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“Will you love a broken person?”
The question doesn’t merely slip past Yeonjun’s lips. It bleeds out of him, a ruptured, jagged confession torn from an infected wound he has spent years trying to hide.
He asked because the agony of silence has finally become more hostile than the terror of rejection. He asked because he is actively hunting for the blade—desperate for Beomgyu to finally look at the mangled, ugly geometry of his soul and admit the truth: that he is entirely unlovable. He wanted Beomgyu to give up on him, because the weight of being held by someone so pure is slowly suffocating him.
It is the cruelest hour of the night—the smothering, lawless expanse between three and four in the morning where reality warps and the shadows in the room seem to feed on his thoughts. Yeonjun lies paralyzed, trapped inside a body that feels less like a home and more like a tomb. They are sharing the same narrow mattress, their skin practically fused, yet Yeonjun is drowning in a solitary, freezing ocean. He is completely, utterly leached out, a phantom haunting his own life.
Beomgyu shifted, the sudden movement against the dead quiet of the room. In the pale, sickly sliver of moonlight cutting across the pillows, his features twist into a look of harrowing, localized devastation. “What kind of question is that?”
Yeonjun swallowed, the motion scraping against his throat like broken glass. “A real one.”
His voice is nothing but a brittle splinter, a pathetic sound that threatens to dissolve into a sob, but he forces himself to weaponize it. He needs to lay out the wreckage before they both choke on it.
“Can you actually love a machine that’s already been smashed to pieces, Gyu? Someone who doesn’t even possess the internal architecture to love you back without hurting you? Someone who drags themselves out of sleep every single morning, looks at the light, and instantly curses the fact that they survived the night?”
The air left Beomgyu’s lungs in an agonizing hitch—a sound so bleeding it feels like fabric tearing.
Yeonjun refused to look at him. He kept his eyes pinned to the ceiling, watching the darkness swirl like oil in water. “I am a localized disaster, Beomgyu. I don’t think people like me are built to survive love. It’s too heavy. I am a parasite—always taking too much, screaming too loud, occupying too much space. Or I’m a vacuum, entirely devoid of anything good.” He let out a trembling sigh that makes his ribcage ache. “I think I am a plague. I think I ruin every beautiful thing that dares to touch me.”
The silence that followed was excruciating, an imploding vacuum that threatens to crush them both. Then, Beomgyu breaks.
It isn’t a gentle movement; it is a desperate, feverish lunging across the mattress, a merciless closing of the chasm between them. He crashed into Yeonjun’s space, pressing their foreheads together with enough force to jar them, riveting Yeonjun’s trembling frame against his own. He pinned him there, hot breath mingling, refusing to let him retreat back into the abyss.
“You are not ruined,” Beomgyu breathe, his voice shaking that it sounds on the verge of shattering into dust. He is crying now, the tears spilling hot and unprompted onto Yeonjun’s cheek. “And you deserve to be loved. More than anyone else on this miserable, godforsaken earth. I wish to God I could pull my own eyes out and give them to you, Jjun, just so you could see the absolute miracle that you are.”
Yeonjun squeezed his eyes shut, but it’s too late—the dam has broken, and the tears are burning tracks down his temples. “And how do you see me?” he whispered, a desperate, dying man begging for a drop of water.
Beomgyu’s hands come up to frame Yeonjun’s face, his thumbs pressing desperately into his cheekbones, his grip almost bruising in its intensity. He held him like he’s trying to keep a shattering glass statue from falling apart in his hands.
“Like you hung every single star in my sky,” Beomgyu sob, the words bleeding directly into the microscopic space between their lips. “Like you are the alpha and the omega of my entire world.” He pressed his lips fiercely against Yeonjun’s forehead, a desperate, holy baptism in the dark. “And I will love you in every single fractured, mutilated version of yourself. Even the one that doesn’t know how to love itself. Even the one that wants to die. I will love you until there is nothing left of you but ash, Yeonjun. I’m not going anywhere.”
Inside Yeonjun’s chest, the last remaining pillars of his defense don’t just crack. They undergo a catastrophic, irreversible collapse.
But as the agonizing warmth of Beomgyu’s devotion floods his veins, a numbing, merciless truth poisons the comfort: Love doesn’t stitch a shattered soul back together. It doesn’t reverse the rot or mend the bone. It merely illuminates the carnage, casting a harsh, blinding light on every jagged, broken edge, and ensuring that when the final collapse inevitably comes, the splintering will hurt so much more.
The air atop the bridge did not merely feel cold but it felt like microscopic shards of glass suspended in the midnight fog, scraping against Yeonjun’s throat with every ragged breath he forced into his lungs.
For years, existence had not been a life, but a sentence. Depression had long since ceased to be an occasional visitor; it had calcified within his bones, an invisible, crushing architecture that rendered his limbs stagnant and his mind an endless, echoing cavern of dissonance. On the good days, he could master the masquerade. He could plaster on a smile, engineer a laugh, and weave a convincing enough lie to persuade the world and, in brief, delusional moments, himself that he was prevailing.
But tonight, the facade had disintegrated into ash. The world had bled entirely of its color, reduced to a suffocating, monochromatic void where the silence was deafening and the emptiness inside him possessed its own agonizing gravity. He was drowning on dry land.
He hadn’t sought out Beomgyu. The thought hadn't even materialized; to involve Beomgyu would be to drag him into the undertow. Instead, he had drifted like a ghost through the labyrinth of fractured streetlights until his feet brought him to the apex of the bridge. Their bridge. The skeletal iron framework where, a lifetime ago, they had traded innocent, starry-eyed promises about a future that now felt like a cruel mockery. Back then, the universe was vast and inviting. Now, it had shrunk to the width of a rusted railing.
Below him, the black water churned—an abyssal, liquid void.
Yeonjun gripped the cold metal, his knuckles turning a stark, bloodless white. His fingers trembled fractiously, a physical manifestation of the tempest tearing through his chest. He leaned over the expanse, staring into the dark, and wondered if the plunge would feel like falling, or if it would simply feel like coming home. Would the impact hurt? Or would the numbing tide instantly swallow the ceaseless, agonizing roar in his head?
He craved the erasure. He wanted to be unwritten, to dissolve into the ether as though he had never cast a shadow upon the earth.
“Yeonjun!”
The scream tore through the night, fracturing the silence like a mirror striking stone. Before the echo could fade, the frenzied, uneven thunder of footsteps pounded against the concrete.
Suddenly, desperate hands seized the fabric of his jacket, yanking him backward with a terrifying, primal strength. Yeonjun’s heels struck the pavement as he was spun around, stumbling into a collision with a heaving chest.
It was Beomgyu.
Beomgyu’s eyes were wide, blown-out pools of terror, glistening with a desperate glaze of unshed tears. He looked completely unraveled, a boy disintegrating under the weight of an unimaginable horror. His hands slid down from Yeonjun's jacket to chain themselves around his wrists, gripping so fiercely that the pressure bruised, as if he could physically bind Yeonjun to the mortal plane through sheer willpower.
“What the hell are you doing?!” Beomgyu was bleeding gasp, cracking entirely as he fought for oxygen. “Why are you here? Why didn’t you—” A choked, desperate sob caught in his throat, cutting off his air. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Yeonjun remained paralyzed, staring at the boy before him. The crushing weight in his chest seemed to expand, pressing against his ribs until it felt as though his heart would rupture. He tried to speak, but his throat felt lined with razor blades. When the words finally spilled past his trembling lips, they were nothing more than a fragile, broken exhale.
“I don’t think I can do this anymore..."
The universe seemed to grind to a horrifying halt.
Beomgyu froze, his entire posture stiffening as if he had been struck by lightning. The only movement was the uncontrollable tremors racking his frame. His fingers dug deeper into Yeonjun’s wrists, an agonizingly tight hold.
“You don’t want me?”
The words hit Yeonjun like a physical blow. His head snapped up, his clouded gaze locking onto Beomgyu’s face. “What?”
Beomgyu’s lower lip quivered brittly, a tear finally escaping to track a hot, glittering path through the dirt and sweat on his cheek. “You’re leaving me.” His voice shook with a devastating realization that Yeonjun was utterly unequipped to handle. “After everything. After every night I stayed awake just to listen to you breathe... after every time I held you together when you were falling apart... you’re leaving me anyway.”
An agonizing breath caught in Beomgyu's chest, his features contorting into a mask of agony. “What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life without you? How am I supposed to breathe?”
A spasm of pain ripped through Yeonjun’s chest. The realization crashed over him with the force of a tidal wave, blinding and brutal. In his desperate quest to silence his own suffering, he had succumbed to a terrible blindness. He had truly, deeply believed that his death would be an erasure. It would be a quiet removal of a burden from the world. He had never realized that his absence would not be a clean slate. Yet, it would be a catastrophic wreckage for the people that he cared and loved for.
He saw the horrific timeline flash before his eyes: Beomgyu waking up in the morning, reaching across the sheets for a warmth that no longer existed. Beomgyu sitting on their balcony entirely alone, staring at a sky that had lost its meaning, carrying the trauma of this bridge inside his chest like an open, infected wound that would bleed for the rest of his days. Yeonjun wasn't just planning to end his own pain; he was planning to pass the blade to the person he loved most.
Beomgyu’s chest heaved in shallow gasps. He was entirely at Yeonjun's mercy, holding onto his wrists like a drowning man clutching at a lifeline, silently begging for a reason to keep holding on.
Yeonjun swallowed hard, the taste of salt and ash bitter on his tongue. “I don’t know how to stay,” he confessed, the admission tearing out of him. It was the absolute naked truth. He didn't possess the blueprint for survival anymore.
Beomgyu let out a shaky, trembling exhale. Then, slowly, his hands released Yeonjun’s wrists. But they didn’t drop away. They slid upward, tracing the line of Yeonjun’s jaw, his palms cupping Yeonjun's cheeks with a sanctity so unfathomabe, a gentleness so overwhelming, that it shattered the last of Yeonjun's defenses.
“Then let me teach you,” Beomgyu whispered against the dark.
At those words, the artificial strength holding Yeonjun upright evaporated. His knees buckled completely, his body collapsing toward the asphalt. But Beomgyu didn’t let him fall alone. He went down with him, catching him in his arms, wrapping his body around Yeonjun’s fragile frame as they both sank to the cod pavement. Beomgyu held him as if he were willing to become a permanent fixture of the concrete, a human shield between Yeonjun and the edge.
Yeonjun buried his face into the crook of Beomgyu’s neck, his fingers fisting desperately into the fabric of Beomgyu’s hoodie, clinging to him as if he were the only solid mass in a dissolving universe. The dam broke. His chest-heaving sobs tore out of him—wrecked, gasping sounds of a man being dragged back to life against his will.
“I’m sorry,” Yeonjun choked out, the words muffled against Beomgyu's skin, wet with tears. “I’m so sorry, my love—I'm so sorry—”
“Don’t say sorry.” Beomgyu’s voice was entirely hoarse, buried in Yeonjun’s damp hair. He tightened his embrace, squeezing so hard it was difficult to breathe, locking them together in a desperate, unbreakable knot. “Just stay.”
His voice fractured completely on the final syllable, a weeping plea that echoed off the cold iron of the bridge. “Please.”
Yeonjun let out a strangled, weeping sound, his entire body convulsing against the man holding him. The storm inside his head hadn't passed; the darkness hadn't miraculously vanished. But as Beomgyu rooted him to the earth, his heartbeat drumming a fevered, stubborn rhythm against Yeonjun’s ribs, the terrifying pull of the water faded.
Beomgyu did not let go. Not when the wind picked up, not when the tears dried into masks of salt, and not when the first pale, fragile light of dawn began to fracture the horizon. He maintained his suffocating, desperate hold with a ferocious tenacity, his embrace hardening into a bleeding, unvoiced covenant: a promise that no matter how terrifying the wreckage of tomorrow proved to be, they would navigate the abyss hand-in-hand.