A/N: Final chapter! Read to the bottom for a longer Author's Note.

May 2066.

She managed to not let it show when she was in the store buying groceries, and at the counter where the old woman who reminded her in that way that people of a similar age often do of Irene, or perhaps Irene five years ago, and when she took the two bags and paid and thanked the cashier and smiled at the man pushing the trolleys into the trolleyshed outside she was still hiding it, and all the way up the hill past a couple of kids riding the curb on their bikes and a woman selling icelollies out of a streetcart like a vendor from times of old and past the dogs with their lapping tongues aloll in the baking afternoon heat where the dust all dry rose like chalk along the sidewalk and the pale dogwhelk sun sat rigid at the rim of the world, and all the way until she was by the gate with her hand on the latch and that hand trembling, and her legs weak, and the bags shifting down her around her wrist, and her breathing heavy and laboured, as if she had walked the hill a half-dozen times and then back down again, stood there at the gateway to some other world beyond, like a wandering pilgrim perched between the inner sanctum of the house and the dark beyond, the outer dark, the dark just forever, forever. She managed to hide it when she unlocked the door and went in and set the bags down in the kitchen and cleaned the glasses off the table in the livingroom and went upstairs to check on Irene, still asleep in bed, asleep all day, the half-wavering and quivering wobble of her chest, the pneumatic heaving wail of her breath while she sat there pale and cold and unmoving, obscene as a ghost in her thin shift, tucked under the covers, her skin yellowed and leathery and so very fragile.

She managed to keep it hidden while she placed a kiss so gentle and tender and loving on Irene’s forehead and pushed the hair away from her face and poured her a fresh glass of water and the TV at the end of the bed and went back downstairs to put away the groceries. She managed to hold it in as told Irene she was going out for a while and she would be back soon, and as she shucked on her shoes and opened the door and went out into the dry white heat of the afternoon while the sidewalk smoked in the thin eye of the sun. She managed to keep it hidden until she was down on the beach watching the tide up and roll out and flare and dip and fade and disappear into the pale twilight like something come up out of a dream and she walked along the sand wrongfooted and stumbling like a drunk or lost in her own interminable pain and there in the hollow dusk with the sky in forks of grey and the rain soon coming she lay down with the sand pressed hard and coarse and shell-like against her face and then and only then did she finally cry. She cried for a long, long time.

*  *  *

Coming up again in the dark she felt the cold in the wake of the steaming day. There was no warmth in that wind anymore. She pushed the gate to and went in and upstairs. Irene was asleep again. The TV was still playing and the curtains were not drawn so she went over and drew them and turned the TV off and sat there on the end of the bed watching the small and leptosomic form inhabiting the space where once another Irene had laid, and this Otherirene still loving and still strong and still able to utter more than a sentence at a time without losing her breath or coughing wet spittle into the palm of her hand or wheezing through the paperthin wimple of her lungs, and this Irene now fineboned and insignificant and barely there at all. Barely even anything. She ran a hand over the fine linen bump of Irene’s leg and then she lay down and soon she was weeping again, weeping and begging and pleading with the world for something, for anything, just give me this, just give me more time, give her more time, do something, do anything. If you can hear me do anything. Did you hear me? Can you still? ing do something.

*  *  *

By the end of the month she could feel it coming. So could Irene. There was a certain air to her that wasn’t there before, like something inhabiting her body that was new and different. As if she could tell by the very essence of herself that her time was coming to a close. And it was. By the start of the next month there was barely any part of her there at all and on the morning of the third of June 2066 she passed away in the bed she had slept in for more than forty years. For all the day Seulgi lay there next to her and there was no sunlight and if someone were to see her there maybe they would think she shared the same fate and in the evening it began to rain. She lay there Irene’s cheek. Her hair fell over her face and she pushed it back. Irene never liked it when her hair was in her eyes. She never liked it. As the rain fell she listened. She would not move. Maybe Irene would wake up. Maybe she would open her eyes. Maybe maybe please. Come on. It's not hard. Just do it. Give me something. Give me anything. I love you. I love you too much to let you go. I can’t do it, Irene. Dear God I can't.

*  *  *

There were six people at the funeral and she was not one of them. One of them was a wheelchair-bound woman perhaps ninety years old and there were two other women about the same age as Irene was and a man in a creased suit too big for him and then two others. She didn’t recognise any of them but perhaps they would her. Perhaps they had seen her before some fifty years ago or near as makes little difference and in truth the statistical chance of such unfortunate circumstances was approaching zero but what if? What then. If they saw her. If they knew her. So.

She was buried in a grove by the end lot of the graveyard on the outskirts of town not twenty minutes from where they had spent four decades together. Her headstone was a simple one. The celebrant stood by the head of the rectangle marked out for Irene and he said something and from such a distance as she was Seulgi heard none of it. None of anything save the rain. It had been raining all day. She watched them bow their heads like cattle as he delivered some wordless sermon or blessing and maybe they were crying or maybe it was just the rain. In the sallow plaster light they looked like waxwork figures. Or silhouettes of phantoms attending some holy incorporeal ceremony. She listened to the rain, she leaned heavy on the tree. The men-at-service stood up the rain in their silk gloves and their black suits like stone gargoyles. She unscrewed the cap of the bottle and tossed it into the mulch and drank until the whiskey in ran with fire and she was wincing and it hurt and it hurt so bad, it hurt more than anything had ever hurt before, and the celebrant with his old and rainsodden book of words said his last and the men-at-service took up the coffin and lowered it steadily into the ground and then like it had never been there at all it was gone, and all that remained in that desolate space was the rotten image of the distant silent sorrowing.

She waited until they were done and gone and it was still raining and then she left the bottle by the bottom of the tree and staggered up half blind and drunk and crying and black of heart and empty and weeping and crying and snotnosed and runnyfaced and ruined in the rain and still crying and pleading and losing her footing in the mud and with her hair matted about her face and the wild yammering of her heart beating out an inordinate rhythm and the raging bloodbeat pumping hot in her ears and still crying and she sat there bending into the soiled ground, the filth cold and awful against her chest and on her hands. And she wept and held out her hands and clasped them in prayer and she turned her face to the grey and atavistic world and she said, Please. Oh God please give her back. Give her back to me please I need her. I love her please. Just give me this. Just let me have this. Don’t I deserve it? Don’t I deserve something? Anything at all.

*  *  *

Four weeks later the house was sold and she left Jeju with no intention of ever coming back. She said her goodbyes to the plot where Irene remained buried and always would be. With her things she took a boat back to the mainland and there she let the days take her. In the long months she went like a dreamer. In Suncheon she spent four months as a contract worker on a construction site where she worked fifty-four hours a week for minimum wage in a yard mixing concrete with men a quarter her age and yet looking twice it. In Hwasun she roomed with a girl just out from university not twenty-three years of age and they became friends until one day two months later the girl came back to find Seulgi gone and no inclination as to where or why and that was that. She worked out in Damyang and in Gurye and then in Namwon she settled in a small place away from all the world where she could hope to die alone and in peace but there was no peace nor death nor solitude to wrestle her from the vice of her own insober agony and each day the pain of being without Irene grew worse and in July of 2067 she fell in with an old man whose name she did not know in a small lodging near Ganwoldo.

She asked nothing of him and he did not ask why she had come bearing only meagre possessions about her person and a small lockbox carrying in it the contents he would never see nor would anyone save her. It was a two-bedroom lodge and the nearest house was four miles north. And just the coastline to keep them company. One day Seulgi asked why he lived alone there in a two-bedroom house and he told her his wife had passed six years prior and Seulgi excused herself and when she came back he saw that she had been crying.

He had about a dozen head of sheep and twice that in chickens and she worked as a farmhand. He offered her a half of his pension but she refused any money. She shelled corn for the chickens, she fed and shaved the sheep. She spent six months there and they spoke not more than a word a day and that was all they were.

At night she would go out to the beach and watch the tails of falling stars arc out of the darkness like planarians and each night without fail meteors rain down the sky with some quotidian aptitude as if bled from the very fabric of the universe itself. As if holding in their immensity some truer meaning, or sacred order. Some secret shared by all things and which spoke of great mysteries of the world. In the west the islands quivered in the dark and the stark black silhouette of the mountains rose against the sky like semaphores. Each of these nights against each of these moons she studied the stars in their myriad scrambled patterns like runic inscriptions stencilled into the ceiling of the world and she tried to make something of them but all she could fathom was darkness and darker still the dark of the night where all was cold and dark and without reprieve.

In the day she worked and in the evening she sat around the logfire in the livingroom and listened while the old man talked of his life and of his understanding of the world as he so saw it. One evening she asked him what he thought of the world and its purpose, or of the purpose of man within it. He told her there was no purpose but man’s own and only man can carve that purpose into the blank slate of all he inhabits, for existence without such is no existence at all but a journey through some other thing that was not quite life. That man makes his own destiny and no other can change that for man is man’s own suzerain, his sovereign where no other can possibly ever be. That there is no set purpose for each man must make his own and in this way there can never be any solitary thing upon which all men can agree, and ultimately only each person can decide their own way forward. And they must do so. They must. Because each without their own guiding hand is the same as each without sight, or without hearing. The whole world hears or none do. Each eye is sacred such as each path is the same. No journey is predetermined or proscribed from any immediate event and each can be altered and changed but never can they be stopped or dictated by some other hand but each man’s own. That the truest and greatest purpose to decide your own purpose.

‘What if you don’t know?’ she said.

‘If you don’t know.’

‘If you don’t know what you want to do. What your purpose is.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well. You’ll find it someday. Everyone does.’

‘Not me.’

‘Everyone.’

Then she asked him what he thought the greatest evil of all was and could it be forgiven and to this he told her in a quiet and refrained voice that he believed the sincerest and most terrible force of evil to be forgetfulness. That to forget things is the ultimate sin because it cannot be forgiven nor washed clean because there in the act of forgetting does one’s sin become obsolete entirely, so that by forgetting you remove yourself immediately of all responsibility. He told her he believed that nothing is ever remembered. Things are just forgotten. You can forget even the littlest of things and it always matters. It always counts up to something bigger no matter what. That all the world would be forgotten someday, each man and woman and their place and the way of all things, and the creatures and the plants and the earth itself. It would all be gone in the minds of men because each mind shares one commonality that tethers them all and it is memory. And over time this like all other things begins to fade. And then you are left with nothing.

Seulgi asked him if he thought then that time was truly the greatest of evils, and not forgetfulness. That forgetfulness in its supreme form was merely an asset of time, and the passage of time. He said no. Because while both time and the loss of memory are inevitable you cannot attempt to fight time. You cannot. You can hold on to your memory for a long while but time is just time. It doesn’t run out or disappear or ever end, it just is. It just always will be. Time is the great equaliser of all things. It is the judge against which all the universe must answer, and be trialled. And must always be so. Finally she asked whether he thought one person could see too much of time and he looked at her for longer than he had ever looked at her before and then with a sort of great solemnity in his eyes he told her the food was getting cold and they should finish before it tastes any worse.

In the night just before Seulgi turned in he knocked on her door and she told him to enter. He was carrying a small bundle of her clothes under one arm and in the doorway stooped there between the inner dark and the thin and yellowing hallway light beyond he looked like a golem. ‘Brought you your clothes,’ he said. ‘Washed them before I forgot.’

She sat upright in bed and set her book down on the dresser table while he came over and placed them by her feet and turned and went on out. Halfway to the door she called to him and he stopped and turned and looked at her with something she couldn’t quite place. Like regret or understanding or something alien entirely to her.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for putting up with me.’

‘That’s alright by me.’

‘I mean it. You didn’t ever have to.’

‘That’s alright,’ he said. ‘You just get some sleep now.’

‘I wouldn’t have put up with someone like me.’

‘You just get some sleep.’

He turned to leave and she called to him again. ‘What if I found it?’ she said. ‘My purpose. What if I already found it?’

‘Well,’ he said.

‘And then I lost it.’

‘Well. You’ve got to find it again.’

‘What if I can’t. What if it’s gone?’

‘Then you find another purpose. That’s what you do.’

‘Is it?’

He nodded slowly, calmly.

‘What if there isn’t any other purpose? What if that’s all there is for me?’

‘There’s always another purpose,’ he said.

‘Do you think?’

‘I know it.’

‘I don’t think there is.’

‘There’s always something else. That’s just how it is.’

‘You’re not lying to me.’

He smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not lying to you. You just get some sleep now.’

He turned again to leave and she called to him a final time. When he looked back she was crying. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Don’t get all upset now.’

‘Thank you so much.’

‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘It’s all just fine by me.’

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Phew, okay! Finally finished :)   

Took a little longer than I anticipated but I'm glad I sat down and wrote it because I loved it (like most things I write). It was about as heavy as a lot of my other stuff but in different ways (not as dark, but more melancholy I guess? Or just straight-up sad haha) and I apologise if anyone caught feelings from this but it's the sort of stuff I love to write. But no fear! I'll be writing fluffy stuff again soon as I tend to often do, to balance the dark with the light I guess :)

To everyone who's read this far: A huge, HUGE thank you!!! You're all amazing as usual. I can't thank you all enough for the fantastic ongoing support, I read every single comment and I love feedback both positive and negative so please leave a comment on this chapter/the story as a whole discussing it or giving feedback or whatever. Love you guys <3

I also want to give a big shoutout to the Shoes of a Unicorn Writing Contest for being so awesome and accepting this (very long) story as an entry to the competition. There's a big lack of good writing competitions and contests in this community so it's great to see such a dedicated and well-judged one :) Go check it out if you haven't already!

As for the future: I'll probably get around to finishing Under the Neon Sun at some point, but I'm not sure when yet. I haven't updated it since July, and I've kinda run out of inspiration/patience/love with the Cybperpunk/mystery genre for now and the immediate future, but we'll see what happens. I hate leaving stories unfinished, as I've done once before with a fic on this sight, so I'll end up doing it at some point. I'll also be posting occasional stuff again in my Red Velvet One-Shots Collection, so go check that out if you haven't already :)

As for major stories, I'll end up starting another one soon knowing me haha. Let me know if you enjoy my writing style and want to see more of it, since I love feedback of all kinds like I've said.

Anyway, I'm rambling etc. Thank you again for the continued support, means the world to me <3    :)