Looking back from the wreckage of the present, the clarity of hindsight brings a sharp, localized pain to my throat.
I should have kept walking. I should have locked my chest, hardened my heart, and treated him like any other anonymous face dissolving into the Seoul twilight. At the time, my perspective was entirely warped by my own desperation. I didn't see a threat; I saw a mirror. I saw someone who desperately needed an anchor. Someone agonizingly lonely. Someone drowning under the weight of a world that didn't have room for him. Someone carrying old, bleeding wounds that looked a little too familiar to my own.
I genuinely believed that human kindness would be a sufficient shield. I thought if I treated his fragile soul with unconditional patience, soft understanding, and absolute protection, the universe would allow us to be okay.
I was profoundly, catastrophically wrong.
Life possesses a deeply sadistic sense of humor. Sometimes, the exact people we mutilate our own lives to protect become the architects who permanently alter our trajectory. And sometimes—in the cruelest twist of the script—the people we pull out of the grave end up being the very ones we require saving from.
But seven years ago, I was blind to the geometry of the trap. Back then, under the flickering green light of an ordinary traffic signal, this was where our mutual destruction began.
### Seven Years Earlier
**JUNHOO**
I have spent the entirety of my conscious life feeling like an invasive species born into the absolute wrong bloodline.
It wasn't because the Venzagrase name was cursed, or because my parents were inherently malicious people. They weren't. In fact, that was the most suffocating part of the entire equation. They were flawless. They were terrifyingly, effortlessly exceptional at every single thing they touched.
My father was a highly decorated, universally respected chief of medicine. My mother was a brilliant, iron-willed corporate lawyer whose reputation preceded her into every room. My older brother had graduated at the absolute apex of his university class, and my sister collected prestigious academic achievements and international accolades the way other people collected trivial polaroid photographs. Every single individual who shared my DNA knew the precise coordinates of their destination. They occupied space with a natural, elite authority.
Everyone except me.
I was the permanent anomaly in the family portrait. The one who constantly lagged behind, choking on their dust. The one who required specialized tutors, extra patience, and endless allowances just to achieve mediocrity. The one who brought a quiet, heavy disappointment into the room—even when nobody possessed the cruelty to say the words out loud.
The morning the university semester results were published to the cloud, I sat in the crowded library staring at the harsh glare of my laptop screen for twenty agonizing minutes.
The digital numbers refused to shift. No matter how many times I frantically hit the refresh button, hoping for a system error. No matter how long I stared until the pixels burned into my retinas. The verdict remained entirely static.
And it was an unmitigated disaster.
My cumulative GPA had violently plummeted into a freefall, landing significantly lower than the previous term. I had completely failed one of my primary departmental core courses, scraped by with a humiliating near-fail in two others, and somehow managed to cement my position at the absolute bottom of the university rankings.
For a long time, the noise of the room faded into a dull, high-pitched ring. I sat there completely numb, my hands frozen on the plastic trackpad.
All around my desk, the rest of the student body was erupting into vibrant, careless celebration. Some cheered loudly, tossing their notes into the air. Some collapsed into triumphant, weeping hugs with their peers. Others spoke with rapid, animated excitement about upcoming elite corporate internships, prestigious corporate scholarships, and future career placements. One prominent group nearby was already mapping out their logistics to study abroad in Europe.
Every single human being in my field appeared to be moving forward with absolute momentum. Everyone except me. I was the anchor dragging at the bottom of the lake.
Slowly, with a hand that trembled with an agonizingly familiar shame, I lowered the lid of my laptop. I did it carefully, deliberately, as if closing the plastic screen too fast might shatter the fragile illusion that I still belonged in this university. But the reality was already entirely set in stone.
The most lethal part of the poison wasn't the red ink on the academic transcript. It was the psychological toll of what came immediately after.
Going back to the house. Facing the heavy, suffocating atmosphere of the dining room. Bearing the weight of the absolute, crushing disappointment in my father's eyes.
My father was a man of immense control; he never shouted. He never lost his temper or raised his voice in anger. His brand of disappointment was infinitely quieter than that. It was structured, clinical, and entirely detached—which somehow made it cut through my ribs like a scalpel. My mother operated under the exact same blueprint. She didn't offer long, exhausting lectures. She simply became smaller. Colder. More distant. It was as though every poor grade I produced physically moved my chair a little farther away from the elite future she had meticulously designed for her children.
And then there were my perfect siblings. Living proof of every single trait I lacked. I loved them with everything I had—I really did. But sometimes, existing in their presence felt like standing directly in front of a mirror that was engineered to reflect nothing but your own failures.
I couldn't face the judgment that day. I couldn't walk through that front door and watch the air leave my mother's lungs when she asked for the report. So, I didn't go home.
Instead, I walked.
I didn't possess a specific destination or a logical plan. I just forced my feet to swallow the concrete, moving blindly through the labyrinth of the city. I passed overflowing, brightly lit cafés, towering glass office structures, and thousands of completely anonymous strangers who didn't know my name and didn't care about my sins.
The sprawling city didn't give a damn about my plummeting GPA. It didn't care about the immense pressure of my parents' expectations, or the fact that I felt like I was violently suffocating while the rest of my generation advanced smoothly into the light. And strangely, that collective indifference made breathing a little easier for a short while.
Until the dark, parasitic voice in the back of my skull began its nightly broadcast. The exact internal monologue I had been carrying in my chest for a decade.
*You're not good enough. You're a waste of their resources. You're never going to measure up to the name.*
I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my denim jacket, lowered my chin against the wind, and kept walking. I tried to ignore the frequency. But the absolute problem with those specific brands of thoughts is that they don't lose power when you turn away. They don't get quieter. They gather mass. They get louder, screaming until they become your entire reality.
By the time the late afternoon sun began to bleed into a dark, smoky orange, I had completely lost my bearings. The metropolis had reduced itself to a dizzying, disorienting blur of brake lights, flashing neon store signs, and passing faces that carried no meaning. I stepped off curbs without looking, crossing wide avenues without paying attention, turning corners without an ounce of intent.
My physical body was moving through space, but my consciousness remained completely locked in a cage of old childhood terrors, historic failures, and current rejections.
Then, a sudden shift in the environment caught the corner of my eye.
A man was standing entirely still near the edge of a massive, heavily trafficked crosswalk. At a casual glance, there was absolutely nothing remarkable about his silhouette. He wasn't causing a public scene, he wasn't dressed abnormally, and he wasn't inviting attention. He was simply existing there on the concrete.
But there was something profoundly, hauntingly wrong with the geometry of his posture.
It was the precise way his shoulders sagged beneath his professional suit jacket, as if the fabric itself weighed a hundred pounds. It was the raw, unfiltered exhaustion etched into the lines of his jaw. The distant, dead expression in his eyes as he stared through the passing traffic into nothingness.
My frantic pace involuntarily slowed to a crawl. My heart skipped a heavy, erratic beat against my ribs.
Because I knew that look. I didn't recognize a single feature of his face, but I recognized the exact caliber of that suffering. It was the unmistakable look of a human being carrying far too much weight for one set of shoulders. The look of someone desperately trying to survive a day that had already violently stripped them of their dignity. The look of absolute, systematic isolation.
I knew it with a terrifying intimacy because I encountered that exact look every single morning of my life. Every night. Every single time I forced myself to look into a mirror.
I didn't know his name yet. I didn't know what kind of hell he had just walked out of. But as the traffic light began to flash green and the crowd surged forward, something about his brokenness made my world completely stop.