Work Text:
There was a wide window by his bed. Han Sooyoung knew it well, the way the glass panel hitched sometimes when she slid it open to let the breeze brush past her hair. The way the clean sill supported her elbows and her slouch. The way the moon shone quietly over the unmoving creases of blank hospital sheets.
Han Sooyoung had never been a restful sleeper, even on calm nights. Since the end of the end of the world, such nights occurred often.
She leaned even more into the sill. Her head was heavy like a sigh.
“Gilyoung and Jihye snuck around and changed their parts in the story. That was a pain in the ass to handle.”
Before her eyes, dust filtered in the moonbeams, fragile. Reminiscent of feathers.
“But you caught it, anyway, huh?”
Her chair was worn from the past hours—the past months—that she had spent in it. To the desk at her right was a laptop, still open and faintly glowing.
If she had the imagination of a reader, she could pretend that someone in space received her small voice, even if it took a thousand light years for it to get there. She could pretend that none of this was happening because that same voice had already reached a lonely back on the subway train from long ago.
Sometimes, it felt as if the distance between her and that moon and the distance between her and the bedside was the same.
“There’s still a lot I need to write.”
The words were unreasonably heavy; Han Sooyoung only said them because no one could hear her at all. Here she was on the second floor of a hospital room, looking out the window. Talking to the both of them. Like a damn sap.
The truth was that she had been young, too—long before she spent her teenage body’s life into ashy fatigue and that very teenage self burned every story trope to heart and cash novels.
When Sooyoung was a child, she had done this before. This gazing out at late night, wanting. A sour cliche.
■■■
“Ahjumma, you look tired.”
“Mind your own business, brat.”
Shin Yoosung didn’t seem offended and went back to placing fresh flowers on the small table by the bedside. Her school jacket brushed above those still, white covers. Damn kids and their growth spurts.
“Stepping outside for once would help,” Jung Heewon said from the other side of the room, very helpfully. “Get some fresh air, you know.”
“I do that. I don’t need it. Besides, I have the window open.”
The air was a little dry, though. Han Sooyoung set her glasses down and scrubbed her eyes with her palms, trying to find some clarity in the spots forming in the darkness of closed lids. Get it together, Sooyoung. Stop wasting time. Yoo Joonghyuk was waiting for her update.
Only Shin Yoosung and Jung Heewon were here at this hour. She half-wanted to shout at them to get out. She was also irrationally afraid that they actually would, and then leave forever, and then there would be no one to change the carnations by his bedside or bring her any more current news or recount their stories to her for the billionth time.
Besides, it was common for others to be in the room at this hour, all breathing in the same dull smell of antiseptic for the same single fool. Her day hadn’t been any different. She had been teaching, as usual. She came to the hospital room to write, as usual. Now, she kept staring at her fingers as if to make sure they hadn’t shattered like glass when she wasn’t looking.
Within Han Sooyoung’s bones lived a frail girl from two decades ago. The girl was so small at the time that even her desk was too big for her. She wondered how she managed to write so much back then.
She also already knew the answer, dug from deep within her heart, but she couldn’t bear to look at it—she placed it back, locked it away, and returned to mulling over her old writing, again.
Again, in her parents’ mansion, that small vessel shattering her bones over blots of ink: Yoo Joonghyuk died. Yoo Joonghyuk died. Yoo Joonghyuk died. And he died. Again, again.
She killed him so easily for years. Broke him in circles like a doll. Threaded him a lonely, mistrustful path with her finest sentences. So why now—even with all his companions giving her their every story, every input, every carnation by the bedside table—why couldn’t she write anything?
It’s simple, Sooyoung. She knew the whisper in the back of her mind was hers because it was mocking and bitter.
Han Sooyoung could not write a story where people loved one another.
She didn’t know how long she sat there, looking into the void of her empty screen, but a sudden sharp scraping noise almost made her jump. It was Jung Heewon rising from her chair.
They looked at each other from across the room.
“What is it?” She snapped.
Jung Heewon’s face remained unchanged.
“Nothing,” she replied. Her eyes were devoid of judgment. Looking into them, part of Han Sooyoung seethed.
Ever since their final regression—Sooyoung’s fight at the museum—they didn’t argue. No, that wasn’t right, either. It was Jung Heewon who didn’t argue with her, anymore.
Han Sooyoung hated it.
“Hey.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“What?”
“Yoosung left a while ago. I’m leaving, too, now.”
“Okay.” She didn’t mean to put so much bite into that response. “Bye, then.”
Jung Heewon paused by the doorway.
“It’s getting late,” she said.
Han Sooyoung’s head ached. Her eyes felt dry again. Maybe she needed to buy eye drops.
“I’m staying.”
“I know,” Jung Heewon said. “Your laptop hasn’t been on for a while, though. Want me to turn off the light?”
Han Sooyoung bit her lip.
“Sure. It’s making me sick, anyways.”
Jung Heewon nodded, flipped off the light. Plastic white-yellow blinked into heavy blue-grey, and Han Sooyoung was left staring at nothing in the hospital room.
She finally turned to the window again, where the moonlight spilled into her irises. Lee Hyunsung was the one who had opened the curtains this morning. No one had bothered to close them after the sun set, since Han Sooyoung sat right next to them.
When she looked back to her laptop, the world outside was still bright enough that her eye bags reflected clearly against the black screen.
She bit back a sigh. Closed the laptop, slid it to one side of the desk. She put her head down into the cool wood, just to rest her eyes. Just for a moment.
In the nighttime, Sooyoung never had any dreams. She didn’t know why it would’ve been any different today.
■■■
“I’m stuck.” It was almost a confession—to the moon, to the bed which it shone upon. She supposed those two were the ones who deserved to hear it the most.
“I’m stuck,” she said again. She wished she could feel the catharsis in voicing what she had been struggling with for days.
He would laugh at her if he could hear her right now.
Whenever he laughed, his starlit eyes always curved so softly compared to his stupid, bland face. She used to look up at him and become dumbfounded by that expression.
Yoo Joonghyuk wouldn’t laugh—not at her thoughts, not even as he carried his endless weight. Though he was a tall bastard, throughout all his rounds, he had been looking up at the same person, too.
Her body was in its thirties. Her joints ached. She realized she had been living for a very long time.
She had carved years out of nothing to write for one reader. She could hollow herself of a thousand more, spill thick ink over pages until they spindled into coherent sentences, and still, no one would know enough. Not of these useless moments in the dark, the hundreds of nights that hung over a worn hospital chair, laying in the defeated shadow of the IV drip.
No one would know enough. Who would write about this?
■■■
Yoo Sangah took her out for coffee the next day.
Because the shop wasn’t particularly busy, they found a seat by the window. Han Sooyoung supposed the wide-paneled sunlight would’ve been nice, but she was too busy slouching over her drink, discreetly trying not to accidentally nod off as she stared down at the wood-grained table.
There wasn’t much to see—Yoo Sangah’s tall coffee was halfway sipped. She probably enjoyed it. Meanwhile, ice cubes floated mindlessly in Han Sooyoung’s cup like melting glass. Beads of dew seeped into a ringed puddle at the bottom.
In the activity of Sunday morning, occasional shadows fell through the window. Pedestrians. The people who easily passed by Han Sooyoung never looked at her; after all, everyone in this world had their own lives to live.
“Heewon-ssi told me you were having trouble with your writing.”
Han Sooyoung leaned down and took a deep, refreshing sip of her drink before saying, “It’s none of your business.”
“Actually,” Yoo Sangah said mildly, “all of us are revising your writing with you, Sooyoung-ssi. It sort of is our business.”
She sighed. “It’s fine. I have a backlog of previous chapters, so Yoo Joonghyuk can still have consistent updates. Besides, I used to write for a living. I’ve been through some dry spells. I’ll get over this quick.”
In the end, her voice had a slight, loathsome tremor—she baselessly hoped Yoo Sangah didn’t notice. Idiot. She kept her head down and let the shadow of her bangs fall over her cup.
“Speaking of, you know I attended some of your classes. I enjoyed them a lot.”
When they first met, Han Sooyoung had hated overly genuine, overly kind people like Yoo Sangah. An archetype of comfort: the pure sort of person who would place her hands over another in grief and smile softly, even though she was grieving herself.
“Glad to see that a highbrow Murakami and Carver scholar can also enjoy discussions about web novels.”
“I like all types of stories,” Yoo Sangah replied easily. “Just like their readers, every author has such a distinct style and worldview. I’ve always enjoyed that about the craft.”
She grew quiet.
“I’ve also been reading more web novels, lately.”
“Good for you.” Han Sooyoung couldn’t help but regret her snappiness. She unclenched the fist she didn’t know she had been holding. Softened her voice. “What did you think?”
“I…” Yoo Sangah’s smile was a little sad. “During my time as his librarian, I understand why he never told me that what he read was Ways of Survival.”
“Besides the fact that he thought you were only work strangers?” They had gone over this before. “Besides him being an incredibly antisocial person?”
“Besides that. It was a story that he loved deeply, you know that.”
Han Sooyoung bit her lip.
“So he didn’t want anybody to judge that part of him. If they did, calling it cheap, poorly written—just a shallow web novel—they would be judging him, too.”
Yoo Sangah paused to finish her coffee.
“All of the Company… We’ve read many parts of your novel by now, even before I attended your classes.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that.
“So did you learn anything?” She finally asked. It felt like the variation of a question she had repeated many times.
“Well, I read those web novels the same way I would read Murakami. Or Carver.”
Han Sooyoung gave a half-hearted scoff. Yoo Sangah’s expression was almost playful. It softened again quickly.
“Readers love the story because it touches them,” she continued. “However, they also begin to understand the author who spent all this time toiling in the dark.”
Another bead of dew rolled down Han Sooyoung’s glass.
“You know this, too. But you wrote… Because, especially when you read it with care, beyond the feeling and intent, the story always inevitably tells you about the writer herself, doesn’t it?”
Her head jerked up.
“Don’t. It was never—I wrote it for him.”
“I haven’t even said anything, yet.”
Anyone else’s tone would have been malicious, sour. Yoo Sangah’s gentle eyes were different. Looking into that brown gaze, clear and honeyed from the sunlight, Han Sooyoung felt this was even worse.
“I know Kim Dokja’s feelings about Ways of Survival.”
Yoo Sangah’s expression was steady.
“Sooyoung-ssi, do you love the story you wrote?”
■■■
When she used to live in that mansion, those gifts that her parents piled in front of her room were never hers. She couldn’t even remember what was in them, anymore: over-the-top birthday cakes, loads of money. Guilt. Dull disappointment.
She had learned to keep this locked inside her heart, just like she locked herself inside her too-big, too-empty room—she had only wanted something of her own. Something that couldn’t be bought artificially. Something she could cling to tightly.
Han Sooyoung decided she wanted to create something with her own two hands.
Even as she said good riddance to that ridiculous mansion and became a writer online, one hundred percent originality was impossible. No one wanted to listen to the romanticisms of someone who was barely twenty years old. Rather, people desired to read about the type of love that they could pretend to understand. A satisfying conclusion to a life they couldn’t have.
And Han Sooyoung was a genius even when writing the unknown, so she delivered. Discarding a part of herself was just part of being an author in this day and age. Besides, through the hard times, she became a success. She got her own car. She was able to cut herself away from her parents and buy an apartment far away from that mansion.
Yet she had found herself, in her early twenties, leaning her arms against that new balcony of hers.
She remembered specifically choosing the place for its flashy city view, but she could only trace her vision up the bitter smoke that wisped from her cigarette into the stars.
The busy world glittered around an author who tonelessly took up smokes, her skin prickled by solitary air. In the end, despite building herself out of nothing, Han Sooyoung was still the type of person who gazed out alone at night.
■■■
Her sentences ran dry.
■■■
She wanted to hold a protest against herself and dig out the strong-willed person—the genius. The brilliant web novelist who faced fickle hate and raging impatience yet consistently barreled through scenes every day.
Even before that, she had spent thirteen years killing her soul for no other reader but him. Even if she hated those old scenes, she had always been able to persevere through her updates.
Sometimes, when she went to the hospital a little later than usual, she found the window by her desk had already been opened for her. Long ago, someone had left a blanket by her chair. She didn’t really know what to do with it. Mostly, she sat and stared at her screen, watching her own words blur in and out of her vision.
She listened to the others recount the story, again, a dozen times. A hundred. She typed with stiff fingers and somehow managed to update, because this time, it was Yoo Joonghyuk who made her heart twist and knot, who still needed to read her updates.
■■■
“Damn idiot.” The moon was used to hearing her complaints by now.
Even when she was younger, she was only ever familiar with a glittering sky. Stars and a moon. She never glowed like they did, luminous in their two different ways.
Because locked away in her millions of memories, she understood well the consequences of her cold actions. Leading the prophets, choosing her specific sponsor, agreeing to kill 1683—rather, already killing every version of the protagonist. This was how she lived.
Han Sooyoung was the way she was because she ruined the world. So she sat with her loneliness now. The truth was this: like the night, Han Sooyoung never had any light of her own.
Within his company, there had only ever been stars.
■■■
When Yoo Mia came to the hospital, they dragged two chairs by the window and watched the moon together.
“Oppa,” Yoo Mia said. “It reminds me of him. Don’t you agree?”
She replied, “Isn’t it past your bedtime already?”
Yoo Mia ignored the response. She didn’t take it personally. There were lots of nights when some of them couldn’t sleep well.
“Ahjumma.”
“What.”
“Look at the full moon.” What do you think I’m doing, you brat. “Isn’t it so round, like a cake?”
“Cake is too sweet for me.”
“That’s a lie, ahjumma. You eat candy all the time. Like a child.”
Han Sooyoung was an adult, so she didn’t dignify that immaturity with a retort.
“Ahjumma.”
“Hm?”
“Do you believe in fate?”
She looked at her hands.
“I’ve always made fate for myself.”
The dark room alit with a moon. The moon shining on an unmoving hospital bed. By the bed, the IV drip. The laptop that remained in the corner of her desk, even now.
“So in the end, that fate you’re working towards… you chose to eat the sweet thing.”
She looked at Yoo Mia. Shining black eyes gazed straight back up at her, curious and unflinching.
“You’re too much like your damn brother,” she finally said.
“If Oppa was here right now, I don’t think he’d like the language you use in front of me.” Han Sooyoung rolled her eyes until the childish tone until it became soft. “I hope he comes back soon.”
She hid a sigh. Out of the current company, Yoo Mia always made her feel the heaviest guilt. She and her brother were similar in that aspect as well.
“I also—“ Han Sooyoung shut her mouth. What the hell was she saying? It was the lack of sleep. She closed her eyes, massaged them.
“But if he were back,” she started again, “he’d sound just like you.”
Yoo Mia considered this.
“Ahjumma.”
“What now?”
“Why did Gilyoung and Jihye-unnie change their parts in the story you’re writing?”
“Because they’re idiots.”
Yoo Mia nodded. “Then why did they add all those extra lies? I don’t understand why it wouldn’t be better for us to be our true selves.”
She really was Yoo Joonghyuk’s sister, down to the expression and bangs. Her pigtails were very straight and even. Han Sooyoung wondered if someone tied them for her, or if she had done it by herself.
“Think about being a book character,” she said. “It’s tough for them when their every part is known: their inadequacies, their pathetic side, even their deepest fears.” It felt like she was in the lecture room all over again.
“But what Jihye and Gilyoung didn’t think about is how the reader gets attached. These things they want to change so badly are what make them cherished. Well—to be loved only if they’re known—some people wouldn’t like that, either.”
She turned back to face her front. She smiled wryly.
“Anyways, now imagine you’re the reader. You’ve grown attached to these characters that you know so well—they become part of you. So naturally, you want to read more about them. You might want to write about them. To make them happy, even if it’s just your own wish or fantasy.”
“Like throwing them a birthday party.”
It was a childish dream, just like living in a big house had been. These dreams were for people who hadn’t seen much of the world. Kids who thought something extravagant like big houses and birthday parties were a happy ending.
“Nah, those are cheap and cliche.”
And Han Sooyoung knew those the best, like a hypocrite. She finally admitted it: she had never been too sure what a happy ending really was, either. Not for herself, anyway.
“Oppa never had a birthday party. That’s why I thought of it.”
“Huh.”
“When he gets back, let’s give him one. With a cake and everything.”
He would throw a fit about the state of the cake, Han Sooyoung thought. And then shove everyone away from the kitchen to spend an hour baking one for himself.
“He can be appreciated in other ways.”
“Then you better help me buy him a gift when he comes back. I’m too young to have my own credit card.”
“Alright.”
A breeze ruffled through their hair. Side-by-side. Compared to the wide window before them, only the small silhouettes of their backs must’ve been visible in the hospital room, casting silver-lined shadows on the floor.
“Ahjumma.”
“Yes?”
“In this new novel you’re writing, aren’t you a character, too?”
Han Sooyoung paused.
She had one reader. He would learn himself that she was the type of person who had destroyed the world: even in a story, even in real life.
But it was unfair to voice those thoughts to Yoo Mia.
In the end, she let her heart quieten. All she could say was, “I guess I am.”
■■■
When she got home, she felt the compulsion to read her own old novel. She sat on her wide, unused bed and flipped the pages of her screen, without thinking about the cliches, the mistakes, or any of the plot holes. She read her own words from beginning to end until the sunlight crept across her blinds and shone onto the layers of dust on her bedroom floor.
■■■
After it was over, she put her phone down.
She did something selfish: she shut off her laptop and went outside. By herself. In the cool, morning air, she forgot about the classes that dragged her around, the papers she needed to grade. The fact that she would never be able to shake off the feeling that everyone would go back to looking at her with distrust. Her weariness. Her unfinished story.
The streets of Seoul she used to watch from above on her solitary balcony were full of life. The rush of cars made her hair sweep against her cheek. People’s faces laughed and frowned through the reflections of lively shop windows. Snippets of conversations floated past her like written words.
“Mom, I want this…”
“For that exam, did you get the question where…?”
“… glad you came, too. I had a good time.”
She ruined the lives of such families, friends, and couples. She made a world where they could be saved. The city built anew upon a forgotten apocalypse gave her this feeling.
In the end, she did not go back to her place or the hospital.
She found a bench and continued to watch the faces of strangers stream past her alongside distant clouds brushing the sky. The day seeped on. Under her unmoving figure and the changing hour, her shadow traveled along the concrete like hands on a clock. When her hands got cold from the setting sun, she put them in her hoodie pocket.
Inevitably, she met the night. The moon. Her old friends.
Han Sooyoung wrote for one reader. She had always known what he used to look towards in those dark times.
“Hah.”
It was never that she couldn’t create a story where people loved one another—she was just afraid to do so. Yet she wrote it all the same, from the very moment she woke up, ready to break her own heart, in her thirteen-year-old’s body. From the moment that soul had faded away.
She was writing it in these current years as well—would do it again in the future. Throughout this lifetime, through the end of it all, Han Sooyoung would create such a story.
The moon that glowed steadily above her: she also made this one with her own two hands.
■■■
“What do you think you’re doing? Don’t put the flowers so close to ahjussi’s face.”
“What’s wrong with putting them here?”
“You two, can’t you stop arguing? You’ve dragged this out for almost half an hour,” Jung Heewon interjected from where she was trying her best to comfort a morose Lee Jihye, who was hunched in the corner.
Han Sooyoung squinted at the words on her laptop, not bothering to look up at the ruckus. Nearby, Yoo Sangah peacefully swept the floor. Time passed so quickly—It seemed like only a few days ago she had been cleaning red fall leaves rather than stray blossom petals.
“Besides, that looks ugly there,” Lee Gilyoung said, after only a brief lapse of silence. “Give it to me. It should be on this side.”
“Does not and should not,” Shin Yoosung squeezed her fingers tightly on the vase, not giving any leeway. Despite the roughhousing, both of them were careful not to knock over the other numerous bouquets at the bedside, flower stems swaying in the breeze. “Someone like you wouldn’t have any appreciation for aesthetics.”
Just as their bickering began to heighten, the door swung loudly open.
“Hi, I brought snacks for everyone.” Lee Hyunsung raised a loaded plastic bag with cheer. His eyebrows dropped to a furrow when he saw Lee Jihye. “What happened?”
“Jihye-unnie failed her semester exams again.”
Han Sooyoung gave up on concentrating and slumped into her chair, sinking into the blankets piled on the back of it. “All of you, get out if you have nothing useful to contribute.”
“I think that’s a good idea.” Yoo Sangah had placed the broom back in the corner, and the floor had returned to being spotless. “It is getting late.”
Han Sooyoung was grateful as she gently ushered Lee Gilyoung and Shin Yoosung out the door until she suddenly turned around with a swing of cinnamon hair. “But the weather is lightening up. We should all go to the park sometime.”
“What, again?” They had just gone a while ago. At first, it had been depressing when the two absences were so heavily felt, but it felt like someone was always bringing it up, now.
“You don’t want to go?” Yoo Sangah shot a sweet, beautiful smile that made Han Sooyoung sweat. She hadn’t seen that scary expression in a while (“Sooyoung-ssi, mind telling me why I found you asleep on a random bench in the middle of the street?”), and she wasn’t eager to see it any more times.
Shin Yoosung poked her head back into the room. “Ahjumma, please? It’s spring break.”
“You brats. Just because I attend a few school-mandatory meetings for you, you think you can push me around,” she grumbled.
“You didn’t complain when Sangah-ahjumma took you to a cafe for the third time this month.”
Before she could even think of a comeback, the three of them bustled down the hall, the kids’ bickering growing distant.
Jung Heewon stayed to give Lee Jihye a pep talk, which involved a lot of terrifying, gun-ho back-slapping. Lee Hyunsung pulled a chair next to Han Sooyoung and read his scene over, posing small corrections with a calming voice. Spring stirred the window curtains.
But the sun set eventually. As the air cooled and the streetlights outside by the hospital’s path began to glow, Han Sooyoung waited until the three said their goodbyes.
When she was finally alone, she shut off her laptop. She turned to face the bedside that the moonlight always illuminated.
“They’re all doing well these days.”
That whole damn novel was because her small voice couldn’t reach far enough, couldn’t work like that at all. This whole time, even when she sighed at unmoving pillows or pinched slack cheeks, she had avoided talking directly to you like a heartbroken lover, because it hadn’t worked, because she needed to avoid the stupid cliche.
Now, no one else saw her, anyways. So she took a shaky breath. In the dark, she allowed herself to scrub her eyes on her sleeve, hastily, just once. Because no one saw her, no one would know.
■■■
When the cloud system broke, and she found that the story was out of her hands, she looked out the familiar, paneled window again.
An author knew her motifs well, though she never revealed their different meanings. This time, however, she wanted to properly acknowledge one.
There was a moon that had been one person’s sole light. He had long left the orbit of those who had bound him, a creation of his own accord. A luminous, silent space object that she couldn’t see anymore. It gave her enough comfort knowing he was there.
“You bastard,” Han Sooyoung said to the moon, one last time. “It’s up to you, now. You better do things right.”
She already knew that Yoo Joonghyuk would be fine.
■■■
Her footsteps echoed quietly up the stairs that the soft, blue daybreak illuminated with generosity. She had taken this specific day off, and it struck her that the hospital corridors were so different in early morning compared to late night: the air was milder, relaxed. It was as if the pains and fears from the prior day had washed away, clearing into a clean sheet of paper.
As she made her way to the second floor, she thought, a little wryly, that if you woke up, she would want the light flowing over these steps to be as gentle as today.
Han Sooyoung pushed open the door to a room full of people.
Before she could speak, Lee Jihye shouted right into her ear. “Surprise!”
A small bang went off, and strips of glittery plastic flew straight into her face. Lee Gilyoung, gripping the opened confetti streamer popper, gaped wide, but he made no move to run or apologize. In the corner, the elusive Lee Seolhwa hid her mouth.
“Hey!” Somehow, she couldn’t recover from her disorientation. Streamers limped off her nose. They were bright supermarket purple. “You two, don’t you think you got into enough trouble already from falsifying the novel?”
“That was months ago, Sooyoung-ssi. Don’t be mad at them.” Lee Hyunsung came over, smiling placatingly. “At least, not on your birthday.”
“Huh? I…” Something clicked in her head, and she turned to the other person smiling quietly behind her. “Sangah—“
“Just sit down,” Jung Heewon said, sounding smug.
“Huh?” She looked to see that they had rearranged some of the other hospital chairs, but her seat by the bedside had remained unmoved. The sunrise was spilling over it. She allowed the kids to take her hands and drag her there. As she sat down, more stray streamers brushed off her hair.
Before she could even say anything else, a pair of slender hands presented to her a round cupcake with yellow frosting. Yoo Sangah ceremoniously placed a blue candle atop it.
“We couldn’t find a whole birthday cake that was lemon-flavored, so we got cupcakes instead.”
She stared at the cake. Finally opened her mouth again.
“Why lemon?”
“Ahjumma always eats lemon lollipops,” Yoo Mia answered. Everyone else had moved over to crowd around her.
“It’s because she had a smoking habit,” Shin Yoosung added.
“Just because I prefer a certain flavor, doesn’t mean it’s the only thing I eat,” Han Sooyoung said belatedly. She wasn’t able to tear her eyes away from the cupcake.
Even as they started to sing happy birthday, she wasn’t able to look up properly. She counted the voices—everyone really was here in this small hospital room. She glanced at the window. On the cusp of a sunrise, the stars still hung faintly beside pink clouds.
To her left, on the bed: a pale, dreaming hand. To her right, in the sky: a distant, steadfast voyager. In front of her, a song.
Everyone was here.
“Make a wish!”
She made her wish.
When she did, the room became completely silent. With quiet breaths, they all watched the little flame wisp carefully into the air.
Jung Heewon was the first to clap her hands, breaking the sudden atmosphere. “Come on, it’s a party, let’s liven it up!”
They cheered as Han Sooyoung took the first bite. Confetti streamers fell from her head again. Lee Jihye popped five more just to be a nuisance. The adults watched in various degrees of amusement as the kids began arguing over the cake. Yoo Sangah placed a hand on her shoulder before joining the festivity all around her.
The wind carried their voices to the distant sky.
In the center of the party, Han Sooyoung stared down at the small, yellow circle in her own two hands, felt the creamy foam of frosting settle on her tongue.
“What a sour and bitter flavor,” she mumbled.
It was sweet, nonetheless.