If You Feel an Endless Shackle Coming On, Just Bow Your Head and Apologize
If you ever feel yourself falling into an endless shackle, just bow your head and apologize first.
Jegal Baekhwa, her small hands clenched tight, spoke to me in a trembling voice.
"I... I spent years waiting, aching for nothing but the day you would come to me. How... how could you?"
Tears welled up in her eyes all over again...
"Whoa..."
The moment I heard some unidentified voice sigh in admiration from somewhere in the crowd, I scrambled to explain myself.
"No, I mean, that's..."
"Please don't make excuses. You'll only make me more miserable than I already am..."
Jegal Baekhwa pressed on, gazing up at me with the pleading eyes of a puppy abandoned in the rain.
"When word came that you had collapsed, do you know how worried I was? And ever since that day I sent you letter after letter — yet you never once wrote back..."
"Ah....."
At her words, I began groping through my memories...
"Sis! What's all that?"
"Oh, these? Letters that came for you. I'm about to burn the whole lot."
"Why...?"
"Word is, people have been slipping white poison powder into letters lately. Better safe than sorry, so I figured I'd torch them all just in case."
"What... I'm immune to every poison under heaven, though?"
"There's always a 'what if,' isn't there? Everything you eat at every meal has an antidote ready here in the clan, but things that come in from outside are another matter. Can't be too careful."
"Even so..."
"Tsk... has listening to your big sister ever cost you anything? When your elder tells you how it is, you just nod and say 'yes, ma'am.' That's all."
And there in Dang Mulin's arms, as she delivered this lecture, sat a whole stack of letters with neatly dried white flowers tucked inside.
Ah... damn it. That crazy sister of mine.
Cursing the sister who had seized on my memory loss to burn every letter — most of them, I realized, probably from Jegal Baekhwa — I tried to plead my case to my fiancée, but...
"There was... there was a reason for all of it..."
"A reason? What reason could possibly be so important that you never answered dozens of letters, not even once!"
Jegal Baekhwa rounded on me, her voice brimming with wounded fury.
"Hic... hic... sob."
And then the tears began to spill from her great, round eyes — one drop... two... drop by drop — while the onlookers murmured among themselves, gazing at her with pity.
"Aigoo... the poor young lady. It breaks the heart, it does."
"You can say that again. A rotten bastard if the world ever made one..."
Only when I swept the crowd with a scowl did their voices finally die down.
But her tears, once unleashed, showed no sign of stopping...
"Let's just go back to the estate and talk this over. Not here in the middle of the street... please."
"Hic... why? Is the sight of me so shameful to you!"
"No... that's not what I meant."
"Do you have any idea how wretched I felt, hearing that my one and only beloved had arrived at the Zhuge Clan Estate, never once sought me out, and gone straight to a pleasure house with another woman the very moment he arrived..."
As she shrieked, consumed by grief and spite, I could do nothing but stand there awkwardly — until at last I pointed off to the side.
"The pleasure house trip was all sis—"
But Namgung Han, who had been standing right beside me, had vanished without a trace...
"Huh...? That wretched woman."
To think that someone who'd been swapping toasts and brotherly titles with me not an hour ago would run off and disown a brother the moment he was in trouble — my hand itched to smack the back of her head for the first time in ages. I looked forward again.
Only to find the scene ahead was even more trouble...
"So now you are selling out even the friend who accompanied you to the pleasure house?"
"No, seriously, Namgung Han dragged me there against my will after I said I wasn't going..."
"Do not lie! You went because your heart wished to go, did it not!"
"Th... ah... er... that part's true, but..."
"Hic... sob."
"Hey, you piece of trash!"
"Yeah! You garbage!"
The crowd, who had been lapping up the spectacle, was now spitting curses at me, faces flushed red.
"The young lady is kindness itself and beautiful as can be, and you made her cry?"
"Go drown in a cesspit and die, you bastard!"
"Just lop his dick off already!"
The curses were getting uglier by the second, and my temper was climbing right along with them, so I resolved to soothe her first and get her back to the estate.
But the moment I stepped forward to take her with me...
"Please come no closer."
Her bodyguard planted himself in my path.
Dumbfounded, I waved my hand for him to step aside, but—
"Absolutely not. How could I permit the likes of you to lay a hand upon the young lady's body?"
"Huh?"
Whether he'd been swept up in the crowd's mood or not, the man was overacting his part with a look of grim heroism all his own. My irritation went off like a tripwire, and I let my killing intent loose.
"Now you would persecute even my guard?"
At her low voice from behind him, I stood there shaking, fists clenched white.
"It's not persecution — this guy's just being insolent—"
"I do not wish to hear it!"
Jegal Baekhwa took a moment to steady her breathing, then pressed on.
"You did not answer a single one of my letters for months... then, the very moment you arrived at the Zhuge Clan Estate, you went off to a pleasure house with another woman and reveled in an orgy... and now you would even persecute my own people. What part of this leaves you so aggrieved!"
"No, wait, what in the hell is this orgy..."
"Did I not say I refuse to hear it!"
Her account was growing more absurd by the second, and with her cutting me off every time I opened my mouth in bewilderment, I could only stand there, struck dumb.
Experience had taught me that in moments like these, the best policy was simply to apologize until the storm blew over. So I ventured, carefully,
"I... I'm really sorry."
"And what, precisely, are you sorry for?"
"There were... circumstances with the letters. But either way, I'm truly sorry I didn't write back right away..."
"How can an apology come laced with excuses?"
The whole thing was draining the life out of me. I heaved a deep sigh.
"Whew... I sincerely apologize for not replying for all those months."
"And?"
"And... the pleasure house. Haah... there's a story behind that too, but it's not as though I went off to carouse in some vulgar fashion..."
When Jegal Baekhwa shot me a look of glacial disdain at yet another excuse...
"Ha... I did go to the pleasure house, that much is certain. So for that, I am truly sorry..."
Only then did her tears finally begin to ebb, and she said,
"And the matter of you persecuting my guard?"
Gritting my teeth, I held out a hand to the guard.
"I appear to have gotten a little worked up... My apologies."
But the guard simply stared at me in silence, leaving my outstretched hand hanging in empty air.
"What are you doing?"
"....."
When he went on ignoring my hand, I swallowed my fury, drew it back, pressed my fingers to my forehead, and let out a long, deep breath.
"Whew....."
It was then that Jegal Baekhwa spoke to me, her voice very quiet.
"Then... could you promise me just one thing?"
"And that would be..."
Her crimson eyes drinking in the sight of me, she spoke with quiet force.
"I will not stand in the way of your taking others into your life. But..."
"But?"
"Can you promise me that you will never, ever abandon me?"
"Hu....."
At her words, something from the far-distant past surfaced in my mind.
Please don't abandon me...
Someone's voice, still ringing clear in my ears. As I stood with my eyes closed and a hand pressed to my forehead—
"You cannot even grant me this much...?"
Her voice shattered my reverie. I opened my eyes and answered her, weariness written across my face.
"All right... no matter what happens, I will not abandon you."
"That promise... you must keep it."
With those final words, she and her guard turned and made their way back to the Zhuge Clan Estate...
"Ha... fuck."
On the street, from which every last passerby had drifted away, I stood alone and murmured under my breath.
"Never thought I'd hear those words again..."
Hush— hush—
How long had I stood there, dazed, alone in the middle of the street?
In the dead hours before dawn, with not a soul left to pass by, the snow began to fall.
Snowflakes drifting down onto me one by one, I found myself looking back on old memories.
"Was it snowing that day too... or was it raining..."
The memory of that day wrung a bitter smile out of me, and as I turned back toward the Zhuge Clan Estate, I murmured to myself.
"I'm well and truly bound now, aren't I..."
Whether heaven knew how I felt or not, it simply went on letting its white snow fall, indifferent, over my head.
Back in her own chamber, Jegal Baekhwa was smiling.
"You have always kept your promises to the letter... even having lost your memories as you have."
In truth, she had a fair idea of why the letters had never reached him.
She had already guessed that Dang Mulin — who thought none too highly of her — had most likely cleared every last one away while her beloved was lost to his amnesia...
And the trip to the pleasure house was, in some measure, a snare she had laid herself.
"Namgung Han turned out even simpler-minded than I'd hoped. Everything went so smoothly."
Lying back in bed, she drew the covers up over herself and murmured.
"'No matter what happens, I will not abandon you'... And now, bound by those words, you will never cast me aside and leave me... will you..."
Giving thanks for a day that ranked among the happiest she had known in years, Jegal Baekhwa drifted off to sleep.
Glug-glug-glug-glug—
"Haah... now this is living."
Namgung Han sat perched atop the roof of the residence assigned to me, tipping back her liquor as she watched the snowfall.
The snow, cooling a body flushed warm with drink, put an easy smile on her face — until her brow creased and she muttered.
"That pale-faced whelp has always given off an unsettling air... hah."
Replaying the lovers' quarrel from earlier, she snorted, tipped the bottle back again and again, ruffled her own hair into a bird's nest, and stared up into the empty night, talking to herself.
"I do feel for the Dang clan whelp... but what can you do? When our darling Baekhwa baits me so shamelessly, someone's got to play along."
The truth was that, uncharacteristically for a woman like her, she was utterly helpless against anything cute.
"Dang Muyeong used to be a cute little thing, but who knows what that one year did to him... If he hadn't changed, I'd been planning to reel him in for myself, you see..."
Having drawn a red line through Dang Muyeong's name in the ledger of future husbands kept within her heart, Namgung Han chuckled on and on as she admired the snow-covered grounds of the Zhuge Clan Estate.