Work Text:
Ho Yuwon is at his desk when he first feels that something is wrong.
He’s flipping through files of his employees. Requests for counselling appointments that have either been slid in by the employees themselves, or by their worried superiors. Another set of papers that he’s ignoring from Director Cheong, about his project that had been shut down and the reparations that she wants from him for loss of personnel.
Endless stacks of papers that Ho usually wouldn’t bother making time for. Paperwork is always someone else’s business. Ho’s only job here is to wait for someone to step inside for counseling, and to talk to them. To help them.
But now, he has nothing else to do.
So he flips through the papers. He signs the ones that he needs to. He ignores the ones that fill him with rage. He tosses aside yet another request for the details of his spendings on his Sekwang Project. He’s spent a fortune, and he has no intention of justifying it to anyone.
He only needs to see it to the end.
But the more that he tries, the longer that his team takes to wake up, and the more things that go wrong—the more he’s starting to realize that he might never see it to the end at all.
Sekwang might never be saved.
Ho might never find himself.
He might have to live with this, and the thought fills him with an anger unlike anything else.
It’s when he’s working through a particularly annoying document that he first feels the sensation that something is wrong.
The Fox Counselling Room is a part of Ho himself. He can feel it when someone enters who doesn’t belong, or when there’s a change in atmosphere that he didn’t intend. And he feels it now—an odd stuffiness in the air. The stench of a familiar stranger.
An intruder.
Someone that Ho knows.
Ho sighs, running a hand through his hair.
He doesn’t have time for this.
He’s tired. His project has amounted to nothing but disaster. The entire city is still locked away, still trapped in eternal despair, while the agents who caused it have lost nothing and even dare to believe that they’ve done good.
And one of those foolish agents has now dared to step into his own territory.
Agent Choi.
It would be easy for Ho to stop him.
Nothing happens in the Fox Counselling Room if Ho doesn’t permit it. He could send Agent Choi crashing back into whatever pathetic life he’d crawled out of, he could make him wish he’d never been born—although he suspects the agent already wishes that, if what Ho knows about him is anything to go by.
He could stop him easily.
But he’s exhausted.
So he lets Choi play out his fantasy of saving someone. He lets him wander into the space where Kim Soleum sleeps like the dead, lets him sneak towards his bed side, unknowing that every move that he makes is one that Ho is completely aware of.
Kim Soleum has been asleep for months now.
Ho Yuwon doesn’t know if he’ll ever wake up.
/
Ho hasn’t had a lot of positive interactions with Agent Choi.
Honestly, he can’t remember any.
The first time that they’d met was when Choi had found out that Kim Soleum was a spy, and Ho had to intercept them both and sentence Choi to a gruesome death. Soleum didn’t appreciate this, because he’d developed some kind of affection for Choi, and had thrown himself into the fire instead.
All in all, it hadn’t been a great day for anyone.
Perhaps Ho had overdone it a little that day. He’d had an agent in his grasp, and an urge to see him dead—an urge to see him die the most pathetic death possible to make up for every single life that he’d destroyed.
But Soleum had stopped him.
Ho never knew why.
Kim Soleum had always had a weak heart.
He’d stopped him, and Ho had been forced to hurt him in Choi’s place, and that moment had set in stone what Choi thought of Ho Yuwon.
A villain.
Ho was happy to play the part—because, for the bureau, he was a villain. He wanted to be.
Even if he had nothing against Kim Soleum himself.
Even if, out of everyone—he was the only person who had ever tried to get Soleum home.
So Ho stayed a villain. He used Soleum to taunt Choi at every chance. He tossed Agent Bronze into the cursed box just to see Choi struggle and panic.
It was hilarious, really.
To see someone so convinced that they were put together fall apart entirely in the face of true grief.
To see the same heartbreak in his eyes that Ho had been forced to bury deep inside of himself.
Choi had pinned him down, angry tears in his eyes, ready to kill—
And Ho had only grinned.
He’d only thought at last.
At last you’re broken.
At last, I win.
/
But that was a long time ago.
That was before the true madness of Sekwang was unearthed, before Choi was forced to understand what the bureau had done.
Before he’d started looking at Ho like he felt sorry for him.
It wasn’t pleasant to see.
Ho didn’t want the pity of a man who had left countless people to die in the name of a greater good. He didn’t want an apology from someone who worked for an organization that killed him.
But he took what he could get, if it meant more people to work on his project.
If it meant more people could try to save what was left of his lost home.
/
And now they’re here.
Ho Yuwon, watching from the doorway as Choi traces Kim Soleum’s sleeping face.
Choi, unaware that he’s already been caught.
/
Agent Choi looks nothing like the man that he first met.
The man who had confronted Soleum that day and exposed him as a spy was fierce, confident, so sure that he was in the right and that he knew what was best. The man in front of him now is empty. His eyes are sunken, desperate, tired. His clothes are worn out, torn in places. There are scratches around his neck that Ho knows, without having to check, were self-inflicted.
Choi can’t see him here. He won’t see him unless Ho lets him. He’s still convinced that he’s snuck in here without Ho knowing.
So Ho watches him in the quiet.
The gentle, almost reverent fingers that trace Soleum’s face.
Choi is a fool, but he has no idea of it.
He rushes headfirst into danger with a charming smile and convinces himself that he’s foreseen every possible outcome. And then he’s surprised when he loses everything instead and is forced to live with it.
The way he’d tried to sacrifice himself to the box in some kind of righteous despair at seeing Soleum consider it—only to end up losing both of his juniors at once.
Ho has spent many nights laughing about that to himself.
Morals that can not be held and a shaky high ground built on sand. A man convinced that he’s trying to save everything that he touches when in reality he’s letting the world fall apart around him.
Ho doesn’t know what Soleum sees in someone like Choi.
But Kim Soleum has always liked people who tried, and Choi really does try.
He’s trying right now.
In the darkness of the room, Choi cradles Soleum in his arms. Like he’s holding the only reason he lives.
Perhaps he is.
Ho leans against the doorway, arms crossed, watching as Choi tucks Soleum into his shoulder.
He holds Kim Soleum like he’s holding his last chance at life.
Like he’d die, if he couldn’t save him.
Ho watches him, and he recognizes the same emptiness that he feels.
The exhaustion.
The feel of death.
He’s just as tired as Choi looks. Just as done.
/
Nothing that Ho tries to save has ever stayed. An entire city of people lost, with no way to bring them back.
Kim Soleum, now, might be one of them.
But looking at him cradled in Choi’s arms, Ho feels his heart waver.
Because Choi looks at Soleum like he’ll either save him or die trying.
Like he’s someone worth coming back for, over and over again.
/
No one came back for the ones lost in Sekwang city.
No one did, because they were forgotten, because they were sacrificed, because the bureau declared that since there was no way to save them, their lives might as well be used to save others.
Every time Ho thinks about it, the rage blinds him.
He becomes someone he can’t remember being before.
Someone who wants to hurt. To destroy. To make everyone feel the pain that he feels.
Then again, Ho can’t remember who he was before. Maybe this is who he always was.
Anger, and bone deep exhaustion.
Agents of the Disaster Management Bureau are all the same. The kind of people who have learned to weigh lives against each other, to use sins as an excuse to let the people they can’t save die. Morally corrupt bastards who think that they’re some kind of saints, who think that putting their own lives in danger every day gives them the right to pick who gets to live and who gets to die.
The bureau agents are the sort of people who will do what they think is their best, and when they fail, they will dust their hands off and call it a good job regardless.
They aren’t the type to come back to a disaster they’ve stepped away from.
They aren’t the type to die if it means another life saved.
But Agent Choi…
Agent Choi is here, in Ho’s territory, when he knows that Ho can not be outsmarted or overpowered.
He’s here when he knows that the only way that he can walk away from here is if Ho has mercy on his soul and lets him.
He’s here, because it doesn’t matter to him if he dies. It doesn’t matter if Ho tears his face apart once more, and curses him to die in the dirtiest street he can find.
It only matters to him that he tries his best to get Kim Soleum out of here.
That he comes back for him, over and over, if he fails.
/
As Choi holds Soleum close, trying to sneak his way back out—he seems to catch Ho’s eye.
It shouldn’t be possible. Ho is well hidden.
But Choi stares directly at him, eyes wide, breath frozen, as if he sees Ho watching him.
He holds Soleum closer, tucking his face into the crook of his neck.
Ho raises his eyebrows.
Kim Soleum is Ho’s best employee. He knows more about the Sekwang disaster than anyone else. He has the sort of crazed intensity that lets him dive into the darkness over and over, as desperate for answers as Ho is himself.
Losing Kim Soleum may be losing the one chance that Ho has at learning the truth.
It might mean losing everything.
But there’s a waver in his heart as he watches the tired agent hold Soleum close. Soleum is fast asleep, showing no signs of ever waking. Exhausted, desperate to go home, but kept constantly alive in worlds that he doesn’t want to be in.
Ho doesn’t want to let go of Kim Soleum.
He doesn’t want to let go of the city that he lost.
But in Choi’s arms—Kim Soleum looks safe.
Protected.
A far cry from the haunted man that Ho has come to know.
Choi is watching him with uneasy eyes, as if waiting for him to attack. To tear him apart from Soleum. And maybe Ho should.
But he doesn’t.
Choi’s scarred hands are too gentle on Kim Soleum’s skin.
His sunken eyes too full of care.
So Ho turns away.
He feels, rather than sees, as Choi disappears as quietly as he turned up.
The Counselling Room is a locked space. No one can enter unless Ho allows it. No one can leave unless Ho allows it.
For Kim Soleum’s sake, Ho allows it.
/