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Jaegal Lin stands alone in a snowy field.
The world around him is quiet – the kind of quiet that has transcended so far beyond a simple absence of sound that it is almost audible; a hollow, echoing silence that rings in his ears. Swirling white fog blankets his vision, and the sky is a dull, cloudless grey; above him, clusters of fluffy snowflakes drift gently onto the ground, blanketing the world in pure white.
He takes a step forward. The snow crunches crisply beneath his feet like porcelain shards, but he hears nothing in the deafening silence. Even the air is stagnant; like a dead pond, it is as if time has frozen to a standstill, leaving him to traverse alone in this empty, boundless field.
Still, he continues to walk onwards. There is something he ought to do, something important, but he cannot remember what it is – when he tries, it slips away like wisps of smoke dissipating in the open air, like fine grains of sand falling through the gaps of his fingers. The copse of withered willow trees at the far edge of the field leer at him, a line of crooked black teeth.
He takes another step –
“Master.”
Cheonhee stands before him, dressed in his favourite robes. He's smiling, bright and happy, the brilliant yellow of a dandelion blooming through cracked stone; the first bud of spring in an endless winter. His dark hair is loose, spilling down his shoulders in a rippling curtain that nearly covers the straps of the rucksack he wears on his shoulders.
Jaegal Lin does not ask what he is doing here, in the middle of this empty, snowy field. It feels right, somehow, that Cheonhee should be here, with him. After all, they are master and disciple; it is only natural for one to be where the other is — Jin Cheonhee and Jaegal Lin, Jaegal Lin and Jin Cheonhee. The White Dragon and his little white dragon.
“Hee-ah,” he asks, “where are you going?”
His disciple tilts his head to the side. Then his smile widens, like he’s laughing to the punchline of a joke that only he can hear.
Jaegal Lin loves few things in the world, one of them being the sound of Cheonhee's laughter. But somehow, this time it only makes an ice-cold ball begin to form in the pit of his stomach, one that he recognises as that of dread.
“You’re so silly, Master." Cheonhee's expression brightens. "I’m going home, of course!”
Home? What does he mean? Is he returning to the clinic?
“No,” Cheonhee explains patiently, his tone gentle, “I mean my real home. The place where I came from.”
His real home.
Jaegal Lin’s breath stutters to a stop.
The White Dragon of Gangho is many things, but he is no fool. Jaegal Lin knows that Cheonhee isn’t from here, not exactly, has known that from the first month he had settled into the White Dragon Clinic. With his intelligence and mannerisms and the strange, ageless maturity that stood out of place in a face so young, it was all too clear that his origins were... different.
No, he comes from someplace else. The place that his gaze drifts away to on rainy nights, hazy and distant, somewhere far away that Jaegal Lin cannot reach. The place with the people whose names Cheonhee calls out in his sleep, curled in on himself and voice laden with such longing that Jaegal Lin could not stop the stab of black jealousy that had struck his chest like a lightning bolt, sharp and ugly. The place he had once described as somewhere he could no longer return to, with a vague, muted sorrow in his expression that had made Jaegal Lin want to cup him in his hands like a sparrow with a broken wing, to hide him away from the world and protect him from everything that would do him harm.
Except Cheonhee is carrying a rucksack and smiling and saying that he's going to leave, to return to the place he came from. To go 'home.'
(He's going to leave you behind.)
"Thank you, Master," Cheonhee says, "for everything."
And then he turns to leave, stepping forwards into the snowy field.
The ice-cold ball in the pit of Jaegal Lin's stomach solidifies into terror.
Say something, the animalistic part at the back of his brain roars, a harsh primal sound that tears through his skull. Say something, do something, or he's going to leave –
But it is as if he's been struck dumb; his tongue is a frozen, heavy weight in his mouth, unable to produce the words he wants to say. He can't even move – like a stone statue, he's rooted to the ground, incapable of speech, of movement, of even breath.
Cheonhee continues to walk forward. With every step, Jaegal Lin's heart constricts with an agony worse than anything he has ever had to endure – worse than the night his clan was slaughtered, worse than the pain of the Nine Yin Severed Meridians that he'd thought would be his death.
This can't be happening, is all he can think. This must be some illusion, some hallucination. Cheonhee would never leave the clinic; he loves practising medicine too much. He would never, he would never leave –
He forces a mangled sound from his lips, a series of incoherent syllables that sounds vaguely like a name.
But it is lost in the silence, and Cheonhee keeps walking. Slowly, his footprints are swallowed by the falling snow, like he had never existed. And Jaegal Lin tries to strain his eyes, but his figure eventually disappears from sight into the fog. Like a ghost who had never been there at all.
Jaegal Lin screams.
“Good morning, Master!”
Jaegal Lin blinks. He's sitting upright in his bed in the White Dragon Clinic, located in the private residence wing attached to the clinic.
Cheonhee stands before him, dressed in his favourite robes. He’s smiling, bright and happy, and all of a sudden Jaegal Lin is back to that endless snowy field bordered by dead trees, an echoing silence; a trail of smaller footprints extending outwards far, far away until they disappear into nothing.
“...Master?” Ever so observant, Cheonhee’s cheery smile bleeds into concern. “Are you alright?”
I dreamt of you, Jaegal Lin thinks. I dreamt of you and you left me and I didn't know what to do, only that I would raze the world to ashes to keep you by my side.
"Good morning, Hee-ah," is what he says instead. "You're up early today."
Cheonhee's expression sours comically. "Well, I'm going to work with Yooho today, and you know how he literally rises with the sun! And if I'm not awake by then, he'll drag me out of bed! I swear he's doing this on purpose…"
Jaegal Lin watches him as he continues to ramble on energetically, waving his hands for emphasis. Takes in the earth brown of his eyes, how they almost gleam a pale amber in the sun; the tumble of curls tied with a ribbon that he knows Cheonhee wrestles into submission every morning.
Like this, in the light of the day, he is as real as anything else.
Slowly, he relaxes, unclenching his fists underneath the covers. He ignores the sting in his palms, healing the bloody crescents in his flesh without a thought.
It was just a dream.
"Master?"
He turns his gaze back to Cheonhee's face, smiling.
Oh, he thinks, I would not survive you.