lay your head to sleep, breathe deeper
lay your head to sleep, breathe deeper
infinite, sunggyu/hoya
pg-13 (mention of drug abuse/addiction, use of iv and needles), 10,236w
inception au. howon's job is to recover secrets, not people, but for sunggyu, he will always make an exception.
--written for seasonthreee 2015. this version has been edited.
--soojung = baby soul; boa = kim boa of spica; minhyuk = b-bomb
ao3 mirror
"It's my brother," the client is saying; "half-brother," he amends quickly, his eyes darting to the sleekly suited, sour-faced assistant next to him. The client, Kim Myungsoo, is young and almost uncannily handsome, and dressed like he has no idea how much his clothes are worth, which Howon supposes is why the agency is entertaining him at all. "He's become addicted to sleeping drugs."
"What kind of drugs?" Soojung asks, not pausing in her note-taking. "Zolpidem? Buspirone?"
Kim Myungsoo's forehead wrinkles. "You know," he says. "The stuff you guys use. For the dreams."
"Somnacin," says Howon, and Myungsoo nods enthusiastically. It's technically not what the agency uses - they make their own - but it's the common brand name for the dream-sharing sedative. "He could've picked something easier to find. Where does he get it?"
"I don't know."
"It doesn't matter," says Jungryul from his desk. Howon raises an eyebrow, but says nothing. "The point is, you don't want him taking it anymore, and neither does your father or his company's board of directors."
Myungsoo slouches, looking at his hands. "He's been asleep for three days now," he says. Then he sits up, speaking carefully. "I heard that extraction can be used to find out why someone is taking drugs, so you can fight it. You can do that, right?"
"For Somnacin addiction? No." Jungryul leans back in his chair and shakes his head. "For something that strong, the person has to want to come out of it on their own. And there's only one way to do that: not extraction, but inception."
At the last word, Soojung's pen pauses on the page, and she and Jungryul both look at Howon. Howon doesn't flinch. He'd had a feeling this was coming. Even if Jungryul hadn't said the word out loud, it was in the way he'd sat listening to Myungsoo, and even before that, when he'd told Howon on the phone, This is something you'll be very interested in.
Myungsoo looks from Jungryul's face, to Soojung's, to Howon. "Inception?"
"What it sounds like. Planting an idea in someone's subconscious. It'll cost more, of course, but it's more effective."
"When it works," says Howon. "It's like transplant surgery. The mind could reject the idea, or it could mutate."
Jungryul smiles and clears his throat. "Well, that's why you're here. Agent Lee is our top extraction operative," he adds to Myungsoo. "But he's familiar with inception. And, I believe, he's someone your relative would recognize, and trust."
The hairs on Howon's neck stand up at this, but he keeps his face neutral. "Would I recognize him too?" he asks Jungryul.
"I believe so. It's Kim Sunggyu." Jungryul says this with the same too-casual tone he'd used on the phone, like he expects his words to have a big reaction. Howon keeps his mouth still, not wanting to give Jungryul that satisfaction, but his nostrils flare as he inhales for a long second. Myungsoo looks at him curiously, but instead of telling him any more, Jungryul says, "So, how much are you looking to invest in this? Put another way, how much is his recovery worth to you?"
Myungsoo blinks and turns away from Howon. "Thirty million won," he says, with the conclusive quickness of someone who's been coached to give this figure in advance. He glances sideways to his assistant.
Jungryul shakes his head. "Three hundred million," he says, kindly but firmly. "And that's a fraction of what a freelancer would ask for." He smiles. "If your father objects, tell him it's cheaper than bribing a hospital to stay silent."
"Oh, it's the board that would object," Myungsoo says, before he can stop himself. Howon snorts loudly, and Myungsoo's assistant frowns at him.
"Well, there's some room to negotiate. Some." Jungryul gets up from his chair, and Soojung also rises to her feet. Howon stands more slowly. "It will take two weeks to set up, but we'll be sure to keep you informed along the way."
Myungsoo bows. "Thank you." Soojung leads him and his assistant out, with one glance at Howon before she takes them out the door of the office.
Jungryul and Howon sit in silence for a minute as Jungryul shuffles through files on his desk. Then Howon says, "Sunggyu doesn't have a brother."
"Maybe he just never told you about it," Jungryul says, barely glancing up. "It doesn't sound like he's that close to them, if they would rather hire dreamshare than have him be publicly known as a family member."
"With someone like him, you either hire dreamshare or you hire an assassin."
Jungryul hums. "Would you prefer to just shoot him?"
Howon shifts in his chair. "Odds are better on that than on inception," he says. "But this isn't about what I'd prefer."
"No," Jungryul says, with the same tone he'd used with Kim Myungsoo, "it's not." He puts the files down and looks up at Howon. "I need names for your team. Four people total. We need to get them under contract before end of day tomorrow." Howon stands, bows ninety degrees, and exits the office.
---
Five years ago, Howon had been part of a team, one of the ten or so small crews of freelance extractors that hovered around Seoul's underground. He'd been drafted into it by a guy outside of a bar in Jongno, after he'd watched Howon beat up a group of drunkards who were picking fights, using the surrounding garbage cans and electricity poles to his advantage to hold them off. "Come by tomorrow," the guy had said, handing Howon a navy blue card. "I need you for a job. Pays a hundred thousand won." The back of the card had an address in Sungin-dong printed in white, and the front of the card read, Coma Beat Dreamcade.
He had vaguely heard of dreamcade fighting before, some underground craze imported from Japan, but the concept was too weird for him to want to understand. But in those days, he'd had nothing to lose, especially not for that sum of money. When he arrived the next day, the room was dark, and the rows of cots were empty except for two people, one man and one woman. Both were asleep and hooked up by IV to a machine being operated by the person he'd met the day before. The man was watching the sleepers with his eyebrows furrowed anxiously, as if he was expecting something, even though neither of them were moving. When Howon came in, the noise of his footsteps made the man look up. He was younger-looking than Howon expected.
"You came," he said. Then he stood and bowed formally. "My name is Kim Sunggyu. Have you ever shared your dreams before?"
Sometimes Howon gets nostalgic for those days, for the four of them stumbling to the bar every week with their arms around each other's shoulders, too wired after dreaming to feel sleepy. But he prefers the way it is now that he's under the agency, where the personnel changes with every job he takes. In the end, it's better to keep the relationship between partners neutral. It keeps him from getting complacent and therefore sloppy, and it keeps things from getting too complicated and therefore sloppy.
In an ideal world, Howon would work alone, but in his line of work that's impossible. An extraction can be done with just two people if necessary. For an inception, all the bases need to be covered in order for everything to be right: dream architecture, subconsciousness simulation, drug chemistry, and a backup, just in case any of the previous things aren't right. That had been his role in his first team, not a specialist, but someone who could fill in any gap. Sunggyu had called him the team's puzzle piece.
Two days after the meeting with the client, Howon meets the other three members of his inception team in Sungin-dong, near a hardware store hidden up in the hills behind Dongdaemun. It's not everyone that he asked for, but as his contract made clear, the agency always has final say on the lineup. At least they've given him Jang Dongwoo, who he's worked with before on a few extraction jobs. Like Howon, he does everything, but unlike Howon, his methods are unpredictable. It had thrown Howon off at first, but quickly he realized that was Dongwoo's most valuable asset.
After their first job together Dongwoo had woken up, squeezed Howon's shoulder, and said, "Good teamwork." That had given Howon a chill up his spine, but fortunately, Dongwoo otherwise stayed so pointedly, cheerfully blank that their relationship stayed just that - good teamwork.
The other two are less familiar to him: Lee Sungjong, an SNU art history student recruited from the dreamcade circuit, and Nam Woohyun, a forger by trade with enough experience to have that slippery, charming demeanour that Howon immediately dislikes. They're not great, but they're what he's got.
"Unfortunately, the place doesn't really exist anymore, but I thought you'd like to see it anyway," he tells the other three as they walk into the tiny hardware store. The old woman sitting at the counter in the back barely blinks as Howon leads the four of them through the store and out into the alley behind it, not even minding the small gym bag Howon has over one shoulder.
"Is this it?" Sungjong asks hesitantly, looking around.
"No," Howon says. He hefts the gym bag. "Come on."
He takes them down the alley and pushes open a door so old that it refuses to move at first, and rakes lines through the dust and dirt on the ground when it does. The staircase behind it is dark, and once he's down the stairs Howon can only make out the door at the bottom because of the light coming from behind him. He enters the old four-digit code, and he raises his eyebrows when the lock chirps three notes and whirs open, counter to his expectation.
His heart suspends its beating as he opens the door, and for a moment, he thinks he might find Boa and Minhyuk sitting up on the cots, restlessly shooting the shit while they wait, and Sunggyu's face lit from beneath by the dull glow of the PASIV device. But the cots are abandoned, and the room is empty.
"So this is where the magic happens, huh?" says Dongwoo, looking around. He kicks at an empty sedative cartridge on the ground and it rattles over the cement floor. "Happened."
Sungjong yanks open one of the blackout curtains to light up the room, then briskly tries to fan away the dust that comes up. "Why did it close? There's practically a waiting list for every dreamcade in the city these days. You could make some good money if it were open."
"This place didn't need to turn a profit," Howon responds, setting the gym bag down at the foot of one of the rows of cots. "We made enough money doing the other stuff."
"The other stuff," Woohyun echoes. He shakes out the sheet on one of the cots and climbs onto it. "How'd you get your marks to come to a creepy place like this?"
"This wasn't where we did that, at least not all of the time. This was our home base, and that's why I brought you all here." Howon stops pacing, and the others all instinctively go still too, watching him. His next breath feels deeper, relaxed; maybe there's something to this team after all. "An inception, you all know, needs to be done in levels. If we can make him believe he's starting here, even if he knows that it's not real, convincing him to go into the next levels will be much easier."
"Genius," says Dongwoo. Howon shifts on his feet uncomfortably at his enthusiasm.
Sungjong is still looking around, holding up his phone to illuminate the darker corners of the room: the control booth near the front door, the American-style jukebox that Sunggyu brought in for decoration. "Has it always looked like this? I mean, will he recognize it just like this?"
Howon crosses his arms. "How much can you do on your own?"
"Well, I can clean up the dust, but I'd have to make up the rest."
"Why don't you open up your bag and show us what it used to look like?" Woohyun says to Howon. When Howon scowls at him, he winks.
Howon kneels down and unzips the gym bag he's brought, and takes out a small black hard case. Inside is a travel-size PASIV device, one of the agency's. Sungjong takes a step back when Howon opens the case, and Dongwoo starts to laugh.
The setup goes quickly. All of them have experience with dream-sharing, and Sungjong and Woohyun seem particularly eager to prove it. Howon makes sure everyone's IV is inserted before he puts in his own, and then, with the PASIV next to him on his cot, he presses the button to deploy the sedative, makes sure the timer is set, and settles back. It's a weaker sedative that the company produces for use in training, and Howon can feel it as it skims through his body, just under the surface of his skin. His muscles relax one, at a time, and then, like falling into a drift of snow, he falls asleep.
His mind works quickly after that, building the dreamcade as it looked five years ago from scratch. Rather than using the way it looks now as a base and working backwards, he's determined to create it purely as he remembers it. Once that's done, the others begin to appear in the room, all lying on cots as their sleeping bodies are. They're not alone: each of the other ten cots has a body lying on it, every one with an IV cable leading from their left forearm except for Howon and his team.
Sungjong gets up first, but as he opens his mouth to speak, Howon puts his finger to his lips to signal silence. Sungjong closes his mouth, still staring at the sleepers lying around him. The sleepers' faces are mostly similar and hard to distinguish from one another, but Howon immediately notices Minhyuk in one of the rows, also asleep. It hurts to see him, but Howon had purposefully placed him here, so the team would recognize him if he came up.
Carefully, he gets up from his cot without making any noise, and waits until Dongwoo, Woohyun, and Sungjong have all done the same. Then he motions for them to follow him.
He feels an instinctive urge to make the rows of cots stretch out to hundreds, thousands of sleepers, but he resists it; he isn't making a trap, but a diagram. Instead he brings the three of them to the control booth, where Sunggyu is operating the PASIV with Boa sitting next to him. Howon's projection of Sunggyu looks just like he did when Howon first met him outside of the bar in Jongno, wearing a black leather jacket that zips up across his body, with his hair short on the sides and spiky on top. Howon stops short, not wanting to get too close, but Sunggyu doesn't look up.
"That's him?" Dongwoo asks.
"Yes," Woohyun says, just as Howon answers. Howon looks at him strangely, but Woohyun doesn't return it.
Sungjong's head has swivelled back to look at the rows of sleepers on the cots. Even though the blackout curtains are pulled, every detail of the room is easy to make out. "So you guys did run games here."
Howon glances back too. "Minhyuk and I always won," he says, with a small sense of pride.
When he turns back to look at the control booth, Sunggyu is standing up and looking directly at him. Boa has disappeared. The other members of Howon's team have disappeared too, and even the sleepers behind him.
Sunggyu steps forward and puts his hand on Howon's chest. Howon lets him. It's been a long time, he thinks, while Sunggyu says it. Sunggyu only touches his chest with a flat palm, but it feels so intimate. Howon shudders. Sunggyu smiles at him, an unexpectedly gentle smile, and then he slides his thumb under the first button of Howon's shirt and pulls the buttons open, one by one, in a way that would be impossible in waking life.
In waking life. Howon is dreaming, he remembers this now, and suddenly everyone is there again: Woohyun and Sungjong standing behind him, Sungjong's mouth curled into a frown, and Dongwoo at his side, with a look on his face that's somewhere between pleased, confused, and wary. Howon steps back from Sunggyu like he's been bitten by something. The broken jukebox in the corner of the room lights up, and starts to play a Supreme Team song that Howon liked in high school.
"It's time," says Dongwoo, and he punches Howon in the face.
Howon wakes up. The Supreme Team song is playing off of his cell phone's alarm, tinnier than it had sounded in the dream. He sits up and yanks the needle out of his arm, ignoring the sting of pain that follows. Around him, the others get up from their cots, too.
Howon shuts the travel-size PASIV off. "I'm sorry," he says. It's a fight to look each of them in the eyes, but he forces himself to do it. "That was irresponsible."
"Hey, it's fine," says Dongwoo. "I think we got the picture, right?"
Woohyun laughs, mostly teasing but with a ragged edge. "There was definitely some picture there."
They go their separate ways soon after that. When Howon finishes packing up his gear, Sungjong is the last one remaining in the room. "Hey, you can go, you know," Howon tells him, shrugging the gym bag over his shoulder. "You don't need to study it so hard."
"Okay." Sungjong looks around the ceiling another time anyway, then follows Howon to the door. "It really is kind of creepy, huh? Not like how Mr. Kim described it at all."
Howon's hand tightens on the doorknob. "Has Mr. Kim been here?"
"I guess so, right? I imagine his older brother brought him here at one point or another." Sungjong brushes his bangs back. "He knows about a dreamcade, anyway."
Howon listens to all this, then takes his hand off the doorknob for a moment, and looks back at Sungjong. "And how do you know about this?"
"The agency gave me some information beforehand, so I went to scout out the locations. I ran into this guy at a cafe and he wanted to talk about dreamshare. He couldn't stop talking about his older brother who used to do it. I didn't know it was the client until today. I...guess I wasn't supposed to do that," Sungjong finishes, seeing the stony look on Howon's face.
"No," Howon says. "But I appreciate your initiative." He opens the door without another word, and once they're outside Sungjong quietly bows goodbye and leaves.
---
The plan is this: between Sunggyu's doses, Myungsoo will switch out his drugs for a non-dreaming sedative, which will put Sunggyu's body to sleep but leave his mind open. Then Howon and his team will bring them into their dreams, and take it from there.
"According to these records, his doses are lower than I was expecting," says Lee Sungyeol, the chemist the agency has assigned to this job. He pushes his clear plastic-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose with one finger. Howon has spent at least half of this meeting trying to figure out if they're prescription or just for looks. "Which is good news, because that means something stronger will still knock him out. And I've mixed in his drugs with ours, so there's a lower chance that his body will reject it. So the biggest risk is that once you guys come in, his mind will block you out."
"That's nothing we can't handle," says Howon, and Sungyeol makes a face and pushes his glasses up again. "Wouldn't the biggest risk be..." He trails off, and glances at Myungsoo, who's sitting further down the table between Dongwoo and Sungjong. Myungsoo blinks back at him, his expression blank.
From the head of the table, Soojung clears her throat. "He's the only person Sunggyu is expecting to see," she says. "Currently, he's been staying in Myungsoo's apartment in Yeoksam-dong while the chaebol figures this whole thing out. It would be easier if we could disguise some of you as employees or private medical staff, but of course, we can't do that because he knows what you look like."
"So bring the rest of the team in as staff, and I'll sneak in after they've started," says Howon.
"You and Nam Woohyun would have to sneak in," Soojung corrects him, and Howon's head snaps around to where Woohyun is sitting on the other side of the table, drinking from a cup of coffee to hide his gaze.
After the plan has been settled, the team and Soojung file out of the room. Someone catches Howon's elbow, and even though he knows who it is, his stomach still drops when he turns around and sees Woohyun.
"We have to talk," Woohyun says.
---
"It's not as sexy as your story, obviously," says Woohyun, and Howon crosses his arms tighter over his chest at his tone. They're still in the agency meeting room; only once in the last ten minutes did a junior employee open the door, only to swiftly reverse direction while repeatedly bowing when he saw the look on Howon's face. "But you know what they say, you always remember your first."
"You're disgusting," Howon says, and the leer on Woohyun's mouth grows wider. "What happened in that dream never happened in real life."
"But you wanted it to," Woohyun retorts, and Howon flinches. "It's okay, no judgment, I understand you. It was exactly the same with him and me, when we started out. He introduced me to it, so of course I worshipped him. I thought he knew everything, and I'm pretty sure he thought so too. Sounds familiar, right?"
Howon stares at him, arms still knotted tight over his chest. "Where's your contract? I'm going to set it on fire. I'm going to use it to set you on fire. I can't believe they sent you to work with me."
"Why wouldn't they?" The sing-song tone goes out of Woohyun's voice for a more condescending one, and he leans back in his chair. "The more people who are familiar with him in this, the better. If we're just going off of your perception of reality and your reading of him, he'll notice. And your reading is about two years older than mine."
He waits for Howon's response, but all Howon does is sigh and look toward the door. If that junior secretary or whatever came back, Howon would let him in now, along with every other secretary and chemist the agency keeps on payroll.
"All right," Woohyun says, and he leans back in his chair to mirror Howon's posture. "I answered your question, now you answer one of mine."
"You volunteered that information yourself."
"But you were curious. And I'm much more cooperative than you." Woohyun smiles. "Mr. Ryu said Agent Lee was familiar with inception. What is the nature of Agent Lee's familiarity with inception?"
Now Howon smiles too. "Bastard. You already know."
"I want to hear it in your beautiful voice. The same one you just used to call me a bastard. Go on."
"Fine." Howon has no idea what Sunggyu could have seen in Woohyun: a hard worker and a desire to please, maybe, but he would have driven Sunggyu up the wall like this. Or maybe the way he acts is all Sunggyu's fault. "Someone tried to do inception on me once. It didn't work. It's not in my file, but of course you found out anyway."
"'Someone'?"
Howon stands up abruptly. "Is this meeting over yet? I have somewhere to be. I don't know about you."
"Go on," Woohyun says, as he gets up. "Tell me who this someone is."
"In my beautiful voice, right?" Howon chuckles. "Fine. Kim Sunggyu," he says, enunciating each syllable. "And don't ask me what he wanted to do. I don't know, because it didn't work. Now you have to answer my question. My real question."
Woohyun shrugs, already at the door. "Go ahead."
"I'm asking you this as your team leader. Are you going to be able to do your job properly when you see him again?"
Woohyun tilts his head to one side. "Are you?"
---
It had taken place in a nightclub, black-walled and lit in pink and purple. Maybe this was only intended to be the first level of the dream, but it was the only level Howon saw. Howon was sitting by the wall, watching other people dance, not so much individuals as a mass of bodies writhing together. There was no music playing, but at the time, Howon hadn't noticed.
Sunggyu came back from the bar with two shots, both glasses glowing from the inside like the pink and purple lightbulbs. "For a job well done," he said. That's right, Howon told himself, they'd just finished a job. It didn't matter that the day before he'd signed a full-time contract with the agency, and that he hadn't even seen anyone from the crew in two weeks. They always worked well together, him and Sunggyu, their individual skills only enhanced by their shared perfectionism. They clinked glasses and downed the shots. Howon could feel himself being lulled by the beat of the dancers and the act of drinking, and by the warmth of Sunggyu's approval.
Sunggyu smiled at him, his eyes and his mouth making the same wide, stretched-out shape. He was wearing a clean white collared shirt and slim-cut black pants; they suited him. "Come on," he said to Howon, holding out one hand, and he led him to the dance floor.
Sunggyu was a bad dancer, but he at least had a sense of rhythm, even if his movements were stiff. Howon fell into rhythm with him at the edge of the crowd of bodies, and his vision focused on the hypnotic twisting of Sunggyu's torso in his white shirt. In waking life, Sunggyu was just his team leader, a comrade. He was probably in love with Boa. It was unrealistic of Howon to expect anything more. But here, he had invited Howon to dance with him, and now he was putting his arms around Howon's shoulders in a circle, and leaning his hips closer. It was too perfect.
"It could stay like this, you know," Sunggyu said, his voice a low murmur. "Just you and me." Howon shut his eyes, let the shiver run all the way through his body, then opened his eyes again.
It was too perfect. Howon wasn't supposed to be here. He was full-time with the agency now, and the Sungin-dong crew was in the past. He wasn't a petty criminal anymore. He took a step back from Sunggyu, out of his arms. The bright white overhead lights turned on, and the other dancers started to melt away, until there was only an empty room left around them.
"Howon," Sunggyu said, taking a step forward.
Howon turned away. "Leave." When he woke up, he was alone in a jjimjilbang room in Dongdaemun. There was a single puncture mark in his left forearm, like some personal belonging carelessly left behind.
---
Dongwoo, Woohyun, and Sungjong are already waiting outside of Myungsoo's apartment when the elevator door opens and Howon and Sungyeol get out. "Hey!" says Dongwoo, springing to his feet right away, but Howon shushes him until Myungsoo opens the door to let them in.
The apartment is as big as expected, but so crowded with furniture and personal effects that it feels like Myungsoo is leading them through a high-walled maze. Howon looks around at the forgotten food delivery boxes and piles of crumpled clothing, but keeps his judgments to himself.
Myungsoo takes them into a bedroom, where Sunggyu is lying on a bed on top of the sheets. He has an IV drip leading from one arm, and there's a PASIV device on the floor beside the bed, inoperative. If it weren't for the IV he'd look like some kind of monk, dressed in loose, plain clothing with his hair cropped to above his eyebrows. Howon puts his hand over his mouth, but he has no idea what expression he's trying to hide. He can feel Woohyun looking at him, but he has no desire to look back.
Sungyeol crouches down next to the bed and opens the old leather suitcase he's brought with him. He takes out his equipment - syringes, brown glass vials, plastic tubing - and sets it next to the PASIV already on the floor. Meanwhile, Dongwoo and Sungjong start arranging the furniture in the room for the five of them. The movement Howon snaps out of his daze, and he goes to help.
"All set," Sungyeol says. He makes one last adjustment to the PASIV's settings, then he looks up at Howon. Sungjong and Dongwoo do the same, and then at last Woohyun, his expression neutral.
Howon looks at the long rise and fall of Sunggyu's chest. Then he says, "Let's go."
---
They're in Coma Beat Dreamcade, inside Sungjong's dream. The place feels empty, but not totally abandoned; it has the air of a busy public square at night when there's no one around. Howon makes a mental note in Sungjong's favour.
Sunggyu is there standing among the cots, in the same clothes and haircut he'd had when they went to sleep, down to his bare feet. He doesn't seem to notice, or else he's more preoccupied with the intruders before him. "Who's there?" he asks, squinting at the four of them gathered by the door.
In reality, it would ruin the mission if Sunggyu recognized either of them, but Howon had decided there was no need for either him or Woohyun to hide in the dream; the low odds of two strangers from Sunggyu's past being in the same place would make it look more like a trick of Sunggyu's subconscious, and therefore something his subconscious could accept as its own creation. Still, Howon lets Woohyun step out of the shadows first.
When he does, Howon gets a shock: he's not the taut-faced, jaded forger he met a week or two ago, but a kid of about the same height with round cheeks and spiky, orange-bleached hair. "It's just me, hyung," Woohyun says.
"You and three other people," Sunggyu observes, as Sungjong and Dongwoo follow Woohyun out.
"They're friends." Woohyun glances back at Howon. "They wanted to play."
That's when Howon steps out from the doorway, and his eyes meet Sunggyu's. Stupidly, Howon expects everything unravel around him, for the cots to start floating in the air or a battalion of soldiers to burst through the door to eject them from Sunggyu's subconscious, or for them to be pulled together as if by magnetic force, and everything in the room to disappear. None of this happens; Sunggyu's eyes meet Howon's, and then they look away.
"So do you all have the money or what?" Sunggyu asks. His appearance has changed: now he's wearing the leather jacket and spiky hairstyle that Howon remembers from five years ago, matching the setting of the dream.
In reply, the four of them reach into their pockets and each pull out a stack of 500,000 won. It's an extravagant buy-in, at least ten times the normal amount for a game among friends, but in a dream, the normal amount would be too small. They set the stacks on a tray on the control booth, and then take their places on the cots.
Sunggyu goes to the control booth and starts fiddling with the machine behind it. "C'mon, aren't you going to play with us, hyung?" Woohyun calls. "We need someone to be the loser." Sunggyu doesn't answer, but looks up at Howon with a scowl. Howon can't help but laugh. If that was how Woohyun talked to Sunggyu, it was no wonder their partnership didn't last long.
"Come on, Kim," Howon says. It's the first time he's spoken since they entered the dream. "I'll try not to beat you too badly in front of everyone."
"Someone has to make sure you all wake up," Sunggyu says, looking down to the machine behind the control booth again.
"I'll handle it." The hairs on the back of Howon's neck stand up at the voice, and the feeling stays when he turns and sees Sungjong, walking toward the control booth. Sungjong's appearance hasn't changed, but his voice isn't his voice - it's Boa's. It's like an association Sunggyu's subconscious would make from his lithe gestures, and it's the voice of someone Sunggyu trusts.
"All right," Sunggyu says. "Just this once."
---
The game level is Dongwoo's dream. They're on a city highway in the middle of the night on motorbikes. The road is free of obstacles, only sharp twists and slopes. Over their heads are wide, flat rows of lights, like a tunnel or a fishing net. It's a classic dreamcade game setup, but Dongwoo didn't choose it for that; "I just like to drive," he'd said, when they were planning it out. He's ahead of Howon, with a mask like a tusked boar's head and a bat that he twirls in one hand. Behind him, Woohyun's mask is the head of a golden Buddha. It's just the three of them on the road.
Howon pulls up between them. "Where's Sunggyu?" he yells through his horse mask, though his voice carries perfectly over the sound of the road.
Dongwoo points further down the road, where a lone rider on a motorbike is a good half a kilometre ahead of them, glancing back over his shoulder. The rider has the head of a Jindo dog, narrow-eyed with pointed ears and a long snout, and is still dressed in the leather jacket. He looks more absurd than threatening. "We can catch him," Dongwoo says.
Howon responds by hitting the gas and pulling ahead of him. Dongwoo laughs and falls in line behind him, using Howon's draft to pick up more speed. Howon can sense Woohyun somewhere behind, hands clenched tight on the steering of his bike as he fights to catch the two of them. Sunggyu may have had a head start, but he'll have a hard time getting past the three of them. The plan is to trap him, and offer him a way out by going to sleep. That will take him into the next level, Woohyun's dream, where the inception will take place.
"Hey!" Woohyun yells. Howon looks over his shoulder, but Woohyun's pointing frantically ahead of them, down where Sunggyu is. Howon turns back to see a car on the road, a beat-up, dark red sedan, going full speed in the opposite direction of the four riders and charging straight for Sunggyu. Thanks to lucid dreaming, even from this distance, Howon can see who's behind the wheel: it's Kim Myungsoo, gritting his teeth and gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles are white. Around his neck is a large, heavy brass key.
Howon hangs back until he and Dongwoo are parallel again. "What's he doing here?" he shouts to Dongwoo. "This is supposed to be your dream."
"It is my dream," Dongwoo replies. "Maybe he convinced Sungyeol to let him come in." Then the boar's ears perk up. "Oh, wait. I know what it is."
"What?"
Just as Dongwoo's about to reply, Sunggyu puts his arms up to cover his head, and the bike hits the sedan with a crash. Howon almost hits the brakes on his own bike at the sound. The sedan flips up and rolls a few times in midair, almost in slow motion, before it smashes down on the ground again, roof-first, flames and smoke pouring out of the windows.
"What the fuck?" Woohyun yells from behind them. "What was that?"
"That was a projection of Sunggyu's subconscious," Dongwoo replies, leaning back a bit on his bike. "You know, because he feels bad about lying to Myungsoo."
"Lying about what?" Howon asks.
"When I talked to Myungsoo, he was like a dog who fetches for his owner but doesn't know what it means. I think his mind is starting to reject the idea that Sunggyu is his brother." Dongwoo turns to Howon, and Howon can see his eyes through the boar's head mask, intense and dark. "You said it yourself, it's like a transplant surgery."
Howon remembers Sungjong telling him in the Sungin-dong dreamcade, He couldn't stop talking about his older brother. "Why?" is all he can say.
"I dunno. Hard up for cash?" Dongwoo nods at the remains of the crash, which is getting closer. "Looks like he survived."
A crash like that would be enough of a kick to make Sunggyu wake up back in Sungjong's dream, but Sunggyu had managed to slide under the car just before impact. Now he's staggering away from the wreckage. In his hand is the key that was hanging around Myungsoo's neck.
As the three motorbikes get closer, he turns to look over his shoulder, and then he vanishes. Dream reason, he'd taught Howon; when you know you're in a dream, you can exploit it.
When he reappears, he lands on top of the netting of lights over their head and starts running towards the three of them. He must have jumped. The three riders skid to a halt. "Shit," Woohyun yells, as Sunggyu runs past them, making the bulbs rattle. "Shit!"
"Hoya." Dongwoo is looking back over his shoulder at Howon. "You get up there, okay?"
Howon looks up. There's no opening in the lights above his head. Dream reason can only do so much. "How?"
Dongwoo backs up a few metres. Then he stands up on his bike and, steadying himself with one hand, he smashes upward with his bat until one light goes out, then shatters. He drags his bat forward and pulls a hole in the string of lights, glass falling around his boar's head, until the rest of the row disconnects and crashes down. Then he turns around, but he doesn't go back to Howon and Woohyun.
"I'll keep going," he says. "You guys catch up." Then he revs his engine, and continues down the road.
Howon stands up on his bike, more slowly than Dongwoo, even though he's stationary. He gets one foot up on the handlebars, and then he grabs onto the lights that are dangling down and pulls himself up. When he looks up, the environment has changed, and the cables that had been supporting the lights are now a web of vertical netting, stretching to a peak. The Jindo head rider is just about to reach the top. "What did you do?" Howon shouts to Dongwoo. But the road underneath him is now too far away to see, as the netting spirals upwards over it like a mountain.
The netting pulls in one direction. Woohyun is climbing up, fast and determined as a spider. His Buddha head mask is gone, and he has his normal face now, the face Howon recognizes. Howon realizes his own mask is gone, too.
"Finally," Woohyun says to Howon, as he catches up. He sounds out of breath, even in a dream. They're almost at the top. "Agent Lee, let's jump. Let's end this now."
Howon shakes his head. "We can't end it. We have a mission."
"Yeah, and now the mission has been compromised. You don't know what he's going to do. Let's get out of here."
"No," says Howon again, and Woohyun flinches back. "There's still four hours before Sungjong kicks us out of here. I'm not going to leave Dongwoo in here with him. You said it yourself, we don't know what he's going to do."
Woohyun laughs. "Is Dongwoo the one you don't want to leave?"
"Fuck you. You want to get out of here so bad, you jump. But I'm here for a reason." Howon hoists himself over the edge of the netting.
Sunggyu is in front of a giant glass pyramid. He also no longer has his mask. Howon watches as he takes the key from around his neck and fits it into a lock on the front of the pyramid, and the door of the pyramid dissolves.
Howon runs. Behind him, Woohyun runs too. And just as Sunggyu steps into the pyramid, the two of them jump in after him, and fall into darkness.
---
In their planning meeting, Woohyun had proposed his dream would be of a tall, western-style house out in the country, isolated so Sunggyu's subconscious wouldn't think to populate it with its own creations. As Myungsoo, he would lead Sunggyu to a bedroom on the very top floor, and Howon would meet him there for the inception, while Woohyun kept watch out in the stairway. He'd promised the dream would hold strong, even three levels deep. "As long as your drugs are strong enough to do the job," Woohyun had said, winking at Sungyeol, who immediately opened his mouth to object. "But this house is a sure thing."
Instead of the house, they're in what looks like a basement or a parking garage, windowless and filled with rows of concrete pillars that seem to stretch on forever, and lit with a neon purple-blue that saturates Howon's vision.
Ahead of them, Sunggyu is running, pumping his arms like a sprinter. He's dressed differently now, in a white shirt and black pants. Howon and Woohyun are already running after him, though there's no end to the space in sight.
"This is your house?" Howon shouts, turning back to look at Woohyun.
"It's my dream," Woohyun replies. "But something's wrong with it."
"Come on," says Howon. "Didn't he teach you how to fight that?" He chuckles. "Or did you just spend the whole time looking at him?"
"Fuck off," Woohyun snaps. Sunggyu looks back over his shoulder at them, and then suddenly he bounces off of a wall in front of him, a mirror that goes as high and long as the space they're in. It's a dead end. He looks around, and just as Howon and Woohyun get close to the wall, he darts left.
The two of them follow Sunggyu into a corridor with bright blue walls that are so high he can't see the ceiling, and Howon stops. He's in the middle of a four-way intersection of corridors, almost perfectly identical and symmetrical. Empty picture frames hang all along the walls. He looks back at Woohyun. "Which way?" They can hear footsteps running past one of the corridors. "This way," he says, without waiting for Woohyun to answer, and takes off again.
He arrives in a bathroom, a surprisingly realistic one, with white tiles and fixtures and dirty grout and even a small window near the ceiling, though the light coming through the window is too bright for him to see what might be outside. "How about this, is this your house?" he calls to Woohyun.
"It's a nice house," Sunggyu replies, and in the mirror over the sink Howon sees him stepping out from behind him. Howon spins around to look behind him, but no one's there. When he looks back at the mirror, Sunggyu is standing next to him in the reflection, looking into his eyes.
"Why are you doing this?" Howon asks. His heart is pounding hard and it's getting harder to breathe, but he doesn't move or look away.
Sunggyu smiles. "It's been a long time," he says. He rests his head on Howon's shoulder; he'd always made a big deal out of being a little taller than him, how far he had to bend down to talk to him. Howon's eyelids flutter, but he keeps his eyes open. "Come here," Sunggyu says, and in the reflection he pulls Howon's face towards his own and kisses him on the mouth, slowly, still looking out to the other side of the mirror.
Howon wants to look away, but he can't even turn his head, so hypnotized by the sight of Sunggyu kissing him in the mirror that he can't move his hands to remind himself what he's here for, can't move his hands to touch himself. In the reflection, Sunggyu pushes him up against the sink and pulls Howon's lower lip between his teeth. Howon's neck feels hot. He takes a step closer to the mirror, his own lips parted.
The mirror shatters just above his head with a noise like a car crash, and the glass splinters into a shower of water that falls into the sink and onto the floor. Howon spins around to see Woohyun behind him, his shaking hands holding a second rock which he lets fall to the floor.
Howon braces himself for the joke, but all Woohyun says is, "Come on," and he takes Howon's arm and leads him out of the bathroom.
Woohyun pulls him back into the tall corridors, which have turned pink. "Wait," Howon says.
"It's okay," Woohyun replies, not looking back at him. He seems more confident about which way to go now, or maybe he's just accepted that they're not in charge here. "I told you, I know what it's like."
"Not that." Howon tugs his arm back, but only lightly, to make Woohyun pay attention. "I have to go deeper."
"No, we need to get out of here. This is the third level. You can't go deeper than this. The drugs aren't strong enough. The only way to go is back up."
They arrive at the end of the hallway in a room. It has the same bright blue walls covered in empty picture frames, but it's small and claustrophobic, unlike the corridors. The wall facing them is a mirror, and in it they can see that the doorway behind them has disappeared. The room has no visible exits.
Sunggyu is on the other side of the mirror. He is not touching either of them; he looks like he's right up against the glass.
Howon walks toward the mirror. Woohyun tightens his grip on Howon's arm. "What are you doing?" he hisses.
Howon raises his arm, not resisting Woohyun but not going with him, either. "I have to go," he says.
"You can't." Woohyun's voice shakes a little. "I won't let you."
"Look, Woohyun," says Howon. "Whatever you had, you have to let it go. You said yourself it was over."
"Asshole. It's not about that." Woohyun pulls on Howon's arm, and Howon turns to look at him. "I don't want him to win."
Howon lets that sink in, and then he sighs. "You're right. But this is the only way."
When he pulls his arm back from Woohyun, Woohyun lets go. Howon walks toward the mirror, toward Sunggyu, who's grinning at him, waiting. Howon stops, and then he runs into the mirror headfirst. It opens up like a pool of water, and it swallows him whole.
---
Howon is on a beach at night, with pale sand stretching in front of him and the ocean sending up the regular sound of waves. The air is still and thin and cool, and even though the beach looks well-lit, the sky is dark and speckled with stars. It could be Haeundae Beach, in the fall when it's too cold to sit by the water, but there are no glass towers behind him; instead, the rectangular mirror he'd walked through is still there, now sheepishly small compared to the scale of the beach. When Howon puts his arm into it, searching for the other side, all he gets is cold water up to his elbow, and a few droplets flow out when he pulls his hand back. They sparkle in midair, then float away to join the other stars in the sky.
Only a few metres in front of him, there's a single figure sitting on the sand, hugging his knees to his chest and looking at the water. The person is dressed in a baggy brown T-shirt and pants and no shoes, with his hair closely cropped above his eyebrows. Howon realizes, with a jolt, who it is. "Kim Sunggyu," he yells, as much to tell himself as to get Sunggyu's attention. "You motherfucker."
Sunggyu looks up, and Howon closes his hands into fists and tenses the muscles of his arms into a ready stance, just in case. But Sunggyu doesn't get up. "It's finally happening," he replies, though it's barely audible, like he's talking to himself. He looks old, much older than he looked back in Kim Myungsoo's apartment, with pronounced lines between his eyebrows and around his mouth.
Howon drops his shoulders, but the tension lingers in his biceps and fists. "What the hell is going on?" he says. "You made me follow you, and now I'm here. So?"
"I don't understand." Sunggyu's facial expression is slack, confused. "You followed me here?" Then something on his face changes. "Lee Howon, is that you? You're not a projection?"
"Would you prefer that?" Howon says. It's a reflex. His mocking tone feels forced, the same as trying to make himself look like he did five years ago felt in Sungjong's dream. "I can go and come back."
Sunggyu laughs. "You asshole. I can't believe it." He starts to get up, but he's shaky, like he's forgotten how to stand, or hasn't learned yet. It takes him a few attempts just to plant one foot on the ground and shift his weight onto it. Eventually Howon walks over and takes his hand, and Sunggyu grips onto it as he gets to his feet, one leg at a time. Howon thinks of the look in Sunggyu's eye in the bathroom mirror, the younger, charismatic Sunggyu. It should feel good to see him this pitiful, this humbled, but it only feels wrong and embarrassing. As soon as Sunggyu is steady on his feet, Howon lets go. "Come on," Sunggyu says.
They follow the coastline, Howon keeping about ten paces behind Sunggyu. The beach seems to stretch out forever. "How did you find this place? You know, this isn't a dream that one of us is controlling," Sunggyu tells Howon. "It's more like a foundation, and all of the dreams happen on top of it. But if you dig deep enough through the layers of dreams, you can find this place." He nods to himself. "That's what I did."
"I don't get it," Howon says. "How is it different from a dream?"
Sunggyu hums, then laughs. "I can't really explain it. But you can feel it, right? It's like your wrists were tied before, and they're untied now." Sunggyu points up, and three oversized lionfish float by, their fins billowing and fluttering like silk. They swim through the air, slow and buoyant, leaving no bubbles in their wake, only the heaviness of their presence and their moonlit shadows on the beach.
When Sunggyu looks back at Howon, Howon can't help but grin. It feels natural now, being with Sunggyu like this. This is a completely different person from the cold, quiet leader he'd ran after through the endless halls of Woohyun's dream; but both of them are the Sunggyu that Howon remembers.
"So when you made us chase you through all those dreams, you were trying to get to this place." Howon looks up at the stars. The lionfish have disappeared. "I can see why."
Sunggyu lowers his eyebrows. "What are you talking about? I've been on this beach for thirty years. Even with time dilation, that's..."
"What are you talking about? I saw you," Howon says. "Stop denying it. You were younger, and you..." He stops, not wanting to say the words to Sunggyu.
"I seriously don't know what you mean," Sunggyu says. "Sounds like a projection to me. Your subconscious knew where to find me, but your conscious mind didn't. That's what people say dreams are to begin with, your subconscious trying to sort things out for your rational mind." Howon knows this already. It's the whole principle behind inception: dreams allow a foreign idea to pose as the mind's own creation, piggybacking on all the other messages sent from the subconscious to the conscious mind. Still, it bothers him that in a situation where all he has to do is execute a plan, something so unpredictable could happen because of him.
"If you were here the whole time," he says, "then you couldn't have been able to leave to convince Kim Myungsoo he was your half-brother." Sunggyu flinches, just a little, but it's enough. "Did you tell him to hire us, too?"
There's a long pause. Then Sunggyu says, "Kim Myungsoo was a long time ago. It didn't work on you, but he's a lot more...susceptible than you."
Howon snorts. "Just say it. His brain is like soft tofu."
"Hey," Sunggyu responds, though he grins. "To be honest, I didn't really think it through. All I needed was the cash. But I didn't think about how dangerous it was, to do that to someone. I'm sorry I did it to him, and to you." He stops and sighs. "Did he really hire you? To do what?"
"Inception. Naturally. According to him, you have a drug addiction." Howon raises an eyebrow. "Is it true? I always thought you were better than that."
Sunggyu looks out at the water. The sound of the waves breaking returns; Howon had forgotten it was there.
"Kim," Howon says, "what happened to you?"
Sunggyu turns, and with the moonlight hitting his face, he looks not young again, or old, but old enough, the way he looks sleeping in Kim Myungsoo's bedroom right now, in waking life. "I realized what I'd done to you," he says, and Howon's heart stops at the word you. "You, and Boa, and Minhyuk," he continues, "and every kid I'd ever brought into this business. It wasn't right. So..." He shrugs. "I exiled myself to sleep." He chuckles, but it's hollow. "I don't even wake up anymore. It's been thirty years. I don't think I can."
Howon's heart has started beating again, and he remembers this feeling, too, of looking at Sunggyu and his heart picking up speed all on its own. He'd wanted something then, something that felt wrong and sacrilegious to want. I worshipped him, Woohyun had said; I thought he knew everything. Woohyun had gotten over it, and Howon thought he'd gotten over it, too. But he'd only pushed it down, buried it under layers and layers, and the more he ignored it, the more powerful it had become.
"Coward," Howon says. "That's what a coward does."
Sunggyu shuts his eyes, and turns away. "I know."
Howon takes a step closer. "You know," he says, "but that means nothing if you don't do anything. You can wake up if you want to wake up, but you don't want to, because you don't want to deal with what's out there."
Sunggyu sighs. "It's too late."
"It's not too late." Howon takes another step, inhales to brace himself, then says, "There's a reason I kept following you all the way in here."
"Because you're good at your job."
"Because I wanted to see you again," Howon blurts out. "But not like this."
Sunggyu laughs. "What, old?"
"No. Afraid." Howon holds out his hand. "I don't care about the money, and I'm not here to trick you. I want you to make your own decision. But I..." For a second, the old fear rushes back. He catches his breath through it, and says, "I want you to come with me, Sunggyu." Sunggyu looks in his eyes, then at his hand. "Come on," Howon says.
The words seem to spark something in Sunggyu's memory. He puts his hand in Howon's, carefully, but his grip around Howon's fingers is strong.
Howon leads Sunggyu by the hand into the ocean. It's cold around their ankles, colder than Haeundae in the fall. They keep walking together, until Howon's feet can't touch the bottom anymore, and he's holding onto Sunggyu to carry him the last few inches. They stop and face each other, just as a wave comes over their heads, plugging Howon's ears and blinding him briefly.
When he blinks away the water, there's Sunggyu, not the twisted Sunggyu of his dreams, but the real Sunggyu, the one who'd seen something great in him and tried to bring it out. The least Howon can do is the same for him.
---
This is what happens next:
In Kim Myungsoo's apartment in Yeoksam-dong, an alarm clock goes off beside Kim Sunggyu's PASIV device. Myungsoo wakes up from where he'd been dozing off in a chair, dreaming about a Japanese cuckoo eating a cat. Sungyeol, the chemist, gets up and shuts the PASIV down, as the sedative he'd given the sleepers wears off. Their bodies begin to stir, like flowers unfolding in time lapse.
In the Coma Beat Dreamcade, Sungjong goes to the American-style jukebox and picks a song by Park Jiyoon. As the opening notes start to play, he walks through the rows of cots, and, staying on beat with the song, he turns each of the cots over, sending the bodies hard onto the floor. If he kicks one or two of them when they don't respond, it's only for their own good.
On the dreamcade track, Dongwoo drives a car towards the glass pyramid that guards Woohyun and Howon's sleeping bodies. The car is a red sedan. He can hear Park Jiyoon's "Coming of Age Ceremony" playing, slowed down, as the car hits the glass wall and the windshield shatters.
In Woohyun's dream, the endless corridors and mirrors have rearranged themselves into the country house he'd been trying to create, only with blue and pink walls. Woohyun goes up to the bedroom at the top of the stairs to find Howon sleeping on the bed there. With a bit of difficulty, Woohyun lifts Howon over his shoulders, then he opens the window and jumps.
In the ocean by the pale sand beach, Howon and Sunggyu are treading water. Over their heads, a small school of crucian carp floats by, iridescent in the moonlight. Then Howon puts his arms around Sunggyu and pulls him close, and they drown.
---
One week after the Kim inception, Howon takes a taxi from the agency office in Mapo-gu to Yeoksam-dong. Kim Myungsoo answers the door himself. He looks surprised to see Howon there. Howon smiles at him.
"I'm here to see your brother," he says. "Half-brother, sorry."
"It's okay, Myungsoo," says Sunggyu from inside. "I'll talk to him." Myungsoo stares at Howon as he walks inside, then he disappears into another room of the cluttered apartment without a word, leaving Howon standing in the entranceway and Sunggyu a few paces away from him. "What are you doing here?" Sunggyu asks Howon. He's dressed in a clean shirt and track pants. His hair is still too short.
"You should ask yourself that question," Howon says. "Haven't you done enough to this kid?"
"I gave myself a brother, so I now have to be one too. Besides, if anyone needs a hyung around, it's him." Sunggyu rubs at his eyes with one hand, then puts it on his back, like he needs it to stay upright. "What are you doing here?"
Howon clears his throat, steadies himself on his feet. "The inception, three years ago, what you said to me. 'Just you and me.' Do you remember?" Sunggyu laughs awkwardly, looking down. "Be honest."
"I remember," Sunggyu says. "I shouldn't have done that to you. It was all just-"
"I don't care," Howon says. "I came here to tell you two things. I quit the agency today, and I still think about what you said to me then, every day. Even if you didn't mean it, I still think about it."
Sunggyu blinks at him. His face is blank, except for a slight furrow in his eyebrows. "So what should I do?"
"I don't know. I'm out of the business of telling people what to do. But I know what I'd like you to do."
"Apologize?"
"You've already done that." Howon turns to go. "Just think about it. If you want to, you can always find me again."
"Wait." Howon stops with his hand on the doorknob and looks back at Sunggyu. "Before you go, come here."
Howon looks down, and then, with his shoes still on, he walks toward Sunggyu. "What is it?"
Sunggyu puts one hand on Howon's shoulder, then leans in and kisses him on the cheek lightly. He keeps his face close to Howon's when he says, "I'm not dreaming."
He smells like medical ointment and he feels bony and his short hair brushes Howon's eyelashes, but he's there, not a memory or a projection. "You're not," Howon says, and he kisses him on the lips, once, lingering.
The sun is setting when Howon steps out of Kim Myungsoo's apartment building onto the street. He gets into a taxi heading back across the river, and as it goes over the bridge he closes his eyes, and drifts into sleep.
THANKS TO: meimei for the original idea, unni for the Inception TED talk, V. for more knowledge (no totems this time I swear!), and my most wise and patient beta.
infinite, sunggyu/hoya
pg-13 (mention of drug abuse/addiction, use of iv and needles), 10,236w
inception au. howon's job is to recover secrets, not people, but for sunggyu, he will always make an exception.
--written for seasonthreee 2015. this version has been edited.
--soojung = baby soul; boa = kim boa of spica; minhyuk = b-bomb
ao3 mirror
"It's my brother," the client is saying; "half-brother," he amends quickly, his eyes darting to the sleekly suited, sour-faced assistant next to him. The client, Kim Myungsoo, is young and almost uncannily handsome, and dressed like he has no idea how much his clothes are worth, which Howon supposes is why the agency is entertaining him at all. "He's become addicted to sleeping drugs."
"What kind of drugs?" Soojung asks, not pausing in her note-taking. "Zolpidem? Buspirone?"
Kim Myungsoo's forehead wrinkles. "You know," he says. "The stuff you guys use. For the dreams."
"Somnacin," says Howon, and Myungsoo nods enthusiastically. It's technically not what the agency uses - they make their own - but it's the common brand name for the dream-sharing sedative. "He could've picked something easier to find. Where does he get it?"
"I don't know."
"It doesn't matter," says Jungryul from his desk. Howon raises an eyebrow, but says nothing. "The point is, you don't want him taking it anymore, and neither does your father or his company's board of directors."
Myungsoo slouches, looking at his hands. "He's been asleep for three days now," he says. Then he sits up, speaking carefully. "I heard that extraction can be used to find out why someone is taking drugs, so you can fight it. You can do that, right?"
"For Somnacin addiction? No." Jungryul leans back in his chair and shakes his head. "For something that strong, the person has to want to come out of it on their own. And there's only one way to do that: not extraction, but inception."
At the last word, Soojung's pen pauses on the page, and she and Jungryul both look at Howon. Howon doesn't flinch. He'd had a feeling this was coming. Even if Jungryul hadn't said the word out loud, it was in the way he'd sat listening to Myungsoo, and even before that, when he'd told Howon on the phone, This is something you'll be very interested in.
Myungsoo looks from Jungryul's face, to Soojung's, to Howon. "Inception?"
"What it sounds like. Planting an idea in someone's subconscious. It'll cost more, of course, but it's more effective."
"When it works," says Howon. "It's like transplant surgery. The mind could reject the idea, or it could mutate."
Jungryul smiles and clears his throat. "Well, that's why you're here. Agent Lee is our top extraction operative," he adds to Myungsoo. "But he's familiar with inception. And, I believe, he's someone your relative would recognize, and trust."
The hairs on Howon's neck stand up at this, but he keeps his face neutral. "Would I recognize him too?" he asks Jungryul.
"I believe so. It's Kim Sunggyu." Jungryul says this with the same too-casual tone he'd used on the phone, like he expects his words to have a big reaction. Howon keeps his mouth still, not wanting to give Jungryul that satisfaction, but his nostrils flare as he inhales for a long second. Myungsoo looks at him curiously, but instead of telling him any more, Jungryul says, "So, how much are you looking to invest in this? Put another way, how much is his recovery worth to you?"
Myungsoo blinks and turns away from Howon. "Thirty million won," he says, with the conclusive quickness of someone who's been coached to give this figure in advance. He glances sideways to his assistant.
Jungryul shakes his head. "Three hundred million," he says, kindly but firmly. "And that's a fraction of what a freelancer would ask for." He smiles. "If your father objects, tell him it's cheaper than bribing a hospital to stay silent."
"Oh, it's the board that would object," Myungsoo says, before he can stop himself. Howon snorts loudly, and Myungsoo's assistant frowns at him.
"Well, there's some room to negotiate. Some." Jungryul gets up from his chair, and Soojung also rises to her feet. Howon stands more slowly. "It will take two weeks to set up, but we'll be sure to keep you informed along the way."
Myungsoo bows. "Thank you." Soojung leads him and his assistant out, with one glance at Howon before she takes them out the door of the office.
Jungryul and Howon sit in silence for a minute as Jungryul shuffles through files on his desk. Then Howon says, "Sunggyu doesn't have a brother."
"Maybe he just never told you about it," Jungryul says, barely glancing up. "It doesn't sound like he's that close to them, if they would rather hire dreamshare than have him be publicly known as a family member."
"With someone like him, you either hire dreamshare or you hire an assassin."
Jungryul hums. "Would you prefer to just shoot him?"
Howon shifts in his chair. "Odds are better on that than on inception," he says. "But this isn't about what I'd prefer."
"No," Jungryul says, with the same tone he'd used with Kim Myungsoo, "it's not." He puts the files down and looks up at Howon. "I need names for your team. Four people total. We need to get them under contract before end of day tomorrow." Howon stands, bows ninety degrees, and exits the office.
---
Five years ago, Howon had been part of a team, one of the ten or so small crews of freelance extractors that hovered around Seoul's underground. He'd been drafted into it by a guy outside of a bar in Jongno, after he'd watched Howon beat up a group of drunkards who were picking fights, using the surrounding garbage cans and electricity poles to his advantage to hold them off. "Come by tomorrow," the guy had said, handing Howon a navy blue card. "I need you for a job. Pays a hundred thousand won." The back of the card had an address in Sungin-dong printed in white, and the front of the card read, Coma Beat Dreamcade.
He had vaguely heard of dreamcade fighting before, some underground craze imported from Japan, but the concept was too weird for him to want to understand. But in those days, he'd had nothing to lose, especially not for that sum of money. When he arrived the next day, the room was dark, and the rows of cots were empty except for two people, one man and one woman. Both were asleep and hooked up by IV to a machine being operated by the person he'd met the day before. The man was watching the sleepers with his eyebrows furrowed anxiously, as if he was expecting something, even though neither of them were moving. When Howon came in, the noise of his footsteps made the man look up. He was younger-looking than Howon expected.
"You came," he said. Then he stood and bowed formally. "My name is Kim Sunggyu. Have you ever shared your dreams before?"
Sometimes Howon gets nostalgic for those days, for the four of them stumbling to the bar every week with their arms around each other's shoulders, too wired after dreaming to feel sleepy. But he prefers the way it is now that he's under the agency, where the personnel changes with every job he takes. In the end, it's better to keep the relationship between partners neutral. It keeps him from getting complacent and therefore sloppy, and it keeps things from getting too complicated and therefore sloppy.
In an ideal world, Howon would work alone, but in his line of work that's impossible. An extraction can be done with just two people if necessary. For an inception, all the bases need to be covered in order for everything to be right: dream architecture, subconsciousness simulation, drug chemistry, and a backup, just in case any of the previous things aren't right. That had been his role in his first team, not a specialist, but someone who could fill in any gap. Sunggyu had called him the team's puzzle piece.
Two days after the meeting with the client, Howon meets the other three members of his inception team in Sungin-dong, near a hardware store hidden up in the hills behind Dongdaemun. It's not everyone that he asked for, but as his contract made clear, the agency always has final say on the lineup. At least they've given him Jang Dongwoo, who he's worked with before on a few extraction jobs. Like Howon, he does everything, but unlike Howon, his methods are unpredictable. It had thrown Howon off at first, but quickly he realized that was Dongwoo's most valuable asset.
After their first job together Dongwoo had woken up, squeezed Howon's shoulder, and said, "Good teamwork." That had given Howon a chill up his spine, but fortunately, Dongwoo otherwise stayed so pointedly, cheerfully blank that their relationship stayed just that - good teamwork.
The other two are less familiar to him: Lee Sungjong, an SNU art history student recruited from the dreamcade circuit, and Nam Woohyun, a forger by trade with enough experience to have that slippery, charming demeanour that Howon immediately dislikes. They're not great, but they're what he's got.
"Unfortunately, the place doesn't really exist anymore, but I thought you'd like to see it anyway," he tells the other three as they walk into the tiny hardware store. The old woman sitting at the counter in the back barely blinks as Howon leads the four of them through the store and out into the alley behind it, not even minding the small gym bag Howon has over one shoulder.
"Is this it?" Sungjong asks hesitantly, looking around.
"No," Howon says. He hefts the gym bag. "Come on."
He takes them down the alley and pushes open a door so old that it refuses to move at first, and rakes lines through the dust and dirt on the ground when it does. The staircase behind it is dark, and once he's down the stairs Howon can only make out the door at the bottom because of the light coming from behind him. He enters the old four-digit code, and he raises his eyebrows when the lock chirps three notes and whirs open, counter to his expectation.
His heart suspends its beating as he opens the door, and for a moment, he thinks he might find Boa and Minhyuk sitting up on the cots, restlessly shooting the shit while they wait, and Sunggyu's face lit from beneath by the dull glow of the PASIV device. But the cots are abandoned, and the room is empty.
"So this is where the magic happens, huh?" says Dongwoo, looking around. He kicks at an empty sedative cartridge on the ground and it rattles over the cement floor. "Happened."
Sungjong yanks open one of the blackout curtains to light up the room, then briskly tries to fan away the dust that comes up. "Why did it close? There's practically a waiting list for every dreamcade in the city these days. You could make some good money if it were open."
"This place didn't need to turn a profit," Howon responds, setting the gym bag down at the foot of one of the rows of cots. "We made enough money doing the other stuff."
"The other stuff," Woohyun echoes. He shakes out the sheet on one of the cots and climbs onto it. "How'd you get your marks to come to a creepy place like this?"
"This wasn't where we did that, at least not all of the time. This was our home base, and that's why I brought you all here." Howon stops pacing, and the others all instinctively go still too, watching him. His next breath feels deeper, relaxed; maybe there's something to this team after all. "An inception, you all know, needs to be done in levels. If we can make him believe he's starting here, even if he knows that it's not real, convincing him to go into the next levels will be much easier."
"Genius," says Dongwoo. Howon shifts on his feet uncomfortably at his enthusiasm.
Sungjong is still looking around, holding up his phone to illuminate the darker corners of the room: the control booth near the front door, the American-style jukebox that Sunggyu brought in for decoration. "Has it always looked like this? I mean, will he recognize it just like this?"
Howon crosses his arms. "How much can you do on your own?"
"Well, I can clean up the dust, but I'd have to make up the rest."
"Why don't you open up your bag and show us what it used to look like?" Woohyun says to Howon. When Howon scowls at him, he winks.
Howon kneels down and unzips the gym bag he's brought, and takes out a small black hard case. Inside is a travel-size PASIV device, one of the agency's. Sungjong takes a step back when Howon opens the case, and Dongwoo starts to laugh.
The setup goes quickly. All of them have experience with dream-sharing, and Sungjong and Woohyun seem particularly eager to prove it. Howon makes sure everyone's IV is inserted before he puts in his own, and then, with the PASIV next to him on his cot, he presses the button to deploy the sedative, makes sure the timer is set, and settles back. It's a weaker sedative that the company produces for use in training, and Howon can feel it as it skims through his body, just under the surface of his skin. His muscles relax one, at a time, and then, like falling into a drift of snow, he falls asleep.
His mind works quickly after that, building the dreamcade as it looked five years ago from scratch. Rather than using the way it looks now as a base and working backwards, he's determined to create it purely as he remembers it. Once that's done, the others begin to appear in the room, all lying on cots as their sleeping bodies are. They're not alone: each of the other ten cots has a body lying on it, every one with an IV cable leading from their left forearm except for Howon and his team.
Sungjong gets up first, but as he opens his mouth to speak, Howon puts his finger to his lips to signal silence. Sungjong closes his mouth, still staring at the sleepers lying around him. The sleepers' faces are mostly similar and hard to distinguish from one another, but Howon immediately notices Minhyuk in one of the rows, also asleep. It hurts to see him, but Howon had purposefully placed him here, so the team would recognize him if he came up.
Carefully, he gets up from his cot without making any noise, and waits until Dongwoo, Woohyun, and Sungjong have all done the same. Then he motions for them to follow him.
He feels an instinctive urge to make the rows of cots stretch out to hundreds, thousands of sleepers, but he resists it; he isn't making a trap, but a diagram. Instead he brings the three of them to the control booth, where Sunggyu is operating the PASIV with Boa sitting next to him. Howon's projection of Sunggyu looks just like he did when Howon first met him outside of the bar in Jongno, wearing a black leather jacket that zips up across his body, with his hair short on the sides and spiky on top. Howon stops short, not wanting to get too close, but Sunggyu doesn't look up.
"That's him?" Dongwoo asks.
"Yes," Woohyun says, just as Howon answers. Howon looks at him strangely, but Woohyun doesn't return it.
Sungjong's head has swivelled back to look at the rows of sleepers on the cots. Even though the blackout curtains are pulled, every detail of the room is easy to make out. "So you guys did run games here."
Howon glances back too. "Minhyuk and I always won," he says, with a small sense of pride.
When he turns back to look at the control booth, Sunggyu is standing up and looking directly at him. Boa has disappeared. The other members of Howon's team have disappeared too, and even the sleepers behind him.
Sunggyu steps forward and puts his hand on Howon's chest. Howon lets him. It's been a long time, he thinks, while Sunggyu says it. Sunggyu only touches his chest with a flat palm, but it feels so intimate. Howon shudders. Sunggyu smiles at him, an unexpectedly gentle smile, and then he slides his thumb under the first button of Howon's shirt and pulls the buttons open, one by one, in a way that would be impossible in waking life.
In waking life. Howon is dreaming, he remembers this now, and suddenly everyone is there again: Woohyun and Sungjong standing behind him, Sungjong's mouth curled into a frown, and Dongwoo at his side, with a look on his face that's somewhere between pleased, confused, and wary. Howon steps back from Sunggyu like he's been bitten by something. The broken jukebox in the corner of the room lights up, and starts to play a Supreme Team song that Howon liked in high school.
"It's time," says Dongwoo, and he punches Howon in the face.
Howon wakes up. The Supreme Team song is playing off of his cell phone's alarm, tinnier than it had sounded in the dream. He sits up and yanks the needle out of his arm, ignoring the sting of pain that follows. Around him, the others get up from their cots, too.
Howon shuts the travel-size PASIV off. "I'm sorry," he says. It's a fight to look each of them in the eyes, but he forces himself to do it. "That was irresponsible."
"Hey, it's fine," says Dongwoo. "I think we got the picture, right?"
Woohyun laughs, mostly teasing but with a ragged edge. "There was definitely some picture there."
They go their separate ways soon after that. When Howon finishes packing up his gear, Sungjong is the last one remaining in the room. "Hey, you can go, you know," Howon tells him, shrugging the gym bag over his shoulder. "You don't need to study it so hard."
"Okay." Sungjong looks around the ceiling another time anyway, then follows Howon to the door. "It really is kind of creepy, huh? Not like how Mr. Kim described it at all."
Howon's hand tightens on the doorknob. "Has Mr. Kim been here?"
"I guess so, right? I imagine his older brother brought him here at one point or another." Sungjong brushes his bangs back. "He knows about a dreamcade, anyway."
Howon listens to all this, then takes his hand off the doorknob for a moment, and looks back at Sungjong. "And how do you know about this?"
"The agency gave me some information beforehand, so I went to scout out the locations. I ran into this guy at a cafe and he wanted to talk about dreamshare. He couldn't stop talking about his older brother who used to do it. I didn't know it was the client until today. I...guess I wasn't supposed to do that," Sungjong finishes, seeing the stony look on Howon's face.
"No," Howon says. "But I appreciate your initiative." He opens the door without another word, and once they're outside Sungjong quietly bows goodbye and leaves.
---
The plan is this: between Sunggyu's doses, Myungsoo will switch out his drugs for a non-dreaming sedative, which will put Sunggyu's body to sleep but leave his mind open. Then Howon and his team will bring them into their dreams, and take it from there.
"According to these records, his doses are lower than I was expecting," says Lee Sungyeol, the chemist the agency has assigned to this job. He pushes his clear plastic-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose with one finger. Howon has spent at least half of this meeting trying to figure out if they're prescription or just for looks. "Which is good news, because that means something stronger will still knock him out. And I've mixed in his drugs with ours, so there's a lower chance that his body will reject it. So the biggest risk is that once you guys come in, his mind will block you out."
"That's nothing we can't handle," says Howon, and Sungyeol makes a face and pushes his glasses up again. "Wouldn't the biggest risk be..." He trails off, and glances at Myungsoo, who's sitting further down the table between Dongwoo and Sungjong. Myungsoo blinks back at him, his expression blank.
From the head of the table, Soojung clears her throat. "He's the only person Sunggyu is expecting to see," she says. "Currently, he's been staying in Myungsoo's apartment in Yeoksam-dong while the chaebol figures this whole thing out. It would be easier if we could disguise some of you as employees or private medical staff, but of course, we can't do that because he knows what you look like."
"So bring the rest of the team in as staff, and I'll sneak in after they've started," says Howon.
"You and Nam Woohyun would have to sneak in," Soojung corrects him, and Howon's head snaps around to where Woohyun is sitting on the other side of the table, drinking from a cup of coffee to hide his gaze.
After the plan has been settled, the team and Soojung file out of the room. Someone catches Howon's elbow, and even though he knows who it is, his stomach still drops when he turns around and sees Woohyun.
"We have to talk," Woohyun says.
---
"It's not as sexy as your story, obviously," says Woohyun, and Howon crosses his arms tighter over his chest at his tone. They're still in the agency meeting room; only once in the last ten minutes did a junior employee open the door, only to swiftly reverse direction while repeatedly bowing when he saw the look on Howon's face. "But you know what they say, you always remember your first."
"You're disgusting," Howon says, and the leer on Woohyun's mouth grows wider. "What happened in that dream never happened in real life."
"But you wanted it to," Woohyun retorts, and Howon flinches. "It's okay, no judgment, I understand you. It was exactly the same with him and me, when we started out. He introduced me to it, so of course I worshipped him. I thought he knew everything, and I'm pretty sure he thought so too. Sounds familiar, right?"
Howon stares at him, arms still knotted tight over his chest. "Where's your contract? I'm going to set it on fire. I'm going to use it to set you on fire. I can't believe they sent you to work with me."
"Why wouldn't they?" The sing-song tone goes out of Woohyun's voice for a more condescending one, and he leans back in his chair. "The more people who are familiar with him in this, the better. If we're just going off of your perception of reality and your reading of him, he'll notice. And your reading is about two years older than mine."
He waits for Howon's response, but all Howon does is sigh and look toward the door. If that junior secretary or whatever came back, Howon would let him in now, along with every other secretary and chemist the agency keeps on payroll.
"All right," Woohyun says, and he leans back in his chair to mirror Howon's posture. "I answered your question, now you answer one of mine."
"You volunteered that information yourself."
"But you were curious. And I'm much more cooperative than you." Woohyun smiles. "Mr. Ryu said Agent Lee was familiar with inception. What is the nature of Agent Lee's familiarity with inception?"
Now Howon smiles too. "Bastard. You already know."
"I want to hear it in your beautiful voice. The same one you just used to call me a bastard. Go on."
"Fine." Howon has no idea what Sunggyu could have seen in Woohyun: a hard worker and a desire to please, maybe, but he would have driven Sunggyu up the wall like this. Or maybe the way he acts is all Sunggyu's fault. "Someone tried to do inception on me once. It didn't work. It's not in my file, but of course you found out anyway."
"'Someone'?"
Howon stands up abruptly. "Is this meeting over yet? I have somewhere to be. I don't know about you."
"Go on," Woohyun says, as he gets up. "Tell me who this someone is."
"In my beautiful voice, right?" Howon chuckles. "Fine. Kim Sunggyu," he says, enunciating each syllable. "And don't ask me what he wanted to do. I don't know, because it didn't work. Now you have to answer my question. My real question."
Woohyun shrugs, already at the door. "Go ahead."
"I'm asking you this as your team leader. Are you going to be able to do your job properly when you see him again?"
Woohyun tilts his head to one side. "Are you?"
---
It had taken place in a nightclub, black-walled and lit in pink and purple. Maybe this was only intended to be the first level of the dream, but it was the only level Howon saw. Howon was sitting by the wall, watching other people dance, not so much individuals as a mass of bodies writhing together. There was no music playing, but at the time, Howon hadn't noticed.
Sunggyu came back from the bar with two shots, both glasses glowing from the inside like the pink and purple lightbulbs. "For a job well done," he said. That's right, Howon told himself, they'd just finished a job. It didn't matter that the day before he'd signed a full-time contract with the agency, and that he hadn't even seen anyone from the crew in two weeks. They always worked well together, him and Sunggyu, their individual skills only enhanced by their shared perfectionism. They clinked glasses and downed the shots. Howon could feel himself being lulled by the beat of the dancers and the act of drinking, and by the warmth of Sunggyu's approval.
Sunggyu smiled at him, his eyes and his mouth making the same wide, stretched-out shape. He was wearing a clean white collared shirt and slim-cut black pants; they suited him. "Come on," he said to Howon, holding out one hand, and he led him to the dance floor.
Sunggyu was a bad dancer, but he at least had a sense of rhythm, even if his movements were stiff. Howon fell into rhythm with him at the edge of the crowd of bodies, and his vision focused on the hypnotic twisting of Sunggyu's torso in his white shirt. In waking life, Sunggyu was just his team leader, a comrade. He was probably in love with Boa. It was unrealistic of Howon to expect anything more. But here, he had invited Howon to dance with him, and now he was putting his arms around Howon's shoulders in a circle, and leaning his hips closer. It was too perfect.
"It could stay like this, you know," Sunggyu said, his voice a low murmur. "Just you and me." Howon shut his eyes, let the shiver run all the way through his body, then opened his eyes again.
It was too perfect. Howon wasn't supposed to be here. He was full-time with the agency now, and the Sungin-dong crew was in the past. He wasn't a petty criminal anymore. He took a step back from Sunggyu, out of his arms. The bright white overhead lights turned on, and the other dancers started to melt away, until there was only an empty room left around them.
"Howon," Sunggyu said, taking a step forward.
Howon turned away. "Leave." When he woke up, he was alone in a jjimjilbang room in Dongdaemun. There was a single puncture mark in his left forearm, like some personal belonging carelessly left behind.
---
Dongwoo, Woohyun, and Sungjong are already waiting outside of Myungsoo's apartment when the elevator door opens and Howon and Sungyeol get out. "Hey!" says Dongwoo, springing to his feet right away, but Howon shushes him until Myungsoo opens the door to let them in.
The apartment is as big as expected, but so crowded with furniture and personal effects that it feels like Myungsoo is leading them through a high-walled maze. Howon looks around at the forgotten food delivery boxes and piles of crumpled clothing, but keeps his judgments to himself.
Myungsoo takes them into a bedroom, where Sunggyu is lying on a bed on top of the sheets. He has an IV drip leading from one arm, and there's a PASIV device on the floor beside the bed, inoperative. If it weren't for the IV he'd look like some kind of monk, dressed in loose, plain clothing with his hair cropped to above his eyebrows. Howon puts his hand over his mouth, but he has no idea what expression he's trying to hide. He can feel Woohyun looking at him, but he has no desire to look back.
Sungyeol crouches down next to the bed and opens the old leather suitcase he's brought with him. He takes out his equipment - syringes, brown glass vials, plastic tubing - and sets it next to the PASIV already on the floor. Meanwhile, Dongwoo and Sungjong start arranging the furniture in the room for the five of them. The movement Howon snaps out of his daze, and he goes to help.
"All set," Sungyeol says. He makes one last adjustment to the PASIV's settings, then he looks up at Howon. Sungjong and Dongwoo do the same, and then at last Woohyun, his expression neutral.
Howon looks at the long rise and fall of Sunggyu's chest. Then he says, "Let's go."
---
They're in Coma Beat Dreamcade, inside Sungjong's dream. The place feels empty, but not totally abandoned; it has the air of a busy public square at night when there's no one around. Howon makes a mental note in Sungjong's favour.
Sunggyu is there standing among the cots, in the same clothes and haircut he'd had when they went to sleep, down to his bare feet. He doesn't seem to notice, or else he's more preoccupied with the intruders before him. "Who's there?" he asks, squinting at the four of them gathered by the door.
In reality, it would ruin the mission if Sunggyu recognized either of them, but Howon had decided there was no need for either him or Woohyun to hide in the dream; the low odds of two strangers from Sunggyu's past being in the same place would make it look more like a trick of Sunggyu's subconscious, and therefore something his subconscious could accept as its own creation. Still, Howon lets Woohyun step out of the shadows first.
When he does, Howon gets a shock: he's not the taut-faced, jaded forger he met a week or two ago, but a kid of about the same height with round cheeks and spiky, orange-bleached hair. "It's just me, hyung," Woohyun says.
"You and three other people," Sunggyu observes, as Sungjong and Dongwoo follow Woohyun out.
"They're friends." Woohyun glances back at Howon. "They wanted to play."
That's when Howon steps out from the doorway, and his eyes meet Sunggyu's. Stupidly, Howon expects everything unravel around him, for the cots to start floating in the air or a battalion of soldiers to burst through the door to eject them from Sunggyu's subconscious, or for them to be pulled together as if by magnetic force, and everything in the room to disappear. None of this happens; Sunggyu's eyes meet Howon's, and then they look away.
"So do you all have the money or what?" Sunggyu asks. His appearance has changed: now he's wearing the leather jacket and spiky hairstyle that Howon remembers from five years ago, matching the setting of the dream.
In reply, the four of them reach into their pockets and each pull out a stack of 500,000 won. It's an extravagant buy-in, at least ten times the normal amount for a game among friends, but in a dream, the normal amount would be too small. They set the stacks on a tray on the control booth, and then take their places on the cots.
Sunggyu goes to the control booth and starts fiddling with the machine behind it. "C'mon, aren't you going to play with us, hyung?" Woohyun calls. "We need someone to be the loser." Sunggyu doesn't answer, but looks up at Howon with a scowl. Howon can't help but laugh. If that was how Woohyun talked to Sunggyu, it was no wonder their partnership didn't last long.
"Come on, Kim," Howon says. It's the first time he's spoken since they entered the dream. "I'll try not to beat you too badly in front of everyone."
"Someone has to make sure you all wake up," Sunggyu says, looking down to the machine behind the control booth again.
"I'll handle it." The hairs on the back of Howon's neck stand up at the voice, and the feeling stays when he turns and sees Sungjong, walking toward the control booth. Sungjong's appearance hasn't changed, but his voice isn't his voice - it's Boa's. It's like an association Sunggyu's subconscious would make from his lithe gestures, and it's the voice of someone Sunggyu trusts.
"All right," Sunggyu says. "Just this once."
---
The game level is Dongwoo's dream. They're on a city highway in the middle of the night on motorbikes. The road is free of obstacles, only sharp twists and slopes. Over their heads are wide, flat rows of lights, like a tunnel or a fishing net. It's a classic dreamcade game setup, but Dongwoo didn't choose it for that; "I just like to drive," he'd said, when they were planning it out. He's ahead of Howon, with a mask like a tusked boar's head and a bat that he twirls in one hand. Behind him, Woohyun's mask is the head of a golden Buddha. It's just the three of them on the road.
Howon pulls up between them. "Where's Sunggyu?" he yells through his horse mask, though his voice carries perfectly over the sound of the road.
Dongwoo points further down the road, where a lone rider on a motorbike is a good half a kilometre ahead of them, glancing back over his shoulder. The rider has the head of a Jindo dog, narrow-eyed with pointed ears and a long snout, and is still dressed in the leather jacket. He looks more absurd than threatening. "We can catch him," Dongwoo says.
Howon responds by hitting the gas and pulling ahead of him. Dongwoo laughs and falls in line behind him, using Howon's draft to pick up more speed. Howon can sense Woohyun somewhere behind, hands clenched tight on the steering of his bike as he fights to catch the two of them. Sunggyu may have had a head start, but he'll have a hard time getting past the three of them. The plan is to trap him, and offer him a way out by going to sleep. That will take him into the next level, Woohyun's dream, where the inception will take place.
"Hey!" Woohyun yells. Howon looks over his shoulder, but Woohyun's pointing frantically ahead of them, down where Sunggyu is. Howon turns back to see a car on the road, a beat-up, dark red sedan, going full speed in the opposite direction of the four riders and charging straight for Sunggyu. Thanks to lucid dreaming, even from this distance, Howon can see who's behind the wheel: it's Kim Myungsoo, gritting his teeth and gripping the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles are white. Around his neck is a large, heavy brass key.
Howon hangs back until he and Dongwoo are parallel again. "What's he doing here?" he shouts to Dongwoo. "This is supposed to be your dream."
"It is my dream," Dongwoo replies. "Maybe he convinced Sungyeol to let him come in." Then the boar's ears perk up. "Oh, wait. I know what it is."
"What?"
Just as Dongwoo's about to reply, Sunggyu puts his arms up to cover his head, and the bike hits the sedan with a crash. Howon almost hits the brakes on his own bike at the sound. The sedan flips up and rolls a few times in midair, almost in slow motion, before it smashes down on the ground again, roof-first, flames and smoke pouring out of the windows.
"What the fuck?" Woohyun yells from behind them. "What was that?"
"That was a projection of Sunggyu's subconscious," Dongwoo replies, leaning back a bit on his bike. "You know, because he feels bad about lying to Myungsoo."
"Lying about what?" Howon asks.
"When I talked to Myungsoo, he was like a dog who fetches for his owner but doesn't know what it means. I think his mind is starting to reject the idea that Sunggyu is his brother." Dongwoo turns to Howon, and Howon can see his eyes through the boar's head mask, intense and dark. "You said it yourself, it's like a transplant surgery."
Howon remembers Sungjong telling him in the Sungin-dong dreamcade, He couldn't stop talking about his older brother. "Why?" is all he can say.
"I dunno. Hard up for cash?" Dongwoo nods at the remains of the crash, which is getting closer. "Looks like he survived."
A crash like that would be enough of a kick to make Sunggyu wake up back in Sungjong's dream, but Sunggyu had managed to slide under the car just before impact. Now he's staggering away from the wreckage. In his hand is the key that was hanging around Myungsoo's neck.
As the three motorbikes get closer, he turns to look over his shoulder, and then he vanishes. Dream reason, he'd taught Howon; when you know you're in a dream, you can exploit it.
When he reappears, he lands on top of the netting of lights over their head and starts running towards the three of them. He must have jumped. The three riders skid to a halt. "Shit," Woohyun yells, as Sunggyu runs past them, making the bulbs rattle. "Shit!"
"Hoya." Dongwoo is looking back over his shoulder at Howon. "You get up there, okay?"
Howon looks up. There's no opening in the lights above his head. Dream reason can only do so much. "How?"
Dongwoo backs up a few metres. Then he stands up on his bike and, steadying himself with one hand, he smashes upward with his bat until one light goes out, then shatters. He drags his bat forward and pulls a hole in the string of lights, glass falling around his boar's head, until the rest of the row disconnects and crashes down. Then he turns around, but he doesn't go back to Howon and Woohyun.
"I'll keep going," he says. "You guys catch up." Then he revs his engine, and continues down the road.
Howon stands up on his bike, more slowly than Dongwoo, even though he's stationary. He gets one foot up on the handlebars, and then he grabs onto the lights that are dangling down and pulls himself up. When he looks up, the environment has changed, and the cables that had been supporting the lights are now a web of vertical netting, stretching to a peak. The Jindo head rider is just about to reach the top. "What did you do?" Howon shouts to Dongwoo. But the road underneath him is now too far away to see, as the netting spirals upwards over it like a mountain.
The netting pulls in one direction. Woohyun is climbing up, fast and determined as a spider. His Buddha head mask is gone, and he has his normal face now, the face Howon recognizes. Howon realizes his own mask is gone, too.
"Finally," Woohyun says to Howon, as he catches up. He sounds out of breath, even in a dream. They're almost at the top. "Agent Lee, let's jump. Let's end this now."
Howon shakes his head. "We can't end it. We have a mission."
"Yeah, and now the mission has been compromised. You don't know what he's going to do. Let's get out of here."
"No," says Howon again, and Woohyun flinches back. "There's still four hours before Sungjong kicks us out of here. I'm not going to leave Dongwoo in here with him. You said it yourself, we don't know what he's going to do."
Woohyun laughs. "Is Dongwoo the one you don't want to leave?"
"Fuck you. You want to get out of here so bad, you jump. But I'm here for a reason." Howon hoists himself over the edge of the netting.
Sunggyu is in front of a giant glass pyramid. He also no longer has his mask. Howon watches as he takes the key from around his neck and fits it into a lock on the front of the pyramid, and the door of the pyramid dissolves.
Howon runs. Behind him, Woohyun runs too. And just as Sunggyu steps into the pyramid, the two of them jump in after him, and fall into darkness.
---
In their planning meeting, Woohyun had proposed his dream would be of a tall, western-style house out in the country, isolated so Sunggyu's subconscious wouldn't think to populate it with its own creations. As Myungsoo, he would lead Sunggyu to a bedroom on the very top floor, and Howon would meet him there for the inception, while Woohyun kept watch out in the stairway. He'd promised the dream would hold strong, even three levels deep. "As long as your drugs are strong enough to do the job," Woohyun had said, winking at Sungyeol, who immediately opened his mouth to object. "But this house is a sure thing."
Instead of the house, they're in what looks like a basement or a parking garage, windowless and filled with rows of concrete pillars that seem to stretch on forever, and lit with a neon purple-blue that saturates Howon's vision.
Ahead of them, Sunggyu is running, pumping his arms like a sprinter. He's dressed differently now, in a white shirt and black pants. Howon and Woohyun are already running after him, though there's no end to the space in sight.
"This is your house?" Howon shouts, turning back to look at Woohyun.
"It's my dream," Woohyun replies. "But something's wrong with it."
"Come on," says Howon. "Didn't he teach you how to fight that?" He chuckles. "Or did you just spend the whole time looking at him?"
"Fuck off," Woohyun snaps. Sunggyu looks back over his shoulder at them, and then suddenly he bounces off of a wall in front of him, a mirror that goes as high and long as the space they're in. It's a dead end. He looks around, and just as Howon and Woohyun get close to the wall, he darts left.
The two of them follow Sunggyu into a corridor with bright blue walls that are so high he can't see the ceiling, and Howon stops. He's in the middle of a four-way intersection of corridors, almost perfectly identical and symmetrical. Empty picture frames hang all along the walls. He looks back at Woohyun. "Which way?" They can hear footsteps running past one of the corridors. "This way," he says, without waiting for Woohyun to answer, and takes off again.
He arrives in a bathroom, a surprisingly realistic one, with white tiles and fixtures and dirty grout and even a small window near the ceiling, though the light coming through the window is too bright for him to see what might be outside. "How about this, is this your house?" he calls to Woohyun.
"It's a nice house," Sunggyu replies, and in the mirror over the sink Howon sees him stepping out from behind him. Howon spins around to look behind him, but no one's there. When he looks back at the mirror, Sunggyu is standing next to him in the reflection, looking into his eyes.
"Why are you doing this?" Howon asks. His heart is pounding hard and it's getting harder to breathe, but he doesn't move or look away.
Sunggyu smiles. "It's been a long time," he says. He rests his head on Howon's shoulder; he'd always made a big deal out of being a little taller than him, how far he had to bend down to talk to him. Howon's eyelids flutter, but he keeps his eyes open. "Come here," Sunggyu says, and in the reflection he pulls Howon's face towards his own and kisses him on the mouth, slowly, still looking out to the other side of the mirror.
Howon wants to look away, but he can't even turn his head, so hypnotized by the sight of Sunggyu kissing him in the mirror that he can't move his hands to remind himself what he's here for, can't move his hands to touch himself. In the reflection, Sunggyu pushes him up against the sink and pulls Howon's lower lip between his teeth. Howon's neck feels hot. He takes a step closer to the mirror, his own lips parted.
The mirror shatters just above his head with a noise like a car crash, and the glass splinters into a shower of water that falls into the sink and onto the floor. Howon spins around to see Woohyun behind him, his shaking hands holding a second rock which he lets fall to the floor.
Howon braces himself for the joke, but all Woohyun says is, "Come on," and he takes Howon's arm and leads him out of the bathroom.
Woohyun pulls him back into the tall corridors, which have turned pink. "Wait," Howon says.
"It's okay," Woohyun replies, not looking back at him. He seems more confident about which way to go now, or maybe he's just accepted that they're not in charge here. "I told you, I know what it's like."
"Not that." Howon tugs his arm back, but only lightly, to make Woohyun pay attention. "I have to go deeper."
"No, we need to get out of here. This is the third level. You can't go deeper than this. The drugs aren't strong enough. The only way to go is back up."
They arrive at the end of the hallway in a room. It has the same bright blue walls covered in empty picture frames, but it's small and claustrophobic, unlike the corridors. The wall facing them is a mirror, and in it they can see that the doorway behind them has disappeared. The room has no visible exits.
Sunggyu is on the other side of the mirror. He is not touching either of them; he looks like he's right up against the glass.
Howon walks toward the mirror. Woohyun tightens his grip on Howon's arm. "What are you doing?" he hisses.
Howon raises his arm, not resisting Woohyun but not going with him, either. "I have to go," he says.
"You can't." Woohyun's voice shakes a little. "I won't let you."
"Look, Woohyun," says Howon. "Whatever you had, you have to let it go. You said yourself it was over."
"Asshole. It's not about that." Woohyun pulls on Howon's arm, and Howon turns to look at him. "I don't want him to win."
Howon lets that sink in, and then he sighs. "You're right. But this is the only way."
When he pulls his arm back from Woohyun, Woohyun lets go. Howon walks toward the mirror, toward Sunggyu, who's grinning at him, waiting. Howon stops, and then he runs into the mirror headfirst. It opens up like a pool of water, and it swallows him whole.
---
Howon is on a beach at night, with pale sand stretching in front of him and the ocean sending up the regular sound of waves. The air is still and thin and cool, and even though the beach looks well-lit, the sky is dark and speckled with stars. It could be Haeundae Beach, in the fall when it's too cold to sit by the water, but there are no glass towers behind him; instead, the rectangular mirror he'd walked through is still there, now sheepishly small compared to the scale of the beach. When Howon puts his arm into it, searching for the other side, all he gets is cold water up to his elbow, and a few droplets flow out when he pulls his hand back. They sparkle in midair, then float away to join the other stars in the sky.
Only a few metres in front of him, there's a single figure sitting on the sand, hugging his knees to his chest and looking at the water. The person is dressed in a baggy brown T-shirt and pants and no shoes, with his hair closely cropped above his eyebrows. Howon realizes, with a jolt, who it is. "Kim Sunggyu," he yells, as much to tell himself as to get Sunggyu's attention. "You motherfucker."
Sunggyu looks up, and Howon closes his hands into fists and tenses the muscles of his arms into a ready stance, just in case. But Sunggyu doesn't get up. "It's finally happening," he replies, though it's barely audible, like he's talking to himself. He looks old, much older than he looked back in Kim Myungsoo's apartment, with pronounced lines between his eyebrows and around his mouth.
Howon drops his shoulders, but the tension lingers in his biceps and fists. "What the hell is going on?" he says. "You made me follow you, and now I'm here. So?"
"I don't understand." Sunggyu's facial expression is slack, confused. "You followed me here?" Then something on his face changes. "Lee Howon, is that you? You're not a projection?"
"Would you prefer that?" Howon says. It's a reflex. His mocking tone feels forced, the same as trying to make himself look like he did five years ago felt in Sungjong's dream. "I can go and come back."
Sunggyu laughs. "You asshole. I can't believe it." He starts to get up, but he's shaky, like he's forgotten how to stand, or hasn't learned yet. It takes him a few attempts just to plant one foot on the ground and shift his weight onto it. Eventually Howon walks over and takes his hand, and Sunggyu grips onto it as he gets to his feet, one leg at a time. Howon thinks of the look in Sunggyu's eye in the bathroom mirror, the younger, charismatic Sunggyu. It should feel good to see him this pitiful, this humbled, but it only feels wrong and embarrassing. As soon as Sunggyu is steady on his feet, Howon lets go. "Come on," Sunggyu says.
They follow the coastline, Howon keeping about ten paces behind Sunggyu. The beach seems to stretch out forever. "How did you find this place? You know, this isn't a dream that one of us is controlling," Sunggyu tells Howon. "It's more like a foundation, and all of the dreams happen on top of it. But if you dig deep enough through the layers of dreams, you can find this place." He nods to himself. "That's what I did."
"I don't get it," Howon says. "How is it different from a dream?"
Sunggyu hums, then laughs. "I can't really explain it. But you can feel it, right? It's like your wrists were tied before, and they're untied now." Sunggyu points up, and three oversized lionfish float by, their fins billowing and fluttering like silk. They swim through the air, slow and buoyant, leaving no bubbles in their wake, only the heaviness of their presence and their moonlit shadows on the beach.
When Sunggyu looks back at Howon, Howon can't help but grin. It feels natural now, being with Sunggyu like this. This is a completely different person from the cold, quiet leader he'd ran after through the endless halls of Woohyun's dream; but both of them are the Sunggyu that Howon remembers.
"So when you made us chase you through all those dreams, you were trying to get to this place." Howon looks up at the stars. The lionfish have disappeared. "I can see why."
Sunggyu lowers his eyebrows. "What are you talking about? I've been on this beach for thirty years. Even with time dilation, that's..."
"What are you talking about? I saw you," Howon says. "Stop denying it. You were younger, and you..." He stops, not wanting to say the words to Sunggyu.
"I seriously don't know what you mean," Sunggyu says. "Sounds like a projection to me. Your subconscious knew where to find me, but your conscious mind didn't. That's what people say dreams are to begin with, your subconscious trying to sort things out for your rational mind." Howon knows this already. It's the whole principle behind inception: dreams allow a foreign idea to pose as the mind's own creation, piggybacking on all the other messages sent from the subconscious to the conscious mind. Still, it bothers him that in a situation where all he has to do is execute a plan, something so unpredictable could happen because of him.
"If you were here the whole time," he says, "then you couldn't have been able to leave to convince Kim Myungsoo he was your half-brother." Sunggyu flinches, just a little, but it's enough. "Did you tell him to hire us, too?"
There's a long pause. Then Sunggyu says, "Kim Myungsoo was a long time ago. It didn't work on you, but he's a lot more...susceptible than you."
Howon snorts. "Just say it. His brain is like soft tofu."
"Hey," Sunggyu responds, though he grins. "To be honest, I didn't really think it through. All I needed was the cash. But I didn't think about how dangerous it was, to do that to someone. I'm sorry I did it to him, and to you." He stops and sighs. "Did he really hire you? To do what?"
"Inception. Naturally. According to him, you have a drug addiction." Howon raises an eyebrow. "Is it true? I always thought you were better than that."
Sunggyu looks out at the water. The sound of the waves breaking returns; Howon had forgotten it was there.
"Kim," Howon says, "what happened to you?"
Sunggyu turns, and with the moonlight hitting his face, he looks not young again, or old, but old enough, the way he looks sleeping in Kim Myungsoo's bedroom right now, in waking life. "I realized what I'd done to you," he says, and Howon's heart stops at the word you. "You, and Boa, and Minhyuk," he continues, "and every kid I'd ever brought into this business. It wasn't right. So..." He shrugs. "I exiled myself to sleep." He chuckles, but it's hollow. "I don't even wake up anymore. It's been thirty years. I don't think I can."
Howon's heart has started beating again, and he remembers this feeling, too, of looking at Sunggyu and his heart picking up speed all on its own. He'd wanted something then, something that felt wrong and sacrilegious to want. I worshipped him, Woohyun had said; I thought he knew everything. Woohyun had gotten over it, and Howon thought he'd gotten over it, too. But he'd only pushed it down, buried it under layers and layers, and the more he ignored it, the more powerful it had become.
"Coward," Howon says. "That's what a coward does."
Sunggyu shuts his eyes, and turns away. "I know."
Howon takes a step closer. "You know," he says, "but that means nothing if you don't do anything. You can wake up if you want to wake up, but you don't want to, because you don't want to deal with what's out there."
Sunggyu sighs. "It's too late."
"It's not too late." Howon takes another step, inhales to brace himself, then says, "There's a reason I kept following you all the way in here."
"Because you're good at your job."
"Because I wanted to see you again," Howon blurts out. "But not like this."
Sunggyu laughs. "What, old?"
"No. Afraid." Howon holds out his hand. "I don't care about the money, and I'm not here to trick you. I want you to make your own decision. But I..." For a second, the old fear rushes back. He catches his breath through it, and says, "I want you to come with me, Sunggyu." Sunggyu looks in his eyes, then at his hand. "Come on," Howon says.
The words seem to spark something in Sunggyu's memory. He puts his hand in Howon's, carefully, but his grip around Howon's fingers is strong.
Howon leads Sunggyu by the hand into the ocean. It's cold around their ankles, colder than Haeundae in the fall. They keep walking together, until Howon's feet can't touch the bottom anymore, and he's holding onto Sunggyu to carry him the last few inches. They stop and face each other, just as a wave comes over their heads, plugging Howon's ears and blinding him briefly.
When he blinks away the water, there's Sunggyu, not the twisted Sunggyu of his dreams, but the real Sunggyu, the one who'd seen something great in him and tried to bring it out. The least Howon can do is the same for him.
---
This is what happens next:
In Kim Myungsoo's apartment in Yeoksam-dong, an alarm clock goes off beside Kim Sunggyu's PASIV device. Myungsoo wakes up from where he'd been dozing off in a chair, dreaming about a Japanese cuckoo eating a cat. Sungyeol, the chemist, gets up and shuts the PASIV down, as the sedative he'd given the sleepers wears off. Their bodies begin to stir, like flowers unfolding in time lapse.
In the Coma Beat Dreamcade, Sungjong goes to the American-style jukebox and picks a song by Park Jiyoon. As the opening notes start to play, he walks through the rows of cots, and, staying on beat with the song, he turns each of the cots over, sending the bodies hard onto the floor. If he kicks one or two of them when they don't respond, it's only for their own good.
On the dreamcade track, Dongwoo drives a car towards the glass pyramid that guards Woohyun and Howon's sleeping bodies. The car is a red sedan. He can hear Park Jiyoon's "Coming of Age Ceremony" playing, slowed down, as the car hits the glass wall and the windshield shatters.
In Woohyun's dream, the endless corridors and mirrors have rearranged themselves into the country house he'd been trying to create, only with blue and pink walls. Woohyun goes up to the bedroom at the top of the stairs to find Howon sleeping on the bed there. With a bit of difficulty, Woohyun lifts Howon over his shoulders, then he opens the window and jumps.
In the ocean by the pale sand beach, Howon and Sunggyu are treading water. Over their heads, a small school of crucian carp floats by, iridescent in the moonlight. Then Howon puts his arms around Sunggyu and pulls him close, and they drown.
---
One week after the Kim inception, Howon takes a taxi from the agency office in Mapo-gu to Yeoksam-dong. Kim Myungsoo answers the door himself. He looks surprised to see Howon there. Howon smiles at him.
"I'm here to see your brother," he says. "Half-brother, sorry."
"It's okay, Myungsoo," says Sunggyu from inside. "I'll talk to him." Myungsoo stares at Howon as he walks inside, then he disappears into another room of the cluttered apartment without a word, leaving Howon standing in the entranceway and Sunggyu a few paces away from him. "What are you doing here?" Sunggyu asks Howon. He's dressed in a clean shirt and track pants. His hair is still too short.
"You should ask yourself that question," Howon says. "Haven't you done enough to this kid?"
"I gave myself a brother, so I now have to be one too. Besides, if anyone needs a hyung around, it's him." Sunggyu rubs at his eyes with one hand, then puts it on his back, like he needs it to stay upright. "What are you doing here?"
Howon clears his throat, steadies himself on his feet. "The inception, three years ago, what you said to me. 'Just you and me.' Do you remember?" Sunggyu laughs awkwardly, looking down. "Be honest."
"I remember," Sunggyu says. "I shouldn't have done that to you. It was all just-"
"I don't care," Howon says. "I came here to tell you two things. I quit the agency today, and I still think about what you said to me then, every day. Even if you didn't mean it, I still think about it."
Sunggyu blinks at him. His face is blank, except for a slight furrow in his eyebrows. "So what should I do?"
"I don't know. I'm out of the business of telling people what to do. But I know what I'd like you to do."
"Apologize?"
"You've already done that." Howon turns to go. "Just think about it. If you want to, you can always find me again."
"Wait." Howon stops with his hand on the doorknob and looks back at Sunggyu. "Before you go, come here."
Howon looks down, and then, with his shoes still on, he walks toward Sunggyu. "What is it?"
Sunggyu puts one hand on Howon's shoulder, then leans in and kisses him on the cheek lightly. He keeps his face close to Howon's when he says, "I'm not dreaming."
He smells like medical ointment and he feels bony and his short hair brushes Howon's eyelashes, but he's there, not a memory or a projection. "You're not," Howon says, and he kisses him on the lips, once, lingering.
The sun is setting when Howon steps out of Kim Myungsoo's apartment building onto the street. He gets into a taxi heading back across the river, and as it goes over the bridge he closes his eyes, and drifts into sleep.
THANKS TO: meimei for the original idea, unni for the Inception TED talk, V. for more knowledge (no totems this time I swear!), and my most wise and patient beta.