Remember the Name

Chapter 54: Lucid Dream (5)

“Okay, no. I can’t.”

“Come on, we’re so close!”

Ki-woong lent Yun-jeong his arm as they made their way up the mountain. Yun-jeong was having more than a hard time with this excursion, as she didn’t regularly exercise. At least the cold winter air chilled her enough that she wasn’t sweating her lungs out, but even that wasn’t enough to stop her legs from cramping and hurting.

“Plaster face!”

As they neared the peak, they heard Myeong-su’s voice ring out nearby.

“There they are!” she said, relieved.

“Yes! Let’s go!”

But no matter how much she tried, her legs simply refused to move.

“Nope. You go first. I need a break.”

Without any idea of what was happening to the children, they didn’t have any time to waste, which is why Yun-jeong decided that sending Ki-woong ahead was their best option. Apparently, Ki-woong agreed with this, as he left without a second thought.

****

“Hey! Hello?? What’s wrong?” Jiwon asked, trying to pull Dong-in up to a sitting position. As soon as her hand touched him, however, she quickly flinched back. “You’re freezing!”

And she had meant that. He was freezing, and not in a figurative sense. His skin felt like literal ice, to the point that she feared her own skin would stick if she wasn’t careful. Myeong-su also tried to touch him, but he showed the same reaction. It felt like their own hands would freeze off if they kept touching him.

Looking at him more closely, Jiwon noticed that Dong-in’s lips had completely turned purple, and his face was so white that she wondered whether corpses would look this pale. Though he was wearing a thick winter coat, he was still ice cold, and Jiwon couldn’t understand why.

She abruptly turned to look at Lucid, suddenly remembering that he was standing right there, and saw that he was simply watching them. His blank face disturbed her, but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything. She didn’t know what had happened between the two, but judging by the boy’s messy hair and swelling cheek, she could guess they had fought, or that at least, the boy had been hit.

“Are you okay?” she asked Lucid. She worried that perhaps this had been a result of overexposure to the cold mountain air, in which case the little boy was also at risk. However, Lucid simply shook his head, and Jiwon turned back to face Dong-in. She didn’t have time to wonder over his every unspoken word. For now, she would have to help this unconscious boy first.

“What do I do?” she wondered desperately.

She hadn’t considered anything like this happening, so all she could do was wring her hands in frustration.

“What happened here?” a low voice spoke from behind. A guy!

All heads turned to face the newcomer, and Ki-woong watched them in turn, trying to figure out what he was looking at. Lucid’s hair and clothes were a mess, and his swelling cheek told him that he had been hit. Myeong-su and the voluteer girl Yun-jeong had mentioned were crouched on the ground, looking at him. And between them, Dong-in was lying unconscious.

“Hey! Dong-in!” He yelled, rushing towards him. He could tell in one glance that things were not looking good. He reached out, trying to get Dong-in to stand, but likewise withdrew his hand in shock.

“It’s weird. He’s so cold, we can’t touch him.” Jiwon explained, and Ki-woong had to agree with her. But unlike Jiwon, he knew what was happening.

“It’s hypothermia.” He said. “If we don’t raise his temperature back up, he’ll die.”

Still, Ki-woong couldn’t quite figure out why he was so cold. In theory, it was likely due to excessive sweating during the climb up the mountain, and the evaporation must have cooled his body too quickly for homeostasis, leading to hypothermia. However, this didn’t explain why he was too cold to even touch. That didn’t make any sense, but Ki-woong didn’t have the luxury to think this over in detail. For now, he would have to do whatever he could to save Dong-in. He quickly took off his padded parka and draped it over the trembling boy, hoping that it would warm him enough for now. Seeing this, Jiwon also took off her outerwear and put it over Dong-in like a blanket. Up in the mountain, with the cold winter wind blowing over them, this was a rather reckless decision, but Ki-woong gladly accepted her jacket. Dong-in’s condition was of utmost importance for now.

“No, not you.” Ki-woong told Myeong-su, who was starting to take off his own jacket. “We’re okay, since we’re older, but you need to keep that on.”

“I’m okay! Really, I’m okay!”

“I’m telling you, it’s fine.” Ki-woong smiled bitterly. He was grateful for Myeong-su’s kindness, but this wasn’t the time to be sentimental. “This is enough for now. You don’t need to take that off.”

Truth be told, it wasn’t enough, and no one could tell what would happen next, but there was no reason to worry a child like Myeong-su. Ki-woong turned his attention back on Dong-in and studied him carefully. His tremors were gradually dissipating, but there was nothing the older boy could do for him. Gritting his teeth, he wrapped his parka around Dong-in more tightly and began to vigorously massage his limbs. Jiwon followed in turn, but the extra layer of clothing did nothing to help against the freezing feeling in her hands. Looking at Ki-woong’s hands, which had turned an angry shade of red, she knew that she wasn’t alone in this. Still, Ki-woong’s hands moved incessantly, fighting off the cold in a desperate attempt to save Dong-in’s life.

“Uh, what’s going on?”

Yun-jeong had just arrived, still out of breath from the overexertion, and made her way towards Ki-woong.

“What the… What’s wrong with him?” she asked, baffled over the unconscious Dong-in.

“Hypothermia.” Ki-woong answered curtly. There was no time to waste trying to explain things in more detail.

That duty fell on Jiwon, who began to explain everything she had seen after arriving. Quick to understand, Yun-jeong also took off her coat, covering Dong-in’s legs before starting to massage them just as Ki-woong and Jiwon were doing. As the three older students worked to keep Dong-in alive, all Myeong-su could do was fret and pace a few feet away from them.

Lucid, on the other hand, simply watched everything unfold without uttering a single word. He couldn’t help but find this whole ordeal quite strange.

“He deserves to die.” Lucid thought. “So why are they trying to save him?”

Perhaps it was because they had never actually witnessed Dong-in’s cruelty for themselves. Though a viable explanation, upon further thought, more questions arose. If they had indeed seen how horrible Dong-in could be, would they have let him die? No, he concluded. He already knew for certain that Ki-woong would save him, but he had a feeling that Yun-jeong and that volunteer girl wouldn’t just let him be, either. Even if it wasn’t Dong-in, even if it was just a stranger in the street, Lucid thought that they would try to save them, because to them, that was the obvious choice. That’s just the kind of people they were.

Seeing these three (or four, if he counted Myeong-su) people work so hard to save someone that he himself had tried to kill broke off some of his steely resolve.

“Can’t you leave him be?” He wanted to ask. “He’s a bad person,” he wanted to say. But upon imagining himself saying those words, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of odd, unpleasant familiarity.

“She smells like semen sometimes. A lot of times.”

When Dong-in had spoken those words, what effect had they had on Somi? Lucid hadn’t known it at the time, but after receiving sex education and doing some research on his own, he had come to understand what those words had meant. However, that had been the extent of it. He had understood the meaning of the words, but not the emotions they evoked. Humiliation. Those words were meant to belittle someone and crush their self-esteem. Dong-in had meant to belittle Somi and crush her self-esteem.

But now Lucid stood in his same position, the words he wished to speak evoking similar emotions to Dong-in’s. Whereas Dong-in had tried to kill emotionally through shame, Lucid was attempting to kill in the truest sense of the word, by suggesting that they leave Dong-in to die. Just a few moments ago, Lucid firmly believed that those who deserved to die should die, but now the three people in front of him were proving otherwise, showing him that Dong-in shouldn’t be left to die.

“Dong-in hyung… What do we do…?” Myeong-su sniffled.

Fundamentally speaking, Lucid didn’t trust others easily. Under the circumstances, he was suspicious of his own parents (and about who had named him), and he couldn’t trust their own parents, who could he trust? But the one exception to this was Myeong-su. His ever-present laughter and his childish innocence easily tore down Lucid’s walls. Lucid considered him a friend, and now his friend was full of sorrow and worry. He didn’t want his only friend to be sad.

Lucid turned around, partly in an attempt to suppress his inner turmoil and partly because he didn’t want to face his friend’s sadness. Above the outstretched trees, the sky was as clear as ever. It was the same sky as before, striking blue without a cloud in sight, but now, something inside him stung. Lucid tried to assess his own emotions. What was he feeling right now?

Guilt, and pity, and something very similar to what he felt whenever his mother scolded him and he ran out of the house to stare at the wall.

Lucid knew he should be punished. He knew that he had tried to do something unforgivable. He had tried to kill someone simply because he could. He would have to keep thinking about whether being threatened with death was enough of a reason to kill someone, but as it stood, he hadn’t been threatened with a weapon, nor had he been in immediate danger. He had tried to kill, merely because he had a very convenient method to do so. His magic. Was there something wrong with his head?

Of course, it was too early to determine right from wrong, but it was enough to make him doubt whether what he believed to be right was, indeed, right. He had assumed that the truths of the world were the same in the other world as in this world, but perhaps he had been wrong about that. Perhaps things were different here. And so, Lucid canceled his magic.

“He isn’t freezing anymore!” Jiwon shouted. She looked at Ki-woong and Yun-jeong to make sure she wasn’t the only one to feel that way, and thankfully, judging by their expressions, she wasn’t.

“I guess massaging helped bring his body temperature back up,” Yun-jeong suggested, sighing in relief.

However, Ki-woong couldn’t quite bring himself to agree with her. Just seconds ago, he felt more like he was massaging a block of ice rather than a living person, but now, Dong-in was as warm as ever, without a trace of frost on him. None of this made any sense to Ki-woong, but the important thing was that Dong-in’s chances of survival had just greatly increased. He pressed on, forcing his red, swollen hands to move faster.

****

As the institute teacher was chatting away with some of the volunteers near the entrance of the institute, she felt a tap on her back. Turning around, she saw that it was Yun-jeong.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Miss, could I have a moment, please?”

Perplexed, the teacher followed Yun-jeong to the back of the building. She wondered whether they were going to the cafeteria, but they instead turned the corner to a small abandoned lot where Ki-woong and Jiwon were still massaging an unconscious Dong-in. Though he looked positively less pale than he had up in the mountain, he nonetheless looked no more alive than a corpse, as far as the teacher could tell.

“What on earth is going on?!” she screamed.

“It’s hypothermia.”

The teacher doubted her ears for a moment, or at the very least, she wished she could doubt her ears. Exasperated beyond words, she hurriedly took out her phone. For now, she would have to take Ki-woong’s word for it, and she knew that he was a good child. Besides, if it really was hypothermia, each passing second was time wasted. Even as she made the call, she scrutinized Dong-in’s face. Ki-woong had told her that he had been passed out for quite some time, which was not what she wanted to hear.

“Yes, sir. It’s me, Eun-seon. There’s a boy here, near the cafeteria. He’s been passed out for a while. Should we call an ambulance?”

Now, it was Ki-woong’s turn to doubt his ears, even as he continued to massage Dong-in’s arms. Why didn’t she call 911 immediately? What could possibly be more important than this? Frustrated, he focused once again on the task at hand, but the trip down the mountain, with Dong-in on his back, had taken its toll on his strength. Still, he couldn’t stop. Dong-in’s pale blue lips were telling him to keep going.

<Lucid Dream (5)> End.