• Rating: T
• Categories:
• Fandom: 타인은 지옥이다 | Strangers From Hell (TV)
• Characters: Yoon Jongwoo
• Additional Tags: Ficlet, Character Study, Post-Canon
• Status: Complete
• Wordcount: 464
• Published on AO3: 2023-03-04

Notes: help, i fell down a rabbit hole and can't find the ladder up!

(note: i'm only on ep 3 of the show but have read a lot of fanfics and at this point, i don't know what is fanon and what's canon. so anything you recognize, just assume it's not mine.)

(title from Everything They Say by Smash Into Pieces)

Disclaimer: I do not own 타인은 지옥이다 or any associated trademarks.

Sometimes, Yoon Jongwoo dreams of monsters.

The sky is red with blood, his hands stained irrevocably, and he breathes through broken teeth and shattered ribs, trying to make sense of an upside down world. The moon—red, red, red—is huge in the sky, a sword waiting to fall on his neck. The monsters are hulking things, dancing through the shadows on strings he can't see, following the direction of some unseen puppeteer. Jongwoo fights, and he tears them apart with his bare hands, and he shatters himself to stay alive.

In his dreams, he always loses.

Is always the first one to go down, the first one to be eaten.

(Perhaps it's a good thing, he thinks sometimes. If he won in his dreams, he might start thinking he can win in reality, too, and that way only lies pain.)

Eden is a nightmare. It's one of his worst dreams come alive; monsters around every corner, a labyrinth of lies and deceit, and Jieun nobody who will believe him. It stains him in a way even his worst dreams don't, leaves marks on his skin, and settles deep beneath his skin, burrowing into his bones like worms. He doesn't know how to get the rot out, how to wash the blood off his hands. It stains, stains, stains.

Even after he gets out of the hospital, even after Eden is just yet another nightmare, Jongwoo is stained. Tainted. Rotting inside out, soul swallowed whole by a monster. He merely goes through the motions; finds work, pays bills, reassures his family again and again that he's fine. The people of Eden are dead, so there's not even any trials he needs to think of—justice has already been meted out.

It's just him, now.

Rotting, rotting, rotting.

He doesn't know what else to do. He works, pays his bills, goes to the dentist and tries not to remember. Eats alone in his tiny apartment, take-out food in a little cardboard box, music in his ears to drown out the noises of the other residents. He hides beneath his covers in the night, and takes pills to sleep, and pretends he doesn't remember his dreams. Pretends he doesn't remember cutting out hearts, ribs, lungs, intestines. Pretends he's fine, and lies to everyone he knows.

it's fine, he thinks in the nights. Everything is fine.

It's fine, because what else does he have?

What else can he be?

The dreams doesn't stop. Of course they don't; that would be too easy. Too gentle. Too kind. So the dreams don't stop, and Jongwoo doesn't stop lying, and the pile of corpses in his mind grows greater still.

There is a justice somewhere in this story, he thinks sometimes. Because he got out, survived, but he's ruined.

Rotting.