If fear had a flavor, Amal imagined it would taste like copper—striking, metallic, clinging to the back of the tongue long after the danger had passed. The ruined gallery echoed with the memories of violence; the air was ripe with sweat, paint, and the tang of old secrets uncoiling from their hiding places. As the last of Min-jun's rivals melted away, Amal stared at the man before her—a man stitched from legends and longing, blood on his knuckles, shadows under his eyes.
She should have run. She'd seen enough movies, heard enough folktales. Monsters didn't have hearts, and if they did, they were either locked away or blackened by loss. But Min-jun's pulse—when she pressed her palm to his cheek—beat strong, slow, and undeniably real, like a sanctuary inside the storm.
They stood in the hush of the gallery's aftermath, the tension between them finally given shape. Min-jun was the first to break the silence, his voice ragged with exhaustion and something gentler. "You must have a thousand questions."
Amal nodded, her mind a swirl of half-formed images: past lives, art rooms, music echoing through locked corridors, the taste of his name on her lips before her thoughts could even grab hold of it. "I need to know—everything. What you are. What we were."
He sighed, the weight of centuries glinting in his eyes. "It started as friendship, the kind that only children know. We belonged to the same summer: mud fights, secret sketches, dares whispered under starlight. But even then, I wasn't like the others. I aged slower. I hungered for things no boy should hunger for. My family moved often; you thought it was wanderlust, but it was necessity. Every few years I needed to disappear, to hide what I was becoming."
Amal listened, caught between skepticism and wonder. Her heart ached with the longing to remember—to piece together the fragments he offered. She interrupted: "And the accident? When did you…change?"
Min-jun hesitated, staring down at his wounded hands. "War found our village. I died the first death that night—protecting you, running headlong into fate. When I came back, I was already half-myth: never aging, always hungry. But my promise to you outlived even immortality."
He chuckled, bitter and vulnerable. "For decades I watched from afar—too dangerous to stay close, but too weak to really leave. When you grew into this," he gestured to her paint-stained hands, her confident stance, "I thought maybe I could belong again. Instead, I became a ghost haunting your steps, hoping you'd see me for what I am…and love me anyway."
Emotions warred inside Amal: relief at finally hearing truth, anger at how much had been lost to secrets, fear at the danger closing in on both sides. But beneath it all, something strange and fierce: the urge to understand him not as a monster, but as the wounded boy she had once…what? Loved? Chosen?
Her mouth was dry. "And now? What happens now?"
He reached for her hand, his touch careful, reverent. "Now, there's a debt between us. Yoon-suk and the others—they're part of a pact, the old order that keeps monsters from exposing themselves. I broke it for you, Amal. For us. They'll be back. Stronger."
She studied his eyes, searching for a lie and finding only weary honesty. "How can I fight with you? I don't even understand what being with you means. How do I protect myself?"
Min-jun took a breath—a heavy, forlorn thing—and raised her wrist gently. "Our kind bond by blood, by memory. Once, you trusted me, body and soul. If you trust me now, I can anchor your memories. Just a taste—nothing more."
Her heartbeat stuttered, fear and fascination intertwined. "Will it hurt?"
"Not if you trust me."
Breathless, she nodded.
He leaned in, lips brushing lightly at her wrist, and bit. The pain was startling—sharp, electric—but so brief it bled instantly into warmth. Vision fractured: flashes of childhood, the taste of stolen mangoes, the smell of paint drying in summer sun, laughter echoing inside old stone walls, a vow whispered under moonlight. She saw herself, younger and braver, hand in hand with a boy who promised to cross impossible rivers for her. She saw Min-jun, not as a monster, but as a survivor—his agony, his hunger, his desperate wish to belong.
She gasped, clutching his shoulder, the world spinning with colors. And then it was over. He drew back, eyes shining almost silver in the moonwashed ruins, the taste of her memory fading from his tongue but etched forever in their history.
Amal swayed, her mind whirring as realization landed hard and fierce. "I remember," she said, voice trembling, some part of her soul finally coming home. "I remember you, us, the promise."
Min-jun smiled—a smile with centuries of guilt and hope behind it. "Then we begin again. Together. This time, I won't let anyone steal you away. Not fate, not monsters, not even memory itself."
And as night bled into the bones of the battered gallery, two souls haunted by loss and longing found each other—if not for forever, then for tonight. And tonight was all they needed to turn a sip of memory into the start of something unbreakable.