Chapter Text
The afterlife is an endless field.
It's a boring, listless place. The air smells vaguely of iron, the sky above is a drab, cigarette-smoke gray. The whole world looks motion-blurred, viewed through foggy glass or the lens of an old camera. Everything is lifeless, of course it is, drained almost entirely of colour and energy.
And then there are the people.
Previous contestants, almost all of them. Losers, winners, lovers, fighters. All are equal here, bare-footed and white clad like children in the garden. Like Adam and Eve in Eden.
The only difference is that God isn't real.
The great, yawning sky above holds nothing but stars when the clouds rarely part. The wind barely blows, and when it does it is a great event, almost as biblical of a miracle as when it rains. Nothing here is guaranteed. Prayers are no longer answered. God had been silent before, but now His absence is an open wound, still bleeding on His children when rain finally arrives.
There is nothing to do here.
Sua spent her first days here just walking.
Walking infinitely forward in a straight line. She made a game of it. How many steps with her right foot? Could she stay on the same path for 20 minutes? An hour? Nine hours? Two days?
She noted the people she passed, lying on their backs in the damp grass or sitting cross-legged or just standing still, staring straight up, silently watching the sky. Counted how many times she passed the same person, used them as landmarks on her travels.
She found, then, that the afterlife is a closed loop. Nothing moves forward. To move backwards was unfathomable. The afterlife is an eternal present, with nothing waiting for you in the future.
Part of her wished she had made more friends.
Sua spent her first uncountable days in the afterlife braiding grass and wishing she had tried a little harder.
Regret is the most common language here. Nearly every sentence Sua ever hears begins with “I wish”, “I should have”, or “If only I”.
If she had a second for every time she heard those phrases, she'd have enough life left to tell Mizi she loved her again.
But she doesn't have that time. All she has are regrets.
There is nothing to do here.
Sua knows, ideally, she has a good 50-or-so years to wait until she sees Mizi again. She's selfish, but not selfish enough to wish Mizi would die sooner. She's content in waiting.
She should be content in waiting.
Why isn't she?
Sua will never admit it — and she knows now how long never is — but she misses talking to people. She misses Mizi's warm hands and Till's nervousness around her and Ivan's quiet pride. She even misses her sister, who she hasn't seen in years.
Sua doesn't like to think about where she is, if not here. But she does anyway.
There is nothing to do here.
And then she meets Hyun Woo.
No one really speaks about the children here. Sua knows, chronologically, most (if not all) of these children were born before her. This should make them older, in theory. But time doesn't move forward.
Sometimes a child will run past her, laughing an out-of-place laugh, and she'll feel an emptiness in her chest at the thought of it. The laughter is a good sound. But it doesn't belong here.
None of them do.
Hyun Woo is a child. Almost a teenager. He's not tall enough to reach Sua's shoulder. His face is matured, sure, but he has that lingering baby-fat around his cheeks, that roundness to his eyes. Some innocence around the way he conducts himself, even as he holds himself with the gait of an adult. Chasing maturity, reaching for adulthood that he'll never quite grasp.
And then there's the head wound.
Hyun Woo's doe-brown hair parts and grows damp and red around the hole in his skull. A kaleidoscope of reddened skin and blue, bruised flesh and yellow-white skull and black spotting that isn't quite natural, like this place is the only thing holding him together. Keeping his brains where they belong. The implication doesn't escape Sua– do the dead need their organs, still? What happens to those without everything nearly intact? Is this place something to earn, somewhere you can only go if you're whole or almost whole? Is everyone here missing something?
Most children die with childish regrets. “I wish I tried less in my classes”. “I wish I played more with my things”. “I wish I hung out with more of my friends”. Children always seem to want more than they were given. They're the most honest in that regard. They know what they want, what they had wanted from life, and they aren't afraid to wish for it. Adults keep those thoughts to themselves and they die with them blooming from their chests like roots of a plant that has long overgrown its pot. Their hopes curl together and strangle themselves, choking on a lack of oxygen and a desire for more.
When Hyun Woo speaks on his regrets, there's something more there.
“I wish I never talked to him.”
When Sua first hears it, she's already intrigued.
In some ways, she understands.
Sua doesn't regret meeting Mizi. She doesn't regret loving her and losing her. She doesn't regret all the time she spent with her, all the shared memories. Even here, even when she's so far away, Sua can still remember the palm of her hand and the smooth skin at the nape of her neck, the softness of her smile under white lights and the easy, effortless feeling of her voice as she spoke to her. Sua finds herself recalling it often, turning over the memory in her hands like a smooth stone weathered by a river, memorizing the surface and feeling its cool comfort.
But when she does, she can't help but remember what got her here.
Of course Mizi brought light into her life. Of course Mizi is the most important thing to her. Of course Mizi means everything to Sua. But to say she couldn't imagine a life without her is a lie.
She could imagine a life without her. It would just be a much shorter one.
But would Mizi be happier without her?
Sua hadn't thought of it until Ivan planted the idea in her head. The idea of her death just being another burden on her, the idea of Sua dragging her down with her posthumously. When she thinks about her past, was Sua sinking as Mizi treaded water? Was it always doomed to end this way? Sua's thinking of Mizi as water filled her lungs wouldn't save her life.
One of the most dangerous things in the world is a person who is drowning.
Even in death, some manage to be a burden.
Sua worries she was one of those people.
Having a friend lessened the pain then. Maybe it'll help this time, too.
So she talks with Hyun Woo. Learns about him, and his sister, and his best friend. His sister is a little younger than him, he says, and he tries to be the best big brother he can be. She’s energetic, and she likes to run around with him, but they always make sure to wait and be patient with their friend. She’s gentle and kind to everyone. He misses playing with her.
Their friend is small for his age. Hyun Woo says that he has really big, dazed-looking eyes, and that he has wispy blonde hair. He eats a lot, even though he’s not supposed to, and his sister and Hyun Woo always give him extra food because he needs it.
Their friend is sick, Hyun Woo says.
Hyun Woo is a kid. Hyun Woo doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, but he knows something is wrong. He coughed a lot, he says. He would fall behind in their studies a lot, and he still sucked his thumb even though he was older than them. Sometimes their friend would stomp on flowers or pull the wings from insects, even when they told him to stop.
Hyun Woo would get into fights with him a lot. But he still liked him.
He… really liked him.
Hyun Woo’s cheeks flush when he tells Sua this next part. He doesn’t know how to explain it, and his little baby voice sounds a little confused, but he says he had a crush on him. ‘Luka’, his name is. Hyun Woo liked his smile and he liked it when they played together. He didn’t understand why he did the things he did, but he liked him. He really did.
He tells Sua, in a hushed voice, that he should have just kept it to himself. Because he knows Luka didn’t like him back.
It wasn’t Luka’s fault, but he was jealous. So he fought with Luka all the time, the same way Sua remembers that Ivan would fight with Till. One day it went too far, and Hyun Woo got hurt. He remembers hitting his head on the rock. He thinks Luka might have pushed him, or maybe it was his sister, or maybe he just fell. In any case, Hyun Woo ended up here. He still doesn’t really understand why, or how.
“Maybe if I never told him, I could go back home.”
Sua doesn’t know what to say to that. Because he might be right. And that’s the worst thing about this place, the fact that people can see so clearly after it all. Detached from reality, everything seems so simple. What they should have done, who they should have been. It’s all so clear to them, and yet so far away.
Sua doesn’t like affection, but she offers Hyun Woo a hug anyway. She threads her fingers through his hair, avoiding the gaping hole in his skull. She thinks that, maybe, this is what her sister felt like. Going from alone in this place with no end, this pointless purgatory, to being accompanied by a little light. Some hope in the darkness.
And then along comes Ivan.