Work Text:
1933
To tell the truth…Jinu had kind of gotten into the habit.
Gwi-Ma didn’t tend to watch them too closely if they weren’t on an active mission. This gave Jinu the chance to slip up into the human world from time-to-time when he got bored. When he went up, he would look around and take stock of how the world had changed since he’d been human.
That was what he was doing when he saw it.
A set of glass bottles sitting on a countertop, being sold for an exorbitant price.
‘What’s that?’ he asked the store-keeper, pointing at the bottles.
‘Soda pop,’ the man answered. ‘Just recently brought over. It’s from Japan.’
‘Of course it is,’ Jinu muttered. Still…curiosity and all that. Jinu eyed off the bottle, and the price tag.
He was gonna give it a try.
A quiet hum and the store-keeper was hypnotised into thinking he’d paid. He handed him a bottle and Jinu took it and headed off. Once he was out of sight, the man would forget all about him. Once he was safely out of sight, Jinu cracked the lid open and took a swig of the stuff.
Instantly, he felt what felt like a series of small painless explosions across his tongue.
But that wasn’t the worst thing.
The worst thing was the taste.
‘PFFT!’
Jinu spat it back out and spent a few minutes choking. He stuck his tongue out and rubbed his arm across it. Derpy appeared next to him, looking up in concern. Sussie, perched on Derpy’s head, just looked amused.
‘It’s not funny, bird!’ he growled.
Here was the thing.
Jinu was a peasant.
When he was human, his diet was very simple (when he actually could eat). While rice had been ideal, it wasn’t always available. He’d more commonly eaten millet, barely, or usually soybeans. He had eaten kimshi, radishes, namul. Meat had only been consumed – often salted for preservation – on special occasions.
He had grown up on this kind of diet.
When he entered the palace, he had been introduced to honey. The aristocrats loved it, but Jinu had found it sickly. One of the older servants had remarked that wasn’t too surprising, given where he’d come from. The aristocrats had grown up eating the sickly sweet sticky substance. (Try saying that three times.) Jinu had not; he had no taste for it.
And he never developed one, even after he was dragged down to the Underworld and indoctrinated into Gwi-Ma’s service.
The souls were, if anything, worse.
And, with that thought, Jinu placed it.
‘This tastes like human soul.’ With a disgusted tilt of his lips, he turned the bottle upside down and poured it onto the pavement. ‘Bad enough I have to put that in my mouth when Gwi-Ma’s hungry. I’m not doing it when I don’t have to.’
He walked as he poured it out, and Derpy fell into step next to him.
As they went, the radio at some other shop began to play a Hunter song.
And, in the back of his mind, the gears in Jinu’s head began turning.