Work Text:
/
Choi isn’t completely new to stitching.
He’s used to patching up nasty tears in his own clothes. Working a job where he’s frequently cut open and torn apart, when his salary definitely isn’t enough to just buy new clothes every few weeks—he had to teach himself to stitch for the sake of practicality.
But he isn’t great at it. The patches on his clothes always show up too obviously. Jaekwan was better at it, as he was with most things that involved precision, his previous study of talismans making his control over his fingers far better than Choi could manage. Choi feels bad about it, but he’s had to ask Jaekwan to mend his jacket a few times. The man always did it without complaint.
But Choi can’t ask this of Jaekwan, because he’s still unconscious.
He might be for a very long time.
There are two hundred and fifty days left till the end of the world. Choi bites off the string he’s using to stitch with his teeth, tying it off. The result of what he’s making isn’t great, but… it’ll do.
It’s soft, it’s comfortable.
A little lopsided, but good enough.
“How’s that?” he asks, with a smile, holding up his work.
A tiny cushion, stuffed with folded cloth, held together by thin threads and hope.
The pink bunny plushie sitting by his side doesn’t respond.
“I thought you might want something more comfortable,” Choi says. “Since we’ve been here for longer than I expected.” He picks the doll up carefully, setting the cushion down on the ground and then gently putting the doll on it.
“Comfy? I’m not great at stitching things, but I tried just for you.”
He gives the plushie another smile.
Again, there’s no response.
“I’m guessing you aren’t a fan of this place,” Choi says. “Based on what Grapes told me about you… you didn’t like our waiting room either, did you? Haha.”
He leans back, resting his weight on his hands.
“Sorry, sorry. But this is only temporary.” He nods towards his sleeping juniors. “They’ll be up soon, and then we can all go home. Why bother trying to find a fancy place when they’ll be awake again any time, right?”
He tilts his head towards the plushie.
“But we have to make sure our host is comfortable, of course. And his friend!” Choi nods towards where Kim Soleum is asleep, tucked gently into his sheets. “He’s comfy too. When he wakes up he’ll be happy to see you’ve been taken care of, hm?”
He pats the doll on the head with one finger.
It does look comfortable on the cushion he’s given it.
Choi has a bit of fabric left over. Maybe he could make Braun a hat. Or a scarf. A scarf shouldn’t be too hard to make badly, if he just stitches the edges…
He picks his scissors up again, starting to shape the leftover fabric. It’s not like he has anything else to do.
He hasn’t been to work in longer than a month. He hasn’t seen his juniors in even longer. It’s just him here, biding his time with two unconscious bodies and a sentient plushie that can hear every word of his but never says a thing.
He stretches out the fabric, comparing its size to Braun. It’s a little long for a scarf. He’d have to cut it shorter.
He snips, and snips, and snips.
It’s been too long since he heard anyone’s voice.
“I wonder what you’re doing down there,” he says quietly. “Is Grapes doing okay?”
No response.
“I’ll keep an eye on him here. But you have to watch over him down there. It’s a team effort, got it?”
He looks up from the scarf that he’s cutting, setting the scissors back down.
Then he reaches out, gently holding a plush paw in his fingers and giving it a light, careful shake.
“Deal?”
Braun never speaks to him. He’s never moved, or given Choi any sort of signal that he’s even here.
But Choi tells himself that he’s agreed.
It’s better to imagine than the alternative—that he’s here completely alone.
/
The place that Choi has built for them is… admittedly pretty terrible.
Agent Haegeum had warned him against it multiple times. We can take turns keeping an eye on the barrier instead, she’d said over and over. You can’t live like this, Choi.
But Choi has lived in worse places. He’s been forced into worse situations and come out alright. Living in a cave is nothing for him, especially not when his juniors will wake up soon and everything will be alright.
So he ignores Haegeum’s disapproving frown and tries to turn the hollow, empty cave into something that Soleum and Jaekwan wouldn’t mind waking up in.
It isn’t an easy feat.
Half of it goes over fine enough—Jaekwan’s half. Choi has known him for years, and has crashed at Jaekwan’s dorm countless times, so he knows exactly what sort of places he likes to live. Jaekwan doesn’t decorate a lot—not his own room, and not the Hyunmoo Team 1 waiting room either, but he does leave fragments of his personality lying around him nevertheless.
The stacks of books he reads in his free time. The trinkets given to him by people he saved when he was younger. Worn out photographs taken with the entire Hyunmoo Team 1, back when their leader was still around, back before they fell apart person after person until it was only Choi and Jaekwan left.
He knows what Jaekwan stocks his fridge with (a crazily balanced diet, for someone as young and overworked as him) and what kind of pillow he prefers (rock hard ones for some reason) and that he likes to sleep with a night light on, because he prefers to not have to waste time having his eyes adjust to the dark if he wakes up to danger.
So for Jaekwan it’s easy. Choi fills the cave with some of his own favourite books, he brings Jaekwan’s pillow and sheets from his dorm room, and he makes sure that his lantern never goes out, keeping the place lit up even in the dead of the night.
For Kim Soleum, on the other hand, it’s not easy at all.
Because Kim Soleum has never made a place his own.
He’s lived in and out of motels, spent a few long weeks in bureau accommodation for supernatural creatures when he’d lost his human body, and now… Choi hates to say that he doesn’t know where he stays. He doesn’t know if Kim Soleum ever even slept, after he’d resigned from the bureau.
Soleum doesn’t have any belongings except for the terrible number of items he carries at all times. Everything that is a part of him lives and dies with him.
He’s never been kind enough to leave anything behind for people to remember him by.
Choi had searched the Hyunmoo Team 1 waiting room for anything at all that Soleum had left behind, but he’d cleared himself out of their space clinically.
All that was left was the words on the whiteboard, and a white handkerchief that Choi had once set down for Braun.
So that’s all that Choi brings back. A single white handkerchief, for his junior’s friend—the only real sign that he has that Kim Soleum once existed in his world.
/
Choi doesn’t know much about Braun.
It’s mostly his own fault.
The moment he’d learned that Kim Soleum was carrying around some kind of eldritch entity in his pocket—he’d shut off the thought of it just to keep his own sanity.
They did some level of preliminary investigation, him and Jaekwan. Eun Haje had told them about the TV show darkness, which was its own level of disgusting, and Kim Soleum had spilled the rest of it when they’d confronted him—but what didn’t make sense was how much trust Soleum had for this strange disaster that had kidnapped him, coerced him, made him commit atrocities, and still regularly hangs around him.
Kim Soleum isn’t a fool. He doesn’t trust without reason. And yet…
And yet.
He seems to trust Braun with his life.
Choi had requested documents from Daydream at first. It took a while to sneak them out, but Eun Haje managed it. Then he’d read through terrible record after terrible record of the sickening show that Braun had hosted, each one leaving an ugly taste in his mouth.
Guts spilling, eyes exploding, heads severed and hoisted on a platter and made to sing forever—
It’s nothing that Choi hasn’t seen before, in his own line of work, but never before has he seen someone befriend such a monster.
There is no doubt that Braun is evil. Whatever good he may or may not have done for Kim Soleum, there is no doubt that he has let an astronomical number of people die for the sole sake of entertainment.
The fact that he’s even here now, clinging on to Kim Soleum and asking for nothing in return, is worrying enough.
What could such a monster want?
What was he doing in their world?
What did he see in Kim Soleum that made him want to sink his claws into him and feign the voice of a friend?
Choi doesn’t know, so he tries not to think about it.
Kim Soleum seems to think that Choi left Braun alone because he was afraid to offend an entity so powerful. That he was tolerating this nonsense just because the repercussions of tearing apart their strange connection might explode in his face.
It’s a ridiculous thought.
Choi isn’t afraid of Braun. If he was afraid, he would have been terrible at his job. A disaster like the Talk Show is nothing to him—he could take it down with enough effort or sacrifice.
What he is afraid of is Kim Soleum.
Of taking something more from his junior and shattering the bond between them that is already hanging on frayed threats.
Of having to see the cold look of betrayal that still shows up in his memories when he hasn’t slept too long—from the day that Choi had caught him only for Soleum to resign and run.
He doesn’t ever want to see that expression again.
If he has to tolerate a monster for it, he will.
So he tucks the plushie next to Soleum’s unconscious body, on a cushion that he’s carefully stitched himself, and pretends that a friend of Kim Soleum’s is a friend of his own.
/
“Honestly,” Choi says out loud, “We don’t have a lot of options.”
The plushie stays silent, staring at him with its beady eyes.
“But I know how to cook this,” Choi says, pointing at the frozen foods that Agent Haegeum had tossed at him with a cook a real meal and stop living like a caveman. Then he points at his own stash of strange plants he’d found growing around his cave. “And I don’t actually know if any of this is edible.”
The plushie keeps staring at him blankly.
“That’s true,” Choi agrees, despite not having heard a single word. “But they smell pretty good. It’s not like we’re in a disaster, hm? What’s the worst that could happen.”
He looks back at his stash of plants and fruits.
They do smell pretty good.
They could easily be poisonous, but if Choi wasn’t taken out by any of the hundreds of things that kept taking out his juniors, and then somehow managed to die because he ate a poisonous mushroom—then surely it was meant to happen.
He shakes his head.
There are still one hundred and seventy days till the end of the world. He has to last till then at least.
“Hah. Alright,” he shoves the pile of plants aside. “Cooking it is. What does our dear host feel like dining on today?”
The plushie continues to say nothing.
Choi nods in agreement.
“An excellent choice,” he says. “It will be done.”
An hour later, he places a leaf with a small slice of meat in front of Braun, which still looks disproportionally huge in front of his plush body. He bows his head politely, wishes him enjoyment of his meal, and then digs into his own bowl.
The meat is tasteless on his tongue. Choi can no longer tell if it’s because he isn’t cooking well or if it’s because his tongue is dead.
There is nothing to do in his cave, so he doesn’t often get hungry.
He doesn’t often feel sleepy either.
Choi doesn’t often feel anything.
He waits, and waits, and checks the pulses of his juniors occasionally. The rare occasions when Agent Haegeum drops by are his only human interaction. They share intel, discuss future plans, and then she leaves again.
He’s left alone once more, with the curse of his own thoughts.
It’s better that he doesn’t feel anything. If he did, there’s no telling what he might do. Choi chooses to live in this easy numbness, feigning smiles at a ghost in the form of a toy.
His juniors will wake up.
That’s all that he needs to know.
That’s all he needs to work towards.
/
Sometimes, Choi admits, he really wishes that the plushie wasn’t here.
It’s pleasant enough to have a companion that he can talk to, knowing that someone is listening, but…
It’s hard to sink as low as feels inside when he knows that there’s a constant pair of eyes on him.
It’s hard to be a mess when there’s someone he still forces smiles in front of.
There are one hundred and forty days left till the end of the world. If Braun wasn’t here, Choi would have let himself lose his mind by now.
He wouldn’t have bothered holding himself together.
He wouldn’t have bothered dragging himself up every morning, to check on the constantly weakening barrier beyond the ritual fabrics that he’s hoisted up, to chew on something edible for long enough to keep himself alive…
If Braun wasn’t here, Choi would have curled up next to his juniors and never done anything at all.
But he can’t, because this strange cosmic horror is constantly watching him.
Every weakness that Choi shows here is one that can be parroted back to Kim Soleum himself—and Choi doesn’t need his junior to trust his abilities even less than he already does.
“Grapes never hesitates to ask you for help, does he?” he mumbles into his pillow.
He’s lying on his side a few feet away from Soleum, watching the steady rise and fall of his chest. Braun has been placed gently next to him, face turned away from Choi’s.
But Choi knows he’s listening. He always is.
“Whenever he’s in trouble, he comes running to you. Because he thinks you can fix it. He has that faith.”
Choi has seen that confidence in Soleum’s eyes, akin to madness, before he thrusts his life into Braun’s hands. He’s seen the same look every time he asks Lee Jaheon for help.
A certainty that they will save him.
A certainty that they’re strong enough.
He’s never seen that look towards himself.
When Soleum looks at him, it’s with fear and hesitation, like he’s looking at yet another citizen he has to keep alive.
Not someone he can count on.
Someone he has to save.
“You must have seen that letter he sent me,” Choi says into the silence. “When he said that he wouldn’t return until he saved Jaekwan. You must have, right?”
No response.
“He said he was sorry. Instead of asking me for help… he said he was sorry and that he’d handle it alone.”
Choi rolls onto his back, covering his eyes with the back of his arm.
“But you know me, right? Braun-ssi.”
The late nights spent in the Hyunmoo Team 1 waiting room, searching for Kim Soleum.
For months and months and months.
Braun had seen it all back then. He’d seen how hard Choi had pushed himself to find Soleum.
He knew that there was nothing in this world that could keep Choi from trying to save him.
He’d seen Choi at his most vulnerable, most unguarded, in moments that he would even dare to show to Bronze.
“Why wouldn’t you tell him I’d help him?” Choi asks the ceiling. “You knew I would. Why—why would you let him run like that?”
Braun says nothing.
Choi sighs.
He turns away, facing the opposite side of the cave, and lies awake.
/
Choi can’t talk to his juniors with Braun around.
He wants to. There is so much that he wants to say.
There are a hundred days left till the end of the world, and it’s selfish—but he wants to see them both before he dies.
He knows that if the plan fails, and the world collapses, it’s best for them both if they don’t wake up. If they somehow manage to escape the pain, if they can die without having to feel a thing…
It would be the best.
But Choi just wants a chance to say goodbye.
Too many people have been taken from him without a chance to say goodbye.
The people that he loves die mid sentence, mid smile, half a step in the wrong direction or half a word too loud to escape the notice of a ghost. Choi has been buried alive with the words he will never get to tell people, that he’s learned to laugh and shake off, but…
Just once, just this once—he wants to be able to tell someone before they’re gone.
Before he’s gone.
But his juniors show no sign of waking up.
Choi could talk to them, still. The way he’s been talking to Braun. It’s not like the plushie responds either.
He could let the words that he never got the chance to say fill the silence.
Just to know that he’d tried to put them out there.
But it’s hard, when he’s constantly watched by someone that Kim Soleum had held so dear.
When he’s constantly forced to think about the fact that Choi is here, saying his goodbyes, while Braun is still safely by Kim Soleum’s side.
It makes the words dry out on his tongue.
There’s a strange loneliness that comes with knowing that the only person left by your side is half in the place where you want to be.
/
All that Choi knows about Braun’s likes is that he was an entertainer.
He likes gruesome things, he has expensive tastes, and he has an odd attachment to Kim Soleum.
So at a lack of what else to do to hang out with him, Choi sometimes shows him videos on his phone.
He doesn’t use his phone much. There’s no need to. He keeps it for emergencies and to share intel, but on most days, he doesn’t ever need to look at it. The battery barely drains and when it does, he recharges it with a power bank that Agent Haegeum had left him.
Choi doesn’t really watch movies. He’s never had the time. So he doesn’t have anything he likes to show to a friend, and instead searches up top 10 horror movies and picks one off the list.
The signal here is terrible, and the movie buffers every two minutes, but it’s not like they’re short of time now.
Choi keeps watching it.
It’s a terrible movie, but Braun must think it’s great. He does seem to love gore and violence.
So Choi lets him watch, and oohs and aahs at all the right places, and pretends that he isn’t bored out of his mind and convinced that the director is a lunatic. Braun watches by his side, his gaze as empty as always.
“Soleum hated stuff like this,” Choi says, into the dark, when the movie is stuck loading for too long. “He was so scared of it all.”
Choi doesn’t know how his junior managed to get this far in his career, with a personality like that.
How he grit his teeth and kept bearing everything that terrified him to the core.
“What did you both even talk about?” Choi wonders. “You’re so different. How—how was he not afraid of you?”
The things that Choi sees on his screen don’t scare him personally at all. He’s seen far worse on a regular basis, he’s had far worse happen to him.
So had Kim Soleum. He’d chopped off his own arm on his first day of employment at the bureau, he’d apparently made it through the Tamra Express disaster—he’d lived through nightmare after nightmare and yet, it had never dulled his nerves.
Soleum still feared every disaster like it was his first.
Choi doesn’t know what kind of act he’d put up at Daydream, for people to think he was a fearless monster.
“He should have been afraid of you,” Choi says. “That’s what I thought it was, at first. I thought he held you close because he was scared of what you’d do to him if he left.”
But that hadn’t been the case.
Choi had heard from Lee Jaheon that Soleum had fallen out of contact with Braun multiple times, and yet—he’d always scrambled back to him at the end.
Desperate not for Braun’s power, not for his protection—but for a friend.
It makes Choi feel lonelier than ever.
“You really were his best friend, weren’t you?” Choi asks, his smile empty.
It makes sense.
It was easier to love a monster, who killed without regret and tortured for entertainment, than it was to love someone like Agent Choi.
/
There are fifty days left till the end of the world.
“Want a drink?” Choi asks Braun offhandedly.
He pours a glass for him without an answer. The glass is larger than the plushie itself, but he places it gingerly in front of his cushion, just to feel like someone is here with him.
He starts to pour a glass for himself as well, reconsiders, and then just drinks straight from the bottle.
He’s long since lost his shame. There’s no point pretending to be keeping it together when everything might be gone so soon.
“This stuff is probably too cheap for you, haha,” Choi says. “Sorry about that. When you haven’t worked for nearly a year there isn’t a lot of money to spend on fancy wine.”
The alcohol loosens his already loose tongue. It blurs the lines between this eldritch monstrosity and the innocent pink plushie that’s kept him company for over two hundred days.
“Is that what happened to Grapes?” he asks, more to himself than to Braun. “Did he forget what you were because he was lonely?”
He takes another long sip of his soju.
“I get it. Really I do. He—he was trapped, right? He was scared at Daydream. He didn’t trust us at the bureau. He must have been lonely… and you were there…”
His fingers tighten around the bottle.
“But I was there too, you know?”
Choi… had let Soleum down once.
He won’t deny that.
But… hadn’t he done his best after that? Hadn’t he worked himself to the bone to bring him back?
“He forgot what you were because he was lonely,” Choi says quietly. “So why… why could he never forget what I did to him?”
He drinks slowly that night.
Staring out into the empty darkness.
He doesn’t feel drunk anymore. It takes too much alcohol to get him drunk, so all he feels is mildly numb. A little emptier. A little more dull.
He refills Braun’s cup as well, even though it’s never even slightly emptied. He fills it until it’s spilling out over the top of the glass. And then he fills it again.
It’s too lonely to drink alone, after all.
The alcohol drips to the ground, slowly drenching the cushion that he’d made for Braun.
He’ll have to wash it in the morning.
It’s alright. There’s nothing else that Choi has to do.
He takes another sip of his drink.
/
The rain starts two weeks before the end of the world.
It comes down endlessly.
Choi drags the unconscious bodies of Jaekwan and Soleum further into the cave, to make sure they absolutely don’t get wet. He tucks them in warm, stroking their hair gently. It’s been a little hot these past few days, the rain will do them good. The rain will do them good…
He doesn’t know if anything will do them good.
He tends carefully to the fire to keep them warm, double checks that no water makes it into the cave, and then he starts to leave.
The pink plushie catches his eye.
He knows this is a bad idea. He’s done his best to keep Braun comfortable and safe, knowing that when Soleum wakes up Choi is going to get an earful about how he’d treated the host.
But it’s been too many months.
Choi doesn’t have enough hope to hold onto his sanity for the sake of what Kim Soleum might or might not say to him.
“I’m sorry,” he tells the plushie, lifting it up and tucking it gently into his own front pocket. The way that Soleum always used to do. “Sorry, I just—I’d rather not go alone.”
The words taste unfamiliar on his tongue. Words he’d never dare to say out loud.
For a moment his vision blurs, and he wonders if this is what Soleum had seen, every time he reached out for a monster because he didn’t trust Choi to keep him safe.
He pulls his hood over his head, shielding the plushie from the rain with his jacket, and steps outside.
He isn’t sure where he’s going.
The rain freezes into his skin. Choi has never liked the cold, it brings back traumatic memories that he likes to pretend he’s gotten over already. On a day like this, if he had no dispatch calls, he’d be fast asleep on the couch of the Hyunmoo Team 1 waiting room, waking up to an extra jacket on top of him because Jaekwan had a heart too big for him.
“Are you cold?” he asks out loud. His voice is barely heard over the rain. “Everything alright?”
He pats absently at his pocket.
“It’s fine,” he says, well aware that he isn’t making much sense. “It’ll be fine.”
He keeps walking.
He still doesn’t know where he’s going.
His shoes are drenched, socks soaked, the hem of his pants dragging against the mud.
“It’ll be fine…” he drags out again, unsure of which one of them he’s talking to. “The rain means a change. It means something is coming. Right, Braun-ssi? Something is coming?”
His juniors will wake up, surely.
Choi will get to see them before he jumps into the fire to try to hold his own against the end of the world.
“You’re with him now, right?” Choi goes on. It’s easier to talk here, in the deafening sound of the rain. “Can you tell him—can you tell him it’s raining? It means a change, he can come back now…”
The cold creeps into his bones.
Choi doesn’t know what he’s searching for.
“Hey Grapes,” he says. “Kim Soleum. Soleum-ah. Can you hear me? Can you hear me through your friend?”
He looks up at the sky.
His hood slips off, the rain striking his face almost painfully. There isn’t anything visible up in the sky. Just endless, endless gray.
Just like the past year of Choi’s life has been.
“There isn’t a lot of time left,” he says again. “Braun-ssi. Tell him to come back.”
HIs fingers shake in the cold. He clutches his jacket tighter, a subconscious part of him still intent on not letting Braun get cold.
He doesn’t know how long he stands like that, in the cold. The grey turns to dark, the shake in his hands disappears into numbness.
There is no sensation in his skin left, nothing to tell him that it’s freezing and terrible—the sort of peace that can only come with knowing that you’ve reached the lowest you can fall.
At the lowest, there’s no need to keep crawling back out.
Choi can finally sink into the quiet.
The rain keeps pouring. Choi doesn’t step away. He stays for hours, until he feels dead enough to keep going, until there isn’t a single emotion left in him to make him waver on his path.
/
Choi wakes up to excruciating pain in his head.
There’s an angry, muttering voice over him that’s familiar. It’s—Agent Haegeum?
He doesn’t know what she’s saying, but the voice lulls him back into a sense of security.
There’s a hand on his forehead. It’s cold. He wants to push it away.
He doesn’t like the cold.
Through the blur of his consciousness, he can still hear the sound of the rain.
His vision fades out again.
/
When he wakes up again, he’s on the soft bedding in the cave he’s lived in for too long.
Jaekwan lies next to him, still fast asleep.
Out of habit, Choi starts to raise a shaky, tired hand to check his pulse. But the moment his fingers shift he realizes that there’s something in his grasp.
It’s the pink plushie.
Held loosely between his fingers, worn out, a little muddy—nothing like the pristine doll that Kim Soleum had left him with when he left.
For a moment, Choi doesn’t do anything but stare at it.
It’s fitting, in a way, what he’s let happen to this doll.
What he lets happen to anything that he holds in his hands.
Everything that Choi touches tends to fall apart.
Everything he tries to care for is ripped out of his grasp.
For the first time since Choi was left alone, he doesn’t know how many days are left till the end of the world.
“You’re awake?” a familiar voice speaks up exhausted.
It’s Agent Haegeum.
Choi shifts to face her. She’s sitting in the corner, stirring something in a pot. There’s a dark expression on her face.
“How do you feel?” she asks. “You’ve been out for days.”
Days? he tries to say. But the words get caught in his throat.
He coughs instead, voice cracked from disuse.
“That's what happens when you don’t sleep and don’t eat and then happily try to drown yourself,” Haegeum says.
She sounds dry, but there’s a hint of anger in it.
“I get that you’re upset,” she continues, a little quieter. “I get that this is scary. But Choi… you’ve made it this far. I know I shouldn’t ask this of you, when you’ve been through so much, but. Try to hold on a little longer, okay?”
Choi doesn’t say anything for a long time.
This isn’t the sort of thing Haegeum ever says to him. She’s always been the type to knock him over the head, slap him on the back, give him a good scolding and then send him back on his way. She never wasted time telling him to hold on because it was a given that he would.
That both of them would.
For Park Hongrim’s sake, she knew they would always, always bite their tongues and force themselves to do their best.
He must have fallen pretty low if she had to ask him to hold on.
“What happened?” he asks quietly, when his throat feels like he can force words through it again.
“What do you remember?”
“I was taking a walk in the rain, and then…”
He honestly doesn’t remember anything beyond that.
Haegeum is quiet for a long while. She stirs whatever she’s cooking, a severe look on her face.
“I was driving home,” she says at last. “It had been a long day. We lost a few citizens, it was awful. You know I never turn the radio on while I’m driving, right?”
“Uh, yes?”
“I didn’t that day either. But it turned on of its own accord.”
Choi stiffens.
“It played a strange show… a talk show? Some kind of disaster for sure. It was chilling, gruesome, but then… suddenly the host started talking about the weather instead.”
A talk show host.
Choi’s fingers tighten further into the softness of the plushie.
“It kept saying that the rain made it the perfect day to drown,” she says quietly. “A perfect day to wander out of the cave you’ve built for yourself and drown.”
… What?
“It was an odd choice of words, and the host kept stressing on it. It made me nervous, so I came to check on you, and…”
Haegeum glances up at him, expression unimaginably tired.
“You were missing.”
There’s a terrible silence between them.
“I don’t know how much of it was your own doing,” Haegeum says. “I found you down near the river, half buried in the mud. I can only assume you had a nasty fall somewhere and blacked out.”
“... I’m sorry.”
“For?” Haegeum doesn’t give him space to respond. “I brought you back but you had a fever for a couple of days, which might be why you remember so little. You kept calling for Agent Bronze, for Agent Grapes, for Agent Honghwa…” Her expression turns darker. “I couldn’t take you to any of them. But you kept asking for that plushie as well… and that I could give you.”
She nods towards the doll in Choi’s hands.
“You refused to let him go. Ha. Is it a Hyunmoo 1 thing?”
The words somehow make everything worse.
A Hyunmoo 1 thing…
Choi forces out a laugh.
“I’m sorry, noonim,” he says politely. “For putting you through all that trouble.”
She shakes her head.
“Don’t be sorry,” she says.
She doesn’t say anything else.
It’s unlike her. She’s always been the type to knock him down to drag him back up.
But for the first time, she has nothing to say to him.
The hopelessness eating at them both.
/
“So,” Choi says brightly, toweling at his freshly washed hair as he sits next to the plushie. “I heard you saved my life.”
Braun doesn’t say anything. He still looks pitiful, soiled and muddy from the time Choi had spent fallen on the ground, sitting gingerly on a cushion that still hasn’t had the soju washed out of.
It’s definitely time to give the plushie a wash, but Choi has no clue how to even start going about that, so for now he pretends that the problem doesn’t exist.
“I’m touched,” he says. “It would have been a shame if I’d died there just weeks before the end. And it must have been cold for you too, right? I said I’d take good care of you, and now… haha. Grapes is going to kill me.”
He falls quiet.
“I’m sorry.”
Less than two weeks till the end of the world.
The rain, that he was so certain signified a change, faded away as if it had never meant to change a thing at all. Choi is left alone once again, waiting for a miracle that might never come.
Months and months of hoping and hoping, when his entire life has taught him that he shouldn’t.
With no one by his side but a ghost, a monster. A demon.
A friend.
“I’m glad that you were here,” Choi says quietly.
Braun doesn’t respond.
“I—haha. I might have lost my mind if I didn’t have someone to talk to.” He towels at his hair some more, a strange feeling twisting in his chest.
Braun could have left him to die.
It would have been so easy to.
A disaster of his size, his power—someone like Choi was nothing to him.
But he’d saved him anyway.
Choi doesn’t know why he did it.
It might have been for Kim Soleum. The way Choi tried to take care of Braun for his sake, it’s possible that Braun tried to do the same for him.
It might have been because Choi’s fall just weeks before the end wasn’t good enough for a man who thrived on entertainment.
Choi doesn’t know why he did it. He might never know, until Kim Soleum returns.
If Kim Soleum returns.
But the fact remains that Braun saved him.
“Can you tell him something for me?” Choi asks quietly.
He’s never dared to ask this before.
There are a lot of things that Choi needs to tell Kim Soleum. He needs to ask if he’s okay. If he knows that the seal is going to break. If he knows just how many lives he’s saved.
If he knows that Choi is losing his mind.
If he knows how much he misses him.
But he doesn’t say any of that.
“Can you tell him that I’m sorry?” Choi says at last. “I’m sorry if I ever made him feel like this.”
Like this, with loneliness eating at his bones, making him desperate enough to share his heart with the host of a disaster that could tear apart hundreds of lives.
With this fear, that there is no one else to turn to.
Choi was at his lowest, and Braun was always there.
Choi is grateful for it. Truly. Without him, he would have lost his last grip on his sanity.
But knowing that Kim Soleum, too, had been here, forced to turn to a monster for comfort…
“I’m sorry,” Choi says again, quieter.
Braun says nothing.
He never does, but Choi knows now, for certain, that he’s watching.
He’s always here.
“Keep an eye on him down there, okay?” Choi says, eyes trailing off to the sight of his unconscious juniors. “I’ll… I’ll keep an eye on him here.”
There isn’t a lot of time left till the end of the world.
But Choi has nothing to do, but wait.
Nothing to do, but to watch, and hope, and pray, until the seal breaks and all hell breaks loose and he’s left to fight with everything he’s got to avoid burying a city alive once more.
“Want a drink?” he asks.
There’s no reply, but Choi laughs anyway.
“Yeah,” he says. “You’re right. But what else is there to do, hm?”
/