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One cup cooked rice, one cup steamed and mashed vegetables, one bowl of lightly salted dak gomtang, a pint of warm water, and his supplements. Yi Sang is still sickly even though he doesn’t exercise. It’s because Yi Sang’s appetite is not very good, see, so Gubo must ensure he eats every last drop. Yi Sang’s mind is still fine. But sometimes he behaves as if he doesn’t know a thing. His job is difficult, but Yi Sang only ever makes it more difficult.
Gubo knocks before entering. As always Yi Sang has not reacted. He remains seated before the mirror, back turned to it.
He places the food on the desk. “You shouldn’t sleep here,” he scolds. Yi Sang has taken off his jacket to drape it across his body, but the lab coat is not very warm, and the ground is cold. The glass is also cold. So it is not good for Yi Sang to sleep on the ground, especially because he doesn’t exercise, so his back is bad, and his immune system is worse.
Yi Sang does not respond. He blinks slowly, as if still in a deep dream.
“It’s been a year,” he says, frowning. “The League has long since collapsed. Surely you’ve accepted the reality as it is. There’s no reason to remain trapped in this illusion, my foolish compatriot.”
Silence. He scoffs, yanking Yi Sang’s coat off his sprawled body. Yi Sang twitches at the cold but still says nothing.
“How long will you continue this ruse? You protest nothing.” He kneels down to look Yi Sang in the eye. His gaze is as blank as always. As always, he dreams of a thousand ways to draw reactions from Yi Sang’s unmoving body. “There is no League anymore. There is nobody but us within your world. Why do you refuse to open your heart?”
Once again, no reaction. He thinks about prying Yi Sang’s heart from his chest, wet and bleeding, beating ever sluggishly. Certainly N Corp has access to technology to make that possible. But it is a useless sentiment. As if that would change his unwavering feelings!
In the end this is a song and dance they always play. So there is no point in deviating.
He pulls Yi Sang up by his upper arm. Yi Sang is really just skin and bones now. Back in the League he would occasionally find it in him to eat a meal or two, but now he does nothing but research, so he has no opportunity to grow. To even pry open Yi Sang’s mouth is an impossibility. So under his fingers there is little give from the ounce of fat and muscle wrapped stingily around Yi Sang’s skeleton.
Once they are at the desk, he picks up the spoon and says, “Open.”
Yi Sang blinks at him. He grunts in frustration and pinches Yi Sang’s nose. After a few seconds Yi Sang gasps for air and he shoves a spoonful of food down his throat. Yi Sang’s eyes water but eventually he swallows. He continues this until Yi Sang has finished the solid foods, and then pours the watery broth down his throat. Under his watchful eye his Adam’s apple bobs up and down, eyes wide as he attempts to swallow everything. Still some soup trickles down his chin and he wipes it away with a napkin. After everything is done Yi Sang slumps forward, chest heaving. His mouth makes pathetic half-wheezing half-gurgling sounds.
“Was it that difficult?” Gubo asks, wiping off his gloves with the napkin. His hands are spotless, naturally, but this is a habit from his first days here, when he wasn’t as proficient at wrangling his old compatriot.
Outside of the soft groans leaving Yi Sang’s throat, he does not reply.
Of course. Yi Sang never replies. Not for him.
He sighs, pressing down the cap of the supplement bottle. It pops open. Yi Sang flinches, but only slightly.
“Open,” he says.
Yi Sang stubbornly does not, eyes fixated on the wood before him. Just as he yanks Yi Sang’s chin to face him, the mirror calls out, “Yi Sang.”
Immediately, Yi Sang pushes him away. He is still skinny and weak as ever so the action does not move him so much as the surprise does. The supplements scatter to the ground, blue casings spilled across the white tiling.
“...My left-handed self,” Yi Sang responds, his voice scratchy. He rises slowly from the desk as if to make his way before the mirror.
He does not have the chance.
His hand clamps harshly around Yi Sang’s thin wrist. Below Yi Sang’s feet the blue supplements are crushed revealing the white powder held within. His eyes are wide as he faces him now. It’s the first reaction he has pulled from him outside of the instinctive reactions he’s expressed thus far. This shock is new.
“Yours is not an ailment of the mind, since you respond so quickly to your mirror,” he notes placidly. “What interests you there? There is nothing for you in your reflected world that you cannot find here.”
Yi Sang casts his gaze downward.
“Oh, is Gubo there?” the mirror asks.
He says, “There is nothing here. The outside world lies across the mirror.”
“Yi Sang?”
“I will be with you in a mere moment.”
His eyes flick upwards. They tell him, You are nothing.
Something dislodges in his mind. Faults in the plates have at last ground past each other, exploding in a mess of shattered fragments. Faster than he can even think about the consequences, his hands shoot out, grabbing on the closest thing they could close around. Perhaps he’d intended to grab the collar of his shirt instead. Instead, they close around Yi Sang’s thin neck, thumbs crossed about the windpipe and fingers slotted under the jaw.
“P—please do not...” Yi Sang wheezes. “...Look not, m—my...”
Across the mirror, the reflection observes, mouth open and eyebrows raised in surprise. He wonders what the stupid thing is thinking. What a barbaric man he must be to treat his old companion this way? What a terrible relationship they have? As if he is the monster so intent on culling whatever feelings they once shared, that was once so innocent, as fragile as the flowers that once bloomed in their home district—!
He thinks about yanking those florets free, about the way he had once presented those strangled buds to the man in front of him, and his grip tightens.
Yi Sang gurgles. His hands wrap around his wrists, bony fingers and brittle nails making not even a dent in the leather of his gloves. Under his fingers he can feel the fragile ligaments of Yi Sang’s delicate neck, can feel the butterfly beating of his frantic heart, can dig his thumbs into the wiry muscle and dream of touching the windpipe. Yi Sang is not a warm person but it is warm here, he notes. Yi Sang’s heart is beating very fast.
Will he kill Yi Sang here? he wonders blandly. The League cut down to just him and Aseah. How pitiful. Nine is three squared and not even close to even and besides Aseah’s smug self-absorbed attitude has not once attracted him. Yi Sang’s face is turning red and the light in his eyes even more crazed. So even Yi Sang who does not eat or drink and instead dallies his days away before the mirror as if it could consume every portion of his soul and leave nothing in return wants to live.
Yi Sang’s heart is beating very fast.
“It’s all the same,” the mirror says. “Shouldn’t you let go?”
And then, Yi Sang does.
His frantic struggling stops. His hands remain curled around his wrists but they are loose now as if they will slip off soon. The light in his eyes fades, and his pupils have stopped shaking, though they are still dilated in an instinctive panic response. He is now as placid as the surface of a winter lake not even rippling as the earth around him shakes reflecting so perfectly the sun and blue sky.
Before him is something like a doll. Its glassy eyes do not stare at him but rather through him. It will not even shake or even struggle when it is dying. It will simply allow itself to die. Under his fingers the fragile glassy ligaments and tender plastic tendons creak and break shattering splinting into a million pieces stabbing into the fabric soft skin. Before him is something like a thing.
But its heart is still beating very fast.
Its face turns red and then purple. Its mouth is open but it says nothing. Its eyes are floating up and up and up like helium balloons flying in the sky while its fingers slip lower and lower until they fall to his sides and then its body is limp like it really is a doll.
He thinks about Yi Sang’s corpse. About having it cleaned and stuffed and taxidermied. About leaving the body by the desk or by the bed or by the mirror still and obedient. Its skin would be eternally soft and its eyes would be eternally lit with something close to life.
It would be easier than having Yi Sang.
So he lets go.
A puppet with its strings cut, Yi Sang collapses to the floor. His chest rises and falls rapidly but his gaze is blank and he only twitches when he kicks him solidly in the solar plexus just to feel the resistance of his lukewarm flesh.
“You really did a number on him,” the reflection says, with neither appreciation nor condemnation. It is merely an observation. “He probably won’t be talking for a long while.”
He looks down at Yi Sang. The bruises will blossom into blacks and purples and blues stretched across the white of his neck like a particularly gruesome necklace. His stomach will pain him. His wrist will ache from his grip. He will open his mouth to speak to the mirror and nothing will escape but white noise and painful crackling. Every word will hurt. So eventually he will do nothing, unable to do anything but stare. He hopes it lasts forever.
Gubo adjusts his gloves. They are truly pristine as ever, with not even slight discoloration where his old companion had scratched them. Below the soles of his feet, the capsules have been ground to a fine mist.
“I’m glad.”
Now the mirror will understand too, what it means to love Yi Sang.