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Three spinal fractures, a contusion, a twisted ankle, and a long drone of various and sundry injuries that Taehoon had stopped listening to as soon as he regained enough presence of mind to properly tune out anything that sounded remotely academic. The long and short of it was that trying to kick felt like somebody was deep-frying his muscles. On the plus side, every attempt made the nurses yell.
No cigarettes, fine. He should probably quit anyway. No solid food, fine. He’d been cutting carbs anyway, needed to get lighter so he could get the proper speed behind those new ITF-style kicks. No video games, fine. He didn’t really enjoy them anyway, and definitely wasn’t in the least relieved that he didn’t have to get his ass handed to him by Hobin another fifteen times this week (combos, tsh. Fucking bullshit. Cheat codes, definitely).
But… no. Goddamn. Fucking. Taekwondo.
See, he’d tried pushing through it. The doctors and nurses may have gone to medical school, but if Taehoon knew anything about doctors and nurses it was they all secretly wanted to do karate instead. Probably just jealous of him sticking with martial arts when they told him he was going to have to “take it easy.” Probably didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about, but then. The whole deep-fried muscles bullshit.
So, sure, when Taehoon was really feeling it, he could get in a back kick or two before collapsing to the ground in agony. And it did cause all the irritating tubes to rip out of him and a bunch of monitors to beep and a lot of screaming and panic, which was nice. But it… kind of didn’t seem worth it, to be honest. And, as much as it pissed him off, he did feel a little better on the days he rested. Also, the doctors had started upping the dose of sedatives.
“Taehoon,” the old man had said with that holier-than-thou emotion in his voice, the one that sounded like when Taehoon had to wait for the right opening in a fight but like the wait could last longer than any human being could reasonably be expected to hold out for (as in, whole minutes before getting what you wanted), “think of resting like training. Like it’s a new technique.” And, honestly? That made a lot of sense. He didn’t like it, and he had told the old man so in the most colorful language he could muster, but if his shady-ass dad had any good traits (a solid maybe from Taehoon), one of them was probably being “a good teacher,” or whatever.
So Taehoon had decided that, as annoying as this shit was, it was a well-deserved break. After all, ignoring his teachers and making sure not to accidentally do an assignment was hard work. Being able to spend his break, you know, doing real training instead of this “pretend sleeping all day can hold a candle to putting a hole in a punching bag” shit would have been nice, but. Maybe he did need a vacation. After all, seeing that shark bastard beating up his – the Yoo Hobin Company (and Yeonwoo) had been… annoying. Yeah, annoying, that was it. It was unfair that some fucking Yakuza chef dickwad got to beat them all up when he wasn’t allowed to anymore. Not to mention, the beer. That was Taehoon’s fucking beer. And seeing all that beer spilled all over the building had – offended his sensibilities. Odd that most of the spilled beer had been red. Odd that they’d even had that much beer around to spill.
Odd to remember how if things had been a little different, more beer might have been spilled. All of it. Just a bit – odd – to think about how a bunch of – beer cans that were his might have gone – empty. Been crumpled in. Thrown away.
Yeah. Wasted beer. Really pissed him off.
So, maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to be taking a break. From fighting, even. Thinking about fighting made him kind of think about spilled beer. And crumpled and cracked – cans. Important to train the mind as well. Maybe he could use the recovery time to meditate a bit more. Couldn’t hurt. Probably. Might at least help him stop thinking about how that night could have been worse. Might help him stop wondering if Seongjun used to talk up Judo like it was Taekwondo or something. If Seongjun had been like him.
After all, Taehoon didn’t want to end up as a sushi chef. That’d be like cheating on Taekwondo.
So that all wasn’t a problem. Taehoon knew a thing or two about problems, and the solution was always either violence or kind of just shoving everything under a mental rug until violence somehow became the solution. Another reason he didn’t need school – he’d never met a math problem he couldn’t beat someone into solving for him. And, in this case, he just needed to fight by not fighting. It sounded a bit like something out of the martial arts movies Hobin and Jiksae and Gaeul liked to rant about. Weird that he kind of missed their rambling, with visiting hours limited. Stockholm syndrome, probably.
The problem was – he didn’t know what the problem was. He was probably pissed that the murder chef had snuck up behind him at the end there. Or maybe he was at his wit’s end from no Taekwondo after all. Or maybe it was the way that his father had hugged him and kept on hugging him when Taehoon woke up and said “I’m so glad you’re okay” as if Taehoon had ever been in danger in the first place. As if Taehoon wasn’t going to wake up just in the nick of time and save everyone. As if Taehoon could have died. As if everyone could have died.
Fucking ridiculous. Taekwondo always wins, the old fart should know that.
Taehoon’s brain tried to say something to that, but Taehoon wasn’t about to listen to that bitch-ass motherfucker. It was high off its ass anyway.
Oh, yeah. The drugs. They were, uh – honestly, Taehoon couldn’t understand why the fuck anyone would turn to this shit. The rush had to be at least a million times weaker than the thrill of Taekwondo. Maybe a trillion. Maybe even a billion (wait, did a billion or a trillion come first? He should probably know this. Eh, nevermind. Must be the drugs.). They weren’t good, exactly, but they had to be the good shit, because they made things – different.
Like, Taehoon was dreaming in color different. He always thought people were trying to one-up him when they claimed they could do that. Ha, joke’s on them, he knew they were all just drug addicts now.
Speaking of dreams, Taehoon was sleeping a lot, which was – kind of nice? Kind of sucked? He wasn’t really sure. Sleeping through being stuck in a stupid hospital hooked up to a stupid IV drip was definitely better than being awake for it, but being told he had missed visits because he slept through them was disappointing. The people coming to visit might be a bunch of weirdos and idiots, but at least they told him things other than what they thought he “had to do” to “avoid exacerbating his injuries.”
Also speaking of dreams, there was no reason to talk about the dreams. Even less reason to think about them.
So, yeah. That was life right now. Sleep through most of the day, not practice Taekwondo, miss one visit fucking sleeping, maybe make the second, and avoid thinking about those fucking brought-to-you-by-Technicolor or whatever dreams. They were – stupid. The color was something else, though. How did the red and brown look so vivid – nope, not thinking about that. The drugs. Just the drugs.
The drugs kept making his mind wander, and that – that wasn’t good.
Anyway, the doctors didn’t have any pills to stop dreams (medical science could eat his ass if it couldn’t even make something that simple), and Yeonwoo would not, no matter how he was pressed, agree to just try some quick brain surgery to make Taehoon only dream about Taekwondo (“Seriously, how hard can it be?” “…Taehoon, if I try to explain why that’s impossible, will you even listen to something something I’ve been tuned out by Korea’s future number one”). So he was kind of stuck with the dreams and, well, shoving them in a locked closet in some corner of his brain wasn’t exactly working like it usually did.
Also, they kept making Newtube videos about talking to him whenever they caught him just waking up from a high-dose induced 12-hour nap. He didn’t get what the big deal was. Mistaking Man-gi for Hobin wasn’t that big of a deal. Anyone could do it, really. And, really, the whole “asking a Taekwondo master how to do a 1080-degree kick while he’s on anesthesia” video interview had gone just fine, in his opinion. It really was like bam, take a step, no not that far, just a little less far than you want to, yeah, like that, Gaeul, Hobin keep your goddamn knees bent more, okay, yeah, now spin – you gotta feel the spin, okay, yeah, yeah, oh – make sure you feel kinda weightless when you jump and just kinda jump like you’re gonna go higher than you are and you just – kinda – yeah, you spin, okay extend your leg midway through the first spin, no, Hobin, not like that, Gaeul gets it, Jiksae don’t make me get out of this bed and kick your ass I don’t give a shit that you pulled a muscle just now, okay, yeah, try again – feet further apart! – yeah, wha-bam, straight through the middle. Alright, drop down and give me 100.
…He didn’t care what anyone said. He had not fallen for the “telling a Taekwondo master on anesthesia that the hospital did some tests and it turns out he’s pregnant” prank. The fucking viral clip of Seong Taehoon looking straight into the camera with confounded dread and whispering, “who’s the father?” did not fucking exist and if anyone said otherwise he would break their fucking spine.
Visiting hours should really be longer. It was kind of too quiet when they weren’t being idiots around him. When they were bothering him, it was easier not to fall asleep, easier not to think about his stupid dreams.
He pestered Yeonwoo and Man-gi during physical therapy. It was a pretty decent pastime. The two of them were fucking gross, acting gentlemanly and exchanging compliments (and throwing them at him, bastards), so somebody had to fucking be the stick to the carrot. “You’re walking wrong, you’re gonna get hurt like that” was a sick-ass burn and he had no fucking idea why Yeonwoo had given him a close-eyed smile that made him feel a little odd when Taehoon had adjusted his stance for him. Probably psychological warfare. Man-gi kept rumbling words of gratitude as well when Taehoon roasted him, so maybe they were doing some kind of tag-team thing. It was – gratifying – to know that they had to resort to some weird reverse-psychology doublethink because his harsh words affected them so much.
It was weird. Having other people learning next to him wasn’t the drag he expected it to be. Maybe he’d try another recruitment drive when he got back to the dojang. The old man had taught him ITF, so maybe he should do something nice for his stupid-ass dad. The geezer had to be pushing eighty by now, he wasn’t long for this world anyway.
Anyway, it was weird. Everything was weird and he was stuck on the fucking drugs and he wanted to sleep all the damn time but whenever he slept his dreams were weird and he kind of wished that he could spend more time around everyone, just a little and he didn’t know what the fuck was wrong and sure all his bones and muscles were fucking cracked and torn but there was something else wrong and he didn’t fucking know what and. And.
And there was something wrong with him. He knew that much. He was pretty sure there always had been.
Anyway, long story short, Taehoon is taking a walk. He’s “supposed” to be in bed (he’s “supposed” to have slept at all in the last 24 hours), but if he’s being honest he’s “supposed” to not be a violent, short-tempered narcissist. He’s supposed to have kicked the sharkfucker’s ass, he’s supposed to not keep shaking every time he wakes up from those goddamn dreams, he’s supposed to. He’s supposed to be alright.
See, that’s the kind of bullshit that goes on in your stupid-ass brain when you’re injured and high off your ass and can’t train properly and don’t want to sleep. When you can’t keep moving forward, doubt creeps in, pulls you backward and downward for no reason at all.
So that’s why he’s taking a walk. To keep moving forward. To shut the traitorous part of his brain up. “You think you can run,” it asks him, and he tells it that the doctors and nurses don’t think he should run yet and look what they know, they tell you that you need to sleep, sir.
He turns a corner in the hospital courtyard. The night air is cold and his hospital gown maybe a bit too thin in it. The moon kind of looks like a cold, furious eye staring right at him. It’s one of those nights, when everything is quiet or maybe too quiet, when you kind of wish that you’d see another person just to be sure that the world hasn’t stopped moving when you weren’t looking. His brain is about to say some other bullshit, probably something about how he’s never run fast enough in his life when it mattered, when it fucking stops cold.
He can’t really blame it. After all, Seong Taehoon turns the corner and he sees somebody dead.
“Oh, h-hey, Taehoon.” He’s got the kind of soft brown hair that people worship if it’s on someone famous and mock if it’s on anyone else. He’s got big wide curious eyes and a skinny, short frame and a smile that almost looks like he’s actually glad to see the psychotic piece of shit who’s staring at him right now. He’s got a scar on his earlobe around a claw-shaped earring and a cracked skull that’s leaking blood and maybe something else. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
“Lee Dowoon.” He says it like an admission of guilt, like a prayer, like he’s cursing himself. He feels his hands shaking, his jaw clenching.
Dowoon goes from looking vaguely startled to shocked to – sad. He looks down for a second, seems to decide something, and then back up into Taehoon’s eyes.
“It’s, uh, been a while, hasn’t it?” Dowoon’s voice, soft and timid and too-easily forgotten, cuts through the frozen-still night air like a knife.
Taehoon takes a step back, and another. His body can’t decide if he wants to settle into a fighting stance or just bolt, and he feels dizzy and cold and like he’s thinking through syrup.
Dowoon looks at him for a second, with those world-swallowing eyes of his, and a droplet of blood makes its way down from his hairline onto the end of his nose. He looks scared and unsure and isn’t that a fucking laugh and a half, because that was surely the way that Dowoon died. Dowoon died afraid and hurting and it’s always been Taehoon’s fault. It was going to be Taehoon’s fault from the moment that the two of them met, because Taehoon is fucking poison. Because he can make all the excuses he likes, he can run as much as he wants, but Taehoon’s going to get everyone he’s ever cared about killed one day and there isn’t a goddamn thing in the world that he can do about it – you think you can run, Taehoon, says the honest part of his brain, you think you can run from the trail of blood that you leave behind you-
“Taehoon!” It’s abrupt, louder than Taehoon can recall Dowoon ever speaking (besides the one time he roared, “where’s master?” and the answer was “just coming through the door now, coming as quickly as he can to betray you and leave you for dead because he’s a narcissistic, childish, foul piece of shit”), and he flinches as Dowoon rushes to him – good, he hopes to any god that will listen Dowoon uses Taekwondo again, uses it on the one person who deserves it more than anyone else-
Dowoon is under his arm, holding him up as he stumbles, guiding him to a stone bench, pulling his IV along as Taehoon just kind of – lets himself be pulled along, like a ragdoll. Funny, that Dowoon is stronger than he was. He’d always been surprisingly quick, surprisingly flexible (how had he not seen it, how had he not known that those wide and curious eyes were the mark of a genius), but now he has a sort of cunning strength, something like a mongoose, a wiry power hiding in a thin frame.
A mongoose. It’s oddly fitting, in some ways. Funny, that he got killed by a fucking snake, then.
He sits there with Dowoon for a few minutes. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know if he wants to say anything. Dowoon keeps looking at him, cringing like he’s looking at a fucking corpse (that’s rich), keeps opening and closing his mouth like there’s anything left to say.
Dowoon was always a good kid.
It goes on like that for those minutes. Taehoon’s hands shake harder, and Dowoon opens his mouth to say something, and Taehoon reins in the shaking and grits his teeth and feels the IV pull at him and another drop of blood rolls down Dowoon’s cracked skull or drips out of where it’s matted in his hair and Taehoon’s hands start shaking again. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Minutes stretch, then Dowoon stands up abruptly and Taehoon nearly throws up. “Tae-Master Seong,” says Dowoon, brash behind the politeness (Dowoon was always unflappable, but he does have a hole in his brain now, Taehoon supposes. That would put anyone off). “It’s okay.”
Oh, thinks Taehoon, I’m crying.
Dowoon puts a hand on his shoulder and sits down next to him and leans against him and if it were anyone else Taehoon would have killed them by now, probably. But then, Taehoon already killed Dowoon. If the kid wants to reach up and brush away Taehoon’s tears, nobody needs to know.
“It’s going to be okay, Taehoon. I forgive you. I was never angry. I never blamed you.” Dowoon is tearing up, too. He looks like a fucking loser with his face scrunching up like that. Taehoon can’t bring himself to mind.
“…why?” It’s a pointless question. The answer’s obvious: because Dowoon is better than him. Dowoon was a genius with eight times Taehoon’s talent and a thousand times his humility. He was smart where Taehoon gave up on understanding how the numbers moved since third grade, he was courteous where Taehoon had never met an asshole he couldn’t outdo, he had deserved to live where Taehoon had deserved to die instead. Of course Dowoon forgives him. He’d forgive anyone, for anything.
Dowoon looks Taehoon in the eyes then, and in them the cold, bitter rays of the moon are reflected warm and sweet. “Because you made me happy.”
Taehoon feels his breath hitch. His hands clench into fists so hard that he can feel his nails split the skin of his palms.
“Master Seong, I didn’t have a single friend in the world. I didn’t have anyone who cared. I don’t even know if I had a reason to live. I wasn’t happy, not in the least. But when I was around you, I was.”
How could he have forgotten Dowoon’s voice? How could he have let him die? Taehoon’s jaw clenches so hard he thinks his teeth might crack.
“Taehoon,” and Dowoon is crying as well, “even at the end, I wasn’t afraid. I was happy. I was happy because you were there.”
“I – I fucked up, Dowoon. I got you killed. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have treated you like that. I should have been a better friend. I shouldn’t have been the fucking piece of trash that I am. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can’t change, Dowoon. I’m still a violent, senseless, asshole.” Dowoon is – fucking patting his back, like he’s a damn dog, and Taehoon can’t even find it in himself to mind.
“I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I can’t stop acting like this. I don’t know why I’m so worthless. It should have been me. It should have fucking been me.”
Dowoon, carefully, quietly, says, “I heard you saved them. I heard that they were going to die if you didn’t step in.”
Taehoon takes a deep breath, and says what his brain’s been telling him. “I nearly fucking died, Dowoon, and everyone nearly got killed because I was stupid enough to not check that my opponent was really down. I nearly got them all killed. I lost, again, and everyone would have died if Hobin hadn’t fucking begged.”
It was through a haze, when he had dozed awake through the taste of blood and a ringing in his ears, and he couldn’t see, his eyes wouldn’t open, but he felt someone grabbing his leg, heard the cold and wild and unhinged voice of death saying “I can’t use something sharp, now, you’re all still kids,” heard Hobin begging, the only fucking weapon they had left.
He shakes, breath rattling in and out of him. “I made Hobin beg for the forgiveness of that fucker. I – goddamn it – I failed them. I failed them all like I failed you.”
Shit. He must look like shit, if the boy with his brain bashed in and leaking out was looking at him with that kind of sympathy in his eyes.
“Taehoon. They would have died if not for you. So what if Hobin had to beg? So what if Seongjun got you from behind? If you hadn’t been there for them, every last one of them would be dead right now.” He’s rubbing Taehoon’s back, like Taehoon is some kind of child who needs consoling. “It’s okay. You did well. You made me proud.”
By the time Taehoon is done crying, the moon has made half its way across the sky and the night air is a degree or two colder. Dowoon’s blood has leaked all over the damn bench, but Taehoon doesn’t want to stand up. He’s not sure he ever wants to stand up again, but he figures he’ll have to. If he’s somehow managed to make Dowoon proud, it might even be worth it one day.
“Dowoon.” His voice is hoarse and raw, and he’s still shaking, but. He thinks he can do it, now. “I… I think it’s time that I told you about what’s happened since you’ve been gone.”
Dowoon smiles at him, eyes bright and warm enough that his skull almost seems not cracked at all. “I’d like that, Taehoon.”
So Taehoon tells him. He tells him about the short, scrawny boy who looks too much like him. The weak, dorky, money-obsessed loser who kicked his ass and proceeded to turn himself into an outright nightmare of a fighter. He tells him about the blonde cameraman who cheers everyone on, whose precision and grace with his camera is as thorough any eighth-dan black belt’s technique. He tells him about the sweet, naïve, slightly crazy girl who talks more like a geezer than Taehoon’s own grandpa, who’s his only student with a scrap of talent for Taekwondo. He tells him about the self-assured, confident brunette who could have been his sister in another life. He tells him about the big, stupid, bald romantic who always asks him how his day was even when he knows Taehoon will never have an answer that isn’t an insult. He tells him about the diligent karateka whose ass Taehoon has to kick whenever he seems to be slipping back into studying too hard (“I treated him like my second chance at you. I’m sorry for that.”). He tells him about how he’s still a bully, how he’s still an asshole, how he doesn’t want to be anymore but it’s so much easier to slip into old habits. He tells him about how some nights he can’t quite fall asleep. He tells him about how he has more subscribers than he could have imagined, how they keep on asking to see his fucking armpits and how he doesn’t know if he should be flattered or disgusted or both. He tells him how he thinks his dad might have some weird connections to North Korea. At some point, he doesn’t know what he’s telling Dowoon about anymore – he’s just… telling him. Everything.
The sun is rising, now, the sky pink and orange and yellow and the air warming, the world – not as empty. Not as cold. Not as still. He keeps on talking, like somebody’s yanked open a latch in him and everything is spilling out. He’s not sure if it’s helping, but it’s – it’s something.
“I can’t even call them my friends,” he admits, at the end of it. “And it’s – fuck, maybe it is my pride, but if I call them friends – I. I feel like I’ll end up getting them killed. Like I got you killed. And I – I don’t fucking deserve –”
Dowoon, uncharacteristically, interrupts him. “They love you, you know.”
Taehoon turns, stares, and starts to say something about “sappy bullshit,” but Dowoon keeps talking, and Taehoon knows that – after everything – he has no right to tune this out.
“They really, really love you.” Dowoon grins at him, a real, honest smile, the kind that he could never quite give under his father’s thumb. “They think you’re a violent asshole. They know there’s something wrong with you. They’ve seen just how weird and annoying and crazy you are. It doesn’t matter. They still love you.”
The sun crests over the horizon, and he knows. Maybe he’s known since the beginning. Maybe it didn’t matter, maybe it did. Taehoon wouldn’t know. He’s crazy, after all. But maybe he can start to figure it out.
He turns to the scrawny, short boy next to him, the weakling who grew up too fast, who grew into his wiry frame with the strength and indomitable iron will of a mongoose, the boy who learned to latch on and never let go – onto friend and foe alike.
Seong Taehoon lets himself smile, lets himself smile like he means it. Lets himself smile at his friend. Looks at him, really looks at him, for what feels like the first time.
“Thank you, Hobin.”