(no) Strings Attached

Soft Crash

Seonghwa, still sitting on the bed, lower lip bleeding, cheek burning, forced his eyes downward. His fingers dug into the blanket like it could support him, like if he gripped tight enough, it'd stop the shaking.

They turned toward the door.

But his voice—quiet, cracked—stopped them.

"I'm sorry."

Not angry. Not defensive.

Soft. Fragile. Meant.

"I—I didn't mean to talk back. I'll fix it. I'll do better."

His throat tightened around the words, but they came out anyway. That's what sons did. Good ones.

"I just got distracted. It won't happen again."

His father said nothing. His mother exhaled, the sigh of someone exhausted by someone else's existence.

His father stopped, glancing back just once. The disgust was thinly veiled.

"If this is your definition of effort," he said slowly, voice like a winter wind, "then maybe we were wrong to trust you with freedom."

A pause.

"If we see no progress by the end of this term, you're coming home."

"Homeschooling," his mother added, like it was a curse. "No distractions. No... bad influences."

They didn't wait for a reaction. Just left. The door clicked shut, but the threat stayed wide open.

Seonghwa didn't cry. Not yet.

He just sat there. The apology still hanging in the air, bruising him in places the slap didn't reach.

And that is when the operation isolation took place.

The blinds were pulled tight again. The room carried a strange silence. The kind that felt heavy. That kind that tasted like iron.

Seonghwa sat at his desk, a stack of thick business case files strewn across the surface—each one more complex than the last. Profit and loss breakdowns, acquisition simulations, logistics nightmares, hypothetical crises in foreign branches. All annotated with ink that wasn't his.

From Father. Solutions by 7pm. Daily. No excuses.

The email had ended with a thinly veiled: If you want to prove you're worth even a desk at the company someday, this is the bare minimum.

He hadn't slept. Not really. Not since they left.
His cheek was healing slow. Still purple, yellow now on the edges. The split in his lip stung every time he moved his mouth too wide, so he didn't. Dried blood clung near the hairline he hadn't touched since. His skin was pale, but there were deeper grays under his eyes.

He looked... dead.

So when Hongjoong stepped into the room unannounced, it was no surprise his breath caught in his throat.

"...What the fuck."

Hongjoong stood in the doorway, eyes trained on Seonghwa's face, voice sharp with panic.

Seonghwa didn't even turn fully. Just stilled, like a puppet caught mid-act.

"You should go."

The words were soft. Too soft. Seonghwa barely looked at him.

Hongjoong took a step forward, then another, brows drawn.

"You're seriously telling me to leave when your face—" He stopped, rage building like a tide. "What happened?"