The Silk Moth Dream (Season 1 Complete)

EPISODE 6: BURIED MEMORIES

It's pathetic.

At best. At worst, it's downright inedible. Fiona stirs the few potatoes in the clear broth that she'd tried to season with dehydrated food flavoring, the seasoning that everyone had to resort to after a mass crop failure a few years back. It tastes like all ramen seasonings of the world combined, which really doesn't taste that good at all. If potatoes were any less expensive, she'd kill for some creamy mashed potatoes with even just salt and pepper. Instead, they float to the surface like pathetic pieces of turd.

"Bon appetit," she says with as much enthusiasm as she can muster, setting the bowl in front of Abin. What's even more pathetic is that she had to run out and buy a second set of bowls and cutleries for him today.

"Is this jjigae?" he asks.

This makes her laugh. "I guess it could be, maybe." Her laughter subsides. "Damn, I miss jjigae. The real stuff, I mean."

She slurps quietly at the paltry meal in front of them, dreaming of fluffy rice and water-fresh cucumber slices. "Did you grow up in Korea?" he asks, somewhat timidly as though making conversation is new for him.

"I was born in Busan, back when it existed," Fiona says, feeling a melancholic twist in her chest. "My dad was Korean but my mom was Irish, so she always wanted to move to America where she said I'd fit in better as a biracial kid. So we left after he died."

Abin doesn't say anything but Fiona can see the question in the slope of his shoulders. "He died from a lung disease. There was an epidemic when I was seven or eight, where mass people in Asia were dying from poor air quality. That's when the first Sheltersuits started to be proposed."

Abin dips his head into a nod. "I lived in a mountainous forest that always had fresh morning air and open skies." He asks his next question hesitantly, turning it over in his mouth like he already knows what the answer is but needs to ask nonetheless. "What do you mean, back when it existed?"

Fiona swallows the bump in her throat. "Korea was one of the first countries to fall. When everything... when everything started changing, there were mass floods in Asia and people had to flee en masse to the west."

His facial expression doesn't change much, but Fiona can almost taste his shock. She tries to remember if she's ever cried about her homeland's early demise. Abin's mouth opens, with some strain. "Korea fell? How... Can you elaborate?"

Fiona bites her lip, but decides to give him the truth. "It's entirely uninhabitable," she gestures to the world outside her tiny apartment window, "Boulder's a safe haven compared to what Korea is now."

He looks out at the smog that leaves streaks on Fiona's window. "It's hard to imagine that this is the same world."

Fiona goes back to stirring her potato soup, or whatever it is, suddenly hating it all the more. "My mother was always very passionate about making sure that it'd never turn out this way. It's part of why she wanted to come here. To join Left Behind, although it was called 'We Are Behind' back then. She had some fire in her that just couldn't be quelled." Until it was.

"I have noticed that your hair is very red. Like a fire, almost." She can feel the pierce of his dark purple eyes on her as she stares into her soup.

He says it like it's a fact – which it is – and not an observation he has any particular emotional attachments to. But it still makes Fiona blush. She changes the subject. "What about you? What about your father?"

Abin shrugs. "I'm a bastard. I have no father, at least in its official meaning. He wasn't a bad man but it was always clear that I was to leave as soon as I was old enough."