A/N: This show destroyed me more than any other show in the history of ever, basically. But one thing is for sure: I love Wang So. A LOT.
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win"
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
He fights.
His strongest memories are of fear. They are not his first, but those that last have always mattered more. There are scars on his face, scars on his shoulders, on his hands. The muttering of the wild concubine of Shinju, her screams when she sees him for who he is.
His own cries are loudest, even when they do not pass his lips. Silence, he finds, is easiest.
The wolves have no pity on one who begs.
The wolves prowl, the wolves leap, and he fights.
Shinju is an evil dream. Shinju is pain, but Songak is worse because no matter how much pain it brought him, no matter how many wounds it will strike against him again, when he rides towards Songak he always calls it hope.
This he plans: he will not return to Shinju.
This he does not plan: he falls in love. But no one has ever taught him about love, so sometimes all he knows is the falling.
When the scar was still sticky with blood, he would run his still-small fingers over it, even though it hurt. When the scar is a crooked rivulet along cheek and brow, familiar as years, he knows that he is fortunate that his eye was unhurt. But there is no one to say so, no one to tell him that it is less a wound for that.
(It is something a mother would say.)
If he has no mother, he does not know why he is still a son. But he is. She marked him with her own hand.
For a long time the mask is the answer. The mask, and what it hides, is what keeps her from loving him.
But then, even before the scar, he was the one she chose to sacrifice.
Her hand never fell on Yo, her wild plea for the king would never have spent Yo.
Later, he knows that the mask does not hide what keeps her from loving him.
Nothing can.
He does not love his brothers.
It is more difficult than he expected.
He goes to the temple, and he leaves none alive. He goes to the temple for his mother, who does not want him, and he sheds blood for her. It is the only thing she has ever willingly received from him.
Until now.
Soo should never have met him. He thinks that the first time she makes him smile, and he knows it until the end.
The mask cannot hide him, all that familiar cold metal and the memory of a far-off father's gift. The mask cannot hide him.
He must hide his masks.
It is the way, he realizes, of a king.
(And he will be king.)
He loves his brothers, and he loves Hae Soo.
It is more difficult than he expected.
He fights.