EGOIST (Sang Woo x Fem!OC) [COMPLETED]

5

It only occurred to her how strange the circumstances she is in right now. Dressing herself half-naked in front of someone she used to know and a stranger, hundreds of millions of wons in debt, and nearly killed in a fever dream-ish play ground in the middle of nowhere. She wonders, now that she's back outside, if the events of that place were real. If not a dream, it felt as if people with cameras would pop out from the bushes behind them and laugh it off: the best and worst prank of the century. Either way, everything stuck to her. The bodies, the blood, and the sinking feeling of regret everywhere she went. There was no escape to this eternal torment. The moment she was dressed, she approached the two bound men and quickly untied them.

It was just her, Sang-Woo, and a stranger whose number she remembered to be 199, alone and cold somewhere in Yeouido. The moment she unbound and unblinded the half-naked 199, he erupted into desperate declarations of thanks. "Get dressed." She tells them. "It's cold."

She did not have to tell Sang-woo twice, putting his dress shirt on quickly and hastily and still managing to look neat and composed. Just like how he had always been, she thought.

"Excuse me, but where are we?" 199 meekly asked, fully dressed though he seemed lost.

"Somewhere in Yeouido." Sang-woo tells him.

"And where is that?"

"In the center of Seoul."

*************

Ravenous at the scent of the piping hot ramyeon in the late night convenience store somewhere in Yeouido, where three strangers sat and ate a bowl of ramyeon together. Hae Young had bought the other bowl of ramyeon for 199 when she found him cashless. He thanked her profusely for it. It was another damage in her already dwindling life savings.

Sang-woo returns to the tables with a newly-bought battery pack that charges his phone, to which he slides down to 199. The stranger looks at him with bewilderment.

"You said you needed to make a call?" Sang-Woo asks him.

"Yes, sir. Thank you so much!" 199 bows humbly and gingerly takes the smartphone and the battery pack, walking off to somewhere to make his call.

There was tense silence between the two averted by the slurping of hot noodles, though Hae Young was the first to speak between the two of them.

"I didn't peg you as the considerate type." she scoffs, blowing on her noodles before taking another slurp.

"I'm not the one who bought him a bowl of ramyeon." He retorts.

He finishes his own bowl before tossing it to the bin, and going back to the counter to purchase a pack of cigarettes.

"I'm going out for a smoke." He says, but then pauses as he thinks about what he just said. As if Hae Young cares. He just shakes the thought away, grabs a stick from the pack and walks off.

Sang-woo had always said that cold days call for a stick of cigarettes, or maybe for days when he couldn't clear his head. The sight of the smoke, and the somewhat aged man before her was reminiscent of the nights they spent together walking around campus after a long day. Sang-Woo only smoked on occasion, that's what Hae Young remembers; only if it feels heavy that particular day, or when there were too many things to do and think about. But this night in particular, the way he held the stick before his hands, the way his shoulders slumped even lower, with each puff of smoke, nothing seemed to get lighter.

Hae Young joins him out in the cold. Without words exchanged, she takes a stick from the pack. It surprised the man a little, though she brushed it off, gesturing to the stick for a light. Sang-woo lights it for her.