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The face in the mirror isn’t one that Baek Saheon wants to see.
His reflection looks exhausted. There’s sweat pooled at his forehead, red scratches on the tender skin around his swollen, injured eye. He looks like himself, like the boy who had learned to grit his teeth and bear anything that he was forced through—but that isn’t who he’s supposed to look like.
The more he looks like that boy, the more he will be forced to be him.
The trick to survival is to act like you’ll survive. It repels any forces that try to bring you down.
For that he has to pull himself together, to stop looking like this—but the pain is fucking unbearable.
He splashes at his eye with cold water. It has never helped, but he still tries it. There isn’t much left to do in his life besides try, and try, and try, and hope that at some point something goes wrong and lets him win.
He scratches at the stinging skin. It’s been weeks, and he knows this isn’t getting better.
Saheon is going to have to live like this, or cut the ache out of him, and when it comes to it, he’s always been the person to cut it out.
There is an empty hollow where Saheon’s heart should be, an empty room where there should have been a home—all carved out by his own hands. An eye, after all that, should be nothing.
He reaches for the blade in the bathroom drawer with trembling hands.
Raises the sharp edge to the ugly, infected skin.
He lets the cold blade rest over his eyelid, stinging—but he doesn’t press down.
An eye should be nothing to him.
It should be easy to get rid of.
But he catches sight of the ugly gaze that stares back at him, and his shaking hands hesitate.
Because the gaze that looks back at him is not his own.
/
Saheon’s sister didn’t look like herself when she died.
She didn’t look like anything that was human.
Her neck disfigured, her complexion blue, her eyes bulging out like a monster that Saheon can never forget.
Eyes that had no love in them. No anger. None of the emotions that his sister used to look at him with.
Everything left of her had been strangled out of the corpse, leaving behind a shell that he couldn’t bear to look at.
Saheon had kept looking all the same.
The eye that he sees in his own reflection, all these years later, is no different from the nightmare that he’d seen that night.
The eye of someone who was long dead.
Baek Saheon needs to dig it out to end the pain, but he can’t bring himself to bury the same face twice.
Every time he tries, he hears his sister’s annoyed laughter.
You think I’m ugly? she would have demanded. I look just like you.
You think it hurts? I’m literally in hell.
She would have acted like Saheon was ruining her life, just for trying to live—and then she’d have patted his hair at the end of the day, given him a snack she bought with his own money, and said Saheon-ah. It’s okay.
Do what you need to do.
What Saheon needs to do is simple. He can’t live with this pain.
But things have never been simple with his sister. Every time he tries to cut her out of him he fails.
Her ghost festers inside of him, eating away at everything he is, leaving nothing in him but an earsplitting scream that says live. Live. Live.
Crawl out of the rot and live.
/
The day that Baek Saheon’s noona dies is a day that Baek Saheon does not.
That’s how he chooses to remember it.
Saheon is no longer a child. He no longer believes that things happen for a reason, or that there is a grand scheme in god’s hands that they are too blind to see. He knows that the universe is whack and that god is a nutcase and that his sister is dead because his sister is dead and not because she took the place that might have been his.
But the day that she dies is still a day that Saheon does not.
Another brush with death that he survives through, by losing everything instead.
So that’s how he chooses to remember it.
Saheon is no longer a child. He knows that you can not let yourself dwell in the past because it will catch up and destroy your future. He knows that you can not let an infection fester or it will eat away at everything that is left of you.
He cuts out the grief because if he doesn’t he will die—and then there will be two deaths when there only needed to be one.
There is nothing worse that Saheon can imagine than making it into hell and coming face to face with his sister.
If you were going to be here this soon, she’d say, I would have stayed up there longer instead.
All this talk about wanting to be alone but you keep following me, Saheon.
He doesn’t want to hear that.
Not yet.
So he digs his blade into his skin, lets specks of blood flow out—but the haunting, dead gaze still stares back at him.
Like the remnants of her corpse have been stitched into him.
Her face hadn’t been that different from his. A little more gentle, a little softer around the jaw. Saheon is older now than his sister had ever had the chance to be, like a ghost from her future, with hints of her past, and the eye of her dead body sown into his socket.
A monster born the day that his noona died, because Saheon stayed alive.
If he lived that day, he doesn’t have a choice. He has to live forever.
/
How far will you go? the face in the mirror seems to ask him. How far will you go to survive?
There isn’t anything that Saheon wouldn’t do to himself for a chance to live.
He smiles, he cries. He begs on his knees. He kicks and screams and does everything but die.
Everything but die.
He can cut his sister out of him, because it’s the only way to live for her. The ugly, unsightly eye that blinks at him through the red and the wet, daring him to kill it.
Daring him to live on.
He raises his knife again.
His hands shake.
Everything hurts, and this will only make it worse, but it has to be done if he wants to keep going.
He tightens his grip around the blade, holds his breath, and cuts.
/
Two weeks later, his empty socket heavily bandaged, Baek Saheon no longer looks like the ghost of his sister.
And he no longer looks like himself.
It’s good. He isn’t supposed to. The more he looks like that boy, the more he will be forced to be him.
The trick to survival, Saheon has learned, is to act like you’ll survive.
To act like plunging a knife into your eye won’t kill you.
The trick is to bury everything in him that reminds him that he wants to be with the dead, and live by the screech in his head that never quietens down.
Crawl out of the rot and live.
Don’t join me yet.
/