Jaejoong likes flowers. He doesn’t like floral arrangements—they’re too organised, too fake, too calculated to look good—more man-made than natural, and that defeats the whole point of having flowers in the first place, in Jaejoong’s eyes. He likes flowers wild and free, not lumped together with other flowers to overpower or be overpowered.

By all rights, despite it being made of wood, he should really, really like the purple iris on the door.

He doesn’t.

Delicate-looking though it is, it seems menacing somehow, the furled petals splayed out in all directions like lounging gods who could reach out and strangle him anytime.

It’s not the enemy, Jaejoong tells himself. Yunho is. He raises his hand tentatively to knock.

Before his knuckles can touch the door, it opens. And even though Yunho is the enemy and the iris looks threatening, the darkness beyond the door is inviting.

Jaejoong takes a deep breath and steps inside.

The door slams shut behind him, and Jaejoong is plunged into utter blackness.

-{}-

Eerie is slowly becoming the new normal for Jaejoong, but even so, he’s a little spooked when the photo frame and the photograph it contains is wrenched out of his arms by thin air.

“There’s an armchair in front of you,” Yunho says, and though he is nowhere to be seen, his voice is everywhere at once, making Jaejoong unable to pinpoint exactly where he is. “Have a seat.”

Jaejoong does, but not before he bangs into the back of the armchair and all but face-plants into the seat.

Yunho’s laughter is soft as Jaejoong sits down properly, face burning. “Looks like clumsiness isn’t something that can be improved by time.”

What?

“I know you’re here for answers. And you’ll get them, in due time. But for you to really understand, we’ll have to begin where everything started, and whether you believe me or not…that’s for you to decide.”

To Jaejoong’s left, a soft, yellow-range light attached to the wall glows, and had it presided over a table covered in white lace and set for dinner it’d have been very romantic. Instead, beneath it is an ancient Korean painting, yellowed with age but so well-preserved that any art collector would give his two front teeth for it. In the middle of the thin paper is a beautiful girl, her hanbok carefully painted and a perfect marriage of pink and red. It’s easily the most beautiful dress Jaejoong has ever seen, and he can’t take his eyes off it, so much so that he doesn’t spare a glance for the face of the person wearing it.

“Goryeo dynasty,” Yunho says, snapping Jaejoong back into reality. His voice is faraway and wistful, as though he’d slipped into a dream just as Jaejoong slips out of one. “You were eighteen, you were a concubine, and you were the most beautiful boy I ever saw.”

Wait…is that girl…me?

Jaejoong squints as he tries to make out the girl’s features. Now that he thinks about it, she does kind of look like the face he sees when he looks in the mirror.

“The emperor was married, but he had two lovers, you and another boy called Heechul. When his wife found out, she was furious and demanded that you be sent away. But to keep his hands off her, she allowed him to keep one of you two…and he chose Heechul.”

Despite everything, Jaejoong honestly is a tad offended. He’s not vain (well, not that vain), but he’s well aware that he’s way better looking than about 99% of the female population. Who is this Heechul and how on God’s green earth can he be any better looking than Jaejoong?

“But he couldn’t let you go either. He wanted to keep you…so he did, without the Queen’s knowledge. You were bundled up and sent to a rarely-visited palace in Gwangju, and I was assigned to follow you there. I was only eighteen and a lowly guard, and babysitting the King’s secret lover isn’t something that gets you promoted. My family was poor; my father couldn’t work and my mother could only sell so much at the market every day, my sister was a gisaeng, and because I had to follow you I couldn’t look after them. I was eighteen, and I hated you.

“For two months, all I did was walk around your quarters…I never saw you personally, and because of that I resented you all the more, because you were a nameless, faceless person I knew nothing about and it was so easy to vilify you.

“The day before the emperor came to ‘visit his lands’, you disappeared, and the head guard sent us out looking for you. My sister was sick and dying and I’d finally convinced my superior to let me go home to see her one last time, and because of you I had to give it up. If it was possible, my hatred for you increased. I’d just gotten news that my sister had contracted something that we were too poor to afford medicine for and was fading fast, but I had to go search for you and I couldn’t go back. I was so furious that something in me snapped and I lost my mind. To me, everything was your fault…because of you, I couldn’t get promoted and earn more to help my family. Because of you, I couldn’t pull my sister out of the gisaeng business fast enough. Because of you, she was dying, and because of you, maybe I wouldn’t be there in time to hold her in my arms one last time. You, you, you, you…everything led back to you, and I hated it. I promised myself that if I was the one to find you, I’d kill you and tell everyone that you were bitten by a wolf and bled to death, to heck with the consequences.

“A couple of guards, including me, went to the forest and spread out to widen the search area. I’d been riding for a couple of hours and was far away from everyone else before when I heard a scream—your scream, to be precise. I rode on a little more, and there you were behind a tree, trying to defend yourself against a tall boy who looked more or less around my age and yours.”

Even though it doesn’t add up, Jaejoong has a fairly solid guess who the tall boy is.

“Like I said, I wanted to kill you, and at first the idea that someone else would do the job for me and keep me from getting my hands dirty was immensely gratifying. You saw me and screamed again, but I made no move, not because I was frozen with fear, but because I didn’t want to move. The only word revolving around my mind was “good”, and in my heart I was secretly urging to boy to hurry up and finish the job so I could haul your body back home already.

Yunho utters a short laugh. “And then you ruined it all. The boy was this close to killing you, and you looked at me, smiled and said “sorry”, so softly that I could barely hear it.

“I had no idea why. I still don’t. You’d never seen me before, and as far as you knew, I was someone that existed but didn’t hold a significant place in your life. And anyway, someone was trying to slit your throat and all I was doing was sitting there. You owed me nothing, least of all an apology. And yet you gave me one anyway.

“But strange as it was, it wasn’t your apology that made me decide to save you…it was your smile. It seemed so sad, so accepting, so…so everything. It was beautiful. You were beautiful. And I just couldn’t bring myself to do nothing.

“So I stepped in and fought. It was hard—the boy had more strength in him than I thought, and in saving you I damn near killed myself. But in the end, somehow I managed, and he ran off. You’d fainted a long time ago, and the whole ride back to the palace, I kept sneaking looks at you, and it was easy to see why the Emperor wanted you.

“I was weak from blood loss, and after handing you over to the doctors I out and didn’t wake up for two weeks. When I finally came to, the first thing they told me was that my sister was dead and buried.”

Jaejoong’s mouth is suddenly dry. I’m sorry, he mouths, because even though he’s not sure if Yunho can see it, it’s his only means of communication, and though he’s not quite sure if he believes Yunho, it feels as though an apology is in order.

“Don’t be. It was sad, yes, but strangely, when they told me, even though I blamed you for it before, at that time all I felt was hollowness…like a part of my heart had gone missing. I couldn’t blame or hate you. Make no mistake; I wanted to. I wanted to so much. But I couldn’t, because firstly, I couldn’t feel anything, least of all hate, and secondly, because every time I made an effort to, I’d think of the smile you gave me, and it just wasn’t a smile I could hate.

“For a long time, I was like a zombie…I did everything I was expected to, I ate, I slept, but it was all just going through the motions. Even when you summoned me to thank me, I accepted it blankly…my voice and eyes were completely dead. I didn’t make a good impression on you, but for some reason, you asked for me to meet you in the garden the next day, and the next, and the next. At first, our meetings consisted of nothing but you asking about my life and me answering correctly but emotionlessly. But gradually, I opened up and started telling you more about myself, and you in turn started telling me about yourself. And after a while, you weren’t the enemy to me, but a victim, the sole survivor of a village massacre, the child sold to the palace by your foster parents when you were six and the unwilling lover that tried to escape from the misery and almost got killed in the process. I don’t know when I started caring for you, but soon, I did, and by the time my birthday came, we were spending every free second we had together.

“I was nineteen, and I loved you.”

I'm sorry for not updating for so long, so here's a slightly longer update to (hopefully) make it up. :)