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Lee Jihye opens her eyes to a classroom. It’s empty, and she’s seated at the back, with windows tight shut and curtains drawn, only moonlight filtering through.
A voice rings sharp in her ears, everywhere all at once. “Oh. Crybaby.”
Her heart pounds in her chest, a harsh and violent thing. She ignores this and gets up from her seat, rounds the teacher’s desk, pulls the drawers open, scatters the papers around.
Autonomy over her movements feel sluggish somehow. It’s a new feeling, instead of the terrible stillness that overcomes her every time she circles back here.
And then someone’s calling her name from behind, a little too close over her shoulder.
She doesn’t turn around. She knows there’s only a wall, a whiteboard. Three steps back and she’ll hit it. Three steps back and this room will still only have enough air to afford one body.
(It’s laughable, really, as if the voice has ever needed something so corporeal getting under her skin in every waking moment.)
But that’s the thing. Lee Jihye had—has, she’s never not living in these scenes—always been the one to share this space all on her own. Here, in Class B of the second years, moments before the shame lurks within its dingy walls and unstring all parts ugly and unbearable about herself. Here, in an empty stage waiting for encore after encore like it’s never witnessed anything more generous than the killing, more generous than the meaning of barbarity in affection.
Here: her ten minute countdown, her line to hell alone, where everything only makes sense by repeating what she came not to do.
“You know fighting here will be useless,” somewhere, the voice continues, “you’ve never tried it, but you know it.” It’s coming from the windows this time. Lee Jihye rises from below the desk, scissors in hand.
“No,” she answers back, throat dry and teeth digging into lips. Not unfamiliar habits at the sight of this scene, the sound of this voice. “I’m just—This is—I’m—”
“What does it matter, when you preserve someone alive or dead in your memories? Either way, you’re just being selfish.”
Lee Jihye raises her voice a little. “That’s what saves you in a ruined world.”
“And what does that make you? Do you deserve to be saved?”
“I—” Lee Jihye pauses, licks her lips. “Saving… demands another. Two things at either end of a line. A saviour and a sufferer. The world went to shit; I don’t think anyone can afford it.”
“I’ll tell you one way you can. Don’t push me out.” Despite the barred windows, a breeze flows in and the words echo along with it. “That’s what I deserve from you. Some things just aren’t meant to be weighed at all, or have an end that you can make peace with.”
Lee Jihye bites into her lips more. The faint taste of blood feels metallic on her tongue, and she feels like she’s chewed out her entire heart.
Her reason for fighting has been solely made out of that—pronounced against the shine of her sword—of living out her losses, and never missing a heartbeat to remind her own two hands that the bones beneath know what she’s done.
“You’re wrong,” is all that comes out of her mouth. But it’s enough to believe in it.
“Now, how do you justify that kind of greed?” There’s no curiosity in the voice. It only falls flat on Lee Jihye’s ears.
She grips the scissor blades a little tighter, feels the pressure sting by the second against her skin.
“We all know where we have to start first,” she says.
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“It’s meaningless”—she brings the scissors up her arm, over the wrist—“to answer that kind of question. The apocalypse brings a lot of things. This is one of them.”
The windows rattle once, twice, three times—and when she blinks, the scissors are gone and her fingers are grasping at something more pliable under her hands. These are the only things that change, but also never change: her body and what she does with it.
Lee Jihye doesn’t remember the shape of Na Bori’s corpse. Not here.
In her dreams, she tries to pull it impossibly closer with spotless fingers, all lifeless limbs and stiff torso, just to mould the slope of Na Bori’s hip bones onto hers and remember remember this is where you belong why do you swing your sword ask for forgiveness ask for forgiveness—
In her dreams, she breathes it all in like it’s her final supper, gutless against the stench of death not because her lungs only ever know to ask for it, but because it’s the easiest thing to lose, and what good is death if you won’t even spare me a trail of you?
The punishment here is not when Na Bori’s body falls over and over. Not when all of her escapes Lee Jihye’s hold and ripens into something wretched and alive that eats, stalks, and never sleeps, devoted to making itself known.
No, the punishment here is receiving it at all. Knowing what she knows now, that it’s something that spans across lifetimes of what she continues to do, however cold Na Bori’s skin feels, she can’t understand how to begin it in any other way. And it always begins with the unforgivable sin, before the fall, before the betrayal—of maybe being worthy of love that it never falls just enough to hold either of them.
It happens many times, with Lee Jihye killing Na Bori with her own hands, draining the air out of her lungs that the traces have gone imprinting themselves onto her own palms, making a fruit out of it—reddened peels of a core, fleshed out pits, and sweet extract that should’ve brought separation.
(In God’s after, Eve wasn’t his. In this after, Na Bori always will be.)
“Jihye-yah, it’ll be alright,” she’ll say. “You must live,” she’ll say. Over and over in litanies.
Na Bori with her bloodshot irises, short black hair, missing button; Na Bori with her neck wrung by slender fingers, and the unfolding of blues on pale skin; Na Bori, and the years of it all melting into something vicious. There’s always cruelty in forgetting.
And Lee Jihye will keep quiet, fingernails sinking into neck, because she’s also been betrayed a hundred, thousand times over. There’s always cruelty in loving someone, too.
When Na Bori dies and the body hits the floor with no sound at all, the other bodies start to appear. All at once, or one after another, Lee Jihye doesn’t care to learn.
Blood is never spilled during or afterwards, not by her own hands and not in the literal sense. If it had been up to her, it wouldn’t be anyone else’s but her own.
It’s a reminder, as she feels the edges of a desk prod at the back of her legs. Turn around, they’re saying. No, they’re screaming. So she moves them up and around the teacher’s desk by memory.
She manages a strained laugh as she feels the familiar shape of the scissors, pulling them out from where they’d been hiding. Doesn’t know if she should feel relieved or pass things with aggression.
Lee Jihye could try flying into a rage. She does exactly that.
The ground shifts. She’s back in her seat. Her hand is empty; the room is empty.
And then, the scissors. Raised high, only to plunge down—
Na Bori’s already cold to the touch this time.
Lee Jihye releases her hold, but it’s too late to do anything. She tries to listen to how a body falls, too. There’s only nothing.
Still, she finds the blades. Still, she hopes this to be enough. Still, still, still.
By the teacher’s desk, the conversations stay the same.
There are no other words left for her to say, besides telling Na Bori she’s wrong, besides saying it’s pointless to answer her questions.
The thing about having faith in these lines is that they mean something. Saving demands another. They mean something to Lee Jihye, to Na Bori, to Lee Jihye taking Na Bori’s life in her own hands. We all know where we have to start first. She’s trying to prove something here, but she can’t name it yet.
If Lee Jihye has to relive the moment she becomes unworthy of saving, she’ll repeat the words again and again, more than what she could ever hold in the space of this lifetime just to find it—that meaning.
The truth, Lee Jihye’s truth, is that she’d thought of herself as the saviour. That when she did it, it’d be over, and Na Bori would hold out her hand to drag her along the school corridors again.
This knowledge of not being the sufferer forever, all because she was given a choice, had all been, in a way, for her. But that was before.
When Lee Jihye finds Na Bori collapsed at her feet for the sixth or tenth time, she knows now that this is how it had felt then, watching her run across the track field, flushed cheeks with a beating heart after the choice had been made. The same heavy feeling of something unattainable, eternally lost in her fingerprints from that twisted neck, up until she picked up a sword—like an incision cut deep in the skin, engraved in her arteries that they can’t help but wring each other out for every crucial tempo.
She’s then reconciled it to this:
Lee Jihye’s defining truth is that there’s no world where she hasn’t killed her best friend. No world where either of them are saved, and the other one forgiven from what can not save them.
Blood won’t return to the body. She can never swallow it back. It’ll stain her to the ends of her roots, the marrow of her bones; a bruised blue throat, and red palm lines as her sin incarnate.
There’s a subtle wonder to the irreversible. It’s why her fingers don’t stop reaching for things sharp enough to cut.
Do you deserve to be saved?
No one can afford it.
The clarity of Na Bori’s dead body only reaches her a second too late.
She can never remember what it’s like to hold her corpse, before or after. Not within these walls.
And she knows why—it’s what breathes life into the ghosts she can’t abandon.
Nothing will change if you keep me alive—this is what Na Bori means when she calls her selfish. Nothing will change if you die.
Saving someone doesn’t save her. It’s all she’s reminded of after Na Bori dies again.
Lee Jihye can say it had all been for nothing, but she knows that’s not quite true. Because if it is, there wouldn’t be a need to drive out the very thing Na Bori left her.
She thinks there are better ways to grapple with such a thing. Better, but never enough to make her feel like she’s doing something right, something equal to what Na Bori’s love amounts to.
In the end, this is what they’ve become—Lee Jihye and Na Bori—a pair of metal blades with handles, a constant thing in this classroom together, waiting to be found.
Don’t push me out. That’s what I deserve from you.
Maybe, in one of those other worlds, Lee Jihye would have the heart to do so.
Who are you, to take away your grief like it’s nothing? Who are you, to leave me?
Lee Jihye says, you're wrong, because she never will. Perhaps the most immortal thing people can hold with all ten of their fingers is this—the undying devotion to forgiveness, to penance.
“Jihye.” Na Bori’s voice comes out gentle, but it pierces her all the same. “It’ll be alright.”
Lee Jihye isn’t crying yet, but her bones are. Is this it?
She hits someone’s desk with the back of her thighs, then something clutters to the ground. Her heartbeat is erratic in her chest as she picks it up. Awareness has always been something alarming here. It’s like anticipating the fall, nearing the end of things.
“You must live,” Na Bori tells her, taking Lee Jihye’s hands in hers, smiling at her. “You have to live.”
It’s so incredibly delicate, the way Na Bori’s touch lingers on the fist enclosed with the scissors.
Lee Jihye wants to break, wants to fall apart, and once she does, would it feel as relieving for Na Bori to shatter her into even more pieces?
She’s tired of playing god, but she can pretend to know the right things to say one last time, if only in here.
“I tried my best, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“You know that I would’ve done the same thing, right? Letting you live?”
“That’s right.”
“You only wanted to protect me, right?”
“I did.”
“Hey, Bori-yah.”
“Hm?”
Lee Jihye unties her ponytail, lifts the scissors up to about an inch from the ends of her hair—then cuts, and cuts, and cuts.
Na Bori looks a little taken aback, but she doesn’t say anything.
“How do I look?” Lee Jihye looks up.
Na Bori beams at her. “Much better.”
When Lee Jihye wakes up, she finds that it’s become a little easier to breathe.