Work Text:
Jongseong’s sword is warm in his grip despite the cold around him. Trusty steel, forged from a world not his own, and it’s never silent, murmurs of violence and composure dripping from it. Jongseong strokes its hilt with his thumb.
Thank you.
The metal warms even more like a last-ditch effort, as if to battle how his fingers are slackening from the numbness spreading from the cold. Or maybe it’s because his palms are bleeding from when he lost his sword earlier and had to stop the two soldiers coming at him with his bare hands. He watches the red slowly drip down the blade to the snow-covered dried grass next to his feet, a crimson pool in the middle of burnt sienna, dying green, and fugue white.
The red is stark as it bleeds into the ice turning it into a cerise.
He should be worried. There are stab wounds all over his body, the one in his stomach has been bleeding sluggishly since the main guard got him at the beginning of the fight.
The cold is unforgivable too. Years ago, he used to wait for the winter. Now all that’s left of the memory is the sharp tang of blood in his mouth and the sound of blades colliding.
It should hurt, but nothing really hurts anymore, not in the way it should. In fact, things stopped hurting thirty two years ago. He doesn’t really care what bleeds anymore, what gets cut off, or how much he is tortured.
His death is set in stone, and it’s not written in the hands of anyone he has been up against. There is relief in the knowledge.
It’s made him reckless. Sunghoon always complains about having to pick him up from pieces.
There’s the other implicit knowledge too, the one truth that has given him hope for the past three decades.
Sunghoon will come for him.
If Jongseong is in pieces, he’ll put him together. If he is dead, he will bring him back to life.
If he is ashes, he’ll make sure he rises like a phoenix.
Keep him alive till his revenge is complete. That had been the deal after all.
Jongseong closes his eyes, spitting blood, finally letting himself collapse on one knee, sword piercing the first layer of snow and into the sand. The ice should seep into him. Maybe it already has and that’s why he’s numb.
Weak as he is, traditions are hard to forget. They’ve been beaten into him since he was four and could barely say his name without a lisp.
You shall not kneel in front of anyone but your kin and god.
There is a little hypocrisy there, because Jongseong’s knees have met the ground a thousand times over for Sunghoon, but he thinks it’s built into humans, hypocrisy that is, the hamartia of thinking they follow one thing when they’ll bend just as easily for something else if they’re convinced.
Convenience is key. Years ago, it hadn’t been convenience, now it is.
Besides, Sunghoon is his kin and his god now, has been for years. The kind of kinship that comes from a man who was offered a hand when there were none to hold him, the kind of devotion borne from being offered a life of purpose.
No family deity had come scurrying smelling like incense offerings and prayers of hope back then. It was only Sunghoon who did, leaning against a broken rock pillar of a ruined shrine, a smirk on his sculpted face, a quiet offer, a dangerous demand.
There’s the tell-tale sound of someone’s feet crunching the dried grass and the snow, paces even and familiar.
Jongseong smiles to himself.
“Jongseong.”
The low murmur of his voice is something Jongseong will recognize even in the roar of a hundred crowds. It’s the only voice he’s heard every day for three decades.
He looks up even if it takes all of his strength to, ready for a sight that has welcomed him for years.
Sunghoon is standing a few feet away, the cut of his black coat hugging the breadth of his shoulders. Snow scatters on top of his hair, white on obsidian, glory for the wicked. A pink hue colors the tip of his nose and the highs of his cheeks.
Jongseong watches him take a sweeping look at the bleeding bodies scattered in the clearing, the ones Jongseong has gladly taken lives of. He smiles, a small quirk of his mouth. He looks satisfied.
Pride is warm as it seeps into Jongseong’s bloodstream. There is something about making Sunghoon proud. It’s unlike any other feeling he’s ever felt. Somewhere along, his purpose has gotten mixed with chasing this feeling too.
Who can blame him?
“You’re late,” Jongseong breathes, finding that there is more blood to spit out. He does so with a grimace.
Chortling, Sunghoon walks to him, hooking his arms under Jongseong’s and lifting him. His arms are strong. They’ve carried Jongseong in all phases of his weakness, held him down when he needed to be. They hold the kind of promise that Jongseong has faith in to never be broken.
It must be sad to know that the one thing you trust the most in this world is something conditional, but the years have worn at his sadness. Jongseong is just glad he has something to trust now, conditional or not.
He collapses forward into Sunghoon like a broken marionette with its flimsy strings cut. Sunghoon catches him as he always does, hands going around his waist, a whisper of a kiss against his hair, fingers roaming to assess the damage.
“How many?” Sunghoon murmurs. There’s a strain of sorrow in it.
(“Just because I heal you doesn’t mean I like seeing you hurt,” Sunghoon says. He’s standing on the balcony of what’s left of Jongseong’s palace, a dark, looming figure, every bit the nightmare he is supposed to be.
His eyes are hazel though, dripping gold that is lethal, though with an oath to keep Jongseong safe and alive.
“Irony,” Jongseong murmurs from where he’s sitting up on the bed.
Sunghoon turns away with a deep breath. There is nothing he can say to that.)
“How many what?” Jongseong wheezes. His voice comes out as a gurgle, metal filling his mouth. Sunghoon holds him close, caressing his hair with all the tenderness someone like him shouldn’t be capable of. All that time spent by Jongseong’s teachers and family to ensure he didn’t lurk into the shrine near the spring because evil beyond redemption supposedly lingered there, and it was just Sunghoon.
“How many times did you get stabbed?”
It’s a pointless question, a distraction that doesn’t fool Jongseong anymore. He screams as Sunghoon uses the pause anyway to lift him with the force of his embrace before he can respond, something like fire cascading into him from the other man, his skin knitting together inch by inch, the blood and bones the blades of the bodies littering the snowed-over clearing had sliced through coming together under the force of Sunghoon’s power.
Sunghoon heals him all the time, but the process is always doused in anguish. There is something lovely about this pain though, something warm and hearty in the delicate way Sunghoon’s fingers map him, of his breaths falling on his hair. It makes Jongseong’s heart pound, open and free.
“Easy,” Sunghoon whispers against the shell of his ear as Jongseong whimpers from the agony. He keeps his lips pressed against his skin, mumbling reassurances that fade into the screech of the pain.
Snow keeps pelting down on them like a storm is imminent. Jongseong lifts his left arm as soon as he feels he is able, stroking his hand down Sunghoon’s hair, ridding itself of the snow that has started to clump together on the strands. His fingertips have started to gain color again, no doubt due to Sunghoon.
“Was it necessary to get stabbed eleven times?” Sunghoon asks as he rearranges his grip so he can grab Jongseong’s wandering hand by the wrist. He feels so breakable in the solidness of Sunghoon’s touch, in the power that oozes out of it.
Sunghoon could so easily break him open, dip his long fingers into his innards, and smear his face with his blood, but he chooses this instead, to take care of Jongseong over and over again. He has the audacity to call it a contract still when they both know that phase passed ages ago.
“Was it necessary to make me wait in the snow for so long?” Jongseong retorts.
“I got held up back home.” Slightly moist lips press over his pulse point, an apology for things that can’t be said, a litany to be careful.
Getting held up back home is a common excuse, one that Jongseong never acknowledges or questions. Jongseong’s never seen hell, but he has always wondered if the reputation it has is undeserved because he doesn’t think someone like Sunghoon can exist there if it’s as bad as the scriptures say.
Jongseong has never asked. He doesn’t think Sunghoon will tell him either. He’ll have to go there soon enough. Maybe Sunghoon just wants to give him the experience firsthand.
“Better?” Sunghoon asks as he pulls away just enough to look at his face. He releases Jongseong’s wrist to cradle his jaw and stroke over the blood that must still be there.
Jongseong nods, drawing him into an embrace, eyes shutting the world out.
“One more,” Jongseong whispers with a relieved smile.
One more and he’ll be free. One more and Sunghoon will be free too.
Their freedom awaits the soul of one more man who sits ignorant in some part of his manor, perhaps unaware of the blade destined to meet his throat.
And then, Jongseong won’t have to carry the burden of avenging his bloodline anymore.
Sunghoon won’t have to heal a broken man over and over so he can keep up his end of the deal anymore.
Sunghoon says nothing, just holding him tighter, his long fingers pressing so hard against the span of Jongseong’s back that he lets out a grunt. It earns him a kiss of apology on his browbone.
Sometimes Sunghoon forgets who he is, the strength he possesses. Jongseong likes the reminder. It keeps him from getting too comfortable. It lets him know his place.
“Let’s go home?”
The word home is said gently this time, and Jongseon knows Sunghoon enough to hear that he means the ruins of what’s left of Jongseong’s home.
It isn’t really Sunghoon’s home, but he still calls it that. If Jongseong tries hard enough, he can pretend Sunghoon cares more than he lets on, enough to keep him around, but he’s never been one to make a fool out of himself for no reason, so he doesn’t.
✯✯✯
Jongseong lets the water lap over him, uncaring if the stream will wash him away. Sunghoon watches him from where he’s seated on a rock boulder, hazel eyes glowing.
“Your hair is still bloody,” Sunghoon says quietly. Water bounces away from where he sits as it hits a spherical shield, invisible to the naked eye. He isn’t very fond of getting his clothes wet.
Jongseong hears it for what it is, so he swims closer, head tilted down. Long fingers curl into locks of hair gently, drawing lines on his scalp. With him facing the water, Jongseong can see it become a diluted pink before the stream washes over it.
“He knows you’re coming.”
Jongseong angles his head to look up at Sunghoon. He’s wrapped in the hues of the sunset, but winter has sapped away some of the colors, leaving them pale and wan, lifeless. They battle over Sunghoon’s porcelain skin. Jongseong watches him for a long moment, he doesn’t have very long left anyway, at the way his eyes dance over Jongseong too, nothing to show and everything to hide.
“Let him know,” Jongseong murmurs. He’s hunted down the man seventeen times, killed him every single time too. Eighteenth is supposed to be his last life. He can’t recall ever feeling so desperate to be alive. Does greed never end?
Jongseong’s sword is ready to be held against a throat and slice through tendons and bones. He’s only a weapon holding a weapon.
“Are you not scared?” Sunghoon asks.
His fingers clutch Jongseong’s jaw tightly. He could so easily twist his neck and end this, but in all the times Jongseong expected him to, he has never. This time too, he leans down to meet Jongseong’s lips in a soft kiss instead.
“Scared of what? Killing him or dying?” Jongseong scoffs. The last time Sunghoon had asked this was two years into their deal, after the first time Jongseong killed a king with the sword Sunghoon gave him.
“Both,” Sunghoon answers, his body a line of tension.
“I used to be,” Jongseong replies, honest. Back then, he’d been scared that this mission he’d taken upon him had been too ambitious. Thirty-two years later, he is drained and ready to let go.
The one thing he wants is the one thing he knows he can’t have. At least, there’s comfort in knowing, the kind that has made him accept his fate and not fight it as so many others do.
“That implies you aren’t anymore.”
Smiling, Jongseong swims away from Sunghoon.
“I am not. There’s nothing to be scared about. It’s just you,” he says.
Sunghoon’s eyes are piercing when they rise to meet his.
“Are you not scared of me?”
Jongseong throws his head back and laughs.
“It’s just you,” he repeats. It’s hilarious how Sunghoon thinks of himself as something to be feared when the first time he’d seen Jongseong, even before the deal was agreed upon, he’d asked permission to tie Jongseong’s hair up with the ribbon around his wrist.
Jongseong’s laughs dwindle into a light giggle. Sunghoon is watching him like he’s a god.
For a moment, Jongseong even feels like he could be one, the devotion in Sunghoon’s gaze is unwavering, a steady ocean of so much that if Jongseong had to dwell on it and identify every single one in it, Chronos himself would have to come down to remind him about the limited time he has.
Oh, you foolish demon.
“Why should I be scared of you?” Jongseong asks. Sunghoon looks away like Jongseong should know the answer, and he does, but nothing about it makes him fearful, so he swims towards Sunghoon again.
✯✯✯
“A long time ago I wished someone would avenge me too, but the ones left didn’t care enough to.”
Jongseong balances his elbows on the sheets. They should change it. Sunghoon will in a bit. A warm washcloth wipes between Jongseong’s thighs. He’s unbearably gentle like he always is.
There is nothing demonic about you, so how are you one?
Sunghoon’s too human to be this soul-claiming creature, but then again, humans are capable of so much horror. Jongseong has seen it. He’s felt the violence bone-deep and given himself up to it too.
Jongseong waits for Sunghoon to continue, but he hides behind his long black hair keeping his eyeline from view. Sunghoon has never spoken about his past, so Jongseong gives him silence and waits. It must be the call of the end making him feel that he should give Jongseong some piece of himself. He’ll take it.
Warm fingers draw patterns on his thighs instead of responding. It’s Jongseong’s cue to stop waiting and ask what he wants to.
“Who did you have left?”
“My parents, my sister, my brother, friends.” Everyone who mattered was alive, and no one had fought for Sunghoon.
“Did they have a good reason to?” Jongseong asks, giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Sunghoon’s mouth twists. It arranges his face into an expression so unlike the calculated and intense calm that it’s always set into.
“What is a good reason? Wanting to move on in life? Wanting to forget someone you supposedly cared about so you can go on with your life?”
Bitterness coats his words. There’s millenniums worth of it. Jongseong’s heart aches.
“I would have,” Jongseong declares after a beat.
I would have sold my soul to a demon and hunted an entire bloodline down for you.
Sunghoon lifts his leg with callused hands and hooks it over his shoulder, kissing his ankle, knowing etched into the gesture.
“I know,” he murmurs before he ducks to kiss him, folding Jongseong into two. The stretch makes him let out a contented sigh.
Jongseong reaches for the black smoke emitting off of Sunghoon today as he kisses him. He’s grieving something. Jongseong doesn’t know what. He hasn’t asked yet either. He always grieves the souls he claims. Usually, it goes away in a day or two, the smoke fading until it is fully gone.
Sunghoon’s tongue laps into his mouth gently, river meeting the ocean in an inevitable collision course designed by the universe, something cosmic in it, but then again, it always feels like this, doesn’t it?
“It’s you,” Sunghoon tells him later, when Jongseong’s fighting to stay awake after Sunghoon has ravished him again, taken him apart in every way he loves. “I’m grieving you.”
Two days is all that’s left.
“Not for too long,” Jongseong warns, caressing Sunghoon’s cheek. The demon’s eyes flutter shut at the touch.
“I’ll grieve as much as I please,” Sunghoon challenges.
“It’s not like I can stop you,” Jongseong murmurs, pulling Sunghoon into his chest, scrunching his eyes shut at the way it feels like his heart has been struck by lightning.
Love is only one thing among the myriad of connections they have, one more wrong thing among a million wrong things they share.
Jongseong’s always been the one to see, never the one to stop, and it’ll be that way this time too. He can’t stop Sunghoon, but more than that, he won’t. This, whatever it is, has been enough.
He’s human, so he’s greedy for more, but he can stop himself from reaching for it, from standing in the snow again and bleeding out, waiting for the world to devour him, can stop the hope that stands as a flicker ready to be turned into an inferno.
This story can’t repeat. It will end with him. Sunghoon will move on as he should, and everything will be right again.
✯✯✯
The man doesn’t recognize him still. Seventeen times Jongseong’s blade has found his heart and head and he still hasn’t identified who he is.
He’s killed too many, Sunghoon had said the day they met, but Jongseong had hoped to make him recognize him at least once. The years are a burden resting on his shoulders, and he feels like he has nothing to show for it for a moment until he catches Sunghoon’s gaze over the shoulder of the man.
“This is the last time. You die today. No more resurrections. No more boons from your deities,” Jongseong murmurs. His chest feels like the weight of a mountain is resting on top of it. Maybe it’s the realization that he ends with this too.
A sense of finality dilutes the air around him.
“I don’t even know who you are,” the man insists. He knows that no begging will save him from Jongseong. It never has in all the times before.
Grinning, Jongseong lets his eyes fall shut. He can feel the wind from the large open windows caress his face, but nothing is as tender as Sunghoon’s touch, so it isn’t enough to distract him. The sword keeps chanting something, one final blow, and it’ll all end here, where it was always supposed to, with whom it was supposed to.
“Maybe that should tell you everything about why you deserve this,” Jongseong says with barely-veiled rage coloring his words.
Jongseong closes the distance quickly. Dragging deaths out isn’t something he can stomach, even if that is what this man deserves.
Blood sprays across his face as the blade finds home in the column of the man’s throat. He falls like a tree uprooted in the forest, a few whimpers like the creaks before a collapse, the rattle of his lungs against the blood, and then, one last breath.
Sunghoon walks around the body to Jongseong. His eyes are glowing bright today like he’s somehow found a way to summon the light of a thousand suns.
“Look at you,” he says, and he’s smiling, but his eyes despite the glow are murky. Jongseong kisses him, but as he sighs into Sunghoon for what he knows should be one of the very last times, he wonders what he sees in him. Is it the jaded coat of rebellion or the all-too-fiery executioner who thought himself self-important enough to take the lives of so many people into his hands? Or does he see the fallen king who avenged the massacre of his subjects?
What do you see, Sunghoon?
Sunghoon tastes like grief and power. It’s a heady, irresistible combination that makes Jongseong feel saturated, like the cobalt blue ink his art teacher used to bring for him. Jongseong’s nails dig into Sunghoon’s shoulders tightly before he pulls off, tucking his face into his neck. He smells like a bonfire, one that could sear through Jongseong if he lets it.
Soon.
✯✯✯
Jongseong tugs at his collar with trembling fingers. The last hour is here. Sunghoon had taken him home and helped him clean up. He’d even listened to him when he said he wanted to dress in his best suit.
It was obvious why he asked for it.
No one wants to die looking shabby. Or maybe it’s just Jongseong.
Sunghoon had bent like the willow outside Jongseong’s window under the request.
“I knew,” Sunghoon tells him as his fingers stroke along the tips of Jongseong’s ear. They’re not normal nails anymore, the tips curved into black claws. Jongseong’s only seen them a few times before. They used to make him feel vaguely unsettled, but they no longer feel any different from his human-looking fingers. They snag on a few strands of his hair every now and then in some odd sort of pattern. He wonders how they’d feel on his scalp, if it’d make him bleed.
Will Sunghoon make him bleed? Is that how this ends? He hopes it’s slow, that he gets to stare at him till he takes his last breath so that he’d be the last thing on his mind. It will be regardless.
“What did you know?” Jongseong asks. He can feel his heart racing despite this being a foregone conclusion since the day Sunghoon found him.
“You didn’t do it for your kingdom alone. You wanted to, but it wasn’t what made you certain to do this.”
Jongseong freezes, looking up at Sunghoon, but the demon refuses to meet his gaze. His eyes are set on the shell of Jongseong’s ear.
“Who do you think I did it for then?”
Sunghoon’s mouth grazes his cheekbone. Jongseong’s eyes flutter shut.
“The boy who used to come to see you near the stream. The one who brought lilies for you. The one who wasn’t even old enough to defend himself, who wasn’t even tall enough to cover you, but still took an arrow for you because he loved his king.”
Jongseong’s knees feel weak. He tries to stumble away, but Sunghoon’s arms come around him, caging him against his chest.
“How did you know?”
Sunghoon smiles, and his fangs push against his upper lip.
“You forget who I am, Jongseong. You always do.”
Jongseong gasps when Sunghoon draws him in, taking his bottom lip in between his teeth. It breaks skin and his mouth floods with blood. He sighs breathily, closing his eyes, meeting Sunghoon’s tongue with his as they curl around each other. The sting is so light it only sets him on the edge of pleasure.
Sunghoon tears himself away just as easily as he pulled him in.
“Will nothing scare you?” He asks, looking rattled and unsteady unlike he’d been moments ago.
“Why are you trying to?” Jongseong retorts. He doesn’t know when he’d done it, but he has a hand fisted in Sunghoon’s coat.
“Because I want to kill you,” Sunghoon whispers, looking at him like he wants some divine revelation to dawn upon Jongseong.
“Isn’t that what the deal was supposed to be, Sunghoon-ah? You let me have my revenge and keep me immortal for as long as it’ll take me to hunt down everyone involved in my kingdom’s massacre and I let you have my soul for it?”
Jongseong feels like something has been lost in translation because Sunghoon shakes his head. He tries to put some distance between them, but Jongseong’s grip on his coat remains steadfast. He could easily break away if he wanted to, but he must not want to. Even as close to his death as he is, it makes him smile.
Clawed hands curl over his hands enclosed over the fabric.
“The deal was that you’d give your soul up to me. It means you kill yourself.”
It takes a moment for the words to dawn. They don’t make a big difference. It would have been nice to have Sunghoon be the one to deliver the final blow, but if this is what the specifics say, then Jongseong will follow it.
“I’d like to use the sword then,” Jongseong says. It had been Sunghoon’s second gift to him, right after the ribbon. It feels right to have both in his vicinity now. Sunghoon had been the one to tie the ribbon into his hair earlier. The sword sits slanted against the bedframe, the tip of it on the marble floor.
“You don’t understand what I am saying.”
“Then explain.”
“I want to keep you,” Sunghoon breathes. It’s delivered like something forbidden.
“I don’t understand.” He wants Sunghoon to keep him too, but there’s nothing to be done. This end was written in the stars, in the middle of the broken ground of a shrine.
“You forget, Jongseong-ah. Humans are greedy, but demons are greedier. So stay with me. Let me have you for an eternity.”
Sunghoon’s voice has dropped, the low undertone to it thrumming with promise, with flickering hope that hasn’t caught fire yet because he doesn’t know Jongseong’s answer.
Jongseong blinks.
“Are you asking?”
Sunghoon nods. His nails dig into the side of Jongseong’s palms, but not enough to hurt.
“But I thought this was the only way,” Jongseong mutters, feeling clueless and unmoored.
Sunghoon wants to keep him. He wants him for an eternity. He wants him to stay with him. Jongseong is ready for all of it, but how does he do it? Where does he begin? What does he have to do?
“It isn’t. If you kill yourself, your soul gets absorbed into me, completing the contract. But if I… if I were the one to kill you with intention, if I were to take your life, the deal is fulfilled and you get to rise again as someone like me.”
“A demon?” Jongseong asks. It’s not really a question.
Sunghoon’s head hangs low as he nods this time. Jongseong ducks his head to look into his eyes. They’re glowing still, but there’s shame in them. There’s nothing for him to be ashamed about.
“Would you be able to go through with it? With killing me?” Jongseong asks after a long pause. It’s as much an answer as anything else could be. His heart has started to slow down with the promise of a lifetime with Sunghoon. It should feel momentous and confusing, but once the certainty in Sunghoon’s gaze convinces him, he can only track the euphoria as it trickles into his bloodstream.
A spirit or a demon or a mere whisper, if he gets to stay with Sunghoon, he’ll take it. He wonders which of his dead relatives would have had the nastiest words spilling from their spirits for this. All those endless cries to stay away and be good and look what he’s done for himself.
The horror of it washes over him warmly in copper and the smell of smoke. He loves Sunghoon. Nothing else matters now. His duty to his kingdom is done with.
“You’d let me?”
“Of course. If I had to die by someone’s hands, why not at the ones of someone who has pulled me back from the brink of death a hundred times?”
“I can give you time to think this through, Jongseong.”
Jongseong feels the tell-tale warmth swirl inside him. There’s nothing about being human that holds anything for him.
“I think you’ve thought this through enough for the both of us.”
Sunghoon presses forward into him. This time, Jongseong can see the black flames rise from his body, sorrowful.
It’s an eternity, but it will still come with Jongseong’s death at Sunghoon’s hands. He’s never hurt him before, but he will have to this time.
“It will hurt,” Sunghoon warns.
“Will it hurt me as badly as it will hurt you?” Jongseong asks.
Silence receives him.
“Look at me.” Jongseong tugs at Sunghoon’s hands and cradles them in his despite the difference in their sizes.
Gilt gold meets Jongseong’s gaze.
“I stopped being scared of death the day I made the deal with you. This was always the only thing in the cards, but somewhere along, I wondered what it’d be like if I could stay alive, if only to be with you for some more time. I thought I was asking for too much. If it’s not, I’d love to die by your hands, Sunghoon. There’s no one I’d want to hand over my heart to and hope to make me bleed.”
Sunghoon’s shoulders rise in anticipation. It’s the first sign he receives before Sunghoon presses a kiss on his forehead. Jongseong lets his hands go when he tries to draw them back.
“It’ll hurt a lot,” he says again.
Jongseong’s mouth tugs up in a smile.
“Let it,” he murmurs back.
“I think you’re a fool,” Sunghoon whispers, but he’s smiling, the gold of his eyes warm now, the black flames rising from his body intensifying by the moment. “But I feel grateful that you are because I get to keep you. I didn’t think it’d be this easy.”
Jongseong didn’t either, but apparently it was.
“It always was.”
In the end, it goes like this, Sunghoon’s mouth meets his in a deep kiss, and his clawed hands sink into Jongseong’s gut and twist. The kiss is salty with Sunghoon’s tears and Jongseong’s blood. He feels it drip down the side of his mouth and spilling to the floor. It hurts like a wildfire spreading through his veins, but it’s so good. It leaks promise and hope and forevers and it’s all Jongseong can focus on.
The last thing he sees is Sunghoon’s bloody face, wet with tears as he lowers him down to the marble floor.
Jongseong’s breath rattles heavily. He tries to reach for Sunghoon’s jaw, but his hand gives up on him halfway. Even amidst the pain, there is so much relief, at knowing what he’ll wake up to.
There is a whisper beside his ear as he feels darkness drag him under.
“See you in a bit.”
His last thought is that he’s never seen Sunghoon cry before this.
✯✯✯
“Jongseong.”
The voice is quiet, but it’s not said out loud. It’s in his mind.
There is a cool hand resting over his heart, something sharp only just digging in, but not with the intent to hurt him.
It’s familiar. It’s the touch of someone he loves enough to be killed by.
Jongseong opens his eyes.
He is met with love burnished in gold, Sunghoon in all his glory. The black flames disappear almost instantly from over his hunched form. Things are a circle after all. Sunghoon doesn’t have to grieve anymore. Without it, there’s no reason for him to be mourning.
“It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would,” Jongseong says quietly as he sits up, a hand holding Sunghoon’s still to his heart. It won’t beat anymore, but it doesn’t have to. He has everything he wants right here.
“Did it hurt you?”
A smile, wispy thin, stretches Sunghoon’s mouth.
“It doesn’t matter anymore. You’re here now.”