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“Yeongeun-ssi, it’s far past lunch time. You should eat.”
As familiar footsteps come to a halt behind her, Go Yeongeun doesn’t move from her seated position on the floor, staring straight ahead at the tank in front of her instead.
Silence rings in the empty basement, golden lights flickering on and off at random like the buzz of cheap filament bulbs.
Behind her, clothes rustle as if fidgeting hesitantly. The phantom weight of a hand hovers just above her shoulder, scalding her skin even through layers of air.
There’s an intake of breath. Yeongeun closes her eyes in resignation.
From behind: “Your parents—”
“Don’t,” she grits out sharply, more harshly than she’d intended. She takes a deep, shuddering breath, before burying her face in her hands.
“... Don’t,” Yeongeun repeats in a near whine, voice breaking off into a whisper.
Wretchedly, damnably, he sits down carefully beside her on the frigid concrete floor. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to see me, but your parents asked me to come. You’ve missed a lot of meals, and they’re worried about you.”
“You’re right,” she says into her hands. “I don’t want to see you.”
Thick silence stretches on between them. Yeongeun hunches in on herself, hugging her legs to her chest to stare mutely in front of her once again.
The remains of Kim Soleum, tank and all, had been moved to this desolate basement when the magical golden mascot presence began to slowly disintegrate into thin air just like him. She doesn’t know what happened to Jang Heoun.
They’ve tried everything they know to get Kim Soleum out of this state. Agents Haegeum, Choi and Bronze, ancillary teams specializing in corruption, Section Chief Lee Jaheon and a plethora of items that must have been from his personal hoard, everyone in Daydream that Kim Soleum knew desperately trying what they could.
Security Manager Jay even hauled that monster Kwak Jegang in to see what they could find out.
She stood vigil for every failed attempt.
“You were the first person I managed to properly save, you know,” he murmurs quietly next to her, like if he is cunning enough, he will lower her defences with his carefully crafted words to slip his way through. “I was calling people to me every single day, but come midnight and they’d simply be helpless again. And that happened day after day after day after day in a neverending loop I never asked for—”
He cuts himself off with a harsh intake of breath, making a sound like he’s scrubbing his face with his hand. Yeongeun’s eyes are still fixed forward.
“... But you were the first person I was truly able to save. Permanently. That day on the train was the first time I managed to make an actual difference in this world.”
“It wasn’t you,” Yeongeun says dully. In front of her, a lump of black goop shifts ever so slightly in its enclosure of fractured glass. It does not talk, does not look back at her with the familiar decisive judgement of a convoluted plan, does not smile at her with eyes crinkled an arcminute kinder than usual. It simply listens passively, never once reacting.
“He is me,” he says ever so carefully. “He is me as much as I am him, Yeongeun-ssi—”
“He’s not you!” Yeongeun spits out in a flurry, instinctively twisting around to face him.
She’s greeted with familiar black eyes lined with shadows and immaculately parted hair. The being wearing the face of her friend looks back at her with pain and patience written clearly in his eyes and none of the heavy, guarded cautiousness that the real Kim Soleum wears like a second skin. Yeongeun recoils instinctively at the sight.
“... And stop calling my name with such a familiar tone,” she murmurs with something like anger. “It’s not like we’re familiar with each other.”
“Yeo— Please listen to me. I understand that we seem to exist as separate beings currently, but he is very much a part of my own soul—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” she cuts him off loudly, voice rising in pitch and tempo. “Soleum-ssi is the one I’ve come to know over the past few years. He is the one who blazes his way through any situation, who always treats everyone so kindly despite his distance! He’s the one who’s always saving me, who just wants to go home, and yet—!”
Yeongeun’s voice breaks off. Horrifically, hot tears well at the corners of her eyes.
“And yet! I messed up his last chance…!” She weeps silently, bitterly, furiously swiping at her eyes, shoulders shuddering with the effort of containing the force of her breaths.
The familiar face in front of her doesn’t reach out to comfort her. He watches on instead with sad eyes, far too used to this sequence of events. Despite it, he keeps coming back, he keeps showing her his face, he keeps expecting her to want to see him—
“Why do you think that?” he asks quietly. “Aren’t I here?”
Yeongeun wants to grab him by the collar.
She wants to shake him until he admits that he will never be the person she tried so hard to save.
She wants him to know that it doesn’t mean anything to her that he’s here, that it only makes everything worse, that she’d rather he never came back at all than come back as a version of him that had ruined her life. That had destroyed her city. That had taken everything from her and found it wasn’t enough, and had come back to take her friend as well—
“Yeongeun-ssi,” the man says quietly. “I know you don’t want to see it. But I really am him.”
“You—”
“You really did save him. Because I am him. What’s left over there—” he glances pointedly at the motionless black goop, no emotion in his eyes. “—he’s empty. He doesn’t want you to save him because he doesn’t want anything at all. He’s fine the way he is.”
“Who are you to decide what he’s fine with—”
“I’m him,” the awful, familiar face repeats simply. “I know him far better than you do.”
Disgust wells up in her throat. He says things like this with a straight face. Refers to her Kim Soleum in third person, confirms he’s still there, trapped in that tank.
There’s no reasoning with the remnants of the person in front of her.
It’s the equivalent of picking a fight with a contaminated soul. She can’t convince this man that he isn’t who he thinks he is. She turns away instead.
“Just go,” Yeongeun says. “Don’t make me kick you out.”
The familiar figure is quiet for a long time. Finally, there’s the rustling of him standing to leave.
“Please eat, Yeongeun-ssi,” he says again, a little softer than before. “Your parents are worried about you.”
“Don’t speak about them like you aren’t the reason I lost them,” Yeongeun says sharply.
The man falters.
“I don’t understand,” he says at last, a crack in his voice that Yeongeun doesn’t want to hear. “It wasn’t my fault I was summoned. I tried to save everyone just as hard as he did. Can’t you tell that we’re the same person?”
In another time, Go Yeongeun might have tried to be kind to him.
Before she’d spent her hellish career at Daydream, she might have believed that anyone with the slightest part of Kim Soleum’s soul was still worth saving.
But she is no longer so naive.
She knows now that the smallest memory, the tiniest part of someone’s identity can make all the difference in the world. It could be the difference between a person, a monster, and an empty shell.
The duty of bringing her friend back to all the people who had loved him had been placed solely in her hands. It was the only chance they had, and she had failed it, and that will haunt her forever.
“Soleum-ssi is nothing like you.”
The words taste like venom as they leave her tongue. Her chest tightens in a painful heave when she raises her voice.
“You didn’t save anyone! It’s your doing that my city disappeared—that my parents had to suffer day after day—for what you claim to be salvation!”
He recoils at her words, pain evident in the familiar eyes that look back at her. She means every word of it, but guilt and fury melt incomprehensibly when she stares back at a mirror copy of the same man she desperately wishes was here instead.
She lets out a huff, the breath shuddering as it leaves her lungs.
“Just… leave. Don’t stand in front of me when you're wearing his face.”
She brings her gaze back to the tank, the disfigured remains of her friend swaying slightly in its container.
Silence hangs in the air for a long moment, dread clawing at her that the man might try and speak again, before she hears the slow clack of his shoes as he backs away.
She lets out a choked gasp when the door behind her swings to a close. Hitched breaths ring loudly in the silence as she bows her head forward to press against her knees.
“I-I’m sorry, Soleum-ssi.”
She had been a fool to think she could save him. To think she could have repaid him, just once, for the many times he had pulled her away from death’s clutches. By taking the offer to make the wish for him whilst so desperately wanting her father to be back safe with her family, the action was akin to killing Kim Soleum with her own hands.
She is the one who did this.
She is the reason no one would ever see the real Kim Soleum ever again.
I’m worthless.
She mouths it to herself so that what is left of Kim Soleum can’t hear her.
So that whatever is left of him can’t agree.