[one shot, for no one, 10 july 2016]
Choi Seungcheol runs his hands through his hair and continues pacing around his room, like he has for the past hour. Time is quick for him. A bit too quick.
He finally stops at his window, looking out to the view outside, revealing a breathtaking scene that perhaps only a few will live to see but he just sighs at it. He's seen it too many times.
It's not the same anymore. Seungcheol breathes out and closes his eyes, listening to the incessant beeping with the radio blare out in its artificial tone,
"ーAnd good morning, Seoul city! Things are looking up for today, March 12, 1967. The traffic is. . ."
He closes his eyes and grips the frame of the window, feeling his vision darken.
Not again.
When he closes his eyes, he opens them to a new place. It's all the colors and it's all the things he could see within a lifetime. It's the very fragment of time between past, present, and the future.
It's like a medium of some sort, a vehicle of existence that only exists to allow time to be. Seungcheol can't feel his arms or his legs and he blinks slowly, letting bubbles of oxygen escape from his mouth.
The medium is like under water but at the same time, it isn't. The medium is everything between time. It is everything, but at the same, it isn't. Seungcheol still doesn't know what he's doing, and it's been almost three centuries.
Time doesn't exist for Seungcheol but Seungcheol doesn't exist for time.
He continues to move his fingers and toes around until he begins to feel the little prickles of shock course through his nervous system. Seungcheol opens his mouth and bubbles of oxygen float upwards, but to what surface?
Memories, images, places he's seen and hasn't flash everywhere around him. He can't breathe that well but he doesn't care. It happens all the time.
What difference does pain make when that's the only thing you feel?
A bright light comes into view and he shuts his eyes, remembering that the first time he hadn't done so, he had been blinded and ended up in the Amazon Forest, during the 1920's. He died the second hour he was there.
But no worries to those who don't know what his story is.
That's part of his daily routine; life, if you can call it that. He's died many times before. It's nothing major.
Seungcheol often wonders what is beyond the medium of life and death. He often wonders if there's something more than time. He is scared.
Choi Seungcheol wakes up headfirst in the middle of shallow water, breathing hard with water up his nose and in his eyes. Although his heart is pounding in his chest and his hands, now white and frail, are trembling furiously, he calms down almost immediately .
His eyes begin to blur with tears, welling up with his own water, and he smiles, painfully.
"Seungcheol, you are not a fish!" He hears but he still smiles nonetheless.
Arms wrap around his neck and he slowly reciprocates their actions. It's her.
And she's real this time.
