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It started, like always in these cases, with a cough. It sounded different from normal coughs: this one is like something that preannounce the imminent arrival of a fever.
Gihun, with years of experience treating Gayeong's colds and flu, immediately recognizes the signs. He doesn't say anything though: he doesn't recommend Inho to rest more, to take at least some medicine to prevent getting worse, doesn't check on his fever, ignores him when his movements become sluggish and less coordinated.
He is a prisoner, and he has no reason to care about his captor's well-being; on the contrary: the worst he gets, the better!
It takes three days for Inho to go from mildly inconvenient to genuinely worrying.
Gihun tracks the progression with the detached interest of a man watching something happen to someone else, someone he has no stake in. The cough deepens, the slight sluggishness of the first day becomes a heaviness that sits in every movement Inho makes, like his body has been replaced with something denser, more reluctant; on the second day Gihun watches him eat almost nothing at dinner and says nothing; on the third day Inho doesn't come to collect him for the morning routine, and someone else comes instead, a younger guard whose name Gihun doesn't know, whose face behind the mask is tight with something that might be concern or might just be inconvenience.
Good. This is good. Gihun spends the morning telling himself he means it. It's not difficult, the logic of it. Inho is the man who runs these games, who puts a gun to foreheads and presses the trigger with no remorse, who gives the orders, who wears the black mask and calls it neutrality. Whatever is happening to him now in whatever room they've assigned him is a fraction, an almost laughable fraction, of what he has put into the world. Getting sick is the most human, the most ordinary thing that happens to a person. It is not suffering nor justice, barely even inconvenience, in the grand architecture of things.
Gihun sits with this logic for most of the day and finds it completely airtight.
He is brought to Inho's quarters that evening. He doesn't know why, he doesn't ask. He has learned, in the particular education of this place, that asking why is a currency he can't afford to spend frivolously. The young guard opens the door and Gihun steps inside and the door closes behind him with the soft, final sound of a problem that now belongs to him.
The room is dim. Inho is in the bed, not sleeping, but doing the thing that sick people do that isn't quite sleep and isn't quite wakefulness, drifting in the gray water between them. He's still dressed, which means he got here under his own power but didn't have enough left to do anything about it. The blanket is pulled up unevenly. There's a glass of water on the table beside him that looks like it hasn't been touched.
Gihun stands in the doorway between the door and the bed and does not move for a long moment.
He catalogs the signs with the same clinical attention he'd refused to give them three days ago. The flush in Inho's face is high and wrong, the particular pink that sits just under the skin when a fever has climbed past the point of being merely uncomfortable. His breathing is audible from here, each breath like something his body is having to negotiate.
He crosses his arms. He doesn't move toward the bed.
This is what he'd wanted, this exact thing. He'd wanted the cough to bloom into something serious, had felt a grim satisfaction every time Inho moved a little slower, ate a little less. He'd constructed, very carefully, a wall between Inho's discomfort and any feeling in himself that might be categorized as concern, and he'd been proud of how well it held. He's not a caretaker here, he's a prisoner. He has given enough of himself to people in this building to fill several lifetimes, and Inho..
Inho turns his head, restless, and says something.
Not to Gihun. Not to anyone in the room.
His eyes don't open. His voice is low and roughened by the fever and it takes Gihun a moment to parse the word from the texture of it.
Yuna.
A woman's name, spoken with the specific quality of someone reaching for something they expect to find, something their hand knows the shape of in the dark. He says it again, quieter this time, and his hand moves against the blanket like he's trying to find something to hold onto.
Gihun uncrosses his arms.
He doesn't know who Yuna is. He, by his own volition, knows almost nothing about Inho, because knowing would make the wall harder to maintain, and the wall has been important. But he knows the way a name sounds when it carries the particular weight of someone who isn't there anymore. He has done it himself.
He crosses the room. His body just does it, with the same automatic competence that it brought to Gayeong's fevers, years of practice overriding the architecture he'd spent three days constructing.
He picks up the glass of water. He sits on the edge of the bed. He puts his hand against Inho's forehead and the heat there is genuinely alarming - not dangerous yet, probably, but closer to dangerous than is comfortable. Inho doesn't wake but turns slightly toward the touch with the helpless animal instinct of someone who is too sick to be guarded.
Yuna, he says again, very softly, and Gihun thinks that whoever she is, she must be very, very far away.
"It's not her," Gihun says, because he has learned that lying to a feverish person is a cruelty with a short shelf life, "Drink some of this."
He tips the glass carefully, and Inho drinks a little, reflexively, and then his head settles back against the pillow and his breathing evens out marginally.
Gihun sets the glass down.
He should leave.
He should sit across the room and do nothing and maintain the principle of it. He should at minimum feel something clear and defined about the fact that this man is currently feverish and calling for a dead woman and trusting the warmth of a hand that belongs to his prisoner.
He feels something, but it isn't clear and it isn't defined. It is just the same thing he has always felt, the thing he has never successfully excised from himself no matter how many times it has cost him: the absolute inability to sit across a room from someone suffering and do nothing about it. He has hated this about himself before. He does not have the energy to hate it right now.
He stays.
He refills the glass when it empties. He wrings out a cloth from the basin in the corner and places it against Inho's forehead and replaces it when it warms. He does not speak except when Inho calls that name again, which he does twice more before the fever begins to break in the early morning, and each time Gihun says the same thing: it's not her, quiet and honest and offering nothing but the truth of it.
He looks at the clock. It's 5 am.
Gihun sits on the edge of a sick man's bed and keeps watch, and hates himself for it far less that he should. He does it anyway.