Echoes

---

The call came just after noon. V had been half-lost in the quiet of his apartment.

“Hey,” Soojin muttered carefully. “Just letting you know that Kaimin’s in the hospital.”

The words hit harder than they should have.

“…What?” His voice came out thin, almost flat.

“He’s fine,” Soojin said, calm, almost casual. “They’ve got him under observation. Nothing serious.”

V let the silence stretch. He swallowed. The word fine clawing against his ribs. Fine was a word people used when they wanted you not to ask questions. When they wanted distance. And he had given Kaimin nothing but distance.

“Why are you telling me this?” he asked finally, his throat dry.

Another pause. Then Soojin’s voice softened, just a notch. “Because I thought you’d want to know.”

V pressed his knuckles against his mouth, pacing the length of the room. He shouldn’t want to know. He had forfeited that right when he left. He had told himself over and over that he had no claim on Kaimin’s life anymore. No place in his world.

But the thought of him, alone, pale in some sterile hospital bed, made his chest ache in a way that felt both familiar and unbearable.

“Which hospital?” V said, quieter now, almost to himself.

Soojin gave the name of the hospital that Kaimin brought him before during his accident. She didn’t push, didn’t ask if he was going, didn’t say anything else. She just let the silence linger until the line went dead.

V stood there for a long time, the weight of two years pressing down on him. His first instinct was to run, to see him fine with his own eyes. His second was the bitter reminder: You don’t get to do that anymore.

His hand hovered over the keys on the counter, trembling with the urge to grab them. It would be so easy, just step out the door, get in the car, drive. The route was already etched into his memory, like muscle that refused to forget.

But then the shame surged up, sharp and suffocating. What right did he have now to show up at his hospital bed? What would Kaimin see if he saw V standing there? A comfort? Or the ghost of someone who had abandoned him?

His throat burned. He pressed the heel of his hand against his chest, as if he could shove the ache down. He had told himself, over and over, that leaving was the only way to survive. That disappearing from Kaimin’s world was the one mercy he could offer. But hearing Soojin say hospital unraveled every thread of that fragile logic.

The thought kept circling, relentless: What if he needed someone? What if he asked for me? And then the darker one, the one that made his stomach turn: What if he didn’t?

The keys clattered as he grabbed them anyway, his hand shaking. He hated himself for it—for still being tethered, for still aching, for still choosing Kaimin even when he knew he wasn’t wanted. But he couldn’t stop.

Because the truth was brutal and simple:

If something happened to Kaimin and V hadn’t gone, hadn’t tried, hadn’t been there—

he would never forgive himself.

So he went.

Every step down the hallway, the guilt followed him. He wasn’t sure if he was going to the hospital for Kaimin’s sake… or just to ease the unbearable weight crushing his own chest.

Maybe both.

Maybe neither.

But the keys were in his hand, and the engine roared to life, and there was no turning back.

The nurse’s directions rang in V’s ears long after he left the desk. Room 917. Each step down the hall felt heavier, as though the building itself was testing how much guilt he could carry before he turned back.

When he reached the door, he didn’t knock. He just pushed it open.

Kaimin was sitting upright in bed, pale but composed, a cup of water on the tray beside him. An IV trailed from his arm. He looked up immediately, eyes narrowing, and for a moment V thought he’d imagined it. That flicker of surprise, quickly buried beneath something cooler. But he looked tired, as if he hadn’t slept in years, shadows clinging beneath his eyes like the residue of nightmares that never left him, even in waking. It took V a lot not to ask. If he’d been sleeping well all these years, if the darkness still chased him down into every night. The words pressed against his throat, heavy, aching, but he swallowed them back.

“Why are you here?” Kaimin’s voice was low, even. Not hostile, but not welcoming either.

V’s throat tightened. He stepped in, closing the door behind him, his palms damp against his jeans. “Soojin called. She said you were—” His voice caught. “—that you were in the hospital.”

Kaimin’s expression barely shifted. “It’s just fatigue. Nothing serious.” A faint shrug. “Not exactly newsworthy.”

The words landed like a dismissal, though his tone was deceptively casual.

“I needed to see for myself,” V said. His voice was softer than he intended, almost pleading.

For a long beat, Kaimin just watched him. Then he leaned back against the pillow, the lines of his body sinking deeper into distance.

“I don’t remember asking you to.”

It wasn’t sharp, but it cut anyway. V felt it lodge in his chest, that quiet precision of someone drawing a boundary.

He shifted, desperate to close the gap. “I was worried.”

Kaimin let out a faint, humorless breath, “Thanks for worrying, V. But you don’t have to. I’ve managed worse things.”

The way Kaimin said his named sounded foreign in his ears. He didn’t look at V as he speak, his gaze drifting toward the window. Sunlight slanted through the blinds, striping across his face, hiding more than it revealed.

V’s hand twitched at his side. He stayed silent, afraid the words would sound like excuses. The room was quiet except for the distant murmur of footsteps outside, the soft beep of a monitor down the hall.

Finally, Kaimin exhaled, his voice calm, almost indifferent. “You can sit if you want. Doesn’t matter to me. But if you kept on lingering, the others will notice why all of a sudden, my pulse rate suddenly matters to you now.”

Each syllable pinned V where he stood. He wanted to explain but the words felt paper-thin against the steel in Kaimin’s tone. And Kaimin didn’t look back. He stared out the window, jaw set, as if V had already left again.

Then, almost to himself, too soft to be cruel if not for the precision of it, Kaimin said, “You don’t get to show up for endings when you weren’t here for the rest.”

The words sank into the room, quiet but immovable, and V felt them like a blade twisting slow.

His breath stuttered. He wanted to argue, to reach across the silence and prove Kaimin wrong. But what defense did he have? He had carved his absence into Kaimin’s life and never once looked back. Every instinct in him screamed to speak. To confess that walking away had broken him too, that he’d thought leaving was the only way to keep them both from shattering worse. But the excuses clogged in his throat, tasting bitter, flimsy, selfish.

His eyes dropped to Kaimin’s hands resting loosely on the blanket. Hands he used to know by touch alone. The thought of them slipping beyond his reach forever had terrified him enough to drag him here, but Kaimin’s words made the truth plain: he wasn’t wanted in this moment, not anymore.

A tight ache swelled in his chest. He swallowed hard, forcing the burn down, and whispered the only thing he could manage.

“…I know.”

It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. But it was the closest he could get to admitting his guilt without drowning in it.

“I know I said it doesn’t matter if you’re here or not.” Kaimin muttered. “But I want to rest.”

The words landed heavy, final.

V’s fingers clenched against his knees, the ache in his chest twisting tighter. Still, he nodded, though the movement felt jagged, unnatural. Kaimin didn’t look at him. His gaze stayed fixed on the blinds.

“And make sure you don’t get recognized when you go out,” Kaimin added. “I don’t like a scandal to break out.”

He just stood there for a long moment, watching the profile of the man he had once loved, once known by heart, now a stranger behind walls V had built himself.

Finally, with a breath that trembled more than he wanted, V said the only thing left to him.

“…Rest well.”

It fell into the silence he knew he deserved.

---

V didn’t plan to end up there. His body had carried him without thinking, as if the streets themselves remembered better than he did. The river silently threaded its way through the night, black glass catching the faint shimmer of streetlights. The sound of water against stone was steady, patient, an old rhythm that seemed to wait for no one. V leaned against his motorcycle, helmet dangling loosely from one hand. He breathed in air that felt sharper here, stripped of the city’s noise, still marked by the weight of Kaimin’s presence. Kaimin's comfort place.

He didn’t know why he had come. Maybe to breathe. Maybe to stare at the wound too much, wishing it would go numb.

The breeze shifted, and with it came memory. He saw flashes of Kaimin here. Shoulders relaxed for once, voice low and unguarded as he spoke about his childhood, about the pieces of himself he rarely revealed. Those were the moments that had felt like sunlight breaking through. Those were the moments were he realized Kaimin was more than just an empire built in cold shoulders and expectations.

V shut his eyes, exhaling shakily. The weight of those glimpses pressed against him relentlessly.

Almost without thinking, he pulled out his phone. The gallery was clean, scrubbed free of mementos. He had made sure of that. But not the cloud. No, he hadn’t been able to delete them forever. Just inconvenient enough to avoid. Not gone enough to forget.

And now, as the longing pressed down like a second skin, he gave in.

The photos began to load.

California. A café on a street corner, morning light spilling across the table. One shot was clumsy, obviously candid: Kaimin leaning back in his chair, his hand frozen in the motion of grabbing his coffee. The blur only made it sharper in memory.

Another appeared: Kaimin half-smiling, almost toward the camera but not quite—half-aware, half-caught. It wasn’t posed, not intentional, but the softness in his eyes made V’s chest tighten. That look hadn’t been for the camera. It had been for him.

V swiped again, and the reel kept unfolding. Neon reflections in Tokyo rain. The paper lanterns of an alley. V’s profile at a temple gate, his face half-lit by dusk, taken by Kaimin. He teased Kaimin then. How he never thought he could take good pictures. Kaimin’s answer echoing in his ears like whispers of the wind: it’s not me, it’s the subject.

Another, a blurred shot of their hands brushing, just barely entangled, accidental, except he remembered it hadn’t been. Then Kaimin petting a cluster of stay cats on a street corner of his hometown. His face softened into a rare, unguarded smile.

V felt it then, the tug at the corner of his lips. A smile that hurt as much as it warmed. Each image cut deeper, golden fragments of a life that felt both close enough to touch and impossibly far away. They were ghosts now of the Kaimin he was allowed to see.

He slipped the phone back into his pocket, exhaling hard, trying to let the cold air it soothe him. Still, the ache refused to lift.

The sound of engine startled him. Then a wash of headlights swept across him, as if forcing him to wake up.

V squinted, hand instinctively rising to shield his face. Tires crunched over gravel, the engine of a car rolling closer until it stopped a few feet away.

When the beams clicked off, silence pressed in again except now Kaimin was there.

Behind the wheel, his expression was stark, caught between disbelief and something harder. He sat for a moment before pushing the door open and stepping out, the slam loud in the night.

Their eyes met across the thin stretch of gravel.

“Of course,” Kaimin said, voice flat, as though the sight explained everything and nothing at once. “Of all places.”

V’s throat tightened. “I didn’t—” He stopped, tried again. “I wasn’t... I just… ended up here.”

A humorless laugh slipped from Kaimin. He leaned on the bumper, arms crossed. It had been three weeks since he last saw him. He looked more well-rested now. At least, under the veil of the night.

“It’s not private property. You’re free to come whenever you want.”

The generosity in the words was a trick, V heard it instantly. The chill in Kaimin’s tone made it clear: you’re free to come, but you’re not welcome.

V’s fingers flexed over the handlebars restlessly. “Kai…” His voice caught, searching for an opening that wasn’t there.

Kaimin’s eyes flicked over him then away as though V were nothing more than a stranger blocking his way. “Relax. I don’t care why you’re here. Just… don’t call me that.”

“Sorry,” he murmured, voice uneven. “Force of habit.”

Kaimin’s mouth curved, but it wasn’t a smile. “Then… try to break it.”

V’s chest tightened, the apology dissolving before it reached his lips. There was nothing left to say.

Kaimin moved back toward his car, one hand on the door handle, not sparing V another look. “Good night.”

V’s grip clenched on the helmet in his lap until his knuckles blanched. His tongue pressed against the back of his teeth, fighting the urge to call after him, to hold onto a name he no longer had the right to use.

In the end, he said nothing. The silence was safer.