VII. | Orcus.
Suicide Circle
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chapter seven
orcus
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11:02, Seoul Central Hospital— East block, room 12.
Our four detectives all sat in two separate rooms. One in a hospital, one in an apartment. Each of the rooms both in the midst of a sickly series of images in a thick screen of black and white. No colors, no vibrance, like the way life had been before the invention of colored television. A mocking and sardonic kind of perspective had taken over their minds due to the cruel twist of fate each of them had witnessed.
In one room, the last one situated at the end of the east block, sat Kim Jaejoong and Byun Baekhyun. Their eyes never left the slender woman's body. For Baekhyun, he had lost a valuable comrade; for Jaejoong, he had lost a life time friend.
... Almost.
Kim Taeyeon laid in the hospital bed with a pastel white bandage covering her eyes. There were no blood stains, there were no infections— everything had been washed away with the water. She had thick woolen blankets pulled up to her chin and a vase of freshly picked tulips— her favorite— on the table beside her bed, curtesy of Jaejoong. The doctors had told them that if she hadn't arrived at the hospital at the time that she did, the she would have definitely been in a different place by now. The reason why she was in the hospital was unknown to them. She was too drunk to remember what had happened that night, but her body's healing rate was impressive— so impressive that if she kept healing at the rate that she did, she'd be healthy enough to leave in the next few days. Although, she'd leave permanently blind in her right eye.
In the other room sat Park Chanyeol and his new infatuation, Choi Jinri. Or Sulli, as she liked to be called. Sulli had become dehydrated due to the lack of water she drank at the party, along with the excessive amount of pure alcohol she had consumed. Her small body just wasn't ready for such a deep hit. She was fine, though, but Chanyeol had insisted to take her back to his apartment and nurse her slowly back to health.
Although the whole time, Chanyeol couldn't deny that he was worried. So far Sulli had spent 3 days in his apartment and the whole time Chanyeol had not left her side. He fed the woman her meals, he brushed her hair, even helped her put on her socks. He couldn't get enough of Choi Jinri, and Choi Jinri couldn't get enough of him. He read to her thrice a day, and during those long sessions they found out that they had the same fascination of particular genres.
Chanyeol enjoys of varying genres — of valiant empires and warriors, myths of faraway lands and puzzling ideals and godly characters doing impossible tasks on long journeys, legends of beautiful wonders of the world, novellas of ninjas and samurais, books of love and happiness and how political figures and social innuendos tear life apart. And Sulli, for some odd reason, loves, in complete specific and absolute explicit detail, romances of ninjas families and samurais, that, of course, include warriors, who live in valiant empires of faraway lands with puzzling ideals and godly characters doing impossible tasks on long journeys to the beautiful wonders of the world, but political figures and social innuendos rip the seams of happiness and shred life to mere sheaths of illusions. But of course, there are few books that combined all of those plots.
* * *
16:30, Seoul's East— Park Chanyeol's apartment.
She pops two pills into and shudders in distaste as they foam around her tongue. It was an awkward sensation that had never happened before, and Chanyeol should've taken it as a warning, but was too invested in the night's story to notice. He hands her a quick glass of water to wash down the black toxin.
"You okay?" He asks her and she nods, the corner of her eyes creasing into beautiful half-moon crescents.
"What do you want to read tonight?" She asks him in her sugary soft voice. Chanyeol shrugs and places a photo album in her lap. On the front in elegant cursive, the word 'Memories' are written on it's leather cover. She looks up at him with an confused frown, "What's this?"
"I though you might want to see some of my greatest memories." He says with a smile as he stands up and scoots next to her. There's barely any room on the single bed, and he can feel his left buttock dangling off the edge, but he doesn't care. Sulli is all he cares about.
She opens the first page of the book slowly, and for the next ten minutes an amused Choi Jinri and a flustered Park Chanyeol go through his baby photographs. In the next ten minutes they go through the photographs of when he was a teen. She saw more of his family in these ones— father suited up with a bible in his hand— "He was a priest," he explains, "And a really good one at that." Moments later they're flipping through his more recent photographs— his apartment, his pet dog, his favorite park— it was like a little collection of all things Park Chanyeol. All you'd need to know about him would be in this thick-rimmed, 158 paged book. Finally, on the very last page there's an empty space.
"Chanyeol?" She looks up at him once again, a look of puzzlement fresh on her features. "What's this one for?"
As if expecting the question, he reaches down to his side table and grabs his camera. "Want to take a picture to put it in there?" he asks, and she smiles her sweet, sweet smile. "I'd love to."
Chanyeol leans just a little bit closer the the woman and lifts his arm up, the flash from the camera temporarily blinds the two, but as another second rolls by, they're soon both smiling again.
Chanyeol doesn't have the best camera out, so once he takes photos he has to wait until it's printed until he can actually see it. It's the one thing that really annoys him sometimes, because he's wasted so much time and money on printing them out than it would take, say, Tao, the cheerful Chinese man next door. He has such a great camera.
* * *
07:02, Seoul's East— Byun Baekhyun's Office.
Two weeks have passed since the party. Taeyeon is out of the hospital and healthy as ever. Baekhyun helped her pay the fees to get a glass eye placed into her empty socket, but she still chooses to wear a deep black eyepatch over it. "Makes me feel fierce, ya' know?" She explains to the young police officer, and all he does it chuckle.
Park Chanyeol and Choi Sulli are officially a couple. She lives with him in his small apartment, and he has distant plans to marry her. Sometimes when he looks at her, he is sure that they have met before. Long before now, he met her and had the same dreams that he has now. He compared notes with her. He found strange affinities with her. He loved her. But he's not so sure if it's true or not.
Jaejoong and Jinah are, well, the same. One side of Jaejoong is still heavily engrossed with his work, but the other side of Jaejoong keeps trying to pull him back to the girl that won't leave his apartment. She's changed his living space into rooms and rooms of well, cleanliness. It smells too much like lilies and chimes and honeysuckle now. But it still gets him every time.
It's seven in the morning and Baekhyun's invited her to coffee— in his office of course, because: "I don't want to waste any time." he makes a point of saying. And she nods, because she admires how much he works despite being an " cop".
"You know, you're doin' a pretty swell job 'ere, darling." She says over a mouthful of black coffee and whipped cream. Baekhyun's shifting though files, his bushy brows are uplifted into a confused pinch. "This can't be right... No, this is absurd."
He's caught the blonde heroine's attention, she puts her mug down and curiously leans over the table. Her lips off the excess froth and catches a smear of Alizarin lipstick too. "What's up, son?"
"This is classified information, so you can't go around telling anyone just yet. But at the site of the first suicide, we had officers investigate the area, and they found something rather peculiar." He pauses for a moment to shuffle through his files, eventually pulling out a large photograph and passing it to the woman. She takes it in-between her thin fingers, it doesn't phase her, but she can't lie when she says that it shocks the daylights out of her. "Whats this?"
On the photograph is what looks similar to a toilet roll, or a giant cinnamon roll, with the exception that it's entirely made of human flesh. Three by six centimeters of flesh are sown together at the ends and rolled into a giant ball. It's greyish green color with thick black stitches sowing the pieces of thin flesh together. There must be around...
"54 pieces of flesh stitched together. We've had the forensics team match them with the remains from the girls that had jumped in front of the train. It was a long job, but I got the results back last week. Though it confused me. The flesh was taken approximately 3 days before the mass suicide. 54 girls jumped, but only 53 survived. As you know, Im Jinah was the sole survivor, so of course, her flesh would be in that roll. To prove that our theory is true, we took a sample of her DNA and matched it with the last piece of flesh. It was a 100% positive match." He tapped his finger on the photograph. "But we had her body examined the day we found her and no scars of wounds were found whatsoever."
"You musta missed a spot, hun." Came Taeyeon's reply.
Baekhyun shook his head. "I thought so too, so we had her checked again the other day and the results are all the same. We know it's her skin, but we don't know where it came from. And between you and me, Taeyeon, but.." He leaned closer, "I get a bad feeling about that girl. I-It's like she sends chills down my spine."
The two sit there in silence for the next few minutes, letting their thoughts and theories whoosh through their minds all at once like a brutal tidal wave hitting the shores of Thailand.
"You're right, kid. Something's not right about her. I'll try to look into things ma'self." Taeyeon was serious now, a trait the young Chief had never seen before in the reckless woman sitting in front of him. "That's fine, I'll need all the help I can get. Don't tell Jaejoong— or anyone about this. Not even Chanyeol. And one more thing," He pulled his gun out of his back pocket and placed it in front of the woman. "Take this, and be careful. You never know what will happen around that girl."
A small flicker of amusement flashed through Taeyeon's hazel eyes as she pushed the chief's gun back to him. "You're handing over a pistol to a convicted terrorist?" Her eyebrow rises, "I'm sure I can protect ma'self around some silly schoolgirl."
* * *
22:47, Location Unknown.
You never forget your first kill, the same way you never quite get over your first love. Most of the time Kim Jongin likes to think that his life started to day the man with the horn-rimmed glasses found him and dubbed him as 'Kai', but the fact of the matter is that his first kill belonged to Kim Jongin.
"It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, it's either kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten." The man explains. He takes the young boy's hand and places a basic pistol in-between his fingers. It's heavier than he expected it would be, that feeling of holding someone's life and death in his clumsy little hands. The man with the horn-rimmed glasses slowly mold Jongin's bony fingers around the grip, gently pulling his forefinger onto the trigger. The weapon is icy and sends chills down the young boy's spine.
"Remember to keep a tight grip, keep your back straight, and use both hands or the rebound will knock you out." The man explains with a faint smirk dancing on his lips. The boy nods, his eyes fixated on his target. The man moves away and before long it's only Jongin standing in the middle of the room.
The man is struggling and crying out behind his gag, but when Jongin looks into his eyes, he sees it. The dimming desperation. The resignation that he's going to get killed by a fifteen-year-old kid. But Jongin sees no penance, no regrets, he knows what he wants to see— that man gagging on his own tainted blood.
Jongin pulls the trigger, and with a loud bang followed by a high-pitched scream,the bullet's found it's way into the mans left jaw. The impact smashes open half of his face, and if he looks closely he can see half of a tongue dangling out. There are broken blood-soaked teeth dropping down the front of his shirt.
Second shot hits his left lung. The sound of the gunshot is louder. They're different, the sound of a bullet hitting flesh and the sound of a bullet hitting a can. The kid smiles because he knows that he's slowly reaching his target spot.
The third shot is what takes it. Three millimeters from the center of his heart. "Bingo." He hears the man hum under his breath. This is the shot that sprays a gallon of blood over the wall behind the victim, but there's no screaming this time. Just panting. Proud, confident panting from the boy that had his first kill.
Jongin lowers the gun. The smell of gunpowder settles in the air, metallic with a touch of putrid blood. The man tugs the gun out of his hands. They feel stiff, frozen.
The human wreckage in front of him is ugly, but he can't look away. So this is what revenge feels like, Jongin thinks. Repulsive. Empty? This is what he's been chasing after for the last six years. A broken sack of flesh and bones. Is that it? If you've already achieved the goal of your life and the one thing you've ever wanted at the age of ffifteen, then what's left?
"You've got good aim," The man says, checking the cartridge with a smile on his lips. "How do you feel about making a new friend?"
"I don't do friends," Jongin is saying, but he's not walking away.
If life is a game you've already won, then what's left? Do you kill off all the other pawns just for the thrill of it? He still doesn't exactly know why he choose to join that guy, he was the one that tainted his innocent. Exposed him to world of sin and bloodshed. It's not a world a mere kid of fifteen should see. "Don't scowl," He says, "I'm teaching you how to survive. How to be a man. So that the next time someone tries to hurt someone you care about, you won't be the one shamelessly hiding behind the rubble."
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