The first thing he felt was cold tile.
Not the alley concrete. Not the ground he remembered going down on. Smooth, clean tile pressed against his cheek and his bare shoulder and the side of his knee.
Every single centimeter of his skin.
He became aware of that gradually, the way you become aware of something your brain doesn't want to process right away. The tile wasn't just cold against his face. It was cold against everything. His back. His arms. His legs. He was on a bathroom floor, completely alone, and he had absolutely nothing on.
He kept his eyes closed for another few seconds.
Then he opened them.
White ceiling. A slim fluorescent light. A towel rack with a folded grey towel. A faucet dripping somewhere above him, slow and patient.
He tried to sit up.
The first thing that went wrong was the weight.
Not the weight of pain, not the heavy ache he'd expected from the alley. The weight of the body itself. He pushed up with his left arm and the arm responded with more force than he'd put in, like the signal he sent and the result he got back didn't match. He overcorrected, lurched sideways, caught the edge of the bathtub with a hand that looked nothing like his hand, and stayed there, gripping cold porcelain, breathing.
He looked at the hand gripping the tub.
Long fingers. Prominent knuckles. A vein running along the back of it from the wrist toward the middle finger. Pale skin, almost white under the fluorescent light.
He turned it over slowly and looked at the palm.
He knew his hands. He'd been looking at them for seventeen years. These were not them.
He let go of the tub and sat back on the tile floor and looked down at the rest of himself and his brain went completely quiet for about four seconds.
....
The stomach he was looking at was not his stomach.
His stomach was soft. Round. It had been the source of approximately forty percent of everything wrong with his life since he was twelve years old. This stomach was flat in a way that didn't seem real up close, muscles stacked in a column with visible definition even completely at rest, the kind of thing that took years of work to build. His chest was broad. His shoulders sat wide and rounded, the muscle in them dense and full. His arms were long, forearms corded with veins, the whole thing put together like someone had been very deliberate about it.
He sat on the cold bathroom floor with nothing on and stared at a body that could not be his.
Then he looked a little further down and immediately looked back up at the ceiling.
He pressed his fist against his mouth and held very still.
Not panicking. Definitely not panicking. Just sitting with the specific sensation of a person whose brain had received more information than it had folders for.
After a moment he reached up and grabbed the grey towel off the rack and wrapped it around his waist. That was the first sensible thing he'd done since waking up and it helped slightly.
He put both hands on the edge of the tub and stood.
That was the second wrong thing.
He cleared the height he expected by several centimeters and had to stop himself from walking straight into the towel rack. He was used to 162. Whatever this was, it wasn't 162. The ceiling was closer. The sink was lower. The whole room had rearranged itself around a body that knew how much space it took up and Jae-beom did not yet know how much space it took up, so he stood very still for a moment and recalibrated before he moved again.
He turned toward the mirror.
He saw the chest and shoulders first before he got his eyes up to the face. Broad. The white shirt he'd been imagining putting on was going to fit across those shoulders or it wasn't and there was nothing to be done about it either way. He filed that away and looked up.
The face that looked back at him had sharp edges everywhere his had soft ones.
A jaw that could have been drawn with a ruler, clean and hard. Pale skin. Black hair long enough to fall across the forehead and over the ears, tangled from the floor but the kind of hair that made tangled look intentional. It fell forward over one eye and he pushed it back and it fell forward again.
And the eyes. Dark, set deep under dark brows. Very still. The kind of face that would make a room go quiet without meaning to.
Jae-beom stared at it.
It stared back.
He lifted his right hand and watched the mirror do the same. Touched his jaw. Felt his jaw. The stubble there, faint but present, that was also not his. He hadn't needed to shave yet. This face had.
He leaned closer and looked for the blur, the soft unfocused edges that dreams had. Every detail stayed exactly where it was. A small scar along the left side of the chin. The specific ring of slightly lighter color in the iris. A single eyelash on the cheekbone.
He straightened up.
Took a breath.
And said out loud, to no one, just to hear something in the silence: "What is this."
He stopped.
Tried again: "What."
He stood there and listened to the voice that had just come out of his mouth. Low. Deeper than his by a significant margin, with a different resonance in the chest cavity, the kind of voice that would carry across a room without trying. He'd opened his mouth and someone else's voice had come out and for some reason that was the thing that finally made his hands grip the edge of the sink.
The face in the mirror was one thing. He could look at a face and tell himself it wasn't real.
But the voice had come from inside him.
He stood there gripping the sink for a moment. Then he said, quieter, mostly just to confirm it: "Park Jae-beom."
His name. In a voice that didn't belong to him.
He let go of the sink and went to find something to put on.
The apartment was small and clean. One main room, a low bed against the wall with plain dark sheets, a window with the curtains half open. Grey morning light. A small kitchen along one wall. A chair at the table with a dark jacket hung over the back of it, the kind that looked like it fit someone tall.
He found clothes folded on the shelf beside the bathroom door. Black sweatpants, a plain white shirt. He put them on because his options were limited. The shirt pulled a little across the shoulders but it went on. The sweatpants fit like they were cut for this body specifically.
That bothered him more than he could explain. Like the apartment had been expecting him.
He shook that thought off and checked for a phone. Nothing on the table, nothing on the kitchen counter, nothing on the shelf. He checked the jacket pockets and found a receipt so faded the numbers had disappeared. He checked under the pillow and behind the small trash can in the bathroom and came up with nothing.
He sat on the edge of the bed.
The mattress was better than his. He noticed that and felt strange about noticing it.
His mother was going to come home tonight and he wasn't going to be there. She was going to put her key in the door and push it open and the apartment was going to be empty and the dinner he'd promised wasn't going to be on the table and she was going to stand there in her worn clothes and her flip-flops with the cracked heel and she was going to worry.
She couldn't afford to worry. She had enough weight on her already.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the clean white ceiling.
No dog shape. No stain. Just flat white plaster and the sound of Seoul outside the window, going about its morning without him. A delivery truck reversing somewhere. Pigeons on the ledge. Someone in the apartment above doing something rhythmic with their feet.
The only thing that made sense was to sleep. If this was a dream then sleeping inside it might reset something. If it wasn't a dream then he had nothing and sleeping would at least give whatever was happening time to sort itself out.
He closed his eyes.
The body he was in felt different even lying still. The weight of it distributed differently across the mattress. The arms didn't fold the same way. Even breathing felt different, the chest expanding further with each inhale, the whole thing just slightly foreign in every small detail.
He thought: I'll wake up and it'll be the ceiling with the dog stain.
He thought: The uniform will be on the chair. The note will be on the table.
He thought: It'll be fine. I just need to sleep and it'll be fine.
Outside the window Seoul kept moving.
He lay there in someone else's body, in someone else's apartment, listening to someone else's city, and he did not sleep for a very long time.