Chapter 252: worried...

"The water got us. We ended up in a cave inside the vine island." I paused. "I didn't know the vines would move us. I thought they'd just... stay… Well, I trusted Alex."

He made a sound that might have been a laugh. "The vines know where the safe zone is. During a storm they close around anyone still in them and bring them to the cave. A very old root behavior. We didn't teach them." He shook his head. "It's been very useful."

"We? Wait…." I looked at his face and frowned.

And just shrugged it off.

"What?"

"아무것도 아님."

"Oh…"

"Just noticed something, don't worry.."

We walked to another bridge. The village was properly awake now— the chickens louder, the rope elevators moving, the fishing platforms occupied again. Kids on one of the central platforms doing something involving rope and competitive energy.

"How did you survive the first time? Just asking again since I'm curious." he said. "The water takes people. It's taken good people, careful people, experienced people. And you've gone in twice and come out both times."

I thought about how to answer that. "I'm from somewhere else," I said, which was true and didn't explain anything. "Things work differently where I came from. Oh, and I heal differently. I move differently."

I looked at the water off the platform edge. "And I've died more times than I can comfortably count. I think my body's gotten efficient about surviving things because of that."

He looked at me sideways with the expression of someone deciding not to ask follow-up questions.

Then he put a hand on my shoulder. "Died? Haha, that's a nice way to say you have survived something harsh. You're a one fucked-up lucky kid."

"I'm twenty-two," I said. "Actually I'm not joking, I've died like 70 times… or more." Well, what's the point of hiding when they won't believe or misunderstand anyway.

"Mm, sure." He looked at me with the assessing quality of someone revising something. "You're actually young."

A pause.

"Tough~ Handsome~ Useful~ Resilient…" He narrowed his eyes at me in a way I was beginning to feel concerned about. "Want to marry my daughter?"

ಠ_ಠ.

"She's twenty. Very capable. Cute. Beautiful. Useful. Knows everything. Gets lost sometimes but you know? She has this bizzare weird sense of direction where... if she's lost suddenly she's beside you, like she has her own Compass in her head so Do yo—"

"I'm going to respectfully—"

"HON!"

The voice came from the direction of the residential platforms, sharp enough to cut through everything else, and I turned before I'd processed whose it was.

Jisoo. Moving fast across the bridge toward us, barefoot, her hair loose and somewhat chaotic, and bags under her eyes that came from sleeping badly and waking worse.

She had clearly been awake looking for me for at least some portion of the night and morning and was arriving at the conclusion of that search with a lot of feelings about it.

She crossed the last platform and stopped in front of me.

Looked up at my face.

Then grabbed my collar with both hands and shoved me. Hard. "Where were you?!"

"There was a storm—"

She shoved me again. "STUPID! I know there was a storm, I was in the house— where did you go—"

"I was outside before it started and then I got—"

"I looked for you," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word, and I stopped talking because I could see it now— the red in her eyes that wasn't just tiredness. She'd been awake. She'd been looking. "The whole storm, I was… I WAS SITTING LIKE A STUPID… Girl inside the house, waiting… I DONT EVEN KNOW WHY THE FUCK WOULD THE HOUSE OPEN! I didn't know if you were—"

"I'm here," I said. "I'm fine. I'm right here."

"You—" She shoved me one more time, but the force was different this time, and then her arms went around me instead and her face was against my chest and she was just— holding on.

The way you held on when you'd been doing something alone for too long and the thing you'd been worried about was finally solid in your arms.

I put my arms around her.

The rain came down on both of us, gentle now, the storm officially finished.

"Even if something happened," I said, trying to make my voice light, "you know we can always— you know. Reset. Start over. It's not—"

"Please," she said. Quiet. "Don't."

I stopped.

Her arms were still tight around me. Then a whisper. "I don't give a Fuck about my regressing power… I hate it… but yo—"

The Chief had tactfully found somewhere else to be… somehow… he just Disappeared.

The village moved around us, morning things, normal things, people who didn't know what was happening between the two people standing in the rain on their bridge and weren't looking too hard.

"It's not that," Jisoo said, into my shirt. The words came out slow, like she was working out how to say them while saying them. "It's not about those… regressed. It's just... what if you disappeared and went back to your world. What if one day you just... went back. And I was here. And you were there."

She pulled back slightly to look at me, chin tipped up, eyes doing the thing where they were calculated and open at the same time. "We've never talked about that."

I looked at her.

"What happens," she said, "when you're done here?"

I opened my mouth.

"...What?" I said.

***

Am I Real?

I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling.

Familiar ceiling. The vine-woven surface of the house I'd slept in a hundred times, the specific pattern of it, the way the light came through the gaps differently at different hours.

I knew this ceiling. My ceiling. Except my back was on something soft and raised, not the floor mat I usually chose, and when I pushed myself upright I was sitting on the bed— the actual bed, the good one, the one that was supposed to be for guests… haha…

I sat there and stared at my hands.

Opened them. Closed them. Opened them again.

"Am I real," I said… or asked.