Instead of letting the emotion burst out, I deliberately pressed it down and swallowed it. The end of my voice went damp all on its own, trembling like water.
“And I don’t want one of us to die, either. That... that would hurt.”
Face swimming with tears, I looked up at Ignis and carefully caught hold of the end of his sleeve.
The one blessing was that the air in the room still had that oppressive weight to it, so the emotion I’d forced up didn’t come apart easily.
“I read it in a book. Dying means sleeping forever. You can’t see the people you love anymore. Mother, and you, hyungnim, and everyone else... it said you can never meet them again, not ever.”
The voice that came out of me was so fragile it startled even me.
“I don’t want that. I don’t want you to fall asleep either. If there’s something you want, I’ll give you all of it, so can’t we just keep getting along?”
Maybe it was because I genuinely didn’t care one speck about the throne, but there wasn’t a trace of greed in it, and that made it land hard. It wasn’t acting. It was about as close to the truth as anything I’d said.
Be emperor to your heart’s content, be my guest. I’m too busy keeping myself breathing!
I spat the words I could never say aloud inside my own head instead, like a grievance.
Ignis simply watched me like that for a long while. Then he tilted his head to one side and asked:
“You’ll give it to me?”
After all the trouble I’d gone to for those tears, I couldn’t feel the slightest ripple of emotion from him. He only looked back and forth between the small hand clinging to his sleeve and the innocent child in front of him, as though none of it made sense.
“Do you even know what that seat is worth?”
The emperor’s throne isn’t something you hand over this easily. And it’s certainly not something anyone ever wants to hand over.
A seat everyone wants, a seat people stake their lives on. That, at least, seemed to be how Ignis saw it.
“This isn’t some light little game you can play again after you lose.”
He asked it the way you’d talk to a dullard who understood nothing, and yet his gaze never once left me.
“Once it’s decided there’s no taking it back, and if you start wanting it too late, it’s already out of reach. There’s exactly one of it in this whole world. You mean to give it up yourself without even trying for it?”
If anything, he stared harder than before, like he meant to burn right through me. As if he were holding his breath, waiting for the moment my lips parted and shaped words again.
Rather than avoiding his eyes, I tilted my head as though rising to meet his expectation, and answered without a single stumble.
“Is becoming emperor much nicer than getting along with you, hyungnim?”
It was phrased as a question, but the tone of it carried certainty.
There’s no way anything could matter more than being close to you. I said it with the face of a child who knew nothing and believed that purely.
I studied Ignis’s reaction for a moment, then let my expression droop a little as I went on.
“I don’t really know. I’ve never dreamed about a future like that. But if you and I ended up fighting over anything, I think I’d definitely regret it.”
“...”
“So I’d rather not dream at all. I don’t want to want any more than this. Everything I ever wished for, I already have, right now.”
On the part about already having what I wished for, I gave the sleeve in my grip one small tug. There was no mistaking who I meant.
Ignis didn’t answer at all. He wasn’t ignoring me, though. That relentless gaze of his was still fixed on me.
He just seemed to be thinking it over, quietly, by himself.
On the surface his emotions were utterly still, but the narrowing of his pupils reported every shift inside him in real time.
The boy gazed steadily at his little brother, tears still clinging to his lashes, as if he meant to plant the sight in his retinas. Long enough to leave an afterimage.
Once the platinum hair and the small, neatly arranged features had been taken in whole, his eyelids slid shut over them, slow, like earth being heaped over them. And when he opened his eyes again—
The eyes that surfaced shone like a full moon.
“Ah...!”
I was hauled up off the bed as though plucked out of it. It happened so fast there was no possible way to react.
The blanket slid down until it was barely hooked on my toes, and cold air seeped through my thin nightclothes.
My body, the fever not yet gone from it, flinched for an instant. But before I could even register the change in temperature, a far higher heat came over me.
“Just a second.”
The whisper that reached my ear was still a touch too boyish to call low, but perhaps because it came from so close, it drove in perfectly clear.
His breath grazed the skin bared between the folds of my nightclothes. At the ticklish sensation my shoulders shrank in, just barely.
Ignis buried his head near the nape of my neck and breathed in, slowly.
For a simple gesture of affection there was far too little distance in it, and something about it was strange, off-kilter somehow. Goosebumps rose on me for reasons I couldn’t name, and my frozen brain slowly worked its way to a conclusion.
What he was doing wasn’t like a person at all. It was much more like some large animal of the canine sort.
Like checking its kill over one more time before dragging it back into its territory. Or like savouring the scent for sport, in the last moment before swallowing it whole.
Ignis locked an arm firmly around my waist, and his eyes curved soft.
“Just for a tiny little while. Want to climb into my mother’s belly and come back out?”
The words were so bizarre that I couldn’t grasp their meaning on the first pass.
What chain of thought do you have to go through to arrive at a sentence like that? Reeling, I managed to get my mouth open a beat late.
“What... do you mean?”
“My mother may hate other people’s children, but she dotes on her own.”
Unlike me, who couldn’t even finish a sentence, Ignis answered as if it were nothing much at all.
“If you’d be born as my brother, blood tied perfectly to mine, I’d dote on you more too. How about it?”
His voice was so uncommonly tender that unless you chewed the words over a second time, you’d never even notice how twisted they were.
There wasn’t a trace of malice in it. And yet it didn’t sound like a joke either.
Ignis was making the offer out of pure, uncomplicated goodwill.
“Not bad, right? You’d get to be with me all day long. The surroundings would be nicer than they are here, too, and maybe that weak body of yours would even get fixed... ah.”
Ignis had been ticking off the advantages one by one, as if to talk me into it, when his voice stopped. The head buried against my neck lifted slowly, and our eyes met.
“Come to think of it, if you were born again, you wouldn’t look like this, would you?”
Eyes that looked like melted gold travelled slowly over my features.
Hair gone fluffy and tousled from being hauled upright a moment ago, cheeks flushed pink with fever, lips parted a little in alarm. He ran his thumb along the soft, downward slope of my eyes, so unlike his own, as if smoothing it into shape.
“That part I’d mind a little.”
The words were a refusal, but he was beaming. The smile that spread across that gorgeous face was beautiful enough to steal your eyes in an instant.
Which only made it more horrifying.
“Your hair sparkles and your face is cute, so it’d be a waste. Your cheeks are soft, too.”
“Ngh...”
“How do I take this with me in one piece, I wonder.”
He pinched my cheek, muttering it to himself. In his own mind he was presumably being careful about how hard he pulled, but it stung enough that a small groan slipped out of me without permission.
“Thah hurrss...”
“It hurts? Surely not. I pinched gently so you wouldn’t break. Oh, it’s gone red.”
Whatever he found so entertaining about it, Ignis giggled as he kneaded my hot red cheek like a lump of dough.
A scorching palm cupped my cheek without leaving a gap, and before long that warmth began to cool to something lukewarm. And then — of all things — a pleasant chill started to bloom under it.
There was no way a human hand could drop in temperature that suddenly. It was exactly as if he’d cast a spell.
As though he could feel the fever draining away, he stroked my cheek once more with his thumb and murmured, low.
“Humans are built far too fragile and delicate. One careless touch and they’re ruined, and then they lose their rarity. How troublesome.”
Ignis sat me down slowly on the bed and combed my messy platinum-blond hair back into place with his fingertips. The touch was painstaking, like someone straightening out a doll that had been knocked about.
Then those yellow reptilian eyes changed direction, and he tipped his chin toward the attendant standing off to one side of the room like a piece of furniture.
“Were you worried I’d hurt that thing?”
The question dropped out of him so casually that my heart felt like it fell straight through the floor. The subject I’d only just managed to drag somewhere else had surfaced again, as easily as that.
So Ignis had known all along that I’d deliberately steered his attention away, and had simply chosen to let it pass.
My whole body locked up with tension in a heartbeat. He, meanwhile, kept moving his hand as gently as before, as if nothing at all were happening.
“There’s no need to worry. I never intended to punish him in the first place.”
Ignis flicked a glance at the attendant, who still hadn’t lowered his guard. There was nothing angry about it, nothing ruffled. It was simply the flat, unbothered look you give something you’ve already finished judging.
“I can’t stand flattery you can see coming a mile off. Or the ugly little lies people tell when they’re frightened.”
“...”
“But loyalty is a different matter.”
His hand pressed down slowly on the crown of my head. It was a shade rougher than stroking, but I could feel him deliberately draining the strength out of it.
“A conviction that doesn’t waver easily even when the circumstances change has real value all on its own.”
Who exactly those words were aimed at, I couldn’t say for certain.
