Work Text:
Three months after returning home, Kim Soleum presses a cigarette to his lips while staring out his apartment balcony.
To describe it as a balcony is a little gratuitous. In reality, it’s a glass door that opens and has a metal railing secured about three centimeters away from the opening to ensure that no one falls to their tragic and somewhat idiotic death.
Kim Soleum watches the smoke disperse as he exhales. It’s mesmerizing, in a way, but he has to quickly look away because it begins to remind him of how he spent months in a melting body that billowed smoke with each breath.
Taking another drag out of the cigarette, he tries to shake off the feeling. But seeing the smoke escape his lips touches something deep and uncomfortable inside his mind.
He puts out his cigarette and crouches down on the ground away from the railing. A breath in through the nose, and out through the mouth. The air he inhales is not black smoke; it is oxygen and the smell of tobacco. And the air he exhales is also not black smoke; it is carbon dioxide – clear, clean, harmless.
Right. He breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide because he is human, or at the very least mammalian and very much not a monster. He is not some horrid, melting, mindless beast like he once was.
Well, this sucks. This is not the first time this has happened, but he wishes it would stop. He had pulled out the cigarette to try and calm his nerves after a stressful day at work, but it just brought bad feelings with it instead.
Well, today was a particularly bad day anyways.
Taking a deep breath in, he runs his hands across his face and makes the move to get up from his crouching position. He closes the not-a-balcony door and properly disposes of his cigarette butt inside the ashtray on the coffee table.
He then sits on the couch. His original plan was to order dinner, but now he doesn’t have an appetite. He doesn’t think he’ll have an appetite for the rest of the night.
And surely enough, he doesn’t. Kim Soleum spends his evening binge-watching cartoons and eating nothing. The nausea that’s settled in his stomach stays there all night.
When he tries to sleep, his brain decides it’s a good time to remind him of everything bad that has ever happened to him, and at 2:00 a.m. he escapes to his bathroom to splash water on his face and check the mirror to see if he’s real.
In total, he sleeps two hours that night. He wakes up too early, and he doesn’t eat anything because he’s still nauseous. He takes his normal route to work, willing away the bad thoughts that plague his mind when he enters the train.
And he sits, staring at a monitor for hours upon hours upon hours. He does not eat lunch because he is still nauseous.
Instead, he opts to smoke a cigarette. Or maybe two.
When Kim Soleum returned from the world of DER, he resumed life in his own world like normal.
Or, at least, he tried.
It turns out that when one spends years in a world of horrors, gets trapped in an inhuman body, witnesses the deaths of those around him, and loses their sense of self, they end up different.
The first week back felt like a dream. He woke up needing to remind himself that he was no longer in a world of ghost stories, that he was back in his normal home world. No one was going to die, his body wasn’t going to spontaneously melt, a city wasn’t going to disappear.
Returning to his original workplace felt strange. Kim Soleum barely even remembered what he actually did before he was dropped inside the Daydream orientation. Paperwork? Well, he did paperwork at Daydream and the Bureau, too, but those papers were always about explorations into supernatural phenomena and how they were cleared and if anybody died. He definitely didn’t write about those kinds of things at his original workplace.
He rediscovered what his original job was pretty quickly. He found himself sitting at a desk, receiving paperwork about company finances and writing paperwork about company finances and organizing papers about company finances. A rather boring, uneventful, and methodical way toward a salary. There’s little to look forward to and little to dread.
So he doesn’t understand why he now has a pit in his stomach when he leaves to go to work. Nothing is going to happen, yet his hairs always stand on end with the instinct that something is going to happen. Suddenly, he’ll discover that his ultra-safe home world actually secretly has ghost stories, and he’s going to get on the train and die or get on the elevator and die or enter a supermarket and die.
Kim Soleum doesn’t want to die. Sometimes, he wonders what it would be like, but ultimately, he is a coward.
He can reasonably rationalize away the thoughts about his world potentially housing ghost stories, but those unrealistic thoughts then turn a different direction. The train won’t be haunted, but somebody might push him onto the tracks. The elevator won’t be haunted, but the cables could snap. The supermarket won’t be haunted, but the building could collapse as a result of a horrible construction failure. And he would die and die and die.
The thoughts initially wouldn’t go away no matter how hard he tried.
So, on the third week back, he bought the first pack of cigarettes he had bought in years.
Meeting his family again was probably the most difficult part of his first week back.
It took an incredible amount of effort to not burst into tears and start hugging them when Kim Soleum visited during that weekend. The only thing stopping him was the knowledge that it’d be incredibly out-of-place if he did. He’s never been an overtly emotional person growing up, so if he started hugging his family and crying out of nowhere, he knew his parents would automatically know something was very wrong.
Technically, something was very wrong, but it wasn’t something he could talk to anybody about.
He did end up crying during his first reunion with his family. He had managed to hold it in for a while, but some stray tears had fallen during the times he had excused himself to be alone.
The worst of it, however, was when he had to leave them to go back to his apartment. Kim Soleum had waved goodbye to them and then made it to the station before hiding in a stall in the station bathroom and bursting into tears.
He wanted to run all the way back to his home and burst through the door and cling onto his parents and sob into their shoulders, but he knew if he did that, they would jump to the conclusion that someone was trying to kill him, or something drastic like that.
So he forced himself to calm down and got on the train. And when he got back to his apartment, where he lived alone, he crawled into his bed and started sobbing again.
The visits with his family after that were easier. Perhaps it’s because he was no longer reuniting with them for the first time in three years but rather for the first time in a week.
They are incredibly attentive to him now.
It had been three years since he had last seen them, and his memories were still fuzzy from not properly even remembering his past until entering the May 4th time loop, but he doesn’t think they’ve been nearly this concerned about him until now.
His parents ask him a lot about his eating and sleeping habits. He doesn’t have the heart to tell them that he rarely sleeps more than three hours a day, or that he skips meals regularly. It seems they still know, though, by the way his mother comments on his dark circles and his father asks him about his declining weight.
He figured his sibling would give him a break from all the pestering, but it seems they seem to feel some modicum of concern as well. They quickly picked up on the fact that he started smoking again, although they were less gentle about telling him than his parents were.
You’re gonna get cancer some day if you keep smoking like that.
Kim Soleum almost retorted back, saying he didn’t really care if he died from that, but he held his tongue. It wasn’t worth it, giving his family something else to worry about.
Kim Soleum doesn’t remember why he’s being scolded by his boss.
All he can focus on is the sound of his somewhat annoyed voice and the feeling of a file folder tapping on his lowered head. Every time it lands, he flinches, even though there is no pain.
He doesn’t remember what he did. Or what he didn’t do. All he remembers is entering the office and sitting down at his computer and staring.
Did he even do anything after that?
Currently, his boss is rattling on about how he’s been slacking recently. The man’s only slightly peeved, and this grievance will probably be forgotten within the next 24 hours, but Kim Soleum still feels his gut twisting painfully with each second that passes.
He can’t even remember what he did wrong.
He can’t remember anything, frankly. How long did he sit and do nothing? How long has it been since he entered the building? How long has it been since he woke up? How long has he even been back in his home world?
That doesn’t matter though. The only thing he can focus on is the seemingly endless berating that’s filtering through his ears and the soft thump, thump as the file folder makes contact with the top of his head over and over and over again. He hears no words, only annoyance and upset and the tapping file folder and the heavy beating of his heart and the deafening silence of everything else as the rest of the office either stares at the scene or blatantly tries to tear their eyes away in some semblance of respect toward his pitiful self.
After what feels like hours, or days, or weeks, the man in front of him finally stops talking. It seems he no longer has anything to say. He shoves the file folder against Kim Soleum’s chest before turning around and leaving.
Kim Soleum is too dazed to react. The folder falls to the ground before he can move, contents spilling out slightly on the thin carpeted floor.
He stands there. And stands there. And stands there.
And someone then appears, collecting the papers. They speak to him, pat his shoulder lightly. He doesn’t know what they say. He can’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears. He can’t feel anything except the stabbing feeling in his stomach.
He feels like he’s going to vomit.
He really feels like he’s going to vomit.
And when he realizes that he is going to vomit, he feebly excuses himself and runs to the nearest restroom with a sweaty hand clamped tightly around his mouth.
Somehow, he manages to make it into a stall. He doesn’t bother closing the door.
And he starts retching into the toilet.
It’s gross and stupid and disgusting – he’s clinging to the porcelain toilet seat in a public restroom and regurgitating whatever measly meal he had for lunch. All because his boss was a little annoyed with him over something that would be forgotten in a day.
Kim Soleum feels like he’s going to die.
It’s terrifying. Angering his boss is terrifying.
And to be terrified by that is stupid. He’s shaking like a leaf over a bit of scolding that he’s witnessed a thousand times before he was ever transmigrated. Fuck, it’s not even the first time he’s been told off like that by this guy.
But all he can think of is his time in Daydream Inc. The way that Cheong Dallae treated him like a slave, threatening to tear him apart and force him to do her every bidding. The time that Ho Yuwon cursed him to die.
He’s scared.
He shouldn’t be scared. Nothing like that is going to happen.
But he’s scared.
It’s suffocating. He can’t breathe; it’s like there’s a wire wrapped tight around his throat, being pulled tighter and tighter and tighter.
And there’s a wire around his lungs, his heart, his stomach, constricting so tightly that it leaves him in agony as it cuts into his flesh. He can’t breathe; he can only vomit and sob.
When there’s nothing left to cough up, he’s left dry heaving into the toilet.
Something pulls on his shoulder, and through the thundering heartbeat in his ears, he hears a voice.
Someone… someone is asking if he’s okay.
He wants to scream. No, no, no. He’s not okay, he’s not okay. He’s going to die. He’s going to choke to death, or his heart is going to stop, or the wire is going to cut so deeply that he bleeds out right there on the disgusting tile floor.
His vision moves, and suddenly he’s no longer crouching over the toilet but instead leaning against the stall barrier. He still can’t breathe.
Through his blurred vision, he vaguely recognizes his coworker. His coworker is trying to say something, but it all just gets lost to the ringing of his years. He’s just glad it’s not his boss. If it was his boss, he really would die.
When he starts to realize he’s not going to die, he finally registers what his coworker is telling him.
Breathe.
Slowly.
And he tries.
Full awareness returns slowly. His coworker at one point tries to help him stand up, but his legs are too cold and unfeeling to function.
So he just sits there, trying to steady his breathing at the instruction of his coworker while he steadily becomes more and more hyperaware of the situation.
He’s sitting on the floor of a men’s public restroom. He just vomited his entire lunch into the toilet. His face is covered in sweat, tears, snot, saliva, and bile, which his coworker is kinda wiping away with toilet paper. He still can’t really feel his legs, or his hands, for that matter. He’s shaking. His coworker is sitting in front of him, telling him to breathe and gently holding his right hand, which does nothing when all he can feel is tingling.
All of this over his boss scolding him.
It’s unbelievable how humiliating this is. There’s no way he doesn’t look utterly pathetic right now. He hates this. He hates being like this.
His coworker watches him with concern as he starts to cry again.
In a feeble attempt to salvage his own dignity, Kim Soleum spits out the poorest excuse he can think of:
“I’m sorry I think I’m sick.”
Kim Soleum is back in his apartment before he knows it.
He doesn’t really remember the trip back. What he does remember is his coworker urging him to leave work early. He didn’t have the wherewithal to resist.
So here he was. Back in his apartment.
Looking back, that ordeal really was embarrassing on his part. Making a big fuss over some criticism in the office. How much more shameful could he be?
Kim Soleum lets out a sigh at the thought.
He reaches into his pocket to grab his packet of cigarettes. He really would like to shake off that feeling of shame as soon as possible, and having a smoke was probably the most efficient option.
With the cigarette held between his teeth, he brings the lighter up with shaking hands. The first inhale of nicotine is like a blessing, and he can’t help but savor the next few drags. He doesn’t even bother opening the window.
Nausea begins to bud in his stomach again, but he doesn’t care. There’s nothing left for him to vomit up anyway.
It’s honestly remarkable how different he feels. Just a few hours ago he was so deep in terror that he thought he was going to die. Now, he can feel the last bits of anxiety seeping away with every breath. It’s as if it’s dispersing in the air with the smoke he exhales. What’s left behind is a soft, fuzzy feeling in his chest. All the tension leaves his body, and he practically melts onto the couch beneath him.
He told himself he was only going to have one, but now he’s on his third. After the day he’s had, he doesn’t want this good feeling to end. He wishes it could be like this forever; no fear or worry or panic, just contentedness and relaxation.
The feeling doesn’t last long, though, because that nausea that he was blatantly ignoring suddenly skyrockets. As he runs to retch into the kitchen trash can, he realizes he was a little foolish to forget he still had some gastric juices left in him.
After he throws up again, all that he’s left with is a wrenching pain in his gut and a throbbing in his skull.
Kim Soleum leans against the not-a-balcony railing with a cigarette in his left hand.
Ideally, this would have been his third cigarette. In reality, it was his fifth.
It was a long day at work.
It’s always a long day at work.
Deep breath in. And breathe out.
The smoke leaving his mouth blows toward his right – southward – away from the apartment. In a few seconds time, it has completely dissipated in the air, no longer visible.
There is a vague sense of awe as he watches. In seemingly an instant, the smoke is already gone and forgotten, leaving no evidence of Kim Soleum’s vice.
He then looks down, toward the ground, at the moving cars and the wandering pedestrians. At the hard concrete below him.
If he fell from this height, he would probably die.
If something happened to the railing – if there was a shoddy welding job, or damage to the outer wall, or if it just magically vanished – then Kim Soleum as he is now, leaning his weight against the railing and toward the open air, would fall and die.
Or, if he took matters into his own hands – if he leaned over far enough or if he swung his leg over and threw himself down – then he would fall and die.
He would fall from the fourth-floor pseudo-balcony and he would make impact with the solid concrete ground and his bones would shatter and his head would split open and brain matter and blood would spill all over the sidewalk.
That’s a scary image. He doesn’t want to think about that.
He takes another drag of the cigarette and then taps it against the railing. The ashes shake off, falling, falling, falling… down to the ground.
If he fell like those ashes, he might survive. He might end up horrifically injured and permanently disabled, but alive.
But it is more likely that he would die.
…If he died, they wouldn’t know.
They would continue to exist as normal. Thinking, or hoping, that he was safe and healthy and alive.
If he died, there would definitely be a funeral. They wouldn’t show up – they couldn’t – but his family would. And some friends. And maybe some coworkers who heard of his demise.
It’s better that way, he thinks. If there are people to remember him after he’s gone.
He would be happy, he thinks. If there are people to mourn him after he’s gone.
That’s a sad image. He doesn’t want to think about that.
He doesn’t want to die. Not right now, at least.
This cigarette is almost finished, so he puts it out against the railing and pulls out another one from the box.
Before he lights it, though, he first closes the glass door and closes the curtains. His hands are shaking slightly when he finally flicks the lighter. It seems like they’re always shaking nowadays.
He smokes his sixth cigarette facing away from the railing the entire time. His brain keeps supplying him thoughts of his death, but he keeps trying to ignore them.
He doesn’t want to think about that.
Sometimes there are good days, and sometimes there are bad days.
A while back, long before he had been transmigrated, Kim Soleum had heard those words spoken in a movie.
He can’t remember what the context behind those words was. Maybe a character struggling with depression, or with PTSD.
As he crouches in his bathroom, heaving and coughing up bile in the toilet bowl, those words resurface vaguely in his mind.
Maybe this was one of those ‘bad days.’
It’s a thought that passes through his mind briefly before his stomach contracts again and he vomits again. The last of whatever food he had eaten earlier had been regurgitated long ago, so now, all he spits up is acid.
It burns, it hurts. The gastric juices are eating away at his esophagus and mouth, and his entire body is shaking with tension. It feels like somebody has taken a baseball bat and aimed it right at his stomach, then kicked him a few times for good measure.
When he finally, finally stops throwing up, he doesn’t have the energy to move. All he can do is slump forward, resting his cheek on the cool porcelain seat. It’s gross, but it feels like heaven against his hot and sweaty face.
The most embarrassing part of all this is that he isn’t even sick.
It’s just a ‘bad day.’
He was indifferent to the pit of nausea that he had felt upon waking up. That was his new normal. He forced down something light for breakfast, went to work, sat staring at a screen for who knows how many hours, and then left. His trip back to his apartment was the same as ever.
Except upon returning, he found himself hyperventilating. That led to choking and coughing as his breathing became wrong. And suddenly, he could feel the bile rising in his throat.
He was lucky he made it to the bathroom before throwing up.
And now, he lay there, collapsed against the toilet, legs numb and body trembling.
The good thing is that, apparently, vomiting made him too exhausted to even panic anymore.
It takes a few minutes of just sitting there and breathing, feeling the way his chest rises and falls, before he finally moves. His shirt is soaked in sweat, so he brings his shaking hands up and fumbles with the buttons before peeling the fabric off his shoulders. He haphazardly tosses it off to the side on the floor. He can deal with it later.
He wants to go to the sink and wash the dried tears and bile off his face, but he still doesn’t have any feeling in his legs. Instead, he opts to crawl toward his bedroom in a rather pitiful fashion.
It takes way too much effort. His body is still weak, and his legs feel like they have needles stabbing into them now that feeling is starting to return to them. He feels disgusting and drained and dehydrated and all he wants to do is lay on the floor and curl up.
After what feels like an eternity, he finally makes it to his room. Somehow, someway, he is able to change clothes and crawl into the bed. He doesn’t even bother with trying to clean his face beyond a few swipes of a tissue, and he doesn’t feel like he can make it to the kitchen to get a glass of water. So he resigns himself to sprawling out atop the sheets.
In about two minutes, he passes out from exhaustion.
And in about two hours, he cracks his eyes open again.
He feels immensely better than he did earlier, but he still feels terrible. Maybe that’s the curse of a ‘bad day.’
Finally, he is able to get up and stagger to the kitchen. There’s an awful feeling in his stomach; it’s not nausea, but rather the feeling that someone has tied it into a knot and then stomped on it.
To prevent himself from a future of retching into the sink, he takes slow, careful sips of lukewarm water. It takes all of his effort to keep his grip on the glass, and he can’t help but wince as swallowing reignites the stinging feeling in his throat left behind by the stomach acid he coughed up.
Around an hour later, he is sitting on his couch staring at the TV. He had tried to heat up some broth as a semblance of a dinner, but after approximately four spoonfuls, he felt himself growing nauseous again. Now, the poor bowl of broth was sitting on his coffee table, growing colder by the minute.
Kim Soleum watches as the TV plays the cartoon he’s put on. It’s one he’s very familiar with, to the point where he could probably recount the characters and overarching plot with great accuracy. He’s currently on season 5, episode 13.
He feels cold, so he’s wrapped himself in blankets. There’s a simple plaid one covering his legs, and around his shoulders is one with a silly cat pattern. It was one that he had bought from a store not too long after his return because it made him feel better.
For a moment, Kim Soleum thinks about how pitiful he is.
Here he is, curled up and wrapped in blankets, watching cartoons and unable to properly eat or drink without vomiting. Panicking over nothing and left crawling around the filthy floor like a dog.
He is truly, truly hopeless.
And that’s when he starts crying again.
It’s not a panic attack. It’s just… sobbing.
Sorrow at what he’s become. Grief for the man he used to be.
As the hot tears roll down his cheeks, as he hiccups and wails, he can only mourn his old self.
Eventually, the exhaustion overtakes him again, and he finds himself lying across the sofa, his cheeks stiff with dried tears. The cartoons are still playing on the TV, but he doesn’t care enough to turn it off. It’s better than sitting in silence.
As his eyelids grow heavy, he can only hope that he wakes up in time for work the next day.
His reflection doesn’t look like Kim Soleum anymore.
As he stands there at the bathroom sink, all he can really do is stare.
This is the first time he’s properly looked in the mirror. Usually, he averts his gaze, or he simply steals glances at himself to make sure he doesn’t look like an utter mess before going to work. He never properly examined himself, looked to see what state he was in.
He’s scared of seeing something he doesn’t want to see.
He’s scared of looking up and seeing a melting, dissolving, collapsing form staring back at him.
He’s scared of looking up and finding out he’s no longer human.
He’s scared of looking up and realizing he was never human to begin with.
Now that he is finally looking up at his reflection, he is relieved to see, at the very least, a human being. Or something that is pretending to be human. Human-ish.
But the thing in the mirror is also akin to a corpse.
The structure is the same.
An adult man. 180-or-so centimeters tall. Short black hair. Dark irises. Pale skin. Thin hands. Lean build.
The details are different.
Skin, which is dry and flaky and ashy in complexion. Hair, which is brittle and dull and overgrown, reaching past the tips of his ears and the tops of his eyes. Lips, which have lost their color and are chapped and scarred from endless biting and skin-picking. Eyes, which are irritated and rimmed red and show no purpose behind their gaze.
Hands, fingernails bitten to the point of bleeding, skin around them peeling. Body, now bony from the lost fat and muscle after weeks of disordered eating.
He hopes that that is not Kim Soleum. He wishes for it to not be Kim Soleum.
That is not Kim Soleum.
That is not Kim Soleum’s face. That is not Kim Soleum’s skin. That is not Kim Soleum’s hair.
Those are not Kim Soleum’s eyes. Those are not Kim Soleum’s hands. Those are not Kim Soleum’s bones.
That is not Kim Soleum.
It is a corpse, or a monster. Something that looks like him, but is off. Incorrect. A failed imitation.
It is not melting or collapsing or mutating. But it cannot be human. A human being shouldn’t look like that.
So that is not Kim Soleum.
He does not want it to be Kim Soleum.
Kim Soleum does not want it to be him.
But it is him.
And he is it.
He takes his hands and touches his face. Feels the flakes of dead skin, the swelling under his eyes, the dry cracks on his lips. And he traces his fingers down his jaw, his neck, into the dip of his collarbone where his skin feels vacuum-sealed to the bone and tendon and muscle. He traces the pad of his thumb against the tips of his fingers, against the rough edges of his bitten fingernails and the torn skin surrounding them.
This is him.
He is this grotesque, dead being.
He does not want to be like this.
He wants to be normal.
He wants to be Kim Soleum again.
With a healthy body, with a healthy brain. With healthy skin and healthy eyes and healthy lips and healthy hands and healthy hair. With meat and flesh on his bones.
A body that doesn’t twist his stomach with nausea, a body that doesn’t tremble with fear with every step outside his apartment, a body that doesn’t always feel exhausted after doing nothing.
A brain that doesn’t tell him he’s going to die at every living moment, a brain that doesn’t constantly remind him of every single awful thing he’s experienced, a brain that doesn’t force him to stay awake night after night after night.
A body that functions. A brain that functions.
He can rejoice in that he is no longer that thing he once was.
But he is also no longer Kim Soleum.
He is not melting, morphing, mutating.
But he is deteriorating.
…He doesn’t want to think about this anymore.
In a quick motion, he forces himself to tear his eyes away from the mirror. He finally notices that, apparently, the faucet has been running this whole time, so he turns it off.
He was going to brush his teeth, but he doesn’t want to be in the same room as the mirror anymore.
So he goes back to his bedroom and finishes getting dressed. He buttons up his shirt to the last button, threads his tie around the collar, and ties it with shaking hands. He slides the black suit jacket over his shoulders.
And he ignores the way his suit seems to be fitting looser on him with each passing day.
“how to stop panicking all the time”
“how to ease anxiety”
“stress management techniques”
Kim Soleum’s recent Google searches quickly start to accumulate many varying queries about stress and anxiety. He’s lying atop his sofa, his feet dangling off the edge into the cold air. His throat burns both on the inside and the outside; acid from vomiting once again is eating at his esophagus, and red scratch marks line the pale skin of his neck.
It’s terrifying, feeling like he can’t breathe, and it’s frankly very annoying, having these panic attacks. He would very much like to get rid of them.
Google results mostly tell him to do breathing exercises and consult a therapist. Well, he’s tried the breathing exercises to the best of his ability, and he doesn’t believe he can tell a therapist about his woes without being deemed a lunatic and dragged to the closest psychiatric facility.
Other results tell him to do “relaxing” things, like going on walks. He can’t walk outside without feeling like he’s going to die, so that’s off the list. There are suggestions for other therapeutic activities like gardening, but he doesn’t think there’s any room in his tiny studio apartment with a fake balcony for anything beyond a single potted plant, and he doesn’t trust himself to not accidentally kill it.
And it seems that none of the suggestions include ‘smoke a cigarette,’ which has been his primary coping mechanism for the past few weeks. What a disappointment.
One thing that does catch his eye, however, is the recommendation to purchase a weighted blanket. Something about pressure therapy and replicating the feeling of human embrace, or whatever. But it seems feasible. It requires little to no extra work, and, well, if it doesn’t work, then he just has another blanket. His eyes widen a little at the price – seriously, why does a blanket cost that much – but after weighing his options, he ultimately decides it might be worth it. He finds a suitable one on an online store and completes his purchase.
The blanket arrives in a box two days later, and he’s both shocked and somewhat offended at just how heavy it is. Seriously, he’s not weak by any means; why is he struggling to carry a blanket!? How do you even wash this thing…
He decides to push away those thoughts and instead put his effort into getting this outrageously heavy blanket out of the box. He doesn’t feel like dragging it all the way to his room, so he tosses it over the back of his sofa instead.
And when he finishes catching his breath from lifting that incredibly heavy blanket, he decides to test it. He sits down on the sofa and drags the stupidly heavy blanket over himself, wrapping it around his shoulders.
Well.
It’s comfortable?
He wouldn’t go as far to say that the atrociously heavy blanket is therapeutic or that it resembles a human embrace in any way, but it’s not terrible.
It’s quite nice, actually, and he ends up not getting up even though he had originally planned to just test it for a few minutes. He switches on some cartoons and readjusts himself to be laying down on the sofa.
It isn’t until he wakes up six hours later that he realizes he had fallen asleep.
It’s the first time he’s slept for longer than three hours since…since… a while.
Well, damn.
This egregiously heavy blanket might be better than cigarettes.
The weighted blanket worked wonders, but it wasn’t a cure.
It helped by grounding him when he was consumed by anxiety or panic, but it wasn’t a preventative measure. It didn’t stop him from hyperventilating or spiraling or the incessant nausea.
Which is why Kim Soleum is currently staring at the small plastic pouch in his hand.
…In that pouch is his first dose of his newly prescribed anxiety medication.
There’s an odd emotion inside of him now that he’s reached this point. It almost feels like he’s given up, finally admitting that there’s something wrong with him, that he’s not normal. He had been resisting visiting a psychiatrist for so long, and now he’s reached the point where he has no other choice.
But it also feels like a step toward something better. Like he’s looking at the destroyed mess that is his life and is now building it back up one brick at a time.
He doesn’t know what to think.
In all honesty, he probably wouldn’t have originally chosen to do this of his own accord. He had already dealt with this terrible condition for months, so what’s a few more?
It was after he had his third workplace panic attack that he finally decided to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. He could deal with them at home, or even in spaces like the train or the grocery store, but it was a nuisance at work.
Even then, the decision wasn’t entirely his own. Rather, it was the result of a coworker – the one who had witnessed him the first time in the bathroom – practically begging him to get help.
Shaking from anxiety, with his head an absolute mess, watching his coworker grab his hand and plead that he get some sort of treatment. He briefly remembered that time at the Scales Tribunal, where he had been pushed to the brink of panic while his friends tried desperately to snap him back to reality and prevent him from digging himself deeper into a hole of despair.
This situation wasn’t the same; after all, no matter how much he felt like he was going to die, he wasn’t actually in any massive danger now. But the look on his coworker’s face was enough to finally convince him to at least seek out some sort of help.
The visit with the psychiatrist was nerve-racking. The doctor had asked more questions than he had anticipated, but they thankfully didn’t ask for him to go into detail about his trauma. After hearing about his increasingly frequent panic attacks, the anxiety-induced nausea and vomiting, and his inability to sleep, they decided to try putting him on a prescription.
They also suggested counseling.
Kim Soleum said that he would consider it, which was a lie. He doesn’t want to discuss his experiences with someone who wouldn’t believe him. He still has a bad taste in his mouth from that time he found out Agent Choi believed he was wholly and utterly delusional, and he doesn’t want to go through that again, especially now that there was an increased probability of him being carted off to the nearest psychiatric facility upon his admittance of being transmigrated into a world of ghost stories.
These thoughts make his odd, unidentifiable emotion develop into uneasiness. He starts to reach into his pocket to grab his packet of cigarettes, but then he hesitates when he remembers another thing the psychiatrist had told him.
That he should cut down on smoking.
To be precise, they had asked him if he smoked, and if so, how often did he smoke. To which he answered that on a good day, he just smokes one or two cigarettes. On a bad day, it’s three to five. On a really bad day, he loses count.
He’s been having more bad days, recently. That was also something he told them.
The question of how much caffeine he consumed daily was also brought up. To that, he was a little shocked. He felt that it should be obvious that he drinks caffeine almost daily; after all, it is the lifeblood of an office worker. It was almost like a daily ritual for him to drink at least one cup of coffee or green tea at his job.
It was then that the psychiatrist suggested he reduce both his nicotine and his caffeine intake.
Honestly, he was appalled at the suggestion. Coffee and cigarettes were probably the driving forces behind 90% of office workers, keeping them going through an otherwise monotonous and dopamine-devoid lifestyle.
But the psychiatrist was adamant. Something about how caffeine and nicotine were both stimulants, which can increase anxiety symptoms and nausea and all sorts of other medical things.
But there was still some merit to their words. After all, they were a professional. And one of the reasons behind their suggestion was that nicotine reduced the efficacy of the anxiety medication he was being prescribed.
The medication was supposed to help him. If all of its positive effects got negated because of his frequent smoking, then there wouldn’t even be a point in taking the medication in the first place. It would just be a waste of time, effort, and money, and him debasing himself enough to finally visit a psychiatrist and admit he was struggling would all be for nothing.
So, he makes a bold decision.
He takes his hand – which has been hovering near his hip – and quickly shoves it into his pants pocket, grabbing the box of cigarettes…
Then he throws them in the trash can.
And for good measure, he ties the bag as tight as possible and takes it outside to the waste bin. Now, when he starts craving a cigarette in the next ten minutes, he can’t grab one unless he wants to make a show of dumpster diving in the apartment building.
When he returns back to his room, he tears open the plastic pouch and takes the pill with a newfound determination.