Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Hwa Pyung stands with the sea at his back and a garden at his feet, and two figures stand in the center of the road, looking back at him.

He has not seen them in a year, but he recognizes them instantly, beyond merely the silhouette of those particular clericals and the color of that specific jacket—beyond even the shape of Kang Gil Young’s eyes and the cut of Choi Yoon’s hair. They haven’t changed at all, is his first thought, and it feels like relief, even if he knows it can’t possibly be true. Any year, even a kind year, must work changes on a person. Hwa Pyung feels the days of his own year suddenly, like a weight caught all at once: the length of his hair against his collar, the look of the scars across his arm, the way he is used to not seeing out of his right eye. Even his dreams are missing half their peripherals, these days.

Is he ashamed, that they see him now, this way? That they see what he has become?

(Hasn’t he always been ashamed of his becomings?)

Gil Young does not quite say his name, but he sees the shape of it on her lips, silent and stricken with joy: Yun Hwa Pyung?

(My name is Yun Hwa Pyung now, it had said with his tongue, as he wept with its eyes.)

Yoon takes one step towards him—just one. The cross against Hwa Pyung’s chest does not burn.

And Hwa Pyung does not run this time: not forward, and not away. He breathes in, and breathes out, and lets the time in between, just for a moment, stand still.

*

Hwa Pyung is sitting in Yukgwang’s cluttered house, the familiar scents of the incense and candles warm around him, the familiar statues and silks bright even in the shadowy room. He leans across the table to pour Yukgwang another drink, but the older shaman does not touch it. Instead, he shakes his head and frowns, poking Hwa Pyung in the chest with one strong, blunt finger. Hwa Pyung jerks back, affronted.

You are unhappy, Yukgwang says: it is not a question. Hwa Pyung frowns back, because he does not think of himself as unhappy, and isn’t that what matters, in the end?

Wrong, Yukgwang snorts. Yun Hwa Pyung, wrong as you are always wrong. Aigoo, why were you the one who got to go back?

Go back? Hwa Pyung repeats, confused. His left arm itches; he scratches at it idly, and the heavy sweetness of the incense must be getting to him, because he is starting to feel lightheaded. Or maybe he drank too much, already? How long have they been drinking?

Yes: Go back, Yukgwang huffs, and finally moves to pick up his cup, eyeing it distastefully. I know I was not young, Hwa Pyung, but I was not old, either. Not yet. And yet there you are: unhappy.

There is a pain, in his arm. Hwa Pyung looks at his right hand, and there is blood there, beneath his fingernails. Across the table, Yukgwang finally downs that drink, all at once, and looks directly at him, very serious.

What you need, Yukgwang says, all the color falling out of him to spread like blood over the floorboards, like seawater. His hair runs wet; his mouth is full of water when he smiles.

What you need, he says, is to live a little.

After he wakes from that dream, Hwa Pyung sits in his open doorway looking out into the empty blue pre-dawn, shivering in his thin sleepshirt. There is no moon tonight, and no light except from a few scattered fishing boats far out over the water.

Here I am, hyung, he thinks: living.

In the dark, where there exists only sound, and cold, and Hwa Pyung, alone, the entire world could be the sea.

*

Hwa Pyung had not thought the sight of these two crying could ever make him laugh, but it does, and Gil Young hits him.

“You bastard,” she grits into his shoulder, hitting him again, blindly. He does not think she means to hurt him—he knows what it looks like, when she is intent on wounding—but she does not know her own strength. Hwa Pyung will find bruises, tomorrow, on his arm, and will press his thumb into them hesitantly—reverently—just enough to hurt. Just enough to make sure that they are there.

But: Aigoo, he hisses now, flinching away instinctively. She is not penitent.

“You absolute bastard,” she repeats, finally lifting her head to glare at him with bloodshot eyes. “You owe us a good dinner, Yun Hwa Pyung. Do you know Yoon saved his pension two weeks to buy good beef for your memorial?”

He had not known. Yoon, too, pulls back, looking embarrassed.

Hwa Pyung can think of nothing to say except: But you are a priest.

“Yes, well,” Yoon says, his nose gone red, “I offered a funeral Mass for you, as well. But I knew what you would want.”

Technically, Hwa Pyung does not own the tiny house he invites them into, but he serves as caretaker there for the kindly old widow who took advantage of his need by offering him her home and making a long-desired move into the city to live with her son and his family. Hwa Pyung tends to her plants and forwards her mail and pays the utility bills, but she does not charge him rent. Instead, she has even sent him a few care packages in the months since she moved away: the kimchi and half-empty jar of makgeolli he has in the fridge are both thanks to her generosity.

She had been one of the villagers who used to come visit him regularly at the clinic, when he was still very ill. She urged him to call her halmeoni on more than one occasion, but he never could quite manage it, even after he moved in to live with her, the last two weeks before she left.

Yoon and Gil Young ask about none of this. They simply walk in, take silent note of how little furniture he has and how empty the walls are, and then make themselves comfortable on his floor, around his low folding table, which is far too small for three. He does not have chairs, but he does have a six pack of Asahi chilling, so he shares that out and they drink together and they spend hours talking about nothing. He does not ask about where Father Yang was buried or whether Gil Young is still pursuing Park Hong Joo; they do not ask how he came back, or how he has lived this long, on his own. Yoon does tell him, hesitantly, that his grandfather is doing well, but Hwa Pyung knows that is a lie. He smiles, and nods, and goes back to the fridge to finish off the six pack.

There are some silences, between them. They are not uncomfortable, exactly; they are just not what they were.

“I have to get back,” Yoon says finally, still staring at Hwa Pyung with round eyes, like he cannot quite believe what he is seeing, even after all these hours. He is holding his empty beer can, rolling it distractedly between both hands without noticing. He only accepted one. Gil Young has had three. “Tomorrow, I have the six o’clock Mass, I can’t—“

“I’m staying,” Gil Young says. “Sunbae has nagged me enough about the sick time I don’t use, he can’t complain. Don’t you dare tell me to go, Hwa Pyung,” she warns him sharply, and he freezes with his mouth already open. What he says instead is: You can have the bed?

“Damn right I can have the bed,” Gil Young snorts, stalking past him into his tiny room, with its single window and unmade cot and dirty laundry Hwa Pyung is suddenly very worried about her seeing. Across the table from him, Yoon smiles like he is containing laughter, and looks quickly down at his hands like he is worried Hwa Pyung will take offense. Hwa Pyung fumbles his phone out of his jeans pocket and swipes to unlock it. He’s had it less than a year, his old one ruined by the salt water, and he’s already cracked the screen; he can see his reflection in it dully, a fragmented silhouette.

I’ll call you a taxi, he tells Yoon, and he steps outside to do just that, his fingers shaking only a little as he punches in the correct number. Behind him, he hears more than sees Yoon climb to his feet and follow Gil Young into the bedroom, where they talk in hushed voices.

When Hwa Pyung goes back inside to tell Yoon the cab will be there in twenty minutes, they immediately fall silent, and that is when he knows for certain they were talking about him.

*

He accompanies Yoon to the taxi when it arrives, his shadow walking long and dark before him and Yoon’s walking even longer. When Yoon pauses with his hand on the open car door, Hwa Pyung thinks for a moment that he is going to hug him again, but instead the priest simply reaches out and lightly touches the cross hanging against Hwa Pyung’s chest.

The rosary does not burn.

“You still have it,” Yoon says quietly, and smiles the slightest smile, as he pulls his hand away. He nods once, and that is all: Yoon ducks awkwardly into the cab and the car pulls away like any car would, dull and unremarkable on a dull and unremarkable road. Hwa Pyung stands in the dusk with all the things unsaid, watching him go, and then turns to trudge back up the path to Gil Young.

He finds Gil Young sprawled on her back on his narrow sofa, one arm crooked behind her head, the other arm hanging down to the floor, her hand already relaxed in sleep. Hwa Pyung can see a scar there, in the very center of her palm. For the space between one breath and the next, he feels sick, knowing what his hands have done.

He tries to rouse her, tentatively, but she swears at him blearily until he gives up, stands back, shrugs, and retreats to his bed. He lies awake a long time, feeling the silence of the house differently, knowing someone else is breathing into it. His blind eye does not hurt, but he almost wishes it would.

(From the sofa, he hears Gil Young turn restlessly in her sleep, then silence again.)

You shouldn’t have loved me, he says to the air, quietly; to the sea outside his window. What did I ever do to make you love me?

Tomorrow morning he will share a breakfast of two-day-old rice and kimchi with Gil Young, and she will criticize him for his burned coffee and insist on washing the dishes after. Together they will drive into Sangyong to meet Yoon for lunch, but Hwa Pyung will sleep most of the way there. Afterwards, they will arrange to have dinner together in three weeks’ time, because that is the first Saturday Yoon will not be busy hearing confessions. Hwa Pyung will feel almost normal again, for the first time since he was a boy—a boy who was loved and who saw ghosts and who thought both those things were just the way things were, in the world.

He is excited; he is afraid; he is sick to his stomach with anticipation and anxiety and guilt and gratitude, all together.

*

You are unhappy, Yukgwang warns with mild disapproval, glancing from the road to where Hwa Pyung sits in the front passenger’s seat, head leaning against his window. They are together in Yukgwang’s car, the usual clutter piled on the floor and the usual charms swinging from the mirror. There is a smell to the car, like smoke and dust and old takeout, that Hwa Pyung had forgotten.

He is watching the tangled trees flow past outside the window, endless and dark.

His eye hurts.

They came back to me, hyung, he whispers without turning, blinking hard. After everything. After everything, they came back. I don’t know why.

He does not know why Yukgwang keeps coming back either, even a year later, but he never sees his friend’s spirit while awake, not since the sea. It is the only consolation he has: that wherever Yukgwang has gone, it was he, Hwa Pyung, who sent him there, and not Park Il Do at all.

Small mercies.

Hyung, he asks, where are we going?

Yukgwang does not answer, just reaches out and shoves Hwa Pyung playfully with one hand, dripping wet and briny.

You’ve got to learn to live a little, Yun Hwa Pyung, he says, just before the water rushes in.