Sunshine's POV
Twelve months.
That was what a year looked like when you were living it without the person who had somehow become the steadiest thing in your life.
It looked like 6AM alarms and lecture notes spread across a kitchen table that had never been used for anything this serious before. It looked like highlighters and case studies and falling asleep over constitutional law textbooks with my glasses still on. It looked like sitting in a lecture hall surrounded by people four years younger than me and deciding every single morning that I belonged there anyway.
It looked like video calls.
Every night without exception.
Sometimes he called from backstage. Hair still done, stage makeup not quite fully removed, the noise of a venue emptying out somewhere behind him. Sometimes I called from the library, voice low, laptop balanced on a pile of books, whispering so I didn't disturb anyone and completely failing because Min-ah said I always smiled too loudly when I talked to him.
She wasn't wrong.
Tokyo. Osaka. Bangkok. Jakarta. Sydney. London. Los Angeles. Cities I had never been to, cities I traced on my phone map after each call just to understand where he was sleeping that night.
He sent things.
Not often. Not dramatically. Just occasionally a package would arrive at my door. A scarf from somewhere cold. A book he had seen in an airport and thought of me. Once, inexplicably, a small cactus from a market in Mexico City with a note that said this reminded me of you at our first meeting.
I had laughed for ten minutes and then put it on my windowsill and watered it carefully every three days.
It was still alive.
I took that as a sign.
The video calls became the rhythm everything else organised itself around.
Some nights he was exhausted. Those calls were short. He would lie on whatever hotel bed he had landed in still in his stage clothes and talk to me with his eyes half closed and I would tell him about my week — a professor who reminded me of Director Han, a study group that met in a cramped café in Hongdae, a case I had argued so well the lecturer stopped the class to discuss it — and he would listen with that focused quiet he had even when he was running on nothing.
"Tell me more," he would say.
And I would talk until his breathing evened out and the call went silent and I would stay on the screen for another few minutes just watching him sleep before I ended it.
Other nights the calls lasted hours.
Those were the nights I held onto.
He talked about the shows. About what it felt like to stand in a stadium in London with sixty thousand people singing his words back at him in a language he had written alone at 3AM in a Seoul apartment years ago. About the strange specific loneliness of being surrounded by that much noise and still feeling quiet inside.
"Is that bad?" he asked once.
"No," I said. "It means you know the difference."
He had been quiet for a moment.
"You sound like a lawyer already," he said.
I had thrown a pen at the screen.
The year moved.
Faster than I expected and slower than I could handle depending on the week.
First semester examinations came and I sat in that hall with my pen and twelve weeks of evening lectures in my head and I wrote until my hand ached.
I passed.
Not just passed.
I called him from the corridor outside the results board. He picked up on the first ring because he always picked up on the first ring.
"I passed," I said.
The sound he made.
I pressed my phone against my chest and stood in that corridor and let myself feel it completely.
When I put it back to my ear he was saying Sunshine, Sunshine, are you there, tell me your score—
"First in the cohort," I said.
The noise from his end was loud enough that whoever was in the next hotel room probably filed a complaint.
Second semester was harder.
The coursework was heavier. The cases more complex. There were weeks where I lived at the library and survived on convenience store kimbap and sheer stubbornness.
But I did not quit.
Quitting had never really been something I was good at. He had figured that out before I fully admitted it to myself.
The calls kept coming. Every day. Even the week he had back to back shows in three cities in five days. Even the week I had three submissions due and barely slept.
"You look terrible," he said one night.
"Thank you," I said. "You look like you haven't sat down in a week."
"I haven't."
"Go sit down."
"You go sleep."
"I have an essay due—"
"Sunshine."
I closed the laptop at midnight. Slept for seven hours. Submitted the essay at 7AM.
Got a distinction.
I didn't tell him immediately.
I waited until the call that night and said it casually, mid-conversation, like it wasn't everything.
He went quiet.
Then he said, "Say that again."
"Distinction," I said.
Another pause.
"I love you," he said.
Just like that. Simple and certain.
I held the phone and looked at my ceiling.
"I know," I said softly. "I love you too."
And we stayed on the call for another two hours talking about absolutely nothing.
Kael's POV
Twelve months on the road taught you things that couldn't be learned any other way.
It taught you the particular silence of a hotel room in a city where you didn't speak the language and nobody knew your face outside the venue. The way exhaustion became its own kind of company. The way a sold out crowd in Sydney felt different from a sold out crowd in Tokyo even if the songs were the same.
It taught you that home was not a place.
I had always suspected that. Now I knew it.
Home was a video call at midnight. A voice telling me to go sit down. A cactus on a windowsill in Seoul being watered carefully every three days by someone who had named it Jae-won and refused to explain why.
She had told me that on a call in month four and I had laughed until I couldn't breathe.
She was first in her cohort.
I had known she would be. She argued like she was born to stand in front of people and make them understand things. She always had. In my office. In the boardroom. In that police station corridor where she had answered every question with the precision of someone who had been doing it for years.
She just hadn't had the room to do it properly before.
Now she did.
I had spent the last three months of the tour carrying something in my jacket pocket.
Something small.
A ring I had found in a quiet jewellery shop in Paris during a one day stop between shows. I had not planned to buy it. I had walked past the window and stopped and stood there on the pavement for a long moment and then walked inside and pointed at it without being asked if I needed help.
The woman behind the counter had wrapped it and handed it to me and said something in French that I didn't understand but the tone of it felt like congratulations.
I had been carrying it ever since.
Not because I hadn't found the right moment.
Because there was only one place I wanted to ask. One place that would mean what I needed it to mean.
And that place was Seoul.
**Sunshine's POV**
The last month of the year was the hardest.
Not because school was difficult. Second year examinations were approaching and the work was serious but I had found my rhythm. The library desk in the corner by the window had become mine. My professor had asked me twice if I had considered specialising in human rights law.
I had said I was considering it.
I was absolutely considering it.
The last month was hard because I could feel the end of the year approaching and I didn't know what to do with the anticipation. It was a physical thing. An awareness that something was coming that I had been waiting for without letting myself fully admit I was waiting.
I cleaned my apartment three times in one week.
Min-ah noticed on a video call.
"Unnie why are your shelves arranged by colour now?"
"They've always been arranged by colour."
"They have not."
"Goodbye Min-ah."
I ended the call.
Rearranged the shelves back.
Then arranged them by colour again.
KDX was still running smoothly — Director Han made sure of that regardless of what anyone else was doing. The new group from the second floor practice rooms had debuted while Kael was away and already had a fan following online. Life at the company moved forward the way life did. Steadily. Without apology.
I tracked the tour schedule the way I always had. Not because it was my job anymore. Just because it grounded me. Tokyo done. Osaka done. London done. Los Angeles done.
Seoul closing night was on a Friday.
I had the date in three different places in my calendar and had been pretending not to look at it for weeks.
He didn't tell me when he was landing.
I didn't ask.
I just waited.
**END OF CHAPTER 30**