Taehyung heaved a tired sigh looking at his unfinished painting, trying to understand what was it that it still lacked. It looked finished but there was something off about it still and Taehyung had been staring at it for ten minutes now.

One of his paintbrushes was missing from his workspace and he doubted it was the brushes' fault the painting looked one stroke away from perfection.

He tore his eyes from the canvas and reached for his phone on his bedside table but his fingers brushed the little velvet box sitting next to it and Taehyung's hand flinched back.

The ring nestling inside the box was supposed to be the ring that his mom picked up from the store earlier and handed it to him the moment his parents returned from their trip in the morning, plunging Taehyung's whole mood into a vile well of dreadful expectations that he was supposed to fetch up and drink from.

No wonder he had his anger on his fist the whole day because seeing the ring made him realize it was really happening, that he was really going to be diagnosed with Kazimir's illness for the rest of his life and would be expected to stay in sick every time she was sick and she was sick all the time.

He picked up the velvet box and opened it to look at the gold band one more time and once he was assured yet again that it was real, he closed the box and put it back on the table.

This can't be happening, he thought to himself but it was happening and he sat back against his bed and closed his eyes to think of how to undo it.

The Jimin scheme was still under question and Taehyung doubted Kazimir would let it finish. Everything was on the line now.

When Kazimir first moved in, he was thrilled to have someone his age around and he took great interest in giving her his company often and in return, Kazimir proved to be someone with the universe at the tip of her tongue and at some point, Taehyung was tempted to know what the stars tasted like. But before he could take a launch to the sky, he realized his rocket was only running on hormones and not feelings.

But he discovered something entirely different called friendship with his feet still on the ground and he thanked God he never let his hormones take over. Eventually, he stopped craving the taste of stars and instead settled back and stared as the universes rolled off her tongue and unto his paintings. She was the one who set him unto the path of artistry with her words and Taehyung would have never thought that the girl who placed little dreams on his palms would one day become the one to take them all away so that instead her hand would fit between his fingers.

Now his dreams were all hanging from the edge of his hands, ready to fall and shatter only to make room for Kazimir and her worn-out universe that had long lost all it's stars to the black hole of her illness. She wasn't the same anymore and so was Taehyung but no one was ready to acknowledge that yet.

He had wanted to apologize to her for his outburst at the hospital but when she woke up, Jimin was already there telling her things that made Taehyung take a step back outside her door and listen and ponder about his actions and Jimin proved true to his words when Taehyung realized he had been driving Kazimir over the edge recently.

He didn't know how Jimin had seen it so clearly when he himself couldn't pinpoint his brutal actions but if Jimin's words didn't land heavy on Kazimir, they sure crushed Taehyung to bits and pieces.

He just hoped Kazimir would at least listen to his side of the story before dismissing him as the devil that Jimin painted him to be.

He unlocked his phone and jot down emotional abuse into the search engine hoping his actions wouldn't make it to the results because for someone who was always aware of the way he treated others, he had somehow let his anger take its toll on Kazimir only to make her take a step back away from him.

He was never good with emotions but anger was proving to be the only emotion he was excelling at.

Just before he could start reading through the articles that showed up on his screen, his phone beeped to signal low battery and he ditched the idea of late-night awareness. He got up to get himself water from the kitchen and on his way back, he saw that Kazimir's light was on even though it was thirty minutes past two in the morning.

But she was known to pull all-nighters pretty often so Taehyung didn't think much of it.

She rarely speaks, this thing that you see is called a shadow,

a shadow of a sound that used to echoe through more than walls.

No wonder this melody is dark and demented and disfigured,

she rarely speaks lights anymore and can you believe me

when I say her shadows outshine her lights?

Her sound has a shadow-

Kazimir crossed off the whole poem with her pen and opened up a new page to start over. There was a poem stuck in her head that needed a way out but she wasn't sure how to give it proper justice on the page yet.

She sighed in frustration hard enough to make the loose strands of hair fly a few centimeters away from her face and picked up the pen again.

Her words have a shadow-

She crossed it again and started over.

A shadow dances across his ears when she speaks-

"Why!" She yelled at the page and shut her notebook with a slap. Her mind was a mess and she knew exactly why it was hard for her to focus but she was not letting herself acknowledge the obvious yet.

She picked up her phone, the screen displaying 2:32 a.m as a proud flag for her victory in the insomniac field and unlocked it to open up Pinterest, and to look for some inspiration that would pull the poem right out of her head with the proper words.

Her home page often displayed images related to writing or memes about chronic illnesses that she often searched up herself to make light of the symptoms that traced their steps across her body because otherwise, she would have lost her mind a long time ago.

Right then, the image that loaded first was luckily a list of things that were meant to clear one's head to write but the very first point was a disappointment for Kazimir.

1. Take a relaxing shower.

She looked down at her baggy shirt and sweatpants and tried not to think about what was underneath them. The blood from the wound had seeped into her black button-up and jeans and even into her hair despite Minho's strategies to avoid that but she only got to change when she got home in the evening at seven and she hadn't showered yet.

Flakes of dried blood were sticking to her skin and she was disgusted with herself but she couldn't carry her body under the running water yet. The fatigue that would follow the shower was already causing her much pain even before the actual act of showering but she was keeping herself awake till her mind was done being a coward about the fatigue that would follow.

As soon as Minho let her inside the house, she went straight to her room and locked the door on herself. The ride home from the hospital was a silent one as Kazimir pretended to have fallen asleep and this time Minho didn't try to make her stay awake. She saw both Naomi and Mrs. Kim waiting for her when she walked in and but she explained in brief sentences that they did stitches before uttering her usual I'm tired phrase into the air and locking herself in.

Naomi knocked a few times for dinner after that but Kazimir had already fallen asleep and eventually, the knocks died down.

When Kazimir woke up at one in the morning by the throbbing ache in her wound, she realized she had to shower and change. She unbuttoned her shirt and took it off before standing in front of the mirror, purposefully avoiding looking at her face. Her eyes traveled down and she saw the dried blood covering most of her back and waist while the rest was still concealed by her jeans.

She knew she was in desperate need of a shower but her mind disagreed. She pulled her jeans down as well and threw the stained clothes into the hamper before taking out clean clothes to wear to cover up her unclean body.

Once dressed, she sat down at her desk to start up with some reading for a class. It was her last year in college and she didn't want her grades to drop at the end of the semester because of a shower.

But the reading took a lot longer than she expected and once that was done, she was dying to jot the poem down that had started to dance in her head eventually leading to her screaming at her notebook at two in the morning still unclean.

But deep down she knew the poem was just another way for her to procrastinate the shower. It was the most strange thing ever because she was disgusted with herself but the actual act of showering was causing her mental pain unless she was ready to spend a few hours after the shower just being a limbless sloth.

Just a five-minute shower, in and out. She tried to reason with herself again but her body was still sitting still on the chair beside her desk.

But the shower wasn't the problem, what followed was. She thought she was going crazy when she first discovered taking even five-minute showers sometimes knocked all her energy away for a whole day making her feel like she was run over by a bus. But other times a shower was just a shower.

Little things like this were what always kept her mouth shut when someone asked her about what was wrong with her body because it is she said showers made the symptoms worse then that's what people started believing. But showers didn't make any difference all the time and if someone saw her just going about her business after a shower, then they assumed she was faking her illness.

The hardest part was explaining that her illness didn't have any rules. Just guidelines.

And if it confused others then they should at least consider how much more of an inconvenience it was for her.

She looked at the pages that she just read on her table and the paper laying next to them signed by the emergency doctor permitting her to take sick leave from college for two days and it was like the decision was made for her. If she took a shower now and let the fatigue take over her body rendering her immobile for a day, she would at least not miss out on school or due homework.

But then again, the shower would just as easily not make a difference to her energy levels. It was a matter of time until she found out which option would win out.

Her phone started ringing and she picked it up to see it displaying Taehyung's name and her face fell into a frown.

Jimin's words from the hospital were all erased from her mind by now but it wouldn't be long before she recalled them again along with everything else that happened before and after she blacked out.

But one thing was crystal clear to her, Taehyung was done putting up with her illness. And her face.

She silently cursed the culture she got stuck in when she moved in with the Kims because as much of a Korean her mom was, she was never really exposed to the toxic marriage culture that infested the far east countries where looks always prevailed over everything else.

For her, it was always about what was inside and not the outside. But now Taehyung felt suffocated because his mom was forcing Kazimir's outside on him while he was sick of her inside.

Needless to say, she was screwed on both accounts when it came to Taehyung.

Jimin had a valid point but Kazimir did not expect his little story to actually start making her believe that Taehyung was out to get her. It wasn't simple like that hence the reason why she had erased Jimin's words from her mind.

Taehyung was suffering as much as her and she felt like a total loser knowing she hadn't noticed that he was maybe into someone else and he was partially right every time he said that his parents wouldn't let him out of their joke of engagement easily when her sick orphan-esque self was concerned.

The ringing died down and started back up and Kazimir put the phone to her ear getting up to lay down on her bed.

"Hey, I can see your light is on. You weren't sleeping, were you?" Taehyung murmured into the phone.

"No. Wide awake as ever, writing actually. You're up too." Kazimir replied getting comfortable on the bed.

"Yeah, I have to submit some paintings in the morning. Just adding finishing touches. The assignments got me so stressed honestly, I hate the person I become under pressure."

"You can take my sick leave, " Kazimir chuckled, "I don't have to go to classes for two days. Can you imagine what a wound could do?"

Taehyung chuckled softly too and then sighed. "I can't believe we are about to graduate," he said.

Kazimir went silent for a second. They both knew what graduating meant but neither was ready to steer the conversation into that direction yet. It was too late in the night for that.

"What are you painting?" Kazimir asked instead.

"Uh- it's that one from three weeks ago," Taehyung replied shuffling around to take a picture and he sent it to her immediately.

Kazimir pulled her phone away from her ear to look at the picture and then put it back. "It looks good." She commented, "You didn't really add anything for three weeks though."

Taehyung sighed into the phone and went silent. They both stayed on the line, occasionally hearing each other's breath interrupting the tranquility, and Taehyung knew they were okay. He knew if it weren't for Kazimir's ability to forgive so easily he would have found himself clutching to his battered ego and prolonging his apology even more but she had already forgiven him without waiting for him to apologize first.

He sighed again thinking about Jimin's story, how he had winced when he heard Jimin tell her to see and to stop being blind but Kazimir was still willing to walk through hell with her eyes closed if she knew Taehyung was guiding her.

Why are you so easy to hurt, he almost asked her. Stop making it so easy for me to become the devil.

"Mir?" Taehyung finally called softly breaking the silence and Kazimir hummed in response.

"Why didn't you stay at the hospital longer to see your doctor?"

"You already know, Tae." She said.

"I don't. I don't seem to ever understand why would you willingly refuse to take pills and see doctors. Do you love seeing yourself suffer?" He questioned.

Kazimir sat up on her bed and looked sideways at the bedside table which contained the pills prescribed to her tucked behind years old things thrown in and taken out.

"The doctors never have anything new to say and....." She started but her voice disappeared in the end.

"And?" Taehyung prodded. He knew the doctors never had anything new to say and he even knew the second reason was always the numerous side-effects the pills had but he hoped this time Kazimir would spill the third reason as well, the reason strong enough to make herself suffer the way she was, the reason she never told anyone.

"And prednisones have those side effects I told you about and so does Plaquenil," she continued and Taehyung thought she would start listing all the pills one by one so he cut her off.

"Besides the side effects, Mir, what really is stopping you?"

Kazimir closed her eyes and tried thinking why Taehyung of all people would understand her reason more than anyone else but she bit her tongue at the last second before the words rolled off her tongue.

"Uh- I don't- I saw lipstick stains on your shirt." She blurted instead steering the conversation away from the question that had quickened her pulse in a mere second.

Taehyung went silent and if Kazimir was there with him right then, she would have seen his eyes go wide and his face lose its color altogether.

Taehyung didn't know what was going through Kazimir's head at that moment but he hoped that if he stayed silent long enough, she would forget the question.

"Tae?" Kazimir said after a while.

"Yeah I am on the line," literally, Taehyung thought.

Kazimir waited for his answer but instead, his words from the hospital came back to her.

I can't love anyone because of your face.

Her hand instinctively came up to touch the little cut on her forehead and a shiver ran down her spine.

The silence pressed down on them until Kazimir finally pierced it with determination.

"Hey, Tae?"

He hummed in response but his mind was elsewhere, specifically, he was repeating the words he had said to her in the restroom.

Set me free, please.

"I can pretend I am with Jimin if it makes it easy for you to... you know," She said softly and closed her eyes but as soon as the lids came together, a trapped tear ran down her cheek.

Taehyung sat up straighter, his ears not believing what they were hearing and his hand came up to run through her his hair in a nervous manner.

"Mir, no, listen-" he started but the static vanished suddenly and he pulled the phone away to see it had died because of low battery.

"Shit," he hissed and got up to go to her room.

Kazimir saw that he had hung up so she threw her phone on the bed and got up in one swift movement taking her shirt off and walking into the bathroom so that her thoughts wouldn't catch up with her.