Chapter Text
Jeonghan can’t feel his body.
No weight. No gravity. No anchor tying him to anything familiar. He floats, suspended in a silence so thick it feels like it’s pressing against his skin, if he even still has skin at all.
There’s no sound. No breath. Just stillness. Unmoving. Endless.
And then, the light.
It isn’t gentle. It slices. Blinding and unyielding, it seeps through his closed eyelids, demanding to be seen. He tries to flinch away from it, but his limbs don’t respond. They feel stiff and foreign, like they belong to someone else.
He doesn’t remember falling asleep. Doesn’t remember dreaming.
But this doesn't feel like sleep.
With effort that feels mountainous, he forces his eyes open. The light stings, white-hot and sharp. He winces, blinking through it, until the world slowly begins to take form. Not a world, really. Just space. Limitless, pale space.
The ground beneath him shifts like mist, barely solid. A vast expanse stretches around him in every direction, soft and shimmering. It looks like a desert, but instead of sand, it is clouds.
No walls. No horizon. No sky. Just nothingness.
He sits up slowly, every muscle aching like he’s woken from centuries of sleep. He raises his hands and flexes his fingers. They feel real. Tangible. But everything else around him feels impossibly wrong.
Then, a voice.
“Young man.”
It’s not loud, but it startles him. Deep, calm, and ancient. He turns sharply, searching, but there’s no one else here.
“What is this?” he mutters. “Where the hell am I?”
The voice speaks again. “You’ve had a long, hard life. And now, your prayers have been heard. You’ve been given the chance to go back.”
Go back.
The phrase lands in his chest like something heavy and important, though he doesn’t understand why.
He squints. “Go back?” His voice cracks, too loud in the hush around him. “Go back where? Who are you?”
“This is a dream,” the voice replies. “But not just any dream. This is the kind only the dead are allowed to see.”
The word cuts through him.
Dead.
He freezes. His heart stutters in his chest. His breath catches.
That can’t be right. Just moments ago, he was—
He grabs his head, squeezing his eyes shut, digging for memory.
Bits and pieces flicker to the surface.
The front door creaking open. The clink of keys hitting the stand. The heavy exhaustion in his bones. A hot shower. The sound of an egg cracking against a bowl. Then, a loud knock. Sharp. Urgent. Someone at the door. Then—
Nothing.
Just a blank space where memory should be.
He opens his eyes slowly. “What are you saying?” he asks. “That I’m dead?”
“You have lived surrounded by death,” the voice says, steady. “But accepting your own is never easy.”
Jeonghan laughs once, bitter and cold. “You’re joking.”
He’s seen death. He’s watched people fall apart in its wake. He’s looked it in the eye more times than he can count. He knows death. And it never looked like this.
“Right,” he scoffs. “So if I’m dead, what am I now? A ghost? A cloud? Some kind of celestial lost and found?”
The voice chuckles. “You are in between. Not quite shadow. Not quite story. Suspended between the world you left behind and the fate that waits ahead.”
Jeonghan exhales slowly, the ache in his chest tightening. “So what am I supposed to do with that?”
“You have been granted an opportunity,” the voice answers. “To return. To the world of the living.”
He furrows his brow. “To do what?”
“To settle what remains unsettled. To fulfill what was left incomplete.”
His lips twist into a dry smile. “You’ve got the wrong person. I don’t have unfinished business. No family waiting. No ghosts haunting me.”
The voice doesn’t respond immediately.
Then it speaks again. Just one name.
“Choi Seungcheol.”
The name hits him like a slap.
His shoulders tense. His jaw locks. A dull heat rises in his chest, heavy and unrelenting.
Seungcheol.
He hasn’t said that name in years. Thought it, maybe. Whispered it in the dark when memories slipped past his defenses. But hearing it aloud is different.
More real.
He laughs again, harsher this time. “Him? You think he’s my unfinished business?”
“He is lost,” the voice replies. “And Jeonghan, whether you accept it or not, your fate is tied to his.”
The silence that follows is heavier than the words themselves.
Jeonghan doesn’t reply.
Because even though every part of him wants to deny it, wants to walk away from it, something inside him already knows.
Knows that maybe he was never finished with Seungcheol at all.
Knows that maybe he never wanted to be.