When was the last time you looked at the sky? No thoughts, no brooding, just looking, reminiscing, enjoying the ethereal painting above the smooth canvas. It is one of the first arts created. One of the seven wonders of the world, or whatever. It is the creature of the Almighty in collaboration with nature; yes, nature the one you forgot to admire, to relish. What made you think that life is endless, made you think that your eyes will never blink and remain closed for eternity? Why would you look at the sky and its immense splendor and still think about the life of yours that can't hold a candle to such beauty?

What made you think that Jimin is more important than your reconciliation with Mother Nature?

But oh, you were looking at the sky alright, delighting in the clear, horizon painted topaz. A clear-cut diamond illuminating the obscurity of your path. Softness in the grips of the mighty ceiling that held your edges at the right corner before they would break free. You looked, but the sky refused to give you solace, still holding a grudge for being ignored, spiking your irk with resemblances of the man who gave you the cold shoulder and pivoted toward a path in which he saw profit.

A path that you were not allowed to tread.

The topaz was his eyes when he wore contacts. You often praised him for the edgy look, and he always told you it was more a source of annoyance he would have liked to avoid if his vision had been as perfect as yours. Sun was the golden hue of his skin when he discarded his shirt while he devoted himself to manual labor, like fixing or washing his car. You had spent hours that the clock refused to count, watching sweat drip down strained muscles, but greed never met ampleness. Jimin was summer, and how could you not miss your summer when it had been winter for so long that your bones got cold?

You didn't know what you might find or see when you got there and stood guard in the corner of his alley. Guard so you could feel better about the stalking you were engaging in. It's been hours, and your desire was still stubborn, refusing to fall on open ears. Hours and Jimin were only visible in the resemblances that reminded you of him but were nowhere to be seen on the premises of his home.

And when he came, you wished he didn't.

You'd pretend to be spoiled and throw off the last vestige of restraint and say that the fault lies with the life that fate gifted you. Would say that if you had had a caring family and a loving husband, maybe, just maybe, you would have forgotten Jimin, locked him in the hippocampus, and retrieved the memory when the raven locks became grey, only to put on a bashful smile and tint your cheeks pink to reminisce youth and the surging emotions it brought. Too bad you had nothing of all this.

Maybe you never would have, either.

"You really want me to move out again, there's no doubt about it now." Jimin seethed. His annoyance was evident in his heaving chest, the movements of his fingers, which out of habit found his curls and stroked through midnight to release some of his anger. "Are you that selfish? Can't you at least care about the innocent child who has done nothing wrong but be related to me?"

"Jimin," you cared, wished you could tell him, but your voice crumbled, your palms sweated, and you found yourself in a rat race of retorts, like a criminal caught in the act, with no justification to demand forgiveness. "I'm not that young girl anymore. I won't let him touch you again."

"Of course, you're not. May God protect you from the evil eye, you are now a grown, married woman whose husband is taking on the work with his dogs that the father left unfinished. Give me a break, Yunjae. We are not made for each other, we would never, ever have a chance. Can't you see, huh? There is no hope for us. It's over, wake up."

Every word was right, and you wished he was still away, wished he didn't break your chimera with his realistic words, wished you were still sitting in your car looking at the blue sky and seeing his image in the clouds instead. His words came like condolences from compassionate mouths, confirming that you had indeed lost a loved one to death.

"If you managed to forget everything so easily, well, lucky you, cause that is not the case with me," you shouted, hoping that the high-pitched voice would relieve you of the frustration and manage to knock some sense into his head as well, "Jimin, I am still there, still waiting at the door of the school, painting us a future that I hoped would become a reality. I had and still have faith that it will; why can't you have faith in me too?"

Jimin returned your outburst with a sneer, bringing your blood to boil in a heat of disappointment you never thought could be so fervent. "It's time for you to leave that school, Yunjae. For schools are not for grown, married women."

Your hands fell numbly to your sides and silenced by the harshness of a man whose softness was one of the qualities that made you fall for him, you found yourself watching the dissolve of your faith, hope, and love as he showed you his back and walked far from the chaos that your existence brought to his life.

You didn't cry. No, you didn't. Because you didn't make the effort to go to his doorstep to show weakness, you went to give choices, to warn.

"Leave, Jimin. Take your sister and disappear. To another country, maybe you'll find happiness far from here.

Jimin stopped halfway, sighed, and turned around so you could get a look at his face again, "Are you trying to demonstrate the level of telepathy you and your husband have reached? Because if that's the case, you've made it. You guys are in tune."

The frown showed that you were far from understanding his point, but you kept silence anyway, pushing your brain that extra bit to make sense of the words. "Was he here? Did he do something to you?"

"It doesn't matter, but just for your information and his, I ain't leaving nowhere. You can pass the word."

"You will," you commanded in a voice different from the subtle one you had used before, "if you do not want me to protect you, if you will not allow me to correct the past, you will leave this country, out of his and mine and my father's reach. That's final."

Jimin knew you as the lines in his palm, as the habits he had acquired growing up, and the endless bad choices and the few rights he had made. Jimin knew your voice, easily figured out when you were happy, sad, or excited; he knew when you were left bare of choices cornered, and that seemed to be the case now. He turned around after soaking up the sound of your voice like the sun warming his back, wishing that the sound would bring him equal comfort despite all odds.

"What's going on, Yunjae?" It took him less time to reach out to you and seal his question with the kind of touch you missed than voicing the question itself. It felt right, oh so right, to have his hand on your shoulder, reassuring, soothing, and everything that Jimin was to you. Everything that love is. "You can tell me: I may be weak, easily discarded by your entourage, and no match for it, but nothing has changed, Yunjae. Even if you are who you are now, you still just need to say the word, and I will make sure you are safe."

The heat of your tears assaulted you before they could surface, and frustration followed suit. Why would he confuse you like that? Who gave him the right to do so? Why did he decide to become Spring when he had taken part in being winter in your life for so long, betraying Summer and the dulcet breeze? Was it fair to betray his spitefulness and suddenly arm himself with the candor of protecting you? After what, huh?

The singer was right: it's too late to apologize.

"I don't need protection, Jimin," the tears were swallowed down, courage thrown into the scale as you spoke without the hindrance of your emotions, "I'm building a name for myself, finally taking shit in hand. I came here to give you choices, and you obviously made yours, so I'm giving you another chance to break free, and if you reject it, what will happen in the future is on you."

It was your turn to display your back and leave him behind, and it was his turn to run after you, grasping your wrist as he anxiously asked, "Is he hurting you? Threatening you? What does he have on you, Jae? Whatever he has on you, don't let it get you down; you're not that kind of person."

You knew Jimin. Every part of him and every inch you had studied, like the anatomy books you had eaten to pass the exam. Mellow was Jimin, squeezing his roughness to help you get over what would never be yours. You knew Jimin like you knew life and its twists and turns, the pleasant surprises and the endless ugly ones. Jimin was dumb, the kind of stupid that would jump into the pit of fire for his lover, and you would have liked to beat him up for not breaking that bad habit. "He has you on me; you're my only weak point, and I'm paying very expensively for it. The world is out to get me, and the threat is you, so would you be helpful for once and just disappear? You said all I have to do is say the word, and here I am saying it, so would you act upon it?"

Emotion overtook you before his could, and you wanted to blame it on his hand, which came off your shoulder and fell to his side. Jimin was blank, a virgin sailcloth ready to disappear into the sea, to travel far from the pain caused again by the mouth of a lover he cherished and still refused to topple off the pedestal, and you caught yourself sighing as a mechanism you newly discovered was effective in suppressing your tears, "Sounds like life is keen on making me relive the same moment twice, huh? Consider it done; the ultimate goodbye."

And his words pierced your heart, just like they did years ago. You wanted to slap him in the face, hurt him the same way his words did to you. An eye for an eye, but you figured you were the one to start it, and he was just dancing on your rhymes. "Let's not meet again." You spook with a tone you wished to reprimand, for it came cracked from the suffocation of your tears, weak and unlike the skin you've decided to adopt after shedding your own for the sake of vengeance.

Tears that didn't match the heiress of Goryo Holdings stained your cheeks as you showed those confident shoulders to a lover who saw only pain from you and led toward your car. Smudges of mascara would tell the tales of a weak leader who tried to wear the mantle of courage by breaking hearts that prayed for her well-being, and even though the roar of the behemoth would claim otherwise, the trembling hand around the steering wheel would agree that you were indeed weak.

Revenge is like the sweet and sour sauce, the only difference is the ratio of the mixture. Revenge is a double-edged knife that stabs the seeker before the adversary, and you wished someone had informed you of this before you accepted your husband's offer.

You had pondered his offer for weeks, trying to figure out if helping him would really help you, as he claimed, and you only acted when you realized that joining forces would be the only solution. You would rather see Taehyung rot in failure while standing against his father, would rather see him weep over his losses the way you mourned yours, but when his father started using Jimin to force you into his schemes, you figured your only way out would be by joining hands.

Liar.

You lied to yourself and to him when you hurled your insults against his father and portrayed him as the only Satan this world knows. But when Jungkook presented the recording of a telephone conversation between your father and old Kim, proving that it was your father who had presented Jimin in a golden tray to your father-in-law, ready to be used as leverage, you realized that both were made of the same component. Both are devils.

Seokjin had opened a bottle of champagne when you came into the cabin to announce your acceptance of the offer. Taehyung was cured and Namjoon kept a low profile for quite a while, which made you question the reason they insisted to meet daily in the cabine despite the inaccessibility of the location, but when Jungkook briefed you in-depth, the hassle became forgivable.

Your father-in-law gave you the title and your husband blessed it with approval. The heiress of Goryo Holdings. The second in charge after the chairman himself: Your husband. All you had to do was act a little, puff yourself up the way investors want to see a board shareholder, and follow the plan until it succeeded and blessed you with a return to the normalcy of your life.

You waved between traffic, wishing for a tomorrow never to come. You mingled between the lanes the same way you wished to swerve into a different line of life. The road seemed long, but not long enough to absorb your tears and swallow them in the cracks of the cement before you could reach the person who had turned your tables upside down. The speed of the vehicle demanded control, and your control was used to hide the emotions from a lover from whom fate had torn you apart.

Forever.

The beeping of the vehicle behind you recollected your lost attention, brought you back from the land of reprimand. The highway seemed ominous as the headlights flickered on and on, urging you to answer the call of a danger you'd rather stay away from, and when you thought the driver wasn't going to reduce the speed at which he was approaching you, the emergency lane started coaxing you into a halt.

With equal zeal, you ran toward the vehicle after you parked yours, and with a force you didn't know you possessed, you knocked on the window, "Come out and face me like a man. Does he know you're following me like the rat you are?"

Jet black met your eyes in a worried countenance divergent from the sly demeanor you met on different occasions. Yoongi got out of the car with a crease between his eyebrows that suggested concern, and you preferred to believe the warmth in his voice when he spoke, "I figured you needed an ear after what happened. It may go against my job and you may not believe it, but I'm someone who can relate to your story, Doctor."

And at that moment, your tears found release from their prison, foreshowing weakness in front of a person who had never shown you evidence to sustain his words, and you collapsed from exhaustion caused by the power of the people who had employed that same man.

"Can't you even give me a day to grieve? For heaven's sake, can't you leave me alone for once?"

But even if Yoongi was there to monitor your steps and report to the higher-ups, he could not abandon you to your demons in a moment of plummet. He had seen the farewells, the strength with which you clad your weakness, he had felt the falseness, and lord, it made his heart heavy.

Yoongi's steps toward you were calculated, confident, and showed no hesitancy, just like the man who captured your pictures from the beginning of your day from a distance where he could not be seen. Yoongi was there to make sure you took the right steps toward a goal his employer had set, and despite his professionalism, he felt for you, pitied your condition, and wished he didn't know the whole story of your love, while the man holding a Canon in his hand and near his eye was acting on instructions he had received and had no intention of breaking his professionalism.

Yoongi's embrace was the "it's going to be okay" you wished to hear but knew no one would say. It was silent, no words were spilled as he contained your anger and raging emotions, cotton welcoming your outburst without complaint, soothing your state with the warmth of his body, which was the only thing he could provide, leaving Taehyung to fight the sort of rage that was divergent from the peace you had found in Yoongi's embrace upon obtention of the photos that had been taken of you and his employee.