Work Text:
A nice lady in her sixties had taken over the supermarket a couple of months before. The emptiness left by the Kang family tragedy – that’s what people had been calling the events that turned Manyang daily life upside-down after almost twenty years of relative peace – haunted the place for quite some time, but recently a kind ajumma from the next town had bought the store, renovated it and brought it back to life. It wasn’t completely devoid of its miserable and horrifying past – sometimes you can’t remove painful memories from a place, even if you burn it to the ground – but surely it was worth having home-made-quality kimchi available once again in the neighbourhood.
Kimchi is what Joowon had bought that evening. While driving to Manyang for his monthly visit, he suddenly had felt the urge to go back to that store. He had been learning through therapy how to let himself feel more, and how to deal with those feelings he was starting to acknowledge. It was tiring, trying to let himself feel instead of tramping every emotion that strayed from bored disinterest, manic focus or utter numbness. It was tiring, trying to learn how to inhibit his too effective impulse control that worked even on basic emotions.
So, that evening, while driving back to Manyang for his monthly visit, he felt a hint of curiosity. What had it become of the store now that it had been taken over? Did the new people there know of the previous owner? And therefore, Joowon had decided to feed that urge and steered from his usual route.
Now he stood outside of the shop, a plastic bag with two tubs of kimchi in hand, slightly disoriented by the assault in kindness he received from the nice lady inside. He hadn’t had the courage to ask her anything about how she’d come to own the place or if she knew of its tragic past, and in the end it didn’t really matter to him – the urge he had felt before faded to the back of his mind. He looked at the building, at its fraying concrete edges. At the blinking neon sign, that had just lighted up in the orange sunset. It all radiated a strange sort of comfort.
A grey cat suddenly appeared from the back of the shop and started strutting down the street. Joowon followed it with his eyes as it crossed towards the more residential part of the neighborhood, where the road gradually lost the city and then dove into the reed fields. That was actually where Joowon himself was originally headed to, had it not been for his sudden urge to witness how things had changed at the grocery store. That road led to Lee Dongsik’s family home.
He started walking, the bag in hand softly swinging at his side. He decided to leave the car parked just outside the shop: the walk to Dongsik’s house wasn’t too long and the evening air was caressing his face in such a gentle way that he didn’t want to lose the feeling.
It felt like home. It was something he had never experienced in his troubled existence, but he didn’t know how to otherwise classify that peculiar chill at the bottom of his spine. Despite all his efforts, maybe the last emotion he had been procrastinating in accepting was this particular feeling of belonging. Maybe he needed to start looking for apartments in the area. Or even a house, perhaps.
Absent-mindedly going over the sudden realisation, caring not to get overtly deep into his own thoughts, Joowon reached his destination. The house exterior hadn’t changed that much since the closing of Yuyeon’s murder case: the garden still had the mounds of dirt dug out in search of her body – although now covered in weeds – and the building itself looked as fragile as its only inhabitant, the concrete corners chipped and the once colorfully painted walls faded.
The main gate was unlocked. Dongsik claimed that the intercom hadn’t been working for weeks and he wouldn’t bother calling an electrician to fix it, so people who came to visit him had just been letting themselves in and directly ringing the doorbell to let him know of their presence. Well, there hadn’t been many visitors in the last few months anyway, as the man spent the majority of his time secluded in the cabin Chief Nam had bought on the lake. However, Jaeyi had informed Joowon that Dongsik was staying at his family home for the week.
She was growing on him, Jaeyi. In the months since the first reunion they had at the butcher shop, Joowon had noticed the change in her behaviour towards him. It appeared that Jaeyi was trying to build some sort of camaraderie between them – Joowon supposed it made sense, the two of them being of a similar age and the youngest in a group of people over fourty. Their conversations, which for the most part happened via text messages, usually were initiated by Jaeyi, as she shared moments and sometimes photos of the daily life in Manyang. Joowon would never (or maybe, was not ready to) admit this out-loud, but he particularly cherished the anecdotes about Dongsik’s handiwork at the lake cabin, and it seemed that Jaeyi had caught it on.
“Ah, Joowon-ah… Today this ahjussi almost broke his thumb nailing one of Jongje’s drawings to the wall, you should’ve heard him swearing ㅋㅋㅋ” “ Ah, Joowon-ah… Look at this stray cat that Dongsik took in yesterday! That grumpy face, it looks just like you ㅋㅋㅋ”
Joowon acknowledged he was a bit lacking in this exchange – his new life outside of Manyang was deeply uninteresting and he figured he shouldn’t bother with telling Jaeyi about his current cases – but he still made an effort to always reply and show a reaction of some sort. He was starting to think he maybe had found… a friend, someone unlike any other person he had ever had a close relationship with. It was indeed a nice feeling, this one of tepid affection, and those that gave him warmth and comfort were the feelings Joowon had been enjoying the most.
Now he was crossing the yard of a house that stood as a sanctuary of painful memories for too many people, Joowon included, and yet it didn’t manage to shake the budding realisation of belonging off him. Just like it had happened at the supermarket a few minutes prior, the haunting memory of past events lost its hold on him and faded to the background.
It seemed that the evening air was carrying some sort of melody, a repeated motif strummed on what sounded like an old and out of tune guitar. A strange sound to Joowon’s ears – completely out of place like laughter at a funeral… like a smile under the pouring rain.
His heart skipped a beat, for some reason. There was only one person known to Joowon who stood out in that way. His feet automatically took him to the basement entrance, where he stood quietly listening for a couple of minutes. He could now hear soft swear words between each repetition of the motif, the frustration clear in every chord strummed harshly and impatiently, as if the person playing was seeking a memory through the music but hadn’t been able to reach it yet.
Nonetheless, the strummer didn’t give up, as he never did, and Joowon finally made the last steps to enter the room. It hadn’t changed much from the last time he had been there – the chunks of the walls fallen to the ground because of the humidity, the discarded police tape and forensics suits in the corners, a disgruntled Dongsik on the old and dusty sofa. However, that evening Dongsik was bent over a battered guitar, staring at his clumsy fingers trying to remember how chords were supposed to be made.
Of course, Joowon knew Dongsik played the guitar – it had been part of his alibi when Yuyeon’s fingers were first found – but he had never witnessed him playing, not that there had ever been the occasion to. Seeing this other piece of him, that had been clearly shoved in the depths of Dongsik’s mind for the last two decades, suddenly made Joowon realise how far they had both come since meeting each other, how far their recovery had come since it all had come to an end.
They had both fought savagely in search of the truth for years and when they finally had found it, only then had they the time to grieve, to bask in the desperation of years never wasted but always so difficult to bear, and finally to move on, to learn how to live again on their own without a final goal. They had been building themselves up from the ground since the day Han Kihwan was put in handcuffs. Small gestures, like Joowon’s monthly visits to Manyang despite him still living in Seoul, or Dongsik’s warm hospitality during those visits, tied them in a journey of healing together with their close circle of people – people who Joowon was starting to let in his personal bubble, one by one.
Now Dongsik could play the guitar and put Jongje’s drawings up on a wall in his new home. Now Joowon could accept a handshake, or even a shoulder pat, and indulge random silly thoughts. Memories of the past still weighed on them, sometimes as haunting demons, sometimes as sudden urges, but a lighter path was under their feet and they both were walking just fine.
It was in that moment that Joowon smirked and Dongsik finally noticed him. A smile spread on Dongsik’s face, his sharp eyes disappearing in crescents. “Joowon-ah! Give me a sec here, I’m trying to get the hang of this old thing…”
“I thought you were supposed to pack up the last things here, not to put up a music show for the neighbours.” His words carried a teasing tone that didn’t get lost to Dongsik.
“Leave me be, Joowon.” He said, “You may not know it, but I’m originally a born entertainer. People came from the next town over to hear me playing the guitar, twenty years ago!” A last strum of his fingers – then he stood up, stretched and brushed his hair away from his eyes.
“I’m just scratching an itch… Come on, help me pick up the last things and then we can leave. I’m sure Jaeyi is already waiting for us.”
Joowon didn’t bat an eye when Dongsik brushed his arm when passing by him to get upstairs. He didn’t bat an eye when he accidentally touched Dongsik’s hand while lifting a cardboard box into the trunk of his car. He didn’t bat an eye when Dongsik gently held his forearm while walking back to the car after closing up the house.
The walk to the butcher shop wasn’t a long one, but Joowon chose to take the car anyway, as he anticipated that Dongsik would probably not be in the best shape to go back on foot at the end of the night. It’s not that he drank too much, but he had grown to be a very silly drunk, one that could be instigated even by a few cans of beer. Joowon, no matter his growing affection for the other man, refused to deal with a Dongsik that insisted on walking shoes-on in the drainage channel beside the road while holding onto his hand for balance ever again.
So, they walked back to the supermarket to get the car. What surely looked like the cat from a couple of hours before walked beside them for some time, silently strutting along. The air carried the last remnants of the sunset, warm and soft on their tired faces. As his hand swaying at his side once more brushed Dongsik’s, Joowon felt that peculiar chill at the base of his spine again.
“Dongsik, I think I want to come to live in Manyang.”
The man smirked, peeking through the messy bangs that had fallen over his eyes.
“You think?”
Joowon smiled, feeling his heart full and warm.
“Yes, I think.”