The private archive room inside Synapse Biosystems was unnaturally cold. The dim ceiling lights flickered faintly above rows of steel cabinets, casting long shadows across the silent floor. Kang Eun-ji stepped inside carefully, letting the heavy door close behind her with a soft click. The sound echoed louder than it should have, making her chest tighten. Everything about the room felt wrong—too still, too hidden, too buried.
Her eyes moved slowly across the cabinets until they landed on one drawer marked in red letters: RESTRICTED – INTERNAL RECORDS. She froze for a moment, staring at it as if it might answer the questions already burning inside her. Then she walked toward it, her heels barely making a sound against the floor. She reached for the handle and pulled, but it didn't move. Locked.
Eun-ji exhaled sharply and glanced behind her, even though she knew no one was there. Her fingers slipped into her coat pocket and pulled out a thin metal pin. Her hands were steady, but her heartbeat wasn't. After a few tense seconds, there was a quiet click, and the drawer finally opened.
Inside were old files layered in dust, their edges yellowed with age. Some were marked with security stamps, others with faded labels she didn't have time to read. But one file immediately stood out among the rest. It was plain black, with no label, no date, and no name. Just a dark cover that looked almost too deliberate in its emptiness. A strange uneasiness settled in her chest as she reached for it.
When she opened the file, she found pages filled with neat handwritten notes. The writing was controlled, almost painfully careful, as if every word had been written with restraint. At the top of the first page, a name had been scratched out so harshly that the paper had nearly torn. Eun-ji frowned and lowered her gaze to the sentence beneath it.
This began the day we lost them.
Her fingers stiffened around the page. Something cold moved through her body. She turned the page slowly, and before she could react, several old photographs slipped out and scattered across the floor.
She quickly dropped to her knees and began gathering them, but the moment she picked up the first one, her hand stopped moving.
It was a family photo.
Her mother was standing in the center with the soft smile Eun-ji still remembered from childhood. Her father stood beside her, younger and warmer than the version memory had left behind. And there she was too—a much younger Eun-ji, smiling brightly at the camera with careless happiness in her eyes.
But she wasn't alone.
Next to her stood a small boy.
Eun-ji's breath caught.
She stared at the image, her fingers tightening unconsciously around the edge of the photo. The boy's body was there, his clothes visible, his posture familiar somehow—but his face had been scratched out violently. Not faded. Not damaged by time. Scratched. Deep cut marks tore across the image again and again, as if someone had wanted to erase him from the world itself.
A chill spread through her.
Her hands began moving faster as she reached for the other photos scattered around her. The same boy appeared in each one. In one, he was standing beside her with a shy smile. In another, he was laughing while she held onto his arm. In another, he was looking directly at the camera, alive and real and close enough to matter.
But she couldn't remember him.
That realization struck harder than she expected.
She couldn't remember his voice. She couldn't remember his name. She couldn't even remember why seeing him made her chest ache so badly.
Her breathing turned uneven as she grabbed the diary pages again and forced herself to keep reading.
They took everything from us. She forgot. I didn't.
Eun-ji's eyes widened as she read the words again. Her lips parted, but no sound came out. A sudden sharp pain pulsed behind her temple, and before she could steady herself, a memory flashed across her mind so suddenly it nearly made her gasp.
A hospital corridor.
Bright white lights.
The sound of someone crying.
A child's hand holding hers tightly.
She could hear herself sobbing, though the memory felt distant and broken, like glass beneath water. Then she saw him—or at least a shadow of him. A young boy standing beside her, refusing to let go of her hand as if she was the only thing he had left.
Eun-ji sucked in a breath and blinked hard, but the image vanished as quickly as it had come.
"No…" she whispered, her voice barely audible in the silence of the room.
Her eyes dropped back to the photographs in her lap. The scratched face. The erased existence. The feeling that this person had once meant everything, and yet had somehow been stolen from her memory.
Her hands trembled as she turned to the final page.
The last lines were written more heavily than the others, as if the writer had stopped trying to stay calm.
You don't remember me. That's why this hurts more. But I remember everything.
Eun-ji stared at the words, unable to move.
Then her gaze shifted lower.
There, at the bottom of the page, was a signature.
Seo-jin.
For a second, she forgot how to breathe.
Her eyes remained fixed on the name as her mind struggled to catch up with what her heart had already begun to understand. The room around her seemed to disappear, leaving only the sound of her pulse pounding in her ears.
Seo-jin.
The name felt old and buried, yet painfully familiar. It struck something deep inside her, something hidden beneath years of silence and loss.
Her grip on the diary loosened slightly.
Her lips trembled.
And then, in a voice so soft it barely sounded like her own, she whispered, "My brother…?"
The words hung in the air, fragile and impossible.
Silence answered her.
But deep down, she already knew.
The little boy in the photographs had not been a stranger.
He had been family.
He had been hers.
And somehow, somewhere along the way, someone had erased him from her life—while he had spent all these years remembering her.