Chapter Text
‘Oh, Sayeon. My big baby.
If you cry, you lose.’
Sayeon wakes with a start.
Immediately she is ramrod straight in her bed, sweat breaking out across her neck. The coiling sensation in her chest has tightened, reawakened by that familiar smell of blood. By that same blue light. Gritty fabric imprints on clammy skin: one hand is clutched tight into the seam of her bedsheets. The other, already in the air — fingers poised, pressed together, essence humming in her blood. She waits. The telltale snap of time splitting does not come. She waits again.
Nothing.
In the bed beside her, Ryujin sleeps soundly. Her head is limp on her pillow, brows furrowed even in sleep, as though that standoffish attitude chases her even in her restless dreams. But she’s there. Breathing even, limbs relaxed.
Sayeon’s hand drifts back to her side.
An unsteady exhale leaves her mouth. Common sense slowly comes leaking back; it’s her brain that wakes second, after animal instinct, and Sayeon carefully slides back under the sheets. She surveys the room. None of the other girls were disturbed, thankfully.
It’s unsurprising. Considering that their daily tasks are dwindling now that they've been assigned to infiltrate that little cult, everyone else has drifted off like nothing. Even you, Ryujin.
Sayeon exhales again.
Her eyes shut after a few minutes or so. She counts sheep; counts the levels left until she’s a red tie; counts the number of ways that maybe she could have stopped Juni. But, undercut by the gleam of cobalt that lurks somewhere in the dark, Sayeon does not fall asleep.
‘Are you crying? What a baby.’
Sayeon is beginning to see it behind her eyelids.
Tendrils of blue, encircling. The pleas hanging in her mouth, unending. Sayeon watches the branches appear; reaches out to one; lets it clatter to the floor and crumble.
She snaps her fingers. She tries again.
‘Oh, Sayeon.’
Over and over, the scenario resurfaces. It’s often said that change is non-linear.
She doesn’t believe that’s true.
‘Don’t cry, Sayeon.’
Because for her, this is circular.
‘If you cry, you lose—’
“You look great.”
Sayeon inhales slowly.
Her eyes are bleary. Ah… She blinks twice, before slowly polishing her glasses with the cuff of her sleeve. When they’re balanced again on her nose bridge, she finds Ryujin staring back at her, toothbrush clasped in hand.
“Twelve hours of sleep last night?” Ryujin jokes. Her voice is still hoarse with exhaustion.
Sayeon stares at the small smear of toothpaste at the corner of Ryujin’s lip. Clean yourself off first, she thinks drily, but her eyes don’t move away even after a few seconds. Sayeon frowns. Then she turns back to the mirror.
For once, Ryujin’s right. Despite having only gotten up ten minutes ago, she looks as though she’s trekked through hell and back. Her eyes are unfocused and shadowed with fatigue; her usually pin-straight hair is bent in a few different directions. Somehow she’s already wrinkled the sleeve of her blazer, having spent too long with her hand bent over the lapel. She doesn’t want to move it away yet. Why does my chest still hurt? Sayeon can try to clutch at that pain — to tear it from the source and swallow it down forever, tasting an inexplicable answer while it’s between her teeth — but her only reward so far is a crease in her clothes; and the terrifyingly loud thumping of her heart beneath it as Ryujin shifts closer.
‘C’mon, Sayeon. Why d’you look confused?’
Sayeon’s gaze burns into her mirror image, into what feels like a distorted reflection, willing that ache to disappear.
‘Why are you so shocked?’
But it only contracts harder. Like a bear trap teething through baby skin.
Unsettled by the silence, Ryujin is squinting at her in the mirror. Like last night, a crease appears between her brows. But there’s nothing to say. Ryujin looks away.
“Yeah, good talk,” she mutters unhappily.
Dahee yesterday, and Min today. It’s been two measly days since Cells 3 and 4 were assigned to sniff out some Naj followers, and it’s unsurprising just how much Sayeon is beginning to despise Juni for forcing them into it.
Wandering around with Dahee the other day had been, frankly, irritating: an all-round score of zero things had happened within the span of hours, and trying to keep up appearances with a girl who couldn’t even remember her own code name frustrated Sayeon out of her mind. Twinned with her inability to sleep more than one hour uninterrupted, she might as well be reeling. Apparently the second day is only worse.
Because this is about the last thing she wants to waste time on.
“No—!”
The fish plushie slumps back onto the pile unceremoniously, its clean white body still free from a captor. The claw hangs above it; it gleams impassively, as though Ryujin isn’t pumping her fists against the glass.
“This is the fifth fucking time!” she fumes, rage painting colour down her cheeks. “This shitty little game has to be rigged!”
Eyes narrowed, Sayeon stands to the side. She watches Ryujin’s slightly slanted face in the glass.
Whether it be in a bathroom mirror, in a claw machine’s window, or her parallel image in Sayeon’s distant nightmares — it’s like she can only ever see Ryujin through reflections. Never face-on.
She purses her lips, eyes tracking the shift in the other’s expression. Ryujin’s jabbing her finger into Iseul’s chest now, the other hand waving about frantically. Her eyes are intent as they flick back to the fish; her brows, as usual, are pinched together frustratedly. But it's better than them being knit up in pain. Better than the ropes of blue round her neck that Sayeon has desperately been trying to forget.
She grits her teeth. Enough of that. Her eyes peel away. Instead they follow the curve of the plushie’s tubular body, down to its tail. The plushie isn’t even cute.
“I— I-I can’t do that, Heejin, that’s cheating—!” Iseul stammers in reply to whatever Ryujin’s asked.
“Fuck are you yapping about? The game cheated me first!”
Sayeon feels herself startle as she realises Ryujin has now turned to her, eyes alight.
“Glasses, you—”
“I’m not wasting my energy on a fish plushie,” is what Sayeon cuts her off with. The words slide out almost involuntarily, bid by the hot, abrupt spike of surprise down Sayeon’s spine. Trying to ignore her own alarm, she continues, “Heejin. We’re only doing these activities to blend in. Did you really forget the point of all this? Your childish game isn’t—”
“Says the one who can’t sleep without her stuffed rabbit,” Ryujin hisses.
Eyes wide, Sayeon stares at the seething girl in front of her. The accusation — or, rather, the unfortunately honest revelation — echoes emptily in Sayeon’s brain.
Without her stuffed rabbit… Without her stuffed rabbit…
Are you kidding me? Sayeon gripes on the inside. She’d woken up with the rabbit on the floor this morning, having likely thrown it to the side in her restless tossing-and-turning. Ryujin had already been in the bathroom while she was changing. She must have caught sight of it.
Iseul gawks at Sayeon. “S… Sayeon, you sleep with a—?”
“That’s enough,” Sayeon mutters, intonation flat.
Ryujin glares back at her. The flush is still bright on her skin, eyes unwaveringly fierce as they beat down on Sayeon’s command.
Shoulders hunched inward, she turns away as fast as possible, and says, “Min and I are going to Zone D. Ryujin, Iseul — you two stay here, in Zone B.” Sayeon straightens out her collar. “Understood?”
As Min wanders after Sayeon, Iseul herds Ryujin away. She’s still glaring. Exasperated, Sayeon shakes her head, trying not to grumble some unnecessary complaint under her breath.
“We still have thirty-thousand won left on the card, Ryujin,” she can hear Iseul saying to Ryujin pseudo-optimistically, his voice petering off the further away she gets. “If we don’t buy lunch, that’s ten more tries on the machine!”
After a moment of pause, Ryujin mutters, “…Yeah. We can do it ourselves, anyway.”
The last thing Sayeon hears Ryujin say is predictable. It slips out like the many insults that’ve flowed between the two.
“Sayeon’s no fun,” she grumbles.
And yet, foreseeable as they are, the words only make that ache in Sayeon’s chest pull tighter.
Sayeon looks through her report on yesterday’s findings. Each letter is pristinely inked atop the thin blue lines of her notebook, etched in her neat handwriting.
‘Today: Dahee and I checked Zone A; Ryujin and Tsubaki checked Zone B; Iseul and Min checked Zone C; Taeho and Jungwoo checked Zone D.’
‘No-one found anything.’
She sighs. This again. But if nobody else will do it, then of course it’s Sayeon who has to. Why else would she have been appointed cell leader?
Scritch… Scritch… She puts down the date first.
Then, she writes, ‘Today: Taeho and Tsubaki checked Zone…’
But, halfway through writing her first sentence, the ink of Sayeon’s pen vanishes.
’…Zone… Zone A…’
She rewrites over the faint indents of the letters. It doesn’t work. Exasperated, she shakes the pen. First Taeho ditches her to take on the brunt of tonight’s work, and now she won’t even be able to finish it. Seriously? Sayeon shakes it again, its insides rattling noisily, but to no avail. When she scrapes it against the paper, nothing appears. She tries again. Still nothing.
Fingers white-knuckled, Sayeon presses it harder onto the paper. She lays down one stroke. Hard. Then, harder, another—
Scri—itch!
The pen tears clean through.
Brows knit in incredulity, Sayeon pauses. She turns it over in her fingers. How helpful. Sighing harshly, she chucks the pen across the table. It skitters to a stop somewhere in the middle. But its tapered nib remains facing her, pointing at Sayeon almost accusatorily.
It’s the one pen she’s been able to find (save the backup pen that Taeho apparently lost yesterday) in the small office that Juni designated Cells Three and Four. There’re a few computers sitting in the back, all old models from a few years ago, their monitors caked with dust; besides that are a wide plethora of empty tables and maybe four or five chairs. Generally very bleak. The Aberrant Corps must seriously despise the blue ties, having barely fed money into even the simplest utilities for us, Sayeon muses. They couldn’t even cough up pens with full ink cartridges?
Well, fine, she decides. She’ll just buy a cheap pack of pencils tomorrow. She’s on rota with Tsubaki from Cell Three anyway, and from what Sayeon’s gauged, she doubts Tsubaki’ll protest much about it.
Sayeon reaches over to the pen. She slots it carefully into her pocket, and looks ahead to tomorrow’s to-do list.