Seoho naturally opened his eyes when morning came. Ridiculously enough, after visiting the shaman, his fear of the crying sounds disappeared.
He didn’t understand it himself, but anyway, that’s how it was. Though the fact that he woke up in the middle of the night still didn’t please him.
‘If you’re going to take me anyway, hurry up and do it.’
Not being able to sleep deeply for almost a month left him in a terrible state. The crying sounds came to Seoho day and night.
Seoho rubbed his eye area that had become dim from fatigue and turned his body to look at the wall. The eye drawn on the wall seemed to be looking right at Seoho.
Seoho reached out his hand and touched the eye. The eye that had been gradually changing shape over the month now had the form of a perfect human eye.
An eye so vivid it seemed like it would be tangible to the touch.
“It really has incredibly pretty eyes, doesn’t it?”
It wasn’t a colored eye. But the eye in monochrome black like a sketch had a charm that drew people in.
As Seoho was touching the eye for a moment, he suddenly realized something was getting on his hand.
“Huh?”
Moisture got on his hand. So really, like tears.
“Wow, now it’s even shedding tears?”
Seoho was getting curious about how far this bizarre phenomenon would go.
“At this rate, will it pop out from inside the wall completely?”
Seoho, who had been giggling to himself, got up from his spot. Then he brought a towel and wiped away the moisture on the wall. If he left it like this, the wallpaper might peel.
Even if he would meet death someday, Seoho wanted to maintain the house in the best condition until then. As Seoho was carefully wiping the wall, he quietly looked at the towel in his hand and muttered.
“Should I try wiping the windows today?”
Since he was holding a towel anyway, doing a deep clean didn’t seem like a bad idea.
* * *
Rosetta had no intention of wasting time with the Holy Maiden Angel on useless talk.
“So what’s the reason you came?”
Bringing up the main point before the meal even came out was very rude behavior, but Rosetta wasn’t someone who cared about such things. Holy Maiden Angel answered with a bright smile.
“Aren’t you being too hasty?”
Rosetta didn’t respond at all and stared at her. Unlike his indifferent outer appearance, an ominous energy was flowing from him.
Feeling that energy, Angel flinched and trembled, then soon smiled again.
“The reason I gave Your Majesty that mirror is because Your Majesty lacks patience.”
Angel advised Rosetta while pretending to be calm.
“Your Majesty, who received a name from the Father, should naturally be merciful. Otherwise, wouldn’t the Father be troubled?”
At the advice thrown as if to provoke Rosetta, an annoyed emotion rose on his dry face. And Rosetta did not hide his emotions.
“Presumptuous.”
“Pardon?”
Rosetta’s indifferent eyes swept over Angel’s face.
“Presumptuous. You are merely a messenger pigeon, are you not?”
A messenger pigeon to the Holy Maiden who conveys divine words! Angel widened her eyes and called him with a warning.
“Your Majesty.”
But Angel’s warning didn’t work on Rosetta. Rosetta wasn’t afraid of the god and had no desire to be considerate of Angel who loved the god. To Rosetta, Angel was merely a bothersome existence.
“Nothing is as irritating as interpreting as you please and acting as you wish.”
“……”
His tone was calm but the meaning was sharp as could be. Angel bit her lips and trembled.
Rosetta just watched Angel tremble in humiliation.
‘Is this a waste of time?’
Angel was jealous that Rosetta, not her, received the god’s love, and tried to control Rosetta’s actions according to the standards she set.
She tried to judge whether Rosetta was truly a person worthy of receiving the god’s love and hoped he would act befitting the position of a human who receives the god’s love.
‘How ridiculous.’
Rosetta didn’t need Angel’s approval. Just because the god chose him didn’t mean he intended to follow the god’s will.
To Rosetta, the god, the name the god bestowed, and Angel who annoyingly clung to him were merely uninvited guests who intruded on his peaceful life, though not entertaining. He had no intention of allowing them to interfere in his life in the future either.
‘If not for this matter.’
Rosetta showed a genuine smile for the first time to Angel, who was angry at his words yet still couldn’t say anything.
“Of course, I quite like what you did this time.”
When Angel first gifted him the mirror, Rosetta briefly left the mirror in his room while pondering how to make Angel separate from him.
However, the moment he laid eyes on the person reflected in that mirror, all plans were erased from his head.
He couldn’t think of anything else.
‘Tears.’
The man with a face still slightly youthful, seeming to be between boyhood and adulthood, was crying in his sleep.
Tears that fell quietly without even distorting his expression.
It was quiet, yet deep sorrow could be felt nonetheless. Rosetta moved his eyes following the traces of tears flowing down along the eye area.
The tears continued to fall ceaselessly.
‘Has anyone’s crying ever touched my heart like this?’
Rosetta let out a big breath. A faint heat lingered in his breathing. Like the breath that flowed out, Rosetta’s body heated up hotly.
Rosetta withdrew his gaze from looking at the man in the mirror and looked down at his own body. To be aroused by watching someone else cry. It was a first.
This was also the first time he had been this aroused. He had never felt such a sensation from anyone before.
When Rosetta entered puberty and his body was growing rapidly, Shinshi gave Rosetta sex education and said:
‘You must live as a woman for life, and must live alone.’
She also said that at least for the next several years, he absolutely could not have any sexual contact with anyone. The reason Rosetta wiped Shinshi’s wet face as she shed tears before him was because he thought it wouldn’t matter much to live that way.
He had never felt affection for anyone and his body had never heated up while looking at someone. But for the first time, his body reacted.
In fact, more surprising than his body’s reaction was something else. Because a body’s reaction was something that naturally followed upon waking from sleep.
‘My body…’
Rosetta raised his hand and touched his heated cheeks. The slightly raised corners of his mouth and the hazily relaxed eye area.
All of these things were not due to simple sexual arousal.
The reason for his roughly beating heart and dazed mind was that thing Shinshi had repeatedly told Rosetta about.
‘Love.’
Something he had heard about many times but never felt. What Shinshi always whispered to him. The love she spoke of until her death.
Rosetta fell in love the moment he saw a man he was seeing for the first time, a man who was shedding tears without being noticed by anyone—not even by himself.
He felt great satisfaction in being able to see those tears that even the man who was their owner didn’t know about.
After that, Rosetta completely fell for the man. Though the man didn’t shed tears as much as before, that was still okay.
‘Because he’s been smiling more often.’
How surprised Rosetta was when he saw the smile that briefly lingered on the sleeping man’s lips.
At first, he had even doubted whether he liked the man’s tears rather than the man himself. But the man’s smile dispelled all such doubts.
At the man’s smile, Rosetta was greatly aroused both emotionally and physically.
And now, with time having passed, Rosetta loved everything about the man. The slightly frowning eye area in his sleep and the fluttering eyelashes, the lips that seemed soft as he mumbled something, the black hair messed up from being pressed against the pillow.
Every time he watched the man’s every moment, Rosetta’s heart deepened.
‘I want to have him.’
He couldn’t endure anymore. When the man shed tears, he wanted to embrace him; when he smiled slightly, he wanted to whisper his love; and he wanted to touch him in every moment.
Unable to contain his overflowing emotions, Rosetta once burst into tears louder than the man had ever cried.
He wanted to see the man directly with these two eyes rather than viewing him beyond the mirror like this, and he wanted to feel him directly with his two hands.
Look at me like I like you. I’m watching you from here. I can no longer be satisfied with just watching.
‘Notice me.’
Rosetta wanted to make the man aware of his existence. Just as his heart had been moved by the man’s tears, he wanted the man to know this crying and be swayed by him.
So he cried, putting all those emotions into it.
He knew the man wasn’t from this world. Angel had said so, but everything he saw beyond the mirror—the man’s room, his clothing, even the letters written on the cover of a book glimpsed briefly—were all things he was seeing for the first time.
Since he could fully guess that their languages wouldn’t be mutually intelligible, Rosetta cried with all his heart.
I can see you but I cannot hear your voice. So I threw a tantrum asking you, who cannot see me, to hear my voice.
And not long after, Rosetta noticed that his wish had come true. At some point, the man would wake from sleep right away when Rosetta burst into tears. Though he couldn’t move his body properly, perhaps due to being connected to the mirror, he still blinked his eyes.
Of course, because the connection would be cut off when the man fully woke from sleep, Rosetta had to stop his tears at the right timing.
‘Matching the timing isn’t an easy task, though.’
After pouring out his emotions like an explosion a few times, his feelings toward the man became uncontrollable.
