Chapter Text
“You’re safe now,” a low voice murmured through the white haze, the words soft enough to feel less like speech and more like something pressed gently into the center of Jisung’s chest. “No need to worry.”
He could not make out the face in front of him, only the blur of brightness drowning everything else in an eerie glow. It was blinding in a way that should have hurt, but somehow it did not. Somehow it felt warm. Jisung tried to open his eyes wider, tried to force the world into focus, but something kept him suspended in that strange in-between place, half-dreaming and half-awake, with the strange certainty that he was being watched over. A hand brushed across his forehead, light as a feather, as careful as if the person touching him was checking for a fever. The contact sent a ripple of comfort through him, so immediate and so tender that his body seemed to remember before his mind did.
“You’ll be okay,” the voice said again, this time farther away, already fading as if it belonged to another room or another life.
Jisung woke with a dull ache in his bones and the rough texture of his pillow pressed against his cheek. For a few disoriented seconds he did not know where he was, only that the room was dark and the air was cool and the mattress beneath him had gone stiff from too many restless nights. He pushed himself up with a sigh, blinking until the glowing digital clock on the wall came into view. 4:36 a.m. The numbers burned dimly in the darkness like a reminder of how little sleep he had actually been getting.
He let himself fall back against the bed, pressing the heel of his hand over his eyes. His thoughts were already too loud. They had been too loud for weeks now, ever since the start of his third semester, ever since the nightmare of his body failing him had settled into something permanent. College had been supposed to feel like a second chance. Instead it felt like a place where every hallway echoed with what he had lost. He missed sleep the way some people missed sunlight. He missed the easy certainty he used to have about his future. Most of all, he missed the version of himself that had once believed debut was only a matter of time.
The dream had been happening for years, always the same in its essential shape even when the details shifted. A voice in the dark. A hand against his skin. Those same words, repeated with impossible gentleness, as if someone was trying to keep him anchored to the world. Sometimes the touch was on his forehead, sometimes his cheek, sometimes the curve of his shoulder. Always warm. Always reassuring. Always followed by those eyes — bright, unnatural, almost luminous in the memory, as if the person behind them carried light inside his ribs.
Jisung had never been able to explain it. There had been nights before auditions, before performances, before the world cracked open and left him limping behind it, when the dream had come just before dawn and left him with the strangest sense of being steadied. He remembered one night in particular, back when his biggest worry had been whether his legs would keep him from making the cut in a trainee showcase. He had been so anxious he could barely breathe. Then he had dreamed of the voice, the same quiet promise, the same touch to his forehead, and when he woke he had felt almost rested. The showcase had gone well. The next one had gone even better. For a while he had started to think of the dream as a blessing, some odd mercy sent to him by a world that had otherwise never been generous.
Then the injury happened.
The doctor had said it in careful, clinical terms. Overuse. Strain. Damage worsened by repeated stress and poor recovery. Jisung remembered the room more than the words, remembered the terrible white sterility of it, remembered staring at the x-ray with the same detached horror one might feel watching a stranger’s life collapse. He had heard enough to understand what was being taken from him. No debut. Not the kind he had trained for. Not the kind he had bled for. The knee brace, the physical therapy, the months of walking too carefully and sleeping too little, had all become a cruel sort of afterlife in which he still had to keep moving while mourning the life he had lost.
By the time his alarm started shrieking at 6:45, he was already exhausted.
Jisung lurched upright, fumbled for his phone, and killed the sound before it had fully dragged him into the world. He stared at the ceiling for one long, miserable second and then groaned into the empty room. An eight a.m. class on the first day of the semester felt like a personal attack, especially for a mind already running on scraps of sleep and caffeine he had not yet earned. He dragged himself out of bed, brushed his teeth with one hand while checking his schedule with the other, and changed into a hoodie and sweatpants without thinking too hard about it. He had laid out jeans the night before, then stared at them for so long he had given up and chosen comfort instead. The fabric felt like a small kindness against his skin.
His roommate had already gone quiet in the other half of the dorm. Jisung didn’t mind that. Quiet was easier. Quiet did not ask questions. Quiet did not look too long at the way he guarded his knee when he climbed stairs. Quiet did not remind him that he was no longer the version of himself who could dance for hours and come home smiling.
He made his way to the kitchen, too tired to cook and too hungry to ignore it, and pulled a couple slices of milk bread from the fridge. He toasted them with the mechanical efficiency of someone only pretending to be functional, then stood watching them brown while his thoughts drifted back to the dream as they always did. It was irrational to be so haunted by something so soft. The voice had never frightened him. The opposite, actually. It had always felt like coming home to a place he had never consciously visited.
“Good morning.”
The voice startled him enough that he nearly dropped the toast.
Jisung looked up, blinking hard in surprise, and found his roommate sitting at the small table as if he had been there for hours. He was a broad-shouldered man with an easy face and a kind of calmness that made Jisung instantly suspicious, if only because people that composed never seemed to belong in his mornings. There was a duffel bag by his feet and a phone in his hand, the screen lit with something he had not yet finished reading.
“Was I being loud?” Jisung asked around a mouthful of bread, already embarrassed. “Sorry.”
The man shook his head, expression unreadable in the way some people were when they had learned not to waste their emotions. “You’re fine. I just wanted to tell you something before I leave.”
Jisung paused mid-bite. “Leave?”
The roommate nodded, then seemed to hesitate as though he were deciding how much truth to offer. “I’m not staying here anymore. My scholarship got messed up, so I have to move off campus for a while and take classes from home.”
Jisung stared at him, not entirely sure he had heard correctly. They had barely exchanged more than a few sentences since the semester began, and now this man was announcing his departure with the sort of apologetic seriousness normally reserved for disasters.
He watched as the roommate rubbed the back of his neck and kept talking, explaining something about paperwork and financial aid and his family situation, though Jisung absorbed only fragments. It was not that he was rude; it was more that his body was still half asleep and his brain had chosen the exact wrong morning to stop cooperating. By the time he looked at the clock again, it was 7:52.
“Shit.”
The word came out sharp and immediate, and Jisung abruptly stood, shoving the remaining toast into his mouth. He grabbed his bag, snatched up his phone and keys, and rushed toward the door with enough urgency to make his already sore knee protest.
“Everything works out, okay?” he called over his shoulder, more out of habit than certainty. He flashed the stranger a bright, practiced smile anyway, the kind that made people assume he was fine even when he wasn’t.
Then he was out the door, the hallway cold against his face.
The walk to campus was quicker than he would have liked and more painful than he wanted to admit. He had never expected the city to feel so indifferent at this hour. Students crossed the sidewalks with coffee cups in hand, already settling into their routines while Jisung half jogged, half limped through the morning air. By the time he reached the arts building, a thin sheen of sweat had gathered beneath his hairline and his chest was tight with the effort of not looking as behind as he felt.
Room 430: Experimental Film I.
He checked the sign twice, then the map on his phone, just to be sure he had not wandered into the wrong part of the building. The arts complex was unfamiliar enough that every hallway looked like the last, all polished floors and white walls and framed student work that made him feel vaguely under-dressed in his hoodie and sweatpants. He slipped into the auditorium only because it was the closest room and, thankfully, the professor had not arrived yet. Relief nearly knocked the breath out of him.
Jisung looked around for a seat and then stopped.
There, a few rows ahead, sat a man in a white button-down and pale trousers, his bright blond hair neat and his posture so composed it was almost unnerving. He looked like he had been arranged there rather than seated. There was something about him that made the room around him seem dimmer by comparison, as if all the light in the auditorium had chosen him and settled there. Jisung stared before he could stop himself. The sensation hit him with the force of recognition, a pull so sharp it made his throat tighten.
The man slowly lifted his head.
Their eyes met.
Piercing, almost otherworldly, with a brown so vividly intense it startled Jisung enough to go still. It was the same feeling from the dream, the same impossible warmth hidden inside a gaze that seemed to see too much. His pulse gave a hard, disbelieving beat.
Before he could think better of it, before embarrassment could save him, the words left his mouth in a startled blur.
“You’re the man in my dreams.”