A devil in disguise [4]

When Haneul finally came to a stop before him, there was no dramatic halt, no jarring shift of his posture, no dramatic extension of his limbs to shatter the space between them, only the slowing of breath, the ceasing of footsteps, and that unbearable nearness that felt less like proximity and more like a shadow creeping forward, submerging Taejun in something he could neither name nor flee from.

Taejun remained stiff, unmoving, not because he wasn't afraid, but because something in the way Haneul stood in front of him had stolen not just his courage, but his very sense of self, stripped him down to nothing more than a flickering presence occupying the corner of a crumbling room, unsure if his body still belonged to him, or if it had already begun to dissolve beneath the pressure of being seen by someone who had no right to look at him like that.

Haneul didn't speak at first. He merely looked at him, looked in a way no brother should ever look, not with cruelty or glee or mockery, but with a kind of sick reverence, a horrible stillness in his gaze that suggested he wasn't seeing Taejun at all, but something buried inside him, something invisible, fragile, and breakable, something that perhaps only he was meant to touch.

He leaned forward in the slow, fluid motion of a body that no longer feared consequence, and as his hand rose, fingers extending with unnatural grace, he allowed them to hover just inches from the side of Taejun's face, not quite touching, but close enough that the heat of his skin brushed against the younger brother's cheek in the same way wind stirs the surface of water before the storm arrives.

"You've gotten taller," Haneul murmured, the words so soft they barely disturbed the air, yet heavy enough to seem like they had been waiting years to be spoken, as if he had rehearsed them a thousand times in a place no one else could follow, his voice lined not with affection or surprise, but with the thinnest thread of something more terrible, something that sounded almost mournful, but beneath it, something far colder, far more possessive, as though what he was truly grieving was not Taejun's growth, but the distance it implied, the autonomy it threatened to establish.

Taejun didn't answer, not with voice, not with nod, not with the slightest motion of his head, and his eyes, wide and glassy, held no hatred or anger, no recognition of the brother he once remembered, but only confusion thickened by dread, the kind of terror that does not scream or flinch, but sinks deep into the bones and turns every heartbeat into a question that never receives an answer.

His lips trembled, parted slightly as if on the edge of speaking, yet whatever syllable had tried to form died in his throat, caught on the hook of Haneul's gaze, as if the act of answering would tether him permanently to whatever this version of his brother had become.

"You were always waiting, weren't you?" Haneul's voice dipped lower, filled with something darker now, not malice, not threat, but something far more disturbing in its subtlety, the sound of someone unearthing an old truth not for justice or confession, but for the satisfaction of having found it first, of holding it alone. "You're always waiting for someone to notice, and someone to reach out and stay, even for a moment longer than they should've... but it was me, Taejun. It was always supposed to be me."

At last, his fingers brushed gently against the side of Taejun's cheek, not a slap, not a shove, not even a grip, but a caress so slow, so deliberate in its softness, that it felt more brutal than any strike, because it imitated love with such sickening accuracy that the lie became its kind of violence.

The back of his knuckles traced the curve of Taejun's face. In that touch there was no kindness, no comfort, no familial warmth, there was only possession, and beneath it, the echo of something unspoken, the terrible suggestion that Haneul did not see a brother standing before him anymore, but something he believed he had the right to mold, shape, break, or take apart until it belonged entirely to him. 

Taejun flinched then, not away, but inward, as though shrinking into himself, collapsing beneath the unbearable intimacy of the moment, and a single tear escaped the corner of his eye, trailing slowly down his face with no sob to accompany it, no shaking shoulders, just that solitary line of wetness carving through his skin like a blade too dull to scream. But still, he said nothing.

Haneul smiled, not widely, not triumphantly, but with that same terrible serenity that had followed him since the beginning, the kind of smile that did not match his eyes, did not belong on a face shaped by years of silence and something far worse than pain. "See?" he whispered, leaning closer until their foreheads nearly touched, the shadows of their breaths tangling in the shrinking space between them. "You don't need them. You only need me. And I will always protect you."

And in that moment, it was no longer clear whether he was comforting Taejun or devouring him.

Haneul exhaled slowly, as if the simple act of breathing near Taejun demanded reverence; his breath was a quiet warmth that ghosted across the boy's cheek, stirring the tear that had not yet dried.

His hand lingered, cradling the side of Taejun's face now with a gentleness so incongruent, so misplaced, that it made the silence around them stretch thinner, pulled taut over something splintering beneath the surface.

He tilted his head slightly, eyes narrowing, not with suspicion or threat, but with the intimate concern of someone pretending, or perhaps believing, that what he was doing was not terrifying but tender. "It's alright," he said, and the words came smooth, unbroken, low enough that even the room seemed reluctant to echo them. "You don't have to say anything. I know it's confusing. I know you're scared. But don't worry, as I'm here."

Taejun's hands had dropped limply to his sides, fingers twitching as though still unsure whether to run or reach for something that might anchor him, but neither instinct found its voice.

The child was neither resisting nor accepting, just suspended, drifting somewhere in the cold space between recognition and denial, trying to reconcile the brother he remembered with the stranger in front of him who now held his face as if it were something precious and breakable, yet no longer his own.

His small chest heaved, not in sobs, but in shallow, confused gasps, the way someone breathes when they aren't sure if the danger is outside or inside themselves.

"I never wanted you to feel alone, Taejun," Haneul murmured, his thumb brushing just beneath the boy's eye in a movement so slow it bordered on reverent, catching the last trace of the tear that still clung to his cheek like a plea left unanswered.

"I used to watch you sitting at the table, swinging your feet because they didn't touch the ground yet, waiting for someone to notice when you were sad, hoping someone would ask why you weren't eating. But they never did, did they?" His voice trembled faintly, not from sorrow, but from something deeper, something coiled in the marrow of his being, raw and aching and far too familiar. "They never looked closely enough. They never really heard you. Not even me. Not until it was too late. Right on this moment today."

Haneul's other hand rose, slowly, hesitantly, as if testing the boundaries of what this moment would allow, and then gently folded around Taejun's thin shoulders, drawing him forward, not with force, but with a quiet insistence that felt almost ceremonial.

Taejun didn't resist. Whether from shock or exhaustion or that quiet, broken hope that still flickered in the core of his chest, Taejun let himself be pulled into that embrace, his small body tense, his hands hovering uncertainly in the air for a moment before falling softly against Haneul's side, not clutching, not holding, but simply resting there as if waiting to be told what they were supposed to feel.

Haneul lowered his head slightly, resting his chin atop Taejun's, and held him. Not too tightly, not possessively, but with a steadiness that was, in its way, more suffocating. "You have me now," he whispered, his breath threading through Taejun's hair with a softness that made the moment feel sacred in a way that twisted the stomach. "I'm here. I won't leave again. I promise."

The silence that followed was unbearable, not because it was empty, but because of what it contained. Across the room, Hyeonjae's lips parted slightly, as if to speak, but no words emerged.

His chest rose once, then again, as though he were drowning in air he couldn't swallow, his eyes fixed on the two figures before him, not with fury or fear now, but with something more complex and terrifying: helplessness.

A sick realization that he didn't understand what he was seeing, not fully. That the lines had blurred.

That which looked like affection bore the scent of something deeper, more rooted, more rotten.

Seojun remained still, his gaze no longer stern but unreadable, as though trying to decipher whether what he was witnessing was salvation or the beginning of something neither of them could undo.

Taejun, meanwhile, remained small in Haneul's arms, his head nestled beneath the crook of his brother's chin, the side of his face pressed lightly against his chest where the rhythm of his heartbeat might have offered comfort in another lifetime.

But now, it offered no rhythm at all, just a silence that stretched inside him, vast and uncharted, the kind that didn't echo, because nothing had ever filled it to begin with.

And as Haneul slowly closed his eyes, the smile that touched his lips wasn't cruel.

It wasn't twisted. It was soft. It was content. And that, more than anything, was what made it monstrous.

Haneul remained still, arms gently encircling Taejun, whose trembling had softened into a muted, irregular rhythm, less of a child calming down, and more of one slowly breaking apart beneath a silence too vast to scream through.

He held Taejun as one might hold a lantern in a storm, not to protect it from the wind, but to keep it from ever going out, as though that flickering, quiet light was the last fragile thing tethering him to something human, something remembered, something not yet entirely swallowed by the cold that had hollowed out the corners of his soul.

His fingertips rested against the child's spine, barely applying pressure, yet firm enough to claim, to contain, to let the boy feel every part of his presence without needing to speak another word.

But Haneul spoke anyway, softly, just above the silence, voice lined with the kind of softness that makes monsters harder to name.

"You know," he began, his breath steady as it passed through the strands of Taejun's hair, "I used to wonder if you ever looked for me… after everything. Not in the obvious way, not with questions, but with your eyes. When you sat alone in your room, when the hallways felt too quiet, when the windows kept showing you nothing, and when you sat alone without anything at home, did you ever think about where I'd gone? If I was thinking about you, too?"

His words fell like snow, soundless, but with weight, covering every inch of the boy's small frame, smothering him not with threat, but with a grief that didn't seem to know where it ended and something more possessive began. "I used to imagine it, how you might sit in the dark and whisper my name under your breath, so no one could hear but the walls and the night, so you wouldn't get in trouble for missing someone who disappeared from your life, although just for a short time."

Taejun made no sound. He didn't nod or pull away, but his fingers clenched faintly now, just once, gathering the fabric of Haneul's shirt in his small fist as if some piece of him still sought warmth in the arms that had once protected him, not knowing what it meant now that those arms had returned.

Haneul felt it, the faint grip, and he smiled again, that quiet, almost maternal curl of the lips that made the entire gesture feel impossibly intimate and irreparably wrong. "You never forgot me," he whispered, not asking, not guessing, declaring it, as if the boy's silence was proof enough, as if the shape of his grief had always pointed in Haneul's direction.

Across the room, Hyeonjae took a half-step forward, though the sound of his shoe against the dusty floor was so muted it barely registered, his movement hesitant, the weight of uncertainty written in the twitch of his jaw, in the furrow just between his brows where calculation now warred with unease.

It was not fear that kept him frozen; it was something else. Something harder to define.

It was the feeling of witnessing something that should never have existed in the first place.

Of standing in the presence of a love warped by solitude, a devotion eroded by time and guilt, and something unspoken that now bloomed in silence beneath the surface of this twisted reunion.

He opened his mouth, but nothing came. A breath caught on the jagged edge of what he could no longer make sense of.

Seojun didn't speak either. His arms hung still at his sides, but his shoulders no longer sat square. Something had shifted in him, something quieter than doubt, darker than recognition.

His eyes, once unwavering, now drifted lower, not in shame or indecision, but in something heavier.

He was watching, not the scene itself, but the space around it, as though the very air had become fragile and traitorous, as though even the silence could betray them if it listened too long.

Haneul's arms shifted slightly, not to tighten the embrace, but to adjust it, tilting his head so his cheek now rested lightly against Taejun's hair. "They don't understand, Taejun," he continued, voice hushed with the stillness of someone confessing at a bedside. "They've never seen what I've seen. They never heard you sob through the walls at night when you thought no one was there. They never watched you draw little pictures of families you pretended were yours, just to feel safe. They never stayed awake, whispering stories in your head to keep the dark from growing teeth."

His thumb stroked the boy's back in slow, deliberate lines, soothing in rhythm, but deeply wrong in its context, an imitation of comfort performed with the gravity of grief twisted by time and isolation. "But I saw and I heard. I remember all of it. I was supposed to protect you." His voice cracked there, just faintly, the smallest tremor, but it did not unravel. Instead, it settled deeper into the space between them. "And I will and I won't fail you again. Not anymore."

Taejun's body, though still small and trembling, leaned ever so slightly into the contact, not fully, not willingly, but with the weight of someone who no longer knew where safety lived, someone who couldn't tell whether the arms around him were building a shelter or a cage.

His breathing had grown softer now, slower, and though no sob escaped, his shoulders quivered with that same subtle, heartbreaking motion of a child who had stopped expecting rescue and instead settled for stillness.

Haneul closed his eyes again, letting the silence swell between their bodies, as if he believed the embrace alone could rewrite the years between them, erase the guilt, the fear, the pain that had taken root in both of them like ivy, creeping through their veins and memory alike.

And for that moment, there was no movement in the room. No sound. No breath dared disturb the scene.

The others remained still as the air grew heavier.

And Haneul held him, not out of love, but out of a promise he had buried so deep, it no longer mattered whether Taejun wanted it or not.