Episode 51: The Shadow in the Abyss

“Once you’ve started, you should explain yourself until the very end, until the other person understands.”

Seonghye frowned and bit his lip. It was the moment when his dark eyes, framed by his lashes, overflowed with a boiling heat as they locked onto Yunhwan.

“I’m sorry….”

One of Seonghye’s eyebrows arched at the voice drifting on the light breeze.

“I’m sorry for saddling you with the burden of the past when you haven’t even fully recovered yet. Whether that burden is a memory, or the anxiety wearing the mask of a memory.”

“…….”

Yunhwan swallowed dryly. As if reflecting on the promise he had just made to himself, he continued speaking to Seonghye.

“From now on, I won’t look for the past in front of you. In exchange… this is as far as I can go for you.”

With a gentle touch, Yunhwan stroked the fruit gathered in Seonghye’s palm. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen and touched such healthy fruit. Moved by the feeling, he carefully brought his thumb and index finger together to pick up a single berry.

“…!”

As if by some trick, the berries tumbled toward the ground in a cluster. All that remained were his fingers foolishly grasping at empty air.

“Were you surprised?”

As the flustered Yunhwan blinked, Seonghye let out a short chuckle while watching him.

“My hands are tied, so I can’t touch them.”

“I’ll pick them up again,” he added, his voice perfectly nonchalant.

In that brief moment, Yunhwan saw Seonghye’s hand covering his own mouth. A sweet fragrance, strong enough to tickle the tip of his nose, wafted from the hand that had held the berries. When Yunhwan raised his eyes again, their gazes met.

“What are you doing? Close your eyes.”

“…Huh?”

Despite the half-beat delayed response, Min Seonghye didn’t care and closed his eyes first. As his neat lashes cast shallow shadows over his skin, Yunhwan, conversely, snapped to attention and widened his eyes.

Seonghye’s lips descended like a feather onto the back of the hand covering his mouth.

“…!”

Yunhwan’s eyes were dyed crimson. The deep sunset approaching from afar had already begun to envelop the two of them.

Seonghye, who had quietly closed his eyes, held a reddish glow across his face. For a moment, Yunhwan couldn’t tear his eyes away from Seonghye’s lashes, which trembled like the wings of a baby bird.

Time, stagnant and unable to flow, circled slowly between them.

With his vision shrouded by thin eyelids, Seonghye didn’t pull his lips away but exhaled a slow breath. Then, as if clearing a fog, he slowly pushed his eyelids open.

When his eyes—shimmering more than a flowing stream—were revealed, Yunhwan reflexively clenched his hand into a fist. His own reflection captured in those depths felt strangely foreign today.

“This is as far as you go, Hyung.”

Without removing his lips from the back of the hand, Seonghye gazed at him with an even more fervent look.

As Yunhwan’s pupils wavered like reeds under that piercing stare.

“If you’ve decided to bury the past, bury it completely.”

“…….”

“From now on, focus all your nerves and attention only on me.”

Deep night.

A man stood in the middle of the living room. The reason his surroundings felt uniquely heterogeneous and unfamiliar was likely due to the pheromones spreading from his body like a bombardment.

Several times, his eyes glinted with a strange light even in the pitch-black darkness.

At that moment, the moonlight that had been hidden by clouds penetrated the house, revealing the man’s grotesquely distorted expression.

“…Ha, haaa.”

His face, as smooth as polished ivory, twisted his mouth several times in an instant, then scrunched his brow like a withered branch. His body was already drenched in sweat.

Within one space, while two egos fighting over a single body continued their clash and antagonism, the man’s pheromones began to swallow the house like a flood.

The second ego, having opened its eyes again to subjugate the third ego, began to pour out every pheromone it possessed until the whites of its eyes were completely bloodshot.

Then, Min Seonghye twisted his neck and murmured dismally.

“Just a little more now.”

The voice, thick with moisture, was clear in its demand.

While this stupid third personality, thirsty for Yunhwan’s affection, played out its pathetic act of pretense and flattery, he had been watching every single thing from within the abyss.

Every time he saw the two of them exchanging emotions surrounded by light, the sun, and all sorts of harmless things, the man in the darkness did not hold back his mockery.

What use were things like affection or devotion?

Not when it couldn’t even properly seize control of this one body.

Mockery and contempt for the third ego welled up in the man’s pitch-black pupils.

“So, f*ck, wouldn’t it be nice if you just knew when to stop?”

Then, he chewed over his words, thinking of Yunhwan who would be behind the firmly closed door.

“Deciding not to look for the past… Yunhwan, you wouldn’t even abandon a pet dog like that.”

The more words he spat out, the more something simmered endlessly in his head. The third ego, which he thought he had suppressed, was howling continuously inside the cage where he had trapped it.

The man, who had released his pheromones through the house like snakes, moistened his dry lips and slowly bent his knees.

Perhaps because he had poured out too many pheromones, his head felt hazy for a moment. He blinked slowly and bowed his head.

“…….”

Then, the man’s past rose before his eyes like a mist.

The man of the second personality had woken up only a short while ago.

The reason he had fallen asleep in the first place was because of an accident in the mountains.

The man, who had been forcibly tied to this countryside by his father’s coercion, had wanted to leave immediately. Each time, the one who held him back was some country bumpkin, and that person’s stubbornness was no joke.

The ridiculous thing was that every time those unremarkable brown eyes looked at him, the body he was supposed to move didn’t follow his will.

He had to go up right away and find “that person.”

‘I’m never going and leaving you alone.’

Every time he heard the other’s firm voice filled with resolve, he felt something welling up in the back of his throat. Due to the abnormal physical reactions he felt, the man wanted to leave even more, but he was frequently caught by those deep eyes staring at him.

Whenever he saw those brown eyes, vivid even in the darkness, he felt as if he were being sucked into them.

It felt as if a new pair of shackles had been created.

For a man who had only been able to act and think under the moonlight of the night for a long time, the man named ‘Kwon Yunhwan’ who appeared one day was confusion itself—a fear he had never experienced.

Yet, his voice and gaze stuck tenaciously to his body, eventually reaching the point of binding the man—

That day. The moment he saw Yunhwan just before the accident, before reason could even take hold, the man rolled down the mountain while holding him with his whole body. The moment he saw those shaking brown pupils, every sense screamed that he had to save Kwon Yunhwan.

“Ha….”

The man distorted his features and let out a hollow laugh. So….

“The day I saved you, that b*stard woke up—”

The laughter that burst out as if in disbelief held a chill colder than midwinter air.

“As if that wasn’t enough, he tried to bewitch you.”

The man exhaled a heavy breath and murmured.

“Even now, he’s in heat because he wants to sleep with you….”

His ten fingers, which had been pressing against the floor, scratched the surface as if they were going to tear the smooth linoleum apart.

“My words telling him to do nothing must have sounded like a joke to him, Yunhwan.”

If you act like this, what does that make me, the one who spent three years searching only for you?

A simmering groan escaped through the man’s lips.

“If you try to abandon me like this just to take in a b*stard like that.”

The man raised his deathly pale face. Then, his face began to distort messily again.

The third personality, which had been tied up for a short while, began to howl in his head again.

The iron bars that had imprisoned him widened, and a man like a wild beast burst out from within.

Looking at the entity that knew nothing but to follow its instincts, the man laughed coldly.

“Wow, I’m curious too.”

His black pupils began to slowly sink like a dark swamp. Without bothering to hold onto his fading consciousness, the man didn’t spare the mockery.

“I wonder how long you’ll be able to stay by Kwon Yunhwan’s side.”

At the same time the suppressed personality was released, the second personality that had briefly seized the body slowly closed its eyes.

Next day.

The morning air, which had become quite cool, woke Yunhwan’s exhausted body. When the sunlight coming through the window warmly covered his still-closed eyelids, the fingertips buried in the blanket twitched.

It didn’t take long for Yunhwan to wake up. He naturally opened his eyes as he felt the bright sunlight filling the room, then gave a big stretch and sat up.

With his messy bedhead roughly combed back with his fingers, it was just as Yunhwan threw the door open.

“…….”

He stared wordlessly at the figure lying in the middle of the living room. With a somewhat flustered face.

In the spot where Yunhwan’s gaze landed was Seonghye, sleeping without a single movement as if he had fainted.

To think he’d leave his bedroom and suddenly sleep in the living room. And with nothing but his bare body on the floor, without a blanket or a pillow. As the situation sank in, a look of distress crossed Yunhwan’s face. While Yunhwan debated for a moment whether he should wake the sleeping Seonghye right now or quietly cover him with a blanket.

“…?”

It was then. Seonghye’s firmly closed eyelids trembled slightly.