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For all she says that she wants him dead, Elijah knows deep down that she loves Yohan. It’s hard to remember some days, when he purposely aggravates her, when he picks on her and teases her and she just wants to run over his toes with her chair just to watch him hop around in pain for a bit, just to knock him down a few pegs.
It’s hard to remember some days that this is the same man who would sit on her bedroom floor with her and play with her dolls with her. This is the same man who would sweep her up into his arms and smile and laugh and tweak her nose playfully. Today’s Yohan is something that Elijah can’t quite define, tight and distant and cold and every so often that playful side slips through.
It becomes increasingly obvious around Gaon. Elijah doesn’t tell him, she can’t find it in herself to mention it outright for fear of losing it again, but Yohan lightens up when Gaon stays in their house. He smiles, he laughs, he eats at the table with them. Elijah is capable of closing her eyes and pretending that things are okay.
But they’re not okay. They’re never okay. Yohan dies and then he’s alive and Elijah clings to him in the fear that she’ll lose him again if she closes her eyes. If she lets go, Yohan may dissolve in front of her eyes, never to return, and she’ll be alone. He doesn’t disappear, though. The Yohan that sits by her side, holding her, never quite disappears.
Physical therapy is exhausting. Elijah can barely keep her eyes open when she finally lays down in bed most evenings. Yohan brings her food, brushes her hair back from her face, and whispers, every night, as she drifts off to sleep, “You’re doing a good job. I’m proud of you.”
It takes a year for her to realise just how much Yohan has become the only person in her life she trusts. He doesn’t tell her everything about what happened, with Gaon, with work, but Elijah can check the news just fine; she’s capable of looking and seeing that Yohan blew up a building, and she’s able to piece together what happened, with the saved stream on the the DIKE app, with what she knows from overheard conversations.
She hadn’t meant to overhear the conversation, but there was always something interesting to do, in watching Gaon and Yohan talk. The way Gaon would challenge Yohan, eyes alight, and Yohan would smile smugly as he replied. The way Yohan’s expression softened when Gaon wasn’t looking.
They’re in Switzerland for thirteen months before Yohan glances down at his phone and Elijah recognizes the number as Gaon’s. “Are you seeing him?” Elijah asks, casual and calm, like every other time she’s asked the question. It works, because Yohan freezes and slowly raises his head to stare at her, incredulous.
“What?”
“Are you seeing him?” she repeats and nods her head, as if to say yes, him . Yohan scoffs.
“Don’t be childish.”
“You’re not answering my question. You only ever don’t answer when you don’t want to say yes,” she counters. Yohan’s mouth drops open just a little more, to that satisfying genuine incredulity and Elijah puts the rest of her piece of toast in her mouth, chewing with a smile. Yohan scoffs again.
“No, I’m not. He’s my-” Yohan pauses. Elijah reaches over and steals the slice of toast on his plate too. He swats at her hand. “Give me my food back.”
“Make me,” she retorts and Yohan exhales, hard, from his nose. It’s so much more fun, she reasons, bickering with a Yohan who isn’t trying to actively push her away.
He rolls his eyes at her, he bickers with her endlessly, and he’s quick to tease, but Yohan never pushes her away, not like he used to. Yohan is kinder, softer, and he does nothing but encourage her on the days he accompanies her to physical therapy. He, unlike some of the therapists, doesn’t border on condescending when he speaks to her, whichever language Yohan chooses to speak in.
It becomes increasingly obvious to Elijah, though, that Yohan misses Korea. He flies back every so often—for work, he says, when he means for Gaon —but Yohan never leaves for more than a day or two. Elijah knows it’s her fault, that Yohan always comes back as quickly as he does.
“I’m practically an adult,” Elijah says, one day, at the table. Yohan is texting (presumably Gaon, if the way he tilts his phone away from her is anything to go by), but he pauses and glances up at her when she speaks.
“If you like,” he says.
“You know you can leave me alone for longer than a day or two,” she tries again. Yohan pauses, eyes flicking up to her, before back down to his phone almost dismissively. “Yohan!”
“What!” he exclaims in the same tone, finally putting his phone down. “I’m listening.”
“No, you’re not,” Elijah snaps. Yohan crosses his arms and raises an eyebrow, his head cocked slightly to the side. “I’m telling you to go back to Korea for a- I don’t know, for a week.”
“I don’t need to go back for a week,” he says.
“But you want to.” Yohan scoffs and shakes his head. He doesn’t deny it beyond that, though, and Elijah takes her chance. “You want to go back and spend time with Gaon, don’t you? He has Kkomi and you miss her.” They’d left in a hurry, without a pet passport for Kkomi, and it had only been later that Yohan, and then Elijah, had found out Gaon took their cat in, exchanging some of his plants for the safety of Kkomi in his home.
Yohan takes a deep breath. He doesn’t want to admit he misses Gaon, Elijah guesses, so she speaks before he can. “Yohan,” she says, catching his attention. “You don’t have to make excuses with me. If you want to go back, then go back. I’ll be okay for a week here on my own. I know how to order food if I need it, and I can get to and from therapy on my own.”
Yohan visibly hesitates that time. He’s conflicted, and Elijah knows he just needs one more little push, and he’ll give in. “Yohan,” she says again, softer. “You’ve protected me and taken care of me my entire life. It’s a gift I’m trying to give you. Please take it.”
Yohan cracks. He looks down at the table and exhales through his nose, nearly a sigh. “Fine,” he says, as though he’s unhappy about it.
He leaves two days later. He’s taking a small bag with him; Elijah guesses, from the state of his room when she checks it, that he’s only taken his necessities with him and left behind everything else as a promise that he’d be back.
He comes back after a week, and Elijah thinks it’s safe to say that Yohan looks happy . He’s relaxed, smiling, and he hums to himself around the house. He also blushes when Elijah asks what he and Gaon did to keep busy, and that is both something Elijah wishes she didn’t have the answer to and also something she’s grateful to have as fuel the next time Yohan frustrates her.
It takes less than a week of Yohan being home for something to change. He leaves in the morning, like always, to go on a run and to just be out of the house, but comes home with bags he doesn’t let her go through. “You’ll see, soon,” Yohan says, shooing her from the room he sets the bags in. He does it two, three, more times before he brings home his end goal.
The dog he brings home is both the cutest dog Elijah has ever seen in her life and also one of the ugliest things she’s ever seen in her life. She calls him “Bam.” She thinks it’s hilarious. Yohan cracks a smile when she names Bam.
Yohan is happier once Bam is with them; he takes Bam on his runs with him, and once they both realise that Bam prefers Yohan to Elijah, Yohan waves it above her head for a solid month.
Bam sleeps on Yohan’s bed. Elijah wakes up early one day, just to snap a picture of them, of Yohan, curled up to the side of his bed, and Bam, spread across the middle with his nose pressed to Yohan’s back, as if protecting him from the reminders of the past. Elijah sends it to Gaon and answers the resulting video call with a grin.
“Is he awake?” Gaon asks, hushed. Elijah shakes her head no. “Lemme see them?”
She sets the phone on the bed, carefully propping it against Yohan’s hand so that he’s the one holding it. Gaon all but coos . Yohan stirs, blinks, and looks up at the phone. “Gaon?” Yohan mumbles. He stretches, glancing back to make sure he doesn’t push Bam, and mumbles again, “ jagi ?”
(It then takes Yohan four minutes to realise he’s holding Elijah’s phone rather than his own. Something tugs at her heart strings, when Yohan crinkles his brow and mutters, “I thought I hung up before I went to sleep,” to the small rectangle in which Gaon smiles back at him fondly.)