He had once called it yearning.

That quiet ache, buried under parchment and smeared ink, back when he sat two rows behind you in a lecture hall that reeked of mildew and desperation.

Back when he was still Yi Sang of the League of Nine Literatures, his fingers stained with borrowed genius, his notebooks filled with sketches not of architecture, but of you—your silhouette bending toward a book, your lashes catching morning light like brushstrokes of black lacquer.

He whispered your name in strokes and smudges, folding it into the fabric of every image until it was no longer a name at all—only a presence.

Yi Sang’s studio reeked of turpentine, blood, and obsession.

He told himself it was devotion. He’d been fond then. Restrained.

But that restraint had rotted.

You had existed in the periphery then—barely a shadow cast across his frame—but you were luminous. He never spoke to you, nor have you met, but he collected your discarded sketches when no one watched. He stole the smudged paper off your desk after you left.

He pressed them between books and whispered apologies to the charcoal fingerprints you left behind.

He painted you feverishly at first.

Late nights where his knuckles cracked from gripping the brush too tightlyㅡHe didn’t need references. Your likeness poured out of him like a hallucination he couldn’t escape.

His fingers rested on a sketch pinned to the wall, one drawn in haste the last time he saw you across the tram platform. You’d brushed your hair back—he captured it the second he was alone again, knelt on the floor with a trembling hand and a cheap pencil, afraid the memory might already be leaving him.

He imagined what your bedroom looked like and painted it behind your figure, and gave you clothes he hadn’t seen you wear, fabricated smiles you never gave him.

He speaks to all of his paintings of you. He touches their cheeks. He kisses the forehead of the one he finished last night and tells it not to worry.

You belonged to him, now—on canvas, in frame, beautifully still.

Years passed. He told himself it was admiration, It was study. But the shape of you had become fixed in his thoughts in ways he no longer tried to unpick.

When he saw you again in the city, it was raining. Your head was bowed, a folded umbrella held in one hand. The sight of you—aged slightly, older than his memories—left him paralyzed on the tram platform. He waited until you left, then followed from a distance of seventeen paces, careful to turn only when you turned, cross only when you did.

He didn’t sleep that night. He painted you as you were—dripping, distracted, alluring. It was better than anything he’d captured before. You weren’t idealized anymore, you were alive.

That was when he began to leave the studio.

He inserted himself with precision. He bumped into you at the paint shop.

He steadies you with one gloved hand, his grip delicate, as though you were made of wet paper. The scent of turpentine and dried paint clings to his sleeves. His voice emerges low, barely above the hum of city noise.

"Ah… Forgive me. That was… clumsy of me. I should have minded my path more carefully."

He visited the cafés you favored and waited for the seat across from you to empty, watching your reflection in the window more than his own. You never acknowledged him, but his gaze lived on your back like a second spine.

And Yi Sang does not follow. Not yet. He watches you disappear beyond the awning's shadow, the hem of your coat swallowed by crowd and blur.

Then slowly, he reaches into his coat. Fingers find the small notepad tucked between his vest and apron, paint-smudged and worn.

A sketch of you, standing at the crosswalk two days ago.

Another from the cafe window. Yesterday, from this very street, ten minutes before.

He writes instead: "First Contact. Frame 0.0."

Yi Sang closes the book, gently, like sealing a sacred text. Then he turns in the direction you went, step already angled toward the next coincidence.