RECAP: Kyungsoo’s and Krystal’s shadows have returned to their original owners. Kyungsoo and Krystal have just met each other again in real life at the SM auditions.

Kyungsoo’s POV 

            Krystal turns toward the door; her arms spread slightly back, right foot facing forward with her knees bent slightly.

            I’ve seen her get into this position too many times, and I know exactly what she’s going to do.

            She’s going to deal with her problems like she always has.

            By running away from them.

            Before she can take the first step forward, I grab her arm and turn her back around to face me. Her eyes dart around, looking anywhere but me. I notice that her eyes are the colour of mud. They hold so many muddled emotions I can barely tell what she’s feeling.

            “You can’t run from your problems forever, you know,” I tell her and she finally looks up at me. For some odd reason, her eyes clear a bit when she looks at me and they look a little less hazy.

            She surprises me by opening and muttering her first words, “Let’s go get some coffee.”

            I follow her lead out the door and into the street, where she makes a sharp turn left and enters the first coffee shop she sees. It’s not until then that I realize her fingers have been trembling and as she takes in deep breaths of the strong coffee scent in the café, she gradually starts to calm down.

            She turns back with a strangely reassuring smile, even though she’s the one panicking, and gestures to a table for two next to the window. It is only when I sit down that the adrenaline of making sure she stayed dies down and I start to feel the weight of the whole situation. I can imagine my eyes doing the same thing Krystal’s did a few minutes ago, turning into the colour of mud as turbulent emotions stir inside me and questions start filling my head.

            I am still staring blankly ahead when Krystal comes back with two cups of coffee. It is only when she places the cup right in front of me and I catch the scent of it that I finally look up at her again. She gestures to the cup in front of me and I take a sip of it and instantly feel a calming effect, which is extremely odd because coffee is supposed to have caffeine in it.

            Krystal answers my unasked question as she says, “I ordered tea for you because I figured that might work better to calm you down. I am one of the only people I know who actually calms down after drinking coffee.”

            I stare down at my cup and wonder how I never registered the odd taste. I take another sip and sure enough, it is tea.

            We sit in silence for a few moments before I finally find my voice. When I speak, it sounds hoarse, “I guess we have more urgent things to talk about other than tea.”

            Krystal nods fervently and I wish I could satisfy the curiosity in her eyes, but the truth is, I’m just as confused as she is. But I also know we have to start somewhere.

            Krystal seems to realize the dilemma I’m in because she starts off the conversation instead. “I’ll probably sound really stupid saying this,” she says, averting her eyes from me and looking at the table between us. “But I’ve been having these really interesting dreams.” She looks up at my eyes now and there is an intensity in them that holds my eyes on hers. “They all involve you.”

            I can’t find anything to say and Krystal takes my silence as a signal to go on speaking. One by one she explains her dreams, and I realize that her dreams aren’t merely fictional fantasies made up in her sleep, but they are events that happened when Krystal’s shadow was still my shadow. I try to explain this to her, and she just looks at me like I’ve lost my mind, which isn’t all that surprising.

            “Have you seen anything weird about your shadow at all in the past month?” I ask her, hoping she has so she will believe me.

            She opens and for a second she looks like she’s going to say no, but she closes it again and thinks. After another moment, she thoughtfully nods her head.

            “I think I saw it move once,” she says, still looking up towards the ceiling. I presume that it’s a habit she has when she thinks. “I just chalked it all up to me just imagining things.”

            I shake my head. “It wasn’t your imagination, trust me.”

            Before this, Krystal still looked like she was dazed, but as soon as she hears my statement, it seems like her eyes harden and she is starting to process everything critically. She suddenly turns to me with narrowed eyes and with a voice as biting cold as ice, she says, “How do I know I can trust you when you’re telling me all these unbelievable things?”

            I wasn’t expecting that remark. If it was from someone else, it would’ve been understandable, but this was the girl I had grown up with; this was the girl who had been my childhood best friend; this was the girl I had fallen in love with. Her words stung.

            But as I look into her eyes, I recognize a certain curiosity in them. It’s somewhere between how you would look at a stranger and how you would look at someone you recognize. And I realize. She doesn’t remember me. All she has are bits and pieces of me from her dreams.

            I ask her just to make sure. “You,” I hesitate and start again. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

            She furrows her brows and it looks like she is trying very hard to think, to bring up any related memory at all. But then she clenches her teeth in pain and holds her head in her hands, as if holding off a huge migraine.

            I hold her by her shoulders and say urgently, “It’s okay, it’s okay. You don’t need to force yourself to recall it.”

            When she opens her eyes again, she is visibly exhausted. She doesn’t face me as she shakes her head. “Something about you is very familiar. But no, I can’t seem to place a finger on when and where I have met you before.”

            I smile at her gently. “It’s okay, I’ll help you remember, if you’ll let me.”

            She looks at me and mutters one word. “That.”

            My eyebrows furrow in confusion. “What?”

            “That’s what’s familiar about you,” she says. “Your smile.”

            I smile again and I see the small glimpse of recognition in her eyes as she looks at me, but it fades away so quickly that it seems as if it was never there in the first place.

            “Well, it’s a start,” I say. 

For those of you who are still reading this fanfic, THANK YOU SO MUCH for sticking with me even though it's been 2 whole months since I updated. I apologize that I gave the impression that I was going to update soon, and I will not make statements I cannot stay true to in the future. This fanfic will be ending soon, so I hope you guys will stick around for a bit more till the end. Once again, THANK YOU SO MUCH for supporting me. It means a lot.