#14
Dare you imagine it? Can you fathom the feeling of facing someone who, more than anyone else, at that moment when help was desperately needed, seemed to listen to me, care for my well-being, and respond to me?
That feeling as if my body, originally molded from dust, had four days’ worth of fatigue, hatred, anxiety, and pain scattered like powder from my toes, and ultimately even a single strand of hair was swept away by the wind, slowly dissolving again into the primordial lukewarm amniotic fluid.
I just wanted to die right then and there.
“…Johannes….”
“Ah, Isolde.”
“What should… What should… I do… Johannes…”
“Why? Are you hurting somewhere? Not feeling well?”
“……”
“Isolde.”
“…I… like…”
Suddenly, Johannes pulled his upper body back. It was as if he had been struck by lightning.
“…I like you…. Johannes…”
The dam burst. Tears. The confession poured out on its own. I stared at the wavering Johannes. There were eyes that seemed to have been ground down a hundred times and dulled a thousand times. Eyes that had swallowed a sword alone. Those eyes were unable to move, caught in my gaze.
I reached out my arms towards him. My arms, already tired long ago, trembled slightly in the air. Johannes swallowed his breath as if breaking ice. I saw his Adam’s apple move greatly up and down. Like a terrible disease, the tremors spread through the air, and he too gradually began to shake his whole body.
“…No.”
Johannes said.
“What are you saying? It can’t be. It can’t be.”
Johannes’s face distorted mercilessly. Even in the midst of it, he was already crumbling. He collapsed slowly, very slowly. Like castle walls eroding over long years, like a falling spire, desperately like fate. At some point, my fingertips touched his nape as he slowly approached. I wrapped my arms around that neck.
“It can’t… be…. Isolde.”
His tense face broke and fell, piece by piece.
“Isolde. No…. This isn’t it. We, I, can’t… do this…”
I didn’t listen. I couldn’t hear. At that time, I had become too weak. Because my mind, shattered from enduring cruel times, could not see anything at all, I obsessively acted childishly. I barely put strength into both arms and clung to his stiff neck. I entwined my fingers through his hair, like fine gold threads, pulsing hot like the devil’s I had once touched.
I lifted my waist. Hold me. I didn’t bother to say it out loud. Because his trembling hands twitched and burrowed under the blanket, fumbling at my waist, and then embraced my body as if to crush it.
His forehead fell onto my nape. And so that day, for the first time, I held Johannes to my chest.
Johannes remained in my embrace for a long time. Just like that moment of seizure, as if uttering anything would extinguish this moment, he didn’t open his mouth even once.
The breath settling on my collarbone was rough. The forearms that wrapped around from my waist to my shoulder blades, not allowing even the smallest gap. His skin. Johannes seemed to be sobbing with his whole body. No explanation or excuse was needed there. I was simply enveloped in my tears and his terrible trembling.
“…I like… you…. I like you, Johannes…”
“……”
His upper body jerked, shallowly.
“So… please…. Protect me…”
I whispered earnestly, as if kissing his hair and ear.
“…Please… ple…. Protect… me… Johannes…”
I couldn’t stop.
At some point, my limp body was lifted into the air. Starting from the toes, it touched water, then slowly my whole body was submerged. Surely Johannes must have embraced me and sat me in the bathtub. The labored sound of water being poured, the occasional hesitation brushing against skin, hurt. Even when the hand that had long hesitated above the water’s surface finally entered the inside of my thigh, my heart only ached unbearably.
Isolde…. Isolde…. I, I couldn’t hold back…. I couldn’t endure the moment. I shouldn’t have done this to you…. Truly, I’m a crazy bastard. I’m a son of a bitch, I deserve to die…. I’m sorry, Isolde. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
His self-reproach seared into my flesh.
I lost consciousness right there.
***
When I opened my eyes, it was still the middle of the night.
A room where a single candle cast light like a dim fog. I was lying not on a bundle of firewood, but on a soft bed. I blinked my eyes a few times and turned my face. I saw Johannes.
He was sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, a thin blanket covering him up to his shoulders. That moderate figure seemed so casual, like a freeman in the marketplace, and the back of his head slightly tilted forward, whether asleep or not, his usually impeccable hair now disheveled like an overturned bird’s nest, looking quite unlike Johannes.
“…Johannes?”
I clearly thought he was asleep, but the face that turned around startled was not sleepy at all. It was only pale and shadowed, frozen in shock as if he had just received a death sentence.
Suddenly I felt a chill. I shivered.
“Isolde.”
Johannes, who had abruptly turned his upper body and put his arm on the bed, adjusted my blanket to cover me up to my chin. I remember those gestures, so clumsy and awkward even in their carefulness.
Every time he moved, his bare chest was revealed between the openings of the blanket. I remember being a bit bewildered with my dazed mind. The clear well and the brilliant summer droplets seemed to blur before my eyes. And then his body that I had seen for the first and last time that summer long ago.
“…Sleep a bit more. It’s still far from dawn.”
Johannes, who had come very close to me, whispered.
My hair that had come over in my sleep bothered me. When I frowned and shook my head, Johannes carefully brushed it away with just his fingertips. A gaze embracing worry flickered above my forehead. I watched him do this and asked.
“…Is it you?”
“…Yes. It’s me.”
I don’t know how dark Johannes’s complexion was. The self-loathing overflowing beyond his pupils. And seeing the face that seemed to be crushed under it made my joints ache anew. At the same time, fear engulfed me that the cause of that pain might return at any moment.
“How’s… your body?”
“Huh?”
“Do you feel like you might have a seizure?”
“No. No.”
Johannes answered quickly before I could even finish speaking.
“That’s a relief….”
A long sigh came out involuntarily. It was an indescribably deep relief. The nightmare I had experienced until then was no longer mine alone, and a groundless belief that Johannes would surely be with me settled shallowly in one corner of my anxious heart.
For a moment, I just breathed with my dull mind. Johannes, who was looking at me quietly with his face lowered close enough to touch if I tilted slightly, felt good to my heart.
“…Did it hurt a lot.”
Suddenly he said. So low it was barely audible, it sounded like inner thoughts that had burst out without him realizing, unable to hold back any longer. To that face that looked deeply troubled even without being pushed, I could not answer anything.
“…It must have been painful.”
“……”
“…I’m an idiot for asking. Of course it was. I’m sorry…. I’m sorry. I have no words to say to you.”
Johannes bowed his head against my bedside. His bangs brushed my cheek. Johannes covered his eyes and wiped his face vigorously. It was a gesture as if scolding himself to pull himself together. Until then, I had been struggling to steady both my body and mind, and could only stare at him blankly.
“Where would there be an uninjured place.”
Johannes, who had been unable to raise his head for a while, opened his mouth.
“So when I… looked…”
It was an unusually careful tone of voice, with his gaze buried in the bed. The fading words that followed were not immediately continued. Johannes seemed unable to speak easily, worried about my feelings. I waited silently without much thought.
The silence continued for quite a long time. Eventually feeling dazed as I watched him, my nape began to burn little by little. I had a guess. I wiggled just my fingers under the blanket to check the nightgown covering my body. The nightgown that Johannes must have personally put on me.
I turned away from Johannes and lay down.
“…At least there were no visible wounds. But… is there anywhere that hurts particularly? I don’t, well, know much about this…”
“It just all hurts.”
“……”
Johannes was quiet. Even his breathing was heavily suppressed as if guilty, and he didn’t say anything for a while.
This isn’t how… I meant to speak. Only after replying curtly did I regret it. But I had no way to deal with the belated shame that arose.
As I hesitated whether to offer an apology to him, the sound of rustling cloth came from behind. The bed sank deeply on one side. It seemed Johannes had gotten up and sat on the edge of the bed.
“…Actually.”
He said in a low voice.
“I thought it was a nightmare. It didn’t seem real at all. This time you called out to me so I came to my senses, albeit late, otherwise I might have continued to…”
“So, you did hear? You came back because you heard?”
I turned my head as if about to get up immediately. Johannes, who had been sitting with his hands clasped between his thighs as if praying, turned his shoulder upon hearing my movement. There was a look in his eyes as if he didn’t understand something, but it soon disappeared. Johannes’s body leaned inward, bracing himself next to me, and a painfully affectionate gaze came down on me.
“…Yes. I heard very clearly. How could I not hear when you called me like that?”
“Then, I did well…”
“Yes. You did well.”
Johannes’s focus, which had been faintly smiling, scattered in an instant. He seemed to be lost, not knowing how to accept the situation himself.
“It’s not something I should be saying.”
Johannes pressed his lips together as if about to bite them. How despondent he must be. I pitied him in my heart, for as far as I knew, he had been an ordinarily good person. As I watched with a sorrowful feeling, I suddenly remembered the day Johannes had his first seizure.
“But you. Before, you couldn’t hear…”
“Before.”
Johannes seemed a bit surprised. And soon, his gaze, which was already sufficiently bitter, began to take on an even more anxious and gloomy light.
“Four days ago, even when called, you didn’t come back…”
“…Four days ago.”
Johannes, who had been quietly mulling it over, swallowed his breath. Noticeably stiffened, he was silent for a moment. Soon he bent his upper body deeply outward from the bed and covered his head with both hands. I saw blue veins rising on the back of his hand gripping his nape. Soon, Johannes’s voice came up from under the bed.
“…I’m sorry. Really.”
With just his voice alone, it was so despairing.
I couldn’t bear to answer. Seeing Johannes so utterly desperate, guilt left a knife wound in my slightly clearer mind. I was confused.
Is it Johannes who should be asking for forgiveness at this moment, or is it me? If we look closely, isn’t Johannes the one who has been caught up in what I’ve done and left with terrible memories? My vision went dark.
Clearly, I had to endure something I never wanted to remember again. But the self-loathing that this was all the result of my own doing pierced me like an awl.
Ah, Johannes. Do you know? I’m the one who summoned the devil. The fact that you had to go through such a harsh ordeal is all my fault. I should have opened up and talked about everything that day, rather on that day. Like a rebound from self-loathing, I suddenly realized something.
You thought it was a dream?
That was the clue to the answer I hadn’t heard four days ago.
Male lead is a Love-Obsessed Merman
When he discovers she has gone, he risks everything to pursue her on land, enduring agonizing pain to transform his tail into human legs…
One-line summary: Male lead chases female lead. The male lead’s love is a bit sick, an invincible love brain.
Synopsis
During a voyage at sea, Jiang Yang accidentally captures a merman.
Servant: I heard that mermen are fierce and brutal.
Jiang Yang looks at the merman obediently rubbing her palm like a puppy: “You call this fierce and brutal?”
Servant: I heard that mermen have no human nature.
Jiang Yang looks at the merman with wet puppy eyes, obsessively calling her ‘A Yang’ like a childish infant: “You call this having no human nature?”
With great difficulty, she releases the merman back into the sea and returns to shore.
Who would have thought that in less than half a month, the merman, who should have been freely wandering in the South China Sea, would shed his scales, endure the pain of losing his tail, transform into human legs, and come ashore to find her?
He kneels at her feet, rubbing her palm, with merman tears rolling down: “A Yang, don’t abandon me.”
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