Chapter Text
Time did not stop for anyone. That was what Han Hyeongjun knew from the start.
Around him were people with other people, hands interlocked and unwavering smiles as they stared at one another. He had always seen this; his family had shown these kinds of affection in front of him with their partners, even with his friends when they were barely high school students.
At birth, a person would have a partner fated to them, however this would only be realized the moment the person would have entered their prepubescent stages of life. A hollow vein would then appear on their wrist, and as they age, the vein would connect to the center of the body—the heart. If it remained hollow by then, the person would inevitably meet their demise, one way or another. Most deaths recorded are natural. Cardiac arrests—that even the greatest doctors were not able to save patients from—were the most common death, but there were also alleged cases of death where fate was only to blame. To avoid such tragedy was to find the soulmate assigned by fate. If a person met their soulmate, then the vein would be filled with blood upon contact of their soulmate’s hand and would instantly connect to the heart regardless of how long the vein was prior.
As beautiful as it sounded, Han Hyeongjun thought otherwise. When he was only fifteen, he was struck with a terrible sickness and when he and his parents consulted a specialist, they were told that everything else in his body was completely fine, except his hollowed vein.
It was starting to reach his heart.
So, they started to search for his soulmate and searching for a fated partner was easy; once a person would be within the vicinity of their fated partner, their hollowed vein would glow, the brightness would depend on the distance.
On one random visit at the cemetery, Han Hyeongjun's strolled around while his parents bid their goodbyes at the headstone of his grandparents. Upon his stroll, his hollowed vein glowed.
Brightly.
When he was beside a headstone of a girl who died before she reached fourteen.
As protocol, fate vein examinations were mandatory at the age of thirteen, and once a person’s examined, they would have a soulmate that couldn’t be changed forever. That was the case for Hyeongjun; both he and his assigned soulmate had their fates checked at the same time, but his soulmate met a tragedy that he would have to face as well.
Although he was quite resolved that life could be beautiful regardless of how cruel it was, there was no mistaking that he was fated to die. That did not waver him, though. Regardless of his ill-fated life, he chose to live it out the best he could, because he could see it in other people—in their smiles and in the glow of their veins, how good life was for them, and that he felt he wasn’t any less deserving of a good life despite fate and its efforts to deprive him of one.
However, as time continued on, his resolve was slowly starting to shake. On some days, he could hardly walk, on some, he could barely lift an inch of his finger. Sometimes his heart would stop for a few seconds, but it had yet to turn into an actual cardiac arrest. Because of this, it was too disruptive for him to continue studying and so he dropped out before he could reach his second year in high school. His family was also starting to struggle financially thanks to his constant check-ins to the hospital, which subsequently led them to moving out of the city he loved. In short, life wasn’t getting any better for him.
There just wasn’t a sign of a good life written in his fate.
He always wondered whether it was fate who was doing all of this, and why did it have to? Wasn’t it enough that he was fated to die, why did it have to affect everything else around him? Why couldn’t he just die without struggling so much? But, Han Hyeongjun never dwelled in these thoughts. It was always just in the back of his head, waiting, itching, and hungry to devour him if he showed any sign of weakness. He never allowed it.
He would never allow it.
There was one thing that kept him going; he would continue to trudge along the world with his fragile heart in hopes that he could, at least, leave this world without the bitter feeling he had lived with for all of his life.