Archive of Our Own ^beta

The apartment was smaller than she’d imagined.

Smaller, yes; and lonelier.

Rumi stood in the doorway, keys still dangling from her fingers, watching dust turn gold in the thin beam of the streetlight that cut through the blinds. The room smelled like paint and rain — the kind of rain that stuck to your sleeves long after you came inside. Cardboard boxes huddled against the walls like patient ghosts, labeled in her quick, messy handwriting: clothes, books, records, misc. The one marked dreams had been a joke when she wrote it, but now it stared at her, unreadable in the half-light.

She let the door close behind her. The echo felt too loud.

Maybe this was what starting over sounded like: a quiet that didn’t quite know how to breathe yet.

Seoul stretches beneath her window like a restless ocean — light and motion and distance all tangled together. Rumi stands in the middle of her new apartment, trying to convince herself that she’s really here. The walls are bare, the air still sharp with new paint, and her shadow looks too small against the floorboards. She sets the last box down with a thud and winces at the echo. Even her own movements sound like someone else’s life.

It’s supposed to be a new beginning. That’s what she told Celine on the phone last week, before packing everything and getting on a train that smelled like old rain and coffee. “Being back will be good for me,” she’d said, and Celine, although skeptic, had believed her. 

Rumi didn’t mention the job that fell through, or the nights she woke up choking on the kind of silence that felt like failure. Celine had raised her on discipline and persistence, and Rumi couldn’t bear to stain that voice with despair and disappointment if she tells her what had happened.

Now, the quiet is heavier than she remembered. The city outside hums faintly through the walls with traffic, voices, the faint clatter of a late-night delivery bike, but none of it reaches her. Loneliness has a sound; it’s the soft vibration of an empty room pretending it’s alive.

She moves through the space as though she’s visiting, not staying. The kitchenette still has the sticker on the stove; the window latch doesn’t close all the way. Her things look wrong here — out of place, too bright, like props from a different life. She stacks books against the wall, lines up mugs, folds a sweater, unfolds it again. The guitar case leans near the couch, untouched. Just seeing it makes her chest ache.

Music hurts. And what a hurtful conclusion to get to.

It used to be her pulse, the one constant rhythm that followed her everywhere, but now, every melody reminds her of how easily something one loves can turn into loss, into pain, into vacancy.

That first night, sleep doesn’t come. Rumi lies on the couch beneath a thin blanket, counting headlights that sweep across the ceiling. The room seems to breathe with her — expanding when she exhales, contracting when she pulls the blanket tighter. Around two in the morning, she starts humming under her breath, the old habit of a melody with no name. Just something to keep the dark from swallowing her whole.

She doesn’t notice that the record player on the shelf clicks softly, as though waking up.

The following morning is pale and raw from the moment she wakes up.

The city is the same as she remembers, and how incredibly different it is to be there when she isn’t the person who grew up there anymore. The loudness is muffled, the chattering is echoed, the lives are so, so far away and mute as her own feelings. 

Rumi drinks instant coffee and tells herself she’ll go outside, maybe buy a plant or something to make the place feel less temporary. 

She doesn’t. 

She scrolls through her messages instead. Mira and Zoey have posted pictures from another day of their lives in New York — blurry, laughing, the kind of joy that makes distance sting. She types a message, deletes it, types again, settles on silence one more time.

By afternoon she’s unpacking books, humming again without realizing it. The sound fills the quiet, low and tuneless. When she stops to stretch, she swears she hears something — the faintest echo of her own hum, an octave higher, like the room answered back.

Oh, good.

Excellent.

She freezes, and waits, and nothing happens at all for several minutes she spends breathing low, trying to listen to something else. Maybe she’s imagining things (most likely, because any other possibility is a terrible thing). Still, she turns off the ceiling fan, thinking it might be the source of the sound, and the apartment falls into stillness.

That night, she dreams of music. Someone else’s voice threading through hers, warm as candlelight, singing a song she almost remembers, in a voice she never once knew. When she wakes, her heart is racing, and the old record player — the one she hasn’t touched — is gently spinning, needle moving in empty grooves.

By the third day, she’s stopped pretending not to notice the odd things that have been happening around her. The strange things are too subtle to be frightening, too tender to feel wrong and too strange to not be bothersome. There’s a soft vibration in the floorboards when she hums, a faint shimmer of dust moving in rhythm with her breath. Once, while brushing her teeth, she catches a whisper of harmony in the running water, as though the sink itself is singing along.

Rumi tells herself it’s stress, jet lag, the mind playing tricks on an exhausted body. Still, when she passes the guitar case, she pauses. Her fingers twitch toward the latch, but she can’t bring herself to open it. The thought of music is like touching a bruise that hasn’t healed.

She calls Celine that evening. The conversation is small — weather, groceries, an old neighbor’s birthday. Celine’s voice is soft and steady, the same voice that used to sing her to sleep when thunder frightened her as a child, after everything burned down. When she hangs up, Rumi sits for a long time staring at her phone. The apartment feels even emptier after goodbyes.

That’s when she hears it again, the faint hum, like someone breathing in the same room. She hums back, tentative, and something in the air shivers in response.

The week unravels slowly. 

Each day folds into the next like thin paper. She starts leaving the windows open at night because she likes the sound of the wind — or maybe because she’s waiting for something she can’t name. 

Her sadness becomes a quiet companion, sitting beside her at breakfast, curling up at her feet while she reads. She begins to speak aloud, little things like “good morning” or “I’m home,” half-joking to the empty space. It feels less pathetic when she pretends someone hears it.

On the seventh night, she hums again, half-asleep on the couch, and the string of her guitar inside its case vibrates — just once, faintly — perfectly in tune, but she doesn’t notice. She’s already drifting between waking and dreaming, a soft smile pulling at her mouth for no reason she can name.

Outside, the city exhales a breeze through her open window. The record player’s needle twitches once, catching a fragment of a melody that isn’t quite real, and in the hush between streetlights and dawn, something unseen hums along with her — careful, patient, as if waiting for the moment she’s ready to hear it or respond in equal measure.

The air outside still smells like roasted chestnuts and exhaustion. Seoul at dusk is a strange sort of symphony — voices rising from the street vendors, the low whine of buses, laughter spilling from corners she doesn’t know yet.  Rumi walks through it all like a ghost haunting her own city; her hands are stuffed into her jacket pockets, shoulders hunched, the collar brushing her jaw. It’s early autumn; the kind of chill that teases but doesn’t bite yet.

She didn’t mean to stay out so long. It started as a walk to clear her head, to remind herself that the world still existed beyond the four walls of her small apartment. She wandered through side streets she didn’t remember, past an old bookstore she used to visit as a teenager, down to a little plaza she’d forgotten. The city feels both foreign and familiar, as if she’s stepping through layers of her own memory.

Someone was singing there — a man with a guitar, sitting cross-legged near the subway stairs. His voice wasn’t extraordinary, but it was unpolished and warm, cutting through the noise like sunlight through smoke; something alive that she hasn’t felt in quite a while.

Rumi stopped for longer than she meant to, listening from the edge of the crowd. The song was something simple, one she didn’t recognize, but the chord progressions sank straight into her bones, stirring something she thought she’d managed to bury better when she stepped back on Korean soil.

For a moment, she wanted to sing along, and the sudden urge startled her. It felt like remembering a language she used to speak fluently and suddenly couldn’t understand a word of, like it became just a bunch of odd, disconnected sounds that couldn’t possibly make sense to anyone.

Now, hours later, the echo of that melody still lingers under her skin. Her fingertips ache in a way they haven’t in months — that phantom burn where calluses used to be. Every step back to the apartment feels heavier, like she’s walking toward something she’s not ready to face.

She unlocks the door. The apartment greets her with its usual silence, the faint hum of the refrigerator, the soft rattle of the window she still hasn’t fixed. The record player’s needle sits crookedly on its base, waiting.

She drops her jacket on the couch and stops, eyes falling to the guitar case leaning against the wall. It’s exactly where she left it, black and dusty, its outline sharp in the dim light. She stares at it for a long time, motionless.

It’s ridiculous, she thinks, how something so ordinary can terrify her.

Rumi walks past it, and pours herself a glass of water of which she only drinks half before she sets it down, and looks back again. It’s just there, unmoving and patient like it was when she was a child and get angry at not learning faster. The part of her that’s still raw whispers, don’t.

But her fingers are already twitching.

She sits on the edge of the couch, elbows on her knees, watching the guitar as if it might move first. Her mind won’t stop replaying the singer’s voice from earlier — that small, defiant sound of someone who hasn’t given up on music. It used to be her, that sound. That girl who stayed up until sunrise recording demos on her phone, who scribbled lyrics on receipts and napkins, who laughed too loudly when a song finally fit together.

Where did she go?

Rumi thinks of her bandmates, of the gigs in underground bars, the smell of sweat and the rush of applause that was always louder in her imagination than in real life. She thinks of their first big concert, of festivals and bigger shows where people knew them — their names, their faces, their music.

And she remembers the night everything fell apart — the argument she can’t forget, the silence afterward that stretched for weeks, the phone that never rang again. Music turned from a refuge into a ghost that followed her everywhere, whispering all the ways she’d failed.

At first, it’s just sound — a low, uncertain hum that doesn’t belong to anything.

Then the air in the apartment shifts. It’s so slight Rumi almost misses it; she’s too busy peeling off her rain-damp jacket and trying to convince herself the day hasn’t completely won. Her hair clings to her cheeks, her heart is hammering against her ribs, the street outside her window is still wet from the sudden storm that crept in when she stepped inside the apartment building, and the city glows in a hazy, orange kind of loneliness.

The guitar still sits where she left it when she stares at it again from the couch — against the wall, silent, judgmental.

She’s been ignoring it for so long.

But the song she heard earlier that evening — that man’s voice echoing through the alley, raw and heartbreakingly alive — hasn’t left her. It’s still in her chest, fluttering, restless; the unknown melody had followed her home like a ghost she invited without realizing.

Now, back in her apartment, she can’t stop hearing it.

She starts singing the song from memory before she even realizes she’s doing anything at all, and the guitar rests on her lap before she understands that she’s moved to open the case and take it in between her fingers. It’s out of tune, obviously, because months of disuse and a whole cross-ocean trip will do that to anyone, let alone pieces of wood glued together.

Rumi sings low, when she tunes the guitar again. Her voice is rusky and untrained, but it’s the same as she remembers — tired and hoarse, yes, but so much more than everything she’s done, sang or heard in so, so long.

She gets to a second stanza before she realizes what it is that she’s doing and tosses the guitar away as if it’d burned her. Rumi’s breathing heavily and she doesn’t know what it is that spooked her so much, so suddenly — but there’s a hum in the air when her breathing settles, and it’s not—

It’s not coming from her throat, that’s for sure.

And guitars don’t hum.

“Okay, no,” she mutters to herself, rubbing her temples. “No auditory hallucinations today. We are having a normal evening, with normal tea, in our very normal, slightly haunted-looking apartment—”

The lamp flickers.

She freezes.

The hum deepens. It’s not quite a voice, but more like a note being held by someone who doesn’t know if they’re allowed to exist. Rumi turns around slowly, trying to find something out of place, but the room looks exactly the same. If she ignores that the shadows feel heavier, and the air is colder.

“Okay,” she says softly, to no one. “This is fine. Totally fine. Maybe it’s just—”

And then the guitar plucks itself.

Just one note, soft and clear, and her heart stops. Rumi stares, and the strings vibrate once, twice — like someone invisible just brushed them with their fingertips.

“Nope,” she whispers, backing away. “No, no, no, absolutely not. We are not doing paranormal indie movie nonsense tonight.”

Another string hums, then another, and it’s not random. It’s a melody. Rumi grabs the nearest object — a rolled-up poster tube — and holds it like a weapon. 

“I swear to God, if someone is in here—”

The music stops. Silence.

Then a dumb, stupid, sudden and ghostly:

“Uh.”

A voice.

Male. Unmistakably there when there was no one in the damn apartment other than her, because she lived alone.

“Hi?” the voice said again.

Rumi lets out a sound somewhere between a gasp and a strangled scream. She spins, eyes darting wildly. 

“Who— who said that?!”

“Me?”

There’s movement near the window — a flicker, a shimmer, and then a shape. Slowly forming, like mist taking form in the half-light.

Rumi’s hand shakes. She tightens her grip on the poster. 

“I’m calling the police.”

The shape solidifies into a man. Well — sort of. It was a man, but, somehow, because the universe is trying to make her die out of spite alone, he’s… translucent. Translucent, see-through, faint around the edges of the clothes that are just as real and unreal as his image. He is young, maybe mid-twenties, around her own age, and has messy dark hair, sharp eyes, wearing a faded t-shirt and jeans that look decades out of place.

He raises both hands immediately.

“Wait! Why are you calling the police?! I didn’t do anything!” he claims, then looks at her spooked face. “I swear I’m not— uh— dangerous?”

Rumi blinks for a second.

“Are you unsure?!” she squealed. “What the— Holy shit,” she babbled. “You’re a ghost!”

He winces. 

“Technically, yes. But like… a very polite one,” the figure continued. “There’s no need to call the police, miss!”

Rumi blinks. Once. Twice. Then she throws the poster tube, and it goes right through him, hits the wall, and bounces off. For some goddamn reason, he flinches anyway. 

“Okay! Ow!— well, not ow, but— hey! Unnecessary!”

“What do you mean technically?!”

He gestures at himself helplessly. 

“Do I look solid to you?”

“Yes, and that’s the problem!”

She grabs the cushion off the couch and throws that, too. It sails straight through him and knocks over a pile of mail.

“Stop throwing things!”

“Stop being dead!”

“Oh, because that’s easy just like that!”

They stare at each other — her breathing hard, his expression hovering somewhere between apology and disbelief. He sighs, rubbing the back of his neck (his hand flickers faintly through his own shoulder).

“Okay, let’s just… start over, maybe?” he says, and clears his throat, somewhat theatrically. “I’m Jinu.”

Rumi slaps her palms on her thighs.

“I don’t care!”

He arches his eyebrows.

“Cool, good start.”

Rumi shakes her head, closing her eyes shut.

“I’m hallucinating,” she grumbles. “I’m insane. I’m seeing and hearing things and talking to myself and someone’s answering,” she mutters.

He pouts, making an odd expression, tilting his head to both sides.

“You’re not,” Jinu says. “Also, if you’re talking to yourself and someone’s answering, then you’re sort of not talking to yourself.”

She gasps.

“Don’t go correcting my insanity, man!” Rumi tells him. “And what are you doing in my apartment?!”

He hesitates, glancing toward the guitar. 

“Honestly? I was hoping you’d know,” he replies. “I was very much nowhere, and then there’s, like, a song, and then I’m here being attacked.”

She follows his gaze. The guitar gleams faintly under the lamplight. 

“No,” she says flatly. “Nope. I have had exactly one glass of tea and zero ghost-summoning experiences in my life, so whatever this is, you can—”

He tilts his head, studying her. 

“You were singing .”

“What?”

“That song just now. Before I— showed up. Appeared? Was summoned?” he shakes his head, as if scattering his thoughts. “You were singing something,” he decides to continue saying.

Her eyes narrow. 

“You heard me?”

He nods slowly. 

“I think it’s what… pulled me here?” he says, and it sounds a lot like a question. “I mean, it’s what I heard before I— uh. Poofed here.”

Rumi stares at him, mouth slightly open. She can’t be sure if it is because of his choice of words or precisely what he means with the odd selection of them.

“You got summoned by bad singing?”

He smiles, something faint, wry. 

“Guess so,” he agrees. “Notice how I never called it ‘bad’”.

“Oh, my God.”

He looks around the apartment, fascinated. 

“Wow, this is— people have tiny houses now, huh?”

“Don’t— comment on my rent situation!”

“Sorry,” he looks back at her, eyes suddenly wide as if he wasn’t even in the know of what was rude about his comment. “You’re, uh… not gonna faint or anything, right?”

“I don’t faint,” she says tightly. “I throw things.”

He scoffed. Bastard.

“Yeah, I noticed.”

Rumi rubs her temples. 

“This isn’t happening.”

“Unfortunately,” he says, “it kind of is.”

The silence that follows is absurd. She’s barefoot, hair a mess, standing in a room full of unpacked boxes and water-stained mail, facing a transparent man who looks like he just walked out of a dream she’s never had.

Jinu clears his throat. 

“So… what now?”

She blinks at him. 

“What now?”

He shrugs, sheepish. 

“You’re the one who summoned me.”

“I didn’t mean to!”

“Guess that makes two of us,” he says softly.

Something in his tone — quiet, honest — cracks the tension for just a moment. Rumi’s breath stumbles. She looks at him properly then, past the absurdity, at the faint shimmer where his hands fade at the edges, the tired curve of his mouth. He looks… lost. Lonely, even.

“Are you—” she starts, then stops. “Are you stuck here?”

He looks down at his faintly translucent hands, then back up at her. 

“Here as in your house or in the state of apparently being dead but not gone?” Jinu asks, and it sounds genuinely confused.

Rumi lets out a long, exhausted groan and collapses onto the couch, covering her face with both hands. 

“Of course. Of course I move back to Seoul to rebuild my life and end up with a ghost roommate.”

Jinu blinks. 

“Roommate?” and his tone is way too cheerful.

“Don’t get ideas.”

“I didn’t—” He pauses. “Actually, wait, does that mean I get half the bed or—”

“Stop talking!”

Rumi wakes to the sound of someone humming.

At first, her mind tries to fill in the blanks — the hum could be the fridge, or a neighbor, or a dream leaking into the morning. But then she hears it again. A human hum. Tuneful, low, annoyingly pleasant.

She cracks one eye open.

Her ceiling looks normal. Her room looks normal. The sun leaks in through the blinds in thin, uneven stripes that make the dust glitter in the air. The guitar still leans against the wall. The cup of tea she never drank sits cold on the counter. Everything is exactly the same — except for one thing.

There’s a boy floating half a foot above her floor.

She sits up so fast she gets dizzy. 

“Oh no. No, no, no—”

Jinu looks up mid-hum, startled, and immediately drops to the ground with an undignified thud.  Rumi doesn’t even want to know how the fuck he managed to make sound in his ghostly state, but she isn’t about to ask about specifics when she was so sure she had just breathed in some spores or something the night before.

“Ow. Okay. Still not great at… gravity.”

Rumi presses a couch pillow to her face and screams into it. The ghost stands there sheepishly, rubbing his arm even though he shouldn’t be able to feel it. 

“Morning?”

She peeks out from behind the pillow.

“You’re still here.”

“Yeah.” He glances around. “Didn’t really have anywhere else to go. Or, rather, I couldn’t go anywhere else. I only get around the middle of the block before I’m pulled back here. And it’s not a great feeling.”

Her brain scrambles for logic.

“This— this isn’t— you’re supposed to disappear at sunrise or something! Isn’t that what ghosts do?”

He shrugs. 

“Well, I guess I missed that memo,” Jinu says.

She groans, dragging herself off the couch. Her hair is a mess, her shirt is wrinkled, and she’s too tired to be properly terrified anymore. 

“Okay. Ground rules. No humming. No floating. No— no existing within six feet of me until I figure out if I need to call a priest.”

“Got it,” he says, nodding solemnly. “But just so you know, priests make me nervous.”

“Good,” she mutters, heading to the kitchenette.

“And I’m not sure I can be six feet away from you at all times when your apartment is—” he adds, and stops midsentence when Rumi glares daggers at him. If looks could kill, maybe that would’ve solved their current situation.

Jinu hovers near the window — literally, because his feet keep forgetting they’re supposed to touch the floor for the sake of Rumi’s peace of mind or whatever resemblence she wants to have of it. The morning light cuts through him faintly, like he’s half smoke. He squints at the city outside, then turns back to her.

“So… Seoul,” he says, conversationally. “Changed… a bit?”

She freezes mid-sip of coffee.

“Changed?” she asks. “It’s been the same boring thing in the last t—” she stops. Rumi swallows, lowers her cup, and her voice is calmed when she speaks again. “What year do you think it is?”

He tilts his head, thoughtful. 

“Uh…It’s 1976, the last year I remember.”

She chokes on her spit. 

“1976?!”

He frowns. 

“So… not 1976?”

“Oh, Jesus Christ.”

He studies her for a second, cautious. 

“So what year is it?”

“Two thousand and twenty-five.”

He goes still. 

“Oh.”

Rumi watches him. He looks down at his hands — faint, pale light seeping through his fingertips — and then out the window again. Somehow, and she avoids thinking about it, Jinu manages to even look pale. And he’s see-through.

“That’s… a long time.”

The silence that follows isn’t funny or loud or absurd. It’s quiet. Heavy. For a second, she sees him not as a supernatural inconvenience, but as a boy who blinked and lost a decade.

Then he turns back toward the room, blinking at the instruments scattered around: her guitar, a small keyboard, a few cables, and, on the counter, her recording mic — one of those bulky condenser ones with a stand and a pop filter that looks like a strange metal spider.

He brightens a little.

“Are you a musician?”

Rumi hesitates, following his gaze.

“Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

She shrugs. 

“I used to be.”

He walks — or glides, really — closer, inspecting the setup with curiosity. 

“This thing’s new,” he gestures at the mic. “Is it a mic or a— kind of lamp?”

“It’s a microphone,” she says dryly. “A condenser.”

He leans closer, squinting at the pop filter as if it’d personally offended him.

“Looks like something you’d trap a ghost with.”

She glares. 

“Don’t tempt me to change its use,” Rumi almost growls.

He grins, unfazed.

“So you sing?”

“I used to,” she repeats, sharper this time.

He blinks at her tone, then steps back.

“Sorry. I just— you’ve got instruments everywhere. Thought maybe—”

“Not anymore,” she rubs the back of her neck. “Music and I… we’re on a break.”

Jinu studies her for a long moment. His voice, when he speaks, is quiet. 

“Like… Heartbreak?”

She frowned.

“Yeah,” Rumi agreed. “Something like that.”

He doesn’t press. The room goes soft again — just the faint sound of city traffic and the fridge humming. Rumi drinks her coffee, trying to pretend none of this is happening. He wanders, touching things he can’t really hold: the corner of a framed photo, the edge of a notebook. Every time he tries, his fingers pass through.

“Still weird,” he mutters, half to himself.

“What is?”

“This,” he waves vaguely at himself. “Being here. Being… whatever this is. I don’t remember how I—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head. “Never mind.”

Something in the way he says it makes her chest tighten. She wants to ask — what happened to you? How did you die? — but the words stick in her throat. It feels too personal, too fragile and a bit too impolite to ask anyone. Instead, she says, dumbly.

“You hungry?”

He blinks. 

“I’m dead.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“Actually,” he says after a beat, “I kind of miss the idea of food. Does that count?”

She stares at him. 

“You miss the idea of food?”

He shrugs. 

“Uh. You ever crave something you can’t have?”

She looks down into her mug. 

“…Yeah.”

They fall quiet again. It’s strange how easy the silence becomes — awkward, yes, but not suffocating. Eventually, Jinu drifts closer to the guitar. He doesn’t touch it — just looks. The sunlight cuts through the strings, turning them to threads of gold.

“You haven’t played it since you moved in,” he says softly.

She glances at him, startled.

“How do you know that?”

“Oh. I’ve been… here,” he admits, rubbing the back of his neck. “Not really awake, but… around. It’s like I could hear things, faintly. Your voice. The city. But never the guitar,” he tells her. “Even when I tried to play it.”

Her throat goes dry. 

“And when I did play the guitar?”

“That’s when I woke up.”

Something flickers between them — small, electric, undeniable and a bit too supernatural to be anything less than restless. Rumi looks away first, a bit more terrified than she was the moment before.

“Great. So you’re haunted by me, and I’m haunted by you. Perfect.”

Jinu smiles faintly. 

“Could be worse.”

“How?”

He gestures to himself. 

“It could’ve been an annoying ghost.”

She snorts despite herself. 

“You are an annoying ghost.”

“Yeah, okay,” he says, grinning now, “but at least I’m a charming one.”

Rumi shakes her head, muttering something that’s mostly curses, but she’s smiling too — just barely, just enough.

Outside, the day brightens. The light spills across the room, warming everything but him.

She tried to get rid of the ghost. 

Multiple times.

The first time, she’d thrown salt in every corner of the apartment like Celine said her mother used to do when something felt off. She sprinkled it under the bed, across the windowsill, and, after a long, wary glance, on top of the guitar case too. Jinu just watched from the couch, eyebrows raised.

“You’re not exactly dissolving,” she mutters when nothing happens.

He peers down at himself.

“Should I?”

Rumi sighs so loudly it comes out as a growl. 

“Yes.”

He gasps.

“Rude.”

The second time, she burns incense sticks until the room smells like a temple, thick with smoke and sandalwood. It makes her eyes sting, her head ache — and Jinu coughs dramatically even though he technically doesn’t breathe and the smoke doesn’t bother him at all. When she cracks the window open, the ghost is still there, lounging by the window like a very smug cat with wide eyes.

“Still here,” he announces cheerfully.

“I noticed,” she snaps, fanning the smoke out. “Maybe I should get a priest.”

“Or,” he says, folding his arms behind his head, “maybe you should get better incense and used to my beautiful self,” Jinu smiles, wide and annoying, and she rolls her eyes.

By the third day, she is desperate enough to google “how to get rid of ghosts in Seoul.” That particular attempt involved a late-night online order of bells, a talisman, and a very confused delivery man. 

None of it works.

The bell jingles, the talisman flutters against the air conditioner, and Jinu remains — slightly more amused each day, slightly more human in the way he tilts his head, watches her move, offers half-smiles when she trips over words and rituals and attempts to have him gone.

But it isn’t funny to her.

Rumi is tired — so tired — and loneliness, once quiet, had turned into something heavy and sharp-edged since she’d come back to Seoul.

On the fourth night, she sits on her couch with her head in her hands. She hasn’t eaten properly in two days, the boxes are still half-unpacked. Her phone has one unread message from Mira, another from Zoey (she supposed Celine has told them about Rumi’s departure from north-american soil), both blinking with concern she can’t bring herself to answer. Celine has called twice, but Rumi hasn’t picked up. 

It’s easier to say she is busy than to explain how she is unraveling. Slowly. Quietly.

And seeing ghosts, which is much harder to explain than all the rest.

Jinu, for once, doesn’t talk. He sits cross-legged on the floor, back to the wall, expression softer than she’d ever seen it in those days he’s spent floating around her place.

“Do you ever stop staring?” she asks, voice hoarse.

“Do you ever stop being interesting?” he counters.

She almost smiled, but it came out like a sigh.

The next morning, she calls a psychiatrist. It isn’t because she’s seeing ghosts, not really — it’s mostly for the silence in her chest that she can’t shake. She doesn’t mention the ghost right away, even if she thinks it is a relevant thing to mention. She talks about the exhaustion, the loss of appetite, the way her thoughts spiral at night. The doctor listens, nods, prescribes medication. The doctor says it sounds like burnout, post-traumatic stress disorder — nothing supernatural. 

When she mentions the idea of ghosts and the doctor looks up at her, Rumi gives on talking about Jinu.

It takes her another week to stop trying to chase him away. By then, he’s started respecting her space a lot more clearly — he sits quietly when she works on whatever it is on her computer, he hums along when she makes coffee (he also loves the coffee maker), he manages to disappear for hours when she needs silence. He never says where he hides, and she never asks. They exist in this odd sort of rhythm, not friends, not enemies — just polite, ghostly acquaintances haunting each other.

Sometimes she catches him looking at her like he is trying to remember something — a memory that isn’t his anymore. Sometimes she catches herself looking back.

When she finally said, “Okay,” that evening — arms crossed, exhaustion melting into acceptance — Jinu tilted his head, curious.

“So you can’t get out of here,” she says.

He shakes his head.

“Nope. You’ve tried to get rid of my beautiful self quite a few times, and I always end up back here.”

“Alright,” she agrees, half to herself, ignoring the compliment he gave himself. “And I won’t get out of here because I’ve just finished furnishing and am not submitting myself to another move. So. Truce?”

He grins. 

“Is it truce if you’ve been fighting alone?”

Rumi glares, lips twitching

“Okay! Truce!” he said quickly, hands raised.

“Thank you,” she scoffed, rolling her eyes. “How kind of you.”

Jinu places a hand over his chest.

“I’m not the one trying to make the other dissipate, excuse you!”

Rumi snorts. 

“You’re a ghost. Dissipating should be your thing.”

He gasps, utterly scandalized. “Wow. Stereotyping much?”

“Excuse me,” she shoots back, arms crossing. “You literally float through walls!”

“I do not float, that’s for boats,” he lifts his index finger. “I’m gracious. I glide.”

“Oh, sorry,” she says, dry as salt. “That’s so different.”

He points at her, mouth open — and then he pauses, reconsiders. 

“Okay, fair. But still! I didn’t choose this. One minute I’m—” He frowns, eyes narrowing as if chasing a thought through fog. “—and then I was just… here. In your apartment.”

“That’s very specific,” she mutters. “Did the afterlife teach you vagueness or were you always like this?”

He throws up his hands. 

“I don’t remember! Sorry! It’s not like there was an orientation meeting or something. No one gave me a handbook that said, ‘Congratulations, you’re dead! Please proceed to haunt a stressed-out twenty-something with commitment issues!’”

Rumi’s mouth falls open. 

“Excuse you?”

“I mean—” He winces, waving a hand. “That came out wrong.”

“You think?”

He grimaces, the picture of sheepishness. 

“I’m just saying, this isn’t exactly ideal for me either! You think I want to be stuck here? Watching you try to microwave rice for twenty minutes—”

“It was frozen! And I was distracted!”

“—or arguing with your blender because the lid was on wrong?”

“It exploded on me!”

Jinu nods solemnly. 

“I know. I was there. It was spectacular.”

She stares at him, fuming and flustered and suddenly very aware of how ridiculous this all was — her, yelling at a ghost, standing in the middle of her new apartment surrounded by mismatched furniture and half-unpacked boxes.

And then, somewhere between fury and despair, she starts laughing. It bubbles out of her like a mistake.

“Oh, my God,” she breathes, pressing her hand to her forehead. “You’re insufferable.”

“Then stop talking to me!” he says. “Why do you keep talking to me if it always ends with me being offended?”

“Only because ignoring you doesn’t work!”

He shrugs, all mock-casual charm, a lot less bothered by her words from one second to the next. 

“I’m persistent. It’s one of my many flaws.”

“Many?” she echoes.

“Countless, really,” he says. “But I make up for it with my winning personality and devastating good looks.”

She squints at him, unimpressed. Or rather, pretending to be unimpressed — he was translucent, yes; but he was good-looking. It was almost ridiculous, really, that a dead person’s ghost chosen to haunt her would be exactly her type.

“You’re translucent,” she says anyway, voice flat.

He looks down at himself, feigning offense. 

“I’ll have you know, this glow is ethereal. Some people pay good money for that kind of radiance.”

Rumi groaned, dragging a hand down her face. 

“I cannot believe this is my life now.”

“Hey, I can’t believe it’s mine either!” he said brightly. “So, look at that — something we agree on.”

“Why do you hate your guitar?” Jinu asks, all of a sudden.

Rumi freezes mid-step, halfway through moving a pile of laundry from one side of the couch to the other — something she does compulsively, as if reorganizing her clutter might rearrange the rest of her life too.

“I don’t?” she replies, voice too sharp, too defensive.

He raises an eyebrow. 

“Is that a question or an answer?”

Her shoulders stiffen. 

“An answer,” she bites out, and immediately regrets how brittle it sounds.

Jinu doesn’t flinch. He’s sitting cross-legged on the armchair, perfectly at ease — or at least pretending to be. He’s learned how to look casual around her, how not to shimmer too much when he moves, how to sit just right on furniture without making it weird that technically, he’s not sitting at all. His elbows rest on his knees now, and his head tilts slightly as he studies her.

“You keep glaring at it,” he says. “Like it said something mean to you.”

Rumi snorts, avoiding his gaze. 

“How do you know it didn’t?”

“I’m serious,” he insists, tone softening. “Every time you pass it, you look at it like it… betrayed you. Is it because of me?”

She keeps folding clothes she doesn’t need to fold, because if she looks at him, she might have to acknowledge how close he’s gotten to the truth. The guitar case leans against the wall beside the window, half in shadow, half bathed in the dull, gold light of late afternoon. The sight of it always makes something twist inside her — grief, maybe. Or longing. Or both.

“I don’t hate it,” she says again, quieter this time. “I just…” Her words dissolve into a sigh. “You wouldn’t understand.”

Jinu hums thoughtfully. 

“You’d be surprised what I understand.”

That draws her eyes up, if only for a second. There’s something behind his expression — not teasing, not playful, but gentle, sincere. And that almost makes her angrier, because she doesn’t want him to see her like this. She doesn’t want to be understood, not when she’s barely keeping herself together, anymore than she wants to just be angry about everything she’s feeling.

“Well,” she snaps, “you don’t.”

The words come out sharper than she means them to. Jinu blinks, taken aback and staying quietly shocked for only a second. Then he nods slowly, holding up his hands in surrender. 

“Okay. I’m sorry,” he tells her. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

His apology is sincere, she can tell, but it’s too late; the air between them has shifted, her anger is solid in her chest again for no reasonable reason, and the room feels smaller now, the hum of the refrigerator suddenly too loud, the air thick with things unsaid.

Rumi mutters something that might be an apology, too, but it sounds more like frustration, and then she’s heading toward her room, voice clipped. 

“I need to sleep.”

“Rumi,” he calls softly, regretful, and she feels regret herself.

She stops just short of the door. His voice is careful around her name, and soft in a way she hasn’t graced herself with in a long time. She thinks he doesn’t move, but she can tell; while sometimes he somehow manages to produce sounds, most times he doesn’t; and the rustling of the chair would already be hard to listen to had he been alive and palpable.

“I really am sorry. You don’t have to tell me, of course,” he says, gaze dropping to his hands even if she can’t see him. “I just… thought maybe it was worth asking.”

Her throat tightens. There’s a kindness in his voice that makes her want to scream and cry at the same time, throw him away and keep him around simultaneously.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, not looking back. “Well. It isn’t. So don’t.”

And with that, she disappears into her room, shutting the door behind her.

Jinu exhales — or mimics it, at least — and leans back in the armchair, floating just half an inch away before he would pass right through it. The room feels emptier without her, and he hates that he notices it.

He glances at the guitar case again. There’s dust along the edges, still, and a faint scratch across the latch. He wonders how long it’s been sitting there like that, untouched and heavy with silence before she picked it up in a hurry and somehow summoned him there — he has noticed, of course, that she didn’t touch it again.

He was almost sure it wasn’t because she was scared to summon another Jinu.

The ghost stares at the guitar, but he doesn’t move toward it, he knows better than to cross that line. He’s made it a rule: no going through walls that aren’t his designated ones — kitchen, living room, balcony. No invading her space. It’s respect, or what passes for it when one’s dead and very much can float through walls without realizing so (both he and Rumi figured that out in a very uncomfortable way).

Instead, he stares at the guitar from across the room, lips pressing into a line.

“Must’ve been one hell of a song,” he says under his breath, almost to himself.

On the other side of the wall, Rumi sits on the edge of her bed, fists knotted in her blanket, pulse thundering. She doesn’t know why she’s shaking — anger, guilt, maybe something else entirely. She tells herself it’s exhaustion, because it’s safer that way.

But in the dark, she can’t help thinking about what he said — about the way he looked at her when he said it. Like maybe he would understand.

She groans, lifts her legs and wraps herself in her blankets.

Rumi is sure she won’t be able to sleep, but she’ll pretend to anyway.

“I was in a band,” Rumi speaks, suddenly.

It’s the following day from their discussion (or her lashing out, which would probably be more of a proper description), and Jinu turns his head sharply, startled — he hadn’t even realized she was there. He’d been watching the city from the window again, the soft neon glow of Seoul stretching endlessly below, when she approached with more fear than an idea of what it was that she would say. 

It’s something he does often, Rumi can’t help but notice, watching the city from the balcony. As if the lights might remind him of something he’s forgotten, or as if he might learn the world from staring at it long enough.

He’s translucent tonight, faint and blurred at the edges, like moonlight filtered through rain.

“It didn’t end well,” she adds, stepping closer.

The ghost doesn’t say anything at first — he’s learned that sometimes silence makes her talk more than questions do. But curiosity wins. 

“Stage fright?”

“Something like it,” she murmurs, leaning against the windowsill beside him. Her reflection flickers faintly in the glass, but his doesn’t appear at all. “We had a fight. Me and the girls. A big one. Everything just… cracked after that. And suddenly we were on stage, and I couldn’t breathe, or sing, or think. My arm was exposed—”

She stretches her right arm toward him, and in the dim glow, he sees the marks that obviously have been on her skin for a long time, but he never noticed before. In a second, he catalogues how he’s seen her, and it was always in long sleeves or wrapped around blankets and hoodies — they are faint but visible, a pattern of pale, uneven lines that crawl up her skin like ghosts of old pain.

“—and I was back in a nightmare.”

Jinu frowns, his voice quiet. 

“Back?”

She nods, eyes distant. 

“My mom died in a stage malfunction,” she tells him. “She was a great, great musician.”

The words hang between them, heavy and brittle.

“Things went down and started burning,” she continues, her tone somewhere between numb and trembling. “Literally. I was backstage with her best friend, Celine, and we saw her fall. Celine tried to reach mom, and my dad tried, too; but I saw the lights go out, and I heard the screaming, and I remember—” Her voice falters. “—I remember the smell. Smoke and melted plastic and perfume. She wore this floral one from the convenience store, even after she and the group hit it big.”

Rumi’s voice trembles before it fades, but the silence doesn’t feel like relief — it feels like smoke still curling around her lungs. Her hand stays half-raised, fingers brushing the faint scars along her arm. The skin is lighter there, uneven. The kind of mark that never really leaves, no matter how many years you give it.

“I was caught in the fire too,” she says finally, the words thin and careful. “Got burns in most of my left side, here,” she lifted her index finger, pointing the side of her face, close to her hair, where smaller scars of burns serpentine. “Here,” Rumi gestured to her neck. “And here,” she pointed gain, now to the right side of her face, close to her jaw.

Jinu listens, still and quiet.

“It affected my vision, too, on the left side,” she continues. “A bit. I’m not sure what they said it was, but there was this surgery to fix it and my eye gets weird, sometimes, so I use a pair of sunglasses or colorful lenses to keep it covered.”

Rumi sighs, clearly tired.

“After that, that’s what I did. Cover up, always. I made it my aesthetic, you know? Long sleeves, gloves sometimes, even in summer. I couldn’t stand people looking. Or worse — pretending not to look,” she laughs once, brittle. “The irony, right? I used to love being seen. I loved the lights, the noise, the crowd shouting. I wanted to be bigger than life. And then suddenly, all I wanted was to disappear.”

Her gaze drifts to the reflectionless glass, to where his faint glow outlines the room.

“When the band started to make it big, I thought maybe I could handle it again. I thought I’d gotten stronger. But that night…” she presses her fingers to her temple. “The dress we wore had short sleeves, and when the spotlight hit, I saw the marks — right there, in front of everyone. I couldn’t breathe. It was like my chest locked. My body just— stopped.”

Jinu doesn’t interrupt. His face is soft, his eyes heavy with something like grief — not for himself, but for her.

“I ran,” she continues, voice smaller now. “Offstage, mid-song. Left Mira and Zoey standing there. Left the crowd confused. The cameras, the noise, the smoke from the machines — it all felt like fire again. I couldn’t tell the difference. I just… ran.”

She wipes at her eyes with the back of her sleeve before any tears fall. “And that was it. End of the band. End of everything. I moved back here because it felt easier to fall apart in Korean than in English.”

There’s a long pause. The city hums outside — low, unbothered, endless. It’s Jinu who finally speaks, his tone quiet but steady, after a while; she isn’t sure she expects him to, but she’s thankful anyway, because the silence had started to crawl up her spine.

“You didn’t ruin anything, you know.”

She gives him a sideways glance, weary and skeptical.

“Tell that to the girls I left onstage,” Rumi scoffs.

“I would,” he says. “If I could. But I think they already know.”

Rumi exhales, shaky, like she doesn’t believe him but wants to. 

“I’m not sure they do,” she says. “I don’t blame them if they do. I left, didn’t say a word, and now look at me,” she mutters. “Hiding in a studio apartment, talking to a ghost.”

She exhales, shaky. 

“I just stopped playing. I went completely MIA and disappeared from the media, from them, from everything I could. And I was so angry at everything,” she laments. “At my past, at fate, at my mother and my father, at the girls, at myself,” her voice breaks. “Mom always used to say that music is supposed to heal, not haunt,” her mouth twists into a humorless smile. “She was wrong.”

The ghost beside her tilts his head to the side.

“Maybe not wrong,” Jinu says. “Just… early on her conclusions.”

That earns him a look — not quite angry, not quite sad. 

“Early?” she asks. “You really think I’ll just pick up my guitar one day and be fine with it?”

Jinu shakes his head.

“No,” he says, surprising her with how certain he sounds. “I think you’ll pick it up one day and it’ll still hurt. But you’ll play anyway.”

She stares at him, long and searching. There’s no pity in his face, just quiet conviction, and Rumi swallows, turning back to the window. 

“It’s stupid. To be afraid of something that used to be yours.”

“It’s not stupid,” Jinu replies. “That’s a poor choice of words. It’s just— It’s human.”

She lets out a shaky laugh. 

“You’re one to talk.”

He grins, soft and crooked. 

“I was human once.”

That makes her glance at him again — and for a heartbeat, she wonders what his story was. How he died. Whether he remembers it, or if that’s part of the fog he carries around. But she doesn’t ask, because it doesn’t feel like something polite to do; she can’t be sure what would be considered polite to ask or not ask a ghost, but she won’t risk her odd peace of mind to find out.

Jinu looks away first. His glow dims a little, like the thought itself takes energy from him and his very supernatural existence. For a long while, the only sound is the soft hum of her fridge and the city outside — car horns far away, wind curling between buildings.

“I ran away, too,” he says, quietly.

Rumi blinks, startled by the sudden crack in his calm. 

“What?”

He gives a humorless laugh. 

“Not from a stage, but from a lot of things,” he leans back against the wall, arms crossed — or what would be crossed, if his elbows didn’t fade halfway through the motion. “I used to have a music group, too. Boys, all of us, and friends since we were kids. We were supposed to make it big — we said that all the time, like it was a prayer. But, you know… dreams cost money.”

Rumi tilts her head. 

“And you didn’t have much of it?”

He smirks, though there’s no real humor in it.

“Oh, I barely had shoes that fit. My family was poor. Not ‘we eat ramen again’ poor, but real poor. Roof leaks, lights off, hunger-that-twists-your-stomach poor. I knew what it meant to be angry at a world that didn’t even know your name.”

Her throat tightens, and Rumi has an urge to just reach out for his hand. She keeps herself from it, of course, because she knows what the results would be; making a fool of herself, longing for human, alive contact, a very awkward situation. 

Jinu breathes in and he continues, his voice softer now, steadier in its ache. 

“The boys — my friends — they didn’t get it. They’d complain about long practice hours, and I’d be thinking about how I could bring some of the rehearsal snacks home for my sister. I’d take every gig, every extra job, everything that paid. Street festivals, background vocals, even jingles for toothpaste commercials. I said yes to all of it.”

His smile falters. 

“They said I was selling out. Said I was losing sight of the music. But I was just trying to eat.”

The words hang there, raw and simple. Rumi doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe too loud.

“I kept pretending,” he goes on. “Pretending I wasn’t tired, that I wasn’t scared of losing it all before it began. Pretending I was like them — carefree, talented, lucky. And maybe I was, for a while. Until I wasn’t.”

“What happened?” she asks softly.

He hesitates. His form flickers slightly, like a candle in the wind. 

“We only argued, and they didn’t trust me anymore. They said I was changing the sound, changing us. And maybe I was. Maybe I thought if we sounded more commercial, more polished, someone would finally notice and we would make it mainstream.”

He rubs the back of his neck — a gesture that looks instinctive, even though his hand passes through his skin like mist. 

“The night it happened— the night I… died, I guess, we weren’t talking. I was walking home from a gig. Alone. It was raining. Everything was so ordinarily normal, and then I remember thinking, this can’t be how it ends, but I was already wherever it was that I got stuck in”

Silence stretches thin, and Rumi’s voice is a whisper. 

“Do you remember how you died?”

He frowns faintly. 

“Not really,” he said. “The only thing clear in my memory is a song still playing in the background. And then nothing.” He looks up at her, eyes distant. “It’s funny. I don’t remember dying. I just remember wanting to live when I already didn’t have a physical body.”

That hits her like a gut punch, the honesty in his voice and the longing in his words. Jinu sighs, as if breathing — that he doesn’t do — takes a toll on him, and he shakes his head softly.

“I miss it,” he says, quieter now. “Playing, singing, the way music fills the air, like it pushes your chest open from the inside. Have you ever felt that?”

Rumi nods, slow and pained. 

“Yeah,” she says. “That used to be my favorite part.”

He smiles at that, soft, almost boyish. 

“Mine too. The moment when you forget who’s watching. When it’s just sound and breath and you don’t care if your voice cracks because it’s yours? That’s the only time I ever felt real.”

She looks at him for a long time, and something unspoken passes between them — two ghosts, in their own way. One made of light, the other of fear.

“Guess we’re both haunted, uh?”

Jinu studies her, a slow smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Maybe,” he says. “But my current state is much cooler than yours, if that’s what we’re supposed to do.”

Her breath catches, amused.

Outside, the city hums again — alive, indifferent, endless.

At first, it was strange living with someone who wasn’t quite there.

The first mornings after their truce, Rumi found herself talking out loud before realizing who she was talking to. Sometimes she’d enter the kitchen half-asleep, grumbling about coffee filters or deadlines, and Jinu would answer, leaning against the counter like a very polite hallucination.

It wasn’t frightening anymore, just a tad disorienting.

He never touched anything, of course — he couldn’t — but he’d hover nearby, watching with mild curiosity as she burned toast or hummed absent melodies into her cup. He seemed to enjoy the rituals of her mornings: the opening of the window, the sound of traffic far below, the way sunlight reached across the floor like it was shy.

Sometimes, he’d make commentary she didn’t ask for.

“Toast again?”

“It’s breakfast.”

He frowns.

“Barely.”

“Excuse me?”

Jinu lifts both his hands in surrender.

“I’m just saying — ghosts probably have better diets than you.”

He’d grin when she shot him a glare over her shoulder, half amused, half exasperated.

By the end of the week, it had become routine — the banter, the light teasing, the constant sense of someone quietly there. The studio apartment didn’t feel so empty anymore. She caught herself leaving the door open between rooms, humming louder, even talking to him from the bathroom as she brushed her teeth. Jinu pretended to cover his ears, even though he didn’t technically have eardrums anymore.

“Do you ever… get bored?” she asks one evening, finding him perched near the window again, eyes lost in the hum of Seoul outside.

“Of what?”

“Existing. Like this.”

He thinks about it for a long moment. 

“Sometimes,” he says finally. “But lately… less.”

Her cheeks warm at that, though she doesn’t know or think about why.

There are quiet days, too — the kind where she works on editing demos for other people or sits at her desk sketching chords she doesn’t have the courage to play. Jinu drifts around, humming half-melodies that sounded familiar, unfinished things that felt like promises. 

She never asks him to stop.

Then one evening — days, maybe weeks later — Rumi finds herself staring at the guitar again.

It leans against the wall, quiet and patient, as if it had always been waiting for her to stop looking and start doing. She reaches out once, hesitates, and pulls her hand back. The air is still, the apartment is silent and her heart screams inside her chest.

Jinu doesn’t say anything. He’s watching, but not intrusively — there is only a calm, steady presence in the corner of her eyes and, finally, Rumi picks it up.

Her fingers tremble at first, tracing the wood like it might burn her again, like it might summon a ghost of her past rather than another random person that decided to annoy her for the sake of it. Then she sits down, adjusts her grip, and lets her thumb brush the first string. The sound is hesitant — thin, a ghost of itself.

Ha. Ghost of itself.

Jinu says nothing when she presses her lips together, trying not to laugh at her ridiculous pun. He only leans back with an arched eyebrow before he looks away, pretending to be wholly uninterested, as though he hadn’t just witnessed the universe shift slightly on its axis.

Rumi glances at him, catching the deliberate nonchalance, and smiles in spite of herself.

“So,” she speaks, adjusting the tuning pegs. “What kind of songs did you like?” she asks. “And don’t say you liked metal or punk rock. I’ve seen you tear up at One Direction songs,” Rumi accuses.

He shrugs. 

“They’re very good songwriters, okay?” he says, almost justifying her accusation, but not denying anything. “And I don’t like any specific genre of music. I like music. Especially ones with heart.”

She raises an eyebrow.

“That’s vague, Jinu,” she points out.

“I’m dead, Rumi. You can’t expect specifics or depth from someone who technically doesn’t even have a brain.”

She snorts, the sound small and real. 

“Okay, heart songs. Let’s see.”

Her fingers search for the chords — rusty, but instinct returning like muscle memory, never really gone despite her stubbornness. The first melody is uneven, the second is a bit better, more confident. And then, somehow, it just fits.

Rumi starts playing something familiar — slow, low, a tune that used to fill late-night cafés when she still believed in stages. Jinu listens to the unfamiliar song (it was one released after the year she supposes he died), eyes softening with something that wasn’t quite nostalgia. Then, without warning, he begins to hum along.

He doesn’t know the song, and therefore it isn’t perfect — his voice comes in faint, like it is passing through layers of water — but it carries warmth, depth, life. And soon, Rumi finds herself smiling as she plays, following his lead, their sounds weaving together — one real, one remembered.

When she misses a note, he catches her with a quiet laugh. When his voice cracks, she teases him back, and the tension of the past weeks dissolves, replaced by something lighter — something that feels almost normal.

They play until the room feels full, and the walls catch the echoes; the city outside seems to hum in tune with them. The air shimmers faintly where Jinu shits — not glowing, not ghostly, just bright.

When the song ends, not a word is spoken for a fairly long time. Or perhaps it is just a few seconds, but Rumi is struck with bliss and nostalgia, and time seems to be a foreign concept inside her head and in her heart.

“You’re good,” Jinu says softly, snapping her back to reality.

Rumi rolls her eyes, though her throat feels tight.

“You’re just saying that because I’m the only one who can hear you and play the guitar so you can sing,” she accuses.

“Maybe,” he teases back, smiling. “But maybe I’m just being honest because it’s true.”

She leans her chin on the guitar’s body, looking at him.

“That was… nice,” she admits. “It’s been a while since music didn’t feel like bleeding.”

Jinu’s gaze softens. 

“Maybe it’s time to let it feel like breathing again, uh?” he suggests.

And for the first time in what felt like forever, she doesn’t argue.

In the days that follow, their rhythm changes subtly. She plays, he hums, and sometimes they write half-lyrics together — silly things, serious things, words about ghosts and beginnings and stages and fire. He floats near her notebook, reading over her shoulder, giving useless (but endearing, though she would forever deny such a feeling) feedback.

“Too cheesy,” he says.

“Says the guy who rhymed ‘moonlight’ with ‘heart’s flight.’” she snorted.

 “That’s poetry, Rumi dearest,” Jinu replies.

“That’s bad poetry,” she adds, even if she doesn’t really believe it. He was a hell of a good songwriter, and somehow a very good poet — his dominance over words is sincerely amazing, and Rumi doesn’t really know how to react to that.

They laugh after each pretend fight; real laughter, unguarded.

And slowly, the apartment that once felt haunted began to feel alive again. The air hummed with strings, the window light danced across the floor, and Rumi started sleeping without her nightmares chasing her awake.

Sometimes she’d forget he was a ghost.

And sometimes, when the music stopped and the world was too quiet, she’d catch Jinu watching her — that same searching look in his eyes, like he was still trying to remember something just out of reach.

But she didn’t ask.

For now, it was enough that they were here. That the songs had come back. That things were a little less out of tune, out of time, and out of life.

Rumi has made countless mistakes in life.

She can list them like scars — the ones on her skin and the ones no one could see. The wrong words said in anger, the right ones swallowed out of pride, the nights she stayed instead of leaving, and the mornings she ran instead of facing what hurt. All those tiny, ordinary mistakes that seemed harmless at first, that haunted so many more people, that piled up and weighed down eventually.

She has chased dreams until her lungs burned, fought for things that broke her, and fled from love whenever it demanded too much truth. Her life was a constant rhythm of fight and flight, of burning out and rebuilding, of trying to exist without falling apart. She had learned how to smile in interviews, how to laugh at parties, how to bury the ache of wanting something she couldn’t name.

And now — now she is falling in love with a ghost.

Because, of course, ordinary mistakes aren’t enough. She has to go for supernatural, surreal, unreal ones.

The thing is that it doesn’t happen all at once, of course. It comes in pieces, like verses of a song that only made sense when one reaches the chorus, and both the melody and the lyrics connect in one more connected, true and sincere thing.

At first, Rumi just likes his presence, the calm steadiness he carries, the way he doesn’t flinch when she went quiet or restless, and she grows used to it. She grows used to having him around, to getting a reply when she speaks, to wandering inside a room and seeing him floating with his back against the ceiling because he finds out he can do that and he finds it the coolest thing the world (she does, too, and wishes she could do it, too).

Then, before she even notices, Rumi starts looking forward to their mornings, to find him humming something by the window, sunlight spilling through him like a secret only she knows and no other set of eyes can ever see.

Then comes the afternoons — when they write together, half-serious and half-laughing, piecing melodies from fragments of each other’s thoughts, teasing stupid things about stupid memories and making regrets feel so much lighter, so much farther, so much more bearable for a human soul and a human body to carry.

Time moves differently with Jinu around. The days no longer blur into one another like static, and there was rhythm again.

And then, one day, they discover something strange.

Jinu could leave the apartment — if Rumi was with him.

They find that out by accident, really. She steps outside to throw out the trash, and he follows her to the door without thinking, arguing about something she pays attention to because it’s so ridiculous that she wants him to win the argument. Usually, the moment he reaches the threshold, he flickers and vanishes, reappearing back inside seconds later, and Rumi laughs for the sake of it. 

But that day, when she turns around to look why he stops talking, believing that he has vanished inside again, Jinu is still there.

Slackjawed, wide-eyed and outside the apartment. Rumi nearly drops the garbage bag in shock, and Jinu smiles the kind of grin that could melt entire winters.

And after that, they try again.

They go on late-night walks down narrow streets, blending into the quiet crowds. She has her earphones on so it’s less weird when she speaks to nothing in the street. Jinu looks around like everything is magic — streetlights, neon signs, old women selling tteokbokki, couples arguing at crosswalks and speaking on the phone. He asks endless questions about phones, cars, drones, playlists. She teases him for acting like a kid, but there is warmth in her voice she can’t hide.

Once, she catches him staring at a bakery window, eyes soft at the sight of people laughing inside.

“You used to like bread that much?” she jokes.

“I used to like being somewhere that much,” he says quietly.

Something about that stays with her.

As weeks become months, she notices how his shape has changed. He isn’t as transparent as that first day anymore — of course, he’s still faint around the edges, still more light than flesh, but almost tangible. He looks just within reach, like he is being pulled closer to her world with every song they write, every laugh they share, every note that echoes between them.

She tells herself not to think too much of it, but she does. Her mind has always had the terrible habit of working overtime.

And Rumi tells herself not to notice how beautiful he is — was? — with that slow, easy smile, that voice that could turn even silence into melody, the way he listens like everything she says matters for some reason. He is steady and sharp and kind, and she hates how her heart always finds a new way to trip when he looks at her too long.

They sit by the window late at night, guitar in hand (and Jinu floating in the middle of the keyboard, because they found out that he could play if he sort of ‘possessed’ the instruments), the city breathing outside. Sometimes, when he laughs, she almost forgets he isn’t alive.

Sometimes she swears she could feel warmth radiating from where he sits beside her — the illusion of it, the ache of it, the longing of her heart when he floats just close enough —, and sometimes, when she looks up mid-song, she finds him already looking at her, expression unreadable, soft and searching, as if he, too, is trying not to name something fragile between them.

But she always brushes it off, because how can she believe in something that isn’t even supposed to exist?

He doesn’t have a pulse, he doesn’t have a heartbeat. He could never hold her hand, couldn’t stay if she closed the door, couldn’t grow old or grow anything but shadows.

And yet — when she sings, he glows, and when she smiles, he shines. And when she looks at him long enough, she could almost imagine the impossible, that maybe, somehow, a ghost could love her back.

But she doesn’t let herself believe it, because it’s ridiculous. Because if there is one thing Rumi has learned, after all her mistakes and running and falling and failing, is that wanting too much always ends in loss.

And Jinu is already half gone.

It hurts, because Rumi had forgotten, for a long time, what it feels like to share silence with someone and not feel devoured by it.

And sure, at first, his presence had been a strangeness she tiptoed around — an invisible outline of a man she could hear humming to himself when he thought she was asleep, or sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching the rain blur the windows like a child trying to understand the shape of water. Jinu had no weight, no shadow, and yet the air moved differently where he stood, as if the world still remembered what it meant to make space for him.

Over time, the absurdity of his existence dulls into something resembling routine. She would wake up to find him sitting by her piano, his transparent hands hovering over the keys — almost, but not quite touching. When she burned her breakfast, he laughed softly. When she cursed at herself, he tilted his head and murmured something she couldn’t quite hear, but it made her chest ache in a way that wasn’t painful. The apartment became less haunted and more inhabited.

There are moments when she almost forgets. When the world feels normal again, as if it, too, has forgotten that he isn’t alive anymore.

When she strums her guitar and he listens with the kind of reverence no audience had ever offered, when she scrolls through her old notebooks — messy pages of half-finished lyrics and clumsy chords — and he leans over her shoulder to read and holds his breath, even though he doesn’t need to breathe, doesn’t need to blink, doesn’t need to be there. And yet, he is.

She starts showing him things she’d hidden even from herself. Her old photographs, burned edges and coffee stains, the letters she never sent, the band posters folded into drawer corners, relics of a version of Rumi that had once thought the stage could save her.

And the scars.

She doesn’t mean to, that last part. One morning she simply forgot to pull her sleeves down, and the light through the curtains caught the uneven skin of her arm. He looks at them for the second time, and now she doesn’t hide them after five seconds; Jinu looks at her arms not with pity, not with horror, but with a quiet awe that frightens her more than disgust ever could. For a long moment, she wants to cry. Instead, she laughs softly, shaking her head at the softness of his gaze.

He smiles, as if there was nothing better than knowing that her life wasn’t taken when the flames licked her skin, and he doesn’t say a word.

In the stillness that follows, something invisible shifts.

They begin to explore the city together, and Rumi’s heart is a weak thing. At first, she thinks it is cruel to tempt him with life he could never touch, but Jinu is too curious to stop or complain about anything.

It’s amusing, because he wants to see, he wants to learn. He wants to know what the world had become since he’d left it — the machines, the lights, the noise. He walks beside her through crowded streets, unseen by everyone else, eyes wide at every flashing sign, every busker, every street vendor shouting beneath neon skies.

It’s subtle that she realizes she is falling in love. It’s slow, terrible and beautiful.

It creeps in like a melody she doesn’t remember composing, a harmony she only notices once it is already there, everpresent in her dreams, nights and days. Every night she goes to bed later, because it hurts to let him fade into the dimness of morning. Every day she catches herself speaking to him out loud, even when no one can see him, laughing at jokes that belonged to no living voice. She tells herself it is loneliness — that it isn’t love, can’t be. Because love is built of touch, and warmth, and the promise of a shared heartbeat.

But then she turns, and finds him smiling in that way that makes the air itself shimmer, and she feels something flutter deep within her, something that had been sleeping for far too long.

He is becoming more solid, too. Not entirely, because he’s dead, but enough for her to notice. His reflection on glass lingered longer, his footsteps, once soundless, began to whisper faintly against the floor. And sometimes, when she reaches for something near him, she could swear her fingers brushed through warmth, not emptiness.

They compose together. It begins accidentally — her humming a melody, him echoing it with that low, velvet tone that doesn’t belong to the world anymore, and somewhere along that way, it sort of becomes a song. A good one.

From then on, the songs were born in twilight, half laughter, half ghosts of memory. Half a life, because he doesn’t have his, and she wants him in hers for as long as the impossibility of it all would allow her to.

Sometimes she thinks the music is what kept him tethered here, that every note is a small act of defiance against the laws of both life and death. She lies awake after he disappeared somewhere each night, staring at the ceiling, her heart pounding with a feeling too vast to name. The ache of it is exquisite; the truth of it was gory.

Love, she thinks, is a cruel, miraculous thing — and maybe this time, it isn’t supposed to save her at all.

It’s Jinu who convinces her to play a small gig in a club near her — their? — house.

He says it casually one evening, sitting cross-legged on the couch, a guitar resting in his translucent lap as if the world’s physics bent politely around him (it didn’t. He was sitting sort of right in the middle of the guitar). The idea slips from his mouth like something ordinary, like the suggestion of a walk or a cup of tea.

The words were a little louder in Rumi’s ears, though.

A gig. A stage.

The syllables alone make her breath turn thin, her pulse a wild thing in her chest. She had laughed first — too quickly, too loud — but the sound had cracked halfway through, collapsing into silence. He hadn’t teased her for it; he never did. Jinu only tilted his head with that patient, unreadable gentleness of his.

“You still love it, don’t you?” he asks. “You shouldn’t let it haunt you, too.”

That question haunts her for days.

She tries to outrun it, but Jinu’s voice lives in the corners of her mind — soft, persuasive, impossible to silence.

And perhaps that was why, weeks later, she finds herself standing backstage at a small, dimly lit club that smelled faintly of alcohol and lemon cleaner, palms sweating, throat dry, her stomach a chaos of knots and fluttering ghosts. The world buzzes beyond the curtain — the murmur of people, glasses clinking, laughter tumbling over low music. Every sound presses against her skin, and every breath feels like borrowed air.

Her reflection in the mirror mocks her — the old guitar strap hanging over her shoulder, the patched-up jacket she wore to hide the scars she can’t bear to show so soon after it sent her fleeing a much bigger stage, a structured life and career, her best friends and her own dream. Her hair is half-loose tonight, a lilac curtain to half her face, as if she can disappear behind it.

What was she thinking when she agreed to such a thing?

It’s been over two years since she’d stood before an audience and disappeared; a little more than one year since she knew Mira and Zoey kept tabs on her through Celine, granting her the space she never knew how to ask for. It’s been years since the fire that killed her parents, more than fourteen months since the crowd’s horrified gasp when her sleeve tore and her ruined skin caught the light. 

A long, long time since she’d run out, mid-song, into the rain that couldn’t cool the burning inside her. She hadn’t looked back then — she couldn’t — and now here she is, trembling all over again, her heart dragging her somewhere she isn’t sure she wants to go.

“Breathe.”

The voice comes from behind her, warm and low, like a note from a song she hasn’t realized she missed.

Rumi turns around, and there he is.

Jinu leans against the backstage wall, faintly luminous in the dim light — that quiet shimmer that always surrounds him, as if he was made of reflected moonlight instead of flesh. He smiles, and something inside her chest twists, sharp and tender all at once.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says. His tone is light, but there was something steady beneath it. Something anchoring. “You can step back and change your mind, Rumi.”

“You told me to,” she manages, a weak attempt at humor.

“I told you that you could,” he steps closer, careful as always not to brush against her, though she feels him anyway — a pulse in the air, a warmth that shouldn’t exist and perhaps is all in her head. “Because you can, Rumi. Not because you have to.”

Her throat tightens. She turns back toward the mirror, staring at the shape of her own fear.

“What if I can’t even make a sound?”

He chuckles — quiet, genuine — and she almost hates how much she loved it. 

“Then you’ll stand there, and breathe, and wait until you can. The world won’t end if you take your time,” he says. “It hasn’t ended so far. It won’t end now.”

But when she looks at him again, there is no irony in his expression, no ghostly detachment — only care, only the kind of belief that makes her want to be the version of herself he seems to see.

He comes closer still, close enough that she could see the faint shimmer of light within his eyes. Close enough that, if he was alive, she would feel his warmth.

“Do you remember the first song you ever sang on stage?” he asks. “With Mira and Zoey?”

Her lips part. 

“Golden,” she whispers.

He nods. 

“Then start there.”

The air between them hums, almost electric, and for a heartbeat she imagines what it would feel like if she could touch him — if her hand could reach forward, if his fingers could trace the edge of her sleeve, if she could anchor herself to something that isn’t slipping through time. But he is made of absence, and she is made of longing, and that is their curse to share, apparently.

Still, his voice steadies her.

“Close your eyes,” he tells her softly. “Inhale. Hold it.”

She does, and her lungs ache.

“Now exhale,” he instructs, and she does. “There. See? You’re still here.”

Rumi lets out a shaky laugh, though tears threaten to follow it. 

“Barely.”

He smiles again, faint but sure.

“Barely is enough.”

When the stagehand calls her name, she freezes. Her hands go cold, and her knees nearly give out. Jinu doesn’t move, doesn’t reach for her because he can’t possibly ever reach her, but Rumi felt his presence like a weight at her back, like gravity itself reminding her that even if she falls, the world would catch her.

 “Go on, Rumi,” he whispers. “The stage is yours.”

And she does. She steps forward, one foot after the other, and when she steps onstage, the lights hit like a memory of fire.

It isn’t supposed to feel like that — the warmth, the glare, the way shadows folded sharp across her vision — but it does. The spotlight burns down from above, and for a heartbeat, she forgets where she is, regardless of having that information hammering her brain for days on end. The murmur of the crowd melts into a dull roar, faceless and formless, just noise that presses in from every direction.

Her fingers hover over the strings. The old guitar feels heavy, almost foreign in her hands — the same one she’d sworn she’d never play again, the one she’d once thought she’d buried with everything she used to be and let collect dust.

The mic stands before her, tall and patient, waiting.

“Hi,” she tries, voice cracking through the sound system. The speakers amplify her tremor, send it ricocheting off the walls. A few people smile encouragingly from the dim crowd, but all she sees are eyes — eyes like flames, eyes like witnesses. Her throat tightens until she can barely breathe.

She can still smell the smoke.

She can feel the same things as years before, the heat curling behind the curtains, the bright flash, the awful moment when she realized it wasn’t part of the show. Someone had screamed, someone else had pulled a cable and made it worse, and then came the burning plastic, the collapsing trusses, the music cut off mid-note.

She’d been there, watching her mother reach for her, her father trying to get to both of them. She had been there, watching the world crumble in color and sound.

Her sleeve had caught, back then — a hungry flicker of flame licking up her arm before anyone noticed, and though it hadn’t consumed her completely, it left its marks and it left the pain. The fire had faded, but the memory hadn’t.

Now, under the gentle orange of the club lights, her skin crawls as if it is happening all over again. Her breath comes in fragments, and the guitar weighs a thousand pounds.

The crowd blurs, her ears ring, her pulse thuds like distant drums. Rumi’s fingers twitch — one wrong movement and she’ll drop the pick, drop the act, drop herself.

You don’t have to do this, she could almost hear Jinu say. But you can.

But he isn’t truly there, and she can’t see him, not in the corner of her vision, not near the sound booth. There is only the audience, quiet and waiting.

She looks down at her arm, where the skin is smooth and pink in patches beneath her sleeve. For a second, she feels twelve again, then sixteen, then twenty — every age that had ever tried to be brave and failed.

The lights brighten, like a cruel reminder. Her hand tremble, and the first chord never came.

A murmur ripples through the crowd, polite, uncertain. She swallows, mouth dry, and tries again, and nothing. Her throat refuses to open, and the sound won’t come.

She can feel it happening, the panic, the spiral, the familiar betrayal of her own body. The sound of rushing blood in her ears, her lungs folding inward, the cruel, small voice whispering you’re going to fail again.

She blinks hard, trying to hold herself still. Trying not to run, not to flee again, because there is no one other than herself to leave behind for good, this time.

Then there’s a sound, soft, steady, almost shy. From somewhere backstage comes a hum — low, resonant, a melody she knows but hasn’t expected.

Her head turns slightly, just enough to catch a glimpse behind the curtain, and there he is.

Jinu stands near the amplifier cases, faint and silver, like a reflection caught in smoke. His eyes are closed, his lips moving as he hummed — the first lines of Free, the song they’d written together on a rainy night when she couldn’t sleep and nightmares had come back mercilessly.

The tune slips through the air like a hand reaching out and, when Rumi hears it, something inside her uncoils.

Her fingers, still trembling, find the right position on instinct. The first chord of Free rings out, hesitant, quiet, and real like the song had felt from the moment they’d written it. The crowd quiets again, the murmurs dying down, sensing the shift.

And as Jinu keeps humming the melody, she finds herself singing.

“I tried to hide, but something broke; I tried to sing, couldn’t hit the notes,” she sings, her voice trembling and faltering slightly at the last words, the air around her quivering with the effort it takes not to crumble.

For a moment, it’s only her — small, scared, and steady in her fear. And then, from behind her, another voice joins.

Low at first, rough like the scrape of wind through leaves. Then clearer, surer, and present in a way that should be impossible.

Jinu’s.

His tone wraps around hers like light through fog, gentle but impossibly certain, turning the broken melody into something whole. The crowd stirs, not knowing what they’re hearing, not knowing how the sound seems to expand beyond the speakers, beyond the walls, until it fills every space that once held her silence, waiting for whatever it is that they imagine might happen next.

He steps out from the curtain.

He’s walking, but it looks more like he’s being pulled by the song itself. The air shimmers faintly around him, as though the stage can’t decide whether to accept his presence or reject it, but he keeps moving, drawn toward her voice like gravity.

Their harmony finds its place, and Rumi is so shocked to hear his voice reverberating around the place that the random staff coming forwards and handing Jinu another microphone — that he holds with his hand — falls into second in the list of importance. The crowd seems to hold its breath, and there’s something odd about it; their eyes find the very thing only Rumi’s could.

It is subtle at first, then overwhelming. The lights above flare, catching on something invisible, bending around him, and the temperature shifts; Rumi can feel it even through the adrenaline. Her pulse races, and the room feels alive — more alive than it should be.

The crowd’s clapping for the new addition to the stage fades into distant noise; all she can hear is the song.

When she glances sideways and turns her face around properly, she nearly forgets the words to the song that seems carved into her soul, because Jinu is different. The faint translucence that always lingered around him — that soft, ghostly blur — is gone. His outline is sharp, his hair moves slightly with the air conditioning, his shirt catches the colored lights of the spotlights, and his chest rises and falls. He’s breathing.

But she doesn’t understand yet. It doesn’t make any sense until the final chorus builds, the melody lifting them both into something fierce and golden and free. Her voice cracks once, but it doesn’t matter. He catches it, carries it, turns it into harmony.

And when they reach the last note — the one that always made her falter during practice, the one she’d never managed to hit without his ghostly hum guiding her — she doesn’t hesitate.

They sing it together, they breathe in the same breath, they share the same space. The sound blooms like sunrise. The audience rises to their feet, cheering, clapping, shouting, and she stands there frozen, dazed by the rush of applause and light and disbelief.

And then she looks at him properly, without any other thoughts running around her mind and her brain and her lungs and her heart.

Jinu’s right beside her now, smiling that same small, crooked smile she knows by heart — the one that always looks like he’s halfway between a laugh and a confession — and he’s beautiful. Beautiful, and the crowd’s noise is distant, muted, like underwater echoes.

Rumi’s heart stutters, and she moves before she can think.

Her hand rises — the same motion she’s made before, in quiet rooms, in hopeless attempts to feel him, to reach through the thin divide of what is and isn’t. Every other time, it passed through air. Every other time, her heart sank like stone.

This time, her fingertips meet warmth.

Her breath catches; the noise in the club disappears entirely.

She touches his face — real, solid, warm skin beneath her trembling fingers. He’s still smiling, but his eyes widen just slightly, stunned, almost fearful. She trails her touch down, barely daring to breathe, to his neck — and there it is.

A pulse.

She feels it under her thumb, steady and alive.

Her own pulse stutters to match it.

For a second, neither of them speak, neither of them move because they can’t. Jinu seems overwhelmed with what she can guess is all five senses coming together back at him, and Rumi can’t even understand what it is that she feels in her chest and under her fingers. They just stand there, the stage lights painting halos around their silhouettes, the crowd still roaring without knowing they’re witnessing a miracle.

Jinu’s chest rises, and she can see it — see him breathing, the rhythm syncing with her own.

Her lips part, but no words come. He looks down at her hand, then at her, and his expression — disbelief, wonder, something dangerously close to tears — is more than she can bear.

She laughs, soft and shaking, a sound caught between a sob and relief. 

“You’re—”

“I know,” he says, voice rough with something that feels like awe. “I think I am.”

And when the last of the song fades for good, the last applause swells like a wave, and all she can think — all she can feel — is that somehow, he’s tangible.

The song ends, but they don’t step back at first, almost turned into stone by disbelief and wishful thinking. They just stay there, suspended in the impossible, both of them shaking, both of them real.

For a second, there is silence — just the last note fading into the hum of the amplifiers, the weight of disbelief hanging heavy in the air. Then, like a sudden storm, the crowd explodes again.

They scream.

They cheer.

They are on their feet, clapping, whistling, stomping — the sound is enormous, crashing and rising until it feels like it’s shaking the walls.

Rumi stands frozen at first, blinking against the brightness, still feeling the warmth of Jinu’s skin against her palm. Her mind can’t quite catch up with what her body already knows. She can barely hear herself breathing over the crowd, but she can feel it — the pulse of life surging through her veins, through the stage, through every corner of the little club that suddenly feels as vast as the universe.

And then she laughs again. A shaky, disbelieving laugh that bursts out of her chest like something she’s been holding in for years. She looks out at the sea of faces, all lit by stage lights and phone screens, and for the first time in forever, she isn’t afraid of being seen.

She smiles — wide, radiant, unstoppable — and it’s like the whole room breathes with her.

She did it.

She did it.

Her throat aches, her hands are trembling, her eyes sting — but she’s standing here, guitar still heavy across her shoulder, heart still racing, alive and whole and full. She sang. On a stage. In front of people.

And she didn’t fall apart.

She glances to the side, looking for him — and there’s Jinu, a few steps behind her, staring at the crowd with the startled awe of someone seeing sunlight for the first time. His eyes are wide, his posture unsure, and when people start shouting for him, too — thinking he’s part of the act, a duet partner, a surprise guest — he flinches like he can’t quite believe they can see him at all.

The realization hits him almost as hard as it hit her.

Someone in the front row yells something about them being gorgeous, and someone else in the back yells for them to kiss. The crowd surges with energy, and Jinu steps back instinctively, almost spooked by the noise. His expression softens as his gaze finds hers — a small, apologetic smile, as if to say this is yours.

And before she can stop him, he retreats toward the wings, vanishing into the dim light behind the curtain.

For a heartbeat, she hesitates — torn between running after him and staying right where she is, in this impossible moment she’s waited years to reclaim.

Then she inhales deeply. The mic is still in her hand, the crowd is still cheering, and Rumi smiles again, brighter this time.

“Thank you,” she says, her voice trembling but sure. “Thank you so, so much.”

The roar that follows drowns out everything else. She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, laughs through it, and adds.

“It’s a pleasure to be here tonight, and I’m really thankful for each one of you,” she tells them. “The song you just heard is called Free. How do you like it?” she asks, and the crowd screams again. Rumi chuckles. “Then let’s keep going?”

The guitarist in the back — one of the staff musicians she’d barely met before the show — nods enthusiastically. The crowd screams louder.

She doesn’t even think before strumming the opening chords of a song she hasn’t dared to touch in years — one of theirs, one that used to belong to the band she left behind. For the first time, it doesn’t taste like guilt.

The audience sings with her, because somehow most of them know that song by heart, much like she does. Rumi can’t be sure they recognize her, but she doesn’t care — verse after verse, her voice grows stronger, steadier, clearer, until the sound fills the space completely. The people near the stage sway and shout the lyrics, and somewhere in the middle of it all, Rumi feels her chest expand with something fierce and boundless.

Peace.

Home.

Freedom.

She laughs into the mic as the last chorus hits, hair sticking to her face, breath coming fast, and it doesn’t matter. She could stay here forever — the warmth of the lights, the crowd’s heartbeat matching her own, the echo of something holy lingering in the air.

By the third song, she’s grinning so hard her cheeks ache. By the fourth, she forgets the scars beneath her sleeves.

She plays everything — old hits, half-finished melodies, a few songs from the band she once ran away from. She even makes fun of herself between songs, tells stories, forgets lines and lets the crowd sing them back to her.

They do.

They sing with her.

And when she steps back from the mic to listen, just for a second, the sound that rises from them isn’t just applause or excitement. It’s something deeper — connection, joy, the shared electricity of people who understand that they’re witnessing something being reborn right in front of them.

The last notes fade slowly.

She looks out into the lights and sees not a blur of faces, but life — laughter, noise, the pulse of the world she’d once been too afraid to join again. And maybe, she thinks, the world really has shifted back to the right axis — the one that spins toward light, toward sound, toward life.

Backstage, the noise of the crowd still trembles through the floorboards — a heartbeat that isn’t hers, but moves through her bones as if it were. Rumi runs, once she greets the crowd goodbye. She runs with her guitar still half in her hands, with her breath catching in her throat, with the applause roaring like waves crashing behind her. She wants to laugh and cry and scream all at once — she did it, she sang. The lights, the crowd, the voices all folding around her like something alive. She did it. For the first time since the world shattered, she stood on a stage and sang.

“Jinu?” she calls, already smiling, expecting him to be there — she can almost see his grin, the teasing comment that will come, the half-sheepish way he’ll admit she was amazing. “Jinu?”

But there’s no answer.

Her voice echoes, too small now in the empty, messy corridor of cables and shadows. The dressing rooms are all open, light flickering through half-broken bulbs. The walls are painted in tired colors, the air still smells like cheap beer and adrenaline, and yet—he isn’t there.

“Jinu?” she says again, quieter this time. Her throat closes around the word.

There’s a silence that stretches too long, too wide. Her hands shake.

Maybe… maybe she imagined it. The warmth, the pulse, the way the air had shifted around them. Maybe her mind, already teetering on the edge of something she doesn’t want to name, had conjured him whole — just for that night. A cruel trick of grief. The universe letting her see what she wanted most before taking it back.

Her knees almost buckle. She grips the nearest table, breath ragged.

No. No, no, no. Not this. Not now.

The thought tears through her chest. The memory of his voice — laughing, humming, whispering songs in the early morning — crashes into her. The last time she saw him fade, that empty stillness after his light had gone out. The fear. The silence.

“Please,” she whispers, choking on the word. “Don’t—don’t do this to me,” she calls, a little louder. “Jinu!

Her vision blurs. She’s calling him again, desperate now, voice cracking between sobs and disbelief. 

“Jinu! Oh, please, don’t do this,” she begs. “Jinu! Jinu, come on— come on, you can’t quit haunting me now!” she screams. “Jinu!”

The back door opens suddenly, and a rush of cold night air slides in, carrying the faint scent of fried dough and something spicy.

And there he is.

Jinu stands there, framed by the doorway, a little windblown and sheepish, holding two hotteok wrapped in paper napkins. His expression freezes for a second, and then he smiles, a moment later.

“They have a hotteok stand across the street!” he says, cheerful and sweet, lifting briefly the napkins. “Amazing, isn’t it? Turns out being dead doesn’t kill your appetite. God, I missed chewing—”

He doesn’t finish the sentence.

Because Rumi is already moving.

Her footsteps echo once, twice — then she’s in front of him, and she’s kissing him. Hard, desperate, trembling. The food drops from his hands, forgotten. For a moment, there’s nothing but the sound of her breath against his, the warmth of his mouth, the unbelievable, electric reality of him. He’s warm. His chest rises against hers. His hands, hesitant for a heartbeat, find her shoulders and pull her closer.

It feels like the world has been off its axis for months — years, maybe — and now, with that single touch, it’s right again.

Rumi kisses him again. Longer, deeper, slower this time — the kind of kiss that speaks in all the languages words fail to reach. She can taste the faint sweetness of the hotteok he’d brought, the salt of her own tears. Her fingers move instinctively, tangling in his hair, pressing against his jaw, needing to feel him, to make sure he doesn’t dissolve between her palms like before. He leans into her touch, his breath catching, the sound of it small and real and so achingly human it nearly undoes her.

For a moment, there’s no past, no ghost, no miracle — only the warmth of his mouth moving with hers, the shared tremor between them, the way their foreheads knock together when she pulls away to breathe. He laughs softly, a little dazed, and the sound breaks against her lips like sunlight breaking on water.

She holds his face in both hands, thumbs brushing over the curve of his cheekbones, the stubble that wasn’t there before. Her chest heaves; she’s laughing and sobbing all at once, the kind of sound that comes from somewhere too deep to control.

“How—” Her voice catches on the word, and she shakes her head, as if it might clear the fog. “You’re here. You’re here. How are you—?”

He blinks, as if the question surprises him too. His lips part, but no answer comes. Then he smiles — slowly, wide-eyed, trembling — and she realizes there are tears gathering in his lashes. Actual tears. He blinks again, startled, and a quiet, astonished laugh slips out of him.

“I forgot what this felt like,” he whispers, his voice unsteady, almost reverent. “Crying. God—” He wipes at his eyes with the heel of his hand, laughing through the tears now, a little incredulous. “It burns. It actually burns.”

Rumi laughs too, breathless and overwhelmed, and presses her forehead to his. 

“You’re such an idiot,” she says, the words breaking on a sob that turns into a shaky giggle. “You’re—God, Jinu, you’re—”

“Alive?” he finishes, softly.

And she looks at him. Really looks — the curve of his mouth still red from her kiss, the light trembling in his pupils, the pulse fluttering beneath the skin of his throat. Every part of him seems lit from within, the same glow that used to haunt her nights, except now it’s tethered to breath and heartbeat and warmth.

Rumi’s hands drop to his chest, fingers splayed over where his heart beats — strong, insistent, almost defiant. 

“You are,” she whispers, as if afraid the words might undo it. “How are you alive?”

He stares at her, still catching his breath — if breath is even the right word anymore. His chest rises and falls, but it feels strange, foreign, like remembering a language he once spoke fluently and forgot over time. His fingers twitch against her wrist, feeling the thrum of her pulse beneath her skin — alive, fevered, real — and then, tentatively, his other hand rises to his own neck.

The pulse answers.

It’s faint, unsteady, but there. There.

Jinu goes very still. His brow furrows, confusion darkening his eyes as he swallows hard. 

“I—” His voice cracks, soft, disbelieving. “I don’t remember dying.” He looks at her like he’s trying to piece himself back together, syllable by syllable. “Rumi, I don’t think I ever really did.”

She blinks, heart hammering in her chest, the words not quite making sense but feeling true in a way that makes her stomach twist. 

“What do you mean?”

He laughs, quietly, breathlessly — a little terrified, a little amazed. 

“I remember being alive, walking home,” his eyes dart somewhere far away, unfocused. “And then a light and… nothing. Just silence. Like the world stopped playing. I thought that was death. But maybe—” he swallows again, shaking his head slowly, eyes flicking back to her, “maybe I was just... caught in some sort of in-between.”

The words hang between them, trembling like a held note.

“A limbo?” she asks. “But why?”

He shakes his head.

“I don’t know,” he tells her. “There’s— there’s a lot— I was ready to sell my soul for success, for fame and for money,” Jinu continues. “Maybe— maybe something or someone, they— maybe they stopped that from happening.”

She blinks.

“And how—?”

“I was still there,” he murmurs. “Somewhere between the last chord and the next. Not gone. Just… I don’t know. Just waiting?” his eyes search hers, tender and bewildered all at once. “And then you sang.”

Rumi feels something break open inside her. A sound leaves her — part sob, part laughter — as she presses her palm harder against his chest, where the pulse grows steadier beneath her touch.

“Music lost its meaning to me,” she tells him. “Like it did to you.”

He closes his eyes, his hand coming up to cover hers — the one pressed to his chest. For a moment, they stand there in silence, and she feels the faint tremor of his breathing, uneven and real.

“Maybe music brought you back,” she says, her voice trembling with something like awe. 

“Or maybe—” he hesitates, eyes shining, “maybe you did.”

He lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh, but it wavers halfway through, turning into something softer.

The words fall heavy, tender, full of something neither of them can name. The air still hums faintly with the echo of the crowd outside — laughter, applause, life moving forward — but in that small backstage corner, time seems suspended again, as if the world is holding its breath.

Jinu exhales shakily. 

“When I was there—” he pauses, eyes darting somewhere far beyond the walls — “wherever there was, I couldn’t feel anything. I remembered songs, faces, places... but it was all flat, like listening to an old tape that’s losing its sound.” His throat works, voice low and rough. “And now—” he places his hand over his chest again, wonder dawning slow and frightened, “now I can feel my soul.”

Rumi looks up at him, her tears catching the dim light.

“I can feel your music,” he says, a trembling smile tugging at his mouth. “Our music. I can feel your voice, right here,” his fingers press lightly against his sternum, as though trying to steady the beat underneath. “It’s like my heart belongs to my chest again. Like it finally remembered where to live.”

Her breath catches — the kind of sound that is half prayer, half disbelief. The weight of his words folds around her, and she realizes how fragile everything is: this heartbeat, this second chance, this impossible miracle built on melody and grief and love.

“I used to think music was a transaction,” Jinu continues, his gaze fixed somewhere in the space between them. “You gave something — your time, your blood, your sanity — and it gave you back applause. Fame. Money. And I wanted all of it. I wanted to never be hungry again, never be small again,” he laughs softly, bitterly. “I would’ve given anything to have the world listen. And maybe I did.”

Rumi’s lips part, trembling. Her throat feels tight, as though every unspoken word she’s ever held back is pressing against her ribs. 

“I didn’t save you,” she says softly.

“You were the first sound I heard,” he admits, voice low. “After the silence. I didn’t even know who you were. Just a voice through the static, pulling me out.” His thumb brushes her cheek, reverent. “Maybe I wasn’t haunting you. Maybe you were saving me.”

The thought hits her like a tidal wave — this idea that all the pain, the sleepless nights, the haunting melodies she could never finish — all of it had been reaching for something, someone, lost between worlds. And somehow, impossibly, she’d found him.

“And we are free?”

She laughs through the tears — a wild, breaking sound that’s half joy, half disbelief — and then she’s kissing him again.

It’s not the desperate kiss of before, but something slower, deeper. A heartbeat and then another. He responds like he’s remembering how — like his body is rediscovering what it means to feel. The world narrows to the taste of him, the rhythm of shared breath, the music thrumming somewhere between them. When she pulls away, his forehead rests against hers, their breaths mingling in the fragile quiet.

And suddenly she realizes: her heart is pounding so hard it hurts. It’s a fierce, unrelenting rhythm that fills her ears, her ribs, her very skin — alive alive alive.

Her voice trembles when she laughs. 

“We are,” she says. “My heart. My soul.” She presses a hand to his chest, still feeling the answering beat beneath her fingers. “They’re free. And they’re yours too.”

His breath catches — a quiet, trembling sound that feels almost too human to be real. For a long moment, he just looks at her. The world narrows to the space between them, to the weight of her hand still resting against his chest, to the pulse that stutters under her fingers.

He raises his hand, slow, uncertain, as though afraid she might fade if he tries too hard, and touches her face. His thumb brushes the curve of her cheekbone, tracing the warmth there like it’s the most impossible thing he’s ever known. Her skin is soft and real, and it makes something in his chest twist painfully.

“God,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “I can feel you.”

Rumi’s eyes flutter closed, a quiet laugh slipping past her lips — half disbelief, half wonder. 

“You can,” she says, her voice breaking around the words. “And I can feel you.”

She reaches up, covering his hand with hers. His fingers twitch, startled, but he doesn’t pull away. Instead, she laces her fingers through his — and there it is. The warmth. The solidity. The tremor of life beneath skin that had once been light and air and nothing at all.

Her other hand drifts up to his hair, and she smooths it back gently, as though to prove it’s real too — the softness, the weight, the way his breath shivers against her wrist. Jinu closes his eyes, leaning into the touch. For a heartbeat — or maybe two — they just breathe each other in.

“How is this happening?” she whispers. Her thumb traces over his knuckles, grounding herself in every pulse, every spark of warmth that shouldn’t exist.

He shakes his head, his forehead barely brushing hers. 

“I don’t know,” he says. “But I’m not one to question good things.”

Rumi exhales shakily, a quiet sound that trembles between a laugh and a sob. 

“You’re really here.”

He nods — once, slow, certain. 

“I am.”

And she believes him. Not because it makes sense — it doesn’t — but because she can feel it. The rise and fall of his chest against hers. The unsteady rhythm of his heart under her palm. The tiny, involuntary squeeze of his fingers around hers, as if he’s afraid to let go.

Her laughter comes out wet, choked, unsteady. 

“This is insane.”

“Probably,” he says, and the way his mouth curves makes her want to kiss him again. So she does.

It’s softer this time — not the rush of before, but something that trembles with awe. His hand finds its way to the back of her neck, his fingers tracing the edge of her hairline. She leans into him, tasting salt and breath and something electric that hums just beneath the skin.

When they finally part, they’re both laughing again, quiet, disbelieving, teary. She presses her forehead to his one more time, and for a while, they just stay there, clinging to the absurdity, the miracle of it.

He breathes her name like a question. 

“Rumi.”

And she smiles, small and tired and full of light. 

“You’re real,” she says again, softer this time, like a promise.

“So are you,” he whispers.

And for the first time, it doesn’t feel like she’s talking to a ghost — or like she’s one herself. 

It feels like home, the city, the stage, her small apartment, his arms.

It feels like freedom, to exist in the same breath again.

For so long, she’d sung into emptiness — to echoes that never answered back, to stages that swallowed her voice whole. But now, when she exhales, he’s there. The air moves through both of them, shared, alive.

His hand stays on hers, their fingers still tangled, as if letting go might undo it all. Maybe it will. Maybe morning will take him back. But tonight— tonight the world has edges again, and they fit inside it.

“Stay,” she whispers, not as a plea, but as a truth already written.

He doesn’t answer verbally. He only nods, forehead against hers, as the silence folds around them — warm, infinite, alive.

And somewhere, between her heartbeat and his, the music begins again.