L*st and Death

“What’s your real name, not the nickname?”

“Baekgyeong.”

“...Just two syllables?”

“Yeah.”

Siron liked how, despite looking sharp and irritable, Baekgyeong answered without resistance—almost obediently.

“Help me up.”

Siron stretched out his hand toward Baekgyeong like a child begging for attention. Baekgyeong scoffed at the absurdity but reluctantly grabbed Siron’s arm and pulled him upright, sitting him at the edge of the bed.

“Now get out.”

“Today’s your birthday, right?”

“...Yeah.”

Baekgyeong answered curtly, frowning.

“Why are you like this on your birthday? You’re the only one in a tux.”

With intense beats thudding from every direction, Baekgyeong looked like he’d fallen out of some old-world gala—dressed for a charity fundraiser in a world of sleek, half-naked bodies and pounding music.

“There was a family event. The party... is just starting. I’m gonna change, so get lost already.”

Handsome, stylish from head to toe, prone to impulsive bursts of anger—and yet, for someone who had just turned twenty-one, there was something immature about him. Siron’s confused impressions of Baekgyeong suddenly clicked into place. He found himself wanting to get closer to this difficult man.

“You probably got a ton of happy birthdays today, so why don’t you say it for me instead?”

“What?”

“It’s my birthday too.”

“Birthday? ...How old are you?”

Siron hesitated for a second before answering.

“To be honest... too young to be here. I turned eighteen today.”

Baekgyeong stared at him in stunned silence, holding his breath. Siron scratched his head awkwardly and looked away, wondering if it was really that surprising.

“I’m eighteen too.”

Baekgyeong grabbed Siron’s chin, forcing him to look straight at him, and repeated,

“I said, I’m eighteen too.”

He said it like he was stabbing an exclamation mark into Siron’s chest. In the beastlike glint of Baekgyeong’s dark eyes, there was an almost innocent hope that his words would have some impact. Siron, unsure what Baekgyeong wanted from him or why he was suddenly closing the distance, gave a clumsy smile.

A demon that devoured my precious child and was born in his place.

Around the age of eight, Baekgyeong had come across that note while secretly flipping through his mother’s journal. He found it the night he came home after a long hospital stay, following a full battery of neurological exams.

At the time, young Baekgyeong had no idea what those angry scrawled words meant. And while the impression faded as time went on, his faulty brain managed to erase even that memory. But as he grew older, he came to realize how much his mother resented him—how every time he called her “Mom,” she wore the expression of someone forcing herself to endure the dissonance of a horrific noise.

Baekgyeong carried a small tumor in his brain. It was located deep beneath the cerebral cortex, in the insula, the so-called “island” of the brain. No one could say for sure whether it had developed in the womb or emerged during early childhood.

From the time he was very young, Baekgyeong had always been a deeply troubled child. He couldn’t learn social norms. His outbursts of rage flared unpredictably, often exploding into violence at the slightest trigger. His behavior set him apart from other children his age.

The problem wasn’t just a lack of discipline—it stemmed from something deeper, something neurological. After extensive testing, the doctors concluded that the mass in Baekgyeong’s head was likely either a teratoma or a fetus in fetu. The former was a tumor abnormally differentiated into hair, teeth, and neural tissue. The latter was a parasitic twin embryo absorbed partially into its sibling between weeks 2 and 8 of gestation.

Both were incredibly rare. And either way, Baekgyeong was at high risk of developing neurological or psychiatric complications as he matured. But at the time of diagnosis, the tumor wasn’t life-threatening. Removing it would be extremely dangerous due to its location, and the surgery itself carried severe risks. In the end, his parents decided to indefinitely postpone the operation.

Even after forgetting his mother’s memo, Baekgyeong lived under the shadow of the mass in his skull. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it was the remnant of a sibling he had murdered. That the body of his dead twin lay inside his brain. ✧ NоvеIight ✧ (Original source) That the soul of that lost twin had become a part of him.

Yoon Siron was born April 12, 1987, at 1:27 a.m.—a premature baby.

Baekgyeong was born April 12, 1987, at 1:39 a.m.—full term.

Baekgyeong kept the birth certificate and obstetrics records of Yoon Siron—documents he had obtained with great effort—stored carefully in a private file. He kept them alongside MRI scans of his own brain. When he looked at them together, it felt as if his dead brother had been reborn in a new body and carried on living.

Baekgyeong’s logic told him Siron was a completely separate person. But his emotions whispered something else. That it wasn’t just a sense of kinship. That their two lives were entangled in some mysterious way. And Baekgyeong, more than anything, was a man ruled by emotion.

It was as if the twin he’d absorbed as an embryo had disappeared from the world and returned, reborn as Yoon Siron. Only concepts like reincarnation and destiny could explain the pull he felt, the hunger that consumed him.

There was an invisible thread connecting him and Siron. Baekgyeong felt it tugging him closer. He sensed the current running between them, the way their boundaries dissolved, as if they were fated to one day share a single soul. He never spoke these surreal thoughts aloud, but in his heart, he was always bound by the idea of that “connection.”

After the party, Siron had more or less become a live-in guest at Baekgyeong’s house. In the lavish, sprawling mansion in Holmby Hills, he was living a life he’d never even dreamed of. The resolution to return to Korea and study acting after high school graduation was fading fast in the face of this newfound physical comfort.

The mansion, where Siron had now spent a full month, had been built in the 1970s by a renowned architect, commissioned by a wealthy Greek family. It took nine years to complete. When you entered, the first thing you saw was a garden that looked like a modern revival of ancient Greek glory.

With white marble walls and a structure reminiscent of a European palace, the mansion had eleven meticulously designed bedrooms and nineteen bathrooms. Out back was a luxurious lounge with a hotel-style pool and a small bar. Siron would often spend his evenings watching the sunset ripple across the water.

The mansion was owned by the president of the Bile Group—a property purchased for family vacations. But for the past three years, it had been used solely by Baekgyeong during winter and spring breaks. After getting expelled from school for a violent incident at fifteen, he’d been homeschooled. Tutors came and went, unable to handle him despite the generous pay. None lasted longer than a month.

The only one who stuck around was Choi Seongmin, twenty-four, a maternal relative currently attending UCLA nearby. He was Baekgyeong’s only friend and self-appointed bridge to the outside world.

Even though Siron hadn’t known Baekgyeong that long, he already disliked the way Choi Seongmin hovered around him like a hyena. Always acting like part of the furniture, Seongmin made sure Baekgyeong—still a minor—was surrounded by adult leisure and entertainment. It had been his idea to throw a “twenty-one-year-old UCLA student’s birthday party at a mansion in Holmby Hills.”

Siron kept his mouth shut to avoid conflict, but he couldn’t stand the way Seongmin so smoothly led Baekgyeong down the path of corruption. Every week there was another pool party. Every party stank of weed. And it seemed Baekgyeong had already opened his eyes to sex, too. Even though Siron had only been staying for a month, there were always women in their twenties hanging around—mature, sexy, older sisters who seemed to cling to Baekgyeong.

“The eldest son turned out fine, at least.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to lock him up in a psych ward?”

“Apparently the medical foundation is building one.”

“No way, really?”

Through conversations among the house staff, Siron picked up bits and pieces about Baekgyeong’s family. He had an older brother five years his senior—smart, apparently. A father who was a painter, and a mother who was the president of the Bile Group. Baekgyeong was practically estranged from his father—because of something he had done years ago.

At the time, his father had been preparing for his big comeback—a solo exhibition at a prestigious gallery in New York, ten years after his last show. He had prepared 41 works, and the exhibition was being hyped as one of the biggest art events of the year.

But two weeks before the opening, the show was abruptly canceled.

Because his youngest son had taken a knife and shredded 29 of the paintings.

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