Chapter 38 - Chapter 36: Episode 35 - Story of Those Left Behind (2)
Hyeon-tae collapsed with that wail, and only then did the reality of Seon-ah leaving his side truly hit him.
Maybe it was because of that light-hearted mindset.
He'd fallen asleep like he'd passed out, but it genuinely felt like the first good sleep he'd had in ages.
He used to groan every day, unable to sleep properly from worrying about his son, but after waking up from that good nap, his mind felt a lot more at ease.
When Min-ah felt Hyeon-tae stir, she took a towel from the bathroom and wiped the tear-streaked face of her husband.
Then she showed him the clothes Seon-ah had worn.
A tremor ran through Hyeon-tae's hands as he grabbed the clothes and hugged them tight.
He looked so pitiful, searching for any warmth that might still linger in the fabric his son had worn.
Had he finally managed to compose himself?
When the trembling in Hyeon-tae's hands finally stopped, Min-ah spoke.
"Honey, I found the camcorder Seon-ah and Yu-rin used. Looks like they have a lot of memories together. Let's go watch it with the in-laws."
"Hic... okay. Just a little... just wait a little..."
Whether it was the aftereffects of fainting, he could barely put any strength in his legs.
Min-ah supported her husband as he struggled to get up, and slowly they made their way toward the living room.
There, the Yu-ra couple, who had been sitting on the sofa, were also exhausted, lying sideways and fast asleep.
Seeing this, Min-ah said to Hyeon-tae,
"The in-laws must have been through a lot too. They've fallen asleep. Let's watch it together when they wake up."
"Yeah..."
Hyeon-tae replied in a weak voice.
"Honey, are you hungry?"
"No... I don't feel like eating at all."
Seeing that Hyeon-tae looked somewhat recovered after sleeping, she'd asked to see if his appetite had returned—he hadn't even eaten porridge properly for almost a month.
But she didn't feel like eating either.
"Then I'll bring some tea."
"Please..."
He must have been thirsty, because when she offered tea, he said he'd have some.
.
.
.
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Even as they drank their tea, the couple said nothing to each other.
Part of it was to stay quiet so they wouldn't wake the sleeping Yu-ra couple, but more than that, in this silence, they kept looking around the space where Seon-ah and Yu-rin had lived.
They etched every single item into their minds, thinking about the people who had left.
As they kept sipping their tea, quite some time must have passed—the light coming in from outside began to fade, and it started getting dark.
Around that time, the Yu-ra couple, who had been asleep on the sofa, woke up.
Min-ah had deliberately not turned on the living room lights, worried about waking them.
The dark living room seemed to remind them once again that the owners of this home were gone.
Both Hyeon-tae and Min-ah began to choke up in the sorrowful atmosphere.
From within the darkness, they heard what sounded like Yu-ra waking her husband.
The two awakened in the darkness where they couldn't see in front of them; they blinked, trying to find the living room light, but couldn't move until their eyes adjusted.
Then Min-ah spoke to the awakened Yu-ra couple.
"Are you awake?"
"Yes, we're up. Is your husband feeling any better?"
Yu-ra, remembering how Hyeon-tae had collapsed earlier, asked about his condition with a worried tone.
"He's much better now. Thank you for your concern."
Min-ah was the one asked, but Hyeon-tae answered directly himself.
Since it was a question about his own condition, he figured it'd be better to answer himself.
Talking to each other in the dark must have felt quite awkward, because Min-ah got up and turned on the living room lights.
As the living room brightened, the somber atmosphere from before seemed to lift somewhat.
"In-laws, I found the camcorder that Yu-rin and Seon-ah used, in the master bedroom. There seem to be quite a lot of videos they took together. Shall we all watch them in the living room?"
"Yes... since it's the children's last recordings, we'd like to see them."
The Yu-ra couple answered in subdued voices, not long after waking up.
Min-ah began looking for a cable to connect the camcorder to the monitor-style TV in the living room.
They must have often watched videos from the camcorder on the living room TV, because the cable was in the first drawer of the TV stand.
Checking the dates on the camcorder through the TV screen—from the oldest to the most recent—it was filled with videos from the day Yu-rin had come to her parents' house to bring up marriage, all the way to two days before the wedding.
It was clear that these contained the story from the last time the two couples had seen them up until around the wedding day.
"Which one should we watch first?"
Min-ah asked the in-laws carefully.
She thought it was only natural to ask for Yu-ra's opinion since the videos contained precious memories of not just her son but also Yu-ra's daughter.
"I'd like to see all of them, from the very first video to the last—even if it's just bits of each."
Even though the shortest videos were 3 hours and the longest were often 24-hour recordings, Yu-ra said she wanted to see all of them.
When they played the first video, there was Seon-ah sitting on the bed.
Then Yu-rin's voice came through, and they realized the person holding the camcorder was Yu-rin.
A feeling of foreboding crept in.
An instinct told them they shouldn't watch this video any further.
Suddenly, the pained expression Seon-ah had shown when he stayed over at their house that one night, and during the formal family meeting, flashed through their minds.
What was the reason that thought—which they had believed had no connection—came to mind now?
It didn't take long before they realized it was indeed connected to this video on the camcorder.
The camcorder's focus shifted to the pills laid out in front of Seon-ah on the bed, then turned back to Seon-ah.
It wasn't hard to tell that Seon-ah was going to take all those pills.
Yu-rin's voice was heard.
Then Yu-rin started asking Seon-ah questions, and apparently not liking his answers, an agitated voice suddenly rang out. The camcorder was fixed at the spot on the desk they'd seen earlier in the master bedroom, now facing the bed.
Seon-ah, sensing what was coming for him, started crying and begging her to stop, saying please no.
Then Yu-rin, who must have been holding the camcorder, cursed and approached Seon-ah on the bed, grabbing his throat with one hand.
With her other hand, she grabbed all the pills on the bed and violently shoved them into Seon-ah's mouth.
What happened next was too shocking.
Yu-rin began to rape Seon-ah.
When he struggled, she punched him in the stomach. And there it was, graphically captured—Yu-rin forcibly inserting herself onto Seon-ah as his whole body trembled and his movements stopped.
Seon-ah's tear-streaked face as he was mercilessly violated was captured completely on the camcorder.
"Ah... aaaahhhhh! No! Seon-ah! Aaaaargh!"
It was too great a shock.
Seeing that, Hyeon-tae started screaming like a madman.
Even as Hyeon-tae was having a fit, as if the loud noise didn't matter to them at all,
the Yu-ra couple, also in shock, were frozen in place with expressions that said "this can't be happening."
Then Hyeon-tae, with a short sound as if he couldn't breathe, fainted once again.
Worried about Hyeon-tae fainting again just hours after his last collapse, Min-ah checked on her husband.
Someone could have turned off the video, but none of them had the presence of mind to think of that. Min-ah took her husband back to the master bedroom, laid him down, and returned to the living room.
Min-ah had come out to turn off the video, but when the next scene played, her intention to stop it froze.
Because the video continued showing Yu-rin raping Seon-ah, who was screaming—screams that were indistinguishable from moans.
The Yu-ra couple finally seemed to come to their senses.
Then Yu-ra stood up from her seat, prostrated herself toward Min-ah, and began repeatedly banging her head on the floor while apologizing.
"I'm sorry. I failed to raise my child properly. I'm so sorry, truly..."
She offered her apologies with tears streaming, smashing her head against the floor, but Min-ah was more curious about what all those numerous videos contained than about the apology.
She began to worry—surely they couldn't all be videos like this?
Leaving Yu-ra where she was, Min-ah picked up the remote and started manipulating it. She skimmed through the first video, only watching parts here and there.
Seon-ah's dazed facial expression, the scene of him being raped while unconscious—all of it was recorded in full.
Seon-ah, ejaculating an impossible amount continuously, looked like he was in so much pain.
And the pills she had fed him earlier seemed to be a whole mix of aphrodisiacs, narcotics, stamina boosters, and the like.
Watching him—unable to subside no matter how many times he came, screaming in even greater agony—Min-ah thought to herself:
The way Yu-rin handled Seon-ah was like playing with a sex slave or a toy.
She began to taste blood in her mouth.
Without realizing it, Min-ah had bitten her own lip.
Yu-ra's husband, as if he couldn't bear to watch anymore, had his head deeply bowed and was sobbing.
He looked as if, as a fellow man, he understood that pain.
Min-ah, with a glimmer of desperate hope, looked for the next video.
It was another video of Yu-rin raping Seon-ah.
Most of the videos that followed started with her feeding him drugs.
A video of her sexually draining Seon-ah's genitals with her hand for 24 hours straight.
A video that seemed like an experiment to see how long she could keep raping him.
A video of her suddenly stripping Seon-ah while he was sleeping peacefully, then forcing herself on him.
A video of her feeding him every drug imaginable, then using a measuring tape to measure the size and girth of his cock.
A video of her feeding him drugs, then choking him until he nearly passed out and then letting go, over and over.
There was even a video of Seon-ah, before the filming even began, desperately trying to escape from the bed to the door, grabbing the doorknob and trying to open it—but it was locked from the outside, wouldn't budge—
and he scratched at the door with his fingernails like a cat, terrified.
Even as his nails broke and tore, as Seon-ah screamed "no" over and over, Yu-rin laughed as if she found it amusing, threw him onto the bed, and raped him.
They were all kinds of perverted and sadistic videos that couldn't possibly come from the mind of a normal, sensible human being.
And as the videos got more recent, Seon-ah, seemingly already addicted to the drugs, could be seen constantly asking for them.
The camcorder contained only videos of Yu-rin feeding narcotics to her son and raping him over and over, as if she was enjoying his brutal violation.
There were 54 of them.
Approximately 44 days. A month and two weeks' worth of events.
Even though it was so painful, why did she watch all of these videos, even if only briefly?
Min-ah herself didn't really know the reason.
But one thing was certain:
Even before Seon-ah was taken through the Gate, he had been living in hell.
Seeing him so brutally violated filled her with immense guilt and regret.
She wished she hadn't allowed the marriage.
Her heart was filled with misery, wondering what would have happened if she had tried to help Seon-ah more actively when she saw him suffering.
Yu-ra's husband, with his head hung low, and Yu-ra herself, still smashing her forehead against the floor until blood was pooling, were probably in just as much pain.
Seeing their own daughter feeding a boy drugs and ruthlessly raping him must have been a tremendous shock.
And there were 54 such videos.
The videos captured situations where, if Seon-ah hadn't been a healer, he would have died dozens of times over from the raping.
That was the crime of the Yu-ra couple, the parents of Yu-rin.
Failing to properly educate their daughter.
A sin they, as parents, must atone for.