Chapter Text
Min-ha breaks her arm, of all the ways one can, by falling from the bookshelf ladder in the archives. One of their undergraduates manages to call an ambulance in all of the commotion and Gyeo-ul is informed of her hospitalisation by their supervising professor, who reminds her to buy some fruits over.
The hospital is only a couple of subway stops away from their university and Gyeo-ul manages to get there before the evening rush hour crowd. It’s a relief, since she’s spent the entire day sifting through audio recordings and transcribing them in the cold of the office she shares with Min-ha and half of Professor Kang’s book collection. The hospital is located just a block away from the subway station and Gyeo-ul feels the tempered heat of summer hit her as she steps out of the exit. It’s been six months since she’s been in this area, since the uneventful breakup with a fellow PhD candidate from the engineering department near the taxi stand beside the station. They’d just said their goodbyes, never to see each other again. Min-ha had called it the most mature breakup ever but Gyeo-ul knows that it’s pointless to hold on to something that you no longer have a grip on.
She makes her way through the emergency room, guided by a very genial nurse who seems like she’s about to fall asleep in her crumpled scrubs, and finds Min-ha with her arm set in a very uncomfortable-looking cast.
“Gyeo-ul!” Min-ha groans as soon as she sees her and Gyeo-ul sets the enormous basket of fruit—bought on their professor’s credit, of course—on the bedside table. “Oh my god, kill me.”
“Are you okay?” Gyeo-ul asks as Min-ha moans about how embarrassing this all is. Most of the undergraduates they teach witnessed the stretcher leaving the library with her on it and Min-ha is probably about this close to quitting the PhD programme, as she indicates with the tiny gap between her fingers. You seem completely fine, Gyeo-ul tells her, and Min-ha motions to hit her on the arm.
“You’re heartless.” Min-ha sniffs and Gyeo-ul sighs at all the melodrama. She’s used to this, now that she and Min-ha have been colleagues for several years. She had been under Professor Kang for a year before Min-ha joined his little pool of PhD candidates, and they became fast friends after discovering that they had a fondness for burgers and city walk tours. They’ve been sort of a stabilising force in each other’s lives—sorely needed when you’re working on a PhD that requires years of ongoing research and interviews. “Who’s been helping you filter interview candidates from the freshman English courses?”
Gyeo-ul’s thesis is focused on the learning of spoken English with second language learners and has been in a serious rut since a couple of months ago, so Min-ha’s been scouring for people she can interview from the freshman English programme, since they fit the profile she’s looking for. Gyeo-ul reassures her that yes, she knows it’s the one and only Chu Min-ha who’s extremely popular with the undergraduates.
“They won’t laugh at you, come on. Haven’t they been texting you the entire time?” Gyeo-ul points out and Min-ha hangs her head in half-despair. “You’ll still be the most popular lecturer around. How are you going to conduct the walking tour, though, if your arm’s like that?”
Min-ha jolts up before Gyeo-ul can stop her and yelps in pain immediately afterwards. The walking tour is something that stemmed from informal tours Min-ha would give with her friends to acquaintances visiting Seoul for the first time—now it features occasionally on cool, hipster websites that make listicles of things to do that other people don’t in South Korea. Min-ha serves as the guide to the mostly English-speaking crowd that sign up every other Sunday and Gyeo-ul has been there a few times. It’s pretty cool, she thinks, and Min-ha even more so for making it happen.
“Yeon-jung is going to kill me,” Min-ha groans into the pillow with the words YULJE emblazoned on it. Gyeo-ul pats her comfortingly on the head and pokes a hole into the plastic covering on the basket of fruits, planning to pick out an apple near the top that looks the best in colour and lustre. Min-ha sits up again, yelping in pain once more, and grabs her hand before she can leave. “Gyeo-ul, can you take my place this week?”
Gyeo-ul points at herself incredulously. “Me?”
Min-ha nods so fast her hair bounces like it’s on vibrate mode.
“Me, the person whose thesis has been on virtual standstill since the beginning of May?” Gyeo-ul would love to help but her non-progress has been weighing heavily on her mind. And on Professor Kang’s too, from the way he sends stilted messages of what could possibly be concern to her every other day. “Also, me, the person who really would stay at home with my cat just because I can?”
“Yes.” Min-ha says with a sort of finality that Gyeo-ul knows she has no way of refusing. “Yes, my friend who speaks perfect English and is the most outgoing introvert I’ve ever known.”
Gyeo-ul stares at her friend for a beat before she pushes her back down on the bed. Min-ha begs her with very pathetic eyes and she finally gives in with a slight nod of her head.
“Fine, fine. I’ll do i—Min-ha, no!” She’s jumped on by an enthusiastic Min-ha, who beats an equally hasty retreat back to the bed when she raises her broken arm a smidgen too high. The tired-looking nurse comes in when Min-ha is about to try again and luckily for Gyeo-ul, she stops them by asking Gyeo-ul to help fill in the forms for Min-ha’s discharge, since her family’s too far away in Geoje at the moment. The nurse leads her out, walking slightly ahead and navigating the crowds in the ER with expertise. Gyeo-ul follows as carefully as she can, wondering if she could ever do this in another life. Probably not, she thinks, before her shoulder slams straight into someone else walking in the opposite direction.
This is why, she groans internally, as she apologises profusely to the person who’s dressed in scrubs and a short white coat. He’s pretty tall too, which explains why he seems to be in more pain than she is—her shoulder had struck him square in the stomach.
“It’s alright,” he tells her, grimacing, and shakes his head at her hands, proffered in some sort of helping action she’s not even sure what to make of. “I’m fine.”
So Gyeo-ul watches as he walks off quickly before picking up into a run towards one of the beds with its curtains drawn. The nurse taps on her shoulder after a few moments, evidently having realised that Gyeo-ul hadn’t kept up with her, and Gyeo-ul follows her again while hoping that the poor guy is alright. No one gets internal bleeding from physical contact with a shoulder, do they? Gyeo-ul wonders this to herself until she gets to the counter.
—
Jeong-won hangs his stethoscope back around his neck as the ER resident calls for a professor from the Cardiothoraric department to come down. The boy’s heart is beating erratically and there’s nothing more he can do until Jun-wan comes and takes a look for himself.
“You okay?” Gwang-hyeon asks, having witnessed the little accident he was involved in earlier. “Looked like a pretty hard knock.”
“I’m fine,” he smiles and shoves his hands into the pockets of his coat. It’s not the worst thing that’s happened to him before in the ER, he thinks, and Jun-wan pulls up beside him, panting and glasses slightly askew. He doesn’t get to chit-chat, however, and the boy is soon wheeled out of the ER and into another ward for surgery preparations to begin. Jun-wan looks at him sort of apologetically and Jeong-won simply waves him on his way. It’s been a week since he’d started at Yulje—he’s more than familiar with the place now.
After bidding Gwang-hyeon goodbye, Jeong-won makes his way to the convenience store connected to the hospital lobby, where he’s accosted by the person who poached him over to Yulje in the first place. Ik-jun is looking supremely pleased with the world and how it’s turning as he pulls out his phone and shows off new photos of his son, all of two months old and already knowing how to pose for the camera.
“What a genius,” Ik-jun marvels as Jeong-won picks out a can of coffee from the refrigeration section, where it’s nice and cold against the clammy hot air that billows in from the main lobby with its doors opening and closing endlessly. Summers in the States are always somewhat different, he thinks, but he can’t quite describe it. Jeong-won’s no poet but he’s okay with that. “Can you believe I had a hand in making this?”
“They say talent skips a generation.” Jeong-won hands his coffee over to the cashier. Ik-jun looks briefly offended before he slides several chocolate bars across the counter. The part-timer dutifully scans them in before Jeong-won can say a thing and he’s forced to hand his card over. Ik-jun shoots him a look of victory and Jeong-won mentally notes to text Song-hwa about it later. Ik-jun is scared of no one but his wife, which makes it good leverage to use whenever he’s too much of a nutcase. They talk a little about how Jeong-won is settling in as they make their way up to the office levels—Ik-jun shares one with Seok-hyung, who’s not in the country at the moment, and Jeong-won with Jun-wan, which is a special experience in itself.
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Ik-jun says as they ride the lift, the crowd thinning out with every level they pass on the way upwards. Jeong-won nods slowly as he sips on his coffee. It’s the first time in five years that he’s lived in Korea, properly enough that he has a rented apartment overlooking the city and a bank account for his salary and three credit cards that somehow he’s found himself signed up for. His mother is ecstatic that he’s back, coming down from Yangpyeong almost every weekend for a meal and replenishing his fridge with any and everything she can bring over, and his siblings do the same if they can find the time.
Ik-jun shakes his bar of chocolate at him as they step out of the lift. “Seoul’s totally different now. You should go take a look when you have the time.”
“Do we ever have the time, though?” Jeong-won wonders aloud as they approach Ik-jun’s office. He has about an hour and a half to spare before his next surgery, a minor one that gives him time to have dinner, at least for today. Ik-jun gives him a sympathetic shake of the head—somehow, Jeong-won thinks, Ik-jun’s able to balance almost everything on his plate, from hanging out with residents from different departments to making nourishing stews for Song-hwa. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t sleep. Or maybe it’s because he finds it a loss to actually go to sleep. Either way, Jeong-won doesn’t think he can ever be able to do that.
Ik-jun tosses the chocolate bars on his desk and rummages in one of the drawers before he comes up with a flyer that he folds into a airplane and throws it at him. Jeong-won manages to catch it before it hits him in the face.
SEOUL WALKING TOUR
TAKE A WALK AROUND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD YOU THINK YOU KNOW
AND KNOW IT EVEN MORE
WE MEET OUTSIDE HANNAM STATION
EVERY OTHER SUNDAY AT 7 PM
“Seok-hyung recommended this to me, so you know it has to be extremely boring.” Ik-jun spins around on his chair and Jeong-won laughs. Seok-hyung and Ik-jun are on two ends of the personality spectrum but somehow have managed to get along just fine in the twenty years they’ve been friends. “But seriously, get out there and meet more people. You know, I have someone that I could introduce to you.”
Jeong-won gives Ik-jun a look, who continues spinning around in his chair, oblivious to the world while looking at pictures of U-ju, before folding the flyer and putting it into his coat pocket. He’ll go if there’s time, he thinks, if there ever is.