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Lee Sa-young hates the smell of ash in the air as much as he hates the heavy feeling in his chest that just won’t let go. Some days he wishes everything was just a drawn out nightmare and he'd wake up with a jolt in a bed in his family home. Perhaps things would have been better off if fate took a different turn. He would still have his parents with him, he would’ve had his sense of taste. But that also meant he would never have been rescued by J, or have met Cha Eui-jae at the alley.
Being a hunter comes with many regrets, and Sa-young knows he will die with more than his fair share.
He’s found that the regrets he will take to his grave are ones that manifested and festered alongside gray hair and a finger to his mouth. Ever since they’d doubled, tripled, and quadrupled ten times over.
Sa-young refuses to entertain the thought that he can die with thoughts of bright, cerulean eyes etched onto his eyelids—his last moments of consciousness filled with nothing more than longing for the unknown.
He doesn’t regret meeting Cha Eui-jae and never will.
Sa-young does not regret taking the extended hand, persevering through all the treatment and recuperating enough to see a plain black mask and to feel skin under his mostly-numb fingertips. He also doesn’t regret taking yet another hand and enduring countless experiments, staring at blank, white walls for hours on end as he believes in a promise left behind by his savior. And he most certainly does not regret awakening, establishing a guild and spending billions of won on research to reopen closed rifts, because it was what led him to meet the man beside him once more.
What he does regret most is knowing he might never get to see his hyung grow old. Sa-young doesn’t want to admit that he’ll die young, that both of them might, it might as well be a part of the job description. While he can melt everything without letting it get close to his immediate vicinity with his ability, Eui-jae charges forward with unnerving courage; it both infuriates and scares Sa-young how his hyung seems to have no regard for his own life if it meant saving someone else’s. Eui-jae stares death and evil and all the things Sa-young cannot shield and protect him from right in the eyes.
For all his bravado and his pure, unadulterated desire to save people, Eui-jae lives his own double life.
They never talk about the bad things that happen as much as Sa-young wishes they could. It feels wrong to watch someone suffer and agonize over death and loss as much as his hyung does (as subtle as his expressions may be) without ever being able to tread that territory. Eui-jae locks it all away in the same cage that encases his heart and even Sa-young is not allowed in.
(He holds the key to his own cage close but it’s still within Eui-jae’s reach. It’s an invitation and he’s the only one with that privilege. He’d long since decided that if anyone were to wreck him and rip his heart to shreds, it was his hyung.
The other boy owned his life, heart and soul. He’d signed them away to him the first time cerulean eyes had met amethysts, the only thing he could vividly remember when he was quite literally melting. It was a transaction made in the moment and worth every hard-earned won it had pried from his cold hands.)
“Sa-young-ah,” Eui-jae’s voice pulls him from his thoughts. He glances to his right and locks eyes with the other boy as he tugs the blanket draped over his shoulders closer. They sat together on the balcony of Sa-young’s penthouse, a rare night wherein they were both free from dungeons and rifts to clear.
Nightmares are something they both suffer from relentlessly, though Sa-young can imagine the contents of their dreams are far different.
While Eui-jae is haunted by the lives that were lost while he was in the rift, and the entirety of Korea essentially depending on the #1 hunter, Sa-young fears the uncertainty of the life of the person sitting next to him.
He hums quietly in response, nodding his head in acknowledgment as he turns his gaze back up to the stars.
“What do you want to do when hunters are no longer needed?”
It’s an innocent question with an easy answer, but the words he knows he should say feel like the acid that lies on his tongue. He’s mentioned it, shamelessly even, at that one moment where distracting Eui-jae was of utmost priority. But now, it’s different. They were back in the real world, with this one rare moment to actually talk.
He knows J is expected to work as a hunter until they find a way to rid the world of dungeons and rifts, of the end of the world that was threatening humanity. The wants of a hunter come second to the needs of the many. The good of the masses at the expense of the individual.
What Sa-young wants is not something Eui-jae believes he can have, and what he will have is not something he’s certain he can live with.
He wanted more.
So much more.
“Didn’t we already talk about this before?” He counters, letting his eyes trace the lines of the big dipper.
He can feel Eui-jae shrug beside him and he hears the sound of the older man’s breaths. The words don’t need to be said for Sa-young to understand.
Life is cruel and unfair. It makes him want things that are impossible to obtain and answer questions that hurt more than any wound he’ll ever get. He wants to run away far from this life and hide amongst the stars. He wants to bring Eui-jae with him, so they can create a home together on an alien planet where monsters are nothing more than myths and legends.
“What I want and what I’m obligated to do are two completely different things,” he sighs. “But, if you’d like then I can repeat what I told you when we were still in the dungeon.”
As the words leave his mouth, he looks at the other hunter and suppresses a snicker as the red tint on Eui-jae’s face intensifies even under the moonlight. “I’m asking seriously.”
Sa-young had been serious about it and he thinks it was all just a joke?
Instead of feeling annoyed, a fondness settles over him like another blanket. The answer was just so inherently Cha Eui-jae. “If you can’t take the truth, don't ask about it,” he snorts. He opens his mouth to ask the other hunter the same question before stopping himself. “What do you want to do then? I don’t care about what you’re expected to do.”
Sa-young wants to do a lot of things. He wants to travel, to see the sea with the older man like they’d promised years ago. He wants to get married and live in their own house by the beach without having to worry, without having to fear that every goodbye in the morning would be his last.
He wants to wake up each morning to see midnight black hair. He wants to feel the cool steel of a wedding band and the heartbeat of a boy who is nothing but normal beneath his palm.
He longs for a life with Cha Eui-jae but has been left with nothing but scraps of one full of hatred and anger.
“If I was completely honest and transparent, you might punch me too. I know you have a knack for violence.”
“I won’t punch you. Maybe. Even though you make me get the urge a lot of times," Eui-jae admits, with his lips pursed and yet Sa-young just finds it cute.
He lets out a huff, a grin back on his lips. “I don’t trust that.”
“Then, I’ll tell you mine if you tell me.”
“I’m touched that you actually thought about it after telling me that nothing came to mind before. You first, then I’ll do it.”
Eui-jae stretches out until he’s lying flat on his back, not looking back at the eyes staring at him. He can see the tint on the older man’s cheeks, knowing that he’d been thinking about his words—that he wanted to take over the hangover soup restaurant, even having an argument about what they would name it, that they would send Ha-eun to college, then buy a house.
It was all vividly clear in both their minds, something to look forward to when they were trapped within the confines of the 2nd timeline and even now that they were back in their original timeline and doing what they could to stop the impending apocalypse.
The moonlight smooths his skin and Sa-young wants nothing more than to reach out and touch it, to feel it once again with his fingertips. His hyung draws him in like they’re magnets of opposite poles. Always has since the tender age of fifteen.
After a moment, Eui-jae finally shares, “I’d want to own a new house,” he begins. “The old one under my name has a lot of memories but I want to start anew. Make it nice and warm and welcoming, and get that quiet life I told you I wanted to have.”
He notices the use of past tense but swallows the lump in his throat and doesn’t comment on it.
Eui-jae watches him expectantly, “Your turn, no backing out now,” he grins. “A deal’s a deal.”
The taller man sucks in a breath. He remembers a comfortable house and a framed photo by the beach. He thinks of wearing an apron and cooking for his hyung. He thinks of mornings with Cha Eui-jae right by his side as his husband, having the ring to back up the claim.
Sa-young thinks and he dreams. He wishes and he yearns. He begs and is willing to be stripped of everything to get it, and yet, his efforts are fruitless.
“I was serious, back then in the dungeon. But one thing I didn’t get to say was that I want to get married,” He begins, the words quiet as they leave his lips.
“That’s not weird, why would you think I’d punch you over that—”
“Married to you,” Sa-young finishes, face heating up as he stares ahead.
The sky is too dark to see much of the creatures of the night even with the clear skies and bright moon, so he settles on the white ash slowly covering the floor surrounding them. It’s much easier to ignore the feeling of his heart pounding in his chest or the nauseating churn of his stomach in the wake of his confession.
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Sa-young pulls his lips into a thin line, ready to pick his blanket up off the ground and make his way back inside. If there was a thing he could learn from the older man, it would be the art of running away. Maybe it was the time to let him get a taste of his own medicine.
It’s not a rejection but it feels like one. It doesn’t hurt as much as it did to hold Eui-jae’s limp form in his arms, but he doesn’t enjoy the feeling nonetheless.
“Isn’t it all a bit too fast..? Usually you go out on dates, get to know the other more and all that before sealing the deal,” Eui-jae says after a few moments, but his voice is lacking the confidence it usually does. Sa-young is almost thrilled to see the dust of pink intensifying into a deep red across his hyung’s cheeks. “Let’s not skip out on those things.”
They don’t move. Instead, they let their words sink into the air between them. They’ve both been through a lot of things, have even gone on a date worth tens of billions, and have gotten to know each other through the countless life-or-death situations they went through in the time they’ve reunited. Perhaps a little bit of hope is what someone like Sa-young needs in his life, where the dread, fear and hate can be momentarily forgotten amongst fading scars and a living, breathing body wrapped in his arms.
Sa-young is thankful he awakened, doesn’t regret choosing to be a hunter with Eui-jae, and one of the many reasons he has come to love about that is the joy his hyung is able to bring even in the bleakest of moments. Even with the future looming on the horizon, Eui-jae effortlessly pulls wide smiles from Sa-young’s lips under the glow of a full moon. He lets Sa-young live a life he never thought he would while simultaneously making the most of his own limited time left.
It’s not a confession like the ones in fairytales that Park Ha-eun likes to read and gush over. It’s unconventional, but perhaps that’s why it works so well for the two of them. They’re unconventional. Their lives are messes of regrets and fears and nightmares that won’t go away. They’re stuck in an endless loop of predictable, unsavory work, so maybe a marriage proposal prior to saving the world is something that was meant to be.
He lets the laugh bubbling in his chest leave him, the corners of his lips pulling up into a smile, “Yeah, I think you’re right. We’ve got time after we save the world.”
Sa-young hates the world for what it’s worth, what it’s done to his hyung and caused them both irreparable scars, but he’s beginning to think that not everything about it is all that bad.
Not when he finally has something a bit more concrete to hold onto.
He’d always been good about keeping his promises, after all.