Archive of Our Own ^beta

fall i.

He kicks his feet in the water, staring at everyone else in the pool. He is quite content with the way he’s sitting and the way he can make little bubbles on the surface with his fingers, and… Two boys laugh a bit too loudly in the middle of the pool and he stops shaking his fingers aggressively in the water for a second to watch. He considers calling out from here: Hi, I’m starting to feel a little lonely here, can you be my friend? Please please please please. He pouts and decides against it. He will have to, like, shout. Shout really loud, and then everyone will look at him, and then maybe they will invite him to their side but he will have to say, Um, no, thank you! Because he isn’t getting in the water, thank you very much. He returns to making more bubbles. Wow. How cool is this?

“You know, Nollie, I didn’t take you here for you to just sit by the pool.”

He means to look up, but his mum is already kneeling to be eye to eye with him, so he just kind of keeps kicking his feet. “I’m not getting in the water!” he exclaims, and points at the pool because, duh, it should be obvious. “It’s way taller than me!”

His mum laughs. “Not all of it. That part of the pool is more shallow, see? Why not go there?”

“That’s…” Nol starts to say, but trails off as he decides against it. That’s not where the others are. He kicks his feet a little bit faster. That’s lonely, he would have said, maybe, but it would also be silly, because, well. It’s also lonely where he is sitting. Technically.

His mum follows his eyes, though, and says, “And you know how to swim!” She pokes at his chest. “We learned it together, remember? So why does it matter that it’s taller than you? You can swim and stay on the surface!”

Right. He probably could. In normal circumstances.

“Hm,” he says, because he doesn’t really want to say no to his mum.

“A lot of the kids are shorter than the water, look.” His mum waves her hand in the direction of other children in the pool, pressing on the word kids like she knows something about it that he doesn’t. “How are you going to get to them if you just mope here?”

“I am not moping!” Nol retorts, offended. “I’m making bubbles.” He reluctantly moves his fingers up and down on the surface of the water. “Look!”

She just sort of stares at his hand with her brows raised.

“There are lots of kids in there,” she tries again. “Why don’t you go and be their friend?”

She says the word friend the same way she said kids. At this, he basically vibrates in place despite himself, looking at the two kids in the middle in particular because yes, he does want to be their friend. Again, though, he just averts his eyes.

“Besides, I’ll just come and save you if anything goes wrong.” She smiles, and it’s so believable for a second that he has to look away.

“You can’t,” he pouts. “You have your normal clothes on.”

“Well, I also have some other clothes,” his mum replies. “I wasn’t planning to get in today but I can.”

“Hm,” Nol says again, unconvinced. He turns his gaze towards the left side of the pool where a couple of girls are sitting next to each other, similar to him, with half their legs in the pool. He points in their direction. “I’ll be their friend.”

His mum gives him a long, long look.

He shifts, uncomfortable. “Can I?”

“Of course,” his mum says at last. “But they do sell floaties here, I can get you some. And then you can swim wherever you want.”

“Er,” he replies, staring at his feet. “I just don’t really want to swim?”

His mum eyes him suspiciously. “Is this about the monsters?”

He turns to her in a flash. “What! No, it’s not!”

She groans and puts her face in her hands. “It was a joke! I only said that to get you to go to the beach, I promise.”

He half-turns around to stare at the floor of the pool, brows furrowed, trying to see something that’s invisible. Which. He isn’t seeing. Because they’re invisible.

You know, Nollie, there are invisible creatures at the bottom of those pools, living in the unhealthy chloric water, and they pull down the children who swim in them. And he had said, with a loud gulp, There’s no way that’s true—but it had been a doubtful thing. His mum had come closer and closer, waggling her fingers as though she was one of the creatures herself, then yelled in his ear as she started tickling him. He had tried pushing his mother away as laughter had bursted out of him in bubbles despite himself. Not funny! That’s not funny! That move was getting old, and it really wasn’t funny, but it was his mum, so.

“It was really a joke, sweetie, I swear. Look! How come nothing is pulling all the other kids down?”

He turns his eyes to the children. He doesn’t know. “I don’t know.”

“Because they don’t exist and I was only joking around.” She moves to angle her body to the right, so that she becomes eye-to-eye with him. “Even if you were pulled down, though, you would just swim back up, because you’re my little champion. Wouldn’t you? Would you just let a monster pull you down?”

“I guess I wouldn’t,” he replies, still unsure. He eyes her skeptically. “Are you lying to me?”

She presses her lips together, fully smiling now. “Of course not. I would never lie to you.”

He stares at her for a few more seconds. Then, “Okay. I’m going, then.”

“Okay. Oh, no, wait. Hey. Wait.” His mum reaches to pull his swimming shorts up. There is a disapproving expression on her face as she ties the string, probably because of how absurdly large it looks on him. She then squeezes his cheek, and it morphs into something that of a wonder. “Aren’t you handsome.”

He can feel the tips of his ears turn red. Embarrassing. He’s embarrassed. He turns his eyes to the floor, itching to leave. “Okay! Going now!”

She smiles, close-eyed and bright, and it warms his insides. “Be safe. Walk slowly, the floor is wet. Wait, do you want your slippers?”

He stares at his bare feet. He moves his toes as he does so. Then he half turns around, and, “Um, no-thank-you!”

But he does walk carefully. He imitates the sounds each of his steps make in his mind. Shap, shap, shap. He gets the urge to fasten his pace, but then he is, like, ninety percent sure that he will slip his feet and fall. Percent. That’s a new, barely known word. He is one hundred thousand million percent sure that he is just a little bit nervous. He is one percent sure that he will be able to convince these girls to be friends with him. Maybe he can use the word during the conversation and make himself seem smart, because they are probably not hearing their mums say the words his mum does, considering they speak Korean, and his mum speaks English.

Duh.

But his mum did say they should speak in Korean from now on. The funny thing is, really, that she used to have a harder time with it than he does and she still sounds even sillier than he does, which shouldn’t be possible, zero zero zero percent, because she’s his mum. How does he even say percent in Korean? He squints his eyes and tries to remember the Make-Friend sentences, because that’s what his mum told him to do. He gets nervous and nervous-er with every step. He comes to a stop, finally, taking his final steps to awkwardly stand over the girls. He pouts, and then tries for a close-eyed, all teeth smile. The one his mum has.

The girls just stare at him.

He keeps the smile plastered on his face for a little bit longer. But his cheeks are starting to hurt, so it would be nice if someone said something, thank you.

The girls blink, then stare at each other, and then one of them uncomfortably turns back around and the others are also doing the same and he blurts out, “Um, hello!”

And he says it in English.

They probably know Hello, he thinks, but he’s also not sure so it’s all the more awkward now, and he hurries to remember everything he has ever learned in Korean to say: “My name is Nol, good morning, what is your name, can we be friends.” He is not sure if he should be saying those in that order, and he also isn’t sure about what he said, mostly, so he adds, a little bit more confident, “Thank you.”

He presses his lips into a smile, though it’s more hesitant now. One of the girls speaks and he only catches the word English, so he just stares at her with unblinking eyes and the smile still glued on his lips. The girl points at him and repeats, “English?”

Well. Not really. But she probably says English and means Not-Korean, so he gives a thumbs up. (Does he count as Korean, though, if his father once lived in Ireland and now lives in Korea? He suspects he might be at least half-Korean, now that he lives here because of his father. He discards the question for now to ask his mum about it later.)

He points at himself, and then next to the empty space next to them, opening his eyes wide open to make his mannerisms that of asking a question. He waits, tapping his foot in excitement-anxiousness. The girl shrugs, and when she does, the other ones do as well. He immediately moves to sit next to them before they can change their mind.

The girl in the middle asks him a question, and he knows what it means, so he beams and replies, excitedly, “Six!” He holds six fingers up as well, just in case.

He kicks his feet in the water and asks, “You?”

The girl says, “Eight,” and holds eight of her fingers up.

And the conversation just sort of dies from there. They have nothing in particular to talk about, and even if they did, none of them have the vocabulary to talk about it. The other two girls don’t seem too interested in talking either, though he decides that it’s probably because they can’t.

He sticks his lip out. This is too hard. It wasn’t half as hard as this with that kid in the park. Ah. He still feels sad about that gaming console. If they had pretended that he was the trash can the kid was going to throw his console in like Nol suggested, maybe he would have had something to do here. Or, even better, he wishes that kid himself was here. He would have had someone to talk to, and yes, he did seem hard to convince, but Nol would say Please please please please please let’s be friends a few more times, and then he would smile at him, and the problem would be solved. Nobody is that hard to win over. His face grows even longer. His mum could have met the kid’s mum if he just stuck around a little bit longer, and then his mum could call his mum to make them friends, or something. But no. He had to talk with Nol for, like, three seconds, and then run. He stops moving for a split second, his feet hanging motionless in the water.

You’re nothing but a mistake.

(Don’t even try to catch up to me. You will never catch up!)

How mean. He would never think to say that to someone, he thinks, and he wonders for a second about how the other kid did.

He lifts his head to look at his mum.

She’s… not there. Her bag and his clothes and the towel are still laying there, but the lounge chair is empty. He looks around to the other chairs, but they’re empty as well. His heart drums in his ears despite himself. Where is she? He wants to turn to his left and ask, Hey, do you see a woman with red hair just like mine, because maybe he is just missing to see stuff like his mum says he always does, but he doesn’t have the words for it in another language. He waits ten, twenty seconds more for her to show up, feeling uneasy. Panic builds up in him with each passing minute. What is he going to do if she never comes back? He doesn’t know anyone here. He doesn’t even know how to tell them what he’s missing.

He pushes himself back and gets up, his foot slipping a little in the process, and looks around again. He has a terrible feeling in his stomach.

He takes one step, then another, then another. He can barely breathe. He calls out, quietly at first, “Mum?”

But it’s silly, really, because she’s not there. This is when his pace quickens, and on the way, he actually clings to a woman’s legs to say, “Sorry, have you seen my mum? Her hair is like this, like mine.”

The woman blinks at him, her eyes wide, but his distress must be so obvious that she kneels down to his eye level. He feels like he’s about to cry from frustration, because she seems old and obviously doesn’t understand what he’s saying, and what is he going to do like this? Tears well up in his eyes. He’s also simultaneously looking around the pool for any sign of her, scanning everywhere for an ounce of ginger hair. “My mum,” he says weakly. He knows the word for mother in Korean but his brain isn’t picking up the pieces to put them together, and he blinks the tears away until he doesn’t.

He leaves the woman there and keeps walking, steps so fast he’s almost running now. He stops someone else, a kid this time. “Sorry! Have you seen my mum?”

The boy looks at him for a second, puzzled, and says, “Mother?”

His exhale of relief is so big and so loud that he almost hugs the boy’s arm. He points at his own head. “Yes! Her hair is like this?”

The kid shakes his head, but Nol doesn’t know if it’s because he didn’t understand him or he didn’t see her. He makes a noise at the back of his throat.

He takes a step away from the kid, turning around himself once, twice and thrice to see his mum, and that’s when he starts downright sobbing. He puts his face in his hands. What’s he going to do if his mum never comes back and finds him? He knows no one else other than her. He doesn’t even know how to speak Korean, or wash his hair, or turn the keys, he doesn’t even have the keys — wait, is he homeless, now? What if he has to talk with the police? What if they don’t understand him? His sobs become so hysteric they start coming out as hiccups.

“Nol?” calls out a voice, from afar, and he lifts his head in a flash. “What’s — Nol!”

His heart leaps. “Mum!”

He would’ve let another sob out, just out of relief this time, but he gets up to run to his mum before taking another breath. He’s not looking at anything other than her. His feet hit the ground, shap shap shap shap shap, and he can’t quite feel his hands, and his mom didn’t leave him, and she is there—

It happens in the span of milliseconds. Before he can even grasp the fact that the world is tilting sideways and he’s looking at the water instead of his mum, his knee sharply hits the marble and his face crashes into the cold water.

His first thought is, That’s what you get for running. Doesn’t matter if it’s towards or away from something. The logic is simple, like his mum always says: If you run, you fall. The faster you run, the more it hurts when you hit the ground, and if you’re running without even looking where your next step is, then, well. You fall into a pool with monsters. So his second thought is, They’re going to get me.

He opens his eyes in an instant.

Nothing seems to be pulling him down. He looks at his hands and feet. No, nothing is pulling him down, not really. His mum did say they were invisible, though, so he hangs there and waits. He stretches out his arms and legs, just to see if he can. His fingertips almost touch the surface. There is nothing surrounding his flesh. Nothing keeps him here. Nothing binds him to drown.

That means he has to go, now, because he has his mum to get back to. He swims up to the surface and gasps when air finally charges into his lungs.

“Nol!” His mum shouts, leaning from the edge of the pool. “You had me so—”

“Mum!” he says, louder than she does, as soon as he has enough breath to use for his vocal chords. “Why would you leave me! You told me not to go anywhere without telling you and you left without telling me and I thought you left me! No one was around and I forgot how to say anything!”

“I was…” his mum says, coming up short. “I’m so terribly sorry, Nollie. I should have told you. I didn’t guess you would realize I was gone before I came back.” She holds up her hand to show what she’s holding. “I was just getting you floaties.”

He’s still so rapidly breathing that his chest feels like it’s about to burst open. “Well, there are no monsters down there, so. I don’t really need them.”

She smiles, slowly. “Wear them anyway.”

Nol holds his arms up, and his mum helps him out of the pool. They sit by the poolside, and he watches her as she blows air into the floaties. She says, again, after she’s done with one, “I’m really sorry.”

He shrugs. He doesn’t want her to feel bad, so he says, “It’s okay. You got me the floaties.”

“Yeah, but you must have been worried.”

He extends his arm. She helps him put the floaty on and pushes it up.

“I guess,” he replies. Then, because it’s his mum and he has to say it, “I really thought you left me.”

She puts the other floaty she has in her hand on the marbled floor and moves to sit right next to him, leaving him with one floaty on his left arm. Her side touches his right arm, the one that’s bare. “I would never.” She lowers her face to the top of his head but just breathes him in, a ghost of a kiss hovering between her and him. “I would never, Nollie, and I need you to remember this the next time you think I might be gone. I would never leave you.”

“Okay,” he says, though her voice sounds tinted with something strange to his ears. And he believes it, because she’s his mum.

They sit like that for a while. It’s fine by him, really, because this is his favorite place. It’s true that he’s trying to make friends, but it’s his mum who’s his favorite person in the whole entire world. She’s his best friend. Though he thinks that might be because he doesn’t have many friends to choose from. Whatever.

“Hey,” she says after a while. “You want to go to the ducky pond after this?”

“Sure,” he shrugs. Then, “Why do you like the ducky pond so much, Mum? I mean, I love the duckies, so I like going. But I don’t know why you want to go all the time.”

A complicated, sad look flashes over her eyes. Nol blinks, and it’s gone.

“Why, I go because I love the duckies, too. You first came to me as a ducky, after all. I took care of you, and then you turned into this sweet, beautiful boy that you are. I look at them and see my little duck.”

Nol looks at his mum with a frown. “What. That doesn’t even make sense. I was in your stomach.”

“Nope. I asked the pond to give you to me, and then you came.”

“There’s no way that’s true! You’re joking with me again.” But he furrows his brows at the pool as though the duckies are there. He asks, suspiciously, “Was I blonde?”

His mum smiles at this. Then her expression grows somber. “Oh, no. Your feathers were black when I was waiting for you to become you.”

“Really,” he just says. He can’t really imagine himself with black hair. Or feathers.

“From a little ducky to a little boy. What will you be in the future?” She looks at him as though she’s trying to see into the future herself, wonder evident in her voice.

He freezes. “I’m gonna turn into something else?”

His mum laughs. “I hope not. What do you wanna be? When you grow up?”

“Like… like, a job?”

She nods.

“Hmmm… I want to be an astronaut. And I want to drive a truck! And, and, I want to be a firefighter! And, Mrs Yun made us paint with our hands yesterday and that was really nice, so I want to do that, too!” He stops, talking more to himself, now, “But my painting was ugly. Would I be wasting paper? Oh, and I want to be a gardener!”

“Why would you even think it’s ugly?” his mom says, appalled. “I’m sure it was very beautiful. Okay, which one of these do you want to be, then?”

“Hmm,” he says, putting his index finger and thumb under his chin. “I want to be all!”

He beams and raises his left arm, and flexes his muscles. He doesn’t really have any, but the floaty seems like it could be his muscles. Big and strong, just like his mum always says he will be. His right arm, the one that’s still stuck to his mum’s side, though, is missing the floaty. It looks like… well, it looks like any five-year-old’s arm, so. It looks small and weak. Thankfully, his mum is there to cover it, so he shifts a little and hides it behind his mum.

“Okay,” his mum laughs, unable not to. “I’ll see to it that you do, then.”

fall ii.

His head spins as he looks for Shin-Ae at every corner of his eye-sight. Of course. Of course. She was with him, was seen around him, was close to him just enough that she would be sucked into a hole where she would no longer exist on her own anymore. He can’t even feel his knees; either from the panic that just went through his entire circulation system upon seeing his father’s face or the fear constantly nagging at the back of his head about what might have happened—what might be happening to her. God, where is she? He frantically looks around the pool.

His eyes catch Sang-Chul. And her jacket.

The same terror echoes and throbs in his skull as he tries to get the answers out of Sang-Chul, as he clenches his fists and tries to get a hold of his temper, as he—

As he hears her scream.

For a split second the world goes black. His legs turn to water and he turns to run upstairs, there is no breathing in his lungs nor a single semblance of control left in his agitated brain. His mind turns the same plea around and around and around. Please let her be safe. Please let her be safe enough.

He takes one step up as his mind provides and spins a million visuals about, God, he doesn’t even want to—why was there a drug vial on the—God, please just let her be safe until I get there, and then he takes another and another and another, and then Sang-Chul speaks, and the implication he’s making about Alyssa is exactly what he’s been so terrified of that his entire body goes rigid where he’s standing. There is no thinking, not a goddamn ounce of restraint left in his limbs and suddenly he doesn’t care about whose son he’s going against or who might be recording the incident or where on Sang-Chul’s face his fist makes contact with.

Yeah. His father is probably going to tear his bones apart for this and Kousuke is probably never going to let him hear the end of it but he doesn’t care; whatever might hit him across the face is the least of his worries. He is just that fucking stupid.

He runs to Shin-Ae.

He stops at the doorway, dead in his tracks, as he takes the sight in. It’s almost ridiculous. She is biting That Woman’s arm while simultaneously trying to punch Kousuke, and if it was under any other circumstance than this, an involuntary laugh might have bubbled out of his throat. But this is far from funny. His chest is still so very tight with fear. So he calls to distract Shin-Ae the only way he knows how, yelling something about fried chicken, and it works, of course. Everything pauses for a brief second as Shin-Ae looks at him and around the room for fried chicken which, obviously she finds none, and that finalizes the chaos to become her breaking point somehow.

“You lied!” she yells. “Everyone is toying with me!”

She goes on an unintelligible rampage about what happened at the party again, using slurred nicknames for everyone in the story, but then an agonized expression replaces the anger on her features and her face crumples, and she looks as pained as she sounds when she cries, “I just wanted to help my dad! Why does that have to be so hard?”

She throws herself back with the force of it. Her face is flushed, tears barely visible on the corner of her eyes, and she is too out of herself to realize that she is stepping on her dress. She seems unaware of the fact that she’s standing on the edge of the balcony until she loses her balance and falls off the ledge.

Kousuke moves to catch her leg, and Yeong-Gi moves in a flash to catch Kousuke, because Kousuke also gets pulled down by her weight. Which, really. He has some fucking nerve, ordering Yeong-Gi to pull the two of them up from where he’s hanging, considering that he’s literally hanging from the balcony because he couldn’t manage to hold a teenage girl.

His arms burn. He grits his teeth, gives his entire weight on his feet, and slowly starts pushing himself back to pull them up. It’s too much. He would’ve pulled Shin-Ae alone easily, but a grown man’s body weight on top of hers is just about to tear his arms from his shoulders. He clenches his jaw. He can’t let them fall. Breathe in, breathe out. He pulls them up, or tries to, centimeter by centimeter. He almost stumbles forward, and pulls his balance together at the last second. Breathe in, breathe out. Big and strong, just like his—

There is a hand on his shoulder, and he instinctively looks over to the person behind him to see her, and she’s so close to his face that he thinks he’s about to turn to stone when that familiar shade of blue touches his eyes.

She paralyzes him, and he lets go.

He takes a step back out of involuntary fear, and suddenly his foot hits the wrong corner with the wrong amount of desperation, and his back hits the railing with the wrong amount of force, and he knows. He knows deep in his bones that he’s about to fall before his vision tilts. She yells at him to grab her hand, but she’s lying, and she’s known that he was a liar even before she made him one, so he reaches for her hair instead; her mask doesn’t get to be impenetrable when his is cracked in two more often than not. They at least need to be even at pretending. It’s the only thing he gets to have, and he pulls her mask down with himself.

His eyes are wide open when his back crashes into the water. Maybe it’s the shock, or the way his head hit the water, but it’s as though his brain resets.

It is so peaceful.

He closes his eyes and takes it all in. All his limbs go slack. He sways without a purpose, without any balance for an endless second. What if he just… What if he just stayed here? What if he stayed here, down the pool, by himself; eyes shut and lifeless, him and only him. It would be quieter, and simpler. It would be easier.

It would be better.

It would save everyone trouble if he could just lay here forever, peaceful until his lungs ran out of air, but that would be okay, too. Because it would be peaceful again, after. Better be alone here than alone above the surface. Better be nothing here than nothing up there. There is no future for him, and he knows this; not one future where he isn’t tied by puppet strings tight enough that he would be choked to death anyway. He wants to be no one, nothing, nothing at all, because he already is, anyway, and it is easier accepting it than—

He cracks his eyes open, just barely.

It is easier accepting it than wanting to search for an out when there is none. It is easier accepting it than wanting to bow his head down until everything maybe goes away, or trying to cling to the desperate, pitiful imitation of a dream his mum thought he would be, in hopes that it would somehow make him real. It is easier accepting it, drowning in it, than looking for ways to fulfill the promise of a person that gets more and more lost by the day. He wants to sleep because he wants to wake up, but it is easier wanting to sleep than being put down. It is easier just being nothing than wanting to be something.

His arms and legs hang motionless and free in the water—not by anything that leaves them unable to move, but out of choice. Every monster he’s ever known is above the surface.

Yeah. He should just stay here. Lay and drift off to sleep until the chloric water either alters his cells into something worse than he already is or carries him back to the pond. Let go; if not for the way it feels nauseatingly sick up there from either being captured in a golden cage like a bird with a broken wing or running from the rifle like a deer with shattered bones for legs, then for the exhaustion seeped into all those fractured pieces from trying to avoid his inevitable end. Collapse on his antlers and roll over on his bruised body until it finds the way to its pre-dug grave. Fall in it and hide in it, (drown in it and sleep in it) because it’s more of a shelter than it is anything else.

Drop the mask. Welcome him back.

Embrace him, accept him, and go to sleep.

The chemicals burn his eyes. There is nothing for him to do, nothing that he can do—nothing at all.

He looks at his side without even meaning to, and—

You.

You.

That’s what he’s here for.

She’s why he’s down here. He’s why she’s here at the party at all. Her body hangs in the water; unmoving, unconscious, eyes closed. She doesn’t know that she’s staying here. She doesn’t look upwards, compare the surface to the lack of air she gets in the water, and see it fit to not go back. She gets no choice at all.

She isn’t meant to be here.

She has people that would notice and miss her absence if she were to ever disappear, though none of them are here now. She has people that would come looking for her even if it’s too late. She has so many things ahead of her, and so many things that she has to do. She has to take an entrance exam, for one, and go to university. Maybe healthcare. He can see her at the campus, laughing with her new friends, because she would make them. He can see her as a teacher, a doctor, a nurse; maybe a scientist, because she has a barely contained curiosity beneath her walls, or a businesswoman, because she just keeps getting better and better at the job.

She has a future. She has a tomorrow. And he knows she will forge it somehow, find a way to make the sun rise if not, because she’s the most resilient person he’s ever known. She has the kind of freedom to her soul that he could only be grateful to have touched, though his shackles spilled out and got to her, now. She has a life of her own with no master to kick and drag her into the playground despite it all. And it is almost painful to see this written on her face when he looks at her, because she isn’t here to return to it herself.

He gets a hold of his own strings. He can’t stay here any longer, because she can’t, either. There is no choice at all if she gets none. He doesn’t get to have the peace of giving up on his future if it means crippling her tomorrows. He doesn’t get to let go with her going down with him. He doesn’t get to stop breathing when there is someone, there is her beside him that would choose to climb up if she were awake.

He doesn’t get to die just yet.

The few strokes it takes to get to Shin-Ae feel like the only ounce of strength left in his body. His hands touch hers. He wraps his arm around her—the good one—and uses his other to swim up to the surface, inch by inch.

Yeong-Gi makes way to a breath of air with Shin-Ae’s body limp against his chest, picking up the scattered pieces of his mask on the way and sticking them to his face the best he can; but water is no glue, so some of them fall off and get in Shin-Ae’s hair as clues. His best hope is that she doesn’t think, doesn’t notice the heaviness in her own head enough to look for answers.

He hopes, prays that she will shake her head and wash them off instead of trying to rip her hair out and finding her hands bloody from the pieces of glass in the process, because the first person she’ll point the arrows at won’t be him. When the arrows do point at him, however, because in the end they always do, what she will do is try to make sense of it. She will ask him all the wrong questions he has the right answers to, but he will be so ashamed of the unspeakable, unbearable truths he’s keeping hidden in his balled up fists that he will not answer any of them anyway. Instead he will smile at her and she will be thrown, and she won’t be able to make sense of it—won’t be able to sort out the wrongness of the hurt clashing with the performed gentleness, because no other hardship in her life had ever been as cowardly as him. Because she’s the most upfront person he’s ever known, and the holes her life dug up for her hadn’t been easier, but they at least hadn’t been lies, either.

Or maybe she will figure him out. Find him and see him and finally trap him in the bubble he’s surrounding her with, popping it with a single touch of her finger, because she’s as distrusting as she’s honest. And then maybe she will step on him as though he were some insect, and crush his bones with the heel of her foot while she’s at it as well, and when he thinks this, his mind’s voice sounds like Please.

You’re Yeong-Gi, he says, like a mantra. Don’t take off the mask. Tough it out a little longer. It’s not time—You cannot let go just yet. Then, again, You’re Yeong-Gi, Yeong-Gi, Yeong-Gi.

You’ll be okay. You’re Yeong-Gi. You’re Yeong-Gi. You. You’re you. You’re Yeong-Gi. Yeong-Gi.

Oxygen charges into his lungs. He makes sure to pull Shin-Ae’s head out of the water at the same time he takes his first breath. The first thing he knows, even before he opens his eyes, is that they’re both alive. The second thing he knows, even before he feels it, is that he’s scared out of his mind.

His left arm pushes them towards the edge even as he coughs water out more than he breathes air in. He doesn’t have a grip on the seconds, minutes that pass before he finally gets Shin-Ae on the hard floor. “Shin-Ae,” he breathes, but he’s not sure he’s breathing. He knows he’s not breathing. “Can you hear me? Talk to me!”

But she’s not there. She’s not hearing him, nor is she answering him, and his brain suddenly short circuits into thinking that he’s spoken the wrong language. Said the wrong words at the wrong time, pleading and shaking and crying to be responded to. He recites the words in every different shape and form he’s ever come to know. Wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up.

“Shin-Ae,” he begs again, suppressing the desperate urge to shake her awake. “Stay with me!”

But she’s not here, and suddenly, hovering over her unconscious form, he’s not here either. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, but she isn’t waking up and she’s not here and he’s not here and she’s not the one who he’s trying to wake up anymore. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. He shakes like a leaf with every breath, and almost collapses on his side, because he has never really put muscle on his right arm.

He finally gathers himself enough to shout for someone to call an ambulance, because the panic from her not waking up right now isn’t bigger than the panic from her not waking up, ever. He’s stuck between being haunted by that neverending timeframe and being afraid of actually reliving that neverending timeframe, and he then latches onto the latter like a lifeline. Because he’s Yeong-Gi, and Yeong-Gi’s death-gripped fear of now is always bigger than the lingering ghosts of the past.

It’s that dude’s fault, a voice behind him says, and He just dropped her in the water, says another, and it starts echoing in his head until his skull numbs from how many times the words crash against it. His fault. His fault, his fault, his fault.

It is, of course. He knows this. And yet, he wants to claw at the solid marble until it opens and swallows him whole because knowing it and hearing it are two different things, and he has seen, known that it is true, but now it is true. It is not up to him to repeat it to himself anymore because his ears are picking the words up without the will of his mind, and it is irrepressible, unescapable, undeniable now. It is not his to ignore or run from.

It is a stone cold fact.

It is this: Shin-Ae laying in front of him, unconscious and injured, mascara running down from her wet lashes. Her dress is all but a second skin to her, now, with the way it sticks to her skin and pool water dropping off of it. Her mouth is downturned almost in a pout, her brows are creased like she might cry. The troubled expression follows her at her heels even when her mind is not attached to her features, even when she isn’t there to protest and shoo it away. Like a ghost, like a bruise, like a virus. Like him.

It is this: His aching arm—the good one—spasming like it has someone to pull from the grip of death, but ah. Too small, too young, too late, always. The entirety of his right side feels like a mess of extinguished muscles that his mum forgot to blow air into. Time and place mash into each other and he grips the hard floor for dear life, panic seizing his lungs again. Shin-Ae’s limp body, centimeters away from his fearful hands, gives him the sense that he’s crashed into the water on his bare stomach, though something about his spine bending sideways with the impact rings right to his ears. It could have been his stomach, or face—like a slap, here or there or now or then stop it—

It is this: Not being able to stop it and the ground being pulled underneath his feet to turn into something from however many years ago, and the ambulance, ringing and ringing and ringing.

It is this: Watching Shin-Ae get carried onto the stretcher and then into the ambulance like a lifeless doll, and this scene tasting so familiar to him it’s as though he’s watching it from a ten-year-old’s eyes. He knows, has seen the exact way Shin-Ae is being lifted like she weighs nothing at all. Her body has gone limp. He imagines her mumbling something, something about her father, maybe, if she were more awake and more conscious and less at risk and less hurt—but what would he know? He wants to laugh. The irony isn’t lost on him. Everyone seems to be landing where they are because of their parents one way or another. The idea that he’s on the list of reasons that caused this on top of a parental figure leaves his mouth sour.

It is this: Watching the ambulance drive away with his gut twisted to knots and Kousuke finally, finally turning his eyes to the side to dig his teeth into him. Kousuke turns to him, and suddenly he is nothing but a mere person, stripped to nothing but a little boy who has no idea on playacting.

It is this: Are you that vindictive and Now Miss Yoo is on her way to the hospital all thanks to you and nausea crawling inch by inch up his shameful throat, washing the words and the shock and the tears stuck there with acid, because this is all so achingly familiar. Ambulance, ringing and ringing ringing. Desperate denial crumbling around his knuckles like fractured glass. A disaster and Kousuke and him, in the middle of it somehow. As if on cue, the policemen get a hold of his arms, and he is struck with such terror that his entire body gives a jolt. This isn’t happening. Not this. Protests die around his wrists like handcuffs, now, and the words caught in his throat this time are wet and childish and instinctive. Please. Please. I didn’t do anything, it wasn’t me—I promise. I promise. He thinks it in a way that would have been understood, with the same syllables anybody else would have used—but it doesn’t matter. Every plea out of his mouth has been of an alien language.

It is this, in the end: A blur. He comes to realize himself humming for what seems to be an endless period of time; a haunting melody from an endless amount of time before. He doesn’t remember being brought in this cell. He doesn’t remember the door being shut behind his back. He doesn’t recall sitting on this bench and looking at the corridor ahead, perhaps because he had been stuck somewhere between here and there and then. His throat feels torn and raw. Just how long had he been singing to himself? He feels his eyes sting, suddenly. He thinks, Mum. Oh, mum. I wish you were with me. Then, a little more wet around it: I wish I was with you.

fall iii.

He makes the decision to tag along after strangers rather instinctually. All it really takes is one look that, comedically enough, confuses one thing—one place, one memory, one time—with another again. Shin-Ae, Dieter, Soushi: There and gone in a blink. He searches for the usual whiplash that comes after, only to find its place empty. Something dull and dead nudges his insides instead. He thinks his mind won’t ever tire of trying to pull back people that aren’t there.

His chest is near the point of exploding with the endless push and pull—with this feeling that is practically of being stuck in the purgatory, the two ends of the same unreal relentlessly fighting each other inside him, lately. The autoimmune response to the long buried dullness is even more unbearable than the resurfacing dead. Dead, dead, dead. This graveyard-eyed creature. Dead. Living, breathing, dead, dead, go away—

He needs something to put one of these away at least temporarily before he goes mad for good. Alcohol doesn’t even seem to work. He thinks, sourly, that it hasn’t yet done anything that kept the teeth and the bites from clashing with the habitual apology. Maybe he needs something more. Maybe something stronger. Alcohol. Ha. He represses the thought before he gets the urge to laugh. He’s not yet grown familiar with this laugh that started coming out of his throat recently.

He blocks out the explanation about the drinks. He already has a bottle picked up in hand when the guy says, from behind him, “A man with a purpose. Nice.”

He can’t say that he wasn’t supposed to have a purpose, and that someone only ever saw to it that he grew to be nothing with nowhere to go, and so he says, “I suppose.”

It is one of those rare moments where he feels there are not two but three spaces occupying his brain—these aching moments where everything else is silent enough to hear a wail echoing from a place that’s long locked the rest out. But it’s an illusion. There are only remnants of echoes left; the poor imitation of the only part of him that’s ever been alive. What remains is this: Trying to fulfill the promise of a boy that was made to him in the memory of the person who broke it, and not hearing the smell of the ugly, rotten-in-the-flesh thing that moans on the ground. The impostor and the dead.

“I could use a pick-me-up,” he starts, and his voice sounds dull, too dull, to his own ears. It’s almost like half of his mouth is pressed to the hard floor. “I need something that’ll make me forget. Something that’ll make me disappear for a bit.”

And so he follows the man out to the balcony.

The cool breeze that brushes his face clashes with the burning shot of alcohol. He almost retches again then and there. The guy laughs, too loud, and there is something complicated in his face when he does this. A smile stays plastered on his face when he falls silent, and when he says, “I’m getting a divorce.”

Something in his stomach turns horribly as he looks at the man’s face, and he suspects the alcohol started hitting way earlier than it was supposed to.

The man—and there is that smile on his face even still—says, “Just when you start to figure out life and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, a giant wrecking ball comes in out of nowhere and knocks you back down.”

He shouldn’t take it personally. This doesn’t even apply to him—not one bit. He hasn’t ever managed to even start to figure out life. There’s no pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—there aren’t even bootstraps. There’s only the boot, and its heel, and what it’s stepping on. Perhaps that’s why the smiles are so muted as of late, why there came to be this groaning voice in his head. Perhaps it’s because Yeong-Gi didn’t know how to pull himself up other than by standing on top of Nolan’s neck. The giant wrecking ball had come and knocked him down, and now there seemed to be two bodies on the ground.

“I just wish I had some more control,” the man says, and his mouth is still curled up in a melancholic smile, and it is nearly impossible to keep having this conversation, now. He thinks, half nauseous from the words and half torn in feeling another evening’s breeze on his coat, Is this how Shin-Ae felt? But Shin-Ae hadn’t been staring at the ghost of her face. She just had been staring at a coward. A coward whose only string of control had been letting it go. Only bravery, too, perhaps.

“Or, I don’t know,” the man continues. “Fly away at least… Could you imagine how freeing it would be to be able to fly?”

He wants to say that he can, and that he would have given everything, once, for it to simply take a clap of his wings to get free of all that keeps him here; that he sometimes misses the sky so much he wakes up from his dreams weeping after it. But that doesn’t matter. Domesticated ducks can’t fly.

He hadn’t known to wonder, back when it mattered, whether ducks could fly if they tried; if they could make it anywhere besides water—and he had, presumably, already been clipped before he got to try. But who knew? Maybe it had been an evolutionary process—they could very well have never grown quite into what they needed to be. He may have gotten crippled on the wings; they may not have been there in the first place—so there may have been no need to do even that.

Or maybe he had just been caged.

The man adds something about feeling alive, and as he turns his back to him to leave, this plants a longing ache in Nolan’s chest. He can’t imagine flying, just as he can’t imagine being alive. But he wants it. Oh, he wants it, and—is there a way? Is it possible?

A huge lump clogs his throat. He turns to the side and climbs onto the railing. Only one way to know.

It is time.

He wanted wants to do so many things, and he wanted wants to be so many things, but he knows it’s too little, too late. Space is even further away from the sky. He isn’t capable of bringing even plants to life. He can’t drive a truck, he can’t fight the fire, and, god, all the things he painted with his hands had only palm-shaped bloodstains, no other color. All that’s left for him to do is move out of the way. There forms a smile, small and halfway to freeing even, when he thinks of this.

The man, after all the brotherly advice and the pleasantries, absentmindedly turns back around to say: “What was your name again? I didn’t catch it the first time.”

“I didn’t give it.” He lifts his arm—big and strong—and pushes his palm against the ceiling to balance himself. “The name’s Nolan.”

So many things need to move out of the way.

He sees Kousuke all the way from the other end of the corridor. There’s that scandalized look on his face—however can he explain this to Father? He’s suddenly struck with this real urge to laugh. Kousuke stands frozen in place upon eye contact, confusion etched into his face. Nolan shoots him a bigger, wider smile. It is all teeth. This mouth hasn’t belonged to him in a long time.

He says, and it is good that the way Kousuke always spat it out is burned into his brain, “But you can call me Nol.”

And that’s when Kousuke starts to run.

Nolan can practically hear his thundering steps: Pat pat pat pat pat. He might have said, if he had been a much younger child, Careful, you might slip your feet and fall. But he stays climbing. Kousuke stays running. Pat, pat, pat, pat, pat.

Don’t even try to catch up to me, he thinks, mind running wild and feet on the edge. You will never catch up.

He takes a step, and starts to fall.

He never realized how different it would be to fall when one saw the water approaching. He has never seen the fall—nor watched the crash coming. He smiles as the air viciously licks his face. This isn’t flying, surely. But it’s a near thing. He crashes into the water neither on his face nor his back. He’s sure his feet are the first to touch the surface this time.

The giddiness from the mid-air vanishes once the cold water hits his face. He feels a wave of freezing shock, not so unlike the last time he was in a pool, and for a second he thinks he’s there, too. But no. It is not her this time.

He and Yeong-Gi float motionlessly in the water, staring at one another. Both awake at the same time. His head is silent at last, and he thinks, Oh. This was it. He has been half and half for some time, neither here nor there, and he only came to realize it now, when the better half got ripped out of his psyche and stood before him in the flesh. He wonders when exactly it happened—whether it was the jump or sometime before—and how much of Yeong-Gi used to be in his body before now, through tooth and nail and blood and sweat. He then wonders how much there was of Nolan himself, before he kicked it awake and wore it like a skin.

Yeong-Gi smiles at him. Nolan stares back; dead-eyed and empty. He, with the final breath he took in the air trying to force itself out of his lungs, accepts this is what he is now, at last. Nolan; the bringer of disaster. Nolan; the shameful end of a doomed sin, the hidden and hideous mirror to what he tried to create of himself and failed, all a mouthful of teeth and countless bite marks to leave. Nolan; the accidental product of a masterful puppeteer, the sole thing that matches the other end of its strings. Nolan; the secret, the end, the very bottom of the lake. Nolan; whose feathers turned back to black. Nolan; who started and caused all of this, who dug a hole in every planet on his axis so deep they all collapsed within. Nolan; who is nothing but a pitch-black void and has nothing but anger and resentment and bitterness to give.

Yeong-Gi’s eyes are closed with the force of the smile he gives him. But Nolan knows this is a farce, that he is not special; that he could have been a brick wall in need for all Yeong-Gi cared. He notices, suddenly, that Yeong-Gi looks as exhausted as Nolan feels. It’s just not in the eyes, but the circles under.

And if that doesn’t sum up this mess they’re in—this play of pretend where they are two different ends of a scale. But the truth—and the truth is only the truth because he is the truth, now, finally—is this: Yeong-Gi is nothing but a work of craft. The unsuccessful mask that covers the skin that is Nolan, the same trapped and tired-to-the-bone thing. The truth is he is not an entity of his own; just the handmade, better part of him. The pitiful recreation of his mother’s son. The truth, and the truth also seems to be realizing itself now, is that it hadn’t been Yeong-Gi whose heel had pressed so desperately on the earth of Nolan’s grave; it had been Nolan himself, trying to drain whatever water Yeong-Gi had to give. It had been Nolan, helplessly and achingly, trying to pull Yeong-Gi’s feet to his tomb, in the hopes that he might grow roots. The truth, the truth finds, is that Yeong-Gi had been a complete and utter lie. Nolan, in his sleep of faux death, had tried to make him real. And Nolan had failed.

Nolan, for all his efforts, had made him into another child on his deathbed at the end; sick and dying and withering away by the day. Nolan had doomed even his own creation.

He numbly stares at the hand Yeong-Gi offers him. Yeong-Gi doesn’t take one single look—his eyes are closed still. Nolan should be surprised, or better yet, angry at this childish naïveté of the act, at the complete falseness of it. He should be going mad with anger that, even though Yeong-Gi now has him in front of him to blame, he is instead extending a hand that he knows Nolan would rather chop off his own than take, as if the very act of extending it doesn’t tug at his insides with misery—but how could he? He is only what Nolan made him.

He knows, in that exact moment perhaps, what he is going to do. He knows it is what needs to be done, and that it is a clumsy attempt at mercy even, to leave Yeong-Gi where he longed to stay all that time before, far and away from what Nolan made him endure. Leave Yeong-Gi, end of story. It is what he needs to do, and it is the right thing to do. He knows this. What he doesn’t know is what to do with this sudden, all-consuming guilt that overtakes him in the few seconds he lets Yeong-Gi hang with his extended hand, unaware of his approaching solitude just yet. Nolan hasn’t been a guilty thing for so long; he’d built a miniature to carry emotions of that sort—a puppeteer himself that way. It is a strange twist in his chest.

He looks around the water, in a last-ditch attempt, for something that might come and drown them both. But there are no monsters in this pool.

None other than him.

It takes him the seconds he lifts his arms—both at the same time—to decide this emotion goes beyond guilt. It hits him around the time his body prepares for a stroke that he’s grieving. He thinks, Maybe I’ll take you back with me one day. He almost thinks about saying, I would never leave you like that. But that kind of promise is often made at naught. And so he lifts his head up without a word.

And so Yeong-Gi stays under, with that smile and hand extended still, incapable of movement now that Nolan has let his strings go. He is only what Nolan made him.

It hits him after the actual act of going through with the stroke that he is now free. Free in a way Yeong-Gi hadn’t ever been free—where he is one and alone, without a third half beneath his feet to keep him afloat. He is whole.

He smiles with each stroke of his arms and each kick of his feet in the water. He is going back to no one but himself. He is taking nothing but himself. He is himself, however violent and flawed and ugly. He is free.

Oxygen charges into his lungs in what feels like an endless gasp. Nolan breathes, and Nolan comes to life.

As he breathes, and breathes, and breathes, he thinks, aimed for the abandoned to hear: Don’t worry. Above the surface with the rest, now.

And he floats.