Chapter Text
At the moment Lee Jung Min has retired. He spends most of his time writing journals and reorganizing the documents he cultivated from his field work over the years. The investigation department still sometimes comes to him for advice when their cases run into dead-ends, but he just sends them straight to his two boys—now young men—instead.
His older son Lee Hyun, 30 years old, is a pathologist at the National Forensic Science Technology Center and is a well-known thriller writer online. How his son manages to make time for writing between his hectic work schedules remains a mystery.
His younger son Lee Min, 28 years old, works as a public juvenile defense attorney. In his spare time he holes up at home and paints away. Except for his family, he allows no one inside his studio—which is not a real problem since they rarely have guests over. Lately Min has turned to tamer color palettes, and the figures in his paintings are looking less distraught. But looking closer, his family could still see the chronic torment that has been plaguing his mind since childhood.
Jung Min sometimes catches Hyun standing stock-still in front of Min’s rows of paintings when his younger son isn’t at home. And the father always knows by the taunt back of his older son that he’s bracing himself for the onslaught of distressing memories which have embedded themselves into the eerie figures and heavy brushstrokes on the canvases. He is, again, being unfairly eschewed by the guilt of tragic events that were out of his once tiny hands.
There are wounds that don’t heal wholly. Lee Jung Min is just glad they didn’t defeat his sons. There were times they feared that Min had been lost to them; if so, losing Hyun then would have been inevitable. That horrid thought had haunted him for years, but for the sake of his sons the man just quietly endured until his fear became a memory.
Now during dinner, Hyun teases that one day Min will become a contemporary artist that is famous for being “prettier than flowers.” Lee Min Jung guffaws while Min glowers at his brother, his salad fork poised dangerously in the air.
But Hyun hasn’t once mentioned Min's hobby to his old friend Na Bong Sung, who happens to be a resourceful artist and informant. The only time he intervenes with his younger brother’s artistic ventures is whenever the art supplies run noticeably low. These days Hyun has learnt by heart all the art brands in Min’s studio and regularly makes bulk orders online.
If there came a day when their fridge runs out of beers, if there was no toilet paper or shaving creams in their bathroom, and their utility bills weren’t paid in time—honestly, it’s unimaginable since Hyun is a born perfectionist, but let’s just go with it—Min would still never run out of art supplies.