A devil in disguise [2]
A voice, low yet strangely serene, drifted from behind Hyeonjae, threading through the dense air with an unsettling ease. "It is beautiful, isn't it, Kang Hyeonjae?"
The words curled around Hyeonjae's spine, and in the instant his mind registered their presence, his entire body tensed, blood surging with a cold pulse that forced his breath to hitch.
His head twisted sharply, eyes narrowing as he turned toward the source that had spoken, muscles coiled beneath his skin as though bracing for something unseen.
There stood Haneul, his figure unnervingly still, gaze anchored on him with an unsettling calm, his presence impossibly sudden.
Moments before, Haneul had stood several steps ahead, his position fixed, yet now, inexplicably, the space where he had been was void of him, leaving Seojun and Hyeonjae staring at nothing but empty air, as though his body had evaporated from one point and manifested behind Hyeonjae without any sound, without any trace of motion.
The impossible displacement gnawed at their thoughts, twisting their sense of space and time into something unstable and suffocating.
What... had allowed him to shift so swiftly?
How had his body traversed the space within the breath of a... heartbeat?
The question gnawed simultaneously at both their minds, cold fingers of confusion gripping at the edges of their composure.
And then, without shifting his posture or blinking away that unblinking gaze, Haneul resumed speaking, his voice softened into something disturbingly wistful, as though he were reminiscing on a memory that never truly existed.
"Sometimes I wonder," he murmured, the cadence of his words almost tender, yet each syllable laced with something far darker, something that pulled at the fabric of the moment like rot beneath painted wood, "if Taejun might ever know what it feels like… to be loved. Even just a little. To be held, even once, by someone who truly means it. By me, most of all. As if I'd ever been a real brother to him. A real one, the way he deserves."
He tilted his head slowly, a shadow of a smile crawling across his lips, not joyous, not gentle, but curled in quiet cruelty, the kind that bled through a face when it knew it had touched something vital and unhealed.
His gaze dragged itself across Hyeonjae's face, studying it, savoring the reaction as though feeding off the tremors building behind his eyes.
And then that smile deepened, distorted into something far more sinister, a twitch at the corner of his mouth betraying the venom buried behind his feigned sorrow.
For a moment that refused to pass, both Hyeonjae and Seojun stood as though rooted in ice, their lungs caught mid-breath, their minds stalling in the liminal horror between what had been spoken and what it implied.
Haneul hadn't moved, hadn't raised his voice or lifted a hand, and yet the atmosphere had shifted violently, suffocatingly, as though the very air recoiled from his presence.
Hyeonjae tried to speak, his mouth parted slightly, jaw trembling, but no sound followed, just a shallow stammer of breath snagged in his throat.
His fingers twitched near his side, his eyes flickering helplessly, and still he said nothing.
The words refused to form. They clung inside him, heavy and suffocating, buried beneath a growing dread that what stood before him wasn't the Haneul he knew, or perhaps it never had been.
The silence thickened, stretching unbearably, until Haneul moved, not abruptly, but with a slow, creeping grace that sent a fresh wave of unease coursing through Hyeonjae's veins.
Step by step, Haneul closed the distance, his movements unhurried yet suffocating in their intent, as though savoring every inch that narrowed between them.
His breath grew audible in the dense stillness, shallow but steady, carrying a warmth that seemed to slice into the chill wrapping around Hyeonjae's skin.
And then he stood before him, far too close, the space between their faces reduced to the width of a trembling breath.
Haneul's eyes searched him, not with curiosity, but with something crueler, as though peeling back layers that Hyeonjae had fought to keep hidden beneath his composure.
His voice came again, this time quieter, yet heavier, each word dripping with venom concealed beneath a facade of mock tenderness. "Tell me, Kang Hyeonjae," he whispered, his tone both intimate and suffocating, "did you enjoy yourself? Spending the whole day with my little brother... sharing his smiles, his laughter, and his trust?"
His words lingered in the air, curling around Hyeonjae's ears with the weight of an accusation masked beneath the gentlest of veneers. "Was it pleasant? Did it feel good… knowing he clung to you as if you were the one who could protect him, as if you were the one he needed?"
Hyeonjae's skin prickled as cold sweat broke along his brow, his breathing shallow and uneven, each inhale rattling faintly against his tightening chest.
His mouth opened, desperate to respond, but no coherent words formed, only a fractured stuttering that tumbled helplessly from his trembling lips. "I-I... we— he just... it wasn't... I didn't..."
The words collapsed beneath the weight of his fear, his voice dissolving into breathless fragments.
His hands twitched involuntarily at his sides, fingers curling into shaking fists as his gaze darted between Haneul's eyes, unable to hold their relentless focus for more than a moment.
The air seemed to pulse with his panic, pressing inward, suffocating, as if every breath might be his last beneath the invisible grip tightening around him.
But before the suffocating tension could snap, before Haneul's next breath could spill its venom across the trembling shell of Hyeonjae, Seojun moved.
His hand reached out with swift precision, gripping firmly onto Haneul's left shoulder from behind, halting him with a force that was calm yet unwavering.
The weight of Seojun's touch settled across Haneul's frame, not with aggression, but with the authority of one who would not permit the scene to spiral further, not yet.
Yet as his fingers pressed into the fabric, something unexpected stirred beneath his palm, a sensation that crawled beneath his skin, foreign and cold, as though touching something alive beneath dead flesh.
It wasn't warmth that met his hand, but a pulse of something unnatural, an ominous current that whispered of something festering far beneath Haneul's human exterior.
In that moment, Haneul's head turned, not fully, but enough to shift his gaze sideways toward Seojun, his eyes locking onto him with a detached, almost leisurely glance, as though mildly inconvenienced by the interference.
Yet what Seojun saw in those eyes was not human.
The whites of Haneul's eyes were gone, devoured by a suffocating void, leaving the sclera consumed by a depthless darkness that swallowed light itself.
His irises and pupils twisted together into a grotesque design, threads of color coiling and knotting into the shape of a yarn ball, its core tightly woven, its strands barely allowing slivers of the color to leak through.
That color was no natural hue; it was a dark red, pulsating faintly as though alive, a dim glow smoldering beneath the tangled layers.
Surrounding the ball-like formation, faint tendrils of dark crimson aura trailed outward, thin and wispy, like the remnants of dying embers or smoke pulled by an unseen wind, giving his eyes an unsettling, unnatural depth that seemed to pulse with a quiet hunger.
Seojun felt a subtle shift in the atmosphere as the aura bled outward, not in violent waves, but in slow, deliberate tendrils that curled through the air with almost serpentine grace, as though testing, as though tasting.
The very air around Haneul felt heavier beneath it, weighed down by a presence that could not be explained by flesh or breath alone.
A chill coiled beneath Seojun's ribs as his grip unconsciously tightened, every instinct warning of the thing now standing before him, wearing Haneul's skin, speaking with his voice, yet carrying something that should not exist within the frame of any man.
But before the moment could fully collapse beneath the crushing weight of its dread, before Haneul's next breath could pierce through Hyeonjae's faltering defenses and unleash whatever poison lingered upon his tongue, Seojun acted.
His movement was neither frantic nor desperate, but calm in a way that made the silence around them feel somehow more suffocating, more oppressive.
His arm extended, steady as iron, his fingers closing around Haneul's left shoulder from behind, anchoring him in place with a grip that neither trembled nor hesitated.
Yet the moment his palm made contact, a current unlike anything natural surged beneath his skin, rising through his nerves in a crawling shiver that radiated through his bones.
It was as though he had touched something not of flesh, not of blood, but of something far deeper, something that pulsed beneath Haneul's skin like a slumbering parasite, breathing beneath the thin layer of human facade.
The texture beneath his fingertips felt strangely absent of warmth, almost deceptively lifeless.
Yet, it moved, as though thin threads beneath the surface shifted and coiled upon sensing Seojun's presence.
It wasn't skin, not entirely. There was something beneath it, a slow, coiling mass of pressure, as if fingers pressed into the stretched hide of something submerged and waiting, something that acknowledged the contact with the eerie patience of a thing unbothered by being discovered.
Haneul did not flinch or resist.
Instead, in a gesture that sent fresh cold across Seojun's spine, Haneul's head began to turn, not sharply, not defensively, but with a dreadful slowness, a glide that betrayed no tension in his neck.
His chin dipped slightly as his face angled toward Seojun, his gaze rolling sideways until his eyes locked with Seojun's in a moment that seemed to suspend the very passage of time itself.
And it was then, under that low ceiling of suffocating silence, that Seojun saw what rested inside those eyes.
The sclera, where white should have lived, had long since surrendered to an abyssal blackness, as though devoured by a void so complete that no reflection could find footing within it.
It was not the black of absence, but the black of swallowing, of a pit that consumed whatever light dared approach.
Resting within this black ocean were his irises and pupils, fused into a single, grotesque formation, coiled and tangled like a tightly wound mass of threads, a ball of yarn made not of soft fibers but of something more sinister, more visceral.
Each strand twisted in upon itself, forming an intricate and unsettling pattern where no beginning or end could be found, as though the threads themselves writhed faintly in slow, breath-like movements.
The color within was muted beneath the entanglement, yet not fully hidden, deep within the woven mass, a dark crimson hue pulsed faintly, breathing in a steady, unnatural rhythm.
The red was not vibrant, not alive in any human sense, but dim and oppressive, the faint glow leaking through the tangles like dying embers suffocated beneath layers of ashen cloth.
Yet it was not merely his eyes that betrayed what stirred within him.
From the edges of his pupils, faint tendrils of aura bled into the air, so subtle that one could almost mistake them for the tricks of strained vision, but they were there.
Wisps of dark red mist unfurled outward, slithering through the stagnant air in curling, almost elegant spirals, like smoke dragged by some invisible breath, thin and persistent, as if probing for cracks in the world around him.
The aura did not surge or lash; it extended carefully, thoughtfully, creeping through the space as though savoring its silent expansion.
The atmosphere shifted further beneath the weight of this revelation.
The air grew heavy, not in temperature, but in density, as though the very molecules were being drawn closer together, collapsing inward under the pressure of something unseen pressing into their reality.
Seojun felt his breath slow, his lungs straining as the presence in front of him radiated not fury, but a suffocating calm, a stillness so unnatural that it rattled the nerves more profoundly than any outburst could have.
Hyeonjae, though untouched, felt the oppressive pulse radiating from Haneul's form.
The sweat on his brow thickened, his chest rising and falling in shallow gasps as his mind struggled to process the sight before him.
His eyes flicked between Seojun's unmoving grip and the abyss staring back at them both, unable to comprehend how the boy he had known could now carry such a presence within him.
The image of Haneul's previous smile, once sinister but still bound by human malice, now paled in comparison to what stood before them.
Whatever force simmered beneath his skin had shed its mask, revealing a fragment of something far more grotesque, something that twisted not with rage, but with a patience that suggested it had always been waiting.
Seojun's hand remained firm upon Haneul's shoulder, though beneath his calm exterior, his body waged a quiet war against the instinct to recoil.
His fingers tightened subtly, as if anchoring himself against the pull of the oppressive aura that gnawed at his composure.
The silence thickened further between them, hanging heavily like a storm that refused to break, as if daring one of them to be the first to shatter it.