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Deep carmine runs in rivulets around a young Seonghwa’s bare feet. There's the overwhelming twang of iron in the air, rusting as the seconds tick by. The scarlet brushstrokes of an artist lost to madness decorate the canvas of the white room he’s boxed within.
It reminds Seonghwa of a nature documentary he watched with his parents when he was even smaller. They would regale him with tales of polar ice caps and the strange creatures that called them home. He remembers gawking at pure white bears prowling on the tiny television screen, their fur yellowed ever so slightly in the sunlight. The bears lived on sheets of ice as pale as their beautiful fur. Seonghwa remembers wanting to touch such beautiful creatures.
Then, a bear began stalking a helpless seal. The seal ducked away from the bear’s grasp, tumbling into the deep blue ocean below. Seonghwa had pressed his fingers into his eyes with a cry when the bear flew right down behind the seal. He still remembers the way his tiny heart had hammered against his ribs, praying hopelessly for the seal’s survival, as though his wish could change something that had happened years in the past. He had been so small then that the mere thought of death had brought him fear. After a few seconds, Seonghwa had peeked from between his too small fingers to see the seal’s blood painted across the pure white bears’ faces as they tore it to shreds. The sight had made him squeak and hide his face into his mother’s neck.
Seonghwa does not squeak in fear now, in front of the seal he has hunted. He does not press his fingers into his eyes so hard it starts to hurt. He does not hide in the comfort of his mother’s neck. Instead, he is left staring down at the mound of flesh as it begins to rot. It used to be a person. It used to be a scientist. One that Seonghwa detested with every fiber of his being.
Dr. Yoon used to smile at Seonghwa with too white teeth and ask him questions as though he was three years old. Seonghwa is not three years old. He’s twelve. He’s too big for ‘ What color is this shape? Do you know where you are from? Very good. Can you point to Jinju-si on a map for me?’ Dr. Yoon never learned his name. Dr. Yoon would always call him a number: 0304-1024. Every time the number fell from Dr. Yoon’s lips, the inside of Seonghwa’s head would fill with an itch no one could scratch. Dr. Yoon would cut Seonghwa with a small knife. Dr. Yoon would hurt Seonghwa in different places every day. Dr. Yoon would let Seonghwa’s blood run, waiting for something to happen.
Today something happened, but not with Seonghwa’s blood.
A shrill cry cuts through Seonghwa’s small reverie. A door opens beside the mirror. A giant, faceless man in all white steps in. Time suddenly moves too fast. One second Seonghwa is standing above his prey with wide, gawking eyes, the next the faceless man pins him to the ground. Seonghwa screams for help, but of course no one comes. Seonghwa cries and screams and thrashes his limbs until everything fades to black.
***
Throughout his years Seonghwa has learned one fundamental thing: he is a monster. A creature of uncontrolled rage and carnage. He is beyond human. He is beyond Anomaly. He has transcended both into another infernal category of eternal pain.
Humans loved to prod at him when he was a child, but not anymore. Anomalies and humans look at him in disgust and fear. They have taken to calling him Mars, for both the red planet and the Roman god of war. The gentle, innocent Seonghwa of the past is no more. He died that day in the lab. The day he made Dr. Yoon pop like an unruly zit.
Mars is an untamable beast, an unfathomable monster of blood and flesh. Seonghwa does not thirst for blood. He doesn’t yearn to taste the hearts of men. He never asked for such a power. It was simply something he was born with.
Seonghwa wanders the territories endlessly, aimlessly. Nowhere feels like home. No one looks at him as anything other than Mars. They see him and think only of death. Seonghwa sees himself in the reflection of shattered window panes and finds a demon looking back at him.
In the destruction that reigns across the territories, ravished by a plague spread by strange, bug-like drones, Seonghwa wanders from crumbling building to crumbling building. Tonight, he finds himself in what he thinks may have been a parking garage. He’s stuck looping around the same gray columns in the dark. His breath clouds in front of his face with every exhale. The winter chill bites every part of him his coat doesn't cover.
Seonghwa sits himself on the edge, with his legs dangling down towards the pavement so many floors below him. He can’t actually see the pavement. It’s just a dark abyss from here. He leans his head against the cement pillar next to his head and lets his eyes slip shut. He devours the silence like it's his last meal on death row.
He soaks in the quiet until a sound cuts through it like a knife.
“Steph?” The call echoes through this floor of the garage followed by three clumsy taps against a cement pillar.
“Steph?” it grows louder now, more persistent. The taps are neater, more orderly.
The echoes mesh together into a cacophony that Seonghwa squeezes his eyes shut against.
“Steph!” Closer this time, more hopeful.
There’s the shuffle of footsteps against concrete, and Seonghwa braces himself for the impact. He knows what happens next. He knows that whoever this is will recoil in fear and turn back once they catch sight of his face. Seonghwa searches for the familiarity of veins and arteries.
“Ste-” Seonghwa thrusts a hand behind him and clutches the mystery person by the blood of their veins, cutting their words short.
He turns around to face whoever is struggling against his hold to find…a boy? A boy somewhere in his teens stares back at him with wide, fear-stricken eyes. Seonghwa doesn’t relent, keeping the boy floating above the pavement. He isn’t the monster people make him out to be. He’ll let go of the boy soon. He just wants to scare him off, so he doesn’t come back.
What surprises him, however, is the kid’s resolve. The kid glares straight through Seonghwa’s eyes, finding something that Seonghwa can’t see. Slowly, the kid’s arm staggers up. Seonghwa stands up, interest piqued. He clenches his fingers, coaxing the kid’s blood down so he will drop his arm. The kid actually manages to fight against him, baring his teeth from the effort. If anything, Seonghwa is impressed. The kid brings his arm forward, clenches his fingers into a fist, and everything goes horribly wrong.
Seonghwa’s knees buckle from seemingly nowhere. He hits the concrete with a dull thud, struggling to keep his hold on the boy. The boy twists his fist half a rotation, and Seonghwa can feel something pull inside him. Seonghwa’s heart flutters, but not in the way that he knows is commonly associated with romance. He can feel his heart palpitating, speeding up and slowing down. Arrhythmic chaos unfolds within his ribcage. Seonghwa cries out in pain, clenching his chest helplessly. He shakily raises his head to look at the boy.
The boy yanks his fist back, and Seonghwa’s consciousness is pulled away with it.
***
Seonghwa wakes to someone peeling his eyelids open. He waits for a light to overtake his vision. The scientists always liked waking him up with light strong enough to rival the sun. Seonghwa hates them. It burns him from the inside out. He braces himself to find arteries and veins again, to make them burst, but as his vision clears he finds two wide, youthful eyes staring back down at him instead.
“Do you like Mincraft?”
Seonghwa screams, sits up, and immediately regrets it. His head feels like it’s made of pudding, and it’s all gonna fall off his neck.
The boy eases him back down to the ground, “Don’t get up so fast. Your soul…um…” he speaks clumsily. He scrunches his face in concentration, looking for the right word, before giving up. He cups his hands and brings them into his chest.
Seonghwa stares back in confusion. He has no idea what this kid is trying to tell him. Is he a foreigner?
“What the hell did you do to me?”
“It-it’s hard to explain um…” the boy lapses into thought again until his eyes grow brighter with realization. He holds up a finger to signal that he needs a second. He digs around in the pockets of his bulky puffer jacket and pulls out a scrap of paper and a marker. He scribbles something down and hands the scrap to Seonghwa.
Seonghwa raises himself to a sitting position, slowly this time, and squints down at the crude sketch. It's a little stick figure of a person labeled with the word “you.” There's another stick figure, this one with long hair matching the boy’s, labeled “me.” There's a strange oblong circle above Seonghwa’s stick figure labeled “your soul.” Then the little stick figure of Seonghwa lays down on the ground with x’s over his eyes, and the little stick figure of the boy has its hand raised with the “soul” in his hand. The boy’s stick figure looks shocked with wide, cartoonishly large eyes. The little stick figure of the boy tosses the “soul” back into Seonghwa’s stick figure.
Seonghwa just sits there and swaps glances between the drawing and the boy, waiting for it to click in his brain. The boy’s looking at him expectantly, eyes peeking above knees drawn close to his chest. His hair is a dark and wild mess of a bob that frames his face. Seonghwa can’t help but see something familiar in it all. Something oddly familiar about this boy and the strange oblong soul and the x’s over his stick figure’s eyes and…
The realization then smacks into Seonghwa like a runaway train.
“You stole my soul ?” He squawks pathetically, “You killed me?”
The boy nods, “Not for long. I…um…put your soul back in.”
Seonghwa just stares with his eyes as wide as dinner plates. He’s never met another Anomaly with a power like this before. Something so small, so seemingly harmless, had just about stolen his life away in a second.
“Why?” is all he can manage to ask. Why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance? He knows so many others would have.
“I didn’t want to kill you. I was just…protecting myself. Like you,” the boy answers, “People…don’t like when I do that. It scares them. A lot.”
There’s a strange feeling building in Seonghwa’s chest. An odd prickle that sends chills running down his arms. Those words…Seonghwa has said those exact words so many times before. He said those words so many times when he was just as old as the boy that now they’ve lost all meaning. No matter how he pleads, it’s still his fault in the end. All Seonghwa has as company by the end of it is himself and the guilt that eats away at him like a vulture to carrion. Eventually he stopped pleading. Eventually he gave up.
The boy looks at him all worried like Seonghwa is going to lash out at him. Like Seonghwa is going to jump him for doing something so rational. But looking at the boy feels like looking in a mirror. It feels like looking at the tiny, harmless Seonghwa of days past. Long before Mars, long before his path of bloodshed and ruin. A power just as destructive. A power just as fear inducing.
“That would make two of us then,” the boy perks up at those words, that hopefully bright look returning to his eyes and lighting up his face, “what’s your name, kid?”
The boy chews his lip and glances around. He’s probably thinking of whether or not to offer a stranger his name, Seonghwa knows that he would have in the same position.
“My name is Soul,” the boy answers. Seonghwa can’t help but let out a laugh at that. A laugh that rumbles in his throat and shakes his shoulders. A laugh that he hasn’t found within himself in so many years. The boy who steals souls is called Soul .
He considers for a minute, introducing himself as Mars, but finds that there’s no use to that. Clearly, Soul doesn’t know who Mars is. He isn’t afraid of him. Mars is meant to invoke fear, and if anything, Seonghwa doesn’t want Soul to fear him.
“I’m Seonghwa,” Seonghwa feels his lips curl into a smile, warmth filling his chest, “it’s nice to meet you, Soul.”
Soul smiles back softly, and for the first time in far too many years Seonghwa feels something akin to hope.
“Are you lost, Soul?” Seonghwa asks.
Soul glances around at the maze of concrete pillars before nodding.
“Were you with anyone?” Seonghwa’s mind goes back to the name that Soul had been calling out earlier. What had it been? Stop? Steph? It sounded foreign.
Soul nods again, more certain this time.
“Do you want me to help you look for them?”
This time Soul shakes his head.
“Are you sure?”
Soul nods this time, “If I’m lost. I have to stay in one place.”
He sounds a bit like a five-year-old right now. It’s so oddly endearing, reminding Seonghwa of a time when he too was taught to stay in one place in case he was ever lost.
“Do you want me to stay here with you?”
Soul nods again, a little more eagerly.
“Alright then.”
Seonghwa looks off into the night beyond, allowing himself little glimpses of Soul in case he feels like communicating something. The two of them lapse into a comfortable silence for a little bit. Soul takes off his jacket and fiddles with it. He checks all the pockets as though looking for something. Soul then shakes it violently when he doesn’t seem to find what he’s looking for. A small cracked rectangle Seonghwa recognizes as a phone and a handgun clatter to the ground. Two things that Seonghwa would have never guessed someone like Soul would find the need for.
Soul takes the gun, and Seonghwa takes note of the many empty pockets where ammunition should be on the boy’s belt. Soul pops open the magazine and sighs when it comes out empty. He checks all the pockets of his jacket again, only to come out empty handed. Defeated, Soul moves on to the phone. Seonghwa sort of wants to know what he would do with a phone of all things. There hasn’t been cell service or internet access in years.
Soul catches him staring and takes the chance to ask, “Do you play Minecraft?”
“Mine…Craft?” Seonghwa echoes.
Soul flips the phone around to show Seonghwa the interface for what looks like a video game. The word “MINECRAFT” is printed in large, blocky letters, but below that all of the text in the gray squares is in Japanese. So Soul is a foreigner.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it?” Seonghwa answers, “How are you able to play?”
Seonghwa wasn’t able to get any of the games he liked when he was small to work when he left the lab. It had left him frustrated and heartbroken. His Animal Crossing island has long since been lost to the changing times.
“My friend. He can make anything work,” Soul replies simply, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. He takes the phone back and taps a few buttons on it.
“Wow, he must be a genius,”
“He’s a…” Soul hesitates, mentally grasping for his next word, “Anomaly.”
“Really?”
Soul nods and thrusts the phone into Seonghwa’s hands. Seonghwa is left blinking at what looks like the first person point of view of a world made entirely out of boxes. Soul comes up behind Seonghwa and starts pointing to things on the screen.
Soul points to the arrows on the screen and Seonghwa presses them obediently. His character moves in different directions. Those must be the movement controls. Seonghwa is so rusty. He hasn’t played anything in so many years.
Soul points to the bar of empty squares at the bottom of the screen, “That is where all of your…things are, but you don’t have anything.”
Soul continues to instruct Seonghwa more through motions than words, and Seonghwa finds himself learning quite a bit. He holds down on the screen to break the blocks in front of him and taps again to place down the block he’s just collected. He finds that he can dig through the floor, and proceeds to dig straight down below him. The dirt blocks change into rock blocks. Seonghwa finds it fascinating. Well. That’s until he falls into a cavernous pool of lava. Seonghwa yelps in panic. The screen goes red, and the text over the screen is in Japanese. Despite that, he can approximate that it probably means-
“You died,” Soul chuckles.
Seonghwa lets out a small laugh.
Soul helps him restart the game, and soon enough Seonghwa has cut down several trees, built his own square house, figured out how to make a pickaxe, learned how to actually put the “mine” in minecraft, and discovered villagers. Villagers make a strange noise. A strange noise that Soul imitates almost perfectly. He folds his arms together like the strange blocky creatures and lets out a noise very similar to the one coming out of his phone. Seonghwa laughs like he never has before, a laugh straight from his belly like he hasn’t done since he was probably seven years old.
This kid truly is the most hopeful thing Seonghwa has ever seen. He smiles and giggles with Seonghwa like he’s any other person. He doesn’t think anyone has ever treated him like this before. Like he wasn’t a monster. Seonghwa cherishes it.
It’s not long after that however, that three rhythmic taps echo through the parking garage. Soul’s eyes widen. He switches off the phone and scrambles to put everything back into his jacket pockets. Seonghwa hands him his pistol. Soul takes it and smacks the nearest concrete pillar with the same three taps. There’s an answering three taps again from the other side.
Seonghwa recalls Soul’s empty pockets, “I’m sorry I don’t have any ammunition to give you,” he murmurs, as to not interrupt the coded communication.
“It’s okay, really,” Soul whispers back.
Soul taps three more taps against the concrete pillar. There’s a bit of silence before the two of them hear a very loud, “Fuck this stupid gun code bullshit! Soul? Soul, are you here?”
Soul brightens up like the sun’s just come out after a long day of nonstop rain.
“Steph!” he cries out in reply, “I’m over here!”
After another match of screaming at each other in the distance, this “Steph” finally emerges from the dark maze of the parking garage. Seonghwa notes that he doesn’t look quite as much like a foreigner, but he does look quite threatening from here. Tall, all sharp lines and angles, a rifle strapped to his back. Soul looks at Steph with the stars in his eyes, and by the way Steph sags in relief at the sight of him, Seonghwa can tell that Soul is loved.
“Soul, oh my god! Where have you been? You worried the shit out of me oh my god!” Steph runs up to Soul and engulfs him in a hug hard enough to nearly send the boy toppling off his feet. Steph pulls back and cups Soul’s cheeks, eyeing him up and down, “Are you okay? You’re not hurt are you? We’re running out of medical supplies but I think Jongseob can-”
“I’m fine, Steph,” Soul smiles up at him and Steph yanks him back into another hug, burying his face into Soul’s shoulder.
Steph then looks up, and his eyes go wide when he finally catches sight of Seonghwa. Seonghwa braces himself for it. For the hatred and fear that people have always given him upon first glance. Steph spins around with Soul in his grasp so that he can talk to Seonghwa directly.
“And who are you ?” Steph pokes a finger in Seonghwa’s direction, brow raised in question.
Seonghwa finds himself frozen in place, lips sealed shut. Steph doesn’t know who Mars is either. He isn’t scared of him in the way people are afraid of Mars. He’s just concerned for Soul’s well being.
“Uh hello ?” Steph urges.
Seonghwa clears his throat awkwardly, “Seonghwa, my name is Seonghwa. I was just looking after Soul until you got back.”
Steph looks to Soul, “really?” Soul nods in reply.
“Okay then. Thank you, Seonghwa. I’m sorry about Soul. I have no idea how this kid got lost in the first place,” Steph pinches Soul’s cheek hard enough for Soul to yelp and swat his hand away.
“It was no trouble at all,” Seonghwa remarks with a smile, “I wish you both a safe journey.”
“Thank you, you too,” Steph ushers Soul away, “When we meet again, I really owe you one Seonghwa!”
“We’ll meet again someday?” Seonghwa asks, hope blooming in his chest like a flower after the spring rain.
“Well, yeah. I don’t plan on dying any time soon,” Steph turns to him with a small laugh, “We’ll see you again soon!”
Soul waves at Seonghwa until the two of them disappear into the night. Steph hooks an arm around Soul’s shoulders to keep him close.
As Seonghwa watches their retreating figures in the dark, he comes to a realization. Looking at Soul isn't like looking in a mirror. Looking at Soul is like looking at a completely different version of himself. A version of himself that had never been stuck in the Alnitak labs. A version of himself that found people that love him. A version of himself that is protected and cared for. Soul is still apprehensive, and he is still deadly, but he has people that don't see him as a monster.
As Seonghwa looks to the rising dawn he finds himself yearning. He yearns for something he hasn't had for too many years. Something he hasn't felt since he stared at gorgeous animals on television screens, pressed between his parents. He yearns for love. He yearns for a family.
Some time long ago, people used to wish on stars. The only star Seonghwa sees is the sun right now. But as the closest one to the Earth, does that make the sun the most powerful star there is?
Seonghwa wishes on the vermillion dawn bleeding across the horizon. He wishes for Soul and Steph’s safety. He wishes to find a family for himself. He wishes to love and be loved.