FALLING SLOWLY ||Complete||

Viper

Few hours ago…

“I couldn’t do anything…” he said then, he says now. Attorney Yoo remembers it well, the glazed eyes of her firstborn, deep set in a bony and pale face. He keeps his hands clasped together on the varnished surfaced  desk he sits behind, head bowed and with dirt smudged cheeks. She watches his chipped nails digging deeper and deeper into the flesh of his other hand as he stutters through his story.

“She was angry - she is usually angry. She tried to burn me - then the house was on fire and I tried to get her out.” He stops and looks at her, his eyes so like her late father’s pleading - appealing. “But she wasn’t moving - she was too heavy. It was too hot -” his voice breaks off and he shivers, flinches and squeezes his eyes shut. “I couldn’t do anything!”

His shirt gapes open at the collar where a button is missing, and a healing bruise on his bony chest peeps through. She gathers him close, running fingers through his hair, tucking him into her embrace so that he would not see her own tears.

Too late she feels - too late to save her son.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs soothingly. “I’m here now - it’s going to be alright.”

They had been forced apart for too long that he clings to her like a lifeline, unlike any of her other children. He makes her the centre of his world. Myung Sung can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed, for she had never been loved like that.

Perhaps, she thinks, it is because both of them has gone through the hell to find each other - her firstborn understands her better than any of her children. He knows her goals, just as they form in her mind, her unspoken wishes, her half formed prayers. And he tries - toils - to his best to make her happy.

He just needed a little love - she thinks - overwhelmed and he would die for her. Or perhaps kill - now a little voice whispers.

Her hand shakes as she shuts the bathroom door behind her and her eyes sweep over the room to settle on the bloodied body now settled on the couch, limp and pale and gut wrenching. Wook crouches beside him and for a startling second she watches immobilized as he pours over, brushing mattered hair off with nonchalant fingers and checking for concussions.

“I couldn’t do anything - he’d heard everything.” He had said, with hands stained from his half brother’s blood. “You were right mother, he has too much of his father in him.”

It is his way of subtly reminding her that she never showed much interest in Yo for reasons twisted and selfish. She had played out her own baby’s death, smuggling him under the nose of her husband to the protection of her old lover. Framing him into a situation where with a few camera footage she could show that he had deliberately tried to harm her and her unborn babies - resulting in the stillbirth of one. That old trick her father had pulled on her helps Myung Sung put the lash around her husband once more. The revenge she has planned for him is to be served years later - much much colder. For making her to choose between her children, for his twisted greed that holds on to her at the cost of his loved ones. But for now she uses him to prepare her stage, brake the son he so lovingly brought into their family folds with his own hands by making him believe in a lie that she takes pleasure in drilling into him without his knowledge. Detaching herself from Yo was necessary to show him that she was grieving, that she hated the child who had failed to aid in her ambitions.

She had never estimated how good she had become in playing her own emotions, now that her own children believed in her duplicity. Yo was lost to her the moment her husband took him under his wing, but focused on her own plans for revenge she had hardly noticed how the distance grew between them. She was much more focused upon braking her husband’s favorite son into pieces he could never put together again - with the help of the greed of that man himself.