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the invitation comes in the same, non-descriptive black envelope as the credit card.
his girl is old enough to attend kindergarten by then, and junho has had no need to do any work for a good year, not after the end of the games, not since the money arrived. he has spent the days keeping busy, anyway, mindless tasks that culminate in one big puzzle, how to conjure something that has been blown to bits, how to lay this thing to rest which has gone up in flames. no one remembers, most everyone who had been on that island is dead. kim is the only one who understands but junho knows that he does not appear sane to anyone who might listen to him for longer than five minutes.
too obsessive, after all these years, still.
italy is hot, balmy, humid, the kind of heat that should be familiar when you are from an island and it is all you’ve ever known, but that catches junho off guard anyway. unprepared for the severity of it, he burns as soon as he arrives, shields his face with hats of the baseball teams inho once admired, back when he knew his brother. relics of another time entirely, when they would share the same air, when inho would look at junho with kindness and not with the unreadable gaze of someone gone, entirely lost already.
for as long as junho can think, he has tried to convince himself that his brother is dead. it would have certainly been easier than living with the undying hope and the knowledge of his brother out there, where he cannot find him, somewhere he cannot follow. even the island was not unreachable. junho has spent his entire life chasing inho, and to be forced to stop—maybe that is the lesson.
the villa is secluded, surrounded by high fences and higher hedges, but the gate opens as soon as he is in front of it. a sprawling yard unfolds in front of his eyes, half a kilometer of lush green grass and olive trees, carefully curated, everything impossible evergreen. the front door is painted a deep navy, almost black, and junho wonders, for the first time since he’s got on the plane and left his girl with his mother, if he really should’ve come here. if he shouldn’t turn around and leave, because inho, the last time he saw him, was not the man he grew up with.
the why hasn’t left him yet, has haunted his every waking moment and has followed him into his dreams, too. maybe that is why he is here, why he followed the simple instructions on the familiar piece of paper, why he got on a plane halfway across the world. an answer might be more satisfying than death at this point, more satisfying than the exhausting circles he is running in his own head, over and over.
inho is standing in the doorway like an apparition, framed by the wood like a cliffside by the waves of a deep, dark ocean, blue and black. he looks older, but only from the distance, and once junho is close enough to reach him, within earshot, he thinks that his brother hasn’t changed a bit. he’s the same as always, but the sun suits him at a slant, and his skin is tanned, his eyes kind, and junho wonders, again, how this man who raised him, whom he would know at the ends of this world, could be the same man who stood on that tower and left him without looking back.
“hyung,” he says and inho doesn’t move, not an inch. he wonders if this is just another of his many dreams, those visions that keep haunting him no matter what he does.
“what am i doing here?”
inho turns and doesn’t wait for him to come because they both know better than anyone that junho will always do the thing he does best, the only thing he knows how to do, which is to follow his older brother into the shade of the large, beautiful house, rife with expensive furniture and paintings adorning the wall, his brother creating a life befitting his taste, one that he could have only dreamed of when they grew up and he showed junho operas in languages he could never understand, books with titles too long to comprehend. junho is far from stupid but inho has always been the one who hungered for a life above their meager reality. Existing outside of his station even back when all he had was movies, television shows, books, the works. Manifesting dreams by bloodshed.
evidently.
“junho-yah,” inho says, as familiar as a heartbeat. a voice unchanged by the flow of time and hazy memory. “thank you for coming.”
it is the first thing his brother has said to him in over three years.