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When someone asked him who he wanted to be when he grew up, he said what they wanted to hear. A model citizen, a valedictorian, a pianist, a good son. And it was the truth. He saw all those paths in the lines on his palm, joining and splitting with age. It just wasn’t the whole truth.
Who he really wanted to be was his brother. He wanted to be kind and warm, but cool-headed, brave without being foolish, and selfless to a fault. He wanted to say the right words and do the right things, especially when it was hard. He wanted to make an impression on someone, some place, leave a deep but tender mark to know that he had mattered.
Mostly, though, he was the polar opposite of Mu Hyeok. He was impatient, reckless, sloppy with his anger and his affection, spoiled by the freedom of being a second son. He was good at mending things, but only because he had broken them in the first place. He was in constant, tireless motion, his heart calm in his chest only when a piano played.
Some days he asked his brother if he’d ever outgrow it, as if for all he tried to be different, to be better, he couldn’t make himself listen. And always, Mu Hyeok ruffled his hair and said, if you grow up, that means I’m growing old. So take your time.
As it turned out, time was something neither of them had.
*
She lands like a meteorite in the DMZ. He thinks she might as well be extraterrestrial, arms flailing in her bizarre purple jumpsuit, hair unkempt, eyes bright with terror but also with a fire that could’ve sparked when she fell through the atmosphere.
Yet, there’s something familiar, in the downturn of her mouth maybe and the size of her shoulders, like a stranger who appears unbidden in a dream that you could swear you’ve seen before. It’s because of this that he steps on the mine, and absolutely not through any fault of his own. Even when he loses sight of her he still feels disoriented, taken by surprise, which makes him frown. After years of patrolling the DMZ, of wading through the muck of human vice and political ambition, very few things take him by surprise.
When she manages to slip deeper into North Korea, to the embarrassment of his entire company, he mutters, “a hummingbird.”
“What?” His men within earshot are staring at him.
“Nothing,” he says sternly. He’s never seen a real hummingbird but it’s apt, he thinks, to think of this woman as a creature of exotic origins, flitting in and out of sight, astonishingly resilient given how delicate she looks.
“We search all night if we have to. The consequences could be significant if we don’t contain this,” he says, not knowing just how big of an understatement that would turn out to be.
*
His brother followed a strict code of conduct, determined not so much by the military as by his own views on right and wrong. He thought if Mu Hyeok had been born on the other side of the 38th parallel, he would’ve been a philosopher, would’ve penned beautiful oratories on how to live a good life.
One such view was one the military never espoused: that morality was relative rather than absolute, and that there were swathes of gray where what was required wasn’t blind obedience, it was empathy.
Which was why despite the propaganda crammed down their throats describing in lurid detail the scourge of capitalism that would rot you to your core, Mu Hyeok brought him things from Pyongyang by way of Seoul, mostly toys but sometimes comic books. And he read them at night when everyone else was asleep, with a flashlight under the covers, thrilling at the thought of holding contraband - American, no less - in his hands.
The Avengers were his favorite, Captain America most of all. Steve Rogers reminded him of his brother, which was silly because they bore no resemblance whatsoever. Plus, Rogers did stupid things - brave, but stupid - that Mu Hyeok would never do. Like rush headlong into a firefight without any backup, never mind that he was a super soldier with a vibranium shield.
“If you could have any superpower, what would it be?” he asked his brother once.
Mu Hyeok had mulled it over, carefully, as he did all things.
“I’d want to see into the future, to make sure you were living a happy life.”
Jeong Hyeok had rolled his eyes.
“That’s boring. I’d want super strength so I could soundly defeat my enemies. I’d protect you, too, of course. No one would be able to touch us.”
“Whatever enemies are out there, you leave them to me to worry about, all right?”
And because he knew his brother was the real hero of their story, he said, easily, “okay.”
*
He would admit later, and only to himself, that it was a stupid thing to do - brave, but stupid.
He knows anyone with half a brain can follow the trail he hasn’t bothered to wipe clean, the weapons log being the most damning. It’s an alchemy of cold fury, blinding clarity, and adrenaline that makes him reckless. Or, maybe he’s just resurrecting someone he used to be, the Ri Jeong Hyeok he buried at the same time they lowered his brother into the ground.
That Ri Jeong Hyeok is still there when he wakes up at the hospital, the boy who spoke before thinking and learned a hundred different ways to apologize. He watches Yoon Seri swallow and stumble over her words, watches her shrink for the first time, as if she’s finally facing the truth that she’s completely alone. And he thinks it’s been a while since his chest hurt like this, like he doesn’t know if he’s drowning or surfacing and he can’t gather enough breath to stop her from leaving.
When he finds her out in the rain, he’s not sure what feels more immense, the relief that she’s still here or the terror that he’s making all this up as he goes, wearing shoes too big for him to fill because it wasn’t supposed to be his turn yet. Only, there hadn’t been time.
He expects to see disappointment when she turns around. Instead he sees worry, and forgiveness, and warmth, sheltering him when it should be the other way around. So he kisses her, because he’s been tired for a long time and she’s offering him a place to rest. He kisses her because she’s trying so hard to rescue him and, for now, he lets her.
*
He was twelve years old when he unofficially adopted a stray cat, mangy, anxious, underfed until he started slipping her leftovers three times a day. He made her a bed out of hay in the backyard and spoiled her with the toys he’d outgrown. To his brother’s amusement, he named her Kimchi after giving her some as a curiosity then watching her throw it up before shooting up a tree, yowling her displeasure.
When their father was away, which was most days, he snuck her into his bedroom. When she wasn’t curled up napping next to him as he sprawled on his bed studying, she was curled up napping in his lap as he practiced piano, purring to Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major and Chopin’s Nocturne. Cats, he found, napped a lot.
She never bit or scratched. She enjoyed belly rubs and pouncing on his shoelaces, perpetually undone. When he was moody she’d distract him by rubbing against his ankles, demanding attention. But sometimes, he saw her perched still as a statue on top of the steps overlooking the valley, like she was searching for something she was starting to remember she lost. Provenance, maybe, or freedom.
Then one day, she was gone when he woke up. He waited for a week, then two, and then he cried. His brother found him sitting in the garden, head tucked between his knees.
“I’m sorry,” he heard, and felt a weight settle next to him.
He sniffled in response and they sat in silence for a while, until what he was feeling wasn’t grief, it was anger.
“What’s the point of caring for something when it’s just going to leave you in the end?” he asked, crushing clumps of grass under his shoe.
“Would you rather forget it ever happened?”
He knew Mu Hyeok didn’t expect an answer. Only his brother could be smug and wear it gracefully.
“It would be cold and lonely, to stop caring.”
“I wouldn’t be lonely, I have you.”
He picked up his head finally to see Mu Hyeok looking at him oddly, as if he just said something profound.
“I won’t be around forever,” his brother smiled then looked away, towards the prodigious display of roses, the centerpiece of their mother’s garden that she coaxed into full bloom every spring. “Promise me you’ll live bravely. Whatever happens.”
And though he didn’t quite understand it, he said, “I promise,” because it was what his brother wanted.
*
When she asks him about his first love, he doesn’t know what to say, not because he’s embarrassed or unwilling. He thinks once you’ve taken a bullet for someone, nothing else makes you feel as exposed. He doesn’t know what to say because there’s a short answer that only scratches the surface and a long answer that delves so deep he might not find his way back out. So he settles on something in between, feeling a little feverish from the cold, the exertion, and the hole in his back, searing like it’s been freshly cauterized.
“I wanted to become the world’s greatest pianist. It didn’t leave room for anything else.”
He stares into the fire and the words come easily, as if there’s something about this night, his condition, or maybe Yoon Seri that’s starting to reassemble all the pieces of him he had exiled to another shore.
“If there were girls who liked me, I didn’t notice. The music in my head never left. Not when I ate or studied, or slept. It was with me when I laughed and when I cried. It comforted me and pushed me to be better. There were bad days, when I was sick of it and wished I was normal. But I never once thought about stopping.”
His throat feels rough and raw, like it’s been dragged over gravel.
“Until my brother died.” He ends it there, because after fifteen years he’s still not ready. To expose the bones he’d buried. To admit he broke his promise and that, for all he can stare down the barrel of a gun and army crawl through a minefield, he grew up to be a coward.
When he finally looks at Yoon Seri, her eyes are soft, tender, and a little tragic, the way she looked at him right before he kissed her in the rain, like they barely know each other but he can already break her heart a dozen ways.
“Ri Jeong Hyeok-ssi,” she says, voice unsteady, “I hope, someday, you’ll play again. Even though I won’t be here to listen.”
*
His brother insisted on driving him to the airport, as if there was a chance they’d never see each other again.
“It’s two years, not forever,” he said.
Mu Hyeok hoisted his luggage into the trunk.
“It’s a big deal. I want to send my little brother off the right way.”
“You couldn’t have gotten a cooler car?” he asked, then ducked as Mu Hyeok took a swipe at his head.
For the first twenty minutes they sat in a silence that soothed him as he looked out across the fields, starting to feel like this was a bad idea and to leave would fling his entire world off its axis.
Then his brother said, “maybe you’ll meet a nice girl.”
He rolled his eyes. As hard as Mu Hyeok tried, he still sounded like their parents sometimes, pathologically worried that he’d be single forever.
“What’s the point? I wouldn’t be able to bring her home.”
“Think of it as practice. For when you need to woo the love of your life.”
He understood practice, he just didn’t understand girls, how their smiles felt like misdirection and why they said one thing when they really meant something else. Frankly he didn’t have the energy to care, but since Mu Hyeok was playing his personal chauffeur, he would play nice.
“It sounds complicated,” he said cautiously.
His brother’s smile widened, which was when it dawned on him that the whole thing was a setup, a premeditated scheme, no doubt engineered by their mother, to try to salvage his marriage prospects.
“You just need to remember a few basic principles,” Mu Hyeok said. “When she’s talking, pay attention. Buy her something nice on special occasions and ordinary ones. Tell her she’s beautiful. No matter whose at fault, always take the blame. And - this is the most important one - when it’s raining and you’re holding the umbrella, tilt it towards her so her shoulder doesn’t get wet.”
The single most poorly kept secret about his brother was that he was a complete sap. And maybe on pain of death, Jeong Hyeok would admit that it swept him away just a little, the romance that his brother saw in all things, tiny and colossal. He would admit that love sounded nice, and felt within reach as long as he listened to his brother.
*
He’s not sure if what they’re doing should be called dating. Going out for chicken and beer, holding hands at the movies, eating popsicles by the river, all against a backdrop of unease that what they’re really doing is playacting to run down the clock, keeping themselves busy until someone gets shot or jailed.
But maybe those are the nuances of a life at any discrete point and he’s just forgotten, having been willfully ignorant for so long of everything other than what’s in front of him. He’s forgotten that living can be ugly and beautiful in the same breath, and that reality, taken at a cross-section, isn’t flat, it’s layered, like the lines of strings and wind and brass unspooling in a concerto.
But really, it doesn’t matter what they call it. It feels nice and normal, and a little like he’s seventeen again, winging it on instinct, and a few basic principles. Only, he never had this when he was seventeen, a Yoon Seri to make his pulse race even when he was standing completely still.
The evening on the day they play hooky, she takes them to a restaurant paved in marble and gold, with tea service in delicate china that look one of a kind and chandeliers - multiple - that are probably hand-cut. It’s the kind of opulence that’s hard to overstate and that he’s made a point of never encountering on purpose. He’s never worn or wielded privilege well, to his father’s disappointment. But on Yoon Seri, it’s magnificent. It’s bespoke armor cut from cashmere and silk, disguising a woman who stuffs whole eggs into her mouth and crushes beer cans in her hand, who feeds orphans and sings softly about the cold wind blowing.
The dining room is cavernous and empty, save a skeleton staff hustling to bring them wine and the first course, either bought out with Mom’s Card he thinks, or long part of her trove of expensive, pretty things.
“You’re a little scary sometimes,” he says, pulling out her chair and then his own.
She hums, considering as she sets down her bag. “Women typically don’t like being called scary on a date, just so you know.”
“How about scary, and beautiful, and impressive?” he amends, smiling as a waiter brings them a tiny amuse bouche on a gigantic plate that doesn’t resemble any organic matter he’s ever seen.
“So this is a date,” she says, triumphant, eyes glittering.
“Since you’ve had so many boyfriends, you tell me.”
“There are some boxes we haven’t checked,” she says, smiling the way she always does when he sounds jealous, which he doesn’t, he isn’t, at all. “For example, I haven’t learned any embarrassing details about you yet. You know, so I can blackmail you later into doing what I say.”
“That doesn’t sound like a very strong incentive,” he points out. He’s not entirely reluctant. The army strips you of any vanity you might’ve had once you’re wearing the same fatigues ten days in a row, mud streaked in places you didn’t think was possible, and using trees for toilets. But he still has some pride.
“But it’s fun,” she coaxes, mouth pouting and glossy, and he thinks he never had a chance anyway. “Fine, I’ll go first. I took something from your bedroom before I left. A shopping list you wrote on a piece of paper. I’ve been keeping it in my nightstand.”
“You stole something from my bedroom?” he asks, faintly, staring at her face flushing, her teeth worrying her bottom lip.
“Well, you’re a weirdo who didn’t want to take a picture with me,” she says defensively. “I needed something - something to remind me, twenty years from now, that it wasn’t just a dream.”
She takes a breath then and he thinks, heart bursting in his chest, that this isn’t exactly how it’s supposed to go. That apparently she’s the one wooing him and all he has to do is let go.
*
Five months after he returns home, narrowly avoiding an unofficial execution by firing squad, he makes his annual pilgrimage to Mu Hyeok’s grave. He’s never once said a word here, having nothing to offer that wasn’t selfish. I still hate myself for not being here to say goodbye. I still miss you, every day.
This time though, he clears his throat and says, “Hyungnim.”
He’s rehearsed it for the last three days, afraid he might forget something important, might misspeak because - as his brother loved to joke - eloquence hadn’t been passed far enough down the bloodline.
“I’ve met someone. I’ve tried so hard not to, and I know you’ll find that disappointing. Truthfully, nothing I’ve done since you left has been what you would’ve wanted for me. The first year, surviving was hard enough. Living felt impossible.”
It stings like hell to say it, but it doesn’t kill him. It makes him think that he’s almost made it to the other side. That everything his brother’s death - and then his own hands - left in ruins is almost behind him now.
“But I’ve met someone. She’s not a nice girl. She’s strong, clever, brave, kind, and a little damaged. If she trusts you, she wears her heart on her sleeve. She says she’s built her career on the corpses of her enemies and I don’t think it’s a joke. She makes me want to play piano again. Because of her I think about the future now and it terrifies me, but in the right way. I’m alone still, but I’m not lonely. I’m - hopeful.”
He wipes his face and his palm comes away wet. He looks over at the cherry tree at the top of the hill, pale buds on the cusp of blooming. Their mother had planted it a week after they laid Ri Mu Hyeok to rest, hands and knees in the dirt, watering the soil with her grief as she bestowed on her son one last gift.
“You’ll never be able to meet her, but I’ll tell her about you. Her brothers are little shits, so she’ll love you no matter what I say. I can tell she wants to ask about you but she’s been waiting, so patiently, until I’m ready. It’s embarrassing to admit but I finally understand what you made me promise that day.”
It feels like tender new skin stretched over an old wound, deep but, as it turns out, not irreparable, when he says, “your little brother finally grew up.”