The night looks breathtaking, it is indeed perfect and Hongbin believes that escaping the crowded gathering at his residence and reaching the grand gardens that surround the place was the greatest idea he has had the whole night. He walks off alone as the sound from the music filling the salon he had been at becomes less and less audible the farther his steps take him.

And his steps decide to take him to the person he has wanted to see all night, as if they knew all along where he’d rather be, the one person who aimed at his heart directly and had successfully stolen it for herself. It doesn’t take long for him to smile, it doesn’t take long for his heart to skip beats upon seeing her right in front of him, looking dazzling enough that she could beat the beauty of any flower or star.

It has been months since they met each other, yet he feels like it has been longer than that, it feels like an eternity he believes. He doesn’t ever want to see an end to his time with her and when he hears her speak that night, he listen to her ask the question he has been longing to hear for a long time. It is the precise question he wanted to listen to, and he wonders if it is because he may be connected to her on some deep level. Or if it is fate. It is fate, he tells himself and he acknowledges that he is being cheesy but that doesn’t matter at this point.

“Have you ever fallen in love with someone to the point of madness?” Hongbin hears her ask with an unfading smile that warms his heart as soon as the melody of her voice utters that question. It is you, I love to the point it borders insanity, he wants to claim, “I have” her voice states in a whisper that sends shivers down his spine in expectation, “I love you to the point of madness” she softly declares. Her voice is filled with all the love in the world and her eyes gaze at him, as though there was nowhere else for her to gaze in the world—because she feels that upon confessing her immeasurable and undying love for Hongbin, the only place her eyes long to be looking at is him. And to him, she is his whole world. He can relate to what she is feeling right now as he has also been dying to voice the words locked in his heart that have been waiting to make themselves audible—he would even allow for the whole world to hear them, and if he could, he would undoubtedly shout them out for every single soul to hear.

“What I want to say is that I’m madly in love with you” he sees her playing with her hair shyly, biting on her bottom lip as her gaze now is on the floor trying to avoid his. He knows she is embarrassed but hearing those words just make him even more ecstatic than he was.

His lips curve into a soft smile that brightens everything that surrounds them both and makes her heart skip as his speeds up after hearing her words full of love, his dimples becoming visible in a way that just melts her heart and makes a smile form in her lips in response, “And I to the point of insanity” he confesses, feeling as if he was chained up to her very being. For his soul, his heart and mind are hers and hers only. Hongbin just wishes for this to last forever and not get forgotten in the depths of time, for their story to be engraved in the sky like the vast quantity of stars that are illuminating them on this very night.

“Just take more of me, I was struck down by the arrow you shot” he declares as he approaches her and holds her in his arms “Take more of me” a whisper escapes his lips and softly brushes against her ear, “Take all of me”.

From that day onwards, Hongbin sees his life as complete, his days as complete the moment he sees her or speaks to her. At times he can’t help feeling like he may die from sweetness overdose, but he tries his best to restrain those feelings and accept that it is a part of being in love. And even if he can’t stand being cheesy, he does, just so he can’t put a smile on her face.

However, as time passes, since that fated day Hongbin also can’t help but dislike it when he sees her at times smiling to colleagues at work. Or when he sees her being kind to other men and he tries to fight those feelings, trying to remember that it means nothing but kind gestures. She is in love with me, right? You love me, right? He asks himself. She belongs to me, right? He manages to convince himself that maybe he is just being too paranoid about little actions that are nothing but friendly gestures from her, so he never mentions them.

It doesn’t mean anything, he repeats, incessantly. It has been a year since that day, he has proposed to her and all of her belongs to him-- she will belong to him in every way. Those little things don’t mean anything, he says to himself. He tries to blame the nature of his thoughts on paranoia-- that he is only exaggerating and possibly being overly dramatic.

 And he doesn’t make mention of any of the things that are constantly bothering him out of fear she might think he is going to react in an aggressive way.

However, Hongbin thinks that now he may have the right to actually feel something is off. She has become distant in a way he doesn’t like, her mind always seems to be everywhere else but on him. And he thinks he is going insane the night he arrives at their apartment and sees a male figure that towers over his fiancée, arms wrapped around her frame tightly, holding the woman that belongs to him. But as he takes a step forward, said figure disappears from his sight, it vanishes right before his eyes and it leaves him in a state of utter confusion. 

He doesn’t mention anything that night when they both go to sleep, but he feels the need to hold her tight against his chest and not let go at all that night. She will think I have gone crazy for real and leave, his mind tells him. Yet he is always met with a loving touch on top of his hands, she still loves me, right?

Days go by, and Hongbin always sees that figure in his apartment, he sees the same man following his fiancée closely at work, when she is out and about, even when they have meetings at works. And it is starting to concern him, he thinks he should make an appointment with an specialist to know what is happening to him. However, he tosses the idea aside knowing that he has somewhere important to be at today.

He has to take the woman that will soon be his bride to an atelier so she can choose her dress for the day she is wed to him. He has heard it will bring bad luck if a man sees his fiancée with her wedding dress, but he doesn’t want to be superstitious. So he doesn’t mind, in fact, seeing her eagerly trying on different dresses until she finds ‘the one’ has him sharing the same feelings as her. Hongbin tries to reassure himself that he is doing the right thing by being here and taking in all the beauty from the woman he sees as his own.

But something doesn’t feel right, he can’t fight the thoughts that tell him that something is definitely strange in all this and for a reason he can’t seem to comprehend-he feels like someone is trying to steal the love of his life from his arms and right in his face. Hongbin feels concerned and he is seriously considering making an appointment with a psychologist, he needs to be reassured that he is probably just stressed and nothing is wrong with his mind--he wants reassuring words, he wants to know he is alright.

The moment he goes out of the changing room for a while to make himself feel at ease, he swears that at the corner of his eyes he sees someone walking right past him, slightly taller than him and with an almost porcelain complexion, the aura about him is almost otherworldly, mixed with eeriness that makes Hongbin’s steps abruptly come to a halt. Hongbin turns around rapidly but there is no trace of that presence and all that is left is a chilly sensation running through his whole system as though the air conditioning system had dropped many degrees in the blink of an eye.

He hastily makes his way inside the changing room only to be met with an unpleasant sight, the man he had seen walking past him is sitting beside his bride-to-be, his fingers are tracing the side of her arm and one of his hands is placed at her chin. Hongbin can only stare in shock, his eyes widening and his hand turning into a fist as he sees a man that isn’t himself laying hands on the woman that he loves, the woman that is his and his only.

What irks him more is the fact that she doesn’t seem to mind the contact, that she doesn’t even acknowledge his presence. Another man is touching her the day she is trying on the dress she is going to wear the day they finally belong to one another forever, and she is not doing anything to stop him. And this man dares approach her even more closely, carefully leaning towards her, coming closer to her neck and placing a kiss on that spot, his lips on a spot no one else was supposed to touch.

Anger is rapidly making Hongbin’s blood boil, and he snaps the moment his eyes meet with the man’s. A smirk drawn on his face, a smirk that is definitely the sign this stranger is mocking him, that he is enjoying seeing Hongbin infuriated. He can’t help the rage taking over him and he lunges their way, he wants to grab the male’s hand and toss him aside but instead, he ends up grasping her arm and making her yelp in pain. Hongbin doesn’t see the young male anymore, he only sees himself forcefully grabbing her, his eyes filled with fury.

She blinks as she looks into his eyes, “W-what is wrong with you Hongbin?” she stutters as she tries to look for an answer in his expression, in his eyes. She feels scared and Hongbin knows, but he is mad that she is looking at him clueless like nothing had happened.

He violently makes her rise to her feet and goes face to face with her, “Who was that?”

“What do you mean?” he hears her reply, he rolls his eyes when he hears her say this and even scoffs. It is even more irritating that she is playing dumb and pretending not to know what had happened.

“Drop the act!” Hongbin shouts, startling her, “Who have you been cheating on me with? Why have you been lying to me?!”

“What are you on about?!” she yells back, and he can see that anger is also taking hold of her but he really believes she has no right to be angry at him when she was the one being unfaithful to him and when she had waited until that day to make it known to him. To break the news to him in a significant moment like the one they were sharing. It hurts, he feels like his heart is shattering, Just why today? his mind asks him and the jealousy clouds him.

“Drop the damn act!” is what he yells before he grasps her wrist in his hand and drags her out of the place, not listening at all to her complaints and questioning, not wanting to listen to anything else until they are back at their apartment. Why is she doing this to me? He asks himself as he throws her inside his car and locks the door as she protests.

The ride is full of shouting from them both, accusations are being thrown left and right by Hongbin in his clouded state of mind, he can’t see clearly at all. He feels betrayed and at the same feels he has lost it when he remembers the young man he saw vanished from his sight as soon as he approached him, he still feels irritated by the smirk the man gave him and it only makes him speed up.

“Hongbin slow down!” she yells, but he won’t listen to her, “Slow down, don’t drive like that!”

“Why have you cheated on me?!” he shouts as a punch lands on the steering wheel, it startles them both, his actions surprise the two of them. And to him the fact that she went from Snow White to a witch overnight, meant something was clearly wrong.

“I haven’t cheated on you!”

“Shut up! Was I not enough to you? Where is your so called maddening love?!” He lets it all out, all the foreign feelings that had been slowly taking control of him are showing up in rising yells that are scaring him but that he can’t control, “Since when have you been deceiving me?!”

“I haven’t done that!” she denies, but he doesn’t seem to believe her.

“Since when have you made another man enter our home?! You took another man inside our home didn’t you?!”

“I haven’t at all! Are you crazy or what?!”

“You darned liar!”

The speed with which Hongbin is driving turns deadly, so deadly to the point all seems blurry in front of him, and he doesn’t slow down, he doesn’t want to slow down, she tries to get him to stop but Hongbin yells at her not to touch him.

And it gets to a point he feels he has no control, over his car, over himself, over his own feelings. He feels he has lost all control and it makes itself more evident when a car from the opposite lane almost crashes onto his own. Luck was only on his side for a short fragment of time though, and he accelerates uncontrollably and menacingly.

“I thought you were mine!” is the last thing Hongbin shouts as he loses control over his car, and at a deadly intersection, another car comes his way and plows into his vehicle, making it flip endlessly on the road, the car is rolling over the road and he is feeling each hit painfully. His w