[2] Red | Mingi ✓

BOOK 3: THERE BE FOOLS ALIVE

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E X C E R P T

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"Will you talk to her?" Seonghwa was asking him, seated and snug, as he volunteered himself to play the empathic role and yet Hongjoong couldn't help making a mockery of the picture. He would've collapsed with laughter, deeming it fit not to when his brain confirmed it would reek of cruelty if he did. Plus, this man was someone he always knew he could take a bullet for with nary a speckle of regret.

Love stretched to cover a multitude of eccentrics, he recalled his father used to say in particular earnest, employing the word 'eccentrics' in the place of 'rancid flaws' to fashion a blanket statement out of his suggestion that neither pointed at a specific target nor affected everyone on the whole. Hongjoong was recollecting now that perhaps his pops had merely been at war with himself in trying to accept his son's rather unique ('unique' to replace 'repugnant') taste in women. He vividly imagined what his parents' reactions would've been had the proposal not fallen through. Hongjoong could see his folks strapping in to suffer in silence. Come to think of it, Hana had never been popular with the people he loved, but they tolerated for his sake. Especially Seonghwa, who also knew when to pull out the fakery. Seonghwa, who believed, too, that a heartfelt confrontation solved all, so much so, Hongjoong wouldn't have been surprised if sometimes his friend dreamed of the day he was going to come about world peace. And Sometimes, Hongjoong expected more than this immature mental attitude Seonghwa tendered towards slipping into almost on the regular, believing it made a coward out of a full-grown man, with a fiancé as good as a wife, in a way that threw him off the scent that he was one. Diluted pacifists never knew what they wanted, Hongjoong was thinking. He wasn't sure he could push Seonghwa past the abstract notion of conceiving all he needed in most situations was to flip a coin and whether heads or tails, he already went for the first thing he'd had his mind on. Talking. But what Seonghwa failed to understand was that once in a while it was safe if stuff got bloody so long as in the end, there would be clarity. Every now and then, a child-like strategy—not influenced by the mentality of one—buried tons. No harm if you kept living with an underlying burden you'd always plan on getting to until you never get to it. Only that, by then, it would've moved from tiny bloodshed (just a drop, no big deal) to something nuclear.

"Are you listening?"

Seonghwa snapped him out of it.

"Sorry. I heard you."

Hongjoong said.

He had eased back into a resting position. One leg crossed over the other, he mirrored his visitor, but lacked the flintness the selfsame visitor seemed to possess to ooze out. He still held his beer close—the drink his liquid corrective, propped up the top of his kneecap, his hand braced it. If it spilled, he'd let it spill, he decided. His other hand met the head of the sofa, fastening in a hard clench without so much of a conscious awareness. Tight enough to know the red had been drained from his knuckles.

He pretended giving the question the intense and careful deliberation it perhaps deserved, meanwhile his brain had cut to half its already debatable performance, slowing down once he was deciding to spare it even if a nip of seriousness. Nevertheless, it was ill-advised, still embracing the element of stupid: Will he talk to her?

Of course, the minute hell became the new North Pole. But in the off-chance that Lucifer was off building his lackeys from snow...

Hongjoong tutted once and said, "I was hoping sometime after my untimely passing, but not before the cremation. I want to be convinced I at least owe her that much. We've been through a lot, you know?"

Seonghwa drank in his irritating sarcasm (it was clear-cut on Seonghwa's face that he was indeed irritated by him), accepting all he'd said with a single nod of the head, as though in understanding of what it meant when people talked about seven years flying by and turning up an utter waste in the end. No big deal.

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