#askingtherfa

The ballad stops and V kisses your hand and looks at you like you have painted the stars in the sky for him.

You’re both laughing – carelessly, joyfully – leaning close together, your hands still in his. Sharing a private joke, maybe.

Saeran can’t remember the last time he was told a joke. Can’t remember the last time he laughed. His throat constricts and he coughs, trying to loosen the vice that has wrapped itself around it.

It is not the first time he is shockingly jealous of V, but it is the first time that it shakes him this much.

The flickering chandeliers and the clinking of champagne glasses suddenly becomes too much. He turns away, exits the ballroom through the French doors.

He can’t let himself get caught in the memories. When he gets caught in them, he obsesses, and when he obsesses, his thoughts start to spiral down, down, down – until there is nothing.

Nothing –

He stumbles through the empty hallways, the columns are tall and the walls so white and bright that it hurts his eyes– if he looks closely enough, he can see a filthy red rug, the faint silhouette of black robes surrounding him. Screaming.

He blinks and he’s staring into white marble again.

He keeps going.

Eventually, he finds himself outside, where he walks under an archway woven with purple wisterias and into an open space where the floor is cobblestone and he is surrounded by hedges and flowering trees. The sky is dark but sparkling with stars and he feels like he can finally breathe.

No one else is here, but the music of the string instruments carries over from the open windows in the ballroom. The sweet sound is softened by the breeze, the singing cicadas, the trickling of water from a garden fountain.

There is something eerily familiar about this place, as if he’s been here before, once upon a dream.

“Saeran!”

That voice, his name; time has passed, and he hasn’t forgotten the first time you called it when you followed him into Mint Eye, the first time you whispered it against his hair when he was forced to take the potion and he couldn’t stop weeping into your lap.

Or the first time you sobbed it when you clutched his broken hands and begged him to leave with you.

He hears the hurried footsteps on cobblestone and he turns, meets glossy eyes framed by black lashes that blink up at him.

Awe. Shock. Euphoria.

Saeran isn’t sure what he is feeling when you catch yourself against the flowered archway, exhilarated from chasing after him. His own heart is pounding so loud he’s sure you can hear it, but he finds he can’t look away from you.

The bottom of your gown is muddy, your hair wild in waves and flowing down your back.

You look like a princess, he thinks. Like magic.

There is almost an unnatural, otherworldly glow about you – lovely eyes, pretty mouth, kissed by the moonlight and butterfly wings.

“Hi Saeran,” you whisper – honeyed, sweet.

Looking at your beauty up close like this, it’s easier to remember the disgusting burn marks that now cover half of his body. The scars that prevent him from looking at his reflection with anything but revulsion.

He turns away from you but you lunge forward, stumbling into his back and catching his hand in yours; he gasps at the contact, tries not to marvel at the softness of it.

“Go back to the party,” he pleads, his voice is raspy. He feels as if he is going to cry and he does not want you see. “Please.”

“Why won’t you look at me?” You draw nearer, stand right in front of him so that he has no other choice but to.

And he does, prepares himself for the look of revulsion that he’s become so used to receiving from others. But your expression – soft, adoring – does not change.

“Saeran,” you frown, your tone sad and disapproving, “you are thinking badly of yourself. I can see it on your face. Why?” You reach out to touch him, trailing a fingertip down his jaw and his body shivers.

Heat rises to his cheeks in shame. “The scars are ugly. I – I didn’t want you to see them.”

“Nothing about you has ever been ugly, Saeran.” Your eyes are honest, and he wants to believe you.

The wind catches your hair and drags it over your eyes and he has to fight against the urge to lift his hand up and brush it away. Struggles against the desire to press his body against yours, bury his face in your neck and hope you will hold him the way you used to.

He looks up at you, hopes he doesn’t look as haunted as he feels. “Why are you so kind to me? Even after everything that I have done?”

You reach up, place your palm on his right cheek and lean forward, press a kiss against the marred flesh that remains of his left one. He feels teardrops, cold and small on his face – yours or his, he’s not sure.

“Is it not obvious?” your voice is soft, questioning. “I loved you, Saeran.”

“Are you saying these things because you’re angry at V?” His chest heaves, an underlying tone of panic laced in his voice. He feels inexplicably light-headed and tears of frustration are gathering in his eyes but he forces himself to blink them away.

“Of course not.” You look up at him sharply. “I have forgiven Jihyun for many things. But I am angry at him; for lying and hiding when his friends needed him. For not answering Saeyoung’s phone calls when he knew he was mourning you. I am angry for the things he allowed to happen to you.”

You stop a few meters from him and give him a humorless, tight-lipped smile.

“I do not know who Jihyun is,” you admit. “I don’t think I have ever known. Earlier, in the ballroom, I told him everything – he has chosen to leave again.”

“But he loves you,” his licks his lips, eyes uncertain, his voice sounds meek even to him. “You love him.”

You shake your head, your answering laugh is warm, without a trace of bitterness that might have been there if he’d said that to you two years ago.

“Saeran, I loved you,” you whisper, heavy teardrops running down to your chin, pooling until they barely hang on. “I loved you so much I thought I would go mad from grief.”

“You…loved me?”

The question seems to hang in the space between you, unbidden.

“I have never stopped.”

He has always loved when the cherry blossoms bloom, when the flowered trees begin to turn pink and some shake loose; when the wind picks them up and blows them everywhere.

That’s what it feels like in his chest. Like it is full of pink petals caught in a spring breeze, spinning wildly out of control. A rainstorm of color.

Saeran cradles your face between his hands; you press your cheek against his palm and run your fingers over the arch of his cheekbones – lightly, lovingly.

“From the very beginning,” he murmurs against your lips. “You have been my entire world.”

Oh, and he recalls clearly, the light of you, the gravity of you; the way your entire being shone and dissolved him into the air when you kissed him in that garden years ago. When you made him believe in magic again.

Since that moment, you have been all he sees when he closes his eyes. Oh, and when your lips meet his, he wonders, if all of this has been one elongated wishful dream.