Work Text:
This is not a place that anyone should be living in.
Agent Choi is definitely overstepping. He has no reason to be in this room, and no reason to be poking around Kim Soleum’s belongings. Kim Soleum has been missing for a week now after submitting his resignation letter, and has switched between five different motels during it in an effort to avoid Agent Choi’s careful eye. Agent Choi knew the location of every single one of them.
Kim Soleum still has no idea.
This is the sixth motel that he’s been in, and it’s the first one that Agent Choi has broken into.
It’s too easy to break in. Soleum is far too lax on security. He locks the door with a halfhearted bolt as if he isn’t on the run from everyone he has known for the past few years.
Kim Soleum isn’t here today, but Agent Choi knew that already. Soleum is at a cafe a few blocks away, handing off Wish Tickets to his fellow spy who had no reason to be a spy anymore.
It means that today will likely be his last day before he goes back home.
Leaving only this empty motel room behind.
There is barely any evidence in here to suggest that someone stayed here. Agent Choi wishes he could say he was surprised, but the only real worrying thing is that this temporary home is no different from the one that Soleum had stayed in during his employment at the Agency.
Just as bare, just as empty, just as dead.
There is a single suitcase that stands near the bathroom door. Agent Choi opens it with none of the guilt he should have. There are a few sets of casual clothing, a blanket, and a picture book for children. It’s one of those books that has different textures for the coats of every animal character for the reader to touch and feel—and it’s troublingly well worn.
He traces one of the textures, frowning to himself.
Their youngest was definitely an anxious one—never sleeping well, never resting, always carrying around his strange bunny plushie even through the worst Darknesses. A couple of times Agent Choi has spotted him watching children’s cartoons on his phone, sitting behind the couch of the waiting room.
He’d always stepped away quietly before Soleum could see him. He knew better than to make someone feel bad about the things they needed to do to breathe.
But as he traces the textures of this worn down kids’ book—something about it hurts his heart.
He imagines how many nights Soleum had sat in his empty motel room, searching for anything to calm himself down.
He shuts the book and sets it over the bedside table. A dead giveaway that someone else has been here, but Agent Choi isn’t hiding right now.
The bed is neatly made, some stationary on the bedside table and a cloth to wipe glasses with. The bathroom is empty, save for basic toiletries in a pouch near the sink, the sort that is provided by the motel.
There is no food anywhere, no water either—nothing to indicate that a living breathing human stays here.
Agent Choi thinks for a moment. Soleum should still be at the cafe. He should be gone for another hour at least, assuming he stays there to ensure that his coworker doesn’t spot him as he leaves.
He checks his watch, makes a decision, and leaves.
/
He makes it back to Soleum’s empty motel room in a record 13 minutes, holding a grocery bag full of snacks and two cups of ramyeon.
To be honest—it would be easier to pull off what he’s trying to pull off if he let Soleum keep starving himself. The more exhausted he is, the less clarity his thoughts will have—and the more likely that Agent Choi will succeed.
But he can’t do that to his junior. He might not be a good person, but—he can’t do that to Soleum.
If things go south and this really is Soleum’s last day here—Agent Choi should at least send him off on a full stomach.
He sets the ramyeon on the bedside table with a clunk. He needs to boil water. As horrible as this motel is, they must have something to boil water, right?
He searches the closet, but it’s empty. In the drawer on the bedside table, but that’s empty too. At a loss, he checks under the bed—and finds something else entirely.
Papers crumpled up into balls and tossed into the dust.
What were you writing, Kim Soleum?
Agent Choi reaches for one, opening the crumpled paper carefully.
It’s a letter.
Squad Leader—
Squad Leader? Is he…writing to Daydream employees?
He grabs the rest of the papers, opening them up one by one. One is addressed to Park Minseong. One to Eun Haje. One to a Baek Saheon. Many others. The contents of each are wildly different, some are apologetic, some are filled with sorrow, one of them is the words of a psychopath trying to threaten his victim which is so unlike Kim Soleum that Agent Choi is just lost.
One of them is to Agent Choi himself, filled with nothing but his name written, and crossed out. Written, and crossed out. Written, and crossed out. The simple words I’m sorry I couldn’t be better crossed out so many times that all that is left is a dark, nearly illegible stain on the page.
Agent Choi stares at the paper, something terrible in his chest. Then he folds it carefully and puts it in his pocket.
The next letter is even worse.
It's less of a letter and more stream of consciousness, just desperate pleas running across the page.
I want to go home I want to go somewhere safe I want to go to where I was before I came into this world I want to go to the world I am from I want to return to a time when there were no ghost stories in my life I want to return to the world with no ghost stories I want to go to the home I was born in I want to go to the world I was born in I want to go back to before I worked at Daydream I want to go back to before I went to the Dark Exploration Records popup I want to go back to somewhere safe I want to go somewhere where I was happy I want to go to the place that I am currently picturing in my mind I want to go back to the place I have described on this piece of paper I want to go back to before I read the Dark Exploration Records I want to go back to my first job I want to go back to my first job in the world that I was first hired in I want to go back to a place I actually want to be I want to go back to the place where I didn't want to die I want to go back to where I am from I want to go back home—
With every word that Agent Choi reads, the suspicions in his heart are only confirmed.
As he holds the paper of desperate wishes—was that what this was? Was he trying to phrase his wish? As he holds the paper that looks like it was written by a man slowly losing his mind, he knows for sure that what he’s about to do is the right thing.
Because Kim Soleum’s scrawling handwriting branches across the entire page and the back of it, and while he has asked in every possible combination of words to go back home, never once has he made any mention of a family to return to.
Not once.
/
The fact is—Kim Soleum does not act like someone who ever had a family.
He doesn’t act like someone who ever had a home.
It’s messed up to phrase it that way, but it’s something that has struck Agent Choi as terribly odd since that first day that he’d confronted him and Soleum had said, with endless exhaustion in his eyes—
I want to go home.
Home.
But—
Someone like Kim Soleum couldn’t have had one.
Agent Choi knows how to read people. He can tell with a look how they’d been brought up, if their parents had been loving or abusive or gone or too dead inside to care for a child. He can tell if they were only children or the youngest of five or abandoned on the streets and found by a passerby. He can tell if they have children of their own to care for, if they have someone at home to love, if they have a home or if they live in empty motel rooms in a desperate effort to never let themselves believe that they could find a home right in front of them.
Agent Choi knows how to read people, and Kim Soleum is no exception.
When he says I want to go home, he says it with none of the longing for any real person that Agent Choi sees in the eyes of every person he rescues—or fails to rescue.
He says it with none of the yearning for family.
When he says I want to go home, it’s a desperate wish that really only says I don’t want to be here.
And that—that can’t be right.
He wants to go home, but—who is there waiting for him? Is there really anyone?
He’s never mentioned a mother, or a father, or a friend, or a partner, or a pet, or a neighbour who stopped by to give him food—the details about Kim Soleum’s home life are absolutely none.
As if it had never existed in the first place.
Even when Jaekwan told him his entire life story in the Glass Prison, Kim Soleum offered up nothing at all. Even on the slow days when they had meals together and took the long way back home, Kim Soleum offered up nothing at all.
And Agent Choi knows how to read people.
He knows that Soleum is one of the smartest people he’s ever met.
Someone like that, someone who was capable of passing the Agency’s interview with flying colours and landing a job at Hyunmoo Team 1 despite being a literal spy for a psychotic pharmaceutical company—someone like that would have definitely known what the home that he spoke of came across as.
Unless—unless he truly didn’t.
Contamination isn’t a rare thing in their line of work. With Kim Soleum’s susceptibility especially, and his history of work in high-rated Darknesses—plus that one month that he’d disappeared off the face of the planet altogether—for someone like Kim Soleum, not being contaminated was way more unlikely than being contaminated.
Agent Choi doesn’t know if that’s what this is. But he knows that there’s something wrong.
This desperate urge to return to a home that he’s never been able to describe—there’s definitely something wrong.
And as he hears the dead, exhausted footsteps approach this run down motel room door, he knows that he has to fix it today.
He’s failed his junior time and time over, but today—
Today he’ll get this right.
/
Kim Soleum’s reactions are too slow.
It’s the first worrying thing that Agent Choi notices. When he opens his door and finds the Agent that he’s on the run from right in front of him, all he does is stare straight at him.
There’s no horror in his expression, no fear.
He just stares.
“It’s been a while, Grapes,” Agent Choi offers, smiling with his hands in his pockets.
“Agent Choi,” Kim Soleum says carefully.
There’s no emotion in his voice.
It’s far too similar to the last time that Agent Choi had seen him, when he’d trapped him in the Glass Prison. Those same dead eyes that have given up on everything.
“I heard you’re leaving today,” Agent Choi continues. “What sort of senior would I be if I didn’t give you a good send-off, huh?”
Kim Soleum steps back.
That strange pink plushie is still tucked into his front pocket, staring at Agent Choi with its beady eyes.
“There’s no need to run,” Agent Choi says. “I’m not here to stop you.”
It’s a lie, and maybe Kim Soleum can tell, because he takes another step back.
Agent Choi sighs.
Soleum isn’t stupid. He’s fast, but he’d never outrun Agent Choi here. Not when he’d given up all of his items to them and is completely unarmed.
He’s caught, and he knows it well.
“Come in,” he says. “Let’s just talk.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Aish. First you leave without saying goodbye, now when I come all this way you try to run from me. Do you really hate us that much?”
It’s a question he asks just to fill the space, but Kim Soleum’s eyes go wide.
He’s taken it personally. Of course he has.
Agent Choi sighs. He reaches out, grabbing Soleum loosely by the wrist. The man lets him. Then he pulls him inside, shutting the door behind them.
/
“What do you even eat?” Agent Choi asks, not expecting an answer.
It’s too clear that the answer is nothing, judging by the state of his room. Soleum doesn’t answer, just lets out an uhhh, which is all he needs to confirm it.
“Do you have anything to boil water?”
“There was an electric kettle, I think.” Soleum wanders into the bathroom, and there’s the sound of some rummaging, then he comes back out with a dusty box.
Agent Choi pulls the device out, wrinkling his nose at the dust.
It takes a while to get it cleaned, but eventually he has water boiling and two cups of ramyeon ready for them to eat.
They sit cross legged on the floor. Kim Soleum seems to have momentarily forgotten the danger he’s in, distracted by the food.
“Our Grapes… when will you learn to eat on time? I hope there’s someone at home to drag you to meals the way Jaekwan-ie used to do.”
Soleum frowns, but doesn’t look up from how he’s practically inhaling his food. “I’ll learn.”
“Will you? Look at you.” He taps him over the head with the back of his chopsticks.
“Ow.”
“You haven’t been taking care of yourself at all.”
“I had things to do,” Soleum says quietly.
“You’ll always have things to do. But you can only do them if you’re in one piece, yes?”
Soleum’s frown deepens. He doesn’t look up from his food.
They eat in silence after that.
Agent Choi waits until he hears the scrape of Soleum’s chopsticks against the bottom of his cup.
Then he leans back, his spine against the bed, and looks directly at Kim Soleum.
“You’re going home today,” he says.
“Yes.”
“I’m jealous, Soleum-ah.”
“...yes?”
“To have a place to return to, away from all of this—I’m jealous.”
Something dark passes over Kim Soleum’s face. It looks like guilt.
“Tell me about this place. Before you go. I want to imagine my junior in a happy place so I’ll know that he isn’t stuck in the hell we’re all still in.”
“It’s—” Soleum hesitates. “It’s not all that happy.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s just. Different.”
“In what way?”
“There aren’t any ghosts there.”
Agent Choi whistles lowly, as if he didn’t already know this from sneaking around Soleum’s room and reading his discarded letters. “That sounds great. I get why you’re so desperate to leave now.”
“...”
“But that can’t be all, can it? Our Grapes hates ghost stories, but you wouldn’t go to this extent just because of that. The people you left behind, you must have loved them very dearly.”
“...yes.”
“What were they like?”
Soleum says nothing.
“Ahhh. It’s too personal a question? We aren’t friends anymore, I get that, I get that. But Soleum-ah…” He leans forward, propping his chin on his hand. “I’m curious. You understand, don’t you? For an agent to take such damning information from the bureau and sell it to our worst enemy—you must have loved someone very dearly back home.”
Kim Soleum’s eyes go impossibly wide.
Agent Choi smiles, but this time it isn’t as friendly.
“You thought I wouldn’t figure it out? I knew who you were the moment you stepped into the Agency. You think I had no way of finding out what you were after?”
To be honest, it wasn’t at all as easy as he makes it sound. It took him most of the time that Soleum spent in the Glass Prison and the entire week that he’d been missing to snoop around Daydream enough and figure out what information Director Ho had wanted.
But he did find it in the end.
“If you can tell me what it is that you have to run back to,” Agent Choi says, “I’ll let you go. But if not—if all this was just because you were trying to run away from here, I can’t promise to be as forgiving.”
“I—”
“You?”
Soleum closes his mouth.
The strange thing is—he still isn’t panicked.
It’s nothing like the last time Agent Choi had cornered him, when he’d lost all grip on rationality and made things infinitely worse for himself.
The look that Soleum gives him now is just. Tired.
As if accepting that something would go wrong, in his last effort to go back home.
As if this was the only way it could be.
“I’m not asking a lot,” Agent Choi says. “I just want to know about your family. About who is waiting for you, when you go back home.”
“My…my friends.”
“Yes? Tell me about them.”
“My family.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Everyone back at home.”
Agent Choi frowns. “Soleum-ah. That’s not an answer.”
But this means he’s right. Every horrible suspicion that he’d had is right.
Soleum doesn’t even seem to realize that that’s not an answer.
“Friends from work,” Soleum continues. “Friends from college. My family. Everyone back at home.”
He says it sincerely, as if any of these words mean anything. As if he truly thinks it’s enough.
“Tell me one fact,” Agent Choi says slowly. “Let’s go with your mother. Tell me one thing about your mother.”
“She loved me,” Soleum says instantly.
“What was her name?”
Soleum stops. “She—she’s my mother.”
“What was her name?”
“She—she—”
“What was her name?”
The panic finally sinks into Kim Soleum’s eyes.
It makes Agent Choi feel like he’s done something terrible, but he has to see this through.
He has to, for Soleum’s sake more than his.
“You don’t know her name,” he says. “Okay. Let’s skip that. Your father. What did he do for a living?”
“He worked hard.”
“What was his job?”
“He—went to the office every day.”
“Grapes. You aren’t answering.”
“He—”
“Do you have any siblings?”
“...yes?”
“A brother? Or a sister?”
“I—”
“Which is it?”
“I don’t—”
“You didn’t have siblings?”
“I can’t—”
“Okay. Tell me the name of one of your friends. Any of them. Just one.”
It’s over.
Agent Choi knows it’s over.
Kim Soleum is hunched in front of him, palm pressed tightly against his forehead, eyes wide and terrified.
He doesn’t remember.
He doesn’t know any of this.
Agent Choi takes out the crumpled piece of paper he's stuffed into his pocket, smoothening it out on the floor. He slides it towards Soleum, forcing him to confront his own scrawling desperate words of I want to go home.
“You never mention a family,” Agent Choi says. “Not once. Soleum-ah. Are you certain that you have one?”
There's sweat pooling over Soleum’s eyebrow, eyes staring blankly into nothing.
He's lost.
Completely lost.
He doesn’t remember his home and it’s sunk in for the first time.
“Did you do this?” Soleum asks, in a low voice. “Did you do something to me?”
The instant suspicion stings a little.
But he deserves it.
He’s done a lot of messed up things to Soleum over the past few weeks. He threatened him just minutes ago. It’s not unreasonable.
“Do you really think that I would do that?”
There is no doubt in Soleum’s eyes.
The fact that their youngest truly believes that Agent Choi would erase his memories of his home to prevent him from ever leaving the Agency—
Then again. Can Agent Choi really say that he wouldn’t?
The man before him is a traitor, and he’s never been kind to traitors. Soleum has sold horrifying information to people who don’t care if the world burns down as long as they become millionaires, and—he’s valuable. Agent Choi had fought to keep him by his side even when he knew that Soleum was a spy, because he was that valuable.
Can he really say he wouldn’t do something as disgusting as this, just to keep a traitor on their side to save more lives?
But then. Kim Soleum has never been just a traitor.
He was—
He was theirs.
Caught in whatever twisted web he’d wandered into, desperate for someone to let him out—he was just someone who needed to be saved.
“I just want to make sure you know where you’re going,” he says gently. “I promise I only want you to be safe. I said a lot of things right now, and I know it scared you—but I just needed you to realize that you didn’t remember. ”
But the damage is done. Soleum’s fingers fist his hair in a painful grip as he shakes, confused, lost. Where will he end up, if he doesn’t remember where it’s to? What is there left for him to return to?
What if he goes back and finds himself in a world worse than the one he’d left behind?
Agent Choi reaches out carefully, to pat him on the head, to console him, to something.
Soleum flinches away.
He retracts his fingers quietly.
Every desperate wish poured across the page in front of him—all amounting to the delusions of someone who just couldn’t keep going.
“Soleum-ah. You have time, okay? You have nothing but time. I know you want to go home, but you have to think carefully. You really have to think, okay? If you don’t remember where you’re going—is it home you want to go to? Or do you just want to leave this place behind?”
Soleum slumps forward, pressing his face into his hands.
He looks exhausted. Too exhausted.
Agent Choi reaches out by reflex to hold him up, but stops himself with a grimace.
“I just want to leave,” Soleum whispers, voice aching. “I just want to leave.”
It’s heartbreaking, but there’s nothing Agent Choi can say.
“I can’t be here anymore. I need this to stop. I can’t do this.”
“You can leave the Agency,” Agent Choi tries. “You don’t have to work for Daydream. You can live as a regular citizen—we’ll take care of you, alright? You won’t have to do anything frightening again.”
Soleum shakes his head slowly, still not looking up. “I can’t,” he says again. “I can’t live like this.”
“Soleum-ah…”’
Soleum shifts, reaching into the pocket of his hoodie, pulling out a box.
Agent Choi recognizes it instantly.
“Kim Soleum—”
Soleum opens it quickly. There’s a vial inside, the cursed vial that started this cursed life of his to begin with. He isn’t breathing right, his eyes aren’t focused—he’s nowhere in the space to be dealing with such power right now.
He fumbles with it, muttering under his breath.
“I should just die. If there’s nowhere to go. I should just die.”
Agent Choi’s heart stops altogether.
There’s a short scuffle, but Kim Soleum is too easy to subdue.
Agent Choi pushes him against the ground, pinning him down with an arm under his neck. Soleum kicks at him blindly, but he’s no match for his experience. It takes some struggle but Agent Choi manages to get the Wish Ticket out of his hands, and then he’s standing back up, holding the potion high over his head, feeling wild and a little scared as he watches Soleum coughing at his feet.
Soleum doesn’t try to fight him.
He covers his eyes with his hands, breathing harsh, and when the coughing subsides, he curls slightly, and gives up.
He gives up completely.
He doesn’t get up from the floor, just stays there, eyes shut tightly, as if there’s nothing left for him to do.
It scares Agent Choi like nothing else.
/
He doesn’t leave that night.
He doesn’t trust their youngest to not jump out a window the moment he leaves.
So he stays there, the whole night. Soleum doesn’t say anything to him, completely lost in his own head. When Agent Choi drags him off the floor and into bed, he only curls into himself further, fingers gripping the blanket tightly. When Agent Choi tries to offer him water to drink he shakes his head.
He doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t look like it, at least. His eyes stay half open, staring into nothing, and Agent Choi sits at the side of his bed, gently stroking his hair.
“I know you want to leave,” Agent Choi says quietly, after hours have passed and Soleum still hasn’t slept. “Most of us do. But when there’s no place to leave to—then I can’t let you go. I can’t let you run off if you’re only going to die.” He pats his head some more. “Our Soleum-ah. You’ve been through a lot, haven’t you? I know how hard it is to keep going.”
He thinks back to the huddled form of his junior behind the waiting room couch, watching children’s cartoons on his phone, just trying to be okay.
Just trying, every day.
He’s young. He’s too afraid, for their line of work. He braved through it anyway, in hopes that if he grit his teeth enough one day he’ll make it out.
But none of them ever make it out.
They can’t.
The world is cursed, and they live in it, and then they die, but—
In between, they try to keep each other alive.
And Agent Choi can’t let Kim Soleum go.
Soleum says nothing. His eyes are still half open, staring blankly ahead, but they’re starting to tear up.
He’s really been through a lot.
Agent Choi wishes he could make it stop for him, but he can’t. It never does stop. It never does get better. The disasters keep coming, people keep dying, the world keeps turning.
It never gets better.
A wish won’t change that.
The most they can do is hold the remnants of their lives together and pretend that it builds a home.
The most they can do is hold each other close and hope it changes something for long enough to keep them alive.
The most they can do is wake up, and go to work, and find meaning in doing their best when nothing is in their control.
The most they can do is stay until they don’t have a choice.
He pulls the blankets higher over Kim Soleum’s chin, stroking the hair out of his eyes. There is so much left to do. In the morning they’ll have to talk more—asking Kim Soleum to return to his job is probably out of the question. They could find him a place to stay nearby. Let him live. Let him learn that he can.
There’s so much to think about.
So much to hope goes right.
He thinks back to the crumpled piece of paper he’d found under the bed, with his name scratched out over and over.
I’m sorry I couldn’t be better, Kim Soleum had written.
“I’m proud of you,” he says at last. “For trying so hard. I’m sorry for asking you to try a bit longer.”
He feels the dampness on Soleum’s cheeks before he sees it, and he wipes the tears away, fussing quietly.
“You’ll be okay. Our Soleum will always be okay.”
Soleum shakes his head.
Agent Choi goes back to carding fingers through his hair.
“We’ll build you a new home, okay? We’ll build one that you want to be in.”
They can do that, right?
He has to hope.
He stays awake by Kim Soleum’s side, until he drifts off at last, and even after. He sits awake through the night, watching over his junior in the nightmare of a world that never fades.
/