*****
"Ahhh!!"
Ha-Joon took a breath.
His windpipe constricting tight as a fist closing around itself in his effort to push air into his lungs, as though he'd burst out of the water a fraction of a second too suddenly.
There was a burning, searing flash within his lungs, every jagged-edged gasp a harsh, gritty one.
His chest heaved and fell, his heart thudding so hard it'd burst out through his ribs.
His eyes crossed, went vague on the edges, a whirling vortex of light and darkness in front of his blind eyes.
Shrieking in his ears, raw harsh sound that filled out the deranged pounding of his heart.
His nerves wailed with anguish, shrinking away from the pitiless shock of feeling.
Beading on his forehead, soaking his hair, sliding down the sides of his temples.
His trembling hands appeared to pound when he extended them in front of him.
His fingers trembled, strange, too pale, too long, as if they were not his.
He moved strangely, jerky, as though something intangible covered his arms.
He bunched his fingers into a fist, but that made him shudder, too, his muscles tight and resistant.
Panic cinched across his chest, a constricting pressure that battled to enfold him, smother him with its enormity.
He attempted to swallow, but his throat was dry, raw as though he'd screamed, or thrown up, moments ago.
His brain spun, trying to reach sanity, sense.
Where was he?
What had happened?
Had he died?
The idea struck him like a bolt of lightning, freezing his spine with cold.
His breathing was frozen, his body shaking in terror.
Not that, no.
He was here, he was alive, he could feel the beat of his heart.
And yet.
Something was wrong.
Deeply, illogically wrong.
He forced himself to look past shaking hands, to look at that which stood before him.
The world was not familiar to him, dark, immense, and unnaturally still.
Things fell away from him into the distance, moving things that seemed to be, bending in some internal flow.
A stifling heaviness clung to the air, heavy and oppressive, against his own form like some amorphous thing that bore down on his being.
Ha-Joon's breath was stopped.
His belly was compelling him to go, to move, but his legs were too limp, too lifeless, as if drained of strength.
He gripped them hard, fists clenched, nails digging into skin with fierce, burning stinging, and tried to open them.
Think.
Breathe.
Live.
But the more he thought about recalling how hehad ended up where he was, the more distant the memories seemed to recede, sliding from his fingers like water.
Where, where was he?
The suffocating darkness was what he remembered, the weight of the betrayal pressing upon him like a burning cloak.
His girlfriend.
His best friend.
The sidelong glances, the stealthy conferring, the deceptions that had stormed in and torn asunder all that he had ever believed would stand.
And then him, yes, what he had done.
He fell, no, he leaped.
The memory burst out, bitter and foul.
The Han River.
The city lights across the water, crumpled and distant, a world away.
The piping of the wind in his ears, his feet planted at the edge of the water, his own gasps of breathing, his head firmly fixed.
The plunge.
The shutting clasp of the river, pulling him down whole.
The bursting of his lungs, struggling to breathe, even as his body was pulled deeper into the abyss.
He had let the cold in, to seep to the bone, to chill him, to pull him down to zero.
He had not fought it.
He had let it overtake him.
And so why, why was he still alive?
Ha-Joon's chest labored and contracted in spasmatic, jerky gasps.
His fists were clamped in the ground he was clinging to, grasping on to something hard, something substantial.
It was not rub grime dirt bridge but below black river grime.
Something.
Something indescribable.
His vision returned so he could perceive around him, and he puffed softly.
This was not Seoul.
This was not the world he ever knew.
Something in the atmosphere that was unreal existed, a deadly miasma which clung to him like stone.
The sky above continued and continued forever, yet somehow wrong, as if painted in colors not meant.
A constricting tightness of fear gripped his chest.
Had he lost?
Had he been pulled from the river, against
his own will?
But no, this world, if it existed, was not his.
Then the ghastly possibility struck him.
Was he dead?
Had he passed some threshold of living and dying, to awaken in a world where no man should ever awaken?
Ha-Joon sucked in as he pulled the air in front of him into his chest.
The soft murmur of talk, the scratch-tap of pencils against wood, the waltzing dust motes dancing on the sunbeams, all sounded so excruciatingly ordinary.
But far down in his belly something was roiling into terror.
Something was not quite ringing true.
He glanced over in the direction of the back of the room, to the chalkboard, where neat scrawl of chalk penned out day's classes in Hangul.
His eyes dropped to the middle-aged man standing beside the teacher's desk, button-down shirt neatly pressed, rolled-up shirt sleeves burrowing into a pile of papers.
He did not recognize him.
No, he could not.
This room had a smell and taste of familiarity that wrapped around it: lines of tables in a row, scratches on the wooden floor, angles of sun coming through the tall windows.
It was just that this wasn't his room.
That wasn't his school.
He was chilled down his back.
He let his eyes fall to his own hands, palm flat on the desk in front of him.
His fingers were long and plain.
Young.
Too young.
His cuffs were the creased navy blue of a school uniform he'd not worn in an eternity.
His heart thudding, he pulled out the small square mirror hidden inside the open pencil case next to his notebook.
The face before him was not the face of a young man in his early twenties who jumped into the Han River.
It was a boy.
A youth, likely sixteen or seventeen, with big eyes and unruly black hair spread across his forehead.
Ha-Joon took a gasp of breath.
This was not somewhere else.
And then, a voice
"Yo Ha-Jun."
Ha-Joon stiffened.
Jihun.
The tone gave him a shock of something alive in his heart, something he could not define except as disbelief, fear, something unpolished and raw.
It couldn't occur.
His mind was yelling at him that it couldn't be, but there was Jihun, grinning at him like everything was fine, like nothing had happened.
Jihun was just as Ha-Joon remembered him, his dark brown hair rumpled, his uniform tie loose enough to swing on the border of sloppy and relaxed.
His annoying eyes, always twinkling with trouble, regarded Ha-Joon with a moderate concern.
"Hey, dude,"
Jihun yelled out, an eyebrow leaping up.
"Lol why tf youu look like someone who's just seen a ghost."
A ghost.
Ha-Joon's stomach churned.
Jihun was a ghost, or would have been.
Or perhaps Ha-Joon was the ghost.
He no longer knew.
What he did know was that Jihun was standing in front of him.
That night.
The night it had all disintegrated.
The night Ha-Joon had decided to kill himself.
His fists were clenched on the desk.
The sound of his heart thumb can be heard in his ears.
This was not a dream.
This was real.
Too real.
The cold wood beneath his fingers, the distant muffled laughter, the chalk dust in his nostrils, his senses recoiled at how it was so.
How?
How did he get there, in school, watching Jihun as if he'd just stabbed him in the back?
He swallowed a dry swallow.
"I…"
His own voice, not his, strained out.
His head spun, too quickly for him to have any presence there.
Jihun rested back his head, still scowling at him.
Then, after a second, smiled.
"Jeez, Ha-Joon, did you game all night again? You look like crap."
Ha-Joon was unable to speak.
Because the last time he'd ever laid eyes on Jihun, there'd been no joking.
No laughter.
No easy, light teasing.
There had only been lies.
And betrayal.
And the icy waters of the Han River closing hard around his head.
Ha-Joon's own tempest was suddenly cut short, his throat constricting when bitter reality hit him.
His heart pounding in his ears, muffling the sound of the room.
His vision spinning at the edges, his eyes fixed inward on the boy next to him.
A thousand things flashed through his mind, whirling spinning before he could get hold of one.
This was not correct.
This was not allowed.
He sat, his brow furrowed in confusion, dark eyes looking at Ha-Joon with kindly concern.
His hair was tousled a bit, the same sloppy cut always, his uniform tie loose just so to offer in contrast the line of neat and rumpled.
His sneer was absent, to be replaced by a glint walking the thin line between fear and laughter.
"Hey, look at you looking at me, man. Did I or did I not sprout an extra head or what?"
Same voice.
Oh so dreadfully same.
Same tone, same laconic coolness, as if all that had happened was for nothing. As if nothing was ever important.
As if everything that was ever supposed to be just wasn't.
Ha-Joon's lip curled into a sneer and he didn't even dare to take a breath.
His neck folded closed, his body turning to keep up with ideas bursting through his brain like a storm of lightning.
His fists cramped, nails driving into flesh as he struggled to keep his grip.
The world was a trick, something that would break apart if he drew one deep, grotesque breath.
The wood between his palms was hardwood.
The chalky scent and wood smell of old clung to it.
The muffled scrape of paper and gentle mutterings surrounded him.
Too real, too overwhelming to be anything other than real.
His heart pounding wildly, his chest squeezing.
He had to move, had to remain in control, had to think.
"I—I'm fine,"
He snarled with a scowl, his voice as soft as a whisper.
His fist balled on the desk as if the only thing standing between him and nowhere was the desktop.
"Horrible… exhausted."
Jihun smiled.
"Huh blud, I'm sure. You're acting like you've seen a ghost or something."
Ha-Joon swallowed his savilva as a big gulps of air, not wanting to let anything appear, even though his mind was screaming at him that it had all been a dream.
"Okay,"
He let out a breath, his eyes scanning the room once more.
It was all of it, the scrape marks on the floor, the ripped posters hanging off the walls, the dusty old spider-web-covered clock ticking tick-tock in front of the room, all of it just the same as he'd remembered so many years and years ago.
This was no dream.
This was no illusion.
It was real.
His stomach titened.
His heart hiccupped, his head spinning wildly out of control.
He'd struggled through it, fought to find some room.
The world was not letting him catch his breath, though.
Jihun elbowed his shoulder again.
"Anyway, did you do the homework? Bro, I completely forgot. If Miss Park finds out about this, I'm toast. Do me a favor, man."
Homework.
So mundane a thing.
So viciously mundane.
Ha-Joon had existed for so long on lies, fury, desperation that shock at this moment was pathetically absurd.
Half of him was crying to be released, to laugh, to shake Jihun and yell what the devil was happening.
But, of course, he didn't.
Because to the rest of the world today was an ordinary day.
Ha-Joon gasped in sharply, his nails digging into his forehead.
He could not lose it.
Not here.
Not now.
Not after having given him this impossible second chance.
His pen dug into the flesh of his hand.
If he was, indeed, behind, then this time they'd be different.
"Yes, I've got you,"
Finally he pushed himself clear, pushing his notebook down the table.
"But you owe me."
Jihun smiled.
"You're a lifesaver, man. I'll get you something from the cafeteria later."
Ha-Joon mouthed the words, but his mind was whirling with overtime, the puzzle pieces fitting together of his new life.
He had a history to which he could return, a future to construct.
The seconds ticked by, his head reeling, questioning, wondering, in fear.
The danger hung over him, but somehow he could not manage to absorb it.
Not yet.
But then.
The ring of the bell sounded through the din of the classroom and lesson time was at hand.
The commotion had only just reached Ha-Joon's consciousness as he set his face to the front of the room.
The door creaked on its hinges as it swung open.
Light poured in from the hall to reveal to him, for an instant, the back of the man's figure that he stood there.
And then he looked.
The face he had sworn, sworn never to look upon again.
Air was rising aprat from his lungs, shouting to back in.
His fingers were curled tightly around the edge of his desk, knuckles whitening with tension.
He shuddered, a creeping, crawling fear that wound tight around his belly.
This was no dream.
This was no illusion.
This was real.
And in that one moment, when all the tension was on him, the words at last hit him, no longer something come up later, no longer something to deny in the final moment,
"I… I really… am back…!!"
*****
A/N: Like I said before this will be not your typical crap sht regress reborn type novel.. as the proverb says don't judge a bit ok by its cover.. it'll be completely different from your typical revenge setting.