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Hong Ji-ah has had far better nights.
…Which, given that most of her evenings are devoted to chasing down unruly, often violent ghosts, is really saying something.
At present, she’s tied to a chair, fingertips starting to tingle from the tight ropes wrapping around her midsection. It’s a bit of overkill, if she’s being honest, with her midsection alone trapped by no less than five loops, each biting creases into her favorite hoodie (It better not rip, she spares a moment to think. Mom will never let me get away with buying a new one).
That in and of itself wouldn’t rank tonight among her worst, though.
No, it’s the absolutely psychopathic land developer whistling beside her and the way her medium is tied up across the room, bloody already, that really tips this evening into Ji-ah’s mental hall of fame. She wishes she could say she had no idea how she ended up here. It would be nice, probably, to deny culpability, to pretend that she – like Oh In-beom, if she had to guess – had woken up, disoriented and concussed, already at Do Hak Sung’s mercy.
It would be nice, but it would be wrong, because she walked right into this, head held high, lipstick perfectly applied, a willing lamb to the slaughter.
One of Do Hak Sung’s grunts (a beefy man, six foot two if she had to guess, with a blind spot on his lower left that she probably won’t get a chance to take advantage of) punches In-beom in the stomach, hard, and Ji-ah nearly winces for him, feels her own chest clench at the way his next breath chokes and gasps. It’s only been five minutes of this, and already she’s barely keeping her composure, desperation sparking up her spine, anger bubbling hot and acidic in the spaces between her joints.
She wants to scream, to growl, to gnash her teeth and crack her nails and curse Do Hak Sung to hell and back – and there’s no real reason not to, to be honest. She’s putting up a good front, acting disinterested and bored, but it’s not worth much; they all already know why she’s here, why she allowed herself to shoved in the back of a van and then, later, to be kicked out onto the dank floor of a long-forgotten underpass, tied palms skidding hard on the rough concrete.
They all know that without Oh In-beom, they would have never taken her alive.
So really, it doesn’t matter if she pretends she’s unaffected. She knows that, but she can’t help it; she hasn’t always been good at tamping down on her feelings, at hiding her hurts and licking her wounds, but she sure as hell is good now, and it’s going to take more than a shitty man acting out some kind of shitty gangster movie to break her sangfroid. So she steels herself, locks her spine and eases up her scowl, shores up her bland expression like its armor.
…It’s almost for nothing, though, because the grunt takes that exact moment to pull Oh In-beom’s hair back, hard, straining the other man’s neck at an impossible angle. Ji-ah’s facade cracks, just a little, and she swallows, her throat bobbing at the same time In-beom’s does, her breath coming out nearly as wheezy and scratchy as she knows his own must be.
(If she’s truly honest with herself – which she hates being, and which she avoids at all costs, because she rarely likes what she sees – she knows it’s not going to take that much more to break her.)
“Can’t I just kill him?”
Do Hak Sung’s voice is bland, almost whiney, and Hong Ji-ah has hated many people in her life – has hated the thugs who terrorized her mom when she was young, has hated the murderers she’s seen in ghosts’ last visions, has hated bad drivers and slow walkers and people who let their dogs lick anyone on the street – but she has never, ever hated anyone the way she hates Do Hak Sung in this moment.
It’s not hard to pull her lips back, to bare her teeth and snarl, “I think you’ll be the one to die.”
(He raises a single eyebrow, bored already, and Ji-ah hates that too, hates his confidence, hates his dismissal, hates the way she can’t help thinking that maybe he’s right, that maybe she and In-beom aren’t getting out of this one alive.)
It’s a relief, almost, when Oh In-beom goes limp, the tinkle of his necklace hitting the floor jarringly loud to her ears. She doesn’t have to look, knows there aren’t any other options in the vicinity, but she does anyway, glances sharply to the side. Do Hak Sung smiles at her and it almost meets his eyes, already convinced he’s at the precipice of victory, but she isn’t looking at him.
She’s looking beside him, at the empty space where a vengeful ghost once stood.
Across the room, In-beom – or, rather, the ghost inside In-beom, because it’s not really fair to say her medium is in control at the moment – yells, and it’s almost loud enough that Ji-ah can’t hear the snapping of ropes and the sickening crunch of bones landing hard on concrete. She doesn’t want to look, afraid of whose bones she just heard breaking, but In-beom gives her no choice. Within moments, he and Do Hak Sung are upon each other, the gangster lifting In-beom high into the air in a suffocating chokehold. In-beom doesn’t seem to react beyond his voice growing huskier as the ghost inside him continues rambling, and even from a few feet away Ji-ah can see that Do Hak Sung’s hands are still tightening, inexorably, around her medium’s throat.
She really, really needs to get untied.
(She’s not sure what she’s more afraid of – that Do Hak Sung will successfully starve In-beom’s body of oxygen, or that he will fail, and In-beom will do far, far worse in return.)
(She promised him that she’d keep him safe, that he’d never have to worry about hurting someone else again. She’s not sure she can live with herself if In-beom wakes up with blood on his hands – even blood as black and oil-slick as Do Hak Sung’s.)
The ghost possessing In-beom is fully raging, screaming half coherently about an apartment, but Ji-ah is only half listening, because there’s a knife on the floor and if she can just reach it –
Oh In-beom slams Do Hak Sung into the ground, brutally, viciously, and Ji-ah stops hesitating. She follows his lead, in a way, rocks herself to the side, losing herself for a moment in the weightlessness of her chair careening towards the ground. She slams into the concrete hard enough that her breathing falters, stuttering, and she knows she’s going to have some substantial bruises tomorrow.
(Not as substantial as In-beom’s, her mind whispers, traitorously. Ji-ah shakes the thought off, ignores the sinking in her stomach, because she doesn’t have time to think about that right now. If she doesn’t move, and move now, In-beom is going to wake up with more than just bruises – there will be death on his hands and screams in his teeth and wounds so deep not even the best doctor alive will be able to fix them.)
Behind her, In-beom snarls, his voice rising in pitch, venom dripping off each syllable he’s spitting at Do Hak Sung, and Ji-ah speeds up, pulls herself across the concrete in inches, strains every muscle in her body towards the knife that’s still just barely out of reach. She hears something rip, feels her skin catch and tear with each drag, but she doesn’t stop, can’t stop, not when she made In-beom a promise, not when he had looked at her with his too-bright eyes and too-wide smile, perhaps not yet believing she wasn’t a fake (Ji-ah wasn’t blind, she knew he had his doubts), but still believing her when she said, I’ll keep you safe.
Her arms are screaming at her, she can taste her own blood in the air, and her fingers are finally, finally, finally finding the handle of the knife. She could sob in relief, but that’s not really her style – and the sickly thunk of In-beom slamming Do Hak Sung’s head against the ground reminds her that there’s no time to waste. It would be a losing battle to find In-beom’s necklace in the dark, a tiny stone lost among bloody puddles and groaning bodies, but luckily Ji-ah has always believed in being prepared. She doesn’t have an awl, but she does have a backup necklace; she’d made a habit of tucking it into her pocket, even when she and In-beom weren’t heading out together. It’d become a bit of a safety tic, her fingers seeking the stone out whenever she was nervous or worried and unwilling (or perhaps unable) to show it.
She refuses to let herself linger on the other reason she’d liked having the stone in her pockets, on how she’d sometimes let her fingers slip into her pockets when she was home alone, the house still and quiet around her, nail tracing gently along the edges of the smooth stone as she imagined that it was his stone instead, that it was him beneath her fingertips.
They hadn’t gotten there, not yet, and Ji-ah isn’t really sure she wants to. In-beom is blinding, a little bit, and Ji-ah has carved a life and a living in the dark. She isn’t sure he will like what he’ll see, when her shadows are peeled back; she isn’t sure she will, either.
(It’s a lie, and an excuse, and she knows it, deep down where she pretends to never look. Truthfully, they felt inevitable, and that – perhaps more than anything else – terrified her.)
(Ji-ah has never trusted fate.)
Of course, none of this is going to matter if In-beom dies here, with a ghost wrapped tight around his bones, and so Ji-ah does what she does best:
She gets back to work.
It’s a blessing of her business that ghosts are not exactly known for having a wide attention span. The one possessing In-beom doesn’t pay her any mind, doesn’t even seem to notice her, his whole focus centered instead on the man he’s crushing between In-beom’s fingers. She takes a moment to assess her trajectory, shrugs off the tenderness pulling at her muscles, and launches herself forward, clasping the necklace around In-beom’s neck in one smooth motion. Her medium goes limp against her instantly (and she has to force down the part of her that screams at that, that thrashes and pants and begs for her to shake him back awake, to see his eyes blink back open; it’s not fair to him, she reminds herself, but really, she doesn’t want In-beom to see this, to see what she let him wrought).
The ghost flickers back into view, thankfully outside In-beom, and it’s clearly vengeful now. He’s black and smokey and there is tar lodging deep in her throat, clogging up her lungs – but In-beom is unconscious in her lap, and so she doesn’t move when the ghost disappears.
She has a feeling they’ll be seeing him again later, anyway.
There’s a lull, afterwards, punctuated only by the groaning of injured men. It’s broken when Do Hak Sung’s secretary finally swings into action, helping her boss stumble unsteadily to their getaway car. She makes as though to grab them, too, but Ji-ah bares her teeth, blood red lips curving around a threat that feels nearly feral, In-beom’s blood chalky beneath her fingertips and a pounding violence drumming to life in her veins. The secretary takes the hint, choosing (smartly, Ji-ah thinks, viciously) to cut her losses and save her boss instead.
Their car peels out of the underpass, wheels nearly smoking, and Ji-ah feels strangely empty. If she could leave In-beom, she thinks she might just have killed them, might just have wrecked pulpy vengeance on the man who tore her medium apart.
(She’s not sure if the thought should scare her. It doesn’t; it carves its name beside her heart, another truth for her to bear.)
In-beom shifts below her, groaning quietly, and Ji-ah snaps back to the present. It takes a few tries, but she eventually finds a cell on one of the now-insensate henchmen. She uses it to call her aunt, first, and the police, second, and it’s only when In-beom is being loaded into a stretcher, his skin pale beneath the gurney’s soft blue sheets, that she lets herself stumble, lets her own vision blur, lets herself collapse, exhausted, her aunt’s worried voice the last thing she hears.
She wakes up when they get to the hospital, though it’s only to snarl, half-consciously, when they make as if to put her and In-beom in separate rooms. The nurse rolls her eyes, clearly exhausted and underpaid, and lets her get her way.
Ji-ah’s asleep again before she’s even aware she was awake.
She wakes up once more during the night, jolting upright in bed, sweat clinging to her brow and breath panting, fingers clenching hard in the sheets tangled around her legs, In-beom’s name on her lips and his blood behind her eyes.
It takes an hour, maybe two, for her to fall back asleep – and when she does, it is to the sound of his heart monitor, slow and steady, a lullaby to soothe her fears.
Ji-ah is slow to wake up the next day, grogginess tugging at her mind even as she blinks her eyes open. The sun is still high in the sky, but she feels syrup-slow, hot and sticky and out of sorts. Out of habit, she slips a hand into her pocket, fingers searching for the necklace she’s taken to using as a worry stone. When she hits empty cotton instead, she furrows her brow, confused, a question forming in the creases between her eyes when it suddenly all hits her, a steam train at full speed slamming into her mind.
She can’t help but to sit up, too fast, head spinning even as she tugs the curtain between her bed and the next one aside, wincing at the metallic screech – she’ll never live it down if he’s awake, but she doesn’t care, because she needs to see him, needs to assess the damage for herself –
The curtain slips out of the way, and her rapidly spiraling thoughts crash to a halt, her hand freezing in mid-air.
Oh In-beom is asleep, peacefully so (or at least it seems to her), in the bed beside her. His lip is split in two places and there’s a huge purple bruise on his cheek, as well as a chunky bandage she’s pretty sure is covering some brand new stitches along his brow.
He’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
Ji-ah lets out a sigh of relief she wasn’t even aware that she’d been holding, her hand extending, slowly, across the gap, perhaps to touch him, or to brush the messy hair off his face.
Her medium snuffles, nose wrinkling, and Hong Ji-ah acts in pure self-preservation. She throws herself backward, slamming the curtain back into place as she goes, and holds herself very, very still, ears straining to pick up the sounds of Oh In-beom waking up. She hears him shuffle around in his sheets, then the sudden whoosh of him sitting up, clearly in shock. Ji-ah can picture his face perfectly, the exaggerated surprise and concern, and it would make her laugh, would make a smile tweak along the corners of her mouth, if only they weren’t in the hospital, again.
She keeps her voice calm, steady, disinterested, even if all she wants to do is pull the curtain back aside and grab his face, turn him this way and that way and assess every inch, every centimeter of his skin. “Stop overreacting. You didn’t break anything. Didn’t pull any ligaments.”
Her voice is flat, unemotional, but she can’t help the way the voice inside her head is screaming, horror lacing every word, This time.
You didn’t break anything this time.
Ji-ah tells him as much, warns him away, tells him to go, to run, to get as far away from her as possible before he ends up hurt. She doesn’t tell him what that would do to her, but his eyes soften, almost imperceptibly, and she thinks he might just know.
She huffs, and he smiles, and Ji-ah allows herself to think that maybe, just maybe, they’ll be able to survive this after all.