His words arrived like fractured obsidian—splintering through the still air, carving syllables into blades. Not spoken. Unleashed.

  And to Stella, each sound felt like a commandment etched into the bone.

  Her pupils constricted into pinpoints, retracting as if bracing for impact. Her head lifted—unwilling. Her heart convulsed once more, misfiring against the brain’s fading authority.

  She realized it too late. It wasn’t a question. It was a verdict. And the clock was dying.

  Obedience slipped through her like cold mercury.

  She tilted her head—slowly, ritualistically—until the noose of silence brought their eyes back together.

  Jin stood. A tower without warmth. Not corrupting the garden’s beauty—but not belonging to it either. Like a wound that refused to scab, he simply existed within it.

  One arm braced against the gnarled trunk behind her. He was close enough to collapse beside her— —but held back.

  Some instinct told him: Don’t fall.

  His face was a ruin. Not from battle. From erosion.

  Expressionless. Worn. And yet, behind the calloused apathy, something ancient stirred. A flicker. A tremor of old humanity—like an elder beast that had long since forgotten its claws.

  Stella’s lips fractured inward. A collapse without sound.

  Words gathered in her throat but coagulated—thick, unspoken. Her mind pounded against the dam of her own heartbeat. But her chest refused to open.

  Terror made a sculpture of her.

  She didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know what to be.

  His gaze was too much. Too still. Too aware.

  So she relaxed her neck. Let gravity do the work. Returned to a neutral position—her expression unchanged.

  Uncertainty glazed her features. Thoughts dammed. Emotions unprocessed.

  Jin blinked. Once. Like a camera closing its eye to remember her.

  He didn’t move his face. Didn’t need to. Everything he was… stayed inside.

  He glanced at the bench. Then at her.

  Then turned.

  He lowered himself—not beside her, but on the other side of the tree’s massive core. Its trunk, ancient and cratered by time, now stood between them like a god watching over its two regrets.

  They sat in mirrored silence, severed by centuries of wood.

  There was silence. But only for a breath.

  Not peace. Not mercy. Just that fragile second between thunder and the scream.

  His absence lowered her heartbeat—but only slightly. Her body relaxed, but her mind... Her mind had already sculpted a shrine from his silhouette. A new tormentor etched into the bone archive of memory. Now, even the idea of his eyes meeting hers was enough to summon ghosts.

  Horrible. Horrible times. So easily resurrected.

  Stella(thinking): “Why is he here? Why?”

  She wanted to flee. To leave this tree. Leave this garden. Leave this life. But her legs were ruins, and some unseen force—a tether of gravity, guilt, or grief—held her there. Fixed like a portrait to its frame.

  Her gaze, once soft and impressionable, began to harden. The eyes of innocence narrowed. And her eyebrows moved like scissors—cutting across her upper eyelid, slicing thought into shape.

  At last, her lips obeyed. They cracked apart with brittle hesitance.

  Stella(frowning): “You’re on the wrong side. There’s planted feces there… You know that, right?”

  It was a half-joke. Half-shield. Half-invitation to conflict.

  He didn’t answer. Not immediately. Which felt… appropriate. After all, she hadn’t answered his either.

  But eventually, he gave her the grace of acknowledgment. Not warmth—just acknowledgment. The kind you give to a stray dog that won’t stop watching you.

  Stolen story; please report.

  Jin(bluntly): “So you can sit at your bench. Isn’t that what you want?”

  She flinched, inside. Not from the words—but from how they landed. He knew her intention. Saw through it like mist. And she hated him more for that than she ever did for the past.

  He chose roots over metal. Maybe that was his rebellion. Or his confession.

  How?

  Why?

  Had it been the way she curled her hands beneath her sleeves? Or how her voice curved downward, afraid of being echoed?

  Her mouth opened again—but the words hung, half-born, hesitant.

  Maybe she was shy. Maybe she was tired. Or maybe... Maybe she was afraid of what his answer might mirror inside her.

  She remembered the lunchbox. The crunch beneath his heel. Her silence back then had teeth.

  Stella(quietly): “Why are you here… are you also—”

  Jin(calmly): “Yeah. I’m dying. Same as you.”

  No emphasis. No theatrics. Just truth, dropped like iron into silence.

  He wasn’t made of hours like the rest of them. He was a permanence—stone, yes, but stone under oath.

  And yet, here he was. Coming to the same garden. Sitting beneath the same tree. Chasing the same fleeting thing: solitude.

  They weren’t alike. Not in soul. Not in structure. And yet—

  Stella(murmuring): “I-I’m usually the one who comes to this garden… No one else does. What makes you want to be here?”

  He didn’t answer right away. Didn’t look at her. Instead, he turned his eyes—first to the hospital, then to the sky. As if seeking contrast. As if trying to decide which one felt more like prison.

  Jin(exhaling): “I don’t like the hospital. It smells like endings.”

  A pause was added after he spoke then—

  Jin(glancing upward): “Every time I step onto a medical floor… the scent of death crawls up my back. Like it knows me. Like I belong to it.”

  Jin’s words felt strange. Why reveal something like that?

  That kind of vulnerability—wasn’t it supposed to be sacred? Hidden? Shielded?

  Maybe he knew she couldn’t take advantage of it. Maybe he pitied her.

  Or maybe…

  He was lonely.

  She was lonely too.

  But how could she empathize with a monster like him?

  How could she sit here—still alive—and pretend she didn’t remember what his silence used to mean?

  She couldn’t even look him in the eyes without shivering.

  Back then, whenever he walked toward her, it felt like being sentenced.

  Her body would lock into stillness. Knees shaking beneath the weight of his approach. Her breath would hitch, caught somewhere between her throat and the edge of panic. Hands would twist into the fabric of her sleeves, anything to hold her together.

  And it was always the same.

  He’d yank her hair just to see if she’d squeal.

  He once tore a page from her sketchbook, scrawled over it in thick, bleeding red ink, and pinned it to the hallway corkboard like it was his art.

  He’d whisper lies to the lunch ladies—say she spat in the food—just to watch their judgment burn across her skin.

  He made a game out of swapping her shoes during gym, hiding one under the radiator, and letting her cry while the bell rang, mocking the way her legs trembled.

  He’d murmur her name under his breath during tests, the rhythm of it just loud enough to make the teacher scold her for talking.

  And worst of all—

  He never hit her. Not once.

  Because pain, physical pain, could be understood. It could be labeled. It could be explained.

  But what he gave her?

  That was the kind of hurt that curled deep inside her. The kind that made teachers think she was the problem. That made her apologize just to stop the air from tightening in her chest.

  A sterile silence presses in. The kind that suffocates and drowns in white corridors, that infects sick children with its indifference.

  Stella(quietly): “Why would you tell me that?”

  She doesn’t say it rudely. Not accusatory, but soft, like she’s trying to understand the unspoken fragments of his truth.

  Jin(shrugging): “I don’t know.”

  A dull ache knotted in Stella’s chest—an ancient echo of every apology she’d ever whispered. She wanted to vanish beneath the sterile tiles, to dissolve in the antiseptic light.

  Her voice emerged as a tremor, not a scream. “Stop crying,” he had once whispered, “you’re making the hallway ugly.” The memory sliced through her, sharp and sudden.

  Stella (closing her eyes): “You made me feel like the world would be better if I disappeared.” Her fingers gripped her sleeves, like she could claw the pain out through fabric. Tears pooled but refused to fall.

  Stella (voice fraying): “I didn’t hate life. I just… hated being me.” She let out a breath so fragile it felt like it might break the bones still holding her together.

  Stella (quietly, fracturing): “I hated myself.”

  Hate—a word too sharp, too heavy for her small frame to carry, yet she spoke it anyway.

  Stella(looking at the floor, voice cracking): “I remember every look you gave me. Every time you stood over me. Every lie you whispered to make them turn on me. Even the things I wish I could forget.”

  Her fingers dug into her sleeves as if she could rip the pain from her bones. Tears pooled in the corners of her eyes, but she blinked them back.

  Stella(quietly, with fracturing grace): “Sometimes… I didn’t want to wake up. Not because I wanted to die—but because I thought I didn’t deserve to live.”

  She exhaled, a fragile thing, as if releasing that thought might shatter what remained inside her.

  Stella(voice dropping to a breath): “I still think it’s my fault… that I existed. That I was in your way.”

  In one swift motion—half-blind rebellion, half-ritual—she scooped a handful of damp earth from the hospital garden’s border and hurled it at him.

  The wet dirt thudded against his cheek. He didn’t flinch.

  Stella’s chest heaved. Her legs shook so badly she stumbled as she turned away. The bench across the room yawned like a chasm. Each step felt endless.

  She collapsed onto it, folding into herself, cheeks pressed to her knees, silent tears finally breaking free.

  Jin watched her—silent, unreadable—before finally speaking in that same quiet voice, as if unfolding a hidden scar:

  Jin(softly): “Stella… do you remember what happened to me when the teachers finally acted on what I did to you?”

  The question hung in the cold air, a promise of shared pain neither of them could yet name.

  And in that heavy stillness, their childhoods—once predator and prey—shifted, fracturing again under the weight of truth.