Work Text:
Unfinished Business
Being dead is not so different to living, Un thinks.
For so many years, he lived in the shadows, watching. Baek Dong Soo. Yoo Ji Sun. Yang Cho Rip. There are small changes. Ghosts, Un discovers, are kinder to a former assassin than the living. They are not afraid, perhaps because they are already dead. An old soldier near the palace, lingering on to watch over Heir Prince, tells him the living cannot see him. A young woman, with eyes that remind him of Earth Lord, tells him to avoid the Grim Reapers, unless he is ready to move along to Hell.
"Grim Reapers?" Un echoes.
"You'll know them, if you meet one. They're supposed to come when we die to take us to the next world. Sometimes, they don't. I don't know why. But they will come if you harm the living."
“I can harm them?” Un asks. “Am I not dead?”
“We are ghosts,” the woman says, with a small shrug. “Our touch drains the living. If we drain them too long, they die.”
Un swears to himself, in that moment, that he will not touch even their hair.
Small changes.
Sometimes, Un watches Dong Soo.
Watches Ji Sun.
Their happiness is a relief.
He is grateful that they have not tossed happiness aside to mourn for what might have been.
In his secret heart, he is grateful too that Dong Soo still drinks, sometimes, in his memory.
He does not want to be forgotten.
He visits Koo Hyang. He remembers his last words to her.
“Do you truly wish to die?”
He regrets those words now. For nearly five years, he had relied on her as he would a his own arm. His own sword. She deserved, not trust, perhaps, but more than threats. He has always known she cared. Dead, watching her grief at the funeral she holds for him that she alone attends, he wonders if she loved him.
On the anniversary of his death, he visits the field where he died.
"What is your unfinished business?" the ghost of a former vagrant asks him once, outside what once was Hoksa Chorong.
"Unfinished business?" Un echoes, "What do you mean, ajusshi?"
"We all have it," the old man says, shrugging. "Everyone who stays stays for something."
Time passes.
Heir Prince becomes King Jeongjo.
Dong Soo fights, is wounded half a dozen times each month, and remains the greatest swordsman Joseon has seen since Sky Lord.
Dong Soo’s apprentice grows. A clever brat, that child. He lacks both Dong Soo’s need to surpass and his reckless disregard for personal safety. In time, Un is sure, Dong Soo will manage to ruin him, but for now Un holds out hope that the boy will survive long enough to train apprentices of his own. If he pretends he is unheard through choice alone, watching them is like being alive.
The strangest thing about time passing is watching Dong Soo get old.
It has been two decades since he died.
Sa Mo has passed away. Hyang has married. Dong Soo has a son. There is no longer an empty field where he fell. It is a village now, small but growing, and market stalls line the streets, offering salt and vegetables and silks.
Un visits anyway.
Habit is a strange thing.
“You can come in, if you want. You look lost,” a ghost says from the inn, next to the urns, and so Un does. He perches on the roof, feet dangling, and watches the living live their lives.
If he moved onto the next life, would he be reborn as one of them?
Would he be born a killer once more?
Un is not sure.
He’s never been, really.
It was always Dong Soo who read, who studied.
All he ever learned was war.
Un is dozing in Dong Soo’s study, when it happens.
It’s a bad habit, when his touch is death, but he’s dozing crammed into the gap between the highest shelf of the cupboard and the roof, so he doesn’t think he’ll accidentally hurt anyone. And so he doesn’t panic when he hears the soft tread of steps outside. Keeps his eyes shut. He’s tired, and he can hear already that they are not Dong Soo.
And then a voice, familiar and startled, says:
“Un-ah?”
His eyes open. He looks down.
It is Cho Rip.
His first thought is surprise. Cho Rip can see him?
And then, moments later, he thinks, oh. Oh. Cho Rip is dead.
Un leaps down. Lands, and rises.
“I will leave,” he says, because he is staying here only because Dong Soo has been injured saving the King again and it is fair that Cho Rip—who cannot stand him, could not bear even his touch, even bleeding out on the ground—has the first claim to watching over his friend.
“You don’t have to,” Cho Rip says.
Un stops, a step away from the door, glancing back at him.
“You don’t have to leave,” Cho Rip clarifies.
Is it pitiful, that his heart should leap so sickeningly inside his chest at those words? Un thinks maybe, probably, and does not care. He turns back properly, facing Cho Rip, and smiles because Cho Rip is here and does not hate him.
Outside, Dong Soo and Ji Jun keep a little shrine dedicated to Un.
There is wine there, this day.
Un takes it, and pours Cho Rip a bowl.
“I thought you had only been exiled, Cho Rip-ah. When did you die?”
“A week ago,” Cho Rip says, accepting the bowl.
He drains it. Un wonders when it was that Cho Rip got old.
“I thought of you, you know,” Cho Rip says, eyes on the gardens before him. “When I was exiled. You and Sword Saint. It made me laugh.”
Un pours him another bowl.
Should he be sorry? Cho Rip does not sound happy.
“Why?” he asks.
Listening, he has found, is the greatest gift he can offer now, sometimes.
“He always said it was the little things I missed. I was frightened of you, then. I was so very frightened. You hurt me, and I never thought you would. Even when Dong Soo told me you had saved me, even when I knew you had saved Heir Prince, I wanted you dead. All I could feel was your dagger, and I wanted to feel safe again. And then, in the end, the one who tried to harm the King was me.”
“I am sorry,” Un says.
Cho Rip looks at him then.
“Why?”
“For stabbing you. For making you afraid of me.”
He looks young, Un knows. He always has. He uses that now.
“I don’t know why I was scared,” Cho Rip mumbles, into his cup. “You look like a kid, Un-ah. It’s hard to believe you were a killer.”
Un smiles a bit.
He likes that for Cho Rip now, it is “were.”
There are ghosts who are killers still. The Reapers do not catch them all.
They both visit Dong Soo, next.
Ji Sun sits with him, and Dong Soo’s eyes say he is as besotted with her now as he was twenty years ago. He will recover, Un knows. Dong Soo always does.
“Why have you not moved on?” Un wonders, later.
Cho Rip shrugs. Smiles, self-deprecatingly, eyes lost.
“I am a coward, Un-ah. I always have been. I know what comes next, and all that awaits me in the next life is hell.”
King Jeongjo dies.
King Sunjo is crowned.
Life and death go on.
Dong Soo has grandchildren, now. His hair is white, and in his eyes is the wisdom of Sword Saint, and Sa Mo's fierceness. Cho Rip’s shrine stands now beside Un’s. Both of them wander, but they make a deal that on the anniversary of Un’s death, and of Cho Rip’s, both of them will meet and get drunk together. They watch Dong Soo mourn them together, and Un thinks:
If I am born again, Dong Soo, I want to be born as your brother.
It's not until the day Dong Soo dies— a heroic death; the King is saved, and the assassins killed, and poison the only reason Dong Soo is not rising— that he thinks- ah.
It is not that he has unfinished business.
It is not that he needs to stay. It is that he wants to leave together.
In his heart, he always has.
And so, instead of hiding, of running, he waits.
"Un-ah?" Dong Soo says, eyes huge, stepping towards him, away from his body, and Un gives a laugh that is also partly a sob because it has been so long since Dong Soo has looked at him instead of through him.
He has seconds, he knows, before the Reapers come.
He drinks in Dong Soo's face, and wonders, in the next life, if he'll remember.
"You waited?" Dong Soo says.
"How could I not?" Un says, "I need to be better than you, don't I? I do not want to be an ajusshi before you are born."
"Un-ah, you fool. Why did you die then?"
Un laughs. Reaches for Dong Soo. Takes his hand, because it does not matter.
It has not, for decades.
When the Reaper comes, he binds both of them, and Un thinks—
It is not so bad.
It is not so bad.
No matter what comes, at least they will face it, he and Dong Soo, together.
Fin.