The tests come through positive in the worst possible way. Being a man who grew accustomed to epithets about his own potentialities, or at least a man of an impetuous spirit, he demands x-rays and access to the labs for his own tests and a second, third, fourth and fifth opinion.

The diagnosis however, is too clear cut for excuses or denial. This realization does not make it any easier for Jumin to accept reality, though.

In order to help the children to understand, MC tacks the x-rays up in the windows so she can show them the dark, angry patches that need to be removed and then chemically treated. He feels ill at the very sight of the images and cannot stand watching her explain it for them.

He refuses to help his wife, and he refuses to help his children. Instead, he goes and turns the shower up as hot and high as it goes. Let them deal with the information the way they must, he is doing the same: in the boiling steam and underneath the rushing sound of water, he finally allows himself to weep.

Jumin cries with terror, with rage. With the utter despair of a mortal man faced for the very first time with his own mortality.

The black-haired man wishes that he was like Jihyun, with that cavalier demeanour towards suffering and death, that ill-begotten, badly-defined Catholicism of his. He wishes that he truly believed on something, anything, just as long as it is grand and all-encompassing, powerful enough to move life and death. He wishes that he could be comforted with platitudes about redemption.

Alas, he is too material of a man and could not be bothered with these spiritual exploits. Whatever is the case, though, he is likely to find out soon.

He never quite forgives his wife for telling the children without consulting him first, though. From a man indestructible, the most powerful industrialist in South Korea, the holder of a wealth beyond the wildest imagination to this weakened, part-human husk, he cannot quite shake his pride enough to admit that he really is infallible now, and in the worst possible way.

They row so furiously about it afterwards that their eldest rings Jaehee, who arrives promptly and stealthily ships the children out of the house.

"You can't just not tell them!" MC insists over and over. "That isn't fair."

"But it wasn't your place to tell them!"

"It is my place to tell them if you refuse to!" She blares right back and then suddenly she is crying. "Do you really want them to keep on believing that everything's going to be fine when any day could be your last? You could die, Jumin. And if they don't understand that you might not get through this then I'm the one who's going to have to deal with the fallout if you don't make it. Not you. I'm going to be alone."

He is abashed when he realises what her justifications were and, although he still does not like the idea, he forgives her. Well, enough at least to help her explain it to the kids. In the end, though, he still withdraws from them all. He does not mean to, he wants to bask in the love that he had foolishly taken for granted before, but it is how he has always dealt with his problems and he is not about to stop a habit like that with so many years of being stuck in his ways behind him.

From there he mainly skips stages one through three and winds up sloping through his treatment, quieter and sadder than MC has seen him in years. Maybe since she first met him. She holds his hand and tries to make him smile and cuts his glorious hair an inch at a time to ease him into the day when it all begins to fall out.

"Horrible things happen sometimes." Jumin explains to his children. Somehow, he manages to do so without crying. "Even to good people. That's just how life works."

During visiting hours, they clamber around on his bed like a litter of over-excited puppies. Their cuddles are so careful though that he thinks they might be worried that he will turn brittle and shatter like glass if they embrace him too tightly, if they love him wrong. Instead, they pat his bald head fondly and knit him horrid things to wear to hide it. Multicoloured monstrosities with tassels and bobbles, the kind of things even tasteless Luciel would have baulked at.

When the treatment ends, he leaves the hospital. His hair grows back curlier and thicker than before and he goes into remission as easily as he went into chemotherapy in the first place. The horrid beanies are hidden in the back of his sock drawer and he triumphantly buys his first tube of gel in he cannot remember how long.

It is not until he has been back home for a few weeks that Jumin realises just how far into himself he has grown. His children have suddenly started to grow up and he has missed so much of it already. They are interested in different things now, they do not look up to him in the same way. MC, for her part, has taken over the household in a way that, even with his prolonged absences, he had never seen her do before. She is so much more self-sufficient, so much closer to the kids.

They do not need him anymore, he realises. His family has outgrown the use of him, they had mourned and buried a living man. He has become obsolete by his absence and it hurts.

They try their best to include him, of course. The children invite him into their games and MC invites him back into her bed, but he finds that he cannot fathom the point of either anymore. His efforts from thereon in to reconnect with his family and friends are no more than half-hearted.

What is the point if he is going to be dead within the next five years anyway?

Quietly, bitterly, Jumin all but puts his life on hold as he waits for the day when he will be given the all-clear or dragged back in for more treatment. He does not return to his job, he does not return to his charity work, he does not return to his old self. He just twiddles his thumb, looking over the green expanse in their country home.

The tests have been sent and they are waiting on the news when MC comes into the lounge where he is watching a massive storm brewing up the mountain.

"Test results will be in soon." She says softly.

He does not respond her.

She clambers onto the couch and curls up beside him, laying her head against his still-emaciated frame, devoid of the beauty he knows he will never get back.

"Tomorrow maybe. Or the day after." The woman insists.

"Yeah." He says blandly, mostly to have her go away and leave him alone.

His wife stares at him. She does so pityingly, he thinks, with disgust at himself for allowing himself to become so wretched, so fucking pathetic that the woman he loves should pity him.

And then she stands up and pulls him to his feet.

"Come on." MC called, leading him away through the dark house.

They get in the car and drive. The kids are with their grandmother or their friends or wherever for the weekend so it is just the two of them for miles and miles of silence, the very feature of the land he purchased. A place to be alone, away from everything, to convalesce.

When they arrive, the sky is black and ominous with storm clouds. Lightning crackles overhead as MC drives them up a steep road and the very edge of a cliff.

It is a sheer drop down to the storming ocean and the rocks below and Jumin wonders briefly why she has brought them here of all places.

When he turns to ask, he finds her stripping off her jumper, then her undershirt. Finally, she toes out of sneakers and shimmies her jeans off.

Wondering, he strips down too until they are both shivering on a craggy cliff top in the middle of winter in their underwear. It is almost like the old days, those very first eleven before the party, when everything was new, strange but so very exciting. The fear tingles his senses and he wants to pursue it.

He nearly loses his composure entirely when she reaches out to thread their hands together and tugs him to the edge of the world.

"I just want you to know." She tells him quietly. "That we're going to go down fighting this thing together. You and me. No matter what. Yeah?"

It is not quite as snappy as, "Run!" but his face creases and the wind whips his tears right off his cheeks as he nods his assent at her.

"Yeah." He says, voice cracking.

Before he has a chance to prepare himself, she has coiled to spring and he has to hastily follow suit or risk being left behind.

Together they jump hand-in-hand into the storming, thrashing seas below. There is a rush of air, the briefest sensation of weightlessness and then...

It is like an explosion.

There is the sound of the wuthering winds being cut in half as the ice-cold water engulfs their bodies, mingling with the tiny pockets of air that they have dragged down with them.

For the longest moment, they are in suspended animation, the water churning and bubbling around them, and then MC gives a powerful kick. He follows her to the surface and when they reach the open air above, still hand in hand, Jumin feels more alive than he has in years. The woman bobs next to him, grinning her head off and he laughs and laughs and laughs until he gets a mouthful of salt water and almost drowns himself on the spot.

They swim back and walk up the steep road to their car in their underwear, get dressed and drive home shivering to make love in the quiet light of an early dawn.

They barely let go of each other's hands the whole time.

And when his mobile buzzes and wakes them later that morning, Jumin reaches for it and actually manages a hopeful smile for MC before he answers it.

There is no sense of dread in him anymore. Because finally he trusts that he will always have her hand to hold, unto whatever end. She will love him for the rest of his days, under fair blue skies or weathering the worst of storms.