The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a pale gleam across the faded linoleum floors of Class 2-3. The classroom smelled of old chalk and floor polish, with a hint of sweat lingering from gym class. Students murmured and shuffled in their seats, eyes flicking toward the door in anticipation.
It was mid-semester, an odd time for a new student.
But then again, everything about him already felt a little off.
The homeroom teacher, Mr. Min, adjusted his glasses with a sigh as he motioned toward the door. "Alright, settle down. We have a new student joining us today."
The class quieted, only barely.
"Come in, Han Seo-joon."
The door slid open with a soft rattle.
In stepped a boy who carried silence like a second skin. Han Seo-joon. Black hair fell messily over his forehead, his uniform slightly wrinkled as though he'd spent the morning in a fight with his closet. His gaze swept the room briefly, not in curiosity, but calculation.
No hesitation, no forced smile.
Just another face in the crowd.
"Introduce yourself," Mr. Min prompted.
Seo-joon stood at the front, hands in his pockets.
"Han Seo-joon," he said. His voice was low but clear. "I transferred from Daesan Middle. That's it."
No flourish. No lies.
Some students chuckled under their breath.
"Daesan? Isn't that the school where that kid got stabbed last semester?"
"Tch, another thug. Great."
Mr. Min cleared his throat sharply. "That's enough. Han Seo-joon, you'll sit there, next to Lee Yuri."
There was a brief pause.
Every pair of eyes turned.
Lee Yuri sat in the far corner by the window, isolated like a ghost. Her desk had a noticeable gap between her and the others. Her uniform was too large, her hair hanging low to shield her face. Her fingers nervously fidgeted with the hem of her sleeve.
She didn't look up. She never did.
Seo-joon walked without comment, slinging his bag onto the desk beside hers and sitting down like he hadn't just been assigned a social death sentence.
The whispers started immediately.
"Poor guy, he's done for now."
"They say she stalked someone and got suspended. Total freak."
"She eats in the bathroom, did you know that?"
He heard it all. Every petty comment. Every cruel joke wrapped in laughter.
But he didn't laugh. He didn't even glance at them.
He just opened his notebook, clicked his pen, and began to write.
Yuri noticed him.
She noticed everything, even if she pretended not to. Invisibility was something you learned to master when it was the only shield you had left.
But this boy, he was different.
He didn't greet her, didn't acknowledge her. But he didn't flinch away from her presence like the others did. He didn't move his chair away. He didn't snicker. When they whispered about her, he didn't add to it.
He didn't defend her either.
But silence, in her world, was an unexpected mercy.
The day dragged on. Classes blurred. The teachers droned.
During breaks, Seo-joon kept to himself, eating from a packed lunch container with slow, mechanical precision. A few guys tried to strike up conversation, mostly to size him up.
"Hey, you from Daesan? That place's nuts. You get expelled or something?"
Seo-joon didn't look up.
"No," he replied. "Did you?"
The boy blinked, not sure if he'd just been insulted.
Eventually, they stopped trying.
The final bell rang, and students filed out quickly, excited to head to cram schools or PC bangs, or simply to enjoy the freedom of being away from this place. Yuri stayed behind as usual, waiting for the room to empty.
Seo-joon, too, remained seated.
Not moving. Just looking out the window.
The sky was bleeding into shades of orange and lilac, the sun casting shadows across the desks. For a moment, the classroom felt like a world between time.
Yuri finally stood to leave, clutching her bag to her chest.
He spoke.
"Why do they hate you?"
She froze. Her heart skipped.
Her eyes widened behind her bangs.
He didn't ask with malice. There was no mockery in his voice. Just plain curiosity, like he was trying to solve a math problem.
She turned slowly, her lips parting.
No one had ever asked.
Not like that.
Not honestly.
"...They don't need a reason," she said. Her voice was quiet, brittle like glass.
Seo-joon nodded.
"Guess not."
She looked at him for a moment longer, uncertain, then left.
Seo-joon stayed behind, watching the sun disappear behind the skyline.
At home, he wrote in his notebook again.
Lee Yuri. Target of social exclusion. Shows signs of severe anxiety. No support network.
Eyes, downcast. Voice, unused. Hands tremble under observation.
Doesn't meet my gaze, but she listens.
Possible history of trauma. Self-isolation? Or forced?
He paused.
Then added:
Doesn't deserve it.
The next day was worse.
Someone put gum on Yuri's chair before she arrived. She stood there for a second before quietly pulling a tissue from her bag and removing it herself. No fuss. No complaints.
Seo-joon watched the culprits giggling in the back.
When the teacher came in, they were angels again.
During lunch, he passed by them.
Just once, as he dropped a piece of paper on their desk.
Later, they unfolded it.
"If you touch her chair again, you'll be sitting on a cast."
No name.
But they knew.
Yuri looked at him differently that day.
Still distant, still unsure. But something had shifted.
Seo-joon didn't speak. He just kept writing in his notebook.
But when he caught her watching, he didn't look away.
He just met her eyes.
And nodded.
It wasn't a rescue.
He wasn't her savior.
But in a world that had written her off, where every kindness came with a price or a sneer-
His silence...
...felt like the loudest thing she'd heard in years.
...
It happened on the third day.
Yuri had stayed late again. Art club had been disbanded last semester, but she still used the empty room to draw, pencil sketches of imagined cities, people without faces, animals with wings.
Seo-joon had gone to grab his bike but paused at the hallway window when he saw the group.
Three boys, Jin-seok, Taejin, and that lanky shadow always trailing behind them, had cornered Yuri just outside the back exit. They pushed her against the wall. She said nothing, barely resisting.
One of them yanked her bag off her shoulder, rifling through it with a grin.
"Why do you even bother carrying this crap?" Jin-seok sneered, pulling out a notebook. He flipped through the pages, chuckling. "What is this, ugly doodles? You gonna cry now?"
Taejin snatched it from him, holding it high.
Yuri reached for it instinctively.
"Please," she said. "That's mine…"
It came out barely above a whisper.
But that was enough for them to laugh.
Seo-joon exhaled slowly and let go of the bike handles.
He walked toward them with steady steps.
No rush. No dramatic warning.
Just three boys, laughing at a girl who'd already stopped begging.
Jin-seok noticed him first. "Yo, what's up, transfer? You want a sketch too? Might be the only way she makes friends-"
Seo-joon stopped a few meters away, hands in his pockets.
"You're in the way," he said.
Taejin tilted his head, grinning. "Aww, you sweet on her or somethin'? Didn't think you were the knight type."
Seo-joon's face didn't change.
He glanced at Yuri's notebook on the ground. A sketch had fluttered loose, skidding near his foot, a drawing of a boy staring out a train window, faceless.
He bent, picked it up, and folded it carefully.
Then handed it back to Yuri without looking at her.
When he stood upright again, the cold had entered his voice.
"Y'know… I used to be scared of punks like you. But right now?"
He tilted his head slightly, cracked his knuckles.
"I feel nothing."
Jin-seok laughed, stepping forward. "The hell did you say, freak?"
He didn't get a second line.
Seo-joon moved.
A single step forward. Fist into gut. Jin-seok folded like a chair.
Taejin lunged, but Seo-joon's knee met his stomach mid-charge. The third kid barely reacted before a sharp elbow cracked against his jaw. He dropped like laundry.
Silence followed.
Only the soft hum of a vending machine in the distance and Yuri's ragged breathing remained.
Seo-joon stood over the three bodies, calm as ever. His hands were red.
Jin-seok coughed on the concrete.
Seo-joon crouched down, eyes level.
"Touch her again," he said, voice like frost. "And I'll stop holding back."
Yuri stood frozen, still clutching the folded drawing.
She didn't speak. Couldn't.
He turned to her, gaze unreadable.
"Come on," he said.
And for some reason, she followed.
They sat on a low wall near the soccer field, far from the teachers' eyes.
"You'll get in trouble," she said softly, watching him dab his knuckles with a wet wipe from her bag.
"I won't," he replied.
"But-"
"They're not brave enough to report it. They'd have to explain why they cornered you."
"…That's true," she murmured.
He looked at her. "You shouldn't have to take that."
"I know."
"But you do."
"…I know."
Seo-joon didn't push. He just handed her the rest of the wipes and leaned back to stare at the sky.
The silence stretched, but for once, it wasn't awkward.
It was still.
Like something had finally stopped breaking.
...
That night, Yuri sat at her small desk by the window, knees pulled up beneath her oversized hoodie. Her room was silent except for the gentle whir of her desk fan and the occasional honk of cars from the street below. The walls were bare, save for a calendar she hadn't flipped since March and a single shelf stacked with sketchbooks, worn, dog-eared, full of people who never looked back at her.
She opened a fresh page and stared at the white emptiness.
Her pencil hovered.
And then, almost without thinking, she began to draw him.
Han Seo-joon.
She didn't usually draw people she knew. Most of her sketches were imagined: safe, distant faces, dreamlike shadows with no voice, no judgment. Drawing real people meant admitting they mattered. It meant inviting them into the space she only showed herself.
But tonight, her fingers moved on their own.
His eyes were hard to capture, not because they were complicated, but because they were still. Like calm water with something deep beneath. People had expressive eyes when they smiled, when they talked, when they lied. But Seo-joon didn't lie with his eyes. He didn't even blink much.
He was just… watching.
Always watching.
And for some reason, she didn't mind being seen by him.
Her pencil curved along the edge of his jaw. Strong. A little sharp. Like he could break something just by clenching his teeth.
She shaded the mess of hair that fell over his forehead, just the way it had during math class when he leaned forward, scribbling something in that battered notebook of his.
That notebook.
She still didn't know what he was writing. He never looked at her when he did it, but something told her it wasn't random. Seo-joon wasn't the kind of boy who did anything without a reason.
She added the faintest detail of his uniform collar, creased and imperfect.
He wasn't a prince. He wasn't clean-cut or gentle.
He wasn't like the boys she used to draw when she was younger, back when she still believed one might notice her. Back when she thought kindness could save her.
No, Seo-joon wasn't kind.
He was… present.
Unshaken.
And that meant more to her than anything.
She set her pencil down, staring at the unfinished sketch. Something was missing.
Not his features, she had drawn them all.
It was something else.
A feeling.
She tried again, erasing the eyes and redrawing them with softer strokes. Still wrong. They looked too guarded. Too cold. But wasn't that what they were?
No…
Not when he looked at her.
Not when he nodded.
Not when he didn't laugh.
Yuri swallowed and leaned back in her chair, the sketch still clutched in her hands. She wasn't sure why it felt like something had cracked open inside her.
It was nothing. Just a boy.
Just another transfer.
But in her quiet room, surrounded by silence and pencil shavings, she allowed herself to feel the smallest flicker of warmth. Not hope, not yet. Hope was a dangerous thing. But curiosity.
She wanted to know why he didn't look away.
She wanted to understand why his silence felt like safety.
She tucked the sketch into the back of her notebook, between a half-finished drawing of a raven and a girl with her hands over her face.
Then she turned off the light, crawled into bed, and stared at the ceiling until sleep finally claimed her.
For the first time in months, she didn't cry before drifting off.
And in her dreams, someone sat beside her in the empty classroom, not speaking, not touching.
Just being there.
And somehow, that was enough.
...
The next morning, the hallways buzzed with the usual chaos, but something felt different, tenser. Rumors of yesterday's scuffle had spread like wildfire: three bullies flattened by a single boy. Whispers followed Seo-joon down the corridor as he moved toward Class 2‑3.
Yuri arrived early, too, clutching her sketchbook against her chest. The fluorescent lights flickered on, and she slid into her seat without looking up. Her heart pounded each time the door opened, expecting laughter, or worse. Instead, Seo-joon entered quietly, paused in the aisle, then set his bag down next to hers. He didn't speak. He only nodded, as if to say, I kept my promise.
During homeroom, the teacher's droning seemed to fade into white noise. Yuri's eyes kept flicking to Seo-joon's notebook. What was he writing? Calculations? Observations? Plans? She'd never been so curious, and so afraid of breaking whatever unspoken truce existed between them.
When the bell rang, everyone surged out in a stampede of voices and backpacks. Yuri hated crowded hallways, too many eyes, too many assumptions. She waited until the rush thinned, then slipped into the back stairwell, heading down to the courtyard in search of solitude.
Halfway there, she froze. In the shadow of the stairwell landing stood Seo-joon, leaning against the concrete wall with the same calm, guarded expression. He held out two paper lunch bags.
Yuri blinked. "Is this-?"
He handed one to her without a word. Inside, her favorite, strawberry jam sandwich and a small carton of milk. She stared.
"Thanks," she whispered.
He only nodded, then turned and continued down the stairs. Yuri's fingers curled around the bag as if it were made of glass. She followed, keeping enough distance that she wouldn't startle him.
Outside, the courtyard was sunlit and deceptively cheerful: children playing, soccer balls bouncing, birds chirping in the trees. But for Yuri, everything seemed muted and brittle, as if the world expected her to crumble at any moment.
She found an empty bench under a cherry tree and sat. Seo-joon perched on the backrest, the two of them sharing the space without speaking. Yuri opened her bag, lifted the sandwich, but then hesitated. He was watching. She took a small bite. He turned his gaze to the sky, hands tucked in his pockets.
The silence stretched, but it felt protective rather than threatening. Yuri swallowed and met his eyes.
"Why… why did you bring me lunch?" she asked, voice barely more than a breath.
He looked at her then, fully, and for a moment the world narrowed to just the two of them. His gaze was still, direct.
"Because you shouldn't eat alone in the bathroom," he said softly.
Her throat tightened. "You noticed."
He shrugged. "No one else does."
She looked down at her half‑eaten sandwich. "I'm not sure I deserve it."
He tensed slightly, as if offended by the suggestion. "Maybe. But you're here, aren't you?"
A breeze rustled the cherry blossoms overhead, petals drifting like snow. Yuri closed her eyes and let one land on her hair.
After a moment, she spoke again. "I've been doing this a long time."
"I guessed," he said.
"How did you know?"
Seo-joon didn't answer immediately. When he did, his voice was quiet. "People don't carry sketchbooks like armor unless they've learned to survive alone."
Her breath caught. He was right. Her sketchbook had always been her shield, drawings she'd hide behind when words failed her.
"Thank you," she said, surprising herself.
He gave a single, slight nod and stood. "We should get to class."
Yuri swallowed her last bite and rose, folding her bag closed. As they walked back through the courtyard, the other students parted around them, curiosity and wariness painting every face.
At the classroom door, Seo-joon paused. He turned to Yuri, then hesitated as if deciding whether to break their silent pact.
Finally, he spoke, low enough that only she could hear: "Don't tell anyone I did this."
Yuri's heart leapt. "I won't."
He offered her the faintest ghost of a smile, just enough to crack the armor he'd worn since day one, and stepped inside.
Yuri stood outside for another breath, listening to her heartbeat loud in her ears. Then she slipped in, took her seat, and opened her sketchbook. On the blank page, she drew two simple silhouettes beneath a cherry tree: one girl, one boy, sharing silence like a promise.
And for the first time, she felt less alone.
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Thanks for reading. You can also give me ideas for the future or pinpoint plot holes that I may have forgotten, if you want.