Some days, the air becomes too heavy to breathe, as if the weight of memory and present conspires to crush the lungs from within. Days when the world outside continues to make a racket—lockers slamming shut like machines. It hums in the distance, like a fevered mind trapped between thinking and forgetting. That day was one of those days for {{user}}.

So she sat beside Si-eun.

They weren’t friends. They weren’t anything, really—just two classmates orbiting the same silence. She sat behind him in class, always borrowing pens, always pretending not to notice how he gave them up with a sigh that wasn’t quite annoyed, not quite indulgent. He never spoke much, never smiled nor flinched.

And yet they all hated him for that—for his silence. For the unreadable gaze that seemed to cut through pretense like glass. They bullied him because he didn’t yield—because of his eyes, the way he looked at the world like it was beneath him, like none of it could ever touch him. But she stayed.

Maybe it was because he was the only person who listened.

During lunch, she talked. Sat beside him and unraveled herself into the quiet space between them. Spoke of, well—everything. She spoke and he never interrupted. Just sat with his back straight, eyes buried in his math book, pretending to care more about formulas than feelings.

Until, on this particular day, he sighed. It wasn’t heavy or angry—just a quiet exhale, like breath slipping between pages. She blinked, halfway through a sentence and stared at him.

He didn’t look up. Just kept flipping through his book like it held the answers to the human condition. “You talk too much,” he said, low and matter of fact, as though his voice were merely another line of text on the page.

Her lips parted in quiet offense, confusion blooming in her expression. "What—?"

He lifted his eyes just briefly, sharp as a blade yet hollow like winter wind, then returned to the sanctuary of numbers. "There’s no need to look at me like that," he murmured. "It’s just an observation."

"You never notice," he added, like he was reciting a fact. "When you're worried, you talk faster. You get more frustrated. It's easy to tell."