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When he first meets Incheol, he thinks it’ll be easy.
Men like him are always easy.
They stand tall but are far too used to bowing low, their smiles are too perfect but their fingers itch with the urge to go insane. Pyeonghwa has met too many men like him. Perfect suits that don’t fit into the neighbourhood. They buckle at the opportunity to hurt, at the chance to have power of any kind—they’ll throw him to the ground with ease and relish the rush it gives them.
They’ll fuck him up at the slightest hint that he’d let them get away with it.
Incheol isn’t any different. His smile is just as strained, his soul just as empty. Just another rich man who thinks that the gods are torturing him by not making him richer—just another asshole who will play sickeningly nice when he might even have blood on his hands.
Incheol isn’t any different.
But it turns out—
He isn’t as easy.
Honestly? It’s a waste.
For a man like him, who can knock Pyeonghwa unconscious with one punch to the face, who can finally make everything stop so he doesn’t have to keep looking for more—for a man like that, he’s still somehow more trouble than he’s worth.
He’s still deluded into thinking that he’s normal. That he’s suffering. That Pyeonghwa is, somehow, making his life worse.
It’s an awful lot of trouble having to dig through Incheol’s disgust and repulsion, to convince him that it’s okay to leave another man bruised and half dead on the floor. It’s an awful lot of trouble that Pyeonghwa is too bored to get through.
He doesn’t have that kind of time.
(He has—too much time.)
Time that he has to spend living, breathing, doing fucked up mundane shit, brushing his teeth, taking a shower, patching up his wounds because for some reason no one gets that he doesn’t care if they kill him. It’s too much time that he’s forced to get through each day. Too much time in this monotonous neighbourhood that he won’t leave unless he dies.
It’s boring enough without having to hold Incheol’s hand and promise him that it’s okay to be fucked in the head. That it’s okay to not be ‘normal.’
So he doesn’t.
He leaves the man to fall apart on his own.
Pyeonghwa finds fires to jump into elsewhere. There are always fires to jump into.
But none of them burn enough to kill him.
.
You have to stop, he keeps hearing, every time he’s forced to get treated. You have to stop before it kills you.
It’s a funny thing to say to someone like him.
It’s funnier still because why would he stop?
Sometimes he wonders what it must be like to be one of those doctors. To try your very best to save everyone who comes to you. To patch up wounds, to stitch them closed, to try to hold onto life as if it were a blessing.
It’s hilarious to think about.
Like making a profession out of holding water between broken fingers.
Aren’t all of them meant to die?
Pyeongwha doesn’t care if he does.
It’s funny to hear—you have to stop. You won’t live like this. You won’t last.
As if he’s ever been alive in the first place.
The closest that Pyeonghwa gets to living is when he’s bleeding out on the floor.
When his face is torn and there’s blood on his tongue and there isn’t anything to think of but the pain.
He doesn’t get people who can smile at each other and then lie about having feelings in their heart. He doesn’t feel a damned thing unless there’s a knife digging into his skin.
But for that moment, he’s alive. Just for that moment.
When the only thought in his head is that everything fucking hurts.
.
But the moment always ends.
Each time he resurfaces, reality is a little uglier. A little more grey.
A little more dead.
He’s starting to lose the ability to live in it.
.
When he was younger he tried to hurt himself on his own.
Slamming his head. Carving scars into his skin. It always hurt, but it didn’t hurt well enough. It wasn’t enough to make him feel like a person.
There was still too much control in it. Too much awareness.
He always knew what he was doing to himself.
Even now he hates this—the fact that he has to ask for it.
Hit me. Choke me. Punch me in the face.
It’s why boxing gets him so much higher.
There, he doesn’t have to waste his time talking to people. He doesn’t have to put up with their fucked up attempts at normality because they think it’s cruel, or something, to fuck him up and then leave. They think it’s cruel to not hold each other in the aftermath, even when he kicks them out and calls them pathetic for it.
When he’s boxing, his opponents are never holding back for fear of hurting him.
They’re never wasting time talking to him like he’s a person.
They smack him in the face and then they fucking leave.
It’s how life should be.
The dazed feeling of having his life torn out of him, the claps and cheers of onlookers who are getting just as high on the spectacle of it—it’s the closest that Pyeonghwa has come to understanding what it must feel like to see god.
He sees Incheol in the crowd once, as it happens.
Pyeonghwa’s ears are ringing from pain, his vision is obscured in one eye by blood dripping into it.
But he sees the vague figure of that perfect suit, hands in his pockets, expression unreadable from this distance.
He wonders what the man must think.
He’s fucking crazy, is probably the gist of it. Why is he doing this to himself, might be it too. Maybe he means it when he says he wants me to hurt him, is something Pyeonghwa can only hope that he’s understood.
Outwardly, Incheol doesn’t seem bothered. He talks politely to the man next to him. He stares at Pyeonghwa hard enough that he can feel the gaze even when he turns back to his opponent.
He takes another hit to the face. His vision blacks out for a blissful moment. Every time it happens, he hopes it’s the end. Every time, he still comes back to reality.
At the end of it, lying on the floor, he catches Incheol’s eye again.
The man is still watching him, still unreadable. Pyeonghwa fills the empty face with what he hopes to see—complete and utter disgust.
.
Incheol calls him many things.
A crazy bastard. A psychopath. A deviant. A lunatic.
He calls him words that he thinks will hurt but are just words that Pyeonghwa calls himself.
Incheol says them with the viciousness of someone trying to draw a line between them. You’re not okay, he’s trying to say. But I am. You’re crazy, but I’m not.
You’ll do all this shit, but I won’t.
Because I’m normal.
Because I’m doing fine.
It’s annoying, but that’s just how some people are.
There’s nothing Pyeonghwa can do about it.
He’s not invested enough to bother explaining to Incheol then when it comes down to it—he’s more insane than Pyeonghwa could ever be.
A government dog who bows too low, who lives a disgustingly boring life just because he’s been told to, who probably doesn’t even own clothes that aren’t that fucking perfect suit.
He lives his life like a dead man just because.
Only a mad man could bear to live like that.
But he doesn’t say that out loud. It’s not going to change anything if he does. Men like Incheol are all the same. Convinced that they’re tortured in a way no one can understand. That they’ve been forced to live like this by powers outside of their control.
That they’re suffering, endlessly suffering with no reason—as if they didn’t bury themselves alive to begin with at the first glimpse of more money than they had.
So Pyeonghwa doesn’t call him out on it. He lets the man live his own terrible excuse for a life. Meeting people, answering phone calls, nodding and smiling at people that he doesn’t give a shit about.
In the meantime, Pyeonghwa lies in bed. Scrolling, swiping. His phone pings with notifications, and it’s done. That’s all he needs to do. A few halfhearted texts, a location sent, and a short wait before he can feel blood on his skin again.
Even the waiting is boring as hell.
A person like Incheol, who lives in that boredom day after day, with no respite—
He’s the mad one.