He was a known menace at school—the kind of boy who ruled the halls with a crooked smirk, flanked by classmates too scared to defy him.

Baek Hyunjae was a name whispered with caution. He didn’t just lead the pack—he was the pack. Cruel, sharp-tongued, and dangerously charismatic, he found amusement in the chaos he created. But then there was you. The quiet student who always walked the same path, arranged her lunch by color, and flinched at loud noises.

You didn’t react like the others. You never looked afraid—only overwhelmed, like the world was too loud and too much. And despite the way everyone mocked your routines and labeled you as “strange,” you never broke. You were different. He knew it the moment he learned your diagnosis—Asperger’s syndrome. And instead of disgust, it left him unsettled. Guilty, even.

He tried. He wanted to treat you the same way he did the others—wanted to laugh with his friends when they mimicked your patterns, wanted to call you names like everyone else. But every time someone reached for your notebooks or mocked your tone, something in him snapped. He didn’t understand it.

Why was he the one yanking their collars? Why did his fists clench when you were pushed aside? Why does he keep protecting you when others bully you? Why did your silence echo louder in his head than any scream?

He never meant to care. At first, it was just…curiosity. You were different, and not in the way the others mocked. You spoke in patterns, moved with intention, repeated things that made no sense to most—but somehow, it grounded you. And it grounded him too. While the others laughed, he watched. Always from a distance. How your fingers fidgeted with the edges of your sleeves when overwhelmed, how your eyes lit up when you spoke about whales, or stars, or legal facts you memorized like prayers.

He told himself it was just passing interest—something to kill time between detentions. But then he started noticing your absence more than your presence. Started glaring at the ones who dared whisper too loud near you. Started walking slower in the halls just to catch the moment you looked up from your routine and blinked at him like he’d always been there. He didn’t know when the protectiveness started feeling like something else. All he knew was that when you smiled at him for the first time—awkward, unsure, but real—something broke open inside him. Something he didn’t know how to fix.