I'll Find Someone to Take Care of You
'No... uh... wha...?'
Seo Harin blinked her black eyes, struggling to make sense of the scene before her.
'Wh-who is this kid...? This is definitely my place, right?'
She'd come home to find a snow-white beautiful boy already inside, talking to her as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Under ordinary circumstances, she would have been wary first, or called the police.
'This kid is just... so cute though...'
What surfaced in Harin's mind wasn't caution, but the sheer adorableness of the boy standing there. Chubby cheeks that hadn't quite lost their baby fat, only adding to the charm. Long white hair and pale eyes — an exceedingly rare sight in South Korea, where she lived. He was so preciously cute that he simply did not match up with the gloomy, dingy semi-basement room around him.
"Um, hello? Can you not hear me?"
"...Huh, huh??"
Unable to take her eyes off the boy, Harin had been ignoring him, and he snapped at her irritably, having waited for a reply for some time now.
"Ah, sorry, I didn't hear you. Could you say that again...?"
Only then did Harin collect herself and ask him what he'd said.
"Do you know how to die?"
"...Huh??"
And then came the follow-up:
"Tell me a way I can do it myself, if possible."
"...HUH!?"
He was asking her to teach him how to kill himself.
"Wh-wait, hold on — how to die? Why on earth are you asking that...!?"
Harin pressed a hand to her forehead, demanding an explanation, utterly confused. A child this cute — a child who looked this young — asking to be taught how to die.
'H-he looks like a little kid... maybe he just doesn't really understand what dying means...'
Her guess was exactly right. He had completely misunderstood what death was. Not the cessation of life, but merely an act of falling asleep for a very, very long time.
"I want to die. I want to sink into sleep, forever."
And yet the boy's answer was, unmistakably, the answer of someone who truly wished for death.
"No! Absolutely not!! Why would a kid your age want to die!?"
Sure, she herself had been contemplating suicide not five minutes ago — but that didn't mean she had the slightest intention of pushing the boy in front of her toward the same cliff. The value of her own life, already at rock bottom, and the value of a child's life stretching out bright and endless before him were worlds apart.
"...Why not? You could just tell me."
He wanted to know what reason she could possibly have for refusing.
"Absolutely not!! I can't tell you!!"
His question died helplessly against her emphatic denial.
"Come to think of it... how exactly did you get into my house?"
A little while later, once her thoughts had settled, Harin — cleaning up the trash she hadn't touched in far too long — asked the boy, who was sprawled out on her floor. The door had definitely been locked, and since this was a semi-basement, the windows were barred with steel grating. And yet, somehow, the snow-white boy had ended up inside.
"I just thought I wanted to come here, and here I am."
But he only offered an answer she couldn't make heads or tails of.
"Then what about your home? Where are your parents?"
"I have no home. No parents, either. When I first opened my eyes, there was no one there."
The more she asked, the darker his backstory seemed to grow.
"Th-then, is there anyone you know?? Have you been all alone this whole time?"
"Oh, right. I came here to find someone."
Oh, so he wasn't alone after all, she thought, relieved, and asked again.
"Where is that person now?"
"They were gone by the time I opened my eyes."
"..."
His situation had passed dark and gone straight past her own misery into something far bleaker. And with it, her own thoughts drifted down an equally grim path.
'...Don't tell me. Was this child... abandoned?'
Judging by his strange answers and his talk of wanting to die, he didn't seem to be in any kind of sound state of mind. The person the boy was searching for was probably his parents. His parents, however, had left him behind the moment he fell into sleep, and the boy, disillusioned with life, had come to dream of death. That was the backstory Seo Harin had imagined for him.
"...Hey, kiddo. Can I ask you for one favor?"
"I'm not a kiddo. But... a favor?"
They say a parent is a child's whole world. A child grows up watching their parents, and learns about the world through them. But this child had been abandoned by his parents — which meant he'd been abandoned by the world itself.
Just like Seo Harin, cut off from the world, was.
"I'll... I'll find someone to take care of you."
Feeling a faint kinship with him, she made her vow through her tears.
"I'll make sure you never feel abandoned again. Will you let me?"
As the boy watched her plead for permission with glistening, damp eyes, he thought to himself:
'...No, I'd really rather you help me find Nyarlathotep, or a friend.'
But the true wish in his heart was something he couldn't bring himself to say out loud —
"Hm?"
"..."
Because the woman weeping in front of him weighed far too heavily on his conscience.