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Time lasts forever in the train that they’re in.
There isn’t much to do, now that Ryu Jaekwan is, in every way that matters, dead. He sits with his back against the wall, the hasty letter that Kim Soleum had left him with held in his hands. He doesn’t know where the man has gone. He doesn’t know what he’s planning to do.
He only knows that Kim Soleum can no longer bring himself to look at Jaekwan’s face.
It’s lonely here, in this haunted compartment where everyone seems to be on edge. Eun Haje sits next to him, her fingers twitching every now and then as if itching for a smoke. It’s a habit that mirrors Agent Choi, and gives Jaekwan the exact same sense of distaste that sitting next to his senior did.
And with it, a worsened sense of loneliness.
Because the person next to him is not Agent Choi. There is no longer a world where he can sit by Choi’s side, where he can tell him off for smoking too much, where he can pull the glass of soju out of his hands when he’s tipped over from a happy drunk into a depressed one.
There is no longer a world where Ryu Jaekwan is alive.
Instead he’s here, with a stranger by his side, as they both pretend there is still something they can mean to the people they care for.
He grips the letter in his hands tighter.
The worst part of it is that he knows that Kim Soleum is still here.
Still doing god knows what, selling his soul to demons, pouring out blood that he can’t afford, all in hopes of bringing Jaekwan back into the real world—but still unwilling to meet his eyes.
Still unwilling to face the truth that Jaekwan truly might be dead.
There is a procedure to these things. One that’s been trained into every agent of the bureau. Their work is difficult—there isn’t time to waste with emotion. When an agent is on the verge of death his partners have a duty to hear him out, to listen to his last words, his will.
There is so much that Jaekwan wants to say before he leaves.
But Kim Soleum doesn’t want to hear any of it, because he can’t bring himself to face the fact that Jaekwan might be dead.
This place isn’t a permanent solution. Sekwang isn’t a safe place. There is nothing that promises that Jaekwan can keep himself alive here, especially not when he’s died unintentionally so many times, and once that happens—he’s truly gone.
To be honest—this time that he gets in between is practically a blessing.
Most people don’t have this. They die, and they’re gone—there’s no time in between life and death to articulate what they want, what they feel, what they wish they had done.
Jaekwan, at least, has time.
His death is inevitable, but not immediate.
But does it change anything, when of the only two people he wants to be with—one has run from him, and the other doesn’t even know that Jaekwan might be gone soon?
/
The last time that Kim Soleum had touched him—that anyone had touched him—was when Soleum tried to save his life.
When he stuck the euthanasia pill between Jaekwan’s teeth, eyes frantic and horrified, desperate to save him before Jaekwan was lost forever.
Jaekwan doesn’t remember a lot of what happened after that. He remembers everything going black. A strange ringing in his ears. Sensations in his limbs when there shouldn’t have been, when his mind couldn’t process anything at all—as if he was still moving while dead, a reanimated corpse.
Then reality had rushed back to him and he’d opened his eyes once again to Kim Soleum’s face.
The last face he’d seen alive. The first he sees in the afterlife.
Soleum’s face in the afterlife was ashen. As if he was the one dead, and not Jaekwan himself. He spoke too fast, wouldn’t meet Jaekwan’s eyes, talked about horrible ideas to sell what was left of his life to a darkness—
Stop, Jaekwan had told him.
Stop trying to bring me back. Stop trying to deny this. Stop pushing yourself into fires to save me.
What he really meant was stop trying to take my place.
Ryu Jaekwan isn't like his teammates.
He doesn't rush headfirst into the flames to sacrifice himself before anyone else can.
There’s a reason there's a manual, after all. It's because emotion isn't a good enough basis to stake their lives on. Emotion only ends up with them like this, with Jaekwan on a train and the person he wants to see the most running from him because he can't bear to see what Jaekwan has become.
There are rules to follow. Not to teach them to be heartless—but because there is no other way to keep going.
But neither of his teammates ever cared about the rules.
Agent Choi tried his best to stick to them, but could never put his heart aside for long enough. Kim Soleum acted as if the rules were never written in the first place. He seemed to think if he tore himself into enough pieces he could save everyone he wanted to save.
Jaekwan never forgets the horror of stepping out of Looky Mart and seeing Soleum completely fall apart.
After the candy in his mouth had melted and the wreck of his bloodied arm reappeared.
The pain in his eyes, the aborted screams, the desperation to still not ask for help because what if he needed the pills later—that scene still shows up in Jaekwan’s nightmares.
Every time he’d seen Soleum frowning in his sleep, head over his desk, he’d wondered—
How could he think I wanted that?
Had he thought that Jaekwan would be grateful? That he’d see the exchange of Soleum’s arm for Jaekwan’s legs and his life as something reasonable, something that Jaekwan was worth?
Did he think that Jaekwan would be grateful now, if Soleum did something horrific to save his life?
Kim Soleum is one of the strongest people that Jaekwan knows.
He can get through anything. He can get them all through anything.
But he lacks the most important quality that any agent should have—
The ability to know when to let someone go.
/
“The least he could have done,” Eun Haje says, voice dry, “Is brought me a cigarette before he left.”
She probably even means it, if she’s anything like Agent Choi. But the frown on her face is a dead giveaway that she’s as worried about Soleum as Jaekwan is.
“He had more reasonable priorities,” Jaekwan tells her.
“More important than a dead person’s last wish?” Haje asks, but the voice is lighthearted.
She knows as well as he does that Soleum would stop at nothing to save them.
“He’s going to keep coming back, you know?” she says quietly. “For as long as we’re here.”
“He shouldn’t.”
“But he will.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“He doesn’t care.” She tilts her head, staring into the distance. “Maybe we should die for real,” she says, contemplating. “So that there’s no one left for him to save.”
The calmness of her voice chills him a little.
But he can’t deny that it’s a good idea.
If the worst comes to be, if they genuinely can’t get Soleum to stop putting himself through dangerous situations in hopes of getting them out—they might just have to die here.
“Do you think it’ll come to that?”
“From what I know of him, yes. He never did know when to stop.” She pauses, fingers twitching again. “Then again, that kid is a miracle. He might even save us somehow.”
“It’s killing him,” Jaekwan cuts in. “Every time he saves someone, he’s destroying himself.”
“I know that,” Haje says. “We all know that. But has anyone been able to make him stop?”
They haven’t.
Kim Soleum is always too fast, too frighteningly intelligent, too heartbreakingly desperate—he’s always put himself in harm’s way before anyone can figure out what he’s doing.
“He’s running on guilt,” Eun Haje says. “I don’t know what for. Me? I have too much blood on my hands. You pretend you’re on the better side but I’m sure you’re no different.” She exhales softly, glancing at Jaekwan for a second before turning away again. “There’s blood on his hands as well, I won’t deny that. All of us have to destroy a little to survive. But the guilt of it is crushing him. He can’t keep going like this.”
Jaekwan is quiet.
She’s right, but he doesn’t know what to say to it.
The moments tick past in silence. Finally, Eun Haje laughs, voice low and more of an exhale.
“I’m glad though,” she says. “That I can still worry about him. It’s keeping my mind off of the rest of it.”
“Is it?”
It hasn’t helped Jaekwan at all.
All it’s making him realize is that he’s leaving Soleum on his own, in a world that he isn’t equipped to handle.
That he’s leaving Agent Choi to try to pick up the pieces when he’s going to be shattered himself.
Who will take care of them both when Jaekwan is gone?
Who will keep them out of trouble?
Who will hold their team together, when neither Choi nor Soleum have ever learned to trust each other?
“It’s strange,” Eun Haje says. “Now that I’m dead. I don’t think about my wish at all.”
It’s strange. Now that Jaekwan is dead, it’s all that he can think about.
/
Jaekwan doesn’t expect Agent Choi to find him.
He didn’t think that Choi even knew that he was gone.
But he stands in front of him, jakdu strapped to his back, an easy smile on his face as if the world hasn’t ended between them.
“Agent Bronze,” he says easily. “It’s going to be hard without you.”
The words are too calm, as if Jaekwan can’t see the shake in his fingers. How sunken his eyes are.
The red around the scars on his neck—the telltale that he’s been scratching at it, unconsciously trying to punish himself.
“You’ll manage,” Jaekwan says.
Because he has to.
Jaekwan is no longer going to be there for him.
Choi’s eyes widen a fraction, something in his expression cracked.
But he’s holding himself together.
Not for his own sake. Not because he’s afraid to show emotion. Choi may be a calculative bastard—but he’s never shied from showing his true feelings when he needs to.
There’s nothing holding him back from telling Jaekwan the truth—
That this is going to kill him.
That there’s no use pretending.
This might be the end for Choi. For real this time.
But he doesn’t let himself show it.
Not for his own sake. Not for Jaekwan’s. But for the man next to them, white as a sheet, trembling on the verge of a panic attack.
Kim Soleum, who still hasn’t dared to meet either of their eyes.
It’s the burden that Choi carries, as the oldest. When no one else can carry out what needs to be done—he has to step forward.
“Any updates to your will?” Choi asks, careful to keep his voice casual.
“No, sunbae.”
Jaekwan updated his will once a month. He never had anything to change, honestly. All of his money goes to the orphanage that he volunteers at. A small bit had been written out to go to Agent Choi, but he’d thrown an ugly fit when he’d found out, shouting about how he wasn’t so broke that he needed blood money. Jaekwan had to write him out of that part after that.
Most of his belongings also go to the orphanage, save for any equipment or items which go to the bureau.
All that he’d left Choi was a letter and a lighter.
The lighter was a small hope—that the reminder of Jaekwan every time Choi lit a cigarette would make him stop trying to burn his lungs out.
It’s the most he can do from beyond the grave, when he’s no longer by Choi’s side to tell him to stop smoking so much.
For Soleum—there wasn’t much he could leave Soleum that the man would have any use for.
He’d left him a letter as well, and a small plushie that one of the kids at the orphanage had made.
Perhaps it could help him sleep.
Soleum really needed sleep.
“Hah,” Choi says. “The perks of updating it regularly. I should learn from you.”
“You should.”
“Then again, what do I even have to leave behind?”
“I’m sure you aren’t completely broke.”
“I might be, I might be…” Choi trails off, glancing back at Soleum cautiously.
Soleum is breathing too fast, shaking uncontrollably—Jaekwan doesn’t think he hears a word that either of them are saying.
Jaekwan frowns, and leans closer to Choi.
“It isn’t his fault,” he says quietly.
Choi’s expression wavers terribly.
“Did you—” he stops. “Did you really think I’d blame him…?”
“No.” Jaekwan knows this. Choi would have never held something like this against Soleum.
But he has to say it anyway. Because he doesn’t know what Soleum has told him.
He doesn’t know what version of events he’s spun.
“And,” Jaekwan continues, voice firm, “It isn't your fault either.”
Choi falls quiet.
Jaekwan can see, in his cracked expression, that he doesn't believe him.
It was Choi, after all, who sent Jaekwan in his place. He couldn't make it himself and he couldn't bear to send Kim Soleum alone—so he'd patted Jaekwan on the shoulder and sent him in.
“I would have come anyway,” Jaekwan tells him honestly. “Even if you hadn't told me to. I wouldn't have let him leave alone again, so sunbae—this really isn't your fault.”
Choi looks upwards briefly, as if trying to hold back tears. They don't fall. He doesn't let them.
“How can it not be?” he mumbles. “When I should have been there to protect you?”
“You couldn't have,” Jaekwan says. “You have to trust me on that.”
“How—”
“That's part of my will,” Jaekwan adds firmly. “You have to trust that there's nothing you could have done.”
Choi laughs. It comes out ugly, aborted.
“Alright then,” he says, but they both know he doesn't mean it. “If that's what our Bronze wants.”
He glanced again at Kim Soleum, who doesn't look like he's even breathing. Lost somewhere in his mind, pale as a ghost.
“He's not doing well,” Choi admits.
“I know,” Jaekwan says.
He doesn't ask Choi to watch over him. He knows that he will. And Choi doesn't tell him that he'll protect him with his life, because he knows that Jaekwan already knows.
Instead, Choi reaches out, placing a hand on his shoulder.
His hands feel cold. Heavy. Not the warmth that Jaekwan is used to feeling.
As if he's the corpse, and not Jaekwan himself.
“Hey, Bronze,” Choi says, trying to widen his smile. “If someone asks, I should tell them what your last words are, right? Do you want to say something cool?”
Jaekwan thinks about it. He doesn’t need to think very long.
“Take care, sunbae,” he says.
Choi’s expression crumbles.
/
Jaekwan catches Soleum when he's trying to leave.
He grasps his wrist tightly, holding him in place. It's the first time he's touched Kim Soleum since he died.
Soleum's eyes go wide. He doesn't look okay at all, something feverish about him, as if he only means to run. To run as far as he can. Until he doesn't have to remember any of this.
Jaekwan tightens his grip around his fingers and pulls him back.
“I have to go,” Soleum says, not meeting his eyes. “I can explain later—”
“Agent Choi asked me for my last words to him,” Jaekwan says. It's a cruel thing to say, but it's the only way to make Soleum stay. “Won't you listen too?”
Soleum freezes.
Jaekwan sees Choi stiffen out of the corner of his eye. He'd moved aside, to give them privacy—but he must have heard them.
Soleum falters.
Jaekwan doesn't let go.
“Agent Grape,” he says carefully. “You need to stop this.”
“No,” Soleum says, too fast. “There's still a way. We can all make it out.”
“That may be so,” Jaekwan says. “And it might not be so. But—you aren't thinking straight. You need to step back.”
For a moment, something like anger flashes across Soleum’s eyes.
He looks at Jaekwan like he resents him.
“Would you step back?” Soleum asks, voice sharp. “If it was Agent Choi who was dead?”
“What?”
“Why do you expect it from me?”
“You—”
“You'd do anything, wouldn't you? You'd die for him, wouldn't you? Why can't I do the same? Why can't I—” he stops, voice cracking.
“Because I don't want it,” Jaekwan says sharply. “I don't want you to die for me.”
“Why?” Kim Soleum demands. “Why?” There's no logic in his eyes, no reason in his words. He asks why with the lack of understanding of a child asking why the dead can't come back to life.
“Why don't I want you to die? Is that what you're asking me?”
“I killed you!” Soleum almost shouts, voice cracking. “I killed you! I killed you!”
There's a terrible silence. Agent Choi is pale, eyes frozen on Soleum as if seeing a ghost. Eun Haje has her gaze averted.
“You didn't,” Jaekwan says, trying to keep his voice firm.
But he can't hide the shake in it.
How—how is he supposed to leave them like this?
How is he supposed to die knowing this is the mess that will be left with him gone?
He needs his family to be okay. He can't leave like this. He can't—
“I killed you,” Soleum stresses again, completely gone. “But I'll figure it out, I'll get you back out, and then it'll be okay, then I'll leave—”
Jaekwan’s heart goes cold.
“Leave where?”
“I don't care,” Soleum almost shouts again, fisting his hair in frustration. “I don't even care.”
There's a terrible silence.
It's an ugly turn.
The Kim Soleum that he'd known, desperate to go home, so much so that he's thrown the family they'd built together aside just to get there—
But this time, the word home doesn't leave his mouth.
This time all he wants to be is not here.
And maybe that was all he'd ever wanted.
To just not be here.
/
It takes too long to calm Kim Soleum down.
They—don’t really manage it.
But they get him to sit down. To breathe. To stop crying out that he’s killed Jaekwan and that he needs to make it right.
Jaekwan sits next to him, rubbing warmth into his cold hands. The hands of a corpse. Everyone seems more dead than he is, and that crushes him like nothing else. Choi has disappeared, somewhere that Jaekwan can’t see, probably unable to hold himself together any longer. Eun Haje had followed him, mumbling about asking him for a smoke, a terrible excuse that Jaekwan didn’t believe and that Soleum wasn’t in a state to even hear.
Soleum’s fingers are freezing. Jaekwan rubs them together gently.
“You wanted to go home,” he says quietly.
Soleum still doesn’t meet his eyes. He stares, empty, at the hands held in Jaekwan’s.
“If I can.”
“But that’s not what you said just now.”
“Yeah.”
Jaekwan frowns.
“Agent Grape,” he starts. “Do you remember what we talked about? Before you resigned?”
That day in the glass prison. When Jaekwan had laid his heart bare and Soleum had, against all odds—trusted him. When after days and days of total silence, he’d trusted Jaekwan with the truth.
When he’d told him that they could build a home together, and meant it.
Soleum is quiet for a long time.
“What’s the point?” he asks at last.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re gone,” Soleum says, voice hollow.
It’s the first time he’s admitted it.
It’s chilling to hear.
It’s somehow worse than the crazed man who had been pulling at his hair and insisting that he’d bring Jaekwan back—now, Soleum is just empty. As if all that had been left of him was madness and with it gone, there’s nothing left in his chest.
“You’re gone,” he says again. “Where—where would I build a home?”
Jaekwan pretends the words don’t break him.
That it doesn’t kill him to be taking Soleum’s only hope out of this world.
“You have Agent Choi,” he tries to say firmly. “He’ll take care of you.”
Soleum laughs. It’s ugly to hear.
“He hates me. He’ll never forgive me for this.”
“He loves you.”
“He doesn’t.”
“He—”
“He doesn’t,” Soleum cuts in. “You were everything to him. And I killed you.” It sounds worse, in this empty voice, than it did before. “I killed you.”
Jaekwan exhales deeply, bringing Soleum’s hand up to his face. He lets it rest against his cheek, still terribly cold.
“You tried to save me,” he says. “Who knows where I’d be right now if you hadn’t?”
Soleum shakes his head. He doesn’t have any intention of listening. Too desperate to blame himself, too desperate to tear himself apart.
Jaekwan had always thought he was okay with dying.
That when his time came, he would go with his head held high.
But now, feeling the cold of Soleum’s skin against his, knowing the burden that their youngest will force himself to carry out of his misplaced guilt—
Jaekwan wishes he didn’t have to go.
He wants to stay, just a little longer…
Just until he can make sure his family can be okay.
/
On the rare, foolish occasions that Jaekwan lets himself dream—he dreams that he dies a hero’s death.
He dies saving hundreds of people, knowing that the world is better off for it.
He dies with meaning. With purpose. A death that would make anyone proud.
He knew it was a foolish dream to have. Agents rarely get heroic deaths. Too often, they were killed in a moment of bad luck, when they took a bad risk, or when they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The bureau agents have heroic lives, but their deaths are too often anticlimactic.
Jaekwan had been ready for it. He’d had too many brushes with death to have any honest hope to die a meaningful one.
But this—
This was something he was never ready for.
For the two people he loved to be digging their fingers into his blood just to feel like it was on their hands.
This wasn’t how he wanted to go. Knowing the irreparable mess he was leaving behind. Agent Choi, who would drown in his grief. Kim Soleum, who would drown in his guilt.
Jaekwan doesn’t want to go like this.
He doesn’t want to go.
If he can stay… if he can somehow stay…
If a miracle lets him wake up in the real world and still be alive…
Eun Haje had told him that now that they were dead, she didn’t think of her wish at all.
But Jaekwan can’t think of anything else.
For the first time in his life, he understands the desperation of the employees that he curses at Daydream.
He understands what keeps them going.
Because if there was something that existed that would let Jaekwan die knowing that his family wouldn’t blame themselves for it—he would do anything for it.
Anything at all.
But in this world, there is nothing left to do. Nothing, except shut his eyes, feel the cold of Soleum’s hand against his cheek—and hope.
Hope that Soleum doesn’t fall apart.
Hope that he lets himself be loved.
Hope that he and Choi stay a team, save each other, pull each other back up every time that they fall—
Hope that in a world where Jaekwan isn’t there to watch over them, they stay safe. Happy. Loved.
Jaekwan doesn’t want to go.
He doesn’t want to leave until he knows that this wish can be a reality.
But death has never been that kind, has it?
It’s kind enough that he has this moment in between.
His last words to Choi had been to tell him to take care of himself. His last words to Soleum aren’t that different.
“You’re always one of us,” he says quietly. “No matter what happens. We’re always Hyunmoo Team 1.”
Soleum’s hand shakes in his.
Jaekwan holds it tighter.
He doesn’t want to go.
/