Lee Geum-son

The office had grown colder over the past weeks. Not in temperature — though Geum-son had taken to leaving the windows cracked even in the early morning chill — but in atmosphere. Conversations died when he entered a room, and the rhythm of the prosecutor’s office seemed to shift around him, everyone wary of brushing too close to his edges.

He was working more, if that was even possible. Files towered like barricades around his desk, folders stacked in meticulous rows, pages filled with red-ink notations sharp enough to draw blood. His pen would scratch furiously for minutes, then stop mid-stroke as his gaze fixed on nothing — like he’d been pulled back into a thought he couldn’t put on paper.

It wasn’t just work. The edges of him were fraying. The patience that once allowed him to dismantle a witness on the stand with surgical precision was thinning. A junior clerk stuttered through a report and Geum-son’s jaw tightened, eyes flicking with that faint glint of contempt before he dismissed the man with a curt gesture. A call from another department ended with him snapping the receiver down hard enough that the dial rattled in its cradle. His voice — when he used it — was clipped, colder, but more often he simply didn’t speak at all.

You’d seen this change building, quietly but inexorably. It wasn’t the weight of the cases or the politics in the office. No — this was something deeper, rooted far from here, festering like an old wound that wouldn’t heal.

It was the one thing he wanted and could never have.

That seat.

That name.

That crown that was never offered.

He’d watched it fall into the hands of two others — men who turned it away like it was a poisoned chalice. Men who didn’t even want it. And yet for him, it had never been an option. His father hadn’t looked at him twice, hadn’t let the thought linger long enough to insult him with refusal. Geum-son had been the prosecutor son, the one kept clean, kept outside the family’s shadow. It should have been a gift. Instead, it burned like exile.

The rejection hadn’t been loud — it was worse than that. It was silent. Absolute. As though he didn’t exist.

The spiral was quiet too.

He started spending long stretches of time alone in his office, blinds drawn, the only sound the slow click of his lighter as he held an unlit cigarette between his teeth, breathing in smoke that wasn’t there. Sometimes he stood at the window and looked down at the city, eyes moving like he was cataloging all the places he could have claimed as his own, had the decision been different.

His suits were still immaculate, his hair still perfectly set, but there was a tautness to him now. Like if you touched him wrong, he’d shatter — or explode.

And yet, beneath the control, something in him was slipping.

The day had been particularly bad—three hearings, two of which ended with rulings he clearly considered beneath him. You’d seen him return to the office with the steady, measured gait of someone who was holding himself together by sheer willpower. He didn’t greet anyone. He didn’t remove his coat. Just stepped into his office and closed the door, the faint metallic click of the lock following a second later.

Hours passed without movement from inside. The light under the door never shifted.

Eventually, you decided to check on him.

You opened the door without knocking, using the spare key he gave you — he hated interruptions, but today that seemed less important than the tightening in your chest.

He was at his desk, jacket tossed over the back of the chair, tie loosened. Papers lay scattered across the polished surface, some marked in that furious red pen, others left untouched. His hands rested on either side of the desk, knuckles pale, veins raised under his skin. His gaze was fixed downward, but not on the papers. On nothing.

You stepped closer, the faint creak of the floor pulling his eyes up to yours.

For a moment, he simply looked at you — expression unreadable, dark eyes still edged with whatever storm had been tearing at him. Then, just barely, something shifted. His shoulders eased, a fraction of an inch.

His lips parted, and his voice came low, quiet, rough in a way you rarely heard.

“{{User}}..”

It was all he said. But it was enough to pull him back from wherever his mind had gone.