The reflection smiled.
It had his face, precisely, impossibly, but not as it was now.
This version was untouched by years, its skin smooth, its features soft with the glow of childhood.
The lips were fuller, the cheeks rounder, and the eyes, wide, unclouded, unbearably bright, held none of the shadows Taejun had come to live with.
There was no hesitation in that gaze, no weight behind it.
Just the untainted openness of a boy who hadn't yet learned what it meant to lose.
The head tilted slightly, not in mockery, but in something achingly gentle, almost fond.
And though the mouth never moved, the voice arrived anyway, threading its way through the silence, delicate as breath on glass.
"You said you'd never forget me."
Taejun flinched like the words had grazed something raw inside him.
His breath caught, his throat tightening with a panic he didn't fully understand.
"I… never said that," he replied, but the sentence collapsed halfway through, cracking down the center like old porcelain.
He wasn't sure who he was answering, Hyeonjae, maybe, or the figure in the mirror.
Or perhaps it was meant for himself.
Some older version of memory, buried and unfinished.
The water in the circle gave a low, rhythmic pulse, soft as a heartbeat muffled beneath floorboards.
That rusted toy soldier remained in the center, rocking faintly in the gentle ripple.
It was no longer alone.
More objects floated beside it now, silent witnesses of something long buried.
Each one surfaced like an accusation, quiet and undeniable.
A bent glass lens and a scrap of ribbon were tied clumsily into a bow.
The soaked remains of a child's drawing, torn at the edge, but preserved by something that refused to let go.
The image became clearer, lines emerging through the wavering liquid: a small house, crooked and hopeful, drawn with a hand still learning to stay steady.
Two stick figures stood beside it, one tall, one shorter.
They held hands. Together, their smiling faces scrawled in looping, uneven circles.
And beneath them, a name scribbled in blue crayon, shaky and earnest.
TAEJUN & JIHOON.
The paper shivered in the water, but the letters held fast.
And Taejun felt it then, not the memory itself, but the shape of it.
The outline of a boy standing in a sunlit yard, waiting by a gate that no longer existed.
A brother's voice echoing through time, not angry, not demanding, just wondering why he'd been left so long.
His lungs forgot how to move.
Jihoon.
The name struck like a stone dropped into still water, disrupting everything.
It was familiar, yet foreign to Taejun.
It had lived somewhere in him all this time, just not in words.
Not in any way that could survive the harsh light of day.
It lingered instead in phantom aches and quiet absences, in the way certain songs made his throat tighten, or how the sight of two boys playing in the street left him strangely hollow.
Jihoon had never been truly forgotten, just misplaced, like a breath held too long, like grief that no longer knew its own origin.
That name. That name hadn't passed his lips in years.
It hadn't even lived in his thoughts, not properly, not clearly.
Only ever as a flicker in dreams, a shape glimpsed in the periphery, or a tightness in his chest when he stared too long at old family photos and felt the ache of something missing, something deliberately unnamed.
"Who is Jihoon?" he whispered.
But the moment the question left his mouth, the room changed.
The mirrors shuddered, deeply, all at once, as if exhaling after a long, held breath.
The hanging bulbs above convulsed in their sockets, flickering violently, casting long shadows that bent and twisted over the stone like grasping arms.
The air turned sharp and brittle, dropping ten degrees in an instant.
And then the silence broke, not loudly, not all at once, but in a thousand small ways, like a spiderweb unraveling under pressure.
Dripping water.
A faint, off-key lullaby repeating from somewhere unseen.
The clatter of metal dragging across stone, slow.
And then— A hand broke the surface of the water.
A thin and pale child's hand.
The fingers were too long, joints too narrow, skin too translucent, slick and glistening like it had been submerged for years.
It reached not with panic or violence, but with something worse: a quiet, mournful hunger.
The kind of reaching a child might do when they wake alone in the dark, calling for someone they forgot had left.
Hyeonjae's hand shot out, gripping Taejun's shoulder. "Don't move."
His voice was iron, but behind it, fear coiled tightly.
Taejun didn't move.
Not because he obeyed, but because he couldn't.
He was locked there, frozen by recognition.
That hand. That toy. That name. That gentle smile in the mirror.
All of it formed a pattern he didn't want to see, didn't want to believe, and yet couldn't look away from.
Jihoon.
A truth buried so deep it had stopped feeling like truth at all.
Maybe not a brother. Maybe a neighbor. A childhood friend. A twin.
Maybe none of those things. Maybe all of them.
The details blurred, but the feeling remained, sharp and intimate: love mixed with loss and guilt was so old it no longer needed a reason.
And somewhere in the dark, the lullaby kept playing.
Something had broken once, long ago, and the cost was this room steeped in silence and sorrow, this submerged memory sealed beneath layers of water and stone, this ghost that did not haunt with vengeance but with grief.
An ache held in stasis. A promise that had waited, decayed, and still remembered.
Taejun stepped forward.
"Taejun!" Hyeonjae's voice cracked through the air, sharp and final.
It wasn't pleading, it was a command, a lash of fear twisted into fury. "Don't you dare go in. Don't touch it."
But Taejun was already crying silently, not from fear but from recognition.
And in the mirror, the reflection, the other Taejun, younger and untouched, was crying too.
Tears ran freely down his soft, unmarred cheeks, but he was smiling, not with cruelty, but with a kind of fragile joy, the way a child might smile when someone finally comes home.
"You remember me," it said, its voice gentle, reverent.
Taejun's breath shuddered as he whispered, "I don't know what I did. I- I don't know you!"
The reflection tilted its head, eyes soft, voice so calm it made the air colder. "You left me here alone," it said. "But I forgave you."
The hand in the water shifted again, slow and deliberate, fingers spreading as it raised the toy soldier, rusted, sacred, beloved. Perhaps it was an offering.
Taejun's hand moved without thought.
He reached down, as if in a trance, his fingertips brushing the surface.
And that was when it struck.
Not like a cut. Not even like cold.
It was a deep, gnawing extraction, something strange curling up his spine like a vine made of frost and iron.
It didn't hurt in the way nerves hurt; it hurt in the way regrets do.
It reached into the base of his skull and pulled something free.
Permission.
And that was when Hyeonjae moved.
Without any question or hesitation, he surged forward and slammed into Taejun with full force, shoving him backward with enough violence to rip him from the edge of the circle.
Taejun flew, crashing into a half-rotted bench that cracked beneath his weight, scattering dust and splinters across the stone.
The room responded instantly, almost violently.
The air warped, pressing in from all sides like the belly of a lung collapsing.
The reflection, still standing, still smiling, screamed.
But there was no sound, it was a rupture.
There was pressure. The kind of scream that made the inside of your teeth hurt.
And the mirrors, those tall, silent watchers, shattered.
It did not explode outward; instead, inward, towards the reflection like glass imploding beneath unbearable weight, caving into the void they'd each been holding back.
The silence returned, but it was not emptiness now.
It was mourning.
The lights snapped out, plunging the room into suffocating darkness.
Only the carved circle remained faintly illuminated, its pale glow barely cutting through the black.
The toy soldier had vanished beneath the water's surface.
The childlike hand that had reached out moments before was gone, replaced by something else, something far happier and emptier.
The glow revealed its eyes first, dark, hollow, endless pits that swallowed the light whole.
They were too vast to belong to a child, too cold to harbor anger or sorrow.
Instead, they burned with an insatiable hunger, a void that seemed to watch, waiting, silently demanding.
Taejun stumbled backward, gasping, his breath ragged in the heavy air. "What the hell was that?"
Hyeonjae said nothing at first.
His gaze stayed fixed on the glowing circle, eyes wide and unblinking, chest rising and falling with harsh, uneven breaths, not from fear, but from some deep, unspoken grief.
"I thought I came here to remember," he whispered, voice trembling, "but maybe… maybe I came here to make sure you never did."
Taejun's brows knitted in confusion. "What do you mean, Ahjusshi?"
Hyeonjae's voice cracked, raw and broken. "I was never meant to be your friend. I was meant to keep you out of this place. That was the deal. I stay here, I keep the doors shut, I keep the memory buried. But fate keeps pressuring."
Taejun's heart thundered against his ribs, panic tightening its grip. "You knew this would happen?"
"No," Hyeonjae shook his head slowly, regret thick in his words. "I didn't know it would be you. Not until now. Not until the house showed me. Or perhaps, him."
"Him? You made a deal?" Taejun pushed himself upright, staggering as the weight of the revelation pressed down on him. "With what? With that… thing?"
"No," Hyeonjae said softly, voice barely above a breath. "With him."
He nodded toward the glowing circle.
"To Jihoon?"
The light beneath the water pulsed slowly, like a deliberate breath held in the dark.
Hyeonjae turned to Taejun, his voice heavy with a weight that had nothing to do with age or exhaustion.
"I was your babysitter, remember?" he said softly, almost kindly. "When your Hyung left you alone. You were so small, like five, maybe six. Jihoon was their secret, the one they never spoke of. An accident, they said. A birth no one wanted except your Hyung and older sister. They locked him away and told you he was just a shadow, an imaginary friend. And when you tried to find him—"
Taejun shook his head, stepping back, voice strained and desperate. "Stop."
But Hyeonjae kept going, his words falling slow and sharp. "You came to this house, and something inside let you in. Something else stayed behind. It was J-"
"Stop!" Taejun shouted, but the memories had already clawed their way free.
He remembered the muffled crying from behind the wall.
The way his parents had screamed when he spoke of the boy who looked like him, hiding in a basement that wasn't supposed to exist.
He remembered the toy soldier.
The hand reaching through water.
He remembered the promise he whispered—"I'll come back for you."
But he never had.
And now… The house had opened its mouth once more.
Welcome home, the voice echoed inside his mind.
And this time, it wasn't speaking to him, it was waiting for him to speak back.
The air thickened, heavy with anticipation, as if the breath of the room itself had grown slow and watchful.
The air folded inward, growing tighter and heavier, as if the entire house had inhaled a vast, silent breath and now held it, waiting for Taejun to make the wrong move that would shatter the fragile balance.
His legs felt like they were sinking into the floor, knees dragging through invisible sludge, and his fingers trembled uncontrollably.
The glow from the water circle shifted from gentle to ravenous, pulsing with a rhythm odd to the living, a heartbeat that belonged to something ancient and unseen.
"I'm back, Jihoon," Taejun whispered, his voice small, trembling with a gentleness that didn't match the storm behind his eyes.
He smiled, a child's smile, crooked and soft, as if everything were okay, as if this were just a game they used to play.
But his nose was red, raw from crying, and the tears that streaked down his cheeks betrayed him, shining and silent, cutting tracks through the dirt and dust.
There was nothing in his face but innocence and a grief too old for his years.
Jihoon smiled then, a small, delicate thing, like a memory unfolding.
He held the mirror plate in his fragile hands, its surface smeared with fingerprints and old dust, but within it: their faces, side by side, as they had once been.
"I'm glad you remembered me," he said quietly, voice thin as breath, almost swallowed by the dark.
"And I welcome you home… Taejun." His smile lingered just a moment longer before it broke, a single tear sliding down his cheek, silent, shimmering, with a final moment.
The face in the mirror had vanished, and the pale hand disappeared beneath the water's surface, but their weight lingered in his mind, like decay clinging stubbornly to bone.
Taejun spun toward Hyeonjae, eyes wide and chest pounding with panic, only to find him already moving, faster than Taejun had ever witnessed.
"Ahjusshi—" he began, voice trembling. "No time!" Hyeonjae snapped, sharp and urgent, his grip firm on Taejun's wrist, not cruel, but steady, like a father pulling a child from the path of oncoming danger.
Despite his slender frame, Hyeonjae dragged him backward, away from the cursed circle, away from the flickering candles, away from the terrible, whispering glow beneath the water that kept calling, calling, calling... Come back.
The air behind them shifted and thickened, the whisper folding into a sigh, and that sigh erupting into a roar, but no sound carried through the ears.
It vibrated in the walls, seeped into the wood grain, filled the very breath Taejun drew, as if the house itself was closing its throat, swallowing down the secret it had guarded for so long.
"Run!" Hyeonjae yelled, his voice raw and urgent, but the corridor behind them was no longer the familiar narrow stretch of cold stone and shattered bulbs.
Instead, it stretched out impossibly long and endless, a liminal space where the mirrors lining the walls no longer reflected reality.
They showed distorted versions of themselves, some running in agonizing slow motion, others frozen, or dragged backward by impossibly long, writhing shadows that seemed to claw at their limbs.
Taejun's legs moved without command, muscles burning, heart pounding so fiercely it thundered in his ears and teeth.
Every step was a battle against the house itself, a force determined to rewind time, to pull them back like a fading nightmare refusing to relinquish its hold.
Hyeonjae grunted, pulling harder, dragging Taejun with both arms now. "It's rewriting," he hissed, voice tight with grim determination. "It knows we saw it. It's trying to erase us by replacing us in our reality!"
"What does that even mean?" Taejun gasped, desperate to understand.
"If we don't get out in time, and if it succeeds, we won't escape. We'll wake up trapped inside it, forever."
The walls groaned with a mournful, living sound as the candles behind them blinked out one by one, not extinguished by wind, but by something deliberate, like unseen fingers closing around each flame, squeezing the light from the dark, inching closer and closer.
They rounded a corner, breath ragged, and slammed into a solid wall where the door had been.
"No— no, no!" Taejun shouted, panic breaking loose.
"Don't stop!" Hyeonjae snapped, undeterred.
His hand dove into his coat pocket, pulling out a small, worn box of matches.
"What are you doing?" Taejun demanded, voice shaking. "Are you giving it something else to feed on?"
His hands trembled, but his grip was steady as he struck a match.
The flame sputtered once, then blossomed bright and golden against the suffocating gloom.
Without hesitation, Hyeonjae tossed the match into the air, and it hung there, suspended, as if caught in invisible water.
The flame spread wide and thin like oil on a black surface, tearing a jagged wound through the wall.
Beyond that tear the attic lay, the real attic, dim, dusty, bathed in pale moonlight and heavy with forgotten memories.
"Go!" Hyeonjae bellowed, urgency raw in his voice.
Taejun hesitated, just for a breath, caught between fear and something deeper, but then took a step forward.
He looked back.
The water in the circle churned violently, bubbling like a cauldron about to boil over.
From its depths, pale and half-formed, a small figure emerged, a boy, not twisted or monstrous, but achingly alone.
In his outstretched hands, he held the rusted toy soldier, a silent offering. "…Jihoon," Taejun whispered, breath trembling.
The boy's lips parted, but no words came.
Instead, his eyes screamed, raw, desperate, filled with a silent agony that clawed at the soul.
"Taejun!" Hyeonjae's roar shattered the fragile moment. "Now!"
The choice carved itself deep into Taejun's bones, sharp and unforgiving.
Without hesitation, he sprinted through the tearing wall, stumbling into the attic's dusty gloom.
His lungs burned as he pushed forward, bursting into the cold, silent hallway of the upper house, real, but stripped of warmth.
Behind him, a deafening slam, the mirror embedded in the floor shattered, erasing the passage like it had never been.
The house exhaled once more, but this time it was a sound heavy with disappointment and lingering patience, as if it had not lost, only deferred its reckoning.
Hyeonjae collapsed to his knees, chest heaving, sweat glistening on his pale face.
Taejun fell beside him, muscles screaming, mouth dry, skin slick with fear and unnamed dread. "…We made it," he rasped.
Hyeonjae shook his head slowly, voice soft but edged with gravity. "No. We escaped. It's not the same thing, y'know? Haah..."
Taejun's chest rose and fell raggedly as he looked at him, eyes searching. "…That was really Jihoon, wasn't it?"
Hyeonjae hesitated, gaze fixed on the shattered floor where the passage had been.
Then, with a tenderness that belied the weight between them, he laid his hand on Taejun's head, steadying him like a parent calming a frightened child.
His voice was low, threaded with sorrow. "I don't know anymore. But something was left behind. Something that loved you enough to endure time, rot, and silence— and hated you enough for forgetting."
Taejun swallowed hard, tears brimming again, not from fear this time, but from the crushing weight of remembrance. "…What do I do now, Hyung...?"
The moment Hyeonjae heard the word, hyung, his expression crumpled like paper too long held in trembling hands.
He tried to smile, but it broke halfway, twisting into something raw and aching.
His lips curled upward, barely, as if it hurt to hold the joy in place.
A choked sound escaped him, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob.
And still, he smiled, hard and helpless, because after everything, after all the silence and forgetting and the unbearable weight of memory, the word had come back.
Hyung.
"Sigh... You must remember," Hyeonjae whispered. "Every day. That's how you must stay out. That's how you stop it from taking your place. In this house."
They sat in silence, bathed in the pale moonlight filtering through cracked beams, surrounded by broken boards, forgotten boxes, and the lingering echo of all that was left unsaid.
And far below them, in the suffocating dark, the house waited.