Work Text:
Hwa Pyung sleeps face-down on her bread-brown, lumpy couch, his cheek pressed into a square little pillow. One hand is crushed under his chest, the other dangles, fingers just barely gracing the floor with his touch. Hwa Pyung’s arms are no less short then the rest of him.
Gil Young stands above him, hands in the pockets of her jacket, and she leans a little into the sharp corner of the coffee table Hwa Pyung carved while he was in his self-imposed exile. The table is not quite sharp enough to cut through her pants, into her skin, but it supplies pain enough. So do Gil Young’s teeth, biting against her lips.
When Hwa Pyung sleeps like this, she cannot see his one blind eye, nor the eye that looks on her with apprehensions and care alike. When Hwa Pyung sleeps like this--he looks as though he were dead.
The door to her apartment clicks, and Gil Young turns away, wipes away at her face with her sleeve, so she can proclaim to the priest that her puffy eyes are the result of allergies, or weariness, for who would not be weary of an ex-taxi driver who crashes into your home without warning, eats all your food, struggles to meet your gaze? Who clearly is concealing something from you, some vision that has sunk like an anchor from his eyes to his heart, and threatens to pull him down into the very earth.
“ Annyeong haseyo ?” Yoon says. He has slipped out of his shoes, and in the dim remnant evening light that slips through the sole window in Gil Young’s apartment, Gil Young notes first the large paper brown bags of takeout food hanging from his hands, and then the the way Yoon’s face looks more drawn than usual, his cheekbones more pronounced. Shadows haunt his eyes as they have not done since before Hwa Pyung’s return to life.
Gil Young sniffs the air demonstratively, says, “If you didn’t remember my garlic soy wings, you don’t get any beer.” She roots through countless past conversations and quiet, pained revelations. Today, are they nearing Father Yang’s birthday? The anniversary of Choi Sang-hyun’s ordination? They are far from anything related to those frenzied weeks of demon-hunting.
Yoon’s eyes widen, and he raises his chin, draws his head back slightly, as he always does when offended. “I didn’t forget,” he says. He advances, leans over to set the bags on Hwa Pyung’s coffee table. He doesn’t remark upon Hwa Pyung passed out on the couch, but his jaw and shoulders relax, and he exhales abruptly, almost smiling.
“Thank you for picking up food,” Gil Young says. “This hungry bastard has eaten all my beef.” Her voice catches on bastard , and she hurriedly kicks her own couch to cover up how her whole body has begun to tremble.
“Hey, you’ll wake him.” Yoon leaps to Hwa Pyung’s defense, as he always does except for occasions when Hwa Pyung has purposefully been irritating him.
It doesn’t matter. Hwa Pyung, though his shoulder-blades shift up and down just enough to prove he breathes, may as well be buried six feet under, or lying tangled amid seaweed at the bottom of--
“Aish.” Gil Young whirls about, abandoning Yoon by the coffee table. She steps across her apartment to her kitchenette, pushes up her sleeves, and turns on her sink water as hot as it will go. She has barely any soap left, but a week’s worth of dishes is stacked in the sink and on the counter, stained with red and orange sauces. A plastic container has become an arbor of sorts for some oddly pretty green mold. Gil Young throws the container in the trash can.
Hwa Pyung still sleeps, and Yoon hasn’t said anything. She can hear him breathing though, faster than before.
Not quite as fast as when he had to run after demons and small children in need of saving. Or Hwa Pyung, kneeling on that bridge, grasping after his father’s swinging body. Gil Young had not been there, but she had spoken to him after the event, on the steps of Hwa Pyung’s childhood home. Hwa Pyung’s grandfather had been taken away in an ambulance, and the local police had taken his father’s corpse down from the bridge.
Yoon still was holding Hwa Pyung’s arm, and Hwa Pyung was staring at the ground.
Gil Young had no idea how to help either of them, not then, and she has no idea now.
The dishwater scalds her hands, but she plunges her hands among the suds, wiping the dishes down, scrubbing at hardened food bits like it will solve all the problems in the world.
The floor creaks behind her, and Yoon questions her gently.
“What’s wrong, Gil Young?”
Gil Young blinks furiously, clutches at a sob, driving it back down her throat, into her lungs, and speaks without breathing.
“Yah, you finally choose to not use honorifics.” She can’t look back, not at the quiet Yoon, the too-quiet Hwa Pyung. Why the hell did she get an apartment without a window above the sink? If she had a window, she could watch the cars drive back and forth, or watch fearless children kick a ball down the street, or catch the last glimpse of the sun setting, bringing darkness no longer tinged by supernatural nightmares brought to life. Instead, she can only stare at the wall blank and bare in front of her.
She hasn’t even put up a damned picture. Her apartment is bare, holding nothing in it but a few treasures from her past, a prying priest, and a scruffy-haired miracle with one eye. They are, in addition to a certain detective, the most precious things in her life.
“You told me I didn’t have to use honorifics anymore.”
Yoon’s voice is hesitant, apologetic, and Gil Young almost laughs. Instead, her lungs treacherously release the sob she has been trying to supress ever since Hwa Pyung stumbled into her apartment that afternoon and frightened her by grabbing her shoulders and demanding to know if Park Hyong Joo had made any contact with her, had threatened her in any way.
Hwa Pyung had been half-wild, turning over her cushions, checking her fridge for bird heads, pacing her floor.
He did not cease this behavior till Gil Young had stepped in front of him, imprisoned his soft, worried cheeks with her hands, and commanded him to sit down and eat some beef.
Even then, he had not relaxed, not till she lied to him.
“You’re working your blood pressure up for nothing, Park Hyung Joo is as absent from my life as money is from your bank account.”
“I don’t have a bank account,” Hwa Pyung said, gripping her wrists and removing her hands from his face. “I’ve been dead.”
And Gil Young had nothing to snap back with, no retort, for there was Hwa Pyung, sitting on her couch, eating her food, and her wrists burned where he had touched her skin.
Now, Gil Young submerges her wrists deeper into water, trying to forget, knowing she will never be able to. Not Hwa Pyung’s touch, nor his strength. Not the way his hair falls over his eyes, the dark and the white, and not the way he once cut his own arms open, bleeding over the sea and his friends, fighting for them, dying for them.
If she has to witness something like that again, Gil Young will not survive.
She wipes her hands on her jacket, turns to Yoon. He is standing there, patiently, and the wisdom in his eyes belies his youth.
They have all been made wise before their age, broken as children, broken again as adults. Yet here they are, all together.
Alive.
“I think he has had a vision,” Gil Young says, pointing to Hwa Pyung. He’s shifted in his sleep, turned slightly on one side, and now she sees he’s been gripping Yoon’s rosary this whole time. She understands, though she has never believed, or at least, never believed till that warm afternoon when Hwa Pyung emerged from that shore-side cottage, plaid shirt and moppy hair, and drew one side of his lips up in the most beautiful smile Gil Young has ever seen.
Yoon bows his head. He knows.
Gil Young almost punches his shoulder, says, “And when were you going to tell me?” but just then, she remembers the reason for the circles under Yoon’s eyes, for the compression of his lips. It is Choi Sang-hyung’s birthday.
“Aish,” she says instead, and her fist becomes a flat palm that rests on Yoon’s bony wide shoulder.
“I’ll make him tell you when he wakes up,” Yoon offers, apologetic again. “It’s not about a demon, but...it isn’t good. He didn’t want to worry you, but you should know.”
Gil Young takes a six-pack out of her fridge and shoves a cold beer into Yoon’s accepting hand. Yoon needs to stop apologizing for things that aren’t his fault. It’s a bad habit that Hwa Pyung shares, and maybe Gil Young, too.
Gil Young finds a pillow shoved between the couch and the wall and forces Yoon to sit on it next to the coffee table, and then she joins him in opening up the takeout food. They are half-way through the garlic soy wings and dumplings when a raspy, sleepy voice interrupts them.
“Some friends you are, eating all the food without sharing. Yoon, I even bought you soju last week.”
Hwa Pyung leans on one elbow, blinking sadly, looking for all the world like a hurt puppy. He is even pouting.
Gil Young will have to yell at him shortly, drag the vision out of him, but for now, she reaches for his hand and squeezes it. She half-expects the skin of her palm to burn as her wrists burned, but it does not.
Instead, her heart warms, like the distant memory of home and her mother, and she blushes, scarcely regretting it.
“We’ve saved enough for you to fill at least half your stomach,” she says. “After that, we’re taking Yoon out for drinks, and you’re buying.”
“I don’t have any money,” Hwa Pyung lies.
That’s when Gil Young hits him, a resounding smack on the shoulder. Hwa Pyung complains loudly, chastising Gil Young for practicing violence on him in front of a priest, begging Yoon to protect him from an unfair beating.
Yoon just smiles, and the shadows vanish from his face, for a time.