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Go Yoohan never claimed to be rational.
What he would call himself, however, was stubborn. Stubborn, resourceful, and in love. In love, and terrified.
When he saw that rope mark on Yeonwoo’s arm, his blood ran cold, and not for the reason most people would consider rational.
He’d heard enough of the fear mongering to know what it was supposed to mean when a Mono acquired rope.
He also had seen the pure terror on his Mono’s face at the meer thought of it — one he seemed to have often, constantly, obsessively. And his reaction, every time, was to push Yoohan away. His reaction, when alone, he knew it in his bones, he knew it like he knew Yeonwoo’s face and no one else’s, was to hurt himself instead.
And a noose was far easier to tie than the most binding of knots.
And Yeonwoo wouldn’t tell him, and he wouldn’t call him to say goodbye, and he wouldn’t let him in if he came to his house screaming and crying to be let in; and the intuition of that made a knot inside him come loose in a way that made him rabid.
But he wasn’t rational, so he tipped off his aunt and showed up anyway, and he had to watch as his beloved’s lifeless body was put on a gurney with a ring of red bruises around his throat and a med student fed him air manually through an oxygen bag. He watched them do chest compressions, and he heard ribs crack. He was too delirious from sobbing to hear if they announced him resuscitated or a time of death.
He remembers watching the news when Jonghyun-Sunbaenim died. He remembered his four Sunbae’ sobbing faces, and never imagined it would be him. Carbon monoxide, hanging. Why was breathing so damn repulsive to them? He could barely breathe himself, dizzy from asphyxiation. Why would they choose this?
A gloved hand was pressed on his shoulder. The other pulled his mask off. It didn’t help. He continued making sounds his vocal teacher would have never heard from even his worst trainees.
“Please, I don’t want to do more chest compressions on a teenager tonight. Breathe, okay?”
He couldn’t. Why should he? Yeonwoo wasn’t breathing, why should he? Call it an exercise in empathy, call it obsession, call it love.
“I-I-I don’t-“
The first responder pressed his hand against her own chest. “In.” She breathed, chest expanding like it was so easy. She held it while Yoohan continued gasping for air. “Out.” She said, breathing it out forcefully.
“D-deserve-“
“In.”
“T-to breathe.”
“Out. You do.”
“H-he’s d-d-dea-ah-ah-d.”
“Please, in.”
“I-it’s m-m-m-myyyyyy-ah-f-fauuult.”
“Out. It’s not. He made his choice.”
“I-I ahhhh k-iiiiahhllled him!”
“You didn’t. In.”
“I did! I did I did I did!”
“Out. He’s alive. Please, listen to me, we resuscitated him.”
Yoohan took such a deep breath in he choked on it. He gasped, in, out, once, twice, thrice. “He’s alive?”
“Good, good,” she hushed, rubbing his back. “He is. We have him on breath support but his heart is beating again. It’s weak and slow, but we’ll be watching him and we won’t let it stop again.”
“W-why would he d-do this?”
She sighed. “It’s not often talked about in the media, but many Monos — far more than those who get in the news, by the way, suffer from what’s called moral scrupulosity OCD. He-“ now she choked up. “You’re his probe, aren’t you?”
Yoohan nodded.
“He was so terrified he would hurt you it was all he could think about. It’s torture for someone like him, you know? Seeing all that in the media, being told it’s inevitable. When he met you, the intrusive thoughts must have been constant. They take it as proof positive, and they decide the only way to stop themselves is to stop living at all, and that they deserve it .” A certain amount of disgust crept into her voice.
“It’s not your fault. It’s the media. It’s my colleagues, it’s…it’s him, in a way. Suicide for Monos is far more inevitable than kidnapping or murder for probes, but that’s not a convenient truth to tell. In truth, the worst of Monos expose the worst in all of us, and most would rather make them the scapegoat than admit it to themselves. Nobody wants to think blood is on their hands. Not you, not him, not most Monos, and not the average person. If people knew what they were doing when they spread that crap, we would all have to face a lot of ugly truths that your Mono has probably thought about every day for his entire life. So they take the fall, and the rest of us live in ignorance while they suffer. And far more people like you would be alive if we stopped using their cases as nothing more than canon fodder.”
She glanced over her shoulder. “I have to go. But listen to me. He’s going to be in a psych ward, and they’re going to try to make him go back to black and white.” She slipped him a piece of paper. “Call me. We’ll get you both where you need to be.” She patted his back and walked away.
“I-wait!”
She paused.
“How did you know?”
She turned around. He saw teary eyes, trembling lips, but try as he might, the sum of her parts was not a face. The lips smiled, and he didn’t understand why, because he could tell that smile was one of pain. He’d never heard of those before. He’d certainly never seen one, and if he did he couldn’t remember it. “Because my girlfriend, my Mono, killed herself.”
She turned back around to hop into the ambulance before he could make out the shape of her nose or the fall of her hair. She fizzled out into a haze of flashing sea-green lights and sirens.
That, at least, he could remember.
He was left with the a piece of paper with a stranger’s number on it, whose face he would never remember. A stranger who had saved his beloved Yeonwoo’s life, and his own.
He never hated himself more. So much that he was starting to understand his Mono.
Call it an exercise in empathy.