Work Text:
The streets that Soleum walks down are familiar, but at the same time they are eerily wrong.
It eats at him. There are the shops that he vaguely remembers from his childhood, the corners that he’s pretty sure he used to dash past to catch the train. The layout of the city that the darkness has conjured looks like the city he lived in his entire life, but moved slightly off center, with forgotten memories and streets crudely woven into it.
Like a memory that he’s tried to recall so often that he accidentally overwrote it.
It isn’t surprising for the darkness that he’s in—a darkness that forces its victim to encounter buried memories and parts of themselves that they try not to think about.
Qterw-C-293.
The ghost story creates mirages of a person’s worst memories. Apparitions of people that have hurt them, that have played a terrible part in their lives. Apparitions of the person themselves, at their lowest points. The memories are exaggerated and made even worse, with the sole purpose of taunting the victim into killing the apparitions—but that’s the trick.
Destroying the memories in this space is akin to destroying yourself.
Killing the ghosts kills a part of you.
Every figure that poses as a villain from your memory is just a part of your own mind posing as them.
Too many people have been driven mad by this ghost story. Haunted by their worst traumas, they try to destroy the monsters to free themselves—but they only end up hurting themselves. The lucky ones come out as shells of the people they were before. The unlucky ones don’t come out at all.
Kim Soleum is here today alone.
Honestly? He shouldn’t be.
It’s a terrible idea, but he hasn’t even brought Braun with him.
The method of clearing the darkness is relatively simple. The only successful accounts listed on the wiki were when people entered the darkness together. It helped when there was someone by your side to help you out when you were at risk of losing yourself.
But Soleum can’t risk bringing anyone in with him.
There’s too much that he has to hide.
If the ghost story shows someone their worst memories, he’s bound to run into himself at the pop up store. The truth of what happened that day, the truth of where he’s truly from, of what the Darkness Exploration Records are—this is not information that he can dare to let anyone ever find out.
He can’t ask anyone from D Squad to help him, because they can’t be allowed to see this truth. Soleum doesn’t know what it would do to them. Anyone else from Daydream is also out, because they still think that he’s dead, while he works under Director Ho. Director Ho himself is definitely out—he isn’t the sort of person that anyone needs poking around their worst memories.
As for Hyunmoo Team 1… Soleum has even more to hide from them.
They can’t know that he’s a spy. That all he’s done since he met them is lie to them.
So Soleum is here alone.
He’s pretty sure he can handle it.
He’s done everything he can to prepare. He made a list of what must be his worst memories, and planned out what to do in case he runs into each one of them.
What’s lucky is that the worst of his memories are all ghosts.
Soleum doesn’t feel any urge to kill ghosts out of fear—his only instinct is to run from them. All he has to do in the darkness is run from his fears, and he’ll be alright.
Running from his fears is one of his best talents after all.
So he keeps walking down the familiar but unfamiliar streets. They look wrong, unsettling, but the discrepancies from reality keep him in check.
They make sure he doesn’t let his guard down.
But the more he walks, the more he keeps putting one foot after the other—the more his anxiety starts to grow.
Because he still hasn’t run into a single apparition.
Where Kim Soleum’s worst memories should be, all there is is empty streets.
As if forcibly abandoned.
It’s somehow worse than the alternative.
/
Soleum can’t find the apartment that he used to live in back in the world that he came from.
Every time he tries to get to it, the streets merge into each other and he finds himself somewhere else. On a different empty road with no sign of life, dust and dirt gathered on the sidewalks that haven’t been swept in too long.
His old apartment is where he expected to run into the first apparitions. As the place where he most often read the Darkness Exploration Records, it was bound to be the location of his greatest regret.
But he never finds the building.
So he gives up, and starts searching for his current apartment instead.
The path to the officetel is just as empty.
This—isn’t what this darkness is supposed to be like. Soleum remembers the exploration records perfectly, and this has never happened.
The streets are supposed to be bustling, with memories pouring out from every corner. They’re supposed to be packed with so many ghosts that he’d struggle to find a place to run to.
Why does he not have memories to fill all this space?
There’s something wrong here.
Has… has he lost some of his memories?
Has he just not noticed it?
The thought of it scares him, but he forces it down. There’s time to worry about that later. For now, he’ll bite his tongue and tell himself that the lack of ghosts is a good thing. It means he can make his way out of this place far easier.
And—there has to be something waiting for him at the officetel. Living with Baek Saheon wasn’t pleasant. He was constantly afraid that the psychopath would snap and try to murder him in his sleep. He never had a good night’s rest, haunted by nightmares of the monsters that he’d been forced to encounter at work.
It wasn’t a home.
It was hell.
But when he keys in the password to his door lock, the sight of his apartment is also unfamiliar.
The familiar layout overlapped with a forgotten one. A different room that he can’t seem to place.
And—the apartment is as empty as the rest of this city appears to be.
Soleum checks Saheon’s room, just in case. He checks his own. He checks the bathroom, the closets, the space under his bed. At a loss, he even looks inside the washing machine. Maybe the ghosts are hiding.
They have to be somewhere.
Soleum knows that he has terrible memories. There’s no way that this makes sense.
He glances at the TV. It’s been muted since he stepped inside, playing something old in sepia tones. He watches it without really seeing, trying to think of what to do next, when he realizes—
The show is familiar.
It’s Braun’s TV show.
Soleum has never seen it on a screen before. He’s always been on set, either contaminated or trying his best to stay alive. It’s odd now, seeing it from an outsider’s point of view. It gives him a strange mix of nostalgia and chills that he’d somehow lived through whatever hell that was.
But as he watches the familiar show—Braun never appears.
In his place is a different host—
Kim Soleum himself.
The Kim Soleum on screen looks unrecognizable. He’s far too happy, far too alive, his makeup done so well that he shines on the screen, despite the dull sepia tones. He looks nothing like the person Soleum feels like on a daily basis—the tired coward, afraid and dead inside.
The Kim Soleum on TV smiles like he’s living the best day of his life.
It’s such an absurd expression on him that it barely passes as human.
Soleum can’t look away.
He watches, wide eyed, as the contaminated Kim Soleum makes people laugh, as he lets blood splatter across the stage for an audience that cheers him on, as he smiles wide and talks about his predecessor and how much he hopes that the man is enjoying the show.
The only face that Soleum has seen so far, in this empty ghost city—and it’s his own.
He doesn’t know if he likes the implications of that.
But it’s too early to draw any conclusions. He has to keep searching.
The darkness is supposed to trick you into killing parts of yourself, but it doesn’t seem to be doing a good job at it.
Soleum turns the TV off. He tosses the remote back onto the sofa.
No part of him wants to kill the TV show host. This ghost story is far too easy.
He leaves the quiet apartment, setting off towards his next destination.
/
His next stop is Daydream.
The building doesn’t quite fit into the scenery. It looks more like a broken piece of a puzzle that’s been forcibly jammed into the wrong spot. Like the vision of the DER world that he knows now has been messily overlapped with the world that he knew before, which is oddly blurred out in his memories.
To his relief, the building isn’t empty.
There’s someone sitting at the front desk, flipping through a scarily thick book. The figure is dressed neatly in a suit and tie, his shirt buttoned all the way to the top and cuffs folded up neatly.
As the doors shut behind Soleum, the figure looks up, smiling.
Once again—it’s his own face.
“Welcome!” the Kim Soleum behind the desk says. “Everything is perfect here.”
Soleum feels a chill go down his spine.
He has a feeling he knows who this is.
The ghost flips to the next page of the book, but he doesn’t look down to read it. His gaze is still fixed on Soleum, smiling wide.
“Everyone is safe and happy here,” he says, as if he’s reading something—but he hasn’t looked down at the words. “There are no accidents. No one jumps. Our Kindergarten is a perfect and safe haven where everyone follows the rules and educates endlessly.”
He flips another page in the book. Then another. Then he shuts the book entirely, pushing it towards the real Kim Soleum.
“Once you finish reading the handbook, Kim Soleum, you’ll be like me. Now read it quickly.”
Soleum takes a step back.
The inhuman figure stays put, smiling wide, arm outstretched offering the cursed book.
The second entity that Soleum has found in this ghost story that doesn’t seem to be going right—and once again it’s his own face.
Is this a pattern? Is this how it’s going to be?
Just running into himself, over and over?
…Are the only parts of him that can be used against him his own identity? To such an extent that it makes all of his other terrible memories worthless in this space?
But it still doesn’t make any sense. The purpose of the darkness is to tempt you to kill yourself. What does showing him his own face accomplish?
Soleum isn’t afraid of these creatures. He isn’t going to hurt them.
If this is all the darkness is going to be—just walking away from the figures that wear his face until the ghost story caves in and ends—it’s far too easy.
He’s never this lucky.
There’s a tension in his chest as he walks away from the teacher at the desk. The man makes no move to stop him, still frozen with his hand outstretched, waiting for Soleum to take the handbook from him.
Soleum pushes the button for the elevator, then hesitates. If all he finds in here is his own face—he’s bound to run into himself in the elevator mirror.
He takes the stairs to the floor where he works instead.
/
There is no pattern or reason as to where he finds these contaminated entities.
Case in point: The figure that he finds at his former desk, in the empty D Squad office, is the Yellow Mascot.
It’s seated in front of a blank computer screen, staring at it with no emotion that can be read on its suit.
Soleum clicks his tongue at the sight.
He’d forgotten just how many inhuman creatures he still had trapped inside of him.
He doesn’t bother going up to the mascot. There’s nothing to say to an empty soul like him. There’s nothing to say to any of the contaminations, really—each one of them messed up entities that Soleum really should have gotten rid of by now. He would have, if he could still dare to trust the Fox Counselling Center—but now that he knows how dangerous the person behind it is, he can’t.
Instead he steps back out of the office.
He thinks he hears something behind him. Whether it’s an attempt on the mascot’s part to speak, or to click at the keyboard that it doesn’t have the right limbs for, Kim Soleum doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.
He shuts the door behind him, and goes back on his way.
He just has to bide his time until he can get out of here.
/
Soleum’s first mistake is going down to the security team’s office.
He’d gotten too confident by the fact that all the faces that he runs into are his own.
The basement of Daydream, in the real world, houses horrors beyond even Soleum’s comprehension. But the basement this time would be empty. It’s curiosity that takes him there, which is his first sign that he’s making a mistake—but exploring the area when there was nothing in it to fear was a rare opportunity that he couldn’t dare to miss.
When he makes it down to the dark, stale office—it’s somehow worse than he could imagine.
In the real world, the place is—well, secure. The dangers are locked up behind doors, and the area is patrolled by people that Soleum has learned to care for and trust. But here, in the darkness—the horrors could be anywhere. Every dark corner is a place where a ghost could be. Every shadow is one that might not be his own.
If the place is truly as empty as the rest of the city is, there’s nothing to worry about.
But in the dim lights, there’s no way to tell.
Cold sweat runs down Soleum’s spine. It isn’t worth the anxiety to try exploring this place. It’s far, far too terrifying—he’d better just go back up and figure out where to go from there.
But as he steps away, in the silence of the emptiness—he hears laughter.
kekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekeke
Soleum’s blood runs cold.
He’d forgotten, in the confidence that he could deal with anything that wore his own face—that some of the monsters inside of him would destroy him if they had the chance.
kekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekeke
Soleum runs.
It’s hard to find his way around in the dark. The basement is unfamiliar to him—a maze of rooms that he’s never been in before—but he just needs to make it to the elevator. It might be dangerous, with the mirrors inside, but it’s a safer alternative than the monster behind him.
The one that will eat away at his time, his story, his life if it gets the chance.
kekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekekeke
He can’t get caught here.
He presses furiously and repeatedly at the button of the elevator, as if it will make it come faster. He hears footsteps behind him, his own footsteps. The sound of his own body crashing into corners. His mind screams danger, danger, danger, and he’s forced to confront the fact that these horrific creatures are inside of him, every single day, waiting for the moment that they can claw themselves out.
The elevator is stubbornly slow. The footsteps are getting closer. Alarms ring in his head—there’s never been a case in the exploration records where the apparition killed someone real—he doesn’t know what happens if he dies to this creature—
Soleum falters.
He doesn’t, but.
He does know what happens if he kills it.
He’s been telling himself that all he has to do in the darkness is walk away from these inhuman monsters, to make sure he doesn’t attack them so that he doesn’t lose any part of himself…
…but what does he truly stand to lose, if he kills a part of himself that’s so dangerous?
Isn’t it better with these entities gone?
If he kills this monster, he’ll return to the real world without this contamination inside of him. If he kills them all, he’d be cured altogether.
He wouldn’t need that tattoo anymore, he wouldn’t need to live in fear of what would happen when the creatures clawed their way out of him.
The kindergarten teacher, the TV show host, the Sekwang Technical High student…
Soleum reaches into his inventory tattoo for the glass gun he’d brought from the bureau.
He doesn’t have a lot of time before the creature behind him catches up with him. The footsteps are too close, the crashes too loud. The elevator dings as the doors open behind him, but Soleum doesn’t pay it any attention anymore. He’ll finish this here. He’ll finish this, and he’ll go back upstairs and kill the rest of them, and he’ll go back to the real world and be human again, instead of this fucked up fractured entity that this world has turned him into—
He cocks the gun, aims at the door, waiting for the creature to dare to step into the doorway. The creature that dares to wear his face.
His hands shake as he aims, fingers trembling over the trigger—
When a hand fists itself in his collar.
Soleum doesn’t have the time to scream before he’s jerked backwards, into the elevator. He’s almost sent sprawling onto the ground, but firm hands catch him, holding him up. The elevator dings again as the doors starts to close, and Soleum just manages to catch a glimpse of his own monstrous figure approaching the elevator before the doors shut firmly, locking it out.
The arms wrapped around him tighten briefly, before they let him go.
Soleum turns slightly, his heart beating out of his chest, fearing what he might see—
But the figure that had held him up is a familiar one.
Tired, worn out, with oddly intense eyes and a hat pulled low over his head.
“Roe Deer-ssi,” Security Chief J3 says quietly. “You… shouldn’t do that to yourself.”
/
For a moment, Soleum considers that J3 might be a ghost.
The real J3 shouldn’t have even known where Soleum was. Not when Soleum had gone out of his way to cover his tracks.
Soleum doesn’t meet the security guard often. He’s paranoid that Agent Choi will spot them together someday and easily deduce that Soleum is a spy. But J3 does so much for him that Soleum tries his best to make time for him every few weeks. They get a meal together, they share stories about their respective work lives and J3’s investigation at Daydream, and Soleum sends J3 back with a giant box of donuts every time, of which J3 always stops to hand him a few.
He knows that J3 looks forward to these meetings. He isn’t sure why exactly—the man seemed to have taken a liking to him out of nowhere, but. He’s kind, and helpful, and Soleum always tries his best to keep in touch when he can.
Soleum’s first mistake today might have been that he had to cancel their plans together to make time for this damned ghost story.
He’d lied about it to J3. Telling him that he was going to enter a darkness alone would only make the man following him. Instead, he’d pretended that he had to stay extra hours at work, exploring a darkness with Agent Choi and Agent Bronze. This should have been foolproof, because J3 had no way to contact either of them.
Plus, he had no reason to suspect that Soleum would lie to him.
J3 should have spent the night at Daydream, or gone out to treat himself to a donut.
What was he doing here?
Was this a ghost? Another apparition that his mind had thrown at him?
But that didn’t make sense either. J3 had stopped him from hurting the monster. Why would the ghost story go out of its way to protect him…?
“I’m not a ghost,” J3 says, as if this clears anything up at all.
“Um,” Soleum says, trying to decide if a ghost would say that or not. “Jay-ssi. How did you get here…?”
J3 tilts his head.
The elevator moves slowly up towards the ground floor.
“I followed you,” J3 says simply.
“...why?”
“You said you were with your team,” J3 says. “But I saw those agents going home on their own.”
…ah.
Of course. It was Soleum’s luck that this would be the only day that his teammates would actually go home on time.
The elevator stops at last, the doors opening.
They’re back at the ground floor, with the kindergarten teacher at the front desk. The man looks up at them both and smiles, holding up the handbook once more, as if waiting for Soleum to come and take it from him.
J3 frowns suddenly.
He pulls Soleum back into the elevator again, pressing the doors shut. He hits the topmost number on the list. The elevator slowly inches upwards, as J3 stalls for time.
What for, Soleum isn’t sure.
“You shouldn’t do that to yourself, Roe Deer-ssi,” J3 says again.
“This isn’t what you think it is—”
“You were trying to kill yourself.”
He states it far too simply.
The words are so matter of fact that Soleum winces, clambering to explain himself.
“I wasn’t,” he insists. “This darkness isn’t like that. These creatures are just… contamination. If I kill them, I’ll be back to myself in the real world.”
J3 just watches him, with his intense gaze.
“How… do you know that they’re just contamination?” he asks at last.
“...”
“Everything in this darkness is a part of you.”
“Yes, but—” Soleum waves in the direction of the elevator doors. “They’re the parts that I need to get rid of.”
J3 doesn’t say anything for a long while.
He… probably doesn’t believe him.
“Roe Deer-ssi,” J3 starts at last.
“Yes.”
“What do you think contamination is?”
Soleum blinks.
He thinks of the cursed figure that had chased him all the way to the elevator, laughing in a high pitched, inhuman voice. He thinks of the pitiful mascot sitting alone at his desk in the empty D Squad office, unable to get anything done and unwilling to leave. He thinks about the TV show host, grinning without a care in the world as blood spurted on the stage around him.
None of those entities had been human.
None of them had been sane.
They were twisted versions of himself that the world didn’t need, that existed solely as products of ghost stories and needed to be destroyed before they ate away at him and took over his body.
“You saw them yourself,” he says, ignoring the question. “Those weren’t me.”
“Hm,” J3 says.
The elevator keeps rising up.
Soleum is starting to get restless.
It’s unlikely that he’ll have a chance like this ever again. Getting rid of contamination is tricky, sometimes impossible, sometimes even fatal. The tattoo on his chest can only do so much for him, and even the treatment at the bureau is out of his reach, what with him being a spy that can’t afford to let anyone see just how many monsters from Daydream he has inside of him. It’s a dead giveaway of the place he used to work.
This needs to be done now, but J3 is someone that Soleum respects too much to just push aside and do what he wants. He has to talk this through and convince him as fast as possible, but what should he say…?
J3 beats him to it.
“Then what are you?” he asks.
Soleum stops.
J3 looks sincere.
This isn’t like Agent Choi’s awful questions that are designed to make you realize that you’re in the wrong. It isn’t like Lee Jaheon’s blunt ones that state the truth and ask opinions and have no room for debate in between.
J3 asks him with honest curiosity.
Then what are you?
He’s… not whatever those things are. But that’s really the most he can say.
“Human…?” he tries. “Part of the real world.”
“Ah,” J3 nods, as if that makes sense. And then, just as easily, he asks. “Then what am I?”
/
There’s nothing that Soleum can say to J3’s question. Nothing that won’t be taken in the wrong way.
J3… isn’t really okay.
He’s been so deeply affected by contamination that he was stripped of his position and his status and his ability to even go outdoors in daylight. Fallen so low, from an elite squad to a security team that no one looks at twice. J3 is a perfect case study of why contamination is so dangerous in the first place, of how much of your life it can suck out of you…
But the thing is, Kim Soleum has never known J3 before he had fallen.
All he knows is the vague rumours he hears from Daydream employees, the curses and taunts that Kwak Jekang spouts, and maybe three sentences that J3 has told him himself.
He’s never been friends with the B Squad Leader. He’s only ever known J3.
This man, who is more wolf than a person, who is more tired than alive.
…he’s not the sort of person that Soleum would call human.
But he could never say that out loud. There’s nothing that Soleum fears more than not being human. Every time he gets a part of himself eaten away by another ghost story, he’s terrified that there’s no longer enough of himself left—he can’t call someone else half a monster when he knows what a terrible thing it is to be.
“Jay-ssi is different,” he settles for at last. But there’s nothing he can tack on to the end of that sentence. There’s no way to say that J3 was a better version of himself because of the contamination.
Soleum hadn’t even known him before.
“Am I?” J3 tilts his head.
“Yes.”
The elevator dings as it reaches the top floor. J3 presses the lowest floor again, pressing shut on the doors before they’ve had a chance to even fully open.
He seems determined to keep Soleum in here until they’ve reached an agreement.
“Most of the floors should be empty,” Soleum tells him, because staying trapped in an elevator for the sake of a conversation is a little ridiculous. “There aren’t many contaminations left that I haven’t seen—most of the building should be safe.”
J3 blinks slowly. “That’s not it,” he says.
“What?”
“The wolf… is out there.”
…what?
“The wolf…?” Soleum repeats slowly.
“My wolf,” J3 corrects easily. And then, as if that still isn’t clear enough,“Me.”
/
Soleum had forgotten, in the midst of his own desperation to get back out of this elevator, that if J3 was here—so would the mirages of his memories.
If this had taken place in the manner characteristic of this darkness—with the worst of his life laid out to see, or if those memories had been degraded and forced into a single, contaminated entity, like it was for Kim Soleum—Soleum doesn’t know.
The wolf must be both.
The inhuman creature that had taken over him, as well as the worst part of J3’s life.
But that’s not what he calls it.
He calls it me.
“Did you see him?”
J3 nods. “He tried to follow you. I stopped him.”
Soleum stops.
J3 looks nonchalant, one finger still resting on the keypad of the elevator. He’s keeping Soleum away from the wolf outside, and the creatures that wear Soleum’s face away from Soleum.
For the first time since he got here, Soleum takes a good look at him, and realizes—
There’s blood on his sleeves.
“Did you get hurt?”
J3 blinks again. “I don’t know,” he says slowly. “I probably did.”
…what?
“I’ll know when we get back out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The wolf,” J3 says, matter of fact. “I bit him.”
Soleum’s eyes trail up from the blood on his sleeves.
The blood on his collar, the gash across his cheek, and—
As he speaks, the blood on his teeth.
The wolf was a monster. J3 should have had no real power over him. The sort of creature that destroyed everything it was told to destroy, that swallowed flesh and bone as one—J3 shouldn’t have stood a chance against it.
But he stands in the elevator as if he isn’t even tired. As if nothing had happened to him at all. There are no real wounds on his body, save for the blood of someone else—the blood that is still, in a way that Soleum doesn’t like to admit, his own.
Soleum doesn’t know what happens in a scenario like this.
If the wolf that J3 had fought was a memory, or a contamination, and what the repercussions of hurting something like that would be in the real world. Would J3 be less contaminated? Or worse off?
For someone who had dragged Soleum into the elevator by the collar at the sight of him trying to kill his own contamination—why was he fighting the wolf in the first place?
And how did he manage to win?
Didn’t his own self matter to him…?
“Jay-ssi…” he starts cautiously. “What did you do?”
“He was trying to follow you,” J3 repeats, completely unbothered by Soleum’s growing fear. “So I stopped him.”
He couldn’t have been following him.
Soleum’s natural fear of ghosts and horror means that nothing can ever sneak up on him. He’s horrifically aware of any movement next to him, any shadows in his vicinity—there’s no way that he could have been in danger of being eaten by a wolf of that size and not have any idea that it was creeping up on him.
But J3 says it was following him, which means…
…it was someone who looked like him.
“Do you mean me?” Soleum asks. “Or… a contamination?”
“Those are you too,” J3 says simply. “If you lose one of them you lose yourself.”
Something sinks in Soleum’s stomach.
He feels sick.
J3 had risked his own life to save a part of Soleum that was better off dead. A part that Soleum is trying to kill with his own hands.
“Why would you do that?” he asks sharply. “Why would you—”
“Roe Deer-ssi—”
“You said I shouldn’t do that to myself,” Soleum says, voice rising. “But you—you did the same thing—”
“Roe Deer-ssi,” J3 says again. He still seems disturbingly calm. “I… I’ve been in here before.”
“What?”
“I’ve killed my memories,” J3 says. “I’ve fought that wolf hundreds of times. My wolf. Me.”
“...you mean—”
“There… isn’t much inside of me left to lose,” J3 says. “I.. don’t want that to happen to you.”
/
The only safe way out of the darkness is to wait it out.
That’s what the two of them are forced to do.
Soleum sits cross legged at one end of the elevator. He’s long lost the urge to break out and kill the contaminations—to try to do so when J3 has hurt himself to stop it from happening would be the worst thing he could do. J3 sits with one leg pulled up, the other outstretched, lightly grazing against the fabric of Soleum’s pants.
He has one hand braced on the side of the elevator. Every time the doors nearly open, he raises his fingers and holds them shut.
Sometimes Soleum catches glimpses of himself, in the brief moments that the door opens. The kindergarten teacher at the desk smiles at them every time, holding out the handbook all over again. Someone who must be the Sekwang Technical High student stares at them blankly, completely motionless, from far across the corridor. Once, just once, Soleum catches sight of the wolf—and J3 snarls, face twisting into a nightmarish expression before he manages to shut the doors again.
Once it’s gone, his expression becomes as empty as usual.
Calm, as if nothing had happened at all.
It’s impossible to tell what time of day it is, trapped in the frigid lights of the elevator. Neither of them makes much conversation. They stay there, in the silence, until slowly, slowly, the familiar but unfamiliar scenery starts to fade around them.
Soleum grabs the ankle next to him, panicked.
“It’s alright,” J3 says. “We’ll wake up together.”
He’s right.
They end up in the precise location that Soleum had entered the darkness from. At the side of the road, in the dust and dirt.
J3 pushes himself up first, dusting himself off and reaching out to help Soleum up. Soleum stares at the blood on his sleeves.
It isn’t his own blood. Not… exactly. The J3 in front of him isn’t bleeding, or hurt, or even mildly upset. There’s nothing about his countenance that suggests that the fight he’d had with the wolf inside the darkness might have affected his mental state in any way. The worst part is—Soleum isn’t sure if he’d even notice if he did.
He doesn’t know anything about J3.
All he knows is the man that likes to have donuts with him, who has an awful dark past that no longer seems to bother him. He knows that he can not stand Kwak Jekang, that he’s fiercely protective of the few people he cares for, that he’s kind, and empty, and does not have the burning hope that keeps people working at Daydream.
J3 is the sort of person who is alive because he is alive and has never really considered why he should be, or why he shouldn’t be.
Soleum doesn’t know anything about him.
It’s hard to imagine a person like the man in front of him slaughtering his alter egos inside of a darkness like this. Soleum can’t imagine him wanting to. J3 has never wavered at the sight of his past.
For someone like that, to destroy all the memories that he found, as he had admitted—
It’s an awful conclusion, but it must mean—that he wasn’t like this before.
He must have been someone who had something to live for.
Something to want.
The J3 in front of him… is a person who has already destroyed most of himself.
Soleum takes the hand offered to him. J3 pulls him up, scanning him over for injuries.
“How do you feel?” Soleum asks carefully.
“Me?”
“After… fighting the wolf.”
J3 blinks. “I don’t know,” he says.
“You’re not hurt?”
J3 shakes his head. “I can’t tell.”
“What do you mean you can’t tell. You have to—”
“I don’t notice anymore,” J3 says. “If I’ve changed. If I’m someone else. I don’t notice.”
“...”
“That… shouldn’t happen to you.”
“It shouldn’t happen to you either,” Soleum says fiercely.
“It already happened,” J3 dismisses. “Roe Deer-ssi… you said that you were human, right?”
“Yes?”
“And the rest of them… you said they weren’t.”
“...yes.”
“But with them gone,” J3 says, “You’ll be like me.” He tilts his head. “You… don’t think I’m human, do you?”
He reaches out to pat Soleum on the head.
He doesn’t seem offended at all.
He doesn’t… seem hurt by anything.
Soleum is incredibly fond of J3. He owes a lot to the man, and he’s never been anything but kind to him—but the more he speaks, the more he realizes how empty he’s running.
“Jay-ssi,” he tries. “Why did you fight the wolf the last time?”
“Hm?”
“You said you fought it hundreds of times. But you would have known, after the first time, that it was hurting you, right? You still… you kept trying it again…”
“I was like you,” J3 says. “I thought if I got rid of it, I would be human.”
“And now?”
“I know I won’t be,” J3 says. “The wolf is me.”
“I don’t think—”
“The wolf is me,” J3 repeats. “That’s what happens when you try to kill it.”
He pats Soleum on the head once more, as if he hasn’t just said something disturbing. “Get home safe,” he says.
“Ah? Yes. You too, Jay-ssi.”
J3 nods, turning to leave, his hands with his bloodied sleeves tucked into his pockets.
Soleum watches him go.
His hunched figure, without a care in the world, and yet with blood on his teeth from fighting a monster of himself to protect someone else from turning into him.
Kim Soleum isn’t that different from him.
There are monsters inside of him that he can not dare to look in the eye.
He would kill them, if he was given a chance. He wouldn’t hesitate. He’d make sure they could never show their faces to him again.
But…
That’s what happens when you try to kill it.
Soleum clenches his fists tightly.
He lets go, one finger at a time.
J3 disappears around a corner in front of him. J3, and his wolf. Inseparable, burned together for life.
Not quite a monster. Not quite human.
Just something eternally caught in between.
/