Chapter Text
Han Joo Won’s head hurts.
Nauseatingly bright fluorescents hum overhead as he descends into the basement levels of Sucheon Police Station in the outskirts of Seoul. He thumbs the sharp contours of the solid bump behind his left ear and avoids eye contact with two detectives who stare as he shoulders past. Their whispers follow him down the stairwell and through the fireproof doors at the bottom.
The stares. The headache. The slight twinge in his wrist every time he moves his thumb. Joo Won ignores it all. He is definitely not counting down the seconds until he can take another painkiller.
Raised voices reach him through the door to the observation room as he approaches. Joo Won frowns and enters without knocking, silencing the brewing argument between Kwak Oh Sub from Munju Station and a man he doesn’t recognise, who must be the chief of Sucheon Station. Ah. He was warned this case recently changed investigating teams and that Munju is being uncooperative.
Beyond the one way glass, a detective is jabbing at a keyboard as she talks with a sullen man in handcuffs who is slumped deep enough in his seat he has clearly been there a while.
Joo Won squeezes the USB stick in his pocket. “You’ve already started the interrogation?”
The Sucheon chief glares at Joo Won’s lack of greeting, but Kwak Oh Sub merely folds his arms and turns back to the glass.
“Now Neural Analysis shows up,” he mutters. “That’s just great.”
“You were supposed to wait,” says Joo Won. He crosses the room, glares at Sucheon’s chief until he moves out of the way of the computer, then jabs the USB into the port a little clumsily with his left hand.
“Wait?” repeats the chief. “And just how long did you want us to do that? If we don’t get a confession within the next few hours, we have to release him! The victim’s family is already breathing down my neck—her father is on the town council! And the lead inspector from Violent Crimes is dragging her feet handing over the evidence. We’re clutching at straws here.”
“A confession is no longer necessary,” says Joo Won. “There’s enough proof in the arresting officer’s memory to get an arrest warrant. Watch.”
He pulls up the video he spent the past few hours picking over for every scrap of information possible. It’s a memory file, uploaded directly from the neurochip implanted behind the arresting officer’s left ear to the police database, the same way hours of Joo Won’s own memories live somewhere in servers at the National Agency. Hundreds of minute-long snips of his life, capturing violent assaults and attempted thefts and all instrumental in court cases in place of a confession or physical evidence.
These neurochips that allow memories to be stored as video footage are the technological revolution of the decade, although Joo Won is green enough he’s never known the police force without them. His father endorsed them a few years ago, and one of the first places Joo Won went after returning from his exile in England was to a JL Technology lab to have one implanted on his father’s order.
He skips through the memory and pauses on the frame he needs. It’s blurry, caught midway through motion as the officer ordered the suspect out of his car, but beneath the back seat is a clear flash of something purple and shiny.
“The victim’s phone,” says Joo Won, pulling up a photo of the missing teenaged girl to prove his point. In it, she is smiling amongst friends, and in her hands is a phone in a purple case.
“That’s it?” snaps Sucheon’s chief. “You sit on those memory files for days, show up halfway through an interrogation, and that’s all we have to work with?”
Joo Won raises an eyebrow. “If the arresting officer’s partner ever actually submitted his footage for analysis, we could have got a clearer angle. They were supposed to do that within twenty-four hours.”
The chief’s face purples, but before he can say anything, Kwak Oh Sub says, “Hyung” and leans in to whisper in his ear.
Joo Won rolls his eyes and turns to stare through the glass to the interrogation room.
“I don’t care if he’s Han Ki Hwan’s—”
“Hyung,” Kwak Oh Sub snaps, and whispers again.
In the reflection in the glass Joo Won catches the chief’s gaze dropping to the cast on Joo Won’s right hand. There’s a long pause, and then the chief shoves away from Kwak Oh Sub with an angry grunt.
“Neural Analysis is still wasting my time,” he gripes.
“But now we have what we need to get an official arrest warrant, and a warrant to seize the suspect’s own memory chip footage,” says Kwak Oh Sub.
Surprised, Joo Won scans the thin strip of skin visible behind the suspect’s left ear. Just in front of his hairline is a faint circle of unwavering green light.
More people have chips than not in Seoul nowadays—but outside the city in more rural areas uptake is slower. Even in the police force where neurochips are pretty much required for anyone who harbours even the slightest desire for upwards career momentum, uptake in rural substations is low. Their suspect in this case is from a small town about a half hour’s drive from Seoul, so Joo Won wasn’t expecting to get any footage from him.
“Send that over once you secure it,” says Joo Won. “We’ll analyse it as soon as we can.”
The Sucheon chief scoffs at that, but doesn’t comment.
Joo Won’s phone starts to buzz in his pocket.
He digs his nails into his palm as Kwak Oh Sub messages the inspector leading the interrogation. She reads the message, nods gratefully to the one way glass, then wraps up the interrogation as Joo Won’s phone rings on.
She catches Joo Won as he attempts to make a quick escape from the oppressive atmosphere of the station’s basement.
“Officer Han,” she calls. “Nice work.”
She’s an old associate of his from his Foreign Affairs days. Inspector Jang Something-or-other. Not a friend, of course, but their paths crossed often enough Joo Won has no choice but to acknowledge her now.
Joo Won bows with a terse smile. “Likewise,” he says, enduring the politeness, and turns away. In his pocket, the buzzing begins again.
“I heard about what happened,” Jang continues. Joo Won stops walking so abruptly he almost trips over his own feet. “I just wanted to say it’s good to see you back at work, and so soon after everything.”
Joo Won’s right hand twitches, sending a pang of pain down his arm. Despite the weeks that have passed, weakness still lingers in his hand. It keeps him from forgetting.
“You know,” Inspector Jang continues, “I volunteer with the force’s mental health team. We get a lot of people coming in after difficult cases. Just… if you ever needed to talk with someone.”
His skin prickles at the mere thought. This is fast becoming the longest conversation he has ever had with Inspector Jang, and after this excruciating exchange he has very little desire to have any more. His headache is steadily growing worse.
A few weeks—months, not weeks, he needs to remember—ago, he may have snapped at her for making such an assumption about him, but lately he doesn’t have the energy. There are easier ways to antagonise people, anyway. He turns stiffly and bows just a little too low and a little too formally to be polite.
“Thank you, Inspector Jang,” he says, and leaves before she can utter another word.
He can feel the weight of her gaze on his back as he does, hers and Kwak Oh Sub’s and the chief of Sucheon Station’s. Everyone seems to be watching him these days. A side effect of nearly dying, he supposes.
By the nervous way people watch him, you’d think almost being brutally murdered by a serial killer is catching.
It’s not. It’s just some bad luck. A hazard of the job, just one of those things, and Joo Won has already put it behind him. Admittedly, demanding his father use his connections with the CEO of JL Technology to get nearly a year’s worth of memories wiped from his mind probably sped the process up somewhat.
He breaths a sigh of relief as he steps out into the fresh spring air, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his face as he makes his way to the subway station. He loathes the subway, and he’s fairly certain taking it multiple times a day is why his germophobia has been getting steadily worse lately, but he can’t drive with a broken wrist and he refuses to be ferried around like a child.
He’s nearly to the station when his phone starts buzzing again, those droning vibrations that make him flinch every time. His fingers twitch. That’s the third call today after the two in the basement, and he can’t keep ignoring them. Just in case.
But as he suspected, it’s not some important call from a colleague or Kwon Hyuk or his father. It’s the same number as always. The one that calls him multiple times a day, endlessly, despite never receiving an answer. Joo Won never bothered to save the number but by now he’s learnt it by heart.
He shoves his phone back in his pocket, lets it ring out. His muscles don’t relax until the final vibration stops.
The number started calling him the day he woke up in hospital after being attacked, confused and aching and high on a dizzying concoction of painkillers. On that first day Joo Won did actually answer, and when he did a man’s voice said, “Han Joo Won?” and pain lanced through Joo Won’s skull so violently he doubled over, retching. He hung up the call as he coughed and spluttered, and he hasn’t answered since.
He fears the calls have something to do with the months he had wiped from his mind, the months leading up to Joo Won’s near murder.
If they do, he doesn’t want to know.
***
Joo Won never imagined himself working chained to a desk at the National Agency—not until he’s well on his way to chasing his father up the career ladder, anyway. He misses field work, misses the glory of puzzling out the crime and arresting the culprit. But when he woke up in a JL Technology recovery room suddenly thrown nearly a year into the future, and his father told him to forget all his cases because he was being relocated to a desk job for his own safety, he knew better than to argue.
And so here Joo Won is, transferred from his front line job to a windowless office where he clicks through neurochip footage, far enough away from any actual cases even he can’t find a way to get himself traumatised and halfway killed again.
Today, much to Joo Won’s chagrin, his desk is occupied by Kwon Hyuk, who is lounging in the chair while he scrolls through his phone and works permanent creases into his forehead.
Joo Won slams his wallet down on the desk. “What are you doing here?”
Hyuk jumps and nearly drops his phone. “Joo Won-ah. Yah. Where have you been?”
“Working, hyung. Move.”
Hyuk does, vacating the chair to instead perch against the edge of the desk slightly too close to Joo Won’s elbow room for his liking. The angle gives Joo Won a clear view of the faint green glow behind Hyuk’s left ear, the one that matches Joo Won’s own.
“You’re not supposed to be out on cases,” Hyuk says.
Joo Won collapses into his chair. The movement jars his still-healing ribs and he takes a moment to shallowly exhale. “Don’t you have your own cases you should be working on instead of stalking me?”
Hyuk brandishes his phone. “I am working. I’m researching. And besides, that’s different. I’m not recovering from almost dying.”
Joo Won digs a thumb into one of his eye sockets. He really doesn’t owe Hyuk an explanation, but if he doesn’t say anything Hyuk will just tell Han Ki Hwan that Joo Won disobeyed him. Joo Won’s father has not spoken to him since the attack, and he has no desire for a lecture to be the first contact they have in weeks.
“I was delivering evidence to an interrogation, hyung. There was solid glass, several officers, and a pair of handcuffs between me and the suspect. Is that acceptable?” he adds just to be petulant.
“Fine,” says Hyuk, holding his hands up in surrender.
Ignoring him, Joo Won loads up the next case in his queue. Another murder. More gruesome memory footage to review. His stomach turns at the mere thought. Mouth twisted, he instead checks for the memory files missing from today’s case. What was the officer’s name? Right. Kim Beom Gyun of Munju Station.
“Anyway. How’s your head?” Hyuk asks, dropping his voice low. The office appears empty, but you can never know when someone might suddenly walk in, and Joo Won’s father was very explicit in his order not to let anyone know he had his memories wiped. It’s not strictly legal. Or even possible, officially.
“It’s fine.”
Hyuk sends him a flat look. “I told Abeonim you're still getting the headaches. He suggested this.” He pulls a small pill bottle from his pocket and slides it across the desk. “It’s usually prescribed for newly implanted chips that don’t want to settle, but it might help.”
So that’s why Hyuk’s here. Joo Won examines the bottle of mystery medication disdainfully. Since it’s not common knowledge neurochips can be used to delete memories and not just store them, Joo Won is one of the first lucky guinea pigs to go through the procedure. Apparently, the CEO of JL Technology, Lee Chang Jin, is funding research into the possibility of using it to treat PTSD, but it’s early days yet. Joo Won’s father frequently reports to Lee Chang Jin on Joo Won’s condition, and in turn Lee Chang Jin sends over pill after pill that will allegedly help cure Joo Won’s endless headaches.
Joo Won sets the medicine down on the desk with a quiet rattle. He’s loathe to take yet another drug Lee Chang Jin wants to test out on him, but the headaches are driving him insane. If they go away, maybe his father will finally wash his hands of the whole ordeal and let Joo Won off the leash a little.
Despite the fact they haven’t spoken, since Joo Won woke up in that JL Technology recovery room his father has been an overshadowing presence in his life in a way he hasn’t been in years. Joo Won’s desk is just a few floors down from his father’s office. His new flat is only a couple minutes’ drive from his father’s house. Joo Won’s meetings with Kwon Hyuk now happen twice a week like clockwork, and every last word is reported back to Han Ki Hwan.
Hyuk tells him it’s Father’s way of protecting him, but Joo Won isn’t entirely naive like Hyuk is. His forceful relocation back beneath his father’s thumb falls closer to punishment than to protection. After all, icing him out by giving him the silent treatment is one of his father’s go-to punishments, and it’s lasted several weeks longer than normal. The mess Joo Won made must have been absolutely catastrophic if his father is still furious with him.
“Just try them, Joo Won-ah,” Hyuk says, more softly, drawing Joo Won’s attention back to the pill bottle.
Because he doesn’t care to argue with Hyuk while his head feels like it’s splitting itself in half, Joo Won shoves the bottle into his pocket and turns back to his screen. He clicks his teeth in annoyance. In the folder where Kim Beom Gyun’s memory files are supposed to be is an empty white space that worsens his headache just to look at.
“What?” says Hyuk.
Joo Won shakes his head. “Nothing. An inspector still hasn’t submitted his memory files. We needed those by the end of the day.”
Hyuk swings his car keys around one finger. “Well if it’s nothing, it’s nearly five, and those new pills can be mixed with alcohol. Let’s go. We still haven’t celebrated Abeonim finally being appointed Commissioner General.”
Joo Won turns away at the reminder. His father’s hearing was delayed in the wake of Joo Won’s attack, but last week Han Ki Hwan finally achieved the dream he’s built his whole life around for decades—and Joo Won’s life as well. For some reason, bitterness curdles in Joo Won’s gut every time the promotion is brought up.
“Don’t we need Abeoji for that?” he mutters.
“I’m sure he’ll forgive you soon,” says Hyuk. “Come on. If you pay, I’ll stay sober enough to drive you home afterwards.”
Joo Won considers. It’s not really possible for his headache to get any worse, and drowning his sorrows in some overpriced new bar without worrying about how he’s going to get home afterwards sounds pretty inviting right now.
Already reading Joo Won’s answer on his face, Hyuk grins.
***
Several whiskeys too many later, Joo Won drunkenly stumbles into his new flat, glad he has a day off tomorrow. He trips over a box in the hallway and kicks it away with a curse. He can’t finish unpacking with his broken wrist, and the dozens of sealed moving boxes have become part of the furniture and a frequent source of stubbed toes. Tonight’s offending box is cryptically labelled OTHER in Hyuk’s chicken scratch handwriting and is heavy enough Joo Won’s kick barely shifts it.
This new flat is larger than his old place, with a separate bedroom and a full kitchen separated from the living area by a peninsula counter top. Joo Won stops to grab a glass and yet another bottle of whiskey from his bar, then collapses on his sofa. He pretends he’s paying attention to the first film that comes on when he turns on the TV while he slowly drains the bottle. His head is still banging, so with a sigh Joo Won chokes down one of the little white pills dry. His father—and Lee Chang Jin—will want to know if they work, anyway.
His phone buzzes on the sofa beside him, and every muscle in Joo Won’s body goes rigid. Slowly, he forces himself to grab his phone. It’s that number again, that same old number. Maybe he should have stopped drinking a few glasses ago, because anger suddenly bubbles up inside him, overwhelming and irresistible.
Already knowing he will come to regret this, he answers the call.
“What?” he snaps, bracing himself for a stab of pain.
There’s a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, and then a man says, “Han Joo Won?”
Just as he expected, his head throbs. It’s nowhere near as violent as it was the last time, but it takes a moment to recover from anyway.
Once he’s got a hold of himself, Joo Won says, “Who is this?”
“My goodness,” says the man. He sounds fucking chipper. “You deleted my number? Was finding out I was right all along really so painful a realisation for you, Inspector Han?”
Joo Won adjusts his grip on his phone. This was definitely a bad idea, and his head is throbbing far too hard for mind games right now.
“Who is this?” he repeats.
“Who…?” A short silence. “Yah. Han Joo Won, you punk. Let’s—let’s just talk, okay? I know you probably have a lot questions, a lot you’re mulling over in that pretty head of yours. So let’s talk. In person would be better. Where are you? I’ll come to you.”
“If you don’t just tell me who you are,” Joo Won says, slowly and carefully as he squeezes the glass of his phone tight enough to hurt, “I am going to hang up.”
“Are you alright? How much have you been drinking? It’s me,” the man says. “Lee Dong Sik.”
And there it is, the lancing pain through the left side of Joo Won’s head. He doubles over, sending a second stab of pain through his ribs. Clutching at his hair, he breathes shallowly until the wave of agony passes.
“Han Joo Won? Yah! Joo Won. Are you alright?”
Joo Won squeezes his phone.
“Leave me alone,” he spits. “Don’t call this number again.”
“Joo Won—”
Joo Won swipes to end the call and throws his phone down so violently it bounces off the sofa and onto the floor. He curls up, elbows on his knees and his hands clutching his throbbing head. Every muscle is tense as he waits for the phone to start ringing again, for it to rattle unpleasantly loudly against the hardwood floor, but no call ever comes.
With shaking hands he pours yet another glass of whiskey and knocks it back. Pours another, then fixes his eyes on the television. He doesn’t hear a word. His attention is entirely occupied by an endless whisper of Lee Dong Sik Lee Dong Sik Lee Dong Sik running through his aching mind.
The name is familiar. Why is the name familiar?
And why does just the sound of it cause his neurochip to send a lightning bolt of pain through his skull?
He doesn’t remember much from the day he woke up in that JL Technology recovery room. The drugs pumping into his veins were just too strong, but he remembers that strange phone call with painful clarity. He remembers his father, too. Remembers the fury and disappointment on his face, how he struggled to keep his voice low as he told him over and over that he was a reckless fool who was lucky to be alive. He remembers Han Ki Hwan’s words of warning as he told him he was being assigned to Neural Analysis.
“Forget all your cases. Everything active has been transferred out of your name. And I know you like to research cold cases and unsolved murders. Stop. You’ll find nothing worth knowing in your old notes.”
Joo Won launches himself off the sofa. He makes quick work of searching his desk, his bookshelf, even rummaging through his wardrobes just in case, but his old notebooks and files are nowhere to be found. Surely his father didn’t order Hyuk to throw them out? It was Hyuk who packed up Joo Won’s old flat, after all, while Joo Won was lying half dead in a hospital bed.
With grim resolution, Joo Won grabs a box cutter from the kitchen counter and examines the boxes piled high in every corner of the flat.
It’s slow work, slicing open the boxes and digging through the contents with his broken wrist. He considers himself fairly minimalist, and he struggles to comprehend how he acquired so many possessions they fill dozens of boxes.
In one box he does find a binder with a few old case notes. He drops the box cutter to the ground, hands shaking in anticipation, but a quick flip through reveals these are from years ago, and there’s no newer writing in the back. This can’t be what his father was referring to.
With a curse, he retrieves the box cutter from where it slid beneath the coffee table, drags yet another box within reach, and continues. Soon the flat looks like a crime scene, with torn cardboard discarded where it fell and hundreds of Joo Won’s belongings strewn across the floor in a way that will make his teeth itch as soon as he sobers up and recovers some of his sense.
But finally, after several paper cuts and some definite strain to his wrist and one cack-handed near miss with the box cutter that nearly cost him his thumb, Joo Won finds it.
It’s in the box labelled OTHER in Hyuk’s handwriting, the one that is dented in one corner from Joo Won’s toe. Buried beneath half a dozen packets of wet wipes, an obsessive number of identical highlighters, and more glasses than Joo Won thought he owned is a notebook. It’s well-worn and stiff with pages and pages of notes and photos Joo Won doesn’t recall compiling. The first few pages are nothing relevant—just old cold cases he took a passing interest in—but after that, Joo Won’s notes become less haphazard and more focused.
The Disappearance of Lee Yoo Yeon (2000).
Joo Won recalls this case as being one he wanted to investigate, in that vague, maybe-one-day way he frequently takes interest in cold cases. That’s about where his memory of this case ends. He flips through the pages of his own handwriting, reading of severed fingers and feet tied together in black plastic bags and a murderous twin brother acquitted for lack of evidence.
He turns another page and a bundle of papers fall from the notebook. On top is a picture—a handsome man in police uniform, staring up at Joo Won with a defiant glint in his eye even in this formal portrait. Joo Won picks it up with shaking hands and reads the name printed on the man’s uniform.
Lee Dong Sik.
Pain spikes in Joo Won’s head just as it did during the phone call, and he rubs his thumb over the small bump of the neurochip behind his left ear. It takes him a moment before he can drag his eyes away from those of this serial killer. Lee Dong Sik. Chief suspect at the time, and chief suspect in Joo Won’s case notes.
Beneath that photograph is another. This one is candid, slightly blurry, and taken at a distance as if by a stalker. In it Lee Dong Sik is smiling amongst friends as they share a drink at restaurant of some description. The words MANYANG BUTCHER SHOP are neatly painted on the windows.
Joo Won reads on, refamiliarising himself with leads and suspects and entire investigations he has absolutely no memory of. It’s an unsettling feeling, reading all these notes in his own handwriting, declaring so confidently that he did this and that, and yet Joo Won has not even the foggiest memory of any of it.
The case notes reference photos he can’t find in the notebook. Joo Won usually resorts to a whiteboard when he’s investigating a complicated case like this, but he briefly searches the flat again and finds no sign of it. That, apparently, Hyuk elected to dispose of.
Joo Won flips back to the photo of Lee Dong Sik in his uniform. He swallows dryly and sets the notebook down on the floor.
He doesn’t like it, but he suspects he might know why the serial killer his father forbid him from investigating won’t stop calling.
***
Joo Won nurses away his hangover holed up at home with the blinds closed. The fridge is woefully empty, but instead of going out he scrapes together what meagre meals he can with frozen vegetables, half empty sauce bottles, and an old bag of rice.
A serial killer is trying to find him. Joo Won has strongly reevaluated how frequently he needs to leave his flat.
Instead, he spends the day tidying up after the chaos he created yesterday. After a few hours the aching in his wrist forces him to continue on one-handed, and he probably set the healing of his broken wrist back a few weeks, but eventually the flat is tidy and fully unpacked. A towering heap of flattened cardboard boxes is the only remaining sign he recently moved in, and Joo Won resolves to deal with it when he’s less paranoid about stepping outside.
As the day stretches on, his phone stays blessedly silent. For the first time since Joo Won’s attack Lee Dong Sik hasn’t attempted to call him all day.
His relief is short lived once he actually gives it some thought. Entertaining the serial killer’s calls will have just encouraged him to try something else, and Joo Won isn’t excited to find out what exactly that will be.
Now that Joo Won is fairly certain Lee Dong Sik is the mysterious serial killer he nearly lost his life to, the man’s face haunts him. He buries his case notes deep in his wardrobe, vowing to never look at those photos again. Less than an hour later, he digs the notebook back out and sits with his back against the wardrobe door, staring at Lee Dong Sik’s face until the light fades. He tries to imagine that handsome face twisted in a murderous rage.
Mostly, Joo Won tries to avoid thinking about his attack. He doesn’t remember it, and practically he doesn’t see the point in digging into a past he explicitly requested to forget. But sometimes the flicker of curiosity in the back of his mind burns like a wildfire, and he can’t help but wonder.
Joo Won has plenty of memories he’d gladly forget. What could have possibly happened that was so traumatic, he saw no way to continue living with those memories in his head?
What exactly did Lee Dong Sik do to him?
He knows the basics of it. The broken wrist, the cracked ribs. The bruises up and down his body that have healed by now, and the wounds across his face that haven’t yet. The concussion he still feels in a lingering fogginess in his thoughts and the aching in his head. The evidence of what happened is laid out across his body.
But the specifics escape him. Was it long, drawn out? Did he have far too much time to contemplate what he believed to be his imminent death before he was rescued? Maybe Lee Dong Sik put up a front, befriended him, then lured him back to his house to slowly rip Joo Won to pieces there. Joo Won pictures his fingers severed just above the first knuckle and has to swallow down sudden nausea.
Or was it fast and sudden? Out somewhere secluded while investigating a case maybe, did Lee Dong Sik suddenly attack him? Did he hope to kill Joo Won, hide his body, and return to civilisation before anyone noticed Joo Won’s absence?
He also wonders who did rescue him. Hopefully he saved himself. He’d rather think he found the strength to fight back and escape instead of worrying about being indebted to some anonymous stranger.
Either way, if Lee Dong Sik tried to kill him, why is he still a free man?
Just what happened in the town of Manyang?