Chapter Text
Kim Soleum hasn’t checked the wiki since he returned home.
He’s afraid that the records might have changed—that all the changes he’d made in that world will be reflected in this one. He’s afraid that there’ll be more content than he’d seen before, with new stories killing off the people he’s loved, and that it will mean that they’re gone forever and that he won’t be able to do anything about it.
At the same time, he’s just as worried that the records might not have changed at all.
If he opens the wiki and finds Agent Choi still dying on the fourth floor of Looky Mart, if all the fates that he’d hoped that he’d changed are still written in stone… he’s not sure what he’d do then.
So he doesn’t check the wiki at all.
Even when his fingers itch for something to do, for anything to feel—he never opens the wiki.
Until now.
He’s alone in his apartment, sitting on the floor by his bed, fingers shaking as they hover over the browser icon on his phone. Agent Choi had returned to work after exchanging phone numbers, and anxiously calling Soleum in front of him to make sure the number wasn’t fake, and saving Soleum’s home address in his notes for good measure.
Soleum had been supposed to meet a friend tonight, but he cancelled at the last minute, unable to set his head back on straight.
Checking the wiki could change everything. He knows this.
It won’t be easy to go back to his mundane life after he sees what the truth of what’s happening to his friends might be.
But Agent Choi had saved his life. He’d made him human again, when Soleum had lost so much inside of him that he couldn’t even want to be human anymore.
The memory of being that strange, emotionless entity, existing in the barest sense of the word—it still comes back to him in his nightmares.
Choi had saved him then. He’d sent him home when Soleum thought there was no other way.
He owes him for that.
Even if it terrifies him to do this.
He scrunches his eyes shut for a moment. Then he clicks on the browser icon, typing Darkness Exploration Records into the search bar.
With shaking fingers, he clicks.
/
Kim Soleum checks the wiki on three different devices.
On his phone. Then on his computer. Then he calls his younger brother and forces him to check as well, ignoring the man’s curses.
“You still read this?” Kim Solbin asks glumly, as he obediently navigates to the pages that Soleum tells him to go to and takes screenshots of it. “It’s boring as hell.”
“You can see it?” Soleum asks, his heart beating out of his chest. “You’re sure?”
“What?”
“Can you read it? Out loud.”
His brother sighs heavily. And then—
A stream of terrible sounds, piercing his ears, come out from his brother’s mouth. Soleum winces, fingers clenching around his phone.
“Stop,” he says sharply. “Don’t say anything else.”
“I barely got past the title though?”
“It’s okay. Just to confirm—you actually read it out right now, right?”
“What?”
“You didn’t just. Screech into the phone?”
“Hyung, now you’re just being rude—”
Soleum hangs up.
His brother really did read it, then. He read it, but the sound that Soleum heard was… something terribly ugly.
And when he looks at the screen on his own phone, the wiki is illegible.
It’s a mess of censored text and indiscernible images, impossible to make sense of. What could this mean? Why can’t he read it?
Back in the world of ghost stories, whenever he had the wiki open on his phone, none of the people he knew had been able to read the text. The screen had always looked blank to them.
Is this something similar?
Has he lost the ability to view the ‘truth’ of that world?
Did he… become a character…?
He shakes his head furiously.
It can’t be.
And even if he did, what does it matter? He’s home now. He’s safe. Nothing can take him again.
He turns his screen off, staring blankly at the wall.
In a way, he’s relieved.
If he can’t know what’s going on in that world, then there’s nothing he can do to change it. He doesn’t have to worry if something has gone wrong, if someone is hurt, if he could stop it, because Soleum no longer has any way of learning anything about that world at all.
It relieves him, but at the same time, it makes him feel lonelier than ever.
This, the inability to see the text that he’d held so dearly for so long, is the final proof that something in him has changed irrevocably and will never be the same.
In this mundane world, where nothing will change or hurt him, where no one will ever understand why he sleeps with the lights on or won’t take the elevator or leaves the room whenever someone turns on a TV.
There is a part of Kim Soleum’s humanity that has been stripped from him, a part that has been permanently branded as something not from here.
He’s going to have to carry that with him forever.
/
“I couldn’t find anything that could help you,” is the first thing that Soleum tells Choi the next day.
Choi blinks at him.
He’s taking off the lock on his bicycle, rolling it up and stuffing it in the basket. His shift just ended, and he’d asked to meet Soleum right after it so they could have a meal together.
“Where were you even searching?” Choi asks, baffled. “There’s nothing to find here.”
Soleum bites his lip.
He can’t say I was trying to find the records of your death that I’d totally read before, so he stays quiet.
“I just poked around on the internet,” he says instead. “You’d be amazed what you can find in forums sometimes, sunbae.”
Choi doesn’t look like he fully believes him, but he doesn’t push. “Is that so? Well. Thank you for trying, Grapes.”
Again, the name slips out without much thought.
He’s changed out of his work clothes at least, only leaving the formal shirt he had on underneath, so Soleum doesn’t have to see his own name pinned to Choi’s uniform.
He doesn’t like what seeing it makes him feel.
They set off down the street, Choi pushing his bicycle beside them.
“We could check out libraries,” Soleum says. “There’s bound to be some kind of supernatural information that’s actually true. Or if we try to send a message—”
“Soleum-ah.”
“Yes?”
“Take it easy, yeah?”
“Huh?”
When he looks up, Choi isn’t looking at him.
He’s staring idly at the path ahead of them, tired, like someone far too accustomed to all of this.
“I’ve tried all of that,” he says. “Trust me. I’ve tried everything you might think of.”
“Yes, but—”
“I want to… not think about it for a while, you know?” he smiles, ruffling a hand through Soleum’s hair. “I’ll just spend a few weeks with my junior before I worry about how to get home again.”
… Ah.
It makes sense.
If Choi has been here for six months, it’s an awful lot of time to have been searching for a way home that might not even exist.
In that way, Kim Soleum was lucky.
When he was dropped into the world of ghost stories, a clear path to get back home was dropped into his hands as well. He was in hell, but he always knew what to do next. He always had something to work towards.
Choi has none of that.
Just an endless, mundane life, trying to keep himself alive in case a miracle happens.
It must have killed him to keep hoping for a hint, for an end, for anything at all.
“... Alright,” Soleum says. He won’t push, then.
He’ll wait until Choi feels better enough to ask him for help on his own.
Choi’s smile widens. It doesn’t reach his eyes.
Soleum doesn’t remember the last time he saw his senior’s carefree smile. He’d let himself believe, at one point, that there was nothing that could knock Choi down.
Then he’d watched him nearly lose Agent Bronze three times in a row.
He doesn’t make the mistake of thinking Choi is invincible anymore.
When he brings his face to mind, it isn’t the carefree, sly smile from their bureau days that he remembers—it’s the haunted, empty expression he’d worn when Kim Soleum had woken up after 293 days and Ryu Jaekwan still hadn’t.
“Have you been to the barbeque place by the bus stop?” Choi asks.
“Yeah.”
“Liked it?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go there, then,” Choi decides.
He steers his bicycle around the corner.
/
Kim Soleum has never spent time alone with Choi for reasons that weren’t either professional, manipulative, terrifying, or required to stop the end of the world.
He has spent time with Jaekwan. While Bronze seemed more of a workaholic at first glance, in Soleum’s early days he’d often treated him to meals, or coffee, or simply walked with him for a while on the way back home after a long day. Soleum was comfortable with him in a way he never could be with Choi, not when Choi was perpetually breathing down his neck, waiting for him to get himself caught.
There were always too many lies buried between them to ever spend meaningless time together.
But despite all that, Choi doesn’t let any awkwardness settle between them. He grills meat expertly, making sure Soleum’s plate is never empty, and chatters on about his days at work.
They don’t talk about the people that they used to know, or the world that they used to live in.
The reality of who they both are hangs over them, but they do a decent job of ignoring it.
“Honestly,” Choi says, “I was starting to consider running away.”
“Huh?”
“You know. Just wander around. If I was going to be stuck here forever, I thought I might as well see places I never got the chance to see back at home.”
It’s odd to hear Choi refer to anything as a home.
It used to be a big joke at the bureau that he didn’t have one, because of how many nights he was found working late and passing out on the couch of the Hyunmoo Team 1 waiting room. Choi never bothered quelling the rumours either. He’d always smile wide and say of course, Hyunmoo Team 1 is my home.
But Soleum knows he must have had an apartment, because he did go somewhere at the end of the day.
But Choi never mentioned the place, and he never called it home.
Now, though, the word comes to him easily.
Because home, Soleum has learned, often only means not here.
“You want to travel around Korea?” Soleum asks.
“I considered it,” Choi says. “But it was kind of lonely to imagine, haha.” He pauses. “They’re all places that I would tell Jaekwan-ie that we should go to after we retired. It feels kind of final if I go without him, you know? Like I’ve decided that our life together has ended.”
There isn’t anything Soleum can say to that.
He fills Choi’s glass of soju instead.
He almost says I’ll get you back home again, but remembers that he’s promised to let it go for a while.
“Aish…” Choi leans back in his seat, stretching his arms.
Soleum’s phone pings again, for the tenth time in about five minutes.
He hasn’t checked it yet, unwilling to interrupt this moment, but he knows who it is, because this is the time when Yesol checks her social media feeds and sends him every terrible meme she likes.
“You should check that,” Choi says, nodding towards his phone. “It might be important.”
Soleum shakes his head. “They’re just memes,” he says.
“From who? They’ve sent a lot.”
Soleum hesitates.
Yesol… isn’t his girlfriend. They’ve talked a lot, they’ve met up a few times, but neither of them has ever mentioned taking it further. Soleum likes her for sure. She’s funny, and kind, and hasn’t once tried to make him watch a horror movie, but he’s…
Well.
He’s become too comfortable keeping people at arm’s length.
Back in the world of ghost stories, he’d done it because he knew he’d be gone soon. There was no point in getting to know someone that he would be leaving behind. No point in loving them when they could die at any time.
But after months and months of learning to keep people at a distance and never ask for permanence—it’s hard to tell himself that it’s okay to now.
Now, there’s a wall between himself and every other person he runs into.
A trauma he can never explain, because the time that it happened to him in didn’t even pass in this world.
If Yesol was dying, Kim Soleum would pull a series of crazy stunts to save her life, but now that they’re both alive and in no danger he doesn’t quite know what to do.
“She’s… someone I’ve been seeing,” Soleum settles for at last. “We met on an app.”
Choi’s eyes go wide in surprise.
For a second, there’s an indiscernible look in his eyes. He doesn’t say anything for a long, awful moment.
But then the strange expression disappears, softening into something teasing.
“Our Soleum settled back in so fast, hm?” he says, grabbing for Soleum’s phone. “Show me, show me.”
Soleum holds his phone out of his reach. “No.”
“Eyy, I won’t tease. Come on.”
“No.”
“Soleum-ahhhhh…”
“No!!”
“Aigoo. Kids these days. So secretive.”
Choi slumps back into his seat, making a sulky face. Soleum doesn’t fall for it.
“I’m glad though,” Choi says, when it’s become clear that Soleum isn’t going to let his guard down. “That you settled in.”
“Eh?”
“That you’re happy here,” Choi says. “I won’t have to worry about you when I get back, right?”
There’s that strange hollow in Soleum’s chest again at the words.
The easy dismissal of the life he’s lived as happy, just because it’s what he always wanted.
Then again—it is what he wanted.
He’s safe. He’s comfortable. He’s surrounded by people he loves.
He’s lonely, but—everyone is lonely.
That’s just how it is.
But there’s still an ugly taste on Soleum’s tongue as he drinks his own glass, at the thought that this—these long days of dull, mundane life—are supposed to be his happy ending.
/
It’s late in the evening when Soleum leaves work for the day.
He’d stayed a little longer to finish his preparations for a meeting he has the next day. When he leaves, his brother has already texted him three times asking him to come over and help him out.
He’s just about to text back and ask him if he actually needs help or if he’s exaggerating when a voice stops him.
“There you are, Grapes.”
Soleum’s eyes snap up.
Choi raises a hand with a cheerful smile.
He’s casually leaning against his bicycle in the parking lot, his shirt sleeves pulled up to his elbows. There’s a cigarette held loosely in his hands, starting to burn dangerously close to his fingers.
It’s such an out of place image in the world that Soleum has settled back into that he stares at him blankly.
“Did I even tell you where I work?” he asks out loud, completely lost.
“Haha? Of course you did.”
Soleum is pretty sure that he didn’t.
He squints at Choi suspiciously, but the man’s smile doesn’t fall. He doesn’t even bother looking ashamed of himself.
How he found Soleum’s workplace is anyone’s guess, but the more important question is…
“What are you doing here, sunbae?”
Choi’s smile dims a little.
“Do I need to have a reason to come see you?”
“Eh? No, I meant—” he hesitates. “I thought maybe you’d found something.”
Choi’s smile dims further, but he shakes it off.
He brings the cigarette to his lips again, finally seems to realize how much of it has burned out, and drops it to the ground, putting it out with his shoe.
His sneakers are old and worn but the shoelaces are tied perfectly.
It’s something he’d taught Soleum to do once, to tie them so well that they never come off.
Imagine how stupid you’d feel if you died in a disaster because you tripped, Choi had scolded him, and then bent down and tied Soleum’s shoes himself. He tied them so well that even now, a full six months after they’d last seen each other—the laces on Soleum’s left shoe still hold the knots that Choi had made.
He stares blankly at his own worn out shoelaces for a moment. Choi catches his gaze and follows it, and his own face goes blank.
He reaches into his pocket for another cigarette.
“Do you want to get a cup of coffee?” he asks, flicking on his lighter. “I’m off work for the rest of the day.”
Soleum hesitates.
He looks down at his phone, where his brother’s message still stares back aggressively, asking him for help.
He looks back at Choi.
“Sunbae,” he says at last, cautious. “Would you… like to meet my brother?”
/
Admittedly, Kim Soleum did not really think this plan through.
In his head it was simple. Choi was lonely. Kim Solbin never knew how to shut up. If he introduced them to each other, surely they’d get along.
What he didn’t account for was the fact that to introduce them to each other, he had to… introduce them to each other.
“This is my senior,” Soleum says at length, “His name is. Not Kim Soleum.”
Choi’s shoulders shake like he’s trying not to crack up.
Soleum wants to punch him just once.
Kim Solbin, who was kneading dough with both hands, bows politely. “It’s nice to meet you, Not Kim Soleum-ssi,” he says.
Soleum wants to punch him too.
“He used to have a better name,” he says instead, because he’s nothing if not a professional bullshitter. “But then… well. His family brought him great shame and he wanted to cut ties with them and finally decided to change his name. So while he picked the first name he saw on the bulletin board at work and went with it, and that name happened to be mine.”
His brother looks baffled, but then again, it’s not the strangest story that he’s heard.
He used to live with Soleum, after all.
“So his name is Kim Soleum,” Soleum continues. “But we can’t both be Kim Soleum, can we?”
“You can,” Kim Solbin says.
“We can’t,” Kim Soleum says. He gestures towards Choi with both hands. “So you can call him Choi.”
Choi’s eyes are crinkled in amusement. He nods politely. “It’s nice to meet you, Kim Solbin-ssi.”
Solbin bows again, still confused as hell. “Can I really call you Choi-ssi?”
“Haha, of course! Or you can call me Kim Soleum, if you want.”
“You can not,” Soleum says.
“Aww.”
After introductions are done, they get along swimmingly.
Soleum knew that introducing them was a good idea. He stays quietly and contentedly in the background, shaping cookies to the best of his ability, while Kim Solbin presses Choi about what Soleum is like at work, which Choi has no real clue of, so Choi makes up terrible stories on the spot to amuse him instead.
When Solbin disappears into the back for a moment, Choi raises his eyebrows at Soleum.
“‘His family brought him great shame?’” he asks, amused.
“Please leave me alone.”
Choi laughs.
There’s a fondness in his eyes that’s unsettling to see, because it looks less like Choi is looking at him and more like he’s looking at a memory that is gone forever.
“I’m sorry, Grapes,” he says at last, voice quiet.
Soleum blinks. “For?”
“For doubting you had a home to return to.”
Soleum shakes his head. “You got me home in the end, sunbae.”
“Even then.” Choi reaches into his pocket for a cigarette, and then seems to remember he’s in someone else’s shop and stops himself.
He stares wistfully at the spot where Kim Solbin had disappeared.
It strikes Soleum, not for the first time, that he knows absolutely nothing about this man.
He doesn’t know if he ever had a family of his own. If he had a brother, or a sister, or parents or anyone at all. He knows every terrible thing that has happened to Choi in his adult life, the origin of every scar in graphic detail—but he doesn’t know if the man has ever had a life outside of his job,
To the Kim Soleum who had read about Agent Choi in the Dark Exploration Records, Choi had simply sprung into life at the bureau. There was never a history before it, and never anything after it.
To the Kim Soleum who had known him personally—it wasn’t any different.
He’d never tried to get to know anyone in the world of ghost stories because he hadn’t wanted to get attached to them.
He didn’t know anything about any of them, that they hadn’t told him of their own accord.
But now, here, in a world that Soleum can actually stay in—
He can ask now, right? They’re safe now.
“Sunbae,” he starts carefully.
“Hm?”
“Do you—”
He stops.
Then again…
Choi will be leaving soon. The moment he can find a way out.
This temporary peace isn’t something that’s going to last.
Choi will stay until it gets too much for him to handle, and then he’ll go back to grasping at straws to get himself out of here, much like Soleum had done.
And Soleum will be left here alone again, in a place where no one knows what happened to him.
“Nothing,” he says. And then, because he knows Choi will keep pushing if he doesn’t fill the space, “Have you ever considered working at a bakery?”
“Hm? You mean here?”
“Mm.”
“I don’t have the skills for it,” Choi says. “Basic cooking is the most I can do. The supermarket is fine, Soleum-ah. You don’t have to worry about that.”
He pats Soleum on the head, running his fingers through his hair.
“For some reason I always saw myself working at a supermarket,” he admits quietly.
The words send a chill down Soleum’s spine.
“Jaekwan-ie used to pressure me to think about a future sometimes, you know? He thought that planning one would make me try harder to stay alive.” He cracks a grin. “He was cute like that, wasn’t he? He said that he’d go back to working at the bookstore. Or at an orphanage.”
“That suits him.”
“Right? But when I thought about my own future, I could never think very far. It’s hard to imagine living that long with a job like ours.”
He says it in the present tense, as if they’re both still there, a part of Hyunmoo Team 1.
“But I always had this odd vision of working at a supermarket,” Choi says. “Almost… intrusive. As if it kept telling me that that was where I was supposed to be.”
Soleum’s stomach twists.
That… was where Choi was supposed to be.
But not in the way that Choi seems to think.
Is this what happens, when a fate is altered? Does it haunt the people who were changed by it?
“But I couldn’t tell Jaekwan that that was all I saw, right? He wanted me to dream of a future that I actually wanted. As motivation. That was why I ended up promising we go on a trip together after we retired.”
He reaches again for a cigarette, and makes a face as he drops his hand.
“If I couldn’t imagine my own future—I could imagine his instead, right? And if I had to be around for that future to play out, then that counted as motivation.”
“That’s… yeah. That works.”
Choi nods. “But now…” he trails off, unwilling to finish the thought.
Kim Solbin chooses that moment to return, a plateful of snacks in his hands. He’s clearly picked out the best of his stock for Choi, which is a little unfair, because Soleum always gets the broken, sad looking ones that he can’t put up for display.
His brother must really like Choi.
Or really dislike Soleum.
They fall back into easy conversation. Choi is unsurprisingly good at fabricating an entire past that he’s shared with Soleum that has literally never happened, and Solbin, the fool, falls for every line of it.
There’s some truth in the stories that Choi tells. Some of it is simply moments at the bureau that he’s moved the location of to Soleum’s current workplace. Some of it is moments that Soleum shared with other people, that Choi easily inserts himself into.
Soleum doesn’t add much to the conversation. He can’t stop thinking about what Choi had said, about imagining a future.
Choi hadn’t been able to imagine one, because his life had constantly been threatened, every moment of every day.
But Soleum’s life isn’t.
He’s never in any danger anymore.
And yet…
And yet.
He can’t imagine a future either.
/