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How many nights does it take to count the stars?
Every night,
Inho looked to the stars.
He could not let go—
not when only there, in the cold sweep of heaven,
could his face reach the one it longed for.
The only one.
The one to whom he had given everything that still dared to beat inside his chest.
The constellations shifted for him,
threading themselves into the outline of a man’s face—
familiar, beloved, unreachable.
Even after the years,
he saw him there.
Sometimes, Inho wondered
if Gihun ever looked up too.
If somewhere beneath the same scattered light
he thought of him,
his thoughts running barefoot across the dark sky,
trying to find their way home.
Did he chase the same ghosts—
kisses in half-lit cars,
laughter in lonely diners,
the warmth of hands that no longer belonged to him?
Gihun had marked him,
had pressed himself into Inho’s skin like a secret ink.
A tattooed kiss,
a name that pulsed in his veins even when unspoken.
And Inho knew:
Gihun would never leave.
He would live between every heartbeat,
in every silence,
woven into dreams like a quiet promise that refused to fade.
It had been such a foolish ending.
A quarrel too small for tragedy.
One of those storms that should have passed with the dawn.
But instead of morning apologies,
Inho had awoken to the sound of a suitcase zipper.
Gihun was leaving—
softly, carefully,
like a thief ashamed to be caught stealing his own life.
And Inho had let him.
Because he knew the weight that pressed on him:
the heavy eyes of a family that did not know how to love
without condition, without control.
They wanted an heir, not a heart.
A legacy, not a truth.
A wife with a pretty smile and a silenced voice,
not a man with trembling hands and too much love to give.
Love was meant to be a background melody—
pleasant, decorous,
like violin music at a banquet.
Never something that burned the air between two souls.
Everything in their world had been arranged,
too perfect,
too artificial,
like the last scene of a movie that forgot how to be real.
And Inho—
he could no longer bear to watch.
So when the time came,
he closed his eyes.
Pretended sleep.
Swallowed his tears,
and let Gihun leave.
Because as long as his eyes stayed shut,
Gihun still belonged to him.
Still breathed beside him.
Still whispered his name in dreams.
The years passed slowly.
Junho’s voice sometimes broke through the silence.
His brother would come by,
his small daughter in his arms—
a piece of sunlight carved into living form.
She would reach for Inho,
and he would hold her,
as if clutching the only warmth left in the world.
Junho smiled at that,
because once, Inho had forgotten how to smile.
He had watched his brother fall—
not dramatically,
but quietly,
invisible to everyone but those who loved him.
A silent collapse that stretched across years.
Sick days.
Empty rooms.
Rumors.
A man who breathed but did not live.
A ghost who still answered the phone.
Until Haneul was born.
She was the first light through the storm.
A small miracle,
so bright that even Inho’s shadows began to tremble.
Junho and his wife never understood
how their daughter had broken through the walls
Inho had built after Gihun left.
But the answer was simple.
Both Haneul and Gihun
had the sun in their souls.
And Inho—
Inho was made of rain.
“If you’re not ready,” Junho said softly,
“we don’t have to go.”
Inho shook his head.
“No. We were invited.
If he didn’t want me there,
he wouldn’t have sent for me.”
“What if he doesn’t know?
What if it’s his parents—”
“Gihun would never allow that.”
Junho looked at him carefully.
“It’s been four years, hyung. Why now?”
“I don’t know,” Inho whispered,
his gaze falling to Haneul’s tiny hands
curled in his own.
“But if I can see him,
if I can speak even one truth—
I’ll go.
Even if I have to bleed for it.”
The Seong family’s annual gala shimmered like a mirage—
all glittering chandeliers and empty smiles.
Seoul’s elite glided between champagne and pretense,
their laughter polished and hollow.
To Inho, it was theater.
A stage dressed as virtue.
He had been here once before,
smiling beside Gihun,
pretending to be just a friend.
Now he crossed the ballroom again,
his brother and sister-in-law beside him,
his pulse a drumbeat in his throat.
Every glance he cast
searched for one silhouette,
one heartbeat,
one pair of eyes that could undo him.
And then—
he saw him.
Gihun.
Standing beneath a chandelier,
his hand entwined with another’s.
Her eyes full of galaxies.
Her smile tender.
And Inho broke, silently.
Their eyes met.
For a moment the world remembered.
Then Gihun looked away.
As though nothing had ever been real.
The glass trembled in Inho’s hand.
The air thickened.
He couldn’t breathe.
He left—
his brother’s voice chasing him through the gold-lit corridors—
until the cold air of the terrace caught him.
It smelled of rain.
The city shone beneath him,
mirrored in puddles and trembling lights.
He fell to his knees.
A hand touched his shoulder.
“Don’t blame him,” a voice said.
Cho Sangwoo.
His face carved in sympathy,
his tone careful,
as though one wrong word could make the man before him shatter.
“Gihun isn’t himself.”
Inho turned.
“What do you mean?”
“He wanted to come back to you.”
The words were soft,
but they struck like thunder.
“He told his parents everything,” Sangwoo went on.
“He stood against them for the first time.
Said he wouldn’t pretend anymore.
He didn’t care about the company.
Didn’t care about anything but you.”
Inho could barely breathe.
He knew Gihun’s heart—
its gentleness,
its stubborn courage.
And he knew what it must have cost him.
Sangwoo’s next words fell like rain.
“He had an accident.
A car crash.
He was in a coma for two years.”
The world stilled.
“When he woke,” Sangwoo whispered,
“the only thing he remembered was your name.
He couldn’t even place the face that belonged to it.”
For years,
Inho had thought Gihun had chosen another life.
That he had moved on,
forgotten,
built something new.
But all that time,
he had been fighting for his life.
And when he returned,
the only thing left in him
was a name carried through the dark.
“How?” Inho asked, voice trembling.
“It was raining,” Sangwoo said. “He lost control.
He was on his way to you.”
The night held its breath.
The terrace stretched before them like the edge of the world —
a thin line between everything lost and everything still waiting to be found.
Below, Seoul glimmered —
a constellation of its own,
a map of lives that would never know how two souls stood here,
suspended in the gentle gravity of one another.
Inho stood motionless,
the city wind curling through his hair,
the scent of rain clinging to his coat.
He could feel the ache of his heartbeat in his throat,
that quiet thunder that once answered only to one name.
Then he heard it.
The soft rustle of a step behind him —
the rhythm of someone who had always moved through his world like a familiar melody.
He did not turn immediately.
Some part of him feared that if he looked, the vision would fade,
like a dream snatched away by dawn.
“I like watching the stars too”
came the voice — low, familiar,
threaded with a timbre that could unravel every wound and every wall.
Inho closed his eyes.
The sound of it wrapped around him like silk pulled from memory.
When he finally turned,
the years collapsed.
Gihun stood there, bathed in the faint light from the ballroom,
and yet somehow separate from it —
as though the stars themselves had stepped closer,
drawn into human shape.
He had changed.
Time had carved its small signatures on him —
a faint crease at the corner of his mouth,
a shadow beneath his eyes.
But to Inho, he was achingly, perfectly the same.
“I heard about the accident,” Inho said softly,
his voice trembling on the edge of confession.
“I’m sorry. That must have been… unbearable.”
Gihun’s gaze drifted from the horizon to him,
slowly, as though afraid the world might shatter with too much sudden truth.
“It was,” he said.
“When I woke, I remembered nothing.
Not faces, not places.
Only… a name that kept echoing through me.
A name I couldn’t place.”
He looked at Inho then,
and something ancient flickered behind his eyes —
a recognition not of mind, but of soul.
“I see you now,” Gihun whispered.
“And it feels like I’ve found the source of that echo.”
The air between them shifted,
electric and fragile,
the kind of stillness that comes before rain,
before the heart remembers how to beat again.
Inho took a small step closer,
the sound of his shoes against the stone loud in the silence.
“You used to say,” he murmured,
“that the stars were our map —
that if we ever lost each other,
we’d find the way back through them.”
Gihun’s lips parted,
a breath caught between disbelief and wonder.
“I think I followed them,” he said.
“They led me here.”
Something inside Inho — something long dormant — stirred.
The years of loneliness, the cold months of waking to silence,
the ache of talking to the sky —
all of it bent toward this single heartbeat.
The distance between them dissolved like morning fog.
Not through grand gestures,
but through the smallest, trembling moments —
a glance that lingered too long,
a hand that forgot to fall away,
a breath shared between two silences.
And when Gihun’s fingers found his —
uncertain, hesitant, but real —
it was as if the world exhaled.
The stars pulsed brighter above them,
their light spilling over the balcony,
soft and golden and forgiving.
Neither of them spoke.
There were no words left untouched by pain,
none strong enough to hold what had survived.
Instead, they stood there —
two silhouettes drawn together by gravity,
by memory,
by a love that refused to vanish even when forgotten.
The night folded around them,
and for the first time in years,
Inho stopped searching the heavens for him.
Because he had returned —
not from the stars,
but from the silence between them.
The wind brushed through the city,
lifting the last of the rain from the streets.
And somewhere in that hush of sound and light,
a new beginning unfurled —
quiet, tender, inevitable —
like dawn finding its way through the dark.