Chapter Text
Yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
The words taste sweet on her tongue. Technically speaking, they shouldn't taste like anything; technically speaking, she shouldn't be able to taste, in her state. That doesn't matter, because yes tastes sweet all the same.
It tastes sweet like ice cream on a hot summer's day, like caramel and fudge and every decadent treat she always denied herself when she was younger. It tastes right, it tastes earned, like everything in her entire life has been building up to this moment, right here and right now, calculated and designed to coalesce into this single, static moment.
It tastes as sweet as the overripe apple that she bit into, unsuspectingly, when she had been nine years old and had decided to buy herself something after school with her measly pittance of spending money that Samin gave her weekly. It tastes sweet like it's been set out in the sun for too long, by someone more careless than she- Sayeon Lee does not, ever, allow anything to rot.
That's what it tastes like. Rot.
There's no going back, though. No room for doubt sewn of wayward, hallucinated synesthesia; no space for anything other than the most definitive of acceptance. There's no reason for it, either; she isn't stupid. She knows that the offer comes at a heavy price, and she knows that paying the toll will be something that she'll almost regret.
Sayeon isn't stupid. She isn't rash, isn't emotional, isn't anything but precise in each and every decision she makes. There is no room to be anything else, no leeway, no forgiveness, no net to catch her if she loses balance on her lifelong tightrope walk. That's the way it is, that's the way it always has been, that's the way it always will be. Perhaps, for other people, mistakes are allowed and there is time to fix it and paint it over, but Sayeon isn't other people. That has always been made abundantly clear to her.
Her decision is final. She accepts the godling's offer, because it is the best thing that she will ever get, despite the strings she knows are attached.
She smells something sweet when she wakes up.
Her first thought is that nothing has changed, in the time in which she was gone; she doesn't feel any different, doesn't notice any real changes in her own thought patterns, and nearly sets out to feel for her own essence when she chokes on nothing.
She sits up, mildly panicked, and feels fluid dribbling out of her nose and over her lips- ah. Nosebleeds aren't exactly uncommon for her, never have been, and they've gotten all the more frequent now that she's a trainee for the Corps, which is a great place to work for anyone who enjoys being repeatedly exposed to threats to the integrity of their facial structures.
There's movement, next to her, and she had been so focused on the deal and then the immediate nosebleed- she holds a hand in front of her face and somewhat below her chin, in case the blood runs so far down it starts dripping- that she hadn't really taken her surroundings into account.
Her surroundings are bright white. She's lying in a bed, covered in a thin white blanket, set against white tile floors, with white walls standing impersonally in her periphery. Cold white sunlight casts itself across her legs, stretched in front of her, lumps of more white beneath what could really be better considered as a sheet.
Standing to her right, the only spot of something in an otherwise blank and colorless room, is Ryujin.
Ryujin is pointedly (she thinks it's pointed, because everything Ryujin does feels particularly designed to send some kind of sarcastic, barbed message of antipathy or else just outright anger at whatever she's most recently decided has earned her ire) looking away, with her hands shoved in her pockets. She's not wearing the same uniform she was before- this one is clean. New. Absent of the jacket. The tie isn't even tied, instead simply slung around her neck. Her pins are instead attached to her shirt, roughly where they would be on her tie.
"What- " Sayeon begins to ask, but almost immediately stops as she coughs on blood from her nosebleed. It's not stopping- usually when it's because of an injury, it doesn't flow this fast for this long, but she's no stranger to fountains of blood happening from time to time, as a result of unusual pressure changes- and it spatters into her hand, a couple of drops hitting the white sheets on the bed.
Honestly, she's not even really upset about being interrupted. She's got so many questions, she's not even sure which to ask first.
She hears a few things, airy whooshes and quiet protests of some kind of friction against thin cardboard, and she blinks in surprise as a fistful of white is shoved in front of her face. It takes her a second to process it, to realize that it's Ryujin's hand, and it's full of crumpled- the clean kind of crumpled, from the necessary folding involved in grabbing a fistful of them at a time- tissues, from a box that must be just out of sight.
She can admit when her vantage point isn't very good. She's still leaned pretty far forward, head tilted down, eyes directly at her knees (approximately- she's estimating based on her own sense of kinesthesia, but she's been developing that a lot lately), which isn't great for her periphery.
"... Thank you." She gurgles, only now noticing how congested she sounds. Of course she does; she's still in the middle of an active nosebleed. She takes the tissues carefully, with her clean hand, and starts trying valiantly to wipe at her face. It doesn't do much, considering that fresh blood replaces itself on her face nearly as quickly as she wipes it away.
There are a few tense moments of near-silence, interrupted only by Sayeon's continued sniffing, before Ryujin eventually decides to do something other than hand over a couple of tissues.
"I'm getting Instructor Ahn," and it's telling how rattled she is, given that she's actually using her name, but also that's just about the last thing that Sayeon wants- she hears footsteps, a door creaking open, and she feels a quiet, woozy feeling almost like vertigo for a moment (a fraction of a fraction of a second, but also for exactly as long as it's been since Ryujin stopped talking and started walking) before she gets her wits about her enough to speak.
"No- no, wait," she says, a little louder than she would have if Ryujin was still next to her, but she has to hope she's not out the door by now. She's not sure when she closed her eyes (against the vertigo, don't you remember?) but she opens them now, taking in a good gasp of air before looking up.
She blinks a little in surprise to see Ryujin standing next to her bed, with no footsteps away and no opened door.
Did she use her gift by accident? Careless. She doesn't remember it feeling like that?
"Alright, alright. Damn," Ryujin acquiesces (to waiting? Sayeon guesses so), but evidently feels bad a moment later, because after a few seconds of hesitation (she audibly shifts her weight, but Sayeon doesn't see what she does with her face, since she went back to shoving her own face into her wad of bloody tissues), she asks, "Did you want water or something? Are you... I don't know, good?"
It takes Sayeon another moment to answer. Now, she really does have to decide what to ask first, because she needs answers and she needs them now.
"What... what time is it?" She settles on (an astronomically stupid question), since it feels simple and familiar and like something that, despite everything else and despite all other mitigating factors, Ryujin will know the answer to. Unlike a dozen of the other questions that Sayeon has already conjured.
Ryujin, for her part, scoffs a bit, but she does actually answer.
"Six forty-ish, in the morning. I swear I'm not fucking with you this time." Ryujin seems poised to keep talking, maybe tell Sayeon the whole sorry affair of how she got here ("here" being the infirmary), but Sayeon interrupts her as soon as she pauses.
"No- no, I mean, exactly. As close as you can." She clings to the steadiness of the clock, the twenty-second (now a minute!) intervals being something of a close companion, something she can depend on as a constant even when everything else is all kinds of wrong. She controls when and how the hand jumps- and in turn the clock's hand tells her when and how she jumps.
Ryujin grumbles again, and Sayeon looks up at her- she's pretty sure she looks some kind of pathetic, with tissues that are more blood than tissue by this point still smushed against her face, looking blearily up at Ryujin (mostly in focus, since she's not that near-sighted) and asking, of all things, for the time.
Ryujin, for her part, is staring at her watch (has she always had a watch?) with a single eyebrow raised, and the rest of her face and most of her body giving the impression that she thinks this is a deeply stupid request. Again, she must really be rattled, because she doesn't say this directly to Sayeon- maybe she should have near-death experiences more often. It would certainly improve the cell's cohesion.
"Six thirty-eight... and about forty seconds, give or take." Ryujin eventually answers, before putting her hands back into her pockets and staring expectantly at Sayeon- like she's expecting her to actually do something with that information. To her credit, that is a concerning bit of information- it would mean that Sayeon slept for at least twelve hours, which she didn't even come close to when she'd gotten stabbed- but the weird, floaty feeling of vertigo is at the edges of her senses, and she's finding it a bit difficult to parse through all of the implications.
The feeling is not quite as aggressive as it was a moment ago- a few moments ago- as it was before, but its presence feels disturbing, in a way. She knows she's not activating her essence, at least not on purpose, but maybe she's doing it on accident? She knows the feeling of her own essence by now, though. It's been long enough.
... Maybe it's just the blood loss, or side effects from whatever other things brought her into the infirmary. She blinks, and Ryujin shifts her weight a little (she was holding weirdly still over the past couple of seconds while Sayeon was thinking) before letting out another tiny sigh.
"O-kay. You know, I really should be getting Instructor Ahn at this point. If Min comes in for his shift of babysitting duty to see you awake, he's going to be pissed at me." Ryujin hedges towards getting Ahn again, which- reasonable, since this is the infirmary and Ryujin is lacking critical context (she wants to kill that white-haired bitch and then rewind time just to do it again and again and again and again- ) except for the fact that Sayeon is also, evidently, lacking some context of her own.
"Babysitting duty?" Sayeon repeats, like a bad echo, and gives up on the wad of tissues entirely. She smushes them into a disgusting, damp and bloody ball into her hand, and Ryujin wordlessly walks over to the little bedside table and puts the entire box next to Sayeon's hip, in easy reach of her cleaner hand. She does not offer to take the bloodied tissues. This, too, is reasonable.
"Yeah. We've been taking turns making sure you don't die in your sleep, again." She pauses, for dramatic effect (or because Sayeon started coughing on her own spit (the blood, thankfully, has slowed to a trickle) and needs a minute to recuperate), before she keeps talking.
"You were originally just put back in your bed in the dorms, since everybody figured you were just exhausted and you'd sleep it off. You're lucky I got thirsty in the middle of the night, because I left for the kitchens, came back, and found you having some kind of seizure in your sleep. Didn't even know that was possible, by the way. I tried to wake you up or something, ended up waking the other two instead- Dahee tried to help me wake you while Tsubaki ran off to get help- until you stopped doing the seizing thing. We thought you were fine- not fine, but not, you know, actively dying- and then you stopped fucking breathing. So. Fun times at three in the goddamned morning." Ryujin recounts the story of what, apparently, happened last night, with Sayeon completely unaware.
This wild story makes her blink, and realize that there are no heart monitors or anything here. Has Ahn been monitoring this place remotely? Why isn't she here, if she had such a critical patient?
Some part of Sayeon thinks it's only fair for Ryujin to have to experience a taste of the fear that Sayeon felt, the moment she awakened her gift- and then she chides herself. Her gift, her deal, is so that she can do the dirty work, and nobody else has to remember the fear and horror that she alone keeps within herself. It's not fair for Ryujin- or Dahee and Tsubaki, for that matter- to have seen that.
"I'm sorry," Sayeon apologizes, while putting the last of the bloody tissues to the side. She's sure they're getting blood on the sheets, but considering this is the infirmary, she doubts that she's the first person to get blood on these exact sheets, and she doubts that she will be the last.
Ryujin clenches her fists inside her pockets- it's subtle, but Sayeon's more awake, now- and looks up at the ceiling like she's asking some invisible entity for strength. Making her own one-sided deal with her own non-existent godling.
"You're so weird," Ryujin complains, but doesn't elaborate. Instead, she clears her throat, looks back down at Sayeon, makes eye contact for a moment, and then looks away. Sayeon belatedly decides to look over at the little table by the bed to see if her glasses are there.
Their red frames stand out from the white table, so she has no trouble reaching over and grabbing them without touching the lenses- an impressive feat, from this distance, since they're further away from her than Ryujin is- and putting them on. She keeps forgetting how near-sighted she really is before she puts the glasses back on, if she's had them off for too long.
She looks back at Ryujin, and only now sees the dark shadows under her eyes, the unusually enhanced paleness of her skin, and the way her usually-curly hair is even frizzier than usual. She catches a little sigh in her throat- she doesn't want to seem pitying, and she doesn't want to seem like she wants pity, either- and instead wipes ineffectively at her mostly-clean face with another useless tissue. It gets a few flakes of dried blood, but not much else.
"Thank you. For- for trying to wake me up, and everything." Sayeon continues, her tongue feeling too large in her mouth for reasons entirely unrelated to the intermittent vertigo, more for reasons related to having less than no ideas on how to proceed. She doesn't think she should waste her essence on rewinding, either- especially since she seems to have used it once already, which can't have helped the nosebleed or any of the other underlying health conditions that must have come into effect in her sleep (unless having a terrifying-looking seizure-like episode is just a side effect of becoming a godling's champion? Though she doesn't feel particularly champion-like, more woozy, disoriented, and vaguely nauseated)- so she's got to hold off. No resets on this conversation. That shouldn't be hard- she went eighteen years without the ability to reset it all whenever she wants, but it's a sorely tempting crutch to lean on when things get awkward and quiet like this.
"I'm getting Instructor Ahn," Ryujin says finally, and Sayeon doesn't argue.
