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A white expanse of space surrounds Baek Cheon. Be it a pocket of time or the cradle of consciousness, it extends far into the horizon of a world he cannot see. He looks around. To his left. To his right. He peers down and watches as a single step of his foot sends ripples through what could be the floor, like waves from a drop of rain.
Baek Cheon does not know where he is. He does not know how he got here or why, for no one knows when a dream starts, but there is an inkling in his head. As if muscle memory. Animal instinct. A forgotten cherished memory finally recalled.
Chung Myung is somewhere here, waiting to be brought home.
Baek Cheon takes a step. It is a soundless motion, but he takes another one, and another, and another. With each, he finds himself sinking deeper into the liquid space, but he trudges through—as if there has never been any other choice but to.
The sea of glass climbs up to his ankles. To his thighs. It overtakes his torso and rises to his neck, and he does not waver when he goes completely under—a darkness swallowing him whole.
Baek Cheon opens his eyes to hell.
The stench of iron slams into him—pungent and thick, clinging to his skin like a stain he cannot rub off. His hand jumps to his mouth. He lays it flat, presses it firmly—otherwise he is sure his heart will leap out from his throat, because the terror that takes hold of him should only be reserved for the greatest of sinners.
The sky screams red. Corpses litter the ground like springtime flowers—missing heads, shredded limbs, and severed fingers scattered about the once-green grass, soiled with a color too sickly to be named.
Bodies stacked in towers.
Limbs decorated like broken puzzle pieces.
Baek Cheon stands in the ruins of a battlefield—the aftermath of a war that has long since ended.
He wants nothing more than to run away. To escape from this hellhole. To return home and forget the sight before him, because no human should ever be subjected to such horrors. Yet, nevertheless—
“...Chung Myung?”
Biting back bile, Baek Cheon walks through the dead chaos.
“Chung Myung?” he calls. His voice echoes through the mountain range, one that should not be as quiet as this, but the only answer he receives is the murder of crows that descend to pick at bone and flesh. “Chung Myung?!”
Baek Cheon wanders for eternity through the eternal underworld. He swallows sand. He studies the silence. He turns over the curiosity-turned poison within the void of his chest.
The unreadable surface of the sea that tells you nothing of its depths: that is how Baek Cheon would describe Chung Myung. It has always been taboo. An unwritten, unspoken rule that no one is to ever ask about his past, because history is not the defining factor of a person. It should never be—lest it drags you down with its weight.
Baek Cheon wonders how Chung Myung ever managed to hide this.
How he can smile. How he can laugh. How he can find it in himself to push and pull others forward when the burden of this hellscape remains shackled to his soul.
“—ry.”
The sound is a breath of oxygen.
Baek Cheon whirls around, eyes wide and searching, panic leaping to its limit. “Chung Myung?!”
He breaks out into a sprint.
With as much concentration as he can muster, all the while hunting for the sound’s source, Baek Cheon steps through the negative space left by the corpses.
“Chung Myung?!” he yells. “Where are you?”
No matter where he goes, the scenes are too similar to differentiate from each other; the corpses and their red and bone are a maze Baek Cheon cannot escape from.
The green ribbon is a beacon in the dark.
Baek Cheon stops in place, chest heaving for oxygen he does not need in this fake world as eyes pull sharply to a figure in the distance.
It takes him less than twenty steps to cross it.
Chung Myung has his back turned to Baek Cheon. He remains knelt on the grass in the center of a spiral made from disciples whose uniforms are all too familiar not to recognize.
But the Chung Myung that Baek Cheon finds is not the one he knows. Not the snarky junior with a taste for alcohol. Neither the silent swordsman with a talent for war.
The Chung Myung that Baek Cheon finds is a small, weeping child—clinging to a cold corpse as if the world has ended.
“I’m sorry,” Chung Myung sobs. His face presses to the torn fabric of a man Baek Cheon does not recognize. “I’m sorry, Senior Brother.”
The shake in his voice is something Baek Cheon wants to put an end to—more than anything.
“I promise I’ll listen better.” When Baek Cheon steps closer, he makes out the dried tearstains on Chung Myung’s cheeks—no doubt having run out of tears to shed. “I’ll do whatever you say.”
The corpse does not answer.
“...Please. Please.”
It was wrong. All of it.
From the moment Chung Myung stepped into the Mount Hua Sect, and afterwards, the world, there has been no one who could match him. Unstoppable. Unwavering. The perfect soldier. The perfect swordsman. Someone who does not take a step backward no matter the adversities that await him and someone who only takes a step forward as if that is the only path.
That was who Chung Myung presented himself to be—the still surface of the sea hiding the tides.
“Chung Myung,” Baek Cheon says.
Jerking his head up, red-rimmed eyes stare up at him before Chung Myung snarls, putting himself between Baek Cheon and the corpse, “Don't touch him!”
Baek Cheon flinches. He slowly puts his hands up. “I won’t. I promise.”
Chung Myung glares at him with a kind of fury Baek Cheon is not used to, and his hands do not unclench from the robes of his grief.
Lips parting, Baek Cheon cannot help but close them moments after. Words do not come to his tongue—neither understanding nor answers to the questions that have plagued him from the moment he met Chung Myung. Claws twist in his heart. Guilt tears at each breath he takes. He stares at this grieving boy and wonders if he even knew Chung Myung at all.
But, if there is anything Baek Cheon can bet on—with his whole heart, with his entire being—
“Chung Myung,” Baek Cheon says gently. He extends a hand, a motion the boy cannot help but trace. “Let’s go back to Mount Hua.”
Chung Myung’s eyes widen for a moment. The fury falls away. The fear grows back in the form of quiet words. “...There’s no going back. The Mount Hua Sect is gone.”
For a moment, Baek Cheon’s face crumbles. He shakes his head and fights to put on a smile. “No, it’s not.” His finger comes up to his chest to over his heart where the embroidered plum blossom lies. “The Mount Hua Sect is still here.”
“But, they all died,” Chung Myung chokes, glass-eyed and breaking. “I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t protect them.”
“You did the best you could,” Baek Cheon says, ignorant to everything but this, because he may not know Chung Myung’s past—the details and the dead, but he knows this, because he has experienced and seen it firsthand.
The fact Chung Myung carries the weight of worlds others cannot—would bleed himself dry and break every bone in his body and surrender every shred of his soul just to do so, because that is the kind of person he is under it all.
“You have to let him go, Chung Myung,” Baek Cheon says softly.
Chung Myung shakes his head and exclaims, “No—no, I can’t.”
“Chung Myung.”
“I can survive being alone, but he can’t!”
Something in Baek Cheon’s chest breaks. His eyes widen. His breath shortens. The epiphany is one he should have seen coming from a long, long time ago. Tears burn, but they do not fall. They have no right to.
“Chung Myung,” Baek Cheon repeats quietly, almost surprised at how steady his voice comes out to be, “Your brother really loved you.”
He does not need to know the man Chung Myung holds to know that, because the plum blossom over the heart of the corpse’s robe is telling enough.
Baek Cheon’s eyes tremble, mirroring the pair staring back. “If you love him too, you need to let him go. He wouldn’t want this for you.” With all his heart, he wishes these words will get through to him—past the surface of the water and into the depths of the sea.
Chung Myung hiccups a sob.
“Chung Myung-ah,” Baek Cheon murmurs. "Let's go home."
Without a reply, Chung Myung holds his gaze for a moment—as if frozen in time.
But, at some point, the world goes on.
It goes on as it has always managed to do.
Hands trembling in the robes of this fabricated corpse of this fabricated world, Chung Myung pulls his eyes away from his. He stares at the cold body he clings to. Breath hitching in his throat, Chung Myung yanks the empty husk of his brother against him, burying his face into his chest as if to never let go.
But in the end, he does.
Chung Myung pulls away before he gently places the corpse down onto the ground. He takes a moment to tidy the robes. Another to tilt his jaw to the sky. One more to comb out the grey hair.
Once the corpse is ready to depart, Chung Myung presses his hands together and prays.
Baek Cheon waits for him to finish. He would wait forever if he needed to.
Opening his eyes, Chung Myung’s quiet gaze stares onward, still full of grief, still of heavy regret, still of unspoken secrets Baek Cheon is not privy to, and he says—with a voice so soft, it makes Baek Cheon want to cry, “...Goodbye, Senior Brother.”
The sky shakes.
In a spiral of crimson, the blood of the corpses and the flesh of them too fall away to dust alongside the stench of iron and the heavy weight of war, peeling away like paper before a light swallows the world—one Baek Cheon cannot help but shield himself from.
Baek Cheon opens his eyes to the void.
A white expanse of space surrounds him once more, not at all telling of the hellscape that once was, but that does not matter. Not at all. Not now.
Baek Cheon looks down at his hands, cupped and cradling this wisp of flickering light with as much gentleness as one would hold the world, and it is by muscle memory, animal instinct, a forgotten cherished memory finally recalled—
The soul of Chung Myung is heavy. Heavy with grief or burden or something else entirely—Baek Cheon is not sure, but he does not need to be, because Chung Myung has been surviving alone when he does not have to and Baek Cheon will not let him do so for any longer.
Baek Cheon says softly, “Let’s go home, Chung Myung—to our Mount Hua."