Hidden Marks || BTS || COMPLETED

Thoughts and Future (A/N)

Hello, so my story is coming to the point where I don't necessarily feel is the first part of it coming to an end, but actually the second part if being finished. The first part ended with chapter 20: Lie so Beautiful. For those who forgot, its where Sera and Lilia finally talk, where Lilia confesses all of her 'sins' and wrongdoing and is a crucial part of the story, that allows Sera to finally begin picking up the pieces of her happiness and start putting them back together. 

I didn't want to initially send Lilia off, I wanted to do more with her character, build off of the relationships she had with all the characters in my book, and yet I felt if I kept her around, nothing would progress. For Sera, seeing Lilia every day, at the same place where her soulmates are, will never allow the opportunity for Sera to actually initiate anything with her soulmates, and I feel like it would have just been an endless cycle of fake smiles and tears if I kept Lilia around. 

However, every now and then, I keep toying with the idea of bringing Lilia back, but it won't be happening for a while at least, not in the part where we are about to get into. 

The first part which is chapter 1 to chapter 20 was all about Sera's inability to move on from the past, it was filled with self-depreciation, unresolved grief, and emotional pain that always outweighed the physical pain. It was about how Sera was enduring all this pain behind a smile, due to a promise she made with her brother Ji-Ho, to make sure Lilia was happy. Sera sacrificed everything to Lilia's happiness, even her own soulmates, because she blamed herself for Ji-Ho's death, that it was her fault in the first place that she couldn't be with her soulmate, because she killed Lilia's soulmate. At this point of the story, Sera wasn't thinking Ji-Ho as her brother, but as Lilia's soulmate, who died because he was saved Sera. 

Sera always believed that one's own happiness always depended on the soulmate, so when Ji-Ho died saving Sera, she believed she took Lilia's happiness away, and the only way to repent was to give up her own happiness. 

Sera never mourned properly for the death of her brother, the short therapy she took never helped her, and in the end, it caused her to be held back from her past relationships and events. 

Even Sera's own family never properly comforted Sera about the death of Ji-Ho, with her parents being ignorant of Sera's pain, and to her sister, Chu-Hei, leaving shortly after the funeral, and never holding a proper conversation with Sera. Even if they did attempt to console her, they would say the lines "It's not your fault," which does nothing for Sera. 

All this lead to Sera, in a way, seeing Ji-Ho in Lilia, and in doing so, through sacrificing her happiness for Lilia, it was a way for her to attempt to gain forgiveness from Ji-Ho. Sera couldn't differentiate Lilia from Ji-Ho for the longest of time until chapter 16: Behind the smile when Jun was talking to Sera about Ji-Ho passing. 

"I killed him!" Sera sobbed out, refusing to believe he was even close to being significant as Lilia was to Ji-Ho. She wouldn't be selfish and ever hold herself to that high of regard, "If it weren't for me he would have been a cardiologist by now! He could have been alive, happy, with all of us, with his soulmate." 

And a single line which helped Sera the most throughout her years of suffering was when Jun said, "But he isn't Sera." 

Even Lilia pointed out Sera's struggle to move past from Ji-Ho:

"You don't mean that," Lilia wasn't angry, nor sad, "You see me like the last piece to Ji-Ho, that's why you're clinging on too tight. Sera...out of everyone, Ji-Ho cherished and loved you the most. The person I've become, I'm ashamed of, and Ji-Ho would have hated the person I am now, that's why I have to leave, so I could at least try to gain his forgiveness to what I have done."