Bonus: Seo Yeon

Looking back at when it first started; what did I feel for him? My brother had just brought a friend to us, the first since father had died; and a noble one at that. Hwi told me how he helped him to bury father, and suddenly we didn't feel so alone anymore. It was strange that he was the son of the man who was around my father quite a lot when he was in his prime but refused to bury him? Even if he was illegitimate? But when I met him for the first time, he was nice to us, especially me since I was the youngest. He always smiled extra hard for me...maybe that's when I started to feel something else?



Because he took care of us extremely well; he would sneak us food when we were hungry, wooden logs for winter, and anything else we needed from his father's house when we needed it until Hwi got his job as a blacksmith. He was always there for us without hesitation, despite us being from two different worlds. He and my brother became a part of each other; like broken pieces of jade that came together. You couldn't see one without the other. As for me, he became something else; the small scrawny boy who we had met had grown up over the years into a well-built gentleman with such a handsome face, I couldn't help feeling butterflies in my stomach every time I saw him. Despite my growing crush on him; I felt as if he was someone I could rely on for anything in this world. He always stood so tall and proud…


But looking at him now in his father's house, he was anything but. He seemed small and beaten down, even though he tried to keep up his smile for me. I felt really bad for him; should I tell him that I got my memories back? He looked as broken without my brother as Hwi himself did, no matter how angry he was at him. But after all, he did take me in regardless of the situation. I sighed to myself; as angry as I was at Seon-Ho, not for what he was forced to put us through but more of the fact at what he had been hiding from us all this time, how his father treated him... I should tell him. Then maybe I can help with his burdens. It was just as hard for me to keep pretending I had lost my memories, but I knew if I exposed myself, then Seon-Ho’s father was going to kill me and bury me somewhere without letting my brother know until he also eventually killed him. No, I had to be smart about this, I had to find a way to keep both men alive since I knew that Nam-Jeon wouldn’t even spare his own son if any part of this plan was messed up.

“Look at you! I put you in the office of general inspectors for a reason! And you cannot even get the simple jobs done!” “Everyone in the office knows that you are using me in the palace as a puppet to do your bidding! To get rid of your enemies! Of course they are blocking my access to a lot of things with the support of the third prince! I am just one man who openly got into the palace though your nepotistic connections! How do you expect everyone to treat me!” “Don’t you come up with excuses to me you lowly bastard! Find a way to get it done! If you ate of no use to me, then there is no use for me keeping you in my home at all!” Nam-Jeon usually tore his son apart every chance he could and ended his ‘lecture’ with a couple of blows to his head with whatever object he could find. No, I wasn’t going to let this continue for the rest of our lives. I was a lot more capable than I had let everyone thought I was, including Seon-Ho. And now it looked like it was up to me to fix the mess that Nam-Jeon had put us all in. 


Only god knows what was going through my mind when I tried to help both men instead of easily turning on Seon-Ho like everyone else did, but my conscious…and maybe my heart wouldn’t let me ignore him. Especially when I was inadvertently a witness to the amount of abuse that he had to put up with on a daily basis. I had to admit that before my memory loss, I was never left on my own with him before so I had never gotten this close to him. But now that I was left on my own with him, the least I could do was to make sure that every day we were both stuck under this roof was a day he was less miserable with the guilt that was very apparent on his face every time he saw me. Even if it meant annoying him on occasion, I was going to help him as much as I could, but not even could come between the relationship I had with my brother who chose to raise me and love me like our father did, despite my illness instead of selling me for money when he could. So it was for his sake that I was in this dark home and keeping a forced smile on my face in clothes that could have fed myself and my brother for a year, maybe even two. 



“…pinky promise?” “Come over here you little brat!” This was much harder work than I thought, trying force a smile out of the both of us, but I had to at least distract him for even a short while, so we could both sort of lean on each other in hopes that he would open up to me after a while so I knew what I could do to help them both out. And I thought that I had run away from his reach, but apparently I was wrong when he managed to grab me by my arm and almost pin me up against the wall for a few moments. It was a scene that all unmarried women dreamed of…if the lover’s father wasn’t lurking around the home and trying to find any excuse he could to kick me out of this place and worse. I barely had time to memorise his face properly as close as we were now before we both ran back into our rooms in time.