Chapter Text
Lee Sookyung is broken. Her son, her love is broken, and they break each other, turn after turn.
The jagged edges cuts them out from ruin, and it cuts them into ruin.
Kim Dokja loves like his mother, and it shows.
She saves him from a monster, and though she speaks nothing of it to him—no. Because she speaks nothing of it to him, he hears more than she wants him to.
She loves him, but her love is a thing he cannot understand. Even then, he does not need to understand, because he is his mother's son. Deep down he knows it already, he just does not want to see it.
Her love is sacrifice, her love is salvation, that much is true—but the question there is, for whom was it for? He won't know the answer just yet.
For now he sees it on the other side—love is not wanting to be saved, even if it means staying and hurting, so long as it means I can spend one more moment with you.
He will not understand her, so long as he stays her little boy.
That's fine.
Lee Sookyung loves her little boy, she wants him to grow up to be a man even when she isn't there by his side anymore.
Her love is sacrifice, her love is salvation—her love says if you are saved by my leaving, then even if it hurts me to leave you, even if it means i can no longer see you grow, i will leave, if only so you can be saved.
She does not quite say it like that. She does not say it at all.
That's fine.
One day, her little boy will be a man, and then he will have someone he loves like she loved him, and he will understand. And he will love, just like his mother did.
He won't see it like that. He won't see that his love is a love just like hers, that it will hurt his love just like his mother's love hurt her love.
His love is—imperfect. It is not whole, not like others'. His love is broken, just like hers.
She sees the seeds of it that sprout from the moment he comes to her with eyes bright like his eyes before, and she knows then that he will find his love. She sees it grow, shrink, stagnate, and grow again. She sees the moments leading up to when that love of his would soon outgrow hers.
She sees, in the final days before he never comes back again, a glimpse of the man he will become and the love that he will have.
And she knows, then, that it will be the last time she will see and hear her little boy, that the next time she sees him he will be a man.
And she is right.
(“Mother knows best, Dokja-yah.”)
(For you, my love, I will sacrifice even mine salvation.)