure,” she said easily. “Or we could just work on it together.”

They weren’t alike.

Not in the way that made sense, not in the way that made partnerships easy or natural or inevitable. In fact, if you laid them side by side, it almost looked like someone had made a mistake, matched two people who moved in completely different directions and hoped they’d meet in the middle.

Y/N was quiet in a way that wasn't shy, but practiced, intentional. Every word she spoke in class felt measured, like it had been chosen from a long list of discarded alternatives and delivered only when necessary. She thought in terms of efficiency, what needed to be said, what needed to be done, how little emotion could be shown without seeming cold. She never rambled, she never raised her hand unless silence stretched too long, she didn’t speak to fill air, she let air settle around her like armor.

She sat in every class the same way, arms crossed, posture rigid, pen in hand but rarely used unless it was for notes. Her gaze was steady, but unreadable, like a locked door with no keyhole. Her expression gave nothing away, if she was bored, no one knew, if she was irritated, she never let it show, if she was interested, that secret stayed between her and the back pages of her notebook.

Jimin was the opposite.

She moved like her thoughts arrived mid-sentence, like she was always catching up with herself but didn’t mind being a few steps behind. There was no hesitation in her voice, even when she was unsure. She leaned in when she spoke, smiled with her whole face, eyes crinkling at the corners in that way that made people soften, she asked questions just to hear someone else’s answer, she doodled in the margins of her notes, wrote little jokes to herself in pink pen, tapped her pencil against her chin when she was thinking.

She was vibrant, undeniably so. Where Y/N retreated, Jimin reached out. Where Y/N observed, Jimin engaged. She used people’s names when she spoke to them, she remembered things, she laughed easily, freely, like she didn’t care who was listening.

And somehow, none of it came across as performative.

She was just like that.

And it shouldn’t have worked. Not on paper, not in theory, but something about it did.

It wasn’t obvious at first. It wasn’t like Y/N looked at her and felt something massive crack open inside her chest. No. It was quieter than that, slower, more dangerous because of how subtle it was. Like water dripping through stone, finding the cracks, working its way deeper with every accidental glance, every shared joke, every moment Jimin smiled at her like she wasn’t difficult to love.

Y/N didn’t understand it at the time, the pull. The slow, steady gravity of someone who didn’t push, but never backed away. Someone who treated her silences like spaces instead of walls.

It wasn’t a crush, not then, it wasn’t even interest. Not the kind she knew how to recognize.

It was something smaller.

A flicker, a shift in temperature, a warning. But it lived in her chest, even then, quietly threading itself through the spaces she thought she’d boarded up for good.

A spark.

One she tried to ignore, one that refused to go out.

They met twice a week at first. Quietly, without fanfare or expectation, just two students working on a shared grade, nothing more. The library on Tuesdays, always the second floor, far corner, tucked beside the philosophy stacks where no one ever looked. On Fridays, they moved outside, settling on the lawn behind the humanities building if the weather cooperated. Jimin would bring a blanket, worn and floral, and Y/N would pretend not to notice that it always smelled faintly of detergent and vanilla.

There was no lingering after, just notebooks, laptops, and the increasingly fragile illusion that this was still about the project. But even in the beginning, there was a rhythm forming, one that Y/N wasn’t prepared for.

Jimin always brought drinks.

She never asked what Y/N liked, never texted first to check. She just showed up with something different each time, as if guessing had become its own kind of game. Cold brew with oat milk, plum juice, matcha with way too much honey, a lavender latte that Y/N claimed tasted like soap, even as she finished the entire cup.

One afternoon, Jimin handed her a bubble tea without a word. There was a bright yellow post it stuck to the lid, its writing slightly smudged from condensation "for the most serious person I know."

Y/N rolled her eyes, said nothing, but she folded the note and tucked it into her wallet later, wedging it behind her ID like something worth keeping.

Y/N, for her part, insisted on structure.

Everything was outlined, roles divided, sources color coded in a shared document. Meeting agendas, timelines, deadlines. She’d walk in with bullet points and walk out with action items. Efficient collaboration, no distractions.

Jimin rarely listened.

She’d start on task, then veer off course without warning. Midway through citation formatting, she’d look up and say something like, “Do you think people are born creative, or does the world just beat it out of most of us?”

Y/N would blink, sigh. “That’s not relevant.”

And Jimin would just grin. “Didn’t say it was. Just wanted to know what you thought.”

It happened more often as the weeks passed. Not questions about the project, but about her. Personal ones, uncomfortable ones, questions dropped like smooth stones in the middle of their sessions, leaving ripples long after she brushed them off.

“Do you think you’re more like your mom or your dad?” “Why economics?” “Have you ever been in love?”

Y/N deflected, shrugged, redirected. Masked truth with dry sarcasm and safe indifference. But Jimin? Never looked disappointed, she’d just smile like she saw the dodge and didn’t mind, like it told her something anyway.

She never pushed, but she never walked away either.

One afternoon, while editing their final draft, Y/N referred to her as Karina. Just once,just out of habit. It slipped out, unthinking, like a reflex.

Jimin looked up from her laptop, fingers pausing over the trackpad. “Call me Jimin.”

Y/N glanced over, brow raised. “I thought that was just your stage name thing?”

“Karina’s a mask,” she said softly, her voice lower now, less playful. “You don’t wear one, I shouldn’t either.”

Y/N didn’t respond right away. She just nodded once, and turned back to her screen.

But she didn’t use Karina again.

They finished the project a week ahead of schedule. On the last day they met to finalize their slides, they didn’t talk much, just worked side by side, laptops glowing in the fading afternoon light, the silence between them no longer awkward but companionable.

Comfortable, unspoken.

On presentation day, they stood at the front of the classroom together. Y/N wore a blazer over her hoodie, an accidental compromise between formal and familiar, and Jimin had her hair pulled back in a sleek braid, all calm confidence and quiet charm.

She spoke first, introducing their theme with the kind of poise that made people sit forward. Her voice didn’t waver. She made eye contact, used her hands when she talked, turned dry theory into something alive. And when Y/N stepped in to explain their economic framework, Jimin didn’t interrupt. She didn’t check her notes, she just listened. And smiled, slow and proud, like she’d been waiting for Y/N to show them who she really was.

They received one of the highest grades in the class, the professor called it “a compelling balance of artistic inquiry and pragmatic application.”

But that wasn’t what Y/N remembered.

What lingered, what etched itself quietly into the space behind her ribs, wasn’t the grade or the applause or even the way the presentation felt easier than it should have.

It was the way Jimin didn’t walk away.

The way she turned to her afterward, after the clapping had died down and the seats were scraping against the floor, and said, “So… same time next week?”

Y/N blinked. “For what?”

Jimin smiled, biting the inside of her cheek like she was fighting the urge to laugh. “You didn’t think I was just here for the assignment, did you?”

Y/N opened her mouth, then closed it again.

Jimin didn’t wait for an answer. She just walked out of the classroom with that same calm grace she always carried, like she knew Y/N would follow. And against all logic, all instinct, all the protective walls she’d built and reinforced for years.

She did.

Most people faded out after the project deadline. Partnerships dissolved like sugar in coffee, sweet while they lasted, forgettable the second the class moved on. Messages stopped, shared folders gathered digital dust. No hard feelings, no formal goodbyes.

But not Jimin.

Jimin didn’t treat endings the way most people did.

She kept texting. Not constantly, never enough to be overbearing, but just often enough to make Y/N pause when her phone buzzed. She sent playlists titled things like “for thinking too much” or “for breathing slower”. She sent blurry photos of campus trees lit up at night, or the sky outside her practice studio when the sunset made the world look unreal “this reminded me of something you said about light and stillness,” she’d write.

Sometimes she sent voice notes instead of typing. Little bursts of warmth in Y/N’s ear, laughter from a group chat she wanted to share, a random thought. Once, an entire monologue about how she burned her tteokbokki.

Y/N never told her how often she replayed them.

One morning in late November, Jimin showed up five minutes before class and dropped something into Y/N’s lap without warning, a scarf, soft and dark gray, folded with surprising care.

“You keep pretending it’s not freezing,” she said, sitting beside her with a grin, “and I’m starting to take it personally.”

Y/N opened her mouth to protest, but the look on Jimin’s face made it clear the scarf was non-negotiable. So she said nothing, held it awkwardly for the duration of the lecture, and later, when no one was looking, tucked it into her bag.

She didn’t wear it right away, but she never gave it back.

Late night study sessions started picking up again during finals, but they didn’t feel like studying. Not really, they’d start with open textbooks and notes, and end with their laptops forgotten, lights dimmed, legs curled under blankets as they drifted into conversations neither of them planned to have.

Y/N learned more about Jimin in those quiet hours than she had during the entire semester. About her older sister, who dropped out of college to start a café in Jeju. About the song Jimin wrote after her grandmother died, and how she still couldn't listen to the demo without crying. About the dance teacher who told her she'd never be good enough, and how she practiced three hours a day more just to prove him wrong.

Jimin’s words weren’t rehearsed, they fell out of her like breath, unfiltered and fragile.

Y/N listened.

She always listened.

But when the silence turned toward her, when Jimin asked something personal or let the quiet stretch, offering space, Y/N would pivot. She’d change the subject, make a joke, ask a deflecting question. And Jimin, for all her brightness, never made her explain.

She never pressed. She just stayed, kept showing up, slowly, steadily. No demands, no guilt, no pressure to trade secrets like currency.

And somehow, that made it worse.

Because Y/N began to expect her.

She waited for the messages that came late at night, buzzed low against her pillow. She started checking the front of lecture halls a little too early, looking for a familiar silhouette. She began noticing the silence on the days Jimin didn’t text, checking her phone with a vague ache in her chest she refused to name.

She caught herself watching the door.

That boundary, clean, simple, safe, had blurred without permission. And now there was something else growing in its place, something unnamed and increasingly undeniable.

And that terrified her, because when people stayed, they expected things.

And Y/N had nothing good to give.

On the surface, Y/N was fine, always fine. She showed up to class on time, sat in the same seat, took notes in the same pen. Her hood up just enough to shadow her eyes, her answers were always just right enough to not invite follow up questions. She turned in assignments early, her desk was clean, her voice was calm.

Her expression? Always unreadable.

Fine.

It was a lie so well rehearsed that even she started to believe it during daylight hours. But the second the world slowed down, when the halls emptied and her phone screen stayed dark, reality came rushing back, uninvited and overwhelming.

Because inside? Everything was chaos.

Not the loud kind, not visible. Her mess lived beneath the skin, in tangled wires of self doubt, in broken glass thoughts she tiptoed around every night. It was a carefully contained implosion. From the outside, she was still. But on the inside? Everything was bleeding.

She didn’t remember the last time she slept through the night.

She’d lie in bed, eyes open in the dark, staring at the ceiling like it might offer answers. The smallest sound, someone shutting a door down the hall, a heater kicking on, would send her spiraling. She’d replay conversations from weeks ago, dissect texts for things never said, overanalyze every expression that crossed someone’s face when she walked into a room.

And in the quiet, the voices returned.

Her father’s voice came first. Crisp, measured, tired in that disappointed way that didn’t need to be loud to cut deep.

“Why can’t you be more like your cousin? She’s in med school now, did you know that?” “You always take things too seriously. That’s why no one wants to be around you.”

Then her ex. Slippery, cold. The kind of voice that didn’t yell, but dismantled.

“It’s exhausting, being with someone who always thinks they’re broken.”“You make everything harder than it has to be.”“I never knew love could feel so heavy.”

And then, the cruelest voice of all, her own. The one that whispered, all day, every day.

“You’re a burden.” “You ruin everything good.” “You’re too much but the same time never enough.”

It lived in her like a parasite, feeding on every crack in her foundation. Every moment she pulled back from someone, every time she flinched when someone got too close, every time she made someone laugh and then immediately convinced herself they were only being polite.

It didn’t matter how much progress she made, or how much she achieved. Her brain always found a way to twist it. If she succeeded, it was because people had low expectations. If someone liked her, it was because they didn’t really know her. If she smiled too long, she felt fake. If she cried, she felt pathetic.

And yet, there was Jimin.

Soft, persistent Jimin. With her messy handwriting and her oversized sweaters and her stupid habit of leaving voice notes instead of texts because “words sound better out loud”, with her playlists and her scarves and the way she looked at Y/N like none of the sharpness scared her. Jimin who laughed at her dryest jokes like they were love poems. Jimin who never flinched at her distance.

Jimin who stayed.

And that? That was the worst part.

Because every time Jimin smiled at her, genuinely, openly, without hesitation, Y/N felt her chest tighten like it was being pulled apart at the seams. Like her body didn’t know how to hold something that soft without breaking it.

Because if Jimin looked too closely, if she really saw the way Y/N’s thoughts tore her apart, she’d leave.

Or worse, she’d stay, and be ruined by it.

“You’ll ruin her,” the voice hissed. “You always do.”

Y/N believed that voice. “She thinks you’re someone worth loving. She’ll learn. They always do.”

She fed it, because it was safer to believe that she wasn’t made for love than to risk needing someone who might walk away.

And yet, when Jimin was around, the voices quieted. Not gone, not silenced, but hushed. Dulled like a radio turned low in the background, still there, but bearable. When Jimin touched her arm, or smiled like the world hadn’t hurt her yet, or looked at Y/N like she was worth listening to, really listening to, the storm inside her stilled.

Sometimes, in those rare and terrifying spaces between words, when Jimin sat close enough for their shoulders to touch and didn’t ask her to speak, Y/N could feel the static of her own panic slowly soften.

Sometimes, she even believed, almost believed, that maybe, for once, the voices were wrong.

And that terrified her more than anything else, because hope was a dangerous thing. And Y/N had never learned how to hold it without cutting herself on the edges. But the thing about quieting the voices, even for a little while, was that it made the silence feel worse when they came back.

And they always did.

They returned on the nights when the world moved too fast, or when she sat too still for too long. They returned when her phone stayed dark, when her reflection looked wrong, when her hands shook and she couldn’t explain why.

They returned on a Thursday night in December, after Jimin posted a new dance video. The video had gone up in the evening, quietly, without a caption, without a filter, without any of the polished edges that usually wrapped Jimin’s work in distance and design. It was a single shot in a dim practice studio, just her and the mirror and the floor beneath her feet, the lights flickering slightly overhead as she moved through something that didn’t look choreographed so much as surrendered to.

Y/N had watched it once, then again, the first time in awe, the second with something tight forming in her chest that she didn’t want to name. Jimin’s body moved with an aching kind of honesty, arms trembling slightly, head tilted back like she couldn’t stand to carry the weight anymore, not even for the camera. She looked unguarded, exposed, like she had laid something bare and then hit “post” before she could think better of it.

It was beautiful.

And the internet, as always, couldn’t leave something beautiful untouched.

By midnight, the ripples had turned into a wave. The reposts began, then the edits, cruel, cheap distortions with captions that twisted her vulnerability into punchlines. There were clips that mocked the way her body had faltered mid turn. The comments multiplied, some encouraging, but most weren’t. They picked her apart, word by word, frame by frame, line by line.

Y/N saw it unfold in real time. She didn’t know why she checked, only that she did, and once she started scrolling, she couldn’t stop.

The last message from Jimin had arrived around 10 p.m. and after that? Nothing, no “goodnight loser”, no playlist link, no voice note.

Just silence.

And Y/N, who’d learned how to exist with silence like a second skin, suddenly found she couldn’t sit still in it anymore. She waited, checked her phone too many times, told herself not to spiral, told herself it wasn’t her place.

But by one in the morning, she was pacing her room, hoodie zipped up to her chin, earbuds in without music, and every instinct she’d buried under logic and boundaries and self-control was clawing its way back to the surface, loud and urgent and shaking her hands.

By 2:47, she was outside.

The walk across campus was cold. Not freezing, but raw in the way late fall could be, quiet air that cut through fabric and made every breath feel heavier. She walked quickly, hood up, shoulders tense, not entirely sure what she’d say if the door opened, not sure what she hoped would happen if it didn’t.

She knocked once. Then again, softer.

She didn’t expect an answer.

But the door eased open, and there Jimin was, wearing one of Y/N’s hoodies, sleeves pulled over her hands, her hair up in a loose knot that had mostly fallen apart, face stripped bare of makeup, eyes red and swollen and barely focused, like she hadn’t decided whether to let herself break down or hold it in a little longer.

She blinked once, slow, as if unsure whether Y/N was real or something her brain had conjured up out of longing.

“You didn’t text,” Y/N said quietly, the words catching in her throat halfway through, but holding steady.

Jimin’s lips parted, then pressed together again. Her voice came out hoarse, barely audible. “I didn’t want anyone to see me like this.”

Y/N didn’t think, she didn’t measure the risk. She just stepped forward, she moved into the room like she belonged there, like there had never been a question of whether she should, and closed the door behind her with one hand, the other already reaching out. She opened her arms, not wide, not performative, just enough, and Jimin fell into them like it was the only thing she’d been waiting for all night.

There were no words.

Just weight and breath and skin and the warm pressure of two people holding still because movement might shatter something. They slid to the floor together, backs against the bed frame, Jimin curled into Y/N’s side with her face buried in the curve of her neck, her fingers twisted into the fabric of Y/N’s sleeve, like anchoring herself there might keep her from drifting off entirely.

The room was quiet except for the soft sound of the radiator clicking on in the corner and the slightly uneven rhythm of Jimin’s breath as it caught and stuttered against Y/N’s skin.

Y/N rested her chin against the top of Jimin’s head and let herself be still.

After a while, she murmured, her voice barely above a whisper, “Whoever edited that video clearly failed art class.”

Jimin let out a small sound, half a laugh, half a broken exhale, and didn’t lift her head.

Y/N added, gently, “And karma’s real. So, honestly, they should be scared.”

That time, Jimin smiled. Y/N felt it, faint but real, pressed against her collarbone. She didn’t move away.

And neither of them spoke again.

When Jimin finally dozed off, head resting against her shoulder, Y/N moved with excruciating care, laying her gently on the bed, pulling the blanket over her legs. She stood there for a second too long, eyes tracing the outline of the girl who had, somehow, let her in, even like this.

She left without a note, without a word.

And neither of them mentioned it the next day.

But something had changed. After that night, Jimin stopped knocking. She just came over, sometimes with snacks, sometimes with nothing at all, and curled up on Y/N’s bed like it belonged to both of them. She started leaving her socks under the desk, her charger on the nightstand. She used Y/N’s shampoo in the morning and never apologized for it.

They never kissed, never labeled it.

But there were nights when Jimin would fall asleep with her hand curled just under Y/N’s shirt, like she needed skin to skin proof that Y/N was still there. And there were mornings when Y/N would wake up to Jimin’s hair on her pillow and pretend it didn’t mean anything.

But it did.

It meant everything.

And Y/N could feel it now, settling in her bones, making a home in the softest, most dangerous parts of her. Because if she admitted it, if she let herself have this, even for a moment, she didn’t know who she’d become when it was gone.

And that was the part that scared her the most.

Spring had come early that year, or maybe it only felt that way because of how long winter had lasted in her chest. The cold had held on through March, gray skies and brittle wind, but now the days were stretching longer, softer, full of golden light and the scent of thawing earth. Everything smelled like the promise of something new, blossoms beginning to crack open on the trees, sidewalk chalk smudged beneath sneakers, cigarette smoke curling lazy from dorm balconies.

Even the air had changed, thicker somehow, laced with warmth that clung to skin and made people linger. It was the kind of weather that made it easier to laugh, easier to stay. Easier to believe, for a night or two, that maybe things could be good.

Y/N hadn’t planned to come out. She almost never did, bars weren’t her thing, and neither was pretending to belong in a circle of people who lit up every room they walked into. But Jimin had asked in that gentle, offhand way that meant she really wanted her there.

So she went.

The bar was small and vaguely hipster, wedged between a bike shop and a flower stand that only opened on Saturdays. It had old vinyl posters plastered crookedly on the walls, mismatched chairs that wobbled when you leaned too far back, and a smell that was half beer and half fries.

It was loud, but not in a bad way. The music was old R&B, the kind that made people dance in their seats, and the chatter around them was constant, shouted greetings, clinking glasses, the high, sharp notes of someone laugh.

Y/N sat near the end of the booth, tucked between the wall and Jimin, who had slid in beside her with practiced ease, legs crossed under the table, elbow always just grazing Y/N’s. Her presence felt easy, like gravity, like something Y/N had stopped resisting weeks ago.

Jimin had ordered for her without asking, something citrusy and light, not too sweet, and placed it in front of her with a grin. “Trust me,” she said, like it wasn’t a request.

Y/N sipped slowly, not because she didn’t like the taste, but because she liked having something to hold when she didn’t know what to say.

The conversation moved quickly. There were too many inside jokes to follow, memories that belonged to dorm rooms and dance studios she’d never stepped into, but it didn’t matter. They made space for her, Winter leaned across the table to tell her about a disastrous blind date, Aeri asked if she’d ever had milk soju, Ning offered her fries and told her about her job at the campus radio station, about how she still got nervous speaking live even though no one really listened on Tuesday nights.

Y/N listened more than she spoke, but when she did speak, they listened back.

She laughed. Not just the small, polite ones she gave to fill silence, but real ones, sudden and surprised, the kind that made her feel like maybe she hadn’t forgotten how.

And all the while, Jimin was beside her.

She wasn’t loud tonight, she didn’t need to be, she chimed in here and there, offered teasing commentary, tucked her hair behind her ear every time she leaned in to whisper something to Y/N, something small and unimportant that still made Y/N’s pulse skip every time she turned to meet her eyes.

Their shoulders touched more often now, not by accident. Jimin’s hand brushed against hers on the table when she reached for her drink, lingered a second too long, and didn't pull back.

And Y/N didn’t move away.

Jimin’s cheeks were flushed from the heat of the room, or the beer, or maybe from laughing too hard, her eyes shining under the dim lights, mouth curling into that crooked half-smile that always looked like she was about to say something kind.

Y/N looked at her, really looked, and felt her breath catch.

There was a strange, dizzying warmth pooling low in her chest, not sudden but steady, something she’d been keeping at bay without realizing it. A shift, an ache that didn’t hurt, not yet.

And just for a second, just long enough to feel dangerous, she let herself believe “Maybe I can have this.” Maybe she could hold onto this version of herself, the one who belonged in this booth, in this noise, in this moment. The one Jimin kept looking at like she wasn’t afraid of the dark inside her.

But then Jimin excused herself to the bathroom, sliding out of the booth with an easy smile and a touch to Y/N’s arm that was too brief to hold onto.

And in the space she left behind, something shifted.

The warmth didn’t go away, but it wobbled. Y/N felt her fingers tighten around her glass like something was about to fall.

The moment the bathroom door swung shut and her absence settled into the booth like an exhale, Winter leaned forward, chin tucked into her palm, her cheeks flushed with alcohol and something softer, sentiment, maybe, or just the ease of knowing she was safe among friends. Her eyes were glassy, her voice low and familiar, the kind of tone people only used when they weren’t guarding their words.

“God,” she sighed, slow and lazy, “I really wish I had someone who looked at me the way she looks at you.”

Y/N blinked, confused at first, her glass halfway to her lips. “What?”

Winter’s grin curled, crooked and knowing. “Don’t what me,” she said, eyes narrowing like it was all so obvious, like they’d all known something Y/N had somehow missed, or refused to see.

Aeri leaned over from her spot at the other end of the booth, one elbow braced on the table, the gold of her rings catching the light. “Seriously,” she said, her voice lighter but no less certain. “You do realize she looks at you like you hung the stars, right?”

Y/N stared at them, her body still but her thoughts suddenly thrashing, something hot pressing against the edge of her ribs.

“What?” she repeated, softer now, barely more than a breath. It didn’t sound like denial, it sounded like fear.

Winter opened her mouth again, probably to elaborate, probably to soften it, but this time it was Ning who cut in, quiet and clear, her tone a shade more sober than the others, her gaze steady.

“Jimin’s in love with you,” she said, and there was no teasing in it, no laughter. Just the truth. “You idiot.”

And it didn’t hit like a slap, it didn’t explode. It landed like a weight, like something that had always been there, just waiting for someone else to say it out loud.

Y/N didn’t respond, she couldn’t.

The world didn’t tilt, the music didn’t stop, the lights didn’t dim. But something inside her shifted, subtle and irreversible. Like a thread being pulled, like a single crack in glass that had been holding for too long.

It wasn’t that she didn’t believe them, it was that part of her already had.

That night, Y/N didn’t sleep.

Not because she couldn’t, but because something inside her refused to let her. She lay still in the dark, fully dressed, the stiff fabric of her jeans pressing lines into her skin, the hem of her hoodie bunched at her ribs, her phone resting on her chest like a warning. The light blinked once, then again. Every pulse of the screen was another breath she forgot to take.

“hey loser, text me when you get home safe.” The message was simple, familiar, harmless on its own.

But to Y/N? It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, like if she moved even slightly, she’d fall, and there’d be no coming back.

She stared at it until her eyes burned, until the letters blurred, until she could hear her heartbeat louder than the words themselves. She typed a reply once, something easy and meaningless “Made it back. I’m good.”

Then erased it before it was fully formed, as if the mere act of acknowledging the message would make the night real, would solidify everything Winter and the others had said in that booth with their knowing smiles and careless truths.

She tried again, deleted it again. Eventually, she just closed her eyes and pressed the phone face down against her chest like it might quiet the noise inside her.

But it didn’t.

The silence that followed wasn’t peace. It was pressure, it was the kind of stillness that scraped raw, heavy in her lungs, thick in her throat, the familiar weight of panic settling back into its usual place beneath her ribs. Her body felt too small for all the things she was trying to hold, guilt, want, fear, the echo of Jimin’s laughter still ringing in her ears.

And then the voices returned.

Not new ones, not sudden. Just the old ones, louder now, braver in the quiet.

“She’s in love with you,” they said, “and she shouldn’t be. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She doesn’t know what you are.”

“You’re going to break her, like you always do. You don’t mean to, but you will. You ruin everything you touch.”

They piled on top of each other until they blurred, until her own thoughts were no longer her own, just borrowed lines from old arguments, old mistakes, old nights when someone walked away and never came back.

She sat up around four, her hands trembling in her lap, her palms damp, her mouth dry. There was no clarity, just the horrible, relentless certainty that the closer Jimin got, the more inevitable the fall would be.

Because Jimin didn’t see it, not yet, but she would. She’d see the cracks in Y/N’s foundation, the sharp edges hiding under silence, the fear behind every guarded smile. She’d reach for her one day and come back cut.

And Y/N wouldn’t survive that.

So when she saw Jimin on campus the next morning, walking toward her with a coffee in one hand and her jacket sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms, her face lit with a smile that was probably meant for her, Y/N crossed the street without a word. She didn’t look back, she didn’t need to. She could feel the moment unraveling like thread between her fingers, and still, she kept walking.

The next day, she pretended to be asleep when Jimin knocked at her door, three soft, hesitant knocks, a beat of silence, and then another. She lay perfectly still in bed, her body tense, her heart hammering in her ears, waiting until the footsteps faded down the hallway before she allowed herself to move again.

Her phone buzzed that night.

Once. Twice.

“Made you something, it’s dumb but here” A link, a playlist. And the title? “if i made you a mixtape, would you finally get it”

She didn’t open it, didn’t press play. Because if she heard her name in those lyrics, if she heard the unspoken truth layered between chords and choruses, she might break the rules she’d set for herself. She might answer, she might stay.

And staying felt so much more dangerous than leaving.

So she didn’t explain, didn’t apologize, didn’t offer closure. She just stopped. Stopped answering, responding, showing up. She disappeared from Jimin’s orbit like it had all been an accident, like she had never been there in the first place.

And she told herself it was mercy, that it was better this way. That if she left now, before Jimin said the words, before Y/N admitted she wanted to hear them, she could protect them both from what would happen after. Because she knew how this ended, she’d lived it before. People left, and it was always her fault.

She told herself Jimin deserved better.

That someone else would come along, softer, steadier, more whole. Someone who didn’t carry a war behind their ribs, someone who wouldn’t destroy the one person who made the world quiet.

But even as she said it, even as she turned her phone to silent and buried it beneath a pillow, the ache didn’t leave.

It just sank deeper, colder, more permanent.

It had been days, maybe a week, maybe more. Time had stopped making sense after the third day of silence, the moment Y/N realized she had started counting how long she could go without hearing Jimin’s voice. Every minute stretched out too far, then collapsed in on itself. She lost track of hours, ignored her classes, let her inbox pile up with reminders she didn’t read. Sleep came only in brief, restless intervals, her mind too loud and too full to rest. Her body still moved through the world, barely, but it was muscle memory, not will. She was keeping herself upright, nothing more.

She hadn’t responded to any of Jimin’s messages.

Hadn’t listened to the playlist, hadn’t let herself so much as open the photo Jimin sent the day before, the one of her coffee cup and messy hair and the caption “this is what heartbreak looks like ☕️💀”

Y/N had stared at it for ten minutes before deleting the notification. She told herself it was better this way. That if she just stayed silent long enough, the damage would be minimal, contained, like a controlled burn that cleared the forest before the fire got out of hand. She was trying to be careful, trying to be kind, or maybe just trying to escape the guilt of having wrecked something good without leaving visible wreckage behind.

But the knock came anyway.

Three sharp, certain taps against her door, no hesitation, no warning. For a second, she told herself it wasn’t her. Just someone looking for a roommate, or a package mix up, or anything else that wasn’t what it had to be.

But then it came again, louder this time.

And Y/N’s stomach dropped, sudden and violent, like something had been kicked out from under her ribs.

She didn’t move right away.

Just stood in the center of her room, heart hammering, the kind of dread pooling in her chest that always came right before everything cracked. She thought about not answering, about waiting it out, pretending she wasn’t there. But something in the knock, its clarity, its insistence, made that feel pointless.

So she crossed the floor with slow, mechanical steps, every part of her already bracing for impact, already composing the lie she’d need to tell to get through the next few minutes without bleeding all over the floor.

And then she opened the door.

There she was.

Jimin.

Standing in the hallway like a ghost that hadn’t realized it was haunting something, dressed in a hoodie Y/N remembered from winter break and black jeans that clung to her hips like an afterthought. Her hair was tied up in a knot that looked like it had been redone three times and still didn’t hold. Her makeup was minimal, smudged slightly around the eyes, like she’d wiped tears with the back of her hand and forgotten to check the mirror before walking over.

Her arms were crossed, her jaw was tight, her spine held straight like she’d spent the entire walk rehearsing what not to say. But her eyes? That was where the exhaustion lived. Not the kind that came from too little sleep, but the kind that settled into the bones after too many nights of hoping for something that never came. She looked like someone who had run out of options. Someone who wasn’t angry yet, but was close.

Y/N blinked, swallowed.

Forced her mouth into something neutral, nothing warm, nothing familiar, just blank enough to hide everything clawing at the inside of her chest. She didn’t step aside, didn’t soften. Didn’t offer a word of comfort or apology or anything that might be mistaken for hope.

“Hey,” she said, voice flat and distant, like it was someone else speaking through her.

Jimin didn’t smile.

Didn’t return the greeting, she didn’t need to, she was already here to burn the rest of it down.

“I thought you weren’t like the others,” Jimin said, and her voice wasn’t loud, it didn’t need to be, but it carried the kind of weight that didn’t ask permission to land. It was steady in the beginning, but trembling by the end, like she was holding her composure in her mouth like glass and could feel it cracking. “You said you didn’t do lies. So what the hell is this?”

Y/N blinked, slow, as if that would give her time to build the mask back over her face. Her hand was still on the edge of the door, gripping it tight enough for her knuckles to pale. Everything in her screamed to pull away, to close the door, to bury herself beneath the weight of her own silence until the moment passed, until Jimin gave up.

But Jimin wasn’t giving up, not yet.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Y/N said finally, her voice flat and cold, practiced. A performance she’d perfected long before she ever met Jimin. Detached, dismissive, as though the past months hadn’t happened at all.

Jimin stepped forward, not inside, not enough to cross the threshold, but just close enough that the scent of her perfume filled the doorway. That familiar note of citrus and something warmer, something sweet, hit Y/N’s senses like a memory she didn’t ask for. It made her want to lean forward and run at the same time.

“Don’t,” Jimin said. Her voice didn’t raise, it didn’t need to. “Don’t act like I imagined everything. Don’t do that to me.”

Y/N looked down, jaw tight.

“You don’t get to do that,” Jimin said, firmer now. “You don’t get to disappear and pretend I misunderstood. I was there.”

Y/N’s lips parted, her mind scrabbling for something cruel enough to push Jimin further away. Something sharp enough to cut deep without letting her see that her hands were already bleeding.

“You’re overthinking it,” she muttered, but the words felt thin, paper thin, like she could hear them disintegrate the second they left her mouth.

Jimin laughed, bitter, wet. Her eyes were shining now, red at the corners, and her mouth twisted like she was trying not to let the rest of her face fall apart.

“You don’t even believe that,” she said. “I felt safest when I was with you. You knew that, you knew what you were to me. And you still—”

“It wasn’t serious,” Y/N snapped, cutting her off like the truth might kill her if it got out.

Jimin’s expression crumbled, just slightly, just enough.

“You read too much into it,” Y/N added, her voice sharper now, trying to wedge space between them with every word. “It was... it was nothing.”

The silence that followed was brutal.

Not like the quiet they used to share on the floor at 3AM or tangled in sheets as the sun came up, those silences had been soft, safe. This one was a noose, tightening.

Jimin shook her head, eyes glistening.

“No,” she whispered, barely getting the word out. “No. Don’t rewrite it now, don’t you dare pretend I made this up.”

Her voice broke, and this time, she didn’t bother hiding it. “I was there too, remember? I saw how you looked at me. I felt it when you held me, when you showed up at my door in the middle of the night just to make sure I was okay. I know what that was, you don’t get to take it back just because you’re scared.”

Y/N turned her face away, then took a step back, not in fear, but like someone preparing for impact. Like someone about to detonate something they couldn’t undo.

She had to say it.

She had to make it final, make it cold. Because if she left even the smallest crack open, Jimin would find a way through it. She always had, and Y/N didn’t trust herself not to let her in, she didn’t trust herself to survive what would come after.

“It didn’t mean anything,” she said, quiet, steady, but there was something hollow in her voice now, something that echoed. “We weren’t anything, you were never mine.”

The words sat in the air like broken glass.

Jimin flinched, actually flinched, like the sentence had struck her in the chest.

And Y/N knew how cruel it was, how false. But she said it anyway, she had to make it hurt enough that Jimin wouldn’t come back. Because if Jimin begged her to stay, Y/N would crumble.

She always did.

Jimin didn’t speak for a long time. She just stared at her like she didn’t recognize her anymore, like she was trying to reconcile the girl in front of her with the one who had tucked a scarf around her neck and made jokes in the dark and whispered things half-asleep that sounded too much like I love you.

Then, without a word, she stepped inside the room.

Y/N didn’t stop her.

She watched as Jimin moved through the space like a stranger, walking to the bed they used to share, picking up the book she’d left on the nightstand, the gray hoodie she always wore after dance practice. Her movements were fast, sharp, mechanical, like if she let herself slow down, she’d break.

She turned toward the door with her things tucked in her arms, her hand trembling where it gripped the hoodie, but her back held straight.

She paused.

Just once.

Her eyes met Y/N’s, one last time. And her voice, when it came, was soft and raw and broken open.

“I don’t know what’s worse,” she said. “That you’re lying to me, or that you might be telling the truth.”

Y/N’s throat closed, her fingers dug into the sleeves of her hoodie to keep from reaching out.

And before she could say anything, before she could backpedal or apologize or confess, Jimin turned, and walked away.

No final plea, no slammed door.

Just silence.

And Y/N stood there for a moment, completely still, like if she moved too fast, the floor would give out beneath her. Then, as the silence thickened, as her chest caved inward around the weight she had tried so hard to carry without breaking, she dropped.

She sank to her knees like something inside her had finally given out, the tshirt Jimin didn’t take still crumpled at the edge of the bed, her name still echoing like an unanswered question in the corners of the room.

She pressed her face into her hands and sobbed, not delicate, not cinematic, but guttural and ugly and real. The sound of everything she never said crashing back in at once.

And the awful, inescapable truth that she had done this to herself. That she had chosen this ache, that she had called it mercy and wore it like armor, that she had let go of something that felt like home and then stood still while it burned.

The room had gone quiet again by the time the last breath left her lungs in something like a gasp.

Only then did the memory begin to loosen its grip, only then did the weight of now return. And when it did, it landed with a kind of cruel clarity, because she was no longer at the door, or standing frozen while Jimin walked away, or wrapped in the wreckage of that final goodbye.

She was here.

On the floor.

Alone.

And the shirt, the only piece of Jimin she hadn’t returned, hadn’t been able to return, was still there in her lap, bunched up between trembling hands that had forgotten how to let go, the material wrinkled and warm from where she’d been holding it like it meant something, like if she just clung tight enough, it might somehow make everything that followed un-happen.

It should’ve been returned weeks ago.

But Y/N hadn’t, she couldn’t. Because even when Jimin left, even when her voice vanished from the hallway, when the knock didn’t come again, when the playlist stopped updating, this was the only piece of her that stayed.

And now it was all that remained.

She lowered her forehead to her knees, eyes closed, breath catching in shallow bursts as her fingers curled tighter into the cotton. She wasn’t sobbing, not really. The crying had happened earlier, maybe an hour ago, maybe three. But now she was just unraveling, quietly, silently, in pieces.

She remembered the sound of Jimin’s laughter, not the kind she gave to everyone, the one that made strangers fall in love with her in seconds, but the real one, the one that only came out when she thought no one was listening. The one that crinkled her nose and made her shoulders shake. She remembered how Jimin used to trace her scars with gentle fingers, never asking what happened, never pushing for details. She never needed the full story, she just held the hurt like it belonged to both of them, she treated it like it didn’t make Y/N broken, like it made her brave.

And she remembered the way she looked at her. Like she was something precious. God, how could she have believed that? How could someone like Jimin, warm, luminous Jimin, have ever thought she could build something safe inside a person like her?

Y/N had never said it.

Not once, she never said the words. Never let them slip past the walls she’d built around her mouth, her heart, her whole damn life.

But she had loved her.

Quietly, deeply, and in every way she didn’t know how to explain.

She loved her in the way she memorized her coffee order without ever asking. In the way she waited for Jimin’s goodnight messages, in the way she kept Jimin’s scarf folded in her drawer all winter and pretended it was nothing.

But she hadn’t said it.

“I wanted to be enough for her,” she whispered, her voice raw and so quiet it felt like it might dissolve in the air before it could finish forming. “I really did.”

She pulled the shirt higher, pressed her face into it, the scent hitting her all over again, fainter now, buried under the salt of her tears, but still there.

“I thought leaving would protect her,” she said, as if saying it might make it true. “I thought if I walked away before I ruined it, before I ruined her, it wouldn’t hurt as much.”

But it did, god, it did.

It hurt in places she didn’t know could still feel anything, it hurt in the space where Jimin used to sleep, in the air where her voice used to fill the quiet, in the part of Y/N’s chest that had gone still ever since that final knock, the one that never came again.

“I thought if I stayed,” she said, barely breathing now, “I’d become the worst thing that ever happened to her.”

She closed her eyes and bit the inside of her cheek so hard it tasted like blood.

There was no one there to tell her she was wrong.

No one left to correct her, no one left at all.

And in that silence, deep, absolute, the kind that settles in your bones and never leaves, she curled tighter around the shirt, the scent, the memory, the absence, and let the final truth settle in her chest like the weight it had always been.

“People like me... we break beautiful things.”

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