Work Text:
When Jin Gyeom puts a bullet through his older self's head, he seals his own fate, even though he feels nothing has changed. His mother lies a bloody, cooling heap on the floor, for the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh time. His younger self wanders around suburban Seoul's streets in search of her, unaware of what is to come. His mother's lover, the father he will never have the time to forgive, bleeds out across white tileless floors ten years away.
For a heartbeat, nothing's changed, and Jin Gyeom fears nothing will.
Until it does.
He feels it. The reset. It rips through him, unraveling the fabric of his present, as if he is living through his tenuous twenty-eight years all over again: the explosion searing his skin with gasoline heavy on his tongue, the wail tearing through his throat when he sees his own grinning face splashed with red pockmarks, the pine-scented perfume clinging to the jacket of his mother– his mother– his moth–
The clanging rush of sensation recedes, seeps from his mind like water through a sieve.
The night lies still. High up in the trees, cicadas are calling.
He's standing before the door of his house.
A gray scuff mars one of the white pillars guarding it, a remnant of a pair of neighborhood bullies. The green wooden door bears scratches, weathered from his eighteen years of passing under its archway. The glow, through the windows, does not flicker, painting his shadow across the low steps of the patio. This is his childhood home, and it is also not.
He looks up, dizzied. Through the glass panes, squared away by sills, the scene is as familiar as it is alien – a memory tinted by time, its details washed away, not quite right. Thrice he has experienced this, but only now is he an observer, not one forcing his way into the role of a player.
Seated opposite each other at the dining table, separated by a cake layered with fruit, the lips of the mother and son move. Soundless, they sing the final chords of the birthday song.
"Happy birthday," they seem to croon, "to you."
"Happy birthday…" he tries. He raises a palm, not daring to press it against the glass. "Mom."
Even now, his tune sounds toneless, lacking his mother's gentle clapping to the beat.
She doesn't do that here. Instead, she cuts into the cake. When she hands the boy in his vision a slice, her mouth moves. Jin Gyeom would have tried to read her lips, but the boy smiles, his shoulders shift.
It jars him. Jin Gyeom hardly smiles, and he's aware. The people around him have commented on it all his life. It occurs to him this must be strange, this must be a sign he is something wrong: that this surprises him more than seeing his younger self from an alternate reality grin with full teeth and hands wet with blood.
This boy, who finishes a birthday song for his mother, who smiles at her with love, with care– this is the boy Jin Gyeom should have been. This is the one his mother and his loved ones should have loved, the what-could-have-been, the far-fetched dream, realized.
It’s a possibility, until it dawns on Jin Gyeom with a slow, broiling ache: it’s not.
It’s reality.
The mother and son get up. They are gathering their valuables, preparing to leave for the convenience store, where they will purchase her favorite soju, under the light of the bloodless moon.
Closing the front gates, their footsteps tap-tap-tap down the stairs and down the street. The mother is chatting, the son quietly listening, but they are side by side. Alive.
Jin Gyeom stands behind a corner of their home, watching with the eyes of a displaced man.