The morning after the tranquilizers wore off, Room 802 fell into a quiet that felt far more unnerving than the shattered glass and roaring screams of the day before.
Do Ra-ik lay propped up against his pillows, his large frame still and subdued. He didn't throw another tantrum. He didn't tear at his IV leads, nor did he hurl medical equipment at the staff. In fact, he didn't utter a single word.
Instead, every time the heavy wooden door clicked open, his head would snap toward the threshold. His dark, sunken eyes burned with an intense, almost desperate anticipation searching for a specific silhouette, a specific cold gaze. But the moment a standard floor nurse in blue scrubs or Dr. Choi in his round glasses stepped into the frame, a flicker of sharp, bitter irritation would wash across Ra-ik's face. He would immediately avert his eyes, staring cold and motionless at the blank ceiling until they left.
He was waiting. And he was stubbornly silent.
On the other side of the city, Maeng Se-na was officially processed.
She was discharged from the medical ward as a patient, and effectively exiled from the surgical wing as a doctor. With her privileges suspended indefinitely and a hefty fifty-million-won fine hanging over her head, she packed her modest personal belongings into a single tote bag and walked out of the hospital doors. The institution that had been her sanctuary, her entire identity, had locked its gates behind her.
When she finally stepped inside her private apartment, the oppressive silence hit her like a physical weight.
Her home was immaculate, minimalist, and icy a mirror image of her professional persona. No clutter, no unnecessary warmth, no lingering scents of home-cooked food.
"Well, congratulations, Maeng Se-na," she muttered sarcastically, her voice echoing off the bare tiles of her entryway. She caught her reflection in the dark glass of the hallway mirror and let out a dry, bitter scoff. "You really outdid yourself. Banned from the OT, fined half a year's savings, and suspended for slapping a patient who was already halfway in the grave. Brilliant surgeon, truly."
She spent the afternoon trying to hide behind her usual armor of cold, biting cynicism humbling herself with sharp internal jabs before anyone else could do it for her.
But when night fell, her psychological defenses completely collapsed.
As Se-na lay beneath the heavy duvet of her king-sized bed, the pitch-black darkness of the room began to breathe. The illusion of her clinical detachment dissolved into thin air.
Suddenly, she was no longer Chief Surgeon Maeng Se-na.
Her body began to tremble violently beneath the blankets. The physical phantom sensations returned with terrifying clarity the roaring wind of a hundred stories up, the dizzying drop of open air, the sickening weightlessness in her stomach, and the agonizing, jagged bite of broken glass beneath bare feet.
She curled into a tight ball, clutching her own chest as tears overflowed her eyes.
She missed the warm, cedar-scented hugs of the grandmother. She missed the chaotic, noisy banter of the high school boys in the small diner, the simple comfort of hot rice and salty soup. And above all, she was terrified.
Underneath her brilliant mind and formidable reputation, Se-na was still a young woman. Her heart a maiden heart that had spent its entire life guarded behind sterile walls could not process the horrific, raw intimacy of having inhabited another person's suicidal despair. She had stood on the ledge. She had felt his desire to turn to dust, and she had experienced the terrifying drop into the abyss.
She pulled the duvet over her head, her quiet, broken sobs shaking her shoulders in the cold, empty room.
Three days passed in Room 802 with the same suffocating silence.
The floor staff walked on eggshells around the VIP patient, baffled by his complete refusal to speak or interact. He took his medication, allowed his bandages to be changed, but remained an impenetrable wall of granite.
On the afternoon of the third day, a senior nurse was standing beside his bed, carefully hanging a fresh bag of saline on his IV pole.
Ra-ik, who had sat motionless for hours, cleared his throat. The sound was horribly dry and raspy a consequence of severe vocal cord trauma from his screaming and days of disuse.
"The... woman..." he croaked out, his voice sounding like grinding stones.
Read all chapters of TBTS for FREE at patreon accuscripter