The First Memory (3)
Exhaustion settled over him like a weight. He'd only just finished the morning's assignments, and time spent with the kids was a surefire way to get the life sucked out of you.
...Yuria.
If he wanted answers, he couldn't afford to sit still. Seowoo headed for the Laboratory on the middle floor, both arms loaded with boxes of drinks. Showing up empty-handed when you needed a favor was the worst possible play.
The sliding door rattled open, and a metallic reek of blood stabbed at his nostrils. It was nothing like the faint traces he caught in daily life — this was raw, concentrated, enough to make his brow crease, just slightly.
The vampires distilling blood and diligently recording results at the centrifuge turned at the sound of the door.
"Good morning."
Seowoo bowed at a perfect ninety degrees, the same groveling courtesy Bold always showed him.
"Oh, it's you, Seowoo."
"It's been a while, hasn't it?"
"Haha... I've been assigned to a different project lately. Have you all been well?"
"Ugh, what's there to say. Same as always. No — wait. Has the workload actually gotten worse...?"
"Yeah~ These days, with you gone, we have to go into the experiments ourselves. Couldn't they at least take us off Livestock Pen duty?"
The researchers greeted him with genuine warmth, and the complaints came riding right along with it.
The Laboratory hired without regard for origin, strictly by ability. So long as you could do the work, discrimination was fairly rare. Fail to demonstrate any talent worth recognizing, though, and the suffering waiting for you would be worse than anything. Seowoo, at least, had never been given work he couldn't handle.
"I'll come running back the moment my current project wraps up."
"Damn right you will. The reagents for the experiments are piled up like a mountain, so take your time getting here~."
"Take his time, my ass! There's a ton of work. Hey, couldn't they just pull one person from the Livestock Pen and stick them here...? I'd train them properly, I swear."
Like veterans pining after a newbie, the researchers poured out their sorrow at having no one fun to work with.
It'd be a miracle if they didn't just kill themselves.
They could act this warm all they liked. The moment he slipped, he'd be left standing there, treated as less than an insect.
"Seniors, work is work, but please — have a drink while you do it."
"See, this is what I'm talking about. The kid's got sense."
"Agreed. No human's lasted as long as this one. There's a reason for that."
"You're too kind. I don't know what to do with myself. Haha."
Here, playing the slightly dim, easygoing fool was better than looking sharp. A vampire's nature didn't just vanish. He needed them thinking, Yeah, we'll look after a kid like you.
"So, you need something?"
"Yeah~ You always show up loaded like a pack mule when you need a favor."
"Was I that obvious...?"
"Hey! You think we wouldn't notice?"
"We're sitting right on top of your head~."
Their noses were practically in the clouds. Getting stepped on by their own superiors was a daily fact of life, so their egos had taken more than a few hits. Putting on the idiot act like this was exactly the kind of thing they enjoyed.
"Then... do any of you happen to know someone named Gunter?"
"Whoa~ Haven't heard that name in a while. Of course we know him~ He was our senior."
"That bastard had one hell of a temper, too."
"...He was your senior."
"Yeah, let's see — he retired about three years ago, so... pretty much right when you took over from him."
"His human-hatred was something else. A bunch of them didn't make it, I think?"
"A bunch of them...?"
"Yeah. The assistants."
"Some thug of a bastard showing up and beating kids to death — even among the researchers, the complaints were flying."
"Complaints..."
"Yeah. We were supposed to put them to work. But he beat them to death day in and day out and we had to start from scratch every time. We ended up doing it all ourselves."
"And then that bastard left, and you showed up."
The way they talked about him, the look on their faces — Seowoo had already known the man was filth. He hadn't realized he was that much of a monster. If Gunter had claimed, back then, that he'd kill someone on the spot, it wouldn't have been an empty boast.
"Then... do you happen to know someone named Yuria as well?"
The name that had come out of Gunter's mouth. The woman who had flickered through his mind. And the child he had met today — Twelve. He needed to know. Now.
"What? You asking about someone with the same name?"
"Haven't heard that name in ages either. She was the one with the glasses."
"The same name...?"
"Well, you wouldn't be asking about your own senior, right?"
"Yeah, that's right. After she got beaten to death by Gunter, we met you for the first time — you were so full of venom. Seriously, every human around here was terrified of you. Ah, not me personally, of course. A friend of mine."
"My senior...?"
"You forgot already?"
"Nah, working here, that kind of thing happens. Don't give the kid a hard time."
A senior. That was news to him. The glasses matched the woman in his memories — but beyond those fragmentary glimpses of her face, he remembered almost nothing. It felt as though his mind had wandered into a labyrinth and gotten lost.
"Ah...?"
His eyes stung red without warning. Tears welled up, and he had no idea why.
Why?
It felt as though his heart and his body were no longer on speaking terms. His hands trembled in answer, a fine, helpless shiver.
"...Forgive me. Just a moment."
"Uh... sure."
At the very least, he didn't want to make a spectacle of himself in the Laboratory. It felt like laying himself bare — exposing something even he didn't understand — and that, more than anything, was the last thing he wanted people to see.
Did we do something wrong...?
I don't know...
The two researchers looked at each other, mouthing the words. They were no less bewildered than he was.
By the time Seowoo returned, it was as if he'd gone and washed his face. There was no further trace of grief on it.
"I... thank you for telling me. I must be more worn down than I thought lately. To show you something so strange..."
"N-no, it happens. This one here howls by himself sometimes too."
"Yeah, well, I'd howl too if they wouldn't give me a raise."
They'd spent enough time together that both researchers felt a pang of pity looking at him. Of course, it would be a lie to say they didn't also want him working there for a long time yet. Even vampires had a faintly human side to them.
"Ah, this is just a rumor from back then, but — that assistant, Yuria. She must've been stubborn about dying. There was talk she was still barely alive, and they used her in experiments."
"Yeah, I think I heard that too."
"Is that so...?"
That was a considerable find. A rumor could be a lead as well as anything else. Fit it against the Yuria of now, and the pieces lined up.
"...Would Yuria's profile still be on file? My senior's, I mean."
His heart was pounding. If he saw a photograph, he would know for certain.
"Unfortunately, they wipe a human's records the moment they die..."
"There's nothing left."
"I see. Of course."
He hadn't thought it would be that easy. He'd only allowed himself a little hope.
"Thank you — truly — for telling me so much today."
Coming to the Laboratory had been the right call after all. He could form a single hypothesis that cut straight through the mystery. If it proved correct, the rest would fall into place on its own.
"Don't mention it. It was good seeing you after so long."
"If you've got business, come by again."
"I will. I promise."
Seowoo took his leave with another careful bow, and left the Laboratory behind him.
The moment he reached his quarters he washed up and went to bed — and opened his eyes in the boy's realm.
"...I'm not even surprised anymore."
That settled it. There was no other way of arriving here. Either he lost consciousness trying to open a door of memory, or he fell asleep while in a vampiric state — or having just been in one. Either way, he always ended up here.
"I'm wrong?"
Three times was enough to pin down a cause.
"I've been thinking."
"About Yuria."
"Mm... I did, in a way. Just not the way I expected."
"Your identity."
He couldn't see the boy's expression, but the air itself flinched. The fluster was obvious.
"No. I've been thinking about it for a while."
It wasn't sudden. He simply hadn't recognized it for what it was. Everything had been connected to the boy from the very beginning.
The rage he'd felt at the ball, overhearing Gunter — the way his body had slipped out of his control. The way the boy had appeared in his dream immediately afterward and said, with that pointed weight, that things were falling into place.
"Why did you do all that, I wonder?"
When he'd thought of Yuria in his quarters and blacked out, he had fallen back here. And the boy had bared his hostility at Gunter all over again.
In the warehouse, when he'd learned that Twelve was Yuria, a pain had bored through his skull. After seeing that child, his body had turned vampire without the slightest warning.
"...The decisive thing was what the researchers said."
Finding out that a Yuria who did not exist in his memories had been his senior — someone he had lived and worked alongside — had left him stunned. The diary she had left behind had been meant for his past self.
Gunter, who had killed his assistants like toys. Yuria, who had been sacrificed to him. And Seowoo, who had been her junior.
"If the hypothesis I've built is right..."
If that was the truth.
"Then the tears I shed were yours."
Another self, living inside his head. A past he did not know. A person sleeping in his memories.
"You're me from three years ago."
At Seowoo's words, tiny puzzle pieces began fitting themselves into the boy's empty face.
A cascading shimmer, like tiles sliding home—
Ash-silver hair, the color of Lucia's. Eyes red as rubies. And there he was. Yoon Seowoo himself — the face Seowoo had seen in the photo albums of his childhood, standing right in front of him.