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Saeran wants. He wants to be loved. He doesn’t want anyone. He wants his brother back. He wants his brother dead. He wants to leave – wants to stay – wants everything and nothing all at once.
He wants you. He didn't want to.
It’s dark, quiet. No Rika or fellow believer in the perfect barbie doll madhouse she’s created, with just enough moonlight to illuminate yours and his faces. It reflects off his white, almost pink hair, like the last bit of sweetness he truly had in his heart had resigned itself to his roots.
(And sweet – truly sweet - unlike the faux kindness, romance novel, coping mechanism Ray had.)
Saeran has spent his last bit of venom reserved for you; or maybe he’s realized it was never meant for you. Maybe it was meant for a ghost, the impression he had of his family, himself.
(You kept trying, anyway.)
Saeran has not been kind to you as himself – maybe as Ray, sure, but he doesn’t want to be Ray. He doesn’t want to be Unknown, a variable you can’t solve. Maybe he wants to be himself.
You want, too – plenty things – but mostly you want Saeran, with the ache of someone who waited multiple lifetimes, like this ache in your chest started long before Ray fairy-tale waltzed/charged into your life, like you were some mundane Cinderella who figured that the pretty poison apple green-eyed, awful liar prince who approached you held some better fate than the lather, rinse, repeat of your old life.
(And cults, a blind artist, an unwell girl and her island of misfit people wasn’t exactly what you were expecting.)
Saeran wants you, as much as you want him, and the rest of your delicate Victorian-style miniatures room blurs to an unimportant detail in that fact – that the tenderness and hesitation was not another one of his sloppy lies. His glass armor cracks, slowly, and chips away, lacking all the dramatization of a full-blown shatter. He carefully closes the distance between the two of you like a cat, like a Lindeworm, though no lye and no whip were needed. He bears no fangs, and the only movement you make is the up and down of your chest as you breathe.
If he had any words, he might say: “You’re a contradiction – you don’t want me to be mistreated, but you let me mistreat you. You want to leave. You stayed. You could have had someone else.”
You know. You might say: “I didn’t want someone else.”
“I love you,” he doesn’t say, not just yet.
“I love you, too,” you don’t say, not just yet.
Saeran closes the last expanse between the two of you, his hands shaking as he places them on your shoulders, sliding to hold the back of your neck. Your lips meet his, and you don’t bother to keep track of how. You let yourself get lost in the taste of him, his xylitol sacchrineness like this moment was medicine, your cure, your life-saving drug, and leaving you as high and floaty as the strongest cough syrups. You tangle one hand in his hair, the other clasping to his jacket like it’s the only thing keeping you grounded. Your heart swells and threatens to leap out your throat. You’d give it to him, anyway.
Saeran thinks that if God is out there, if They’re real, he feels Them in this moment, and he knows for the first time in his life what selfless is. He wants to give everything in him to you, everything left, everything outside of the anger and hatred – he knows he’s given you plenty of that. This, he might think were he more inclined, this is religion, no book or preacher needed, no rules other than love one another and he wants to, he intends to.
He eases away from the kiss, as much as he doesn’t want to. Saeran falls to his knees, his hands sliding from your shoulders down to the center of your back. You’re certain he can hear your heart pound from here. You both stay still for a moment – maybe a moment longer than you’d be allowed to – but your eyes stay transfixed on each other. He might have thought you were a figment of his imagination – a corroding mind picturing up an imaginary friend who wouldn’t, couldn’t leave.
And maybe he was your escape just as much as you were his.
(You cup his head, and you gaze down at him, but don’t look down upon him – you can feel his pulse rush through the veins in his neck, and your collective heartbeats seem to be the only evidence this isn’t some dream.)
On his knees, he begs for you – he doesn’t need to, but it’s the last damnation to his savior. He lets you see him for the disaster he is.
You don’t run.