Work Text:
Rolling thunder. Tuning fork. His soul...
Burning.
It slams into him, like a gong clashing out into the frigid air, standing on the threshold of the stir-fry. Atom-flash, whole-body caught in a ringing filling the universe, a convergence of two things he knows on an animal level: the jaws of the ambush set to snap closed here--
--and there, Jiwoo's need of him.
His soulmate's need of him.
Mujin knows, a certainty in the very marrow of him, the jaws have closed on her already. He knows.
He's felt this before. Not even a week ago, blooming under his skin as he stood on a dock two steps from climbing into a boat, and he had nearly ignored it. Fought himself, and the pulsing need reverberating the fabric of reality, with every ounce of skepticism and cynicism and black, venomous ink. It doesn't mean anything. Romanticized superstitious bullshit. And yet still unable not to step back, and back, on an animal level, trying Jiwoo's phone. No answer, trying it again. Still unable not to delay, uneasiness growing, infecting his men. Until, when they finally set out, slipping through the dark on-edge and eagle-eyed, someone spotted the police boat lights and they'd veered off just in time. A warning radioed to the ship, by which some product was salvaged and the factory destroyed rather than give it up to the narcs, and Dongcheon's standing for its demon's insolence in evading the authorities climbed yet another superstitious notch.
The explosion had set Dongcheon back, but not as much as it had Cha Giho. Left with no evidence and no arrests, his department enveloped in its own flames of incompetence and disgrace, his hands tied under the scrutiny of review too big for the Commissioner to hush up. By the next day Mujin had jabbed Cha Giho's beady little eyes out of his doorways, the narcs in such disarray they couldn't even muster a response to Dongcheon's exposure and losses in the attack on the gym before the organization had it half covered up and local police had bungled the rest.
And, in return, Mujin had Jiwoo's voice in his ear, around and around inside his head, asking if he was okay. So worried. She couldn't contact him before the narcs' raid, she didn't know how he'd dodged it.
She didn't know, how the pure piercing sincerity of her desperation had already saved him.
Her mark on his soul had been a red-hot ember under his tattoo from the moment he saw the match on her chest five years ago. He had ignored it, contained it, smothered it, poured all his will into wishing he could go back to when he'd believed he was nothing but ashes and nightmare, souring inside. But ever since the frantic warning calling out to him from her own soul, since the low concern reaching out to him in her own voice, Are you okay?...
He is the demon. A vengeful, pitiless fiend, claws and teeth tearing through a world of tissue-paper men. He should have no soul in the first place. He should not be coming apart, burning and tearing, seams he never knew he had, tangling up around a single, soft caress of a question that he cannot get out of his fucking head.
He can leave it. All he has to do now is walk away, let the universe end the problem for him. From the first, that is all he had to do. And from the first he has only gone charging straight to her--long before he ever knew her mark. Driven forward like the debt of his best friend's car following a tracking signal, plowing through men to save him.
He steps back. And back, from the restaurant door, a single point of eye-contact sufficient to ensure the ambush piles out after him onto the street. Ripped tissue paper litter for Mr Hwang to oversee the clean-up, as Mujin throws himself in the punks' car that had nearly run him over and floors it.
He was supposed to have been Dongcheon's ambush bait, not her--Yoon Jiwoo was no longer supposed to even exist in that aspect, but he hadn't wasted time asking questions. The answers already crash in his heart, peal through his entire body, and he yanks up every burning, tearing shred of his soul in the fist of his will, bending all to that pulsing need calling to him from across the city, pushing beyond any superstitious story he's ever heard, driven beyond any memory or debt he can assign his unchecked need to charge straight to her.
He does not let the doctor to so much as look at him. Not until Jiwoo is patched together and somewhat stable, still unconscious on a bedroll on the monk's floor, receiving fluids. The eastern sky is no longer night-black by the time the doctor turns to him wearily, and asks if he may now be allowed to inspect the various gashes Mujin had taken no notice of either time he gouged a bloody swath through Do Gangjae's boys.
Not fast enough.
Gangjae was only yet a baby nightmare, but enough to make mince of Jiwoo's gut when he saw Mujin coming at him, his mutilated, triumphant face staring him down and giving him no choice at all but to lose her right in front of his eyes. Punishing Mujin for taking the hit on his gym at face value, his sickening stupidity in never anticipating the psycho's fixation on punishing his girl, too.
When the baby narc had lunged, with cuffed, scarred hands, he'd bought the few seconds Mujin had needed--the few precious seconds the demon himself could not, with all his standing and power and teeth and claws, secure for himself. If Jiwoo survives, the boy had saved her life, protected her with unblemished devotion and the price of his own.
Impossible grief fills Mujin's empty, unblemished hands, terrified gratitude and lament howling against his seams, against stitches sewing his skin closed, one loop at a time.
She is so slight, lying still. Far too pale in the morning light, dwarfed in the monk's clean robe that Mujin had not dared help the doctor wrap her in. This fragile-looking girl he had charged to and saved from the trunk of that car, and then still seen a weapon for use. He remembers too vividly how he'd tied handkerchief and possession around her small bloodied hand with violence in his bones, brotherhood and vengeance, impatient for distance and desperate for a cigarette even then. Even tonight, shoving her into the back seat of Gangjae's range rover with distant sirens approaching, hauling her limp insubstantial form up the mountain, he has only ever touched her in roughness and force. How can he touch her in care?
How can he touch her with the softness that poisons night-time dreams with the salt and lap of the ocean, and lately the scent of chamomile?
"I can watch over her. You could sleep," the monk advises mildly.
Mujin slumps slightly. "I can't."
In the silence that follows, he realizes his hand has lifted. At her hairline a lock of hair is caught oddly, clumped with a spatter of dried blood. He allows his hand to hang only an inch closer in the air before he drops it again, the lack sticking inside his fingers. He forces himself to his feet, and it might be the hardest thing he's ever done, to walk away from Jiwoo lying there suspended between life and death.
Yet walk away he does, all the way back down the mountain to where the car is hidden, every gash and bruise and creaky joint protesting as vociferously as Taeju's silence when he arrives with a clean car at the meeting place Mujin had texted to him from the road. Far enough away to keep the vital sanctuary trackless, an animal prowling and snapping at any hint of threat from within or without, survival paramount.
Taeju's impassivity gains another level of disapproving frustration, but he's brought everything he was told, and drives away with his instructions, the bloodstained range rover, and its extinct baby nightmare in the trunk. Mujin knows that by the time he gets back to Jiwoo's side, no trace will remain on the face of the earth. The narcs can sink all their remaining resources into a hunt for Gangjae in the hopes of finding their lost corporal and avenging their noble sergeant. Let them be added to the pile with Song Joonsu and Yoon Donghoon both, forever unresolved in their shadows of deceit.
The November days are shortening, the wintery fire of the sun sinking to the horizon by the time Mujin has trudged back up the mountain. Fallen leaves make a flame-colored carpet of his cold path, scrunching in the silence, his misty breath swirling in the exhaustion of his mind. He can't think about whether Jiwoo, too, still breathes. The universe does not sing, he does not vibrate to her very existence. His marrow holds no certainty.
He can't sense her.
Soulmates sharing echoes of extreme emotion, usually after they have identified one another, occur just enough for the public's obsession to put far too much sentiment on it, pretending at connections that span stars and fate and past lives and entire entertainment and religious industries--shit, at least the evil doses he trafficks in to pitiful customers deliver real, quantifiable results for their price. But even with all the bullshit, those much-vaunted "destiny's meetings", he's never heard of anyone literally locating their other half before, under any circumstance. He can't understand it, how that can be. If having a soulmate is like having Jiwoo...
But now he is alone with himself, dazed to remember this is how it always is. There is only his dulled, unreasoning climb with a pack that feels heavier than her body had, back to where that body lies, too small to carry such a large wound in her side. There is blood in her hair. If he had never...
It's too late.
It has always been too late.
The crystalline peace of the clearing makes him wish to weep. To fall to his shaking knees and never take another step. Just exist, fossilized in front of the temple, never facing the answer of whether she's already slipped away.
But movement in the doorway catches his eye and he roars to life, staggering forward even as his senses tell him it is just the monk. Not a threat.
Not a miracle.
She is unchanged, still unconscious. Still frighteningly pale, and small. But she breathes.
From the pack Mujin hands the medical supplies to the monk, then pulls out some fresh clothes for himself, finally shedding one more casualty in a countless succession of designer suits reduced to just so much bloodied, perforated debris. Everything feels so slow as he gets clean, a viscous flow of time, one heavy-headed motion after another after another. But he can't stop. He doesn't know how. Some immutable part of him simply...can't. For all his wanting, he wouldn't have known how to give up enough to let his knees sink down in front of the temple, some numb mockery of non-attachment.
He is beyond attached. He replays over and over the way she'd twisted silent to the ground out of Gangjae's hold, her bound hands at her bloody side...and then feebly lifting, groping to still pull herself back up. He never knew he could be reduced to meaningless superstition, desperate to believe his soulmate is truly made of the same stuff as him.
When Mujin emerges the sun is down, yellow electric light is swimming in his eyes, and the doctor has returned to check on Jiwoo. He has no thoughts left in his head, and so he just slumps motionless in a corner, his eyes tracking every movement of deft hands working over her. A porcelain-pale abdomen that is a harrowed patchwork, a ruin of inky spidery stitches. A bruise-mottled inner thigh is bared, a single grisly puncture in the muscle, and Mujin has an awareness he should look away. But he doesn't. He can't feel any more meaning in looking away than he can in looking. Collecting a visual recitation of every wound on Jiwoo's body, sketches of brutality so stark that the claim he'd made in black long ago just blends right in.
The doctor doesn't look any more hopeful than he had the first night, and Mujin continues to second-guess his own reflex not to risk a hospital. That instinct has been too ingrained for too long, and the idea of her fate in the hands of the authorities stays him once again. Distrustful, or selfish, to want Jiwoo in the fate of no hands but his own. But if she shows signs of infection, or hasn't woken by this time tomorrow...
The doctor nods gruffly at the antibiotics Taeju had delivered, gives a few additional instructions, and then turns to examine him, too.
Mujin glares.
The doctor backs off. There's money for his work and his silence, and the monk shows him out. Then the monk is speaking to Mujin, a flowing of syllables that make no sense. Mujin just looks at him. After a while the monk goes and, distantly, Mujin is aware of a quiet chanting starting up, meditations making no more sense than the words had.
He is alone in the room with Jiwoo. He does not know what to do.
He wonders if she still has blood in her hair.
He can't tell from the corner where he is, the lamplight too low, and then he realizes he's crawling forward. When he gets to her he can't seem to expend the effort to sit upright, and so it makes sense to simply lower down, one segment of his body at a time, until he's propped at her side and all he has to concentrate on lifting is his arm. His very fingertips brush the hard crumbly-black blood in feathery black hair.
The lamp in the room is darkening. He wonders if the blood is even hers.
Salt of ocean.
Scent of chamomile.
The gentlest chime of his reaching soul, not alone.
Don't go. Stay.
Stay with me.
He wakes with a jerk, a stab of hunger in his stomach. He doesn't remember when he last ate.
He is lying on the floor beside Jiwoo. There is a blanket over him. Everything hurts.
He is holding her hand in his, curled around it in the dark, warm, against his chest.
He doesn't move. Hardly even breathes. But his heart thumps like a wild animal thing, betraying the reality of it, and he can't stop here, in this stolen moment.
He wrenches away.
Mujin sits, shaking, his head buried in his arms. She was being devoured after her father's death. Mujin had saved her. He was the only one who could or did. Her rescued life in the keeping of the only fiend big enough to keep her from getting killed--keep her from willingly getting herself killed like a dog in the street, half-mad in that screaming maelstrom of grief and guilt. She was in his world or she was dead, and his were not the choices that had knowingly put her in such conditions. Jiwoo is his as much as she ever was Donghoon's. She belongs to Mujin by choice. Not blood, not birth. Not fate. Love is ephemera in the breeze, and soulmates are interminable nauseating dramas no better than the dreck they shill, but loyalty is a stake driven deep, the only thing he has, and the mark now standing over her heart is the one she chose to bind herself to him, not the one the cosmos branded her with...
And her inescapable devotion is a living presence inside every heartbeat and his deception eats into him and eats into him, corroding deeper than hunger. Deeper than rage. Deeper than grief or agony. Deeper even than Donghoon. Donghoon betrayed him, and Mujin had looked in his eyes and made him answer. Jiwoo's dauntless, loyal eyes have not opened. Mujin has nothing left but eyes in the mirror to answer for how he has broken faith with himself.
Are you okay?
This has to end. Jiwoo is his, and he can make it end.
The monk is moving around in the next room. Mujin checks the time, and it's been only a few hours, not even midnight. He levers himself to his feet, shuffling out. There is tofu, spicy and warming, with nuts and mushrooms. The monk is a good cook.
He gives Mujin a pillow, and another bedroll--the temple doesn't get many visitors this time of year. It's been a very, very long time since Mujin slept on bare floor, or an empty stomach. Now it's neither, and he's had less than a handful of hours since yesterday, but he cannot go back to sleep.
The dangerous ocean-chamomile dreams are rare enough, their softness very innocent...mostly. He is still able to feel, with perfect, shameful clarity, the single time he'd cupped her face and slowly fit his lips to hers, endless and sweet. A kiss so chaste he could almost believe that, but for how he'd woken up gasping and hot-through and then buried it, along with the ardent soulmate's response his dream had conjured for her, to the very depths of his mind with all his will. Never to happen again. Yet all his will isn't enough to fully put a stop to the dreams themselves. Usually they are a hazy clinging, gentle and still, holding her into him. They are the only time in the last five years he hasn't felt like he's dying.
He cannot go back to sleep.
He fetches some warm water, and his shampoo from the pack. He sits at her head, tucks a towel under her, and slowly and methodically washes her hair clean of blood and sweat and grit.
There's a gash on her brow, a bruise on her jaw. The doctor had checked for other head injuries, but Mujin finds himself carefully running his fingertips over her scalp as he goes, to make sure. She has to wake up. She has to.
He sinks into his task, his mind narrowing down so far he doesn't even register the distant meditations again until he realizes the way her ribs are rising, falling with it. And only then does he notice the way his fingers have settled its rhythm into their work.
He stills completely, the cool wet tendrils of her hair the only contact between them, and her chest shudders and shallows, out of sync. Slowly, slowly, he inches his fingers back into her hair until they find warm skin, and with his own lungs locked fast he watches her tiny sigh, private and soft. After her breath starts coming easier again he gets his own working too, choppy, as he gently massages with no purpose at all. It's unsteady, hardly what anyone could call skillful, but it cannot be mistaken the way her body relaxes under his touch.
Mujin had only thought to...No. He hadn't thought. Because if he thought then he would be forced to confront that, this time, his penchant for putting things in order, neatly squared away, had been pure excuse.
His hand's first, vicious slap had been one warning more than he'd ever gotten--and once it failed to deter her, he'd never had any compunction in reaching his hand back out and taking her for himself. He can rationalize every choice he has made, before and after learning of her mark. He still will not submit to any fancies that a credulous tissue-paper world puts on soul matches. But it's no longer possible to deny that he has snatched at the flimsiest pretext to allow himself to touch, and take care of her.
That the very first time he heard her voice on the other side of a door, her pounding fist the drowning beat of his own heart and long, slow seconds of wellspring realization, this girl and her true relationship to Donghoon as Mujin stood over him with the weight of his best friend's gun in his hand and one bullet already in his best friend's body--even then, something had still grabbed him as though it would yank him insanely back down the hallway instead of walking away, unable to stand watching his greatest traitor's last breath, much less take the life of his innocent girl on the remote chance she'd seen enough to identify him. That for all the many, many ways Mujin has wrapped Donghoon around his reasons for holding on to the man's daughter, he has never been able to help seeing Jiwoo outside of any of that. From the first, Jiwoo's existence had come at him never less than wholly her own person.
Her own person half his age whom he had kissed in his dreams and given himself every excuse he could to make his and keep his.
Mujin stares at her scuffed face upside-down below him. His soulmate...visibly soothed by his hands. After all the things his hands have done to her.
He's shaking again. Has been, for a while, he thinks. Doesn't really seem able to stop. He blinks, clearing the sight of Jiwoo's face, which had begun to blur. And grow near, his body possessed with something that folds him forward, blinking the blur away again and then his eyes are shut and his forehead comes to rest down on hers.
Shaking, hot silent tears slipping into her damp hair.
He hadn't closed his soul up, put his guard up against her again. Ever since ripping himself so heedlessly open to find her, the rippling ember under his tattoo has bloomed and bled and caught and engulfed, all his seams already weak, he hasn't been able to...hasn't thought to...hasn't wanted...hasn't.
And now his hands are cradling her head to his in the real waking world, a soundless, endless howl, every shred and ember and claw of his being, an immolation of longing that's lived longer than she has. He would whine and slink like some savaged starving cur, anything to get free if he could. But his heart is chains on the ocean floor and his mouth tastes of ashes and free is one thing he's never been, and he can't pull back even a fraction from her, held and flayed to wretchedness. Please. Mine.
Come to me.
Time ends, lost in an agony of need and too late. It has always been too late. Since before she was born, maybe even before he was. Everything ends, here, bowed over his soulmate and never so helplessly alone, nowhere else and nothing beyond, always, always, too late.
There is no measure for how long he sits there, bent over her. Minutes, hours. Lifetimes. His thumbs on the curve of her cheekbones, fingertips along her jaw, the one thing. The only thing.
As though his soul really could call to hers with need too.
The obnoxious jangle of a text jars him back to rude cognizance, wariness eventually pulling him across to his pack by the door to check the burner phone. Deciphered, Taeju has made short work of Cheolho: the narcs' gamble of releasing Mango had led Gangjae straight to Jiwoo. The spike of rage that would eviscerate them all has nowhere to go but a code, giving the order. Eliminating Mango is more acting out than strategy, but Choi Mujin lives from his gut first, and he leaves it to the caution of Taeju who lives all in his head without a further thought.
And then any other thought is forgotten too, in a disturbance so faint his rational mind would discard it. He turns sharply, in time to see Jiwoo stir, her eyelids flickering to the same ripple he feels inside his ribs.
His fierce rush of emotion takes him to her side in an instant, hunkered down, a sheltering palm on her cheek. A guiding. Come up. Come up. Here, you're here, and her eyes draw hazily up to his.
Soft. Her gaze is so soft, so unguarded and still. Her face so small in his large hand, and they just look at each other, nothing but this, here, you are I am, here. A thousand years his heart could live in this moment, I am you are, I am you are. When Jiwoo shimmers in his vision, then clouds, his eyes pinch shut, crumpling the wetness clear. Relief so strong it could spill down his face.
A warmth follows, and he looks, and finds its source in the drowsy smile of her eyes on him. As trusting as a child. As secure as a woman. Slipping closed again, another tiny sigh, with a slow, restful nuzzle into his touch. A gradual loosening into true, good sleep.
Mujin stays there for a long time.
I am, you are.
The touch on his shoulder jolts his hand from Jiwoo's cheek, and only a subconscious identification that the monk had been speaking checks his violent reflex before it gets far enough to do damage. He looks back down, but Jiwoo's sleep is profound, undisturbed.
He inhales, and lets it out. Then tips his head heavily back, up at the monk. The dark of night is once again just starting to slip away.
"Rest now," is not as much just a suggestion as it was, the last time. "I'm up for the day. I'll wake you if anything changes. Rest now." The other bedroll is laid out, quilt and pillow.
Mujin drags it closer and crawls in. Her fingers under his is the last sensation as he crashes into blackness.
It seems like only a blink, but the sun is high in the sky when he comes to with a start. His fingers are grasping for her even before his eyes do.
They've shifted slightly in sleep: her hand curled over, fiercely small on top of his.
Adrenaline slashes through grogginess, a gasp of air as it all comes flooding back and he yanks clear. Scrambling over to his pack, on his knees and filling his trembling hands with cigarette and lighter or he doesn't know what they might do. He kicks the door open to outside with a free foot and lights up, sucking harshly until he can't cram any more toxin in his lungs, stooped over on the step with his back to his sleeping, protective little soulmate. The sunlight spears too bright, the cool fresh mountain air pricking until he hacks out smoke, shuddering silently over elbows on sprawled knees.
He doesn't notice until he feels Jiwoo settle again behind him, back into sleep, her tiny frown easing in the corner of his eye as she smells his cigarette. How secure does she feel, not to rouse at the disruption Mujin hadn't made any effort to quiet?
Maybe deliberately made noisier, just a little.
He sits there sightlessly, bright-dying foliage against the bitter sky, the open doorway at his back, chain smoking until mid-afternoon. Dark butts accumulate like fastidious cockroaches in the half-finished soup bowl, which he'd only taken along with the tea because of the monk's infuriating needle that Mujin is no good to her, fainting away with hunger.
He retrieves his dagger--she'd had it on her, and Gangjae had been arrogant, or just plain demented, enough to have left it there, if he even noticed it at all. Mujin doesn't care. What drives him fucking insane is it was still sheathed at the small of her back, the idea inescapable that she hadn't had it out to defend her own fucking life because she was saving the fucking thing for something more fucking important.
What resentful hubris had possessed him, to not just cut Gangjae's throat out with it in the first place? Had he been so determined to pose as though he wasn't already disastrously attached to the girl he'd tucked away deep inside his domain, right across the river under his ever-watchful eye? As though his towering rage was aloof, the injury to himself--as though his pain and maddened wrath had been coldness, to tend her and use her and discard her as easily as this blade?
There's blood splattered on the hilt, gumming one of the two bolts holding it together.
He grunts in disgust, and sets to cleaning and oiling it, though he notices she's done that even in the short time that she's had it from him.
It had been a few, rare months back when Jiwoo was first recovering--dead and gone to the entire world except himself and his second-in-command. Mujin had settled her well out of town, a small quiet place where he could oversee her recuperation, a garage underneath where he sat with the kid when he could, late at night, taught her in caring for her weapons, trained her strength and sparred, continued honing and honing the form Donghoon had started her with from when she was practically smaller than her own boxing gloves. Brought her food and soju and ignored the brand-new knowledge blaring like a lighthouse from under his tattoo, healing on her chest.
Had her all his. Irresistibly his, all to himself.
He'd tried not to smoke around her, but caught a funny, wistful look once when she sniffed it out on his clothes anyway. It smelled like her dad, she'd shared when he pressed. His excited, grinning fool of a brother had taken care to never smoke around his little girl either.
After that Mujin had stopped being so conscientious about it on his visits, though he put his foot down when she asked to try one.
But that had faded, too. Mujin hasn't thought about it for years, but he remembers now--how he'd eventually found he preferred driving back to the city with the sweat-and-weapons scent of that garage in his nose, the clean laundry and soaps Jiwoo used. Not the smoke.
That day, when his whole body had flooded with the sly tucked-away smile on her face on a sniff of him. His skin, his sweat, his clothes, scrupulously clean of any lingering reminder of Donghoon.
He twists the knife in his hands, once more immaculate. The wicked twin sweep of carbon steel from point to haft, double-edged with only one purpose, the hollow scored up its spine like a single thrust of will lending its contradictory strength. Jiwoo has taken far more care over it than she had over herself.
In wrath and pain, Mujin hadn't known what revenge would cost him, then.
In wrath and pain, he never knew what it would cost him now.
It has to end.
Mujin comes back into the room with the food tray and nearly drops it.
"What are you doing?!" he snaps, like it's the last straw.
Jiwoo jerks, but doesn't look at him from where she's dragging herself forward by inches on the floor. She's barely looked at him at all since she woke up properly, and why that's so aggravating Mujin has not and is not going to examine.
When she does answer, it's both abashed and annoyed at him. "I need to..."
She doesn't even know where the toilet is, he realizes. She'd just keep crawling forward and crawling forward until she found it. He slams the food down and strides over, jaw set, scooping his girl up. Ignoring her surprised squeak. Her wide, wide eyes, staring at his grim mouth.
He holds her tenderly. She is wounded, after all.
"Don't you have to return to Liber, sir?" is her first question, like a bolt from the blue.
A blanket snug around her, a huddled figure out on the step beside him, their shoulders close enough to brush in the square yellow light spilling out of the doorway, the last fragile flush of sunset sneaking from behind the mountain under heavy iron clouds. Her protests are still in his ears, when he carried her out, until he'd snapped at her again to stop it. And to eat the monk's "healing" broth, if she didn't want Mujin feeding her himself, if she wouldn't at least stay in bed.
"Taeju's managing it," he answers shortly.
Jiwoo frowns. "But..."
Irritation lashes, a scowl which her eyes flit over and he immediately smooths out. Yes, he is sitting in a remote temple getting periodic updates about his far-reaching, ceaseless organization--Taeju might actually sleep less than he does--instead of sitting in his own office running it, and getting periodic updates about her.
Sitting beside her. Having not left her. Never had a single thought of leaving her.
But Mujin has arrogance equal to anything, even something so incriminating, the glaring truth rendered in his own behavior. Even the challenging impertinence in his young protegee which is never far below the surface, always that shade too bold, a few ticks too astute. He levels a quelling look at her, and is a little surprised when she backs down, if only to drop her eyes to her broth with the slightest pink on her wan cheeks.
He'll press his advantage, though. "Eat," he tuts. "Why must it always be a fight, for you to accept care?"
Or comfort. Or connection. Or enjoyment, let alone happiness. Or anything that would mark her life as of human need, rather than of a dagger's purpose.
Her lips shy, and she fiddles with her spoon before lifting it to them. The bond has been safely quiescent again, the raw, desperate, treacherous intimacy spent and gone before Jiwoo ever could have consciously registered it...worked out what it meant--but the sudden instinct that she recalls any part of last night propels the one thing that ever reliably distracts her. "Donghoon was a terrible invalid." He gives her round, intent eyes a reproving glance. "You're worse."
Now her lips twitch, private, pleased, a smile pulled into herself. All Mujin wants in the world is to go with it.
But he's caught fast in memory's wicked, tangled edges, why Donghoon would be so difficult and fretful on his sickbed, little brother hovering anxiously over his brawny side with its single deep stab wound, getting too old for this, fever setting in.
This daughter would have been twelve.
"Who could stand your nagging?" Jiwoo mutters, pitched for him to only just hear it, hovering at her side. Where her too-spare flesh had absorbed enough shallow, overexcited jabs from Gangjae's vicious little blade to kill her all themselves, had they been any more, or any deeper at all.
Mujin jolts to his feet. A few paces forward, eyes fixed on the dim horizon, hands on hips, air heaving in his lungs and getting no oxygen at all. His coat hangs open, the shirt underneath as red as spilled blood and gaping at the collar despite the darkening mountain chill, desperately needing bite against the warm gossamer threads of affection, coiling and suffocating. Once, the vast roiling tributaries of evil had felt like a great, ravening beast he had conquered, the purest proof of survival that he stood upon to harness a world to his will. Now it feels as poison flowing straight from his veins, his marrow splitting apart.
It's too late, it has always been too late.
He can't do this anymore.
"As soon as you're well enough to travel, you're flying out of here."
In the lull of the statement, all Mujin can do is breathe. Exhaustion a silent buzzsaw behind his eyes, numbness falling over him like a cloak. Snapping him back five years, he'd forgotten--those few, endless days after Donghoon stretching to nothing and nothing and nothing and nothing. Before Jiwoo, bursting upon him with all her temerity and pain and wildness punching dents and then pinholes and then gaping rents into all that nothing.
He stares unseeing, feeling conviction drain away like water, once more--the conviction that's sustained him ever since. It hadn't been his. It had been all Jiwoo.
He has nothing at all.
It's a release, of a kind. He laughs, just a breath, soft and mad. The part of him that can calculate pure animal survival in a heartbeat sees it so clear, how quickly he would have succumbed. How little he would have cared. Crumbled under before facing the year out, and oh, how he would have spread that pain around as he went. Cha Giho would finally have gotten his feckless wish, taking them down from inside.
"What?"
Mujin turns, slightly taken aback to find Jiwoo not already gone forever from him. Still right there.
Frowning, confused. Aghast. Her shoulders going tight, her eyes going hard.
"It's over. Oh Hyejin is finished," he explains, more gently than he feels. "I'll get you out of the country. A place on a beach? You can choose."
She's staring at him like she's never seen him before.
Then--she erupts, soup crashing as she breaks for the doorway.
For a moment he can only watch, in disbelief.
It's not her wildness, thrashing to the surface, as ever-present as his own and as unsurprising.
It's the sensation of having his will crossed so thoroughly, so flagrantly, right in front of him. Begging and appeasing, for all their contemptible futility, he is accustomed to. This...thwarting, of his this will be, and this will be, stuns like a firecracker going off in his face, this feeble mauled girl who would defy him, so wholly overmatched she can hardly crawl.
And yet, somehow, feels as right as though he'd lit it himself.
He plucks her up with a shake, and she does shake, like a small creature in the jaws of a predator, the blanket half fallen off in the bare dirt. His slippers on her feet scrabble the ground, the toes of his shoes, oversize even with double layers of his thick wool socks he'd put on her when she couldn't bend enough to do it herself. The only thing keeping her upright is his hands wrapped around her upper arms. And Jiwoo stares into his eyes, unmoved. Fearless. "Where are you going?" Mujin demands, with another furious shake. Angrier, to smother over the unbidden pride, the surge of soul-joy recognition that rises every time she refuses to stay knocked to the ground, this woman who will never bow her spirit down no matter what she faces.
Her abdomen has to be agonizing. She won't even flinch, her eyes striking sparks, her lips clamped. Silent, as a few delicate flecks of white drift in the inches between their locked gaze, nothing more to say to him. One lands on his soulmate's upturned face, melts on her skin, not even a wisp of wetness.
Burning. He is burning.
"You can't go back. You won't go back," he hisses. "Your cover won't stand this. There's nothing left--"
That gets a reaction. Her arms squirm up between them, elbows and the heels of her hands bashing at his chest, his neck, his jaw, too close in to make them count, struggling against his hold.
He tightens it.
She tries to bring her knee into it, glancing off his thigh, and has to swallow a whimper, buckling from her activated, hacked-up core muscles.
"There's nothing left!" Mujin shouts, having found that hurt, stamping down harder. And still she refuses to look away, to concede the point, his standing and his right over her, his sheer raw advantage, anything at all. "You'll tear yourself to pieces, just to keep risking your life for a dead man?" Jiwoo writhes against him, full-body desperate. No less than him. "You think your father would want--"
The crumpling keen that bursts forth from her silences him, far more than the blows from her hands that follow. On and on, fruitless, a sob with each one, frightening him with their vacancy. "Jiwoo!" Mujin shakes her. "Yoon Jiwoo!"
For a heartbeat, an infinitesimal pause, her eyes clear on his. Her face is a fine pearl. Snowflakes strew her crown, her shoulders. Before he can even take a breath, her eyes dart away, seeking inside the room, the strain of her body following suit.
He knows exactly what she's looking for.
He snarls, dragging her with him back up onto the step. She sags against the door frame in his one hand and her one good leg, and he grabs his sheathed dagger from on top of his pack and slams it to her chest. "Here. This?" he yells, unnecessarily, her fiercely small hand claiming it protectively in front of her heart, between them. He needs to rip it away from her again and pitch it off the side of the highest peak. "This is all there is? This is all you are, Jiwooyah? Nothing but this?"
Her head shakes, not an answer to his asking but refusal of it altogether. Tears line her eyes and he's not sure she even realizes, her lips open, vulnerable.
He pulls her in without even thinking, an arm hooked around her waist to brace her with the pillar of his body, not some dumb stubborn wood post, urgent to speak to those tears, those lips. "Look--" snatching the Dongcheon ring off, all the years and all the lives and all the achievement it commands, all its human rule and all its inhuman cost, everything it means, holding it up to her attention until she does "look. See?"
And Mujin flings it out into the cold, lonely dark, into the worthless dirt and the dispassionate snow floating down to bury it. Her eyes flick with the gleaming arc, then back up to him, gaping astonishment as he gives her his bare right hand. Under his left, her rigid weight is easing ever so slightly against him. "Look," he says more softly, pleading that Jiwoo accept the lie, that can be true for her. That's not too late, for her. Her eyes trace his divested little finger like a caress, then lift wide to his, and then his naked hand is possessing his woman's face like a lover. Here. Here. I am...You are.
It hurts so much.
"I'll send you anywhere," he promises. "Anywhere in the world. Anything you want--"
And then--it will be over.
The first warning is Jiwoo's spine, stiffening like a lightning strike under his palm.
Her jaw jerks away from his other, then firms, her eyes wounded accusations before hardening over once more.
Mujin knows then.
"Enough!" He has her by the scruff of the neck, now. Jiwoo's throat is not all that much larger than a tumbler of chamomile tea--he feels like he could circle it with his whole hand if he tried. "I promised you my protection. You are mine, and you will do as I say."
He's locked like a cage around her.
He is holding a storm in his arms.
The turbulent thrill answering within him is almost enough to make Mujin very, very stupid. "No more," he whispers.
His eyes drop to her lips.
Jiwoo hits him in his.
She mounts just enough force to draw blood and his teeth bare, a snarl or a laugh but all hunger, the angry sting of the split like a drug in his bloodstream, like a kiss.
She hits him again.
Mujin almost purrs. Almost bites her. He could sink his teeth in that small open palm that catches him on the muzzle, a smear of his blood, and instead he tightens his fist in her silky clean hair and yanks her back, throat exposed. He needs no soulbond to feel her pain in the movement of every pant of breath she takes, body bent and crushed to the implacable will of his breaking like waves against the black stones of her eyes.
"No more," he murmurs over her. He looks down. "You are mine. No more of this." Slowly--like a trance, he releases her nape, watches his own hand close over hers still clutching his dagger to her heart. Slowly--he lifts his eyes to hers again, hardens his grip to match hers.
Jiwoo doesn't wait for him to try to take it away from her. She wrenches back, fighting him with all the perforated strength she has, fighting so hard her legs give out completely.
He ignores her free hand still pushing him away with all its might and goes down with her, gentling her collapse to the floor. He keeps her close with the arm around her back, bracing on one knee and straddling her hips, never releasing his dagger for a second--being sure not to give her any angle for a groin shot, because Mujin is only almost very, very stupid, and he absolutely would not put it past his wild girl to take it if he allowed her the opening.
"Enough. Enough now." His head dips, his forehead nearly resting on hers, feeling calmer and calmer the wilder the storm in her grows. Outside through the door snow flurries and swoops, ice in the dancing air that can't touch the furnace their bodies have become. Her muscles gather under his hands and he moves with her, curbing the blow of her headbutt to a glance off his mouth, opening the split in his lip again, a trivial reflection of her own stitches being pulled in her efforts. He shakes his head, holding Jiwoo tighter, bowing back to her, looking down into her eyes so tenderly. "This is done. It's over. You'll never find it--"
"I will!"
It has the force of a scream, if not the volume, bursting like a dam...this thing that's sustained her all this time. "I will, I will! I will!"
He absorbs the primal blows that she lands on him with that, as well. He barely feels them.
He knows.
A twist of his wrist, so fast she can't follow, and he draws the blade clean, leaving her only its sheath--and a glint of surprised question, so dagger-sharp in her eyes it's almost fear.
And Mujin closes Jiwoo's hand around the hilt, because there's no surrender in either of them.
There.
"You will?" he says, softly. His hand on hers, a guiding, the knifepoint--back to their place at his neck five years ago, when he first showed her who he was.
Finally.