Work Text:
To: Hwang Si-mok
From: Han Yeo-jin
Subject: A visit
Hwang Si-mok! How is Namhae? You never write, so I’ve had to pester your former colleagues for details. Even they don’t know much. Mr. Kim seems to be pulling his hair out working for Seo Dong-jae.
Detective Jang and I each got some paid vacation days when we received our promotions. I’d planned on using mine to visit a cousin in Busan, and since I’ll be driving there, I thought I might stop by. What do you think?
To: Han Yeo-jin
From: Hwang Si-mok
Subject: re: A visit
Detective Han. It’s good to hear from you. I’m not sure what there is to write about; I rarely talk to anyone from Western Seoul.
Namhae is more than an hour out of your way from Busan.
To: Hwang Si-mok
From: Han Yeo-jin
Subject: I know. There’s a thing called navigation these days
Aigoo, what a cheerful response. Should I not come then?
(By the way, you should recognize my subject line. You said that to me once.)
To: Han Yeo-jin
From: Hwang Si-mok
Subject: re: I know. There’s a thing called navigation these days
I apologize. It has been unexpectedly busy here.
Please do come.
-----
Things have been busy at his new office, though “new” is probably a misnomer after almost four full months of work. It’s nothing like the pace of the investigation, or of Seoul casework in general. Serious crime is relatively rare here. His superiors are mild-mannered, much more relaxed. The majority of his tasks are merely repetitive, and exceedingly slow going; Si-mok’s predecessor, it turns out, suffered some kind of nervous breakdown and departed with a shocking amount of reports and legal paperwork left unfinished. All of this is time-consuming, but fine. Most of the work is already so out of date that no one cares much when he manages to finish it.
What makes it difficult is that unexpectedly, and for reasons he cannot fathom, Hwang Si-mok has to consciously will himself to stay focused. This has never been a problem for him before. His worst days, admittedly, are still better than most people’s at their best; he is as ruthless with himself as he is with others, likely more so. The feeling still jars him. He remembers what Mr. Kang said, about not being able to recover from being pushed out a second time. He could picture that happening to Mr. Kang. He could never imagine it might happen to him.
He tells Han Yeo-jin to meet him at the Prosecutors’ Office, just after noon; it’s the weekend, but he’s been there since early morning nonetheless.
“We should go to the beach,” she tells him over the phone. “I need the fresh air. Seoul is unbearable at the moment.”
“Okay,” Si-mok says, and leaves the itinerary up to her. He hasn’t had or made much time for sightseeing and has no idea what beach they should go to. He spends the half-day slogging through backlogged case files and is more than ready by to leave by the time Yeo-jin texts that she’s made it here from Busan.
She stands in the parking lot and waves with both hands when she sees him, resisting the impulse to pull him into a hug. She’s growing her hair out; by now it’s a little past her shoulders. She looks lean and healthy and happy. She’s also dressed more casually than he is: sandals, a cotton blouse, loose trousers.
“Do you want to go home and change?” she asks immediately, all but wincing as she looks at his suit.
“Why?” he replies. Even to his ears it sounds a little belligerent.
“Goodness, never mind. Let’s go, then. I think I’ve scouted out a good place.”
Yeo-jin smiles disarmingly at him during the entire drive along the coast, something like disbelief in her expression. The trunk of her car is packed with blankets, towels, a straw tote bag, a plastic ice chest.
“It’s good to see you, Hwang Si-mok,” she says more than once. “Everyone was excited when I said I was coming down to visit you. Mr. Kim said to tell you ‘hwaiting,’ and Kim Jung-bon wants you to meet him for coffee the next time you’re in Seoul.”
“I see. Anything else?”
“Ms. Choi wants to make sure you’re remembering to eat.”
At that very moment Yeo-jin’s own stomach growls alarmingly. She makes a face and puts a hand over her stomach.
“We shouldn’t skip meals,” Si-mok says. “I wonder who told me that.”
“You’ve been practicing your jokes. Not bad. All in good time, Hwang-geomsanim; you’ll see.”
The beach she’s found is truly striking. A crescent of white sand unfurls between crags of stone, the hills above them spangled with cypresses and orange flowers. The water is clear and the waves gentle. Si-mok helps her unload the car and follows her to what seems to be a promising patch of ground, sees tiny flakes of crystal glittering in the sand. Yeo-jin spreads a picnic blanket out, drops to her knees to anchor it in place with the tote bag and ice chest.
“See if you can find something for the other corners. There. That’s perfect, thank you.”
She begins the work of unpacking, tossing several dog-eared manga aside and handing Si-mok containers of things without looking: gimbap, sliced omelet rolls, shrimp chips. She’s cut watermelon into cubes and frozen it, as an added treat. Si-mok is astounded by the thought of someone else preparing a meal for him in this way, of her planning and going about her work, stacking fruit into two neatly divided sections.
“My cousin’s daughter,” Yeo-jin says, assuming he’s staring at the penguin stickers on the plastic lid. “She’s three. We went to the aquarium.”
She hands him a toothpick and spears a piece of watermelon for herself. They both eat noisily; they’re both famished, and the food is good. The sea is a perfect shade of blue, receding to faint silver in the distance. Tourists pad along the edge of the surf while she tells him about the Yongsan Police Department’s latest escapades. He answers questions about his new apartment and his new assistants and his recent cases, though she senses there’s something off about the way he describes his work. He wanders more than he ever has. It takes him half a beat longer to zero in on the relevant details.
“Hwang Si-mok, I think they’re giving you too much to do at your office,” she says finally, as she puts away the chip bags and empty containers. “You seem stressed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your brain is tired. You have too many things crammed into it. It’s even making your body tired. Look, you’re slumping over again.”
“Oh.”
Yeo-jin pokes him to make him straighten his posture and then leans over to dig in her bag again. She unearths a pen and sketchbook, flips through to an open page.
“You’ve been doing more drawings,” Si-mok says, somehow managing to combine polite interest and dread. He catches glimpses of cartoon people and aquarium otters, rolls of gimbap, a recent rendering of the Gwangandaegyo Bridge in colored pencil. Undeterred, she outlines what looks like a large cauliflower, makes squiggle lines to separate it into segments, then scribbles over most of it, black ink blotting the details of the structure.
“This is your brain,” she announces. “This box here is the portion that should be taken up by work. I even made it very generous. But see? It’s overfilled. It’s taking up the space that you need for other things. You’ve been like that before, but at that time I don’t think you knew you had space for other things, so it wasn’t as obvious. How’s your head, by the way?”
“It’s fine.”
Yeo-jin tears the page from her sketchbook. “Gift,” she says, and Si-mok resignedly shoves the drawing into his pocket. She snaps the book shut, stows it away in her bag.
“Now then. Frisbee?” she asks next, a subject change sudden enough that it takes him a moment to register the words.
“What?”
“I brought a frisbee. Should we play a little catch?”
Si-mok’s expression is so priceless that later, not wanting to test his patience with a second masterpiece, she has to draw that too. For now she insists that the exercise will be good for him, and watches in rapt delight as he stands and brushes the sand from his suit pants, mouth curled as if he’s eaten something sour.
“Wait until Jang Geon hears about this,” she mutters to herself. She finds the frisbee, jogs down the beach a respectable distance, and lets it fly.
They toss the frisbee back and forth for a quarter of an hour or so. Si-mok is stiff and unpracticed but, amusingly, willing to play along, lurching forward to catch it rather than let it fall. Afterwards Yeo-jin takes a short nap under the shade of one of her comic books, while Si-mok looks out at the ocean; then they both take a walk along the water’s edge, shoes and socks in hand. She pauses occasionally to pick up small shells, and to her surprise he does the same, though most he puts back after further thought.
“My father’s mother lived by the sea,” Si-mok says. “She used to ask me to bring her seashells, although I’m sure she just wanted to keep my attention occupied.”
“Grandmothers are crafty. With mine it was blackberries. She lived out in the country.”
Yeo-jin takes two steps forward, still beaming, and then doubles over in pain.
“Aigoo!” she exclaims, pulling her left foot back. Si-mok stands frozen, eyebrows lifted, in sudden threat-assessment mode.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes; I stepped on something sharp. Ah, it’s bleeding a little bit.”
She lifts her bare foot, wedging it atop her opposite knee, and touches the arch of her foot gingerly. A piece of glass or jagged stone has punctured the skin, and a ribbon of red blood courses down towards her heel.
“Do you have a first aid kit in your car?” Si-mok asks.
“Yes, in the center console. Ouch. Let me lean on you a little.”
Yeo-jin hops forward and rests her hand lightly on his arm, careful to give him his space. Si-mok isn’t sure what it means that he can recall every instance when she’s done something similar—whacking him on the arm on one of the few occasions he’s seen her lost for words; seizing him by his jacket sleeve to drag him up for a group photo—but he doesn’t seem to mind it, either. He steers her to the parking lot and retrieves the first aid kit.
“Thanks. How stupid! Not you, obviously, whatever cut me.”
Yeo-jin pops the hatchback of her car open and sits down to tend to her foot. She washes the sand off with water from her thermos, applies a glob of white first-aid cream and a band-aid. Si-mok watches the process silently, eventually taking a seat beside her.
“There. That wasn’t bad,” Yeo-jin says. “All right, Hwang Si-mok. You still look much too glum. You’d think you were the one who just impaled yourself.”
He’s not looking directly at her. Her smile fades when she sees his face.
“I was wrong. It’s not work that's bothering you,” she says after a moment, much more subdued. “It’s something else, isn’t it?”
Si-mok inhales slowly. Until now, he would never have connected it to his lack of focus, but once he’s thought of it, it makes sense.
The truth is that sometimes, often enough that he it gives him pause, he still finds himself thinking of Eun-soo, childlike and blood-soaked beneath a paper-white sheet. Of Lee Chang-jun falling backwards into empty space. Time and distance haven’t helped much. It happens when he least expects it, and the images are difficult to shake; seeing the red stain on Yeo-jin’s fingers reminds him sharply of the blood that is, arguably, on his own.
Sunbaenim, he hears in his head sometimes, the voice desperate and hopeful and strained. Or slow down, Lee Chang-jun says, and wood splinters as Si-mok reaches the edge of the building an instant too slowly, a handsbreadth too late.
“I would have helped you!” he wants to tell him, raging at him like he had at Young Il-jae. “You could have told me if you thought I was so promising!”
But this is ridiculous and impossible, and if none of that had happened he would not be here, and others might have died, maybe, unnoticed, behind the scenes. It’s too much to communicate all of this in words just now. He settles for little more than their names.
“Lee Chang-jun,” he murmurs. “And Eun-soo. I thought I had put it behind me.”
To his relief, it is enough for her to understand. He knew that she would understand.
“This is a thing that happens to people, sometimes,” Yeo-jin says quietly. “It’s certainly happened to me. It takes time; I don’t think it will ever go away. But it will get better, Hwang Si-mok. After a while you’ll be able to think about them…not without the pain, but in a way where the pain doesn’t define how you remember them. And that will make everything feel lighter.”
Tentative at first, but then decided, she puts her hand on his back, between his shoulderblades, and pats gently. Si-mok clears his throat. For a fraction of a second he softens into her touch.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks, and he shakes his head.
“Do you?”
“No. But thank you for asking.”
They sit in companionable silence, looking at the sky and the sea. Finally Yeo-jin pushes herself up again, finds her sandals and begins to slip them on, willing her voice into a chipper, businesslike tone.
“This was an awfully long lunch for you. I should probably get you back to the office soon, hm?”
She glances in his direction, resigned to a nod or a yes. To her surprise, Si-mok’s mouth is doing that thing it does when something—a thought, a chance word—makes him happy. The right corner is turned down in his habitual frown, but the left quirks upward and brings a tiny sparkle to his eyes.
“No,” he says, and stays seated where he is. “I’ve heard the sunsets are nice here.”
“Goodness,” says Yeo-jin. A warm, contented feeling blossoms over her, relieves a pressure in her chest she hadn’t known was there. “If you’d told me, I would have brought some soju.”
The fading light paints them in gentle colors, oranges and pinks and evening lilac.
“Han Yeo-jin,” says Hwang Si-mok. The sound of the waves is a music he’s never noticed before. “I’m glad that you came.”
-----
They don’t see each other again for more than five months. They rarely email and never text. Somehow, and in a completely different way, it doesn’t seem necessary.
When Mr. Kang calls to summon him back to Seoul, Hwang Si-mok can look at the photograph from the rooftop, and the finished work on his desk, and Yeo-jin’s drawing of him clipped to his computer monitor, and exhale deeply, and smile.