Chapter Text
Epilogue
The final credits were running on a drama Young Seo had confided was a comfort watch. After yet another confrontation with her father, she needed to wallow a bit. The show was a time-travel fantasy with lots of fighting and special effects, and Young Seo had tears in her eyes at, Sunghoon felt, the oddest times.
“Isn’t that romantic?” she sighed, when two of the male characters talked about why one was so devoted to the male lead, a king with a tragic back story.
“Romantic?” Sunghoon responded in surprise. “He specifically says it isn’t like that – that they aren’t dating. Doesn’t he?”
She scoffed, elbowing him in the ribs. “Romance doesn’t always mean sex, you goon! It’s romantic that he chose to devote himself to his king, even at such a young age. Four years old is just a baby! Romantic like chivalrous,” she said, using the English word, “Like choosing to dedicate your life to an ideal. In this case, the royal family, the child king. Like that.”
He nodded as if he agreed with her and got up to bring her another drink and more snacks.
“Not always sex,” he thought. “Not always a choice, either.”
He’d been five when he arrived at the True Light Children’s Home. Old enough to have memories of his family; too young to have words to talk about them. In fact, he’d had few words at all.
When the Kang family showed up, he had taken little notice at first – just another wealthy family doing good works with the orphans – but they gently and kindly persisted, taking him on outings with the little prince Tae Moo, returning him like a borrowed umbrella at the end of the day.
He never knew why they decided on him. Why the Kangs showed up at the home and talked to Mother Superior for hours while Sunghoon was hastily scrubbed and dressed in clean clothes, bags packed with all the things he called his, even while knowing he owned nothing of his own.
Just one blurry photo in a cardboard folder, taken in front of a small house, of two adults about to get in a car, one turned away, the door obscuring her face, the other cut off, just his waving hand and part of a laughing face.
He had become a part of the Kang household. Cared for, no doubt. Given all the advantages, no question. Trusted and even loved, almost certainly.
But always the runner-up. The spare. The “just-in-case.” Part of the household. Never quite one of the family. Not in the car with Tae Moo and his hal-abeoji the Chairman on that terrible night. Not a son when the parents died. He saw the horrors of the accident only through the life-long nightmares of Kang Tae Moo.
Even now, every time it rained, he looked for his hyeung.
The first time he saw her, he fell hard, dazzled by her light. He knew she was the only one he would ever want. And then he saw her name - Jin Young Seo - and knew she could never be his. The precious princess daughter of Chairman Jin. Destined for a man like Kang Tae Moo.
Cha Sunghoon had to step back. As always. One step behind the prince to whom he owed his loyalty. To whom he had been pledged when he was too young to fully understand what that meant, but old enough to know a vow did not have to be spoken out loud to be binding.
Every time he saw her – and he saw her everywhere – she stole his breath and stirred him up. He couldn’t sleep, knowing she was on the other side of the wall, her bed up against his. If he didn’t draw a line, he thought she might swallow him whole.
And then she crossed that line to kiss him. And he stepped forward and blew the line out of existence when he pulled her into his arms, when he kissed her back, when he dragged her into his apartment and took her into his bed and poured his soul into her hands.
The next morning, before he could tell her what that had meant to him, she drew a new line. Hard. She’d used him to scratch an itch and then sweetly wiped him off the bottom of her shoes. Asked him to consider it null and void.
Made him nothing. Made him empty.