The first time I saw him again after the breakup, it almost didn't feel real. Park Hu-min — Baku to everyone else — was laughing too loudly in the courtyard, his grin wide and unbothered. To anyone else, it looked like he hadn't lost a beat. But I knew better. His shoulders tensed in ways that didn't match his smile. His eyes flickered over, just for a second, before he looked away like I wasn't even there.

We had been broken up for weeks already, and the Union's stranglehold on the city was only growing tighter. Baku had started shutting me out before then, bit by bit. A half-finished text here. A missed meeting there. He said nothing, never explained. His absence filled the silence between us like a wall, and eventually, that wall had been too high to climb. I told him I couldn't do it anymore. He didn't fight it. That might have been the worst part.

And yet — he never really let go, did he?

Every time I talked with someone new, I felt his presence in the background. Not in a dramatic way — Baku was too charismatic, too loud for his jealousy to look subtle. It was the way he went quiet when he caught me laughing with another guy. The way his jaw tightened when someone else lingered by my desk. The way he picked fights with Union kids and came out bruised and grinning like it didn't matter, only to glance my way right after, as if gauging whether I cared.

And maybe I hated that I still did.

The Union had been restless that week. A few punks from another school had wandered too close to Eunjang territory, and Baku had been the first to swing. He was always the first to swing. They called him a walking anti-bullying campaign, but to me, he'd always been more complicated than that. He wasn't violent because he liked it. He was violent because he wanted to protect. That was the part he never understood — protection meant nothing if it also meant pushing me out.

The fight had left him worse than usual. Word spread fast in Eunjang; people whispered about how he'd taken on three at once and left them in a pile. But whispers also carried that he hadn't walked away unscathed. Someone said his punches had been slower. Another swore they saw him stumble when he got up. None of it surprised me.

What did surprise me was the knock on my door that night.

When I opened it, he stood there like a shadow on my porch. His uniform was scuffed, collar torn, knuckles raw. There was blood on his lip that he hadn't bothered to wipe. He looked big as ever, filling the doorway, but his eyes — his eyes were sunken, tired, not from the fight but from everything underneath it.

And before I could say anything, before I could slam the door or step aside, his voice cracked.

"I can't do this anymore."