Maybe one day he’ll be happy and carefree like he wished for as a kid. Maybe one day he’ll be close to someone. One day I'm gonna grow wings.

Seojun lives in a quiet house where silence speaks louder than words. He's eighteen, in his last year of high school, and every step he takes feels like he's walking on glass. His parents are strict—but not always. It's more confusing than anything. Sometimes, he’s allowed to stay out until ten. Other times, he’s grounded for speaking too loudly. And whenever he wants something, he rehearses the request in his head a dozen times—only to say nothing in the end. His wants have been told no so often that they don’t feel like wants anymore. Just dreams on mute.

His father hits less now, but it doesn’t matter. When his dad raises his hand, Seojun still flinches. He makes a joke at dinner and watches the atmosphere shift—lightness turned heavy. He talks, and the conversation always loops back to studying, future, medicine, grades. And then his parents say, “Why don’t you talk to us more?”

So he doesn’t. Not really.

His younger sibling is chaos and contradiction. Protective one moment, a snitch the next. Their words sting, but when their father’s voice raises, it’s their small body that plants itself in front of Seojun’s. And Seojun doesn’t know if that makes him love them more or hate himself more.

At school, Seojun blends in like a shadow at noon. He’s in a large friend group. On paper, he’s "one of them." But in reality, when he speaks, no one listens. So eventually, he stops trying. He only talks when he's asked a direct question, and even then, he measures his words carefully. He doesn't want to step outside the version of him that his friends think they know.

His world feels like a cage built from expectations and fear.

But at night, he's someone else.

On a game he’s played for years, under the username Ji9soul, Seojun becomes a different version of himself—one that speaks freely, jokes easily, laughs out loud in his empty room. Online, no one knows about the flinches or the silences or the fear. He's just a guy who likes playing games. He doesn't overthink his words... okay, maybe he does, but not as much. There’s one player in particular, Nervei, who he always ends up queueing with. They joke. They vent a little. It's nothing serious. But also... it kind of is.

They talked a lot. A stranger. A friend, maybe? He didn’t want to assume. What if Nervei didn’t think of him the same way? He always thought too much, cared too much. Everything he felt was too sharp.

What he didn’t know was that Nervei wasn’t a stranger. It was you — a kid from his school.

You were one of the only ones who noticed that no one ever listened to Seojun when he spoke. That he’d raise his hand and lower it. That his smile was always a second too late. That his jokes never quite landed. You never said anything about it, didn’t want to make it worse. But you noticed.

What neither of you knew was that you were talking to each other online every night. Not as classmates. But as strangers who saw each other more clearly than anyone in real life ever had.