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The night sky above him is infinitely vast, with stars twinkling down from every corner and an array of colours that can only be seen during the deepest and darkest moments, when all the world is asleep and the lights turned off until a hush falls upon the earth to herald the end of a day undefined by hours.
It is, of course, a darkness that is almost never seen within the busy and ever bright city of Seoul. Lamplights, advertisements, offices, and night businesses flood their glow through the streets and up into the clouds, the light pollution that one can not escape even miles away from the city. At best, most evenings someone looking up on a cloudless night would see the moon and some scattered array of constellations that struggled to glow against the backdrop of LEDs and neons.
Yet as Kim Soleum lay upon the soft grass of an open field, he can see thousands of stars shining down on him. Each light but a pinprick in the dark blanket of the atmosphere, creating a swirling pattern of art that spread its skirts in a dance across the sky.
The night air is as warm as a midsummer dream, and Kim Soleum breathes in deep to stretch his lungs, and then slowly exhales to enjoy the sensation of freely breathing, with no obstruction before his face. He lifts one hand from his side, and then the other, to stare at the silhouette against the backdrop of stars.
Five long fingers on each hand, joints slightly knobby, and wide, strong palms. They are hands that serve him well.
Human hands.
He moves those hands to touch his face, his jaw, and slides lightly with his fingertips down to the shape of his chin. A little sharp, but the skin is soft enough to compensate for that. He then moves his hands up and feels his forehead, his brows, the slope of his nose, and the curve of his cheekbones. The exploration ends with both hands over his mouth, as if to prevent himself from speaking aloud, even as Soleum continues to watch the stars.
“Are you surprised?”
Kim Soleum tilts his head slightly to the side, his hands following with his movements, and spies the dark silhouette of a person seated on the ground next to him, an arm resting upon a drawn up knee, torso turned to face him. The person looks to be wearing a sharp suit, although details other than the shape escape him in the dark oblivion.
Atop the silhouette, where the head should be, there is a large rectangular shape, like a box.
Braun, Kim Soleum mouths underneath his fingertips, recognising the figure.
How can he not?
Despite not speaking the name aloud, there is something about the box shape that looks pleased at the recognition. This is not the small bunny figure that Soleum is intimately familiar with, but rather the larger than life host of a very dangerous Darkness. A star from the deepest dark of his own right, sitting on the grass next to him.
Braun, the terrifying television host, with his screen of a face dark in solidarity with the quiet night, waits patiently for Kim Soleum to answer him.
Soleum doesn’t know if he can. He pats at his own cheeks again, and drops his hands to the grass beside himself. Ten fingers curl into the dewy grass, the soft blades scratching lightly against his skin. He moves his wrists, and then his elbows, and rotates his shoulders to squeeze against his back. His ankles move as though to a soundless tone, and then he shifts around on the grass like a wildcat trying to scratch an itch they can’t reach, twisting his spine and his hips and his knees, to one direction and then the other, almost like a slithering snake.
Each movement is slow and measured. Each movement is a small burst of joy as his toes curl in pleasure.
He opens his mouth, then shuts it again. Open, shut. He tests turning his neck, and then makes a humming noise, delighting when he hears the sound.
The feel of clothes encasing his skin. Hair curled behind his ears.
He is himself, familiar and whole.
“Are you Braun?” He asks, his voice cutting through the silence of the night. For such a beautiful scene, it is not accompanied by any familiar sounds or smells, breaking through the illusion. “Am I dreaming?”
The silhouette of the television head comes closer, and Braun replies in that smooth, charismatic voice that is little more than a rumbling whisper with an undercurrent of electrical hum. A voice literally made to be adored by the masses, “I am your Good Friend, come to visit.”
That both answers and doesn’t answer his questions, which confirms his identity to Kim Soleum. Braun the television host would answer just as such, with smooth declarations and dubious intent. Even his voice is different from that of the plush bunny, akin to deep vibrations over silk. While the Good Friend plush soothed and cajoled, the sheer presence of Braun the television host is an electrifying rush that can not be ignored.
“Then you already know how I feel.”
“Goodness! How can I not be worried when you answer so coldly? Your friend is here to listen to you directly. As they say, I’d like permission to your thoughts.”
Permission? Now Kim Soleum starts to doubt Braun’s identity again.
Permission is not something Braun ever asks of him. He decides, he manipulates, he leads, and he sidesteps. As he is a creature from the Darkness, Kim Soleum understands it is unfair to judge Braun by human standards, but he doesn’t have any other standards to judge him by. Braun is a person, an entity, that more often than not gets exactly what he wants.
In human terms, he might be an arrogant, conniving, manipulative asshole.
Next to him, Braun sighs, as much as a television set can sigh.
“I feel perhaps I have been misrepresented once again.”
“Maybe stop listening to my thoughts without permission,” Kim Soleum suggests audaciously, something he would not normally do outside the safety of a dream. Even within this dream, he is terribly aware of his own vulnerabilities. Methods of pain and death nip at his heels nearly every night, unless there is the off chance he collapses from an exhaustion so deep that his mind can’t spare the strength for dreaming.
“I merely hear what you want me to hear, and what is necessary to help you as a friend should.” Braun excuses. “If there are thoughts about me, directed at me, then it is of course my duty to hear my friend even when he has no voice to use and no tongue to speak with!”
The words are both ominous and a looming threat, but Kim Soleum is now too jaded to fear it. What is the lack of a voice to him, the lack of a tongue? He is well aware he is in a dream, and that outside the dream—
The lack of a voice and tongue are the least of his worries.
More than just that, he is very nearly gone. Very nearly liquid and clumps of flesh, everything physical about himself collapsing under the mental strain of his inhumanity.
And isn’t that just the sweetest irony?
Kim Soleum is only human so long as he believes he is human, no matter what reality might say. When faced directly with the truth, his entire being melted away like wax under a fire.
He curls his fingers through the grass and down into the soft, damp earth, feeling grains of sand dig under his fingernails. Outside of this dream, he is… untethered. Mere gas in a balloon, shaped only by the suit he is wearing and his new contract to Daydream.
Without it, he is… nothing.
“Why are you still here?” Kim Soleum whispers the words into the swirling abyss of stars and deep spaces between. Does it count if it is merely in a dream? “I must have disappointed you. I didn’t listen to you, I didn’t take your advice. I decided against every entertaining choice and did things the way I wanted to. I ignored you. I resented you.”
“Did you really?” The silhouette of the television tilts in an almost human fashion. “I found our latest interactions far more entertaining than before. You’ve truly transcended your previous self, my friend. You have gained perspective enough to develop your own methods, even without my help. In fact, not once have you needed my aid!”
“I asked for it, though,” Kim Soleum grits out.
The television head gazes down at him once more, moving in closer. Closer. There is a slight static within the black glow, dark to not disturb the night but filling out bit by bit until it is just bright enough for Soleum to see the outline of his own form reflecting in the faintly glowing screen.
“But you did not need it.” Braun tells him, the screen now centimetres from his face. There is a flicker of static, of rainbow noise, dripping down to his eyes like shooting stars. “Why cling to the end of a show that has long since lost its audience? You are meant for bigger and better things.”
“But that’s not up for you to decide!”
“It is, so long as I am your Good Friend.”
Kim Soleum bites back a scathing retort. It is petty and it is thoughtless (and dangerous) to renounce the status of friends. Even amongst humans, friends argue and fight, and they often continue as friends despite that. He knew that.
He knows that.
In the calm of the dreamy night, Kim Soleum lets out a deliberately slow breath, trying to feel the movement of his lungs. He turns his head away from Braun, staring out instead into the endless dark of their surroundings, nothing but a grassy field that went on forever in all directions, leaving only the two of them in this world under the starlit witnesses.
An audience akin to Braun’s shows, flickering with curious light upon the endless expanse caging him in.
He doesn’t think about which entry record this dream might match, because it doesn’t matter anymore. Why even think about the <Dark Exploration Records> when none of that matters? He once imagined himself victim to its entries, captive to the overwhelming authority that those stories had on his life. He thought himself a regular person caught up in the tides of some grand plot, like a novel protagonist, with only his foreknowledge to light the way toward escape. Toward a way home.
It turns out he isn’t like that at all.
Maybe he isn’t even real.
Just a concept brought to life by others, another failed experiment, with holes in his mind where holes should not be. Perhaps in that manner he is truly comparable to a novel protagonist: ever trapped on the page of horrors. He is not outside the <Dark Exploration Records> navigating its strange mazes, but inside it and puppeteered by those he originally thought were characters he enjoyed reading.
Foreknowledge does not help him when those ‘characters’ are smarter than he can fathom. He thought he had a grasp on things— he thought knowing the characters on the page would make them predictable, yet he was blindsided by all the brilliance of those from the shadows. Those who know better than to be named on the <Dark Exploration Records>, instead marionetting from above with strings that rise higher than his eyes can follow.
Who can move in the face of such staggering horror?
He isn’t strong enough.
“But you are.” Braun says, the words smooth as butter. Coaxing. Melting. There is a style of mechanical purr to his voice, like a gravel heard in older and grainier recordings. The Darkness creature drops the pretense that he can only hear the thoughts directed at him. “And that is why I came back.”
“And you saw all my weaknesses.”
It wasn’t until Braun’s return, until the subsequent narrowing of the road, of blocked paths and shut doors, that Kim Soleum started to understand the depth of his own despair in this world. Everything narrows down to one line, to one point:
I need to go home.
He burned his bridges with the Disaster Management Bureau, burned his bridges with Daydream Inc., all for the chance to make it back home. All because his anxieties and his dread grows hour by hour, day by day. In his sane mind, he might have taken more time to decide on things… might visit more friends to say goodbye, to tie up more loose ends because this world is now more than a story to him, more than government styled documents whispering tales of horrors to haunt the late hours.
Up until the point of Braun’s return, until the point where he is driven into a corner by a fox, Kim Soleum held tightly onto a faint and wispy hope.
Should anything happen to him, he had a lifeline. He could do anything.
Part of that bravado was contamination, but the other part was the belief that he had a friend watching over him. He had people who believed in him, including himself, and even as things got worse and worse, he could still reach out, reach as far as he could, and almost taste success on the tip of his tongue. He was falling, and in that fall he was brought ever closer to his end goal.
But falling is descending, not ascending, even as he fools himself into thinking that the increase in speed will break through the barrier to get him home.
And the thing is…
He didn’t really have a home to begin with, did he?
If that’s the case… then everything he did was for nothing, all those moments of highs and lows and sacrifices and despair… none of that paid out. It all led him down to this point. To this place. Not the grassy field underneath a starlit sky, but down into the pitch black basement of Daydream, with broken glass under his hands and knees, and a rapidly fading wish.
Kim Soleum closes his eyes. Yet despite that action, he can still feel the tears escape, the wetness disappearing against his hair and then tickling his ears.
He is so confused.
He is so tired.
“Braun,” Kim Soleum’s voice is an echo within the fullest depth of a dark and broken dream, “can we just stop?”
“If you need a break, then this dream is the place for it.”
Soleum slowly shakes his head. No.
“I can visit you each night!”
Those words make him laugh, the sound wet and broken. “And then what? What would change? I’d still wake up in the mornings, I’d still have to—” Face the truth of my reality— “I’d still be falling apart every moment. Can’t we just… stop?”
He opens his eyes again to the light of the stars, to the audience twinkling in this sky, now frozen by his words.
There is a burgeoning dark wish in his heart.
A way to finally end that despair which held tight to him no matter his struggles.
“What if I don’t wake up?”
There was a period of time, after he was found out as a spy within the Bureau, that Kim Soleum seriously entertained that notion. Everything had become too much, all at once; it felt like there was no escape. No happy ending waiting for him. He felt like everything he touched was brought to ruin, and that it was better for him to hide away like a wounded animal, and just find a private place to spend the last of his days.
And then he was chosen as the village sacrifice, and…
Kim Soleum felt… relieved.
He was okay with that, okay with dying in place of someone else. It wasn’t that he truly wanted to die back then, but he thought that perhaps if there was a bit of meaning behind his death, then he could accept it. Even if it was for Baek Saheon, and even if he was angry about being deceived, there was… relief in knowing that maybe this time…
He felt trapped. Like the Abyss Transpo train never ended for him. The nightmare never stopped, only continued, gradually worsening with each stop.
To be sacrificed, to die like that… it felt like he was finally allowed to get off that train.
It would have been alright if he just… stopped right there.
(Except the Bureau had come to save him, and for one sun-lit moment, Kim Soleum imagined that they had come to save— him , from the darkness he had been building around himself. That perhaps there was a chance they were really able to pierce through the mire of despondency and pull him out by the hand.
After falling to the darkest despair, for one brief, brilliant moment, he thought…
‘It’s going to be okay.’
…That moment did not last long.
He had been wrong about being in the darkest despair, as his reality proved he could still dig further down from there.
Down, and down, and no matter what he did, what he does, it just gets worse and worse. No matter how he tries to salvage the situation, tries to keep his morals and his boundaries, tries to— hold it all together. Hold himself together, and do what is necessary without hurting anyone else.
“If my friend does not wake up…” Braun’s silhouette turns toward the sky. He stays quiet for a moment, truly contemplative. “...Is this where you would like to stay?”
“I don’t have to stay here,” Kim Soleum responds, growing more confident with each word. Yes. It doesn’t have to be here. It doesn’t have to be in a dream. Aren’t dreams just giving false hope, the way he clung to that false hope when he was last rescued?
The way his heart nearly burst with joy from the false hope of having his wish finally fulfilled?
Kim Soleum would rather die than feel that again.
He would rather…
“My friend, you do not want to die.” Braun tells him bluntly. This time, he drops the charisma, drops the soothing and the lulling, the siren-song lilt that makes Kim Soleum unconsciously lean in his direction. “Soleum. You are here because you do not want to die.”
It is a terrible thing to say.
It is the truth.
Kim Soleum had been dying, and he… panicked.
After all the highs and lows… thinking everything was going to be okay after the Good Friend summoning, being found out as a spy only to be placed under a prohibition that would kill him within a month, to being saved from that prohibition, to then imprisoned by the very ones who saved him… and then after all that, finally walking away with the Wish Ticket and the sheer giddiness he felt combined with the sadness of leaving everyone he connected with in this world… the overwhelming relief of finally being done, of going home…
To have all of that crash down on him, and the truth revealed.
At that time, he could have died. It would have made sense for him to die. Even if not physically, the emotional burden nearly tore him apart. The mental strain had melted his physical form.
It would have made sense to give up right there, to lie down and ride out the end.
Instead, Kim Soleum struggled. He pushed back, and he accepted Daydream’s contract in order to survive, without even looking at the fine print.
It was stupid.
It was dangerous.
It was entirely unlike him.
But…
At that moment, he wanted to live.
Yet rather than victory, rather than some well-timed epiphany to rewrite his very being and light up his neurons in some cartoonish manner that might switch his entire outlook around, all he felt in that moment was…
Defeat.
Somehow, during the days when he accepted his own death, there was a peace that came along with it. His mind would tell him, slow down. We’re at the end. And it felt like the worst of the fear, the overwhelming sense of anxiety and notion that everything would go wrong, always, forever, bottling up until he exploded outwards from pressure… it all…
…Relaxed.
Just a little bit.
In those moments when he thought it was okay to just give up, to let what was going to happen, happen— he felt like he could breathe just a little bit easier. Hold his head up a bit higher. The acceptance came with a lightness in his heart, as if urging him to enjoy his last hours now that his mind was made up.
And then… and then…
“I do not want you to die.” Braun says to him, drawing Kim Soleum from his spiraling thoughts. The ghostly television host’s presence is daunting, yet comforting in its threat, like a weighted blanket growing heavier and heavier. “I will not allow my Good Friend to die. Mr. Roe Deer, if you only say the word, then there is a stage prepared just for you. I have done it before, haven’t I? A show for you to be comfortable, to be safe. Where you’re allowed your curiosity, where I can help make you shine.”
“...That’s not what I want.”
“No.” And the silhouette seems to grow larger, all encompassing, blocking out half the night sky. The television screen turns to him, looks at him, only at him, like Kim Soleum is the only thing in the world left to gaze upon. Like a flower drawn to the sun, yet it is the opposite— a show drawn to dark delights within the shadows. “You have said as such. As you believed it at the time, I agreed with you.
“But do you still believe it?”
“I do,” Kim Soleum insists. He pushes against the earth behind him, his hands sinking slightly against the damp grass and soft dirt. He pushes himself to his elbows, and then upward into a sitting position, all the while Braun retreats just enough to give him the illusion of space with every movement.
They stay at exactly the same distance apart.
Here, in the quiet with nothing else to distract them, he can appreciate the genius behind the Midnight Show. It was like a dream to the both of them. Braun got to shine, got to flourish under the cameras, while Kim Soleum was allowed free reign as writer, slowly and carefully nudged into the spotlight alongside the television host in brief, heart-racing moments to acclimate him to the attention.
That was Braun’s plan.
A place where the two of them thrived.
Together.
But that equilibrium could never last. Not when one person is human and the other supernatural. Not when Braun is charisma and dazzling delight, all spotlights and applause, while Soleum relaxed only behind the protection of a screen, happier to indulge his curiosities without taking center stage. One presence is bound to flatten the other if they aren’t both centered and willing to compromise.
And Braun is not a being of compromise. He is brilliant and bright, and he wanted to bring Kim Soleum into the light rather than dim his own shine to meet in the middle.
“Is that what you think?”
Here, Braun sounds truly upset for the first time. No cloying sultriness in his tone, no forceful cheer or inherently artificial sympathy. The static is almost gone from his voice, like it has been brought forward decades in technology. From analog to digital to…
Sounding real.
“I have always compromised for you. Did I not return to being a doll, an inanimate form of cotton and fluff, for your benefit? Did I not squeeze myself into something small, confined to a form unable to speak or move all the while living at your whim, in a world unfamiliar to my own? Have I not made myself helpless to indulge your sense of safety?”
That… Kim Soleum stares at him in the dark, at the static and noise leaking from the confines of the screen out into the surroundings. Slowly immersing the dream, until there is crackling in the earth and in the sky.
“You were never helpless.” He says, although his tone is unsure.
“No, I was not helpless the same way my friend was never helpless. At all times, you had a way out of every scenario you ever encountered, limited only by your teetering human morality; high one day and low the next. One that not even those around you follow. At all times, there were those who would break the rules for you. Should I tell you I am one of them?”
For a moment, the last words ring out in an echo, like thunder accompanying the flashing electrical lights that escape the television screen.
It is…
Kim Soleum’s fingers itches to trace against the flashes of light, as if they are mere brushstrokes across a page and he wants to feel the bumps in the paint. But the brief crackling of electricity soon dies out, the echo falling away.
Oh.
Braun is actually, really, upset.
“Why?” And this question is one that Kim Soleum can not fathom the answer to. During their first meeting, everything expressed was merely deception. Braun pretended to enjoy his show with dwindling viewers, while Kim Soleum— no— the Roe Deer who signed up as a participant, exaggerated a certain charm out of his desperate fear.
When it all went south, Kim Soleum manipulated— outright lied, used items against Braun, and eventually convinced the host to let them leave… perhaps at his expense.
If he can think of it, then Braun knows of it.
“Why would you choose to come back?”
Braun leans down until Soleum’s forehead nearly touches his screen.
He answers with another question. “..Why did my friend’s mind turn to me during the summoning, knowing there are plenty of others vying to help you?”
“Because you would always come for me.” Kim Soleum replies easily, and then pulls back slightly as he realises what he said.
Is that… really what he believes?
“Then you know,” Braun’s tone is like a purr as he also pulls back. The static calms, and his voice once again takes on the familiar lilt of a talk show host, of the reverb included in old televisions. “I have always cared, my friend.”
“...And you let me go.”
“Yes.”
Twice. Kim Soleum doesn’t think too hard about the second time, his head already full of thoughts, unable to handle anything more. Back then he feared that Braun would stop him, would be insincere in wishing him the best or perhaps even actively sabotage his wish in the end.
Yet just as before, Braun let him go. Watched quietly as Soleum left.
While Kim Soleum struggles to remember Braun is not human, and continues to judge him under human standards… What did it mean for loud, boisterous Braun to stay quiet during those moments?
To watch and not interfere, with an air of acceptance and perhaps defeat?
No. No, that can’t be it. That is just Kim Soleum assigning human emotions and predicaments to a non-human entity, the same way one will pretend a vacuum has emotions when a smiley face is drawn on it.
The silhouette of the larger than life television host remains silent as Soleum gathers his thoughts, giving him the time and space he never got while awake.
Isn’t it ironic? That they spent so much time together, nearly half a year with barely any moments apart at all, and yet they never spoke in such an honest manner before? They didn’t even have to speak in those times, not when Braun could literally read his mind. Yet the communication was lacking, and after Braun returned several months into their separation, it didn’t get any better.
Perhaps it really was wrong of Kim Soleum to expect the easy comradery they had after everything that happened. He once hoped… he wanted the friendship, but also the help that Braun so freely gave the first time around, despite the fact that things had changed between them ever since.
Braun had gone his own way, and Soleum… Kim Soleum had chosen to go down his own path as well.
In those brief months apart, they had become different people.
“You try so hard to stay the same, yet your changes are dazzling. Brilliant. Captivating.” Braun says, once again lauding Kim Soleum’s form as if they were on a talk show performing for an audience.
Soleum didn’t need that when it was just the two of them. He didn’t want that.
He wants those old days back, when they would sit and watch cartoons and old game shows together in the middle of the night, and his racing, pounding heart would slowly calm in the presence and comments of his good friend.
“Change cannot be stopped, and in your case you have continually changed to be greater.” Braun’s tone continues to soothe, to cajole, yet that only makes Kim Soleum tremble with a swell of emotion building in his chest.
He didn’t want—
Why should he have to—?
Why won’t Braun just accept that Kim Soleum doesn’t want the same thing from himself that Braun wants from him?
That he doesn’t want to live up to his potential, he just wants to—
“I don’t want to be greater!” Kim Soleum burst out, because he doesn’t want this performance, he doesn't want the false compliments, and he doesn’t want to feel like the contaminated parts of himself are the greatest parts of him. “I want to be human!”
He covers his face in his hands, knees drawing up until his thighs press against his forearms, attempting to get a hold of himself over the feeling of dirt rubbing over his skin. His nails scratch over his temples, and he tries to calm himself in that feeling.
Human skin. Nails. Hands. Fingers. Clothes. Dirt.
He can feel it, all of it. He is still human.
“Oh, Mr. Roe Deer,” Braun’s tone gentles, perhaps understanding that he pushed a little too fast. “Can you truly not see what you are?”
Kim Soleum makes a low noise in the back of his throat, and drags his fingers down his face until he can see again. The low light, the dark fabric pulling tight against his knees, and the shape of hands in the dark.
“I am human,” he protests. “I have to be. I…”
He can’t remember his previous life anymore. It must have existed! He must have had family, friends, experiences… The more he searches his memories, the deeper the yawning pit comes to an abyss of nothingness. All he can remember… all those entries of the <Dark Exploration Records>... what had his job been before Daydream, exactly? His parents were worried over his job choice, but what did they actually say?
He can’t have been fabricated. He must have lived as a human. He must be human.
“Have you ever…” Kim Soleum exhales. He licks dry lips, suddenly terrified on a primal level, deep and pulsing, not fear that triggers adrenaline, but more like a wellspring of anxiety slowly bubbling over.
He thinks of his most human experiences.
The things that prove, that has to prove, his humanity.
Kim Soleum bites at the inside of his bottom lip, thinking. It feels strange to say it aloud, but also worse to keep it in. He has to prove, if only to himself, that he’s not a monster.
“Have you ever walked in the snow at night? I mean after it snows, and everything’s covered under this… layer of white. There’s a— quiet, to it. The only thing you can hear is your own breath. Your own footsteps. It’s like… the entire world’s been muffled, and everything fades away.”
He covers his ears as if demonstrating, closing his eyes a moment for the full memory.
“It’s like you didn’t know until that point just how much noise air made, until it’s covered up by the snow.”
Soleum slowly uncurls from his knees, looking upward into the glittering night sky again. The stars above them are so beautiful. He doesn’t know if that beauty is real. He has never been to the countryside, far enough away from city lights, to experience a night like this.
“I can still recall it,” he says, like a whispered secret. “That’s all I could think of while we were in the glass prison. That the whole world just… disappeared. Under the snow.”
His hopes for the future, buried. Back then, he struggled hard in the silence to find a solution to a situation that exhausted him too much to allow even his fear.
He then turns his head to face Braun. To stare straight into that dark screen.
“I know the taste of yam baked underneath a fire.” He inhales through his mouth, smiling softly. “How it burns your hands if you’re not careful, and your tongue even when you are. The sweetness of it, the warmth. The texture.”
The dark pit in his mind gives no indication if Kim Soleum has ever eaten a yam with his family or friends like that before. He very likely has never walked alone outside in the snow, being the scaredy-cat he is. None of it fit, yet those sensations were vivid across his mind.
“The warmth of sharing space in a dormitory. The noise and the disgusting habits people would bring, but you learn to laugh it off. Eventually you become… relieved to see the mess. Like proof that others are there with you.”
He raises his hands in front of himself, inches from his eyes. Extends his fingers, and then curls them back down. He can feel the give of his flesh, the warmth of his palm against chilled fingertips, the slight bite of his nails.
All of those non-memories, the sensations… they feel so human to him. Make him human. It’s a strange feeling to take pride in, but Soleum has always been the type who wants to fit in. He doesn’t want to be known for other-ness. He doesn’t want people to look at him and think that he’s different. He just wants to blend in with the crowd.
Just a normal, regular human being.
There is an electrical hum as Braun takes in his words.
“You can be all of that,” the talk show host says, “and so much more. Human, yet also beyond it. Your potential is vast, and I would hate to see such a beautiful thing squandered by momentary sentiments.”
Kim Soleum drops his hands, his moment of dazed nostalgia and wonder gone.
“Well,” he says bitterly in response to that. “You got your wish.”
Funny how that worked— Kim Soleum spent the entire time in this world working toward the Wish Ticket, only for his wish to fall through. Yet Braun’s wish for him, against his own will, comes to fruition. It feels like a bitter pill lodged in his throat. It makes him angry.
It isn’t Braun’s fault, yet Soleum still feels angry about it.
“Had your wish worked,” Braun says to him. “Had you left at that moment for a home too far for me to reach, I would still be here. Waiting. As your Good Friend.”
“A Good Friend, huh?” Kim Soleum gives a bitter laugh. That reminds him: how can someone such as Braun be a Good Friend to someone such as himself? …Can one Good Friend even summon another? Daisy chain them?
“Yes. I have, and will always be, that Good Friend.” The silhouette looms over him, overcoming all the glittering lights in the sky, the screen flickering until it is the starry sky itself, twinkling above Kim Soleum. “Mr. Roe Deer. I would very much like for you to be my Good Friend in return.”
Kim Soleum startles. He stares up at the stars within Braun’s screen in a daze. The wording of it feels rather particular— not as a good friend, but as— a Good Friend. The doll. Bound to the one who summons it.
…Who was Kim Soleum bound to?
Braun does not answer that verbally, but there is the sense, the static noise reflecting straight into Soleum’s mind, that volunteers: to me.
But can he? Is that something he can be? Or is that something he already is, bound into his melted human form, restricted by all the rules of the summoning up until he can finally one day leave for home… a home that may not even exist.
His head hurt.
His heart hurt.
“...Perhaps that is enough for tonight.”
Braun’s large, looming form retreats into the size of something more manageable, still larger than life and a force to be reckoned with, yet not as overwhelming as before.
“You have a busy day ahead of you,” Braun says, and now they are two friends sitting side by side in the dark of night, watching the stars together. The dream returns to its semblance of normal, and Kim Soleum finds that the starlight is so bright he can see the texture of Braun’s suit. “As do I, it seems. There is much to do for us who work, isn’t that right?”
The tone is jovial, the joke light-hearted. Kim Soleum wonders why Braun works as he does. He thinks it might be for the love of the stage, but perhaps it is something a little different from that. Even television hosts are subject to the whims of directors and producers, and Braun doesn’t seem the type of person to humbly submit himself to the whims of others.
Oh.
Perhaps he does, though. To the people he likes.
Above them, the sky is starting to lighten. It was so black before, but that just went to show that the darkest hour was just before the dawn.
“I should hope,” Braun continues to say, and now the detail of the television head is becoming more visible. Kim Soleum can almost see his reflection on the screen. His reflection, and nothing else. “That you’ll speak with me again tomorrow.”
“Isn’t that up to you?” Soleum asks, half bitterness and half genuine curiosity.
“It is up to you.” Braun says, the wording vague. His statement could mean the power is in Soleum’s hands, or he could be answering the question to say that interpretation is entirely up to Soleum.
It is a confusing thought.
“Until then,” and here Braun leans down again, and faintly, there is the impression of a smiling face on the screen. “I will wait, ever faithful, as your Good Friend. Until the moment you finally need me again.”
I thought I always needed you.
The opacity of the smiley face on the screen brightens, and on the horizon the first hint of light breaks through the last dragging veil of night. The sudden brightness makes Soleum look away from the person next to him, his eyes drawn to the light and warmth of what is coming.
He raises a hand, perfectly normal, a little pale, with several small scars from random scratches he doesn’t remember getting, against the light.
The world quickly brightens to white, and he starts to forget what happened before the light flooded through his dream.
Something nice, he thinks.
Something cathartic.
It was one of the very rare times the dark felt like… a friend coming to greet him.
As Kim Soleum wakes up to stare at the blank ceiling above himself, he once again pieces himself back together to something resembling human thought and form, something that isn’t melting, isn’t hooves or scales or horns or tails, and he… despairs.
And he thinks in his still-waking mind—
It would be nice to have a good friend there.
