“He doesn’t even know about all this… danger”
“Then don’t tell him. Let him have one day that isn’t about you fighting ghosts.”
“They’re not ghosts, Jaewan. They’re cowards who think fire erases shame.”
“Then let them think it,” Jaewan said softly. “You’re still the one who taught me: you don’t show the sword until you’re ready to use it.”
That stopped him.
For a heartbeat, the old light came back into Seungho’s eyes—molten, ancient, barely contained.
“Fine,” he said at last. “Keep the meeting. But tighten the circle around him. I want every step logged, every face cross-checked. If anyone so much as looks at him wrong—”
“They vanish,” Jaewan finished. “Already written.”
Seungho nodded once.
“And if they touch him—”
“You won’t need to finish that sentence.”
The two men stood there, the air between them humming with the unspoken: the city was about to burn, and they were the only ones who remembered how to start or stop a war.
??????
The apartment is hushed.
Not quiet—hushed, like the air knew better than to intrude. Haneul had turned the lights low, curtain half-drawn, one leg curled beneath him on the wide velvet couch. A sketchpad lay open beside a crumpled hoodie. His phone lay screen-down on the armrest. A tea cup, forgotten, cooled slowly in his hands.
And between his fingers—creased, almost translucent with time—was his mother’s poem.
He unfolded it carefully, as if it might shatter under the wrong breath.
And then, aloud—just once, because that’s the rule—he read it.
His voice didn’t waver.
Not until the end, when the last line echoed.
“Before the snow falls…”
It was a spell. A mourning. A message from a past life, even if he didn’t know it.
His fingers trembled slightly. But not from cold.
He didn’t remember her. Not truly.
But something deeper than memory pulsed in his chest whenever he touched the paper. A recognition older than language. She had given it to him. Tucked it into his pocket. Before they left that last time.
“I would love to see you.”
It hit differently this year.
He didn’t know why. Only that it did.
Maybe because Seungho had a way of looking at him like the world had stopped ending.
Maybe because for the first time in years, the longing wasn’t one-sided.
