Dual POV — Seo-ah & Jae-hyun
Seo-ah's POV
Seoul didn't feel like a city. It felt like a pulse — fast, chaotic, and too big for someone like her.
Seo-ah tightened her grip on the suitcase handle as she stepped through the gates of Hwayang University. The air was laced with city dust, ambition, and coffee that had no business smelling that good. Students buzzed around her, faces new, excitement visible, laughter unfamiliar. Her shoulder ached from the weight of her laptop bag and sketchbook, but she didn't mind. They were the only pieces of home she had brought.
Clean slate, she reminded herself. This is your blank page.
She wandered toward the building marked Department of Creative Writing & Digital Literature — sleek, glassy, hugged by trees whose leaves seemed to applaud softly in the wind. Her fingers brushed over a nearby poetry slab carved in stone.
"The quietest voices often carry the truest echoes."
She smiled. That could have easily been a line from one of her own chapters. Her fingers itched for her pen, like muscle memory urging her to sketch this moment — the quote, the atmosphere, the slight ache in her chest she couldn't name.
"Excuse me," a voice said.
Warm. Calm. Unrushed.
She turned. A boy stood just a few feet away, his hand holding out a pen — her pen.
"Oh—" She blinked. "That's mine."
He nodded once, offering it like it was fragile.
"You dropped it back there."
Their fingers brushed briefly. A flicker of something. She looked up. Soft black hair, glasses, hoodie, unreadable eyes that felt like they could see beyond sound.
"Thanks," she said, slipping the pen into her tote. "I didn't even notice."
"First day," he said with a quiet smile. "Happens."
A comfortable silence stretched.
"You're in Creative Writing too?" she asked.
"Yeah," he nodded. "First year. Jae-hyun."
"Seo-ah."
Just names. But somehow, it felt like something had started.
They walked together to the orientation hall, steps syncing up naturally. She noticed the notebook in his hand — it wasn't clean. Scribbled with lines and messy verse, the kind of notebook that lived instead of posed.
"You write poetry?" she asked curiously.
He looked down at it like it embarrassed him. "Trying to. It's easier when no one's looking."
She understood that too well.
"I write stories," she replied.
"Then we're both trying," he said softly.
Jae-hyun's POV
She had the kind of presence that didn't ask to be noticed. But the world around her seemed quieter when she entered it.
Seo-ah, he repeated silently. The name already felt like the opening line of a poem.
He hadn't expected anything when he stepped on campus — just another day, another chapter, another stranger. But the girl with the sketchpad wasn't just another stranger. She lingered at the poetry slab like she was reading a secret. She picked up her pen like it meant something. She didn't rush to fill the silence with noise.
There was something about her.
But not enough to draw conclusions.
Not yet.
Still… "There was something about her — the way she paused before speaking, the way she looked at poetry like it had been written for her instead of the world. I didn't know what it was yet. But I wanted to stay long enough to find out."
He had no reason to connect the two.
Not really.
But when she smiled at the poem stone, when she said she wrote stories… a small thread pulled taut inside him.
Not recognition.
Just… something.
"So," he asked, as they approached the door, "read anything recently that made you cry?"
She blinked, then smiled a little, caught off-guard by the question but not offended.
"Actually... yeah."
"Let me guess."
She tilted her head. "A Wattpad story. Lavender Skies and Winter Lies."
He chuckled. "Of course. Ha-joon?"
"The literal green flag of my life," she sighed dramatically, and then softened. "He made me believe fictional men are a genre of comfort."
He grinned. "Real men have a long way to go, huh?"
She smiled, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. "Exactly. Like, bare minimum, just talk like Ha-joon."
Jae-hyun watched her speak, watched the ease with which she said things most people guarded. He wanted to say more — ask about the stories she writes, what she sketches, what she's healing from — but didn't.
Not yet.
Because even if there was a story between them… it hadn't started yet.
As they sat in the auditorium side by side, she began flipping through her orientation folder, and he watched the way she underlined things with a soft frown, the way her fingers traced margins like they belonged in them.
He didn't know she was the MoonWriter.
She didn't know he was one of her readers.
Not yet.
But maybe — just maybe — this was the first sentence of something worth writing.