Page 15

Chapter Fifteen

Seokga

S eokga is loath to admit that Hajun looks vaguely familiar, and that Seokga might know precisely what popular boy band he’s from and even like a few of their songs. Perhaps even have attempted some of their complex choreographies himself (and failed spectacularly). This is because Seokga has decided on one of his many whims to dislike Hajun, a decision that is reinforced only when Hajun mentions that he and Kisa share a cabin.

A cabin.

His fury only grows when Hajun proves to be hard to hate. The boy is disgustingly nice. He offers to hold Hwanin for him, and—unlike Seokga—doesn’t hold the baby like he’s a mangy cat carrying rabies. Before heading to Deck 10’s stairwell, Hajun even buys Seokga a large iced coffee from Deck 8’s bustling Creature Café.

“For morale,” the boy offers over the chatter with a kind smile that makes Seokga grimace. He dearly wishes he could be as revolted as he’d like to be by this kindness, but the truth is that after the hideousness of the past day, he is not capable of his usual spectacular rancor.

“Thank you,” mutters the trickster god reluctantly, and sucks a long drag of coffee with one cream, one sugar, into his mouth. Hajun smiles, orders an iced matcha for himself, and Seokga watches in a growing bad mood as he makes easy small talk with the cashier before paying in Jeoseung coins—black coins with Yeomra’s grinning, winking face on them. Somehow, Hajun manages to hold a dozing Hwanin in one hand and his small drink in the other.

The second morning of the SRC Flatliner is just as packed as the first. Shoes clatter against the polished corridors as excited guests rush to the many attractions of the day, cheerful despite their state of being very, very dead. Surprisingly, though, there are few gwisin who bear the scars of their deaths, even when they’re young (which means, Seokga concludes, their endings had to be vicious and nasty). Hajun catches him staring at a grinning young boy, no more than ten, who is carrying a large stuffed teddy bear—presumably won from the noisy casino and arcade a deck below.

“He’s a repeat guest,” Hajun explains in a quiet tone. “The kid isn’t ready to reincarnate just yet, so the CEO’s let him stay on for another cruise or two. Kisa fixed him up with some Restoration when he got here. You’d never even know he was in a crash. It helps him, being here and looking whole. In time, he’ll be able to move on.”

Seokga glances sideways at Hajun. The idol has no signs of injury, either, though if what Seokga remembers from the papers about ST4RL1GHT’s beloved maknae, Kim Hajun…Seokga’s gaze drops to Hajun’s wrists.

“She fixed me up, too,” Hajun says, and Seokga feels a peculiar jolt of shame at his subtle scrutiny being not so subtle, after all. The idol smiles, though, as if recalling something pleasant rather than awful as they walk through the cruise’s throngs. “Kisa is wonderful. I was scared as shit when I got here, but she’s helped me in so many ways.” He shrugs, adjusting his grip on Hwanin. “I think if I’d met her while we were alive, maybe our stories would have turned out differently. Maybe they wouldn’t have ended so soon. She’s a good friend.”

Seokga takes a small sip of coffee to settle his stomach. “Kisa said,” he manages after a moment, “that she fell off a roof…”

Hajun’s smile slips. “Is that all she told you?” he asks quietly.

A cold shiver of foreboding slithers down Seokga’s spine, and he grips his cane tight. “It is,” he manages. Hajun’s eyes are sad. “Why?” snaps Seokga, fear like a vise around his heart. He can’t mean…

The idol hesitates as they reach the chaos of Deck 9. No longer indoors, the deck is open-air, covered in a mess of glittering pools and spiraling waterslides. A live band plays festive music in the corner, and the air smells of a strange mix of Seocheongang River and lemonade. Guests splash in the pools, leaping into their depths or flying through the air from the slides. With an expression of supreme distaste, Seokga sidesteps a throng of giggling women who eye him with more than a little interest. Below, the Seocheongang River churns and flows, blood red as the ship cuts through it.

“Kisa and I might have more in common than you think,” Hajun finally says, heading toward one of the stairwells connecting it to Deck 10—the stairwell where Seokga found his brother’s corpse. It will be gone by now, unable to remain present in a world where the baby form also exists.

“She told you this?” He’s struggling to accept this. He won’t. He can’t. Seokga will not accept that Kisa felt so alone, so…

“She didn’t have to,” Hajun replies as he pulls the stairwell’s door open, stepping aside for a cluster of swimsuit-clad men with thinning hair to waddle out. “Some wounds are deeper than skin. And—” He shakes his head, looking slightly guilty as he speculates on his friend. “I don’t know, it’s just…hardly anybody just falls from a skyscraper. Why was she up on the roof to begin with? She’s not a reckless person. She always thinks things through.” As the final Speedo jauntily struts out the door, Hajun and Seokga slip inside. The former turns as they enter, blocking the god for a moment as his normally kind hazel eyes narrow. “I’m telling you this so you’re gentle with her,” he warns, a fiercely protective light in his eyes. “She’s apprehensive about you already, but still, there’s the red thread. Anything can happen. I don’t want her to find the courage to dive in only to get hurt in the end. Okay?” He sounds almost terrified for Kisa, and Seokga closes his eyes, steadying himself.

“I think,” he hears himself saying, “that you should warn her to be gentle with me. ”

The other man laughs, and he hears Hwanin yawn, waking from his nap. “You’re both so scared of each other. For the record…” As Seokga opens his eyes, he sees Hajun offering him a small smile and gestures to the red thread tied to his left pinky, the knot like a floral ring around the small finger. It’s invisible to anybody but Seokga and Kisa, but she must have told him about it. “I don’t know much about mythology, but I know that’s there for a reason.”

“Right,” mutters Seokga, uncomfortable with the amount of kindness Hajun has shown him. He hates nice people, but still adds another rough and awkward “Thank you” before gulping down some more coffee and attempting—in vain—to find a hidden passageway for what feels like hours, but can only be fifteen minutes before a wrinkled hand clamps around his shoulder.

Stiffening, Seokga whirls away from the wall he’s been knocking on (hidden passageways, he hopes, would at least throw him a bone and sound hollow)…and makes eye contact with a very grumpy-looking Jang Heejin. She’s no longer wearing the rubber-duck dress, and Seokga finds himself muttering “thank the heavens for small mercies” aloud. A few steps above, Hajun freezes, holding baby Hwanin with an uncertain expression.

Luckily, Dr. Jang doesn’t seem to see the infant. Behind a giant pair of flamingo-pink sunglasses, he gets the sense that she’s glaring at him, stare boring through the inner depths of his soul. “Seokga,” the elderly therapist chides. “You’re avoiding me.”

“Uh,” says Seokga, attempting to convey a message to Hajun with only his eyes. Go. Run. If Dr. Jang catches a glimpse of the baby with eyes suspiciously similar to Hwanin’s, the gig is most decidedly up. The therapist will—as she’s sworn to do—contact Okhwang in case of emergencies pertaining to Seokga, and this would undoubtedly count as an emergency. Hajun, to his credit, picks up the hidden plea and hurries away with Hwanin. Ignoring the annoying stab of anxiety at having his brother out of his sight, Seokga attempts a casual smile that does not at all seem to fool the good doctor. “I forgot about our scheduled session,” he says. That much is true. That Dr. Jang had demanded a session in the morning after the disaster in the greenhouse had been completely forgotten by him.

Dr. Jang sighs, pushing up her sunglasses. “Well, let’s go, then,” she grumps, and—with one hand on the wall—makes her way back down the stairs. Seokga notes that she’s being extremely cautious with her movements, feeling the wall or railing before she takes each step, and feels a spasm of guilt. Dr. Jang is an old woman, and running about the ship looking for him couldn’t have been good for her bones—which she, on the way down to Jeoseung, complained of being incredibly arthritic. Seokga’s guilt fades as he sits in the plush armchair across from hers in her cabin and watches as she pulls out a notebook. He wonders if he should mention she’s still wearing her sunglasses, but decides against it. They match her neon Hawaiian shirt in a way that’s most amusing.

“So,” says Dr. Jang Heejin.

“So,” echoes Seokga, crossing one leg over the other, determined to look as casual as possible. Nothing to see here. No murders, no baby-older-brothers.

“The greenhouse mess,” prompts Dr. Jang, and Seokga almost snorts. With everything going on, his little tussle with Somi last night is the least of his concerns. “You were upset.”

With a beleaguered sigh, Seokga allows Dr. Jang to guide him through an exploration of his feelings. Feelings are so inconvenient. At times like these, Seokga wishes he didn’t have any. As Dr. Jang sagely suggests that the revulsion he felt at seeing Somi mimicking Hani stemmed from an unconscious attraction to a creature so like his lost love, Seokga abandons all politeness and begins to take great pleasure in causing the therapist unnecessary difficulty—as he used to do in the days before she somehow managed to bond with him. He refutes it emphatically and then, with a thin smile that tells the psychologist he knows precisely what he’s doing, answers each prompt-slash-question with a roundabout reply that can make absolutely no sense to anybody. He speaks in riddles, takes long breaks to slurp (loudly) on his coffee, bothers Dr. Jang about what deity her patron is (one answer she’s repeatedly refused to give him, although he’s sure it’s Hwanin), and goads her when she deflects. He grabs a Kopiko from his pocket and noisily crinkles the wrapper, even pretending that the small coffee candy is too big for him to talk around. But Dr. Jang is an admirable opponent, and Seokga grimaces when he realizes that he’s the one growing tired.

It doesn’t help that Hwanin cried the whole night, or that when he finally did manage to fall asleep, he was awoken by a strange dragging noise in the corridor. Yet when Seokga had slammed open the door, nothing had been there. It’s possible his exhausted mind gifted him some auditory hallucinations.

“Seokga,” Dr. Jang says, setting down her pen—she hasn’t taken many notes throughout the session, he notes with some satisfaction. “I’ve been treating you for long enough that I’ve picked up on your tells. When you deflect, like you’re doing now, it’s to hide a deep anxiety, anger, fear…or all of the above. So.” The old woman leans forward, hands lacing together. “I want to talk about Kisa. We spoke a little about her yesterday, during our emergency session, but I regret that we didn’t have the opportunity to delve deeper—especially considering the events in the greenhouse.” She hesitates. “You are, I assume, still adjusting to having found her—and the stark differences between herself and Hani.”

Seokga bites down hard on his candy. “We went over this yesterday,” he grinds out around the loud crunching.

Dr. Jang leans back in her chair, presumably studying him behind those ridiculous sunglasses. And she does what Seokga hates most—she waits. Silently.

Oh, how Seokga hates the silence. His crunching becomes unbearably noisy. It makes him feel awkward, and Seokga is never awkward (except in cases where Kisa is concerned, apparently). Four minutes and twenty seconds go by (the longest he’s ever lasted is ten minutes) before he snaps out: “Fine. I knew not to expect Hani, but…” He clenches his jaw. “I think I did. And it’s disorienting. One moment, she laughs or rolls her eyes like Hani, but the next…The next moment, she’s somebody I don’t even know.”

His therapist’s face—or what he can make of it, at least—softens. “I have a question for you, Seokga,” she says kindly. “And I want to preface it by saying that I know it might stir up some complex feelings.”

Seokga’s entire body stiffens. He’s had enough complex feelings for a lifetime. “I decline,” he replies flatly, and that really should be the end of it, but of course it isn’t.

Jang, the tyrant, is unruffled. “Have you given any thought, perhaps, as to why the red thread connected you and Kisa? Not you and Hani?”

His brows furrow before he can stop them. “It connected us because she was Hani,” Seokga answers immediately, the words springing to his mouth like a knee-jerk reflex. “And Hani was my…She was…” Everything. Throat tightening, Seokga cuts off and attempts to compose himself.

“Hmm,” Dr. Jang says, and above those ridiculous glasses, a thin eyebrow arches.

“I suppose you have an alternate theory,” Seokga drawls coldly, rather wishing Jang’s hmm wasn’t so laden with skepticism. It makes him feel quite violent.

“I do, yes.” She exhales, lacing her hands together. “I’d like you to consider, Seokga, that it is you and Kisa that fate has chosen to vouch for. That even if you’d never met Hani—stop making that face, please, and listen—that you still would have, somehow, met Kisa. Your Threaded. That you met her in her past life was just a coincidence—”

The grinding of his back molars is beginning to give him a headache. “A coincidence ?” he demands in a voice that armies have fled from but the elderly therapist seems to find amusing.

“And what a wonderful coincidence, too.” She reaches forward and pats Seokga’s knee as if he’s a small child and not a notorious god. He gapes at the sheer audacity. “But your expectations are holding you back from knowing Kisa for who she is.”

It can’t possibly be healthy for his mouth to be this dry. A long silence stretches out between Seokga and Jang in which the trickster god experiences a complete nervous breakdown while expertly hiding beneath a facade of bored indifference.

“Seokga,” Jang says when the silence has stretched out to five minutes. “Are you all right?”

“No,” he tries to say with a certain cold pointedness, but it comes out as an undignified wheeze instead, his mask finally cracking.

“It’s only a theory…”

But what if it’s not? What if his time with Hani meant nothing ? His stomach roils and he thinks he might be sick. It isn’t true, he tells himself. Hani is— was? —the love of his life. It didn’t mean nothing. It couldn’t. Even if Dr. Jang’s idea is true, what he shared with Hani was special and achingly real, red thread or no. And Kisa…

She was Hani, once.

“I want to know her—it’s just that I’m not sure if she wants to know me, ” he rasps, and then grimaces at the admission of his insecurity. Seokga wishes, for a moment, that he could tell Dr. Jang of Yeomra’s bargain…Of how Kisa will be reincarnated if they succeed in catching the murderer, how her face lit up like a fucking firefly’s ass when the bastard god offered that (knowing exactly what he was doing—godsdamned Yeomra).

Dr. Jang nods. “You’ve struggled with rejection your whole life,” she says, rather fucking bluntly in Seokga’s opinion. Suddenly, he greatly desires to hurl himself off the cruise and leave himself at the mercy of the ineo. “Your father, especially—”

He stiffens even further, if such a thing is even possible. “I don’t want to talk about Mireuk. You’ve tortured me enough for the day as it is.” He’s practically begging for a reprieve.

His therapist only tilts her head. “It’s imperative that we talk about Mireuk, Seokga. His favoritism of Hwanin has affected you deeply, even now. I see a connection between your issues with your father and this situation with Kisa.”

It’s nothing Seokga hasn’t heard before, but each time Jang offers up this conspiracy of hers on a golden platter, he wants to smack it right out of her hands. In Dr. Jang’s opinion, the imbalance of respect his father showed to Hwanin and Seokga has ingrained within him an unconscious sense of “worthlessness,” which the trickster attempts to compensate for through things like bloody coups. It also, apparently, accounts for Seokga’s long history of women, but rather short list of partners he has truly loved (Hani being the only one on that particular list). He is terrified of rejection, of being loved only for that love to shift to something—somebody—else.

Even before Mireuk went mad, he was a less-than-stellar father…To Seokga, at least. Mireuk didn’t hate him (at least at that point), but it was Hwanin that he really took under his wing, it was Hwanin that Mireuk showered in praise and affection while Seokga watched from the shadows, jealousy festering in his heart. As the second-born, Seokga was largely ignored. As the first-born, and crown prince to the throne, Hwanin was showered in anything and everything he could ever possibly want.

It was during Okhwang’s annual talent show that Seokga and Mireuk’s relationship really began to fester. Seokga was, by godly standards, only a teenager at the time: hungry for his father’s approval and appreciation, hungry for a modicum of the affection shown to his oh-so-perfect brother. For Seokga’s talent, he declared, he would challenge Mireuk to a flower-growing contest—a random, and largely useless, talent that Seokga inherited from his earth-goddess mother, Mago. As the crowd tittered, Mireuk reluctantly agreed.

The young trickster god had believed he’d succeed. He had been practicing, and had purposefully chosen this challenge as an acknowledgment to Mago—who loved him fiercely, even though he was only the second son. Confident he would win, young Seokga grinned at his mother, who grinned back.

But, as the competition commenced, his father quickly overtook Seokga’s progress. The impending humiliation beginning to flush his cheeks, he had glanced out into the audience, and Mago’s disappointed face had struck him like a slap. So Seokga did what has always been in his nature to do: He cheated. With one of the many sleights of hand he is so skilled at, Seokga ruined Mireuk’s flowers and unjustly won the contest.

His father was not fooled.

Never until then had Seokga seen the emperor so enraged. It was then, over something as simple as a flower-growing contest, that the beginnings of Mireuk’s madness began. Even now, there is a part of Seokga that whispers it’s all his fault—his father’s slipping grip on sanity, and what came close after. The creation god began to weave sufferings into existence, sending them down to torment the mortal world. The years that followed were heavy with grief and horror. Mireuk tortured Seokga every chance he got. The god’s pride and fragile ego had been dramatically (and even nonsensically ) wounded over the talent show’s result, and he took a sadistic pleasure in cutting Seokga down whenever the chance arose. Okhwang became a place of terror, and Seokga began slipping off to Gamangnara to hide in the shadows and chaos.

As Seokga and Hwanin both came into early adulthood, they imprisoned their father beneath the Seocheongang River they now cruise on, having been left no choice. Mireuk had become the Mad God. Hwanin took the throne, and Mago—stricken with grief and regret, exhausted by the years and “all these testosterone-fueled battles”—went to sleep. She’d not awoken since.

Seokga has been determinedly trying not to think about how, leagues and leagues beneath the SRC Flatliner, his father lies trapped.

Until now, he’s been doing a rather decent job of it.

Dr. Jang is still speaking, but Seokga isn’t paying attention. Every day of his life, he regrets the flower-growing contest. A part of him—as disgusting as it is—still longs for his father to see him and love him as he once did Hwanin.

Fucking daddy issues.

“How much would you give to earn his pride?” the therapist asks, jerking Seokga out of his reverie. Jaw tense, he narrows his eyes at the therapist. This is a new question.

The truth is, honestly, that he would give any of his bodily organs to go back in time and prevent himself from cheating at the flower contest. But Seokga will never, ever admit that. It’s a dangerous line of questioning, and Dr. Jang knows that. If Seokga displays any hint of ideating upon treason, she’s instructed to report it to Okhwang immediately. “I don’t want anything to do with him,” Seokga answers stiffly.

“Good,” says Dr. Jang, pushing up her sunglasses. “And you’re still taking your medication?”

“At seven each evening,” he mutters back.

And that’s that.