Chapter Text
Lee Cheongsan had always been fast.
It was the first thing people noticed about him — the blur of limbs darting across the schoolyard, the streak of motion that left others trailing behind in a cloud of dust. His mother marveled at it, his father boasted, and his friends, breathless and bruised, could only laugh as they tried to keep up. He was always first to the finish line, always too quick to stop cleanly, always too scraped and scruffed to care. His leg bore the evidence — a constellation of bruises, a roadmap of reckless speed. After the initial panic, his mother stopped fretting. She’d simply sigh, and clean his wounds with a practiced tenderness, muttering about sons who ran faster than their sense of gravity.
But Cheongsan’s velocity wasn’t limited to his feet. His mind, too, raced ahead — sharp, curious, and unrelenting. His grades were good, not perfect, but consistently nestled within the top twenty. That wasn’t what made him remarkable though — his mother’s words. No, it was the way his thoughts leapt from one question to the next, never content with surface answers.
Why did the old man arrive at the park every day at precisely 3 p.m. to feed the birds? Why did the woman on the bench smile so wistfully at the children playing nearby?
Most children might wonder. Cheongsan asked. And when the answers didn’t satisfy him, he imagined better ones.
The old man, with his sweeping coats and solemn eyes, was clearly a retired superhero — a man who had once battled chaos and now sought solace in routine. He had lost someone, Cheongsan decided. A lover, perhaps. And this daily ritual was a quiet promise, a way to honor what remained.
The woman with the coffee cup? SHe was ordinary, yes, but her gaze lingered on young families with a kind of aching reverence. She must have wanted children of her own, Cheongsan thought, but hadn’t yet found someone to build that life with.
He spent hours in that park, spinning stories from strangers, weaving lives from glances and gestures. His mother called him meddlesome. Cheongsan decided it was a healthy dose of curiosity. After all, curiosity killed the cat, but it also brought it back.
Still, his mother patted his head fondly, eyes crinkling with affection as she said, “One day, you’ll find someone who will keep that curiosity of yours in check. Heaven knows I won’t have such luck.”
Maybe that’s why he fell for Nam Onjo so quickly.
Nam Onjo wasn’t just perfect — she was a dazzling star, lighting up his night sky with her blazing fire. Cheongsan didn’t fall at first sight. He fell at first punch.
The boy who shoved him off the swings didn’t stand a chance. Onjo, fierce and fearless, socked him twice and reclaimed the swing with a glare that could melt steel. Then, with a gentleness that contradicted her fire, she knelt and bandaged his knee. And as fate would have it, his knight in shining armor was moving in next door.
Now, Cheongsan wasn’t shy by any means — he literally pestered adults relentlessly and made them spill their life stories to him as a pass time. He could care less about how people perceived him. Act first, face consequences later — that had always been his motto.
But Onjo was different.
Something about her made his little heart bounce around his ribcage like a child experiencing a sugar rush. With her wide, Bambi eyes and a smile that could light up the darkest corners of his universe, she became the center of his orbit. They clicked instantly — like two peas in a pod.
Afterall, the universe never let Cheongsan down.
Cheongsan only fell harder as they went through the chaos of elementary school and into the hormonal battlefield of middle school, the home ground of teenage drama. Onjo stuck with him through thick and thin, even as they found new friends and created their own social circles. Their bond was just different, forged through years of shared dinners and apartment complexes, and complicated parents. His dream of a life together with Onjo, with their three children and two cats, in a small house by the ocean in the countryside became more tangible through their shared laughter and secretive glances.
But life, as it turned out, was not a fairytale.
The rain had never bothered Cheongsan. He never saw the appeal in rain-soaked confessions and reunions they portrayed in the rom-coms Onjo enjoyed so much. Cheongsan liked them too, but he liked riling Onjo up even more — he’d rather be caught dead in a ditch before getting caught bawling his eyes out to Man-wol crossing over to the afterlife leaving Chan-sung behind to mourn her.
It was never supposed to turn out that way. They were supposed to be a team — two souls entwined together fighting against all odds thrown at them, coming out bathered and bruised on the other side, but always together. Always together.
But Cheongsan was left all alone, cradling the broken pieces of his fragile heart as Onjo cut him down with the same ruthless precision she reserved for bullies and fools. Cheongsan had always admired her fire — he just never imagined it would burn him too.
For the first time in his useless life, Cheongsan wished he thought before he acted. Maybe then, he would not have lost the love of his life, his best friend, because of stupid feelings he couldn’t keep to himself.
To say he was inconsolable would be an understatement. Cheongsan became an empty shell of himself, drowning in insecurity and self-pity. The boy who would never think twice before letting his thoughts spill out, second guessed everything that came out of his mouth. People started noticing. Of course, they did. His mother kept asking why Onjo wouldn’t come over anymore, his friends kept poking and proding, trying to make him spill what happened. It was pure torture. How could he even begin to describe how delusional he’d been, how pathetic? It was embarrassing. Cheongsan was many things, but his pride was deeper than his self-pity.
The rest of the year passed in a haze. Onjo wouldn’t speak with him no matter how much he tried to apologize. His friends walked on eggshells around him, and his mother kept smothering him to the point it started to feel suffocating. Everything hurt, nothing hurt. He was in a constant loop of choking on his tears and feeling nothing at all. He needed to move on. He knew he did. But how do you stop loving someone you planned your entire life around?
Life, as always, had something planned for him.
Graduation brought a turning point — or rather, a supply closet and two very fed-up best friends.
“Get your shit together, or so help me, I’ll throw you both out the fucking window” — were the famous words spoken by none other than Yoon Isak, followed by his traitorous friend Han Gyeongsu who sounded way too pleased with himself as he said, “You two are better than this. Don’t ruin our friend group over some stupid confession. Grow up!”
He was going to kill Gyeongsu.
What followed was an hour-long talk between him and Onjo about boundaries and apologies that made Cheongsan want to sink into the ground inch by inch. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows between them after this, but Onjo extended the olive branch and Cheongsan held onto it with dear life.
Between the new year and a mending friendship, Cheongsan felt a rare, fragile sense of hope entering high school. But life was never one to give him a fucking break — or perhaps he just wasn’t one to take one. Deep down, Cheongsan knew this was a hell of his own creation, but his pride had always run deeper, and he was never going to admit he was wrong. He seriously needed to make better life choices. Specifically, he needed to stop obsessing over the school’s resident enigma and rumored ex-bully — a walking contradiction with a jawline sharp enough to cut glass: Lee Suhyeok.
Lee Suhyeok was dangerous; that was a fact. Everyone knew to steer clear of his path because, God forbid, he set his sights on you. He was a force to be reckoned with, a weapon Myeonghwan and his cronies had been more than delighted to add to their arsenal. Cheongsan never felt the urge to play hero as the bullies went about their business — the farther he was from the spotlight, the better. But distance didn’t stop the stories from reaching his ears. To say they didn’t send chills down his spine would be a lie; they were visceral, ugly, and they all centered around a boy who didn’t possess a single bone of mercy.
That was why catching Lee Suhyeok in the act of apologizing — actually helping a victim he said to have brutally beaten just weeks before — was a total shock to his system.
Two months into the new school year, the rumors of Lee Suhyeok “turning a new leaf” had begun to circulate, but Cheongsan had dismissed them as what they were: a rumor. He told himself his sudden interest was purely academic. It definitely wasn’t because he’d noticed the tall boy keeping his distance from the gang. It certainly wasn’t because he’d spent his lunch hours tracking the boy to a lonely corner of the cafeteria. And it was absolutely not because Cheongsan was looking for proof that the monster had a heart.
Yet, that single incident had set Cheongsan on a trail of near-obsessive investigation — a relentless interrogation of the enigma that was Lee Suhyeok. Much, of course, to the dismay of the subject himself.
To be honest, Cheongsan never imagined that the certain doe-eyed boy — the kind of boy who made him betray every rule he’d set for himself — would become someone he cared about deeply. If Cheongsan had fallen for Onjo with the reckless speed of a bullet train without brakes, he fell for the enigma that was Lee Suhyeok torturously slow and steady, unconsciously and as naturally as breathing. And by the time Cheongsan realized, he had fallen irrevocably and deeply in love.
The realization was terrifying. He was a boy. Who was in love with another boy. Coming to terms with that fact was a different kind of survival. He wasn’t ready to hand over his heart again; he’d done that before, carelessly, and it had left him raw. But this was a completely different territory that slammed him from the left field. He wasn’t ready for whatever this was.
But fate didn’t care about his readiness.
Being quick on his feet was the only reason Cheongsan had lasted this long. His former schoolmates — now senseless, screaming nightmares on legs — forced him to fight within an inch of his life to survive. Then there was the bastard Yoon Gwinam, a creature neither human nor dead, who hunted him with a singular, rotting obsession. Cheongsan had reveled in the sick, twisted pleasure in pulling that monster into the flaming elevator shaft with him. In the end, death was a price he was willing to pay to end Gwinam’s hunt.
His only regret was his own lack of truth. He was dying with the weight of every word left unspoken — every I love you he had buried beneath his pride. He should have never kissed Suhyeok. He should have never succumbed to that selfish, desperate desire right before running to his death, but it was done. It was out there, a stain on Suhyeok’s memory that he could never wipe away.
He should have kept his inner monster — that ravenous, terrifying love — locked behind his ribs where it belonged. He should have never let Suhyeok see it, because in those final seconds, Cheongsan swore he saw something reflecting back in those caramel-brown eyes. It was a look he refused to name, a possibility he could no longer indulge in.
He was dying.
He was leaving Suhyeok with the ghost of a kiss and a lifetime of questions.
Maybe this was his punishment — a cosmic penalty for not listening to his heart sooner, and for finally speaking only when it was too late to stay. He should have told Suhyeok when he had the chance. He should have risked the rejection, risked the pride, and made a move while the world was still standing.
Cheongsan gripped that regret like a weapon as he fell into the fire. As skin curled into scorched flesh, and flesh sloughed away to reveal bone that crumbled into bitter ash.
He burned,
And burned.
And burned, until there was nothing left but the searing memory of a love he never dared to name.
And in the depths of the inferno, surrounded by heat that left a husk of his physical form, the world began to stitch itself back together.