PRE-ABSOLUTION

[1nfernoh]

OH KIYONG.

ABOUT. / PROFILE. / INTRO. / PLOTS. / PINTEREST. / WIKI.

[1nfernoh]

@hymnosis — DRAW THE LINE

“just… imagine fucking it up so bad for everyone because of a skill issue.” this time he barks out a laugh, ugly, loud and obnoxious. unsure which he’s more frustrated at: the situation, himself or heeseung—how fucked up would it be if it was the last one?

kiyong doesn’t like being inside the hotel. but he’s in it often enough that he starts feeling like one of those working dogs ill-fitted for the city, but still crammed up inside some shoebox apartment and expected to behave. he’s sort of been behaving. to the point where it makes everything worse, and he’s all snappish and angry when anyone looks at him for too long. he needs to get out. needs to find air, and then he needs to make it smoke. the air, not him. or maybe both. that’s the reason he’s walking through the corridors on the way out through the hotel lobby. that’s why sees jihoo. or he hears him before he sees him. if he hadn’t heard him, he probably would’ve walked right by. he doesn’t know him that well, and he hadn’t been making a plan on how to change that, either. so he hears him, because he’s talking to the cops and that’s enough to make anyone pause. or at least make kiyong pause. they’re familiar questions to everyone in the room. rote and worn through at the throat. by now and those cops just sound bored with the lack of answers to pin to their missing person's case. and then he hears him in the after, with the phone. because kiyong has to spend an extra five minutes shuffling awkwardly out of the way of those cops, and that gives jihoo enough time to dial his call out. he would’ve kept going, pushed right outside those doors and forgotten about jihoo, but he can’t keep his ears from listening. now, if he hadn’t just been witness to the police circling around heesung’s memory, all vulture-ready to pick the scraps out from jihoo’s mouth, then he might’ve attributed whatever he was saying on the phone to a private conversation. but he had. so it just sounds cruel. like picking up this dead thing called grief and laughing at it. kiyong's fingers clench too tight, the type of tight where nails start peeling away at skin in onion-thin layers, and then that sting of it encourages his anger. he’s got too much anger lately, and nowhere to burn it up. he wants to confront him, tell him to stop being a fucking dick right here in the middle of the hotel. but he feels the camera. no, that’s not right. it’s not supposed to be right. he sees the camera. so he walks up alongside jihoo to sling an arm around his shoulders like a meat hook, and he drags him along outside with it. to a place where he knows there aren’t any cameras or mics, a small square of a space out back behind the hotel. “it’s stuffy in here, isn’t it? let’s talk a walk. talk to your friend later.” he smiles, and it’s for the camera. for all the eyes watching them behind a shiny cellphone screen. it’s caught crooked on his face, and in the low quality catch of the far-off lens probably looks friendly. that’s because you can’t make kiyong’s eyes out from that far away. because those don’t look friendly. they just look mean.

[1nfernoh]

@abberatiohn — UNDERTOW

“we’ll find somewhere to sit and i’ll wrap it. i know enough from dance classes to know that. rest and compress and… i forgot the others.” she takes a step forward towards the maw, and it seems as if the action wakes an unstoppable momentum that carries her to the cavern’s edge before she’s had the chance to think better of it.

the thing about the water is that the deeper it gets, the less light it lets in. that’s a common denominator with all things considered evil, isn’t it? keeping the light out. the night swallows it up, save for that shotgun scatter of stars, and the light pollution has dulled them by now anyway. so it’s still too dark when the moon forgets to cut its way into the sky. and that cave over there, that’s so deep it looks black. it’s like standing in front of a void and waiting to fall in. again. waiting to fall in again. lijae’s hand gripping tight around his is more comfort than pain, even when he can feel the soft bones inside of his fingers grinding together. or maybe because of it. it keeps him in place despite the way he can feel his body shaking without his permission, even if he's so sopping wet he can blame it on the cold. but they both know that’s not it. lijae’s one of the only people who knows about it this far out from his home town, about the water. about how he’s scared of it still, even if he should’ve outgrown that fear along with his braces. he shouldn’t be carrying little-kid worries around with him on his back, letting them weigh him down rock-heavy. it’s with that thought in his head that he leans forward, closer to the cave. like forcing himself through the motions of it all will teach his body to behave. it doesn’t work that way. he has proof of that, documented in an entire movie shot on the ocean with praise so glowing about the naturalness of his fear. wondering at why he wasn’t a bigger name. wondering why he had a two-year gap after. kiyong wondering too, about why that didn’t just fix him. because he didn't die on that ship, shooting that movie. and he’s not dying here, standing on these rocks. he shouldn’t be scared, and he hates himself for it. he hates feeling this way most of all, but that’s harder to admit. “people keep saying that, but if he was just gone, they’d tell us. right? they wouldn’t just. have the police wandering around and ban us from talking about him. they’d be like ‘he fucked off, back to seoul, because this hotel is fucking awful’” he pitches his voice the wrong way out his throat, so he doesn’t sound like himself. “i feel like i can. the same way i can tell about the cameras, when they’re there. it feels like…like it’s empty. whatever space he was taking up.” kiyong knows this sounds jumbled and odd and he scrapes the thick of his palm into the socket of his eye, until black smears into something red-white from the pressure. he can see the indents of color left behind when he blinks his eyes back into focus. he squeezes her hand back, just as tight. “cops are cops.” because expecting them to do much of anything is the same as dreaming, as far as he’s concerned. especially here, when the boy gone missing was never a local. kiyong knows it because that’s how his town was too, where you didn’t matter there unless you were born in that nowhere. “well, it might go higher in the back. we can keep out from the water. and it’s fine, my knee i mean. i’ll be fine” when they finally find the mouth of it, he reaches out and holds tight to that rock, sharp enough to sink into skin if he put any more pressure down into it. he uses it like a crutch to drag himself inside. “you got your phone? i think we need a flashlight.” around him and his voice echoes. only it sounds a little wrong, like before, when he’d done it on purpose. just pretending at himself.

[1nfernoh]

@phantaisms — LIGHT THEM UP (IN FLAMES)

"so." she blinks and mirrors innocence, as though she is not complicit to the idea of playing with fire, "what's the plan? burn and say bye? or do we make a whole campfire experience out of it, because i have marshmallows in the trunk."

“it’s not, count me as your personal poison tester, because that was ass.” he heaves himself out from the car before she has any time to argue about that, the door cracking shut behind him loud despite all the nothing to swallow it up. he leans the weight of himself against the top of the car, arms folded up against the metal, hot and sun-baked from the drive. he wants to watch namra’s answer on her face, even if he can hear the words of it easy. she looks like she’s telling him the truth though, and he hums along with her in assent. “come on, driving isn’t that bad.” it feels like running away too fast from all his problems. he could’ve sat in that car for two hours longer without thinking of stopping if namra hadn’t started hinting at it. at least it means she’s happy to let him slide behind the wheel whenever they’re going off together somewhere. if he had his own car, he’d likely be spending a fortune on gas and for no reason besides avoiding the discomfort of sitting still in one place for too long. she’s moving before he is, so he waits there against the roof of the car. keeps himself still as she shoves a hand into his pocket, because jostling around won’t do anything more than get his shoulder slapped. he doesn’t mind it anyway, it’s not like he’s using it. “you know, i hardly ever go into things with a plan. it sort of just happens.” that’s the truth of it, everything to do with the fires. that compulsion setting like a flame in him, too-hot and growing hotter. it’s the kind of thing you can’t ignore, even if you want to. a hand to a lit stove, and you have to pull it back before it eats into you, give that heat its head just like a horse pulling at the bit. that’s how it happens, he gives in. only it’s not to pull back, it’s to pull closer. the smattering of burns stuck to his hands and fingers and arms like hot wax are evidence of that. “if you wanna roast marshmallows i won’t object, but we’ll probably need more kindling for that.” he laughs then, and it sounds loose in his chest. the expectation of what’s to come is relaxing him, soothing him in a way that it shouldn’t. it’s even better than running, burning up the past.

[1nfernoh]

@liveformebaby — RED LETTERS, BLACK SKY

"just... it's been a lot to handle." she leans towards the lighter still in his hand, two curved fingers around the stem of her unlit cigarette to prompt him. once it's lit, she takes a deep breath and turns her head to blow it away from him, leg bobbing. "i've barely had any cell service. i haven't been able to get in contact with my manager for days."

the gulls are cackling to themselves, just over kiyong’s shoulder. a constant outpouring from their throats, because they all cluster together in a group that mimics those schools of fish that they hunt. so when they laugh together, dancing on rust-coated handrails and waiting to see if food drops out from either of his or sera’s pockets, they sound bigger. an annoyance, that’s how he should think of them. but the gulls have always made kiyong’s skin crawl in the way that spiders and snakes and innate-generational fears never have. so he keeps his back to them and the ocean and he finds sera’s face instead. up this close and he’s probably making himself the target of at least three fanclubs, but he can’t bring himself to care when there’s no camera pinned to his body and tracking his micro-expressions. she takes that smoke and he hides the last of them in his pocket, like he’s worried the gulls might snatch the box off of him and take up with his bad habit. he’s not waiting for the thank you, once some people get to a certain point of famous the basics of humanity start leaving them, like geese from the winter. only they never come back again in spring. a mass extinction of empathy all inside of one person’s body. so he wouldn’t have been all that offended if she hadn’t, he’s been in the industry long enough to see all sorts of people who have forgotten that everyone else around them still matters, too. but he nods when she does, because it’s nice that she hasn’t yet let that part of herself go. kiyong’s not so sure where he lands on that matter, but he does know he’s not famous enough that anyone’s wondering about it. and that means it doesn’t matter. it’s an offering, that empty space she makes for him, and kiyong hesitates over it for a minute that feels too long before he turns and sits down next to her. it probably looks like he’s nervous over being filmed, or seen by someone with a grainy iphone camera and a desire to get pann-famous for posting it. but really it’s because he’s not in the mood to look at the ocean, to watch the skinny silhouettes of the gulls as they dive down and skim the surface of it like it’s easy. so when he sits he tips his eyes up toward the sky, that electric-slush blue of it, and lets the corners of the sun blind him. “yeah, i know. were you guys close?” he’d have guessed no, but then, despite figuring he was close to heesung himself, he’d never really bothered in finding out who else he hung around with. that wasn’t part of things, bleeding into each other’s friend groups. so now kiyong’s just left with the gore of the situation and nobody to point the finger at. he flicks his thumb against the sparkwheel until catches, one hand bracing it from that water-soaked wind, too humid for the fire to breathe properly. “can’t you talk with the, you know…” he waves a hand, like that might summon the right title into his mouth, “execs or whatever, have them call up your manager for you?” kiyong figured that some of the bigger-named celebrities on the show would’ve been allowed that, anyway. “if it makes you feel any better, i bet they’re on higher alert now than before.” kiyong’s not so sure he actually believes that himself, not with the amount he’s still been able to slip off without anyone noticing. but it’s the sort of thing you’re meant to say, and kiyong’s learned a lot about doing that over all the years he’s been living. lying in the right places that make people consider him in a better light than he deserves.

[1nfernoh]

@velveteenr4bbit —

"hey kiyong. it's totally not what it looks like, except it absolutely is." minji laughs under her breath, dragging a hand down her features. "what are you up to?"

he feels like something caged and in a zoo as he paces the outskirts of the hotel. an animal without enough space, with too many eyes, relentlessly pacing. a back and forth seesaw, as pointless as the real thing because he’s not actually going anywhere. not unless you count ‘not back to his room’ as a destination. maybe it looks like exercise, boring enough for everyone to leave him alone. around another corner, seven steps in and he pauses for the first time in, what? he hadn’t actually been keeping track of the time. but that doesn’t matter anyway, because minji’s in font of him and apparently fighting the camera. not that he blames her. he’s been thinking about it lately, too. “me? just walking.” he eases in a little closer, behind the camera from it’s hidden position and he’s not too worried about being filmed, but he does want minji to see him when he mouths 'are there any mics around?' because he really would like to help her in the desecration process of the camera, but they could probably desecrate a whole lot more of them if they didn’t know who was doing it. kiyong wants to desecrate a whole lot more of them very, very badly. he tips his head to the side, glances up toward the edges of the building where they might’ve tucked a stray mic or two, but he can’t spot anything obvious. but then, the mics have been harder for kiyong to figure out than the cameras have.

[1nfernoh]

@abberatiohn — UNDERTOW

“do you really think he’s in there?”she murmurs, squeezes his hand lightly before she glances back over their shoulders at the lapping waves. “won’t it be -” she trails off, nodding towards the obvious elephant in the room. “dangerous?”

“i was being careful, until you came along and un-carefulled me.” he sounds the same as before, a distinct lack of anger where it should’ve been. it takes him a minute to reorient himself, to track down all the parts of his body and how they’re turned the wrong way. getting up is easier after that, except for the way his leg aches when he leans his weight down against it. tenderized meat under the bone of his kneecap, beat-swollen. he’s not looking forward to the walk back up the cliff. and he’s not looking out toward the water, at the way it creeps toward them with the kind of measured slowness you’d expect out of a predator, hungry and hunting. he tries to brush some of the salt-stuck water off of him, but it's soaked into his clothes. “i’ll bet you a hundred-thousand won you fucking don’t.” he knows for a fact that lijae’s been shoved into all sorts of nonsense classes, but wilderness survival would’ve been low on the list. he remembers the inside of her family’s place, a bunch of art kept tidy in ornate frames and a piano that he always thought looked too expensive to touch. knowing what kiyong’s house had looked like though, well, you’d realize he thought a lot of things looked too expensive to touch back then. he hides his wince when he starts walking by turning his face away from her and back toward that cave. there’s a couple of emotions that, when people have them, you can sort of feel them in the air. they’re heavy, the kind of primal feelings that animals keep. unease, that’s one of them, and he feels it behind him, because that feeling is climbing out from lijae and taking up too much space. it almost turns kiyong guilty, because he’s not feeling it in the same way. not when it’s bracketed between two things that are so much more enormous to him in their terror. the ocean on one side and the cameras that are perched up on top of that cliff on the other, waiting to zoom in and watch and stick to his skin. he knows, logically, that the cave is a bad choice. that’s because the rocks he’s standing on are greased with brine and they belong to the ocean when it remembers how to swallow up the land again. then that cave will close itself with with a water-tight door and they both don’t know what’s inside, except for all that dark. “pretty sure the cops here want us dead, too.” he’s only exaggerating a little, they all look around at the crew like they’re angry everyone got the bright idea to start existing. that’s how kiyong thinks of it, anyway. “i mean, maybe? he could’ve got washed inside of it or something, and that’s why they didn’t find him out on the beach.” water stops scent hounds from sniffing people out, doesn’t it? swells up around the leftover sweat and life and blood and swallows them. it’s like the ocean keeps discovering new ways to be worse. “i mean. it’s just rocks, isn’t it?” he squints, takes a step, and hisses at the way pain gnaws at his joint. it’s an overeager dog of a thing, the way it nearly feels like teeth under the chip of bone. “and anyway, not so sure we can make it up the cliff in time before the tide comes in, on account of you maiming me.” he says that after he slides his eyes away from the cave and re-finds all that water. in the gathering dark and it starts looking deeper, the waves sloshing up brutal and heavy. kiyong’s hands are shaking, and so are his elbows. they’re knocking into both their sides, because kiyong’s moved closer and closer to her without realizing it. like the size of her might protect him from the swells.

[1nfernoh]

@8ractured —

"like someone trying to talk. but—" he stops himself. but what? but it sounded like it came from the walls? but it said something it shouldn’t have known? the thought rots in his mouth. he looks away, fingers curling into the cuff of his sleeve. he shifts his weight and exhales like it might loosen the grip the place has on him, but it doesn’t. the hedges still feel too close. the air still feels too aware. and somewhere, distant but insistent, he swears he still hears static folding under itself. “never mind.”

he’s stuck in here, technically. the too-tall walls of shrubs are boxing him in tighter and tighter with each right turn that he takes. kiyong keeps looking up though, toward where the birds should be flying, his shoulders left loose and without that curl of something wrong bunched up in his expression. he’s trapped, technically, but it doesn’t feel like it. a hunted animal that’s gone and run itself into a cage for protection against creatures with bigger teeth than the trapper's. kiyong’s not even really thinking through things that hard, he just lets himself settle in the relief of it for this brief moment. a space without cameras. and anyway, it’s just a bunch of bushes. in his ranking from most to least disconcerting things around the hotel, this is slotting itself pretty low. for a minute and he’s willing to reorient that ranking, and it's for no real reason, because footsteps have never come packaged with anything that or wrong or terrible in all his time here so far. but it does anyway, his pulse pounding against his wrist like a headache that's found the wrong spot. and then he feels stupid all over again, because it’s just yeqing there, even if he does have a weird look in his eyes. glassy, maybe. or vacant. “heard something like what?” kiyong asks him outright, thumb tracing over the engraved divots of his lighter still hidden in his pocket like a ritual. some kind of talisman, though it’d be a misnomer to say it’s for protection when so often kiyong’s going around and destroying with it. “well if you heard just someone, then how d’you know it wasn’t me?” kiyong’s not so sure he’s in the mood for cryptic, the last few days have left him sleep deprived, the kind of sleep deprived that makes him go all angry or panicked and wanting to set a flame to something that’ll make it grow brighter. a personification of those feelings leaping up and consuming everything he sets it too. but he can’t here, really. or it’s hard. so he just has all that anxiety boxed up in his chest, and it’s proving to be corrosive with the way it leaks out and into the rest of him. “trying to talk from where?” kiyong tips his head back again, like this time he might find a parrot displaced and circling above them, cackling like a ghost. it’s still empty though, just clouds colored so neutral a gray they look devoid of color. “from the hedges you mean?” kiyong looks back toward them again, and he reaches his arm in to see just how deep they go. up to the shoulder and he’s still feeling the sharp bite of twigs and ridge-edged leaves. he’s not so sure anyone could force their body through it all that easy. “we could burn it, you know. the maze. nobody would have to know, really. there are no cameras here.” this is the kind of talk that comes from too long without setting a fire, pitched hypothetical but not. pitched like yeqing might be losing it at the same velocity kiyong is. that he might think it’s a great idea too. kiyong smiles just in case, laughs like it’s a joke even though it doesn’t sound anything like levity. it doesn’t even sound like a laugh.

[1nfernoh]

@abberatiohn — UNDERTOW, H4

"“you can’t be serious,” she points out, gaze cutting meaningfully towards the waves crashing against the shore. her brows lift skeptically, thumb drawing an arc against the stark line of his collarbone beneath thin cotton. “you gonna go in there for real?"

for a boy who hates the water, he hasn’t been shy around it. not lately. that doesn’t make him any less scared though, it just makes him stupid. he’s been on edge and being down here by the ocean just makes it worse, but he’d already started his heart up fast like one of those rev-up lawn mower engines earlier. had the foresight to knock back a couple of energy drinks. now and he can’t tell the difference between fear and the chemicals in his gut playing at adrenaline. that’s what he tells himself anyway as he walks across the rocks. they’re slick with sea-grime and he almost loses his balance on the incline down. it’s like nature’s version of those no trespassing signs, or the kind of dogs people buy who bark deep and snarl with all their teeth. he gets the warning, the ocean saying: this is mine, every water-stained rock stacked up in their tombstone rows. maybe heesung’s sitting underneath one. kiyong shudders and he pretends it’s because of the wind. the waves are louder down here, their roaring runs angry across the lengths of cliff wall and that just echoes back down on him. it feels like jeering. kiyong’s walking slower, that careful way that people do when they get too close to the edge of someplace high, wobbly-kneed and acting like something small and new to the world. he doesn’t have an an excuse though, because the high is up above him, and all he’s doing is walking across wet rocks while the tide’s gone out. it’s because of all the ocean’s screaming that he doesn’t actually hear lijae coming up behind him. his eyes are roaming up ahead, like he’s expecting to find a body tangled in seaweed, or in some darkened gap of a cave, and then there’s a hand jamming down on his shoulder and he jumps. jumps is a kind way of putting it though, because he’s already on that edge and the rocks are still slick so it’s more of an uncontrolled startle, an unbroken horse out from a starting gate, scared and tripping all over itself. he jerks himself back so quick his neck snaps like whiplash, but he can’t focus on the hurt of that because his hand is caught like a vise in her hoodie, and the rock’s still slick, so he’s going down and he’s pulling her down with him. there’s too many words that all sound like something bad coming out of his mouth, so it all just ends up intelligible. his elbow’s throbbing, but so is his knee and they somehow cancel each other out. “what the fuck, lijae?” he’d like to imagine he sounds angry, but he mostly just sounds scared and that makes him snap his jaw shut. “well, i was thinking about it. but maybe now i have to learn how to fashion a splint out of driftwood.” he’s being dramatic about it, probably. he can still stretch his legs out once lijae takes her weight off them. “and anyway, nobody else is down here looking for him.” he wipes the residue of what must be algae off his palms and onto the heavy damp of his jeans. “wouldn’t you come down here for me?” he says it in that unfair way, where there’s really only one option you’re allowed to answer back.

[1nfernoh]

@liveformebaby — RED LETTERS, BLACK SKY

"fuck," sera curses under her breath; kwon sera, smoking and cursing — a career-ending combination. in a mild fit of frustration and amplifying anxiety, she throws the empty box to the ground before the wind quickly picks it up and blows it down into the tracks. she feels her heart start drumming through her chest as reality settles itself miserably into her already lacking headspace. "fuck. fuck. fuck."

Kiyong’s walking, ask him why and he’ll say he’s out of cigarettes. He wouldn’t even be lying, he nearly is on account of all that chain smoking he’s been doing recently, like it’s possible a seance in his lungs could invite Heesung back to life. He thinks of Heesung like that, in the past tense. It doesn’t matter how many dispassionate cops leading around dogs with their noses stuck in the dirt he sees. It doesn’t change his mind. He’s pretty sure he’s not the only one thinking it, either. Kiyong’s walking, but the cigarettes are only a part of it. It lets him go deep into town, where the people who stick to the land barnacle-stubborn live. The kind of places that Kiyong assumes wouldn’t ever let in a camera for some convoluted reality show. He doesn’t like it in town, but he does like being off camera. So he’s walking. It’s a chance that he notices her. Maybe it’s the jacket, something bright against the sky. He usually wouldn’t, because she’s up near the ferry and ferries float. Kiyong’s not too keen on floating off to anywhere at the moment, so he’s been sticking his eyes to the asphalt and ignoring the sting of salt and brine on his way to the mart. But it’s the jacket. That’s what makes him look up when he gets close enough pass her by, and by then he’s recognizing the face on the inside of that jacket. He pauses, his back to the water, and makes a slow loop with his eyes from Sera to her suitcase to the the out of service sign. He almost laughs. “I’m gonna go off on a limb and say you didn’t float this one past your manager.” He tips his head toward the sign as he talks, like he even needs to make that point. “Either that or you have a real terrible manager.” Could be either, Kiyong’s never had one to give a personal anecdote about the level of competence one could expect. It's not like Kiyong can really blame her, he’d like to leave too. The unfortunate part of it is that Kiyong’s too broke to even consider it. He’d blocked off such a large chunk of time, and whatever fees they would make him pay back would likely bankrupt him for years. So he’s stuck like a fly to a glue trap. All he'll get for his struggling is even more stuck. “You want a smoke?” He asks mid-nod down to her empty pack. It feels like deja-vu, but it isn’t, because he’s pretty sure this actually happened. Back on set, during the movie's filming, the air a little too humid with a palm that stung like a hornet had made a good time of it. He’d lent her a cigarette then, and they’d smoked them half-hidden out back, behind some set piece, maybe. It’s when Kiyong tries to picture things properly that they become blurry and stretched and wrong. It makes it hard to come up with the details of the moment, all that he knows for sure is that it happened. That she was frowning at him then like she is now. He shakes out a couple, only one left tucked in the half-crushed box of it. They get jammed back down into the pocket of his jeans after Sera takes one. Kiyong eyes the bench as he lights up, but he doesn’t sit, just rocks back on his heels and exhales out toward the sky. Against that thick gray and nobody can tell Kiyong’s polluting it. “So, is there a reason for the world’s worst escape plan?”

[1nfernoh]

@8ractured —

one moment, there's nothing there, and then the next, there's a figure standing just beyond the next bend — partway obscured by the hedges, somehow seeming too still. yeqing blinks once, twice, pulse stuttering, convincing himself that whoever is standing before him must be real. " . . . did you hear that?"

There’s a difference between a labyrinth and a maze. A labyrinth has exactly one path that snakes through the foliage nice and easy until someone can find their way out the other end. A maze is all jumbled up on purpose with dead ends. This should be a labyrinth. An extension of the garden, something peaceful for tourists. The more Kiyong walks, the more he’s sure it isn’t. There’s not even a real reason for him to be here, which makes it even more annoying, the way he’s starting to feel all turned around. The way the path in front of him sometimes seems like it’s opening itself up into two even thought that’s impossible. And anyway, when he blinks a few times it’s all the right way round again. It’s probably the lack sleep. Or the over-consumption of caffeine. Or Heesung being missing and presumed dead. It keeps distracting him from the point of this though, which was to see if, somewhere along the way, the crew got tired of planting cameras in the middle of shrubs. He can feel them when he walks into their line of the sight, the cameras. Lately anyway. Not like before, like shooting a movie and knowing that his face would eventually be transported behind a screen. It’s different, and it’s like they’re getting better at it. The cameras. At touching him. Or not touching exactly, but something like it, something he swears he can feel. Insistent and skittering and wrong, like so many spiders all bunched up and tightrope walking across his shoulders. Around the next corner and the feeling vanishes. Alone again and, Kiyong assumes, not being filmed. So there are probably blind spots out in the labyrinth-maze hybrid but he’s not so sure it’s worth the long walk into it to find them. Especially when there’s no clear land marker to where those blind spots are. Just long stretches of green. The sort of green you’d find printed on a poster for children learning their colors. Maybe it’s manufactured, this whole thing, picture perfect and without the need for upkeep. Kiyong turns, moves in closer. Close enough to trap a leaf between two fingers and pull until it snaps off at the joint of the twig. It looks real, and he almost goes to pull off a bigger piece of it when he hears something crunching. Gravel bunched up tight underneath the feet of something bigger than a rabbit. For a minute, his heart picks itself up and starts running off ahead of him. It doesn’t have any reason to, it’s in the middle of the day and he’s on site filming something. It’s a distinct and obvious possibility that someone else is out walking. That they sent someone else in after him on a suggestion, looking for sound clips. That doesn’t stop the uncomfortable thrum of it that he can fear beating away in his ears. But then, a body eventually follows the sound and there’s Yeqing talking nonsense out at him. It’s still a relief. Yeqing’s alright. He’d rather be in the middle of a labyrinth-maze with him than a lot of other people. “Hear what, you? Yes.” Kiyong scuffs a clump of gravel up, an imitation of the noise Yeqing made on the way over. “What’re you doing out here anyway?” Kiyong asks him, one hand shoved deep into his pocket to toy with his lighter. Usually it helps him re-find the doctor recommended beats per minute of his pulse.

[1nfernoh]

@cr4shc0urse & @draed — LOST AND

"or another room, at least? that's got to be fucked up, if they're making you stay in yours." she wonders if police have confiscated anything. does kiyong have a bunch of yellow tape around his bathroom now? she's surprised it took him this long to come over if they just left all of heesung's stuff in place.

It could be that part of the problem with relaxing is that everything looks identical. Wonshik’s room, mapped out like Kiyong’s own, and the bathroom with the same pale tiling that hints at a pattern without committing, like whatever nondescript hotel designer they hired to construct the place was concerned about pleasing everyone, and by the end of it pleased no one. That’s how it works, people pleasing, and even knowing this Kiyong can’t say anything about it because that about sums up his entire personality on this show. Placidly neutral and smiling when he feels the camera lens zoom in on him, nothing going on behind his eyes. And lately Kiyong’s been feeling the camera looking him, a near-physical thing. But he doesn’t talk about that right now, because it sounds insane, and then they’ll think he’s having a mental break because of Heesung and he’s not. He kicks the counter harder, “Look, I’ll kiss you but I’m not shoving your toothbrush in my mouth, if we’re sharing bacteria it at least has to be fun.” Does Kiyong actually care? Maybe to probably not, but Sunhee opening up her door helps him dodge at suspicion, so he turns and grins her way instead. That’s how you make it look like you’re not in mourning, Kiyong’s pretty sure. Smile a whole lot. Even though it stops feeling like a smile and more like a mask that takes too much effort to keep in place. Like the one he wore on set, only worse, because this one’s made out of his own skin. “What am I, a raccoon?” he uncaps Wonshik’s cologne left out on the counter and smells it anyway, not because he actually cares, but because he’s still got that jump of static in his limbs, like he needs to keep jerking himself into motion or else he’ll collapse. Some awkwardly put together marionette doll. "Are they letting you stay with wonshik now?" She says it so easy it’s a little unfair. “Nope.” Kiyong sprays some of the cologne on his wrist instead of meeting the look Sunhee’s pointing at him. “I think I heard some people, production crew? Talking about cleaning it out in case, like, someone needs a spare, so. I think where I’m sleeping is low on the priority list.” He recaps the bottle and slides it back into place. “And it’s whatever. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a room. A room that has my toothbrush. And so much soju.” Off the counter again, and he’s moving. Not out the door, not yet, Wonshik’s blocking one end and Sunhee the other. He settles on moving his hands instead, fingers tapping in something that looks almost agitated. “Let’s just…go get wasted, yeah? Unless we’re thinking trapping me in the bathroom to talk through my feelings is gonna help with much of anything.” It won’t, by virtue of Kiyong believing most of the feelings that crawl through his body are the kind of things that people would prefer to look away from. Like a monster under the bed, or roadkill. Kiyong does want to get wasted, but he also wants to go back upstairs without being alone. Because he’s not so sure what’s behind that door, but he really wants to know, in the same way someone really wants to know whether there’s someone breaking in through the window. That is to say, not at all, but in a way where you’re propelled forward and into it. An inevitable dread.

[1nfernoh]

@velveteenr4bbit — SMOKESCREEN

a beat, stretching long. figures fuck it and asks anyways. "have you.. seen or felt anything? weird, i mean?"

Kiyong laughs as she falls, it’s choppy behind his teeth. He hears her join him when she rises back up from that fake-death like a miracle worker. Right now and death doesn’t feel like a real threat, call it foreshadowing. “Yeah well, who do you think is liable to talk?” Kiyong’s not actually sure he could figure out if anyone would be willing. Sure there’s a whole lot of nobodies, himself included, but who wants to get famous off of people calling you insane? Probably not many. “Maybe we should plan out a story, start feeding it to ‘em in bits and pieces. More and more stupid until they realize they’ve wasted a bunch of time on us.” In reality and Kiyong’s not sure he could sit still and earnest enough in front of the film crew to pull it off. He likes the idea of wasting someone’s time though, in theory. She keeps talking, and everything starts snowballing up and into something serious. Unavoidable. And that’s all Kiyong ever wants to do, avoid. “Yeah.” he agrees, only it doesn’t sound he’s agreeing. He lays himself back onto his own rock and ignores the way a jut of it digs into his spine, bending it the wrong way up. “Do you really wanna know though? Like, actually?” Because Kiyong’s not so sure he does. Had been pointedly doing his best to sidestep something he couldn’t even put a name too after the movie had stopped filming. Not that it did him any good. “I feel like I’m not all that exciting to be hanging around.” He keeps smoking down his cigarette, and it’s mostly gone by now. He wants another, but they’ll probably start wondering where they’d gone off to soon. Kiyong had technically promised an interaction, someone looking for her. Maybe there's an intern cycling through camera streams trying to pin down where they’d gone off too. Or maybe not. Maybe they were still getting lucky, everyone busy with the top-billed names of the cast while everyone's still new. “How many spare cameras you think they got?” The way Kiyong says it makes it seem like he might do more than blacking them out. He won’t, though. He won’t. “Yeah, we’d be shark bait.” Kiyong agrees with a stretch that does nothing but dig the rock harder into his spine. He almost wants to wait, see how long he could take it before the pain propels him up. But that’s the kind of thinking that’ll lead him toward more bad decisions. So he’s up, elbow skinned on the way. “Probably it’s going to be fucking weird. But I only brought so many cigarettes, so.” It’s not too long after he says it that he’s finishing up his own. He drags it across the rock next to his thigh to put it out. Traces out his initials in an ashy mess. “I…” he starts and that’s it. It takes him a while to find more thoughts to add on after. “Not, like, technically I mean. Just. I feel like there’s eyes. Everywhere. Especially behind the cameras. They won’t stop looking. Not even when I sleep. I think they watch harder when I sleep.” It sounds stupid, little kid kid stupid. He mangles the filter of his used up cigarette between his fingers instead of looking at her. “You?” There’s a stretch of time, enough to fill an answer with before the sky starts crawling towards night. That’s when he gets up, offers Minji a hand with a nod back toward the hotel. It feels harder walking back toward it than it had leaving.

[1nfernoh]

LOST AND — @cr4shc0urse & @draed ROOM 316 (NOT FOR LONG) - BORDERING ON NIGHT WONSHIK'S BED LOOKS LIKE A BURIAL MOUND AND SUNHEE'S ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THAT DOOR, (JUST LIKE HEESUNG WAS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF HIS DOOR)

He’d come here to run away. Kiyong’s always been good a that. It just turns out that Heesung is hard to run away from, even if he doesn’t even have any legs left to chase him with. Not working ones, at least. That’s what everyone thinks. That he must be somewhere gone and dead, littered on the ocean floor with all those old soda bottles and chipped seashell. Kiyong can’t imagine a worse grave. He’d thought a floor down and maybe Heesung’s memory would’ve gotten all turned around and left him alone. But it didn’t. He just keeps thinking about him. It. The situation. That’s what someone had called it, one of the PD’s, maybe. It all came down too fast and too hard, like a concussion. It left him just as disoriented. The situation. Which really just means ‘shut up about it, because this is a real horror and not the kind of make believe noise marketing we actually wanted to film.’ This is worse than letting them mop up his grief with a camera lens, the being forced to pretend that Heesung’s either fine or that he never existed in the first place, when he very much did. Right on the other side of Kiyong's bathroom door, actually. He’s taken over Wonshik’s bed for the past, well. Hours. Some amount of them. But he can’t bring himself to actually care, because of the situation. Was it just the PD, or had the cop told him that too, when they were interviewing him? Kiyong can’t even remember how he’d answered them. If he did. Part of the problem could be that Kiyong’s never actually experienced a death like this. Sure, older relatives have gone, but those are expected deaths. Life worn out from the spine until they're stooped down and reaching toward that grave, calling it a comfort. There were a couple of younger ones, two maybe, people he sort of knew from back home. But that was said to him second hand and after the fact, so it felt like an echo. Heesung’s was a scream. Not a Wilhelm scream, from all those horror movies. The kind of scream that forces it’s way up and out of you, choking and guttural. An animal scream, where it sounds all wrong and unnatural. Because that’s what this is, wrong and unnatural. Heesung shouldn’t be dead. Kiyong knows this like he knows his bones. An innate understanding that he doesn’t have to see to know is real. “I give up on sleeping.” Kiyong pulls himself up from the wadded mess he’s made of Wonshik’s sheets. He’s close enough that Kiyong can throw an arm around his shoulder. He tucks his chin in against the other side of his neck, can feel the sharp angle of his collarbone against his jaw and ignores it. Ignores that he hasn’t actually made an effort to sleep in the first place, he’s still got his jeans on and the grime of an energy drink sits stale on his tongue. Maybe the caffeine is still sitting inside of him too, because he’s up, climbing over the heap of Wonshik and bypassing him into the bathroom. He leaves the door open and clatters around inside, one foot kicking at the other door of that bathroom as he sits up against the counter. Was it premeditated and louder than it needed to be? Maybe. “You don’t have an extra toothbrush?” He calls that out too loud, too, even if he’s pretty sure he can hear Wonshik following in after him. It's for more than just Wonshik's ears. From his experience, Sunhee's easier to talk into things than Wonshik is.

[1nfernoh]

@draed — UNDERCURRENT

"it's gonna be easy work. no lines to learn, go home with a decent paycheck. and you know what, i'm happy you showed. i'm sharing with sunhee, y'know?" he's talking about the bathroom between their bedrooms, connecting them and, hopefully, the booze they're going to carry up. "we'll have some fun, even if this place is fucking bleak."

They weave across the sand, but not the uniformed weave of knitting needles against yarn, its like the weaving of an injured animal, an ungainly gait half a step out of sync. A rock back and forth that follows the pull of waves, retreating from damp sand until the unleveled shifting of it leads them right back down again. Kiyong tries forcing himself to relax as Wonshik walks them farther away from the ocean, and he should relax. He should find this calming. Most people find this calming. He’s not even in the water. He’s been around the ocean before. He’s filmed in the ocean before. It feels worse here, somehow. On this island. Like he’s trapped by it. Like it won’t let him out again. “Lots of people talk about things that don’t need to be talked about.” But he only says this because he’s frustrated, and he can’t actually pinpoint the exact reason for his frustration. It’s easy to just say this reality show, that he hadn’t expected how much he would hate play-acting as himself, but he’s not even sure if that’s really it. Because he was frustrated before this, had felt like some aspect of himself had been unspooling for a while, until he was nearly threadbare. There was even this dumb idea in his head that coming back to the cast, the memory of the movie, this fucking island would help him…what? Collect himself like so much string left loosened and figure out how stitch everything back into place? Standing here now, on the beach, on this island, makes it seem ridiculous. He almost laughs. “Maybe you should start pretending you had a girlfriend lost at sea, really get that sympathy footage going.” It’s another joke, because Kiyong doesn’t want to keep himself stuck down in this unsettling rut where it just feels like he’s shoved deep in a giant hole carved out from wet sand and threatening to collapse on him. “Well, I guess you’ll have to move to lunch and get them real wound up.” Kiyong wears a smile that only fits on half his mouth, the other half could even be called a frown if anyone wanted to get technical about it. It looks odd, wobbling, and only sits in place for a brief moment before his face auto-corrects itself and he’s smiling like he would for a camera, script reading: SMILES NATURALLY, a flash of teeth straightened by too many years wearing braces. “Is yours still on your ass? You seem to be doing pretty good. Like, genuinely, I mean.” He tacks on that bit at the end, because he feels like he’s repeating himself. But he means it, Wonshik’s career does seem to be climbing that upward trajectory so many hopefuls dream of. “Easy for you. Pretending to be someone else has always been easier for me. But yeah, the paycheck’s nice.” Kiyong kicks at more sand, he’ll have to upend his sneakers and pour out all the grit from them by the time they finish their walk, but he still doesn’t stop doing it. “Yeah? We should hang, like old times. Get just a little trashed, you know?” Not drugs, that’s not what he means. But too much soju or vodka or whatever they could find that Kiyong likes to mix up with an energy drinks until he’s awake. Buzzing veins and jittery hands sort of awake. He could use a bit of that now, he thinks.

[1nfernoh]

@phantaisms — LIGHT THEM UP (IN FLAMES)

"anywhere's fine as long as there aren't any eyes around, kiyong."

He likes the wind when it howls like this, guttered in through the car windows that help it find a mouth. It makes it easier to drown out his thoughts, the white noise. Lately all Kiyong’s been wanting to do is drown in white noise; funny, because Kiyong’s not usually one for drowning. But ever since that movie finished, stopped filming, whatever, all he’s been wanting to do is clutter up his mind with a frenzy of nothing, if he could’ve shaken up his skull like a snowglobe and left those gritty pieces of plastic pretending at a blizzard to take up all the room he would’ve. Covering up what is another question entirely, because he can’t actually remember what it is he’s trying so hard to avoid. Just that he should. Like taking an out of the way and hardly used side road because the radio informed of a three car pile up down the main avenue that promises the trouble of gore and police sirens. Kiyong blinks and refocuses on the road in front of him, a disorienting moment of autopilot where everything slots back into place and he recognizes he’s been driving too long without realizing he’s doing it. He flexes his fingers tighter against the steering wheel of Namra’s car until he feels like he’s in control again. The music’s constant, familiar, and he uses that like an hook to latch him to reality. He’s been doing that a lot lately. A grounding method, that’s what the article he’d read online had called it. He doesn’t actually have enough money for a real therapist. He doesn’t actually want to see a real therapist. Sometimes talking feels dangerous. More dangerous than a fight or a fire. He doesn’t jump when Namra talks, he almost doesn’t hear her at first, over the music. It can be hard to distinguish the start of a conversation when she plays her own albums, like the track might be looping back on itself. He figures it out toward the end of the sentence, that she’s talking. His eyes move fast from the road to the dash clock and back again. “There could be eyes around.” It seems like a joke, because a whole lot of nothing is sprawled out around them. Dried out fields and forgotten farmlands. That and he’s not sure he can remember the last time a car passed them in the opposite direction, but then, he’d been zoning out. It’s not a joke though, even if it sounds like one, because lately he keeps seeings eyes where there aren’t any. In windows and the backs of phones, where beady lenses sit accusatory in their beds of plastic, threatening to film. Kiyong shakes his head back and forth a few times, tries his best at being a snowglobe again. Still, the next by-road he sees, he turns onto. It’s more of nothing, but the grass starts growing taller and when he pulls the car into a clearing he can make out the idea of a forest up ahead. He turns off the car and steals a sip of Namra’s lukewarm coffee instead of climbing out. “How’s this, your highness?” He asks her before draining the rest of it, which is honestly more a favor than theft with how it tastes. It’s over-bitter and the residue of coffee grounds finds a home on the back of his tongue. Then, quieter, “do you feel any better when we get out of the city, or no?"

[1nfernoh]

@phantaisms​  —

a small black box, tied together with black ribbon, sits by kiyong’s door, almost anticipating to be picked up and inspected. once opened, a lighter, glistening under the harsh glows of ceiling lights, greets him. the image of the butterfly on it should be enough for kiyong to realize the identity of his not-so-secret admirer. on the back of the lighter, there is also an inscription engraved into it that says: “born to burn”. he should also recognize that handwriting; one that he knows all too well. 

underneath the lighter, a small note peeks out and calls for his attention: 

“to make sure you don’t forget me. can’t get rid of me that easily. 

 see you when i see you. 

- namra"  

It’s over now, the movie, but he feels it still on the inside of his skull. It’s a scratch he can’t reach, something he wants to scrape away with the blunted edges of his nails. He keeps sitting at home, even though he’s broke. He keeps ignoring the pinging chime of kakao messages on his phone; even the others who’d been ingested by that movie. It’s the knock that snaps him out from staring blank at the wall, the quick one-two rattle and squeak of sneakers turning heel tells him it’s a courier. So he picks himself up for the first time in, what? Minutes, hours, days and opens his door.

It takes him another day to open that package, wads up the bundle of ribbon and rips the edge of the box on the way to opening it. Inside and he finds a lighter, the immediate reaction is the kick-up of his heart before he notices the butterfly and the note, and words he feels before he sees as his thumb catches the gouge of an engraving. He swallows his heart back down and flips it open. On the third try of that sparkwheel the flame catches. He watches that too, for minutes, hours- and then cuts himself off. That’s when he finds it in himself to figure out where his phone is, dying its slow death at fourteen percent battery, he scrolls to Namra’s name and calls her.