"Hello little brother!"

The world comes to him in bits and pieces. Stinging, burning and blistering pain follows. Blood drips on his lashes in thick, heavy drops of sticky darkness as they flutter open. The first face that comes into focus is of his brother - contorted with malice as his hand fists into his hair, tugging upwards until his vision is filled with the burning hatred in his eyes.

"Wook..." So groans, the word punctured with a puff of blood. His lungs burn at the effort as if he had stayed underwater for hours without breaking the surface. "I should have known."

"Of cause - you should have known..." His assent is followed by a knee to his solar plexus that sends him backwards in to the freezing ground. The sickly crunch and the blood that fills his mouth stills him for a moment. The ceiling above is yellowed with time and crisscrossed with cobwebs. Wook continues to talk just as he soaks up the details of his surrounding - something locked behind the deepest corner of his mind unlocking itself. He has been here before.

"You should have known I am not your plaything - not this time around. You can't give her to me and take her back whenever you please - no brother - you can't!"

His limbs feel heavy as lead, unheeding to his commands. With great effort he rolls off, avoiding the next strike aimed at him and the attempt is rewarded with maniacal laughter. "Oh yes, how does that feel exactly? Being unable to lift a finger in your defence? Not very pretty I assume - I used to hate it. When you did the very same thing to me."

It clicks slowly, the possibility of the impossible. When their faces come close again and the derailed Wook, breathes down at him the words of conformation.

"I'd rather had you kill me - the man who snatched my throne and my woman."

"You -" he rasps, feeling more and more like a rug doll in Wook's hand as the time passes. "You remember?"

"Yes..." He hisses in his ear, tugging at his hair until the pain cuts through his head injury and curls somewhere deep in his brain. "That is exactly why I decided to improvise your ending." He releases his grip, letting him fell face first into the freezing ground. "You see brother, Omma wants you dead. She has a nice replacement in mind for you - a man who had lived in shadows for years. He could come out wearing your skin now. Only your father has been thwarting her since he got the winds of her plan for revenge. A long story - but you are too hard to replace with all your glory."

There is another wet crunch as he kicks and So's eyes snap open.
"Wake up!" He continues irked. "How dare you sleep while I'm talking?" Another kick, that makes him cough up blood. "So yeah - first we had to strip that off. Most of things your daddy dearest kept you away from - are you even aware what's up with your public image little brother?"

His mind is blinded with pain, the inability to defend himself but still Wook's words bring about recollections of almost scandals he had avoided over the time. Even the alleged doping incident did not turn into a stain -

"Because of your father! He has a nice way of wrapping it all up, wiping your record clean - his star athlete son! All to save your worthless skin - from the burn of his own sins. So yeah - once your career was dealt with she wanted you out of the way. Sad - because I won't let you die so easily." With the sole of his shoe crushing between his collar bones, pressed against his wind pipe hard enough to make him choke, Wook peers down at him - his eyes gleaming in a delirious red as he gargles for air. "It is me returning a thousand year old favor - brother. You won't die until you see how everything is snatched from you - one by one, starting from beloved Ha Jin..." He chuckles - a poisonous dark sound and presses harder. "Mu... Yo... every one of them - and the funny thing is you will be blamed for it all. I'll keep you alive little brother -" he eases the pressure and sighs. "Until you beg me. Oh how the times have turned - soon I'll have you begging me - brother!"

**

"Let me GO!" Yeon Hwa screams at the top of her lungs, only to have the sound resonate back to her from the bare walls. The man who looks so different to what she remembered him to be, has an unyielding hold on her. She stumps her feet on the ground, and growls when Wook enters.

"Traitor!"

"Who? Me?" Wook raises an eyebrow. Her eyes trails down to his hands stained with blood and she screams again.

"Don't you dare touch him!"

"Sis - cousin," he corrects himself mid sentence. "You hate him - remember?"

"What did you do to him? You weren't supposed to touch him. He is only to be used -"

"Oh Hae Soo will come." He replies nonchalantly. "And So will serve his purpose. But you dear cousin - did you really think I would let you, use me as means to your own ends?"

His hand fists her hair and he pulls her away from the man that held her still, dragging her to one of the dusty windows.

"You want to know where he is? There he is!"

Her gasp is harsh and Wook chuckles in her ear.

"I caught a whiff of your plan as soon as you volunteered to bring him - instead of involving us ." He adds the last word with a glance at his partner in dark dealings. "All tall claims of hatred and lost love - you just can't help but fall at his feet- huh? You pretended to help me - and my mother so that you would know everything we were planning to do. So that you could twist the same against us..."

She whimpers, when he twists her hair harder.

"You'd have us kill her and stage yourself the savior by saving So and trapping me?" Malice drips from his tone and Yeon Hwa flinches, her face twisted with pain. "The concerned cousin who turns up a little too late to save Soo, but would manage to help So? Oh the great Yeon Hwa who even saved the little girl from the bad wolves - I knew it the moment you took Kyeong Hwa. You wouldn't have needed her to bring in So, you could have easily injected him a sedative."

"You are wrong -" she lies through gritted teeth. "Why would I threaten him then, if I was planning to save him? Your dog heard me - I used the girl to blackmail him!"

"Oh but you did that for that very reason - right?" Breathes Wook. "You knew my hound was lurking around and you changed the plan on the spot. Had you not known - you wouldn't have stepped out of the car. No - that was not the moment to face So. It would only incriminate you! You wouldn't have dragged the girl out. You did it the moment you saw who awaited your catch. You did it to get him on a CCTV. - Well sadly, by the time someone finds your CCTV, it will be too late for your love."

"What did you give him?" She demands, struggling against his hold, sneering with her teeth bared.

"A little dose of something magical," chuckles Wook. "I can't have him striking back at me right?"

"Coward!" She spits trying to claw at him.

"Perhaps -" Wook pushes her away, straight to the hands of the man who grips her shoulders and pulls her towards a chair. "But no longer your pawn."

"You can't do this! My uncle will never let you!" She screams as he fastens her to the chair.

"Oh my dear Yeon Hwa - your uncle has made a fool out of you. Because you were the only one he could have integrated into Mu's household. The unassuming but very talented nurse. The only person Yo would have believed worked for him while you played our double agent in reality. He held on to you because you were needed to do what I cannot. Do you really think it meant you would get a part of the inheritance? Do you really think my parents would cast me away on your favor?"Again is the word that he swallows. Looking at his once sister with contempt. The woman who had once used him to get her own crown and then discarded him without a second thought to advance her ambition. Using Yeon Hwa has always been a part of his plan as much as replacing Myung Hee with Hae Soo had been. He had just wanted to give her a taste of the bitter regrets she had left him with a thousand years ago, for she is still the same person, the woman who poisoned and then played the victim so that So would survive, the woman claimed to hate his enemy until the moment she gave herself up to him - only this time, Wook was a step ahead.

"Lock her up," he tells the hound. "We don't want her stirring up trouble when your Soo turns up right?"

With one last flash of a blade like smile, he shuts the door to Yeon Hwa's screams. His sister has not learned to take defeat gracefully even in thousand years.

**

There's nothing novel in him avoiding her, 'Mini - Migraine' is his nick name for her. But, So had never gone out of his way to hide himself in the shadows before. The sole purpose of a teenage Ha Jin in accompanying her cousin to this boring family dinner had been the fact that it was held in the Hwang manner - therefore a chance to meet So, outside the confines of their school. She has had no luck so far, until she stumbled across him in the wildness of their rooftop garden.

He is curled into a ball, forehead resting on his knees, partially hidden behind a grove of bamboos and ghostly lit by the bluish green aqua - lights of the pond.

"Go away!" He growls when she draws closer, trying to sound threatening but failing when his voice stutters. "Leave!"

"So?" Her hand shakes when she reaches out, afraid and concerned at the same time. He snatches her wrist before she manages to touch him and jerks it away, recoiling into the shadows faster than she could blink.

"I said Leave!"

"Do you have fever?" She moves closer concerned with how warm his touch was, unmindful of his indifference her palms comes to guide his face up from his knees. "You are burning up So!"

She had wanted to ask him how the vacation was - but the idea dies as her eyes take in the secrets he had tried to hide in the shadows. A purple bruise blooms along his jaw, slightly swollen and painfully dark. A bluish ring surrounds the eye that his bangs keep discreetly hidden. She brushes the hair back, revealing the heartbreaking damage against the pale skin.

Noticing where her eyes remain, he makes a move to cover his face with a hand, trying to twist away from the line of her sight. But her hands are too insistent as they hold his face in place. Defeated, he drops his eyes and mumbles under his breath.

"Don't look."

Hesitantly, she traces the bruise along his jaw drawing her hand away when he flinches.

"Do you have ointment for this?" She asks instead. His eyes widens a little. "No? You should get one. And some concealer too - unless you are planning to hide here forever."

"Doesn't matter -" she hardly catches his reply. But there is too much darkness in it for her to pursue, instead she tries to sound lighter.

"What are you doing up here?"

"Trying to sleep -" He rocks himself, arms wrapped around his knees. When she doesn't press him for answers he finds the silence too still to tolerate. Instead he talks - first time in a while, with the only person who had ever cared enough to stay around and listen. "I can't sleep here - downstairs."

"Why are there monsters under your bed?" She asks with a chuckle and he shivers wondering if he could tell her the monster was not under his bed, but that used to be where he hid from the monster that roamed the halls of this house - the monster that had taken over his mother. But he was too big for his hiding places now - too old for his fears.

"I don't like it here." He says instead. "I feel - I feel -" breath clots in his throat and he rubs it with a hand, clutching his heart with it when the feeling increases. "Air -" he chokes squeezing his eyes shut, unable to voice the terrors of his own home. Her arms comes around him automatically, soft and hesitant - the arms of a girl who is still learning to embrace, who wants to but knows not how to soothe. Still she tries to imitate what her mother used to do when she wakes up from a particular nightmare and holds his head against the crook of her neck, rubbing his back with small hands.

"Breathe -" she tells him. "I'm here."

"I can't -" he rasps, his uneven exhales trickle her nape. "I'm trapped. The door is locked. Sh - she - always locks the door."

"There's no door here..." she tells him, beginning to worry how warm he is, and how feverish he sounds. "Can't breathe -"

As his fingers that claw at his neck moves, in the bluish light she notices the faint finger marks left against his pale throat, scratches of nails like marks of talons are hidden under tiny stains of dried blood.

"Can't sleep - she - she'll kill me. Can't sleep, until Aboji comes." His head rests heavy on her shoulder as exhaustion takes him and he collapses against her. Ha Jin tastes the salt of her own tears as she holds him close, no longer the star athlete of their school but a broken - battered boy, who she has no idea how to save from his own nightmares. "Stay -" he murmurs against her skin. "I want to rest - please stay just another moment."

"I'm not going anywhere So," she says softly, and shifts into a more comfortable position, with his head on her lap and her hand threading through his hair. "Sleep. I'm here."

That is where she first meets the senior Hwang, when he rushes through the grove of dark trees, beside himself with worry and asks her the same question.

"Where is my son?"

A little less than a decade later, she stands in his monochrome office, as the man paces in front of her like a wounded lion. It reminds her of snippets from a thousand years ago, of the same man - sitting top a throne, dictating their lives.

"Do you know what happens if he doesn't make it to the investigation, Ha Jin Ssi?" He demands when he stops in front of her. "They have a CCTV with his face - he will be ruined if they issue warrants!"

"He went with the detectives! And he was with me!" She cries in desperation. "He didn't go anywhere near Hwang Mu Ssi! He was with me the entire day! We - we were -"

"I know where you were," he cuts her off simply. "I have my men, trailing him."

"In spite of that - you missed him." She tells him bitterly. "He hasn't absconded Mr. Hwang, somebody has taken him. Weren't you the one who told me long ago that he has to go abroad or he might end up dead? Now the same people have taken him and you're doing nothing!"

The man sits behind his desk, head buried in his hands.

"You failed him," she tells him with no regret. "And you failed the woman you claim to love. Is this how you protect your son? What have you ever done? Where were you when your own wife killed him little by little everyday? Where were you when he believed he was dying? Where were you when they tried to kill him over and over again?"

"I was keeping him alive!" He barks at her, thumping his fist against the desk. "Why do you think I've done it all? I did it all to keep him alive. To stop them from using him to their ends - do you think all this - this position this power has any other meaning to me? No! I've pursued it all to keep him - them - my children safe. If I didn't had power, he'd be dead so long ago. Dead - defamed - crushed under a misplaced revenge."

The sound of the door opening makes them both jump. It is coach Park who walks in, but there is a different aura to him - a darker, menacing glow. He doesn't spare a glance at Ha Jin as he faces the senior Hwang.

"Forgive me - Mr. Hwang, I've failed to keep your son safe."

"Coach Park?" She mumbles, gripped with surprise.

"And his phone? You can't track his phone?" Assemblyman Hwang asks, his tone crisp. The other man shakes his head. "They've covered their tracks meticulously. The investigation will not be stayed for long either sir."

"Where is Yo?"

"Unreachable. I'm starting to fear he has gone missing as well."

The Assemblyman sinks to his chair looking weary and defeated, he wipes a hand across his face and sighs.

"What will happen to him?" He muses aloud.

"Nothing!" The other man supplies, a note of pride to his tone. "I've trained him just the way you wanted, nothing will happen to him."

Their conversation hardly registers in her mind, as the mobile in her hand starts to vibrate - flashing a screen that reads private number. She clutches it immobile for a moment before holding the cold metal against her ear to breathe a shaky "Hello?"