[ksw] clouds
sunwoo x reader
wc. 5k warnings: medical inaccuracies, death, illness, hospitals, overall just a pretty heavy piece genre can only be described as an absolute mess inspired mainly by san junipero but also slightly by charlie kaufman and wong kar wai
a/n: this is supposed to be told nonlinearly but like the creation of it was very messy so i have no clue if it actually worked, so good luck trying to make this piece make sense of this :)
act iii. scene iii.
Sunwoo sits and watches the sun shift from pink and blue to an impossible shade of green. And it’s then he knows that without a doubt Clara has ruined the color green for him. Because instead of marveling at the color of the sky, Sunwoo is reminded of the doors in her apartment building.
“Thought I might find you here.” The voice of a stranger who Sunwoo loved once upon a time says behind him. He tries like hell not to turn around. Not to lean back towards the voice and wait for your hand on his shoulder or your shin knocking familiarly against his back. He focuses on the waves crashing below instead. The roar of the water beneath him is deafening, but only if you let it be. He does, and he almost forgets that you’re behind him.
“Where’d you go?” You ask, now sitting next to him, tugging at the long grass.
“I’m right here.”
“And what about in there?” You bring a finger up and poke at the side of his forehead.
He turns to you, facing you in full. He takes in your features like it’s the first time all over again. And, oh, he wishes he knew before how many firsts you already had together. This is just another. This is just the first time he’s seen you in the past six months and remembered the thousands of times he’s seen your face before.
He studied your cheeks. The one he now recalls running the back of his palm over after you left for the Cloud.
He memorizes, for the millionth time, your eyes. He used to swear they were darker than they are, but then he saw them in the sun. He was dying back then; then he saw your eyes and you saved him. Just like that.
Mr. Choi was right of course. As he always must be. You and him are like an old married couple. Not like. You are. Almost were.
“I had lunch with Mr. Choi today.” He tells you.
You squint at him. “I know. It’s Thursday.” You pull out a piece of the grass. “What’d he make?”
“Ramen.”
“Was it good?”
“It was okay.”
“Too spicy?”
Suwnoo answers with a sigh, looking away from you and back towards the water. The deafening waves crash against the cliffside. “I know you looked at your file.” He finally says. You stop pulling at the grass. You still. “Mr. Choi told me.”
After he says it, there’s a silence that isn’t actually silent at all. The waves rage below his feet. The seagulls are there too, beneath, above, somewhere, everywhere. And then, of course, there’s you and Sunwoo, trying to be silent over the static in your heads and the machines you’re hooked up to in a universe far far away.
“Did he tell you about my file?”
He looks at you again. “No.”
“Oh.” You look away, brows furrowed, lick your lips, and then turn back to him. “So why are you upset?”
“After he told me, I went and I…”
“You didn’t.”
“I looked at mine.”
There’s another silence, except that this time it really is quiet. Sunwoo read once whilst in a rabbit hole of medical research that true silence only happens in a vacuum, where there is no medium for sound waves to travel through. This must be that. This place, the files, Mr. Choi and Mr. Chan, Clara and her apartment building full of green doors--it’s a vacuum. And they stick people in it then call it the Cloud. They call it extra time. But it isn’t. It’s nothing and he’s stuck in the middle of it. So Sunwo stares at you, straight through the vacuum of time and space you’re both lost in, waits for you to say something, and then waits for himself to hear it.
“You looked?” You finally say, voice folding in on itself.
“Yes.” Sunwoo’s own voice is barely there. You must be reading his lips which you’ve always been good at anyways.
“So you know now?”
“I always knew, and now, I remember.”
act i. scene iv.
There’s been an accident.
That’s what they say when the sun falls out of the sky and the world starts spinning in the wrong direction. It’s how they show up at Sunwoo’s door painted in shades of blue and red, with authority in their arms and hands on their hips. How they prepare him for the looming moment where they rip past his skin, blood, bone to shoot a gun straight at his heart. I’m so sorry for your loss, they say leaving him with a bullet lodged somewhere between his left and right atrium.
And those are the four words that play over and over and over in Sunwoo’s head as he gets to the hospital. Those are the words that crawl inside his open chest and turn him blue and black with infection. There’s been an accident, he remembers, staring at the extraordinary measures taken to keep your heart beating and lungs beating. This is it. Except that the accident isn’t that you’re dying, but that you’re dying. It’s always supposed to have been him. He’s supposed to be the one stuffed with tubes and hooked up to monitors, the one whose life is hanging on by a thread, and you’re supposed to be the one that saves him. It all feels like a play that’s gone horribly wrong because everyone switched parts after intermission without telling him. At what point did you steal the role of dying protagonist from him?
We did everything we could, a stranger in a white coat says. Except that it’s not some stranger, it’s your colleague and co-worker because this is the hospital you work at and the hospital Sunwoo met you in. There was too much damage to the brain, they explain as the image of their tear-stricken face goes from your friend during intern year to the doctor who operated on you as your brain went dead.
“We have two options, right?” Sunwoo is far too familiar with surgery and all this. He knows from his hospital days what’s supposed to happen next. But apparently, things have changed since then.
“Actually, there’s a third option.”
Sunwoo doesn’t waste a second. He jumps out of the chair stained red from his bleeding heart and asks: “What is it?”
“We can upload them.”
act iii. scene ii.
In fifty days of living in the cloud, Sunwoo has learned all about the people that he shares a building with. There’s Mr. Chan who lives behind a vomit green on the same floor as him and who hasn’t left his room since last January. There’s also Mr. Choi, who lives behind the emerald door and invites Suwoo over for lunch every Thursday. Clara lives upstairs, where the walls are painted in various shades of green--olive, seaweed, moss, hunter, shamrock, sage, and others that Sunwoo tries not to think too deeply about. He’s only met Clara once in the past fifty days and has no particular wish to see her again. He hadn’t expected her to be a kid. Cancer, you told him after their introduction in the lobby, poor girl was only seven. As said before, Sunwoo tries not to think about it.
And then of course there’s you behind the forest green door who has been slowly showing him all the good places. There’s the beach where you spent the day making seashell necklaces. The cafe which serves its tea too sweet for him, but sweet enough to be considered your favorite. Sunwoo just gets the chocolate bread. You took him downtown. To a club. The tallest building. And to midtown where the amusement park is.
But his favorite place you’ve taken him so far is the cliffside above the beach, where the waves crash against the rocks in a way that can only be described as violent. That day you and him laid in the grass and stared at the clouds with your heads dangling just over the edge and water spraying the backs of your necks. That day you turned to him and told him you’re sorry. For what, he asked. I’m so sorry you’re sick, you said, but it’s nice to have you around here. I think in a sense, we’ve both been waiting for this. Then, you smiled and stole all of the blood from his body. So yeah, that day, that place--it’s his favorite.
Today, you take him on a hike up a mountain.
“Do you believe in an afterlife?” You ask him after having spent thirty minutes silently staring at the view from the best peak.
“One after this?”
“Yeah. I guess. Although, I’m not so convinced this counts.”
“I don’t know.” Sunwoo shrugs. “Maybe.”
“Do you think we’d be able to be with our loved ones in it?”
His chest lurches. “If there is one, yes.”
“Do you think it’ll be different than this?”
Sunwoo turns to you finally. “Why are you asking about this?”
You shake your head. “Nevermind. It’s a stupid question.”
He turns back towards the view. From here, he can make out Clara’s building. He thinks about her, about Mr. Choi and Mr. Chan, who he recently found out were once married but who haven’t spoken since Mr. Chan read his file in January, and he thinks about you and about him.
“I think,” Sunwoo says, loud enough so that you can hear after wandering a little bit away from him, “that whatever the afterlife is, if it does exist, it’ll be worth it.”
You turn to him, but don’t make any move to come near him again. “And if it doesn’t exist?”
“Then life will have been worth it.”
The corner of your lip lifts. “I like that.”
Sunwoo only nods at the sentiment, and after a long while, he builds enough courage to ask, “you’ve been here a really long time, haven’t you?”
“Time doesn't work as linearly in the cloud as it does in the real world. Sometimes it feels like I got here and then you arrived the very next day.” You turn back towards the view and exhale heavily.
“But yes. I’ve been here for an eternity.”
act ii. scene i.
Before he actually sees you, Sunwoo feels you. Not you, in particular, but something in the distance, a presence in the corner of the room and a pair of eyes watching him from somewhere far away.
The scariest part is how much the feeling doesn’t actually scare him.
--
Two days after that, he starts to see you in the flesh. He tells himself that his mind is playing tricks on him, that the person he saw in the produce aisle wasn’t actually you at all and was just a stranger with the same hair.
He doesn’t go straight home from the store that day. Instead, he stops by the hospital and checks in on you, but even that doesn’t do anything about the fact that he sees a shadow of you behind the bed.
--
The day after that, you speak to him. Standing in the middle of his kitchen in broad daylight, you speak, you say hello, and the first thing Sunwoo thinks is that he’s dead.
You aren’t, you reply. You’re a zombie, he reasons, here for my brain. I’m not. A ghost. No. Are you, here Sunwoo falters, fear flooding out of his body to make room for the briefest blotch of hope that’s crushed almost immediately by you saying: I’m not alive, Sunwoo. You saw me in the hospital yesterday.
“So then,” he swallows, “what are you?”
I’m here. You look at him, stare at his face and without a sliver of doubt say, I’m here for you.
Sunwoo knows it’s impossible. You can’t be here. You can’t. And yet, you are.
Three years ago Sunwoo was told he had three months left to live, and he still remembers how impossibly you saved him from the brink of death. He remembers how impossible things happen all the time, and how impossibly possible it is that this is one of them. He steps towards you, touches your face, and feels the real, impossible thing against his hand.
“You’re here.”
--
On the fifth day of your haunting, Sunwoo finally has the sense to ask why.
Why what?
“Why are you here?”
I’m here for you.
“Stop saying that.”
But I am, you tell him. You asked, and that’s the answer. I’m a doctor, Sunwoo. I’m here for you.
Then, finally, he hears what you’ve been saying for the past five days. You’re here for him.
And the thing about doctors is that they’re there for you when you need them.
“I’m sick.”
Yes, you answer quietly, although it wasn’t a question.
“Again.”
I’m so sorry.
“You’re a hallucination, aren’t you?” Sunwoo’s shocked by how sad that makes him, how disappointing it is. “I’ve been hallucinating.”
Find me in the Cloud, Sunwoo. There’s something I want to say.
You’re gone by the time he gets to the hospital.
act iii. scene i.
Sunwoo stares at the hall of green doors, eyes darting from door to door in an attempt to stare down the shades until they confess which one of them is tea green.
“Clara, the landlord, likes colors.” A voice says from behind him. “Every couple of months she repaints all of the doors in different shades of the same one. Before the green, it was yellow.”
Sunwoo turns around to face you. When your eyes find him, they go blank for the smallest of moments. You give him a look that goes right through him, turning him inside out like you’ve seen the underside of his skin. It irks him.
“I’m Sunwoo. I’m new.”
You gulp. “You’re here.” He doesn’t know what to make of the statement. Do all people in the cloud act like this? “Why?”
Sunwoo nods, maybe you’re not so weird as much as you just have a weird way of posing questions. “I was told I’m sick.”
“I’m sorry.” You say, frowning like you actually might feel back for him.
“Have you been here a while then?” You nod. “Can I ask how long?” You shake your head. Sunwoo doesn’t think too much about it. Instead, he returns your earlier question “Why are you here?”
“Brain dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
You ignore it and point to a door down the hall. “I’m forest green. You?”
“Tea green. But I can’t find-”
You tap the door in front of him. “This one, genius.”
“Oh.” He laughs awkwardly. “Thanks.”
Your mouth parts as if to say something, and your face goes blank again. He feels his skin turning itself inside out because of it. “Have you read your file yet?”
He shakes his head. “I just got here.”
You inhale, softening, and mutter an ‘okay’. You continue down the hall towards your door. Sunwoo is stuck in place. “I can show you around here, if you like. Take you to all the cool places.”
Sunwoo takes you up on it.
A forest green door slams shut down the hallway.
act i. scene ii.
“Thank you for taking me out of the hospital.” Sunwoo says, exhaling. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve been to a park like this.”
And it’s true, he really can’t. He’s been sick for so long now, and has been through a multitude of treatment plans and too many surgeries. When you’re sick and have 9 surgeons turn you down after asking them to save your life, you forget the joy of being outside and feeling the sun on your skin. You were the first doctor to agree to the surgery. You’re the only doctor to have ever treated Sunwoo like he wasn’t dying, like he was actually going to live.
“You don’t have to thank me. This is good for me too.” You say, head resting against the park bench and eyes closed.
Sunwoo inhales, taking in the park with all his senses. A visceral sort of thing you learn to do as often as possible when you’ve been as close to death as frequently as he has. He feels the wood beneath his body and the grass beneath his feet. He feels the light on his skin and the wind pushing against his arms and nose. He listens to the kids screaming at the playground at the bottom of the hill and to the dogs barking within the dog park beside it. He takes all this in, relishes in it for the last time as a dying person.
You sigh. “One more surgery.”
“And then I’ll be done with this sickness.”
You smile. He pretends not to see. “And then you’ll be done.”
“Thank you for saving my life.”
“Don’t do that.”
“No. Seriously.”
You smile again, this time at him. Sunwoo doesn’t have to pretend not to see. “I haven’t finished saving it yet.”
He leans back against the bench and closes his eyes. “But you will.”
You tap on your coffee cup. “Honestly though, you did more work than me.” Sunwoo frowns while you take a sip. “The other nine doctors you called are good doctors, and they made the same judgement call I would have made for any other patient. No sane doctor would have agreed to treat you. But you were the reason I said yes. You had such faith that you were going to live and so much faith that I could do it that I believed you. I might be the one doing the technical saving, but you, Sunwoo, you’re the one who convinced me to do it. You saved yourself.”
He stares at you. The light hits your eyes like it’s finding a way to break through them. In truth, before Sunwoo got sick, he didn’t think he was scared of death, but he is. He’s terrified of it. Sunwoo realized it two weeks after his diagnosis and the day after he was wrongly told he only had three more months left to live. But now, for the first time since he was diagnosed, he doesn't feel so afraid of it. Despite how far he’s come and how close he is to beating this fucking illness, while staring at the light woven through your eyes, Sunwoo thinks he could live with himself if he dropped dead tonight.
That thought alone, is almost as terrifying as death used to be.
act iii. scene v.
“I saw your ghost, you know.” It’s the first thing Sunwoo has said to you in over two weeks. “It wasn’t actually you though, was it?” You don’t even bother looking up from your cup of tea. Through the silence, Sunwoo orders a coffee.
“I didn’t know that.” The coffee turns lukewarm. “It wasn’t me.” You push an uneaten half of chocolate bread towards him. “It’s in your brain this time. Symptoms can include hallucinations.”
“Think you can still save me?” You can’t. If you know that much, you know he’s out of medical miracles, and that this time, he really won’t survive it. But it’s a joke. And you laugh at it.
“Definitely not. I never really liked neurosurgery.”
And all at once, he’s painfully aware of your friend somewhere in the real world that does like it but watched anyways as your brain died before her, split wide open.
“Anyways, how do you know all of this?” But what Sunwoo really wants to say is brains are killer. Literally. Figuratively.
“I’ve known since we...“ you hesitate, mouth stuck halfway through a word he can’t place. “After last time, I read your chart and looked at your scans.” Sunwoo nods. He expected as much. He doesn’t ask how you got them. “I’m sorry you're sick again.” You say to him quietly. “I’m sorry you’re dying.”
“I’m sorry you’re dead.” As soon as the words have left his mouth, he regrets them. Because you aren’t. And he knows you too well to think you’d look past the technicality.
You scoff, shake your head slightly, and with a spiteful smile say, “Can I say it?”
Sunwoo only sighs. “Let’s start over instead.”
You nod. He pushes the chocolate bread back.
act iii. scene iv.
Mr. Choi was the one to recommend that Sunwoo give you and himself space. It’s been a month since you and him last spoke, since that moment hovering above the waves after he read his file and after he found out you read yours. He misses you, and has been for so long now. Mr. Choi was wrong. Sunwoo’s standing outside your forest green door to prove it.
You open the door before he can knock. There’s no shock in your voice when you say his name, like you’ve been waiting for this day, expecting it.
He looks behind you, at your apartment in Clara’s building that looks just like your apartment in the real world. The same one he cleaned out after you died, still filled with things he gave to your family or donated or took back to his place. He wants to crumble just looking at it again. “Can I come in?”
“It’s only been a month.”
And he knows what you mean by it. Three months is the recommended time off after reading one’s file. To reacclimate, they say, to process. But the insinuation that Sunwoo was supposed to go three months without seeing you makes him feel sick. The insinuation that after a year of being without you in the real world he was supposed to be without you here too, enrages him. Then he remembers how long you’ve been here, and how long you’ve been doing this and feels slightly murderous.
All he says is: “It’s been a lot longer than that for you.”
Your lip twitches. You lock and unlock the open forest green door five times before saying, “Are you sure?”
He nods. You let him in.
Sunwoo used to imagine what it would be like to meet you again in the Cloud one day. He imagined tears and hugs and kisses. He imagined i love you’s and i hate you’s and i miss you. He imagined the scenario more times than can possibly be considered healthy. But he imagined something. He was waiting for the day. Waiting for this day. But this moment, sitting at your round wood table while you boil water for tea, is nothing like the million different ways he imagined seeing you again.
And as you set down two mismatched mugs and take the seat across from him, he doesn’t even try to create one of them. “How long has it been since you read your file?”
You watch the steam rise from your tea for a long moment, then stand, grab the sugar and pour a spoonful of it into your tea. You take another spoonful and look at him expectantly. “Want some?” He nods, and you pour the sugar into his. You stir the tea then taste, then cringe, then add more sugar and then ask if he wants it. He refuses. You stir again. Sunwoo watches the whirlpool and waits the eternity it takes you to say: “I read it on my first day.”
You put the sugar away, satisfied with the tea’s sweetness while Sunwoo marvels at how long you’ve known and how silently you’ve been carrying the knowledge of you and him since he came. And that knowledge is what makes him finally remember one of the reasons he came. “Is there something you want to tell me?” You look up at him when he asks it, exhaling like you’ve been wanting to bring it up for so long now, which Sunwoo guesses isn’t as much of a simile as he thinks it is.
“Yes, actually. I…” you hesitate, flicking the mug as if the right words will come hopping out of the tea. Sunwoo watches for it. “I’ve just been here for a long time now, Sunwoo.”
“Two years isn’t that long.”
“Time doesn’t work the same here as it does down there.” You tell him tiredly. “It’s been decades.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“In the beginning, I didn’t mind the waiting. I knew you were on your way, but I just,” you hesitate, “I didn’t think it’d take so long for you to come back to me.”
Sunwoo covers your hand with his. “I’m sorry.” You twist your palm into it, squeeze, then pull your hand away. Sunwoo swallows. “I came as fast as I could.”
“I know. I waited.”
“Do you regret it?” Sunwoo’s terrified of what the answer might be.
You don’t give it. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Then?”
“I’ve been here for so long, and,” your head drops, voice breaking under the weight it carries, “it’s been so lonely.”
“But I’m here now.” Sunwoo says, leaning forward against the table. “You aren’t alone anymore.”
“I know you’re here. I know, and I thought that would fix it, but it didn’t. Seeing you in the hall that day was so bittersweet, because you were here but that also meant you were somewhere else dying. Because you were here and I still felt lonely.” You stop, chugg the remaining bits of your tea, and then wipe your cheeks. “Do you get what I’m saying?”
“No.” But it’s a lie. He does get it. He knows all about loneliness and the way it creeps inside, so slyly. The way it starts small and then grows, feeding on negligence, until it's too big for your body. He knows how it sits inside you, for all its enormity, and spills into everything. He knows how it lingers. How it has nothing to do with people or lack of them and everything to do with grief. Sunwoo knows all about loneliness. The day he read his file he felt a dam of it burst open within him.
“I’m saying that in the real world I saved you, and now it’s your turn to save me.” You gulp. “I’m saying that I want you to unplug me.”
It takes a moment for Sunwoo to even register what you’ve said, but when he does remember the life support that’s keeping your body alive somewhere in a universe far away, he doesn’t say anything. He just stands and walks out of your apartment.
act i. scene iii.
“Doctor, please present.” The attending announces, stepping into Sunwoo’s room for rounds.
“Mr. Kim,” a resident starts, flipping open his chart, “was diagnosed 14 months ago and has gone through several different treatment plans. When he came to us, the illness had spread and was deemed inoperable and untreatable by several other physicians. Our treatment plan was aggressive and grueling but ultimately, effective. Sunwoo is 20 days post op from his third and final surgery. The surgery went extremely well with no complications and his vitals were excellent. He has been a model patient all throughout recovery, and according to our latest scans, he is also now illness free…”
Sunwoo doesn’t even bother listening to the rest.
--
“So, now that I’m no longer a patient, if I ask you out on a date, will you actually say yes?”
“Well,” you say, signing his discharge papers, “only one way to know.”
“What is it?”
You look up at him, smiling. “Ask me again.”
He does.
You say yes.
act iii. scene v. take ii.
“I saw your ghost.” The first thing Sunwoo says after the last failed attempt.
You look up from your tea. “It wasn’t me.”
“I know.” Sunwoo orders another coffee. “But the hallucination was how I knew I was sick again. It made me feel like you were trying to warn me, like you were up here somewhere caring from a distance. Right after I pieced it all together you told me to find you here and that there was something you wanted to say.” The coffee turns lukewarm again. Sunwoo can’t bring himself to say it. You sigh and push the same piece of chocolate bread back towards him. This time, he takes a bite from it. And with a mouthful of chocolate bread, he cries, “I just got you back, and now you want to leave all over again.”
You frown. “I didn’t want to leave the first time, and it’s different now.”
“How?”
“I want to go. Isn’t that worth something?”
“And what about what I want?”
“Oh, Sunwoo,” you say, “I’m sorry you’re sick. The hallucination was you and your head, but for what it’s worth, I have been up here caring from a distance. I still…” you don’t need to say the words. He knows. He never had to doubt it. “I never stopped.”
“I’ve been thinking about what you asked of me.” Sunwoo tells you. He made the decision last week but today, right now, with your confession still falling through the air, is the first time he’s had the stomach to swallow it. “And I’ll do it. I will. I just need some time. You’ve had so long and in comparison I’ve had nothing.”
“Okay.” You say simply.
“How long can you give me?”
You smile. “You know I’d give you an eternity if you asked for it.”
“I’m scared.” Sunwoo confesses then. “I know it’s what you want, but selfishly, I don’t want to let you again. I don’t know if I’m a big enough person to do it.”
“I do.” You say to him, leaning forward against the table and looking straight through him. “I know because I was your doctor. I have cut inside your body, seen all your organs, and during surgery two, I held your heart in my hands. I felt it beating. So I know exactly how big it is, and I know it’s big enough for this”
Sunwoo feels the heart you worked so hard to repair bursting inside of him.
“God. Why’d you have to read your file so soon?”
You laugh. “I missed you. I couldn’t help it.”
And just like that, you’ve stolen the entire concept of fear from him.
“I’m ready.”
“What?”
He looks at you and feels the loneliness slither away.
“Ask me again.”
