your hand gestures, your eyes they are faded but not gone
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People said that if you loved someone, or even cared about them deeply, you would never forget some things about them. That you would remember the sound of their laugh, the way they smiled, the color of their eyes in the sunlight. Little habits. Little things.
That wasn't true.
When Taeyong emerged from the darkness, he looked...different. I didn't know if it was because of the years, or if my memory was failing me, but he did. The sound of his voice was almost alien when he grunted—I could only recognize the barest hits of it, the rough undertone, a syllable there. One of the few things I remembered as vividly as day was the shape of his hands. The pattern of veins on the back of his left hand, in the shape of a wishbone. The mark under one side of his lower lip. The dark glint in his eyes, like smokeless fire, when he looked at me. His black leather jacket.
Little things.
"Hi," he said.
My throat felt closed. There was no tug in my gut, no feeling of a free fall, nothing like the world being swept out from under my feet. Just a blankness, a calm before the storm, the only thought in my head being Taeyong Taeyong Taeyong alive safe dream nightmare Taeyong.
"Hi," I said.
Vernon's knuckles were white, veins and scars standing out a shade darker, but the gun was steady in his death grip, pointed straight at Taeyong's heart. If it hadn't been for me, he probably would have shot him already. I was torn between being awed at his control and angry at the fact that he was still suspicious.
"He's not going to kill me," I told him, but he didn't even look at me. The conviction in my voice was only a step short of bold stupidity, but short nonetheless.
"You don't know that," Vernon said. I could hear him fighting to control the snarl in his voice, the veins bulging at the side of his neck like cables, a symbol of his anger. "You know what else you don't know? That he's been with the Lees for the past three years. The same Lees that have been trying to kill you since before you were born."
His words were jarring, but I schooled my expression into a mask of calm. Taeyong was staring at me, hard, and I was staring at him right back. The last memory I had of him—with red eyes, my face in his hands and I love you on his lips—had faded into the depths of my mind, but now, looking at him, with red lips and I love you in his eyes, the force of it was so much more.
"You killed Baekhyun," I said, not taking my eyes off him, but Vernon knew I was talking to him. I could tell by the way he stiffened in my peripheral vision. "To 'protect me'."
"He didn't join the Lees to protect you—"
"I know. He did it to protect himself." I interrupted him mid-sentence. My voice was confident, but I couldn't help but falter in my belief. Wasn't I the one who had doubted Taeyong of conspiring with his family against me? How could I really trust him?
