Tears without Clouds
Chapter 30: Tears without Clouds
( The Saintess's POV )
━━━━━━ʕ• · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·•ʔ━━━━━━
The Saintess watched Han Si‑woo waste her money.
It was almost impressive.
Weeks since Russia. Weeks since she had cut his leash from the Association, buried his old file, handed him a new identity and a penthouse and a number in a bank that would make most jealous.
Weeks.
He had not once set foot back in the Association.
He had not gone begging to any guild.
He had not tried to claw his way back into the world that had chewed him up.
He sat in bars on skyscrapers and looked at lights. He wandered streets. He bought food. He slept.
“Sleeping,” she muttered once, looking at the image in the floating lens. “Of all things.”
He was supposed to be a man desperate for direction. A dog cut off from its master should scratch at the door.
He didn’t.
He drifted.
Like a current with nowhere to go.
─ ·𖥸· ─
The Saintess sat alone.
No choir. No priests. No Inquisitors.
Just her, the hum of holy machinery, and a scrying lens hovering in front of her, showing her a man who refused to behave according to plan.
Han Si‑woo leaned on the bar’s rail forty floors up, one hand curled around a glass, the other in his pocket.
A Gate tore itself open beside the next tower, ripping glass and air and sense.
People screamed.
She watched.
He didn’t move.
No flinch toward the stairs. No instinctive step between civilians and danger. No hand reaching for a weapon he did not carry
anymore.
He cast a small shield around himself like an afterthought, the same way one might open an umbrella out of habit when it rained.
Nothing more.
The monsters that started to push through—dark insects, too many limbs, too many mouths—never reached him.
They were incinerated mid‑crawl by a flare of sanctified light that nobody on that rooftop noticed.
Her light.
She let the lens float back an inch and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“Do something,” she said, knowing he couldn’t hear her. “Anything.”
He took a sip of his drink.
The Association’s emergency teams swarmed the area a moment later: helicopters, snipers, loudspeakers.
Her attention stayed on the only person who didn’t care.
“Pathetic,” she told the empty room.
She had freed him.
Cut him out of the bounty logs, severed his death certificate, handed him anonymity on a silver plate.
He was supposed to… return.
To creep back to the world she pulled him from.
To the Association lobby.
To Church’s doors.
To her.
Instead, he sat there and let the world fuss around him.
It wasn’t just laziness.
Laziness had a softness to it.
He looked more like someone who had walked through every possible script and decided that standing still annoyed the gods more.
Which would have been admirable, if she hadn’t needed him to move.
• · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ·•
The nights were more productive than the days.
He had been an obedient patient, in that sense.
Every night, in that too‑large, too‑quiet penthouse she’d arranged for him, he lay down.
He tossed.
Turned.
Closed his eyes.
And some time after that, when his breathing fell into a pattern that even his stubborn soul had to accept as sleep, she reached for him.
Not physically.
She had no need to walk into his bedroom to work.
Her hand hovered over the scrying lens.
Her real hand hovered over the anchor on her table.
Between the two, his soul hung, a distant knot of warped blue and wrongness.
She had seen something like it once.
She had buried it.
She had promised herself she would never again...
Now, she poked it.
Pulled.
Just a little.
Refining was an art.
You did not hack at souls the way you hacked at meat. You did not pour power into their cracks without care unless you wanted them to shatter.
She knew that.
She had broken enough specimens learning.
So she stretched.
Nudged.
Smoothed.
Sharp edges became finer. Blunt parts thinned. The lines around his core shifted, taking on weight in directions she wanted.
Useful.
Her scalp prickled with the effort.
She wasn’t supposed to be doing this.
There were rules, even for her.
He was meant to refine himself.
The world was supposed to do it.
That was the point of all this.
Throw the anomaly into a hell, let it cook, pull it out, cut it open.
Neat, clean, efficient.
This one refused to cook properly.
“It’ll take years like this,” she whispered, fingers hovering a breath above the glowing sphere on her table. “Centuries, at this rate.”
He twitched, miles away, in his sleep.
His hand clenched around nothing.
His mouth moved.
The lens zoomed in on his lips.
The word scraped out.
“...sorry…”
Her breath caught.
For whom?
It didn’t matter.
It wasn’t hers.
She pulled back.
The soul snapped back into place.
He turned over in his bed and didn’t wake up.
She stared at her own trembling fingers and told herself it was just strain.
“This is inefficient,” she said aloud.
─ ·𖥸· ─
Indirect refinement wasn’t working fast enough.
The world was not doing its job.
He wasn’t doing his.
So she cheated.
A Gate in a station as he walked past.
A rift over a quiet street he liked.
A monster, misplaced, crawling out from under a bench where monsters shouldn’t be.
Always near.
Always when he was.
She watched.
Waited.
Gauged his reactions.
The first time, he stepped to one side with a vague look of annoyance when something with too many claws lunged out of a sewer grate beside his leg.
The claws hit an invisible barrier a finger’s width from his ankle and turned to ash.
The beast didn’t even have time to scream.
He glanced down at the scorch mark.
Then walked on.
He didn’t even look around to see who had saved him.
“You’re supposed to be the kind one,” she told the lens. “The one who jumped first. Run last. Did they burn that out of you, or did you carve it out yourself?”
The second time, in a subway car, a portal the size of a human head opened under a child’s seat.
She let it.
Just enough crack for something to squeeze through.
Nothing too much yet.
A test.
How fast would he move?
Si‑woo watched the anomaly with tired eyes.
The girl’s mother didn’t notice. The other passengers didn’t notice.
Just him.
Just her.
He stared at it.
It widened, lazy and hungry.
He sighed.
His hand moved.
One lazy flick.
A shield enclosed only him.
The monster that burst from the floor hit the barrier around his knees and disintegrated.
The child screamed anyway, at the sight, at the noise, at the wrongness of a mouth appearing where metal had been.
He didn’t touch her.
He didn’t help her.
He stared at the residue.
Then at his own fingers.
She saw the frown.
The hint of surprise.
“Ah,” she breathed, in the watch room. “You noticed.”
He didn’t chase the feeling.
He got off at the next station.
Left the clean‑up to the Association.
Old Han Si‑woo, he couldn’t imagine disobeying someone in tears, would have wrapped half the carriage in a barrier and shouted orders.
This one couldn’t be bothered.
It infuriated her.
It fascinated her.
“You selfish thing,” she whispered. “What did they do to you? Or what did I do to you.”
She wasn’t sure.
The past had started to smear for her too.
That was the dangerous part.
─ ·𖥸· ─
She had noticed things about him.
A lot of things.
Too many.
The way he tilted his head when people lied, like he was cataloguing tells out of habit.
The way he glanced at exits first, always.
The way his hand went to his throat when he was uncomfortable, fingers brushing where chains had bitten once.
Little echoes.
Little ghosts.
None of them should have meant anything.
He was a project.
Not a person.
A potential blade she had hammered from birth.
Parents removed.
Environment designed.
Enemies positioned.
All for this.
There was no “him” here.
Just a useful cluster of traits and traumas.
She repeated that to herself often.
It didn’t help.
Sometimes, watching him on the lens, something slipped.
A memory.
A man on a rooftop, in a different world, under a different cracked sky, laughing at her with blood in his teeth and calling her by a name she could no longer remember.
A hand taking hers, warm and calloused.
A child’s laugh.
Then static.
The present.
Han Si‑woo burning his dinner.
She blinked.
He was standing in the middle of the penthouse kitchen, waving a dishcloth at the smoke detector, half the pan blackened beyond recognition.
He coughed.
“Right,” he muttered to himself, through the ascending haze. “I can solo raid calamities, but chopping an onion is too much.”
Her throat felt tight.
She raised a hand and touched her cheek.
It was wet.
She stared at the droplet balancing on her knuckle like it wasn’t hers.
Tears?
She hadn’t cried properly since...
She couldn’t remember.
Her eyes had burned plenty. From smoke. From overuse. From staring at too many death scenes until they blurred.
Her body remembered how to make the fluid.
Her mind didn’t remember how to assign feeling to it.
“Ridiculous,” she told herself.
It wasn't him.
She wiped the tear away with more force than necessary.
Maybe she was finally going mad.
Maybe she had always been.
─ ·𖥸· ─
The blue flowers were the worst.
It was a small thing.
A plant nursery on the corner of some quiet Seoul street. An outing that meant nothing. An afternoon where he should have been doing something else, anything else, than playing at being an ordinary man.
She watched through the lens as he walked in.
The bell above the door jangled.
The clerk smiled, said something in bright, forgettable Korean.
He answered politely.
His eyes scanned rows of green.
Stopped on them.
Not the same species.
Not the same shade.
Not the same world.
But close.
Small blue flowers. Stubborn. The kind that clung to soil and cracked through stone.
He picked up a pot.
Turned it in his hands.
For a heartbeat, the scrying image wavered.
The weight of memory on her sight bent the world.
She saw that other place.
Broken pavement.
One single blue thing pushing up through it because it didn’t know how to do anything else.
Him, in that world, kneeling beside it and saying, “It’s stupid.”
Her, answering, “It’s like you.”
She pulled herself back.
In Seoul, Han Si‑woo was paying.
He carried the flowers home like they were heavier than they were.
On the balcony of the penthouse, he knelt.
Set them down.
His fingers sank into the soil with a competence that didn’t belong to this life.
He pressed, gently.
Arranged.
Patted.
She leaned closer to the lens without meaning to.
He sat back on his heels.
Looked at the flowers.
Her heart stalled.
Then started again, too hard.
Her vision blurred.
Again.
More water at the corners of her eyes, like they had decided they were done being dry.
She let it fall, this time.
One drop.
Two.
They hit the scrying surface and rippled the image of him.
Maybe she was finally going mad.
Or maybe she had just lived too long pretending she was already there.
─ ·𖥸· ─
It had been weeks.
Too long.
She had honoured her own plan.
Cut his ties.
Hidden him.
Watched.
Waited for the soul to flourish, remember how to move.
He did not.
He floated.
Played at being human.
Took walks.
Bought food.
Planted flowers that should not have meant anything.
Never once came looking for her.
Never once pounded on the Church doors and demanded to know why she had killed his chains.
He was wasting herself.
Her years.
Her bargain.
“How long are you going to drift?” she asked, fingers drumming on the edge of the control table. “Until you forget that you can drown.”
He didn’t answer.
The Church reports on her other screen flickered.
Gate incidents.
Unstable awakeners.
Minor cults.
Noise.
She had enough idiots to manage globally without babysitting one man in one city who wouldn’t even properly get himself killed.
If the world would not polish him, she would.
If life would not refine him, she would stretch the soul herself until it screamed.
She was tired of subtlety.
Indirect influence.
Whispers.
Gates.
He had survived too many gods to be prodded into motion by side quests.
Fine.
She would be direct.
─ ·𖥸· ─
She considered robes.
Then dismissed them.
She stood in front of a mirror that had seen her in more skins than this one could count.
Her reflection looked back.
New lines around the eyes.
She picked simple clothes.
Not because she wanted to look human.
Because she needed to walk into his life as something that didn’t make everyone in the building drop to their knees and start praying.
Let this visit be between the two of them.
No witnesses.
No choir.
Her hand hovered briefly over the rosary that wasn’t.
Over the artifact in her pocket that hummed in tune with his soul.
She didn’t take it.
She wasn’t here to cut him open.
Not yet.
First, she had to make him move.
To make him remember how.
To make him look at her not as the strange, distant god who had plucked him from a collapsing ice field, but as… She caught that thought and strangled it.
No.
Not that.
Not again.
He was not that man.
No matter how many times he picked blue flowers.
No matter how he stood on rooftops and laughed.
No matter how his eyes looked when he said sorry.
“Han Si‑woo,” she said, to the empty room. “You are a tool.”
She stepped into the teleportation circle.
Light rose.
A corridor appeared around her.
Plain walls.
Security wards.
A front door at the end, in a building her people had quietly wiped from most databases.
The penthouse she had bought with blood.
She walked.
Her steps didn’t echo.
Her heart did, annoyingly.
It had no business being this loud.
She reached the door.
Lifted her hand.
Pressed the bell.
[♪♪♪]
There was a faint sound from inside.
A pot boiling over.
A curse, muffled.
She watched the little camera above the door blink red.
He was looking.
On the small screen inside, he would see her face.
Not the Saintess in full array.
Just a woman.
She looked straight into the camera’s glass eye.
“Can I see you?” she asked.
The words came out quieter than she intended.
Too honest.
Too close to something she hadn’t allowed herself to want for a very long time.
Silence.
Then, slowly, the lock on the door began to turn.
“Of course you can,” he said over the screen.
