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Quietly breathing into the night, frost leaving his lips, Jeongguk pulls his hood down a little further. Moonlit lanterns and the shimmering lake make Jeongguk's existence feel dull.
Like an ugly, colourless splotch amidst sparkling lights and bright smiles and swirling rose tattoos.
His feet are slow and mind is slower, visions blurring before him as he breathes deeply yet is unable to quite grasp how beautiful this city looks during dusk. If he were to describe the place he is in, he would be unable to.
Jeongguk is a traveler, he is immortal and he has been alive for pitifully long, yet he has next to nothing to show for it at all. No midnight cats crawling along his finger tips, no burning hearts on his neck or even a pitiful smiley on his fucking elbow.
Jeon Jeongguk has seen the world change from a dystopia made of tall buildings and steel roads and metallic roads and a concrete jungle, to a world with nothing at all, to this utopia where the land glimmers with the remnants of the rain, and his blurry, melancholic face in its reflection.
Yet, all he has to show for it is a mark of a cigarette burn on his clavicle, thickly threaded chains along his ankle, and a quiet, lonely moon beneath his ear. His birth mark.
He has not been waiting for this day, but Jeongguk has seen Fate knead it's happenings so many times in his life that he has become accustomed to the pattern.
How he's given something so sweet, so gentle, before it is snatched away from him because beneath the gowns, beneath the laughter, beneath the rich wine and absence of poverty, humanity still belongs to a concrete jungle.
Today, his mark tingles, a warning, or perhaps a timid mischief.
The wind is cool against his face and Jeongguk has been on this exact street three times hence, alone each time, with no where to go because he's been cursed with having to live forevermore.
He was told by his mother, the queen, a frail and delicate lady according to what he remembers of her, that his curse may save lives of millions around him. How he shall be the only man alive when not even the trees breathe.
It seems to have done more wrong than good, because no many deserves so much power, and certainly not Jeongguk, who has no one to share it with.
Energy can neither be created, nor be destroyer. And Jeongguk wonders where it shall all go once he finally tumbles over the bridge his hands have been craving to jump over.
He's been counting down for tens of hundreds of years, and now he's finally run out of fingers. He's out of breath, out of places to be, and most importantly, the last hand of the clock has ticked away from the date engraved on his wrist.
The world buzzes around him, perhaps not longing, rather relief lodged into Jeongguk's chest because.
Because he does not quite have to be alive anymore now that he knows for sure that the numbers on his hand mean nothing.
He leans back, hood falling off and eyes sparkling with either tears or the stars, he could not be bothered.
A rain drop falls on his face, or perhaps it is a teardrop.
"E-excuse me?"
And then an umbrella is clouding Jeongguk's vision, knuckles white and skin pulled taut around them because of how hard the being is clutching the handle.
The relief is gone as soon as it had come, and Jeongguk prolongs his misery once again.
He turns on his heel and-
"Do you speak Korean?" The man asks, voice timid, now speaking in Hangul.
Jeongguk has been alive for millennia, he knows just about every language in existence.
His shirt drops down to show off sharply carved collars, skin honeyed underneath musical-esque lighting, and none of it is visible through the thick brands of colourful ink swirling on the stranger's arms and he is breathtaking.
How Taehyung has not changed even centuries after his death, despite a change in the planet itself, Jeongguk fails to understand.
"Have you forgotten me already, Taehyung?"
His name out of Jeongguk's mouth makes the man go rather still, mouth falling agape and eyes rounding, a sweet cherub like fluster colouring his cheeks.
He exhales rather slowly, and Jeongguk misses the sight of his mark on the man's skin, where it used to be years ago, a claim on this human. A claim on the only person who'd ever managed to give Jeongguk a home.
And he doesn't even remember him.
"...I don't know who you are," Taehyung whispers guiltily, a band on finger shining. "Why do I not know who you are?" He asks, head bowing down in misery.
Jeongguk could've spent his entire life searching and researching for Taehyung, but could've only met him when it was his time to. Yet, an unspoken confession lingers between the two that Taehyung has been wondering who the date is for, and why he does not remember who they are.
Guilt is the greatest punishment he could be given.
Jeongguk smiles gently despite the cry of his heart, a cynical tilt to his lips.
"This is the fourth time you've asked me that," Jeongguk purses his lips to hold back a choke. "Yet each time, you appear more and more conflicted. Do you really not remember me?"
Taehyung, this time with curled brown hair and a Parisian purse in his hand, looking every bit like the previous two times he had been reincarnated and had forgotten, appears estranged.
"No," he whispers, but Jeongguk can already feel the beginnings of Taehyung's mark (a constellation of stars) forming somewhere on his body.
"Well then," Jeongguk shuts his eyes, let's the wind wash him away, wash away his sorrows, because God knows he won't be able to give up on Taehyung anytime soon.
Taehyung, who used to be a part of his world the first time, but now seems to be his entire world itself.
"I'm Jeon Jeongguk." He sticks out his hand, "and I am your soulmate, Kim Taehyung-ssi."
Taehyung appears like an angel, and perhaps it serves the two of them right.
An Angel and a Demon, reincarnated over and over and over till the pain finally tears them apart.
Till death does them apart.