Six days out, and the apartment had settled into a strange new rhythm nobody had explicitly agreed to but everyone seemed to understand anyway — a careful, deliberate normalcy, built the way you build anything fragile, with both hands and total attention.
His mother had started cooking more than usual, not out of any stated reason but because Ryan recognized, watching her move through the kitchen each evening, that it was simply what she did with worry when she couldn’t fix the thing causing it.
Extra portions.
Careful, thoughtful meals that took longer than a Tuesday really required.
Ryan ate every bite without comment, understanding it for the quiet love it was.
“You’ll do fine,” she told him, Wednesday evening, setting a plate in front of him with more force than the gesture strictly needed.
“Whatever this Trial shows.
You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“I mean it, Ryan.
Whatever they say you are or aren’t — that doesn’t change one single thing about who you actually are in this house.” Her voice wavered slightly, the careful composure she’d maintained for weeks finally showing its seams.
“You’re still my son.
You’re still the boy who used to fall asleep in his cereal bowl.
A piece of paper from some academy doesn’t get to redefine that.”
Ryan reached over and squeezed her hand, throat tight.
“I know, Mom.”
She held his gaze a moment longer, something fierce and protective behind the worry, and then, seeming to catch herself, straightened and returned to the stove like the moment hadn’t happened at all — though Ryan noticed, for the rest of dinner, that she kept glancing at him slightly more often than usual, like she was trying to memorize something about him before it changed.
His father found him afterward, in the hallway, and pulled him aside with a quiet urgency that immediately put Ryan on alert.
“I need to tell you something before the Trial,” he said, voice low.
“Something I should have said the very first night, honestly, instead of parceling it out in pieces.”
Ryan braced himself.
“Okay.”
“The girl who died.
Song told you the facts — what happened, who she was, why Valen never let it go.
But there’s a piece I never told her, either.
Something only I saw.” His father’s expression had gone distant, pulled backward into a memory Ryan understood he’d carried alone for two decades.
“In the last few seconds, before it happened — she looked directly at me.
Not at anyone else in that corridor.
At me.
And she said something.
Just three words, before the manifestation took her entirely.”
“What did she say?”
His father was quiet a long moment, visibly working to steady his own voice. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
“‘Tell someone kind.'” He met Ryan’s eyes, something raw and unguarded passing between them.
“I’ve spent twenty years wondering what she meant by that.
Tell someone kind what, exactly.
I never had an answer.
I still don’t.
But I think about it every single time I think about you walking into that Trial in six days, carrying the same thing that killed her.”
Ryan felt something cold settle in his chest, heavier than anything Director Song’s careful briefings had managed to produce.
“You think I could—”
“No,” his father said immediately, firm.
“No.
You’re not her, Ryan.
You’re seventeen, not fifteen.
You’ve had weeks to prepare, training, people around you who understand what’s happening.
She had none of that — she Awakened in the middle of violence, completely alone, completely unprepared, surrounded by people who saw her as cargo instead of a person.
That is not your situation.
I need you to understand the difference, because I’ve spent twenty years failing to fully believe it myself, and I don’t want you carrying my fear as if it’s a prophecy.”
Ryan absorbed that, turning his father’s words over carefully.
“Why tell me now?
Why not before?”
“Because I think you deserve to walk into that Trial with the whole truth instead of pieces of it,” his father said quietly.
“And because — selfishly — I think I needed to finally say it out loud to someone, after carrying it alone for so long.” A faint, tired smile.
“Your mother’s right, you know.
Whatever the Trial shows, it doesn’t change who you are to this family.
I just needed you to know the entire reason I’ve been so afraid these last weeks, instead of only the parts that were easy to explain.”
Ryan pulled his father into an unexpected hug, feeling the older man startle slightly before returning it, tight and grateful, and stood there in the hallway a long moment, two people finally setting down a weight that had sat between them, unspoken, for far too long.
He told Ji-hoon about the conversation the next day, walking home from another session with Officer Han, the late afternoon light stretching long and gold across the pavement.
“Tell someone kind,” Ji-hoon repeated slowly, something thoughtful and careful crossing his face.
“That’s a strange thing to say, in the middle of dying.
Not a name.
Just — an instruction.
Aimed at nobody specific.”
“That’s what my dad thinks too.
Twenty years and he still doesn’t know what she meant.”
Ji-hoon was quiet for a long stretch, turning something over that Ryan couldn’t quite read, before he spoke again, careful and deliberate.
“Maybe it wasn’t a puzzle to solve.
Maybe it was just — a wish.
The last thing a scared fifteen-year-old could think to ask for, in a moment when nobody around her had been particularly kind at all.” His voice had gone unusually soft.
“Maybe she just wanted someone, somewhere, to end up being told the truth by someone who actually cared what happened to them.
Instead of being used, or hidden, or turned into a weapon by people who only saw the power and never the person.”
Ryan looked at him, struck by the specific weight behind that interpretation, the careful, personal way Ji-hoon had arrived at it.
“That sounds like it means something to you,” Ryan said quietly.
Ji-hoon didn’t answer immediately, and when he did, his voice carried a rawness Ryan hadn’t heard from him before, a crack in the easy confidence he usually wore like armor.
“Maybe it does,” he admitted.
“I told you I’d tell you everything eventually.
I meant it.
Just — not yet.
There’s a version of my own story that rhymes with that girl’s a little too closely for comfort, and I’m not ready to say it out loud yet, even to you.” He glanced over, something apologetic in his expression.
“Soon, though.
I promise.
After your Trial, maybe.
Feels wrong to hand you my weight while you’re still carrying so much of your own.”
Ryan wanted to push, the way some old instinct always wanted to push at open doors left carefully ajar — but he recognized, better than almost anyone, the particular shape of a person deciding when they were ready, and chose, instead, to simply reach over and bump Ji-hoon’s shoulder lightly, the same easy gesture Ji-hoon had offered him a dozen times over the past weeks.
“Okay,” Ryan said.
“After the Trial.
I’ll hold you to it.”
“Wouldn’t expect anything less.” A faint, grateful smile returned, some of the weight lifting from his expression.
“Six days, Ryan Han.
You ready?”
Ryan considered the question honestly, turning over everything he’d learned in the last month — his father’s twenty-year grief, his mother’s fierce unwavering love, his sister’s simple bright acceptance, Director Song’s careful protection, Officer Han’s patient training, and this strange, steady, unfairly loyal boy walking beside him who carried his own unspoken grief like a shadow he hadn’t yet found the courage to name.
“Getting there,” he said finally, and found, walking the rest of the way home in comfortable quiet, that it was even true.