Free Web Novel“Because you said we were going home together!”
Jo Youngwoo stared blankly up at Jaegyeom, looking half out of his mind.
“Huh? Oh, uh...”
Inside his head, everything before and after was tangled together in a complete mess. What? I was definitely on my way home. So why am I here? Didn’t Jaegyeom leave first? And why does the back of my head hurt so much...?
Youngwoo’s eyes wandered distractedly over his surroundings, then he sucked in a terrified breath.
The woman, who had backed herself into a corner, was glaring at Jaegyeom and Youngwoo as though she wanted to kill them. The moment Youngwoo spotted her, he began trembling violently, his face going white. Only after seeing those bizarre eyes, black with no whites at all, did his sense of reality finally return. He pointed at the woman with a shaking finger.
“J-Jaegyeom! Th-that, th-there...”
The woman had only been startled for an instant by Jaegyeom’s soundless approach. Now her face was overflowing with murderous intent.
“Who are you?”
Jaegyeom, who had just been standing there vacantly, flicked a glance at the woman and then turned his eyes back to Youngwoo. The moment she spoke, Youngwoo looked on the verge of losing his breath entirely. When Jaegyeom did not answer, she asked again in a grim voice.
“Who are you?”
“If you don’t know who I am, maybe don’t go around calling me you, you, then?”
Jaegyeom answered flatly, without sparing her so much as a look.
“I’m not someone who takes you from the likes of you.”
He bent at the waist and checked Youngwoo’s face. This side came first. It had not been a bare-handed hit either—he had smacked the back of his head with a hand carrying ghostly force, so it must have hurt badly. Still, now that focus had returned to the boy’s eyes, at least he seemed to have come back to himself.
“Hey. Look at me.”
“W-we have to run, we have to run!”
With his face drenched in tears, Youngwoo grabbed helplessly at Jaegyeom’s clothes. Well, look at that. It had only been a few hours since Jaegyeom had told him to get a grip, and already he had gotten himself bewitched. This was all because he was weak-hearted enough to get taken in. Jaegyeom grumbled inwardly. If Jeongju had been standing beside him, he would probably have clicked his tongue and said, And you ran all the way here just because he shared his meat with you once. Unfortunately, Jeongju was not here, and Jaegyeom had never been any good at self-reflection.
“We have to run, Jaegyeom... that woman, her eyes are strange... and the butterfly, she said, she said I had to kill the butterfly, but then suddenly my body wouldn’t listen...”
Without warning, Jaegyeom covered Youngwoo’s eyes with one hand. Startled by the incomprehensible move, Youngwoo struggled and grabbed at Jaegyeom’s wrist. Jaegyeom’s palm grew damp with Youngwoo’s tears.
“Calm down. Keep your eyes shut until I tell you that you can stop.”
“Jaegyeom! What are you doing? I’m telling you we have to run...”
“Ah, shut up. Close your mouth too. Just stay still.”
“B-but...”
Jaegyeom made a sharp clicking sound with his tongue, a wordless warning. Youngwoo flinched and shut his mouth.
A few seconds passed, perhaps, and strangely enough, the palm covering his eyes began to feel cool. The very center between his brows started tingling, as though something were being drawn out of him.
And strangely, from the very moment that palm touched him, he could not hear a single sound.
It was an unfamiliar sensation. Youngwoo wanted to ask what on earth he was doing, but for some reason Jaegyeom’s whole manner was so rough that he did not dare speak.
“You’re still here?”
Jaegyeom spoke abruptly.
At that, the woman, who had been standing several steps away and watching him the entire time, tilted her head and asked back,
“Why are you interfering with me?”
At her question, Jaegyeom frowned and glared at her.
“Interfering? You’re the one who started it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Jaegyeom jerked his chin toward Youngwoo.
“You grabbed an innocent person and got in the way of him going home.”
Youngwoo had been tilting his head in confusion the whole time. Why can’t I hear anything all of a sudden...? He did not realize it himself, but at some point his trembling had stopped completely. The haze in his head had also cleared. All of it had started the instant Jaegyeom’s hand touched him.
“You would do well not to carry word games too far.”
The woman muttered darkly.
“Word games? Me?”
Jaegyeom slowly rolled his eyes and looked at her from the corner of them. The moment their gazes met, her expression changed. The sharp ghostly force that suddenly flowed from her lucid eyes seemed to aim straight for his throat.
“You don’t seem to understand the situation. Then again, I suppose your reason is getting foggier and foggier.”
“...What?”
“You know it too, don’t you? For now it’s only your eyes, but little by little the rest of you will start losing its shape too.”
“......”
“You still haven’t done what you wanted, and now you’re getting anxious that you’ll end up as a stray ghost. Right?”
The woman’s face was slowly going blank.
“If you’re reaching for some worthless little thing like this one, you must have gotten pretty desperate. What your goal is isn’t any of my business. But if you don’t even have enough strength left to get rid of a butterfly, then you were doomed long ago. Why not just give up?”
“Shut your mouth.”
The woman spat it out through her teeth. Anger overflowed from those pitch-black eyes. Jaegyeom had seen eyes like that until he was sick of them. Eyes consumed by resentment and hatred. From the moment he had followed that voice into the alley, he had felt it clearly enough without even needing to look at her feet.
A sorrowful, heavy grudge.
The woman was a vengeful ghost.
“What could someone like you possibly know? If only you... if only you hadn’t...”
“Right. You were planning to steal his body as it was.”
The moment Jaegyeom saw Youngwoo from behind, he had known the boy was under her spell. And at the same time, he had realized where that voice calling him so desperately had come from.
Youngwoo-ya, Youngwoo-ya...
The voice that had sounded like pleading had been coming from inside Youngwoo’s closed fist.
The owner of the voice was the butterfly.
Only then was Jaegyeom finally able to understand the butterfly’s true nature, something he had pushed to the back of his mind until now.
That transparent, warm presence, that soft fragrance, the thing that kept following Youngwoo around—
it was a wish.
The reason Jaegyeom could hear that voice at all was probably because he had touched it briefly while batting the butterfly away. Someone’s desperate longing had remained in the world, unable to leave Youngwoo’s side. Whoever it had been, someone Jaegyeom did not know, must have kept praying for Youngwoo over and over while they were alive.
Youngwoo, stay healthy. Youngwoo, be safe, my precious Youngwoo. Always, always...
“The butterfly was protecting him, so you couldn’t touch him. But if you tried to get rid of the butterfly, you were afraid it might turn on you instead. So you were planning to coax him somehow and separate it from him.”
The butterfly that had escaped from Youngwoo’s hand was circling him again.
Overcoming hardship with the help of a noble person.
As he watched the butterfly, a thought suddenly occurred to Jaegyeom. Perhaps that noble person was not Jaegyeom himself after all, but the butterfly. If he had not heard the butterfly’s voice, there was no way he would have come all this way.
So in the end, I got played by the fortune again...
Just as Jaegyeom let out a small sigh, the woman bared her teeth and glared at him.
“Fine. You’re right. Day by day, my thoughts are growing dimmer, and later I’ll lose every last memory. But I, I... I still have something I have to do.”
By now, the woman’s voice was trembling. Though wicked energy rippled around her, she felt less threatening than pitiable in some indefinable way. Probably because she had grown weak. It was obvious she would become a stray ghost before long. Pitch-black tears, like spilled ink, ran down from her eyes.
“It’s the same desperate wish. So then why... why does one become a butterfly, while another can’t even die after death and has to wander between heaven and earth?”
Perhaps there was something cruel in the way the fierce emotions of a vengeful ghost gradually faded with time. But Jaegyeom thought a little differently. Maybe it was one of the few twisted kindnesses the world had to offer. To forget the memories and sins of life meant that one might also become that much freer.
Still looking at the woman with a numb gaze, Jaegyeom said quietly,
“The world is malicious for no reason to begin with.”
There was firmness in the words, but also something lonely.
After saying that, Jaegyeom abruptly raised one hand and started undoing his tie. It was the tie Jeongju had knotted for him that morning, made, of course, from expensive fabric. Jaegyeom caught the tie lightly between his teeth for a moment, then let it go. Then he rolled it up roughly and tossed it toward the woman. She caught the tie as it came rippling through the air and blinked, blood-tinged tears running from her eyes.
“If you can do it, then try.”
*****
“J-Jaegyeom...”
Youngwoo, who had remained frozen in place for a long time, moved his lips. Just as Jaegyeom had told him, he had kept both his eyes and his mouth shut the entire time. It felt as though time itself had stopped. Wrapped in darkness, all he felt was stifled frustration at not knowing what was happening. But somehow, he had the sense that by now it would be all right to speak.
“Um, over there. Jaegyeom...?”
At that moment, the lukewarm warmth covering his eyes slipped gently away. Once the palm that had rested there for so long was gone, the space around his eyes felt strangely empty. At the same time, his clogged ears seemed to clear all at once.
Can I open them now?
After hesitating for a moment, Youngwoo slowly opened his eyes, his face screwed up tight.
The first thing he saw was Jaegyeom’s face crouched in front of him. Jaegyeom’s gaze was fixed somewhere far away, as though he were lost in thought. The neat line of his profile looked deeply preoccupied.
Youngwoo looked around uneasily.
“Th-that woman... where...”
“No idea. She left right away.”
“J-Jaegyeom, you saw it too, right? Her eyes were completely black.”
“Completely black? They looked normal to me.”
Jaegyeom wore a look that plainly said, What nonsense are you talking about? freewёbnoνel.com
“What?”
Flustered, Youngwoo hurriedly retraced his memory. Come to think of it, Jaegyeom had looked calm from the moment he first saw the woman. If he had seen the same thing, there was no way he would have looked that unaffected. So what on earth had happened...?
Just as Youngwoo pressed a hand to his forehead in confusion—
“Do you have a grandmother? No, I mean, is she alive?”
Jaegyeom threw out the question out of nowhere.
“Huh? Wh-why all of a sudden...?”
Even in the middle of everything, Youngwoo could only stare blankly.
“Just answer. Do you have one?”
“Huh? Oh... my paternal grandmother is alive, but my maternal grandmother isn’t.”
“When did she die?”
Most people would have asked that question carefully. Jaegyeom, however, had no hesitation whatsoever. The one thrown off balance was Youngwoo. He answered haltingly.
“Oh, uh... it wasn’t that long ago. Was it right before I started high school?”
Jaegyeom nodded. It seemed like he wanted him to go on.
“She worried about me all the time. And at the time I happened to be sick, so... in the end, I couldn’t be there when she passed. Even now it still doesn’t feel real. She really adored me... B-but why are you asking that all of a sudden...?”
After a brief silence, Jaegyeom rose to his feet and answered carelessly,
“Just because. I don’t have one.”
He hitched the bag that had been hanging loosely from one shoulder back into place. Once Youngwoo’s eyes opened fully, he would understand everything then, but for now it was too annoying to explain piece by piece. Until he could no longer get away with it, Jaegyeom intended to keep glossing over things.
While his hand had been covering Youngwoo’s eyes, he had done two things.
One was to draw out the ghost’s foul energy that had clung to him while he was bewitched. The other was to let some of Jaegyeom’s own ghostly force flow in instead, muddling Youngwoo’s head. Put simply, Youngwoo had first been bewitched by a ghost, and then by Jaegyeom. When someone was bewitched by a ghost, what they saw and heard—and beyond that, even how they moved—became restricted. Jaegyeom had interfered with the sounds entering Youngwoo’s ears in much the same way.
“Jaegyeom, did that woman say anything strange to you?”
Youngwoo began blurting everything out in a jumble.
“That woman was seriously weird. She said I’d dropped something. Then she suddenly told me to follow her, and then she started saying all this strange stuff. That the butterfly brings misfortune...”
As he rambled, Youngwoo suddenly stopped speaking.
“Why’d you stop?”
“Oh, no. It’s nothing...”
Youngwoo shook his head, his voice shrinking.
“Sorry. I keep saying weird things.”
Come to think of it, he was the one who had kept blurting strange things at Jaegyeom from the moment they met today—saying he could see a butterfly, saying his yut divinations kept coming true. Just like that woman must have seemed strange to him, maybe he looked strange to Jaegyeom. And now here he was, bringing up the butterfly again. In the middle of speaking, he was suddenly seized by fear over what Jaegyeom must think of him.
“You’re not strange.”
At that, Jaegyeom answered in a listless voice.
“That’s just normal for you.”
Youngwoo froze and looked at him. In a sullen tone, Jaegyeom added,
“So stop worrying about how you look in other people’s eyes and worry about your own life.”
“Huh? Oh... yeah...”
Jaegyeom rose from his spot and started walking out of the alley. Youngwoo stood there blankly for a moment. Suddenly, something like sorrow welled up inside him all at once.
He really did like Jaegyeom.
There was something almost special about the things Jaegyeom said. Whether he had seen a hallucination or not, Youngwoo had been too terrified to think straight, but he was simply grateful that Jaegyeom had come looking for him instead of leaving first. And the best part was that, whatever else happened, they really were going home together after all.
He had thought Jaegyeom disliked him, thought he was pushing him away, but that was not true. The moment he realized that, his chest tightened strangely. It felt as though he could confess anything.
That’s just normal for you.
Youngwoo took a few steps after Jaegyeom, then suddenly stopped.
“Jaegyeom... you know...”
After hesitating, Youngwoo drew a breath and spoke.
“The truth is, there’s a butterfly that follows me around.”
Jaegyeom looked back at him with a detached expression.
“Sometimes I can see it, and sometimes I can’t...”
“Yeah.”
Jaegyeom answered carelessly.
“I don’t know why it follows me, but... honestly, it kind of scares me.”
“......”
All at once, Jaegyeom tipped his head back and stared absentmindedly up at the sky. By now, the sun was sinking low. His smooth brow and the fine line of his face suited the evening sky absurdly ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) well.
“What’s there to be scared of.”
Still looking at the sky, Jaegyeom turned his head to glance back at Youngwoo.
More precisely, at the transparent butterfly perched on Youngwoo’s shoulder.
“Maybe to it, you look like a flower.”
He said it as if it were nothing at all.
“Ah...”
Jaegyeom, who was already walking ahead again, jerked his chin at Youngwoo. “What are you doing? Come on.”
Still standing there dazed, Youngwoo hurried after him and fell into step at his side. Two shoulders in school uniforms passed out of the mouth of the alley together. A small mountain bird perched atop the wall of the alley watched them go, then fluttered up into the sky.
It was late afternoon.
