Looking For Love(ATEEZ)

4.11

I call out, "Leo?"

He appears before me, this time blue, his gaze down, as if feeling sorry for me.

"Why did he kill me?"

I notice tears fall down my eyes.

I wipe them away.

He says, "Young lady, you have fully completed your mission for this birth. You will be allowed to transmigrate again."

I ask him again, "Why? What did I do? I never ill treated him, never scorned him, treated him like an equal, I was the first one who extended a hand of friendship to him. Then why!?"

He apologetically glances at me and throws his hands in the air making me close my eyes. A flash of information travels through my brain.

It feels like I am in Wooyoung's body, looking at the world through his eyes. It all feels like a dream. But then again, could a dream feel this degree of real? And why would I dream in HD?

His story begins playing out.

A bastard prince.

The label that the Liang had left on him.

He was cursed at, bullied, scorned by his other step brothers and sisters, just because he was born to a maid.

I see it all, I can feel the pain. It is as if I inhabit his body, watching it all occur, the conversations play out in my brain, but I can't move the body on my own accord.

Being kicked in the dirt, soil stuffed in his mouth, being tossed around, shackles around wrists. Being poisoned by the Queen, narrowly escaping that too. Being pushed into the large flooding river when he didn't know how to swim, being half alive when the flood subsides and returning to the palace just to know that nobody even knew he was gone.

He waited in a cave for five days after he was washed ashore by the flood, fending for himself, failed attempts at generating fire and keeping himself warm.

Being held against the door, physically abused by the Queen as she nearly kills him. The king, well, he never bothered. He had just enough sons to compete for the crown. He had space to neglect one, especially one who was a bastard.

He vomits immediately after drinking the soup, which he later knew to be poisoned. Severe insomnia, sleeping on an empty stomach, waking up just to be bullied.

Beaten over and over again, pleading with those animals, telling them to stop, crying and begging, but they derive pleasure out of his sufferings, they love torturing him, a bit too much.

Life was hell. Anxiety attacks, but no one to save him from that. He could tumble down the whole palace, and no one would bother. Because who bothers about a bastard child?

Slowly and gradually turning emotionless, stoic, handling all the insults hurled his way with an empty mind. Being forced to kneel in front of the king's chambers just because he vomitted out the poisoned food. Multiple times.

He escaped each time. He didn't know whether the Lord was kind to keep him alive or brutal to make him live a pathetic life.

He never learnt warfare, he wasn't considered worth the effort to teach. He was taught to be a scholar, though. That was the necessary rule for all princes there. No one knew him. Even the servants treated him like their own slave.

I tear up, bursting into crying.

I might not have felt this way if I was just a passer by, watching. But this was different, I was in his body, feeling each and every of his emotion, feeling the scorn, feeling the flickering flames of hatred that consumed him, feeling the monstrous desires, feeling the anxiety, feeling the insomnia, feeling the physical pain and mental agony. The feeling of being invisible, yet the easy target everytime.