Chapter Text
“Oppa, your handwriting has gotten really, really bad.”
These were the words that Yoo Mia called out from the halved dining table Yoo Joonghyuk had haggled —read: intimidated the owner— for at a secondhand furniture store.
They also marked the beginning of a story filled with the supernatural and unanswerable. However, that was neither here nor there. Presently, the problem was this: His handwriting was definitely halfway decent.
“It has?” Yoo Joonghyuk asked half-heartedly, he knew his sister’s reviews to be unreasonably scathing, from how he did the housework to how he styled his hair. It was second-nature not to take her words at face value.
Stationed at the stove, Yoo Joonghyuk looked briefly over his shoulder at one of his sister’s pigtails. It swayed as she leaned over to pencil answers into her workbook and cascaded down her shoulder as she turned to slide a paper torn out of her notebook closer.
She hummed a long note, then ended it abruptly with a quick climb to a higher octave, like sliding a finger across a piano. Her last high note resonated for a short while before she announced resolutely, “It’s really bad. I’ll show you, one second.”
“Mn.” Yoo Joonghyuk agreed, easing a sizable glob of kimchi off a bent spoon and onto a bowl filled with a varied, but thankfully cheap, assortment of vegetables.
In just this one noise, he somehow communicated:
1. Sure, show me
2. Stay away from the stove
And finally,
3. I’ll prove you wrong.
Yoo Mia scoffed quietly, eying Yoo Joonghyuk for a moment to make sure he hadn’t heard her. He did, but before he ended up glaring at her, Yoo Joonghyuk turned away to add kimchi into the second bowl he’d prepared.
Turning the paper over once, then twice, Yoo Mia held up the sheet and waited for her brother to turn around. Said older brother stuffed his spoon into a container of store-bought kimchi and glanced off to his side.
After reading two lines, Yoo Joonghyuk paused and read over them again, and again, and again. He ended up fully turning his body, intently leaning forward. By now, Yoo Mia had lowered the paper, assuming Yoo Joonghyuk had read his fill. The moment she dropped it a centimeter lower, Yoo Joonghyuk stuck his hand out, wordlessly asking for her to hand it over.
Skeptically pursing her lips, she placed the paper in Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand while saying, “Well, it’s not that that bad?” She slinked around him and peered into a bubbling pot on the sink, frowning imperceptibly, “You can borrow my handwriting workbooks.”
“Sit back down.” Yoo Joonghyuk answered succinctly. Yoo Mia grumbled but obediently rounded the dining table and plopped down in her seat.
He sighed and shook the paper straight, dutifully reading every word he could find. His eyes darted over the cluttered paper, paying particular attention to the margins. After almost every question, without fail, there was a scraggly, faint note written next to it, either giving constructive advice or praise.
For example:
“Wrong character here. Try saying the sentences out loud before writing.”
Then, in another spot, over the starting end of a wiggly arrow:
“Good job. Keep it up!”
“This…” Yoo Joonghyuk stalled, an odd cold spread through his veins like it was injected into his blood, “isn’t my handwriting.”
“Oppa? It wasn’t a question, but a deadpan set-up to her next statement, “That’s seriously creepy.”
It was creepy. Yoo Joonghyuk was out of the house most of the time, completing odd requests and scheduled shifts from the jobs he was juggling. Even if he did remember himself writing these personalized notes down, he would have had the decency not to droop his letters down for too long or let the lines linger.
With three quick folds, Yoo Joonghyuk turned the paper into a nice, unassuming rectangle. Casually, he slid the paper over the dining table…
“Closer, Oppa.” Yoo Mia requested sweetly.
He slid it closer.
“Closer…”
Yoo Joonghyuk moved it over again.
“Even closer-”
“Mia.”
Almost immediately, Yoo Joonghyuk took his hand off the folded paper, narrowing his eyes at his wryly smiling sister. She began to draw out her words, a definite sign she was messing around. Taking the hint, she picked up her pencil and got back to work, the ghost of a pout appearing on her lips.
Yoo Joonghyuk did the same, minus the pouting, returning to the stove and turning the heat down, calming the near-boiling broth while simultaneously bringing the two vegetable-filled bowls closer.
As he moved to find a ladle in the drawers, a freezing, biting breeze dissipated over his shoulder, reaching out to the cold within his veins. Quite dumbly, his hand paused over the drawer's knob as he whipped his head over his shoulder, only to find nothing there. Yoo Joonghyuk shuddered.
“Oppa?”
He didn’t realize he was blankly staring over at the living area for the past few seconds until Mia called out his name. Seamlessly, he got back to work, but internally, he jolted and warily looked around him.
The sensation was still there, warming slowly like it didn’t want to leave. It felt as if someone with ice-cold hands had clasped one over his bare shoulder, painstakingly sliding their fingers off his skin one by one. Either he needed more sleep or it was the air conditioning fizzling to life. He decided it was a mix of both and rubbed his shoulder until it warmed up.
Dutifully, Yoo Joonghyuk wrapped up dinner, two bowls of budae-jjigae cooling on the dining table. He’d gotten a bonus that week and had promised Yoo Mia a nice meal compared to their daily fried rice and kimchi. Still, she couldn’t be all too excited. Now that Yoo Joonghyuk had the ingredients, budae-jjigae would be their daily meal for the coming week.
Regardless, she thanked her brother for making dinner, pushed her homework aside, and the small family of two shared a meal with a common question looming over them.
Yoo Mia broke the tension-filled silence first, “Oppa,” her eyes flitted between Yoo Joonghyuk and the folded paper, “Are you sure it wasn’t you? I mean, I’ve been getting the notes for a whole week now, and only my teacher and you see my homework.”
“Then maybe it's a classmate of yours?” Yoo Joonghyuk theorized, skewering a floating piece of lettuce together with some pork, “I haven’t touched your homework.”
“No one in my class likes me enough for that.” Yoo Mia lamented, pushing the food around in her bowl.
Yoo Joonghyuk gave her a grave look until she finally began eating again, but behind his feigned sternness was a festering panic. His eyebrow twitched twice as he swallowed a bite of pork.
“It was me.” Yoo Joonghyuk admitted, “I wrote those notes.”
“What?” Yoo Mia dropped her chopsticks and braced both hands on the table, suddenly leaning forward, “What!? Oppa, you lied?! Are you sick? Since when did you joke around!?”
“Since now.” Yoo Joonghyuk casually answered, a hint of distaste trembling in his words at his sister’s open mouth filled with food, “Sit down and chew properly.”
Shocked, Yoo Mia pulled her chair back in and quietly ate. Was her brother losing it? She thought back to the notes that helped her get a whole letter grade improvement on a test two days ago.
“Come on, Mia-yah! Divide the question into parts!”
He never spoke with excitement, let alone wrote with it, and he hadn’t called out her name like that in ages! Warily, she spared a glance up from her food, only to see Yoo Joonghyuk eating casually like the absurdity of the situation was lost on him. Her brother really was losing it!
By the time dinner finished, Yoo Mia had settled down somewhat, offering to clean up and not taking no for an answer.
“Sit down, Oppa. Let me do it.” She volunteered earnestly, maneuvering past Yoo Joonghyuk to grab his empty bowl. When he tried to take them from her hands, she insisted, “I said I was doing it, Oppa.”
He didn’t know why his sister was being so helpful all of a sudden, but he didn’t pass up on the opportunity to sort out his thoughts for a bit. Yoo Joonghyuk sat on the two-cushioned couch in the living area, the pained creak as he settled in having long become ambient noise, and kept an eye on Yoo Mia as she tidied up the kitchen.
It was a bit difficult not to feel a modicum of guilt for lying to his sister, but it was for her own good. He couldn’t have her worrying about the predicament the small family had found themself in. She was a smart kid and would end up coming to the same dreadful conclusion Yoo Joonghyuk had:
Some psycho is breaking into our house.
-
For the first time in his 10 years since reaching adulthood, Yoo Joonghyuk took a day off. However, despite having not slept a wink, he didn’t sleep in and stood vigil for a while over his sister, sitting on the edge of the bed and resting a hand on the pillow divider Yoo Mia had insisted on adding.
Today, Saturday, he was supposed to be working his regular graveyard shift, but thankfully, his manager cut him some slack. She had said, “Young people like him shouldn’t have to work tirelessly like her.” He grew a little more thankful for her after his sudden phone call.
Additionally, the PC cafe he worked for in the mornings had shut down for the weekend, a shame for the high school students in the area, due to rusty piping in the bathroom. All in all, Yoo Joonghyuk was perfectly ready to stake out his own home. He had to if he was to catch the inveterate home intruder.
Later in the day, he started by inspecting his apartment, beginning with the door. His next-door neighbor was a handyman of sorts, so Yoo Joonghyuk took it upon himself to make a small visit. After knocking on Apartment 052’s door thrice and a couple seconds of patient waiting, an elderly man opened the creaky door and smiled up at Yoo Joonghyuk.
“Sorry, young man. I don’t have the ears to listen to any sales pitches,” He slowly articulated, voice weathered by age.
Yoo Joonghyuk sighed and explained, “I live next door.”
The older man squinted at Yoo Joonghyuk before his eyes lit up in recognition, easing the wrinkles under his eyebags just for a moment, “Ah! I haven’t seen you since you came by to drop off rice cakes! Ah.. when was that?”
“Last year.”
“Ah, yes, the other young man who used to live here left around that time. I remember. It’s good to see you again.” The old man reminisced, piecing together various memories to bring back the ones he needed, “It’s Kim Dokja, isn’t it?”
Other young man? Kim Dokja? Yoo Joonghyuk thought curiously. It was the first time he had heard about such a man, especially one with a name like that. He hadn’t even spoken the name out loud, but it felt warm on his tongue.
Yoo Joonghyuk corrected, unintentionally stern, “My name isn’t Kim Dokja.”
“It’s not?” Quietly, his neighbor thought for a while, looking askance. His eyes gradually welled up with a shade of shame, “Yoo Joonghyuk, was it? Sorry, you’ll have to forgive me.”
“It’s fine.” Yoo Joonghyuk nodded. Instead of asking questions about this mystery previous tenant, for now, he continued, “Are you free to check on my lock, ahjussi?”
Laughing, Yoo Joonghyuk’s neighbor exclaimed, “I’m too old for an address like that! Now, I just have to come over and check it out for you. One second, let me grab my tools.”
It wasn’t the effect Yoo Joonghyuk was going for, since he was just trying to be slightly polite, but he wasn’t complaining. The old man ducked back into his apartment, and Yoo Joonghyuk waited outside again. Once the old man emerged, Yoo Joonghyuk let his neighbor get to work with a succinct nod as he headed inside his own home to do the rest of his inspections.
In the small apartment he shared with his little sister, a wonderful but unnecessarily snarky girl, there was only room for a table shoved right behind a kitchen counter and a ripped couch that faced a cathode ray TV. When you turned the electronic on, you’d find it was old enough to have developed wrinkles in the form of thin, neon purple lines burned onto its surface.
Overall, it was a dilapidated space, and any robber would definitely rather rob a yard sale than their apartment.
There were also the doors to the bathroom and bedroom, but Yoo Joonghyuk doubted there would be any home intruder bold enough to stay in either room. Was there? Fixing his sister’s homework was definitely overly familiar, so maybe the intruder really was mentally deranged enough to hide out in the private rooms of their house. Yoo Joonghyuk gave a full-body shudder, glaring at the off-white wall housing two closed doors.
Yoo Mia occasionally walked out of their shared room to grab water or snacks, eyeing her brother and getting increasingly worried. Skipping work? Yoo Joonghyuk? He was definitely coming down with something. She went back to the kitchen to grab another glass and left it in Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand, pumping her fist and giving him a look of genuine encouragement.
Yoo Joonghyuk repeated in his head, mostly for himself, it’s for her own good.
He decided he’d leave the two doors open for the night and station himself in the kitchen. It would have been nice to use his day off to catch up on some sleep, but sadly, he’d be spending the night like a cop spying on a drug trade by the docks. As he made his future plans, he grabbed an unopened box of canned nuts from an overhead kitchen cabinet and slipped it into his pocket, a little something to give to his neighbor for troubling him on a Saturday.
Suddenly, a gravelly voice called out from outside, “Yoo Joonghyuk?”
Yoo Joonghyuk stood up and walked to his door, greeting the old man who had set all his tools down. The elderly man smoothed back his meager hair and perplexedly shook his head.
“It looks fine.” He deduced, twisting the doorknob twice to watch the latch bolt piston in and out, “Young people like you always work too hard, and it makes you lot paranoid. Listen to this old man and live a little slower, okay?”
Yoo Joonghyuk was just as confused, but quietly nodded his head, “I’ll try.”
The old man shook his head exasperatedly before coming back to the lock, “Everything's in its place. These doors are the only good things about these apartments, solid and not thin at all.”
“I see.” Yoo Joonghyuk monotonously agreed, pulling out the earlier gift he’d prepared, “Thank you for your help. Please accept this.”
Once again, the elder man’s wrinkles smoothed out briefly, as if to make way for the deep smile lines that grew deeper at Yoo Joonghyuk’s gesture.
“I’ll savor these well, Dokja-yah.” The old man thanked.
That name again. The old man says it like that 'Kim Dokja' never left. Yoo Joonghyuk irritatingly observed.
If tonight's stakeout bore no fruit, his next course of action was to collect information on this Kim Dokja. Furthermore, if he had left due to the same problem as Yoo Joonghyuk, then maybe with two testimonies, they could work together temporarily to sort the issue out legally. Before Yoo Joonghyuk got caught up in his musings, he corrected the old man again.
“It’s Yoo Joonghyuk.”
The old man rubbed his forehead, squeezing his eyes open and shut, “This brain of mine!” He sighed to steady himself and smiled, “Thank you, Joonghyuk-ah.”
The gifter himself didn’t know when they became close enough to earn that unexpected endearment, but he suppressed an unamused raised eyebrow.
As his neighbor headed back to his own apartment, Yoo Joonghyuk grew steadier in his resolve to weather the night. That man might be next. In no way was Yoo Joonghyuk an overly righteous person, but his neighbor had done right by him. He couldn’t let a psycho taint another resident in his apartment block.
One awkward, leftover-filled dinner later, Yoo Joonghyuk sent Yoo Mia to bed and leaned on the kitchen counter with his arms crossed, a broom in the crook of his elbow. Internally, Yoo Joonghyuk hoped everything would end tonight.
Unbeknownst to him, the pencil on the dining table trembled and lifted itself, teetered on an edge, and rolled over.
-
The luminescent microwave read 1:30 in the morning. The rhythmic blinking of the colon between the clock’s numbers almost lulled Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes closed, but he fought to stay awake, gritting his teeth and glaring in another direction. Now focusing on the corner of the dining table, Yoo Joonghyuk continued to wait in silence, the picture of discipline and determination.
His apartment was now shadowed in a dull greyscale, only a select few places lit up by moonlight that filtered in through the living room window’s curtain. In an environment like this, anyone would assume the entire city to be asleep. Yoo Joonghyuk knew better. In a city like Seoul, there was no telling what kind of events were taking place on its advert-filled, sleepless streets.
Apart from a stray cat running across the windowsill, there was no movement except for Yoo Joonghyuk’s steady breathing for the entire night. Was he mistaken? He once experimented with the idea of a classmate of Yoo Mia’s being the one to write the notes, and it was steadily becoming more plausible the longer the stagnant night dragged on.
After some thought, Yoo Joonghyuk threw the idea out. She was right, at a parent-teacher conference, Yoo Mia’s teacher had expressed many concerns. Grades, behavior, and above all, her lack of companions. It concerned Yoo Joonghyuk to no end, and it pained him now to use that as a rationale for the notes not coming from a friend. Regardless, it was true, and the most credible hypothesis of a potential intruder remained.
Yoo Mia’s homework was still bunched up in the far corner of the dining table, along with the offending sheet that held evidence of a potential person preying on his younger sister. An illusory vein bulged in his forehead at the idea.
He wanted to read it over again, but there was no light and his phone was in the bedroom, charging on a bedside table. It had to be sufficiently charged if Yoo Joonghyuk was to call the police after knocking the trespasser out with his trusty broom.
Determined to keep the lights off, Yoo Joonghyuk slowly sneaked off to the bathroom, broom reared up in case he met the hypothetical unsavory visitor. He met no such person as he crouched down to sift through the sink cabinet for a flashlight. Now that he thought about it —weighing the object in his hands— this was a much more effective weapon.
Laying his broom against the sink counter, Yoo Joonghyuk slowly got up from his crouched position and quietly left the bathroom. His heart sank into his chest and beat incessantly there, causing acid to run his throat dry. There, poring over his sister’s homework on the table, was a man. A scrawny man with thin shoulders, clothed in a frumpy suit, but all those details were negligible.
Yoo Joonghyuk’s grip tightened on his flashlight, and he stalked forward. The intruder was lucky he hadn’t turned around yet; the sheer malice coating Yoo Joonghyuk’s eyes was enough to turn any lesser man to stone. No matter how quiet Yoo Joonghyuk made his steps, they echoed loudly in his ear over his pounding heartbeat.
How the hell did he get in? What does he think he’s doing? Is Mia alright?
His last question made countless possibilities flash in his mind in time with his quickening heartbeat. His sister being taken away, his sister in danger, his sister…
Dead. This bastard could kill her.
By the time Yoo Jonghyuk loomed behind the man, who was busying himself with writing his dastardly little notes, his joints had gone stiff with rage thickened by horror. His widened eyes could just about make out some angular words written on a paper’s title margin, visible over the bastard’s shoulder.
“Keep it up, Mia-yah! Proud of your whole letter-grade improvement!”
For the second time that day, Yoo Joonghyuk’s blood ran cold. She’d told him about that during breakfast earlier that week. How could this man have known? The invader’s presence grew three times larger in that moment, obstructive and disgusting.
Stiffly, Yoo Joonghyuk raised his arm. He had to control himself; if he struck too hard, the trespasser would surely die. In Yoo Joonghyuk’s heart of hearts, that was what he wanted. Death and a lifetime in hell for this bastard.
Yoo Joonghyuk counted down.
Three, the stranger adjusted his grip on the pencil, curiously unable to keep it in his hands unless he did so.
Two, and Yoo Joonghyuk held his breath, eyes widened with feelings impossible to pick apart but strong enough to urge him to cave this man’s skull in.
One, and the stranger dropped the pencil, finally noticing the furious shadow encroaching on him.
There might have been a gasp coming from the intruder’s slimy mouth, but Yoo Joonghyuk could hear nothing over the sounds of his body all screaming to bring the flashlight down on its target.
Yoo Joonghyuk inhaled sharply and darted a hand up to meet the one grasping the flashlight’s handle, the ridges digging into his skin and wafting a metallic smell to his nose. Instantaneously, it streaked down to strike the stranger’s head… then his neck, then his chest?
“Huh?”
It was hard to tell who made the noise first. All Yoo Joonghyuk could see was his flashlight piercing through the intruder’s back. The fabric around the metal spread out in misty tendrils, weaving through the handle and Yoo Joonghyuk’s hand. Belatedly, Yoo Joonghyuk recognized the sensation. It was the same one from yesterday, akin to cold fingers ghosting across his shoulder.
In silent horror, Yoo Joonghyuk watched the stranger turn around. His flashlight stayed in the same spot and ripped through the man’s body like a rock diverging a stream layered with fog. The mist reached out towards him, but Yoo Joonghyuk couldn’t move, only able to trail his eyes up to meet a faded tie and a high collar.
Finally, his eyes flicked up to the other man’s face, and he just barely pulled away, the flashlight now half stuck in the person’s tie. It was a face that suggested there were features to be seen, but they kept themselves nondescript. Even though the face couldn’t tell one much, it wasn’t hard to take away the confusion from the stranger’s body language, however.
Yoo Joonghyuk followed his target with his eyes as the other man glanced down at the ‘weapon’ in his chest, then at Yoo Joonghyuk, then back down at the weapon.
Tentatively, the stranger brought his gaze back up to Yoo Joonghyuk’s stunned face. A whole beat passed before he put up his hands in mock surrender and awkwardly screamed, “Ahhh? It…hurts?”
Yoo Joonghyuk’s arms flopped down to his side while he stared at the hole in the stranger’s chest as it was patched up by countless, crisscrossing cloudy lines that grew from the skin within.
He mindlessly, hoarsely asked, “Who-” He sputtered, “ What are you?”
“I guess…” The stranger stalled, appearing to genuinely wonder how he should answer, “I don’t know much about folktales, but the closest I can think of is a gwisin?”
“A gwisin.” Yoo Joonghyuk echoed, still stuck in his high-strung stance.
“A gwisin. ” The ‘ gwisin’ echoed back wryly. He tilted his head, letting his hair fall over his face and be lost to the miasma that covered his features.
Somehow, Yoo Joonghyuk didn’t drop the flashlight in his hands, no matter how much disbelief accumulated in his body. Instead, he robotically straightened up and stared at the ‘person’ in front of him. Their body became steadily translucent and began to take on a bluer hue. There were no longer any doubts in Yoo Joonghyuk’s mind.
“Yoo Joonghyuk,”
A ghost haunted his apartment, and the ghost called out his name with such comfortable familiarity that Yoo Joonghyuk almost found nothing wrong with it.
“Nice to finally meet you.”