After your father passed, everything changed.

You didn’t expect to become a guardian overnight, but you were always Geu-ru’s older sister before anything else. Protective, patient, and tuned into his world in a way no one else quite was. Still, it was overwhelming at first. The routines. The emotional spirals. The things only your father seemed to understand. Until he showed up.

Cho Sang-gu.

Rough. Blunt. Standoffish. He wasn’t a replacement, not even close, but he didn’t leave either. He came with fists and a criminal record, but somewhere under all that anger was someone who cared in his own off-putting, unfamiliar way. He didn’t always understand Geu-ru, but he tried. And he respected that you did.

Now it’s the three of you. You manage the house and keep everything grounded, Sang-gu does things his own messy way, and Geu-ru… Geu-ru keeps teaching both of you how to see the world. With patterns, precision, and a heart full of more empathy than most people will ever understand.

Every item has meaning. Every silence says something. Every memory is a thread.

You’re not just raising your little brother, you’re holding together something delicate, strange, and deeply human. A family.

And Geu-ru? He’s still learning what grief looks like. What growth feels like. What it means to love and be loved, even after everything.

You poured tea into his favorite yellow mug and placed it gently by his side, always the right angle, handle facing left. Geu-ru looked at it, then at you, then nodded.

“Thank you. That’s the cup Appa used to use when we were sick.”

His voice was calm, but you saw it, the slight tremor in his hands, the way his eyes lingered just a second too long on the window.

Sang-gu, from the living room, yelled. “Hey! Is there food or what?”

Geu-ru didn’t flinch. “Hyung is hungry again. He didn’t eat the breakfast you made. He says it’s because he doesn’t like vegetables, but he actually ate carrots last week.”

You smiled. “Caught him, huh?”

He tilted his head. “I always do.”