pooka!

IN THE FUTURE, YOU will be a fragment. No more than sweet memories swirling in the head of the boy who still loves you, little more than a whisper in the wind when a person who remembers thinks of you in passing. Keonho knows this, because he will remember you for as long as he still lives in the hellscape which becomes his life.

When he ventures into the forgotten city of Seoul at the break of dawn, back aching from sleeping under the table in the observatory for so long, the bags under his eyes more pronounced than the wild waves of his hair he’d forgotten to tame in years, he will think of the mornings you made the same trip, taking the same winding paths to the abandoned supermarkets and restaurants, ready to raid their supplies and kitchens, yet at a significantly earlier hour than Keonho will someday go out by himself, because nightmares had plagued you ever since that day in the mall.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he’d remember you used to say, your voice a gravelly murmur from lack of proper rest. Or lack  of hydration, or nutrition. Or what he didn’t wish to even think could’ve been affecting you. Perhaps not just a lack, but a complete and total depletion. You’d look ahead of you as if you hadn’t made his heart stutter in his chest with worry, looking towards you the same way he would’ve if you’d been shot and were bleeding out before his eyes.

Then you’d stop for a moment, leaning against a pillar that was long due to crumble to dust, splattered with dried blood from the early days. You’d catch your breath, and when you finally caught Keonho’s eye, you’d break into a smile—the kind you pulled when you wanted him to stop worrying, to shut up before he’d even said anything—and tell him, “Quit your nagging. I’m fine, Kkeon.”

Even now he won’t believe you. He refuses to. Because then he’d have to believe that perhaps it wasn’t preventable, that he wasn’t completely at fault like he wants himself to believe. Because then he wouldn’t be able to derive that sick, sick… could you even call it pleasure? He couldn’t, not when it left the taste of bile in his mouth. But that feeling, we all know the one, when we want to close our eyes and revel in the feeling that we are the only reason things went wrong, that the problem is with us, and not the people we loved. Love.

When he moves swiftly through the empty buildings, eyes sweeping over the empty racks as if he could conjure up something to eat, to desperately extract nutrients from, to keep him going for the next week just by looking at a nearby shelf like he wanted to kill it, he will think back to when the two of you first discovered this supermarket, stepping in tentatively as if danger was imminent, as if it were a real threat. Which, in those days, it was. Keonho had swept the place to make sure no one was hiding among the racks, waiting for the opportunity to make you their next victims, while you’d carefully picked apart the packed shelves, eyes roving over the items you’d been deprived of so long while absently stepping over the bodies in your way.

“Wah,” you’d once mused, eyes widening at the sights before you. “They have fresh fruit here.” No matter that the fresh fruit was splattered with blood just as fresh, that you’d have to pick your way through a makeshift graveyard while trying to get to the other necessities. All that mattered was that you no longer had to scavenge, no longer had to break into the houses of the departed to find what you needed.

Keonho remembered how he, in his past life, had made his way over to you, hovering cautiously behind as you filled up your backpack with goods—rice, soy sauce, black beans, fresh fruit and milk, bottled water; things that had become scarcities in the months that followed the incident. He’d do so whenever you go somewhere new, somewhere you didn’t exactly know how to navigate on your own. Waiting for you to slip up, to fall through the cracks of a split street, to trip over a fallen shotgun, so that he could reach out to catch you like he’d always done.

He’ll miss that in the future; the endearing trait which was your continued clumsiness. You were a girl who’d lived off axis, always found something to stumble over, whether it was obvious objects like bricks and steps, or the more complex things like words you wished you knew how to say, words he wished he could remember and understand.

When he stalks back into the empty streets, glancing back and forth to make sure he’s alone, Keonho will remember the first time he saw what he was currently on the lookout for. Will remember what it felt like to see that small, insignificant, seemingly harmless object floating through the sky, and the horror he felt upon realising what it carried inside, what it would do to his countrypeople, to his family, his friends, his… you. When he ducks, knees creaking as the ailed joints fail to keep up with the movement, grunting in pain as they hit the asphalt while a drone whizzes past, lights scanning the area for signs of life, for blood to infect, he will think of the days you told him you’d grown tired of running from them. That you felt like one day you’d grow so tired you’d simply succumb and become whatever became of you when you were caught.

Both of you knew what would happen. You’d seen it happen too many times to forget. And yet, like with anything, like with any teenager thinking of things they may have seen a million times before, you never truly thought through what it would be like if the same thing happened to you. What it would feel like, look like. Sound like. He still remembers, remembered, will remember your screams, will never fail to have it echo in his ears as he wakes up from yet another nightmare where you were still alive.

It will be a lonely path that he walks as he grows older, as he blossoms into an adult with no future, for the world around him had not only failed him, but fallen apart around him before he could ever experience anything besides puppy love. Even that could not withstand. A lonely path, yes, but at least he will find some people to join him after you leave.

When he travels back to the abandoned observatory he will call his headquarters, he comes face to face with one of these people. He’s sitting on top of his work desk, nose pressed intently into an English dictionary, some sort of mechanical device shredded to pieces at his side. “You’re late,” he’ll say, because the three of them will have arranged for a special, specific schedule to stick by, taking turns in showing their faces outside their home to scavenge, or gather supplies, or simply go out for fresh air, because in this new world, it is the only way to ensure survival. There’s no such thing as a leisurely stroll at midnight, not when the streets are filled with things waiting to rip you apart.

“Got distracted.” His words are short, to the point, not the winding roads he used to walk in conversation with you, not the rivers he floated down as you laughed, and he kept adding to his sentiments, hoping to get another out of you. Not here. Not now. He spoke now how he lived, just like he did when life was different. “But I brought noodles.”

Seonghyeon’s face did not light up much in the time Keonho had known him until this point, though now, when he mentioned a food that had become a luxury in that time, he swore he could see a trace of joy pattering across his handsome features. “Proper, or instant?”

“Both.”

His eyes might even light up, just that slightest bit, like a bulb dully flickering on after a power outage. “Ooh, goody.”

Keonho can only muster a slight smile, accompanied by an exhale from his nose; the closest anyone could come to smiling nowadays. How odd, that once he’d been the sort of person you teased for smiling too much, as if his life had been nothing but cupcakes and rainbows at one point. Unfortunately, cupcakes only lasted so long, and rainbows were blown away by the harsh winds of change, swallowed by the acid rain of apocalypse. “Here,” he’d say, lifting his backpack and tossing it across the room, Seonghyeon catching it like he’d caught the many basketballs he’d thrown in high school, when the world was still as we know it today, “help yourself.”

The last thing Keonho would hear before he confined himself to the equatorial room for the remainder of the day was, “Don’t mind if I do.”

In the future, Keonho is a shell. Something that echoes the boy he used to be, that reminds those who knew him before of what he once was, before everything happened, before he lost himself in memories. His friends, fellow survivors, know this, because they barely see him outside of grocery runs, when he isn’t pulling all the bits of information he can find apart piece by piece, practically gnawing at the bars of the enclosure he’d thrown himself into.

When he takes his usual leave and disappears up the steps to the equatorial room, raw fingertips brushing against the dusty railing, swollen eyes blinking through the curtain his wild, unruly waves make over them, it is only a matter of time before he finds himself at the top of the staircase, staring out at the floor, covered by books and pieces of scrap metal, the dim screen of a beaten laptop blinking in the corner like an alarm, always frozen on a radar that turns and turns with every second that passes, tracking drones and searching for uninfected life forms.

He will take an uneasy seat on the wooden floor, dust gathering in the same spot on his trousers from where he sits down, day after day, without fail, to search, to remember. He’d begun this search when you were still by his side, and he remembered how you would lean over his shoulder while he worked, glancing at his computer screen with a frown, the scent of you brushing against his collarbone.

There was one day where you simply stayed like that, pressing your chin into his shoulder and taking a seat behind him, breathing in his air, in silent awe of what you could only assume he’d soon accomplish. You’d watched as he scanned through government databases, fingers cruising over the keyboard to switch to another tab when he didn’t find what he needed. Unfamiliar words popped up, flashed across your line of vision as your best friend attempted to find the creator of the small device responsible for the destruction of your world as you knew it. You’d sampled a few possible names, though none of them pointed to an experiment resembling one like this which had been executed. That, and all of them had died off long before you needed to really know who they were. A dead person is no bigger danger than a fly.

“Do you remember,” you’d spoken up that day, voice muffled from where your words landed into his soft sleep shirt, cold hands playing with the warm, sunkissed skin of his back, “that man we saw? That night after the barbecue restaurant? The one with the board?”

He’d frowned at the sudden question, the enquiry he’d, at that time, deemed rather unimportant, though satiated your curiosity by answering, “I do. What makes you think of that right now?”

“He said something when we walked past him, on our way back home… something about following Salhae,” you murmured, brow creasing as you attempted to recall the exact details of that night. You’d come back from having dinner together one night after school, after your tutoring and after Keonho’s swim practice, when you’d been stopped by an elderly man standing outside of your apartment block, walking around and wearing a sign around his neck that said, Follow Salhae for a better life! Choose the truth!

You’d run away from him then, muttering your disapprovals. 

“You think that man may have had something to do with the apocalypse?” Keonho wondered, quirking a brow then. “The old guy with the sign?”

“No, stupid.” You’d landed a smack to his head that made him hiss in pain. “The man he spoke of following. Salhae.”

“Probably just some second-rate cult leader,” Keonho dismissed.

You’d sighed, dramatic as always. He missed that about you. “Whatever you say.”

That would have been nearly a year ago to the day. Keonho hasn’t come any further in his research. 

When he finally collapses on the floor of the observatory, eyes fluttering shut under the starry sky, most probably from malnutrition, as becomes the new standard for him—not so much a lack of eating because of too little food, or personal restrictions, more so the sheer dedication he has to something besides living, besides surviving, because he figures, out of the two of you, he’ll always be better at that—he dreams not of his future or his past, not in the way he used to. He dreams no longer of something embarrassing happening in front of his classmates as he tries to deliver a presentation, or a collection of memories from age five to twelve that he could only remember a few seconds of. 

Rather he dreams of you. He doesn’t ever know what exactly it’s about, what you’re doing in his dreams, what subconscious value you carry; he only knows that you are there, and you will be there for as long as he is alive. He will dream of you in various stages of your shared life, fragments and shattered pieces of the mirror you’d once held up to him, to Keonho. You say things that don’t make sense, half-words and sounds that could be mistaken for something you’d have said if you were still alive. Fleeting moments, your face in the window of a passing train, your reflection glimmering in the screen of his phone, your laughter in his ear, warm, comforting, living breath tickling the shell of his ear, making the hair on the back of his neck raise.

He will wake up only two hours after he’d passed out, like clockwork, as it strikes midnight, shooting up from the filthy floor with a gasp, skin sticky with sweat, the air ragged and broken as it escapes his weak lungs. He’d cough, doubling over until it seemed his throat could give no more, and for a moment, he will swear he feels your hand on his back. But the feeling is gone before he can say it, before your palm was splayed fully over the skin, before he could shudder at the feeling of you on him again.

When he finds himself in this position, on his knees, hands clasped as if in silent prayer, hair sticking to his dewy skin in a way that makes him want to claw his eyes out, lips trembling as they press against his permanently broken skin, he will remember the day he’d doubled over your dead body like this, muttering prayers and curses as if that would guarantee him forgiveness. He will still hear the sound of his gun clattering to the floor, the round he’d loaded in the morning emptied in seconds. The loud, deafening bang! that had come seconds before, and the thud of your corpse against the concrete seconds later.

He will remember how you’d begged him before you’d been turned, how you’d physically clawed at his skin until he made you promise that if it took, if the pin that had been shot into your neck began to change you, change you, change you until you were no longer the girl he knew, the girl he loved, the girl he wanted, he would kill you. 

“It’s for your own safety,” you’d said. Your voice had been trembling, and in the moment, you looked no older than the five year old girl he’d met on the playground after he’d pushed her face first into the sandpit, not even thirteen years later. “You know what the virus does to humans. You won’t be able to fight me off once I’ve turned. I won’t be able to forgive myself if I kill you.”

Tears had welled up in his eyes when you’d said that. You wouldn’t be able to forgive yourself? You, who did not love him the way he loved you? You, who did not dream of a life with him the way he did with you, with children and pets and a white picket fence and stories upon stories to tell? You, who had only ever seen him as Ahn Keonho, your best friend, four months younger and years behind mentally, a friend and nothing but? You? Understand?

“And you think I would?!”

The words had come out more desperately than he’d intended, a hoarse scream where he’d only wished to question you sincerely. Perhaps it was because in that moment all he felt sincerely was pain, and rage, and the all-consuming feeling that his life wasn’t fair. Every teenager felt it; boys, when they didn’t get the girl; girls, when they didn’t get the grade.

But could all the teenagers in the world with unfair lives compare to this one? Keonho’s, in which he’d been forced to fight for his life, survive an apocalypse, the outbreak of a virus which wiped all logical thought from a human’s brain, reducing them to soulless, heartless killing machines? In which he’d stood in front of the girl of his dreams, a gun pointed at her chest, ready to shoot, because if he didn’t kill her, she’d kill not only him, but several other people who deserved nothing of what they’d been given in life?

He will remember and never forget, not even when the familiar footsteps race up to the observatory, where you and Keonho had looked at the stars through the old telescope for so long before you left, before he made you leave. Not even when Martin, the second addition to his lacklustre group of so-called guerrilla survivors, desperately hoists him to his feet while he tries, tries to speak through sobs, hiccuping, crying about the day you left.

It’s easy to say that you’d choose the greater good over personal gain when nothing is at stake. When you’re spread across your bed, your best friend’s head in your lap as you discuss things you thought were reserved for the movies, ask, If you were given the chance, would you save the whole world, or just one person?

It’s easy to say yes to the former when you are with the one person you’d sacrifice the world for, when they are alive and well and by your side, and when you press your hand to their chest much to their confusion, you can breathe a sigh of relief when you feel their heart thumping beneath your palm. When they can still smile, and laugh at your jokes, and kiss you the night before the world ends because fate brought you that one centimetre closer, and you can imagine the rest of your life with them in it. Then, it’s easy.

But when you stand in front of that same person, your person, gun cocked, staring into their eyes as tears roll down your face, knowing that in a few seconds, you will be forced to choose between the two worst versions of them you’ll ever see. You will have to fight for your life, and escape with it as they chase after you relentlessly, because those infected have no other purpose or drive besides killing, because they do not eat, they do not sleep, until every last person and, eventually, if they catch a glimpse of themselves in the reflection of a mirror, is dead. Or you will have to watch as they fall to the ground, landing first on their knees, then on their face, dead to you and to the world, blood flowing from the newfound cavity in their chest. When that happens, the latter seems like the only reasonable option. Damn the world, your world. What about his world?

A dead person is no bigger danger than a fly. But flies carry disease. They carry conditions and viruses that could end lives, that could rot creatures from the inside out, and that was what you were doing to Keonho.

You’d infected him with whatever you’d carried in your heart before he shot you straight through it, and now he was no better than a living, breathing corpse, reduced to nothing but bruised skin and bone that knew only to remember you. 

IN THE PAST, YOU were complete. Like the moon once a month, full, shining brighter than all the stars in the sky, acting like a guiding light for those moored in the depths of uncertainty before they met you. Keonho knows this, because he was once just that. A lost soul, washed up on the shore of life, before you found him. Saved him.

It was a heavy burden to carry, especially for someone you’d met when neither of you had any awareness of the world outside of yourselves, when you didn’t know the difference between important or trivial when it did not concern you. That was why Keonho never told you what you truly meant to him, never told you why he stared at you when you walked home from preschool together, never told you why you started receiving texts and calls close to midnight once you became teenagers together, never told you why he held you so far away when he eventually blossomed into a young man.

When you were in middle school, that particular detail hadn’t mattered. That Keonho’s own dignity depended solely on you, his best friend who knew nothing of such things occurring. It hadn’t mattered because it hadn’t yet had the chance to stand in the sun, to be brought to your attention and to bring your whole world crumbling down. That would only come much later, once you turned fifteen and sixteen, and an apocalypse served as the catalyst to your friendship. 

Back then, you were only thirteen and fourteen, doing little more than existing as you wished to, trying and failing to fit into the moulds you’d been shaped to since your births. Back then, as you zoned out of a Maths lesson while your teacher explained a theoretical concept to death, you hadn’t anticipated how your life would turn out, let alone that it would turn out like this. Like that. 

It had been a busy morning that morning, wherein you’d done everything from the chores you’d held out on doing the previous three nights to the next four days’ homework in the space of a few hours before the sun came up, all because you’d wanted nothing more than to, when you got home from school that afternoon, land unceremoniously on your well made-up bed and doze off until you were called to dinner that evening. Of course, that didn’t happen, and you rather spent your entire late afternoon and evening with Ahn Keonho, the boy in the grade beneath you who couldn’t seem to ever leave you alone.

That obviously wasn’t how you viewed him then; it wasn’t how you’d viewed him when you first met as preschoolers, and it wasn’t how you’d ever view him in the future. Keonho was nothing short of a precious gem in your otherwise dull and predictable life, a breath of fresh air in a way that was familiar enough to not be boring, that was new enough to not be frightening. You loved him more than you could understand, really, both in your head and your heart, had loved him in a way neither of you could fathom, in a way he hadn’t yet realised he loved you. But, God, he was as annoying as he was clingy. Which was to say, a lot.

You’d first been dragged to the park, where Keonho spent a grand total of fifteen minutes and thirty seconds spinning around in circles and telling you to watch how he didn’t get dizzy. This was, as we all know, an activity that did not reflect his true mental age, and was instead something many boys his age did, done for a reason many of them used in a situation that required no further explanation: because he wanted to. You let him, of course, and held his hair back when he dramatically threw himself into the nearest bush and announced he needed to empty his lungs. All he seemed to have in him, however, were a few dry heaves that got you nor him anywhere.

“I probably should not have done that,” he’d told you, wiping the corner of his mouth clean, though it hadn’t been dirtied in the first place. “Maybe that’s why my mom says I shouldn’t spin around just… whenever.”

“Or just… ever, for that matter,” you’d suggested, ever the voice of reason between the two of you. Keonho waved you off with a queasy look, cheeks still pink from the flurry of movement which had occurred just moments before. 

The park had not been busy that day, it was a Tuesday—Keonho remembered, because you wore your jean shorts on Tuesdays. Mondays and Thursdays were for skirts, Wednesdays and Fridays were wildcards, and on the weekends you stayed in your pyjamas. Not that he’d consciously noticed it then, all those years ago. No, he had not, and it had not been busy; an oddity considering the time and circumstance the park had found itself in. A lovely spring afternoon, during peak park-visiting hours. The weather had turned from chilly to bearable, not yet dialled completely up to that hot, humid heat known to Seoul natives during the summer, but not anymore the biting cold that had passed during winter and autumn.

This had been how you and Keonho had once spent the majority of your afternoons, strolling around the park only a few blocks from your homes, talking about everything and nothing all at once. Hands shoved in your pockets as you discussed the world as you knew it at length, tried your best to make sense of things you wouldn’t understand for a long time to come. Your conversations wound on like the roads passing through the park, taking twists and turns as the topics changed while you spoke. Soon enough you found yourself lost, not only in your words, winding and lilting with each sentiment you wished to express, but literally, lost inside the vast park you then realised you hadn’t explored nearly as thoroughly as you thought you had. 

Keonho hadn’t seemed to notice that you’d lost your way, that the path you’d disappeared down had seemingly vanished, that you were now walking peacefully unattended under dozens of trees forming something more of a forest than a park. He hadn’t noticed how it became darker and darker with each step that you took as the leaves grew thicker and denser, slowly blocking you from the stifling summer sun that had crept into your throats just moments before. You knew from prior research, a late-night thought turned helpful pocket of knowledge, that the difference in oxygen levels between forests and normal air were miniscule, that one would not effectively inhale too much oxygen when walking through a forest as dense as that one had turned into, yet, despite that, despite your knowledge on the matter, it felt to you as if that fact had been a fabrication; something to distract from the thickness of your lungs as you inhaled the enriched air, to take away from the chill that rang through your spine as the sun disappeared from your sight.

It was only after a good twenty minutes that your best friend had seemed to catch on to the change of scenery, head raising heavenwards as if in a daze, and asking, “What is this, now…?”

“Not sure,” you’d answered, trying to catch just what he was looking at, but it seemed as if he’d simply been taking in the view, eyes roving over every detail he could find. “But it’s getting darker. Maybe we should turn around and get back to the park.”

You weren’t sure what it was that possessed Keonho to say no. Perhaps it was a spur of the moment sort of feeling, simply something telling him not to turn back because he wasn’t ready to return yet; perhaps it was something that had been boiling beneath the surface of his skin for much longer than you could make sense of, that had told him to abandon his life as he knew it with you by his side, to turn and walk further into the unknown until he found something he could make sense of. Whatever it was, his eyes darted to meet yours and he simply said, “I don’t want to.”

For some inexplicable reason, that was enough for you.

It was that Tuesday in the height of summer of your fourteenth and thirteenth years that you and Keonho ended up in a clearing hundreds of metres away from the park you’d been strolling around since you were toddlers, having journeyed through thick forestry and near-darkness before you found yourselves there, in that pocket of sunlight. The whole place had a green tinge to it, yellowish tones blending into the background. In a way it was rather dreamlike, the sunlight turning pale from where it shone down through the trees, sickly green hues changing the colours of your skin to something all the more inhumane.

Despite its odd appearance, all the wrong colours in all the wrong shades making you feel all the wrong things, you felt at ease where you’d stood then, Keonho next to you as he stared the way he always did at things he wished he could memorise, burn into his retinas so as to never forget the image of them. You didn’t know then that he’d turned to you with that same look in his eyes, as if you held his world in your shaking hands, as if you had all the answers to all the questions he had for you and the world. His world.

“Wow,” he’d said. “It’s so… peaceful here.”

Yet, despite the ease you felt, the ease that simply seemed to be a common side effect of standing next to your best friend, there was something else in the air that made the hair on the back of your neck raise. That made your fingers tremble, your eyes want to dart around and make out the shapes that moved through the bushes that stood faraway. You know that feeling, that overwhelming feeling that something—that someone was following your every move? Watching, waiting for you to make a wrong move?

That was what you felt. “It feels kind of creepy.”

He glanced at you. “What do you mean? It’s beautiful here.”

“I’m not sure,” you said, and a thin shiver ran up your spine. “I just… it feels creepy here. Like something’s about to jump out and—”

BANG!

Never in your life had you heard a gunshot. In an environment as isolated and protected as your own, such weapons of destruction had seemed like a faraway reality affecting only those in the worst of positions. Fictional heroes faced with a formidable villain. People in war-torn countries doing their best to survive. A deer being hunted by someone who wanted their skin and nothing more. Those were the beings that had worries of guns, of rifles.

It was at that moment your life started falling apart.

At that moment, you became the deer. Hunted for its skin and nothing more.

Keonho’s head whipped around and, in a moment of panic, you fell to the floor, palms flat on the leafy ground as you landed with a painful crack. You paid no mind to the possible injury, instead whirling around and dragging Keonho down with you in a desperate attempt to get to safety. The shot hadn’t come from a discernible direction, the bullet landing somewhere too far and too close for you to tell where it really was.

“What the hell was that?!” he’d demanded, as if you’d have any knowledge of such a thing. “Did someone just shoot at us?”

The incredulous, terrified look you’d sent his way had ensured you didn’t even need to answer properly for him to understand exactly what you were trying to say. 

There had been a deadly silence that rang through the air as you waited with bated breath for whatever came next. Would it be another shot that narrowly missed your heads as it had the first time, or would it be right on target? Would it be your unfamiliar foe revealing themselves, telling on themselves why they’d shot at you in the first place? Or would nothing happen, and you’d have to walk home that afternoon wondering whether everything you’d experienced up until that moment had been a figment of your overworked imagination?

You’d stood with great hesitance, your eyes still wide as you tried to make sense of the previous moments. Your hand blindly reached for Keonho’s, and you were lucky enough that he didn’t question when you squeezed it so tight the tips of his fingers turned red, blood rushing to the scarred joints. No words were exchanged then, nor as you began to make your way to the right, where you could’ve sworn you’d come from.

And you’d sworn then and for years to come that you saw a figure rise from the bushes as you ran away, masked face watching you with eerie, indiscernible calm. Watching, waiting for you to make one wrong move.

You’d stumbled back into the park in a daze, finding it in the exact same state you left it in: peaceful, a near utopia where families gathered for the afternoon, having fun and laughing amongst themselves. You and Keonho, conversely, walked through the scattered crowds in a daze, grasping each other’s hands as if your lives depended on it. It was only later that day, when the afternoon bled into evening, when the sun set below the rolling hills, that you and Keonho found yourselves side by side again. That time, in a dark street in front of a telephone box.

You’d returned home hours earlier, though the stay did not last long before Keonho was knocking on your door again, telling you that he wanted to talk to you about something. It had not been an uncommon occurrence, this thing of your best friend solemnly telling you he wanted to talk about something. Usually it meant that he wished to discuss the trials and tribulations of his life, to walk around your neighbourhood and vocalise his thoughts until your feet started to hurt and you asked to go back home. You’d talk, too, when he asked you to come with him. About small things. Big things. Things you didn’t want to talk about with anyone else besides Ahn Keonho.

It had gotten dark by the time you’d gone outside, the sky an inky black illuminated by the warm lamplights lining the streets. There had been a soft feeling to it, dazed and eerie, like a dream where nothing felt quite right. 

Keonho had been standing in front of the old telephone box for a good fifteen minutes before you’d shoved his shoulder to one side, asked him why he’d dragged you outside so late. You’d been shivering beside him since you’d arrived, watching and waiting for him to make a move, and yet he did not, standing still as a statue as he stared at the old-fashioned telephone inside. He was still in the clothes he’d donned earlier, his favourite navy blue bomber jacket and jeans; you, conversely, had already changed into your pyjamas, and had been shuffling around in slippers with comically large puppies on the fronts of them. 

“Hey,” you called, voice showing telltale signs of frustration you rarely felt towards him. “Are you going to do something, or what? Why did you even bring me out here tonight?” you continued. “Why would you need to use a telephone like this? Why—”

“I don’t want to use it for anything,” he said. “I just wanted to get out of the house for a bit. Clear my head for a bit.”

“With me shivering in my pyjamas next to you?”

He had found it in himself to smile. “Yeah. With you next to me.”

You had wanted to roll your eyes. Usually, and, really, always, you’d had an ungodly amount of patience for Keonho and his neverending antics. There was something about the way he went about doing things that made his actions significantly less irritating than they would’ve been if they had been thought out or done by anyone else. You’d always been a patient girl, towards everyone you knew, but it stretched especially far and wide for the likes of your best friend. All that considered, though, you’d once had your limits. This—having your evening unwinding interrupted by his meaningless ruminating—bordered on crossing them.

And, if you’d been completely honest with him then, as you should’ve been, you would have told him you were still shaken from that afternoon. Only a few hours before, a bullet had whizzed through the space you’d occupied and narrowly missed your head, your heart, wherever it could have struck, and you’d had not the slightest as to why or how someone tried to shoot you in the first place. It had been something so out of sorts that you’d started to doubt your own sanity in the matter, that you’d laid in bed just moments before wondering if it had even happened in the first place.

It was Keonho who assured you it had.

“I was just thinking about what happened this afternoon,” he had confessed. “I mean— you remember it, don’t you? That someone—”

“I do,” you interrupted, voice shaking with something that begged for his words not to be closer to the truth than they already had been. You hadn’t told him then, and you would not for years to come, but you’d go on to dream about that masked murderer you’d seen as you turned your back and ran all those hours earlier. You’d never forget that face. That unfamiliar visage. 

He’d shaken his head, as if trying to make sense of a thought he hadn’t dared to speak aloud. “I’m just so confused. Why someone would shoot at us— who would want something like that to happen to…”

He’d trailed off, eyes falling somewhere behind you, somewhere into the lamplit street. You’d frowned then, turning with a look of pure confusion as your eyes searched for whatever his had settled on, before finding that very thing standing right in front of you, making her way through the street with odd urgency in her step for the late hour. Sejong, Keonho’s swimming instructor, had been walking at a questionable speed when you’d caught sight of her, brows then raising in understanding, and further subsequent confusion. You knew then what he’d been looking at, but the new question was why you were looking at it, why you were watching her scurry off somewhere close to ten o’clock at night when you’d known her to live in an entirely different neighbourhood.

“Instructor Lim?” Keonho had called out, the greeting coming out as more of a question than anything else.

She’d whipped her head around then—Lim Sejong had always been an attractive woman, a decade or two older than you, with flowing black hair that came to her tailbone, and a dainty yet muscular frame that had often had you seething with jealousy. Her face, beautiful and sculpted and filled with an uncharacteristic anxiety, had split open into a smile you could only have called forced. She’d stopped, if only briefly slowing her step and redirecting herself to you, and greeted, “Oh, it’s Ahn Keonho!”

She’d said your name, as well, the foreign vowels sounding wrong in her mouth, moving with difficulty from her pink lips, and you’d given her a tense wave in return. You’d stood awkwardly as she approached you with the grace of a reanimated corpse, the smile on her face appearing to tighten the closer she came.

“What… are you doing out so late, seonsaengnim?” your best friend had asked.

She had told you, with something—not hesitation or apprehension, per se, but something worrying, “Oh, a little bit of this… a little bit of that.”

“…Right.” Keonho looked unsure.

You had not dared to say a word.

It had been mere minutes later that you found yourselves following after the young woman once she’d excused herself as cordially as she could, creeping along the dark streets after her. There’d been a wordless sort of agreement that occurred between the two of you when she took her hasty leave; a glance that spoke a thousand hushed words. 

“We should follow her.”

“Something is the matter.”

And, most loudly of all, “Something definitely isn’t right.”

You’d found yourselves in front of the old Sohn Bathhouse, a nearly derelict building that had known no true business for several long years. It had once been a place frequented by many people, though a bad reputation and aging customs had turned it into some sort of time capsule, a place where only certain people of a certain age and persuasion spent their time. You’d been told to steer clear of it—not just it, but the entire street it was to be found on—from as young as six. You could’ve only assumed it had gotten worse over the years as you’d grown older.

When you were teenagers, thirteen and fourteen and no older, it had become known by that time as a place where shady business deals took place, where the wrong kind of people came to make the wrong kind of conversation. So, in all senses of the word, you did know not to go near there. If not for the reasons you’d already known of, then certainly because of what followed.

It looked like a typical enough building, in the same style as the older areas of the neighbourhood which, on its own, from what the creaking walls and rusted locks of your flats told you, was not very young to begin with. Green tiles tumbled from the roof which had started to collapse in on itself; paint peeled from the walls, cracks lining the brick beneath. An old wooden sign read, Sohn Bathhouse.

Inside, it looked even worse. Old, terracotta-coloured tiles had split to reveal muck beneath the floors, while the flickering lights cast an eerie blue glow overhead; the kind that highlighted every imperfection of whatever caught itself under them, every ridge and bump and curve of your faces and bodies. Keonho looked the same to you as he always did, handsome in that childish way all young boys were. A future shone on his face, something that told every adult who came across him that he’d make a terribly attractive young man in a few years, something that made you hope your friendship would last longer than most childhood friendships of your nature did.

Sejong had moved jerkily through the halls, not daring to glance behind her for even a second. Her fear, her apprehension had worked in your favour then, for you could follow behind her completely undetected, while she continued down the pathway, blissfully unaware of your presence only a few metres behind her.

It was in the old Sohn Bathhouse that you had gotten your first taste of the disaster which was to come, which was to follow you for as long as you could remember.

The voice you had heard when Sejong finally slowed to a stop, caught somewhere between the locker rooms and the receptionist’s desk, her back straight with unseen discipline, with years’ worth of punishment, made your blood run cold, freezing over like the Han River in winter.

“Evening, Agent 29. Were you followed?”

Sejong’s voice, steadier than you’d ever imagine it to be, “No, sir. I made sure of it.”

“Why are you late?”

Momentary hesitation. Would she sell you out? “I got lost on my way here, sir. I offer thousands of apologies.”

“Do not let such a mistake be repeated in the future.”

“Of course not, sir.”

A moment of silence passed. “Come in.”

Sejong disappeared into a doorway, the old, wooden slab clicking shut behind her. Yours and Keonho’s eyes had widened in fearful harmony, and like the smart, responsible children you’d always been, you’d approached the door and pressed your ears against it. You didn’t know it then, but the door did not shut fully, so was the disadvantage of meeting in such an old building that no longer had a proper, permanent owner for upkeep’s sake.

What you heard, what came out of that bathhouse locker room, turned your life upside down in the worst of ways.

“It has been approximately three years since our leader’s death, which is why I have gathered you all here tonight. Things have been moving infuriatingly slowly in the progressional sector of the Salhae plot, and we are running out of time. We need to have everything finalised and ready for execution before 2024.”

“Our scientists have been working tirelessly, sir, to perfect the formula, however they continuously are faced with challenges inside the human body. The test subjects’ wills do not break quickly enough; they all die before it can properly take, not because of its effects, but because their bodies shut down before such things can happen.”

“I’ve seen it with my own eyes, sir. The injections do not take quickly enough. What occurs in the mind and body in the first three days of infection is something that works endlessly against its effects, fighting and fighting until the subjects all eventually die of brain haemorrhaging. They do not even reach the final stage before dying.”

“And why do you suppose that is? It is because we have lost our way, we have forgotten ourselves, and been too soft with these weak-willed test subjects. Manual injection is not a viable option for spreading Beongyeonsalhae. Our leader said so himself. We must resort to the old ways. We must revisit the original blueprint.”

There was a moment of simultaneous hesitation. From the people in the room, the henchmen of an unnamed villain, the followers of a dead man, and from those outside, the teenagers listening on in fear, frozen where they had stood, refusing to have mercy on themselves and leave, leave and pretend as if nothing had happened, walking away untouched.

“But, sir… we have established that the drones would double the time it would take to spread our message. The building of them alone would take years, much less the programming, the upkeep, not to mention how technology is constantly changing—”

“Are you questioning my authority, Agent 44?”

“No, sir, but I am—”

BANG!

The second time you heard a gunshot was that night. It echoed throughout the cold, silent night, and was followed by the sound of something falling to the ground with a thump. A body. That man’s dead body. Killed, wiped out in seconds, before he had even had the chance to finish his sentence. It was the first time you’d heard that, the sound of a body hitting the floor, a skull splitting open as it hit the floor, but even for that night, it would not be the last.

A dead silence followed the shot.

“Is there anyone else who dares speak out against me?” Nothing. “I was our mighty leader’s second in command. When he left us and passed on to the spirit world, I was left in charge. I am as good as your leader, second only to the man himself. Now, without the doubts of such pests plaguing our minds, I want us to move forward with our plans.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Our home, this planet that we live on, has been run aground by the likes of filthy commoners, lowlives who do not do their part, who greedily gobble up the economy, the systems that hard workers such as ourselves have put into place. That must, once and for all, come to an end. They must be put to an end. We are an overpopulated nation, an overpopulated Earth. We must ensure that only the fittest, only the smartest, only the worthiest survive. Only those like us. I have tested a handful of drones created by a new team of scientists in Chulmyeong Park this afternoon, and they work with electrifying precision. That is why I have gathered you all—minus Agent 29, who has thankfully shown his true colours—to be the first messengers of Salhae’s plot.”

There had been a gentle chime of agreement, like a factory lineup of robots pledging their allegiance to their supreme leader, Sejong’s voice among the loudest of all. “It would be my honour, Commander, to spread our message all over the world.”

“Perfect. Now—”

Keonho would, in several years’ time, come to miss your clumsiness. It had always been such an endearing trait of yours; the way you’d tripped over your own feet, the way your mouth seemed to move too fast for your brain to keep up with. It was something that had made you appear so awfully adorable, that had taken the edge of your burning eyes right off. But in that moment, moments before disaster struck, that Tuesday night in a perfect, untainted Seoul, when you’d leaned back to take a seat on the floor, and without thinking shifted a loose tile, with a sound louder than a gunshot, Keonho wanted to kill you.

Your breath had hitched, and your eyes had flitted to meet his, widening like saucers. Your face had said it all. 

“…I’m disappointed in you, Agent 29. You said you were not followed.”

“Sir, I—”

“Take care of that. Make our leader proud.”

Sejong chased you as far as Chamsa-dong that night.

Five kilometres from the bathhouse.

Your lungs burnt with overexertion as you raced up the hilly terrain of the roads leading you past your home, up and far away from the safety of your families. You’d lost all sight of Keonho; the only thing that had told you he hadn’t been taken or given into the temptation of capture were his laboured breaths followed you around every corner, sounding as close as over your shoulder and as far as one hundred metres away. 

Your breath had shuddered as you rounded a corner, your back harshly hitting the brown brick of an unmarked building. You’d bitten your lip in an attempt to prevent the tears which so wished to fall, to roll hot and wet down your cheeks, wiping harshly at your dewy eyes as you looked around for any sign of Keonho. Your legs had shaken, had trembled with a sickening mixture of exhaustion and fear as you watched, waiting for the reassuring thump of his footsteps behind you, that would draw closer and closer as he neared you.

Perhaps it had been because of your long friendship, the many years you’d spent together, in close quarters with one another, that had given Keonho the same idea as you. Perhaps he had simply known you would’ve chosen such a route as the one you did, because he knew you that well—perhaps it was you who knew him so well as to wait for him and instead of running further as you so badly wanted to. Whatever it was, it had not been a second before he came barrelling after you, falling to his knees and bloodying the palms of his hands.

Tears rolled freely down his cheeks as he looked up at you, something unspoken in his eyes. Raw, unposed, unafraid of the judgement that came with ordinary circumstances. Your best friend, four months younger and years behind mentally, looking at you like he’d seen you die before his eyes. His lips moved, but no words came out. No words could come out.

It had all been a blur from there. 

The moment you’d noticed, you’d fully taken in your whereabouts and realised you were in familiar territory. When you’d stalked into the public swimming pool where Keonho spent most of his days practicing, training endlessly for the professional career he so yearned for, laughing with you and Sejong from where you’d once watched from the sidelines. When you’d hidden behind the entrance, closing the glass doors as gently as you could once you heard the deafening thump of her combat boots against the pavement outside, following tirelessly after you, her breath ragged as it escaped her lips.

The glow of the swimming pool shining against your sweaty faces, the way it had turned Keonho’s lips blue, not dissimilar to the shade they became when he’d confined himself to the water for too long. When you’d released a breathless, manic laugh that wanted to turn into a scream; of fear, of frustration, of everything that had occurred in the past ten hours that you could not think to discuss in that moment. When Keonho had looked at you like you carried the world on your shoulders, and you had a wordless conversation that came to a terrifying conclusion.

Either we die tonight, or she does.

It had been so difficult to reckon with that fact, though terrifyingly enough, the realer the threat became, the louder her shouts, her taunts of, “Come out of hiding, you cowardly little brats!” became, the easier it had been to come to such a decision as murder. To rationalise what you would’ve done in the name of survival, or salvation.

Fortunately, that moment never came.

Sejong burst into the opposite entrance, metres and metres away from where you’d hidden yourselves, the glow from the lit swimming pool turning her face a sickly sea green. 

The earlier conversation had been swirling in your mind when her eyes had landed on you, that deafening whisper, those words that made you sick to your stomach. As if you hadn’t been let off the boat carrying you over the cruel sea of Seoul’s hidden societies, the hideous underbelly that fought for a spot in the light of day. There were too many people in the world. Not enough were selected to die. Not enough faced a fate they had no say in. Over and over and over again, the words repeated themselves until they became virtually unintelligible. A murmur as foreign as the whole language had once been to you.

She’d stared at you for far too long, her eyes blazing with emotion you couldn’t make sense of. They flicked back and forth, between Keonho and his world, the moon and the planet in orbited, caught in an endless consideration, a one-sided exchange that came to a terrifying conclusion.

Her words were hushed across the water, her visage glimmering like a ghost’s. I have failed my people, she’d mouthed. But I will prove my faith with death.

BANG!

For the second time that night, a body fell from the heavens of life. Fell into the glistening, acidic blue water, and turned it a nightmarish shade of red. Like a deer, freshly dead on the forest floor, a hunter looming over its vulnerable form.

IN THE PRESENT, YOU’RE just his best friend. The version of you that Keonho is most familiar with, the version he falls deeper in love with every day. You are yourself in the present, flawed and funny and clumsy and so much more, so much more that makes his heart beat so hard in his chest it feels like it’s going to pop out. He doesn’t have to worry about you being hunted down, or infected, or shot in the head when you’re fifteen and sixteen. 

It is two years from the day you witnessed a woman kill herself when Keonho is falling asleep in the middle of a Calculus lesson, and his friend is throwing rolled up wads of paper in his direction, aiming for his mouth. Trying to choke him awake, he supposes, because that’s the best idea he can come up with right now. Their teacher, Mrs Cho, drones on and on about functions, how x fits here, y fits there, all things Keonho has already forgotten by the time he returns to school the next morning.

He’s rudely awoken by his friend’s mission succeeding, a piece of paper landing square in that part of his mouth that makes him jerk in his seat, eyes wrenching open like they’d been welded shut. He frowns, eyes turning stormy, searching for the perpetrator with a look in them like, What’s the big idea?

Mrs Cho is politely entertained. “Mr Ahn, if you’d like to sleep all day, I’d suggest that you arrange for lodgings outside of the classroom. Here is where you learn, not doze off.” She points at him, squarely at him and no one else, and adds, “You’ve earned yourself extra homework for the afternoon.” Then, as she turns back to the chalkboard, elegant hand raised, “Now, as I was saying about asymptotes—”

And so on the lesson goes until Keonho is saved by the bell, the bell which grants him the instant gratification of a finished schoolday; the last schoolday before the weekend, no less. He doesn’t care that he has homework for the next two weeks, if that—Mrs Cho tends to go overboard in her punishments—or that he will surely miss out on swimming practice because of it. All he cares about is that, for the time being, until reality inevitably catches up with him, he is home free.

He finds you soon enough in the hallway, exiting your last class of the day just as he had moments before. You look beautiful, he thinks, if only fleetingly, as the afternoon sun filtering through the windows catches on your skin. That thought is soon thrown at those same windows when he stops and takes you in properly. 

It’s not to say that time hasn’t been kind to the two of you, to your friendship. If anything, it’s been more merciful than ever. But it would be a lie if Keonho said you are still as close as you once were, you still see each other as much as you once had. Time has caused the two of you, the unforgettable pair of you, to slowly drift apart, to say a silent goodbye to your friendship as you’d once known it.

You’re still friends. Best friends. But something in Keonho’s heart has changed, and it’s making being around you something far too painful to be normal. It’s not like the mere thought of you, the mere mention of you in conversation makes him misty eyed, but there’s definitely something that’s changed in his heart that makes it difficult to be as close to you. Maybe nothing changed; maybe he’s just finally coming to terms with what he’s been feeling all along, since he was five years old, glancing up at the girl who, for not too long after they met, stood a few centimetres taller.

You find him looking at you not long after this string of thoughts occur in his pretty head, and give him a subconscious smile you didn’t know how to drop. He’s grown since that night in Chamsa-dong, into a rather handsome young man, if you were to say so yourself. Which, of course, you wouldn’t—because, considering your age gap, was just too weird. He was Ahn Keonho. The baby you called your best friend. 

He approaches you without a second thought, the movement something as subconscious as the step back you take to accommodate the space he takes up. There’s a wordless exchange between the two of you, wherein he nods his head, and you give him a look that’s started to make his knees feel weak. Shall we? you seem to be saying to one another. And though you aren’t what you used to be, the answer will always be yes.

Keonho has been a swimming prodigy for as long as you’ve known him. Every person who knew him, who’d seen him in action, all of them say he’s on a fast track to the Olympics, they all say he’s lucky to be so talented. You’re happy for him; you always have been, supporting him at every one of his meets and competitions, being there for him even through his difficult transition from one club to another after he’d lost his first coach in a freak accident. And yet, when you look at him, smiling up from that first place block on the podium, there’s a bitter, metallic taste in your mouth like blood, blood that flowed from the wound you’d bitten into your tongue in a fit of jealousy.

You’ve always hated how he had something. Something that he was so good at that he could do it for a living, that he could openly dream of and not be chided about. Something people considered a real job, a prestigious and honourable job. Something going for him. Something you didn’t have. 

You feel that taste in your mouth as you walk home from school with him, your shoulder bumping against his from your constant, necessary closeness that neither of you could ever go without. It’s the evening before one of the biggest competitions of his life, one that would decide whether or not he should go on to the Olympics, one that would seal his fate and change his world as he knew it, and you’ve never hated him more. 

He’s smiling as he’s walking next to you, teeth glimmering in the orange sunlight, sunkissed skin glistening like copper. His hair is blowing in the wind like he stepped out of some sick romance film, and he’s laughing, and you hate him so, so much.

Keonho doesn’t know that you hate him. That you’d hated him for years before, and that you will hate him in the years to come. It’s something that coexists with your love for him, your intense, burning affection that singed the edges of your still-beating heart, and it’s something that leaves you feeling conflicted whenever it flares up. It’s always fleeting, like the thought of kissing someone or hitting them, like the thought of making a rash decision or playing it safe, opposite sides of your heart warring against one another in an attempt to keep you safe from harm. Safe from the harm your handsome, talented best friend poses to you, to your wellbeing, your life as you know it. 

Keonho won’t know that you hate him, not for a long time. Not until after you’re out of his life, when he thinks back on all the things you’d told him before, and he realises that not everything he mistook as playful jabs had been all that innocent. 

But for now, all he knows is that you’re his best friend, and he goes to sleep every night wishing you would wake up that next morning wanting to be more. And all you’re going to say is that you’re proud of him, and that you wish you could be as free to express yourself as he is. That’s all that needs to be known or said, all that needs to see the light of day for now. Time will later tell what else needs to be revealed. 

“What are you thinking about?” Keonho asks you, squinting as he stares recklessly into the sun though he knows he shouldn’t. Something tells him that there’s a thing or two on your mind that you aren’t telling him, that you perhaps should be telling him. He’s always had that sort of intuition when it comes to you—whether it was borne of fear of losing you or a need to please you he doesn’t know. All he knows is that he has it, and sometimes, it feels like you have it, too.

You meet his eyes with great reluctance, the older girl chagrined by her annoying boy best friend once more. Little does he know you’re just tired and too hot and too jealous and too cluelessly in love with him to care how you look at the moment. “Nothing,” you lie, because every time someone says that in response to a sincere question it is a lie, an unspoken rule that acts as a veto for unwanted and unwarranted concern.

“You’re too smart to be thinking about nothing,” he shoots back. Keonho always had something to say. It was one of the reasons his grandmother had grey hair. “Tell me. What are you really thinking of?”

It’s hard to say what you actually are thinking of now. Your mind is a graveyard of thoughts, a place where things go to die; sometimes they rise, roaming around the place, making you think of things you thought you should’ve forgotten already, making sure you are never truly at rest because come sunset, come midnight, anything could rise up again. You always think of more than one thing, can’t keep a one track mind like some people say they can. You’re not even sure you believe that, that someone can only think of one thing at a time.

But you always try to be as honest as you can with Keonho, because after all, he is your best friend. “I’m thinking about the accident,” you confess, because in some corner of your mind, you are. You can’t forget it, really, that night from two years ago. Neither of you bring it up much, too afraid that it could bring back all those things you’d witnessed for good. So far in your life that’s how things have gone—you say something is going to happen and it does; you have a bad feeling about something that turns out to be true; you mention something from the past that returns in full swing. If it were any other time in history you’d have been tried for witchcraft. Unfortunately, you live in the twenty-first century, and can only call yourself a girl with positively rotten luck. “What we saw that night…”

Keonho doesn’t say anything to that. Doesn’t have anything to say to it, in all honesty. The cheek had been shocked out of him since that night, and his tendency to rehash old news faded into nothingness, into the recesses of his personality. It seems now that only you do things like that, mention things that have long since passed, wonder about things you shouldn’t be wondering about. Beating the dead horse until nothing remained.

“I just don’t know,” you say. “I can’t seem to forget about it. It’s like it’s—”

“Tattooed into your brain?” Keonho guesses. “You’re not the only one.”

You nod solemnly. “What are you thinking about?”

He tilts his head, thinking, mulling over the question. “My competition’s tomorrow morning,” he says, not fully answering your question. “I’m a little worried about that.”

“About what?” you question, critical frown marring your pretty features. Pretty, Keonho thinks. Pretty, pretty, pretty.

“Everything,” he guesses.

You roll your eyes. “Don’t.”

He’ll try not to.

It’s in the present where you and Keonho are the furthest you’ve ever been from each other, more so than when you become nothing more than a corpse rotting at his side, a sweet memory floating through the air and acting as a reminder of what once was. No, not even then will you be as far apart as you are now, sitting across from one another in a restaurant not too far from your apartment complex. 

The restaurant is busy, bustling with people who’ve just escaped from work, and are now lengthening their night by getting drinks with friends and colleagues, anyone but the people waiting for them at home, just as you and Keonho had gathered to avoid the pestering of your parents. You know that they are merely sharing their concerns, asking you what you intend to do with your life, questioning your need for autonomy, interrogating whether you’ve got someone special in your life and, if not, why?

There is music drifting through the air, but it is overwhelmed by the sizzling sound of meat being grilled to perfection right under your noses. Keonho yells to be heard over the ruckus, eyes narrowing as he asks, “Are you sure there’s nothing else you’re thinking about?”

“One hundred percent,” you tell him softly, at a volume only he can hear. It’s not the truth at all, but you don’t need him knowing what else you are thinking of. “Are you sure your competition is the only thing you’re worried about?”

“Yeah,” he answers, because it’s a really long, awkward road to walk down if you try to confess to your best friend of eleven years that you’re pretty sure you’re in love with her when it feels very much like she hates your guts half the time. “Just that.”

It’s in the present where Keonho takes you to the swimming pool where he’s been practicing since he was thirteen and had to switch clubs after Sejong shot herself in the head. It’s a larger area, with an Olympic-sized pool that Keonho often loses himself in when he’s not training. The white ceiling glitters with the chemical glow from the water, and the scent of chlorine wafts through the air as he swings the double doors open. There’s a smile on his face as he leads you inside, tugging you by the hand and whispering for you to hurry up and close the door.

“Come on,” he urges, reaching behind you to check that the coast is clear. Not that he can see much, when the sun has already set and the lights have been turned off inside the place, and he’s aided only by the glow of the underwater lights in the pool. 

You watch as he moves past you and towards the pool, and for a moment, you find yourself wondering what he’s about to do when he jumps into the icy cold water without a second thought, not even thinking to discard his jacket or pants. The only thing he’d rid himself of were his shoes. You run to the edge, eyes widening impossibly at the sight, and before you can stop yourself, chide, “Ahn Keonho! What are you thinking?” 

He can’t hear you, too busy laughing like his life is nothing short of perfect. It isn’t, and it never will be. There will always be something keeping his happiness from reaching its full potential, but in this moment, right now, as you stare down at him with something akin to deliberation swimming in your eyes, it is the closest he will ever get to it. Something like a happy ending. He smiles up at you, arms coming out in an arc around him to keep himself a float, and tells you, “Come on in. The water’s warm.”

Your expression drops to an unimpressed manner. “You always say that. The water’s warm. The water’s perfect. It’s just like a hot tub. And then when I get in it’s the coldest I’ve ever been in my life.” Untrue. The coldest you’ll be is when you’re dead in his arms in a year.

“You’re being dramatic,” Keonho says. “It’s fine. Don’t be a baby.”

You’re fighting the urge to say, You’re a baby, when something in you tells you to listen to him. To kick off your shoes and jump into the pool, into the freezing water with reckless abandon. It’ll feel good, you’re sure. If not to release the tension you carry every day of your life, then just to be that little bit closer to Keonho in a setting as intimate as the one where he practices his biggest passion outside of loving you. 

You’ve always been afraid of the water. It’s a rational fear you have, because your earliest memory is your stepmother hoisting you out of a pool when you were still too young to know any better than not to wander into the deep end. You never forgot how that felt, not even in the present as you are contemplating whether or not to join your best friend in a pool where the water would probably only reach your chin. How it feels to drown, or come very close to it, your body sinking, dragged down by its own weight as you struggle to kick yourself to the surface, struggle to keep your eyes open. You suppose that’s why there is so much catharsis in it, in drowning, in giving over to the sea or to the water, succumbing to your weakness as a human and putting yourself out of your misery. 

Or perhaps that is too dark a thought to be occupying your mind as you are faced with the prettiest boy alive, looking up at you like you craved his world from ash, brought life to him with your own blood. A boy who is one with the water, who refuses to drown, to sink below the depths and be forgotten. A boy who fights no matter what, who succeeds regardless of the mission. The sea. A test he didn’t study for. Adolescence. A girl who wanted to be left alone more than she wanted to be loved.

It’s in the present where you end up listening to your best friend for the first time in your life and jump into a pool long after the sun has set behind the mountains, screaming with a mixture of fear and glee as you land in the water. It chills you to the bone, sends shivers down your spine before you’re even properly inside, and you bump harshly into Keonho’s floating form as you find your footing. He just laughs, steadying you in his arms, sending warmth shooting to your core like he’s on fire. 

The whole scene is bizarre, something completely out of character for the both of you in any normal circumstance. By all means, you were a pair of responsible teenagers, who just so happened to feel very much like jumping into a closed pool at ten o’clock in the evening one night after spending half of your monthly allowances on an expensive barbecue dinner. A pair of responsible teenagers who were staring at one another as they floated through a swimming pool with no worries in the world besides what they thought of each other.

You and Keonho are friends for almost eleven years before you share your first kiss, a secret which is exchanged in the water and under the dull city stars. You’re not sure who moves first, or who decides that a friendship is not enough, but you drift towards one another and before you know it, your lips are pressed against his, and you’re kissing him, and you can’t think of anything besides how wonderful the feeling is.

Gone are all the feelings of wrongness, all the nights spent wondering if it was normal to feel this way about someone younger than you, someone who was meant to be your best friend like he was your annoying little brother. Gone are the fleeting moments of doubt, of your inner voice telling you to just forget it. Instead you are filled with nothing but certainty, nothing but warmth. From his lips, from his body against yours, from the sure love he forces into the kiss, makes sure you feel every edge of.

You pull away before it can get any worse, before you can lose any more of your breath than you already have. You’re panting, and so is he, searching desperately for the air you’d lost, breathed into his lungs like life. “This is wrong,” you say, lips just barely still touching his. His breath smells like the mints he had a habit of popping into his mouth too many at a time, and you could taste the sugar on your tongue from where he’d gotten particularly desperate for you. 

“No, it’s not,” he denies, nose brushing against yours. Water droplets stick to his cheeks, make his lips taste like chlorine. “I’m not a baby, you know.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” you say. Not completely a lie, not completely the truth. “We’re supposed to be best friends.”

“And you know what best friends do?” he asks you. Honestly, with more seriousness than you think he’s capable of. “They get married. They settle down together, and they spend the rest of their lives not regretting this moment we’re having right now.”

Keonho doesn’t know that you want nothing to do with that. That you have no idea what you’re going to do with your life, but that certainly isn’t anywhere close to what you’ve got in mind. That you just want to be left to your own devices, to do what you spend the rest of your time doing: writing, painting, creating, making something of yourself that does not depend on the fickle opinions of people around you.

You don’t really know it, either. All you really know in the present is that Ahn Keonho is the love of your life, and that he will do anything to keep your attention, to keep your eyes locked on him. Even disregard what he really wants from you. Maybe even kill for you.

“Your lips are blue,” you tease, smiling to distract from the fact that you had no intention of answering his question.

He grins. “So are yours.”

It will remind him, in a years’ time, of the way you looked as you lay below him, unmoving, skin becoming ashen with death. How your lips had trembled, how your body had twitched involuntarily, until you finally were laid to rest. Your plush skin becoming flat, balmy, your lips tinged blue like you were cold. How you had wished and wished for the fate which had befallen you for longer than his broken mind could remember. How you had once begged for death when you thought he wasn’t listening. He will look back one day and remember it, the moment you fell to the ground, how he had failed to catch you because he’d been so frozen with shock, with grief. 

Your lips turned blue, like his once had when he’d been in the water for too long. Signalling the end of your life, the end of your suffering, and the beginning of his first life without you by his side. He wasn’t ready for it, not even for one second. Just like how he hadn’t been ready for the apocalypse to begin the morning of his swimming competitions, how he hadn’t been ready to start running for his life from drones that carried a disease meant to wipe out people like him, people who, in the eyes of a dead man, were not fit to live.

But no one is ever ready for these sorts of things. Death. Destruction. Disaster. All things that cannot be stopped, that cannot be reversed. We as humans are never ready to lose in every sense of the word the way Keonho has, the way he had, the way he will. We all think we are, when there is nothing at stake. When your world is sleeping peacefully on your shoulder, when she’s looking back at you as you walk home from school, when she’s leaning into your touch and pressing her plush lips to yours, pink pressing into blue, warmth meeting cold, life meeting death.

No one is ever ready. Not the hero, not the villain, not the audience.

I suppose all we can really do is pity him, no? And be glad our lives will never be like his.

And be happy for him in this moment, when he’s holding you in his arms and pulling you in for another kiss, because God knows when he’ll be able to do that again.

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