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The first time it happens, Yuyeon disappears.
His mother’s quiet footsteps are audible as he buries himself under the blankets. His clothes are still dirty from his escapade, but he still doesn’t pay them much attention, his eyes wandering to the empty bed beside him. The longer he looks, the more his skin aches.
He’s confused ( and worried, but he doesn’t admit that until much later )
Dongsik has sneaked out at nights before, has had days of running down the twilight lit streets and coming back late and grinning. If he were a good brother, he’d keep quiet and let her have a night off. Let her enjoy one night. Later his sister’s lips might clench as she’d look over her mother’s scolding shoulder. Her eyes would probably be accusing, “Oppa! how could you ?”
He’d keep still, if he were a good brother.
But Dongsik was not a good brother, and that was why the burn started.
The wind is still in his hair and the stench of Jeongje’s hideout still engulfs his person, when he goes down to his mother and tells her of the empty room. It’s midnight when they wake up and as he sees their eyebrows furrow, he knows that his twin is going to get a scolding tomorrow.
But Yuyeon never comes home.
And his skin keeps aching.
When the police come to their house, Dongsik cries.
He remembers there being many officers, three or five or maybe even seven. The only thing that had felt real then, was the hands that grasped at his arms and the shrieks of his mother as she pleaded for them to stop.
He resists, kicking and screaming as he’s pulled into the car. His tears are wet against his cheeks and he can feel his throat becoming more sore by the second, but he doesn’t relent. Because they should be finding his sister. They should be looking for her, so then why are they taking him away ?
He didn’t do it.
He promises that he didn’t do it.
He screams until he sees his father through the stained windows of the car. Over the years to come, he’d understand those eyes better. He’d understand the accusation behind them as they mutter behind his back and throw rocks at him from the front. He’d not known what those eyes were back then.
Despite that, he stops screaming.
Dongsik stays in the police office for a long time.
His skin hurts when they beat him, it bruises and welts and blood leaks down his quivering face, but they don’t stop.
The punches keep coming and they keep shouting, “Confess, you bastard” and a hit to his right. “Where is she ?” and a slap to his face.
He wonders why the words burn more than the welts, as they leave him alone on the cold floor of the cell. The chill creeps up under him and he shivers under the hateful eyes of the guard. He wants to cry again, wants to beg them to let him go so he could search for his sister. But the past few days have told him otherwise.
He picks at the scabs on his barefoot and scratches at his bare skin, hoping it would stop the sting underneath. His entire body feels like livewire and he’d never wanted to tear at his skin more, but then he thinks about – her.
She wouldn’t like him bleeding, so he’ll hold on.
Hold on, till she returns.
She’ll take him away from here, he’s sure.
Dongsik leaves his home with an ache under his skin and some money on his back. He applies for the police university when no one is watching and packs his bags the day he gets the letter back.
He knows his father would sneer at him and his mother would break down as she sees him leave, so he doesn’t tell them. He sits at Yuyeon’s desk and reaches for the coloured pens she coveted. It’s the first time he’s touched any of her belongings since she left ( since she was taken ), so his hands shake as he lays down the words on the paper.
“I’m sorry, mom and dad. I’m leaving for the police university tonight, but I promise to find her.
I will.
I love you, even if you don’t love me the same.”
His father was a stubborn man, he was a suspicious one too, but Dongsik knows him. He knows that even though he doesn’t talk to or look at Dongsik anymore, he loves him in whatever little quantity he could.
He’s aware he’s abandoning them and leaving them alone for the wolves. But his skin hurts so much. It prickles and aches and Manyang feels like a blanket of filth on himself now. He’d never imagined leaving his hometown before, but now it feels like every breath in the town was choked and tainted, so he doesn’t shake when he packs.
His fingers are steady as he puts down the belongings, but they do tremble as he grips at Yuyeon’s cross necklace and tucks it into the back of his bag.
He doesn’t believe in God, but she did, so it’s only fair that God’s eyes are on him at all times.
Dongsik keeps the cross on him through the entirety of college.
He grips at it on days when clothes on his skin hurt too much and he grips it on days when the other half of his heart feels so empty that he can’t move.
On the day of his graduation, he wishes he could hold the cross in his arms instead of the bouquet he carried. As he smiles into the camera held by a stranger, with his parents nowhere in sight, he wonders if Yuyeon would be proud of him.
He’s still not religious, but the cross holds her touch and he’s desperate for anything of hers.
Dongsik is in RIU when the burn fades away a little. His skin settles and he goes to work.
He laughs and grins and gets drunk with his co-workers. He’s the nutjob of the branch, but everyone adores him anyway. They smile when he comes with an extra coffee and gossip with him about the escapades of their new recruits. He still cries and sometimes it’s hard to get out of bed, but it’s okay.
He’s good at his job and he comes to an office that doesn’t hate him, so he manages with half a heart and tucks the necklace into his cupboard drawer. He smiles at the cross ruefully and the promise rings clear in the back of his mind. “ I’ll find her. I will”
And then his partner dies.
He’s back in Manyang again, laying on his sofa when Sang bae comes to visit.
“Life is hell, you fool”, he says, “ You have to breathe, eat, laugh. And you don't get to decide to live or die”
So, Dongsik gets up and tries to pretend that everything is fine. He carries the cross with him everywhere he goes and hopes that it would remove the sin from within him.
Because that is what he is.
A sinner, who deserves to rot in hell.
He knows that he’ll be plunged into hell the moment the soul leaves his body, but that’s fine. His skin has been dirty for so long that there’s not a shred of innocence or light left, but he’s come to terms with that long ago. So, even though he wants to die sometimes, he has to burn in the skin of his treacherous body till he fulfills the one promise he can’t break.
Dongsik’s plans are thrown off when Juwon forces himself through his iron walls. There’s a lot to say about the time they’d spent together, Dongsik thinks. Throwing jabs at each other when one of them is pinned against the other.
There’s fury in their eyes and blood on their hands, but he feels more alive than he has for a long time. He wants to live, even if it’s just to see those eyes trained at him and only him.
Juwon is soft, Dongsik thinks. Even when he's pushing against him and hurting Dongsik with the blade that is his words, Juwon is soft. He looks for justice and retaliates against Dongsik because for him, Dongsik is anything, but.
They dance around one another and it quickly escalated from one murder to another.
Min Jeong dies and Dongsik burns like he’s not burned in a long time. His eyes water and his soul feels shredded to pieces when he stares at her rhinestone fingers. He wants the Earth to swallow him whole and Juwon is there to watch as his life crumbles right before him.
They arrest Jinmook.
They arrest Jeongje and Dongsik tries not to cry at another loss.
And then they arrest Han Kihwan, this time together.
When Juwon puts the handcuffs on him in his father’s cold room, he thinks that this might be it, the end of the line when he finally gets to be happy for once in his life
Juwon leaves and doesn’t call back for a year.
But unlike anything in his life, Juwon comes back for him
It takes him 22 years, the loss of his family and niece, but he finds love in the end.
He finds happiness in Juwon’s hidden smiles and twinkling eyes. He wakes up in the arms of someone who adores him as much as he does, and he wishes that Yuyeon was here to see him. He shows Juwon the cross and lets him run his fingers through the worn down wood.
Juwon kisses Dongsik’s forehead that day and says, “It’s beautiful”
( Dongsik thinks that she would’ve liked him. )
He tells Juwon about the ache under his skin, tells him how it hadn’t rested in 20 years and cries when Juwon touches him. When Juwon starts to worry and panics, Dongsik tells him that they’re happy tears.
He’s just happy that his skin doesn’t hurt anymore.