"I wanted to bring here everyone that should get on their knees for Saeran. Me, that woman, and V..."
Saeyoung Choi is not a man of mercy. He is a hellbound force of retribution with nothing left to lose. Those who hurt his brother will pay for it in blood.
What if Saeyoung had brought V to the cabin too?
Warnings: Major character death, murder, suicide, arson, death by fire, unhinged Saeyoung.
Read on AO3
A/N: "Hey Luc, didn't you post this already?" Yes. And then I edited the post fifty times and added an AO3 link, so I wanted to make a neater post.
Anyway, I wrote this at midnight because the thought wouldn't leave me alone. I wonder what Saeyoung's plan was if he'd gotten all three of them to the cabin like he'd wanted in VAE. Whatever it was, it wouldn't be pretty. And I think seeing both of the people he blamed Saeran's death in front of him... the thought that Saeran wouldn't want revenge wouldn't stop him. Not this time. The world needs more unhinged Saeyoung. Let him be angry and terrifying.
I'm normally not a fan of unhappy endings, so maybe a miracle happens. Maybe Saeyoung ends up with a cool scar to match his brother's. Maybe not. Who knows.
There is an old clock in the cabin. Saeyoung isn't sure how it still works--it's not like anyone who comes out here is about to change the batteries or anything. Yet it works, filling the tiny wooden building with a steady tick, tick, tick as the seconds go by.
It's fitting, really. It's as if the universe is counting down the minutes. How many more does he have? Maybe it's only a few. Perhaps as much as an hour. Certainly not much more than that.
Tick, tick, tick.
He had already sent Vanderwood outside. Well, forced them out might be more accurate--they could tell something was wrong with Saeyoung. Of course, they knew about his brother by this point; they knew he was going to grieve, and grieving people do weird shit to cope. And Saeyoung is a weird guy to begin with. But something was just... off. It was a feeling in their gut. Something snapped in that kid's brain and Vanderwood wasn't keen on leaving him to his own devices.
"I'm not leaving you by yourself so you can do something stupid," Vanderwood had said.
"I know exactly what I'm doing, Vanderwood." Saeyoung did not shift his gaze away from the cabin's other two occupants. "It's in everyone's best interest if you wait outside."
"I told you I'm--"
"Get the fuck out!" Saeyoung snapped, briefly looking away to shoot a glare at the other agent.
Vanderwood had been momentarily stunned into silence. They yelled at Saeyoung on a regular basis--the kid had caused them so many headaches over the years--but never had Saeyoung snapped back like that. He would make smartass remarks, god knows he was full of them, but he never yelled. If he had ever been truly angry with Vanderwood, he had never shown it.
There was a long silence, broken only by the ever-present tick, tick, tick of the old clock. Then, Vanderwood had sighed and stood from their chair. "Fine. But if I think you're about to do something that will endanger both our lives, I'm coming back."
"You don't have to worry about that. Just wait outside, Agent."
Something about the way he said that sent a chill down their spine. Maybe it was his tone, now constantly laced with barely-restrained rage. Maybe it was the fact that he called them Agent. Maybe it was instinct. But after another moment's pause, they stepped outside the cabin. They reached into their pocket for their cigarettes, only to find them gone, along with their lighter. Must have left them in the cabin. By the time they turned around to check, Saeyoung had already latched the door behind them.
So now it's just the three of them, three people tied together by one unbreakable thread. Three people who weren't human anymore. Three monsters. Three killers with blood on their hands. The worst kind of scum, all responsible for taking the life of an innocent--someone too kind and pure for this world.
Saeran may have been the one to detonate the bomb that destroyed Magenta, but the three who sit in the cabin--Saeyoung Choi, Jihyun Kim, Rika Kim--are the ones responsible. They all killed Saeran. Saeran's blood coats their hands and would never, could never, be washed away.
Tick, tick, tick.
V, ever the mediator, is the first to break the silence. "Luciel--"
"Why?" The word tears itself from Saeyoung's throat, finally pushing past the lump of rage and guilt that threatens to strangle him.
"I'm sorry, Saeyoung," Rika says. "I'm so sorry for everything that happened. If I could go back, if I could trade my life for his--"
"You have no right to say that." Saeyoung spits, standing abruptly. "You have no! Right!"
Rika falls silent, her hollow-eyed gaze dropping to the floor. Saeyoung hates it. Her demeanor only angers him further. How dare she play the victim? Maybe the 'it's all my fault, I'm the worst, I deserve retribution' thing would garner sympathy from other people, but not Saeyoung. He, in fact, wholeheartedly agrees. It is all her fault. She is the worst person in the world. She does deserve retribution. The same goes for V and himself.
"Luciel--" V tries again.
"And neither do you!" Saeyoung's venom now turns to him. "Don't you dare say anything about sacrifice. It means nothing. It won't bring him back. It won't change what you did to him."
Tick, tick, tick.
"I trusted you," Saeyoung says. "I. Trusted. You. You promised me--you swore to me that you would protect him! How could you--" his voice cracks. "How could you do that to him? Saeran was good. Saeran was innocent. Saeran was kind, and gentle, and he deserved to be loved. But you--you--"
He lets out a frustrated noise, unable to turn his thoughts into words. His mind is nothing but a loop of rage, rage, rage. Rage and vengeance and shame and guilt.
"You killed him," he finally growls. "Both of you killed him. And... so did I. Every one of us is responsible for what happened to him."
"Luciel," V tries again. "We--" he sighs. "Please, Luciel... if anything, do not blame yourself--"
"How?" He snaps. "How?! I trusted you both to look after him. To care for him. To treasure him. And instead, you manipulated and brainwashed him. You tortured him just like our mother did." He feels a twisted sense of satisfaction at the pained gasp Rika lets out, as if she's been stabbed through the heart.
Saeyoung decides to twist the knife further. "Actually, you were even worse than our mother. At least she never lied to us. We knew from the beginning that she only wanted us to get money from our father, that she never loved either of us. But you? You lied. You promised to protect us, to help us. But in the end you were just the same. You gave us hope only for your own selfish needs.
"Saeran spent every day of his life living in fear while you beat all the kindness and gentleness out of him.
"And you--" Now he speaks directly to V. "You did nothing to stop her. Fuck all your excuses. I don't care about your sacrifice. You were only ever concerned with her. You were only ever protecting her. If you had really wanted to protect Saeran then you would have saved him from her. You can martyr yourself all you want, it won't make you any better than her."
Tick, tick, tick.
The air in the room shifts abruptly. It's charged, thrumming like a livewire. The explosive anger evaporates in an instant; it's replaced by something far more terrifying.
"All of Saeran's killers must be held responsible for what happened," Saeyoung says. His anger is no longer a raging inferno. Now, his anger is like ice. It's calm, now. No less intense, but calm. As if he had long ago decided a course of action.
Tick, tick, tick.
Saeyoung crosses the room and reaches for something behind one of the chairs. He wonders, briefly, what his brother's last moments were like. How did the bomb detonate? Had Saeran simply pressed a button and ended it, or was he forced to sit there and listen as a timer counted down his last minutes on Earth?
Tick, tick, tick.
Rika does not react, but V's eyes widen when Saeyoung lifts a large, red plastic canister from behind the chair. "Luciel, what are you--"
Saeyoung unceremoniously upends the container in the middle of the cabin's main room. The liquid quickly soaks into the carpet and the wood flooring, and the heavy smell of gasoline fills the room.
Tick, tick, tick.
"Luciel! Wait, let's talk about this--" V has risen to his feet, but freezes when Saeyoung pulls a beat-up zippo from his pocket.
"Talk?" Saeyoung says, laughing. "Talk?! You had years to talk, V, but you stayed silent and let Saeran suffer. The time for talking has long since passed."
Tick, tick, tick.
He flicks the lighter open with a small metallic clink.
"Saeran wouldn't want this," V tries. His half-blind, once-honest eyes are wide and desperate.
"Don't you dare speak his name!" Saeyoung shouts. "You don't deserve to say his name."
"Please--"
"It doesn't matter anymore what he would have wanted."
It's then that V notices the tears running down Saeyoung's cheeks, the tremble in his voice. Had he ever seen Saeyoung cry before?
"He's gone. And he's never coming back. And those responsible need to pay for it.
"Heh... you know, this is the first time I wished I could get into Heaven," Saeyoung continues, voice breaking. "Just for a few minutes. Just long enough to apologize to Saeran. For everything. For not being able to protect him. For leaving him. For being a terrible brother. For betraying him. For failing him. Beg for his forgiveness. All of us should."
Tick, tick, tick.
Saeyoung lets out a low chuckle. "Knowing Saeran... he would probably forgive us. Not that any of us deserve it. So perhaps it's better this way."
Tick, tick, tick.
"Take your revenge, Saeyoung." Rika's voice is hardly above a whisper, yet it seems so loud in such a small space.
Tick, tick, tick.
Saeyoung lowers himself to the ground, thumb on the wheel of the zippo. The gasoline soaks into the legs of his jeans. His head feels light, and he's not sure if it's from the fumes or if it's a weight lifting off his shoulders.
Tick, tick, tick.
"You wanted us all to be a family, right?" He says.
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you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't
It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)
Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.
By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.
Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.
#oh is *that* why i feel 14 again after my fiance broke things off with me and i had to move halfway across the continent back in with my ma?
Yeah that's just what humans feel and act like when they're unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing. Teenagers are pretty much constantly unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing, and react reasonably to those circumstances.
if i met a genie and fixed the world and all its ills with my first two wishes, my third wish would be that sabrina carpenter would get gradually taller. she'd be in on it and think it was hilarious. we'd have a strong cap at 7 feet here, maybe an inch a week so people have time to theorize--let's not be ridiculous. but she'd still keep up the "ooh! im so little and small!" schtick. but shed be gradually getting taller. she'd be like 6'1" and still jumping for the microphone. and she'd never say anything about it. and if anyone asked shed act like she had no idea what they were talking about. and shed cheekily play into it a little bit but mostly still keep up the "ooh im so little and small" schtick. do you see my vision. do you get it
ok and so if i met a genie and fixed the world and all its ills in one wish i would do the sabrina carpenter thing second and third i would wish for all evidence of one random taylor swift song to disappear from the world once every month or so. taylor would have no memory of it. her fans would remember it and there would be an outcry over where it went (it's not even in concert videos anymore!) but taylor would have no memory of it
instead, all her brainspace spent on that song would be replaced with the vivid memories of roman gladiator, taylaurius velox. she's able to hide this at first, but her music begins to take on a gradually romaner and romaner tint. at first, people are like "damn, she's getting REALLY conservative, huh" and other people are like "wow, she's so deep, she knows what a rubicon is" but eventually travis kelce leaves her out of nowhere (he wasn't sure if dating someone possessed by a roman gladiator made him gay or not and anyway he was getting sick of being like "we're going to play the lions" and taylor being like "LIONS? WHERE?") and taylor publishes an entire brutus themed album about this betrayal and it's beginning to weird people out
and so eventually travis kelce is getting like, bomb threats sent to his family for leaving taylor and eventually he's like "okay, okay, i left her because she kept having all these vivid nightmares of gladatorial combat and she kept saying that football was giving her the ick because we never actually killed anybody for the glory of rome" and then he just gets more bomb threats because he left a struggling woman during a mental health crisis
and eventually taylor is writing music about her forbidden roman senator lover and her fanbase is either whittled WAY down or WAY up because people want to watch this trainwreck happen (or maybe she influences culture so hard that we're just all really into rome now) but she's being super cagey about the name of this roman senator. until. and now here's the twist:
weird al has been getting all of the same vivid memories of taylaurius velox. and he still has all his memories of her old songs. so he's writing all these detailed song parodies of taylor swift songs that don't exist anymore including specific details about their shared gladiatorial reality that taylor has never shared with anybody else. including that her lover's name was publius, and she's been calling him Poob for short
at this point a lot of original swifties are leaving. they could do the brutus stuff, but they really can't survive poob. taylor makes a clapping back at the haters song including the lyric "these bitches don't know publius" and it ends up all over all sorts of merch. there's a renewed archaeological interest in roman gladatorial combat
most importantly, the internet discourse is the best it's ever been. does this make taylor swift transmasc? is travis kelce problematic for leaving his fiancee while she gradually morphs into a roman gladiator? is this good queer representation? if taylaurius velox was a gay man, does that mean the gaylors were technically correct? is weird al morally wrong for capitalizing off of her music if she cant remember it anymore? was weird al sent by god to torment taylor swift?
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Really hate that most people don’t understand the difference between “self-expression” and “artistic-expression.”
I say this as someone who sells pottery, and many people who see my art assume I am using art as an outlet to “express myself.”
I am not.
I use art to challenge myself. A lot of what I do is the equivalent of doing a hard sudoko or a half marathon, answering the question of “can I do this?”
I use art to question things and explore ideas. Finding physical synthesis between concepts and working out a design to its end state.
I use art to make money. I make some things just because I suspect they’ll sell well, and I keep making them when they do.
This idea that an artist is “putting themselves out there” every time they create is not only stupid, but harmful, and it kills critique and analysis.
Yes every creative work is influenced by its creator, but the most preliminary step of analysis is to define the purpose of a work of art (functional, narrative, entertainment, persuasive, decorative, ceremonial, etc.) and a vanishingly small percentage of that is self-expression. Even then, it’s generally tied to the self’s relationship with something else—perception, society, etc.
It’s very tiresome to have people assume they know you because they like (or dislike) your art, to make assumptions about who you are and how you approach the world. It’s nothing new— people called the Impressionists insane and the Fauvists degenerate. And now people are expected to hand out their identities and traumas to prove they have the right to explore certain subjects.
But to actually understand art, you have to contextualize it beyond assuming it’s just what the artist felt like making at the moment and it’s somehow coming from their deepest soul, or you’ll badly misinterpret most art you come across.
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