The first time he sees her, it's him catching and walking into the sight of her in pale blond hair falling down her neck, breathing in a cigarette stick down her lungs. She's smoking in a library he just found in one pallid and grey morning and it irks him because there is a possibility it can burn the whole building down. Where the hell is the librarian? he thinks.

Her breathing is sure and confident. She's clothed in mom jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt and she's barefooted. Leaning to one of the window panes, she casts her gaze slowly to him. 

Then she's gone in a flash, pushing off the window behind her and jumps off. It takes his breath away for a minute and he scurries there, to see that she is safe and sound and running away from him, lily feets padding across the green, moist grass. 

The second time he sees her is the very next week. Wonwoo always comes to the library in the early morning and he has forgotten the existence of that fleeting human-like creature. She is still breathing death around her but a book is flipped through the pages with her left hand effortlessly. 

"Who allowed you to smoke here?"

He has snooped silently right in front of her and in a closer distance, he can see that the cigarette between her fingers is a menthol one, the one his lover in bed smokes all the time. And from a closer distance, her eyes don't seem human, feline-like and terribly black in void.

"The old man who sleeps at daylight and awake when souls are mourning," she mumbles warily, tipping the cinders to the table. He blinks his eyes and she is nowhere to be found again. He takes the book to see that it's turned to the dedication page, where a name is written.

"For Kang Seulgi, the person who steals into the night and dreams, my one true love."

The third time is not the next week, but three days after the last time and it's in the evening. He thought that the library is closed down but he sees the librarian talking to the said blond girl. She is smoking another different cigarette, a clove cigarette, black and she doesn't cough into it after breathing it all in.

"He will never come back."

She's clothed in a summer dress, protruding collar bones and shoulder blades under floral patterns. Her hand is trembling and the librarian faces him but he doesn't pay attention to him, as if he wants Wonwoo to be a witness to a crumbling beauty.

"I know-"

"You can never be with him, even if he does-"

"I know," in a more restrained voice, she puts the cigarette back between her lips, and he can feel silent tremors inside of his body when she said it that way. "He still looks as beautiful as always," he can hear a smile and a sense of longing in her voice, and he wonders how can he imagine the image of her smiling when he only sees her for two times, none with her thin lips curved upward.

"He always thinks you're the one more beautiful out of the two," he gives a fatherly smile at her, hair grey and fading in thickness, eyes giving a sense of care and condolences.

"He thought that I am a thief who stole his heart, al-" suddenly, she is hit by a realisation that he is not with her anymore and she can't use 'always' anymore even though always has been their favourite word together; always love you, always be with you, always by your side, always sleeping with the thought of you.

"I should go," her voice is cracking and beating out of her body in memories. She doesn't head to the window this time, she heads to exit through the door like a normal person, right hand clutching her head that is dangling lowly to the ground and each step that she takes feels like the world beneath her is tumbling down to darkness and when her knees unbuckle themselves, he catches her. Him in his blue shirt and hair swept neatly across his forehead and a black sling bag hanging by his shoulder, his broad yet lean shoulders.

He catches her with him holding her arms from falling.

"Please don't run away anymore," tears are dribbling down her cheeks, and from a closer distance he can see that her eyes are not that dark and it is actually very brown and light with yellow circles in it and her eyes look like the eclipse, the sun bring swallow by the dark moon. There is a constellation of light freckles on her cheeks and he doesn't know anything about her at all but this profound sadness she seems to be coming back into makes his heart churn for her.

She trembles in a greater amount when he looks at her and she breaks away from him, running away from him like a normal person and not like a night creature.

The librarian silently looks at him, as if waiting to be asked.

He has so many questions in his mind, why does she smoke different kinds of cigarettes? Why does she love killing herself so much? Why does she smoke in this library of all places? How come he lets her do so? Why does she always run away from him but not from the librarian?

"Why? Why so much sadness in her?

"Seulgi is mourning. She is mourning for the living who won't return," his voice is calm but somber, his grey hair puts on this light of a wistful thought, his wistful thought. There is a sense of fondness he gives to him with the way he looks at him. "Such a sad, beautiful thing. He's the only one she will always love. So cruel, he was stolen away from her."

He has never talked to the librarian like this before, and he seems very thoughtful. Wonwoo makes a note that he should talk to him more often, because he sounds closer to him than a father he never has.

Δ

"I watched them grew up," it is a calm and soothimg morning in Saturday, the day he met her for the first time, the day where he doesn't have work on his hand and give some time of calmness in his heart. For a library this large, not a lot of people comes here and he finds that comforting. He needs his time away from the real world, too.

"I watched them grew up and fell in love with each other. She was a dreamer merely seeking for an escape and he was a boy overflowing with feelings. Watching them fell in love with each other is one of the most beautiful things in my life. I have never seen a love so innocent and selfless yet passionate before them. Never. It can never be compared to all the literatures here," the librarian explains all of this with a smile, waving his hand across the area as if to make a comparison to the separated lovers, eyes so nostalgic and he feels himself covered in a blanket of lukewarm heat he has never felt so long. So warm he wants to bury himself and die in it.

"Did he...pass away?"

At this, the librarian gives a steady and unreadable look. "I can't tell."

"What do you mean?"

"I just can't," he looks away, to the door then to the window, as if waiting for someone. "Her hair wasn't like that. Hers was as dark as her heart now, black and painted in darkness. Only that her hair used to be tangled between his fingers, where he often weaved and collected it up and tied it and he would place his lips on the nape of her neck. I caught them when they came on evenings and hid in corners, behind dusty shelves of books from the oldest time. Still wearing their uniforms for most of the time. They buried and kept their love for themselves between tales from the oldest era. She rarely smoked also, often she did it when she came here by herself and I could feel her worry that he'd leave her someday from my own space. He didn't know until the end that she did this. Then, she got worst."

"This is a secret between you and me, and it was the only time I caught them being intimate. I avoided it for a lot of times," but there is a knowing smile across the librarian's cracked lips, in which Wonwoo lets it brush away through his eyes.

"They must have found something so extraordinary between each other," Wonwoo replies, after a moment of having to ponder on his answer. He feels a surge of sadness lounging into his heart, gripping tightly into his chest.

The librarian smiles to him. "You seem like you'll be in the same age as them."

"How can you tell?"

He smiles ag