Chapter Text
The red light of the "In Use" sign outside the editing suite felt like a mocking eye. It wasn't just a light; it was a boundary marker between Joong Archen’s dreams and the cold, digital reality he was currently facing.
Joong leaned back in his ergonomic chair, the mesh pressing against his sweat-dampened shirt. He stared at a screen that was—for the first time in three months—completely black. Not the deep, artistic black of a fade-out, but the flat, empty black of a system failure.
"Please," he whispered. His voice was a rasp, worn thin by three days of surviving on energy drinks and the stale air of the Broadcasting building.
He clicked the mouse with increasing desperation, the sound echoing like a heartbeat in the silent room. "Don't do this to me. Not tonight. Not when I’m this close."
The external hard drive, a silver brick he had named 'The Vault,' emitted a final, sickly click-whir. It sounded like a bone snapping. Then, silence. The LED light that usually blinked a reassuring blue went dark.
It was 11:30 PM on a Thursday. His final documentary project—the culmination of four years of tuition, countless sleepless nights, and hours of exclusive footage from the Bangkok indie music scene—had just vanished into the digital void.
For Joong, this wasn't just data. It was the way the light caught the lead singer’s sweat at a basement gig in Ari; it was the quiet, shaky confession of a drummer who almost gave up. It was vision.
And now, it was gone. He felt the weight of his father’s expectations—who still didn't quite understand why Joong chose cameras over commerce—pressing down on him. If he failed this, he wasn't just losing a grade; he was losing the proof that he belonged here.
Ten minutes later, Joong was sprinting across the darkened courtyard toward the Innovation Engineering building. The humid night air did nothing to cool the panic rising in his chest.
His hair, usually styled to effortless perfection, was a chaotic mess, and his shirt was untucked, flapping behind him. He clutched the dead hard drive to his chest like a holy relic, praying to gods he hadn't spoken to since primary school.
Every shadow on the pavement seemed to stretch out, trying to trip him, but he kept his eyes on the brutalist architecture of Building B.
"Pond! Pond, wake up!" Joong hissed into his phone as he reached the heavy glass doors of the lab. He leaned his forehead against the cool surface, gasping for air.
"Joong? It’s nearly midnight, man," Pond’s voice came through, thick with sleep and muffled by what was likely a pillow. "Unless the building is on fire, call me at noon."
"My drive died, Pond. The Vault is gone. My thesis is on here. The rough cut is due Saturday morning. If I don't have it, I'm toast." Joong’s voice was climbing in pitch, teetering on the edge of a total breakdown. "Who’s the guy? You said there’s a guy who can fix anything. The one you mentioned at the faculty mixer. The one who supposedly speaks binary."
"Building B, Room 402," Pond groaned.
In the background, Joong heard a second, softer voice—Phuwin’s voice—mumbling something about Pond being too loud. The two of them were always "studying" late together, a fact the rest of the friend group teased them about relentlessly.
"Look for the guy who looks like he hasn't seen the sun since the semester started. Name’s Dunk. But Joong, be careful—he’s not like us. He doesn't like people, he doesn't like noise, and he really doesn't like people who talk too much. Don't be... you. Just be a client. Don't try to charm him; he has a firewall against that kind of thing."
Joong didn't wait to hear the rest. He bounded up the stairs, two at a time, his footsteps echoing through the hollow, clinical halls of the Engineering block.
The air here was different—colder, filtered, and stripped of the creative clutter that defined his own department.
Room 402 was cool, smelling faintly of ozone, solder, and expensive, dark-roast coffee. It was a stark contrast to the lived-in, chaotic warmth of the Broadcasting wing. Most of the workstations were empty, their monitors dark like sleeping giants. But in the far corner, tucked away behind a partition of server racks, a single monitor glowed with lines of neon-green code that scrolled too fast for Joong to read.
Behind the glow sat a tall, lean figure. He was wearing oversized glasses that reflected the code, and a charcoal hoodie that looked three sizes too big, swallowing his frame. He looked less like a student and more like a ghost inhabiting the machine.
Dunk Natachai didn't look up when the door slammed open. He didn't even flinch when Joong practically collapsed onto the desk beside him, gasping for breath and smelling of desperation. Dunk’s fingers continued their dance—a rhythmic, mechanical staccato on a keyboard that sounded like rain on a tin roof.
"Are you the wizard?" Joong gasped, thrusting the hard drive toward him.
Dunk finally paused. The silence that followed was heavy, filled only by the low hum of cooling fans. He slowly turned his head, his movement deliberate and economical. He looked at the drive, then at Joong’s frantic, sweat-streaked face, and then down at Joong's hand.
"I'm a Computer Innovation student," Dunk said. His voice was low, steady, and entirely devoid of the panic Joong was radiating. It was the voice of someone who dealt in absolute truths and logic gates. "And you're bleeding."
Joong looked down. He’d scraped his knuckle on the heavy metal door handle in his rush. A bead of dark red was smearing across the silver casing of the drive. "Doesn't matter. My life is on this drive, Dunk. Please. I’ll pay you. I’ll do your laundry for a semester. Just... please tell me you can save it."
Dunk sighed, a long, weary sound that suggested he'd heard variations of this plea many times before. He reached out, his fingers brushing against Joong’s as he took the drive. The contact was brief—less than a second—but it sent a strange, grounding spark through Joong’s system. Dunk’s skin was cool, and his hands were steady. He moved with the grace of someone who understood exactly how much pressure it took to keep the world from falling apart.
"Sit down," Dunk muttered, turning back to his terminal. "And be quiet. The file header is likely corrupted, but the physical platters are still spinning. If I can bypass the firmware, I might reach the raw data. But I need to focus, and your heart rate is loud enough to be a distraction."
Joong collapsed into the spare chair, a worn-out thing that smelled of old fabric. He watched, fascinated, as Dunk began to disassemble the drive with a set of precision tools that looked like surgical instruments. Dunk’s movements were precise, devoid of wasted energy. He was a creature of efficiency, every action calculated for maximum output.
"You're staring," Dunk said after a few minutes, his eyes never leaving the microscopic screws.
"I'm observing the process," Joong corrected, his natural charm beginning to leak back in now that the drive was in capable hands. "It’s a broadcasting thing. We’re very visual people. We find the story in the movement. Right now, the story is 'Brilliant Engineer Saves Local Student’s Career.' It's a classic three-act structure."
"Observe in silence, 'visual person,'" Dunk replied.
But as he turned to his keyboard to begin the deep-scan protocol, Joong noticed the corner of the engineer's mouth twitch. It wasn't a smile, but it wasn't a dismissal either. It was a ripple in the logic.
By 1:45 AM, the silence in Room 402 had become a character in itself. Joong had spent the last hour scrolling through his phone until the battery hit 10%, then staring at the posters of circuit diagrams on the wall, trying to find a pattern in the madness.
He thought about his footage—the way the lead singer’s voice cracked during the bridge of that final song. He could see the frames in his head, the way he wanted to color grade them to evoke a sense of nostalgic longing. He realized then that he was doing the same thing to Dunk—mentally framing him against the blue light of the monitors.
Dunk hadn't moved. He looked like a statue carved from shadows and blue light. Occasionally, he would mutter a string of commands under his breath, his brow furrowed in a way that Joong found oddly endearing.
"Hey," Joong whispered, the sound feeling like a shout in the stillness.
"I told you to be quiet."
"I was quiet for two hours! That’s a personal record for me," Joong protested, leaning forward so his chin rested on the edge of the desk, dangerously close to Dunk’s mousepad. "I’m going on a coffee run. The vending machine downstairs is trash—it tastes like wet cardboard and regret. There’s a 24-hour place two blocks away that does a real espresso. What do you want?"
Dunk’s fingers faltered for a fraction of a second. He looked at his own mug, which contained nothing but a dark ring of dried stains. He looked exhausted, the skin beneath his eyes bruised with fatigue. "Black coffee. No sugar. And don't get lost. The security guard locks the side gate at two."
"Yes, sir!" Joong gave a mock salute and vanished into the night.
When he returned twenty minutes later, he wasn't just carrying coffee. He had two large cups, a bag of hot steamed buns from the convenience store, and an oversized chocolate muffin. He set the black coffee down next to Dunk with the reverence one might show a king.
"Fuel for the wizard," Joong announced.
Dunk looked at the spread, his eyebrows climbing above the rim of his glasses. "I only asked for coffee."
"Think of the food as an incentive," Joong said, hopping back into his chair and unwrapping a pork bun. The steam smelled like heaven. "If the recovery bar moves faster, you get the muffin. It’s a performance-based bonus. In my industry, we call it craft services. It's essential for morale."
"That’s not how software works, Joong."
"In my world, everything works better with a bribe. Try it. The bun is still warm."
Dunk hesitated, his gaze lingering on the muffin, then he took a sip of the coffee. He closed his eyes for a moment, savoring the heat. When he opened them, his shoulders had dropped an inch from their defensive posture. "It’s actually good coffee."
"Of course it is. I have excellent taste." Joong watched him work, feeling a strange sense of victory. "So, Dunk... do you ever leave this place? Pond said you haven't seen the sun since the orientation. I think he thinks you're a vampire."
"I have a project," Dunk said, his gaze returning to the screen where the progress bar now sat at a painful 42%. "An AI model for predictive neural mapping. It’s designed to analyze human reaction to visual stimuli and predict the emotional output before the subject even realizes they're feeling it. It takes a lot of compute time. My professor wants it to be the foundation for a new type of adaptive UI."
Joong blinked, processing the jargon. "I understood 'AI.' The rest sounded like Elvish. Is it for your thesis?"
"It’s for everything. It’s about understanding the code behind the chaos of human emotion." Dunk’s expression darkened slightly. "But the data sets are inconsistent. People don't always react the way the logic dictates. They're... unpredictable."
"Because people aren't logic, Dunk," Joong said softly. He leaned in, his voice losing its playful edge. "That's why I do what I do. You can't code the way a singer’s voice cracks when they’re talking about their first heartbreak. You can't script the way a shadow falls across a face and changes the entire meaning of a look. That's the 'magic' you can't map. Maybe your AI is failing because it's looking for math in a place that only understands feelings."
Dunk turned to look at him then—really look at him. Not as a nuisance with a broken drive, but as a person with a perspective that was diametrically opposed to his own, yet somehow... compelling. He looked at Joong's eyes, wide and expressive, and for a moment, the engineer forgot to look at the data. He saw the flicker of a soul behind the lens of the "visual person."
"Maybe," Dunk said softly.
As 3:00 AM approached, the exhaustion finally caught up with Joong. The adrenaline was gone, replaced by a warm, heavy fog. He tried to stay awake, watching the progress bar reach 78%, but his eyes kept drifting shut. He found himself mesmerized by the rhythm of Dunk's typing—it was a lullaby in a minor key.
"You can go home," Dunk said, his voice sounding far away through the haze of Joong’s fatigue. "I’ll text you when it’s done."
"No... stayed this long..." Joong mumbled, his head dropping onto his crossed arms on the desk. "Gotta see... the finish line with you... can't leave my savior alone... what if the code gets lonely..."
Dunk didn't argue. He went back to his code, but he noticed that his typing had slowed. He was no longer just watching the recovery; he was watching the way Joong’s chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm. The lab was silent, but for the first time in years, it didn't feel lonely. It felt like a shared secret between the analog and the digital.
An hour later, the recovery was complete. 4,281 files restored. Dunk should have woken him. He should have ended the transaction. Instead, he sat back and looked at Joong. The broadcasting student looked different when he wasn't talking—softer, more vulnerable. His face was turned toward the monitor, a single green line reflecting in the curve of his cheek.
Dunk reached out, his hand hovering just an inch away from Joong’s hair. He could feel the warmth radiating from him. He pulled back, his heart doing something irregular—a glitch in his own system. It was a physical reaction he hadn't accounted for in his mapping project.
He turned to his 'Neural Mapping' script and tentatively typed a line of comment code at the very bottom, hidden away from any formal review:
// Warning: High levels of distraction. Potential for system override. Subject presence correlates with increased heart rate variance.
He didn't wake him. He just pulled his spare charcoal hoodie from the back of his chair—the one that smelled of his own life, of laundry and long nights—and gently draped it over Joong’s shoulders. Then he leaned back and let his own eyes close, the neon-green code continuing its silent vigil over the two of them.