Chapter Text
Album No. 1: AFTERGLOW
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There was no floor here—no ceiling, no horizon, no left or right—only a lilac cosmos folding in on itself like an endless silk ribbon. Minute sparks drifted where stars ought to be, bright as frost and twice as fragile; they pulsed in time with a heartbeat that wasn’t his, a distant percussion that boomed somewhere beyond the lavender haze.
Rumi.
Her pulse was a kettle-drum—too slow when she slept, too frenetic when she pictured losing control, too steady when she lied to her friends about breakfast. Jinu could read it all because he was inside it: inside her power, her aura, her half-demon circuitry.
He drifted through the amethyst gloom, weightless, fingers spread in a reflex that expected gravity. They met only velvet dark, like water without wetness. Somewhere overhead—or underfoot, the directions blurred—rose a canted rampart of glimmering stardust. And beyond that: absence.
Eight vast, jagged rents tore across the galaxy. They were negative space, pitch-black and humming, edges ragged as raw flesh around a wound. From each tear leaked faint motes—memory, music, scent—vanishing before he could focus on them.
Fragments.
Fragments of my soul. Missing pieces sawn off when I—
He couldn’t finish the thought; it unspooled into nausea. A soul wasn’t designed to notice its own missing organs.
He pressed a hand to his sternum—except there was no sternum, only plasma-light shaped like memory. He could still feel the press of Rumi’s fingertips on his cheek from Namsan Tower, her gasp as he gave his soul to her, his own body collapsing into stardust. It felt like minutes ago. It felt like four centuries ago. Time here warped with her moods.
“Rumi,” he tried. The name scattered like dust—no vox, no air. Speech dispersed into trembling motes that chased each other and died. He pressed lips shut—habit—and tried again, projecting thought instead of sound.
Rumi, I’m here.
Silence, but the lilac nebula vibrated. Her heartbeat kicked—she must have taken the stairs two at a time again. He sensed her lungs, the flex of her diaphragm, even the cramp in her left calf from dance rehearsal. It all fluttered through him, intimate and impersonal at once.
He drifted closer to one tear—it hovered like a black gash ripped through a lavender curtain. A faint scene flickered at its center: mud-brown streets, a paper-thin boy curled beside a fireless brazier, holding two smaller arms—one skeletal mother, one coughing baby sister.
Jinu felt his own phantom throat tighten. That shard was the memory of freezing winters and the night the rice ran out. The first fragment. He tried reaching out—too slow, too late; the vision collapsed into indigo static, sucked outward into nothing. Pain bloomed like iron in his gut.
Not gone, he reminded himself. Hidden.
He rotated—somehow—toward another breach. This one showed silk banners, gold-lacquer masks, aristocrats clapping while a nineteen-year-old boy with a borrowed voice sang in too-tight shoes. He’d signed the contract an hour earlier—inked in blood he’d thought he could spare. The shard winked out before guilt could devour him.
Eight.
Eight holes; eight absences.
He swept his gaze over the void—stars dimmed, then flared, as if breathing. This entire place was her, yet also them; a symbiotic galaxy where his song now orbited her gravity. He tasted honey-ginger tea on his phantom tongue from her last sip, felt the mild burn of antiseptic from the stylist’s pinprick on her shoulder. Alive—but bodiless. And worse—powerless.
But not useless.
She thought he was a ghost in a speaker. But that couldn't be farther from the truth.
He closed ghost-eyes, reached for the pulse again. Her vow from minutes ago—I’ll find the rest of you. I swear it. I'll bring you back to me—reverberated across the galaxy like a promise etched into bedrock. The words glowed briefly in the nebula, curling violet calligraphy before dissolving into dust.
Not if I find the rest of me first, Rumi-ya.
He gathered what strength the void granted—the ersatz brush of spirit fingers, the memory of lungs filling—and shaped it into a note. The same D he’d pinged hours earlier, but steadier, brighter. It rang through the galaxy, bounced between shards, then tunneled outward—through marrow, through skin, through circuits in the studio mic on the floor.
He felt the cost instantly—a dimming, a fray at his edges—like slicing a sliver off an already ragged soul. But he held the note until it threaded into her ears in real space. She would hear it as tinnitus, as déjà-vu frequency, as the muse that wouldn’t shut up. And maybe—if luck dared—she would follow.
He exhaled—though there was no air—and let the note fade. Colors bled darker. The heartbeat eased into a slow-lull; Rumi was entering that micro-meditation she liked before choreography. Breathing through fear.
He drifted deeper, seeking orientation. The “floor” became aurora veils, sliding underfoot then overhead. A kaleidoscope of Rumi’s sensations spooled around him: the ache of a healed sword-cut on her shin, the electric rage at Bobby’s brand-first pep talks, the warmth of Dabbadon’s fur brushing her calves, the soft stab of guilt for lying to her friends, the lonely twist of desire for him that she would never voice to anyone but the dark.
Every time she felt, the galaxy glittered brighter. Every time she doubted, the light pooled like oil.
He didn’t want to spy on her most private aches; but there was no line anymore. He was inside her; she carried him like a second pulse. If he tuned out, he risked drifting into fragment-nothingness. If he listened, he risked drowning in her.
So he balanced—just enough to anchor.
Another ripple. Her attention snapped to something outside—probably a pin jab delivering pain‐static to him a heartbeat later. Jinu flinched in sympathy, then steadied himself. He drifted toward the galaxy’s core—a roiling vortex the color of bruised violets, in all shades of purple there were, thrumming with power. Her power. It felt like storm-wind on phantom skin.
If I can’t step into the physical yet, he reasoned, I can at least map these fractures, feed her clues.
He extended a thought—probing each jagged tear. The moment his essence brushed the first, lightning pain shot along spectral nerves. He recoiled. Touching shards hurt her; he felt her physical body flinch, calf muscle seizing.
Okay. So no direct contact. The last thing I want is to hurt her... again.
He retreated, floating until the throbbing ebbed. He wished for breath, wished for a body to pace. Longed to tap knuckles against something solid, to run hands through hair, to feel her skin warm under his, to under her braid and inhale the scent of her hair. The ache spooled into the void, almost physical.
Anger sparked—low, quiet. At Gwi-ma for carving him apart, at himself for letting it happen, at centuries wasted. The anger fed the light; stars vibrated sharper, edges crystalline. He swallowed it. Barely.
Focus.
The word rang through the star-dappled void like mallet on temple bell, a single strike that set every drifting fleck of his disassembled being into ordered vibration. The Phantom Galaxy—that liminal dreamspace he’d built from equal parts memory, regret, and Rumi’s borrowed lifeforce—swam into clarity. Silver filaments tightened, constellations sharpened, and for one crystalline instant he felt almost whole, a silhouette of sound and light rather than a smear of echoes.
Then the pain returned: the quiet, lead-heavy knowledge that his soul was still in tatters, scattered to the winds of Gwi-ma’s spite.
Location.
That was today’s problem.
Eight shards glimmered in the dark like orphaned moons. He reached with sense instead of limb, tuning himself to their frequencies the way he’d once tuned a twelve-string dan-ga guitar before sunrise shows at Namdaemun Market. No eyes, no ears—only resonance. Each shard thrummed its own key, a private Morse.
E-flat minor: a slice of someplace frigid, the metallic scent of ice over brackish water—maybe a port city hugging a winter sea.
G major: bright as lacquered doors and political smiles; he tasted sugared lotus on his tongue and heard a marimba laugh beneath.
C-sharp Phrygian: dry wind over dune, sand rasping like vinyl hiss, a horizon shimmering under punishing sun.
None of these places belonged to him. That was the point. Gwi-ma’s punishment was geographical exile, scattering the pieces of Jinu’s essence to lands his living self had never trod, severing every shortcut of memory that might guide him home. Distance as disorientation. A cosmic blindfold.
Yet one shard boomed louder than all the rest, a relentless heartbeat in D-flat major—lush, wet, fragrant with frangipani, diesel, and low-rolling thunder. Jungle humidity and island salt. Southeast Asia, though he couldn’t specify a city; the aura felt nomadic, half-river, half-road. He could almost smell fermenting jackfruit and wet stone.
Jinu had never went there. Never even passed through it. Perfect exile territory.
He tasted the shard again and shuddered. The farther a fragment lay from Korea, the weaker his root frequency—his han—could sing. Every second he pushed into that distance threatened to snap the intangible cord that kept him tethered to Rumi’s pulse.
But the D-flat shard called to him like a gong in fog, impossibly clear.
If he could seed its coordinates into her dreaming mind, she might tilt south when booking travel for the next video shoot. The studio bosses would assume a sudden marketing whim—“tropical visuals! fans love that!”—while he rode in silence inside her bloodstream. He couldn’t speak in daylight; Gwi-ma’s warding sigils still throttled his voice past dawn. But music, always older than any binding charm, slipped through cracks no sorcerer anticipated.
He began the delicate work of folding himself. Imagine trying to origami a thundercloud—painful, but possible if you accepted the rip and ache. He compressed stray harmonics, pulled starlight into a spine, compacted longing until it hummed like a bass string. Four notes would do. A motif spare enough not to trip alarm wards, strong enough to drag a dreamer across an ocean.
He chose a lullaby his mother had murmured during ration blackouts, one she claimed was older than dynasties, meant to coax uneasy spirits to rest. He layered it on the D-flat carrier wave, then braided in coordinates older than GPS: metaphysical longitude, latitude in pure pitch.
Now—release.
The motif unfurled like glimmering pollen, drifting outward in slow, concentric tides. Every centimeter of spread stripped energy from his form; translucent edges fuzzed, pink turning to gray. But he kept pushing until he felt the note slip past the perimeter of Rumi’s aura in the waking world.
Take my echo. Just get her there.
Seconds—or light-years—later, the tether shivered. On the other side of the veil Rumi’s diaphragm stuttered, a micro-gasp no one else in Dance Hall 4 would notice. He felt her fingertips twitch where they rested on sweat-slick hip bone. Connection established.
Good. That was good.
The Galaxy dimmed from ultraviolet brilliance to bruised plum. Stars winked out like stadium LEDs shutting down after encore. He’d burned spirit mass, but it was price of progress.
Rumi’s subconscious, forever half-aware of him now, brushed his psyche with a featherlight hush: rest.
So he let himself drift, tumbling end over end through an astral sea of her surface thoughts. They flared like bioluminescent plankton:
— Celine complaining the ginseng latte tasted like “bitter mud but keep it coming.”
— Mira scolding the seamstress, still stressed about a crooked hem.
— Zoey face-timing someone, laughing so hard she dropped her phone.
These flickers of mundane life soothed him more than Buddhist sutras. Because beneath them ran the basso continuo of her grief—silent, almost noble in its restraint. Most days she tucked it away behind staged smiles and riot-girl bravado, but he felt its weight: the marrow-deep ache of having no corpse to bury, no gospel of closure to sing. Her managers called it drive; the tabloids called it rebranding. Jinu recognized it as mourning wearing an iron mask.
He pressed phantom palms together—tingle of habit where skin ought to meet.
Protect her, even half-gone.
He would build bulwarks of chord and counterpoint if that was all he had left. Each shard reclaimed wasn’t simply about resurrecting himself; it was armor for her. A stronger guardian frequency to shield her from Gwi-ma’s next gambit and from the hungry machinery of an industry that devoured bright girls for breakfast.
Fragment by fragment he would assemble a citadel of sound, a fortress whose halls echoed only with music they chose.
A playful impulse sparked—part dare, part devotion.
Save me a mic, Rumi-ya. I’ll fix the harmonies this time.
He forged the sentiment into a warm, unadorned D—subtle enough to skate under Gwi-ma’s detection, sincere enough to vibrate straight through her sternum. He sent it, then watched its glow feather out like dawn across violet sky.
On the waking side, her heart settled into slow, even meters—4/4 breathing, the tempo she slipped into right before she truly focused. He aligned himself to that rhythm, letting every beat weave him closer, warp and weft. Their pulses interlaced like silk threads under an artisan’s loom, each tug strengthening the other.
Darkness curled around the Galaxy, not threatening but protective, a velvet blackout curtain. He welcomed it. Just before surrendering, a ripple trembled through the tether: the tap of her fingers on a mic stand, faint, hesitant—like checking if the metal remembered his touch. Then, the hush of her breath shaping his name, too soft for human ears, perfect for his.
Sleep—cool, merciful—folded over him. In the final slide toward nothingness he felt, rather than heard, the promise crystallize:
Alive is still possible.
And this time, he vowed with marrow-made-of-mist, alive would mean more than applause or charts.
It would mean duet, shield, love, home.
It would mean stepping onto any stage Rumi chose with harmony stitched between their shadows, daring Gwi-ma or any god to silence them again.