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Everyone in the lowland villages knew the story.
Beyond the bramble fields and the fog-soaked river lay a manor swallowed by forest and rot, its towers crooked like broken teeth. And inside it lived a monster.
They said he had claws that could tear a man in half. A voice that curdled blood. A face so horrible it drove mirrors to crack. Livestock vanished near the woods, and sometimes travelers never returned.
None of them knew his name.
Heeseung did not remember the witch’s face anymore. Only her voice, sharp and amused, as she looked upon him with eyes like split glass.
To be loved, you must first be lovable, she’d said. Let’s see how you fare.
The curse hollowed him out and rebuilt him wrong. His bones twisted. His skin darkened and split. Horns curled from his skull. His hands became talons better suited for tearing than holding.
He screamed for days. Then years passed.
And no one ever came close enough to see that the monster cried.
<><><><>
Heeseung found the boy at dusk.
He’d been checking the old boundary stones, a habit left over from a life where he still pretended he belonged to the world, when he heard it. A small, broken sound.
Crying.
He froze.
Humans didn’t cry in these woods. Humans didn’t come to these woods.
Following the sound, he pushed through fern and thorn until he found a child curled beneath a dead oak, knees pulled to chest, clothes thin and torn, dirt streaked across his face. The boy couldn’t have been more than six or seven.
Heeseung sucked in a breath and instantly regretted it. The sound that came out of him was wrong. Too deep and too rough.
The boy looked up and their eyes met.
The scream that followed was thin and terrified, ripped straight from a chest that thought it was about to die.
Heeseung staggered back, heart lurching.
“No,” he rasped, holding up his claws, as if that could help. “No-- please--”
The boy scrambled backward, sobbing.
And something inside Heeseung broke clean in half.
He could leave. He should leave. That was what everyone expected of him.
Instead, he carefully, so carefully, tore a strip from his cloak and set it down between them, then backed away into the shadows.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, voice shaking. “I swear it. I just can’t… I can’t leave you all alone out here.”
The boy sniffed, eyes wide.
“...I’m Riki,” he whispered.
And just like that, Heeseung was doomed.
<><><><>
Riki didn’t trust him. Not at first.
Heeseung didn’t blame him.
He kept his distance, letting the boy walk ahead while he followed like a shadow. He carried Riki across the river so his feet wouldn’t get wet. He wrapped his own cloak around the child when the night grew cold.
The manor terrified Riki, but the woods terrified him more and he didn’t have anywhere else to go.
So he stayed.
The first night, Riki slept with a knife clutched in both hands. Heeseung had given it to him with the promise that if Heeseung ever harmed him, which he never would, Riki could harm him back.
Heeseung sat by the hearth until dawn, unmoving, in case the boy woke screaming. He didn’t want to scare him further.
Days turned into weeks.
Heeseung learned how to cook again, slowly, awkwardly, with claws fumbling around pots too small for his hands. Riki learned that the monster always gave him the biggest portion. That the monster knew stories. That the monster hummed quietly when he thought Riki wasn’t listening.
The nightmares came often.
Riki would wake crying, and Heeseung would sit at the edge of the bed, unsure, until small hands grabbed his sleeve.
“Don’t go,” Riki would mumble.
So he stayed.
Always.
<><><><>
Children, Heeseung learned, were braver than adults.
Riki stopped flinching when Heeseung spoke. Then he stopped staring at the horns. Then, one afternoon, he got close enough to touch them.
“They’re warm,” Riki said thoughtfully.
Heeseung nearly cried.
They built routines. Breakfast. Lessons by the window that Heeseung was sure he wasn’t qualified to teach but did so anyway. Long walks where Heeseung pointed out safe paths and dangerous ones. He carved toys from scrap wood, delicate despite his claws.
Once, Riki asked quietly, “Are you going to eat me?”
The question hurt more than the curse ever had.
“No,” Heeseung said, steady. “Never. I would rather die.”
Riki nodded, satisfied.
That night, he slept without the knife.
<><><><>
Heeseung didn’t think of it as love at first.
Love was something bright and easy. Love was something given freely.
Love was something Heeseung knew he didn’t deserve.
This was quieter.
This was mending torn hems and listening to a child talk about dreams. This was standing between danger and someone smaller without thinking twice. This was fear, constant, gnawing fear, that one day Riki would leave.
The curse didn’t stir.
Years passed. Riki grew taller. Laughed louder. Ran through the halls like he owned them.
“Hyung,” he started calling him, one day, like it was obvious.
Heeseung had to leave the room before Riki saw him cry.
<><><><>
The curse waited.
It always did.
On a winter night, after a long day of snowfall and stories by the fire, Heeseung tucked Riki into bed, as he always did.
“Goodnight,” Heeseung said softly.
Riki yawned, then sat up suddenly.
He leaned forward and pressed a quick, warm kiss to Heeseung’s cheek, careful of the scars, careful of the horns.
“Goodnight, hyung,” he said. “I love you.”
The words hit the air like a bell tolling.
The world breathed.
Light tore through the room, not blinding, but gentle. Heeseung gasped as pain lanced through him, then vanished. Bones shifted. Skin smoothed. The weight he’d carried for years lifted all at once.
He fell to his knees, human once again.
Riki stared.
“...Hyung?”
Heeseung looked up, tears spilling freely, and smiled with a face that no longer frightened anyone.
“Yes,” he said, voice finally whole again. “I’m here.”
The curse, at last, had nothing left to hold onto, broken by the love of a child.
Heeseung’s child.