Work Text:
His first impression of Soo-won had been … unimpressed, truthfully.
Yona had brought Soo-won along to the park one afternoon and introduced him as her cousin, which had intrigued Hak.
This was the Soo-won, the cousin, that Yona talked his ear off about nearly every time she found her way to the park?
He was scrawny, Hak had noted, and a little too happy.
But he was near Hak’s age, and he was Yona’s cousin, so Hak had stuck out a hand to shake and they’d been throwing snowballs at each other in minutes.
Soo-won had always been eager to learn, constantly asking questions and reading and blabbering on about what he had learned recently.
Hak had always found it annoying, but now he saw it for what it had apparently been all along: Soo-won had been following in his father’s footsteps, looking forward to becoming an important part of the family business, just as Yona’s father had intended for her.
After the accident that had claimed his parents’ lives, Soo-won had changed.
He hadn’t been old enough yet to be part of the company, and presidency had passed from Yu-hon to his younger brother, Il Hiryuu.
Soo-won hadn’t been the same since.
He’d withdrawn after that, not nearly as eager to learn as he once had been.
It had seemed normal, at the time, Hak recalled, because losing your family was a traumatic thing.
But now he could see the subtle shift it had made in Soo-won, the shift that none of them had noticed right away, not until that night at the bonfire when the pieces had fallen into place.
Soo-won wanted the company.
He felt it belonged to him, not to Il or Yona.
And Hak was certain that the car accident that night hadn’t been an accident.
Perhaps it hadn’t been Soo-won’s plan specifically, but someone who knew him, who sympathized with him, had suggested it, or had had it carried out.
They had probably expected Yona to be in the car with her parents, or to have been so distraught at their deaths that she would give up on the idea of taking over the company.
Of course, that hadn’t happened, so Soo-won and his “advisor” were employing a new strategy.
Hak didn’t like it one bit.
And he had decided, the moment that Yona had handed him that root beer float, that he was going to do everything in his power to keep her from being hurt again.
He just wasn’t entirely sure what that would mean yet.