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Saturday. Choi runs Kim Soleum’s motel to find him hanging himself. Sorry, a yellow post-it note says stuck to his forehead.
“Sometimes he can be so oblivious.” Eun Haje lifts the cigarette, then brings it back down. Indecisive, hovering. The flickering lights of the nearby store buzzes, and bathes Eun Haje in neon blue. In the dark, Choi can only barely make out her expression. It’s blank. “Once I took him out to eat food and he joked about killing himself. I was the one who found him.”
Choi can say nothing to that. The relevation that this is not the first time Kim Soleum has tried does not even shake him. He leans his head back instead, hands in his pockets. “He brings up his arm around Jaekwan a lot,” he offers. “I don’t think he realises how guilty Jaekwan feels about it.”
“When he first started this job I told him —” here, Eun Haje’s voice wavers. Choi listens to it, the tilt of the words, the shaking of her vowels. “I told him to stop caring so damn much. It was going to kill him.”
Eun Haje knows a version of Kim Soleum Choi has never met. Desperately put together, surviving, before contaminations. Before whatever happened to wipe him for a month and resurfacing as a spy for Daydream. Choi has only ever known a Kim Soleum on the verge of breakdown, desperately grasping at straws to keep floating.
Maybe the two versions weren’t so different after all.
Across the street, Kim Soleum sleeps in a hospital bed. Choi says, “Why do you think he did it?” He says it blandly, unfeeling.
“Maybe he thought that it would be the least worst option.” She tilts her head, hair hiding her expression. “Given that he’s already been hanged before.” Segwang city. Kim Soleum had taken the longest to wake up out of all of them; Choi had been thankful that Kim Soleum wouldn’t be able to see the aftermath: him, staring blankly, unable to even scream.
He can’t keep the image out of his mind: the coarse rope between his hands as he cut it down with his jakdu, the sick pounding heartbeat in his ears as he cradled Kim Soleum’s body — too thin, too light — and ran to the hospital. The dokkaebi by the doorway, having led Choi here.
Choi wishes — well. He wishes for a lot of things.
“Why,” he says. Tries again, putting stress on the word. “Why did he hang himself.”
Eun Haje’s smirk is less smile more scar. It looks like Choi’s neck in the mirror: ugly, stretching, brittle and strained. “We all knew it was coming.”
A truth. Kim Soleum had been more erratic, after failing to go home. Less desperate less scared more resigned. Hopeless. He’d gone back to the Disaster Management Bureau. He looked as if though he’d rather be anywhere but here.
“No,” he says. “I didn’t.” He truly hadn’t. He’d thought, well, what he thought was stupid, in retrospect. Of course Kim Soleum, King Destruction Rookie, top employee of Daydream would turn to extreme lengths for anything. Choi can’t bring himself to feel sad about this.
He just feels blank.
Monday.
Smiling at Kim Soleum, he claps his hands. “Grapes-ie,” he says. “I bought flowers.” Eun Haje grunts from beside him, hands in her pockets.
“Thanks.” Kim Soleum looks more ghost than human: pale and thin and as if the slightest of winds could blow him away. Choi has the sudden urge to reach out and grab his wrist, as if Choi alone was enough to stop Kim Soleum.
He could try, he thinks. The glass prison was safe. But Kim Soleum had already escaped, hadn’t he? Choi could say a great many things: are you okay? Talk to me. Why did you do it? Please talk to me. He doesn’t say any of it. Instead he watches the slouch of Kim Soleum’s shoulders, the scar of his mouth as he grasps the flowers in his hands, knuckles white.
“Please,” Kim Soleum says. “Get out.”
They’re out of the hospital room and Agent Choi’s holding a leaf from the bouquet he bought as if it’s the only thing between a complete mental breakdown and sanity.
When she’d heard the news of her informants’ suicide of course her mind immediately jumped to the politicians she was digging dirt up on. When she heard the news of Kim Soleum’s attempted suicide of course her mind immediately jumped to a Darkness being the cause.
Stupid, really.
Once, she’d found Kim Soleum in the bathtub staring down at his bleeding skin as if there was no where else in the world he wanted to be. She’d forced a potion down his throat, a spare she’d kept in the case of her being half dead. Eun Haje liked to pretend she didn’t care. Reality was a different matter altogether.
Now she sighs as they stand outside of the hospital room, Kim Soleum’s heartbreaking sobs behind the closed door. It sounds painful: wheezing, hoarse gasps, as if the world was breaking and he was shattering.
Her own eyes burn. Fuck.
Outside the world starts raining, which is stupidly fitting. She should have known Kim Soleum was going to pull something like this. She hadn’t breathed a word of Kim Soleum’s previous attempt to anyone, had planned to take it to the grave. She wasn’t in the habit of being idealistic but something about Kim Soleum made her hope that he’d be alright.
It was a mistake.
Agent Choi starts shaking beside her. She doesn’t want to look over.
Why did he hang himself, Agent Choi had asked. Eun Haje wanted to know, too. Why, why, why. It felt sort of like her own world had crumbled for the second time. We love you so much, Noru-ya, she thinks to herself distantly. But hopes and dreams and trying your best has never ever been enough, so Eun Haje breathes and ignores the civil servant next to her.
From behind the door, Kim Soleum has fallen quiet.