Work Text:
"Sunbae,” Jaekwan says quietly. “You should sit down.”
Choi shakes his head next to him.
He has the point of his jakdu braced against the ground, leaning heavily on it. His clothes are covered in blood and dirt and nothing good. He looks like he’s lived a hundred years too many in the past two days, but he doesn’t sit. He doesn’t rest.
He stares ahead, where Agent Haegeum is kneeled on the ground, talking to Kim Soleum through a barrier they can barely see.
The security guard is next to her, his head tilted low in an attempt to catch every last word that Soleum says to them. It’s where Jaekwan expected Choi to be. But Choi stays back, the furthest of them all, staring blankly as if he no longer knows why he’s here.
It’s the face he usually has after the end of a mission, when he knows there’s nothing left for him to do.
What happens will happen, and he has no say in it anymore.
From here, they hear Soleum’s muffled voice. He’s fine, Agent Haegeum translates. He’s safe. There’s a path ahead of him that leads to where he wants to be.
Soleum wants to talk to them.
He wants to thank them.
Jaekwan hears Choi’s breath hitch, but there’s no change in his expression.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Agent Haegeum says, hesitant. “It’s best that we don’t let him consider turning back.”
“He won’t,” Choi says.
The first words he’s spoken since the wish was made. Agent Haegum’s eyes snap to his, but Choi’s voice is firm.
“He won’t look back. He’ll be fine.”
There’s hope in it, but also a hint of resignation.
The firm belief that Kim Soleum has never loved any of them enough to turn back from the path home.
It’s a good thing, Jaekwan thinks. It’ll save him. If what lets him be free at last is the fact that he doesn’t want to be with them any longer—then Jaekwan will take it as a godsend.
If his inability to provide Kim Soleum with a home worth living in let him find the one that he truly belonged to—then maybe it was a good thing that Jaekwan would never be enough.
It’s a good thing, and it fills him with relief, but at the same time, it breaks his heart.
And if the cracked grin on Agent Choi’s face as he promises that Kim Soleum will never turn back is any indication—Choi’s heart has been broken for far too long.
/
Jaekwan’s daily routine doesn’t change much with Soleum gone.
He’s spent most of his life without Kim Soleum, and he continues to do so as he always did.
It’s odd, now that the disaster is over. The bureau is in shambles, trying to piece together all that had happened in Sekwang, all the mishaps that had been buried and the lives that had been lost. There’s talk about change in management and reorganization of the duties of the teams to account for the one that had been wiped from memory, and if it all works out then Hyunmoo Team 1 might no longer be the Hyunmoo Team 1 that Jaekwan is used to.
But his routine doesn’t change much. He goes to work. He goes into disasters when he has to. He does his paperwork. He tries not to think of the man he owes this life to, who had saved him once and then over and over again.
The blurred face of the agent in his past that Jaekwan had followed the footsteps of, only to find out he was the same Kim Soleum that Jaekwan could somehow never hold on to.
But work is quieter now. More stifling. He doesn’t have to go to the management meetings or anything—Choi takes care of all that, but it’s Choi who makes the atmosphere stifling in the waiting room.
He’s far too quiet.
He sits at his desk, and he works. He doesn’t look up, he doesn’t poke fun at Jaekwan. His cheeks are more hollow than they should be, after the awful year that he’d lived through in a cave, and he doesn’t often remember to eat unless someone puts food in front of him. He doesn’t remember to smile, or to pretend that he’s doing okay.
He looks like a man who’s finally had his life catch up with him.
The Hyunmoo Team 1 waiting room that had once been home is now just another place that Jaekwan passes through.
It’ll be alright soon, he tells himself.
Choi has always picked himself back up.
He’d lost his home, he’d lost his name, he’d looked death in the eye over and over and still stood back up as if nothing could hold him down.
He’s been battered and bruised by grief this past year, but he’ll be alright again.
It’s what Jaekwan tells himself, as he switches the lights off in the empty waiting room. Choi left long ago, because he no longer waits for his junior. He no longer stays over time.
Jaekwan turns the lights off, and heads back to the dorm.
He’s starting to realize what Kim Soleum felt when he refused to call this world a home.
/
Sometimes Jaekwan finds Choi on the rooftop.
He’s there more often than he should be, smoking like he hopes that it kills him. Jaekwan doesn’t often go to see him up there because their conversations only make him more sad, but sometimes, when he’s lonely enough that seeing a broken down Choi is better than seeing no one at all—he climbs the dark staircase to the rooftop.
Choi is there, sitting against the wall, staring absently at the ground.
He glances up once, at Jaekwan’s face, and then turns back to the ground.
“I don’t want him to come back,” Choi says quietly.
There are burns on his fingers, from when he keeps zoning out and letting his cigarette burn through before he drops it. It’s worrying, how out of it he is, but he was long overdue to fall apart.
293 days spent sitting next to their unconscious bodies, counting down to the end of the world.
A crazed plan to kill himself and save everyone, intercepted by his junior who melted into nothingness right in front of him.
Choi was long overdue for a breakdown, but it hurts Jaekwan to see how quietly he falls apart. He sits at his desk and works. He goes outside and he smokes. He smiles at him when he remembers to, he pats him on the head like he’s still in awe that Jaekwan is alive, and then he goes home, without cracking any jokes, without pausing to make a nuisance of himself at all.
For someone like Agent Choi, who had always easily attracted the eyes of everyone in any room he stepped into—he disappears into the background just as easily.
“I don’t want him to come back,” Choi says again. He reaches for another cigarette, as if he’ll remember to not let this one burn him.
“That isn’t true,” Jaekwan says.
“It is. I truly don’t. I never want to see him again.”
Jaekwan shakes his head.
He knows that Choi cared for Kim Soleum so much that it broke him. He’s seen first hand how much he misses him every time he disappears.
But Choi’s voice is empty now. Dead.
“I’m tired, Jaekwan-ah. I’m tired of being afraid for you both. I’m glad he’s safe now, but I hope he doesn’t come back.”
…ah.
It… really had been a long year.
Choi had lost Soleum over and over. Tried to save him, and watched him slip out of his hands. Watched him jump into danger to spare everyone else. Choi had been trapped in Sekwang, forced to know that Soleum was destroying himself while Choi couldn’t reach him.
He’d watched him die in front of his eyes.
He’d watched him leave, and not turn back.
“If we keep him safe this time,” Jaekwan says, with no real hope in it. “Now that the disaster is over—”
Choi shakes his head firmly.
“He’d never be safe here,” he says. “And we could never keep him safe.”
“But—”
“I can’t,” Choi says firmly. “I can’t. I tried.”
Jaekwan falls quiet.
He can’t deny that.
Choi tried harder than anyone, to save Kim Soleum from himself. He’s the only reason that they even managed to scrape together a plan at the end and get him home, instead of leaving him as an emotionless lump of flesh, dead in every way that mattered.
There wasn’t anything more that Choi could have done.
“I did the math, you know?” Choi says. “In the time I’ve known him, I’ve barely spent any time with him.”
“...”
“He resigned. Disappeared. Came back. Disappeared again. All I’ve done is search for him. Nothing else.”
He smiles, a small, hopeless thing.
“Remember when we talked about the hot springs? Remember how fucking long ago that was?”
Jaekwan does.
It’s horrific, in a way, to think of how much time had passed since then.
Back then, what had killed Jaekwan the most was that Kim Soleum had walked away from him because he couldn’t trust that Jaekwan could build him a home.
And now, still—Kim Soleum had walked away.
But this time Jaekwan can accept it.
Because this time he knows that the words he’d spouted back then, those stupid hopes of a man who just wanted his friend to stay—all they’d done was kill Kim Soleum further.
/
The rain pours endlessly.
Jaekwan stands in it, staring into the empty sky. It’s cold. It’s dark. He’s done with work, he should be heading to the dorms—
But he’s lonely.
It feels like he didn’t lose one friend, but two.
He lost one to a world where he could hopefully be happy, and another to the despair that had finally caught up with him.
There isn’t anything he can do to save Choi from himself. It happens to every agent at some point, when they’ve held themselves tall for too long and the world finally crashes around them.
All that Jaekwan can do is keep turning up at work, keep sitting by Choi’s side, and keep making it clear that he won’t disappear again.
But he can’t even promise that.
Not in this line of work.
Jaekwan could die again any time, and Choi could be left alone—and Choi knows that better than anyone else.
The rain pours endlessly, almost like it’s trying to drown him.
And then an umbrella is tilted over his head.
Jaekwan blinks slowly, turning to the side. It’s Choi. He looks tired as always, but a frown mars his face as he looks Jaekwan up and down, taking in his drenched figure.
“I thought you went to the dorms,” he says.
He used to say I thought you went home.
But home is no longer a word that either of them toss around easily.
“I was going to,” Jaekwan says.
He doesn’t make any move to keep going.
Choi joins him, his umbrella tilted more over Jaekwan’s head than his own. Jaekwan grasps the handle, tilting it back towards Choi, and Choi’s frown only deepens.
He’d usually throw a fit, about how he’s the senior, and how he should be taking care of him, and how Jaekwan is going to fall sick, and how it must be part of his plan to get Choi to do his own paperwork—but he says nothing.
He simply stays by Jaekwan’s side, staring into the rain.
“Did I tell you what he did?” Choi starts, at length. “Back when you were still dead.”
“Hm?”
Jaekwan doesn’t know most of what happened back then. He’s heard a few vague accounts from fellow agents, about how Choi had wandered aimlessly for days, fingers clenched in the letter that Kim Soleum had left him that said that Jaekwan was dead but that he’d bring him back. But Choi himself has never spoken about it. It’s a memory that he’d rather never recount.
“I took him to the dream incubator,” Choi says. “Soleum, I mean. But he realized he could make a wish, and—” He smiles, and it comes out broken. “He didn’t pause to say anything, you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“There was no good bye. No parting words at all. He saw the chance to leave and he jumped at it like he was feral.”
“...”
“And he was, wasn’t he? He was that afraid of staying here. Of being with us. That poor kid, how long did we keep him here against his will…?”
It’s not a real question.
Because they know, better than anyone, that Soleum never wanted to be here.
Jaekwan will never forget the man who agreed to build a home with him, and then disappeared without a trace.
The man who’d nearly died for him over and over, and then walked away without looking back even once.
“I wonder what would have happened if he looked back,” Jaekwan says quietly into the rain.
Choi shakes his head. “The wish was for him to go home. If he refused it, he might have lost his form again.”
“...I know.”
Choi is quiet for a long while.
Then he laughs, cracked, terrible.
“It still hurts though, doesn’t it?” he asks. “That he didn’t look back.”
Jaekwan doesn’t reply.
…of course it hurts.
The rain keeps pouring. Neither of them make any move to leave.
/
The note that Kim Soleum had left on the whiteboard of the waiting room is never erased.
People worthy of respect.
They didn’t have the heart to get rid of it back when Soleum resigned, and now that he’s gone forever, they might just live with the words for the rest of their lives.
Jaekwan still doesn’t know what possessed Soleum to write it. But he assumes it was an emotion similar to what Jaekwan felt, back when he met Soleum for the first time in Sekwang City and thought that’s who I want to be.
It’s funny to think of. That he’d written those words as a hope to be like them, when he was the reason they were like this to begin with.
Sometimes he catches Choi staring at it. But he doesn’t look at it with the same wistfulness that Jaekwan does.
He looks at it like he wishes the words were gone.
Like they insult him somehow.
Jaekwan never asks him about it. They don’t talk about Soleum if they can help it. But Choi always looks at the words at least once a day, and he always turns away with a conflicted look on his face.
Weeks pass. Months pass.
Choi doesn’t get much better. His face is still gaunt, his eyes are still dead. He still works diligently at his desk in a way that he never did before.
But he does get better at hiding.
He smiles more. He stops pacing the waiting room every time Jaekwan goes off on a mission without him. He stops holding him too close every time Jaekwan returns, back when he was horrifically convinced that every time he saw Jaekwan would be the last.
He acts more human, but still not like himself.
And that’s fine.
Not everyone can bounce back after losing and losing and losing.
Choi always did somehow, but even he had his limits, and watching his juniors die in front of him might have been it.
Those 293 days might have been it.
So Jaekwan doesn’t push him. He lets Choi live in his own way. He ignores it when Choi stares at the words on the whiteboard, when he smokes too much, when he comes back with burns on his fingertips and scratches on his neck.
He only speaks up when he catches Choi at the whiteboard, the duster raised as if he’s about to wipe the words off.
“What are you doing?” Jaekwan snaps.
Choi doesn’t even startle.
He stays horribly calm, duster clutched tight in his hands.
“Was he making fun of me?” Choi asks quietly, staring at the words.
“...what?”
“He never trusted me to do anything right. But he wrote this… was he making fun of me?”
Jaekwan shakes his head firmly.
“He trusted you.”
“Haha. You didn’t see him those last few days. You were dead, remember?”
Jaekwan falls quiet.
It’s true.
He doesn’t know what happened between them.
Just that they’d had an awful argument, and tried to patch things up, and that Soleum had all but locked Choi away and ran off to go die on his own.
Jaekwan watches Choi with bated breath. He doesn’t want to fight him. But if Choi really does try to erase the words, he might have to.
“That bastard,” Choi says to himself. “That bastard.”
But he lets his hand drop.
He leaves the duster back on the stand.
He spares the memory for another day, and Jaekwan breathes a sigh of relief.
There isn’t a lot they have to remember Kim Soleum by. They don’t have enough to risk them.
/
Hyunmoo Team 1 has always been overworked.
Their skill set gets them assigned to far too many disasters, and they’re always shortstaffed, with a leader who is permanently out of commission and team members that keep dying, or worse, or going home forever.
It isn’t surprising when they end up having a new agent assigned to the team.
The agent that informs Jaekwan is jumpy when he tells him, as if afraid that Jaekwan will throw a fit. It’s always a touchy subject to assign new recruits. In this case, it should be less difficult, because Kim Soleum didn’t die the way most of the agents did.
When a new recruit comes in to replace a dead one, their teams are often irrational about it.
But Kim Soleum is still alive.
He’s doing fine.
All Jaekwan does is nod stiffly.
Kim Soleum is Kim Soleum, and work is work. Both he and Choi are burning out fast without help, and it’s stupid to not want help.
The new recruit is a good kid. He’s polite, intelligent, and while he isn’t as terrifyingly efficient as Kim Soleum was, he does his job pretty well. Choi is supposed to be the one showing him the ropes, but the job is left to Jaekwan, because Choi isn’t someone they trust to be around someone young and with hope right now.
Because Choi stares at the new agent like he’s already written him off as dead.
He used to be the friendliest towards new recruits. He’d take them out for meals, he’d tell them stories about the bureau that made them go wide-eyed, and he’d make sure they felt like they fit in. But he doesn’t do any of that anymore.
Instead he holds the agent at arms length and barely talks to him at all.
“Did I do anything to offend him?” the agent asks Jaekwan once, hesitant.
He looks genuinely upset.
It’s understandable. He’s worked hard for them, has progressed remarkably fast for a rookie, and Choi has barely nodded at him in recognition before he clocks out for the day.
“No,” Jaekwan says, but he isn’t sure how to explain what’s actually going on.
He doesn’t want to get close to anyone anymore, he could say.
He’s still traumatized from all the times he was left alone with his team gone.
“He’s seen too much,” Jaekwan settles for. “He’s had a difficult year. Don’t take it personally, agent.”
The agent nods, but Jaekwan can tell he isn’t convinced.
Jaekwan lets it go on for a few weeks. A month. When Choi still hasn’t so much as taken the agent out for a meal, Jaekwan finally approaches him about it.
“He thinks you don’t like him.”
Choi blinks. “Am I supposed to?”
The question startles him.
“You—”
“We’re coworkers. I treat him like one.” He’s quiet for a moment, staring at his screen. “That’s all we should be to each other.”
“You aren’t my coworker.”
Choi smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. “I know,” he says. “Jaekwan is my family. And isn’t that where we went wrong?”
He keeps typing, not sparing Jaekwan a glance.
The thing is—he’s even right.
In a place like this, where you can die at any time, building a family with your coworkers is the worst thing they can do for themselves. It’s a guaranteed way to break each other’s hearts.
It’s what they did with Kim Soleum.
“I’m not doing this because I’m sad,” Choi says. “I’m not treating him differently because I think he’s replaced Grapes, or something. He’s doing a fine job. But I don’t want to make friends with him. And that’s fine, isn’t it?”
“...It’s fine.”
Who is Jaekwan to push him to care about someone who could leave him behind again?
Who is he to force him to put himself through that?
Choi’s smile widens. It still looks dead.
“I’m too tired to care so much again, Jaekwan-ah. But I can be his coworker. I promise I’ll do a good job at that.”
He turns back to his screen, typing away.
He clocks out the moment his shift is over.
Jaekwan is starting to accept that Choi might never be who he was before.
It’s alright. It’s fine.
It was long overdue.
/
It’s not often that they have kids in the Hyunmoo Team 1 waiting room.
Their job is to rescue people. It isn’t to care for them once they’re safe. There’s a whole other department for that, for medical care, for psychiatric help, for memory erasure, for coaxing the victims into giving them as many details as they can so they can update the manual in the future.
Their job is just to rescue people.
But there’s a kid in the waiting room today, while the bureau searches for his mother, and Jaekwan is forced to look after him.
It’s not like he’s bad with kids. He’s spent enough time volunteering at the orphanage that they even like him. But this one in particular seems more afraid of Jaekwan than calmed by him, which might have something to do with the fact that he’d seen Jaekwan covered in blood and stabbing a humanoid ghost multiple times.
So Choi ends up taking over.
He used to be good with kids. He’s tended to avoid them recently. But he settles on the couch with this one, pulling up a cartoon on his phone, and tells the kid excitedly about it as it loads.
Jaekwan lets out a sigh of relief when the kid actually appears interested.
The show is familiar to Jaekwan as well. It’s one that Kim Soleum used to watch often, between missions, when he thought that no one else could see his screen. It was just one of the many methods he’d learned to cope with being forced to live in their world.
But Choi talks about the characters like he’s an avid fan.
Jaekwan knows vaguely of the show, from the snapshots that he’s caught while he passed by Soleum’s desk, but Choi speaks like someone who’s watched it diligently.
Jaekwan doesn’t want to think more about it. He doesn’t want to imagine his senior sitting alone in his empty apartment, watching a show that his junior had once watched to calm himself down. He doesn’t want to imagine him in those 293 days, holding on to any memory he had of the two of them to pretend that they’d wake up before the end of the world.
So he doesn’t.
He pretends that Choi must know about the show for another reason.
He lets Choi cheer the kid up while they wait for his mother to arrive. He lets him see the two of them off.
He pretends he doesn’t notice when Choi stands blankly at the door after waving them away, lost in thought.
“I wonder if he sleeps well now,” Choi says at last, more to himself than to Jaekwan.
He doesn’t have to say a name for Jaekwan to know who he’s talking about.
“There’s nothing there to give him nightmares,” Jaekwan says. “He’ll be fine.”
Choi is quiet for a long moment. “It doesn’t go away though,” he says at last. “The memories. I hope they don’t haunt him.”
There’s something messed up about hearing it from Choi, who’s been haunted for so long now that he might never be the same.
It’s worse, still, because it forces Jaekwan to think that it might be true.
Kim Soleum had lived through more horrors than Jaekwan could imagine. All of that wouldn’t just go away. He imagines Kim Soleum lying awake, just like Choi, watching cartoons on TV in hopes that he could someday forget that he’d ever had to live in this world at all.
The thought makes him feel sick.
Jaekwan shakes his head.
“He’ll be fine,” he says, because he has to be.
“Yeah,” Choi says. “I hope he’s eating well.”
He settles back at his desk. He goes back to typing his report. When their new recruit comes back in, he looks up, nods, and turns back to his screen.
The Hyunmoo Team 1 waiting room, for the first time in years, is a workplace before it is a home.
Jaekwan can’t even say that this isn’t how it’s meant to be.
/