“Well, it’s nothing you need to remember. Some crazy bastard drove drunk in the wrong direction and hit your car.”
“Ah….”
His head throbbed sharply for a moment and Jieon held his forehead. Suchan’s expression turned deathly pale again.
“Hey hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. So?”
“So what…. The car was totaled, you were totaled, and Mua too….”
“Mua? Shin Mua? Ah, was he riding with me too?”
“Yeah.”
Suchan nodded with an awkward expression. He was one of the people who knew well just how badly things had deteriorated between the two before the accident.
Jieon slowly chewed over his hazy memories. Come to think of it, he remembered having a huge argument that day with Mua, who had gotten into the car on his own. Jieon opened his mouth with a grimace.
“So what about him? How is he?”
“He was badly hurt too, but they say his life isn’t in danger. He woke up before you and is recovering.”
“Hah…. I don’t know whether I should be happy or disappointed about this.”
Jieon muttered self-deprecatingly. It was fortunate that no one died anyway, but thinking about how he’d have to face that person again after nearly dying made his chest feel stuffy and irritation surge up.
Shin Mua.
It was a name that gave him a headache just thinking about it. Looking back at the years he’d been tormented by Shin Mua, he thought it might have been better for his mental health not to have woken up at all.
Clearly at first, he’d thought they could have a good relationship helping each other, but who knew how they’d ended up here.
“But you know….”
At that moment, Jieon sensed something ominous in Suchan’s voice.
“Why are you suddenly so serious?”
“Well, about Mua.”
“Yeah, what about Shin Mua. Did he cause trouble again?”
“No, rather than that….”
“What is it, you’re being frustrating.”
Jieon retorted irritably. He didn’t think anything he heard about Shin Mua would surprise him much anymore, so he couldn’t understand why Suchan was hesitating. Then Suchan, letting out a small sigh, opened his mouth.
“He has amnesia.”
“…What?”
“He woke up, but he can’t remember anything. They even said he doesn’t know his own name.”
“He can’t… remember?”
“Yeah. He can’t remember you, the fact that he married you, nothing at all.”
Jieon’s mouth fell open. Was this what they meant by a blessing in disguise? It was truly an unexpected result.
“He can’t remember me means….”
Doesn’t that mean he’s forgotten the fact that he liked me too?
Jieon’s eyes wavered subtly. His head was already complicated, and then there was an accident on top of that, so he’d been gloomy wondering why nothing was going right. But if he’d disappeared from Shin Mua’s memories as a result, it didn’t seem like such a bad deal.
“The doctor? What does the doctor say? Will his memory come back later?”
Suchan made an ambiguous expression.
“The doctor says it will come back. But they can’t guarantee how long it will take. If he’s unlucky, it might never come back at all.”
“If he’s unlucky? What’s unlucky about that? It would be unlucky if the memory comes back, for me.”
Jieon grumbled. It was quite a cruel thing to say in front of someone who’d lost their memory in an accident, but Suchan understood such a Jieon. Even the person watching from the side was about to lose their mind because of Shin Mua, so how much more so for Jieon who’d endured that treatment for months?
Suchan continued while gauging Jieon’s reaction.
“Usually it comes back within a few weeks. In severe cases, it could take months….”
“……”
Jieon bit his lip with a displeased expression. How unfortunate that the memory would come back that quickly. Since things had turned out this way, he wished he’d forget him forever.
‘I’ll never, never divorce you like this! If you really want to divorce, you’ll just have to kill me!’
He recalled the face of Shin Mua throwing a fit and causing a scene before the accident. Then what kind of reaction would the amnesiac Shin Mua show to his suggestion of divorce? He could hardly imagine it.
Then suddenly, a thought flashed through Jieon’s mind.
“But… did he really lose his memory?”
Had Shin Mua truly lost his memory?
“…Huh?”
“He’s not just pretending to have lost his memory?”
Before the accident, Jieon and Mua’s relationship had been at its worst. They just hadn’t stamped the divorce papers yet—their relationship could be considered already broken beyond repair.
But in this situation, to have lost his memory so conveniently. Wasn’t it the kind of excuse a crazy person who wanted to reverse a ruined relationship might make? Having finished his thought, Jieon continued.
“Hyung, can I meet with Shin Mua now?”
“Well, if you want to meet, you can, but… will you be okay?”
Suchan seemed worried about Jieon, who had just woken up. However, Jieon was anxious. He wanted to quickly meet Shin Mua and confirm his condition.
If he’d truly lost his memory, now before all his memories returned would be the only chance to divorce, and if it was a lie, it would be best to strike before his plan became perfect—either way, meeting him quickly was the best strategy.
“What’s there not to be okay about. Let me meet Shin Mua.”
“Okay. But they say Mua’s physical condition is better than yours, so I’ll tell him and have him brought to this room.”
“Yeah. I don’t mind going either, so as fast as possible. Got it?”
As Suchan knew how terrible Shin Mua had been before the accident, he couldn’t help but understand Jieon’s reaction. The recent Shin Mua had been nothing less than Cheon Jieon’s vicious stalker.
Imagine even having to become a married couple with that stalker and live together in one house. That wouldn’t be easy for anyone.
“Anyway, you’re not perfectly fine right now either, so they say you need to rest. So for now, put aside complicated thoughts for later and get some rest.”
Jieon, who had been stirring as if to kick off the bed and get up immediately, let out a deep breath and relaxed his body after hearing Suchan’s words. Indeed, even this brief emotional expenditure made him feel completely drained.
Jieon didn’t believe what Shin Mua said at face value. The Shin Mua he knew was someone who would do anything to keep his place by his side. Faking amnesia was something he could easily do.
Recalling Shin Mua who had shouted that he could never divorce like this, Jieon steeled himself. Cheon Jieon was the person who knew Shin Mua’s true face best. If he was putting on some half-baked act, he would surely be able to notice.
***
“Ahhh…!”
Along with a loud noise, Mua’s scream echoed through the hospital room. In indescribable pain, he couldn’t even breathe properly. Mua curled up his body and waited for this terrible pain to pass.
The cause of the incident was nothing short of absurd. Having fallen asleep without realizing it, Mua reflexively tried to get up from the bed as soon as he opened his eyes. That was all.
Surprisingly, just trying to stand up was the problem.
To be more precise, the first problem was that his hazy mind couldn’t clearly recall what situation he was in right now, the second problem was that Mua, who had lived long as a grim reaper, hadn’t adapted to a human body. And the third problem was that adaptation or not, Mua’s body was too broken to stand on its own.
Unable to properly support himself on two legs, Mua’s body crashed onto the cold floor, and the IV stand rolled around too, turning the hospital room into a mess.
His face deathly pale, Mua bit his lip and tried somehow to endure this pain in a ‘reaper-like’ manner. He couldn’t shed tears like some human wretch just because he’d fallen from a bed. Even if some physiological tears leaked out a bit, that was because the human body was weak, not because Mua was weak.
“Goddammit….”
An old-fashioned curse he didn’t usually use flowed out naturally. From head to toe, the blood and flesh making up the human body, and all the sensory organs were filled with pain, announcing their existence.
It meant it hurt like hell.
For Mua, who had been a grim reaper, it was an even more unfamiliar pain. Mua’s misfortune didn’t end there.
“Oh, oh my, goodness!”
Having heard the loud noise, the caregiver opened the hospital room door and came in, approaching Mua in shock.
“How did this happen…! Are you all right?”
And the moment the caregiver’s hand trying to support Mua touched his body.
“Don’t touch me!”
Mua, who screamed convulsively and shook off her hand, curled up again, unable to overcome the pain that had deepened even more because of it. The pain that had barely lightened struck his entire body again.
“How, how dare a mere human touch someone’s body….”
“…Pardon?”
“Touch someone’s body… urk….”
However, even in that pain, Mua was wary of the caregiver. His mind was hazy, so he had even less time to think of anything else. He just didn’t want any human to approach him.
Even when he was a grim reaper, he hated conversing with humans for long, but the reality of all sorts of humans sticking to his side all day, speaking to him and touching him, was unpleasantly nauseating. Every sensation he experienced with the human body he’d gained after a hundred years was pain by another name to Mua.
When he hated humans so much that he refused even reincarnation and lived on—what in the world was this disgrace? Now beyond absurdity, even sorrow washed over him.
“I, I’ll call the doctor. Please wait just a moment!”
When blood flowed from the arm where the IV needle had come out, the shocked caregiver rushed out of the room. Left alone, Mua took deep breaths while lying on the cold hospital room floor.
It had been a full hundred years of struggling to forget that humans could be beings in this much pain, and that his younger sibling must have been this hurt and suffering at the moment of death. But now, now again like this.
Grim reapers don’t sleep and therefore don’t dream. Mua closed his eyes, desperately hoping that all of this was a dream, that when he woke up he’d be the grim reaper Mua again, going around collecting the souls of the deceased.
