Chapter Thirty-Eight: Taehyun's POV
The rain outside is a roar, but the silence inside the car is a scream. You're limp in my arms, a broken doll of wet silk and bone, and the world narrows to the faint, terrifying flutter of your pulse beneath my thumb. Your breath is a shallow, ragged thing, and every faltering exhale feels like another piece of my soul being torn away.
"Stay with me. Please."
The word cracks. I've commanded armies, ordered deaths, built an empire on unyielding will. But this one plea, whispered into the damp, cold shell of your ear, is the most powerless sound I've ever made. My hands are trembling—a violent, shameful tremor I can't control—as I push the sodden hair from your pale forehead. I'm begging a God I don't believe in, bargaining with a universe that's always been cruel. Blink. Squeeze my hand. Curse me. Anything.
You don't.
A silent scream detonates in my chest. No. No, no, no—don't you dare leave me.
Every beat of my heart is a drumroll of your name. My sternum is a cage of splintering bone, my lungs burning with air that carries no oxygen, only terror.
I get you into the passenger seat, arranging your limbs with a care that feels like a pathetic apology. My fingers fumble with the keys, slick with rain and my own shaking. The engine growls to life, but all I hear is the deafening void where your voice should be.
"You have to fight," I choke out, the words mangled by a sob I can't suppress. Hot, shameful tears cut through the rain on my cheeks. "Don't close your eyes. Don't give up on me. Not now. Not like this."
My gaze is locked on you, a hawk watching for the faintest sign of life. Your chest rising a fraction. The flutter of a lash. It's the only thing that matters. Because you are my gravity, and without you, I am just matter flying apart into the dark.
"Why didn't you tell me?" The whisper is shredded with guilt. It's not a question for you. It's an indictment of myself. "Why did you let yourself drown alone when I was standing right there?"
I curse myself. Every moment of inattention, every time I mistook your quiet strength for indifference, every second I was too wrapped in my own shadows to see you fading in yours.
My hands are vice grips on the steering wheel, knuckles bleached white. My heart is a frantic, wounded thing trying to beat its way out of my ribcage to reach you.
"I'm sorry." I say it to the night, to the slashing rain, to your unconscious form. "I'm so sorry. I never wanted to be the source of your pain. I just wanted… I just want you to come back."
The car is a projectile through the storm. Headlights tear through curtains of water, but all I see is the devastating fragility of your face in the intermittent glow of passing streetlights. All I feel is a desperate, clawing hope—a emotion so foreign it feels like dying.
"Please," I breathe, the final word a prayer torn from a place I thought had died long ago. "Don't leave me."
---
The hospital emerges from the gloom, a monolithic temple of sterile light. I skid to a halt at the emergency entrance, the sound of screeching tires lost in the downpour. I don't feel the rain as I lift you again, your body alarmingly light, frighteningly still.
I am a storm moving through the automatic doors. "My wife!" The shout is raw, stripping my throat. "She's unconscious! Help her!"
A flurry of blue scrubs descends. Efficient, impersonal hands try to take you from me. My arms tighten instinctively, a possessive, primal reflex. Mine. But this isn't protection; it's hindrance. With a agony that is purely spiritual, I force myself to relinquish you to the gurney.
My hand finds yours as they wheel you away. I hold on until the last possible second, my fingers entwined with your limp ones. "Come back to me," I whisper, a vow and a plea pressed into your cold skin.
Then you're gone, swallowed by swinging doors.
The world condenses to a waiting room purgatory. The beep of machines from beyond the wall becomes the tempo of my damnation. I pace, a caged predator, my heart a solid block of ice in my throat. Every minute is a lifetime of helpless, gnawing fear.
"Don't leave me," I whisper to the antiseptic air, to the ghost of your scent on my clothes. "Not now. Not ever."
---
The private room they finally lead me to is an affront. Too white. Too bright. A cruel parody of peace.
You lie in the center of it, small and devastatingly still. The fierce, biting woman who drew blood from my lip is gone. In her place is a porcelain effigy. Rain-damp hair dark against the pillow. A livid bruise on your elbow, a fine scratch on your cheekbone—a map of my failure. Your lips are slightly parted, trembling with some silent, internal struggle even in oblivion.
You look like you're being torn apart from the inside.
And I did this.
I was supposed to be your fortress. Instead, I became the siege.
I sink into the chair beside the bed, the leather groaning in the silence. Gently, so gently, I take your hand. It's cold. I envelop it in both of mine, trying to pour my warmth, my life, into you. I bend, pressing my forehead to our clasped hands. The posture is one of penance.
"Wake up," I murmur, the words vibrating against your skin. "Just open your eyes. Yell. Scream. Bite me again. Tell me you hate me. Just… don't be silent. Don't leave me here alone with what I've done."
The door whispers open. I don't look up.
"She fainted from acute stress and physical exhaustion," the doctor says, his voice carefully neutral. "Dehydrated. Minor abrasions. Physically, she will recover with rest."
I don't move. "Just stress?"
A hesitation, thick and telling. "Her body, yes. But…" His tone shifts, lowers. "There are indicators of prolonged, severe emotional distress. Sleep architecture is shattered. Cortisol levels suggest a system in constant fight-or-flight. The collapse wasn't purely physical. It has the hallmarks of a dissociative episode—a conversion disorder. The mind, under unsustainable pressure, simply… checks out. The body remains, but the conscious self retreats. It's a defense mechanism when the pain becomes inescapable."
I finally lift my head. My gaze is a blade. "What are you saying?"
"I'm saying her mind has built a wall to survive. Her body is here, awake or asleep. But she… she may be somewhere else. Trapped inside. And we have no way of knowing when, or if, she'll decide to come back out."
Trapped inside.
The words land like a death sentence. I look at you—the faint, involuntary twitch of an eyebrow, the shallow rise and fall of your chest. A living body. An empty house.
You're gone. And I locked the door.
---
Time loses meaning. It's measured in the steady, mocking beep… beep… beep of the heart monitor. Then, a miracle. A flutter of dark lashes against your cheeks.
My heart stops, then restarts with a violent, hopeful slam.
"Angel…?"
Your eyes open. Slow. Unfocused. They drift across the ceiling, then find the window. They slide past me without a flicker of recognition, without a spark of feeling, and settle on the blank wall. Then, with a languid, final motion, you turn your head away.
The world tilts off its axis.
You're awake. You're alive. But you have sentenced me.
You didn't speak. Didn't glare. Didn't sob. The complete, utter absence of you in your own eyes is a punishment so exquisite I feel my knees buckle. I have to brace a hand on the bed rail.
I force myself to move, to breathe. I lift the soft hoodie I brought—the one you steal from my closet because it smells like me. I place it carefully beside your hand on the blanket. "I brought you clothes. Your favorite socks. You always say hospitals are cold."
Silence. A silence so profound it has weight, texture. It presses down on me, crushing.
"I never meant to hurt you," I whisper, the confession pathetic in the vast, quiet room.
You shift slightly, a rustle of sheets. Your gaze remains fixed on that neutral wall, seeing nothing, seeing everything I've done.
It's worse than the fury. Worse than the biting kisses in the rain. This… this serene, absolute indifference. It's the void. And I am screaming into it, unheard.
I sink back into the chair, the fight draining out of me. I drop my head into my hands, the heels of my palms pressing against my eyes.
"I miss you," I admit to the quiet, the words broken glass in my throat. "And I deserve every second of this hell."