Chapter Text
He’s heard it said that the strength of someone’s soul can be measured through their eyes. How sharp a person’s stare is, or is not. The pair of eyes which can see you before you them, the eyes which have reach across one entire province to the next. The pair of eyes which measure, which calculate.
A man’s stare, his Uncle, or someone, called it when he was so young as to have not been able to see over the table. Just elbows, the moving thumbs and the backs of chairs surrounding tactical tables - though the men would often stand, pointing.
And there he was, overhearing this note about eyes, just having entered his tenth year. Also having, it pains him even today to remember, to listen in on their conversations and never partake. Being at the table would reveal the source of his shame both to himself and his parents: that he had made progress into adolescenthood yet still did not understand terribly much: the goingson of the numbers, how to position horsemen and cavalry figurines across the tactical boards, or what it meant when a territory changed color. Pale, he assumed, was good; no color. Red was uncertain, difficult; people would clam up, women would cry. Nobody could describe black to him, and some territories had simply disappeared between the meeting one week and the meeting of the next.
Perhaps because his soul was weak, too used to being carried on various platforms, that the position of Magistrate was appointed and not – he hates to tell himself, despite knowing it’s truth – earned. So it was. There was no arguing, no questions, and it followed that it became easier to sneak his own companions higher up various ladders. The first hours of the day of his appointment were grand until Dongnae became Dongnae, which is still the setting of many a frequent nightmare.
This nightmare carries over into the day. It has no end — it is perpetual, this feeling of living on the end of a pendulum always being shoved by different forces, monsters on the one hand and the indifference of human beings on the other. The ship capsizes, his closest die, he flounders to shore, is humiliated by the Crown Prince. No time to ruminate on any of this. There is no time, for in the slightest slip of distraction more territories seep red as did Dongnae.
His ineptitude baffles his new audience as much as it did his last: adults, grown men, who laughed long at the way he would place horsemen on the rivers of maps — and his Uncle, who stared him out of the room. Such is a man’s stare. The scholars were just as indifferent while he was trying to comprehend what his Uncle was speaking about during his youth, struggling to understand Haewon Cho ordinances; he was not educated on basic swordsmanship technique, and it follows that, for a lack of education indepth as he had required, he doesn’t understand tactical boards. Beyond the miniaturized ones that he would station on mountain ranges thinking them to be clear land, all horses whinny and back away, typically. Mounting them is difficult, and he’s been bucked off several times by the entire animal range of donkey to steed. Military terms are lost on him. He has never seen any of the Japanese in person, always thirdhand through people’s... descriptions, which vary. Medicine, something he’d shirked as well during a period of not believing in its’ utility, is now everyone’s focus. Reincar- resurrection plant this, ressurec- revival?- plant that.
If he scratches his chin and repeats her glassily said observations, Seo-bi seems pleased that he’s present.
(Seo-bi has no time for him, and has no interest in making any. No time to ruminate on that.)
Saving a life weighs no currency in this new world, this new existence that speaks with blade-tongue and craves blood. His past experiences — fragrant Palace rooms; decadence, disregard, women; liquor upon liquor, are without use in this existence of strong-souled men with steeled minds and staunch bodies. There is no transfer. He can’t bring his here-and-there culinary aptitude and his hearsay knowledge of trading work onto daily battlefields. No-one else seems as caught in this divide as he; it’s not in the faces, in the eyes, of those he takes company with now. These people who save lives as quickly as their own. These people without vainglory.
Seo-bi took his thanks, all ten hundred of them, but saving lives is her work. Is her past experience. His thanks are commonplace, he realizes; he is her regular, save the added persistence, but perhaps that’s also been deeply in her life and nothing about him is distinctive. Perhaps he is the dross. Upon the contours.
Beom-pal, the lone intimist in a world that is difficult and makes him shudder.
Someone saves his life again today and in all of the bedlam he hardly saw it occur. Blood into mouth, monster on face, wailing. Both of them, possibly, wailing. Blood, blood, pungent and oxidized, blood. Blood, uncertainty, trying hard to avoid the monster’s face and it’s eyes. Just the eyes. Looking at Seo-bi’s is enough, knowing it’s unrequited – not another; he couldn’t—
A staff, shoved through. Staff. The monster is shoved to the side underneath someone’s foot. Blood hot with fury hemorrhaging at a river’s pace out of the undead and onto him, over him and his entire body’s uncontrollable tremors – have not shaken this much since childhood, since his discipline for not memorizing texts – reading them improperly —
Hand.
Hand which lifts him. Onto his feet, which stagger. The look on the tiger hunter’s face is so utterly uninvolved that he could just as well be contemplating the color change of sundown, watching the cranes soar the cloth-bolt of shaded sky. Eyes. His look rather than his lips say, in the five seconds before he’s off, bounding again in one more incomprehensible thrust of movement, ‘are you alright’.
Beom-pal feels his nerves fray out within his legs and the screaming ceases, the clinging of the blades stops for one moment excluded from this new existence, and the tiger hunter has a richer soul than anyone he has ever touched the skin of.
All in a look. One passing of hands, the entire berth of a single swipe of skin. A man’s stare.
And then he is gone. Moving, a fast lunge outward at another body, and by the next blink, shouldering a blade he had hidden in an impossible fold of his clothing and forcing it into a throat. Strangled cry, bleeding. Face and body caked with black dirt, once a – woman, sister, daughter, even mother, falling limp to the ground. Then to have her head removed, body burnt, smoke scattered high. The entire transaction took ten seconds. The tiger hunter does not tire, and it’s with a stuttering of his chest's rises and falls that Beom-pal realizes that the only time he’d paused at all since entering this Palace courtyard was to help him.
The gods bid Beom-pal one moment where the monsters avoid him. Running their disorganized circles around him, as he is left stock-still and watching the man’s utter grace which comes in spite of, or because of, his violence.
This ends when he is attacked again and woken from this stupor.
After he’s kicked it away and it’s been handled by another soldier, he looks at the body on the ground — the woman, her shelved neck. “I’m sorry,” he says aloud, “for... this. For-- I’m sure he - I’m sure he didn’t want to. I. It’s for all of the others. Not- not you. It wasn’t personal. He wouldn’t have just killed you. I'm sorry, it. It must have hurt.” He supposes he says it aloud - there is no way to hear over the screaming.
***
In and out as he is, he doesn’t hear the plan being formulated. Bits of it. Something about bait, crossing over to the ‘garden’ and many upward glances. Beom-pal isn’t sure what these glances signify until the façades of the Palace estates are being scaled and he is left with the breathless piffling of his own petrified voice.
He can hear the scolding of his past mentors: strengthen your focus. But these scolds come from the same direction as the rest of the slew of thoughts, come from the same nadir of terror; it’s merely another pair of hands to push the pendulum. He thinks of the Queen. He thinks of his Uncle, tastes blood in his throat. He thinks of Seo-bi, then stops doing so from the shame of having to use a cart as a platform to jump atop a roof plateau - he is not agile and has already gone through the full gamut of self-loathing in this regard. He thinks of himself and stops immediately when he gets two handfuls of shingles, using what has to be willpower alone to claw up the incline. It is as unforgiving as this existence, as — as often are people, inadvertently or not — no one waited for him to come up the r
No time to ruminate on that.
The Crown Prince goes one way. Beom-pal follows and doesn’t know when to stop running or which direction he is supposed to jump in when the soldiers fork off and go both left and right. They’re on the roof, running on the notched roof. He’s especially concerned when they start slicing at their hands, and looks around for confirmation whether or not he’s supposed to do so as well; ‘Wait, wait, are- are we—’ he starts to say, but no-one is listening or no-one acknowledges.
Someone saves his life a second time after he goes sliding off the tiles. This happens so quickly that there is a blackout between running and being pulled up, and the way he forked upright – again, pulled by one hand — then he’s wheezing, wheezing yet alive, and with the tiger hunter. The tiger hunter. On him, the blank eyes of a slave trader’s grandfather.
But the intensity of their pupils could be measured in stone, they could transform lead into gold and gold into jade, and Beom-pal is stuttering in the way he’s always done. The age-old problem that kept him from reciting manuscripts properly and therefore kept him from positions that required oratory legwork — what got him beaten so often for his desecrating sacred texts ⸺ the drag of his speech, the slur, the
“I, I, uh, I. I—” I want to thank you.
“Watch your step.”
“Ah- ah, my— my step?”
He can’t tell if the tiger hunter thinks him beside concern, pitiable, dead weight, or all three. (No time to ruminate on that.)
He watches his step, and later scratches some of the blood off his soles like he sees the tiger hunter do in-between jumps from rooftop to rooftop. Beom-pal traces around the long way.
***
For two entire hours, he doesn’t have a single thought of Seo-bi. The awareness of this comes some half-an-hour after the Crown Prince opens the hot baths of the palace to everyone, firstly catering to all those recovering from the reservoir’s freeze. Hot coals, steam billowing; what few ladies of the court are left begin to add oils and waft the stench of blood out with flower bundles. One Palace room at a time, freshly-pressed clothes, cones of incense; the soldiers with more care for personal grooming walk alongside them. The fragrances of the flowers from the Queen’s chamber are dry, raw-smelling with reach that crosses the entire main court, and are quickly replaced; the court ladies with stronger stomachs, or politics which align closer to those of the Crown Prince’s, replace the old laurels and go with the eunuchs to bring swift replacements. Their parties are small and noticeably pockmarked, continuing to move in tight formations with holes where it is clear a person missed once would stand. Shifts are enacted for the monumental task of wiping blackened blood from within even remote corridors - just as then in the war, he keeps hearing, everywhere you turn, everywhere you turn. The dissociated piles of viscera have been more distressing than the the mounds of corpses inanimate.
Beom-pal wants to follow, but paradoxically he never feels safe anywhere the Crown Prince is not in immediate view. Just as he does Seo-bi — her name burns inside his thoughts — he orbits other people to feel necessary, but he is now landlocked from all sense of helpfulness, staggering here-and-there without others to toddle alongside, seeing as the Crown Prince has stopped moving; wherever he goes, and much to his chagrin if his lack of expressions tell anything, he has orbiteers of his own. The councilors revolve him as though Saturn’s rings, the tiger hunter shadows him like one of the planet’s moons. Moons cannot have moons, and Beom-pal maintains slight distance.
The Crown Prince is sitting quietly in a room well-off from the rest of the survivors and the councilors are arguing over who should approach him first. They all quiet when retching sounds through the broken screen door, and this cue is the one which makes Beom-pal stop his lingering.
The tiger hunter hardly even blinks. Stands like a stone. Not even... shivering.
Catching himself staring, Beom-pal flees. Takes for the opposite corridors, and flies down them. Entirely flees with what little is left in him.
Finding directives, coming up with them, is difficult. Even as Magistrate it was well communicated that there would be a range of things he could do, and unless he had strong conviction, venturing outside of said range would be frowned upon if not overtly punished. In other words, dogmas to adhere to, order. He tries to find the court ladies and soldiers (new clique to orbit), but the traveling smells are rooms and rooms away now.
In the baths where bodies are acclimating to the warmth and fingers are regaining feeling, Beom-pal ends up going through the oils himself when the rust scent of bodily decay enters in through a southern window. Everyone makes a face, and Beom-pal has a rare thought: ‘I can take care of that.’
No-one would berate him for this, surely. But it’s unmanly, so he hurries. There is a rich bouquet’s worth, full of imports and rarities that were only available before the famine struck. Lavender, bergamot, jasmine, myrrh, types of musk... Lavender into the water on the left side of the baths, supposing that’s one no-one should have qualms with; yellow narcissus on the right side. Then, a proud feeling as he watches the soldiers crowd the left, but the exhausted councilors take the right.
The moment he’s certain no-one is going to summon him, he’s gone to the furthest back pool and drawing the doors closed behind him. Here, patchouli, his mother’s signature; a scent that replaces every thought with good ones and furnishes new hope. Hope everything will right itself in due time, hope Seo-bi still considers him despite the distance she creates. A full-scale draining of all his terror, his confusion, everything that wants to be ruminated over. Now concerns only the matter of waiting for the coals to warm the water, and... peeling everything, fold after fold, off. Where blood has turned black and fixed fabric tight to him, sleeves and ties are difficult to undo. Navigating around his bandaged palm and coaxing his fingers back into motion, all processes are slow: untying, unwrapping, undoing. Then he stands there. Oddly aware of himself in the low light provided by candle and box lantern, hearing the ringing of a distant row of winter birds, and surrounded by aged, sculpted wood.
He misses his wardrobe, even the idle time wasted in wait for his dress attendants to come to him. His bid would be for all to own at least one silk, whether Haewon Cho or stonemason, apothecarist, fishmonger. Forbidden to opine, but something approaching a fully-voiced opinion is taking root in him, shaped like this; with each instance he brought sappanwood, Queen Cho was dressed differently but never less the resplendent, never impoverished of another embroidered silk - this was true before she became a Lee, and was true to her death. Sitting before children brought to their knees, moments away from execution by blades not unlike those now used to kill monsters — he wonders why such a wonderful material is not available to all. The sandpaper coarseness of rags is all some know.
And the matter of food. If he were king, he’d...
A mutinous thought. He drops it. Shakes his head as though doing so will clear him of it, or as though the Crown Prince can mind-read.
He supposes he might stop drinking, except for holidays. If he can come across someone who won’t laugh him out of the room, he also ought to ask for lessons on proper sword technique. There’s a series of ribbed indents in his palm where he was clawing to hold his own blade upright— and they’re heavy, those things; they obey their own directive of gravity and go opposite the way he swings in, always making this horrible sound as they make contact with any surface, not just bodies. Saying that, however, they’re not bodies, not to the blades - they are... targets. Targets. Improbable moving targets that are screeching, running lampreys.
And the woman — to the tiger hunter, merely a target who intended to maul — had an identification tag. He kneads it in his fingers, unsure why he went back for it and understanding less why she and it were still in the same place.
Merely a target, but he refuses to believe there’s no conscience behind the tiger hunter’s animation; there must be enough cogency to know it’s still a human being’s body behind the pretext.
The water is scalding and Beom-pal intends to do something he realizes he’s always taken for granted: wash his hair with clean water.
Magistrate. Seeing the Palace cave in beneath the weight of corruption and the disease has lead him to wonder, hysterically, if there’s authenticity to any of this. How it got to be this way. How some starve here or there, and mere kilometers away the Queen perishes in her dressings of silk and gold. Beom-pal thinks about divisions, and thinks about nearly ordering three dozen people to be executed for admiring the person he’s been orbiting (himself admiring) for weeks. He thinks about how hollow his words were in that moment and how his own voice sounded to him as though it were reverberating through a tunnel padded with cotton, as though... he were someone who could do that. Make that command.
A series of words assembled just so means the death of children, mothers. He splashes his face, pulls newly-formed knots (clotted with blood) out of his hair, becomes terrifically aware of how small he is in the large judgment of things, and decides not to ruminate. Tries. Tries. Tries.
And he adds more patchouli.
He could have drowned, beneath that ice. He’s never swum well, necessarily, and chose a shallow bath for good reason. Mud is caked beneath his nails and he he’ll never rid himself of the taste of someone else’s blood no matter how hard he scrubs at his tongue, and knowing this he adds more patchouli. When the adrenaline stops is where the problems begin; no longer making the arm movements of slashing shows him how raw his muscles feel beneath his skin, how overexerted his joints are. Everything is sore.
He adds more patchouli and thinks of his mother’s lenience. The mountains of her faith in him. Then her death, which was instantaneous, baffling, and as quick as a shortsword being dug into a neck clad in black dirt — he adds more patchouli, the steam of the room is now purple. He isn’t afraid of the tiger hunter, he’s afraid of the smallness of his own soul and its’ lack of power when compared to that of the tiger hunter’s. He’s never known what it’s like to walk with purpose, with surety. He knows a lack of expression is an expression as is the case of - of Seo-bi, for instance; he knows Seo-bi’s unwavering focus and her other priorities,
he knows the Crown Prince’s unwavering focus and his other priorities,
he knows the tiger hunter’s unwavering focus and his other priorities, and so he
Beom-pal sticks his head into the water.
He does this because he should have drowned and was not relieved to have resurfaced.
He doesn’t know what it’s like to fully subsume oneself into an act, a creed, a craft. All he wanted to do in his youth was later said to be out of his capability. Cannot orate, cannot opine, cannot participate in any court, cannot be the face of the Haewon Chos, the clan for whom progress had to be exponential. And their definition of progress - he begins to choke - is each generation more capable of monstrosities than the last.
He hears the laughter of his Uncle issuing from a deep part of his core just as pitilessly as the laughter of his past mentors.
He can’t do it.
***
The Moon moves.
Moves on the same curve pattern that it has decided to follow for its’ entire life, or for Beom-pal’s alone. This many souls in the entire kingdom and only the one Moon. Does everyone see a different curve, or does no-one have time to watch the moon any more - too occupied slashing, running, or perishing? He would be at a tactical table if he understood them.
On a seating pillow Beom-pal sits alone in an aired-out bedroom of the Eunuch chambers, temporary boarding until the blood smell is out for good and he can be moved somewhere more suitable. Sitting here, letting the gratitude be awake inside his mind in a way it has never before been. He smells like a garden comprised only of one flower. There’s a chance Seo-bi might like-
He has been sat here crying for an hour, roughly. Timing himself to the moon. In the flat absence of ruminating there’s no way to know what the subject of these tears is; he’s reluctant to think they could just be overdue. There were five tears over his Uncle, and all after were involuntary, more miserable. It was past some uncertain threshold where it began to hurt to heave during the long draw of dehydration that he had left the gentry, holding himself together for all of the two minutes needed to evade earshot, to where he crumpled behind the Queen’s estate. Leaning against the tall walls that squared everything away (boxed her in?), scraping at his chest when he lost the ability to breathe.
Still now, crying particularly hurts because his deep gulps for air remind him that his lungs still have water in them - each heave blends into a choke. With his hands lacking the coordination to return his hair to a topknot, it straggles about his head. Half-dried. As he pulls his robe tauter for warmth this material doesn’t provide, it was odd, the way the tiger hunter—
Why doesn’t Seo-bi⸺?
It was odd, the way the tiger hunter refused the Crown Prince’s bid that each survivor may wear royal silks. On that stone face, he had scrunched his nose and gave his thanks but did not take them at distribution, which
⸺have I done wrong and gave her a poor impression?
She’s seen the sides of me I didn’t want her to,
but I thought that would make her think me honest⸺
made Beom-pal feel all the more ashamed to take them himself, for a reason he cannot name. Of all, the person who deserves the feeling of silk, jade and gold most, he would wager, is the tiger hunter — this is another strange thought, vaguely mutinous, and he doesn’t mean to exclude the Crown Prince with it, but - being picked up by a commoner before any soldiers had noticed he fell levels everything his clan has ever taught him about the lower classes. The things they tell themselves to stay complacent and sure of their place in the order. The order.
And the Moon moves cleanly. Above all of this disorder, observing individual ills.
He doesn’t hear the door slide, but flinches at the foot which enters his peripheral vision because it is the same one that accompanied the staff. The same shoes that have been covered by dirt and by mud, yet still ones that would not allow themselves to be replaced by palace slippers. Years ago Beom-pal might have said this was someone who did not value courteousness, but he’s having impossible thoughts, mutinous thoughts, that royalty is just an absurd construct. Put together, all of these constructs mean nothing because some starve and others – he tugs at his sleeve like a child, looking to it for protection it cannot give – wear silk.
“That’s you choking?”
There is no lying to a man’s stare. “Oh, no. Ah. No, it was- just a passing cough, but thank you for ask...ing. Um...”
It is only now that he notices his visitor is the tiger hunter. The thought wasn’t properly using its’ weight until now. And it is now that the typical fear of inadequacy triples, throws itself up to a new height, and Beom-pal backs himself swiftly away and cocoons himself into the room’s corner - while Yeong-shin’s face drops, surveilling the floor for what could have caused the hacking he heard seven chambers down.
Hand, again. The one which righted him, both onto his feet and back onto the roof — just from feeling the calluses and scabs, the deep lines across the palm, Beom-pal knows it to be the one. He can feel every detail through his garment, all fine-inlaid details of this hand on his shoulder and the bit of the elbow which kneads into his back, steadying him from the turning of the storm. He wheezes as he tries to force-quit his cry, coughs gutturally from his lungs, and Yeong-shin in this instant drags him to the center of the room. Looks in his lap, looks to both sides of him and makes the first expression that Beom-pal has ever seen from him.
Just a small part of his lips, but his eyes tell all: terror. Then the tiger hunter is pulling through drawers, checking the windowsill and under the pillow Beom-pal was just sat upon.
He asks, voice low but with the power of a yell, “Where is it?”
“Uh. I don’t... Where- uh, where— wh-- where is, where is what?”
“What did you ingest, and how long ago?”
“In? Inge--? Ingest? Um, ingest?”
Kneeling before him. Two hands. Rattling him by the shoulders. Eye contact. A stare that asks more than Beom-pal has to give, and he, the cry gears up to return, the stinging of the corners of his reddened eyes, the long thin strands of hair garroting his cheeks and neck, the hair pin he cannot himself apply a mocking weight in his lap. Sorrow beyond the capacity of this body comes tearing back through. Eye contact and weight and the momentary feeling -- so slight -- of being safe -- where he has been.
The tiger hunter says, although Beom-pal only hears a part of it: “You’re already inarticulate. We don’t have time. What did you take?”
“Ta- take? There wasn’t, ah, I'm, I didn’t— you- oh, I. You’re, you’re asking if I...”
“Did you?”
“No. No, I could-- I could never do that sort of thing, I.” He does not have words for what he wants to say, lacks descriptive power to put somehow in spoken word that the sole asset allowing him to evade suicide remains material comforts, and he leaves the statement undone in the air. The gleam of the Moon is reflecting off surfaces, off the polished flooring, off of the silk, and Beom-pal becomes much too aware of his own reflection in the eyes of the —
In them, he looks frantic. Seeing himself is also the avenue that makes him aware he has had both hands on the tiger hunter’s wrists ⸺ he pulls them away. He recoils. The tiger hunter does not move, still as stone, hands still on his shoulders — still there, still touching, still there, still touc
(Unable to court a common physician who is dozens of levels below him in the social strata.
Unable to touch a peasant, and too soft, his clan might have said had they been peering through the walls,
to discipline the peasant for touching him,)
His heart is too close to the ants, and some day they will feast upon him. Soul too weak. Too appointed.
Yeong-shin is wondering if an excess of patchouli can be used as a poison, because the scent is steeped across this whole room.
It must be— Cho is flushed and his voice is slurring. And with all his conferring with Seo-bi, there’s a place he could have got it from, as well... when Yeong-shin got her attention and lead her from the crowd, that might have even been their discussion. A death march of people to be executed, Cho piledriven beneath the strain of responsibility, and Seo-bi, for all her good, impartial with information.
But nobody else is dying. Not at any rate, and Yeong-shin sits.
(which is something that makes Beom-pal’s heart do nerve-ridden somersaults.)
“Uh, I know why you think so,” says Beom-pal, quickly, on instinct; not looking up but knowing the sort of face Yeong-shin is making. “What, with- all of the... what with all of the many... deaths of that kind. Uh, during the. The war. I recall. That is, hhho-- however nothing I would, um, do. That’s truly nothing I would ever do. I, I...”
(The entire berth of a single swipe of skin, and Beom-pal is ruminating, helplessly and weakly, on those wrists.
Very cold, but the veins on their undersides were whipcord-tight, straining.
Straining against his collarbone, then just above that, two flat palms over his shoulders which shook him to confirm he was alive,
to ensure he had not done the worst to himself. Safeguarding his life, again.)
“...I wanted to-- to say, I never... so much has happened, I couldn't, um. I was never able to... word a thanks. I can’t become accustomed to being so near death so many times, and-- at, at some points I stop and... I stop, when - I become as afraid as I was when, we followed His Royal Highness. I can’t move, every, um- every so often. I don’t even feel that I have been able to understand what has— happened, in the last weeks, but I my gratitude to you I can see fully. Had you not saved me, I wouldn’t even be able to tell you so, and— before I can no longer do so tomorrow, after then or even years from now, I need to— tell you now. You saved me. Myself, my life. My very life.”
Now he’s looking. They both are.
(The tiger hunter was lingering more to the right side of the baths, given, not quite getting into the water. Still clad in all of that blood, but his head was tilted upwards. Pleased by the scent, or just making time while the Crown Prince was sick - or enjoying the narcissus, or waiting for directives? Waiting for directives. Waiting for directives, just like him. They’re similar. Similar. Similar. Similar, similar,
—and he imagines a red hand-shaped mark on his cheek,
the shape and size of his Uncle’s hand, for daring to make this comparison.)
“And for that, I...” At the moment, Beom-pal has nothing to give. Not a proper chamber with accommodating servants in the next room to bring tea, no sweets or gifts; just his own syrupy affection that clouds the room, flushes his face, and, and — “From this moment forward, I promise to use the full extent of myself to aid you however I can. Everything I have is now at your disposal.”
— unbelievably, it relaxes the tiger hunter’s shoulders. They fall from their straight line, as though he’d exhaled after holding his breath since the beginning of this dynasty.
(Each of those five tears were tears of joy.)
Yeong-shin scratches his nose, sighs more sharply; has a moment of confusion where all of the cortisol from his lunging to this room, fully anticipating a bomb to be defused, withers. The Chakho thrive in countersituations, but only those of a certain type. Not the sort that involve beginnings, they can only handle the loose ends found in endings. Ending of one’s own life, or that of the tiger that’s rived a village and halved the count of its’ farmers. He looks at Beom-pal and then he stops looking at Beom-pal because he’s never planted a tree. He’s only ever just collected kindling.
Unsure how to proceed and feeling unable to just up and go, he snorts, looks around the room some. Winds up to spit. Does so out the window, and then returns to sitting cross-legged across from the Magistrate, whose expression looks...
Ah. Yeong-shin tilts his head when it hits him, that’s why it looked so familiar. He knows where he’s seen this exact look: it’s the one he always makes when the physician enters the room. The one before he gives himself a few inches by straightening from his slouch, adjusting his gat and retying its’ strap when necessary. That fact makes this more confusing, not less. Unsure how to proceed and feeling unable to respond to the prompt of having someone’s entire being vowed to his service, Yeong-shin blinks twice. Blinks twice more, and rolls his shoulder. Thinks about inedible soup.
“You should wipe your face.”
“Ah, ah.” Sleeves it is-
“No. You don't want to stain them, do you?” Yeong-shin reaches into a pouch, raises a patch of oilcloth and lowers it into Cho’s quivering hands - as lightly as if it were sacrosanct. Looks around again, doubting there is no present fire when the bells had just been howling: “So. Everything is alright, then.”
Are you alright. In both hands, Beom-pal blocks out the world with the cloth as his screen. But he minds not to hold it too tight, before the object becomes another thing to thank the tiger hunter for once the embarrassment passes from his attempt to speak. His foolish attempt to speak. It’s why he’s no orator -
⸺it’s why Seo-bi never reacts to anything he says with his heart,
(He knows better than to point out when someone’s been crying, whether ten minutes or three hours have elapsed after the fact — giving him the cloth was a veiled, and unclear at best, attempt to point out the expression and meet Beom-pal somewhere he’s been stranded for weeks. The man is in love. Showing it on one’s face is natural. What Yeong-shin is failing to follow is why that expression is here.)
Yeong-shin scoffs (to relax his nerves).
What?
Beom-pal supposes he said that aloud, because with a curt laugh, the tiger hunter continues: “Never thought I’d hear a lord address a peasant that way.”
Lowering the cloth just enough to see, it doesn’t seem likely the Palace is molting away all around them. The tiger hunter looks at ease, as though he is fighting a smile down instead of struggling to produce one. Ease. Comfort?
No. Bemusement, confusion.
Because Beom-pal is beside concern, Beom-pal is pitiable, Beom-pal is dead weight -
He wishes they were not but his cheeks are steadily heating and he cannot tamp down their impulse, mind is vying a battle that is harshly uphill just to keep up with the conversation. Beom-pal looks around, wildly, pulling his robes tighter to affirm this is not a dream nor a mere construct. The afterlife. Did he die beneath the ice?
He’s stammering when he holds the pillow out for the tiger hunter to sit upon, head bowed; “I, I, I meant to say it that way. I’m indebted to you, so— so, uh...” What follows is an attempt to recreate his first thanks to Seo-bi. He pulls himself upright, rights the ties of his robe and properly flares his sleeves, and ties his hair as quickly as he can; “That wasn’t very formal, was it, let me - I, Cho Beom-pal, from this point forward-”
Yeong-shin places the pillow back on Cho's lap (because the Seo-bi expression is only becoming more poignant): “This is yours.”
“Wha— no, I’m, I’m giving it to you now. To be hospitable.” Pause. Directionless motion with his free hand: “Go ahead, it’s...”
“Thanks, really.”
Very feeble: “But you’re supposed to...”
“Hmm?”
“...sit on it, because I offered. And...”
He doesn’t know how to put the hair pin in, and trying makes his topknot fall out - a motion which flattens his hair against the redness of his face. “Oh, oh no,” he says; before making another attempt, he places the pillow back before Yeong-shin. ‘I won’t take no for an answer’, he tries to say in the glance upward he gives (but his eyes fail to communicate anything so complex, because his soul is as meek as a woman’s).
“...In, in the morning,” Beom-pal continues (still talking some strange reason), “I will find some way to- I will— um, so, I will greet you properly with a meal, and some tea. And some sweets. What type of-”
The pin isn’t the problem. He doesn’t know how to tie his own hair. Cho’s cheeks, his shoulders, they’re both as red as the crane embroidery on his sleeves, and it’s not even just the—
when he isn’t pulling the sleeves and distorting the garment’s entire shape, Yeong-shin notices the robes haven’t been knotted right either. On his under dressings, the knots are looser tied and coming through the front, but on the outer robe it’s tourniquet-taut, and
In one motion, Yeong-shin is stood and has grabbed the pin. “Let me do it.”
And then he’s
the tiger hunter, with both of his palms (the palms of a peasant, the palms of a peasant) is. Is tying the
the palms of the peasant who saved his life are on both sides of his head, his nape. Raising his hair, combing through,
combing the knots out with his fingers.
They’re similar.
When Beom-pal’s mind jolts slowly back into operation, his hair isn’t curtaining his peripherals any longer. No, and his headband is on. Further, the tiger hunter is sitting before him again sitting before him on the pillow and
His mouth just... speaks, the words come out, not necessarily as result of his will. His lips drift. “I have to be able to call you something.”
sitting before him on the pillow, and his legs keep shifting in an odd way as though he is not accustomed to it. The tiger hunter is sitting before him and his hair is fixed, in the topknot, done by the same hands that saved him and the tiger hunter is sitting before him and. Fixing his robe. And, fixing his robe. Beom-pal doesn’t know what he’s looking at. Everything is discolored and slightly blurred. His
“Yeong-shin,” responds the tiger hunter, in a strange and toneless voice. “You can’t do anything, can you?”
The way that’s said, asked, isn’t as accusatory as the words would have it be. Not with distaste, not with disappointment, but asked as if... trying to get a firmer understanding of Beom-pal’s background. How he came up. His needs. With some hesitation, unaccustomed to material which yields and does not resist like sackcloth, Yeong-shin straightens and ties the outer robes closed properly — all at once, unlike the past two hours, Beom-pal can breathe. Can breathe. Can
Those words should hurt him. They don’t. He should discipline this peasant and his errant tongue. He won’t.
They’ve met eyes. Beom-pal can breathe. With that new breath, with words and a mouth that refuse to obey him, he says
Incidentally, he doesn’t say anything. But he does grab the hand that pulled him up.
The Haewon Cho blood coursing through him insists he snap the wrist by bending the hand backwards.
The Haewon Cho insists he rip this hand from its’ tendons.
The Beom-pal, however, whose body tremors wildly on his exhales that come out like sighs
— heart racing from being overjoyed being very very very impossibly full of something
that only Seo-bi has ever made him feel and concubines could only emulate
holds the hand instead.
“Not Cho, you— you said Cho before.” He’s never cried from joy before, which... comes as a surprisingly refreshing, exhilarating, change. “And- it is not-- no, I. I, not anymore. Just- just Beom-pal. Please.”
Trying to avoid looking directly at his face and not trying hard enough to not look because he’s looking at it. Yeong-shin doesn’t know what this means. Any of it. As it’s a two-hand undertaking, he’s stopped with the robe. He is sat here holding a man’s hand and everything smells like patchouli. “That’s.” He doesn’t know what to say. He recalls being asked about his identity. Cho, Cho looks. Cho looks so - “That’s too informal for a Lord to say to a peasant, remember.”
“It’s never done me any good, besides... comfort, and...”
He trails off. Yeong-shin can’t believe he does so, but he prompts him. “And...”
“If you’d let me, for all of your kindness, should I still have the amount of influence I do, I will see to it that you’re rewarded when all of this is over. Whatever,” - now two hands are enclosing the one that saved his life - “it takes, whatever you want, Yeong-shin, I’ll gladly—”
Another sound. Not quite a scoff. Lower, more meeting the room’s docent still: he hushes Beom-pal, anything to get him to stop talking and making it all unbelievably complex and socially insubordinate on both of their parts, using his free hand to — the motion is somewhat clammy. More clammy than a Chakho's fighter would be, clamminess and uncertainty are tantamount to death warrants, but he's (he supposes he's) trying to water this tree, and trying not to do so just from the anticipation of fruit. Tending to tend.
He pats Beom-pal's shoulder, running his palm across it in broad strokes before descending the bicep, the forearm, then stopping at the stoop of his wrist.
The last time he touched someone this way, he was in Sumang.
Yeong-shin tightens the fingers of his hand being held, just so.
They look at each other until the moonlight is ousted by a row of clouds.