Prince Caspian -Jung Yoonoh NCT

58. Spring

ONE YEAR LATER

"Yiseul?"

I know that voice, five years of history filed down into a single memory.

I turn, and there he is.

It doesn't matter how long it has been or what we last said to each other. He stands in the sunlight and I catch my breath. He takes a step forward and it’s summer, and he's kissing me, and I'm nineteen. He says my name and I’m eighteen, and in love for the first time all over again.

He is pale, almost pallid. All those months in hospital in China, and finally, the day when he was flown home to Korea in a private jet, all the months of rest and recuperation have helped to put the weight back on, slowly. He walks with a slight limp; in the early days he would close his eyes, and grip my hand tight when the pain came. Even now, I flinch at the recollection of those early days and nights, when he had clung to the edge of death, and later, mercifully, waking up, the harrowing ordeal that followed, the endless torment of constant, marrow-rotting pain.

"Yiseul," he says, and his voice drops so low that I can scarcely hear what he says. "I miss you."

"I've only been gone ten minutes." I breathe him in.

"It felt like ten years," he mutters.

"The washroom was full." But he only pulls me in tighter. "We're in a park," I laugh. "People are staring."

"Let them," he says arrogantly.

He folds me in tightly and wordlessly. "Would you like to hear a story?"

"I would love to hear a story."

"Once upon a time, there was a foolish man," he says, cradling my face. "One day, when the sun was high in the sky, he met a girl - a child, really - in a far away land on a windswept cliff."

"Oh, no," I say, softly. "No, he wasn't foolish. He was young and carefree and wanted nothing more than a stolen kiss."

"Did he steal a kiss?" he asks, smiling.

"To be honest," I say, "She did not put up any fight."

"She wanted him to kiss her?" he asks me. "And did she enjoy it? Did she fall in love with him?"

"The girl was very foolish," I say. "It was her first kiss, and she went home to her castle, and dreamt of him that night."

"Well," he says coolly, allowing a slightly mocking smile to lift one corner of his mouth, "he kissed her again the second time they met on a moonlit night by a pond on her eighteenth birthday..." He strokes my face tenderly. "But she was afraid, and she ran from him..."

"She was running from herself," I say, smiling, "but it was too late by then; she had already fallen in love with him, and she would be in love with him for the rest of her life."

"You loved me?" he says, his eyes very sad, "Even though I was an arrogant jerk?"

"I was a mere girl," I say, laughing. "Of course I loved you. You were handsome and dashing and everyone was in love with you."

He presses his forehead to mine, and I have the sensation that I am falling into his eyes.

"I was foolish," his voice cracks. "I should have told you that I loved you. I should have made it clear. But I didn't, and I lost you..."

"Oh, Jae," I say, smiling through my tears. "You never lost me. I was yours from the start."

I laugh softly and blink away my tears.

"You love me?" He wants reassurance, this new Jae, this broken Jae, no longer the shiny, arrogant Prince Caspian, brimming with youth and confidence, who fell at my feet that long-ago summer's day on a cliff in Cornwall, my precious, precious Jae, who came so close to losing his life, who, doctors say, may never be able to walk without a limp for the rest of his life. "Even though I broke your heart?" That familiar pain flickers in the depths of his eyes.

"Oh, Jae," I say, laughing again. "How silly you are!" I cradle his face, and kiss away his tears. "I fell in love with you when I was eighteen and you were thirty. I was a girl then and I am a woman now. But Jung Yiseul the girl loved you. Jung Yiseul the woman loves you. You are my best friend and my lover and I love you."

"Memory can be the most damnable thing at times," he says quietly. "I can never forgive myself for what I did to you."

I wrap my arms about his waist.

"Jae," I whisper, "I love you. I love you."

"Yiseul, my love," he says brokenly.

I lift my hand and cup it about one of his cheeks.

"I am sorry," he whispers. "I am so sorry."

He is apologizing for the pain and hurt of the past. For our baby. The child that we lost.

"Don’t be," I say, weeping. "Oh, don’t be." I look at him. "We can't stay paused forever, Jae. We have to stop looking backwards." I am crying, but smiling through my tears. "We should be looking forward to the future."

"Even though everything we have, everything we are, is created by the past?" he says.

"The past shaped us, but we can't let it dictate us," I say. "The present is what counts, and my present is you, Mark Caspian Jung. It's time to let go of the past."

We lie where we are for a while, on the river bank, gazing upward through leaves that are half green, half yellow to the cloudless blue of the sky beyond. I remember the heavy pull of despair, the dark days of bereftment, the long nights of loneliness. I remember, and then I close my eyes. Goodbye, my baby, my angel. Mummy loves you. Daddy loves you. Goodbye, and be free.

We get to our feet after a while, and turn to walk away in the direction of home. The leaves are even more yellow above my head here. It is undeniably autumn. Soon all the leaves would be down and it would be winter. But, with him by my side, my precious, precious Jae, I will look beyond winter to the spring that inevitably follows, bringing back colour and life and hope.

We walk away, and leave our sorrow and our pain and our hurt on the river bank.

He stops, just within sight of the apartment block, and there in the dark, beyond the light of the street lamps, cool tendrils of autumn mist curling about him, he turns to me, and takes my right hand in his, which is warm in contrast with my own - and he...

Oh, yes, he really does. He goes down on one knee before me.

"Yiseul, my darling, love of my life," he says, looking up at me, his very dark eyes soulful, almost worshipful, and surely many fathoms deep, "Will you do me the great honour of marrying me and making me the happiest of men?"

"I will," I say, and smile through a blur of tears.

He lifts my hand to his lips, and kisses it, and I feel the dampness on it, and when he looks up, his eyes are filled with tears.

I kiss him tenderly, and he kisses me back, my fiancé, soon to be my husband. The same awe overcomes me again: the same awe, the same searing happiness, the same throat-constricting realization that, this man, that I had almost lost, wants to marry me, and spend the rest of his life with me.

"I love you,  Jung Yiseul."

"I love you, Mark Jung, Caspian, Jae, Jaehyun, Jung Yoonoh."