[3rd person pov]
The sunfish tasted like river mud and copper, but Seung-ho chewed anyway because his father was watching him with that rare, tentative smile—the one that only surfaced during their excursions away from the apartment. They sat on the concrete embankment of the Han, fishing rods propped against rusted railings, the city's hum distant enough to mistake for wind.
"Good?" his father asked.
"Yeah," Seung-ho said. "Good."
He was nineteen. His military service loomed six months away, a temporary salvation he'd been counting down since he turned eighteen. That afternoon, with the water lapping at the pylons and his father's shoulder brushing his, he allowed himself to believe that this was what fathers and sons were supposed to be. Quiet. Uncomplicated. Existing in the same space without the weight of unspoken debts.
They packed the gear at dusk. The subway ride back to Incheon was silent, but it was the silence of shared exhaustion, not the suffocating vacuum of their apartment.
The front door clicked shut. Seung-ho was still smiling, faintly, when he kicked off his shoes in the genkan.
"Did you have fun?" His mother stood in the kitchen doorway, drying a ceramic plate with a towel that had frayed edges. She wore the lavender cardigan she always wore on Saturdays.
"Yeah," Seung-ho said. "We caught six. Threw them back."
His father slipped past them both, heading straight for the study. The door closed with a soft click that Seung-ho, even at nineteen, recognized as surrender.
His mother set the plate down. She approached, her slippers whispering against the floorboards. She smelled of barley tea and the jasmine soap she kept by the bathroom sink. When she placed her hand on his shoulder, Seung-ho felt the shudder begin in his spine—a seismic tremor he'd learned to hide but never suppress.
"It's my turn." she said softly.
She said it the same way she'd said it since he was fourteen, as if the word could sanitize the act, stretch it into something maternal and nourishing. Seung-ho looked toward the study door. The light beneath it flicked off. His father was already pretending to sleep.
"Mom," Seung-ho said. His voice cracked.
She tilted her head, hurt flickering across her face—the practiced injury of a woman who believed she was giving love he was too selfish to accept. "Just an hour," she whispered. "Then you can sleep."
He went. He always went. Not because he was weak, but because the calculus of survival in that apartment had taught him that resistance extended the hours, whereas compliance at least offered a clock.
That night, staring at the ceiling while she arranged the pillows, Seung-ho thought about the sunfish. How they'd fought the hook, gills flaring, before surrendering to the air. How his father had cupped them gently before releasing them back into the brown water.
He wondered if his father would ever cup him that way.
***
Nine years later, Seung-ho sat on the floor of his studio in Guro, the diary open on the low coffee table. The number he'd just written—247—bled slightly into the paper. He capped the pen and set it down with precise, economical movements.
He was twenty-eight. The therapy had worked alot. His friends—Jae-min and the other guys from his university cram school—had noticed the way he flinched from casual touch, the way he'd disappear during group dinners when the conversation turned to girlfriends. They'd reported their suspicions to the university counselor in his second year. The investigation had been swift, humiliating, and ultimately liberating. His mother was institutionalized; his father's hard drive revealed search histories that explained the retreat into the study, the complicit silences. The court records called it non-intervention. Seung-ho, in the private language of his recovery, called it something else.
He wasn't broken. That was the enlightenment the doctors had guided him toward, the plateau he'd reached after three years of cognitive restructuring. He understood his mother's illness. He understood his father's perverse relief at being cuckolded by his own wife, the way it absolved him of masculine responsibility. Seung-ho had even forgiven them, in the abstract way one forgives a natural disaster. The resentment was there—an ember that never fully cooled—but it didn't consume him. He didn't cut himself. He didn't wear black or write poetry about razors. He simply existed in the aftermath.
He'd tried relationships. A woman from his office, Hee-jin, kind and patient. A man he'd met at a language exchange, Min-woo, who'd been gentle. But the moment intimacy turned physical, Seung-ho's skin remembered. His first kiss, his first touch, his first everything—stolen not by a teenage fumble or a sweet mistake, but by his mother's lavender cardigan and his father's retreating footsteps. The body keeps score, his therapist had said. And Seung-ho's body refused to learn new rules.
He closed the diary. The leather was soft from handling. He didn't need to read the earlier entries. He remembered the progression: the initial confusion at fourteen, the dawning horror at sixteen, the mechanical dissociation of nineteen. The entries after the arrest were sparse. Date. Number. Physical state. Then, in the last year, nothing but the count.
Seung-ho stood. His knees popped. He moved to the balcony door, sliding it open. November air flooded the room, carrying the smell of exhaust and burnt chestnuts from the street vendor below. He didn't own much. A bed. The coffee table. A wardrobe of neutral-colored clothes. He'd given notice at his accounting firm last week, transferred his savings to Jae-min's younger sister's college fund, and left a package of his mother's pottery—her one true art—at the hospital's reception desk.
He wasn't sad. That was the crucial thing. He wasn't the weeping, traumatized boy the social workers had expected. He was simply finished. The mathematics of his life had reached zero. He had experienced what he was capable of experiencing, and further existence felt like reading the same page repeatedly, hoping the words would rearrange into a different story.
He prepared the rope with methodical care, the way he'd once prepared tax spreadsheets. Precision mattered. He didn't want to be found by a neighbor, didn't want to burden the landlord with a biohazard. He chose the hour carefully—3:00 AM, when the city's pulse was lowest.
As he stepped onto the chair, balancing with the grace of a man who had made peace with gravity, he thought of his father. Not the man on the riverbank—that version had been a mirage—but the man who'd closed the study door. The man who'd let his wife consume their son because watching was easier than leaving.
Seung-ho's final thought, as the pressure built and the darkness encroached, was not a scream. It was a whisper, curious and almost gentle, directed at the ghost of the sunfish afternoons.
How could you stand by and let your son be raped by his own wife?
Then, the dark.
***
He opened his eyes.
Not gasping. Not struggling. Simply opening them, as if waking from a nap. There was no floor, no ceiling, no sense of horizon. Just a gray void that seemed to absorb the concept of sight itself.
Seung-ho floated. Or stood. The distinction felt irrelevant.
"You died," a voice said.
It had no gender, no direction. It simply vibrated in the space where his bones should have been.
"I know," Seung-ho said. His voice sounded the same—calm, slightly husky, unaffected.
"You refuse to cry," the voice observed. "No pleading. No bargaining."
"There's nothing to bargain for."
The void pulsed. It might have been laughter.
"You are scheduled for reincarnation," the voice said. "Cycle 4,719. A different continent. Better parents. You'll retain no memory, of course. Clean slate."
Seung-ho shook his head, though he wasn't sure if the motion translated. "No."
"No?"
"I want to pass on. Dissolve. Whatever comes after this—I decline."
The voice made a sound like wind chimes in a hurricane. It took Seung-ho a moment to recognize it as amusement.
"No," the voice repeated.
"I'm done," Seung-ho said. "Let me rest."
"You think enlightenment earns you oblivion?" The voice drew closer, though distance remained meaningless. "You think because you processed your trauma, because you forgave your monsters, you get to choose the exit?"
Seung-ho felt something for the first time since the rope—a flicker of irritation. "I get to choose peace."
"You get to choose nothing," the voice said, and now it carried weight, a pressure against his non-existent chest. "You don't understand yet. You think that was the story? The abuse, the diary, the noble suicide? That was the prologue, Seung-ho. You're not escaping. You're being recycled."
Seung-ho tried to recoil, but movement was denied. "I refuse."
The voice laughed again—fuller, warmer, terrifying in its familiarity. It sounded, for a dizzying instant, like his mother's voice on a good morning, like his father's laugh by the river.
"No," the voice said.
Darkness rushed in, not as an absence but as a substance, filling his mouth, his lungs, his thoughts. Seung-ho felt himself being pulled, stretched, rewritten. He tried to hold onto the number—247, the final count—but it dissolved like sugar in rain.
The last thing he heard before the void took his consciousness was the voice, soft and final:
"Wake up—"
The ceiling was wrong.
Seung-ho opened his eyes. Not the gray void. Not his studio. A ceiling of cheap fiberboard, water-stained in one corner, with a single light fixture buzzing at the edge of his vision. He lay on a futon that smelled of mildew and old cotton, covered by a blanket thin enough to see through.
He sat up. The room spun, then settled. Small. A studio apartment, maybe six tatami mats total. A kitchenette with a single gas burner. A mini-fridge humming against the wall. Through the balcony window, he saw concrete and neon—the angular architecture of a Japanese city, not Seoul.
Seung-ho looked at his hands. They were small. Clean. The fingers short, the nails bitten down. He touched his face—smooth chin, round cheeks, no stubble. He stood, and the floor was closer than it should have been. He walked to the mirror on the bathroom door.
A boy stared back. Twelve, maybe thirteen. Dark hair cut in a bowl shape, hanging over eyes that held too much weight for the face. Seung-ho recognized the bone structure, softened by youth. It was him, or had been him, decades ago.
He pressed his palm against the glass. Cool. Real.
He moved to the balcony. Slid the door open. The air smelled of exhaust and yakitori smoke, of ozone and something sweeter—sakura, maybe, though it was the wrong season. Below, the street moved with people wearing uniforms that looked like hero support gear. A woman walked by with four arms, shopping bags dangling from each hand. A man hovered at the bus stop, reading a newspaper three feet off the ground, his legs trailing blue fire.
Quirks.
Seung-ho closed his eyes. He searched inside himself, the way you check for a toothache or a heartbeat. Nothing. No hum in the blood, no pressure behind the eyes, no strange weight in the bones. Just meat and breath and the ordinary ache of a body that had been sleeping too long.
Quirkless, then.
He went back inside. Found a school bag by the door—navy blue, with a name tag he couldn't read yet. The calendar on the wall showed April. He'd have three years until high school. Three years until the hero course entrance exams.
Seung-ho sat on the floor. The tatami was worn smooth in patches. He was alone. No parents this time—no lavender cardigan, no study door closing. Just him, a twelve-year-old body, and a world where ninety percent of people had superpowers.
He thought of the movies. The comics. The ones he'd watched in his past life, sneaking DVDs when his mother was out. A hero in a green wetsuit. A teenager with no powers who refused to stay down. He'd watched that film seventeen times the year he turned sixteen, watching the protagonist get beaten and stand up again, beaten and stand up again.
Kick-Ass.
Seung-ho smiled. It wasn't happy, wasn't sad. Just a decision.
"Kick-Ass," he said aloud. His voice cracked, high and unsteady, but he said it again. "I'm going to be Kick-Ass."
He stood. He stripped off the oversized t-shirt he'd woken in—some kind of hero agency promotional shirt, too big for his frame. He found a notebook in the school bag, tore out the used pages, and wrote on the fresh sheet: Day 1.
He dropped to the floor. Push-ups. His arms shook after five. He did five more. Then ten squats. Then he stood in front of the mirror and threw punches at his reflection, slow and awkward, remembering the boxing gym he'd walked past in his old life, the sound of gloves hitting bags.
[Ding]