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— cough, cough!
Cale spits blooms into the sink, watching them pool, pretty red things that almost innocently tumble into the bottom by the drain.
He’s sick of red — red flowers, red hair, how his cheeks turn so ruddy a colour whenever he’s in the vicinity of a certain someone.
He twists his wrist to allow the water to run. The blooms melt away into nothing and he wonders not for the first time why he can’t be more “Korean.”
Less Rowoon, less himself; more the person he was meant to be — so the person he loves stops looking so fucking sad all the time when he meets Cale’s eyes.
Sure Choi Han does his best to hide his sorrow, ever the polite and dutiful swordsman. But even he can’t forever suppress a blooming cough of his own when he spends so much time in Cale’s inner circle.
“Fucking bastard,” Cale calls his reflection. He should probably tell Choi Han to just leave and visit the East Continent or something to ease his pain.
The funny thing about love, though?
It makes you selfish.
No matter how much Cale has made his peace with that, he kind of hates himself for it.
— knock, knock.
“…Cale-nim?”
Speak of the devil.
Picking out a remaining red petal from between his wet lips, Cale turns off the water.
He walks over to the door to push it open.
Choi Han stands on the other side looking quiet and bleak as he always does. Cale spares a moment to marvel at the fact that this shadow of a man is whom he’s fallen in love with. He’s always pictured himself with a grounded homely type of person in the few times he’s allowed himself to dream. He bypasses the guy to stride down the hall wordlessly.
There’s a moment when they each spot the other and they pause in unison, suppressing blooms.
“…”
Cale makes no mention of it and neither does Choi Han.
Choi Han had confessed to Cale once on a night out by the moon’s sorrowful glow late enough that confessions could be attributed to ramblings and forgotten in the morning.
He told Cale of the person he used to be.
He recounted how Kim Roksoo had died and everything had unraveled. How a god rewound the clock to save their world and Choi Han seemed to be the only one with the memories left to try again and differently this time.
Cale had refrained from reciting how lonely it must have been as there was no need to rub salt in the wound. He hadn’t commented how jarring it must have been to encounter a familiar face only to discover it is a different person altogether. Choi Han has lived it, all the decades alone and then through the years now that they are fighting a war together.
Cale muses it was around that time he began developing the telltale cramps in his chest that eventually devolved into vomited blooms and the thought makes him hate himself a little bit more.
“Cale-nim?” Choi Han prompts, pulling the redhead out of his private musings.
He doesn’t look in Cale’s direction, eyes pointed towards the Count.
Deruth looks curiously at them and Cale sits back, pulling the bottle he’s procured for himself closer to his lips.
“We need a ship,” he tells his father. The East continent has a library they need to pilfer from. They have little time to waste.
Deruth looks carefully at his son and though for a beat his gaze flickers to Cale’s right, that is it.
“Of course, son,” he says. He folds his hands on his desk and brings a smile to his face. Cale is already on his feet, striding away and out the door with the mouth of the bottle kissing his lips.
Only the best for the heir of the Henituse family.
Time aboard the ship passes quickly. It’s an enclosed space but spacious. Cale only has to see the other members of their crew when discussing strategy or around meals. He stays to himself as much as possible. The damned cats make it difficult but he manages.
The ship sways one evening along with the waves.
Cale can see them from his cabin, the round window displaying the black of them through the glass. He can see a part of the deck as well, his window facing the stretch of it leading down to the dorms though it’s typically curtained off.
He sees Choi Han. While his fingers coldly draw the curtains over the glass his feet carry him out of his room like they can’t help themselves.
“Too comfortable to sleep?” Cale asks. He’s walked over and onto the deck several feet away from where the swordsman stands.
Choi Han knows he is there but he hasn’t looked up. He’s staring out at the night sea like it can give him answers.
He looks like he’s seeing a spectre, someone that isn’t there but only he can see. The guy angles forward as if reaching and Cale resists the urge to pull him into his arms or anything equally as maudlin.
“Cale-nim,” Choi Han calls as he blinks the shade from his eyes. He still isn’t looking at him but Cale is glad. These are the moments when Choi Han’s eyes are so raw and longing that Cale thinks the man may burst into tears if someone so much as poked him the wrong way.
Cale remains silent. Choi Han gazes. They breathe in the salted air together.
Then Choi Han grips the front of his chest and coughs, spitting black blooms that spill over the deck and into the sea.
“He comes to me in my dreams, sometimes,” Choi Han rasps when he’s finished wiping his mouth. His lips are bloody and Cale watches, suppressing his own cough.
Choi Han continues, “I see him in the cats, and Ron. And Vicross. But they don’t remember.
“He saved us, you know.” Choi Han glances at Cale then, as if to say, I see him in you most of all.
Cale doesn’t know what to say. He’s never been comforting and the words stick in his throat as much as his chest aches, burning with the need to vomit. He turns away, runs really. He barely makes it back to his quarters before he retches, painting the floor in a ghastly blanket of crimson.
Red petals, red blood.
Cale scowls as he wipes his lips and uses his foot to shove the petals and speckles of blood to the side.
Hans will take care of it tomorrow.
He’ll just have to keep the fucking kids from trampling all over them and contracting it too.
“Don’t fall back!” Cale barks as he swipes a sharp eye over the battlefield. They’d arrived at the library just fine. So fine that they’d anticipated the fight.
What they hadn’t foreseen was how many reinforcements the Darkness had lying in wait at the meet. Instead of saving their resources their strategy appears to be to go full stop on an attempt to eradicate them.
They’re idiots, Cale thinks uncharitably hiding the smirk that wants to spread over his face. The Darkness has reinforcements but they have a dragon.
— and an archmage, and the last members of an assassin clan, and all the traps and weapons and backup that a county’s wealth and the backing of the Rowoon Royal Family can buy.
They are attempting to cripple Cale, but he will destroy them.
He brandishes his silver shield like a battering ram and strikes down a group of the Darkness with the sweep of his hand.
“Duck!”
“To your six!”
The battle lasts the better part of an hour. Not that Cale is keeping track but blood has been spilled from both sides. Thankfully no one he knows has been fatally injured though they’re all worse for wear.
Things are winding down.
He would attribute what happens next to relief, to guard lowered because of it, if he doesn’t know Choi Han better than that.
Off to his left, surrounded by a tight ring of masked men and women who all wield very sharp and very deadly weapons, Choi Han swings his great sword, knocking them back.
They parry, maneuvering against him in turns. One of them must be a mage because a great twister of curdling yawning energy erupts from their hands and roars toward Choi Han.
And Choi Han just… stops.
“No!”
Cale shouts, shooting toward them. Behind him the noise has drawn attention. He feels the familiar gust of the dragon’s magic coupled with Rosalyn’s approaching.
Their combined wave is faster than him, charging over the shove back the grey twister with a loud groan. This affords him time to dart forward.
He tastes iron on his tongue.
It really isn’t the time but as Cale spits blooms in the face of one of the masked men, he finds he’s matched by how Choi Han turns his head and spits black flowers to the side, startled back into action, and he thinks it’s beautiful.
When the dust has settled the Darkness has beat a retreat. By that time Cale is pleased to see that they’ve shrunken to two thirds of their initial size upon their encounter.
Cale doesn’t have time to savor it or their victory; his hand is curled tight to Choi Han’s arm and the man for his part looks shocked as if he can’t believe what he’s almost done.
That he almost let himself die.
Tough luck, Cale thinks as he hauls him back. He throws Choi Han in the safest most secluded niche of the crumbling library that he can possibly find on such short notice.
Choi Han sits down heavily, and blinks. Cale is already hissing in his face, his chest tight and hands trembling.
“Some might say that I can’t respect other people’s losses — but I can.
“But the next time you so much as think of doing that again I’ll kill you myself.”
“I…” Choi Han says. He looks at Cale, but he doesn’t see him. He’s looking at a shade that Cale can’t see, can’t even understand but he takes pity on Choi Han because he can.
Love is a selfish, complicated thing.
Cale murmurs, “Look. His memory takes you back —“ he gets that. But, “Your dreams—“ of him, “should take you forward. Are you really going to sully his name by throwing away your life?”
Choi Han in that moment freezes. His eyes grow still and he holds his chest. His lips are dry but he coughs and doesn’t stop.
Blooms spill down his front and the man hunches to hide that he’s weeping.
Cale leaves him to his grief and relief and whatever else is going through his impossible mind as he stalks off. He swallows his own flowers and wishes they were never there in the first place.