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Sometimes Kim Soleum’s boss goes a little insane.
It happens, when people get old. Choi isn’t that old in the grand scheme of things, but he’s definitely old enough that people squint at him and wonder how he’s still alive at this job that was specifically designed to kill him. It’s a question that they do not ask out loud, because asking invites answers, and no one wants to know answers to this question from Choi himself.
Unfortunately, he keeps answering even though nobody asks.
“It’s because I’ve been Chosen,” he keeps saying, while he sits near the bureau’s shared coffee machine and sharpens his jakdu. It’s an odd place to choose to sit, for someone as Chosen as he is, but he finds it one of the few places that he can still find an audience.
Even the fear of running into Choi can not keep overworked field agents away from their coffee.
…for the most part, at least.
“Chosen for what,” a starry eyed rookie makes the mistake of asking once.
Choi hadn’t responded for a long moment, tracing the blade of his jakdu until it drew blood. It was one of his favourite things to do—to make a big deal about how he felt no pain from it because of how apparently pure he was.
Soleum likes to think that it hurts like hell and that he just won’t admit it.
“The world rushes into darkness,” Choi had said at last. “Disaster is inevitable. It’s my job to make sure innocent souls aren’t caught in the cross fire.”
“Why is disaster inevitable?” the starry eyed rookie had asked, since they hadn’t learned their lesson in the past two seconds.
Choi had stared into the distance.
“It always is, isn’t it,” he’d said. “Until someone like me arrives.”
.
See, the worst part is that Choi is mostly right.
The world is rushing into darkness. Disaster is inevitable. Soleum doesn’t know how long they have until they apocalypse but it’s quite definitely happening, but he knows for a fact that Choi has no part in stopping it because in the real version of events, the one that Soleum didn’t accidentally fuck up—Choi is dead.
Lost on the fourth floor of Looky Mart, an eternal balloon man of some sort. He wasn’t Chosen or anything, he was just a crazy person who walked into his own death.
But he can’t say any of this, because he can’t tell people about the Dark Exploration Records.
So he shakes his head when Choi talks about the end of the world, because it’s totally happening but he isn’t going to indulge this guy.
But Choi doesn’t stop talking about how invincible he is.
“I looked death in the eye and still lived to tell the tale,” he likes to say, too often, to no one who asked.
It would be impressive, if it weren’t for the fact that literally all of them did this literally every day. Kim Soleum nearly died this morning. He will nearly die tomorrow. He doesn’t go around making speeches about it, he lies in bed and sobs his heart out and watches kids’ cartoons the way god intended.
“There was a voice in my head,” Choi likes to continue. “It told me to live. It said I hadn’t yet finished what I was born for.”
It’s called your common sense, Kim Soleum wants to say. It would be something worth talking about if the voice told him to die. As the voices in Soleum’s head have taken to doing recently, every time he has to go to work.
But he says nothing aloud, because he can’t get fired yet. He has a spy mission to complete. A home to go to. Et cetera.
“That’s great, sunbae,” he says instead.
“You think I’m lying, don’t you?”
“No.”
“It’s alright,” Choi says, smiling graciously and patting him on the head. “No one ever believes us until they have to.”
“Okay, sunbae,” Soleum says.
Maybe he should have stayed with Braun after all.
.
To be fair, Kim Soleum was warned plenty of times about Choi.
When he was first assigned to Hyunmoo Team 1, the people who passed him in the corridor would give him pitying looks. They’d pat him on the shoulder. They’d tell him they were praying for him.
Looking back on it, that was probably not a good sign.
But Soleum had done the natural thing, and assumed that they were praying for him because his job was dangerous. He was, after all, going to nearly die the next day and then survive somehow, despite not being Chosen by God.
But no.
It was because he was going to spend the greater part of his life trapped in a room with this guy, who’s sitting with his legs crossed over his desk, staring into the fire of his lighter as he turns it off, and on, and off, and on.
Soleum doesn’t ask what he’s doing. He’s learned not to.
Choi could burn this building down right now and Soleum wouldn’t even turn around for fear of having to listen to his godawful explanation as to why.
But Choi, as always, tells him anyway.
“Fire is so easy to extinguish,” he says. “What does it say about us, who never cease to burn?”
Now why are they all burning? Soleum doesn’t get half of this man’s metaphors.
“I don’t know,” he settles for.
“It means the light inside of us can never go out,” Choi says. “Until you let it.”
He looks at Soleum seriously, as if he’s waiting for him to have a breakthrough.
Soleum doesn’t.
He couldn’t have one if he tried.
“Um,” he says instead.
“There’s darkness inside of you, Grapes,” Choi says, when it becomes clear that Soleum isn’t going to get the point. “One day it’s going to come out.”
It’s true. At this point, Soleum is more darkness than human, after all.
“But there’s light as well. Don’t worry. I won’t let the darkness take it over.”
He stares at Soleum so hard that it’s starting to get unsettling.
“Thank you, sunbae,” he says.
Choi nods. He flicks his lighter off.
Then on again.
Then off.
“So easy to extinguish fire,” he says again. “And yet, not us.”
You died Easily, Soleum wants to say. Easily. So easily.
He says nothing.
.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” Kim Soleum asks once.
“Falling from heaven?” Choi asks.
“No. The cape around your neck.”
Choi doesn’t even wear a tie to work. He doesn’t button his shirt to the top, because the trauma of the cold storage has never truly gone away.
But he likes to tie the arms of his agent jacket around his neck, pretending it’s a cape, while he leans against the walls of the corridor and greets passersby.
“Ah, that,” Choi says. “It does hurt. But what’s life without suffering, hm?”
Fair enough.
Soleum leaves him to it.
.
Sometimes Soleum makes the mistake of thinking that Choi is just a chill guy.
It happens at odd intervals. Like when he sees Choi sitting on the stairs, cigarette held between his fingers, staring into the distance as if he’s seen more horrors than he can ever admit.
Against his better judgement, Soleum sometimes sits next to him.
“What’s wrong, sunbae?” he asks quietly.
Choi blows smoke out. He doesn’t look at Soleum when he speaks.
“Grapes,” he says. “Do you ever think about how this world is built on the bones of the dead?”
“Sure,” Soleum says, standing to leave.
Choi catches his wrist.
“But I won’t let it go on any longer,” he says. “I’ll end this madness. I’ll set everything right.”
“Thank you, sunbae,” Soleum says, tugging his wrist away.
Choi lets him go.
“You walk away now, Kim Soleum,” he calls ominously after him. “But when the end comes, there won’t be anywhere left to go but by my side.”
That’s creepy. Isn’t that creepy? What sort of workplace is this.
Soleum really needs to go home.
.
“You,” Choi says, pointing at Jaekwan with his jakdu. “Sidekick number 2.”
Jaekwan blinks. “When did I get demoted?”
“When the previous sidekick number 2 started outperforming you,” Choi says easily.
Soleum realizes, with growing horror, that the previous sidekick number 2 was him.
That means he is now sidekick number 1.
“No,” he says. “I quit.”
“What?”
“I’m a spy.”
“What?”
Jaekwan looks completely baffled. Choi just looks pensive.
“You aren’t,” he says. “Not anymore.”
“I am.”
“No.”
Soleum might cry. He can’t even confess to his crimes in peace.
Choi traces the blade of his jakdu with his finger. “The darkness in your heart,” he says slowly. “I no longer sense it. You found the light, Grapes. Just as I knew you would.”
Soleum didn’t. He doesn’t even know what that means. He’s a spy and he doesn’t want to be sidekick number 1 and he’d honestly rather go back to Daydream than keep pretending to understand these metaphors, god damn it.
“I want to go home,” he says, to whatever god will hear him.
But god’s spokesperson is apparently still Choi. “Where is home, for the ones as lost as us?”
Soleum really might cry.
