The Devil Judge ? || (ONE-SHOTS)

AUTHOR NOTICE:
The names of Kim Ga On's parents in this one shot are Kim Jun-seo (준서), the father.
Kim Seo-yeon(서연), the mother.

💞

"Your heart is with me and with nobody else".
-Nikki Flores, I got you

🌱

||EVENING
-Tuscany, Italy 🇮🇹

🔸KANG YO HAN🔸

-Breathe...-

A weary sigh left my lips, a sour taste in my throat, beyond, inside my stomach, as I sat motionless in kim Ga On's father's office, gazing at the wooden floor, on where not even a few minutes before, the scattered papers laid, the ones he had thrown at me.

-Kang Yo Han... breathe-

Mrs Kim had come in with her husband, a few hours after Kim Ga On's outburst, and with infinite gentleness, she had taken away the sheets of papers, pausing to analyse the room, the fragmented vase, the sunflower I had prepared for him; a gift that had failed to reach the intended destination, and at last on me, on my horror-swollen face, crossed by a million nameless flashbacks, reopened scars and a lump in my throat that did not allow me to breathe properly.
I couldn't exhale without my chest or my heart starting to ache.
Something somewhere was scratching the walls of my skin and making me bleed from the inside and I didn't know how to stop the internal bleeding.

Mrs Kim had sat down next to me in the meantime, and had asked Mr Kim to leave, to leave us alone.

And for a moment she reminded me of my mother, the gracious and calm way she handled every situation, even the most tedious, the ones that seemed insoluble. Uniquely impossible.
And in that instant, I almost felt like crying, the memory of her became so agonising that I could feel her ever-present emptiness. The emptiness she had left like a good perfume leaving a dwelling.

-You should have seen his face, he was terrified, as if he was looking at a monster... As if I were that mon...-
Words failed me, and I had to stop to breathe again.

-Look at me...-
Her warm hand rested under my chin, turning my dull face to hers, docile, caring in contrast to mine.
Her brown eyes stared at me as a mother would look at a wounded child, full of love and an affection that almost made me ache, an affection I had missed for so long.

-You are not a monster, Kang Yo Han. You never were one to begin with-

Somehow those words were enough to break the surface, the ice, they were enough to crack my back and chip away at the steel armour, making me as vulnerable as I had only been with my mother and Isaac, long time ago.
I wiped away a tear, surprised, even more unprepared when more tears fell, streaking my cheeks, like a lonely river lost in the desert.

I had never cried, and yet here I was, subjugated, victim of strong emotions that Kim Ga On had awakened deep inside me, as if he had stirred up the child inside me who had been hiding from the whole world as not to be stoned alive.

-You know...I was in the kitchen when my husband came to me, saying he wanted to shelter you at our place...
And there is something you don't know about...-

I remained silent, waiting patiently for her to continue.
Mrs Kim took my hands in hers, squeezing them in a form of comfort.

-Before we moved here to Italy, we used to live in south Korea, right in your district, close to your hometown, and at that time my husband worked with the cops...-