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They’re under the shade of the convenice store, seeking reprieve from the sun beating down above them. On the streets before them, a red car speeds past, gleaming in the sunlight. Choi catches his reflection in the cars mirror, brief. He’s slouched, hair tousled. The figure next to him sits with better posture.
“I used to watch children’s cartoons just to fall asleep,” Kim Soleum says, as if Choi wasn’t aware. He looks at the grape icypole in his hands, twirling it around. Choi breathes, feeling the swell of his chest, the expansion of his stomach as he finishes off his own icypole. It’s cold enough it hurts his teeth, and his hands itch to pull out a cigarette, breathe it in: the smoke, the smog. The filthy flavour coating his tongue would be better than this, whatever it was.
“Your icypole’s going to melt soon.”
Kim Soleum hums, not in agreement, just an acknowledgement. Two weeks since Kim Soleum was discharged from the hospital. Two weeks since Choi cut the rope of the noose he’d used to hang himself. Now, an inverted v mark smiles up at Choi from his vantage point beside Kim Soleum, just below the ear.
“My least favourite episode was ‘We Love you, Rody’.”
“Rody?”
“From Pororo the Little Penguin.”
The icypole has started dripping. Choi watches as Kim Soleum brings it to his mouth, licking it. Then he lets it dangle again, as if that was all the effort he could spare. Choi gets the urge to hold Kim Soleum, sometimes. Trace the lines of his neck and the dip of his shoulder blades, press his fingers to his wrist just to check that he’s still — that he’s not —
The most he lets himself do is ruffle Soleum’s hair.
“Yeah? I’ve never watched that, I think.” Choi’s memory is blank ever since he woke up a few years ago, nameless with Lee Kangheon’s life’s information in his pockets. Something terrible has happened, he’d thought all those years ago, sitting in the wreck of who he used to be and who he wasn’t. Now he thinks the same words, something terrible has happened, as Kim Soleum’s gaze turns more vacant than it already is, an empty smile pushing its way through his face.
“There’s a character, Eddy. He’s a fox.” He speaks with the same intonation and cadence he’d spoken with before he tried to hang himself. Choi hadn’t expected Kim Soleum to act just the same, before and after. He doesn’t know what he expected, but something fundamental had broken for Choi and Kim Soleum was the same as he always was, just a bit duller, a bit blanker.
“He falls into the ocean one day, and his friend Rody jumps into the water to save him.” A huff escapes Kim Soleum. It sounds like the gasping he’d heard at the hospital, quick and soft, trying to hide the sound of his tears behind the hospital door. It sounds like Choi’s own huffs of breath as he ran to the hospital, Kim Soleum in his arms, praying and praying and praying.
“What happened?” Choi dares to ask. His mouth tingles from the icypole, sickeningly sweet with artificial flavouring and a distant thought of bile at the back of his mind.
The icecream has dripped onto Kim Soleum’s pants and all over his hand, tracing the crevices of his palms and sticking to his wrist, thin lines of purple and blue intersecting under the surface. Sometimes Choi worries his wrists will snap one day when he’s alone in his motel room, and he’ll let them stay broken just because.
“Well.” Kim Soleum wets his lips, reaching up to touch the scar on his neck. “Rody’s a robot. He shortcircuited and died.”
Choi’s heart seizes.
Kim Soleum lets the icypole drop to the ground, careless. It spins and tumbles, dirt encrusting the sides. He begins rubbing at his palm with an air of vague disatisfaction.
“That’s not why it’s my least favourite episode, though,” he says. His legs kick forward on the bench they’re sitting on, displacing the dirt underneath them. It’s a sudden, jerky motion.
Choi doesn’t want to know why. He watches Kim Soleum open and close his hands, then lean down to lick at the quickly drying juice on his palm. Choi opens his mouth. Closes it. Thinks, very clearly, I don’t know how to help you.
“You’re right. The grape icypole really was good.” Kim Soleum raises his head again, offering another smile. He gives up quickly, and stretches his neck up to the sky. His scar goes with the motion, stretching, sickening. I never wanted you to have a scar too, Choi thinks. I wish you didn’t.
“…Why did you dislike it, then?” he says, to quiet the sick pounding of his heart, an odd type of grief and mourning for someone who’s alive but whose neck is lined with a scar Choi had never thought he’d see. Why did you do it, he wants to say instead, but that’s a one way path to Kim Soleum walking away.
“Well, Eddy starts crying and his tears touch Rody’s heart. Rody is revived, and everyone is happy.” He splays his hands, the purpling stain corpse-like, dead skin, and waves them, as if saying ta-da. “The end.”
Choi stays very, very quiet.
Kim Soleum’s eyes meet his. They’re dark enough it’s nearly black, and with a glint of red in them that’s always sharpened with intensity bright enough to burn. They burn now, for the first time during this conversation. “I wish he'd stayed dead,” Kim Soleum says bluntly. He picks at the skin of his palm, scratching, scratching.
Choi jerks forward. “Stop that,” he says, grabbing Kim Soleum’s hands with his own, tightening until his knuckles are white. His eyes stay trained onto their interlocked hands, and feels a bit like throwing up.
“…Sunbae,” Kim Soleum says. “You’re hurting me.” He looks at Choi curiously as he says it, something not quite resentment, not quite neutrality in his voice.
Choi lets go quickly, and, with a lurch of guilt and horror, he sees that his nails had dug into Kim Soleum’s skin, leaving behind yet another mark. Crescent indents into picked apart skin. Blood rushes into his ears, heart beating, beating, beating.
“I’m sorry,” he says, voice wavery. He feels like he did all those years ago, lost and utterly helpless. He had no idea what to do. He has no idea what to do. All of his cleverly planned defences and plans and escape weapons, lain to waste before a Kim Soleum who stares at him with a emptiness he’d never shown before.
“…It’s fine,” Kim Soleum says, hand reaching up again to touch lightly at his scar, distant wistfulness in his eyes. “You can’t help it. It’s just how you were made.”