Sleep decided not to visit him that night, taking its cue from Kang Do-hyun. Jaemin's words, spoken into the soft darkness, had met with startled cedar, and then…
Nothing. The silence had been so absolute that Jaemin had wondered if his senses hadn't been playing tricks on him again. But the quiet had seemed to hold a different quality after that.
He had sat in the dark music room for a long time after, before eventually returning to his room. He had sprawled on his back on the guest bed, staring at the high beams and its view of the dark treeline.
It was probably for the best that Do-hyun hadn't responded. Jaemin knew, somehow, that it had been him. He still didn't know what he was going to say to him about the forced dominance of Do-hyun's Commands. Well-intentioned or not, it had been a violation, and Jaemin didn't know yet what to do with that, no matter how much he missed him.
But it had been a week since Jaemin had found himself in the Kang family estate, and Do-hyun had not appeared once. Not at a meal, not in a corridor, not as a shadow at the door, until last night. Nothing. Six days—seven now—in the same house and nothing, nothing except the ghost of his presence lingering in rooms he'd apparently vacated for Jaemin's benefit.
They would have to meet eventually. There were things that needed to be said, a reckoning for what had taken place between them.
He lay there until the sky had brightened, and, when he entered the dining hall for breakfast, was not surprised to find Do-hyun absent.
Both women looked up as he stepped in. "Jaemin-ssi," Ji-young greeted pleasantly. "Did you rest well?"
"Somewhat." He sat and nodded his thanks as Nakyung poured him a cup of coffee, then eventually said, "He was there. Last night. Outside the music room. I called out to him." He looked up at Ji-young, who was watching him. "He ran."
"Yes." She looked at him steadily. "He would."
Jaemin turned his cup in his hands. "Is that… Is that what he does? Has he always done this?"
Ji-young was quiet for a moment. Not evasive; considering.
"Since he was very young," she said at length. "When he does something he cannot account for to himself—something he cannot rationalise or explain away—he doesn't face it. He removes himself from it, and he waits until he has found a way to live with what he's done." She took a breath before adding, "It is not directed at you. It is directed at himself."
Was that what Do-hyun was doing? Was that what he was hiding from? When he had gone silent all of a sudden after their last concert before they had fled Seoul, Jaemin had thought it was because Do-hyun was avoiding him, trying to ward him off like a bad luck charm.
He swallowed. "And… How long does he usually take? To come back."
Ji-young hesitated. "Sometimes that takes a day. Other times… Other times, it takes longer. When his father passed, it was two weeks before we saw him at a meal."
"When he finds it? A way to live with it?"
"Usually." She paused. "He is very good at building structures around things he cannot bear to look at directly. Whether that constitutes living with them, is another question altogether."
Jaemin thought of the music room shelf, of the one folder Nakyung had said he'd never opened.
"And if he can't?" he asked.
Ji-young looked at him with her dark, patient eyes. "Then I imagine he stays outside," she said, "for as long as it takes until he's ready."
…
That morning, he sat at the piano for a while, hands in his lap, and let the room be quiet around him. The manuscript was still on the rest where he had left it the night before, Han-sol's last unfinished phrase pointing toward something it had never reached. He looked at it for a while without touching it.
Then he opened his own pages and read through what he had made.
It was rough in places. Several passages needed work—transitions that didn't yet know how to connect, a section in the middle that was reaching for something he hadn't found the shape of yet. But it was real. It existed on the page in his own hand, and it was unmistakably his, and that was not a small thing.
He was still sitting there, reading it through again, when Nakyung appeared with a thermos of something hot and two cups, which she set on the low table. Now that Jaemin had recovered enough, he was able to catch her scent of green tea and woodsmoke, a paradoxical blend of clean and sharp, with a warmer layering underneath.
"Omma told you the clean version," she announced without preamble.
Jaemin looked at her, startled. "Of what?"
"Oppa's avoidant tendencies."
"There's a… dirty version?"
"Yes." Nakyung filled one of the cups, then folded herself into her usual perch. "Did Oppa ever tell you about his ex?"
A flush started across Jaemin's cheeks. "I—well, no, he hasn't mentioned—When you said 'dirty version', what exactly were you referring to??"
Nakyung was uncharacteristically quiet for a moment, as though she were making up her mind about something.
"Oppa had a girlfriend, before," she said finally. "Gan Minseo. She was a friend of mine, actually—is, technically, though it's complicated now. They were together for three years. She was—she is—a good person. Patient. Gentle. Kind.
"But Oppa would do this thing where, whenever something went wrong, whenever he'd said something that hurt her without meaning to or even just felt like he'd failed at something, he'd just... close up. Not cruel. Not cold, exactly. Just… gone. Going somewhere inside himself that she couldn't reach." Her thumb absentmindedly stroked the rim of her cup. "And Minseo-unnie would wait, because she loved him. Eventually he'd come back to her, and things would be fine for a while. Until it happened again."
"Until she left," Jaemin said. It wasn't a question.
Nakyung nodded, staring down into her tea. "She used to say he was like a house with all the shutters closed. Perfectly maintained on the outside. No way in." She sighed.
"After she ended things, she told me, the hardest part wasn't the closing off. It was realizing he was never going to stop dealing with things this way unless someone made him realize what it cost."
She looked up at Jaemin then, gaze cool and direct. "She said she was too tired to be the one to do that all on her own."
Jaemin stared back. The loneliness he'd felt, those few days back in Seoul when everything had come crashing down and Do-hyun was nowhere to be found, came surging back. "Why are you telling me this?" he asked thickly.
Nakyung shrugged. "Because he's been missing for days, but you're still here. And because—" Something shifted in her expression, something younger than her usual composure, "because I liked her. I was angry at Oppa for a long time about it. And I'd hate for it to happen again."
The room was quiet for a moment. Jaemin stared down at the keys. He thought about six mornings of reaching across an empty bed. About cedar in the walls of a house where its owner refused to appear. About music played into the dark, and the sound of footsteps retreating outside.
"I'm sorry I said you were slow."
It took Jaemin a moment to figure out what she was talking about, but when he did, he laughed.
"You weren't wrong. Maybe that's the only reason why I'm still here," he teased.
She grinned back at him, relief clear over her shoulder. "Well, all our gates are locked, so I dunno how you plan to get out."
Jaemin shook his head, still smiling, and turned back to the piano. Then he placed his hands on the keys, and played a new passage, the one that had come from the direction the manuscript had given him. The one that still needed its ending.
Nakyung stayed to listen until dinner.