Chapter Text
It’s a ten minute walk from the apartment that Kim Soleum stays at to Ho Yuwon’s shop.
It takes him three minutes if he sprints.
So he sprints.
The protection amulet that Ho had given him is kept carefully around his neck. In his front pocket is a talisman he’d been given for good luck. Around his wrists are several bracelets that Ho had woven himself while Soleum had cleaned the shop—also meant to protect him.
Despite the layers of protection, Kim Soleum still steadies his breath, steps out of the apartment, and sprints like his life depends on it.
Because it does.
There aren’t many people on the streets yet. It’s 5AM, Ho likes to have him open the shop early. The sun hasn’t risen, which only makes matters worse, and as Soleum runs past the blur of his surroundings in the street lights, the darkness that creeps up behind him is impossible to ignore.
Why do you run?
Every day of this cursed routine, the darkness appears to gain speed. One misstep and it will grab him around the neck and pull him back into the hell that he just barely escaped from.
Come with us.
He can hear the shrill screams of the ghosts behind him asking him to slow down. He doesn’t. He runs, and runs, until the familiar street comes into view.
Ho’s shop looks ominous in the flickering street light.
It’s fine, because the average person can’t see it.
Soleum all but crashes into the gate, pushing it open desperately and slamming it shut behind him.
Instantly, there’s silence.
The darkness cuts off. The ghosts can’t cross the border.
Soleum sighs in relief, slumping against the gate.
Another day survived.
Ho has offered a few times to let Soleum live in the shop. They do have a couple of spare rooms, which they usually use when a visitor arrives in too bad a shape (maimed, unconscious, bleeding out to death) or when Ho gets questionable guests (spirits, supernatural entities, Eun Haje). It’s not a bad deal—Ho doesn’t stay here personally, so it’s not like Soleum will be forced to live with his insane boss. But he still doesn’t trust the man enough to dare live in a place that is completely under his control.
So instead, he risks the dash to and from his apartment, which, thankfully, hasn’t killed him yet.
He steps into the shop and switches the lights on.
The glass displays blink at him, hundreds of tiny bottles of tiny wish potions glittering in the artificial light.
It looks magical to see.
An endless display of hopes that might never come true.
Soleum still doesn’t know how the potions get here. If Ho steals them from Daydream, if he smuggles them out, or if he just buys them with his own money because as a director, he’s filthy rich.
Whatever Ho does, the wish potions are here.
It’s Soleum’s job to sell them.
He doesn’t have a lot to do on days that they don’t get customers. He cleans the displays, he wipes the floor. He goes through the storage room to make sure none of the strange items they’ve collected as payment have escaped and started running around wreaking havoc.
He sits in the chair behind the front desk and stares at the bottles of wish potions.
He no longer dreams of breaking the glass and grabbing one to go home.
He’d tried it, just once.
In a fit of desperation.
There’s a scar over his eye now, a mark burned into his skin that keeps him from ever trying again.
There isn’t a lot to do here on the days that they don’t get visitors. Ho had once offered to bring him a TV, but even within the safe walls of his shop, watching TV is like sending a direct message to Braun to say here I am. Please kidnap me again.
Instead, he reads.
Ho Yuwon has an incredible library. From the latest trashy romance novels to books so old and thick with knowledge that they seem to fall apart when Soleum flips the pages. He reads everything that he can get his hands on, even books that have so many hidden secrets that the words are censored in his mind.
Ho lets him read everything he wants. It’s one of the few perks of working here.
Well, apart from the obvious perk that it keeps him alive.
He settles in his chair, picking up the book he’d left off last, and bides his time.
/
It’s a full eight hours later that there’s a jingle at the front door.
A customer at last.
It’s been three weeks since the last one. They almost had one last week, a young woman who’d burst in, bruised and bloodied, but she’d died right there in the shop before she could even tell Kim Soleum what she wished for. So she probably doesn’t count.
Hopefully, the one today lasts a little longer.
Soleum places his bookmark in the book he’s reading and sets it back on the table.
“Welcome,” he calls.
A tall man steps inside. His clothes are wet and muddy, which is already strange, because it’s bright and sunny outside. He’s in a dark black coat with his collar pulled so high that it obscures half his face.
He’s in such a terrible state that for a moment, Soleum doesn’t even recognize him.
It’s only when the man’s eyes go wide, and then narrow in anger, that he realizes who this is.
“You,” Agent Bronze bites out. “What are you doing here?”
Soleum opens his mouth. Shuts it.
He isn’t sure how to play this.
The last time that they met, things hadn’t gone well. He’d duped Bronze into thinking he was an innocent citizen, only to get caught as a Daydream employee, and then he’d manipulated his feelings and made him think he was dying tragically to get out of the situation.
All in all, Agent Bronze probably hates his guts.
Soleum could, perhaps, play the pity card. He could talk about the Tamra Express, about getting kidnapped by his closest friend and made to work on the set of a cursed TV show for a month, about how he’d lost his points at his job because of it and had to grab at the first sign of hope he’d been offered—which was, unfortunately, to work for Ho Yuwon instead.
But running through the story, he realizes that no part of it would inspire pity.
All Agent Bronze would hear was 1. Daydream agent messed up at his job and 2. He faced the repercussions.
“I lost my job,” he settles for, leaving out all the backstory. “I work here now. What about Agent-nim? What brings you here?”
Bronze still looks angry, but he seems to compartmentalize quickly, pushing aside his animosity for the sake of whatever he’s here for.
“I’m looking for someone,” he says. He pulls a photograph out of his pocket, handing it out for Soleum to take. “She was last spotted in this area. Have you seen this person?”
Soleum stares at the photo. A middle aged woman, scars all over her face.
He’s seen her.
She’s one of the agents that came in last month. For all that the bureau seems to hate Daydream, in moments of weakness too many of them come to Ho’s doorstep. Soleum doesn’t know where they rank in the bureau hierarchy, if they’re rookies or corrupt or just disillusioned by the morals of the bureau, but he’s seen too many of them stop by in the time that he’s worked here.
Some of them make wishes that are so simple that they hurt to hear. I want to sleep, someone had asked. I want to be able to take the train again.
Still others make wishes that can’t be granted in this reality.
I want my daughter back.
I want to save the ten people I let die.
I want to be happy.
The payment for these wishes are always astronomical. Sometimes it’s memories. Sometimes it’s years of their life. Sometimes, if Ho is feeling generous, it’s all the money in their bank account.
The agent in the photograph had wished to be freed of the guilt of the last disaster she’d been in. She’d paid her will o’ the wisps for it, which had taken the place of a lung.
She’d taken the wish potion and dropped unconscious.
They all do, when a wish can’t be granted in this reality.
She fell into an endless sleep and her soul left to a different world that her wish could be granted in. Leaving her unconscious body behind, in a way that could pass for dead.
It’s also Soleum’s job to bury these bodies.
It’s a job he hates.
He buries the bodies behind Ho’s shop, in the empty soil that appears to stretch out to infinity. Endless, endless land filled with people who aren’t dead, under the light of the stars that shine too bright.
Sometimes Soleum gets paranoid that the people he buries are still alive.
Sometimes he digs them back up in the dead of the night, but only ever finds the rotted corpses.
The wish ticket is a strange, ugly thing.
You find the world you hope to live in but leave nothing but a dead body in the world you were born in.
So yes. Kim Soleum has seen the person in the photograph. But he can’t tell Agent Bronze where she’s gone, because even he doesn’t know it. He doesn’t know how the potion works, just that it does work.
He hesitates too long, which makes Bronze’s fingers tighten around the photograph.
“She was here,” he realizes. “What happened?”
Soleum doesn’t meet his eyes. “She left to another world.”
Bronze’s fingers tighten enough they turn white.
“She made a wish?”
“...yes.”
Agent Bronze is terribly silent.
There’s an emptiness in his eyes that Soleum doesn’t want to place.
“She’ll be happier,” Soleum says quietly, in an attempt to console him. “She made a good wish.”
Anger flashes in Bronze's eyes. He takes a furious step closer, hand reaching for his collar. Soleum flinches away quickly, and Bronze’s hand falters, fingers curling into a fist.
“I don’t know why I expected more from you,” he says.
The words cut deep, but Soleum doesn’t have a response for it. He did lie to Bronze after all. He left him thinking that he was an innocent citizen and duped him several times, only to end up selling wishes that the man hates to the agents that he loves in their moments of weakness.
“I have her things,” Soleum says quickly. “Her phone. Some items.”
Bronze nods, tense.
Soleum reaches for the box under the table, where he’d carefully packed everything that the woman had left behind. He hands the box to Bronze, who takes it just as carefully, as if the box holds what was left of his heart.
“I’m sorry,” Soleum says quietly. “Did you know her?”
“She was my senior.”
“I’m sorry.”
Bronze ignores the sympathy. “If you were sorry,” he says, “You wouldn’t have sold her the wish.”
Soleum doesn’t have a response to that.
Bronze looks through the items in the box with gentle hands. Then he tucks it under his arm, turning to leave.
“I’ll be back, Roe Deer-ssi,” he says, voice terrifyingly steady. “I won’t let this go.”
He leaves, slamming the door behind him.
Soleum takes a deep breath.
He’s worked here for six months now.
Another four and a half years, and maybe, maybe—he’ll finally be allowed to go home.
/
He expects Agent Bronze to be back like he promised.
Every day, after Soleum’s mad dash to the shop, he sits in endless anxiety, expecting a storm of agents from the bureau to barge in and knock the place to the ground.
In addition to the anguish of losing fellow agents to the wish—the bureau struggles with manpower to begin with. A shop like Ho’s, that tempts their agents in a moment of weakness and lets them leave forever—even the higher ups are bound to want to shut them down.
Director Ho’s shop is heavily protected, and the man is so powerful that he’s most likely not human—but even he wouldn’t be able to hold up against the complete fury of the bureau.
But Agent Bronze doesn’t appear again.
“Did you kill him?” Soleum asks Ho bluntly, when Ho appears for the first time that week.
Ho laughs. “Of course not.”
He settles in the arm chair in the library, legs crossed. Soleum is seated on the ground, a hefty book in his lap.
“Then why has no one attacked us?” Soleum asks cautiously.
Ho shrugs. “They surely have other matters to attend to.”
He doesn’t seem worried in the slightest. Soleum is struck again by just how much experience he’s had in this line of work. It’s not just the bureau that he has to worry about—any grieving family member, any friend that feels wronged to have been left so abruptly—they’re all enemies of the shop.
In a way, using the wish ticket is synonymous with death.
It gives the person using it what they want, while their loved ones are left to bang on the shop doors and demand to know why they had to leave.
“Any visitors this week?” Ho asks.
“One. There was a man who made a wish to stop hearing the voice of his dead father.”
“Oh? What did he pay?”
Soleum hesitates. “His name.”
Ho’s eyes soften. “You did well,” he says. “You’re getting better at this.”
Soleum doesn’t want to be better at this. He doesn’t want to work here at all.
The premise of Ho’s shop is simple. He’ll sell you a wish, for an equal exchange. The disappearance of voices in your head for the loss of your name. A loved one’s vision for the loss of yours. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, every reason you’ve ever had to keep yourself alive for the sake of saving your life.
It’s a cursed profession.
Only the truly desperate come here, the ones willing to do anything—in that way, it’s no different from Daydream.
Soleum doesn’t usually take care of the transactions. He never gets the exchanges right, always asks for too less, and if you ask for too less the universe makes you pay for it in other ways.
There are scars all over Soleum’s back to prove it.
Ho usually handles payment himself, but when he can’t, Soleum fills in. Sometimes it goes wrong. Sometimes, like today, it goes right.
“The agent who came over,” Ho says. “Bronze, was it?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a strong one.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can only see the shop if you have a wish that you’re desperate for. The fact that he found us means that he has one, and yet—he walked away with ease.”
“Is that so strange?”
Ho levels a look at him. He’s smiling, but there’s something ugly about it, and Soleum realizes that he’s staring at the scar over his eye.
“You tell me, Soleum-nim,” Ho says. “You know better than anyone how hard it is to step away from a wish.”
/
Going to the supermarket is even harder than it is to get to work.
Soleum no longer does it.
The supermarket is close by. It’s at the end of the street that he lives on. But the amount of time it takes him to actually buy the things that he needs is enough time for ghosts to catch up with him, which means every visit is just—pure hell.
Ho had offered once, in a suspicious show of kindness, to buy his groceries for him. Soleum had refused. He didn’t need his boss turning up at his door.
His boss is a strange man. He weaves Soleum protective bracelets, he offers him smiles and comfort as if it means nothing to him—and then he leaves Soleum with this cursed scar across his eye that doesn’t let him reach for a wish potion unless Ho hands it to him on his own.
Soleum doesn’t want to depend on him for everything, but he does need his groceries, so he gets away with it by paying a guy across the street to get them for him.
But sometimes the guy isn’t home, and that’s when Soleum has to risk the outside world again.
Honestly? It’s hell.
He checks all of the talismans that he keeps in his pockets. He pulls a hoodie over his clothes to obscure his identity—some of the ghosts only recognize him by sight and tend to leave him alone if they can’t see him. He pulls gloves over his hands. A mask over his face.
Overall he looks shady as hell.
He takes a deep breath and sprints down the street towards the supermarket.
Already he hears footsteps behind him.
Why do you run?
The people and the cars that he passes are a blur. He pushes the door to the store open, trying to control his breathing.
He knows the layout of the store perfectly because he always follows the exact same path through it—he stocks up on vegetables, rice, instant foods, a tube of toothpaste, moving so fast through the aisles that a young man curses at him and an old lady shouts after him asking who raised him.
“I’m sorry,” he calls out, but doesn’t slow down. “I’m sorry.”
He’s at the register in a second. The tired part timers who work here are used to him by now. For all they know he’s a criminal on the run, but none of them are paid enough to care.
They scan his items while the footsteps behind him step closer. Soleum can feel the chill on his neck. The hands creeping up his skin. He shuts his eyes tightly—the ghosts might be near, but they won’t hurt him. It’s the strangest part of the curse.
Come with us.
They won’t intend to hurt him—but what does a ghost know about what hurts a human?
On one occasion a ghost hugged him and it snapped three of his bones. The potion that Ho gave him to recover extended his work contract by three months.
Don't run.
Come with us.
You want home?
We can be home.
Come come come come.
Home home home.
He squeezes his eyes shut, ignoring the voices. The part timer finally scans his last item. Soleum already has his money out and he drops it on the counter, doesn’t wait for change, doesn’t wait for his bill.
He takes the bag and rushes back outside. Sprints back to his apartment. Gets the key stuck in the lock, panics.
Drops all his groceries.
Slams the door in a burst of desperation and makes it inside.
He bolts the door shut, hearing the whining and angry pounding of the ghosts outside, but his apartment is protected well enough. He lets himself slide down the door, into a heap, burying his head in his arms.
His groceries are still outside. It’s alright. He probably doesn’t deserve a meal. Or toothpaste. When does anything go right for him?
His phone pings. Once, twice. Soleum reaches for it absently—it’s probably his boss. No one else texts him.
But it isn’t Ho.
It’s an old contact, one that Soleum hasn’t thought of in ages.
Soleum’s blood runs cold.
/
After the Tamra Express disaster, Kim Soleum had, pretty much, been kidnapped.
It was mostly his own fault.
He’d spent one month happy and out of his mind on Braun’s show, until Lee Jaheon had found him and explained to him that he was, indeed, out of his mind, and had then blown the place into smithereens and helped Soleum escape.
Braun… hadn’t taken it well.
Soleum hasn’t seen him since. The host made no effort to contact him either.
It’s lonely without him, but Soleum knows he can’t give in. He’s reminded of the danger of giving in every day as he dashes through the streets.
Because Braun hadn’t parted with him well.
He’d left him with a curse.
As revenge for crushing their friendship under his shoe—a curse to be loved by all the darknesses that he dared to fear for no reason.
At first, Soleum hadn’t noticed anything wrong. But it caught up to him eventually. It was manageable for the short period of time that he was under Lee Jaheon’s care, as the man would punch the ghosts that followed him with ease—but after he realized that he couldn’t return to Daydream and had to find employment with Director Ho, this is where he is.
In an apartment that’s been protected with more barriers than he can count, with his phone screen taunting him.
Daydream can never know that he’s still alive.
Soleum doesn’t know what will happen to him if they find out. He’ll be trapped all over again, desperate for a wish that he has no chance to get, forced to pay off all those points to make up for his disappearance and start again from zero.
Forced into darknesses that could kill him.
The same nightmare, all over again.
How had this shady person known that he was alive?
Soleum ignores the message. He can’t reply to it. That would be falling right into his trap. He can’t even open it. He swipes the notification off the top of his screen, so that Lee Kangheon doesn’t know he’s ever seen it.
But another message pops up instantly.
Cold sweat runs down Soleum’s neck.
Lee Kangheon isn’t bullshitting him. He actually knows where Soleum is. But how? No one should be able to find him, let alone someone who hasn’t been in the city for years.
He swipes that message away as well.
It’s only replaced with a new one.
Soleum almost throws his phone across the room.
/
“No one at Daydream knows that you’re here, Soleum-nim,” Director Ho says patiently.
Soleum thrusts his phone in his face. It’s pointless, because he can’t open the messages to show him, which means all that he’s waving in his face is his home screen.
“Then explain this,” Soleum demands.
Ho looks at the screen with great focus. “Interesting choice of wallpaper,” he concludes. “Most people would choose more than just solid black.”
Soleum wants to tear his hair out. His own, or Ho’s, it doesn’t matter.
“He said he knew I was alive,” Soleum says, “and that I work at a Daydream knock off, and that he’ll wait outside.”
“Well that’s rude, isn’t it?” Ho says, looking actually offended. “I wouldn’t call us a knock off.”
“...you’re the director of Daydream. Why are you offended?”
“Our shop is far older than Daydream.”
Contrary to what Soleum had believed when he first started working here—this isn’t strictly speaking Ho Yuwon’s shop. He takes care of the place now, but it’s passed through so many hands before it came to him.
The concept of selling wishes in this tiny shop is older than time itself. It used to be supernatural, but now Ho sells potions.
It’s easier to sell Daydream potions than it is to say ‘I’m a strange man, but trust me, the power of this shop lets me grant any wish you have for a price.’
Ultimately, Ho is a good businessman. But the point is that as a terrible boss, he doesn’t seem to take K.LEE seriously.
“If Daydream knew that you were alive,” Ho says calmly, “there’s no way I wouldn’t have heard of it yet.”
“Then how did this guy know?”
Ho smiles. It’s the sort of smile that says that he knows something that he isn’t going to share because he likes fucking up Soleum’s life for absolutely no reason.
“Who knows?” he says. “I wonder too.”
/
Kim Soleum takes extra care to get home after work.
He pulls a hoodie over his work clothes. He puts on a face mask and keeps his shoulders hunched, checks all of his talismans and charms again.
He takes a deep breath and dashes out the door—
—and trips—
—falling.
The world tilts and he’s on the ground, vision spinning, head throbbing.
“I’m sorry,” a voice says, with feigned sincerity. “I didn’t see you.”
Soleum blinks, trying to restore his vision. Everything still spins a little, but he catches sight of a pair of shoes right in front of him. Black, polished, with shoelaces tied together so symmetrically that it’s frightening to see.
Did… did this man trip him?
“Need help?”
A hand reaches out to him. Soleum stares at it, confused. He lifts himself up on his elbows instead, ignoring the offered help.
The man clicks his tongue, tucking his hands back into his pockets.
Soleum dusts himself off. His knee is scraped, he thinks. His palms as well. But this is no time to check.
“You’re in a rush,” the man continues. “Eager to get home? Haha.”
Soleum chances a look at his face.
The man is smiling brightly, but his eyes are cold. He’s in a neatly ironed shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his black tie somehow as perfect as his shoelaces.
There are bandages wrapped around his neck, disappearing into his shirt collar.
“You never checked my messages,” the man continues. “But it’s lucky I ran into you!”
He reaches out once more for a handshake.
“I’m Lee Kangheon,” he says. “And you’re Kim Soleum-ssi, yes?” His smile never falters, but his cheer is almost frightening. “The man we’d all thought was dead.”
…Lee Kangheon.
Soleum shakes his hand politely. The cuts on his hands sting.
There’s no way he can pretend that he isn’t Kim Soleum. He has to pull something else in this situation. Erase his memories somehow? Could he do that?
If he asked Ho for a potion to erase Lee Kangheon’s memory…
It might extend his contract a few years, but it would be worth it to stay out of Daydream’s grasp, right?
What other options does he have... should he call Lee Jaheon? Could his squad leader do something? Should he… should he risk summoning Braun?
His mind reels with possibilities, but more than all of that, more than the smile on Lee Kangheon’s face that looks cheerful and charming and scares the wits out of him—
There’s something even more pressing.
More shocking.
Because Kim Soleum is standing outside the influence of the protective barrier of the shop.
In a place where the ghosts should have eaten him alive by now.
And yet, there isn’t a single ghost in sight.
/