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He wakes with a start, coughing up seawater, brine burning his throat.
Gilyoung’s patting his back and he can distantly hear her voice telling him to breathe, but all he can focus on is that the only person he can see is her.
“Where’s Hwapyung?” he manages to eke out, but he sees the answer in her eyes even before she says, tearfully, “I can’t find him.”
He’s coughed up all the seawater, but it feels like it’s back in his throat, blocking his airways and constricting his chest until it hurts to even breathe, hurts to know that he’s still alive when Hwapyung might no longer be.
He staggers to his feet, sheer desperation propelling him forward on shaky legs. His first call of Hwapyung’s name is weaker than he’d intended it to be, quavering and anguished and afraid, as if vocalising it would make it all too real. Then he screams for Hwapyung, voice raspy and raw, a futile cry into the suffocating expanse of darkness.
There’s no reply except for Gilyoung’s voice behind him, echoing his screams. His legs take him further and further into the sea, as if on autopilot, and then he’s diving below the surface, fighting against the current to go deeper, to go to wherever Hwapyung is.
He can barely see anything before he's forced to resurface for air, but he won’t let himself give up, not until he finds Hwapyung. So he dives down again and again, forcing his eyes to stay open through the stinging of saltwater, forcing himself to stay down even when the need for oxygen claws at his lungs, and it's dark, so dark, why is it so dark why can't he see anything why can't he save—
Choi Yoon!
—and suddenly there are hands gripping the soaked fabric of his blazer, hauling him back up to the surface for air. It's all he can do to keep the tears in his eyes from brimming over when he turns to look at Gilyoung. Her gaze is pained, yet resolute, and suddenly Yoon is eleven again, eleven and wanting nothing more than to bury himself in the arms of someone who will take the pain away.
“I have to find him,” Yoon rasps, dazedly, even before he realises his lips are forming the words. “I have to save him.”
“Choi Yoon,” she repeats, and he can’t hold the tears back this time, guilt and regret and despair spilling over in heaving, choked sobs. She loosens her grip to pull him into an awkward half-embrace, one hand still holding on to his blazer as if she’s afraid he’ll throw himself back into the sea again. He lets his head drop onto her shoulder, hiding his face from her knowing gaze, the dampness of her jacket masking the wet tracks staining his cheeks.
"Come on, let's get you back to shore," Gilyoung says, more gently this time, and there's something in her voice that silences Yoon’s protests. He’s thankful for her firm grip on his shoulders as she steers him back to land, his legs lead-laden from his exhaustion and the weight of his failure.
He doesn’t move the whole night, unable to do anything but stare forlornly at the sea, watching the waves crash against the shore over and over, as if the next one will somehow be different from the last, will somehow bring even the slightest trace of Hwapyung with it.
It doesn’t, of course, though they do find Yukgwang, pallid and grey. Yoon’s fingers tremble around the plastic bag holding the sole remnants of Hwapyung that the coast guards had managed to retrieve, and tries not to think about how, somewhere, Hwapyung might be lying exactly like Yukgwang is, cold and stiff and dead.
The next time he sees his own reflection, it’s with bloodshot eyes and a wrinkled collar that feels too tight around his neck.
It reminds him of back when the stab wounds were red and raw on his skin, back when the ghosts had writhed about in the mirror, back when Hwapyung was still alive. Now, there is nothing left but himself, a withered, haggard shadow of the man he once was. There’s no illusion to dispel this time, but his fist still crashes into the mirror before he even registers it, chasing away the cruel reminder of who he is and what he’s lost. It leaves him with nothing but shattered glass and a reflection as broken as he is, but as the blood drips down his fingers, he finds that the twinges of pain running up his nerves almost feel good, almost feel like his penance for being alive.
He doesn’t know how he gets through the days. The people around him don’t ask and he doesn’t tell, but he knows that they can see him falling apart slowly, day by day, seams unravelling from where they’re barely holding him together.
It’s no different from when he was a child. He tells himself that he’s long since used to it, and he is. He tells himself it doesn’t matter to him, and it doesn’t.
The curse is long gone, but the guilt that eats away at him from the inside out may as well be rotting his flesh. He regrets ever doubting Hwapyung, regrets believing for even the briefest of moments the possibility that Hwapyung could be Park Ildo, when they’d fought together and hurt together and he'd even said, with his own two lips, that he trusted him. He’d caused Gilyoung’s mother to die, and Yukgwang too, and for all his experience in exorcising spirits he hadn’t even been able to save Priest Yang or Hwapyung’s father or Hwapyung.
But more than anything, he hates himself for letting go of Hwapyung’s hand, for not being able to hold on when it mattered most. For surviving, alone.
It isn’t fair, Yoon thinks, not when the one that should have died is him.
Things don’t get better, and they don’t get any easier to deal with.
Yoon still gets nightmares, though they’re no longer of his brother or the spirits or a phantom self. Instead, they’re of Hwapyung, bleeding out like his grandfather did on the floor of his family home, eyes blank and glassy. Hwapyung, pinning him to the floor with red-hot hatred burning in his one unbloodied eye, blackened hands tightening around his throat. Hwapyung, pulling the covers up around him and brushing gentle fingers through his hair, murmuring a soft lullaby to ease him through the stabs of pain.
Sometimes, he thinks the dreams in which Hwapyung dies hurt less than the ones in which Hwapyung is happy and smiling and alive.
“You look like you’ve lost weight,” Gilyoung comments, by way of greeting. It’s one of those things that haven’t changed, even after a year, even after all she’s had to go through. “Have you been eating?”
He tries not to think about the nights spent hunched over the toilet bowl, retching soju and instant ramyeon and then bile when there was nothing left to vomit up. Tries not to think about the meals that went cold on the dinner table and then went bad in the refrigerator because he hadn’t had the appetite for anything.
Instead, he says, “I eat well,” and hopes she doesn’t call him out on the lie.
She doesn’t, thankfully, though she gazes at him for a beat too long. She lets him change the topic, then asks about the plastic bag he’s brought with him.
The familiar lump in his throat is back, like it always does whenever he thinks of Hwapyung, of the memories they’d shared. He pulls the bag closer to himself even though he doesn’t need to, trying to buy himself a few extra seconds, not trusting his voice to come out stable just yet. The last thing he needs is for Gilyoung to find out that he hasn’t been coping as well as he’d claimed to be, and worry about him all over again. She’s busy, especially so since she’d been reinstated at her job, and it’s not like he’s the only one who’s hurting.
“It’s beef,” Yoon finally says, voice coming out steadier than he’d thought it would. “He liked it.”
He doesn’t expect the sigh that comes from Gilyoung, who holds up a similar bag with a wry smile. “Looks like that brat will be able to eat as much as he wants.”
He’d really liked beef. Yoon still remembers the wide grin on his face when he’d surprised him with it one day, remembers the way Hwapyung had pretended to feed him before directing his chopsticks into his own mouth instead. Remembers how he’d laughed at Yoon’s affronted glare, loud and bright and blissful.
He doesn’t realise his lips are curving into a smile until it’s there, just barely, marred only by the sheen of tears in his eyes.
He hadn’t dared to believe it, even when he’d seen the parcels in the yard, even when the fisherman had told them about the man living alone. It’d been a year, a year of chasing down every possible lead like a dog that had gone mad, only to have them dashed cruelly over and over again until he’d thought that even no hope would be better than false hope.
But Yoon Hwapyung is standing before him now. Yoon Hwapyung, their Yoon Hwapyung, with the same terrible fashion sense and an even more terrible haircut, but it’s him and that’s all that matters. He’s wearing his rosary, Yoon realises, and his heart quickens as if it hadn’t already been racing at seeing Hwapyung alive and well.
He doesn’t dare to speak, as if doing so might somehow shatter the moment, might somehow turn everything into yet another painful dream. The words don’t come anyway, not when the past year’s worth of emotions are surging upon him, crashing against one another like the waves had the day they lost Hwapyung. Except now they’ve found him, finally found him.
Hwapyung grins at them, the same fond, lopsided quirk of his lips he'd always worn after cracking a lame joke over the dinner table. Yoon can’t help but smile back, small but genuine, and for once the tears clouding his eyes aren’t entirely unwelcome.
Later, after Gilyoung’s tackled Hwapyung with a headlock, kicked him in the shin for making them think he was dead for a year, and then stalked grumpily into Hwapyung’s hut to grill the beef because “You look like you haven’t eaten a proper meal in forever, geez,” Yoon finally finds his voice.
“You’re alive,” he says, voice breathy with disbelief.
Hwapyung grins, sheepishly. “Sorry I disappeared for so long, I didn’t want to risk—”
Impulsively, he pulls Hwapyung into a hug, burying his face in his shoulder. "I thought I’d lost you," Yoon murmurs, voice choked with relief and guilt and a longing that had never quite managed to fade away. Thank you for saving me. Thank you for returning to us. Thank you for being alive.
"Shh, don't cry." Hwapyung pats his back soothingly, steadying the trembling of his shoulders. "I survived, didn't I?"
“I’m not crying,” Yoon says, but there are tears in his eyes even as he’s smiling into Hwapyung’s shoulder. Hwapyung pulls him closer, and Yoon lets himself relax into his embrace, fingers still clinging onto the back of Hwapyung’s shirt as if he could disappear any moment.
When they finally separate, Gilyoung is gazing at them from inside Hwapyung’s hut, that unreadable look in her eyes again. For once, listening to the steadily quickening rhythm of his heart, Yoon thinks he knows what it means.
“C’mon, let’s eat,” she calls, placing another slice of beef on the grill. As they walk towards the house, their fingers brush, just barely, Hwapyung's ones fleeting but familiar against Yoon's own. Yoon smiles, just to himself at first, and then at Hwapyung, scarred and half-blind but very much here.
I’ve finally found you, Yoon thinks, heart filling with warmth as Hwapyung smiles back, I won’t lose you again.