#154
“Ugh.”
Lee Han-sol didn’t even pretend to hear Ki Baek-woo’s pained sound.
“This! This! This! This! Are you doing this for me to see right now? That’s it, isn’t it!”
His agitated hands shook Ki Baek-woo’s face roughly before throwing it aside dismissively. Ki Baek-woo hurriedly straightened his cast-off face and hung his head with a pale, ashen expression. Lee Han-sol shouted.
“If you’re going to do that, why don’t you just slash it with a knife? If you’re going to deliberately mess with a perfectly fine wound to make it bleed again just to show me and play the victim, then just tear your whole face off instead! Can’t do it? Should I do it for you? You were acting up just fine, so why are you suddenly staying quiet!”
“I, I…”
“You what, you what! Are you flustered? It’s strange that I’m not pitying you when I should be, right? When you’re bleeding all over your face, an idiot like me should think ‘Oh, Ki Baek-woo got hurt, he said he was going to die and ran off and he’s really doing it, what’s been on the news day after day was real, Ki Baek-woo becoming a wreck is all because of me, I’m the sinner!’ I should have such stupid thoughts, but it’s unfamiliar that I’m not? Does it feel bad? Is that it?”
“No, no hyung, it’s not like that.”
“What do you mean it’s not! You did this before too. When it seemed like I was angry, when it looked like I wasn’t interested in you, you shoved your injured arm at me back then too, saying you were hurt. You begged for attention with that kind of thing! In your eyes, I still look like an idiot who can be swayed by a single scratch. You’re still treating me like such a pushover, right!”
Ki Baek-woo could only shake his head frantically in confusion. It seemed the wound on his left cheek had reopened when Han-sol had touched his cheek earlier, telling him to snap out of it. It appeared he’d been misunderstood because of that. Ki Baek-woo wanted to make excuses that it wasn’t his intention. Though it was true that he had desperately begged for Han-sol’s pity until now, this time it really wasn’t like that, he knew clearly that he couldn’t do that anymore, and he needed to explain so his sincerity could reach him.
But Lee Han-sol’s anger grew faster than Ki Baek-woo could convey his feelings. There was no room for Ki Baek-woo to interject between his irritably continuing shouts. Lee Han-sol’s voice, filled with spite, grew increasingly agitated.
“You asked for forgiveness, what? You’re taking revenge on yourself instead of me? And then you’ll ask for a chance? Who are you to decide such things on your own! Did you think I’d come running because I’d pity you if you babbled whatever came to mind and rolled around like a crazy bastard obsessed with dying? Did you think I’d even kneel and beg you not to do it!”
Do I still look like such an idiot to you? Do I, fuck, do I still look like such an easy target who’s hung up on you!
Lee Han-sol couldn’t control his emotions. He poured out his heated words recklessly, came to conclusions on his own, then repeatedly stamped his feet not knowing what to do. Like a small animal feeling threatened in its existence because its weakness had been exposed. As if he’d been caught off guard.
Ki Baek-woo felt despair. He had only been driving himself to the edge. He had no intention whatsoever of attacking or threatening Lee Han-sol. Though he always hoped his life could be a means to intimidate and bind him, that he occupied at least that much of a position in Lee Han-sol’s heart, even in this situation he wasn’t a scoundrel who would try to intimidate Lee Han-sol. Yet to be misunderstood like this… thinking about how much Lee Han-sol must have been hurt by him to reach this point made his mind go blank.
How should he handle this? How could he deal with hyung who had become like this…
Ki Baek-woo lost himself. A desolate feeling as if abandoned in space.
“I won’t do that anymore! The idiot who used to act like the world was collapsing just because someone like you showed off being hurt a little has died about twenty times over! However much you get hurt, wherever you get hurt, whether it hurts or not, whether you get scarred or not, I don’t give a damn! Don’t get hurt, don’t be in pain, don’t say you’re going to die, I’ll handle all the hard stuff, you don’t need to know about such things, all the bad stuff is my share so Baek-woo you, you…! Do I still look like a moron who desperately pleads like that! No no no I’m telling you no!”
Lee Han-sol’s face flushed red as if feeling humiliated by being hit where it hurt. His wavering gaze. He blamed Ki Baek-woo with a voice full of shame, resentment, and grievance.
“If you’re going to die, just die quietly by yourself, why let people talk about it everywhere! Why do you keep making your name reach my ears! You thought I’d sympathize, didn’t you. You thought I’d still tremble at a single scratch on your body like when I lived my life obsessed with you. You thought I’d be unable to do anything and struggle just worrying about you alone!”
“No, no… no, hyung. It’s a misunderstanding, please listen to me. I really…!”
“You said you remembered everything, that you remembered how you treated me all this time, how I groveled to you like that! You remembered that, so did you think a few broken limbs could make up for it? Did you think I’d come running here begging and pleading, saying please don’t do dangerous things, that I can’t do anything when you’re like that! Just how much are you looking down on me!”
“I’m not looking down on you…! I’m the one who can’t do without hyung. So how could I look down on hyung! It’s not that I thought of it lightly, without hyung I’m not even worth being trash… so somehow…!”
“Shut up! Right, you’re doing this because you remember everything. Yeah, that’s exactly why. Even when you were fucking around not knowing I was me, even though you didn’t know who I was, I was ready to die of happiness just because you said I was pretty a few times with your twisted tongue! You were panting saying you liked it too, saying you couldn’t do anything because of me, but then the next day you wiped your mouth clean and even laid hands on me, yet I still clung to you! Even when people looked at me like a stinking shit bucket, I loitered everywhere just to see your face once! That’s why I’m still ridiculous to you. You think you can play with me again, right!”
Ki Baek-woo could no longer even deny it and only moved his lips aimlessly. Looking at his pale complexion as he barely exhaled, Lee Han-sol stamped his feet. His distorted face looked anguished. He poured out almost as if screaming.
“Because you did such things so many times! Thinking of how I struggled to stay by your side even if it killed me, yeah, I must seem like fucking trash to you. Even when you found me as disgusting as vomit on the street, even when you kissed another guy in front of me, even when you ignored all my pleas to see me just once before I died, I kept circling around you like a dog until the end. I became like this because I couldn’t give up on someone like you! That’s why you took it easy this time too. You thought if you rolled around on the ground a few times and bled somewhere, I’d immediately collapse and grovel, right!”
Answer me, Ki Baek-woo! Answer me!
Ki Baek-woo just stared blankly at Lee Han-sol who was obsessively berating himself. Irregular panting breath, large eyes moist with tears, pale complexion blooming with fever. Lee Han-sol was desperate like a cat puffing up its body. To the point where it was impossible to distinguish whether those words pouring out paranoically were accusations toward Ki Baek-woo or self-hatred toward Lee Han-sol himself. Such a Lee Han-sol seemed to have reached his limit.
The fact that he was the one who made him like that felt like wet cotton blocking his windpipe, Ki Baek-woo thought. Lee Han-sol’s anger pouring out recklessly like pressing a self-destruct button in front of a dead end. It seemed like it was saying this was truly the last time, and Ki Baek-woo felt his blood run cold.
“I’m asking you to answer, so why won’t you! Why are you ignoring me! I’m asking if I still look like an idiot trembling at one of your fucking wounds! I’m asking if I still seem like a moron who treats your sadness and pain like a disaster! I’m asking if that’s why you turned your body into a rag like this!”
As if his throat was being choked, Ki Baek-woo was at a loss for words. Instead of an answer, only tears helplessly squeezed between his eyelids. It was miserable. The desolate feeling of not having the slightest clue how to handle his heart. The Ki Baek-woos embedded in Lee Han-sol’s mind were so terrible that his breath caught. What would he have to do to erase all those fakes from his heart?
No, was it even possible to erase them?
His vision went blank. That his true feelings had never wavered once, that he was different from those artificially manipulated by the system, that in fact if hyung hadn’t existed in the world he wouldn’t have wanted to be born, that he was surely born without dying in the womb because hyung existed – how could he prove that heart? Ki Baek-woo felt like his body was freezing.
He began to regret everything. If he had committed suicide in the womb. If he hadn’t been born, Lee Han-sol wouldn’t have experienced such things. He shouldn’t have met Lee Han-sol. Meeting him and falling in love was inevitable, and wanting to cling to him like a leech and suck at his heart was also such a thing. So Ki Baek-woo should never have been born in the first place. If Ki Baek-woo hadn’t existed in Lee Han-sol’s life… If that had been the case, hyung wouldn’t have been hurt.
Lee Han-sol was the sun, and spring. Sweet like expensive dessert, soft like layers of feathers. Ki Baek-woo felt alive and wanted to live only when he was with him. The contempt that always pierced his body became pleasure. He wanted to become a necessary existence, to somehow do things that would make him happy. He wanted to become part of his world. Desperately. Even if he himself was eroded without knowing what he was, he came to desire that. Lee Han-sol was like that.
So if Ki Baek-woo hadn’t been by his side, if he hadn’t gotten involved with someone as gloomy, persistent, and capable of only dirty thoughts as himself, Lee Han-sol might have met someone as wonderful, beautiful, and perfect as himself. No, he surely would have.
Though Ki Baek-woo really didn’t want to, regardless of his will he thought of Choi Tae-hyuk’s hyung. The person who had already begun circling Lee Han-sol’s side during this brief time when Lee Han-sol had shaken off Ki Baek-woo’s persistence and left.
‘There must have been… countless such people…’
He would have met plenty of people who wanted to offer him even the sky, not villains like himself who grabbed his ankles and prevented him from flying. Because Lee Han-sol was that kind of person.
Even so, Ki Baek-woo felt like a monster for being unable to do without Lee Han-sol, even knowing that all of Lee Han-sol’s misfortune and sadness was his fault.
Did hyung come here today to completely cut me off…
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
