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Jaekwan should probably feel worse about dying.
He wonders what it says about him that he doesn’t.
Lying on the filthy ground of an abandoned factory of nightmares, blood pouring out from the cut in his stomach. Vision fading, breath slowing.
He saved half the civilians he had meant to save. The rest, he had let die. Jaekwan doesn’t feel guilty about it. There isn’t room to feel guilty on the job.
There isn’t room to be afraid of death.
There is no way to call for help, no way to escape. He’d been reckless with his shoelaces, handing them off to a stranger to save them because he was foolishly certain he could save himself. He never would have made a mistake like that before he met Kim Soleum.
Kim Soleum.
His face flashes briefly in Jaekwan’s mind, as the pain of bleeding out takes what was left of his rationality. Kim Soleum. Agent Choi. Home.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
Home was temporary. Everything was temporary. Everything was meant to be held onto for as long as possible, and then quietly let go of when there was no other choice.
Jaekwan lived as long as he could. He tried to do good.
Now he lets go.
Just as quietly.
His eyes fall closed, breath fading. And he gives in. Letting the cold sink into his bones.
He’s tired. So tired.
He held on for long enough.
There’s a strange crackling sound that drifts in through the pain. Static. The sound of a dead radio trying to come back to life.
A creak.
A thud.
A voice in his ears.
“What a terrible place to be dying in,” a strange voice says.
A pressure on his stomach, right where the wound is.
Jaekwan gasps, choked.
“A dear friend of my dear friend deserves a much more dignified death,” the voice continues, dark and cheery at the same time.
The pressure increases, horrifyingly so.
Jaekwan blacks out from the pain.
/
He wakes up.
He wasn’t…supposed to, was he?
Jaekwan was half dead at that factory. There was no way he could have survived.
But he wakes up in an unfamiliar room, and when he touches the gaping wound on his stomach, there isn’t one.
He’s been healed.
He’s instantly alert. Something strange has happened here. The voice in his head, the pressure on his wound, the appearance of this room—was he saved? Or was he found by something worse?
“I trust you’ll make it back on your own,” a voice says from nowhere.
Jaekwan has his weapon out by the end of the sentence.
The voice laughs. It’s coming from…
…a TV?
The screen is static, blinking away like the old broken televisions they used to watch at the orphanage. There’s a blurred smiley face emoji on it, heavily pixelated.
“I’ll give my friend your regards,” the voice continues. “Although he doesn’t seem to hear a word I say… this Braun will keep telling him until it gets across.”
The screen flickers.
“Wait!”
It pauses.
The emoji doesn’t speak further, waiting for Jaekwan to gather his thoughts.
A friend. The face keeps mentioning a friend.
What sort of friend would want Jaekwan alive so badly that he would find a way to save him through an entity that is likely not even human?
“Do you know Agent Grapes?”
The screen flickers again in amusement.
“Quicker than usual today, I see.”
Jaekwan pushes past the insult that only brings up more questions. “Where is he?”
There hasn’t been any sign of Kim Soleum for five months now.
He’d left the bureau and disappeared completely, leaving no trace that he’d ever even existed behind him. Jaekwan doesn’t know if he ever got his Wish Ticket, if he ever made it home, or if he died on the way or if he’s lost in a ghost story—
“If I tell you,” the strange voice says, “Do you really think you could save him?”
Jaekwan tightens his fists.
So Kim Soleum is in trouble.
He’s in trouble, and the voice knows where he is. It’s a lead at last, and Jaekwan will beat the truth out of this TV screen if he has to.
“Yes,” he says, with a confidence he doesn’t have.
The screen flickers, the smiling emoji replaced with a grinning one. It looks terrifying, despite its innocence. Mocking.
“You couldn’t,” the voice says. “But I appreciate that you think you could.”
/
The strange voice calls himself Braun.
The name is familiar, but Jaekwan can’t place it. He tells Jaekwan that he’s the host of one of the greatest shows of all time, and that Kim Soleum had once been one of his best employees.
Jaekwan wishes he could say that sounded unlikely—but that was the sort of person Kim Soleum was. It was completely in character for him to have been employed on a deranged quiz show.
“Did he make it home?” Jaekwan asks.
“What is home, truly? My friend didn’t make it anywhere he wanted to be, if that’s what you mean. But where he wanted to be is a different question altogether.”
He didn’t make it home.
That meant he was still out there somewhere, and if Jaekwan were to trust the words of the host—he was in need of saving.
Jaekwan needs to find Kim Soleum as soon as possible.
“Where is he?” he tries again.
The emoji considers him for a long time, blinking away in amusement. And then—
“He’s right next to me.”
He’s… what?
The emoji disappears from the screen, and then Braun’s voice drifts through the screen again, but from much further away.
“Say hello, friend!”
His voice is muffled, as if he’s speaking to someone else.
Jaekwan’s heart stops.
Is he really with Kim Soleum?
Jaekwan strains his ears, but there’s no response to Braun’s words. The host keeps speaking cheerfully despite it.
“Your coworker is here wondering about you. This Braun saved his life, you know. If you could hear me you would appreciate that.”
What is going on?
“It’s a pity, isn’t it? He says he wants to save you. He’s even been trying, with that other coworker of yours. So many people willing to save you, my friend, and yet you refuse to even look up.”
Jaekwan’s throat is dry.
He’s across the room in a second, fingers pressing into the cursed TV screen, torn between shattering it out of rage and fear and being unable to let go because this is the only lead he’s gotten in months—
The screen blinks, and the emoji appears again, a face with mocking shock.
“What did you do to him?” Jaekwan asks, deadly quiet.
“I see you have the wrong idea. I’ve done nothing to him. I simply keep him company, but he isn’t doing well enough to notice yet.”
“Where is he? What’s wrong with him?“
“He isn’t quite himself.”
“What does that mean?”
The screen flickers, going black for a terrifying three seconds before it comes back with a squinting emoji.
“You know,” the host says, voice lower than it used to be, “You ask a lot of questions for someone who made him leave.”
/
Kim Soleum left the bureau right under Jaekwan’s eyes.
Jaekwan had spent days with him in the Glass Prison, getting to know him, telling Soleum things that he’s never told anyone before. They’d built trust in those days, Jaekwan knows they did. He’d seen the want in Soleum’s eyes when Jaekwan told him they could be his home.
But Soleum was released, and then—
He disappeared.
He left Jaekwan and Choi everything that he had, all his items, all his knowledge, and he disappeared off the face of the earth.
They haven’t stopped looking for him since.
None of the employees of Daydream seem to know where he is. There are no official records of his existence—not his birth, or his death, or any proof that he’d lived anywhere at all. Kim Soleum simply vanished, after promising that they would build a home together, leaving the Hyunmoo Team 1 waiting room quiet and terrible in his absence.
“I didn’t make him leave,” Jaekwan says, but he’s terribly afraid that it isn’t true. “I asked him to stay.”
The smile on the emoji appears to widen ominously. “You must not know him very well.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can not make my friend stay by simply asking him to stay.”
“I offered him a home,” Jaekwan says, voice hollow. “He wanted it. I know he did.”
“He did,” Braun agrees. “But that's never enough for him, is it? He didn't just want a home.”
“That's all he ever wanted.”
“He wanted to be safe,” Braun says easily. “Far more than to be home. He wanted someone to keep him safe, and you could never offer him that. You offered him the opposite of that.”
It’s—
It hits him straight in the heart, because it’s true.
Jaekwan never could keep him safe. He let Agent Grapes down over and over, always depending on him to save them all and never the other way around.
“He wanted to stay,” Jaekwan tries again. “I know he did.”
“Perhaps,” Braun says. “But not enough.”
/
The TV is Jaekwan’s only clue.
A TV, and a host. If he makes it back to the bureau and searches the Darknesses that they’ve recorded, maybe he’ll find a match. Maybe he can narrow down Kim Soleum’s location.
Maybe he can save him from this madman who has likely kidnapped him.
He traces the edges of the TV, searching for anything that can help him at all. He could just take the entire thing with him. Have it tested at the bureau. If the host can communicate through it, there should be a way for Kim Soleum to communicate through it as well.
He has to find out.
He has to.
He can’t let Kim Soleum down again.
Everything in Jaekwan’s life was meant to be held onto for as long as possible, and then quietly let go of when there was no other choice—but Kim Soleum has taught him that there is always another choice.
There is always a way through.
The smiley face on the screen is watching him examine the TV with some kind of amusement.
“You know,” Braun says conversationally. The emoji on screen switches to something wistful. “My friend did give up on his dream of returning home once.”
…what?
“Just once. He abandoned the idea of it and we built a much better home together.”
“You’re lying.”
“It’s the truth. We stayed together for quite a while, before he was brutally torn away. If only I hadn’t let him go back then, perhaps he wouldn’t be in this state right now.”
It can’t be true.
There is no way that Kim Soleum would have agreed to give up on his wish—especially not for this. Not for whoever this man is.
He had been happy with Hyunmoo Team 1.
Jaekwan knows this.
The genuine yearning in his eyes when he had mentioned that they could build a home together—
How had it amounted to nothing?
How had it been so easy for Kim Soleum to leave after that?
“You made a simple mistake,” Braun says, the emoji switching back to the smiley face. “You tried to convince him that this world was worth living in, which simply isn’t true. My friend would never fall for such a cheap lie.”
Was it not worth it?
Wasn’t the warmth of their comradery enough, to keep them going through the horrors?
Wasn’t the life they had built for themselves, in the quiet haven of Hyunmoo Team 1, enough?
Weren’t he and Agent Choi enough?
“On the other hand,” Braun says, “All I did was remind him that every world he might want to return to was as terrible as this one, but in mine—I could protect him.”
The emoji gets larger, as if the host is leaning forward.
In a low voice, he says—
“And that was all he needed.”
The screen flickers, and flickers, and dies.
The room is plunged into darkness suddenly.
Jaekwan is left alone, emptiness settling into his bones.
I could protect him.
Jaekwan never could.
He promised that he could, over and over, but he never did.
And Kim Soleum—
He left, because he knew Jaekwan could never keep him safe from the nightmares he was running from.
/
He left, because Jaekwan could never build a home that wouldn’t fall apart.
/