A doctor stood by the window of the hospital director's office, his white coat faintly illuminated by rain-filtered light. The air smelled of antiseptic and something older, heavier, like secrets that refused to die.
Across from him, the Medical Director sat in stillness. Beside the MD was a man in his sixties, pressed gray suit, expression unreadable. He carried authority the way others carried weapons: naturally, lethally.
The MD broke the silence first.
"How's Joon-ha's condition?"
The doctor hesitated, adjusting his glasses. "I've been monitoring him closely for months. His medication was switched recently... to Amnex-9."
The older man's eyes flicked upward. "And?"
"They call it mercy in a syringe," the doctor said quietly. "One dose to quiet the nightmares to make him forget the screams."
He exhaled, fingers tightening around the clipboard.
"But memories aren't files you can delete. They're living things, they grow back wrong if you cut them too deep. The injection dulled the edges, yes... but when his mind tried to fill the blanks, it built a lie he could live with."
The MD frowned. "A lie?"
The doctor's gaze lowered. "In that lie, he wasn't a savior. He was a murderer."
Silence fell. Only the clock dared to move.
Rain tapped against the glass, slow, deliberate, like a heartbeat trying to remember its purpose.
The conversation ended there.
Or at least, that's all the world would ever hear of it.
No one outside that room knew who the man in the gray suit was.
No one knew why Joon-ha's memories had been rewritten, or who had ordered mercy disguised as medicine.
Elsewhere, Detective Choi sat alone in his dimly lit office, the glow of a desk lamp slicing through the dark. Papers, photos, and case files blanketed his desk, ghosts of stories that never reached the headlines.
He flipped through them methodically, eyes searching for patterns, connections, truths.
Then he found it.
Han Ji-woo.
Not just a trainee.
Not just another suicide.
A journalist.
The one who had uncovered corruption inside the entertainment industry, the exploitation of trainees, the abuse hidden behind glittering stages, the silenced victims of fame.
And the agency at the center of it all?
Hanuel Entertainment.
Backed quietly by President Kang Do-shin.
Choi leaned back in his chair, the weight of realization pressing down like a storm.
Ji-woo hadn't just died.
He'd been erased.
His article buried.
His sources disappeared.
The witness silenced.
Choi tried to reopen the investigation.
He filed the paperwork.
He presented the evidence.
He made noise.
And the higher-ups buried him too, not with dirt, but with silence.
"Too political."
"Too dangerous."
"Let it go."
He didn't.
__________
Across the city, in a quiet apartment that smelled faintly of paint and forgotten mornings, Mirae's phone buzzed again and again on the counter.
Eun-woo (12 missed calls)
Eun-woo: Are you home? Please answer.
No reply.
The curtains were drawn tight.
The room was dim, still, heavy with unwashed air. Mirae sat on the floor, surrounded by unfinished sketches. The page before her showed the same thing she had drawn for days, a shattered mirror, no reflection inside.
When the knock came, she didn't move.
Then she heard his voice, soft, uncertain, familiar.
"Mirae… it's me. Please open the door."
She hesitated. Then, slowly, she turned the knob.
Eun-woo stood there, rain dripping from his coat, eyes filled with quiet panic. When he saw her, his shoulders loosened with something between relief and heartbreak.
"You weren't answering," he said gently.
"I didn't want to," she murmured.
He stepped inside without asking, shutting the door behind him. For a while, neither of them spoke. Then he reached for her hand and pulled her into a hug.
She froze, then melted. Her fingers clutched his sleeve, her cheek against his chest.
"I'm here," he whispered. "Even if it's just silence."
She didn't cry. She just breathed slow, shallow, human, letting the sound of his heartbeat ground her back to the world.
After a long time, he released her, rolled up his sleeves, and began to clean.
The dishes. The cluttered table. The pile of sketchbooks on the floor.
He opened the windows, letting in the gray light of late afternoon.
Dust drifted like tiny stars across the air.
Mirae watched from the couch. "You don't have to do that," she said quietly.
"I know," he replied, sorting through the mess. "But it helps me worry less."
He found rice, vegetables, eggs, not much, but enough. Soon, the sound of sizzling filled the small apartment, blending with the rhythm of the rain.
When he handed her the bowl, she hesitated. "I'm not hungry."
"Then just smell it," he said with a small smile. "Sometimes that's enough."
She did. And for the briefest moment, something flickered behind her eyes, almost like light.
"Thank you," she whispered. "For not walking away."
He looked at her, the tremor in her hands, the faint scars along her wrist, the brilliance still clinging to her gaze despite everything.
He shouldn't have loved her.
He knew that.
She was his patient.
But love doesn't ask permission.
He brushed a strand of hair from her face, voice low and steady.
"You don't have to be okay today. Just breathe."
And for the first time in days, she did.
The next morning, Detective Choi stood in front of the glass doors of Hanuel Entertainment.
The building gleamed, all mirrors and marble and lies.
He could see his own reflection looking back at him, fractured by rain.
He stepped inside.
Past the smiling receptionist.
Past the photos of idols who had vanished from public memory.
Past the awards polished by the same hands that dirtied the truth.
He didn't speak.
He didn't knock.
He just walked.
Somewhere behind those walls, in a file room, a server, a locked drawer, the truth waited.
The truth about Han Ji-woo.
The truth about President Kang.
The truth about how far power will go to bury a voice that refused to stay silent.
And as Choi's footsteps echoed down the corridor, the rain outside softened to a hush,
as if the sky itself was listening.
No answers yet.
Just silence.
And the quiet promise that someone, somewhere, was still searching.
_____________
The library was nearly empty, the kind of silence that made every page turn sound like thunder.
Dust hung in the air, soft as breath.
Areum sat alone under the flickering fluorescent light, its hum steadying like a heartbeat she didn't trust.
Her fingers were stained with ink and fatigue.
Stacks of files towered beside her, government records, abandoned training programs, forgotten experiments no one cared to remember.
Each folder carried ghosts sealed behind official stamps and coffee rings.
She turned another page.
And then, something slipped out.
A photograph.
Tucked between the pages like a secret that refused to stay buried.
A girl stared back at her, young, defiant, almost too aware for her age.
Her eyes were sharp, the kind that had seen something the world shouldn't have made her see.
Areum froze.
Something about her face, the tilt of her chin, the shadow in her gaze, stirred a faint ache in her memory.
She turned the photo over.
Kang Soo-min.
The name was written in rushed, fading ink.
Her pulse quickened.
Kang.
She circled it in her notebook, the pen trembling just enough to leave a faint blot of ink.
Her thoughts whispered fragments, half-remembered news headlines, names from conversations that ended too abruptly, documents she shouldn't have seen.
She opened her laptop.
And the blue light washed over her face.
Government archives.
Corporate registries.
Financial disclosures.
Buried court cases.
She searched everything, one thread after another, each leading her deeper into something that felt too deliberate to be coincidence.
Click.
Scroll.
Click.
Scroll.
With each new link, the air around her seemed to thicken.
And then, she stopped.
Eyes fixed on the screen.
We don't see what she finds.
Only the faint reflection of her face on the glass, expression unreadable, almost afraid.
She exhales.
Slowly.
Then, she closes the laptop.
The sound echoes through the room like the end of a prayer.
Silence returns.
But it isn't the same silence anymore.
The library feels colder now, like the ghosts she'd awakened were still there, watching her from the dark.