By the time the front door clicked open, the black in my hair had dried, settled, and drunk the last breath of the afternoon light. I'd already caught myself lingering by reflective surfaces too often, testing angles, tilting my head—not out of vanity, but out of… confirmation. I looked different. Not louder, not sweeter. Sharper. Still me, but distilled.
I was curled sideways on the living room couch, legs tucked beneath me, phone dimming on the throw pillow beside me. The faint scent of dye clung to my shirt collar, threaded under Sejun's overachieving cologne. He'd vanished upstairs half an hour ago, probably updating a spreadsheet or researching the philosophical implications of "returning to one's roots," because that was the kind of absurd narrative he liked assigning to mundane acts.
The door creaked open. A warm gust of air, the shuffle of shoes. And then Seungyong's voice—melodic, scathing, amused, like a piano played with a razor blade.
"I knew something was off," he said. "The place smells like chemicals and questionable judgment. Roots finally got touched up?"
I didn't turn around, just deadpanned, "No. I was born this way. The doctor nearly cried."
He smirked, slow and slanted. "No, no, you misunderstand. I find it… avant-garde. Subversive, even. A daring return-to-natural aesthetic. A reclamation of the mundane. Truly groundbreaking."
I wanted to hit him with a pillow, but I didn't trust the way he leaned in—too conspiratorial, too ready to weaponize a whisper or a smirk. With Seungyong, proximity was always a gamble.
"You're insufferable."
He raised a brow. "I mean, it's not hideous. Just… startling. Like you woke up and chose to star in a coming-of-age indie film."
"Seungyong."
"What? I'm being honest."
"You're being a dick."
He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, appraising me with the clinical detachment of someone inspecting crime-scene evidence. His tone stayed dry, impersonal.
"It could've been worse," he muttered.
"I see. So you actually like it, you're just physically incapable of saying something kind without swallowing glass first."
He frowned. "That's not—"
"Seungyong Kang."
"Fine. It looks… better than before." He sighed, then looked away like even he realized the line he'd crossed, but not enough to apologize. He didn't do apologies. He just changed the subject and hoped you'd let the debris go.
"This isn't going to become a phase, is it?" he asked. "Where you start talking about self-actualization and buying overpriced incense?"
Something in his expression shifted when he finally met my eyes. Not softer—just less rehearsed. As if he'd forgotten to hold up the mask for a second.
I tilted my head so the black fell across my face like ink. "Observe carefully—Sejun helped me dye it because I wanted to feel more complete again. Maybe even feel pretty. There. You can psychoanalyze that all you want."
"Pretty," he echoed under his breath. "Well. I won't argue. But don't quote me."
I rolled my eyes. "I'll engrave it in stone."
Compliments from Seungyong always came wrapped in barbed wire—razor-sharp, beautiful, and meant to wound as much as they soothed. Maybe that was just how he translated care: cut first, soften later. A warning disguised as attention.
Still, when I ran a hand through my hair and watched the glossy strands slip like wet ink over my fingers, I couldn't stop the curl of a smile. Because if Seungyong—critical, callous, violently allergic to sincerity—couldn't look away…
Maybe I hadn't dyed it just for myself.
Maybe I'd wanted someone to notice.
And unfortunately for both of us, he had.
It was quiet again by the time the front door opened a second time.
Not stormy like Seungyong.
Not sugar-slick like Sejun.
Just… quiet.
Soft footfalls. The rustle of a bag being set down. The hush of someone who never needed to announce himself.
If Seungyong entered a room like he wanted the world to feel his disappointment, Haneul entered like he was afraid to disturb the dust. Even the air gentled around him. The room felt different—lower gravity, fewer edges.
I stayed curled on the couch, back turned, pretending to scroll my phone. But I heard him. I always heard him. The room repositioned itself to accommodate him.
Silence followed—sharp in its softness, almost aching.
I waited for something more. A word. A phrase. A sigh charged with meaning I'd have to dissect. But nothing came. He just stood there, seeing me in that way he did, like I was already known, already figured out, like he'd read the last page of a book I was still writing.
He approached quietly, then sat on the armrest across from me, eyes lingering on the floor. Haneul never faced things directly. He orbited them, careful, considerate, afraid of colliding.
"Your roots," he murmured, "it suits you."
The words were small but somehow enormous—more of an observation than a compliment. I wanted to ask what he meant by 'suits': my skin, my mood, the parts of me I thought I'd lost? Did it suit the quiet I sometimes wore like armor? Did it make me look less like someone performing and more like someone simply being? The version of me he used to watch quietly while the others laughed too loudly?
But I didn't.
Because Haneul didn't hold language like water—overflowing, abundant.
He held it like rare coins—intentional, heavy, precious.
And sometimes, the beauty was in what he didn't say.
Haneul was not one for explanatory generosity. He gave his words like rare coins—measured, polished, and heavy with intent. He made a soft sound then, half a hum, half the faintest approval. And although he didn't lean in to question why Sejun had been the one to retouch my roots instead of him, his eyes carried the kind of seeing that makes you want to unbutton your ribs.
For a second, I almost tugged at that silence. I wanted to pull him closer and force the question out of him—ask why he didn't ask, why he hadn't been the one to offer, if he thought I'd dyed it for attention or to hide. I wanted him to say anything, messy and clumsy and honest, so I wouldn't be the only one scattering sentiment across the room.
But I didn't. Instead I let my fingers run through the hair at my neck. The dye had given my strands a weight—a dense, familiar heft that felt like a coat you'd forgotten you owned and then put on and realized it fit better than anything you'd been wearing. It absorbed the light rather than throwing it back, and in its calm darkness there was a kind of relief: less spectacle, more belonging.
Seungyong lingered by the doorway, folding and refolding his opinion like origami, while Haneul sat with his quiet verdict. Both were different kinds of attention, one loud and edged, the other soft and taut. I liked that they noticed, even if they pronounced it with their respective brand of brutality. Maybe that was the point: I hadn't dressed or dyed for either of them. I'd done it because I wanted to stop having to explain the color of my days.
A crease of something like amusement crossed my face. If Seungyong—the man who critiqued the world like a thesis—couldn't look away, and Haneul—the one who hoarded words—could say so little and mean so much, then perhaps part of me had been hoping for those exact reactions. Not to be validated, exactly, but to be observed.
Haneul made a tiny, almost embarrassed smile and shifted his gaze higher, finally meeting my eyes for the briefest beat. "It's… good," he said, the way someone handing back a thing you'd entrusted them with might.
"Thanks." The word was small but true. It felt like an offering in itself.
Outside, the city went about its indifferent, noisy business. Inside, the apartment folded around us—half-finished dinners, half-read books, roommates in various states of being. My hair was black now, back where it had been before the sudden eddies of color, and it felt like a decision I could wear without ceremony. That didn't mean everything was simpler; it only meant some part of me had stopped performing for the room and started, at last, listening.
didn't even have time to process or react when the front door opened for the third and loudest time that evening.
Daeho entered like a human sunbeam, arms full, eyes sparkling, grin stretching halfway to the moon before he'd even set his feet down. "Hellooo homies! Guess who brought samgak kimbap—don't worry, I got the good kind, not the sad gas station ones."
I didn't need to look to know he was kicking off his shoes with reckless optimism, one foot against the other, the telltale rustle of convenience store bags announcing his approach. Then he spotted me.
"Aureal? Woahhh…" He froze mid-step, golden-retriever astonishment written all over his face. His eyes widened, his jaw slackened just a little too much, and the air seemed to shiver as the inevitable words tumbled out: "You did a touch-up on your roots!"
He said it like I'd grown wings overnight, like the dark-black crown of my freshly dyed roots was some dramatic transformation sequence brought to life. He plopped down between Haneul and me on the couch, sprawling with a casualness that only Daeho could pull off—head on my lap, legs draped across Haneul's. The contrast of his chaos against Haneul's measured stillness made me smile despite myself.
"Seriously," Daeho gushed, lifting a hand to run through my hair, "I know you've had pink for a while, but black? Oh man, it's… it's perfect. It just… clicks. Like, it's still you, but also somehow stronger. More… complete. You could keep it this way forever, and I'd never get over it."
His words were loud, effusive, and clumsy, but they landed differently than Seungyong's razor-edged critiques. Daeho didn't dissect or analyze; he exploded attention and affection like fireworks, and for once, it felt safe to bask in it. I let my fingers tangle in his, playing with his hair absentmindedly as he hummed in approval at the way I massaged his scalp.
"You really think so?" I asked, half teasing, half serious.
"I mean it! Like, actually," he said, eyes fluttering shut as he leaned back and let the comfort of the couch carry him. "You're glowing. Not literally radioactive glowing, don't freak out. But, like, you know… it just radiates off you. Black hair, sharp but soft, makes your face even more… I don't know, like you're exactly where you're supposed to be. It's cool, it's hot, it's nice, and also, somehow, it's just… you."
He shrugged, as if that explained everything, then added quieter, almost conspiratorial: "I'm glad you do things that make you feel good. Keep doing that, okay?"
And suddenly, the room shifted. Not in volume or color, but in the texture of attention. Beneath the energy, the theatrics, and the boyish grin was something quieter: genuine, quiet warmth that threaded itself into the couch cushions and lingered in the spaces between us. Daeho carried it in his posture, in the way he let his voice drop when he leaned closer, in the subtle timing of his words.
"I wasn't sure if I wanted to redo it," I admitted, tracing the soft curve of his shoulder with my fingers. "It was fading, and I thought maybe I'd just let it go. Let myself fade with it, maybe."
"But you didn't," he said firmly, nudging me gently. "You're here. With black hair. Looking like someone who could be the main character in her own story, not just a background extra. Do you feel better?"
I considered it. Part of me still carried shadows under my ribs, quiet, unresolved scars that refused to be polished by a new color. But there was something in the way Sejun's careful hands had worked on me earlier, the way Haneul had acknowledged me with a rare, unobtrusive nod, and now Daeho, with his bright, messy affection, looking like he could have painted the sky and still found time to notice me, that eased a weight I hadn't realized I'd been carrying.
"Yeah," I said finally, curling slightly closer into the couch cushions as if to absorb the energy of the room. "I think I do."
Daeho grinned like he'd won something monumental, his enthusiasm spilling over into the quiet, mundane apartment. The black hair at my roots, heavy, rich, and natural against my scalp, wasn't just a touch-up—it was a declaration of return, a claim on the parts of me that had been fraying. And for the first time that evening, with all three of them occupying the room in their very different ways, it felt like I belonged somewhere that had noticed me—not the dyed spectacle of pink or past choices, but the unassuming, unapologetic me.
Even Haneul, silently observing, offered a faint, approving smile. Even Seungyong, watching from the corner, said nothing sharp, only the slightest twitch of recognition in his expression. And Daeho? Well, he just kept grinning, like my roots weren't just touched up—they were alive, and so was the way they made everyone around me notice.
Daeho grinned, pressing his cheek against my lap as he adjusted himself on the couch. Then, as if suddenly remembering he'd brought provisions for a small army, he got up again. "Do you want me to make ramyeon? Or wait—have you eaten? You should eat. I brought that triangle kimbap you like. The tuna one with too much mayo. I know Seungyong hates it, but it's comfort food, right?"
"Thanks," I mumbled. Quiet. Genuine. "I love it."
That was when Seungyong re-entered the room. He stopped halfway through the doorway, wearing a look usually reserved for discovering a hair in his food.
"What the hell is this?" he asked flatly. Seungyong blinked once, then slowly took in the scene: Daeho stretched like a human throw blanket across two laps, me stroking his hair, and Haneul cradling his legs without protest.
He didn't say anything for a moment. Just stood there. Calculating.
Then he walked over with all the grace of a man too proud to admit he was feeling left out and too petty to let it slide. He climbed onto the couch—not beside us. Not near us. On us. More specifically, on Daeho.
He sat squarely on the middle of Daeho's torso like a throne, leaned back, and threw his arm over the couch behind me. His other hand stole a handful of popcorn from the bowl on the coffee table.
"You're sitting on me," Daeho wheezed.
Seungyong chewed. "You'll survive."
I turned to look at him, half in disbelief, half in horror. He didn't meet my eyes, but he was close. Too close. His arm brushed the back of my shoulders, resting behind me with casual nonchalance, as if he weren't currently using Daeho as a chaise lounge.
He didn't say another word. Just settled in. Possessive, in the way cats are—claiming space not out of affection, but entitlement.
Daeho grumbled beneath him. "You're doing this out of spite."
"Correct."
"Do you like sitting on me, or—"
"No."
"Then get off!"
Seungyong popped another piece of popcorn into his mouth and didn't budge.
And then, like a casual afterthought laced with venom, he said, "You know, for a guy who doesn't care—" he drawled, eyes still on the screen, "—you've been staring an awful lot."
I frowned. "What?"
"Nothing." He smiled, just not at me.
It was aimed past me. At Haneul.
Then followed a beat of silence so thick it felt like the air had stopped breathing.
Daeho grunted beneath him. "Seungyong, you're a menace."
I turned to look at Haneul, confused—but Haneul didn't meet my gaze.
His sketchpad was shut now, closed like a secret. His hands were still, his face unreadable. Marble-calm, like always, like nothing touched him. But something about the way his jaw set, just faintly… the way his gaze stayed on the screen a fraction too long…
Seungyong smirked again, but said nothing more.
Whatever had passed between them, I'd missed it. A glance, a flicker, a lightning bolt buried beneath the quiet. But Seungyong leaned a little closer, now fully content to stretch like a lazy cat along the couch, his presence too smug for someone supposedly watching TV.
And for the rest of the episode, I couldn't shake the feeling that something sharp was sitting just beneath the softness.
By the time Sejun came downstairs, the light had dipped low enough that the TV cast the only real glow across the living room. Daeho was still sprawled across my lap, humming faintly every time I absently combed through his hair. Haneul hadn't moved, but I could feel the tension in the way he kept his shoulders square and the lines of his attention sharpened—though his gaze stayed on the screen, not on Seungyong.
I turned my head before I could stop myself. He was still damp from the shower, droplets clinging to the soft hollow of his collarbones and catching the low light like tiny suns. His hair, darker when wet, curled slightly at the ends and dripped lazily against his temples. The towel slung around his shoulders looked like an afterthought, as though he'd nearly forgotten modesty and remembered just in time.
He didn't say a word, just caught my gaze and tilted his head a little, as though silently amused by the transparency of my attention.
I meant to look away, but I didn't. Sejun had that kind of gravity. The warm, golden, devastating in the gentlest kind. Even the way he walked over made the room feel like it was rearranging itself around his presence. He didn't sit, not at first. He looked at me, then at Seungyong's arm slung behind me like a warning sign.
Then he walked over—of course he did. He never stayed on the outside of things for long. He perched himself on the armrest of the couch beside me, casual and close, with his arm draped over the couch behind me, deliberately mirroring Seungyong's earlier pose.
This couch wasn't big enough for all the undercurrents it held.
And still I felt it: the subtle magnetism of male egos quietly warring in silence. Not a battle of words. Not a loud, showy thing. This was subtler. Calculated. Ancient, even.
Haneul, still unmoving, glanced briefly toward Seungyong, then Sejun. His expression gave nothing away. But the corner of his pencil-smudged thumb tapped once against his knee. A tell.
A stare here. A lean there.
Territory drawn not in conversation but in centimeters.
Seungyong tilted his head toward me, and I felt his gaze skim the curve of my cheek like a knife pressed flat. "You're popular tonight."
"I'm always popular," I murmured, more to myself than anyone else.
Seungyong's mouth quirked. Not a smirk. Not a smile. Something in between. Sejun's fingers flexed lightly along the couch, a breath of contact that didn't quite reach me. And me? I stared straight ahead at the screen.
My brain was slowly leaking out of my ears from the sheer weight of all the unspoken tension when, from the lap pillow of oblivion, Daeho let out a snort. It started small. A breathy sound. Half-choked. Then—
"Hah!"
Seungyong glanced down judgingly, and Sejun raised a brow. Daeho, eyes still closed, smiled lazily into the fabric of my pajama pants. "You two are so bad at this."
Seungyong's expression twisted into something that might've been offense or indigestion. "At what?"
Daeho cracked one eye open. "The subtle pissing contest."
I froze. Oh no.
"I mean," Daeho smirked, lifting a finger as if presenting indisputable evidence to a court of law, "I'm the one lying on her lap. Face in her lap. Her fingers are literally in my hair right now. Like, look at her. She's doing it right now."
My hand froze like I'd just been caught committing a crime. Everyone turned to look at me. Including Daeho, the traitor, who raised an eyebrow as if to say, Go on. Pretend this wasn't happening.
Haneul hadn't moved. But something in his gaze had changed. The tiniest up-curve of his lips. Not quite a smile. More like a silent acknowledgment that Daeho had just lobbed a grenade and sat back to watch it explode.
"I'm regretting every decision I've ever made."
"Too late," Daeho mumbled, yawning again. "You made your bed. And I made mine. It's warm, it's soft—" He shifted again, pressing a little more into my lap. "—and it's very pink-haired."
I looked down at him with the frozen horror of someone realizing they were, in fact, the bed.
Seungyong muttered something that sounded suspiciously like 'bastard', while Sejun leaned closer until I could practically feel the steam rising from his skin. "You could play with my hair next," he offered, his voice all sugar-laced suggestion. "It's soft. Smells like pomegranate now."
"I think I'm going to play with no one's hair," I said flatly, wishing the couch would develop a trapdoor function and drop me into a dimension where personal space still existed and men didn't behave like competitive houseplants jockeying for the sun.
Seungyong scoffed. "She wouldn't even enjoy playing with your hair, Sejun. It's damp. Clammy. Slightly pathetic."
"Says the man who sat on someone else's torso just to cop an arm around her shoulders like a cartoon villain."
Haneul still hadn't said a word, but I felt his gaze shift. For the briefest second, our eyes met—and his were unreadable. Quiet. Still. But beneath that, I saw it: the flash of something contained and simmering. A restraint that was holding back something heavier.
Like a shift in weather no one had checked the forecast for, Haneul moved.
Not slowly, not dramatically—just… efficiently. One second, Daeho's legs were draped across his lap. The next, they weren't. He pushed them off with a firm nudge, more graceful than annoyed, and rose in one smooth motion. Daeho let out an indignant noise halfway between a cough and a betrayed puppy's whimper, but Haneul didn't spare him a glance. His eyes were locked on me.
Then he stepped toward me. Not far. Not urgently. Just enough to make the corner of the room ripple at the edge of my vision, just enough that my spine stiffened under the weight of being noticed. He didn't speak. Of course not. Haneul's words were always rationed, delicately unsaid, parceled out like winter embers.
But he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. Gentle. Intentional. Reverent.
I didn't even have time to process the heat of his fingers before he leaned in—closer than he ever had before—and placed a featherlight kiss against the arch of my eyebrow.
As if that was something people did. As if that was normal. And the act on its own definitely wasn't, but even more so the fact that it was coming from freaking Haneul.
The contact was brief. Barely there. A ghost of affection that somehow short-circuited my entire brain like he'd pressed a self-destruct button hidden in my face. It didn't matter that he missed my cheek or my forehead or the textbook zones of casual intimacy. He went straight for the poet's choice. The strange, the specific, the unforgettable.
And then he smirked. Haneul smirked. Not smiled, not chuckled, not exhaled softly through his nose like he usually did when the rest of us were being unhinged. No. He smirked, and it was slow and almost sinful, like the expression had been simmering inside him for years and tonight, finally, he gave himself permission to let it surface.
There was a sound, like someone had dropped a pin into a sinkhole. Seungyong stiffened beside me, a frozen sneer halfway up his face. Sejun went unnervingly still, eyes narrowed as if trying to calculate the angle of impact and its implications. Daeho—still on my lap—craned his neck back so far I half-expected it to snap, his face a perfect portrait of bro, what the actual hell.
Then he said, in that soft, celestial voice of his, the one that usually sounded like it belonged to a shrine maiden or the wind passing through pine trees:
"I'm going to bed."
Then he left. Just like that. He ascended the stairs like a ghost in human skin, with the smirk still haunting the corner of his mouth, and not once did he look back. The lights above the stairwell haloed him. Of course they did. The world bent to his aesthetic like he'd paid off the lighting director.
Seungyong and Sejun froze beside me, mid-snark and mid-sass respectively, both with their arms still outstretched along the backrest, like dueling gargoyles frozen in time. Neither moved. Neither breathed. For once, their rivalry had been rendered moot.
Because Haneul had just outplayed everyone.
He hadn't nudged himself into my space like Seungyong had done with all the casual predation of a territorial cat. He hadn't draped himself around me like Daeho, using warmth and loyalty as a weapon. No, Haneul had walked in, kissed my goddamn eyebrow, and left.
Daeho twisted around from his half-supine position, stared at me, and said with complete sincerity, "Aureal.exe has stopped responding."
He wasn't wrong. I was sitting there, blinking like an idiot, my hands hovering in midair like I'd forgotten how to use them. My mind had left the building. My soul was somewhere between a full system crash and a blue screen of death.
It wasn't even technically romantic. It was just the way he'd done it. The deliberate care. The hush. Like I was a painting he'd finished and didn't want to smudge. And the look he gave me; soft, smug, knowing.
I pressed a hand to my face.
"Nope," I said out loud, voice embarrassingly high. "Nope, not thinking about it. Not now. Not ever."
"Too late," Sejun murmured. "It's already in your brainstem."
"I hate all of you."
I should've known better. You don't survive a man like Haneul. You just endure him, and pray your dignity lasts long enough to make it to your room before you start screaming into your pillow.
There was no salvaging the moment. Not when I could still feel the phantom warmth of that kiss lingering on my brow like it had been stitched into my skin. Not when Haneul had smirked on his way up the stairs like he knew exactly what kind of mess he'd left in his wake.