JKA 50

Since Hanbyeol was also a man, there were times when he was moved by the form the demon Egi transformed into. But it was a bit awkward to tell Jiwoon every single one of those stories. That was only natural. It was because he was embarrassed to tell Jiwoon that the demon appeared naked and seduced him. Moreover, the fact that he had sometimes started to react to it was also a factor.

Above all, the demon’s face was the problem. Hanbyeol also had wet dreams from time to time. The subject was invariably always a woman. Perhaps that was why, whenever Egi pulled some nonsense in his dreams, he always took on a woman’s form. But as this repeated, Hanbyeol, who had become extremely sensitive, began to keep his senses on high alert even when he slept.

He had started to wake up with his eyes wide open if he felt any kind of sexual contact. The demon, noticing this, changed its approach. But that approach was excessively malicious. He began to appear as a being that Hanbyeol wouldn’t be wary of, and at the same time, could naturally talk about Egi with.

There was no one like that besides Jiwoon. Egi appeared in Hanbyeol’s dreams in Jiwoon’s form, acting as him and asking all sorts of questions. Hanbyeol, who was asleep, would naturally not realize it was happening in a dream and would answer freely, only to sense something was off at some point and wake up, repeating this cycle.

As the quality of his sleep deteriorated, funnily enough, that method started to work better and better. And as he repeatedly had such dreams, Hanbyeol realized one thing. It was the identity of the strange sense of disharmony he had felt every time he saw Egi’s face. Egi the demon looked quite similar to Jiwoon. They didn’t look exactly the same, and there was something different about their texture, but strangely, the more he looked closely, the more their faces resembled each other, making him feel more familiar with Egi than before.

No matter how much he was on guard, his body, exhausted from increased part-time work, was no match for completely fending off Egi. If he were in his right mind, it might be different, but once he fell asleep from exhaustion, it was safe to say he was helpless. He could confide in Jiwoon about many things. That had already become the case, so it was an irreversible part of their relationship.

While they weren’t the same, being an angel and a demon, they were in similar situations, and through sharing various stories, Hanbyeol had come to consider Jiwoon his closest friend. Since it was all stories he had already told, he could also speak his thoughts on Egi without hesitation. Egi, realizing this, always appeared in Jiwoon’s form, and from a certain point, he began to gradually erase Jiwoon’s appearance.

He chose a method of slowly moving away from Jiwoon’s features, bit by bit, as if overlaying two photos and then making one of them gradually fade. Eventually, he made it so that even when Egi asked various things with his own face, he would answer without hesitation. There was a part that he could guess as to why Egi started to change his appearance bit by bit instead of insisting on Jiwoon’s form.

It was Hanbyeol’s sexual reaction. Hanbyeol did not show any reaction to sexual contact when it was Jiwoon’s form. The same was true when Egi appeared in his own form. But when the boundary between those two faces became indistinct, a strange reaction appeared in Hanbyeol. That was a very peculiar thing. Both Egi and Hanbyeol were thinking the same thing.

It was an incomprehensible matter. Hanbyeol had no idea why he reacted to that strange appearance. He swore, he had never felt that kind of emotion for Jiwoon. If there had been even a little of that feeling, he would have hesitated to draw a line in his relationship with Jiwoon. But he hadn’t done that.

“Y-You don’t h-have any g-guesses about it, d-do you?”

At Jiwoon’s question, Hanbyeol, who had been lost in thought for a moment, snapped to attention. Looking at Jiwoon’s face, he felt a strange sense of guilt, but even though he could talk about other things, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about this.

“Yeah. Nothing particular comes to mind.”

Hanbyeol feigned ignorance. Jiwoon, not noticing this, looked at Hanbyeol and said.

“W-Whatever comes to mind, tell me. M-Maybe I c-can help.”

Jiwoon gave an awkward smile with an innocent face. How could he tell him this story when he was talking with such an expression? Of course, Jiwoon had a history of pouring out whatever he wanted to say without distinguishing what was appropriate, but Hanbyeol wasn’t the type of person to say such things, even when drunk.

He had managed to catch the constantly fleeing Jiwoon and straighten things out somehow, and now he was supposed to say, this time I’m having that kind of dream with you. And the cause seems to be that I’m turned on by a demon who’s strangely mixed with about 30% transparency of you. How could he say something like that?

“What about you?”

“H-Huh?”

“He’s still around, isn’t he, that angel.”

At Hanbyeol’s question, Jiwoon recalled the events of the dawn that he had momentarily forgotten and poked at the side dishes with his chopsticks.

“When I contacted you about the script, the club president sunbae mentioned it. He asked if I knew that you have a cousin who looks like a foreigner. He said he thought he was some kind of model.”

“…”

“It’s not that he looks like a foreigner, he just seems like a foreigner. But seeing how he wholeheartedly believed the story about him being a cousin, I wondered if that angel had done something.”

It wasn’t simply a matter of being handsome or not. Their races looked completely different, yet the fact that people so easily believed they were related by blood felt extremely strange to Hanbyeol. Honestly, he had a look that was so incongruous that it felt out of place to even think of him as just a human.

He didn’t know what Jiwoon thought, but to be frank, in Hanbyeol’s eyes, the angel Zeo looked like nothing more than some being imitating a human. The moment he encountered him on the street, he had a gut feeling that this being shouldn’t be here. In some ways, he was worse than the demon attached to him.

The eyes, so blue they almost seemed white, were definitely not human. The moment their eyes met, his back had felt so chillingly cold. He had somehow managed to stand in front of Jiwoon, but for a moment, he had felt fear. He even wondered if it was possible to continue living with something like that.

He couldn’t know how he acted in front of Jiwoon since he hadn’t asked, but to Hanbyeol, everything felt like an act or like some trick had been used. If not, it just didn’t make sense for the people of the world to perceive his existence so naturally.

“Anyway, they’re not human.”

Hanbyeol lumped Egi and Zeo together, referring to them as ‘they.’ To Hanbyeol, that was the best he could do. No matter how much they imitated human speech in human form, the aura he felt when they were near told him they were not human.

“Maybe it’s because I don’t have a religion, but honestly, it’s not easy for me to believe in words like angel or demon. If I had to categorize them, I’d just think of them as something similar to aliens.”

“A-Aliens?”

“Yeah. He claims to be a demon, so I call him a demon. The thing attached to you is the same; since he claims to be an angel, I just comfortably call him an angel.”

Hanbyeol did not believe in God. There were many moments when he thought that if a being like God existed, things shouldn’t be this way. Not only all the things that had happened to him and his family since he was young, but he had similar thoughts when he heard about what had happened to Jiwoon in the past.

How could He show that young child his brother dying right before his eyes? How could a being called God leave young children with parents worse than trash? How could He present them with disasters they couldn’t do anything about and just watch them, as if letting things take their own course?

After making him live like that, He had let something like a demon come to him. Fortunately for Jiwoon, it was an angel and not a demon that came, but Hanbyeol didn’t think that was a good thing either. A person’s life, in the end, is something no one can live for them, and it made sense to say that God had thrown humans out like that from the beginning.

Such a being called God had whimsically given a being called an angel to Jiwoon. Then couldn’t that angel leave Jiwoon at any time? What would happen to Jiwoon then? Would it be resolved by completely erasing the memory of the angel’s existence? Then where was the guarantee that Jiwoon, who had just begun to change little by little, wouldn’t go back to how he was?

Everything was just a temporary fix. Hanbyeol was genuinely worried about Jiwoon. No being could stay by someone’s side forever. Hanbyeol knew that fact more painfully than anyone. How much had he resented that fact when his mother was on her deathbed? Perhaps his heart at that time, that despair, was what had summoned the being called a demon.

“Looking at you, it doesn’t seem like that angel thing is doing anything bad. At least he wouldn’t act like the demon attached to me, right?”

“…T-That’s right.”

“Asking for your soul… well, it gets complicated if I put it like this, but to put it simply, I consider it all a joke. He’s playing with me.”

“…”

“Will he really save my mom in exchange for my soul? Will he let me live as a rich person for the rest of my life? What’s so valuable about my soul anyway?”

“…”

“I’m not just talking about myself. What I want to say is, I think the reason they’re hanging around spouting nonsensical things like being an angel or a demon is just to watch us.”

Because it’s fun to watch us struggle. Hanbyeol said, moving his spoon. Whether they were angels, demons, or aliens, weren’t they by our side because it was fun to watch humans struggle, unable to escape their past? Hanbyeol couldn’t erase that thought. From the very beginning, he had never expected the demon to grant his wish.

They just enjoy the momentary wavering that flickers whenever they whisper such things. He thought that they were stimulating him because they wanted to keep seeing him in a state of conflict and anguish, looking as though he might even make a choice to abandon himself at times. Just as they themselves watch movies, dramas, or novels.

“So I think they should all disappear. Even if they’re not doing anything to cause you problems right now.”

“I-I…”

Jiwoon, who had been listening silently to Hanbyeol’s firm assertion, opened his mouth. He thought that nothing Hanbyeol said was wrong. To some extent, it was all understandable. Especially if he was in a position of being tormented by a demon every night, it was natural to think that way. It was much better for Hanbyeol to draw a clear line rather than to think the demon would grant him something and follow him.

Even while thinking that, Jiwoon, unlike Hanbyeol, couldn’t bring himself to think badly of Zeo. It wasn’t just because he was an angel. Not for a single moment had Jiwoon ever thought that Zeo was watching him. Even if Zeo, as Hanbyeol said, was not an angel but some alien-like being and was enjoying watching him change, his thoughts about him would not change.

“I like that person.”

Jiwoon said clearly, looking at Hanbyeol. At that, Hanbyeol stopped eating and met Jiwoon’s gaze. Jiwoon did not shrink back from that gaze. He knew that Hanbyeol was saying this out of concern for him. So there was nothing for him to be afraid of.

“T-The me now is much better than the me before. The reason I’ve become like this is all b-because that person helped me. Even while I think everything you said is r-right, I d-don’t think I want him to disappear.”

Jiwoon had asked himself the same question. He had asked Zeo, once everything got better than before, that is, once he no longer thought about dying, if he would suddenly disappear just as he had suddenly appeared. The reason he asked such a question was because he was afraid of that.

Even at the moment when he hadn’t fully realized his feelings for Zeo, he had been afraid of that. He just thought of him as a bothersome existence. He had only thought that he didn’t need anything even if he did everything he wished for, and that he just wanted to be left alone. Even while he was taking on all sorts of chores, he himself had repeatedly thought about wanting to die every day.

He felt pathetic for not cleaning the filthy house, and hated himself for not being able to say a single word properly to others. He had wanted to escape from home so badly, but once he actually did, he despaired every time he saw with his own eyes that there was nothing he could do with his own hands. He was far too substandard to be treated as a whole human being.