Mouse - Rewind

Chapter 7

Ba Reum woke up with a headache. He managed to open his eyes to look at the time, in the hope that he still had a couple of hours left to sleep, but it was only five minutes before his alarm would go off. He groaned, sitting up in his bed and disabeled his alarm clock.

Ba Reum tiredly rubbed his eyes, wishing that the headache would go away. He knew that it was there because of the brain transplant. The profiler, or whatever he really was, had clearly told him he would still die within a year, even mentioning that the death would not be a nice one. So, he should count himself lucky for now.

So far, painkillers had been helping him to get rid of them, but the intensity and frequency was already worsening. All in all, for now it seemed like just a minor inconvenience seeing the chance he had been given.

His workday was the same as the previous few days and it surprised him how easy it had been to get back in the motions of it all. The paperwork was still mind numbingly boring as he remembered, but it gave him the opportunity to let his mind wander a bit.

The fact was that his dinner with Chi Kook and Dong Koo had made him think of the other victims he had made the last time. The fact that they would just stay alive wasn't enough to settle his conscience. He wondered if that was a reason he was sent back, to see if he would try to make amends?

He knew how to deal with Chi Kook, so that didn't seem to be a problem. He would just try to be the best friend he could be and he knew that it would make Chi Kook happy. He was a simple man and having good and loyal friends was the one thing that Chi Kook really would desire.

The thoughts of atonement kept on lingering in his head the rest of his work day and when he finally arrived back home, he set himself at his desk, taking a piece of paper and writing down the names of all his victims.

It almost hurt physically to reread the list and he had to swallow tears a few times, but he reread the list a few times, just to print in the names. He deserved to hurt for what he had done and this was just the tip of the iceberg.

He frowned at one name and hesitantly took out his pen and crossed it out.

He knew how he had killed the boxer the first time around and although the cruelness he had used gave him guilt, he still felt that the man had partially deserved his fate. Perhaps death hadn't been the answer, but he had at least three murders on his conscience.

Ba Reum toyed with the idea of connecting the murders to that man, but for now he let it go. The man hadn't seemed to be a part of OZ anymore, and he wondered of he hadn't been searching for his own redemption in that aspect.

Ba Reum guessed that he would just let the guy be, at least for now, but he wouldn't do more than that. Ba Reum's conscience was clean concerning that man.

He looked over his adjusted list once more, and then he hesitated a bit, his pen hovering over the paper. Yes, these were all the people he had killed, but there had been one more death that was his responsibility.

He wrote down the name, thinking that this had perhaps been one of the biggest victims in the whole story.

He contemplated the list, thinking about the best ways to help those people and wondered who he would start with, but his gaze kept on being pulled towards the latest name he had written down.

Well, it seemed that Sung Yo Han would be the first one he would try to make amends with and he knew just the way to do it.

It hadn't been hard to make an appointment with Yo Han, seeing that he was a doctor. He had slightly deceived the woman on the line, saying that it had been very urgent and he had been in luck.