The Winter Gallery was shrouded in a silence that felt both sacred and suffocating. Amal entered, and the hush soaked into her bones, dulling her footsteps and softening the nervous staccato of her breaths. Shadows loomed between displays—oil portraits, sculptures, relics from another age—each piece seeming to guard a secret of its own. At the far end, Min-jun stood framed beneath an antique crystal chandelier, the play of cold light sharpening the edges of his beauty and rendering his eyes half-hidden, wholly unreadable.
It struck her, suddenly and with an ache, how little she truly remembered about him, and about herself. The invitation's words haunted her: "Tell me the color of your fear when we meet." As she walked toward him, she weighed her answer—was it red, like blood and roses, or the muddy gray of uncertainty? Each possibility knotted in her chest.
Amal paused at a canvas near the entrance. It was a child's painting, clumsy and exuberant, colors running wild—a river, a mango tree, two small figures hand-in-hand, rendered in bold childish lines. Her throat tightened inexplicably, the sweet-sad urge to cry building behind her eyes.
Min-jun watched, silent, respectful, letting the moment drag. "You painted that when you were eight," he said quietly, startling her. "You hated the way grown-ups drew leaves. You said trees were supposed to laugh, not stand still."
She spun, heart racing. "How do you know that?"
He smiled, boyish for just an instant. "Because I was there. You insisted I use yellow for the river, even though I told you rivers weren't suns in disguise."
Bits of laughter, long-buried, flickered at the edges of her mind—fragments of clay-smudged fingers, sunburned knees, a promise exchanged in the hush of a dusk that felt like forever. She clutched the frame, hope and dread twisting within her.
"I don't remember you," she managed. "Not really. I just… I feel like I should."
Min-jun stepped closer, his movements careful, reverent, as though crossing into a sanctum only she could grant him. "That's memory for you. Sometimes it slips between the cracks, surviving only as feeling. Sometimes it gets buried until something or someone is brave enough to dig it out."
Amal shook her head. "Why me?" Her voice faltered. "Why keep coming back?"
He hesitated, jaw clenched as he weighed what could be spoken and what must be endured. "Because you're the only thing that's ever made me believe I could belong to both the day and the night." There was a rawness in him, a hunger for something gentler than what his years had offered.
She let herself study his face, searching for the boy he claimed to have been, and for the vampire she suspected he was. There was something in the way he radiated contradiction—a restlessness, an ache, a silent discipline honed by survival but softened by longing.
"Do you believe in fate?" Min-jun asked, his tone almost playful.
Amal thought of all the ways her life had spiraled—artschool rejected for medicine, loves lost to distance or anxiety, her talent for painting haunted by scenes she'd never lived but could always imagine. "I don't know," she confessed. "I believe in moments that refuse to let you go."
They walked together, drifting through the gallery's winding halls. Each curve and corner seemed to echo with old laughter and half-whispered promises, and Amal felt her fear shift shapes—no longer sharp and jarring, but deep and pervasive as fog. Min-jun led her past portraits of royalty, gods disguised as mortals, and a particular painting of a woman with a wolf's shadow at her feet.
"Sometimes we remember through art," he said. "Sometimes art remembers us when we can't remember ourselves."
Amal's fingers grazed the frame. The subjects in these paintings—lovers, monsters, legends—seemed to blur. She saw herself in them: hunted and haunted, daring and doomed. The urge to ask questions burned, but she couldn't give voice to her suspicions; they felt too big, too ancient.
Instead, she asked, quietly: "Why did you save me?"
Min-jun hesitated, eyes flicking to a distant memory she could not touch. "Because losing you once was enough to last me lifetimes."
There it was—the first honest truth. It struck her with the force of recognition, even as memory failed to supply the details. She swallowed, sensing the shift in the gallery's air. They were alone, two souls circled by ghosts who cheered for or mourned them, she couldn't tell which.
Suddenly, warm fingers interlaced with hers—Min-jun's touch, steady, grounding. For a brief, crystalline second, the gallery faded, and they were only children again, running along a riverbank, sharing whispered promises to never let go.
She squeezed his hand, tears stinging. "Even if I don't remember, I think some part of me always knew you."
He smiled, something desperate and hopeful in it. "That's what monsters like me pray for."
She finally knew her answer: the color of her fear was sunlight yellow—brilliant, impossible, promising that even from the deepest shadow, warmth could be found.
And as the hour deepened, Amal realized this meeting was no mere reunion but the first step back into a labyrinth of forgotten love, unspoken danger, and the terrible, beautiful truth that sometimes, memory is only the beginning.