What Yeehyeon wanted to run from wasn’t Inwoo, but the reality of it all. Like someone trying to swat away a swarm of winged insects, Yeehyeon shook his head.
“No… I know it’s not your fault, hyung. I know you’re not the one who did anything wrong. But right now, what I know in my head is useless to me…. It’s like my mind has stopped working and my limbs are moving on their own… I can’t control it! I… I want to handle this calmly… but my body….”
“Don’t push yourself. Who could possibly be calm in a situation like this? That would be the strange thing.”
“What’s strange, and what’s normal… I don’t even know that anymore. This, this situation… the Director… how… how am I supposed to accept this?”
Lifting his head to look up at Inwoo, Yeehyeon had completely lost the usual equilibrium that kept his emotional range, which was small for his age, in check. With the face of a terrified young boy lost in chaos, he grabbed Inwoo’s arms and shook them, repeating the question.
“What… what the hell is this, hyung?”
“……”
Like a truck crashing into a taxi that was waiting for a green light, listening to the radio. It had charged into the side of his daily life without any warning, smashing everything, breaking the flow, ruining all plans… turning the touch of a person he had taken into his very core, a person he had felt was as close as his own self, into a moment of unidentifiable, alien horror. That destructive power.
To think he would experience a shock of that magnitude twice in his life….
Inwoo, who had been looking down at Yeehyeon with a face like he had a mouthful of bitter medicine, gripped Yeehyeon’s arms tightly and pulled him in forcefully. He wrapped his arms around Yeehyeon’s shoulders and back, not holding back his strength in the slightest.
“You don’t need to understand, and you don’t need to try to accept it. Because you did nothing wrong.”
“Then what… what should I do? What am I supposed to do?”
“……”
“Blame him, resent him, demand he take responsibility… is that what I should do?”
“If you want to do that, then you can.”
The feeling of the other’s shoulders being slightly lower than when he hugged Liu face-to-face was awkward. The warmth of their chests pressed together and the sensation of their ears and cheeks overlapping, the fact that this wasn’t him… it made Yeehyeon flinch.
But now, he probably wouldn’t be able to feel the same familiarity and reassurance from Liu’s embrace either. Probably. He was realizing that in the arms of another person.
Yeehyeon slowly pushed against Inwoo’s chest. The arms that had been holding him tight, as if to keep him from going anywhere, loosened and fell away with surprising ease, as if their earlier pressure had been a lie.
Yeehyeon steadied his staggering feet, took a step back, and slumped against the wall behind him. He scrubbed his hands over his face to maintain at least a minimum of composure and lowered his voice, trying to even it out.
“And then what? After I’ve spewed out all my emotions… am I supposed to go back to how things were, as if nothing happened? Or….”
Or… is this something that should never be forgiven.
He bit his lip so hard it turned white, swallowing the words that were about to follow. For now, the sincere image Liu had shown him—or at least, what he had believed to be Liu’s truth—and his words of healing and empathy still felt more real than the horrific change Liu had supposedly wrought upon his body. The accumulation of those moments was still trying to defend him.
“I’m sorry…. Really, I don’t know how I should apologize…. No, this is already past the point of apologies…. It’s not like I borrowed something without asking and lost it…. What he did to your body and your life…. Regardless of when I found out, I’m just as much of a bastard for keeping my mouth shut….”
Yeehyeon shook his head firmly, cutting Inwoo off. As Inwoo said, it wasn’t a matter of apologies. And what he needed right now to calm down wasn’t an apology.
Yeehyeon muttered, anxiously gnawing on his lower lip.
“I think… and I want to say that this isn’t something you should be sorry for, hyung, but I don’t know….”
“Even I, an Alpha, can’t understand it, so for you, who’s lived as a Beta… it must be unimaginable. I kept quiet because I agreed with that bastard when he said your shock would be even a little less severe if he told you himself… but if he was so afraid of you being shocked, he shouldn’t have started this in the first place. I know that I, who fell for that sophistry and stayed silent, can’t be free from responsibility in this.”
Inwoo’s voice was rising with agitation. He leaned his back against the opposite wall and ruffled his hair, which had been neatly styled with wax. He repeatedly clenched and unclenched his fists, as if before a blood draw, and glared fiercely at his forearms, exposed below the sleeves of his sweatshirt that were pushed up to his elbows.
“His pheromones ran wild. The Alpha instincts he’d never once been swayed by took control of him…. For an excuse coming from the mouth of the great, near-perfect Golden Alpha, Liu Weikun, it’s pretty pathetic, isn’t it? If he couldn’t resist the pheromones… if he couldn’t control himself when he saw you, touched you, was near you… then he should have given up on being near you at all.”
Inwoo, who had been clenching and unclenching his hands, squeezed his fist tight, looking as if he were suppressing the urge to smash it into something. The veins on his forearm bulged blue.
“He watched and observed the object of his lust every day… yet claims he had no intention of rape. It’s no different from that excuse.”
Inwoo’s voice was as low and quiet as a whisper, but it was as cold as metal, as if there was no room to reconsider the conclusion he had reached.
“……”
The word ‘rape’ seemed to lower the temperature of his surroundings and his own body by several degrees. Yeehyeon flinched, his body stiffening as he stared straight at Inwoo. But Inwoo, boiling with rage at the absent Liu, didn’t even seem to notice him.
Strictly speaking, there had been no coercion or force in the sexual act itself. But he had never been informed about the fundamental change to his body that could occur through it. It wasn’t rape in the general sense, but while he felt a revulsion to Inwoo’s analogy, he couldn’t bring himself to readily defend Liu by saying it was an overly unjust leap in logic.
Is that really what it was? Did he do something as disgusting as rape… to my body?
The gravity of that word felt like it had doused all the stray thoughts floating through his mind with cold water. I have to get cold. To see the truth behind the temporary turbidity without distortion, I had to sink, cold and heavy. But it wasn’t easy.
“How… how can you turn a Beta into an Omega? By what method did I….”
The end of his voice was still trembling faintly. Inwoo’s guilt-ridden gaze carefully met Yeehyeon’s.
“It’s through knotting….”
“……”
“Normal knotting has no effect on a Beta… but a trained Ghost can induce a chemical reaction in their semen during the knot. If that chemically altered semen is continuously injected into a Beta through knotting… they slowly change into an Omega, and… I heard they call that… Changing.”
He hadn’t heard such a detailed explanation from Shushu. Only that Liu was a Golden Alpha and a ‘Ghost’ with the special ability to change a Beta into an Omega. That whenever he attempted to change his partner, his eyes would turn cloudy, literally like a ghost’s, within a few hours. That was all.
Yeehyeon wrapped his arms tightly around his own trembling body.
“Then, every time we knotted….”
A hollow laugh escaped after the self-directed mumble. The sex with Liu, which he had thought was their most intimate form of communion, had been a tool for his thorough deception. The fact added shock upon shock.
Shaking his head slightly, as if he didn’t want to believe it, Yeehyeon felt Inwoo’s hands grip his shoulders again.
“Let’s go to the hospital tomorrow. We can check how far it’s progressed, whether there’s a chance you can live something close to a Beta’s life if we stop now… we can run some tests. I’ll arrange a VIP examination and handle the consultation myself.”
Yeehyeon’s eyes looked at Inwoo. They were unfocused, as if asking what good any of that would do now. Inwoo loosened his grip on the shoulders of Yeehyeon, who was like a defenseless young animal in the face of violence, and stroked them as gently as he could.
“Of course, if you’re not ready, you don’t have to do it right away.”
“How long will it take to get the test results?”
“We should be able to confirm a certain amount right away with just an ultrasound.”
“You can tell by… the development of the uterus, I suppose.”
“……”
The word ‘uterus’ felt just as alien and produced the same sharp, metallic chill as the word ‘rape,’ making his speech slow down on its own. Seeing Inwoo avert his gaze, his lips tightening in place of an answer, Yeehyeon let out a thin sigh.
He remembered Liu asking him to just sleep together without having sex because he wanted to stay with him until morning. He then recalled his own question, asking if they couldn’t just sleep together after having sex, and a bitter smile escaped him. Right, he couldn’t have done that…. What kind of expression had Liu worn then, looking at him?
Pity? Guilt? Conflict and sorrow? No matter what complex story had been mixed in there, in this moment, he didn’t want to block his own emotions just to try and fathom Liu’s.
Yeehyeon took a deep breath and bit down hard on his lower lip.
The reason for Liu’s urgency after their first penetration and first knot in Hong Kong, when he had scraped the semen out of his body like a madman… the reason for his repeated apologies and the ‘unnecessary cleanup,’ he could now understand it all clearly.
「I want it. Do that for me. Knot me… do it again.」
His own lewd whispers, begging Liu to knot him, were vivid. He unwrapped the arms that were holding his own biceps and scrubbed at his face, as if trying to crush it. It was becoming difficult to control his breathing, which was quickening again. He wished he could just lose consciousness like he had in Liu’s living room when he first saw ‘Isolation’ again, but his foolish body was demanding he witness every part of the agony.
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