When the Clock Strikes|Pi Han Ul x Reader|

(S02) Chapter 41

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, staring at the dirt below our feet.

“You know,” he continued, “when I first found out you were… different, that you had powers—I thought maybe I could use you.”

I stiffened.

“Not in a cruel way,” he added quickly. “I was just… desperate. I thought Pi Yeonbeak had killed my mom. I thought Han Wool was part of it. I wanted to destroy everything connected to them.”

His voice grew quieter.

“And then there was you.”

He looked at me again, the sunlight soft on his face now—older, but still holding that fire I remembered.

“I thought I could use you to get revenge. I even started getting close to you for that. It was supposed to be tactical.”

Something bitter twisted in my chest, but I didn’t interrupt.

“But then I got to know you,” he whispered. “The real you. The one who picked up strays and left water bottles in forgotten hallways. The one who hid how strong she was, just to protect others from being afraid.”

He swallowed.

“And suddenly, you weren’t a weapon anymore. You were someone I wanted to protect.”

My breath caught.

“And Han Wool,” he went on, “I stopped blaming him when I realized the truth. My mom adored him. He was her favorite student. He would never… I was wrong about him. And I was wrong to use you like a pawn in my head, even if I never went through with it.”

We sat there, a silence stretching between us—heavy but honest.

“So,” he said after a beat, glancing sideways at me. “Are you two…?”

The question floated there, unfinished.

I took a breath. “We were something. Something soft. Something not quite finished.”

His eyes searched mine.

“I broke up with him,” I admitted. “Because I thought I had to end everything before someone else ended me first. But now…”

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t know anything anymore.”

He nodded slowly, his expression unreadable.

“I’m glad,” he said finally.

I blinked. “You’re glad?”

“That you’re still figuring it out. That means you’re not shutting down. That means you’re still fighting.”

I smiled faintly, then looked down at my hands again.

The wind moved softly between us, brushing the tips of the grass and lifting strands of my hair. Silence stretched long enough to be mistaken for peace.

Then—

“I liked you,” he said again, this time quieter. “Actually… I think I’ve liked you since high school.”

My head turned slowly, eyes meeting his, but he didn’t look at me. His gaze was on the horizon—where the sky kissed the earth in faded, tired blue.

“I never meant to,” he added with a weak laugh. “But you were just… there. With your oversized hoodie and those sharp eyes like you were constantly carrying the weight of things no one else could see. And I—I noticed that. I saw it before I even understood what I was seeing.”

He paused, letting the words settle in the space between us like dust on old photographs.

“I thought it was strategy. Getting close. Learning your habits, your strength, your patterns. But it wasn’t. Somewhere along the way, it turned into something else. Something real. And it scared the hell out of me.”

My heart stilled.

“I remember the first time you smiled at me—really smiled,” he said, finally glancing over. “My chest ached. Like my ribs weren’t built to handle something that pure.”

I blinked, biting my bottom lip to hold it together.

“But I also knew,” he continued, voice softening to something fragile, “that I wasn’t meant to be near good things.”

His eyes dimmed like dusk.

“My life… it doesn’t have a comma. Or a full stop. Not even an apostrophe. It just runs. An endless, jagged sentence no editor could fix. No break, no breath. Just chaos.”

He turned his head fully to me now.

“And you? You were poetry. Gentle in the places you didn’t show. You were healing. But I—I’m a storm that doesn’t pass.”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came.

“So when you and Han Wool found each other,” he went on, a shaky breath threading his voice, “I was relieved. Genuinely. Because he’s the kind of man who would bleed just to keep your hands clean. And I—I’m the kind who’d let your hands get dirty just so you’d survive.”

I looked away, blinking back something hot behind my eyes.

“That’s why I never said it before. Why I never came back to tell you everything. I thought maybe if you hated me, you’d be safer. I'd move on.”

He gave a half-smile, brittle as frost.

“But now you know. Now it’s out.”

I turned back to him, my voice a whisper. “And what do we do with that?”

He stared at me, then exhaled. “We let it be a scar. Not a wound. We don’t pick it open again.”

I nodded, slowly.

And somehow, that made the pain deeper.

Because sometimes, the hardest kind of love is the one you let go of before it ever had the chance to breathe.