He wasn't even pretending anymore. Every morning, he checked the clock and calculated whether he could make the 8:43. Every evening, he caught himself rehearsing answers to questions the old man might never ask.
It was pathetic—he knew that—but in a strange way, the man had become the only point of focus in his week. Without him, the days blurred. With him, time felt… deliberate.
That morning, the train was more crowded than usual. The rain had turned the platform into a slick, steaming mess, and bodies pressed close as the car doors shut.
He almost didn't spot the old man. The usual seat was empty, and for a moment, panic flared.
Then he saw him further down, standing in the aisle. When their eyes met, the man didn't move toward him right away; instead, he remained where he was, swaying with the train.
Only when the carriage thinned a few stops later did he approach. This time, he didn't sit. He gripped the overhead rail, his long coat brushing against Baeksan's knee.
"Young man," the old man said without preamble. "If you lost your sense of balance permanently, how would you cross a crowded street without falling under the wheels?"
He blinked at him, uncertain. What kind of question was that? "Like… vertigo?"
"Worse. Every step, the ground tilts. Your legs obey, but your inner ear lies. The crowd shoves. The road is wet." The old man's eyes bored into him, as if waiting to see whether he'd flinch. "What do you do?"
His mouth went dry. "I'd… grab onto someone?"
"And if no one is there?"
The sway of the carriage seemed to sharpen, tugging at his balance. He swallowed. "I… I don't know. Crawl?"
The old man's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Better than falling, worse than being trampled. The answer is three points of contact. Always. Cane, wall, rope, railing. Two feet, one support. Never less."
"Okay," he said slowly, "but these are getting kind of—"
"Do you know what happens when the body loses balance in a panic?" the old man cut in, his tone sharp enough to slice through the noise of the carriage. "The hands claw for something that isn't there. The knees collapse. The skull meets the curb." His voice sank into a murmur, intimate and dangerous. "Balance is the last thing people expect to lose. That's why it kills them."
His throat tightened. "Why are you telling me this?"
The old man's eyes didn't waver. "Because the world you're in now is not the one you'll be in for long."
The train screamed into the station, brakes shrieking like metal tearing. Before he could say another word, the old man melted into the crush of bodies and was gone.
He sat rooted to his seat, heart hammering as the train carried him forward.
It wasn't the question that haunted him.
It was the phrase the world you're in now.
Spoken like prophecy, like certainty, by someone who already knew the world that waited for him next.
He got to the station ten minutes early, but not because he was worried about missing the train—he just wanted to be sure he wouldn't miss him.
It was ridiculous, and he knew it. He told himself that more than once as he stood on the slick platform, rain misting the air, the lights overhead glowing like dull moons. A grown man, waiting with the restless anticipation of a child, as if the arrival of one stranger could conjure something impossible.
The 8:43 arrived with its usual hiss of brakes and metallic groan. He stepped into the second carriage, eyes already searching, his pulse quickening without permission.
Nothing.
No grey coat. No sharp gaze fixed on him from two rows down.
Maybe he's late. Maybe he's on another carriage. But as the train rattled through station after station, every empty seat where the old man should have been felt like a small, precise cut. By the third stop, he was almost bracing for disappointment. By the fourth, it had turned to unease.
That was when a woman slipped into the seat across from him. She looked to be in her forties, hair tied back, a patterned scarf pulled high around her chin.
At first he thought nothing of it—just another commuter seeking a dry place to sit. But the way her eyes kept flicking toward him, never for more than a second at a time, set his nerves on edge.
When the train slowed for the next station, she leaned forward. Just enough that he caught the faint smell of wet wool clinging to her clothes.
"You're the one he talks to, aren't you?"
The words froze him. His stomach dropped. "What?"
She didn't answer the question. Instead, her hand—shaking only slightly, but enough to notice—slid a folded piece of paper across the narrow gap between them.
"This is from him," she said, her voice low, urgent. "Don't open it here."
Before he could speak, the doors clattered open. In an instant she was gone, carried off into the press of bodies on the platform until she vanished altogether.
The paper seemed to burn in his hand. It's small, no bigger than his palm, sharply creased as though it had been folded with care. He slipped it into his pocket, pulse hammering in his ears, and forced himself to sit through the rest of the ride.
It wasn't until he was home that he opened it.
The handwriting was neat, deliberate, almost clinical in its precision.
Only one sentence:
Next time you see me—
Wait, what? He's stopped there? What's the meaning of this?