Posted: 29 May 2016, 17:00 EDT | Words: 4,003

~//~

Murky, gray skies above the NEATT tower signaled an oncoming, nasty rainstorm in Seoul. The first drop spilled out of a saturated cloud and stung Kai on his cheek like a cold, wet bullet. The driblet of water rolled down his jawline and disappeared along the curve of his neck.

Subsequent projectiles fell right through the genie who turned invisible and lay unfeeling on the concrete roof. The dull heavens above had painted a grimly accurate representation of his past, present, and future. It was springtime but it felt like a winter at the Pole – no sun, no color, no warmth. That was the life he was meant for. He’d learned now to never aspire for more again.

But it was hard to forget temporary bliss, even when he now knew it had been built upon disingenuous promises.

Kai picked up his hands and stared at them. For a brief moment, his dreams had become prospects that he could just touch with his fingers. With a little more reach, they would have been in his hands, hands that now flickered with the rain pouring through them.

Kai.

An ember in the ashes – that was how Ji Won’s calling felt.

So this is it, her final wish.

Jaw set, Kai put on a mask of indifference and let his master drag him through space like a dog on a leash for the last time. He appeared in the center of her room.

Ji Won stood by her bedside, her back to him. “You called, Master,” he said, keeping his voice emotionless.

She spun around to the sound of him and slowly approached, but Kai refused to meet her gaze and kept his eyes low. He didn’t know if he’d be able to maintain his cold detachedness should he see her face.

With only two steps between them, Ji Won halted and said, “I have something to say before I make my wish, but I don’t want you to listen because you have to.” Her hand appeared in Kai’s periphery. In it was the talisman. “If our friendship meant anything to you at one point, then please, hear me out.”

Was this all her efforts at atonement amounted to? Returning the talisman a few minutes before her final wish?

Anger building, Kai’s eyes drifted up to Ji Won’s face despite his earlier resolve. There was so much red. From her bloodshot puffy eyes to her pink-tipped nose to her blotched cheeks, it was evident that she’d been crying since he’d left her hours ago. Were they tears shed for him, for what she’d done to him, for what she had yet to do?

No. Don’t let her sway you. Once was already enough. Do you really want to let her crush you with her crocodile tears a second time? Just take the talisman and leave.

Kai carefully collected the necklace from her palm and held the stone with a crushing grip. He could have left then and there. He should have left. But Ji Won had attached a condition. All he wanted was to forget the nightmare disguised as a daydream of the past couple days, but the puppet master of the dream was insisting on one last show before cutting his strings.

Well he wouldn’t play into her hands anymore. With one last hard look at Ji Won’s anxious face, he flicked his visibility off. He would listen to whatever venom spilled out of because yes, he had at one point valued the deception she called friendship. But it was up to her to talk as he turned a bitter back to her and waited.

A gasp followed by a loud thump.

Kai spun around thinking Ji Won had passed out on the floor, but she was still conscious. On her knees, moist eyes stared vacantly ahead, a mirror image of him when she’d tried to make her final wish for her grandfather. The genie almost reached for her, but the somber voice that came from her pale, cracked lips arrested him and he kept his distance. Did she know he was there?

“I’ve been thinking a lot and I realized some things. I thought that my first wish was wasted, but in actuality, because of that wish I was saved from squandering any more of my time pining for a guy who couldn’t have been any less like the angel I imagined him to be. So in the end I’m grateful that you granted it, even if I hadn’t meant to make it.”

Outside a storm continued to brew. Rain pelted the window and roof and a strong wind bent a tree branch which grated against the siding. Ji Won flinched at the loud, grinding sound and looked expectantly around for something…or someone. Him? Her posture slumped when she found nothing, and to her knowledge, no one.

“And because I had you in my life,” she continued, “my grandfather’s dementia was cured. Otherwise, I don’t know what I would have done, how I would have handled having someone I love not know who I am.” Her hands wrangled with one another, a sign of worry. “So I wanted to say I’m sorry for what I said earlier, about how you made my life worse. It’s like you said, I was in shock. I thought things were going perfectly and then this anchor was dropped on me out of nowhere and all I could think was I’m going to lose someone I just got back. It didn’t seem fair and I took out my anger on you, because that’s just how I am, I react before I even know what I’m doing.”

He’d been right. Kai wasn’t even a human and yet he’d recognized what Ji Won had been going through before she had. Reminded once again that he hadn’t deserved any of Ji Won’s oppressive resentment, he trembled with a mélange of emotions: frustration, antipathy, and most prominent, anger. It rose like bile in his throat until he could no longer contain it. “So because you were hurt, it gives you license to hurt others?” he fiercely demanded.

With a sharp inhale of breath, Ji Won’s head snapped up to meet his visible form. A small spark brightened her eyes. On wobbly legs, she stood up and tried to close the space between them. “You were listening,” she said with a weak smile.

“Stay where you are,” Kai ordered, taking a step back to keep their distance. She froze, smile dropping with the light in her eyes. “It’s true I did think we were friends at one point, but after what you did to me, I’ll never be foolish enough to believe I could be friends with my master again.”

“You’re right, my pain didn’t give me authority to cause others pain,” she readily agreed. “But you don’t understand. When someone you love and care about very deeply is in trouble, you do whatever you can to help them, and in the process it can make you do and say things you don’t always mean.”

Kai would never have been able to do to another as Ji Won had done to him. Perhaps he’d been brusque towards her in the beginning, but never could he exact such abuse even on his worst enemy. But maybe he just wasn’t human enough to harm, or to love. “You’re right, I wouldn’t understand. Because I’ve never had anyone like that, someone I cared about so much that I’d go to any lengths to help them.”

He watched his guilt-ridden master duck her chin, lost for words. Amber eyes were half-hidden behind soft, black lashes he’d mentally traced when he’d her hair on the roof. Those feelings of awe and gratitude from last night returned, rippling the frigid hole in his chest with a gust of warm wind.

Kai filled the silence with a confession that scared him with its frightening revelation of just how much Ji Won had scarred him. “You were the closest I had to that.” Wide-eyed and alert, his master locked her gaze with his. “Even before you made your promise, I found myself caring about you. Seeing you cry or get hurt, I hated it, because it made me think how cruel I must be to taunt someone when they’re in pain. So I tried to secretly help you just so I could continue thinking of you and treating you as a terrible person without guilt…until I realized you weren’t terrible. And then I just…cared.”

His impression of his masters had always resulted in resolute loathing. At their core they were vile and greedy. But his opinion of Ji Won had faltered when she’d advised a stranger against Gi Cheol, swayed when she’d cried about her grandfather’s dementia, and careened when she’d used a wish to cure the elderly man.

“But then you extended a hand to me and made me think you cared for me too. For the first time I had a friend, someone to talk to who actually wanted to listen. That was already enough, yet you went further. You wanted to help me. You promised to free me. And I thought how lucky I must be to have come across a master who was so selfless she’d give her last wish to me without a second thought.”

By that point, Ji Won had become something more than just another master. She’d put him on equal footing with her grandfather. Clearly he’d meant something to her. And likewise, she’d become the only thing more valuable to him than the talisman, at least until he realized the caprice of Ji Won’s concern.

Kai wrung dry the sympathy in his voice and brutally concluded, “But in the end, you turned out to be crueler than any of my previous masters. You knew how much power the talisman held. You knew what it did to me. And yet you still used it against me. You tortured me, watched me struggle in pain, even as I begged you to stop!”

His words had exactly the effect on Ji Won that her vicious ones earlier had. They broke the will holding her frail body up and she clashed to her knees. She breathed hard and unevenly like the air around her was sparse. “I’m sorry,” she gasped.

Kai saw himself in her glistening eyes filled with unshed tears. Hurt and confused, he’d pleaded with that same look of desperation. But it wasn’t enough. She’d done more and likewise he needed to do just as much. He took a step forward. His eyes burned with water that felt like fire, but he would not let it spread down his face. “I was better off not knowing what it was like to care and be cared for,” he spat, “because then I wouldn’t have known what betrayal felt like and how much it hurts.

“I’m so sorry, Kai,” Ji Won cried between hiccups.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. He’d said those exact words and been scorned. Kai shut his eyes and clenched his jaw, trying not to lose to the battle of tears within him. “Please,” he growled lowly, “just make your final wish so I can be free of you.”

“Okay,” Ji Won sniffled, “just let me say one more thing.” She drew heavy breaths until it evened. “I know I’m not the great friend I thought I was. I’m not even that good of a person. If I was, I wouldn’t have landed myself in this situation. A good person would have been able to save both my grandfather and you. But I can’t do that. I have to choose who I should save and who…” her voice caught in with a sob she had to suffocate, “who I should let go. I made a promise to my grandfather, one that I didn’t intend to keep when I made it.”

So it wasn’t only the promise to him she’d broken. The heartless girl was going to break the one she’d made to her beloved grandfather. She loved him enough to hurt another for him, but not enough to keep her word? If this was what being human meant, then he was better off remaining a genie.

“But if I do that, then I’ll be breaking two promises,” she continued with quiet dejection. “So if I want to stop being this terrible person, then I shouldn’t make promises I can’t keep…and I should keep the ones I’ve already made. I have to at least try, starting from now, to be good.”

That did nothing for him. She’d strive to be a better person, but he would still have to suffer his days as a slave for hundreds more masters to come. Her efforts were worthless and Kai made sure to stress upon her that there would be no absolution from the wrongs she’d committed against him. “Then I’m glad I won’t be around to see you try,” he ruthlessly retorted, “and fail.”

He wanted to break her as she’d broken him, scar her so deep she lost all hope and the rest of her days would see misery as desolate as his. But no, either this girl was stronger than him, or the abrasion of his words could not match that of hers in how they’d kept him obeisant.

On trembling legs she stood and stoutly met his gaze. There was none of the malice in her eyes that was in his, only resolute acceptance of whatever consequences she would face for the decision she had made. In adherence to that professionalism, she held out a cordial hand. “I know a hug would be out of the question, but you could honor a handshake, right?”

No, he couldn’t. A handshake implied they’d be parting on tolerable terms. “Stop dragging this out any longer and just make your final wish.”

Ji Won’s unshaken hand dropped to her side. “You didn’t shake my hand the first time we met either,” she noted with a wry laugh.

He’d been correct to have treated her with glacial curtness then. If he’d continued in that manner, there wouldn’t be a black stone permanently embedded within him now. It fed on the bitter anger and turmoil within him, expanding it into the caverns of his chest until he feared that one day, his heart would become as black as his masters’.

“I don’t know what will happen to you after I make my final wish,” Ji Won continued, “but, take care.”

Her lips warped into a ghost of a smile. Her eyes were a never-before-seen dark shade of brown that emanated hollow disconsolation. Expunged of her fire, she was a shell of the vivacious, headstrong girl he’d first met. Is this how he hoped for her to suffer the rest of her traitorous days?

No, that’s not what I want.

Despite all the torment he’d endured of her making, a fragment of their shattered friendship remained lodged in his heart and he knew it was better that at least one of them lived happily. It wasn’t going to be him. His design was the life shrouded by humanity’s greed. But Ji Won was meant for the world of ignorant bliss. She was meant to smile animatedly without a care in the world, if not with him by her side, then with her grandfather.

He wanted to release her of her culpability, to tell her she was forgiven, but he’d lost his chance.

“I wish…” Ji Won was already speaking the two words that ignited his magic to separate them forever. “…for you to finally have the future you always dreamed of, free from being a servile genie suspended in time and a slave to human whims.”

A thousand thoughts and questions deluged his open mouth. None came to fruition because in the split second after Ji Won had spoken her wish, an inferno exploded inside him. His whole body burned with magic that flowed from the tips of his toes and fingers backwards to his heart. With a loud cry, Kai tumbled to his knees, scraping his nails at his chest. The talisman that he’d strung around his neck drifted up and off him and spun rapidly above, syphoning the magic out of him.

It was an agonizing process. So many years of magic the talisman had infused within him, sustaining him for immortality, was being extracted out of him within the span of seconds? Minutes? Kai didn’t know. He had no sense of time, only inexpressible pain that was beyond torture. Black holes speckled his vision and he began losing consciousness. Would he die before the magic was completely expelled?

“Kai?! Kai!”

Ji Won’s voice was a beacon of light keeping him from submitting to the darkness that threatened to engulf him. His eyes searched for her terrified ones beside him. Her hand was firm and warm on his shoulder as she called him, guiding him to her. This might be my only chance, Kai thought. So many things he wanted to tell her, but there was one he needed to before her wish diminished him to oblivion.

“I’m sorry,” he tried to say, but it was drowned out by a deafening, blinding flash of light that enveloped him. Kai shut his eyes and waited for the final blow that would simultaneously rid him of his pain and end him.

Peace.

That was how he would describe the light, weightless feeling in the moments that followed. There was no pain, no sound, only pitch blackness. He was an unfeeling conscious being floating around in space. Was this the afterlife, the other side as humans referred to it?

No, he realized as he started to get his bearings. His body started to feel heavier, normal. He slowly regained feeling of his fingers and toes, then his legs and arms until he realized he was lying on something soft and firm. Splayed hands traced the surface beneath him, oddly similar to Ji Won’s bed.

Open your eyes.

Kai did as he commanded himself. In slow flickers, light and shapes clouded the darkness. He was in a bedroom from the looks of the clothes chest and desk that greeted him and, he realized as he started to sit up, the bed he lay upon. His body was sore and joints cracked as he stretched his back and neck.

“Where am I?” his groggy voice asked aloud.

In your room, he mentally answered. But how did he know that?

Kai slid his legs out from under the covers to the edge of the bed. He stood up and examined his body. He was clothed in basketball shorts and a white tank, unusual attire from what he typically wore as a genie.

But this is what you usually sleep in.

Something was off, yet at the same time Kai knew this was just another normal day. But how was that possible if he’d been a genie his whole life?

Kai surmised he might get answers if he explored outside the room. He crossed the large space to the door and with a deep breath opened it. Immediately he was impeded by three small poodle dogs that growled and yapped at his feet.

“Mong Gu, Jang Gu, Jang Ah, heel!”

The command came from a young woman who stepped out of the bathroom across from Kai’s room. She was clothed in a t-shirt and cotton pajama pants. Her bare face was freshly washed and her bobbed hair was kept in its place with a shower band.

Hands on her hips, she approached the dogs with a stern glare. “What is wrong with you three? Don’t you recognize your uncle?”

Uncle? Kai almost asked aloud except that he answered his own question as soon as he’d thought it. The girl before him was his older sister, Jung Ah. The dogs were hers, and she loved them like any other family member. They were practically her children.

Jung Ah bent down to pet each in turn. “It’s like they’ve never seen you before,” she jokingly commented. But when her affectionate pats did nothing to lessen their glares, she stood up and placed a serious look on Kai. “I know you hate this, but you can it up for a second.” Before Kai could ask what she meant, Jung Ah stepped over her dogs and embraced him around his waist. “See, you’re Uncle Jong In isn’t bad,” she said to her dogs in a gentle, motherly voice.

The trio of canines seemed to accept her acknowledgement of Kai as a friend. Her gaze swept up to him. He was dumbfounded by how real this dream seemed to be and how into his part of her brother he felt. He could feel frustration bubbling up inside him, like it was a normal reaction when his sister showed any sort of affection for him.

But when Jung Ah’s own expression contorted into confusion and for a fleeting second, distrust, like she suddenly realized she was hugging a stranger instead of her brother, Kai’s heart dropped to his stomach.

No, this can’t be where it all falls apart.

Whatever this was, Kai wanted to see it play out longer. But it looked like he was already waking from the strange dream.

Jung Ah shook her head, seeming to clear the haze of suspicion that fogged her vision. She smirked and swiped the back of his head. Kai instantly yelped and cradled the back of his head. Pain. This wasn’t a dream.

“Close your mouth! You look like a stupid zombie and your breath makes you smell like one too.” She strolled away down the hall, her obedient dogs in tow.

Kai scowled, and like a shaken soda bottle spilling out when opened, snapped an involuntary retort to her form retreating into her room. “At least I can look good after only washing up. You have to spend an hour caking on makeup to even look decent, you ugly witch!”

Her closing door suddenly swung open and out marched Jung Ah, nostrils flaring and a wide, murderous look in her eyes. “What did you say, brat?!” Kai bolted into the free bathroom and locked the door behind him with a satisfying chuckle. Jung Ah pounded on the door to be let in. “Alright fine,” she said with the halt of her knocks, “let’s see how long you can hole yourself up in there. But you know my dogs will attack anyone that upsets me, so we’ll see who gets the last laugh.”

With the fading of her footsteps, Kai turned to the mirror and stared at the reflection before him. It was still his face that stared back, but the person who’d interacted with that girl had been someone else, someone she’d called Jong In. 

Of course, Kim Jong In, that’s your name.

It was like there were two people inside him. He’d ask himself a question, wondering what was going on, and be answered by his own thoughts. If that was his sister, then that meant he had a family. Who else would he run into in this house?

Your mother and father, and one married eldest sister who frequents home often, Yoon Ah.

Were they his real family?

No, you were adopted as a baby. You found out on your own before your parents finally told you in middle school.

How old was he?

Eighteen, just graduated and starting college in the fall.

And with each answer came a series of images, like a slide show of photos with moments from a life he’d apparently lived, memories forged into his brain.

A past invented for a future to exist.

Kai’s eyes widened with realization. He pulled down the left side collar of his tank and almost gasped. Gone was the mark. Gone were the shackles. Gone was the lonely, infinite life of a genie. In its place was a future, the one he’d dreamed of.

“It worked,” he whispered. “Ji Won’s wish worked.”

~//~

Author's Note