Mok-young moved, heading further inside toward where the table stood. Hae-gang followed his retreating figure with his eyes, and at his silence, Mok-young — just setting his mask down on the table — turned to look at him. Hae-gang had his lips pressed firmly shut, straining. He so plainly had something he wanted to say but couldn’t, as though openly begging to be noticed, that Mok-young couldn’t help a hollow laugh.
“If you’re asking whether I’m really letting it pass just like this — yes. So come sit.”
“Does the Hyeonsin Art teach mind-reading too?”
Hae-gang said it as he approached the table as bidden, and Mok-young laughed softly once more.
He had Hae-gang sit, while he himself remained standing, looking down at him — when Mok-young suddenly recalled what Jihwan had told him earlier: “It has been over twenty years since I began attending His Highness. In all that time, do you think this is the first or second time something like this has happened? But each time, he opened his eyes on his own.”
One who had barely kept his life going for fourteen years, since the age of thirteen. When he first saw Hae-gang, he’d looked perfectly sound on the outside, and Mok-young had wondered if the rumors were empty talk. But now he knew: everything else might be rumor, but this one thing — that he clung precariously to his lifeline — was fact. And Jihwan had said this was far from the first or second time. Had he grown this composed, dulled by that countless repetition? The thought sent another ripple through Mok-young’s chest.
Hae-gang lifted his head to look at Mok-young. Then he reached out, lightly caught Mok-young’s fingertips, and called to him. He gave the held hand a small tug, and Mok-young sat down as Hae-gang led.
Mok-young’s gaze rested briefly on Hae-gang’s hand. Somehow, this contact felt natural now. There was no reason it shouldn’t, at this point — but it was something a little different from that… as though the burning heat that had flared at the merest touch had lessened somewhat. As though a sturdy outer wall had melted, leaving less resistance.
“How about we live together in this room from now on?”
At Hae-gang’s tossed-off words, Mok-young had no room to think of anything else. He lifted his head to look at Hae-gang, and in the meantime Hae-gang — absently or not — wrapped Mok-young’s fingers a little more firmly. It felt less like an affectionate touch than a firm holding-on.
In this moment, Hae-gang too felt that touching Mok-young brought less of the tingling reaction than before. Instead he felt at ease — a sensation hard to sum up as mere familiarity. It was difficult to name in a word, but a strange warmth suffused it. And it stirred the instinct to keep touching. No — it seeped into instinct and made touching feel natural.
For Hae-gang, for whom touching someone had always been either numbness or unpleasantness, it was an entirely new sensation. Hae-gang perceived that something in him was changing.
A day and half a day. Time enough to scare everyone around him half to death, but for Go Hae-gang himself, it had been a peaceful time. Though the aftershock had struck from such intense contact with strong yin energy, once he had settled his scattered energy and woken, his body felt lighter than ever. Knowing Mok-young had worried enough to be struck speechless before his very eyes, he felt almost sorry.
So wanting to live here in the bridal chamber together with his wife from now on was a natural longing for Hae-gang — and not an unreasonable one at all.
“I say it because I think my body and mind will be more at ease with you beside me.”
Hae-gang spoke as honestly as always. Strangely, even to himself, he had become so before Mok-young. Each time, his wife had in the end been unable to refuse him — and this time, he thought, would be no different.
No — or so he had thought, but his wife was not such an easy man.
“Can you tell me where it hurts?”
Before saying yes or no, Mok-young put forth the question he had been holding all along. He had meant to ask properly yesterday after finishing work, so this too was a much-belated question — but it felt somewhat easier to ask now. Didn’t the suggestion to live together in this room mean he was lowering his guard? Mok-young had been barred even from entering the room when Hae-gang was ill — never knowing what treatment was given or how badly he suffered. Living together was no guarantee it wouldn’t happen again, but the sense that part of the defensive line was crumbling was unmistakable.
Hae-gang gazed quietly at Mok-young’s face for a time, saying nothing. The silence wasn’t heavy, and the hand wrapped around Mok-young’s remained as it was. Only, his expression had quietly vanished into calm, making his thoughts hard to read — and Mok-young found it all the harder to tear his gaze from Hae-gang’s face.
It was Mok-young whose eyes held the universe of the abyss — and yet, in this moment, looking into Hae-gang’s eyes, Mok-young felt he could never fathom their depth.
As if he had ever been able to fathom him. He had only ever clicked his tongue at what an inscrutable man he was. The thought crossed Mok-young’s mind, and in that instant a chill spread through his chest.
Mok-young knew better than anyone what sort the imperial family were. There was Ju Geonyang, whom he had long observed close at hand, and his aunt had entered the palace as the late emperor’s concubine, making him kin to the imperial family by marriage — so he had, willy-nilly, watched the great and small affairs of the imperial court from the closest vantage. His impression of them: outwardly serene, majestic, splendid — yet at times so base, so heartless, so vulgar, one could never know what schemes they hid. Frightening people.
Was Hae-gang like that too? Having endured palace life in such wretched conditions, was he also skilled in scheming, hiding much from him? Taking a neighboring country’s prince as his spouse, he had never expected anything like trust — but in this moment, a bleakness brushed one corner of Mok-young’s heart.
Was he afraid of wavering even knowing? Or did he harbor some small hurt at such a reality? Or was it neither — was he simply irritated that since meeting Hae-gang, it felt like only he was being tossed about by him?
Just then, Mok-young started to pull his held hand free.
“I don’t know how to explain it so you’ll understand.”
Hae-gang’s lips parted, and sensing Mok-young’s impulse, Hae-gang gripped his hand again with a little more strength. As though he would not let him flee.
Perhaps his wife had been frightened, having lain ill the whole day, Hae-gang thought. Needless guilt, that would be. Telling him how he was ill, at least, was something he could readily do. It was better than watching Mok-young make that troubled face right before his eyes. Hae-gang, who had so loved seeing his wife’s flustered face, didn’t much want to face this coldly cooling expression.
Mok-young’s gaze, which had drifted downward, returned to Hae-gang’s face, and as their eyes met, the corners of Hae-gang’s mouth softened gently. Not quite a smile, but ease and warmth lingered there. Hae-gang now drew Mok-young’s hand fully to himself, gripping it firmly and wrapping it completely with his other hand too. Then, fiddling with the general’s big, rough hand, he rolled his eyes — clearly wondering where and how to begin the story.
“I heard… you suffered a calamity when you were thirteen.”
Feeling Hae-gang searching for a way to approach him, Mok-young laid the first stepping stone.
Hae-gang’s wandering gaze returned to Mok-young’s face, and a soft “ah” of exclamation slipped from his lips.
“Who told you that story?”
“Minister Hong told me. Before coming to this room, I had tea with him for a while.”
“Ah, and I said such terrible things to a man who must have been startled already.”
“Ah. Tell him I wasn’t startled. Shall I say I was a little worried?”
At Hae-gang’s phrase — “a man who must have been startled already” — Mok-young felt his worry had been seen through entirely, and when he could not readily answer, Hae-gang spoke again, as if to show he understood that heart too. It seemed like kind consideration, yet there was something subtly teasing in it; Mok-young’s eyes narrowed faintly, and a somewhat clearer light of a smile spread softly across Hae-gang’s lips.
“So how far did you hear?”
“Just… that’s all. That until then, he’d been very healthy.”
If it was about his health, that was indeed all. He had heard other things worth weighing on his mind, but not wanting to mention that part to Hae-gang, Mok-young held his words back.
Hae-gang nodded and nodded, then stepped onto the foothold Mok-young had set down for him and began his story.
“That’s right. After that incident, my qi and blood twisted, and I became a body that cannot bear yang energy. I don’t know myself what got tangled where or how. Seolyong doesn’t know either. So there is no cure; I’ve simply spent fourteen years bent only on managing my yang energy, barely keeping this body alive.”
“So… that’s why your Juyang Divine Art is at such a high realm.” At Mok-young’s words, Hae-gang nodded and nodded again. That he would connect “managing yang energy” straight to the Juyang Divine Art — truly, his wife was a peerless master, Hae-gang thought, and smiled warmly even in the midst of all this.
Watching Hae-gang’s face, Mok-young could only marvel. A yangin — and an extreme yang person at that — saying he could not bear his own yang energy, that for fourteen years he’d been groping for ways to manage it, barely keeping alive, and yet so calm about it himself. When he knew little of Hae-gang’s illness, the vagueness had frustrated him; now, hearing it properly, the situation was more serious than he’d thought, and Mok-young felt his chest seize. Having mastered the Hyeonsin Art, his understanding of yin and yang ran deeper than anyone’s, and so the feeling sank deep as well.
“Do you feel properly deceived?”
Hae-gang asked, offhand. A joke, tossed out thinking that even marrying a sick man, one wouldn’t have imagined a life hanging by so thin a thread. And that lightly tossed remark angered Mok-young.
“Don’t say such things!”
Mok-young’s own voice startled him with how loud it was. Hae-gang, rarely, blinked in surprise as he looked at Mok-young, and Mok-young clicked his tongue, frowning, and whipped his head away.
If it had struck his heart… ugh, why speak of it. Even thinking of it now is horrifying.
*Someone said unlucky children turn out that way no matter what.* Perhaps because he’d heard such words from Jihwan, Hae-gang’s joke didn’t sound like only a joke. A corner of his chest ached sharply, and though Mok-young clenched the hand Hae-gang still held into a tight fist, he did not shake Hae-gang’s touch off.
“Don’t… take your own body lightly. That’s what I meant.”
Mok-young belatedly, slowly opened his mouth, and the words that flowed out had shed much of their anger. Hae-gang didn’t quite know what face to make, but soon a gentle light returned to his face as well.
“Mok-young.”
Hae-gang called Mok-young’s name, offhand. In that instant Mok-young flinched and looked at Hae-gang’s face, but their eyes did not meet. Hae-gang had already lowered his head, looking down at Mok-young’s hand, which he held.
“You are truly… kind. Who would ever have imagined. That the hand of one called the Ghost King would be this warm.”
At the end of his words, Hae-gang stroked the back of Mok-young’s hand once with his thumb. That the hand was “warm” was a figure of speech. To Hae-gang, whose body always boiled like a volcano, Mok-young’s hand was cool and pleasant — it could hardly be truly warm. Hae-gang had put it that way to say that, though he looked fierce and formidable on the outside, his heart was kind.
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