Chapter Text
"Have you ever heard of the multiverse theory?" she asks softly, then lifts her hand high above her head, as if shielding her eyes from the sun — though it's the dead of night. The sky above them, speckled with stars, is a deep, inky black, melting seamlessly into the infinite sheet of ocean stretched out along the horizon.
She has a small hand, delicate with neatly clipped nails. In the cloudless, moonless night it looks like a dark fern frond reaching upward — fragile, divided, barely etched against the sky. She turns it a little, opening and closing her fingers as if testing some invisible surface above her, or maybe just moving to feel the motion itself — as if that were reason enough.
“No,” he says simply, glancing at her from the side.
He draws on his cigarette, and the tip flares briefly, then dulls. A thread of smoke escapes between his lips. It rises straight at first, then falters, pulled apart by a breeze. He turns his head to let it out, more from habit than courtesy, and then he looks back at her — a quiet signal that she has his attention.
“If the sky we see is only a fragment of infinite space,” she says, almost whispering, eyes still fixed on her moving hand, “then somewhere, in that same reality, there could be regions with identical initial conditions — which means there could be another Earth out there, with another version of you and me, living the exact same lives.”
He smiles faintly, though she doesn’t see it.
“Sounds like science fiction.”
“It’s mathematics,” she replies, not correcting him so much as continuing the thought, as though he hadn’t spoken at all. Her voice is quieter now. Sadder, maybe — but not in any ordinary way. Not grief, not regret. More like the ache of realizing something too vast to change, too true to ignore.
“If there are infinite trials,” she says, almost to herself, “then everything that can happen… does. Somewhere. Eventually.”
She pauses, her tone turning softer, almost childlike. “Look. Beneath a single one of my fingernails, there are roughly ten thousand galaxies.”
He doesn’t move. Just follows the line of her arm with his eyes. Her hand, still lifted, is trembling now from the effort of holding it there. The muscles too small to keep pretending they’re not tired. In the stillness of the July night, against a sky so wide it forgets to end, her hand seems paper-thin. Less than that. Like if he blinked too slowly, it might disappear altogether.
Then she adds — as though she wants to convince him, to make sure he believes her:
“I read it in a paper,” she says. “One night I couldn’t sleep.”
He leans back against the rough stone wall behind them and sighs when he sees the cigarette in his hand has burned itself out.
“In that case, there must also be a world where you don’t suffer from insomnia.”
She lowers her arm and turns her face to him. Her hands fold behind her back, and he could swear he sees the corner of her mouth tighten in a barely suppressed smile.
She smiles so rarely.
At first, he’d thought it was the trauma — the loss she could never quite come to terms with. But as the years passed, he came to realize it was simply who she was. Distant. Cool. Steady in a way he respected.
He often caught himself thinking how used he’d grown to her presence — how, despite his contempt for the human species at large, it was easy to be near her. To share silence. Or listen to strange facts untethered from reality.
“Want another smoke?” she asks, seeing the disappointment in the way he flicks the stub into the nearby brush.
Yes. He wants it badly. His hand is already patting down the flaps of his black uniform, searching for the pack.
She doesn’t smoke at all, but each night she comes with him to watch the ocean roar below, to breathe real air.
What they’re doing isn’t exactly legal. Soldiers are bound by a strict set of rules, a litany of prohibitions designed to preserve order — to hold the structure together through obedience and anonymity.
But he doesn’t answer to rules. He answers to the man who writes them.
It’s the kind of power that takes years to build — slow, unglamorous years of submission and calculation, of choosing when to nod and when to strike. That power buys him this: the right to stand here, in the middle of the night, on the edge of a cliff. The same power that lets her be here too — unpunished for crossing the lines they were both told not to cross. For keeping contact outside of the Games. For knowing his face. For calling him anything other than sir.
“You can wait for me inside,” he says, lighting another cigarette. The flame catches with a soft click, and for a second his face glows orange — more hollowed than illuminated. “I’ll be right there.”
If they keep talking, there’s a chance he’ll forget to smoke again. And she — she seems to understand. Whether it’s the kind of understanding born of time, or simply the drilled instinct not to press — he never really knows. She doesn’t answer. Just nods once, as if that were enough. Takes up her helmet from the stone where she left it, and walks off without looking back, disappearing slowly around the curve of the rock.
His mind drifts back to the work. It’s been nearly two years since Il-nam’s death.
At the time, he'd expected collapse.
He’d thought the Games would buckle under the weight of that absence, unravel like something that had never really been whole.
But In-ho surprised him.
Not by surviving, but by adapting. By stepping into that vacuum with a calm so complete it felt inherited. He was a different kind of leader, colder in some ways, more technical. But the sharpness — the particular edge of it — that was unmistakably learned. Observed. Absorbed from years spent watching the old man work the room like a patient knife.
In-ho enforced the rules with a kind of elegant violence. Never rash. Never messy. What needed erasing, he erased. What needed shaping, he shaped. But he wasn’t interested in control for its own sake. His eye stretched only as far as the boundary between what fed the system, and what merely happened in its shadow. If it didn’t interfere, it didn’t matter. Even if it stank of rot.
He draws on the cigarette and lets the smoke sit in his lungs a little longer this time, eyes narrowing against the burn.
This was his window — narrow, yes, but open. A clean route back into the old trade. Organ trade. No need to reinvent the machine — just keep the gears turning where no one was looking.
He just had to avoid the mistake from three years ago. The Games had to continue. Smooth. Undisturbed. As if nothing else moved beneath the surface.
He tilts his head back and looks up.
The sky above is crowded with stars — scattered in patterns he doesn’t bother trying to name. There’s a kind of cold in them that feels cleaner than anything down here.
Below, the ocean does what it always does: hits rock, retreats, gathers, returns. Constant and pointless.
He lifts his hand, stretches his fingers wide. Watches the light vanish behind the silhouettes of his knuckles, one star at a time.
His hands are bigger than hers. Broader, less careful. They cover more of the sky.
And for a moment — just a breath, no more — he wonders if somewhere, hidden in the seams of those distant galaxies, there’s another version of himself. One just like this.
Doing the same things.
Making the same mistakes.
Telling himself they don’t matter.
She sits beside him on a narrow bench at the edge of Sinwon-dong Park. The kind one that seems older than the trees surrounding it, older than the path beneath their feet, older even than the routine that brought them here again.
September has only just begun — technically — but the air already has that clarity, dry transparency that hints at the months to come. And the leaves — yellowed and thin-skinned — are everywhere, already strewn across the packed dirt.
The sun, caught between thinning branches, filters down in soft fragments — light that no longer claims space the way it did in July. It glows lower now, slowly backing away from the world it scorched all summer, exhausted.
“I don’t like this,” she says with the quiet finality of someone who’s thought it through and found no better way to say it. There’s no room in her tone for sidestepping. But even as the words leave her mouth, they feel foreign — like a borrowed strength she hasn’t tested before.
She isn’t used to standing against him.
The balance between them, whatever it is, has always tilted subtly in his direction — not because she lacks opinions, but because she’s spent too long learning which ones are worth voicing and which are just noise. Most of the time, she lets herself follow the current he creates: not blindly, not submissively, just — efficiently. Sometimes because she agrees. Sometimes because it’s easier. And sometimes because disagreement feels performative, like throwing a stone into a river just to prove you still can.
But now that she’s said it, that unfamiliar weight — of resistance, however mild — spreads outward from her chest, down her arms, into her fingers, her legs. The discomfort is physical.
Her hands clutch the peeling edge of the bench, thumb grazing a splintered groove in the paint, her shoes shift against the dead leaves beneath them, kicking unintentionally, nervously.
Beside her, he breathes in deeply and lets it out without saying a word.
His shoulders roll slightly forward, head tipping up toward the open sliver of sky between the trees, as if he might find something there. A thought. A way around. Something better than what was just said.
She can tell he’s not pleased.
She watches him from the side, careful not to let her gaze settle fully on him. There’s a tension in that too — looking, but not looking. She waits for the familiar move: his hand reaching instinctively for a cigarette, but it doesn’t come. His hands stay buried deep in the pockets of his jacket,.
And still, he says nothing.
So the silence stretches, and in it, everything else grows louder: the faint drone of a car far off on the avenue; the dry rasp of leaves dragging across the path; the creak of a branch somewhere overhead.
“Have I ever let you down?”
The question arrives softly. His voice is low, deliberately calm. Not a threat. Not even a challenge. Just a weight, dropped carefully.
She closes her eyes. Not long. Just enough to absorb the shape of what he’s asking, and the shape of what he already knows. Because he does know — the question isn’t a real one, not really. It’s a technique. He’s always had a way of choosing the exact pressure point — the quiet, pulsing places where memory and loyalty overlap, where argument can’t grow.
And he’s not wrong. He’s never let her down. Not in the ways that matter.
Still, it doesn’t sit easy. That he’d say it out loud. That he’d need to.
He plays their history like a familiar instrument, never out of tune. Years of unspoken understanding, of knowing when to step back and when to step in, of letting things be — it’s all here, hovering in the space between them. And now, here it is, named.
“No,” she says, her voice barely audible. “And I’d like it to stay that way.”
She can feel him turn slightly toward her, not fully, just enough — enough that she knows he’s watching, waiting, listening. So she mirrors him, instinctively.
The difference is, he stays composed. She doesn’t.
Her nerves show — not in her eyes, which she keeps focused and still, but in the tension that pulls at her mouth, the way she bites down hard on the inside of her cheek. Not because she has too much to say, but because the things she could say now feel like traps. Too many syllables, and something might break.
“No-eul,” he says — her name soft on his lips, almost reluctant, like it costs him something to say it here, now, in this kind of moment.
She turns toward him fully then, almost against her better judgment. And in the amber light that filters through the branches, flickering and thin, she catches the color of his eyes: dark, steady, the shade of bitter chocolate just before it melts. The thought is fleeting, intrusive. It doesn’t belong here, but it comes anyway, uninvited. And behind it, another thought forces its way through — just raw.
“I just don’t want you to get into trouble,” she says, each word heavier than the last. Her hands are fists now, white-knuckled around the edge of the bench.
He doesn’t flinch. His eyes keep moving between hers — not rapidly, but carefully, like he’s scanning, assessing the depth of what she means, looking for a crack in her logic, or maybe in her resolve.
“This isn’t a good idea,” she says, the sentence catching at the end, not because she doubts it — she doesn’t — but because she already knows what he’ll do with it.
He’ll listen. And then he’ll move past it.
He nods, slowly, just once. Not agreement. Understanding.
And then, finally he reaches for the cigarettes.
She watches the motion, familiar enough to feel like ritual. There’s something almost reverent in the way he pulls one free, places it between his lips, lights it with a flick that’s muscle memory. For a second, the flame catches in the gold of the dying light, and his face sharpens in contrast.
He leans back slightly, as he tilts his head just enough to glance down at her.
“When I say everything will be fine,” he says, the cigarette shifting slightly with the motion of his mouth, “that’s exactly what I mean. No more, no less.”
She wants to believe him. She really does.
Wants to take the calm in his voice — that quiet certainty he carries so easily — and let it settle somewhere in her. Let it be enough.
But the plan — the thing laid out like it was nothing more than logistics — doesn’t sit right.
And maybe that’s what unsettles her most.
Not the idea itself.
Just how out of place it feels, coming from someone like him.
It doesn’t sound like the person she’s known all these years. Doesn’t match the version that moved carefully, said little, but always knew where the line was.
So for the first time in a long while, she wonders what does match. What he’d choose if no one were looking.
And whether she’s ever truly known.
Her fingers reach for distraction. They find it in the wood beneath her — the bench old enough to hold the memories of hundreds of afternoons just on the edge of turning — and under her hand, she feels the indentation of a word, carved crudely, deeply, without art.
She doesn’t need to read it. She already knows what kind of word it is. She traces it anyway, letter by jagged letter, slowly, rhythmically, back and forth.
“I understand why you want to do it,” she says. Her voice is quiet, but steady now. Like she’s repeating something to herself as much as to him. “But that’s not enough.”
And she means it. Not because she doubts his reasons — but because they’re not the kind of reasons that fix anything.
He told her once. Only once. Years ago, late at night, in the kind of silence that doesn’t invite questions.
He never brought it up again. She never asked.
But she remembers everything.
The long weeks in the transplant ward.
The waiting.
The silence.
The little boy who didn’t survive.
It was more than ten years ago. Maybe thirteen. Maybe longer. But it’s not the kind of story that dulls with time.
And if there’s one thing she’s never tried to do it’s take that grief from him, or ask him to carry it differently.
Now, he draws on the cigarette. Holds the smoke in his lungs.
And he doesn’t say a word.
She watches his profile in the fading light, the curve of his jaw, the fine crease between his brow that appears when he’s thinking too far ahead.
She waits. For the moment he’ll meet her eyes and say, You’re right. Let’s leave it.
Waits for the flicker of doubt, the pause in his breath, the silent undoing of whatever engine is running inside him.
But none of it comes.
Only when the cigarette is nothing more than a smoldering stub between his fingers does he turn to her.
The sharpness in his gaze is gone. Something else is there instead — resignation, maybe. Or affection. Or the kind of tired kindness that comes when two people know they’re not going to win.
“Alright,” he says, and the word is soft. “I won’t force you.”
There’s a pause — not long, but long enough for the cold to move in at her ankles.
“But if you don’t want to help me…” He exhales slowly, eyes still on hers. “Then please. Don’t stand in my way.”