RED LETTERS, BLACK SKY: AN OPEN STARTER
SERA TRIES TO LEAVE (BUT IS SOON HUMBLED)
in a moment of reflexive panic, a bad habit over the years she's grown to actively respond to rather than ignore, sera freaks out and leaves the hotel with her luggage in tow to walk herself to the train station.
march weather on the coastline isn't mild — remnants of winter still linger as the breeze whips at her hair and laps at her skin; jinhae proves itself to be a force not to be reckoned with. at this point, the unsettling news about heesung's disappearance has brought nothing but clearly distressed production crew members who spend their days anxiously chainsmoking around their trailers and standing uselessly with their arms crossed with looks of disdain at officer yu and her tiny search party. they act like she's the one that caused all of this, like it's her fault that some of the cameras have had to been taken offline to give room for the search crew to survey the surrounding area.
sera wonders if anyone watching will even bother to question where that mic operator ended up going — will they lie and say just up and left he left the show, just like she's planning to now? will they write him out of the script and call it a day?
will his body suddenly turn up on one of the cameras one day and shut this entire thing down?
she's not so sure she can handle the latter. sera still finds her thoughts wandering to those dark corners, the horrible scenarios that her imagination can conjure always fighting to be at the forefront of her mind. they slip in like snakes on water and seep their venom into every crevice that it can find to poison her decaying rationale. she had barely even managed to change out of her pajamas this morning when things were feeling like too much and threw everything back into her luggage. how nobody on production had noticed that she was leaving was beyond her — if nobody could see that sera was missing, then surely there would be no issues sweeping park heesung's disappearance under the rug.
OUT OF SERVICE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
the electronic marquee on both sides of the platform read in obnoxious, bright red text. the wind is even worse down here than it was at the hotel, only making sera even more frustrated that she'd packed away her hair ties. because the reality that she is now stuck in jinhae is slowly sinking in — a reality that considering the current circumstances is actually quite frighteneing — is not an easy pill to swallow with all of this wind ruining her hair and makeup. she looks nothing like her typical made up self, and although she thinks there's no way that the reunion production would've bothered putting cameras out here, there's something in her chest that still doesn't sit right, even this far away.
"god damn it," she exhales, shoulders falling as she stares up at the marquee, perplexed. an internal debate begins — does she go back to the hotel just to hole herself up in her room until all of this passes over? does she wait until some train service worker shows up so she can demand answers she already knows they won't have about when the trains will be up and running again, so she can get the fuck out of here?
sera takes a seat on a nearby bench, holding the collar of her dusted pink peacoat closed in a poor attempt to keep herself warm. she reaches into her coat pocket for the box of cigarettes she'd kept hidden inside and gives one subtle take over her shoulder. the cold had caused the skin to begin cracking on the surface of her hands, hands that try to keep the box as hidden in her lap as possible. a quick flip of the paper lid, and — of course — it's empty. "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."
