Chapter Text
A bus whizzes by, spitting rainwater out towards the sidewalk as its wheels go over the slick asphalt. Seong Gihun sputters in unison, as grimy water goes into his mouth, gets on his clothes, and speckles the ice cream cone in his hand. He looks down at it dejectedly. Then he uses his fingers to flick off the dirty bits and takes a rather forlorn bite.
He watches the pedestrians from his spot on a bench. It’s wooden, beginning to rot, and offers no shelter from the rain. He's been shielding his food under his coat and in the process, has managed to get ice cream on it. But the rain has begun to blot out the stain.
There's a couple passing by on the opposite side of the street, a child between them. The man is holding an umbrella with one hand, and holds the hand of who's presumably his daughter with the other. The woman is holding the man's elbow. She ruffles her daughter’s hair as they all turn the corner and disappear.
A raindrop falls directly into Gihun's eye, and he blinks rapidly, a curse forming on his lips. He's glad to see them go.
Then Gihun is yelling as a man sprints across the busy road, narrowly avoiding collision with three separate vehicles. A cacophony of horns breaks out, and the man inclines his head in its direction in apology. Turning back around, the man stumbles into Gihun.
"Hey!" Gihun grasps the man’s shoulder with one hand to steady him, holding his ice cream carefully out of the way. "What are y-"
His voice stutters as he meets the man's gaze. "Sangwoo?" he yelps. He brandishes his ice cream cone at him as though he's seen a ghost. Then, as melted ice cream drips precariously down to his fingers, he collects himself and licks it off. Sangwoo procures a tissue from his pockets and hands it over. Gihun begins to thank him, then realizes there's blood on it.
"Holy- are you hurt?" He looks Sangwoo up and down. He seems fine—good, even. Sure, there's mud on his loafers and the cuffs of his pants are soaked through but it's raining and he doesn't have an umbrella, so he's a little drenched everywhere. Gihun wants to offer his own, but he doesn't have one either. Instead, he nudges Sangwoo to sit on the bench and simply lets him catch his breath for a moment while he takes another bite of his ice cream. It tastes bad, sugar diluted by all the water. He makes a face at it.
All in all, it gives Sangwoo approximately fifteen seconds of rest before Gihun starts his barrage of questions.
"What are you doing here? I heard you were on a business trip, did it get canceled? Ah it's been so long—you remember me, right?"
He shuts up when Sangwoo meets his eyes, and Gihun thinks he's a little amused. Even though the amusement is slightly incredulous, it puts Gihun at ease.
"Gihun-hyung, of course I remember you."
That makes Gihun smile.
“But I’m in the middle of running for my life. Now is not the best time to catch up.”
Gihun drops his ice cream cone. A cat darts out from the alleyway behind him and licks the dregs off the pavement.
They get out of the rain, moving to stand under a bit of awning. The cat follows and noses at Gihun's feet. He squats down to pat the top of its head. Its fur is wet, plastered to its little skull by the rain. Gihun uses Sangwoo's bloody tissue to gently dry it off. The blood is dried, anyway, and he doesn't think human blood is poisonous to cats. He could ask Sangwoo, he thinks, tilting his head up at him. But then he remembers why they're here in the first place. His eyes widen.
"Is this okay? Should we go somewhere safer." He glances around. A pair of teenage boys walk past, laughing loudly. He squints at them suspiciously, pulling the cat protectively to his chest. If anyone gets too close, he can throw it and run.
"It's alright," Sangwoo says, lighting a cigarette for himself. He holds another out to Gihun in a silent question. Gihun nods and lets Sangwoo light it. He puts a hand up for it without looking, and it's placed carefully between his fingers. They don't speak for a moment, watching the smoke curl and disappear into the rain.
Eventually, Gihun stands, cradling the cat in one arm. It's started licking its paws. He thinks he can smell the ice cream on its brown fur. That, and some rotting fish too.
"What's going on, Sangwoo?"
Sangwoo's arm drops to his side and he lets out a deep breath. Gihun watches him turn his head up towards the sky. The clouds are thick, indigo-grey puffs of wool over their heads. It's dark enough that it's difficult to tell what's the sky and what's not. Gihun had a sweater in this color once, one of his favorites. Sangwoo's mom made it for him. He lost it, though. Really, lots of things got lost in the move back to his mother's place.
"I took a lot of money from the wrong people. I can't pay it back, so now they're after me."
"Loan sharks." He'd suspected this was the case. "Ah, Sangwoo, how'd you get mixed up in this? You're the genius of Ssangmun-dong! Come on."
Sangwoo looks at him like he's restraining himself. Gihun recognizes the expression, though it's more muted than it once was. Sangwoo has gotten mature, he thinks with a hint of pride. He pets the cat one last time and sets it down. It lays on his shoes. Gihun sighs, though not unkindly. Then Sangwoo speaks.
"It wasn't loan sharks. I stole money from my clients at work and lost it all. I'm six billion won in debt."
"Six billion what the fuck." Gihun leans close so he can whisper. "Are the cops after you?"
"Yes. Company thugs too." Sangwoo tries to snuff his cigarette under his heel. He misses. The cat puts a paw over it and yawns.
Gihun glances away, putting the words he wants together haphazardly, quickly, dressing excuses in the dark. "Hey, I can't be an accomplice to a crime. I wish I could help you but-"
"I'm not asking for help." Sangwoo seems slightly annoyed at the implication. "Actually, I'm not even here for you. I just wanted to see my mom at least one last time. And I have some other business to take care of."
Gihun nods slowly, considering this. "Well then, what are you going to do?" He really looks at Sangwoo now, at the dark circles under his eyes and the signs of aging, written onto his face. His suit is grimy, his hair is a mess. The rain has taken him and scrubbed him down, worn away at him. And yet there's something abstrusely determined there, glimmering like the reflection of traffic lights in the pitch-dark puddles on the street. Fragmenting off into droplets when driven over, and then coalescing anew.
Sangwoo pinches Gihun's cigarette from him and casually takes a drag. "The company I worked for? The larger conglomerate was completely corrupt." He chuckles lightly. "Not surprising, but I'm going to get some proof and expose them. Cause an SNS scandal. In the chaos, I'll transfer enough money to myself to pay off my debts, erase myself from their databases so they leave me alone, and then...I'll be free."
"Free," Gihun repeats. He claps Sangwoo on the shoulder. Then he stretches his arms out in front of him until his back cracks satisfyingly. He can escape the conversation now. "Well, have fun with that, but I'd better be heading home. It was nice to see you again. Give me a call if it goes well and you don't end up. You know." He doesn't know whether he means "dead" or "in prison" by this, so Gihun just makes a telephone gesture. "Good luck taking down your company- what was it called?"
"Squid Corporation."
The cat is digging its claws in someone's arm. Gihun's arm, because he's just tripped and elbowed it in the tail.
For a moment, Gihun genuinely forgets how to think. He just blinks, seeing red, shining everywhere. Superimposed over the green stoplights. In the chili stall down the street's vibrant logo. Undertones of it, in the cat’s fur. Lighting Sangwoo's face with a string of LEDs embedded in the awning. Pooling over the sky so it leaks through the clouds like shreds of clawed sun. Bubbling up under his fingers. He stares at his hands and pushes himself up to sit.
"I'll help you."
"What."
"I'll help," he insists. "There's good money in this, right? And I'm a chauffeur. I'd make a good getaway driver." Gihun hasn't done any driving more daring than breaking the speed limit for extra pay, but Sangwoo doesn't need to know that.
Sangwoo helps Gihun to his feet and Gihun dusts himself off, begrudging the water that's seeped into his pants. Sangwoo isn't saying anything, so Gihun claps him on the shoulder.
"So, what about it? Want to do this together?"
"Alright."
Sangwoo is thinking. Even when they were kids, sometimes when he got particularly intense, like now, Gihun imagined that he could almost see Sangwoo's thoughts flickering past his eyes, calculating, analyzing. Gihun is tired of people regarding him this way. Like if they focus hard enough the pieces of what they knew and know about him will fly together, magnet polarity switching, and they'll understand him like they did when he was seven, eighteen, thirty-five. He gives Sangwoo a pass this once because the situation does kind of merit it.
"Okay! You said you needed to visit your mom?"
Gihun is running his fingers through his hair, shaking out some of the water. Sangwoo is standing beside him. Ms. Cho is filleting fish. They watch her from several meters away, standing at the crossroads that leads to her shop's street.
"Come on, let's get out of the rain." He nudges Sangwoo's wrist.
But Sangwoo just stands there when Gihun starts forward. Gihun doesn't realize this, not until he's already taken several steps, not until Ms. Cho has caught sight of him and is rolling her eyes like she's just noticed a mouse nibbling at her shoes. So Gihun keeps walking, trying his best not to look back and see if Sangwoo is going to follow behind. Annoying little asshole.
"Hey Ms. Cho!" He pulls out a smile and waves sweetly. He's glad to be out of the rain, even though the night winds still whip the warmth out of the air here. Ms. Cho doesn't heat the store until it's so cold that she can't chop up fish without her hands shaking.
She makes a sarcastic sound at him, like the stoppered beginning of a laugh. "Gihun. Back so soon?"
"Well...I dropped my ice cream. Come on, please, give me another." He clasps his hands together.
Now she does laugh, smiling with a kind sort of disapproval. "If I do, will you go straight home to your mother? No drinking?"
Gihun casts about the store, flapping a hand dismissively. "Of course, of course! Have you known me to misuse your genorisity, huh?" His eyes fall on the framed photo of Sangwoo and his mother at his graduation. Gihun glances over his shoulder, but there's no one standing beyond the sheets of rainfall.
"Have you heard from Sangwoo recently?" he asks.
Ms. Cho's face lights up thinking of her son. Though, Gihun thinks, the effect may be caused by the sheen of sweat on her forehead.
"He's on a business trip in America." Chop. "Ah, I wish he wasn't so busy." Chop. "He works too hard!" She puts down the knife and bags the fish. "I don't like him being so far away all the time."
Actually, Sangwoo's probably standing a couple of meters away in the rain looking like a drowned cat. Gihun has to try very hard not to let his expression shift into a sheepish wince. He looks around the little store like he hasn't seen it hundreds of times.
"A business trip? Tell him to bring me a present."
"Just take an ice cream and leave," Ms. Cho snorts.
She lets him walk to the back, where a little freezer hums. White, squat, and old. There's a little scorch mark on the side from that time an outlet blew out.
Gihun grabs a dessert and shuts it. When he looks up, he finds himself staring into a tiny hall with a door at the end. The storage closet. He's seen this door many, many, times but after the events of this day, he contemplates it, dredging things up that he hasn't thought about in years. A memory flutters its wings him.
During winter vacations, he and Sangwoo would sit in the storage closet wrapped in blankets and eating braised mackerel stew while their mothers worked. He still remembers the heat, pooling in his stomach. He remembers that Sangwoo's hands were always cold back then. He'd press them to the bare skin of Gihun's abdomen and laugh when he yelled and shrieked and complained. Gihun always let him, though. Their gloves growing up were always threadbare, anyway.
He walks over to Ms. Cho and grins, holding the packet of ice cream up like a prized fish. (He's never gone fishing, but Ms. Cho used to as a teen, and there's a picture of her standing like this.)
"Nice choice, nice choice. Now scram."
Gihun reaches in his jacket pocket and holds out some coins. He'd found the change on the sidewalk a couple hours ago in his post-hospital stupor, and had grabbed them habitually.
Ms. Cho gives him a look but takes the money without counting it. He waves at her and leaves.
Sangwoo is leaning against an alley wall, eyes closed and face turned up. There's an unlit cigarette in his hands. Gihun pockets it and hands him the ice cream bar.
"We used to eat this as kids, remember?"
Sangwoo opens his eyes and looks at Gihun, then at the plastic packet that's been placed in his hands.
"Yes, I remember."
He rips it open with his teeth and bites off a morsel, which has always terrified Gihun a little bit.
"There's still time. You can still go see her."
"I saw her." Sangwoo stands up straight and throws away the ice-cream wrapper.