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Three years after the end of the world, Kim Namwoon looked in the mirror and knew that he had lost something that he didn’t even know he still had.
Where he lost it, he cannot say. Maybe it was left somewhere along the way, like a kicked dog following a master that had long abandoned it. But maybe that wasn’t the right metaphor — Kim Namwoon is more dog than person, afterall. He was as much a master as Yoo Joonghyuk was a savior.
That was to say, not at all.
It didn’t bother him. He’d never been good with words, anyway. It’s always been that way. At least that hadn’t changed.
The change must’ve been gradual. He had never noticed it, but that was because he thought he’d lost it long ago. Kim Namwoon was no innocent. Even before his hand was forced to the knife, they were bloody. He had never claimed to be a good person. He had never claimed to be a person, either.
No one has ever seen him as a person. Maybe they had once, but he killed it. His first kill would always be himself. His fingers extracted boyhood from himself like picking out glass. Glass. Yes, that sounded right. Boyhood had clung to his skin but it had never belonged to him. Not even close.
He bled when he killed for the first time. No one would know, because he washed it out in the sink and watched boyhood flow down the drain in diluted sickly pink colors. He was reborn as something stronger. Stronger. He was reborn a sinner.
Kim Namwoon was no innocent.
He had never been an innocent, not since the day he put his own claws to skin.
Lapping at his wounds, he had gotten a taste for blood and had not stopped since. His knuckles were always red and purple. His sink was always stained pink.
No, Kim Namwoon and boyhood and innocence had parted ways long before the world ended. He ensured it. He killed it.
So why, now? Standing in front of the mirror and the sink with a cracked basin, he saw that something was off.
Maybe he had been wrong, back then. Maybe in his haste, he had skimmed over a few shards of the glass and they had buried themselves beneath his skin.
How long had he carried them?
And how long ago did he lose them, washed away in the bloodbath?
“Master.”
Yoo Joonghyuk gave no indication of hearing him. He was used to that. The man was a god, Namwoon thought. No human could bear the weight of that much blood on their hands.
Somehow, Yoo Joonghyuk and Namwoon were both non-humans. But whereas Namwoon shedded humanity and was left grasping at straws, Joonghyuk was reborn glorious and stronger. He was a god and Namwoon was nothing but a sinner.
“Is there something different about me?” Namwoon ventured to ask, unsure if he wanted to know the answer.
Yoo Joonghyuk looked at him, eyebrows furrowed and eyes questioning. He was somewhat of a mystery to him still. Reading people had never been Namwoon’s forte, but he wasn’t dense. Yoo Joonghyuk was still his companion after all, although he never said it. Still, Namwoon couldn’t read him. A god’s mind was difficult to interpret, even after all this time.
“Today?”
“No, I mean,” Kim Namwoon waved his hands vaguely. “Just in general.”
“No,” Yoo Joonghyuk said after a moment. “What is it?”
Immediately after the answer, he regretted asking in the first place. The most embarrassing thing about this all was the thin layer of concern in the man’s voice.
Feeling like a slighted child or maybe a dog, Kim Namwoon shrank away. “Nothing, nothing to worry about! Bye!”
Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t see it, then. Perhaps it was nothing to worry about.
But maybe, some part of him said. Maybe Joonghyuk had never been looking at you in the first place.
Seoul was blood-red and so were his hands. He ripped them apart like they were nothing but dolls and somehow it was good. It felt good.
Something warm ran down the side of his head and the bed of his nails were stained red. He wasn’t sure if the blood belonged to himself or to someone else. He found that he doesn’t mind the thought of either.
It wasn’t hard to lose himself.
His mind buzzed like it did the first time he tried cigarettes, hidden afterschool in the alley behind his house. It was a pleasant feeling. No thoughts intruded like it usually did, and he had no urge to cut himself up when he was turning his blade on the skin of other people.
Yes, it felt good. It felt good, to grant himself some feeling of power, even if it was false. Power meant killing himself was worth it. It meant he had grown back stronger, and had grown back more capable. He was no longer a scared little kid with no means to defend himself. He was a sinner. And sinners could scream and fight.
He wasn’t helpless anymore. He was dead but he wasn’t weak.
I hate you , he screamed at the man he dug his knife into. The man’s eyes were young and red. Glass shards dug into his skin. In the light, the man’s blonde hair looked almost white.
I hate you , he screamed again. And again. The knife went down and down and down again.
Suddenly it didn’t feel so good. His clothes itched and his vocal cords strained against his flesh, scratchy and painful. It wasn’t the good type of pain.
The man was screaming too. The man stopped fighting back a long time ago, eyes wide and glassy with death. But he was still screaming. The screaming didn’t stop, and it was unnatural. The man was dead. The screaming wasn’t. The glass shards in the man’s skin dug into Kim Namwoon’s hands and he wouldn’t stop screaming.
Stop it, stop. Someone stop the screaming, he didn’t like this anymore, this wasn’t-
“-woon! Namwoon ! Stop it kid! You’re hurting yourself, put the knife down -”
Coming back was like taking a breath of air. Namwoon’s head spun, and his throat was made of sand every time he attempted to inhale. He choked on the sand, and in his mouth it turned to iron.
Someone was holding him down. Somehow, he was too tired to push them off. He felt a hundred years old. An aching pounded in his brain, desperate to be let out. Leave, he wanted to say. No one’s keeping you in.
“You got a concussion,” someone said. “Don’t fall asleep.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he slurred, then closed his eyes.
In his mind someone was screaming again, and when it was dark he finally realized that it was him.
“You wanna tell me what that was about?” Hyunsung urged gently.
“Not at all,” Namwoon grumbled. “Ow ! Be careful!”
Mumbling a quiet apology, Hyunsung applied alcohol wipes to the cuts on Namwoon’s knees with gentler hands.
He wasn’t a child. He didn’t need big brother Lee Hyunsung to bandage his scraped knees for him. What was next? Kissing away his booboos?
Namwoon told him such. Hyunsung just laughed and pointed out he could if Namwoon wanted him to. Hurriedly, he shot back that he definitely did not want that, thank you.
Spending time with Hyunsung was different from Yoo Joonghyuk. At least with his mentor, Namwoon knew what to expect, or more accurately, what not to expect. With Hyunsung though, nothing was off the table. That man could do anything, and more often than not, it ended up making Namwoon feel like a small child.
It was almost like Hyunsung couldn’t tell that he was a sinner. But wasn’t it obvious? It’s not like he wasn’t the one who restrained Namwoon to the ground after he’d turned a man into ground beef.
Hyunsung must know. Which was why it startled Namwoon so much when Hyunsung did something stupid like ruffle his hair or bandage his scrapes like now, for example.
After a few minutes of relative silence, Hyunsung patted his knee and set the roll of bandages back in his backpack. Namwoon hated military people. They knew how to do everything except hold a proper conversation.
“I’m not a kid, you know.”
Hyunsung smiled. “Yes you are.”
“I’m twenty-two,” Namwoon retorted disbelievingly. Twenty-two. He only ever thought about his age when it was advantageous to him, which only happened when he was arguing with Hyunsung. He didn’t feel twenty-two. How was that supposed to feel?
“You’re still pretty much nineteen, don’t you think? I still think of us as the age we were when all this started.”
He scoffed, leaning against the wall. “You’re just saying that because you don’t wanna feel old, ahjussi.”
“Maybe.” Hyunsung looked to be deep in thought for a moment. For a second, Namwoon regretted pushing, but then the strange mood passed and he disliked Hyunsung as much as he always had. “Regardless, I’m still your senior, so you’re like a kid to me,” he finished with a smile.
“Tch.” Namwoon turned away. Talking with Hyunsung was always exhausting, mostly because he actually wanted to talk , unlike some certain someone (Yoo Joonghyuk).
But even with the bandages from Hyunsung’s loving hands, phantom aches of glass shards in his skin bothered him until he went to sleep.
In his dreams, he stabbed the man with the red pupils and blonde-white hair again and again, and dug his eyes out of their sockets so he wouldn’t have to see them glassy.
The man didn’t have time to be a sinner, or to be reborn stronger. He was simply dead.
In his dream, they were both screaming.
He lost his innocence long before the world ended. But he already told you that.
Boyhood meant love. That had never belonged to him, like he said. His boyhood was never his. It stuck to him like old glass, like a god meant to purify him of his sins via water but instead dropped the cup and watched it shatter against his skin.
His boyhood was never his, and maybe that was why Kim Namwoon had been so eager to get rid of it. A kid who had never known love wouldn’t hesitate to leave it behind.
But saying that would mean he was putting the blame on his creator’s shoulders, and he knew that wasn’t true. Kim Namwoon was born rotten. He was a dog meant for the pound in a human’s body, a sinner pretending to be a child.
He didn’t die when he was supposed to. Instead, he picked himself up from the bathroom floor that day and hadn’t known innocence since.
But then that wasn’t true.
There was something left in him. Something hopeful and hungry, but something that could have resembled boyhood. Innocence was a dog he abandoned. He never looked back to see if it was following him because he thought it wouldn’t. Because why would it? Namwoon was a dog meant for the pound. He was no master. He wasn’t even human.
Still, still.
He killed that dog, eventually. He hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t even known that it was still there. He didn’t know he had lost his innocence completely until he did. Before that, he hadn’t even known that there was any more to lose.
Kim Namwoon had always been foolish. He regretted many things. But he would never regret killing himself.
He killed himself when he was supposed to and lived regardless. He was reborn, and then he regretted everything else that came after.
“I think I love you,” Kim Namwoon whispered to her open palm, like a dog. He didn’t want this to be something he regretted.
Lee Jihye was not a sinner. She was no innocent, either. Namwoon hadn’t known that there could be an in-between before he met her.
There was something real about her, like she hadn’t shedded her human skin yet. She was so human and fierce that at first Namwoon felt afraid to touch her. Between a sinner and a person, one of them had to die.
That was before Jihye assured him, quite strongly, that she was no martyr, and least of all for him , of all people. Namwoon wanted to tell her that he was no person, but didn’t. She must know, because Yoo Joonghyuk was no human either, and they got along fine.
He expected to feel jealous of them. Strangely enough, he didn’t. Yoo Joonghyuk and Lee Jihye felt right, somehow. Moreso than he and Namwoon ever could. But maybe that wasn’t quite the reason. Maybe Lee Jihye just felt right, in anything she did.
Could sinners love? He wasn’t sure, but he knew that dogs could.
Jihye’s girlhood didn’t come in glass. It came like a second skin, and she shedded it day by day like someone was supposed to. That, he was jealous of. The thought of that scared him, because why would he be? He was the one that pulled the glass out of his skin, that bled on the bathroom tiles, that picked himself up again and survived stronger. Glass made him stronger, and he shouldn’t feel jealous of something like Lee Jihye’s innocence.
But when he thought about shards in Jihye’s skin, it didn’t feel right. She was strong without it. She was human and she was strong. Namwoon didn’t know that someone could be both at once.
But like he said. Namwoon was born rotten.
Jihye didn’t seem to think so. She poked fun at him like she would another guy his age, and he laughed with her like he wasn’t a monster. When he laid down at night, sometimes he did not dream at all. It was a nice routine. It was the most fun he’d had in years.
It was a lie.
“I’m not human,” Namwoon told her one day, when he couldn’t delude himself any longer. Jihye sheathed her sword, a drop of sweat running down the bridge of her nose from training. Slowly, he followed it with his eyes and pulled himself away when he realized he was staring at her lips.
“Are you delusional?” she scoffed with a laugh, raising an eyebrow. “The demon thing is a joke, dumbass.”
“No, not like that,” he protested, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I’m not like you.”
“Hah. Good one. Yeah, obviously! I would kill myself if I was chuuni like you.”
She turned away and put on her jacket before he could get another word in. Jihye wasn’t stupid and she must’ve known what he was trying to say. For some reason, she’d deflected it completely. He thought he knew why. It made him feel sick, somehow.
Later, when they laid on their makeshift mattresses and stared at the ceiling, Jihye finally spoke up. “What did you mean, back there?” she whispered to the dark, and Namwoon knew she was talking to him.
The night loosened his lips. That must've been why he started talking, started telling her things that he’d never said aloud — how he was a sinner, how he was born rotten with a bird between his teeth like a dog. He rambled on and on about the dog he’d killed and left beside the road and about the man with the red eyes and white-blonde hair, knowing he probably didn’t make sense. He had never been good with words or with metaphors. That, at least, had never changed.
Jihye didn’t say a single word as he talked. He didn’t think he was talking to her. His only audience was himself, saying these things out loud in a way he’d never done before, been afraid to do before.
As he talked, he remembered things he forgot long ago. He remembered knives and blood in the sink, remembered skin splitting apart and remembered thinking he was dying. He was never reborn, he realized after he stopped talking. He merely survived.
The night gave him courage, and it pushed words out of him like liquor. Why he was saying these things to Jihye was incomprehensible. She would never look him in the eyes after all this, he was sure.
“It made me strong,” he said, after a period of silence. He didn’t know who he was trying to convince.
Mattress springs creaked, and Jihye crawled closer to him. He could barely make out her figure in the dark, but he knew the shape and build of her face anyways.
“You didn’t need to be strong,” she whispered after a moment of thinking. “You needed to be loved, and to be held.”
There was nothing to be said. Namwoon had never been good with words, and definitely not at a time like this. Instead of saying anything, he nodded.
That was answer enough, and Jihye took him in her arms, pressing him close to her. She was warmer than any blanket could possibly be. He had never loved anyone more.
She held him, and when he opened his eyes he found that he was crying.
There was nothing to be said. Jihye was good enough at words, good enough to know that they were not needed. Not now.
“I’m sorry about your dog,” she said, finally. "We'll get you a new one."
They both knew what she meant.