​A/N - So new chapter! Ji-yun tells Sanghyun she's going to die, but now we'll find out if that's the truth or not. Sorry its a little too much like bio class, but the details are important. Anyhoo, enjoy~~~~ 

@thunbii - Hmmm how should I say this without revealing too much...but Ji-yun's death won't be as simplistic as you might imagine... Heh heh heh~~~

@ImaVIPbaby - I know, poor Doongie >< to still be strong after all of this, he's such a little trooper!

@Wookielove - Well, now you know. Haha, thanks so much for still commenting *hugs*, the reason why I always find myself having to update daily - in order to not disappoint you all!!! 

@HanSang - Nooope, I'm leaving Korea tomorrow. Went to everland today! Haha and yeah, I loved that one shot to bits. The fact that it's only a one shot just killed me.

@ainnurdoongie - Haha which part were you happy about? Haha, very well! I shall go be Doongies knight in shining armour and do something!!! Ooo and an update!! My life shall be complete!!!

@t4kara - Haha, hugs. And happy birthday again~~~ Consider this lengthy chapter your late bay prezzie, albeit the fact it is rather morbid. Anyhoo, hope you had a good day!

@cazz_96 - Haha, we shall see...

Chapter 48 – Without looking back, she is still in love

Ji-yun POV

The moment I uttered those words, Sanghyun’s face turned stark white and his eyes grew wide with shock. I always loved the way he could never hide his thoughts, the words written just as clearly on his face in the exact same manner an artist paints a picture using nothing but color and and somehow still conveying a message more powerful than speech ever could. 

“Y-you’re going to die?!” he finally managed to splutter.

I nodded.

“This isn’t another ploy is it?” his eyes narrowed fractionally but deep inside I could still see the shards of fear.

I shook my head.

“No,” I said, a little saddened at his mistrust even though it was duly deserved. “I really am going to die.”

Sanghyun closed his eyes for a moment and I knew that right now he was trying to sort out his feelings, sealing the chaos beneath a barrier so that I would not see the furious war raging beneath. And as always, failing.

“How long?” he croaked.

“I don’t know.” I whispered and felt dread claw at my heart as it always did when I thought about this morbid subject. “A year, perhaps two. Three if I’m lucky. Who knows?”

“W-when did you find out?” he opened his eyes and stared at me with pitch-black eyes, the exact color of the shadows which filled a coffin. I tried to stop thinking in such a melancholic manner but failed miserably. 

“Ever since I was ten.” I said simply. “Don’t pity me, Sanghyun,” I told him sharply and rapped his forehead with my fist, knowing he would take the information to heart. I didn’t want to hurt him any longer but this was something I had to tell him. “I’ve had a long time to come to terms with it. It’s inevitable and not your fault.” Oh, yes. I had come to terms but that moment had be far too late and far too marred by the need to view it as punishment for all the sinful deeds I had incurred.

“Tell me about it.” He whispered, but suddenly a coughing fit came over him. I patted his back and his forehead till it subsided, and then I helped him drink some cool water. “Please.” He finally said. And I couldn’t say no.

“Have you ever heard of something called the Batten’s disease?”

He shook his head.

“It’s an inherited disease that shortens the lifespan to about the twenties, sometimes earlier.” I recited the words that had decided my life so long ago like reading from a textbook, the words imprinted into my heart yet their meaning worthless.

“That soon!” Sanghyun’s eyes popped wide open. “Your twenties! B-but that’s barely a life!”

I barely suppressed my bitter chuckle. “I know. That’s why I said time is ticking for me. That’s why my parents told me if I wanted to be a singer I had to make it big quick, or else snip goes the lifeline and poof goes my dream.”

Sanghyun closed his mouth. “Is that why you always acted like time was against you?”

“Yes.” I confessed. “Because I always knew I would never get to experience a lot of things in life. Fame, fortune and love. I wanted those things and I wanted them quick. But now, all of that is impossible for me now.”

“Isn’t there a cure?” Sanghyun gripped my cold hand with his heated one.

I shook my head sadly. “Sanghyun, my father’s a doctor. If there was a medically known cure, he would be the first to know.”

“But you don’t know if you’ll die by your early twenties!” Sanghyun was babbling now, his fear and shock overriding his logical thoughts.

“Shhhh,” I put a finger to stop the tirade of words. “Sanghyun, whether I live or not what matters anymore. What matters is that I want the chance to explain everything to you.”

He nodded apologetically and pressed his beautiful lips close though I could still see the thousands of questions bubbling in his eyes. “You see Sanghyun; the symptoms of Batten’s disease appear around the age of 5 to 10. That’s how my father diagnosed me. And those symptoms only get worse when it comes close to the time.” I took a deep breath and told him. “There’s the worsening of motor skills, vision problems and…and a progressive loss of speech.”

He froze beneath the touch of my right hand. 

“So you see, Sanghyun. Even if my parent’s hadn’t pulled me out of the entertainment world, even if I hadn’t damaged my vocal cords in the accident, I would have had to leave.” I couldn’t help the harsh, bitter laugh that spilled from my mouth. “What use would a company have for a singer who can’t sing?”

“B-but you can still speak fine, right?”

I nodded with a small smile. Desperately trying to look on the bright side, that was my beloved. “Sanghyun, the symptoms are already getting worse. I may not have lost my voice, but it’ll have sometime soon. It’s not a question of ‘will it’ but ‘when’.”

“S-so…something…already…?” he couldn’t finish his sentence.

“My sight.” I admitted. I couldn’t help but reach up to touch my left eye – a habit. “I’m already completely blind in my left eye. And my right is slowly losing its clarity.”

“Your motor skills?” he probed me gingerly.

“Walking has become difficult for me. Short distances is manageable but for too long and they’ll become shaky. In addition, I’m losing strength in my right wrist.”

I waited to hear his response. 

“So…you said you’ve known this since you were little?” Sanghyun stared at me.

“Yes.” I said. “My father noticed I suffered from slow learning, repetitive speech and clumsiness. In addition, I was perpetually skinny because I experiences decreased body fat frequently. Sounds good to a girl, but it meant I had little strength in my body and so my endurance was short.”

I still remembered the day Ji-eun and I had come home from school with our respective tests clutched tightly in tiny, chubby hands. Hers had been a stellar 80%. Mine had been a fail with 5.2%. How the hell the teacher managed to concoct a .2% had been a mystery.

It was then that my father frowned and began to observe me. It had all started with a simply disbelief that his daughter could be such a failure. Then he had noticed my awkward limbs that refused to move in tandem with one another and the way when my mother tried to force-teach me the Korean alphabet, I had trouble remembering the difference between ‘shiot’ and ‘rieul’ whereas my sister had already progressed to ‘bieup’. It had followed for several years into maths and science and history.

Finally, he had taken me aside to a white, white room and stuck countless needles into my arms. There had been no soothing to my eight-year old self. No. I was too old to be coddled. And then when the tests came back, he had his answer.

I had a genetic disease and I was going to die.

I still remember how that night he took me home, his eyes cold and hard as a glass marble in which I could see the center piece but never touch it. He had told me to get changed and go to bed, but I had disobeyed him and snuck out to the living room where he was deep in discussion with my mother.

“She’s going to die by the time she’s twenty.” He wailed, hands clasped together with his back to me. His long shadow stretched under the unforgiving lamp light and I could hear despair in his voice.

“Is there no cure?” my mother whispered.

“No.” he shook his head furiously. “It’s a genetic disease and there has been little progression on that frontline in the medical field.”

“What does that mean for her right now?” my mother whispered, always the strategist.

“She’ll have learning problems as well as lacking motor skills. She’ll never be normal.” My father said in a hushed whisper like this was CIA level information and he was divulging secrets for which his throat was be slit for and his body tossed into some unknown river. “She’ll never be able to achieve her dreams, never be able to become a young woman living her life, never know what it means to fall in love and have a family.”

“Then how shall we treat her?” her mother sounded close to tears. “We have to make sure her life is worthwhile, no matter how short.”

“We do.” Her father agreed. “Even if it’s a short life, I want her to life it well. Plus,” he said in a brighter voice that contained an ever-so fragile shard of hope. He held it like it was the crown jewel and prone to shattering from even the gentlest touch. “There’s a possibility a cure may appear in the future. We cannot write her off as dead yet-“

“Ji-yunnie?” came a soft voice. Ji-yun spun around to see her twin sister stumble out of the crack of their shared room’s door and rub her eyes. She was still half-asleep and Ji-yun knew this was something she did not have to hear. So she had rushed forwards and ushered her younger sister back into the room.

“What’s wrong?” Ji-eun yawned.

“It’s nothing.” Ji-yun lied, the first of many. “I was just thirsty.”

“Okay.” Ji-eun gave a small sigh and climbed back into her bed. She was at the age when answers were not the most essential part of life and secrets could be kept. “Goodnight Ji-yunnie.” She said sweetly.

And Ji-yun had climbed back into her bed and pressed the covers over her head. She heard her parents enter their shared room and her black, downy head, but she chose not to make a move. Let them think she was asleep. Let them not know in truth she was crying out in her heart and soul.

She felt them press a kiss to her head but through the slit of the bedsheets she saw them focus their eyes on Ji-eun with blazing hope. And it was then that she knew the divide between her and sister had widened into a chasm as large as the Grand Canyon.

Before, the two had been twins separated only by grades and likes and dislikes. But now what lay between them in the pitch dark abyss was that of expectations and life and possibility and ability. It was a deep, dark hole where the acidic touch of secrets and the poisonous creep of lies furthered the distance and no bridge could ever hope to reconnect the twins.

It was then and there that Ji-yun knew she would always and forever be inferior to Ji-eun.

“Ji-yun?” Sanghyun reached up with one long, muscular arm to touch me. His cold hand shocked me out of my reverie. “Ji-yun?”

“Ah, sorry Sanghyun.” I shook my head to clear my thoughts of the past. “You were saying?”

He bit his lip, evidently wondering if he should continue asking. “You said it’s inherited right?”

“Yeah.”

“So how come Ji-eun doesn’t have the disease.”

I smiled crookedly at that. Even know I knew where his heart lay. He knew too. “We’re fraternal twins.” I explained, smoothening a sweaty lock of his black hair to one side. “We may share the same DNA, but it’s not identical. Therefore I got the recessive genes for Batten disease and Ji-eun didn’t. Don’t worry, she’s fine. Father tested her for it already.”

 “Does she know?” he then asked.

“No.” I said. “I asked mother and father to never tell her. I couldn’t bear it if she too treated me differently. But it’s funny because I’m the one who started treating her differently.” I laughed here. “I started putting distance between the two of us. Maybe I had already accepted my death somewhere on the inside, but we just became normal siblings from then on. But I suppose…I suppose my jealously of her grew.”

Sanghyun tilted his head questioningly.

“I was jealous of her. She had everything: a healthy body, a bright future and parents who had high expectations of her.” I smiled sadly. “My parents tried to treat me well. They looked after me, they helped me when studying was difficult and they supported my dreams of being a singer even if it came with a thousand rules. However, there was always something that held them back from them treating me the same as Ji-eun. I was always different and always a failure – doomed to achieve nothing.”

Sanghyun said nothing. There was nothing he could say.

“And then she graduated middle school whilst I got held back a year. She got accepted into LOEN as a trainee and I was still failing the auditions. And then…” I held my breath. “She got you, Sanghyun.”

Cheondoong POV

I blinked, surprised. Me? Had I been such an important figure in the equation?

“She got you Sanghyun and I had no one.” Ji-yun whispered, her hand clenching and unclenching as if to show how much it hurt her. “So I thought I would take one thing from her, just one. One thing she could get over. I tried to take you.”

She looked down at me with flat, black eyes. “It was such a childish reason, just wanting to steal you from my sister in order to feel some sort of happiness. In order to fill the hole in my heart.” And then her voice changed in a hushed, distant tone. “But it didn’t work. You loved Ji-eun too much and I never saw it. But it was that devotion that I craved so badly, like a drug you know you just have to get your hands on. They say the grass is greener on the other side and it was exactly like that for me. Pandora’s box, call it whatever you want but I wanted what I couldn’t have.”

I was being overflowed with her rushing feelings, the emotions pummeling me. “But my little game of war became something real, something borderline obsessive.” She admitted, her eyes closing as she delved into some sort of memory I could never intrude upon. “I fell in love you for real and when I knew you wouldn’t be mine, that night in the car when you rejected me even though you didn’t mean to do it harshly, it hurt so bad to me. It felt like the ultimate loss. That my sister had truly won even though she had never even known she was playing this silly little war game.”

Ji-yun laughed bitterly and I wondered just how much pain she had been holding inside of her. Just minutes ago I had been thinking I would never forgive her, but now with the truth in the palm of my hand I couldn’t help but want to change my mind and forgive her if forgiveness would be the last gift I could grant her.

“That night,” she whispered in a dark, guilt ridden voice which told me she was remembering the night of the car crash. “I lost it. I just lost it and wanted everything to end. If I was going to die, I might as well die of my own accord.”

My heart twisted at her words. To want to die because you knew you were and always would be alone with no one but death as a constant companion, always looking over your shoulder. What sort of life was that? A living death essentially.

“Time was ticking.” She whispered. “I don’t have much time left.”

I didn’t like the tone she was using. It was bleak, but at the same time there was the feverish edge of an unpredictable person warning that he or she was about to do something inexplicably dangerous. Like jump of a cliff or standing in from an incoming train.

Then it came. Ji-yun leaned her head over mine so that her long, black hair which fell to her waist now covered the both of us, forming a black curtain to our own little world.

“I want to apologize for everything I did, Sanghyun.” She breathed. “I know words will never make up for everything I caused. For the rift I created between you and Ji-eun, for the pain that came from the following days, but I had to say something.”

“Ji…yun…” My mouth was completely dry as I saw her pink lips right above mine, her dark eyes searing into mine.

 “And because I still have something to tell you.” She continued, seemingly unperturbed by our closeness.

“What’s…that?” I my lips and her eyes flashed like black lightning. Her neckline fell down and I saw her dark, jagged scar peep out.

“That I know I’m dying and my time is short and I don’t want you to think that this is a form of blackmail…but…I want you to come back to me.”

“What?” I asked with a dry mouth. “Come back…?”

“Yes.” She repeated herself. “I want you to come back to me, be with me even if it’s only for a short while. Stay with me, comfort me, love me…because…I still you love you…”

A/N - Um so yes, I'm not a doctor or a medicine student so I'm not totally sure if my description of batten's disease is entirely correct or not but it fit the type of disease I wanted regardless. Hope it wasn't too mind boggling, but, well the nxt chapter should be less textbook like and more action-y. Next chapter, Ji-yun and Ji Youngs relationship is explaine from the beginning! And my update might be a lil late tomorrow coz my flight touches down late~~~ but until then!

And recommendation of the day is Silver Lining by dexajaA Sanghyunxjieun story, but unfortunately there's only a few chapters. Buuut Sanghyun here is super y and super cold, totally badass~~~~