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When Shin-Hye was five, she stopped being Yoo Shin-Hye and started being Han Mi-Cha. A little on the nose, in her honest opinion, but she can count on one hand the times her honest opinion ever mattered to anyone.
It had been confusing at the start, sure, but she’d acclimated fairly quickly. Maybe there’d been a few stumbles in the early days, a few half-embarrassing delayed responses during roll call in school, but it was nothing that she couldn’t get the hang of. Han was her mother’s family name, after all, so at least that part wasn’t new. She could handle it. Her name wasn’t exactly the most painful loss she’d had to endure.
And then she turned eleven, and one night she found herself sat on the bathroom floor again holding her mother’s hair back for her as she puked and puked and puked into the toilet bowl again, and she realized she shouldn’t have been made to endure any of it to begin with.
It had been like a little act of rebellion, choosing to keep calling herself Yoo Shin-Hye in her head, something quiet and private and unequivocally hers no matter how far away her mother tried to drag her from herself. It had taken her this long to realize she would probably never see the people who called her it ever again, hard as her mother tried to scrub any and all traces of them from their new lives, so Shin-Hye swallowed down the guilt of defiance and decided right then that she would cling to at least this small piece of her past with everything she had. If the rest of it was entirely out of reach, she would hold on tight to her name and never let it go, no matter who the rest of the world saw her as.
If she ever saw Shin-Ae again, her sister would know exactly what to call her.
It’s almost like a tether, she thinks, to keep herself within reach. When she thinks about who she truly is, under the countless quick-change personalities and roles, she doesn’t think Han Mi-Cha, only daughter. She thinks Here lies Yoo Shin-Hye, exiled eldest, beloved by one.
But private conviction doesn’t a legal identity make, so. Han Mi-Cha it is. It’s the name printed on her ID card (the real one, at least), the name at the top of every report card and disciplinary note that never made it back to the studio flat, the name she had written on every nametag at every part-time job before she realized pseudonyms were so much more fun (and, later, that they made keeping a low profile so much easier), the name she’d given Yu Jing as a show of trust that had only worked half as well as she expected but still well enough. For all intents and purposes, Han Mi-Cha is her name, and it is not a pseudonym.
Yet it’s not that name, nor is it another pseudonym, that flashes in her mind when Hirahara Kousuke finally, after the fifth (fifth!) time he requests her services, realizes it’s actually rather rude to not know the name of the woman who acts as both your semiregular cleaning lady and the impromptu audience to your one-man tragedy. He’s sat at his kitchen table, slumped over the wood and resting his head on his forearm. The collar of the same shirt he was wearing when she was last here three days ago rests loose and messy around his collarbone from where he’d presumably been pulling at it and stretched the fabric, like he’d tried and failed and given up taking it off. What a mess, she’d thought to herself that first night, with his paranoid thinly-veiled threat still ringing in her ears and her wrist still thrumming where he’d gripped it through the rubber glove, and she thinks it again now.
From where she’s doing the dishes, if she turns her head just so, she can see him loll his head towards her out of the corner of her eye, and it takes her a second to process the words, “Your name. I don’t recall having caught it,” through the scratchiness that takes over one’s throat after not speaking for seventy-two hours and less than half a glass of water meanwhile.
She hums, shaking out the dish brush with one hand as she rinses the suds off the glass she just got done washing with the other. (“The dishwasher does work, you know,” he’d informed her the first time he watched her pull on a pair of rubber gloves and make for the sink. “Everything in this apartment serves a purpose, and serves it well.” He’d worded it in a way she knew in her bones would lead to some maudlin-as-all-hell comment, so the subsequent, “One might think me out of place,” hadn’t even surprised her, but good God. If he’s this exhausting all the time, no wonder she’s the only one ever coming around.) “Funny. I don’t recall having given it.”
He glares at her. He’s always glaring at something, when he’s not too busy crying to muster up a sneer. It doesn’t faze her, nor does her objectively unprofessional answer. If he were going to fire her, he’d have done it the third time she was here, when he tried snapping at her for not moving his ridiculously expensive half-eaten Wuber-Eats order from the floor where he’d put it, only for her to snap right back before she could stop herself and tell him he should know to watch where he steps in his own damn penthouse. All he’d done was glare at her for a moment before rolling back over into the couch, grumbling at her to bring over a paper towel roll so he could wipe the chutney from his foot, and she’d released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and realized she could get away with a lot more in this apartment than she thought.
This is how it’d started: “I’m not the right person to ask about mothers.”
Shin-Hye still doesn’t know why she said it, but once she got going she’d found it hard to stop. “Or any parental figure for that matter.” Stop. “I’ve had to fend for myself for as long as I remember.” Stop that. “With how things were, I would be no different from any orphan. Fatherless. Motherless.” What the fuck are you doing??
The first step in Shin-Hye’s plan to infiltrate Hirahara Kousuke’s apartment, after getting ahold of the address, had decidedly not been to spill her guts to a stranger she knew slightly more about than the average stranger. It hadn’t even been to nick some poor unsuspecting housekeeper’s uniform, or figure out a way to relieve a janitor’s closet of its cleaning cart (as was almost always the case, the easiest way to avoid suspicion was to act like whatever you were taking was already yours). It had been to research everything she could about the housekeeping company employed by the River Street Hotel— operating hours, rates, the fucking year it’d been founded and the names of every CEO it’d had in the last fifteen years, just in case. The name of the person in charge of handling and scheduling (a Miss Lee Nayeon) and her tone of voice (nauseatingly bubbly) and the exact words of the message she’d left on the answering machine (Thank you for choosing Imperial Commercial Cleaning! We’re delighted to help make your living space sparkle like new! At the tone, please provide us with your name, phone number, and the service you are requesting, and a representative will return your call shortly to schedule a session. For corporate contracts, please refer to the Contact Us section of our website and call the number for our legal consultant. Have a beautiful day!).
The second step in her plan had been to change the outgoing message for her own voicemail box to the very same spiel, nauseatingly bubbly tone and all. It wasn’t as though anyone but Yu Jing had her new phone number anyway, and Shin-Hye never let the woman go to voicemail in the first place. She’d put her own number at the top of the fake invoice sheet she’d printed out in advance and left on Hirahara Kousuke’s newly-cleared coffee table before slipping out the door. It was, in retrospect, a bit of a gamble, because it would’ve been completely worthless if Hirahara Kousuke happened to have the housekeeping company’s real number in his phone, or if his reputation-preceding assistant did actually decide to hire a cleaning service, but it was a risk Shin-Hye had been willing to take. If all went as planned, and the man somehow found it in himself to request Imperial’s services again, it would be Shin-Hye who got the call, and it would be Shin-Hye who showed up.
So when she saw the new message in her voicemail box a few days later from an unknown number she already knew, there’d been the telltale rush of exhilaration of a plan falling into place, and she’d let a pleasantly surprised little smile make its way onto her face. When she put the phone to her ear and heard Hirahara Kousuke’s inebriated drawl stumble his way through asking specifically for the young woman with the sister, the smile froze itself in place.
Shin-Hye likes to think things out in paths.
Path one: Hirahara Kousuke had caught on to the fact that Shin-Hye was no cleaning lady, and was attempting to draw her back to his apartment to catch her in the lie. From there, Shin-Hye would be walking straight into his trap if she decided to return, and from there the path branched out again: either she’d manage to talk her way out of the confrontation, or she wouldn’t. And from there: either Hirahara Kousuke would attempt to contact the authorities, and her attempt to stop him would only serve to dig her own grave deeper, or he… wouldn’t care. She didn’t like either of those odds, for their plausibility or lack thereof.
Path two: Hirahara Kousuke wanted Shin-Hye to return for another reason entirely. And she could scratch cleaning off the list almost immediately, because they both knew she’d done a pathetic job. But what?
You know what’s something I swore I’d never say out loud? This stays between us. Well.
As unlike her as it had been, she guesses her display of vulnerability hadn’t been entirely useless. It’d certainly gotten him to talk, even if it had just been a pitiful and long-winded tirade of regret soaked in whiskey, the world’s shittiest marinate. At least her suspicions about the role he’d played in the kid’s current circumstances have been more or less confirmed— though that information is really only of any interest to Yu Jing, and Yu Jing isn’t exactly aware of these late-night excursions of Shin-Hye’s to begin with. (And it may have been of interest to Yu Jing, but to Shin-Hye all it had been was pathetic, empty grief, a eulogy for a brother who was still alive, and given the choice she’d have preferred to hear it, hear anything, from someone she could respect on some level, not some overgrown child lamenting the loss of a relationship he’d personally destroyed who couldn’t even deign to be sober for it, and she was grateful that the mask on her face hid her clenched jaw as well as her identity, because she may not be making much headway with regards to her own family matters but at least she’s fucking trying—)
It’d won her a second chance at gathering the info she needed (because one night of a madman’s drunken ramblings and some amateur snapshots of a handful of bank statements stashed in his bedside drawer had not been nearly enough to indict anybody, and no one owns two separate phones if they have nothing to hide), because it’d gotten him to invite her back. Shin-Hye knows how effective it can be to give an inch when you’re looking for a mile. She’s used vulnerability to her advantage to get people to play right into her hand more times than she can count, so it’s not as though Hirahara Kousuke’s reaction that first night had been all that shocking. It’s just… well. What she’d given didn’t need to be true. It unsettled her deeply that it had been.
So the second time she crossed the threshold of Hirahara Kousuke’s apartment, she was even more careful. She smoothed out his bedsheets and fluffed up his pillows and unscrewed the grates over the air vents with her jackknife and screwed them back on when she failed to find anything hidden inside, and when she made her way back to the living room he was still in the same spot she’d left him, lying on the couch with his blanket hanging off one knee and an arm thrown over his eyes. When he heard her approach, he’d asked did you tell anyone? with half the panicked paranoia of got it?, and she’d let the practiced I’ve had my trust broken before. Your secrets are safe with me flow like water from behind her mask, and he’d pulled his arm away to peer at her and she’d thought she had him.
But the look in his eyes. She’d only been there twice and she was already familiar with it (Shin-Ae Yoo. Does that name ring a bell?). Not enough, she realized. He wasn’t buying it.
That’s the only reason she kept talking. “I told you I’ve been on my own this long, didn’t I? I don’t have anyone to tell.”
And the look, after a few seconds more of staring at something deep in the center of her, fell away with a slow sigh and a mumbled reminder about the dirty dishes in the sink, and as she watched the soapy water circle the drain she ignored the feeling of rawness and turned the failure into a new plan: if his misery longed for company, she’d provide it. If he wanted honesty, she’d make sure she got more than she gave.
What Shin-Hye has gotten: Hirahara Kousuke’s father stepped into his position relatively quickly, and previous CEO Kim abdicated relatively quietly (despite reports of significant sanctions and repossession of his assets after he’d been sentenced). I don’t think Father will want to look at me ever again. He “barely recalls” the incident that put his brother in the Hirahara Mental Health Institute six years ago, only sitting on the curb in a shock blanket and watching him leave as he was taken away. I will be watching him leave for the rest of my life. His mother met with the Hirahara Corp representatives in Japan the week prior to his being granted the offer to run the sister location (a trip that received zero news coverage, despite the media’s usual fascination with Hirahara Yui). This entire time, she… And he tried to tell me, and I… All of his university friends cut ties with him following the sexual assault case in 20YY and the victim’s subsequent suicide (even the more well-to-do ones, from families with substantial prior dealings with the company). All of his university friends agree he’s beyond saving. All of them would be correct.
What Shin-Hye has given: she got into her own share of trouble, when she was younger, and has seen her own fair share of juvie. Can’t say it was ever the Ritz, but. Sometimes it felt better than home. She’s familiar, if secondhand, with long-term substance abuse. If it’s any consolation, you’re among the more put-together potential addicts I’ve come across. Though that’s not saying much. She’s a child of divorce, and was estranged from her sister when they were very young, and has never had enough people around her to agree she was beyond anything in the first place. I don’t think I know how not to be on my own. (He takes a breath when she says this, hesitates, then goes, “I don’t think I’ll survive it.”)
She’s sacrificed much, much less than Hirahara Kousuke has. The ball remains in her court, the game going exactly the way she wants it to. That the feeling of rawness has only grown more raw is irrelevant.
(But the reality is she hadn’t been playing any games that first night when she told him that she does what she can for her sister from afar, that she would get through to her no matter how long it took. It had been more an act of spite than anything, because all she could think was at least I’m trying to save her. At least I’m doing something other than drinking myself to death in the gilded cage I built around me.
It’s wildly unfair, but, well. Fairness has always been a bit of a foreign concept to Shin-Hye, hasn't it?
We’re not that much different. She can’t help but cringe to herself every time she thinks about it.)
Anyone else in Hirahara Kousuke’s tax bracket would have fired Shin-Hye on day one, after she’d asked a suspicious amount of questions about how to do the job she’d supposedly been trained to do, but he hadn’t. She’d suspected a desperation for someone to talk at after the first voicemail, but she thinks she understands something about him better now. It’s like he finds more comfort than he’d like in being challenged by someone’s personality instead of something like a stupid crossword, so different from his every whim being catered to or decided for him in advance. His whims, when he’s given agency, seem to be to glare and glare and glare some more, and to keep paying her specifically to clear his empty bottles from the coffee table and listen to him grovel and cry at nobody’s feet when the mood strikes him, which is often. To bare his soul. Shin-Hye wonders, idly, how starved for attention one has to be to be physically unable to stop themself from baring it.
That seems to be part of it as well, that she isn’t anyone special. She’s only borne witness to this level of patheticness from a handful of people, but they all have that same ridiculous iron grip on the last vestiges of their pride, too stubborn to ask for help and too desperate for compassion to keep from making cries for it anyway. Hirahara Kousuke requests her, and her alone, because the only thing worse than letting someone watch as you waste away at rock bottom is wasting away alone— or worse yet, someone watching you whose opinion you actually value.
(She remembers the barely-a-scandal from about a month ago, before it’d been almost entirely scrubbed from the internet— KOUSUKE HIRAHARA IS A MESS, as WMZ had so tastefully put it. She’s watched the scene unfold from a frankly excessive number of angles, caught on camera by everyone within earshot the second his name rippled through the crowd like a pebble into stillwater, or a cannonball: the heir to the Hirahara Corporation making a spectacle of himself by harassing some rando who’d been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shin-Hye’d off-handedly asked Yu Jing about it the night after, and the woman merely huffed a laugh into her cup of espresso and said, “He used to hold his liquor better,” without even looking up from her tablet.
There’d been hundreds of posts, but only one video had caught the moments leading up to the scene that made the most rounds on social media. Hirahara Kousuke’s own words were inaudible, and his back had been to the filmer, rendering lip-reading impossible— for the heir, at least. The stranger’s face had been all too clear, and maybe anyone who’d only learned there was a second Hirahara son when news of that goddamned disaster of a formal broke the Internet would’ve assumed he’d said no? Who’s that? But Shin-Hye has known about the second Hirahara son for longer than that, and she knows that hadn’t been a no.
She’s never met a sober Hirahara Kousuke, not personally, but when he’s too inebriated for inhibitions there’s only one person whose opinion truly matters to him, and it sure as hell isn’t her.)
“For someone employed in hospitality, you are awfully impolite,” Hirahara Kousuke sniffs, bringing Shin-Hye back to the present. The hand not trapped under the weight of his head, the one immobilized by the brace, fiddles with his empty glass. He tips it onto its edge and twirls it around and around, the heavy crystal making a soothing sort of drone as he rolls it against the wood, and combined with the steady white noise of the running sink it makes Shin-Hye stifle a yawn under her mask. Then it stops, and there’s a sharp clink as Hirahara Kousuke lets gravity right the cup flat on the table. “Though I suppose I’m in no position to talk about manners.”
Shin-Hye tries not to roll her eyes, she really does, but there’s only so much of this directionless Napoleon complex she can stomach, and her back is already to him anyway. The subsequent sarcastic, “Self-deprecation. Aren’t you full of surprises?” she tries keeping in as well with the same amount of success, which is absolutely none.
Hirahara Kousuke only clicks his tongue in irritation. “Funny,” he bites, but he’s hammered and half-asleep so it’s more of a grumble than a bite. “You are as witty as you are efficient.”
He’d apologized to her that first night for his rudeness, expressed remorse for his assumption that she simply must be poor if she’s working as a cleaning lady (he’d been half-right, in any case) and acknowledged having had no right to assume it. That remorse, it seems, had up and left him entirely along with everyone else in his life, because he’s been nothing but a bitch every other time Shin-Hye has been here. It seems no amount of top-shelf liquor is enough to wash away the snark that lives on the tip of his tongue. She’s not entirely used to someone acting the same way drunk as they do sober— which, really, isn’t what’s happening here either, but she’s not accounting for Hirahara Kousuke’s habit of oversharing in her analysis of his personality— and she can admit that that uniformity makes her skin crawl slightly less at the smell of liquor than it usually does. She’s certainly had her fill of liars.
She huffs out a dry laugh at the comeback. “Yeah, yeah. You know, you could start by getting yourself there,” she suggests idly, picking at a particularly stubborn spot on the plate in her hand with the edge of the brush and probably scratching up the porcelain. She doesn’t care. “In position, I mean. People generally introduce themselves first, instead of assuming everyone in the room already knows their name.”
Hirahara Kousuke takes a moment to process Shin-Hye’s words and remember what they had been talking about, then scoffs at the notion. Shin-Hye rolls her eyes again. So much for manners. “I can’t remember the last time it was properly necessary to give someone my name.” He says it like it’s only obvious, but she watches out of the corner of her eye as he blinks at his own words, like he only just realized how strange it is that they’re the truth. He frowns at the glass in drunken confusion. “Everyone usually… says it first.”
Funny. Shin-Hye can’t remember the last time someone said hers.
She grabs another dirty dish from the pile soaking in the stainless steel sink. It’s heavy and solid, glazed in some sort of stain-resistant lacquer that makes it gleam under the running water, so different from cheap cornerstone china that bounces when it hits the ground instead of shattering. The detergent smells pleasantly crisp, hints of eucalyptus snaking their way under her mask, so unlike the sickly sweet watery dishsoap that always left her hands tacky, the kind her mother would buy in bulk so they wouldn’t have to worry about reusing plates on months where they couldn’t so much as make the rent. Perhaps not the best use of their cash, but it was important to her mother to keep up appearances and dignity in at least some aspects, even the inconsequential ones. Especially the inconsequential ones, depending on who you asked.
Prodigal conglomerate heir Hirahara Kousuke. Star investigative journalist Yu Jing. It boggles Shin-Hye’s mind, sometimes, the company she’s found herself keeping as of late.
Sometimes she thinks she may be in a bit over her head in her mission to keep Shin-Ae safe. It’s not doubt in her conviction, never her conviction— but sometimes, when she’s pretending to pore over old newspaper clippings on Yu Jing’s couch, or slipping blood samples into the pockets of her stolen scrubs, or scratching up Hirahara Kousuke’s fine china and bantering with him about congeniality, she’ll ask herself what is this? What the fuck am I doing here? She’s no stranger to casual delinquency, sure, but there’s recreational shoplifting and run-of-the-mill breaking and entering, and then there’s full-blown espionage. Is all this peril truly the only road to saving Shin-Ae? Is this tightrope walk, fire on all sides and no net to catch her should she fall, necessary to get her sister out of the circus?
When Shin-Hye tries seeing herself through the eyes of a third party, someone on the outside looking in, she knows how it all must appear. Some would call it excessive, or needlessly risky, or flat-out stupid to throw herself in the line of fire just to try and pull someone else out of it, and who knows? Maybe some would have a point. But Shin-Hye is not on the outside. She is very much in. “Necessary” has nothing to do with it— she will do whatever it takes to protect her little sister from the worst the world has to offer.
Throwing herself into the line of fire for Shin-Ae has been her job since she was two years old. She has more than enough lost time to make up for.
She’s not in Hirahara Kousuke’s apartment because he may reveal the key to taking down Hirahara Corp and getting justice for every last victim of its tar-black evil. She’s not here to report back to Yu Jing, who’d… let slip to someone over the phone that the timeline had moved up, that the kid was in jail earlier than expected and little miss Yamazaki might have a few things to say about it. Shin-Hye’s here for one reason— the only reason that has ever mattered to her.
There is nothing to Yoo Shin-Hye, if not her conviction.
She puts the final plate on the drying rack, sets the dishrag down in a crumpled heap next to the sink, and makes towards the dining table Hirahara Kousuke is still sprawled across. She pulls out a chair, sudsy gloves dripping dishsoap down the back of it, and settles into the seat across from him. Her eyes follow the mindless patterns his fingers draw in the wood, his eyelids drooping and his breathing measured and slow. He’s mere minutes from falling asleep, Shin-Hye can sense it (and there are worse positions to pass out drunk in, for sure, but not many). She sits in silence and watches for the telltale final sigh before he slips into unconsciousness.
And all of a sudden her stomach swoops with something like dread, a little voice telling her she cannot let this ridiculous conversation fizzle out here.
Why not? Why the hell not? What’s with the acute spike in adrenaline, with the new tension in her shoulders and the stutter of her pulse? Is it the idea of not getting this stupid point across? Failing to teach him what a proper introduction looks like, to impart some lesson about polite company on a rich boy whose vomit she’s wiped off his tiles? Whose entire relationship with her is decidedly not founded in any semblance of politeness?
And you should know to watch where you step in your own damn penthouse.
She really hadn’t meant to say that. It gets harder and harder every day she’s here to filter her words before they leave her mouth in a horrifyingly true representation of her own internal monologue. For some reason, Shin-Hye’s been finding it more and more challenging lately to keep herself from being herself. It is an unbelievably dangerous realization to come to. It has been too long to remember how herself interacts with people, and every instance comes as a surprise.
It’s only a matter of time before herself says something she isn’t supposed to say, and everything goes to complete and utter dogshit.
(But it’s starting to come back to her. She’s quick to bite, and that isn’t new. She has a habit of finding the wrong things funny, and a hard time keeping a smile off of her face when she does, and none of that is new either. Bits and pieces of personality have begun to push up through the six feet of conviction, daisies and dandelions decorating the grave of Yoo Shin-Hye, exiled eldest, beloved by one.)
Hirahara Kousuke’s eyes have fallen shut. Let them. Let them fall shut. Let him fall asleep. Can’t fuck up if he can’t hear you do it.
Your name. I don’t recall having caught it.
The last time Shin-Hye had said her name out loud had been a little under a month ago, leaning her forehead against the locked door of a tiny bathroom with a throbbing hot ear and a heart that was straining to lurch out of her chest and phase through the door and all the way through to her sister’s own. She couldn’t have been standing more than five feet away, a slat of wood nothing in the wake of fourteen years. It was the first time she’d said it in just as long.
Had Shin-Ae heard the dry swallow before she opened her mouth? Had she caught the waver in her voice, the anxious pitchiness as the syllables clambered past her lips, foreign and half-new? Shin-Hye had caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the sink right after she’d said it, almost surprised to see a nineteen year-old staring back instead of a child.
It hadn’t been a confession. It hadn’t been anything close to sharing a secret, the deepest, most closely-guarded secret she had ever and would ever keep, the crown jewel in her dragon’s keep— because Shin-Ae had already known it. What reason would she have had to expect Shin-Hye to say anything else? How would she even have known to? There hadn’t been a way for her to find out about the name change. There hadn’t been a way for her to find out anything.
(Shin-Hye forces this train of thought to stop right where it is. Whenever she thinks too hard about what Shin-Ae must have been through these last fourteen years, about how abandoned she must have felt with no one but a drunkard of her own around to try and fail to convince her otherwise, it threatens to saw Shin-Hye straight down the middle, and she cannot— cannot— afford to break before she’s done something to fix it. So much of Shin-Hye’s life has been out of her hands, and she has never blamed herself for the hand she’s been dealt, but if there were one thing she would never forgive herself for it would be wasting time by letting herself fall apart prematurely over the injustice of it all.
Evidently, her philosophy is not shared by present company.)
But sometimes, it feels like sharing secrets is all she does in this penthouse.
It feels like fleas, the sudden, unbearable itch to confess this secret to someone, someone else. Someone with absolutely no idea of the weight behind it, the load each distinct syllable bears, what it means to her to have kept it sewn into every part of her, layers and layers under the skin where no one could see it or say it or take it from her. And, almost deliriously, she thinks: who better than the person who couldn’t give less of a damn, even if he were sober enough to remember it in the morning? What better audience to expose herself to than one who is too caught up in his own melodrama to watch?
She chews on her lip behind the mask, another daisy from years ago she thought she’d outgrown. Would he hear her do it? If she fucked up right now?
Path one: she’s right. He wouldn’t care in the slightest. If he’s even still awake enough to hear her, he’ll give some noncommittal hum at her confession, maybe find the energy to level her with something cynical about how he feels more neighborly already, and this ridiculous lapse in sanity will be over and she’ll be able to go right back to moderately resentful of him and, more importantly, focused on the task at hand.
Path two: she’s wrong. She tells him, and for better or worse, he cares. From there: either the last of his synapses will fire and he’ll make the incredibly obvious connection between one brunette, red-eyed Yoo sister and the other, and despite his insistence that what happens in this unit stays in this unit he’ll bring as close to hell as he can raining down on her, because he’s not been as paranoid around her lately but he was suspicious of her the minute she first stepped foot in his apartment, and he will know he had been right to be all along, and she’ll be taken into custody for unlawful trespass or harassment or whatever trumped-up charge the flush-pocketed authorities manage to cook up to indict someone who dared cross a Hirahara and every last drop of effort she’s poured into saving Shin-Ae will go straight down the drain, Shin-Hye in cuffs and unable to even cup the last of it in her hands and watch it trickle through her fingers. The visual, while haunting in its austerity, does nothing to soothe the itch.
Or… Or. He gets it instead.
…Her imagination comes up short. Somehow, she’s less prepared for his— anyone’s— understanding than she is for abject, calamitous failure. How fucking depressing is that?
Would it be cathartic? Would it make her feel any better at all to let go of at least a fraction of this weight? Or is the secret, like her conviction, all that keeps her upright?
(Is an uncaring audience the best she has to hope for? Is the funeral of Yoo Shin-Hye destined to have only the apathetic in attendance? Will she, for the rest of her life, be the only one who cares this deeply about the corpse of her she lugs around, with a heart that has only just begun to twitch again? Is there no one else who will bother to question why it is twitching?
It occurs to her that, for the first time since she chose to bear this cross at eleven years old, she is thinking about it as a burden instead of a badge of honor.
Do you not have that many people that care about you or what?)
Here lies– “Han Mi-Cha,” she all but whispers, rushed and abrupt, unable to find her voice. Leagues better than the insanely stupid alternative, but she feels like a coward anyway, and the fleas continue to chew.
Hirahara Kousuke is not asleep. He cracks a heavy eye open to peer at her where she hasn’t moved an inch despite her instinct to squirm, more black pupil than blue iris. Shin-Hye has the absurd fleeting thought that she could probably see herself reflected in it if she got close enough. What would she see? What does she look like right now? What does he see? Who fucking cares?!
(What is this relationship founded in?)
And of all the things he could have responded with— like his stupid name, which had been the entire goddamn point of this pointless exercise— he asks, “Is it really?”
(The first day of elementary was the first time Shin-Hye had gone to school and Shin-Ae hadn’t been by her side, even if just to be dropped off at her classroom and have her protests about how she’s not a baby, Shin-Hye and can make it across the hall by myself go ignored. The teacher had been a frail little thing, old as a bat and just about drowning in a frock so colorful it was dizzying to look directly at her, but Shin-Hye was too busy staring at the carpet under her feet and trying not to look like she was missing half of her so it didn’t matter anyway, and the teacher had read out the name Han Mi-Cha four separate times before Shin-Hye realized that was her now, because ‘Yoo Shin-Hye’ was gone and she would never be coming back, and all the other kids had giggled amongst themselves and the teacher had smiled, kind but amused, and said oh dear, you wouldn’t want everyone thinking that pretty little name wasn’t yours, would you? and Shin-Hye knew, she knew she was supposed to be the bigger one and the smarter one and the older one, but in that moment all she wanted was to throw herself onto the ground and kick and wail and scream that’s not my name! That will never be my name! like a baby until she could hear Shin-Ae over the din, clutching at Shin-Hye’s sleeve close to tears herself and begging her to please, please stop crying, or else she’d start crying too, and Shin-Ae always had a knack for knowing what to say to bring Shin-Hye back to her senses. She thought her body would burst with the strength of the desire, with the size of the empty space beside her, so big she thought it would suck her right in and swallow her.)
Shin-Hye is forced to take a second or two to process the words that couldn’t have possibly left Hirahara Kousuke’s mouth just now, because, “Excuse me?! ‘Is it really’ my name?!”
It comes out way too defensive, the words tumbling out of her way too quickly to write off as mere incredulity. She hears just how suspicious she must sound, the shrillness of her tone betraying the existence of the secret underneath it, and she holds back a cringe at the way her too-intense outcry seems to echo around the apartment. She has never, not once in her life, wanted to kick her own teeth in more than she does in this moment.
There is one reason Shin-Hye is here, and it’s a good and goddamn fucking important reason, and she foresaw this and she knew this would happen and still may have just fucked it all up anyway because she couldn’t keep her stupid, stupid mouth shut— and she has never had this much trouble keeping her mouth shut, accredits having survived this long on it, so what is it? What the hell is the problem, then?
She is more mad at herself than at him, she acknowledges. That is part of the problem: she is nowhere near as angry at him, at him calling her a liar, as she should be, and that just makes her angrier, because grace is the one thing she’s always managed to have for herself and Hirahara Kousuke, of all fucking people, is the one making her self-flagelllate? When he’s the one languidly plucking at her lifeline, the one stumbling blind and drunk and careless and knocking over everything she thought she could say with certainty about herself— and okay, now the fury is going where it needs to. She keeps it there, forces it to stay blistering hot like she’s holding her palm over an open flame, because otherwise she’ll start to panic over the fact that she may have just ruined everything she’s spent every waking moment of the last three months working towards in record time. She’d find her efficiency almost impressive, were it not so disastrous.
He blinks once, heavy and slow, before his eyes widen perceptibly and a flicker of awareness lights up his dead face for a fraction of a second, and damnit, damnit, damnit, I hate you— and he turns his gaze back down to the table, clearly— clearly embarrassed? By his response?— and Shin-Hye sits with every muscle in her body tensed and ready. Her bitten nub of a thumbnail scratches hard and fast against the seat of the chair underneath her through the glove, nervous energy desperate for an outlet.
“I don’t know why I said that,” he says, tone suddenly sobered and voice unnaturally quiet and no longer sounding very tired at all. His brow is pinched, more in confusion than misery (though there very much is misery), like his question had left his mouth entirely without his permission. “I don’t— I apologize.” He rubs at his face in an attempt to wake himself up, and when he looks up at her again with that far-away gaze she suppresses a keyed-up flinch. There’s a red mark forming on the right side of his face from where the velcro on his splint had irritated the skin. Shin-Hye can’t help but think it looks a bit like he’s been slapped. “I apologize,” he repeats. “I have no right to accuse you of using a fake name. Nor do I have any reason to care.”
It is nowhere near the reaction she had been expecting. Some defensive posturing, maybe. A paranoid baring of fangs, or perhaps even one of his trademark glares. It would have been somewhat of an uninspired response, certainly, but still further within the realm of plausibility than— than an apology.
Well. That’s not exactly true. The first few visits, it was like he couldn’t get more than three words out before apologizing for having even said them. But those instances had had more to do with unconscious bouts of rudeness (which he has since seemed to stop caring about), more irksome overcorrections in the wake of a much too long-overdue epiphany than they were earnest expressions of remorse for his immediate behavior. This is… quite earnest. Even if it feels like he’s talking to more than just Shin-Hye, Hirahara Kousuke is still very much talking to her. She’s been here enough times, borne witness to enough tears and snot and aimless confessions to an empty booth to know the difference, to discern when Hirahara Kousuke is actually in the room with her and not somewhere else entirely.
But there, just behind the thousand-yard stare, is the look. Whoever he’s talking to alongside her (and she can hazard an educated guess as to who that is), it doesn’t dull his perception. There’s shame, yes, and palpable guilt she doesn’t think she’s ever looked at him and not seen, but he is here in the room and beneath it all there’s the look from the second time Shin-Hye was in this apartment, cold and razor-sharp and knowing— or at the very least, doubtful. Even as he’s saying sorry, he’s doubting whether he even needs to.
And he’d be right to.
(“Okay, fine,” Shin-Hye gives, after an acceptable amount of faux-handwringing, bringing a hand up to pick at a loose thread in the elbow of her jacket to further sell the look of jilted defeat. She averts her gaze from the woman in front of her and looks down at her designer boots instead. They provide a stark contrast to her own beat-up red Converse, and together they make four splashes of color against the black asphalt outside the cafe, where Shin-Ae is currently sitting inside by herself, staring at the table before her lost in thought, waiting for the woman to return. “It’s Han Mi-Cha. Happy?” she ‘admits,’ lowering the volume of her voice in what would sound to an outsider like chagrin, and waits for the woman to bite.
When Yu Jing doesn’t respond immediately, Shin-Hye peeks up at her to find the woman tilting her head slightly to the left, peering at her with an indiscernible squint. For half of a second dread threatens to crack Shin-Hye’s illusion, because she’s done her research, and she knows Yu Jing is at the heart of the web of people Shin-Hye needs intel from— even if, as far as she’s been able to gather, Yu Jing hadn’t been the one to weave it— and this is her one shot at getting an in with the woman, and too much of her plan to save the sister sitting thirty feet and a brick wall away from her hinges on the believability of her social justice sob story and she swears, swears, if she’s forced to waste any more time going back to the drawing board and risk wrecking her one and only chance at making things right again because of her acting skills—
“Alright,” the woman sighs, effortlessly assured even as she’s giving Shin-Hye a win. She glances to the side once before pulling a nondescript black phone from the inner pocket of her coat and flipping it open with a perfectly manicured thumb. “Got a phone number, Mi-Cha?”
Shin-Hye doesn’t let the full-extent of her relief, of the exhilaration of a plan falling into place, show on her expression. She huffs a practiced breath out through her nose and squares her shoulders instead, as if she were breathlessly relieved to be given a chance and dedicated to not letting anyone catch on. “‘Course,” she sniffs, and the very real ebb of panic at least adds to her credibility. “Got an address?”
There is no other emotion to hide.)
When Shin-Hye fails to do anything but stare at him in shock, Hirahara Kousuke lowers his reddening face and lets that shameguiltknowing gaze dart back to the table, half-empty eyes scanning the wood like he’ll find an explanation for his behavior among the whorls. “I apologize,” he repeats, and he sounds like he’s lost. “Whatever your—“ He cuts himself off abruptly, snuffing out the sentence before Shin-Hye can even begin to guess how it would have ended. “It’s. It’s a fine name.”
There’s a silence after that settles over them like smog. Shin-Hye has a genuinely difficult time breathing through it.
Again, there’s something happening here that is completely unrelated to her. Even amidst the cortisol coursing through her veins, she can gather that much. Both of them had overreacted to what really hadn’t been more than an unorthodox response to an unorthodox situation, and Shin-Hye’s been here enough times to deduce not only that much, but also exactly who Hirahara Kousuke must have been reminded of, who else it is he’s also apologizing to. And by all accounts, that shouldn’t matter to her past an investigative standpoint.
And it doesn’t. That’s not even a lie— it’s the problem. She doesn’t care because, regardless of the circumstances, this is the closest anyone— anyone— has ever gotten to exiled eldest, beloved by one without having to be told she was lying there, choking on dirt and blue in the face deep underground, and Shin-Hye must be absolutely fucking ravenous, because oh, she itches—
And then he extends a hand out to her, the one with the brace, and says, “Hirahara Kousuke.”
Silence.
Shin-Hye stares at the cast, yet again at a loss for words, for all of five seconds before he rolls his eyes, annoyance painting over the grief etched into every barely-there line of his face, and goes, “I’d say ‘pleased to meet you,’ but, well. I can’t say it has been much of a pleasure.”
The breath she’d been holding escapes her unexpectedly and she coughs up something halfway like a laugh. God, he is such a bitch. But Shin-Hye already knew that, didn't she? She’s known that for months now, ever since the intercom at the mall called out a name she thought she’d never hear again and she followed the commotion with her heart in her throat to find her sister— her sister— with a man she could just tell was made of money, suggesting she press charges over a spilled soda. He’s been a bitch this whole time, and for some reason Shin-Hye’s fighting off a smile about it.
What is this relationship founded in?
“We need to have a serious talk with whoever let you believe you were a ‘winsome individual,’” slips out before she can stop herself again, without sifting through her repertoire of responses first for the best or right thing to say again, and her stomach gives a lurch like the ground has fallen out from under her because, again, she’s forced to face the fact that this is way too easy.
For the first time she asks herself what is this? What the fuck am I doing here? and can’t come up with an immediate answer, because this stopped being just disguising herself as a cleaning service employee to search the apartment for intel after the first night. This is not one-sided spite, the excuse no less flimsy now than it had been when she first hid behind it. This is not just earning Hirahara Kousuke’s trust, or painting herself as a shoulder for him to cry on, or dragging broken truths from his lips under a pretense of mutual vulnerability until he gives her what she needs to hit the Hiraharas where it hurts, grab Shin-Ae, and get the fuck out of town before they manage to pick themselves back up. So what is it?
Path one: this is the natural, foreseeable outcome to not having to work very hard to manipulate someone for information. She doesn’t put on a mask because she doesn’t have to, because all she needs to be to loosen Hirahara Kousuke’s lips is there. Not her usual modus operandi, but effective all the same.
Path two: this is something more dangerous than that.
Is it really?
All of the homework she’d done before showing up on Hirahara Kousuke’s doorstep hadn’t been what taught her that he, above all else, wants someone to see him. She’d learned that firsthand. We’re not that much different.
And no, he hasn’t seen her. The corpse she lugs from place to place remains resolutely under wraps, unbeknownst even to him— but she’d caught it. That look. The words of his apology may have been imparted on her semi-vicariously, but he’d been looking right at her when the doubt began to creep in.
If nothing else, he’s begun to notice the smell of rot.
“Well, last I checked, lying wasn’t exactly a hallmark of politeness,” he snides back, a semi-satisfied note in his tone along with everything else Shin-Hye hears it holding back, like his behavior is totally normal and not at all weird. He sounds tired. He sounds a left turn from pleased, too.
This is not just saving her sister, not anymore, and that may be the worst of it.
His hand hangs between them still, drooping slightly from the weight of the cast, and when she meets his gaze there’s something like expectation behind his eyes, or something more precarious than that, and she realizes with a start that this, his feeble attempt at salvaging the remnants of their previous conversation by retroactively acting on Shin-Hye’s advice, is what it looks like when Hirahara Kousuke feels bad about how he’s treated you. This is him, against all logic and reason and everything she thought she understood about him, trying to make it up to her.
(It was easier than confronting the real problem. His own words, weren't they? Maybe not everything, then. Old habits, and all that.)
There’s still a not-insignificant amount of dread weighing Shin-Hye’s bones down, but she finds her gloved hand traveling up anyway to reach over the table and shake Hirahara Kousuke’s splint awkwardly, rubber squeaking faintly against velcro. Stop. She takes care not to put too much pressure on the sprain without even intending to take it. Stop that.
The perma-frown on his face grows more pronounced at the drops of gray dishwater that fall from her glove to the wood, but only slightly, because he’s too busy looking at their hands like he’s never seen them before. Maybe, in this context, in a non-professional setting where no one expects a thing from him, he never has.
What the fuck are you doing??
For the first time since she first crossed the threshold of this penthouse there’s nothing incriminating for Shin-Hye to blurt out— in fact, nothing is all there is. Her listless, helpless shrug earns her the look again, but she cannot for the life of her figure out how to convey what she’s feeling in this moment into words.
“Right,” she replies instead, voice barely there, the word coming out as more of a suggestion of speech. “Because you’d know all about that.”
Their hands are nowhere near touching, too-thick layers of rubber and thermoplastic keeping them from feeling so much as the other’s body heat, but. But.
The body at her feet jolts, the dead heart giving yet another twitch. But.
“Names,” Hirahara Kousuke mumbles, abruptly off-topic, and it’s a small and miserable thing. He takes his splinted hand back and sprawls his arm back across the tabletop, leaving Shin-Hye’s own floating frozen above the table as she watches him pull away. He brings his forehead back down to his forearms, apparently over his brief remission from the effects of a bottle of vodka, and doesn’t move much again. “Names, names, names…”
The blistering outrage from moments ago is long gone by now. All that’s left are burns, third-degree and dire. Sunken patches of hypodermis mar her palm and trail up the length of her arm, hidden under the glove.
And they itch.