Honbul: Flame of the Soul

Bright moonlight washed the night sky in a pale glow.

Late at night, the two-story house at the foot of the mountain was silent. The sliding window of the living room, which opened out onto the wooden porch, was shut tight. A cricket climbed up onto the porch.

Tr-r-r-r.

“May I come in?”

At the faint question from the other side of the window, Mesan nodded.

He reached out and slid the window halfway open.

“But can you chirp a little more quietly inside the house? My lord is asleep.”

Covering his mouth with one hand, Mesan whispered the words.

“I will just look around for a moment and leave.”

The cricket gave its tiny thanks and hopped into the living room.

Mesan was kneeling in one corner of the darkened room. Dim moonlight spilled over the cell phone resting on his knees. Fiddling with it, Mesan swallowed hard, then pressed the numbers in the order Jeongju had shown him before.

He lifted the phone to his ear.

Tr-r-r-r. Tr-r-r-r.

For a moment the ringing sounded almost like the cry of a cricket. Then a familiar voice came through.

“Mesan!”

The instant his name was called, Mesan’s face lit up.

“J-Jeongju!”

The feeling that surged up in him made his voice come out much louder than he meant it to. Startled, Mesan quickly turned to look behind him. He was afraid the sound might have carried all the way through the firmly closed bedroom door.

Fortunately, the room where Jaegyeom was sleeping stayed completely still and quiet.

Mesan let out a small sigh of relief and clasped the phone respectfully in both hands.

“N-no, it is nothing. Yes. My lord fell asleep a little while ago.”

All day, Mesan had done nothing but wait for Jaegyeom to come home from school. Jeongju had tried to soothe him, telling him not to worry, but Mesan’s heart had crumbled over and over again. He had paced the yard all day long, worrying, imagining, worrying again.

What if Jaegyeom had not said those things in anger?

What if he had meant them?

Part of him wanted to know Jaegyeom’s true feelings more clearly. Another part desperately did not want to know. Mesan had spent a long time wondering what he should say to him first.

But all that time he had spent thinking proved useless. The moment he saw Jaegyeom come through the gate, he froze on the spot.

He could not bring himself to say a single word. He only stood there and stared.

The first thing Jaegyeom said made something inside him collapse in vain.

“Did you have fun?”

It was the same greeting as always.

Jaegyeom did not show the slightest sign that anything from yesterday remained on his mind.

His lord scolded him as usual, ate dinner, made sure to watch his daily drama, tapped away at the game console, and then went to bed.

At the sight of Jaegyeom acting as if nothing at all had happened, Mesan was left feeling more confused than anything.

Did I dream yesterday?

Just in case, he had gone into the kitchen.

As expected, one rice bowl was still missing.

The whole day had been so ordinary, so calm, it almost made Jeongju’s request—to keep an eye on Jaegyeom’s state—feel embarrassing.

Now and then Mesan would glance toward the closed bedroom door and quietly tell Jeongju how Jaegyeom had spent his day. Jeongju listened in silence, then only said, “I see.”

His voice had sunk heavily.

Since there was no way to tell what Jaegyeom truly meant, Jeongju seemed every bit as unsettled as Mesan.

After exchanging a few brief words about how they were doing, the two of them ended the call with a promise to speak again at the same time tomorrow.

His legs had gone numb from kneeling so long.

Mesan tucked the phone deep into his pocket and tiptoed to Jaegyeom’s room. After hesitating for a moment, he carefully took hold of the doorknob and turned it.

Moonlight flooded the dark room in a soft wash.

Relying on that pale light, he stepped inside. When he sharpened his eyes, he could make out his lord lying on the bed.

Jaegyeom was fast asleep with his stomach completely exposed.

Mesan looked down at his sleeping face. The expression that was always so flat and indifferent had gone slack and blank in sleep.

He spread his palm over Jaegyeom’s face.

“My lord.”

It was little more than a breath of a whisper.

“Do you regret taking me in?”

A faint glow seeped from Mesan’s palm. The air around his hand brightened just a little.

But Jaegyeom remained sunk in deep sleep, without the slightest stir.

After what had happened yesterday, Mesan had not had the courage to say out loud earlier that he wanted to heal him. The faint clusters of light settled over different parts of Jaegyeom’s face and over the hand that still held lingering injury. The dried blood on his lips flaked away. The blotchy bruises gradually faded too.

“Have you come to hate me?”

As he asked the question—one that could never possibly be answered—Mesan slowly drew his hand back.

Only enough for it to look like the work of ordinary healing. No more and no less than what one night could account for.

If it had been up to him, he would have healed everything at once.

But if his lord was going to keep attending school, this was the best he could do. If every injury vanished in a single day, it would look strange to the eyes of ordinary humans.

Because he knew he could not die, Jaegyeom had always treated his body carelessly. Even after he started going to school, he was constantly getting hurt. He bit his fingers, drove knives into his palms, smashed his nose and bled. Every time, Mesan healed him in misery, and every time Jaegyeom would say the same thing by force of habit.

“I won’t die.”

Mesan hated hearing him say that.

Even so.

Even if he would not die.

Even if death would never come—

“When you are hurt, it still hurts.”

Even an immortal body felt pain all the same.

If an ordinary person drove a blade into their throat, their breathing would stop. And once breath stopped, the pain would end too.

But his lord had to endure that same level of pain in full, even after suffering wounds grave enough to kill.

And compared to everyone else, even the smallest scratch healed painfully slowly on him.

Mesan could not bear seeing Jaegyeom in pain.

“I am ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) not leaving you.”

He whispered it without strength.

At some point tears had pooled around his eyes. He wiped them away with a quick rub.

For a long time, he simply stood there looking at the sleeping face in the dark. Then he carefully tugged down Jaegyeom’s T-shirt to cover his exposed stomach. Only after pulling the blanket back into place as well did he leave the room.

The door shut without a sound.

The moonlight withdrew.

Heavy darkness filled the room.

“......”

Jaegyeom’s tightly closed eyelids slowly lifted open.

*****

The next day, and the day after that, the young man handed him a notebook again.

“What about the cleaning?”

“I already did it earlier.”

“Why? You could have made me do it.”

“I forgot my friend was coming.”

When Jaegyeom stared hard at him, the young man smiled with perfect innocence.

And it was not just the cleaning. If one really wanted to, there seemed to be no end of work that could be invented in a place like this. But for several days now, the young man had been making the same excuse and telling Jaegyeom to write another response.

In the middle of all that, Jaegyeom and the young man sometimes exchanged short, ordinary bits of conversation.

The young man was always the one who spoke first.

Things like, “Was lunch good?”, “They had yogurt drinks today, so I was delighted,” “Are classes bearable?”, “It keeps getting hotter.”

Most of it was trivial, silly, pointless chatter, and because of that, Jaegyeom found it surprisingly easy to answer.

At first, he had wished the man would just give him some manual labor instead.

But the young man gave generous evaluations even to the responses he had scrawled down carelessly. Strictly speaking, he was supposed to be there to serve out a punishment, but something about it felt strange.

No matter how he thought about it, this did not feel like punishment at all.

In any case, Jaegyeom had nothing to lose.

He picked a book at random and sat down at the reading table. At first he had only skimmed them to kill time, but by the third day of idly flipping through books, at some point he found himself reading with real concentration.

Of course, when unfamiliar loanwords kept appearing one after another, he would get stuck and stare blankly, not knowing what they meant. Even so, if he pushed through by guessing at the meanings from context, reading had a kind of pleasure to it. More than anything, when he followed the sentences one by one, all the useless thoughts in his head disappeared.

Maybe it really was true what they said about humans being creatures that adapted.

Jaegyeom rested his chin on the backs of his folded hands.

By now he had a rough sense of what posture made reading easiest.

He had the book spread wide open and was reading his way slowly through the lines when the young man, who had been staring at the monitor, rolled his chair back and asked in a low voice,

“Is it good?”

“Yeah.”

The answer slipped out carelessly as he turned the page. Then, suddenly feeling a gaze on him, Jaegyeom looked up.

The young man was watching him with a curious expression in his eyes.

“......”

“......”

An oddly foreign silence passed between them.

Jaegyeom abruptly corrected himself in a hurry.

“Ah, no. I mean—yes.”

The young man laughed soundlessly.

“What is that supposed to mean? So is it good or not?”

“...It is.”

“I see.”

A little embarrassed, Jaegyeom cleared his throat for no reason. He stole a quick glance at the other man, then pretended to go back to reading. He was just making a show of looking at the page, rustling it as he turned—

“The moon always shows us the same side.”

—Jean Grenier, The Island

At the sudden remark, Jaegyeom looked up.

“So it is with people’s lives as well. We can only guess at the hidden side of a life, and yet that hidden side is the one thing that truly matters.”

After finishing the line, the young man looked directly at him.

“It is what I am reading now. I liked it.”

And what am I supposed to do with that...

Jaegyeom was staring at him with a flat look when the young man smiled and asked,

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“About the hidden side of the moon.”

“I have never thought about it.”

“I am dying to know.”

Tapping his fingertips against the desk like piano keys, the young man added,

“What could possibly be hiding in a place so carefully concealed?”

Jaegyeom answered flatly,

“If you are that curious, why not ask it yourself?”

“Ah, ask it directly?”

The laughter lingering in the young man’s eyes deepened.

“There was a method like that. Somehow it never occurred to me.”

He had only tossed the words out without thinking. But when the young man nodded as if he were seriously considering it, Jaegyeom nearly snorted out a laugh despite himself. The expression on his face as he sank into thought was absurdly solemn.

Still propping his chin on one hand, the young man stared at Jaegyeom and asked with complete seriousness,

“Do you know its phone number?”

“Whose?”

“The moon’s.”

“......”

What?

Jaegyeom, who had been turning the page, jerked his head up.

“It is too far away. I suppose I will have to call.”

The young man drove the point home.

“......”

“......”

Jaegyeom clenched his fist so hard his hand went white.

In the strange silence, their gazes collided head-on. The ticking of the clock on the wall sounded absurdly loud.

And then—

Pfft.

In the end, Jaegyeom lowered his head, unable to hold the laughter in.

At that reaction, even Yoon Taehee—who had kept his face perfectly calm until then—quietly laughed as well, chin still resting on one hand. He had only answered a ridiculous remark with one of his own. He had not expected the boy to laugh like that.

Still chuckling under his breath, Jaegyeom raised his head.

Their faces, both still carrying traces of laughter, met each other’s eyes.

The moment their gazes locked, Jaegyeom suddenly grew self-conscious and hurriedly tried to straighten his expression. He erased the smile from his face as fast as he could, but its traces still stained the tips of his ears red.

“Hah. It was just so ridiculous. The laugh just... came out on its own.”

Now that he had laughed, he felt awkward, as though he had somehow lost face. Lowering his eyes stiffly, Jaegyeom pretended to scribble something in the notebook.

Meanwhile, Yoon Taehee found himself in a rather strange state of mind as he looked at the curve of Jaegyeom’s ear.

The moment the boy’s face—usually so sullen—had gone slack in unguarded laughter had left a peculiar impression on him.

That clear, bright laugh. The slight scrunch of his nose. The tiny trembling of his shoulders.

Before he knew it, Yoon Taehee had opened his mouth.

“When you laugh like that, you really look exactly...”

Murmuring as though under a spell, he stopped in the middle of the sentence.

At that, Jaegyeom flicked his eyes up.

He waited for the rest, but Yoon Taehee only looked at him with a quiet face. Then he picked up his book, set it back down, and suddenly glanced at the clock on the wall.

“Are you finished with your response yet?”

The words that finally came, after such a long pause, were completely out of left field.