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(truth: jie-sun park and wei chen first meet amidst the ruins of a sunday afternoon stretched to its breaking point)
The meeting—more mission briefing than it is a proper introduction—barely lasts five minutes, but Jie-sun knows he will be carrying the ghost of that day in his heart until he dies.
It is something about Chen’s eyes, he thinks. The pierce of them, the iron. In stories cold iron always wards off the fey, the dark, the grotesque. Looking into Chen’s gaze, he can believe it. He wonders if those eyes could burn away everything unnatural about him, leave him raw and real, whole and human.
A lesser man would call it destiny, but Jie-sun knows better. Everything he has, he worked himself to bone and marrow for. Everything he has, the world did not want him to have. Destiny is a hollow word.
(lie: this meeting means nothing)
When the Farm finds him again, this is what they try to tell him. This is what they show him; it is no coincidence that they let specific news channels play, leave particular newspapers lying open. His “friends”, if they were ever anything that could be described as that, are doing perfectly well without him. He has never been needed.
When the Farm finds him again, this is what he tries to tell himself. It hurts less if it is true.
And he is so tired of hurting.
(truth: a lot of things mean nothing in the grand scheme of things)
Like comfort, when compared to survival.
Like hopes, when compared to reality.
(lie: wei chen is one of them)
Unfortunately, Jie-sun has never been good at lying to himself.
(truth: every beginning begets an end; where there is a first meeting, there must be a last)
“Once upon a time” is linked, intrinsically, with “the end.” Jie-sun knows a lot of stories; he knows how this goes.
Once upon a time, a knight who slew a monster. The end.
Once upon a time, a clever little man poked out a giant’s lone eye to save his own life. The end.
Once upon a time, a prison thought itself panopticon, thought its captives cowed sufficiently through fear. A clever little man realized that it was not an all-seeing prison, but a cyclops instead, possessing just the one eye, blinded to its own weakness by its hubris. The man stabbed it out and killed the giant; he saved his own life, and returned to the home of his own making, and lived happily ever after. The end.
Once upon a time, Jie-sun Park met Wei Chen. The world has never felt right since.
Where is this story’s end?
Jie-sun is not ready to tell it. Perhaps no one is. Perhaps No One is.
(lie: that last meeting must be today)
The day is overcast, clouds overlapping roughly so that it gives the illusion that the sky is overflowing, leaking out in between the edges. He’s haunted by that first afternoon still, he thinks, tilting his head up and back and tracing the path of the clouds with his gaze. Dull, gunmetal gray. Rain would be appropriate if this was a story, the sky weeping for what has become of him. Of them.
There is no rain. Only the quiet sound of wind through the trees, and distant laughter from across the grass. Today is a good day.
He waits for a long, long time. Day passes into evening, evening into night.
Still no one comes.
Jie-sun heaves himself off of the bench—their bench. No, his bench, now. Grief clogs his joints, makes every motion slow. He hadn’t expected, but he had hoped. He should know by now that hope gets him nowhere. It is easier to pretend that nothing matters. Perhaps he will even learn to believe it, this time.
“Wait. Park.”
He knows that face, knows that voice, but still it takes him a while to realize it isn’t just desire twisting the whistle of the wind into what his heart wants to hear, the shimmer of moonlight into what his heart wants to see.
“Jie-sun,” says Chen, quietly. His mind is feather-soft with worn regrets; flickering, timidly, with hope. “We need to talk.”