Passion: Diaphonic Symphonia Novel - Chapter 42

Jeong Taeui flinched, instantly clearing his mind of thoughts. His hand, which had been stroking his bruised side, stopped, and he remained frozen for a moment. Then he slowly turned around, frowning.

“You could make some noise when you walk.”

“Why should I? I’m curious about what you’re talking about.”

Ilay, who was now standing on Christoph’s doorway, chuckled and stepped inside.

Christoph, who had been leaning against the wardrobe door, facing Jeong Taeui, watched him silently.

“I didn’t see you at dinner tonight.”

“I was resting.”

“Hmm. …But there’s a familiar smell.”

Ilay raised an eyebrow and spoke. Jeong Taeui gave him a blank stare. He was a keen nose, too.

“You know it too, don’t you?”

Christoph said in a curious tone. Ilay tilted his head, as if not understanding what he was saying.

“The medicine he applied. I got it from Jung Chang-in, and he knew about it. I’ve never seen such a strange-smelling medicine. …But does it really work? Rather, for bruises…”

Christoph muttered vaguely then closed his mouth. Lost in thought for a moment, he stared intently at Jeong Taeui’s stomach, hidden by his clothes.

Ilay looked back at Jeong Taeui.

“Medicine? What medicine are you applying?”

“…Bruise medicine.”

Jeong Taeui muttered, pointing at his side with his thumb. Ilay’s eyes widened slightly, but he said nothing.

Just then, Christoph seemed to remember something and said, “I’ll be a moment,” before leaving the room.

Jeong Taeui stared blankly at his suddenly departed form, muttering to himself,

“He must have left because you came…”

“Why would he suddenly leave because I came?”

“Otherwise, there’s no reason for him to leave. The timing is perfect. As the crow flies, the pear falls… So it’s your fault.”

“…Do you know what you’re saying?”

“It’s not your fault, but it’s your fault, that’s what I mean.”

Jeong Taeui asserted confidently, raising his head. Ilay narrowed his eyes in disbelief and stared intently at Jeong Taeui, but then chuckled.

“But, is it okay to just show up in someone else’s room in the middle of the night? Especially Christoph’s room, of all people.”

“Do you know how many years I spent in the same mobile unit as that guy?”

Jeong Taeui nodded, watching Ilay snort. It seemed Christoph’s lack of reaction to Ilay’s sudden intrusion was due to years of such experiences. …He felt a little sorry for him.

Jeong Taeui, out of habit, unconsciously rubbed his side for a moment and clicked his tongue. Ilay, looking down at Jeong Taeui, gestured with his head. When Jeong Taeui looked up, asking “Huh?”, he gestured with his chin, pointing to the hem of Jeong Taeui’s shirt.

Jeong Taeui awkwardly stared at him for a moment, then readily lifted his shirt.

“My side’s popular today…”

In front of Jeong Taeui, who muttered like a sigh, Ilay silently gazed at the exposed skin. No particular light appeared in his cold eyes.

“…”

Jeong Taeui scrutinized him as he carefully examined his own abdomen, doing likewise.

It didn’t seem likely, but perhaps, just perhaps, he was feeling sorry.

Jeong Taeui scratched his head.

If he were apologizing, Jeong Taeui would certainly accept it, but he didn’t feel particularly angry or resentful. While he might have felt a surge of indignation—’This guy shot me by mistake and isn’t even apologizing?!’—(though that’s just how he was, so he accepted it), it wasn’t intentional on Ilay’s part; it was an accident.

He seemed to remember hearing in a human relations lecture that emotionally blaming someone for a non-malicious accident was a prime example of poor handling.

But what if he was genuinely bothered by it?

Jeong Taeui twisted his head slightly and gazed intently at him. He smiled faintly and abruptly said,

“Since coming to this house, I’ve been hit by you quite a few times.”

At that, Ilay, who had been silently looking at Jeong Taeui’s exposed torso, raised an eyebrow.

Looking at him like this, it was impossible to tell whether he truly felt sorry or was just proudly observing his accomplishment.

Their eyes met.

As Jeong Taeui chuckled softly, Ilay seemed to frown slightly, then let out a small laugh. Though that laugh quickly vanished.

“That’s why I told you to go back to Berlin. Why are you purposely inviting trouble?”

“No, I mean, the book…”

“The book. If I find that book for you instead, will you go back to Berlin?”

Ilay slowly approached and sat down beside Jeong Taeui. He sat with about a span’s distance between them.

He spoke as if joking, with a playful smile that wasn’t quite there, but it didn’t seem like a joke.

Jeong Taeui stared at him and scratched his stomach. Then he poked the bruise, muttered a short “Ugh,” and then meekly pulled his shirt back down. Seeing that, Ilay clicked his tongue.

“Well… then there’d be no reason to stay here long.”

Having said that, Jeong Taeui paused slightly before asking,

“But why do you want to send me away so badly? You’ve been hinting at sending me back recently… …Are you secretly living a double life?”

The latter part was almost a monologue.

But then he shook his head.

With that personality, a double life? That guy seemed like he’d just boldly bring home anyone else he was interested in.

“Double life?”

Ilay muttered with extreme disbelief. As if it was a word he’d never heard before.

Beside him, Jeong Taeui was lost in his own fantasy, and still not quite out of it, he looked at Ilay.

“Then I could go back to Korea for a long time. No need to stay in Germany, just at my house… Oh. I’m a wanted man.”

He remembered as he spoke.

Most of the reason Jeong Taeui was in Berlin was because of this man, but to some extent, it was also due to Kyle’s protection. It was all thanks to him that he could live a relatively comfortable life as a wanted man on pension.

“What if that happens? Should I cling to my brother or uncle?” he muttered, already planning a unstable future. A look of extreme absurdity flew over Jeong Taeui’s head. But Jeong Taeui didn’t notice the gaze, and the look in Ilay’s eyes grew colder.

“Cut out the nonsensical talk. Nothing like that is scheduled to happen in the future.”

“Oh, really?”

At those words, Jeong Taeui completely erased his anxious future plans.

Something else might happen to make his future unstable, but it seemed he didn’t want it to be unstable because of this particular matter. Good words rarely came from his mouth, but never once had nonsense.

“If possible, try to return to Berlin before the succession date.”

Ilay returned to the previous topic.

Jeong Taeui simply watched him silently.

Waiting for him to explain the correlation between the succession date and returning to Berlin.

Ilay stretched his arm back, rested it on the bed directly behind the stool, and sat comfortably. Then he spoke indifferently,

“When Christoph’s mother comes, he will become more unstable.”

Jeong Taeui, who had been looking at him blankly, frowning as the conversation seemed both contextual and out of context,

“How much more unstable can he get?”

Jeong Taeui pointed a finger at the doorway where Christoph had left.

He was already unstable enough. Although he showed more of his normal side in front of Jeong Taeui, Jeong Taeui considered Christoph to be unstable enough. So unstable that if he got any worse, he’d have no choice but to go to a hospital.

Ilay, leaning back comfortably, his gaze naturally falling on the swinging light fixture just below the ceiling, suddenly asked,

“Have you ever killed a butterfly?”

“What?”

“A butterfly. Or, say, a dragonfly.”

Jeong Taeui stared blankly at Ilay, who was showing his profile.

In a somewhat languid tone, he couldn’t quite grasp what he was trying to say.

“…Yes.”

Jeong Taeui answered, his lips slightly pursed.

Perhaps because there was a pond and a large empty field near his house when he was little, many dragonflies flew around.

Dragonflies began appearing one by one as summer deepened, and by autumn, their tails had turned bright red, covering the nearby fields.

Jeong Taeui ran around with his neighborhood friends, holding dragonfly nets. One of his friends collected dragonflies as if collecting butterfly specimens, and at some point, when he came to his senses, his friend’s net was full of dragonflies. And many of them would die before they returned home.

Seeing their dead bodies, like insects, made him feel bad, so after that, he didn’t catch dragonflies or butterflies.

“When you’re a kid, you catch butterflies and pull off their wings, pull off their legs and play with them.”

Jeong Taeui furrowed his brow at Ilay’s words.

“No, I didn’t play like that,” Jeong Taeui muttered, and Ilay looked at him with a faint smile in his eyes.

“When they’re little, kids kill butterflies or dragonflies, or earthworms, or pill bugs, or things like that, without any reason, just for fun.”

“Hmm… there are often kids like that.”

There’s probably no one who hasn’t killed a small creature or two when they were little. Even an ant, for that matter. Children are innocent and cruel.

Sometimes when you reread children’s fairy tales you read as a child, you’re surprised. “Were they really this cruel and horrific?”

It was definitely the same book, the same translation, not a single word different from when he was little.

Stories that he had enjoyed without any hesitation back then now bothered him in places.

Cruelty, in reality, was a human instinct born with compassion, and what one learns as they grow up merely covers that instinct, Jeong Taeui sometimes thought.

“In a pure sense, a child is more cruel than an adult. Because they step on ants laughing for fun.”

Jeong Taeui muttered, and Ilay nodded, picking up the thread of conversation.

“Yes, so would other children be afraid of a child who kills ants?”

Jeong Taeui looked back at Ilay in puzzlement. Ilay was still smiling faintly.

“Then how about this? A child who kills squirrels, or rabbits, or dogs, with the same feeling as killing an ant.”

“…—”

“Christoph’s mother was utterly horrified by Christoph.”

Jeong Taeui closed his mouth. The story coming from Ilay’s mouth, spoken as if it were everyday conversation, chilled him to the core.

“‘How is killing a rabbit any different from killing an ant?’ she asked, bewildered. He said his mother screamed.”

“…It’s quite significant that she asked you. Did you kill them together?”

Jeong Taeui muttered softly, and Ilay laughed.

“By no means. Believe it or not, I never killed ants or butterflies without reason when I was little.”

I heard you swung an axe at a friend—was he really a friend?—before you even came of age, Jeong Taeui thought.

Jeong Taeui gave Ilay a blank stare then quickly averted his gaze. Ilay slowly continued.

“It wasn’t merely a problem confined to animals. Christoph was a bit strange mentally from childhood—in the commonly understood sense of the word, I mean. He was extremely insensitive to pain. To others’ pain, and to his own. …At least now he knows what it means to present himself, but back then, he didn’t even have that. He just hurt things for no reason.”

Just like you stepped on an ant. Just like you killed a fly.

“In fact, some kids were more uncomfortable with Christoph than with me.”

“That was… …quite serious, then.”

Jeong Taeui muttered foolishly, absent-mindedly.

Ilay paused speaking for a while. His hand, resting on the bed, slowly patted the duvet.

“The problem was that Christoph was also insensitive to his own pain. Emotionally, he had no self-defense mechanism.”

He muttered to himself. Jeong Taeui lowered his head and looked at his own feet.

Not being able to feel pain.

He didn’t quite understand what that was like. He could grasp it mentally, but he couldn’t truly imagine it. Because Jeong Taeui was not like that.

But a thought suddenly struck him.

If you experience pain, and pain, and pain, yet don’t feel it and continue to leave yourself undefended, you will eventually die.

Whether it’s your body or your mind.

He didn’t even know he was dying. He just tilted his head, thinking, ‘This is strange, very strange.’

“That guy’s thoughts are dual. In some ways, he feels and accepts things like everyone else, but in other ways, he’s completely different. And the one person he thinks about in a similar way to others is his mother. His mother, who despises and fears him.”

Ilay stretched the end of his sentence slightly, “…fears his mother,” as if he wouldn’t say anything more.

Jeong Taeui glanced at Ilay but turned his head away again.

He kept looking at his feet, then at his wiggling toes, then up at the ceiling once, and sighed.

“That wasn’t a story I particularly wanted to hear.”

The strength drained from Jeong Taeui’s voice.

Christoph might be the same as he was when he was young. He was purely cruel. He didn’t attach any particular meaning to his actions or leave them in his memory.

The man sitting next to him was the same; he didn’t attach any particular meaning to his cruel actions, nor did he leave them in his memory.

But Christoph and Ilay were different.

In what way?

“…Really…”

Jeong Taeui grumbled, “Ah, I really didn’t want to hear that, I shouldn’t have listened,” pulling at his innocent hair.

Watching him, Ilay suddenly smiled.

“Now then, Tae-ui.”

Jeong Taeui suspiciously watched the faint smile that appeared on Ilay’s lips. He lowered his voice a little more, as if whispering into his ear.

“Why do you think I told you this story?”

“…You’re enough of a crazy bastard to be closely involved with my life.”

Jeong Taeui muttered sulkily. Ilay then raised an eyebrow slightly. The smile on his lips was too faint to discern, but the amusement in his narrowed eyes clearly said, ‘Excellent answer.’

Jeong Taeui looked at him.

He gazed at the man who was always composed yet hid a cold glint in his eyes for a long time, then let out a quiet sigh.

“It’s exhausting just taking care of one crazy bastard… A guy who might even shoot me later.”

He should try to humanize him before that happens, but the more he knew, the longer the road seemed.