A devil in disguise [5]

It was Seojun who moved first, not with haste or recklessness, but with the slow, precise certainty of someone who had seen enough to know that stillness could be far more dangerous than motion.

He stepped forward across the dust-strewn floor, boots disturbing the stale debris in quiet crunches that sounded, in that moment, like shouts against the silence.

His gaze never left Haneul, but it was not challenge that colored his expression; it was the quiet, grim realization that whatever this embrace was meant to be, it was no longer safe. And perhaps never had been.

Hyeonjae followed, less out of agreement and more because his nerves, strung taut and singing with unease, would no longer permit him to stand still and watch.

He didn't speak. The dread rising in his chest had climbed high enough to choke his throat, had knotted itself around the back of his jaw, tightening with every passing second.

The way Haneul held Taejun, so gently, so protectively, no longer looked like love.

It looked like he owned him. An ownership, to be precise. It looked like obsession worn beneath the skin, blooming slowly and irreversibly.

Seojun's voice was calm, but it carried a firm, unwavering weight that could not be mistaken for suggestion. "Let him go," he said lowly, as if every word was carved in stone and would not be moved. "Whatever this is, it must end now. And he will be in our hands in the end. You should just stop trying to save him where you have no power against us. You're just a mere human. What can you do in this place, right at this moment, with us around?"

Haneul didn't respond right away. His arms remained exactly as they were, encircling Taejun with a softness so unnatural, it screamed louder than any scream could.

He did not lift his head. He did not turn, nor did he breathe any faster. But something in the shape of his body had shifted, so subtle, small, imperceptible to the untrained eye, yet heavy with meaning.

The fingers resting on Taejun's back curled slightly, pressing into the fabric with the smallest pressure. But it was not enough to hurt him. It was only for a reminder.

Hyeonjae stepped closer, voice lower, but trembling now, part fury, part disbelief, part something else entirely. "Shin Haneul, whatever this is, it's beyond normal, beyond what people usually think.n You might overwatch this, but you're currently scaring him. Don't you care about him being scared of his Hyung?"

And then Haneul moved with a smooth, unhurried pace of someone who already knew what he would say long before the others arrived.

He drew back just enough to let his eyes meet Taejun's, still cradling the boy's face with a care so unnatural it had begun to rot in their eyes.

His voice was low, soft enough that it might have been mistaken for affection by the child in his arms, but laced beneath it, buried in every syllable, was something darker, something neither gentle nor kind.

"Don't be afraid, Taejun," he murmured, his lips so close to Taejun's temple they nearly touched. "They just don't understand us. They would never have. We are one when we're together, right? You know it, too, right? They look at me like I'm some sort of monster and see something wrong with their childish accusation. But you see more than that, don't you?"

Taejun didn't speak. His eyes, wide and glistening, flickered toward Seojun and Hyeonjae now, a silent question trembling in the corners, pleading, confused, unsure whether to run or stay, unsure whether the warmth he felt was safety or something that had long since disguised itself as love.

And then, Haneul lifted his gaze.

He turned toward them slowly, still crouched beside Taejun, one arm lingering protectively around the boy's shoulders as though shielding him from an accusation he hadn't yet heard.

But something in his face had changed. His expression was still composed, still calm, but behind that calm, behind the gentle slant of his lips and the softness of his voice, was something seething.

His eyes, which had moments ago closed with quiet contentment, now held an edge so thin and veiled it made the tension worse.

His anger was not loud. It did not scream or bare its teeth. Instead, it sat just behind the surface, in control.

"Do you always interrupt things you don't understand?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper. But it reached them. It cut clean through the air and sank into their skin like ice water. "I was talking to him."

The silence that followed wasn't peaceful; it was suffocating, drawn tight around the room like a noose closing with every breath.

Seojun's jaw tensed, but he said nothing. Hyeonjae looked as if he might speak, but his tongue seemed caught behind his teeth, clenched by a tension he couldn't name.

Haneul turned back to Taejun, his face softening instantly, though that softness now looked even more terrifying, the way a mask softens before it cracks. "Don't listen to them," he whispered, brushing a knuckle beneath the boy's eye as if to soothe a tear that hadn't yet fallen. "They don't know what it's like. They've never had to experience losing everything. They've never had to stand in the dark and wonder if the one person who needed them had already forgotten their face."

His eyes didn't flicker, didn't change, but Seojun and Hyeonjae both saw it. For the first time, the edge of the mask trembled.

There was rage there, except quiet, immense, buried deep but boiling steadily beneath the surface.

But it's not a rage at them. It was a rage at something deeper.

At everything. At himself. At the world. At whatever force had twisted this boy, once lost and grieving, into the thing now kneeling beside his brother like a priest before an altar, offering comfort with a voice lined in possession.

"You can hate me if you want," Haneul whispered to Taejun, his smile tightening, faltering for just a moment before returning. "You can run. But I'm still the one who stayed. I'm still the one who came back."

Behind them, the door creaked. No one moved.

And Haneul, still crouched, still calm, tightened his grip around the boy's shoulders just slightly, as if daring the room to try and take him.

It was Hyeonjae who stepped forward first, not out of courage, but because the silence had twisted itself so tightly around his throat that standing still for another moment would've meant suffocating on his restraint.

He didn't speak. His words had abandoned him minutes ago, drowned somewhere in the hollow echo of Haneul's voice and the unbearable calm with which he whispered to the trembling boy in his arms.

His hand reached forward, not in a quick pace, not with anger, but with the slow, tentative desperation of someone who knew what he was doing might shatter everything.

He wanted to touch Taejun's arm, to remind him that he wasn't alone, to show him, somehow, that this wasn't the way things were supposed to be.

But before his fingers could make contact, Haneul moved.

He didn't strike. He didn't even raise his voice.

Instead, he lifted his head slowly, very slowly, until his gaze met Hyeonjae's. And in that moment, something in the room shifted, something invisible, something that didn't make noise but made everything else feel impossibly louder for every breath, every heartbeat, every crack in the floor under their feet.

Haneul's face did not twist with anger, nor did it sneer with mockery. Instead, it remained perfectly calm, perfectly still, except for his eyes.

Those eyes, which moments ago had burned with suppressed rage and devotion twisted into something holy and wrong, had returned to their original color.

But to Hyeonjae, they were worse than fury. Because nothing was missing from them.

There was something added, a thin, barely visible thread of hostility that coiled through his pupils like smoke through a glass, impossible to grasp but undeniable in its presence.

Haneul's lips parted, and for the first time since they'd entered the room, he spoke not to Taejun but directly to the two intruders who dared to sever this moment.

His voice was quiet, softer than the dust shifting on the floor, but it struck with the cold finality of a guillotine. "You always reach in at the last moment, don't you?" he murmured, his tone wrapped in a mockery so gentle it nearly passed for concern. "You're always showing up with guilt on your breath and shaking hands, pretending you're here to help."

Seojun took a step forward, his jaw set, shoulders squared, the controlled fury rising in his chest no longer willing to be smothered by confusion. "Let him go," he said again, each word landing like stone across rotted floorboards. "This isn't love. It's a grave. Your grave, Taejun."

Haneul blinked once. The smile that slowly spread across his face did not touch his eyes. "You speak with such certainty," he said, voice dipped in something colder than scorn. "But tell me, did you comfort him when he cried alone? Did you stand beside him when the world forgot he existed?"

His hand moved, gently brushing Taejun's hair behind his ear, and for a breathless second, the gesture was so quiet, so filled with the illusion of care, that it struck like a wound. "Yes, you didn't. You weren't there. But I was. Even when I was gone, I always remembered him."

Taejun flinched. Both Hyeonjae and Seojun saw it.

A subtle pull in the boy's shoulders, a quiver in his breath.

His hands had not moved, but something inside him had, something small, something desperately human.

It was not trust, and it was not comfortable either.

It was a question, and that question was growing louder with each second.

Seojun took another step, now close enough to see the fine tremble in Taejun's fingers, the way his shoulders curled inward, not toward safety, but confusion.

Haneul turned his head, just slightly, just enough to keep his face angled between the two men, yet within that glance, a flicker of something colder passed across his face.

His lips curved, but not in amusement; it was something else, a reaction too calm, too quiet, too practiced.

And then, for Taejun's ears alone, so low it did not reach the others, Haneul's voice dropped into a whisper that bled with something terrifyingly intimate. "Don't pull away from me, Taejun," he said, almost lovingly. "They'll take you, and they torture you. They'll ruin what we've just begun to repair. You don't want to be alone again, do you?"

But to Seojun and Hyeonjae, who could not hear the words, only see the way Haneul's body had tensed, the way the air thickened around him, they saw what Taejun could not. Haneul's expression had changed in that single moment.

The mask had slipped. His brow twitched, his jaw tightened ever so slightly, and the line of his mouth hardened, not enough to startle, not enough to scream, but enough that every cell in Hyeonjae's body locked in a single, thrumming warning: this was not a brother comforting his sibling.

This was possession. This was a wound dressing, itself a bandage.

And whatever Haneul believed he was healing, it was not Taejun. It was he.

"I said— let him go," Seojun repeated, his voice now laced with something heavier than command, grief, fury, guilt, all crashing into one desperate demand.

But Haneul did not move. He turned back to the boy, eyes softening again into something sickeningly serene, as if the confrontation behind him no longer existed.

And for a moment longer, he held Taejun like the world was ending and no one else had the right to touch him.

Taejun didn't speak for a long time, and the room, heavy with suffocating stillness, seemed to breathe around them with slow, exhausted heaves, as if even the air itself had grown weary of holding this moment in place.

The warmth in the floorboards had long since bled away, replaced by a cold that no longer belonged to the room but to the space that had opened between them, between the boy and his brother, between what was once meant to be protection and what had become something far less clear, far more dangerous.

Haneul's hand remained on Taejun's shoulder, unmoving, yet the pressure in his fingers had shifted, barely, no outward change a stranger might notice, but to the two who still stood across the rotting boards, to those whose eyes had seen through the first mask, it was enough to spark something beneath the surface.

Seojun's breath caught. He hadn't taken his eyes off the boy since the moment he'd spoken.

There had been no demand, no accusation in Taejun's voice, merely a question, barely audible, that hung in the air with the trembling frailty of someone begging the world to make sense again. "I don't know what to do," Taejun had said, but it wasn't confusion that twisted his face now. It was the quiet agony of someone who had lived too long without the luxury of being asked what he wanted.

The hand on his shoulder tightened again, not forcefully, not with violence, but with something infinitely more cruel: expectation.

Haneul's voice followed, so calm, so endlessly patient, as if he were a priest soothing a frightened child before a ritual. "You don't have to know anything," he murmured, his lips close enough to the boy's ear that neither of the others could fully hear. "You just have to trust me. I'll always be there."

It was Hyeonjae, not Seojun, who moved first, not because he had the courage, but because he recognized the look in the boy's face, that same dull resignation he had seen once before in a mirror he had shattered years ago.

He stepped forward with all the weight of someone dragging the chains of his guilt behind him, each movement cautious, trembling with restraint, he no longer knew how to maintain.

"Taejun," he said, and this time his voice didn't drip with sarcasm or cruelty, but with something raw and broken, something that could've been mistaken for love if it weren't buried under so much shame, "You don't have to stay there. You don't belong to this. Just stay calm and go with me."

Haneul didn't turn. He remained crouched beside the boy, but his shoulders tensed slightly, enough for the rot in the room to feel sharper, for the walls to lean in, for the floor to whisper its discontent through the boards beneath their feet.

Taejun still hadn't looked up, his eyes fixed on the space between his knees, but something was trembling in his hands now, his fingers, small and pale and cold, twitched as though they wanted to reach for something, but no longer remembered how.

"Don't let them take you away again," Haneul said, still quiet, still calm, but now with a note beneath his words that rippled with barely-restrained urgency. "They weren't there when you needed them. I was. You remember that, don't you? You remember how I stayed for you."

There was no scream, no sudden motion, only the smallest shift in the angle of Taejun's head, the slow, faltering tilt of someone being pulled in opposite directions by hands that claimed to love him, by voices that spoke in comfort but carried a weight too heavy for a child's heart to bear.

He turned, enough for Haneul to see it, enough for Seojun to see it.

The boy's eyes, which had been glassy and unseeing, now flickered with something else. A quiet plea for escape from the unbearable tug-of-war playing out over the ruins of his childhood.

Seojun stepped closer, one hand outstretched, not to grab, not to force, but to offer. To give the boy the smallest possible space in which to decide for himself. "Taejun," he said again, softer this time, and in that voice was a decade of sorrow, of guilt buried beneath years of silence. "You don't have to go with anyone. You don't have to be used anymore."

Haneul turned slowly, his head shifting just enough to glance over his shoulder, his face a mask carved in porcelain, cracked not from age but from tension wound so tightly beneath his skin it threatened to break with even the gentlest breeze.

His expression didn't contort in fury, but beneath the calm, the serene tilt of his smile, the fury was unmistakable. But what Hyeonjae and Seojun saw was not what Taejun saw.

To the boy, his brother still looked calm, reassuring, maybe even loving. But to the others, the truth was there, stretched tight across the bones of his face: his patience had limits.

"You both have a talent for speaking as if you're offering salvation," Haneul said quietly, and this time his voice was no longer warm, soft. It had cooled into something slow and deliberate, something stripped of its earlier pretense. "But all I see in your eyes is regret, not love. Regret for what you didn't do. For what you didn't see. But now that he's finally found peace, now that he's finally being held, you dare to pry him away from me?"

And still, Taejun didn't speak, he didn't run, but his breathing had changed again, no longer trembling in fear, but something close to a decision.

His shoulders shifted, just slightly, and the hand Haneul had kept on him now felt resistance, not rejection, but doubt. And that doubt was louder than anything they had said.