written for @vuranos
Hanbyul was thirteen years old the first time he witnessed someone die. It happened on a Sunday. It must have, because he remembered being restless and defiant, the way he always was on Sundays, the day that happened to collide with his birthday and one of the biggest festivities of the year— Christmas. The boy had never relented to the ways of the religious; he had christened them as hypocrites— a congregation of humans with seemingly saintly smiles but completely devoid of humanity within. All that scantimonious talk about being kind to their neighbours withered quickly in the presence of his family; sneers and judgmental gazes were all that Hanbyul recalled receiving from "pious" members of church. And so guilt was an absent party when he thought to sneak out of service that day, a mind he had to follow the pastor’s son as he too, had turned his back and abandoned the morals that only existed to be confined within the pristine church walls.
But sins it seemed, were always rewarded with death. He could never forget the sight of a wingless child falling from an unknown height, the muted thud upon a snow-covered ground, the way warm blood flowed from a fractured skull and bled into the wintry land, consuming and melting everything that lay in its path. It was then that he was reminded of a common hymn—
Oh! precious is the flow That makes me white as snow; No other fount I know, Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
Hanbyul remembers thinking that the boy is Jesus as he descended the hill and cried for help. And then he never sees him again.
But maybe his deduction had not been a fallacious one after all, because eleven years on, he sees the dead boy walking past him on the street. Jesus has risen, he thinks, and he whirls around to grab the male firmly by his wrist, his own trembling mildly behind his sleeve in unacknowledged fear. It is unlike Hanbyul to leave horror on his youthful countenance, to let his emotions betray the constant calm that he endeavoured to portray. One would assume that he’d grown accustomed to it; resurrections reduced to nothing but an ordinary scene for someone who worked in a coma ward, but this was different— this was someone whose existence had bled into the earth and then disappeared for years, someone whose heart had ceased to beat and lived. Regaining his composure, the nurse assaults his childhood acquaintance with variances of the one question that threatened to wreck his mind. “ Why aren’t you dead? You’re supposed to be dead. How are you even alive? ”
