You feared solitude and darkness—that trembling reached even me.

So you always listened intently, trying to hear humans’ sounds. Though you couldn’t hear properly, you even pitied that humans’ various chatter resembled crying.

As if forgetting their vulgarity and cruelty.

I watched you for a long time before deciding to speak.

I too was alone like you,

I too was lonely like you.

My voice would be clear and distinct to you unlike humans, so I thought you’d welcome me. But instead you were startled and frightened.

Since I was the one in need anyway, I didn’t blame you. I’d already seen it. Your growing curiosity and affection toward humans. Your clean, innocent gaze that looked faintly sad.

And I desired you.

Wishing all the gaze and emotion toward humans would turn to me.

For you who couldn’t see, I selected and told only beautiful, lovely stories humans made.

Because even if they were mere fiction humans created, if one believes it exists, it has powerful vitality.

As time passed, you listened to my words and gradually lowered your guard. Then you asked.

“Kata, would there be humans who want me too?”

You thought you couldn’t see humans well because they didn’t seek you. Whatever the reason, I didn’t want to disappoint you.

“There would be. We were born from humans’ wishes.”

“……Why did I become the moon? If I’d become human again, I wouldn’t be so alone.”

I resented you for a moment. I was beside you, yet couldn’t you love me like you loved invisible humans?

“If I could hold them in my eyes, hear their voices clearly……”

You truly grieved and shed tears. Countless tear streams were like daggers to me. So I decided to grant your wish. We were the only beings who could affect each other.

Because I loved you, who loved without reward.

So I opened a gap in the sky and showed you humans.

“And… you……”

Romeo swallowed rough breaths as if strangled. In the shadows of his unfocused, frowning eyes, crushed resentment and rusted affection surged.

“You went down seeking voices calling you. Because there were those seeking the moon as they sought the sun.”

He trembled as if regretting his mistake.

“But the fate of a fallen god is cruel.”

“……”

“You repeatedly loved and were abandoned through infinite lives and deaths in someone’s grand story, or in actual life.”

His wandering red eyes pierced Rosaline like a spear.

“Like when you were human before becoming god, just like now.”

Silence fell. Returned memories piled in Rosaline’s mind, but rather calm like a still river as if finding their place.

Rather, he seemed confused. As if not expecting her silence. Without releasing the hand holding him, she lowered her body to meet his eyes more closely. He’d still been bending his waist, so he ended up looking up at her.

“Romeo, I actually knew everything. I never forgot my past for a moment. I mistook forgetting because I’d looked away so long.”

“……”

“I even knew who you were.”

Very long ago, from when she first heard his voice, she’d witnessed all his heart and past that couldn’t hide even an inch in the radiance the sun emitted.

She’d known him from the start.

“Kata, the sun.”

She confessed toward him gazing at her like one parched.

“You were a murderer’s child.”

He whispered blankly.

“Yes, I was……”

I was a murderer’s child.

Prison was my cradle, and like you, without a clear name, I learned sl*ughter, lived wielding a sword, and was ultimately designated a sacrifice like you.

I hated the parents who abandoned me, the comrades who betrayed me, the humans who killed me.

The cruelty of k*lling one’s own kind, endless vanity and desire, the baseness of abandoning even one’s child.

All of it.

So perhaps that’s why I became the sun. Wishing for their destruction, harboring hatred-filled heat, never taking my eyes off them. My only pleasure was watching their prosperous nations fall, self-destruct in groups, and ultimately burn to death.

Unlike you who became the moon lighting paths in darkness because you loved humans too much.

So when you appeared, I found you pathetic for yearning for them. You surely had memories like me but pretended not to know while craving affection—it was laughable.

But that ridicule ultimately turned toward me.

Because I too wanted you.

I hoped your smile would turn to me, your eyes would embrace me, and since you loved even those annoying humans, you’d embrace me full of hatred and rage.

Watching you, I stopped staring at humans.

The price for me glancing away to watch you when I should hate humans and witness their destruction was clear.

A fall.

So when you descended to earth, I fell too.

But I was rather willing because I could follow you. I repeated lives with you, staying in your shadow. Sometimes formless like a god’s appearance, sometimes in human form beside you.

I planned to save you from humans who didn’t love you.

But you were busy running when you saw me. No matter how I grabbed you, you ignored me. Though you surely knew who I was, you willingly pushed yourself into tragedy’s pit.

I tried stopping, persuading, even threatening you.

But you didn’t stop loving someone with light-filled eyes, yes… with the moon’s lingering heat. Without sparing even a glance at me always behind you.

Actually Tivre, you even joined bodies with me once. You drugged me to sleep early the next dawn and left, but I can say thank you now. That first night with you was the most ecstatic day of my life.

After leaving me, you always died abandoned as when human, and after you died, I had no choice but to see humans, so I fulfilled my duty as god.

I brought humans’ ruin and destruction.

Yes… dozens, hundreds of times. Through countless repeated lives, it was so.

I was exhausted. I yearned for s*icide. I thought returning to the sky would be better than being with you.

So I thought this would be the last time.

I’ll tear apart that tattered heart of yours that never looks back even once, and cast you out for absurdly begging for another’s life.

I failed again. And was abandoned again.

I couldn’t contain my rage. My head felt ready to burst with injustice.

Things being what they were, I resolved to hold on until death in this life.

Together with you.

Her hand touched Romeo’s jaw after he’d spilled his insides like a criminal. She traced his lips exhaling rough breaths, touched his cheek and traced over where his dimples would be. He thought she was touching his scars.

“I’ve clung to you, so you can’t become god or human and your wounds won’t heal.”

Her memories had clearly returned, yet her calm face made him anxious. She should be shocked, avoid him, be frightened. Anxious feelings made harsh words come out.

“But you dying doesn’t mean I’ll live, so foolish thoughts—”

“I fell because.”

Rosaline spoke without inflection. He couldn’t move at the different light entering her eyes. They sparkled like before, when she’d been the moon in the sky. Bright eyes that glimmered no matter how trampled.

“I saw what I shouldn’t have seen, and wanted to have it.”

Compassion accepting even distant strangers, affection sacrificing oneself for friends, love taking an unrelated child as one’s own.

With so many humans, wouldn’t there be one place for me among them? Greed seized her recklessly. Fire ignited inside like a hungry ghost with an empty stomach. She had no intention of becoming light in solitude.

“I should have illuminated all things as the moon, but I wanted to receive light rather than shine it on someone. I lost my qualification.”

Like Kata only chasing Tivre’s tail.

“You said you were different from me. You were wrong. Actually, we’re too similar. Foolish, having nothing, lonely—exactly like me as if stamped out.”

Rosaline laid bare the heart she’d suppressed and looked away from. But she had no hesitation at all. She’d always been this way before Romeo, as always.

“So I was afraid. I thought only solitude would wait if I followed you who were just like me.”

She placed her forehead against his and kept stroking his cheek. These dimples. They must have been there when he was human before becoming god. That fierce gaze too, the sometimes nasty way of speaking, the life forced to hold a sword.

Like the inescapable sun, light endlessly illuminating her was right before her nose, yet I acted so foolishly.

“Romeo, what would happen if we abandoned the names Kata and Tivre, sun and moon, and chose each other?”

Romeo gripped her hand wrapping around him powerlessly yet ecstatically like a thoroughly defeated soldier. And buried his cheek in her small palm.

“We’d become beings that are neither god nor human, nothing at all.”

Just as common people with the names Romeo and Rosaline. Living lives where they’d no longer be abandoned or have to stain their hands with blood.

Rosaline smiled and bent her waist. At a distance where their breaths mixed an inch away, she whispered.

“While fallen together?”

“While fallen together.”

Without being toyed with by any fate.

“Living ordinarily.”

Her eyelashes tickled him, trembling delicately. But her voice shook more with passion and joy.

“Just like now……”

A deep kiss followed without question of who started. Rosaline recalled him saying ‘If you wish, I’ll give you even eternally unquenchable light.’

Ah, he truly gave it. Laughter burst out amid the kiss.

Resembling tragedy and comedy someone created, they’d continued such foolish, clumsy lives. But she knew. That only love was unquenchable light, so she’d clung foolishly to that one hope.

Rosaline embraced her unquenchable light, Romeo. Vowing not to fall to the same fate again.