What followed was chaos. The purple face. The choking. The screaming. The crying.

It was awful, and Arin had to sit there and watch the catastrophe unfold before her very eyes.

She cried so much, it felt like her heart was being ripped out of her chest.

Hyojung was also screaming and crying, trying to resuscitate her father. When he went limp, she just sobbed into his chest for a very long time.

When Hyojung lifted her head up to look at Arin, she looked furious, made apparent by the gleam of her protruding eyes and the grit of her teeth.

"Get out!" Hyojung yelled at her. "I don't want to see you anymore. Get out!"

That was yet another blow on an already battered soul. Hyojung had never spoken to her like that before. Hyojung had never looked at her like that before, like she was a monster.

She wanted to get out anyways. She had managed to pull her other wrist out and used her free hands to untie her ankles. As soon as she was free, she went out the door and onto the rooftop.

Arin's body froze in the frigid outside air and the falling snow. She walked up to the ledge, wrapping her arm around her shivering torso. All the rooftops she could see around her were covered in blankets of white.

She wished she could jump, but she if she did, she would just come right back.

She had nowhere to go, so she just sat in a fetal position, trying to forget what just happened, trying to make herself believe it was all just a horrible dream.

It was too cold to be sitting at such an altitude with the meager amount of clothing that she had on, clothing that was now getting wet with melted snow. However, she simply could not hear her body complain over the self-loathing insults she was screaming in her head.

She had killed five people up until now. When she killed Joshua, she had Hyojung to calm her down and convince her it was not her fault. Now, she had no one. Now, Hyojung, who had been her source of comfort, blamed her and thought her a murderous monster

Before long, her body could not hold out any longer, and she passed out in the snow.

-

She awoke in Jeonghan's bed with a sore throat and dry lips. Despite the piles of blankets over her and the cranked up heating, she was shivering.

She was so tired and weak that she could barely think let alone move. Before long she passed out again.

She found consciousness again in her dreams, where she saw Hyojung, purple spirits swirling around her. They suddenly faded out, and Hyojung dropped dead. Then Dasinai. Then Hoshi. Then the rest of MRS, all together all at once. She saw herself walking in the underground MRS headquarters, stepping over the scattered corpses of mages, including children, including babies.

No! Hyojung was going to close the portal now. Hyojung was going to bring about this massacre, and Arin felt like she needed to get up and stop it. She was the only one who knew it was going to happen now.

She needed to wake up.

But where was Hyojung? Where is she? Where is she?

"Where is she?" she heard outside her head. It was not her own voice, but someone else's.

"Where is she?" yelled Woozi right outside the bedroom door.

The voice brought her to her senses, and her eyes flew open. She was finally awake.

-

She pulled herself off her bed despite her weak knees and sore throat. She saw that she had on different clothes: a sweater and sweatpants that belonged to Jeonghan. She remembered them from when she used to do his laundry.

She figured that Jeonghan was the one who had found her passed out on the roof and so carried her into his apartment and changed her clothes to help stabilize her body temperature. She tried not to let herself think too much about that, and instead focus on finding Hyojung.

When she finally found her footing, she went for the bedroom door. She heard Jeonghan and Woozi arguing.

"What did you do to her?!" Woozi yelled.

When she opened the door and revealed herself, Woozi's eyes widened.

"Arin, are you okay?" he asked.

Jeonghan began to yell. "Where are you going, Missy? You think you can get away that easy?"

"What is wrong with you?" Woozi said to Jeonghan, horrified.

"Go away and stop meddling!" Jeonghan yelled.

"I have to go," she interrupted them. Her voice was hoarse and it hurt to speak.

"Go where?" Jeonghan yelled. "If you die on my property and I have to deal with a lawsuit, I'll ing eat your corpse and..." he continued to threaten her, but she blocked him out and tried to push past him. Jeonghan blocked the door.

"Hey, let her go!" Woozi yelled.

"If I let her go, she'll die!" Jeonghan spat. "I will not let her die!"

Woozi narrowed his eyes at him. "What?"

"I'm not going to die," she said. "I need to stop Hyojung," she said.

"Your body temperature is low,"Jeonghan replied in a sputter. "You need to stay warm if you're going to recover!"

Arin did not have time to argue with him about this. She didn't care about her body temperature; that was nothing compared to what was at stake now: the lives of thousands of mages.

"Why are you being so nice?" Arin responded as loudly as her sore throat could manage. She wanted to manipulate him again, to manipulate him into thinking that the unkind thing to do, the one warranted by his curse, was to leave her alone and stop protecting her.

"Nice?" Jeonghan scoffed. "Keeping you alive is my way of torturing you. You don't deserve the release of death. You denied it to me, so I will do the same for you."

"Then why not torture me for real?" Arin said, trying to make him see the flaw in his logic. "You can hurt me and me, cut off my fingers, gouge out my eyes. Why are you letting me dirty your clothes and sleep in your bed?"

Jeonghan clenched his fists. He looked like he was trying to restrain himself, to think himself out of doing the things that Arin was suggesting.

Jeonghan's curse was like a mind game. No matter what he did, even if what he was doing was kind, as long as he convinced himself that it was unkind, he could do it. If his actions suddenly seemed kind to him, he could no longer do them. Right now, she could tell that she had confused him.

"What you're describing is cruelty," he reasoned. "And I can be unkind without being cruel. I'm working within that range between unkindness and cruelty, and I choose to stay on the lower end of that."

"Relative kindness is still kindness," she said. "You're being kind, Jeonghan."

"Stop playing with my head like this!" he yelled as he pressed his palms on either side of his head.

"You mean like the way you played with my heart in the elevator this morning?" Arin yelled back, remembering his heartfelt confession. "Screw you, Jeonghan! I hate you!"

Arin did not even realize that she said his name. It came out too quickly, in a rage of pouring emotions and cloudy judgement resulting from her shivering body and lightheadedness.

Arin gasped when she realized, covered , and waited to see if she had made a huge mistake.

Nothing happened.

"Screw you too, Arin," Jeonghan mumbled, lower lip quivering, eyes wide and glistening. He didn't hang around for long enough for Arin to retract what she said, to tell him she didn't mean it. He rushed into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him, and Arin was free to leave.

She considered for a moment going back to speak to him, but the urgency of the Hyojung situation made her forget about that. She didn't have time to mend Jeonghan's hurt feelings, or even to worry about her conscience. She needed to stop Hyojung.

She rushed past a confused Woozi, up the stairs, toward her old home on the rooftop.

She hoped to find Hyojung there, but there was nothing. The room looked far too tame and normal for a place where someone had just died the previous night. Even the chair that she was tied to with rope was pushed into the corner, and the rope nowhere to be found. It was just her old room, the smiling faces of Chilli looking at her through the posters on her wall.

Arin also found her phone, the one Hyojung's girlfriend had taken from her, on the bed.

She found a text message from Hyojung, who was still labeled "~" on her phone.

Dearest Arin,

I am so sorry for yelling at you. I hate to think that those yells would be my last words to you. I didn't mean to yell, and I could never blame you for what happened to Dad. I love you, Ar, and I always will. I was just too emotional. I'm so, so sorry.

When your curse activated, a lot of magic came out of it, so now I have enough to close the portal. I guess our father's death was a necessary sacrifice for the greater good. I think he would be happy to know he died for such a cause.

I know you love Jeonghan, or you're starting to. I'm not sure if it's romantic love or something else, but whatever it is, please be happy together when and if your curses fade away. Closing the portal might do the trick. I really hope it does; I would love to give you the gift of a regular love life as a parting gift. You both deserve happiness after all you've been through.

I also want to apologize for the secrecy and for hiding so much from you. I thought that the less I told you, the better I was protecting you, but now I see that I only made you lose trust in me. I hope you don't remember me as the lying, conniving stranger named Hyojung who trapped you in a building and tied you to a chair, but as ~, a friend, a sister, a guardian angel, as you once put it.

This is my goodbye message to you. I eliminated the enchantment on the building, so you're free to leave. Please be careful out there, and live your life well.

With all of my love, forevermore,

~