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Sooheon and Chanmi take life day by day. There are normal days, where everything is quiet and the world moves as it always does, and there are bad days, where Sooheon spends his time in a hospital gown or too sick to move or - there are no good days.
There hasn’t been a good day since the two of them walked hand in hand away from the school that had buried itself beneath their skin like a terrible parasite.
There should be good days, and there are days where he thinks they could be. The ones filled with laughter and the warm tinge of sunlight streaming through the window, the ones he always dreamt of enjoying when he stopped coming to school. But they’re always clouded by the overhanging thing neither of them talks about. One day, when Sooheon is gone, he doesn’t want these memories to be tainted, doesn’t want Chanmi to think back on something that should be happy and cry instead. So there are no good days, because if the days aren’t good then she has nothing to remember fondly anyways.
They don’t talk about the future much either. Don’t plan trips or events or dates past maybe a week in advance. They don’t take polaroids and scrawl the date below in sharpie to tuck in a box so it can be pulled out years down the road and stained with tears. They both have their reasons.
Chanmi has a hard time with it because she latched so firmly onto finding her brother’s killer for so long that she forgot to think of an after, a ‘what comes next.’ (Sooheon doesn’t say this out loud but he thinks she’s afraid of facing a time where she grows to ages her brother will never reach).
Sometimes she mentions wanting to try for the national sharpshooting team if she ever gets tired of the marine corps. He thinks she could, if she really put her mind to it. She’s good enough for it (he knows that from first hand experience), and it’d be nice to watch her shooting, especially when he’s not the target.
There’s bits and pieces there, the foundation for what could one day be a great dream.
(And when she does make it one day, they’ll write about her dead brother and her dead boyfriend, how inspirational it is that she persevered despite all the loss. And Sooheon will be nothing but a tragic backstory, something to overcome, instead of all the countless days they spent together, bad or not.
Maybe it is better that way).
Sooheon has a hard time with it because he doesn’t have a future to talk about.
He was supposed to die a couple months ago. Living past that should feel better than it does, like a sense of freedom, or a sudden want to plan ahead. It doesn’t. Because it’s not like that means he’s suddenly cured. It’s not a homework deadline that is over and done with once it’s passed, it just keeps going and going, until the inevitable stop.
One day the red bracelet will hemorrhage all its luck away as if the blood from Sooheon’s nose.
(There had been a foolish part of Sooheon that thought that if he did enough good everything would be alright. That his cancer would shrink a little bit more with each act of revenge. Sa Jung-Gyeong is done for, Gi Osung won’t ever wake up, Seok Jaebeom is behind bars. The evil has been vanquished.
Sooheon is still going to die).
Every time he feels a sharp pain in his head, or passes out, he thinks this is it only to wake up in the hospital slightly sicker than he was before.
(Sometimes he wonders if this is what it felt like for Jaebeom when he wasn’t aware that there had been an entire other identity inside him. This terrifying unknown that constantly weighs upon your shoulders and slowly eats at your vision.
How trying to stave it off is this useless desperateness that always gives out in the end until the next time you come to there is blood on your hands and hours of time missing).
Chanmi is always there.
Holding his hand, or wiping the sweat from his skin with a damp cloth.
Sooheon never tells her he loves her, even if they both know he does. Chanmi tells him she’ll love him forever, even if they both know she can’t.
She still stays.
He just hopes she’s not there when it actually ends.
(She doesn’t deserve to witness such violence more than once. Being on the phone with her brother when he was pushed had already been cruel enough. The fact that his blood was already beginning to stain the snow red by the time she registered that something was off. Seeing the video later had been even worse).
Sooheon doesn’t want to leave her worse off than when they met; both of them broken and bruised in more ways than one.
It’s not like there’ll be something to avenge this time anyways; it’ll all be the same ash when he’s cremated. Sooheon’s tumor is as much a part of him as Jaebom’s ‘twin’ had been his. A sort of terrible concoction of their own bodies that hollows out everything around it.
When they store him in a jar in a columbarium, there won’t be a ‘hero,’ just a kid who never got to know what his twenties were.
How wonderful it is then, to have people that love all of him. Chanmi and the members of the gym, every single student at school who covered for him and waved goodbye as he left. How wonderful it is to love someone, to be loved so much that he’s terrified of what leaving them will do.
(If Jaebom had been loved like that, would things have turned out differently? Maybe Park Won-Seok would still be alive, and Chanmi would still be at her old high school happily practicing her shooting skills.
Sooheon will still die in that scenario too, far more alone and unhappy).
The day will come sooner rather than later.
At least he has done good, even if it didn’t whittle away his tumor.
At least he has Chanmi, even if it’ll hurt her in the end.
(On the bad days, they don’t talk, they just sit in silence. He listens to the rhythm of her breath and matches it to his own, slowly quelling the rapid beat of his heart.
On the normal days, they do everything people their age should. Maybe a picnic, or karaoke, or star gazing. Just... living).
He hopes he dies on a good day.
(then again, he’s never been one to think of the future anyways)