Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,

But seeming so, for my peculiar end;

For when my outward action doth demonstrate

The native act and figure of my heart

In compliment extern, 'tis not long after

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

- Iago (Othello 1.1)

~o~

There was once a woman who lived alone in a cottage far from town. She was gathering firewood in the snow when she found a poisonous snake under a log. It was on the verge of death, and she found it in her heart to save the creature. She brought it home, nursed it back to health and cared for it as her own. One day, it bit her.

"How could you?" she asked with her dying breath. "I saved your life. I took you in and shared you all that I had. I loved you."

"What did you expect?" it said. "You knew I was a snake."

~o~

Everyone knows how the story of Snow White goes. She is the heroine of the story, although heroine is too much of a word to describe her because she did nothing but wait for the Fates to save her from her dreary life, from her stepmother who wanted nothing but for her to die. She did nothing. She is just a princess who got her prince, who got her happy ending.

Dara is her. Dara is not her.

She is beautiful. She is kind. She is loved. But she did not wait for her prince. She did the unthinkable and did what the heroine must not do.

She fell in love with the person who will cause her demise, whose poisoned apple is as deadly as a snake's venom.

She will fall for the villain.

And she is sure she won't regret any second of it.

~o~

Seunghyun is the stepmother. Seunghyun is not the stepmother.

He is beautiful but he doesn't get the love Dara receives. It was a different kind of love, a fake one, one that stemmed out of either greed or fear. Greed, because people knew who he was and they want a piece of it. Fear, because they knew that behind all that beauty hides a ruthless killer, one who has no God and who has no conscience.

He is envious, yes. He is insecure to the point other people's opinion of how he looks matters so much to him. But it doesn't make him want to kill her, to send her to a never-ending sleep. It made him do the unthinkable.

It made him fall in love with the person he is supposed to kill.

And he is sure