worn out faces

by 52hz (nitilia)

Summary:

“I’m okay,” he says in a steady voice. “But I can’t be who you’re looking for.”

“Who do you think I’m looking for?” Agent Choi asks, voice deathly quiet. “Are you not Kim Soleum?”

He is.

But he’s not Kim Soleum in any way that matters.

He’s not a Kim Soleum that can feel anything. That can do anything. That can be anything, except a shell of what a person should be.

.

(Two and a half years after 208, Agent Choi finds Kim Soleum working a dull desk job.)

Notes:

if you knew me in 2021 you might know that i had an unhealthy obsession with the cicada by shaun tan. which i never really got over. so here is yet another story based on it.

this is set post mid-208, diverging from canon after that.

title from mad world - michael andrews which i looped while i wrote this.

i hope you like it.

Chapter 1

There are three different elevators that lead to the 13th floor.

Kim Soleum uses none of them.

The elevator is the easiest way to the floor where he works. But it isn’t safe. There is very little in this world that is safe.

The best that Soleum can do is skip over the triggers that he knows of. So he avoids elevators. He avoids mirrors. He avoids going into the supermarket when it’s late and the roads are deserted.

He avoids the theatre. The park. The subway. Late night buses. Taxis.

He avoids talking to strangers. Talking to faces. Talking to anyone.

It isn’t hard.

There isn’t a lot for Kim Soleum to do in this world besides survive.

He lives in a quiet motel a twenty minute walk from the building he works in. He comes to work at 7AM sharp. It’s a whole two hours early, but there’s nothing else for him to do. He doesn’t sleep much. He doesn’t have hobbies.

But he does have work.

Climbing up 13 flights of stairs is asking for trouble. There’s always a risk of falling into the infinite staircase disaster. So Kim Soleum climbs up two flights.

Then he walks over to the other side of the building, where the other staircase is. He climbs up another two flights.

He crosses the building again.

Another two flights.

Crosses the building.

He does this until he makes it to the 13th floor.

It takes a lot of time, perhaps too much time, but that’s alright. He’s still early.

The 13th floor is mostly deserted. Soleum works in a quiet, corner cubicle. His desk is mostly empty, save for a small pink rabbit plushie that resembles a friend he used to have, and the visiting card that Lee Jaheon had left him with to call if anything seemed like it was going wrong. The rest of the cubicle is just his computer and stacks of files. 

The windows are all hidden behind heavy blinds, and no one ever opens them. Soleum likes it better that way.

He sits at his desk and boots up his computer.

His work is mindless. He copies, and pastes. He fills forms. Prints them. Sets them on the desk of his superior to sign. Copies and pastes some more.

At 11AM sharp, he heads into the break room for a cup of coffee. Soleum doesn’t like coffee, but he’s learned that having a routine can make it easier to try to be a person.

So he has his coffee. He doesn’t make eye contact with anyone in the break room, and they don’t try to talk to him either. Their voices flit in one ear and out the other. He finds it hard to care about what they say.

It’s hard to care about anyone when Soleum can’t even see their faces.

It used to bother him. When he was new to all this. 

When his former Squad Leader had finally found him and tried to help him up, Soleum hadn’t seen the face of a lizard, but a face hidden in black smoke. He had panicked, he thinks. Maybe thrown up. That day is a bit of a blur to him now, so far in the past that it feels like it happened to another version of him altogether.

That was back when Soleum wasn’t used to not being a person. When he thought not being human would kill him.

Now when he sees the smoke covering every human he runs into, he feels nothing at all.

He finishes his coffee and sets his cup in the sink. He gets back to work.

Copies, and pastes. Writes emails. Deletes emails. Prints out some more documents. Fills in more forms.

Sometimes someone will call his work phone. He’ll answer. Write some more emails. Attach some more files.

He skips lunch. He doesn’t have an appetite anymore. But it’s important to stick to a routine, so he goes into the smoking room and smokes a cigarette from a brand that Agent Choi used to hate. He can’t tell if it’s terrible. He can’t tell a lot of things.

In this room, he imagines that the smoke covering the faces around him is there because of the cigarettes. And not because of Kim Soleum himself.

He gets back to work. Works till 7PM, a whole hour later than his coworkers. Then he shuts down his computer and begins his long trek back down the stairs.

Two flights down. Cross the building. Two flights down. Cross again.

It takes him another twenty minutes to walk back to his motel. Sometimes he makes dinner. Sometimes he doesn’t. 

His motel room is old. Worn down. The paint on the walls is peeling and the mirrors have been covered with flattened cardboard boxes and duct tape so that he doesn’t make a mistake and look into them.

He doesn’t own a TV. Nothing good can come from owning a TV. It’s the easiest way for the Darkness to reach out.

He doesn’t sleep much. He ends his day by lying in bed, staring at the ceiling until the next day comes.

He has done this for two years.

The next day always comes.

 

 

/

 

 

Kim Soleum is in debt.

A lot of debt.

The sort of debt that he’s honestly given up on paying off. He will work, and work, and pay Lee Jaheon as much as he can scrape together at the end of each month, but if he dies young before he clears the debt he honestly won’t feel too bad about it.

He doesn’t feel bad about anything anymore.

He works because he remembers that Lee Jaheon used to mean something to him. There was a bond there, a respect that he doesn’t feel anymore but knows he used to have. So he works out of memory for the Kim Soleum who used to exist, who used to care about paying his debts back to his alien lizard friends.

He will probably work until he dies.

It was Lee Jaheon who got him this job, two years ago. Kim Soleum doesn’t know how the man found him when he had fallen apart in those dark six months, or how he wiped Soleum’s history enough for his resume to be presentable for a boring desk job, but his former boss placed him here, and promised him that no one from Daydream or the Disaster Management Bureau or any other messed up organization would ever find him unless he went looking for them on his own.

Soleum was never going to look for them on his own.

Lee Jaheon checks in sometimes. He appears at the motel that Soleum stays at, asks him if he’s been well, and they share a meal in complete silence. 

Each time, Lee Jaheon asks him if there’s anything he wants to know, and Kim Soleum shakes his head.

He doesn’t know what his former boss’ expression at that is, because he can no longer see his face.

Lee Jaheon is right, though. No one ever finds him. It’s been two years and six months since Soleum resigned from the bureau and he hasn’t heard a word from anyone in his old life.

He doesn’t want to, either.

He works, and comes home. Works, and comes home. He will do this until he dies.

He doesn’t know if he wants to die.

 

 

/

 

 

One of the times that Lee Jaheon stopped by, he’d given Kim Soleum a book.

“It will help to have a hobby,” he’d said, leaving the thick volume on Soleum’s bed side table.

Then he’d left, and Soleum had stared at the book for the next couple of hours.

He wonders if Lee Jaheon had ever had to do this. If he had had to slowly, carefully shape himself into a creature resembling a person. They’re similar, the both of them, working strange pointless jobs for strange pointless superiors and doing their best to pass as human while they’re at it.

He wonders if Lee Jaheon spends his nights staring at the ceiling and just waiting for time to pass.

But they’re different, in a way, because his former boss has a purpose. He has things he wants to do. Things the other lizards want to do. He has something that keeps him going, something that keeps him making sure his squad is safe, something that keeps him checking in with Soleum even though he hasn’t worked for Lee Jaheon in ages.

Kim Soleum doesn’t have that.

His alien lizard ex-boss is more human than him, because he has something besides a monetary debt that’s keeping him alive.

The book that Lee Jaheon had left him was a harmless young adult novel. It’s about a sad withdrawn teenager who doesn’t know how to make connections and wants to die. Or that is about as much as Soleum can figure out by reading the blurb at the back.

It looks harmless. It’s very unlikely that reading this would drag him into a disaster. If there was any risk of that, the lizard wouldn’t have given it to him in the first place.

But Soleum doesn’t read anymore.

He doesn’t do anything but work.

Reading is too much like hoping. Hoping that other worlds exist, that Kim Soleum could find a home in them.

He doesn’t hope.

He leaves the book on his bedside table and never picks it up. The next time that Lee Jaheon visits, he spots the untouched volume. He quietly leaves another thick paperback on top of it before he leaves.

Soleum doesn’t read that one either.

 

 

/

 

 

Soleum works till 7PM. 

Then he shuts down his computer and begins his long trek back down the stairs.

Two flights down. Cross the building. Two flights down. Cross again.

He doesn’t wish the receptionist a good day as he leaves because he can’t even see their face.

He swipes his ID at the doors and leaves. It’s a Thursday. He has another day of work before the weekend. He never knows what to do on the weekend, so he spends them waiting for Mondays.

He sets off on his twenty minute walk to his motel room.

“There you are, Grapes.”

A familiar voice.

One that Soleum hasn’t heard in two and a half years.

He stops in his tracks.

There’s a figure standing by the side of the road, leaning against a bicycle. One arm rested on the handlebars, the other in his pocket.

His face is hidden, but this is not a figure that Kim Soleum could ever forget.

The hints of the scar across his neck.

Soleum stares at it with empty eyes.

“Have you been well?” Agent Choi asks.

Soleum turns away.

He sets back on his twenty minute walk to his motel room.

“Hey, what? Soleum-ah, come on, is this how you treat your senior who you haven’t seen in years?”

Soleum doesn’t turn back.

He can hear the man scrambling to catch up. It takes a while, but he’s by Soleum’s side again, wheeling his bicycle next to him as he tries to talk to him.

“Kids these days,” Choi complains, in his usual lighthearted voice. “No calls, no texts, and now you won’t even look at my face.”

Soleum still doesn’t turn back.

Agent Choi follows him for five minutes. Ten. He chats on and on, about unimportant things, about important things. It all goes in one of Soleum’s ears and out the other.

He can’t remember the last time he walked with someone by his side. It feels wrong. Too wrong. Like an ugly memory of the Kim Soleum that he used to be before he found out who he was.

At the twelfth minute, when Soleum is starting to wonder if he has to head to a fake address to get rid of Choi, the footsteps at his side start to falter.

“Soleum-ah,” he says, more serious. “Kim Soleum. I can tell that you remember me. What’s—what’s happened to you?”

That’s a question that he knows how to answer.

It’s one he taught himself to answer clearly, those two years ago, when his faceless Squad Leader found him and asked the question over and over again.

Soleum smiles. “Nothing happened to me,” he says.

When he keeps walking, the footsteps don’t follow him.

 

 

/

 

 

He doesn’t leave work the next day at 7PM. 

All of his coworkers have left. His boss is still here, in his private office, but Soleum doesn’t think the man is working. 

Soleum stays at his own desk, in the only corner of the floor that’s still lit up. He shut his computer down at 7PM sharp but he idles at his desk, tracing the visiting card that Lee Jaheon had left him with.

He’d been told to use it if it ever felt like things were going wrong. Agent Choi’s appearance, when he should have never been able to find him, definitely counts as something going wrong.

It might be worse than being found by anyone else. There should be alarms going off in Soleum’s head, because out of all of the friends that the previous version of him used to have—Agent Choi is the only one who wouldn’t actually listen to him.

If he decided that there was something wrong with Soleum, he would drag him out of here whether Soleum liked it or not.

He traces the edges of the visiting card, the sharp edge scratching his fingers, but he doesn’t make the call. He doesn’t know what Lee Jaheon would do. Would Soleum have to move? Would he have to get a different job? It’s all too much work. He’s too tired for it.

Moving… he’d have to take a train. Or a bus. Or a taxi.

It’s too much risk, for a man who appeared once and might never appear again.

But if Agent Choi was able to find him—it’s likely that Daydream would be able to find him. And if Daydream was able to find him…

Should he die?

It’s a thought that comes and goes, with no real emotion behind it.

Just something he wonders about, like should I eat and should I smoke.

If Daydream found him then Soleum would be in real danger. It would no longer be enough to avoid mirrors and elevators and cars and trains. He would be back in the hell that he’d managed to get out of.

If Daydream found him, he’d be better off dead.

Soleum traces the card a little too hard, cracking skin. It stings, but he stares at the blood in wonder. It always fascinates him that he still bleeds red. He honestly thought that he’d bleed tar and mud.

He wipes the blood off on the white card, leaving a tiny smear.

A pang of annoyance hits him. Agent Choi is ruining the routine that he’s worked so hard to build. A routine helps keep him human. He can’t let go of his routine.

Soleum has spent months not even having to think, and now he’s faced with this messed up dilemma.

He could call Lee Jaheon and ask him to fix this for him. Or he could try to fix it himself, but he isn’t quite sure how.

Agent Choi would only keep following him if he thought something was wrong, right?

Could Soleum convince him that there wasn’t?

He’d managed to convince Jaekwan to keep his history at Daydream secret when he’d first become an agent at the bureau. Maybe he could try something similar. If he said something about a Darkness that he was caught up in, made something up about corruption, and said that if he was ever found by anyone he’d likely die, then maybe Choi would let him go—

But maybe he’d try to pull something to get rid of the corruption.

That’s the problem with Agent Choi. He does what he wants because he’s convinced that what he wants is what’s good for everyone.

At 9:30PM, when the building is about to close, Kim Soleum sets the visiting card down. If Agent Choi was here again, he’ll definitely be gone by now. Even he isn’t insane enough to wait in the cold for two and a half hours.

He goes down two flights of stairs. Crosses the building. Two flights down. Crosses again.

All the way to the ground floor.

The receptionist is packing up to go home, and he doesn’t wish them a good day because he can’t even see their face.

He swipes his ID at the doors and leaves. It’s Friday. The weekend. He never knows what to do on the weekend, so he spends them waiting for Mondays.

There’s a figure outside the building, leaning against his bicycle.

Soleum stares at his scar with empty eyes.

Agent Choi doesn’t speak, and neither does Soleum. He turns away, heading back towards the motel, fully expecting it when the footsteps follow him, wheeling his bicycle by his side.

Still, Agent Choi says nothing.

It’s almost peaceful.

Soleum almost lets himself pretend that there’s nothing wrong here. It’s like he’s in the silence with Lee Jaheon, with someone that an older version of himself had some kind of bond with. A bond that the current Kim Soleum can respect, but can’t bring himself to care about.

So he keeps walking, and Choi keeps following him.

He turns a corner, and then—

Arms grab at him.

He’s slammed into the wall, head hitting the concrete hard. Pain explodes in his head but all it really does is remind him that he has a human body. That he’s close enough to human now. He’s worked hard for this, and he has it.

The bicycle clatters as it falls to the floor.

It strikes Soleum that this is the first physical contact he’s had in months. Lee Jaheon has never been a tactile person. The most physical touch that Soleum gets is when he accidentally brushes fingers with the cashier at the grocery store when they hand over his bags.

It’s been months, and the first touch he feels is raw pain.

“Kim Soleum,” Agent Choi says, voice low. He’s pressing Soleum into the wall with an arm under his neck. “Look at me.”

Soleum looks at his scar. The dark, jagged lines that he never deserved to know the story behind.

“Look at me.”

He raises his gaze higher.

At the smoke covering the face that he’d once looked up to.

The person he’d once tried his best to be like.

It was too hard. Being a good person was too hard. Being a person is the most that Kim Soleum can manage, and even that is something he isn’t particularly good at.

Kim Soleum doesn’t have what it takes to care about other people. To care about the world.

He goes to work, he pays off his debt, and he will quietly die.

That’s the best that he can do.

“Why—why do you look like that?” Choi murmurs, almost to himself. He traces the skin under Soleum’s eyes, his touch alarmingly soft after he’d slammed Soleum against the concrete. “What is it that you see?”

Soleum doesn’t see anything.

“I can tell that you recognize me, but why do you still look like you don’t know who I am?”

Soleum doesn’t.

He doesn’t know who anyone is anymore.

He thought they were all just like him. But now he’s learned that they aren’t , that he lacks something fundamental that makes everyone else human, and—

He doesn’t know anyone.

Not anymore.

Choi strokes the side of his face, his fingers painfully gentle, despite the arm still pressed up against his neck. “Two and a half years ago,” he starts. “Did you get your Wish Ticket?”

“I did.”

“And. You used it? To go home?”

“Yes.”

Choi sighs. “I guess it didn’t work. I did tell you not to put your trust in it.”

Soleum shakes his head. “It worked.”

“...what?”

“It worked.”

“But you’re here.”

“Yes.”

“Soleum-ah. What happened to you?”

Again, the question that he recognizes.

Soleum smiles. “Nothing happened to me.”

“Stop that. You’re not okay. You know you aren’t.”

The words annoy him.

Soleum is okay.

He’s as okay as he can be.

What he isn’t is the Kim Soleum that Agent Choi used to know. The one who thought he was human. The one who could keep pretending to be, without having to take a break for coffee at 11AM and stop to smoke at 1PM.

The one who could smile and think it meant that he was happy and could cry and think it meant that he was sad.

The one who was delusional enough to think he was a person.

Kim Soleum isn’t a person anymore, but—

That shouldn’t mean that he isn’t okay.

That shouldn’t mean that he deserves being forced into a wall with the demand to be someone he can never be again.

He reaches up with twitching fingers, wrapping a hand around the wrist holding him in place.

Agent Choi’s wrist is warm, despite being out in the cold for so long.

The sort of warm that Soleum can never be again.

“I’m okay,” he says in a steady voice. “But I can’t be who you’re looking for.”

Agent Choi leans in closer. Close enough that Soleum can feel his breath on his face. The black smoke fills his vision, obscuring everything, including the scar.

“Who do you think I’m looking for?” Agent Choi asks, voice deathly quiet.

Soleum doesn’t know how to answer that.

“Are you not Kim Soleum?”

He is.

He is.

But he’s not Kim Soleum in any way that matters.

He’s not a Kim Soleum that can feel anything. That can do anything. That can be anything, except a shell of what a person should be.

He tries to push Agent Choi away, but the man doesn’t let up. He should have called Lee Jaheon. He should have left. The train, the bus, the taxi—the risk didn’t matter. He should have left.

Falling into a darkness was much less worse than whatever is happening right now.

“I’m not the Kim Soleum you knew,” he tries, his grip tightening around Agent Choi’s wrist.

“Does that matter?”

Yes.

Yes.

It matters because—

Because—

Kim Soleum… 

… wants…

…to be?

He wants? 

Wants?

Wants…

…to be human?

He wants…

…wants…

He shakes his head. He pushes Agent Choi away as hard as he can. The man stumbles, almost falling over.

There is nothing that Kim Soleum wants.

There is nothing that he can be.

He will go to work, repay his debts, and quietly die. He doesn’t hope for more than that.

“Soleum-ah,” Agent Choi starts, voice deceptively kind. “Won’t you come with me? Whatever is wrong, I’ll help you.”

It’s a tone of voice that Soleum recognizes better than anyone.

The soft, gentle voice that Choi uses to talk someone into doing something, when he means none of the emotion behind it.

The insincerity that Choi had directed towards him for the entirety of the time they had worked together.

Soleum turns away.

“Soleum-ah—”

“I don’t want you here.”

Agent Choi stops.

There isn’t much that Kim Soleum wants, but he knows that he doesn’t want this.

“I don’t want you here,” he says again.

He can’t see the expression on Agent Choi’s face, because he can no longer see his face.

When he leaves, brushing the dust off of his clothes, Agent Choi makes no move to follow him.

 

 

/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2

Notes:

ahhjkdshfjkdsfhs. help me.

Agent Choi doesn’t come back after that.

For the first few days, Kim Soleum is cautious. He leaves work at 8PM. He keeps his head down when he steps out of the building. He takes a different route home, just in case the agent follows him.

But Agent Choi doesn’t come back.

A week passes. Two weeks. 

Agent Choi is gone as quickly as he had appeared, as if he had never meant to stay. 

And Kim Soleum goes back to his life.

It’s too easy.

His work is mindless. He copies, and pastes. Fills forms. Prints forms. Sets them on the desk of his superior to sign. Copies and pastes some more.

At 11AM sharp, he heads into the break room for a cup of coffee. He doesn’t like coffee, but having a routine can make it easier to try to be a person.

He shouldn’t want to be a person. He shouldn’t want to be things that he can never be.

The Kim Soleum who’d worked at the bureau had been banned from drinking coffee. His team had been worried that he wasn’t getting any sleep. Agent Choi had on more than one occasion snatched his coffee right out of his hands and replaced it with green grape ade instead.

But Kim Soleum doesn’t need sleep anymore. He doesn’t know if caffeine even affects him.

He doesn’t know if anything does.

So he has his coffee. He doesn’t make eye contact with anyone in the break room, and they don’t try to talk to him either. Their voices flit in one ear and out the other. He finds it hard to care about what they say.

It’s hard to care about anything.

He finishes his coffee and sets his cup in the sink. He gets back to work.

Copies, and pastes. Writes emails. Deletes emails. Prints out more documents. Fills in more forms.

Sometimes someone will call his work phone. He’ll answer. Write some more emails. Attach some more files.

At 1PM, he skips lunch and goes to the smoking room. He smokes a cigarette from a brand that Agent Choi used to hate. 

He doesn’t finish it, dropping it into the ash tray long before he should. He stares at the smoke that surrounds him, obscuring faces, obscuring his life, and pretends it’s all smoke that everyone can see.

One night, on the way home, he buys a different brand of cigarettes that Agent Choi had no opinions about. He smokes it outside the store, to see if it makes him feel anything different.

It doesn’t.

The next night he buys a brand that Agent Choi had loved.

That doesn’t make him feel anything either.

He crushes the burned out cigarettes under his shoe and heads back to his motel room. 

He doesn’t sleep much. He ends his day by lying in bed, staring at the ceiling until the next day comes.

He has done this for two years.

The next day always comes.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Once a month, Kim Soleum goes to the bank.

It’s the only day of the month that he leaves work at 5PM.

He doesn’t have to go. His paycheck is deposited directly into his bank account, and his monthly transfer to Lee Jaheon can be dealt with online with a click of a button. But Kim Soleum goes to the bank. He goes and fills forms, and transfers money, and spends an hour of his life standing in lines that he doesn’t have to be standing in.

He nods as empty faces tell him where to sign his name, and bows apologetically when they ask him to fill the forms again because he never gets his signature right on the first try.

Kim Soleum goes to the bank because it's the easiest way to tell if he’s passing as human.

At work, it doesn’t matter. At work, no one is human. They all work and work and die and die and type and type and die some more.

It doesn’t matter at the supermarket either. He buys his groceries. He checks them out. The cashier wants him to leave more than they want to find out if he’s a person or not.

But at the bank, they want to know that it’s him.

They want to know that this isn’t a stranger in Kim Soleum’s body.

Kim Soleum is a stranger in Kim Soleum’s body, but as he signs his name and transfers money to his former boss, he can learn how good he is at hiding it.

So far, he’s been doing okay.

Once a month, he goes to the bank, and he comes out, and then he goes back home. There’s nothing to do for the rest of the day. There never is.

He sits on his bed and stares at the books that Lee Jaheon brings him. There are three, now: the novel about the boy who wanted to die, a novel about a boy who loves to read, and a novel about a man who loves to read and wants to die.

He doesn’t read any of them.

Reading is what got him into this mess.

There is no world but the one that Kim Soleum is in. There is no point in trying to imagine another one.

He stares at the wall instead.

It took him three tries to get his signature right today. 

He wonders if it truly matters.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Soleum works till 7PM.

Then he shuts his computer down and begins his long trek back down the stairs.

Two flights down. Cross the building. Two flights down. Cross again.

He doesn’t wish the receptionist a good day as he leaves because he can’t even see their face. He probably wouldn’t wish them a good day even if he could.

He swipes his ID at the door and leaves. It’s a Thursday. He has another long day of work before the weekend. Soleum wishes he had work on the weekends.

There’s never anything to do without it.

Maybe he should get another job.

If he worked the weekends. If he worked nights. If he worked and worked and worked and paid Lee Jaheon back as soon as he could.

Maybe then he could die a little earlier than he will.

He turns the corner, setting off on his twenty minute walk to his motel room.

“There you are, Soleum-ah.”

A familiar voice.

One that Soleum hasn’t heard in a month.

He stops.

There’s a figure standing by the side of the road, clutching the handle bar of his bicycle in a death grip. There’s stained blood on his clothes, and it’s unclear if it’s his or someone else’s. A rip in the knee of his pants, revealing a dark gash underneath.

His face is hidden, but Soleum knows this man. The scar across his neck. 

Agent Choi.

Soleum stares at the blood with empty eyes.

Choi’s fingers tighten around the handle bar that he’s clutching desperately. It’s unlike him. It’s unlike the easygoing personality that he adopts whenever he’s around someone like Kim Soleum.

Someone who needs to be watched, tricked, manipulated.

“Have you been well?” Agent Choi asks, but his voice is too serious.

Soleum doesn’t know what that question means.

He turns away.

He knows how to deal with this situation now. All he has to do is leave, and Agent Choi will leave too. Then Soleum will go back to his routine. Maybe get a second job, to cut down on his free time. And he won’t see Agent Choi for another month.

He can do that. It’s too easy.

He turns away, and the bicycle clatters to the floor abruptly.

A hand grabs him, tightening around his wrist.

“Soleum-ah.” 

Choi’s voice is desperate. 

It sounds wrong.

It makes Soleum feel sick.

Choi pulls him towards himself, and Soleum stumbles, tripping towards him, his gaze fixed on the blood on Choi’s clothes, dark and ugly.

This close, he can tell that the blood is his.

It’s red, the same colour that Soleum himself bleeds.

They bleed the same. That can’t be right.

They bleed the same, when Agent Choi is Agent Choi, and Soleum is—

He wish he knew.

Maybe if Soleum bleeds out enough, he’ll find the truth inside of him.

Choi’s grip is tight around his wrist. “It’s my birthday,” he says.

Soleum blinks slowly.

“Will you spend it with me?”

The hand around his wrist is scarred. The blood on Choi’s clothes is drying out. Soleum doesn’t know how bad the wounds under the fabric are. If there are any at all.

“You’re bleeding,” he says quietly.

Choi laughs. It’s a sound he hasn’t heard in so long.

It unsettles something inside of Soleum. He wishes he never hears it again.

“I’m not,” Choi says. “I got a bit scratched up, but I’m alright now. I just didn’t have anything else to change into. You still worry about me?”

Soleum glances from the blood, to the dark gash across the Agent’s knee. He isn’t alright.

He’s still hurt.

“It’s my birthday,” Agent Choi says again. “You don’t hate me enough to ignore me on my birthday, do you?”

The words are lighthearted, but there’s an edge in his voice. A desperation.

Kim Soleum looks up to where Choi’s face should be. To the dark, dark smoke, that covers up the man he used to look up to.

He doesn’t hate him. He doesn’t feel anything about him, except an exhaustion at the thought that he might not leave.

“What do you want to do?” Soleum asks carefully.

The grip around his wrist loosens, and then tightens again. He’s pulled closer. He stumbles, almost face planting right into Choi.

Choi laughs again, in relief. Soleum doesn’t like the sound of it.

He wishes Choi would stop laughing.

Choi ruffles his hair, and Soleum pulls away quickly. Choi lets him go, bending down to pick his bicycle up.

“Will you come with me?” he asks, kicking off the break of his bicycle. “Just for a while.”

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Agent Choi takes him to a quiet restaurant.

Smoke fills the room, the white smoke from the heat of the grills clashing terribly with the black smoke of the laughing faces.

Agent Choi takes him to a corner table at the back of the restaurant, gesturing for him to sit.

“What would you like to eat?” he asks, pulling the menu towards himself.

He sits casually, arms folded over the table, leaning forward slightly to put his weight on his elbows.

Soleum stares at his own menu listlessly.

It’s already 8PM. He needs to end this strange meeting fast if he wants to get back to the motel before the streets get unsafe.

Choi tells him about his own recommendations on the menu. Soleum has tuned him out. He scans the menu himself, looking for something small and cheap that he can finish quickly and then leave.

It’s Choi’s birthday. That must have meant something to the former Kim Soleum. That’s the only reason that he’s here right now.

“Happy birthday, Agent,” he says, because he realizes he hasn’t said it yet.

Choi falls quiet. And then, “Thank you.”

Soleum finally settles on an item on the list. He points to it, and Agent Choi leans forward, closer, to see.

The black smoke shadows his face.

“That’s all?” he asks, sounding displeased.

Soleum nods, shutting his menu.

Choi places their orders, but he asks for a second portion for Soleum. It’s just like him. He never did trust Soleum to know what was best for himself.

He won’t eat it. He promised a meal, and he will have the meal, and then—

What time is it?

It’s starting to get late.

There are too many ghost stories that start when you leave a quiet restaurant in the night. There are too many ghost stories that start in quiet restaurants in the night.

He checks his watch. It’s 8:13.

Choi is saying something, but he isn’t listening. He hears him mention Ryu Jaekwan. Something about Hyunmoo Team 1. Something about Braun. Something about Elder.

When the food arrives, it’s 8:37.

Soleum’s food is placed in front of him, and in the middle of the table, a large bottle of soju is placed with a clunk.

Soleum looks at it blankly.

He wonders if Agent Choi is smiling.

“What’s a reunion without alcohol?” Choi says.

There’s a smile in his voice, but there’s an edge to it.

The edge that Soleum knows means—

You’re about to get caught.

The edge that means that Choi is here with a trap, and he’s waiting for Soleum to walk right into it.

He’s too tired for this. Far too tired. He should be back in the motel, staring at the ceiling, until the sun rises and it’s safe to go outside again.

Instead he’s here while his former senior plays mind games that won’t get either of them anywhere.

“What do you want to know?” Soleum asks quietly. “What will make you go?”

Choi doesn’t say anything for a long time.

He’s quiet for so long that Soleum thinks he really will leave him alone.

“You really hate me, don’t you?” Choi says at last. “There isn’t anything I want to know, Soleum-ah. I just wanted to have a drink with a friend that I haven’t seen in years.”

That can’t be it.

That never is it, with Agent Choi.

But the sorrow in his voice makes Soleum feel sick, so he picks the bottle up, quietly pouring his senior a glass.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Kim Soleum doesn’t drink these days.

He doesn’t really need to.

There is nothing unbearable about his life that he needs to resort to alcohol to get through. He doesn’t have friends to hang out with after taking the edge off with cheap soju. The only real person who talks to him is Lee Jaheon, and Lee Jaheon has never offered to drink with him.

So Soleum doesn’t drink. 

But Agent Choi places a glass in front of him, filled to the brim.

And the sadness in his voice was wrong and ugly, so Soleum puts the glass to his lips and drinks.

The liquid burns his tongue. It’s unlike anything he’s tasted before. It burns, and burns, and burns, and—

Agent Choi pours him another.

He doesn’t know how much he drinks. He doesn’t know how much Choi does, except that it’s too much. Choi’s voice gets lighter, happier, worse to hear—his laughter so bright it makes Soleum want to cover his ears.

Choi tells him stories about things that Soleum couldn’t care less about. About the bureau, about Daydream, about the world, about them. About the things that happened outside of Kim Soleum’s life. About the things that mean nothing to him.

The liquid burns every time Soleum swallows. He doesn’t even know if it’s soju.

He drinks anyway, every time Choi fills his glass.

They’re on their third bottle when Choi reaches out.

Soleum flinches, but Choi’s touch is gentle. He cradles Soleum’s face, stroking the skin under his eyes carefully.

“What do you see?” Choi asks, voice deceptively soft.

A lilt, little more than a lullaby.

What does Soleum see? Enough. He sees enough. He sees nothing at all.

“When you told me I was bleeding,” Choi continues, “You looked at my clothes. You looked at my legs. But—”

He lets him go, reaching for Soleum’s hand instead.

He pulls it towards himself, to touch his own face under the smoke, and—

Soleum’s fingers come in contact with dried blood.

Rough, flaking, and crusted over Agent Choi’s eye.

He jerks away, but Choi holds him in place. Digging his fingers closer into the closing wound.

“You never asked what happened to my eye. It's because you can't see my face, isn't it?”

Dried blood.

The feel of it is terrible. Ugly. 

Soleum’s fingers twitch, trying to get away.

“What happened to you, Soleum-ah?”

The words click. The words he knows. He’s a little lightheaded, from the alcohol, the blood at his fingertips, the fact that it’s late.

But he knows these words.

He smiles.

“Nothing happened to me.”

Choi’s fingers tighten around his. “You know,” he murmurs, “You used to be better at this.”

He lets Soleum go, leaning back in his chair.

“The Kim Soleum I used to know was an exceptional liar.”

Of course he was.

The Kim Soleum that Choi used to know was delusional.

He didn’t even know how much he was lying because he hadn’t known the truth.

He’d believed he was human, and got through life like that, until the facts were forced in his face.

“The Kim Soleum I used to know would have convinced me that he was fine, and then I would have never been able to find him outside the same building again. That Kim Soleum wouldn’t give me this broken look with the confidence that he looks happy. ”

It’s 10:37PM.

Soleum is far too late to avoid any ghost stories now.

He’s going to have to take a crazy path back to the motel, he’s going to have to climb out a window to leave the restaurant, and he’s going to have to walk backwards through the dark alley that leads to where he lives.

So much extra work that he’s too tired to have to do.

But the alternative is—

Is it that bad to just die?

The Kim Soleum that Choi used to know would have never been in this situation, but that Kim Soleum is never coming back.

Even though Choi wants him to.

Even though that’s the only reason Choi is even here.

Soleum reaches for his glass, taking another sip of the burning liquid. It isn’t soju. He doesn’t know what Choi has given him, to pretend that they’re friends while he tries to bring the dead Kim Soleum back—but it isn’t soju.

“It didn’t work, did it?” Soleum asks. “Whatever you planned to do to me.”

Choi is quiet for a long time.

“It didn’t,” he says at last. “You still don’t see me.”

“I’m not going to,” Soleum says. “I’m not him.”

“You say that like he’s a different person.”

“Yes,” Soleum says. “He was a person.”

He sets his glass on the table. He hasn’t touched the extra portion of food that Choi had ordered for him.

He leaves enough money on the table to cover both his and Choi’s meals. He doesn’t know what strange liquid Choi smuggled here to pretend was alcohol, and he doesn’t know what it costs, so he doesn’t pay for that.

“What do you mean?” Choi asks sharply. “What do you mean he was a person?”

Soleum is lucky that the restaurant is on the ground floor. The windows are large, and left open to keep out the smoke. He braces a hand on the windowsill and carefully climbs out.

“Kim Soleum!” Choi shouts, worried, desperate. “What do you mean?”

Soleum lands with ease, both feet on the ground. He sets back towards his motel room. It’s going to take him far too long to get back.

Choi is calling something out behind him, but Soleum doesn’t need to hear.

He never should have gone with him in the first place.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Contamination.

Soleum scans the words on the shady forum that he’d searched up on his computer. He’d searched for the brand of alcohol that Choi had made him drink, and after tons of false information and well placed ads to draw attention away from the truth—he found his answer.

The drink was used to get rid of contamination.

Choi had used it on him, and nothing about Soleum had changed.

He closes the page, and gets back to work. Fills forms. Fills documents. Types and types and types.

Contamination.

He hits the keys harder than he should.

He takes his break at 11:01.

He doesn’t smoke at 1PM but he goes into the smoking room, watching the smoke mix with the faceless beings that he sees, and wishing the smoke would fill up the entire room until they all suffocated to death.

Agent Choi saw the creature he truly was and thought he’d been contaminated.

It had taken Kim Soleum three tries to get his signature right at the bank.

There is none of the old Kim Soleum left inside of him, but it hasn’t stopped Choi from trying to dig into him to reach it.

It hasn’t stopped Choi from trying to find a person who was never real at all.

For two years, Kim Soleum has worked. And worked. And worked. 

He’s followed his routines, he’s done his best to blend in.

He’s tried.

He’s tried.

But he will never be human enough for it to truly matter.

He will never be human enough for anyone to believe that there isn’t something irreparably wrong with him.

Contamination.

Soleum wishes he was contaminated.

He wishes he could drink a bottle of alcohol and become the person that he used to be.

He wishes—

He stops.

No.

He shouldn’t wish.

He shouldn’t hope.

He shakes his head.

He turns back to his computer.

He copies, and pastes. Copies, and pastes. Copies, and pastes. Fills forms. Prints them out.

Copies, and pastes. Copies, and pastes. Copies, and pastes.

He glances at his desk, where Lee Jaheon’s visiting card is. There’s a tiny scratch of blood on the side, from where he’d accidentally nicked himself before.

He glances back to his screen.

Copies, and pastes. Copies, and pastes.

He gives in.

The risk doesn’t matter. The exhaustion of relocation doesn’t matter. Kim Soleum can’t keep living here knowing that every time he goes downstairs there might be a man outside who is desperate for him to be anything besides what he is now.

He reaches for Lee Jaheon’s card.

It’s unprofessional to make a call like this at work. But if Soleum is right, then this will be his last day at this job.

He dials the number with shaking hands, pressing the phone to his ear.

A dull, dead, automated voice comes out—

This number does not exist.

The call ends with a click.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

kim soleum are you just not going to ask why this guy had dried blood over his eye...

Chapter 3

Notes:

i spent a disturbing amount of time in reality. touched so much grass. it did not help. let's go back to thinking only about agent choi.

this chapter gave me actual hell but i can not bear to look at it anymore... so here it is.

also. updated the tags for this chapter. please do take another look for warnings.

Kim Soleum does his laundry once a week.

It shouldn’t take much time, but he makes sure that it does. 

All of his clothes look the same. White shirts, black slacks, and the two black blazers that he switches between on alternate days. The blazers need to be washed more carefully. White t-shirts and black shorts that he wears at home. Those don’t need to be washed carefully at all.

The laundromat is on the ground floor of the motel. It’s only one floor down, so he doesn’t need to be afraid of taking the stairs. He splits his laundry into two loads. He adds the exact amount of soap that he should. 

He waits on the bench while the washing machine runs. 

When it’s done, he puts the clothes in the dryer. When that’s done, he goes back upstairs.

Then he irons all his clothes on top of his bed.

He makes sure that everything he owns is crisp and proper.

Three books sit on his bedside table, dusty and untouched, staring at him. A book about a boy who wanted to die, a book about a boy who loved to read, and a book about a man who loved to read and wanted to die. 

Kim Soleum has never tried to read them. Lee Jaheon’s phone still won’t connect. The books stay on his bedside table, staring at him all day.

Lee Jaheon has been gone for two weeks now.

Kim Soleum doesn’t know what happened to him. He doesn’t know if anything happened at all.

Whether his former boss had left him with a fake number, or if he’d died in a Darkness, or if he’d broken his phone—Kim Soleum has no way of knowing. When he has no way of knowing, everything is true.

He doesn’t have many tasks to do on the weekends. He does his laundry, he goes to the grocery store. He tries Lee Jaheon’s number. That’s about it.

When his clothes are ironed and folded neatly, he glances at the stack of books again.

A book about a boy who wanted to die, a book about a boy who loved to read, and a book about a man who loved to read and wanted to die. 

Kim Soleum reaches for the book on top.

Hesitant. Careful.

He flips the cover open, to glance at the first paragraph—

[There are three ways to survive in a ruined world. 

I have forgotten some of them now. 

However, one thing is certain: you who are currently reading these words will survive.]

Something ugly wells up inside of him.

You who are currently reading these words will survive.

Survive.

Survive.

The word he’s lived by his entire life. He’s survived for too long and now he no longer knows how long he’s going to have to last.

He picks the book up. He picks up all three.

He chucks them all into the trash.

You who are currently reading these words will survive.

Why should he?

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

He still goes to work. There is nothing else to do.

He goes in at 7AM sharp. Up two floors, across the building. Up two floors, across the building. He doesn’t take a smoke break. He doesn’t take a lunch break. He goes in, and works, and clocks out at 7PM.

Then he stands at the entrance of his workplace, and waits.

The cars pass by, covered in smoke. Strangers pass by, covered in smoke. He can’t tell if he gets weird looks because he can’t see anyone’s face.

He waits until 9PM, when it starts to get unsafe to wait any longer.

He waits. And waits. But Agent Choi never appears.

He does this for a week. Two weeks.

Three.

But Agent Choi is gone, as if he had never meant to stay. As if he had heard Kim Soleum say I’m not him and had realized that it meant he had no reason to come back.

Lee Jaheon is gone, and so are the remnants of purpose that Soleum had held halfheartedly in his hands. 

There is no debt to pay back. There is no life that needs to be lived.

There is no reason he has to survive.

Kim Soleum is left with nothing to do.

He keeps going to work.

He still doesn’t take his breaks. He copies and pastes and copies and pastes. He fills forms. Prints them. Files them. Stares at the words on his screen until they start to lose their meaning.

He waits in the middle of the street every night, for the man he never wanted to see again.

The man never appears.

Week after week, he never appears.

Soleum keeps going to work. He keeps surviving. He doesn’t know what for.

Choi is the only link he has to the Kim Soleum who used to exist. The only link that might know where Lee Jaheon is.

Without Lee Jaheon, without the obligation of his debt—Kim Soleum has nothing.

So he keeps waiting in the dark, in the middle of the street, for the man that he used to know.

Agent Choi never appears.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

A month passes.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Two months.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Copies, and pastes. Copies, and pastes.

He forgets to fill a form. His boss yells at him. Kim Soleum can’t see his face, so it’s really just noise.

He fills the form. He prints it out. 

He doesn’t take his break. He doesn’t have lunch. He goes down four flights of stairs because he forgets to switch after two, and it doesn’t even bother him.

He waits in the middle of the street, but no one appears. 

He checks the money in his bank account.

It isn’t too much, but it’s a decent amount. He hasn’t paid Lee Jaheon in two months now. No one has come after him for it.

He wonders what he should do with it.

Survive?

Survive.

He puts his phone back in his pocket.

He doesn’t go back to the motel.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

He copies and pastes the wrong files. He fills the forms with gibberish. His work is all a mess.

His boss tells him to get his shit together or just quit. It’s hard to take him seriously when he’s just smoke and emptiness. His coworkers watch the commotion with their own faceless bodies, and not for the first time Soleum wonders if any of them are even real.

If Lee Jaheon even saved him.

If he really brought him somewhere he could start anew or if he’d chucked him into a different Darkness and left him here.

Soleum wonders if he should quit.

He checks his bank account again. It’s still a decent amount of money. He still hasn’t paid Lee Jaheon, and it still hasn’t ended his life.

Humans are supposed to have purpose. That’s what the files in the lab said.

They need to have purpose, and a reason to keep going, and it will keep them alive until they do what they were meant to do.

Kim Soleum no longer has a purpose. He no longer has a reason to put one foot after the other.

The remnants of his humanity are crumbling.

He will never be a person.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

He watches his coworkers eat. He hears them laugh. He sees them wave goodbye to each other as they pack up for the day and leave, off to another place where they will still be seen as human. Where they might be cared for. Where they might be loved.

He watches them smoke. They do it recreationally. They do it to cope. They do it for reasons that aren’t just there is smoke everywhere and I want to pretend it’s not my fault.

He wonders sometimes if the smoke means that something is burning.

If everything around him is burning.

If he’s burning himself, and hasn’t realized it yet.

Maybe this is part of an experiment too. Maybe he’s been left here to see how long he lasts before he dies in the fire that he can’t sense. He’s heard that a frog in water won’t notice that it’s boiling to death as long as the temperature is turned up gradually.

Maybe Kim Soleum isn’t just not human—maybe he’s already dead.

Maybe Lee Jaheon wanted him to survive because he wanted him to come back to life.

But that Kim Soleum’s life wasn’t very fun, was it? The dark room he’d been trapped in, until he’d lost everything that was left of himself. Until he’d come out of it inhuman.

Until he’d come out of it dead?

He looks at his hands. He doesn’t know if they’re real. He doesn’t know if it matters.

Humans are supposed to have purpose. That’s what the files in the lab said.

Without that, he shouldn’t be able to keep going.

Without that, he’s too likely to be a failed experiment.

His ID card gets declined three times at the entrance of his workplace. The files he prints are gibberish. He sends emails to the wrong recipient, forgets to reply to the important ones. It causes a ruckus, with a client throwing a huge fit, and his boss calls him into his office.

“Kim Soleum,” the man says sternly. “What happened to you?”

It’s the only question he still knows the answer to.

He smiles.

“Nothing happened to me.”

It’s the wrong answer.

His boss flings a paperweight at him. Soleum flinches, and the object misses him, hitting the wall with an awful crash. 

Alarms ring in his ears.

“I’ve been patient with you,” the man says, deadly furious. “Because of who brought you here. But the way you’ve been acting—”

Soleum doesn’t hear the rest.

He’s too caught up in the raw fear he’d felt, when the paperweight had come flying for his face.

It’s been too long since he felt that fear. Since he’d felt anything but tired.

Lee Jaheon had wanted him to survive.

But why?

Humans want to survive. Humans run from fear. The files at the lab had told him as much.

Lee Jaheon wasn’t human. He was never afraid.

The Kim Soleum who had lived before—he had been afraid all the time.

The Kim Soleum now never had to be.

Not when he worked so hard. When he was so careful. When he avoided everything that could ever make him afraid.

Had he been too safe?

Had he been so safe that he lost the very humanity he was trying to find?

Maybe he doesn’t respond for too long, because hands grab at his collar, shaking him angrily. He feels his brain rattle in his skull. He feels. He feels.

His boss pushes him away, sending Soleum stumbling back into the wall. 

It hurts.

“Get out of my sight,” his boss spits. “One more mistake and you’re out.”

The Kim Soleum he had been before was always in pain. He was always afraid. He was always something.

Is that what had made him a person?

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Kim Soleum doesn’t know where he’s going.

He doesn’t know what time it is.

He doesn’t know how many flights of stairs he’s walked down, or how many dark alleys he’s walked through. 

He doesn’t know if he’s alive. Or if he wants to be. Or what he even is.

He hasn’t been to the bank. Or done his laundry. Or eaten. Or slept.

No one has contacted him to ask him to pay back his debt. Lee Jaheon is still gone. Agent Choi is still gone.

Kim Soleum doesn’t know where he’s going, but he knows that it’s very cold.

The cold is sinking into his bones.

The water drenches his shoes. His socks. It drenches his pants up to his knees.

The sound of the waves is deafening.

They crash into him, trying to drag him in deeper. Deeper, deeper.

Into the ocean?

He’s at the ocean.

Knee deep in the water, letting the waves crash into him in the freezing cold. Kim Soleum doesn’t know how to swim. He should be afraid. 

He would be, if he was human.

But he isn’t, so he stumbles as he gets pulled deeper and deeper, and makes no move to get out.

The files in the lab said he had to be afraid if he were to survive. That without that fear, he would dissolve.

It’s cold.

It’s so cold.

Soleum doesn’t know how he got here. But he thinks this is where he should be.

Survive?

He doesn’t need to.

What would his survival prove to whoever left him in that lab?

That whatever happened to him should be made to happen again, to someone else?

But nothing happened to him.

Nothing happened to him.

He’s always been okay.

The waves crash into him. It’s so cold. It’s so cold.

And then—

A rough hand around his arm.

A curse in his ear, that sounds more desperate than it should.

He’s dragged out, tripping over sand, nearly falling face first back into the water, but the grip around him is firm. He’s dragged out of reach of the waves he’d been trying to disappear into, and pushed roughly into the sand.

He lands awfully on an elbow. It gets scratched up but it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt over the sound of his heartbeat.

Agent Choi stands above him, face hidden in the smoke—the angry scar around his neck a dead giveaway.

He stands tall, threatening, his silhouette lethal against the ocean.

“You,” he says, deadly furious. “This is what happens when I let you out of my sight.”

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

Agent Choi says a lot of things.

A lot of things that mean nothing to Soleum.

He tells him about how stupid he is, how scared he’d made him, how fucking dangerous what he was doing had been. He tells him that he never should have left him alone for so long and that he should have dragged Soleum home by the collar of his shirt the moment he’d found him all those months ago.

He says the word so easily.

Home.

As if that wasn’t the entire reason that everything between them was dead and buried.

Soleum’s clothes are all drenched. The chill of the weather doesn’t help. Agent Choi has taken his bureau jacket off, and is using the awful, filthy fabric to try and towel Soleum’s hair dry. It doesn’t work, but the agent doesn’t stop. 

His hands are rough, angry, worried.

He doesn’t stop talking, his words sharp, fragmented.

It’s so cold.

There is a lot that Agent Choi says but it doesn’t matter to him. None of this is the reason that Soleum had waited for him day after day. There’s only one thing he needs from the man, just one question.

He reaches up, grabbing Choi’s arm gently to stop him from towelling his head.

Choi falters, as if taken aback by the touch.

There’s only one thing that Soleum needs to know.

“Did you kill him?”

It comes out dead. 

Soleum feels dead.

“Kill who?” Choi asks, cautious but tired.

“Lee Jaheon-ssi.”

Choi doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“I didn’t,” he says at last. “Jaekwan wouldn’t let me.”

He—

“You tried to kill him?”

“Of course I did,” Choi’s voice is sharp. Angry. “Soleum-ah, you—I’ve been trying to be normal—I didn’t want to scare you, but—you’ve been missing for years. Years. Of course I tried to kill that bastard.”

He—

He hasn’t changed at all.

Agent Choi is still the person he was before, rushing into things, diving headfirst into situations that he doesn’t understand, assuming he knows what’s best for everyone involved before he even stops to look for a moment.

Trying to fix Soleum’s life before he even knows what’s wrong, because he always thinks Soleum needs to be fixed.

But Lee Jaheon—

Lee Jaheon had just let him be.

He’d given him his stupid books to try to convince him to survive, but he’d just let him be.

He grips Agent Choi’s arm tighter without meaning to.

“He saved me.”

“Lee Jaheon?” Agent Choi sounds more furious than he’s ever heard. “ Saved you? Soleum-ah. Look at yourself. You can’t even tell me what happened to you. You just tried to die. Don’t tell me he saved you.”

But he did.

He’d dragged him out of the dark, he’d given him a reason to keep going.

Without it—without him—

“I’d still be there,” Soleum says sharply. “If it wasn’t for him. I’d still be there.”

He expects Choi to ask where. To ask what he means. To shout after him as desperately as he did that night in the restaurant, asking for any possible hint about what Soleum really was.

But he doesn’t.

He pulls his arm out of Soleum’s grasp, setting both his hands on his shoulders firmly.

He leans closer, as if to look into his eyes, the smoke obscuring everything in Soleum’s view. His sleeves are rolled up, still completely drenched, and his arms are more scarred than Soleum remembers.

“Soleum-ah,” Choi says quietly. “We’d never have left you there. I would have found you. I would have taken you back home.”

Home.

He says the word like it’s nothing.

Choi knows what the word means to him. He knows it makes Soleum want to give in and let the ocean take him.

Maybe that’s why he says it.

“I would have found you,” Choi presses, more desperate.

“And then what?” Soleum asks. “I still wouldn’t be the Kim Soleum you used to know. Then what?”

Lee Jaheon had just let him be.

He’d let him keep going, day after day, with the barest hint of purpose because he knew that Soleum was too tired to try to be any more.

But Agent Choi could never do that.

He couldn’t.

“You keep saying that,” Choi says, a warning in his voice. “As if you’re a different person.”

“I am.”

“Do you think that matters to me? Do you think I would have spent three years looking for you if that mattered to me?”

But it does matter to him.

Agent Choi only cared about people who were good.

He left everyone else to rot on the edge of his blade.

Kim Soleum hasn’t been good in years. He hasn’t been anything. A shell of a body trying to trick everyone around him into thinking he’s human—and now, failing at even that.

“What did you do to him?” he asks instead. “Where is he?”

“Why?”

“I owe him a debt.”

“He told me that,” Choi says easily. “We discussed it. You no longer have to pay him back.”

Soleum stares into the smoke of the man in front of him, and he hates him.

He hates him.

He wants to sink his nails into the smoke and hope it catches where his flesh is. He wants to drown him in the ocean behind them. He wants to drown himself. He wants to kill himself. He wants to die. He wants to be human. He wants to be dead. He wants to live.

He—

He shouldn’t want.

He shouldn’t wish.

It’s what got him into this mess, but—

“I’m not like you,” he grits his teeth. “I don’t have any other reason to live.”

The debt is all he had.

Work is all he had.

Without it, he has nothing.

Choi falls silent. 

“I know,” he admits quietly. “I know.”

But his grip on Soleum’s shoulders only tightens.

He doesn’t let him go.

 

 

 

/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

honestly i wanted to write this entire story in kse's pov, to keep the effect of only understanding as much of the situation as he lets himself think about... but this guy has so many things wrong with him that literally none of the story gets across. i might make the next chapter in agent choi's pov. idk. slkdfjlsdf. this is killing me.

also. if you haven't read orv: the book that kse reads at the beginning is orv.

Notes:

this is all very serious but honestly the idea of agent choi leaning against his bicycle and posing like he's a cool guy is cracking me up. that is not how you approach someone you haven't seen in 2.5 years. especially not if your last interaction with them was tossing them in jail.

ideally i will update this once a week. ideally. i will try to hold myself to that.

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