Niamh isnât getting much sleep these days, which she sees as some real rotten luck. Peltless, hungry, overworked â and now underslept. The list of her ailments is growing at an alarming rate. There was a time when she used sleep to cope, deriving solace during severe bouts of depression by slipping into temporary unconsciousness. But since arriving in Seoul, a whole nightâs rest is as hard to find as her hide.Â
Haunting 24-hour convenience stores has become something of a habit for the selkie. It sure is better than staring blurry-eyed at the ceiling until sunrise. Niamh finds something strangely consoling about a convenience store. Sometimes, she doesnât even buy anything; she floats down each aisle like a crimson-haired wraith. There are plenty of convenience stores in her neighborhood, and which one she chooses to visit is random, allowing her bodyâs nonsensical gravity to pull her wherever it wants.
That night, it leads her to the CU. Sheâs wearing her usual late-night attire: faded lounge pants, her University College Dublin sweatshirt, fuzzy white socks, and Birkenstocks. The dark circles under her eyes are prominent among the paleness of her face, only mildly obscured by her freckles. The twentysomething guy manning the cash register greets her with polite familiarity. Sheâs been around enough at this hour for them to recognize each other, but sheâs never attempted to make friends with him. Even though she probably should. She needs more friends. And given how the search for her hide has been going, she will be in Korea much longer than she anticipated.Â
Usually, sheâs the only one at the store (aside from the cashier) at this hour. But this time, sheâs joined by a young man sheâs taken to calling the CU cryptid. He is a man of about her age with a thick mop of black hair, usually disheveled. Whenever she saw him, he was always in some state of disorder, and this time was no different; he only had one slipper on. At first, she pegged him as a university student on a bender, and then she thought he was a down-on-his-luck junkie (but the drug laws here are much stricter than in Ireland), but now sheâs unsure what to think.
The Cryptid stands before the freezer, door open and gimbap in hand. The way he stares into the freezerâs contents makes it seem like he is trying to conjure a portal to a new world. And maybe he is. Itâs evident that Seoul has a higher population of supernaturals than sheâs used to. But he continues to stand there and no portal is conjured.Â
She starts down the aisle. When she draws nearer to the young man, she feels compelled to speak to him. That in itself is weird, as she usually avoids people like the plague during these late-night fugue states. Her Korean isnât great at the best of times, even less so when she is running on no sleep.Â
âIf you stand there for too long,â she says in Korean, âI think you will get icicles on your nose.â She is trying to make a joke, a risky move in a second language, but she has nothing to lose. He looks so out of it, so zoned out, that thereâs a chance he didnât even hear her.Â
Doyun snorted, though the effort wasn't derived from a conscious effort as much as it was an involuntary reaction. He turned, fingers clenching slightly around the tuna gimbap to the point where it threatened to smush under his fingers.
He was immediately taken aback by the shock of red hair, features as foreign as they were somehow familiar. Like he remembered her without truly recognizing her. Maybe he'd seen her in his fugue state, during one of those episodes where he'd only been half-awake, wandering in just as quick as he made to leave, with only a bottle of juice or strawberry milk in hand after a long night of sleep-walking.
They'd never spoken before, that much he knew. The voice lilted in a manner that was new to him. Somehow bright despite the weariness around the darkened eyes of their owner. The joke is still funny, even after he'd finally processed it amongst the rest of his thoughts, and he snorted again. "The cold never bothered me anyways." And then he finally stepped back, letting the door of the freezer shut heavily in front of him before he added, "Like Frozen." He didn't need to explain every joke he made, but it was a habit, maybe because at some point he realized that he himself couldn't understand half the shit he said anymore.
He took another step back, his awkward, broken slipper threatened to snap fully in half as he did so. "Did you need to...?" he trailed off, motioning toward the door. It wouldn't be the first time a veritable stranger had politely engaged him in conversation in order to distract him or get him to move out of the way for something. In moments like that, he felt something like a stubborn cow, sitting in the road and making cars pass around it.
