He looked away, he knew what I meant.
“You think you’re the problem. You always think you’re the problem.”
When his eyes slammed back into mine, I almost stumbled. They burned with ruinous hurt, like an animal that’s been kicked one too many times.
“It is always me! They come for me through the people I love.”
The words rang in the air.
Oh. Oh, Jihoon.
I wanted to reach for him, but the gulf between us was too wide.
“I knew what it would do to you,” he said quietly, voice trembling, “and you’re right. I made a decision for you because I didn’t know how else to protect you. I put you in a tower because I thought it was the only way to protect you from the monsters. I never meant to turn into one of them.” His words cut off as if someone had snatched his breath away, and it was a moment before he could talk.
“I did not know how to be better. Better for you. I know I did all those things, and I wish I could go back and change them, Kaiya. It has taken me so long to understand how much I fucked up. How I lost you. I should have told you.”
The fight drained out of me as I listened to him say the things I never thought I’d hear. All I’d ever wanted from him was to be his equal, and it hadn’t been just him that had made me feel less than.
“I wanted to keep you safe. I needed to. All I ever wanted was to keep you close to me, but my side is a dangerous place. I couldn’t keep you with me knowing it would hurt you.”
“Why are you telling me this now?” I crossed my arms, trying to act like the question didn’t matter. “What’s changed? Hana still has the photos. She could still show the whole world.”
His eyes slid closed as he exhaled, but when he looked back at me, the set of his jaw made his face somehow seem different.
“I’m not scared of the world anymore. I’m scared of a world without you.”
The air froze in my lungs, even as my chest seemed to expand.
“What does that mean?” I whispered.
“It means I cannot stay away from you anymore. Seeing you… it broke me when I thought I could not break any further. It was easier not knowing where you were, but I could not be in the same city, and not come to you,jagiya.”
He took a step towards me, a single one that seemed to move him closer to me than it should have, but perhaps that was because to me, he had always taken up all the space around me. But now, somehow, it felt like he moved into my space, and not the other way around.
“I thought this way the pain would fade,” he confessed, looking down at me, coffee brown eyes so familiar that this moment could have been now, three years ago, or a decade from now.
“Has it?” I asked softly.
“Never. It’s constant. You are like a bruise, right here,” he tapped his chest right above his heart. “I feel it every time I breathe, and it never goes away because I know I caused it. Atfirst, I tried to drown it out. Nothing worked. One day I realised. I need to feel you there, jagiya. I need to feel the pain, because it reminds me every day that what we had was real.”
I froze, because his words were an almost exact replica of how I had felt these past years, every time I had given myself the grace to think about how it hurt. How it still hurt.
He put his hand inside his jacket, and I frowned as I watched him pull out his wallet. A battered, old leather thing he’d always used, despite having an entire drawer of designer ones. Somehow the sight of it made this feel more real, less like the fantasy I’d had for so long. Entranced, I watched him open it, and from inside a little hidden pocket, he pulled out–
“Your ring!” I gasped. Because there, in the palm of his hand sat the little braided ring of silver. The companion to my own. A pair he had bought so long ago.
“I took it off the day I… the phone call. I did not feel like I deserved to wear it, knowing what I’d done. But I keep it with me. It reminds me.”
He pressed his other hand to his chest, rubbing slightly, absentmindedly, and with shock I recognise the movement, because it was the same one I’d made into habit.
My eyes burned, but I blinked furiously.
“Of what?”
He smiled softly.
“It reminds me of the man you thought I was, once. It reminds me that I need to be better, because if I had been better, maybe I would not have lost you.”
