"This isn't my uniform!" a brunette shouted towards her mom, who immediately refuted the statement. She looked at the uniform in disbelief. A pure white jacket, with a red ribbon, and a one-piece beige skirt.
A uniform that came straight out of a comic book or a novel.
――――――――――
Faces stared at her from above, blurry and unrecognisable. Vaguely, she recognized the sound of cars beeping and yelling, but the noises faded in and out from a loud, piercing ringing.
Ba-dum, Ba-dum. 'Are heartbeats supposed to be that loud?'
Pressure grew in patches in her head, on her leg, and all over her body. Her blurry vision swam, and for a second, she felt such a sharp spike of nausea that her entire body convulsed. Sirens came through distorted and distant.
She blinked.
――――――――――
'Such an unrealistic pretty girl is in front of me' the girl thought, staring into the purple eyes of the middle schooler. "Dan-ah, we're going to be late," the beautiful girl said with a close-eyed smile.
'Did I actually lose my memory? Or is someone messing with me?' the brunette asked herself, following the purple-haired stranger.
――――――――――
A truck beeped as the pressure in her leg lessened. Instantly, orange and black filled her vision, and she felt herself being lifted. White gloves pressed a plastic piece to her mouth, and cool air filled her throat. She couldn't make sense of any of the confusion before it all faded into a black void.
――――――――――
"Dae Dam Middle School! It's the school that I go to!" she insisted, moving away from the sparkling building.
"There's no school like that around here!" the beautiful girl said back.
――――――――――
'If a main character existed...It would definitely be Ban Yeoryeong and the four of them.' Avoiding the gloomy gaze of the purple-haired girl, the brunette stared at the unrealistically handsome group of guys.
Her seat partners continued gushing over them. "Can we call them the Four Heavenly Kings?"
She froze, her horrified expression going unnoticed. 'This is definitely a novel...something like this cannot be real.'
――――――――――
'March 2nd, the day of the school entrance ceremony.'
'My daily life has begun to change into a web novel.'
――――――――――
Amidst a dark room, the blank, grey eyes of a patient shot open. They scanned from side to side frantically, focusing on nothing.
'I'm...'
"Dan~i. Want to be friends?" 'If I grow closer to someone else, won't I eventually end up distancing myself from Yeoryeong?'
'I'm just a character in a novel?'
"...Big brother, I think Dan-I is avoiding me...and she's friends with someone who hates me..." Ban Yeoryeong said, pressing her face into a pillow.
'A villain in a novel?'
Focusing and refocusing, the ceiling tiles seemed to sway while Yeomin lined up her memories with those of the vision.
Her complaining to Yura in the bathroom about Ban Yeoryeong and the beginning and end of her friendship with Ham Dan-I... was just set up for her as an antagonist?
The insults she slung towards them both, Eunhyung defending Dan-I, and the whole class...
Yeomin's eyes paused, staring pointedly at a random point on the ceiling. A textbook confrontation scene.
'It was all part of a plot?' she thought incredulously. 'With Ham Dan-I and Ban Yeoryeong as the protagonists?'
'Is that why everyone was so quick to defend them?' Yeomin wondered, her stare slowly sharpening into a glare. Because the protagonists can do no wrong?'
With indignant anger rising through her body, the girl's body tensed. 'Is that why Ban Yeoryeong is so obnoxiously pretty and talented? Because she's favoured by the story?'
'Why do they get to be the main characters? Why do they get to be the main characters while I'm nothing more than a minor villain that's just there to hate―'
Her thoughts stopped. 'Just there to...' she thought, 'just there to hate them...'
Like pouring water over a flame, the thought doused any trace of her anger, replacing it with a cold discomfort.
'Is...is that part of the story as well?'
Throat tightening, a sense of nausea overtook her.
'Is the only reason I feel this way because of the story? Because I need to hate her in order for―'
Mixing with an all-encompassing disgust, the anger bubbled back up to the surface.
'Because they need me to be a villain? To be jealous? To be―'
"Rude."
For Yeomin, the memory of her emotions was as clear as day. Her annoyance at Yeoryeong, her, the ire and resentment she felt towards Ham Dan-I for choosing Yeoryeong over her, the bitterness at her classmates for doing the same, the guilt whenever she remembered their―
Now, every memory was tainted with doubt.
'How much of this... how much of this is mine?'
'Was this all just predetermined by the story?' Yeomin wondered deliriously, eyes beginning to swim again in her panic. Her breathing picked up.
'Am I even my own person?' The thought sent her mind straight into torment. Spiralling mentally, her entire body shuddered with quickening shallow breaths.
Adding to her anxiety, a rampant beeping noise begins to fill the room―rapid and shrill and oh so LOUD. Breaking out into a cold sweat, Yeomin flinches as a door slams open before her vision started to blur at the edges and―
――――――――――
White.
White walls made the room seem bigger than the cramped space it actually was. A white curtain separated her from the adults talking in the corner, but not enough to cover them completely. She saw the white coat of the doctor while he talked to an upset couple.
The girl's face was unhealthily pale, nearly white as she lay propped up in the hospital bed. Motionless, like a porcelain doll.
"...weren't able to salvage..."
Words flow into her ear and out of the other. With vacant eyes, she stares down at where her body ends and the blanket dips. Her parents whisper questions to the doctor, leaning on each other for support.
'They were supposed to be on a trip,' Baek Yeomin thought idly. Floating through her mind, the thought vanished in the wind, just like the rest.
"...woke up in the middle of the night...state of panic..."
Blinking, the girl stares down at her lower body. Her hair falls slightly, obstructing her view.
'I could've died,' Yeomin realises vaguely. In the weight of everything else, the admission almost feels mundane.
If she did die, would that just be considered the cathartic downfall of a villain?
The words of her literature teacher echo in the back of her mind.
"Imagine a villain in a story does some heinous action, and we hate them for it. Hatred is uncomfortable. It claws at our anger, our desire for revenge."
"When the protagonists defeat them and the villain receives retribution for their actions, we experience relief. We experience catharsis. We purge our hatred through the downfall of the villain, through wrongs being righted."
Is this her retribution? Would people be relieved that she almost died? Would Ban Yeoryeong, Ham Dan-I, and the others be relieved?
She stares at where her right shin should be. She stares at the dip in the blankets, where it isn't.
'Isn't this too much?'
A dark-haired man and woman stand close to one another for comfort. Dark bags hang beneath both of their eyes, and contrasting their business attire, both of them stand unkempt and messy. As the doctor began to give them space, they sent worried glances to their daughter.
Unlike the usual smiling girl they're used to, the only thing left in the bed was a lifeless husk. Her hair was stuck up in various places. Her grey eyes stared down with no emotion, unresponsive. She appeared nearly catatonic; the weight of the event proved too much for her young mind to handle.
"Yeomin..." the girl's mother sat on the bed gently.
"Hmm?" Slowly, she glanced up from what was left of her leg.
"I―" the woman began, but she didn't even know what to say.
How could she comfort her? How could she sit here and tell her daughter that everything would be fine when she looked so absolutely destroyed? That everything would be okay when it wouldn't. Not for a while.
Yeomin's eyes scanned her mother's hesitant face. On instinct, she felt the need to calm her, to smooth out the worry on her face with a smile.
"Mom..." Yeomin started.
But she couldn't.
The sentence went unfinished, words failing as she opened and closed her mouth in vain. Scrunched, the girl's face only looked more and more anguished as time went on. Mirroring her own, her mother's face shifted from hesitancy to concern.
'Is this what I deserve? For being a villain? Am I destined to be an awful person no matter what I do?' Am I always going to feel what the story wants me to feel―think what the story wants me to think? Mom, who the hell am I? '
Unable to take it anymore, the distressed woman flattened her lips and pressed her daughter's head to her chest.
The girl's thoughts stopped.
"Yeomin..." she began slowly, "no matter how this pans out...Your dad and I, we'll always be here for you."
"You'll always be our lovely daughter, okay?" Wrapping her arms around the girl, the woman gently rubbed her back. Yeomin froze in her grasp. A lump formed in her throat.
'Are you part of the story? Do you only care about me because you're supposed to?'
Her mother's arms tightened around her, and some part of her broke down.
With quivering hands, Yeomin grabbed onto her mother's shirt. 'No. I can't―I won't believe that.'
Shakily, she breathed in and out. In. Out. In and out. In, ou―As if a dam had been broken, her face crumpled and tears poured from her eyes. Her hands clung onto the shirt in a death grip as she hiccoughed and cried.
All the while, her mother sat beside her, whispering reassurances and soothing her daughter as she trembled.
――――――――――
AN: Existential crisis speedrun
A bit messy but this is roughly how dead-inside Yeomin looks in the hospital: