Work Text:
Lalali
(or: four idiots, one motel room, 3am)
- vernon, or: a man who has found his people (they are all seventy years old)
The thing about Hansol Vernon Chwe was that he had not planned any of this.
He had taken the internship at Sunrise Senior Living because his university required forty hours of community service and his friend Seokmin had taken the last spot at the animal shelter, and now it was eight months later and Vernon was sitting in the common room on a Tuesday afternoon getting absolutely destroyed at Go-Stop by a woman named Mrs. Oh who was eighty-three years old and had the card shark energy of someone who had been waiting her whole life for a mark this good.
"Hansol-ah," she said, laying down her card with the kind of calm that only comes from decades of practice, "you owe me three thousand won."
"Mrs. Oh, we're playing with fake chips."
"The principle," she said, "is the same."
Vernon looked at his hand. He had nothing. He had, in fact, never had anything this entire game, a fact that Mrs. Oh had been aware of for the last twenty minutes while she slowly and methodically took everything from him. Across the table, Mrs. Kim was pretending to look out the window but her shoulders were shaking. Mrs. Jung had given up pretending and was laughing openly.
Great. Being laughed at by the women he was supposed to be taking care of.
"Again," said Mrs. Oh.
"I have to help with dinner—"
"After."
Vernon sat back down.
— ✦ —
He thought, sometimes, about the Friday it had actually changed.
Not the slow accumulation of it — the way he'd gone from clipboard to card table over the course of weeks, the way Mrs. Kim had started saving him rice crackers and Mrs. Jung had adopted him as a supplementary grandson — but the specific Friday, three months in, when Mrs. Oh had looked at him across the common room and said, with the authority of someone issuing a decree: "You. Bring your music."
"My music?"
"The thing on your phone. You're always listening to something. Bring it on Friday. We're bored of the activity schedule."
The activity schedule that week had been: gentle stretching, a documentary about the Han River, and a craft session involving foam stickers. Vernon could not, in good conscience, defend it.
He'd brought his speaker. Small, green, a little dinged up at one corner from a concert two years back. He'd made a playlist he wasn't sure about — a mix of things he actually loved and things he thought they might recognize, 60s classics bleeding into something newer, a throughline he couldn't quite articulate except that it felt right — and he'd set it up in the corner of the common room on a Friday afternoon not knowing if this was going to be the worst idea he'd ever had.
Mrs. Oh had listened to the first song with her arms crossed and her expression unreadable.
The second song, her foot had started moving.
By the third song — something warm and rolling, a track that had no business making a Tuesday feel like a Saturday night — Mrs. Jung had stood up. Not to leave. Just to move. Just because the music asked her to and she saw no reason to refuse.
And that was how Vernon had ended up DJing for eleven elderly women on a Friday afternoon in a senior living common room, watching Mrs. Kim — quiet, knitting-needle Mrs. Kim who texted him reminders to eat — close her eyes and sway like she was somewhere else entirely, somewhere warm and full of people she loved, somewhere the music still knew her name.
He had not planned this. He had stood behind his little green speaker and felt something loosen in his chest that he hadn't known was tight.
Mrs. Oh had uncrossed her arms somewhere in the middle of it. She never mentioned this. Neither did Vernon.
After that it was every Friday. He came in with new additions to the playlist, previewed songs with Mrs. Oh like she was his A&R, accepted her verdicts without question. "Too sad." "Good, but later." "This one again." The common room on Fridays became something. Not an event, not a program, just — a room full of people who had decided that music was worth standing up for, and a twenty-two year old behind a small green speaker who had figured out, without meaning to, that this was exactly where he was supposed to be.
The clipboard had stayed in his bag. He hadn't needed it after month two.
— ✦ —
Now it was eight months later and he was their Hansol and Mrs. Oh was taking everything from him at Go-Stop, again, and the memory of that first Friday lived somewhere behind his ribs like a song he couldn't stop hearing.
He had opinions about the afternoon snack cart selection — the banana milk was non-negotiable, everything else was up for debate. He knew which residents slept badly and which ones would be awake at odd hours wanting company. He had Mrs. Oh's number in his phone under "Gambling Nemesis 👴" even though she was a grandmother and the emoji was technically wrong. He knew that Mrs. Kim's doenjang jjigae required more patience than he had and less water than he kept adding. He knew that Mr. Bae's taxi stories had an architecture to them if you listened right — the same routes, the same punchlines, but never exactly the same, like jazz.
He knew, in the particular way you know things you didn't go looking for, that this was his. That he had walked in with a clipboard and forty hours to fill and had ended up with something that had no official name and no end date and fit him better than most things he had chosen deliberately.
"Hansol-ah," said Mrs. Kim from across the room, not looking up from her knitting, "you got a text."
"I'm in the middle of a game."
"It's from your mother."
"I'm in the middle of a game."
"It's also from me," said Mrs. Kim, and Vernon looked up to find her holding her own phone up, the screen facing him. She had sent him a text that said: you look tired. eat more.
He looked at her. She looked back at him, serene, needles clicking.
"I'm literally right here," he said.
"The text," she said, "is more official. Every time you see it, you should feel guilty for making a poor granny text that."
Vernon put his head down on the card table. Mrs. Oh patted his hair with one hand and laid down another card with the other.
"Again," she said.
— ✦ —
The call came at 2:17am on a Thursday.
Vernon was asleep. He was having a genuinely good dream about something he couldn't remember later, which felt unfair. His phone buzzed on his nightstand. He grabbed it, rubbing his eyes against the glare of the screen, saw the contact name, and was suddenly, completely awake.
Gambling Nemesis 👴
"Mrs. Oh?" He sat up. "Are you okay? What's wrong?"
"Nothing is wrong," said Mrs. Oh, sounding deeply unbothered. "I want the banana milk. The one with the yellow cap. Not the other one. They ran out because that new nurse hogged all the bottles for her younger son."
Vernon stared at his ceiling.
The ceiling of his room was ordinary. He had looked at it many times. It offered nothing.
"Mrs. Oh it's two in the morning."
"Yes."
"The store—" he whined, burying his face back in the pillow.
"The 24-hour one on Mapo-daero is open," said Mrs. Oh.
"You want me to—"
"You said," Mrs. Oh reminded him, with the precision of someone who had been waiting to deploy this exact sentence, "that if I ever needed anything I should call."
Vernon had said that. He had meant it in a general sense. He had perhaps not been specific enough about the parameters.
"Yellow cap?" he said.
"Two," said Mrs. Oh. "One for Mrs. Kim."
He was pulling on his sweatpants — green, soft, the ones with the slight bleach stain on the left knee that he kept meaning to throw out — before she'd even hung up. He found his green hoodie on the chair by the door, the one he'd worn to the park yesterday, still holding the shape of the afternoon. He zipped it up. He found his keys.
It was 2am and he was going to buy banana milk in his pajamas for two elderly women who were almost certainly still awake playing cards without him and he was not even annoyed about it. This was his life. He had walked into it sideways, through a door he hadn't been looking for, but at least it had turned out to be the right room.
He stepped out into the night. This was his life now. At least he got to have jam sessions with them to actual classics from the 60s on Fridays
- mingyu, or: a man of simple needs (he needs everyone to think he is interesting)
Kim Mingyu had made seven hundred million won on a Bitcoin investment he'd made at twenty-two because his roommate at the time had been very boring at parties and Mingyu had run out of things to look at on his phone and had downloaded an investment app by accident.
He told people it was strategy. He told people he'd seen the market signals. He told people, with great confidence, that it was about reading the moment and having the courage to take the leap. That big wins came from big gambles.
What he did not tell people was all that the moment had been: somewhere around 1 am, a bad party, a phone screen with too many cracks and a tap he had made while trying to find a gaming app.
He had woken up eight months later significantly richer and deeply confused. He had been close to finishing his degree in marketing and was applying for internships, when the notification came in please remember to pay the taxes on your earnings.
Now he was twenty-six and he had a yacht. The yacht was named Business Expenses because his accountant had told him to name it something that could be written off and Mingyu had taken this instruction very literally. He had an apartment in Mapo that was too large for one person, a refrigerator that was always stocked because he'd hired someone to stock it, and absolutely nothing to do between the hours of 10am and 6pm on any given weekday. Most of his days were spent in investing and divesting from anything that caught his interest: firms, ngos, production companies, that one idol group that debuted 2 years ago and charities.
He had tried, in the beginning, to be a person of leisure in the way that rich people in dramas were people of leisure. He had worn good clothes and gone to nice restaurants. He had attended events. He had been photographed at things. This had lasted about three weeks before he'd realized that being a person of leisure by yourself was just being bored in nicer locations.
What Mingyu wanted — what he had always wanted, if he was being honest with himself, which he mostly wasn't — was to be somewhere he was known. To be the person people looked up when he walked in. To be fussed over, specifically. He wanted someone to save him the good snacks and text him to eat more and call him at 2am for completely unreasonable things.
The grandfathers at Mapo Riverside Park had not been part of the plan.
The plan had been to sit by the river and look successful. He had been doing this, in his good leather jacket with ray-bans on his head, on a Tuesday, when the park's regular Tuesday checker players had been one man short and the remaining three had looked at him — at his expensive coat and his air of a person with nowhere to be — and one of them had said "you there. sit."
Mingyu had sat.
He had been coming back every Tuesday and Thursday since.
He now had opinions about checker strategy. He had been given unsolicited advice about the stock market that was completely wrong but delivered with such conviction that he'd written it down anyway. Mr. Choi brought him sweet potatoes in a thermos sometimes because he said Mingyu looked like he didn't eat enough (he ate plenty, his refrigerator was full, but he still ate the sweet potatoes). Mr. Han had started introducing him to other park regulars as "our Mingyu, the investment boy" which was not accurate but which Mingyu had stopped correcting because he liked how it sounded.
Our Mingyu.
He posted about his "strategic business consultations with industry veterans" on his private Instagram. Seungcheol, his gym trainer — a man he knew from the building, who trained the wrestlers on the third floor, who Mingyu had bothered into a loose friendship by showing up at inconvenient times — had responded with a voice message that was just him laughing for forty-five seconds.
Mingyu left him on read.
The yacht thing had also not been going the way he'd hoped. He had imagined the yacht would attract interesting people. It had attracted his accountant and two of his accountant's colleagues who had spent the entire afternoon talking about depreciation. He had taken it out alone twice, which had been peaceful in a way he found vaguely accusatory, like the sea was asking him to sit with himself and he simply wasn't ready for that.
He was eating chips on the deck on a Wednesday, watching the water and being quietly tragic about his social life, when he'd seen the man on the riverside path.
Or more accurately: when he'd seen the man fight the riverside vending machine.
He was tall. He was wearing all black. He had the face of someone who had decided, very early in life, that the world owed him something, and the energy of someone who had decided, even earlier, that he would collect this debt personally. He was also currently in an extremely serious physical altercation with a vending machine that had apparently eaten his money, and he was losing.
"Come on," the man said, to the machine, in a low and deeply threatening voice. "I will end you."
The machine did nothing.
The man shook it. Once. Twice. He looked around, apparently checking for witnesses. His eyes landed on Mingyu, sitting on his yacht deck with a bag of chips, watching this with complete attention.
They looked at each other.
The man's jaw set. He looked back at the machine. He retrieved his money via a technique that Mingyu could not fully see from this angle but which definitely involved his elbow. He walked away without looking back.
Mingyu sat there for a long moment.
"Hm," he said.
He went back to his chips. He thought about the man's face for the rest of the afternoon, and then for most of the evening, and then, if he was honest, while he was falling asleep.
He saw him again three weeks later.
Same riverside path. This time the man was walking with purpose, hands in his pockets, three other people trailing behind him with the energy of a procession that was taking itself very seriously. He glanced at the yacht as he passed. Glanced at Mingyu and then kept walking.
Mingyu straightened up and immediately tried to look like he was doing something important.
He was eating chips again. He was doing nothing important. The man's mouth did something that might have been the beginning of a very small smile before he looked away.
Mingyu finished his chips in a state of mild devastation.
He told no one about this but he did think about it continuously.
— ✦ —
The night of the 3am convenience store trip had started because his chef was asleep and Mingyu was hungry and he had a fully stocked refrigerator and knew how to use all of it and had still somehow ended up standing in front of it for ten minutes before deciding that what he actually wanted was convenience store ramen and there was no explaining this.
He put on his green sweatpants — the nice ones, from the brand that made them look like they cost more than they did— and his green hoodie and his most expensive slides and went out into the 3am city feeling like a man of the people.
This, he told himself, was research. This was ground-level business intelligence. This was him staying connected to the everyday experience of the ordinary consumer.
He was just hungry and a little lonely and the convenience store was bright and warm and no one there knew who he was.
He got his ramen and a banana milk for reasons he couldn't explain and stood at the self-checkout feeling extremely normal when the door opened behind him and he heard, very distinctly, someone say:
"If that machine ate my won again I'm going to—"
Mingyu turned around.
The man from the riverside stopped walking.
They looked at each other.
Oh, thought Mingyu, with the particular quality of a person whose brain has just gone offline.
You.
iii. wonwoo, or: a man with a mission (it is not a normal mission)
Jeon Wonwoo had written his undergraduate thesis on the semiotics of the fight scene in South Asian and East Asian mass entertainment cinema. It was 47 pages long. His advisor had called it "genuinely interesting, which is rare," and Wonwoo had taken this as the highest compliment of his academic career.
He had graduated. He had moved back to Mapo. He had intended to apply for graduate school.
He had not applied for graduate school.
What had happened instead was that he had gone to Ms. Park's arcade on a Sunday afternoon because it was raining and he had nothing to do and he'd grown up going to that arcade and he'd wanted to play the claw machine and the claw machine had eaten his money without producing anything and when he'd complained about this to Ms. Park she had sighed and said that everything was breaking and she couldn't afford repairs and she was probably going to have to close.
Wonwoo had looked around the arcade. The flashing lights. The old machines. The faded carpet. Ms. Park, who was sixty-seven years old and had run this place since before he was born and who was currently looking at her counter with the expression of someone who had already made their peace with something.
"When?" he'd said.
"End of the month, maybe," she'd said. "The claw machine has been broken for six weeks. The air hockey table is shorting out. I've had three customers this week." She'd smiled at him, the kind of smile that didn't reach the eyes. "It's fine. I'm old. I should rest."
Wonwoo had gone home. He had thought about it for one evening.
He had come back the next day with his friend Jihoon, who was an engineering student and could fix things, and his other friend Seungkwan, who could not fix anything but was extremely loud and had once convinced an entire bus to reroute through sheer force of personality, and he had said: "We're going to fix the claw machine."
"Why?" said Seungkwan.
"Because someone has to," said Wonwoo.
This was, in retrospect, how it had started.
The claw machine had required a specific part. Finding the part required a supplier. The supplier was three subway stops away and operated out of a unit that also sold electronics components and very old magazines and had a cat named President who sat on the counter and judged everyone who came in. Getting the part required negotiating with the supplier, a retired engineer named Mr. Yoo, who had initially refused to sell to them on the grounds that they "didn't look serious."
Wonwoo had looked at him for a long moment.
"We are," he'd said, "very serious."
Mr. Yoo had sold them the part.
The claw machine had been repaired. Ms. Park had cried a little, which she'd denied. Wonwoo had come back the next week because the air hockey table was still broken.
The week after that, the pinball machine.
The week after that, they'd realized that foot traffic was the real issue — the machines being fixed meant nothing if no one was coming in. So they'd started coming in. Bringing people. Telling everyone they knew. Seungkwan had made a group chat. The group chat had grown. The group chat now had thirty-one members, most of whom Wonwoo knew only vaguely, all of whom showed up on rotation to play games at Ms. Park's arcade so that she had customers and didn't feel like she was running the place for no one.
They had not called themselves a gang. The thing with the name had been Seungkwan's idea, delivered as a joke, and then somehow it had stuck.
"We need a name," Seungkwan had said.
"We don't need a name," Wonwoo had said.
"The Arcade Preservation Society," Seungkwan had said.
"Absolutely not."
"Operation Ms. Park."
"No."
"We could just call ourselves—"
"Fine," Wonwoo had said. "Operation Ms. Park. Fine. Can we focus."
The name had gotten around. People in the neighborhood had started calling them that. Ms. Park herself had heard about it and had laughed for a very long time and then made them all a meal and told them they were ridiculous, which Wonwoo took as confirmation that they were doing the right thing.
The claw machine, specifically, had become a personal grudge. It was built to be one of those wrestling games where most people were bound to lose with how over-stimulating the vibration of the metal bar would be. But where one would usually find a hand to wrestle against there was a claw, like the ones on JCB.
It worked. Jihoon had fixed it. But it was a claw machine, and claw machines were, philosophically, designed to take your money and give you nothing, and Wonwoo found this offensive on a level he couldn't entirely articulate. He played it every time he came in. He had never won. He had spent, over the course of six months, a sum of money that he chose not to calculate. He kept coming back.
"You know the claw is weighted, right?" Seungkwan had said once.
"I know," Wonwoo had said, feeding another coin in.
"The house always wins."
"Not today."
The claw clasped around his hand. It started vibrating painfully as Wonwoo tried to make it budge at least an inch. The machine increased its intensity, with an annoyingly joyful music track rising in its fervor. It ended with Wonwoo’s hand slammed against the stainless steel.
Wonwoo stared at the machine.
"Tomorrow," he told it.
— ✦ —
The night everything changed had started ordinarily enough.
He'd been at the arcade until eleven. The claw machine had eaten four of his coins. He'd walked home along the riverside path, hands in his pockets, running through the logistics of getting a new air hockey puck because the current one had developed a wobble that was affecting the structural integrity of Mr. Lee's Tuesday night games, which were taken very seriously by everyone involved.
He showed up at the arcade to find Ms. Park behind the counter with a slightly stunned expression and a man in green sweatpants sitting across from her, very tall, eating chips, looking around at the arcade with the bright curious attention of someone taking inventory.
Wonwoo stopped in the doorway.
The man looked up.
Oh, said something in Wonwoo's chest, unhelpfully.
You, he did not say.
"This is Mingyu," said Ms. Park. "He wants to help."
"I heard about the place," said Mingyu. He had a very easy smile, the kind that arrived before the rest of his face caught up, like it was a reflex. "I think it's cool. Old school. I want to invest."
"We don't need investment," Wonwoo said. "We have a system."
"Your system is thirty people rotating through to play games," said Mingyu. "I looked at the numbers. The electricity bill alone—"
"You looked at the numbers."
"I'm in business," said Mingyu, with the energy of someone saying something they'd practiced.
Wonwoo looked at him for a long moment. Mingyu looked back. He didn't flinch, which Wonwoo noted with something that might have been, reluctantly, respect.
"What kind of investment," Wonwoo said.
Mingyu told him.
The investment was: buying the building.
"No," said Wonwoo.
"It's a good deal—"
"Ms. Park owns her lease—"
"For another eight months, and then the landlord is selling the building, I looked it up, the sale is already in progress—"
Wonwoo went very still.
He had not known that. He had not looked that far ahead. He had been so focused on the machines, on the foot traffic, on keeping the place running week to week, that he had not looked at the structural reality of what was going to happen in eight months when the lease ended.
He looked at Ms. Park.
She was looking at her counter.
"I was going to tell you," she said quietly. "I just. I liked watching you all fix things."
The silence lasted about four seconds.
"How much," Wonwoo said to Mingyu.
Mingyu told him.
"That's—" Wonwoo stopped. "You'd just. Buy it?"
"I buy things," said Mingyu, with a shrug that was trying to be casual and landing somewhere in the vicinity of please think I am interesting. "It's what I do."
"And then what. You own an arcade."
"Ms. Park still runs it." Mingyu glanced at her. "If she wants to. Or she retires and we find someone. Or—" he paused. "Or you run it. I don't know. I just thought—" he looked around the arcade again, at the machines, at the faded carpet, at the photo on the wall of Ms. Park at the grand opening twenty years ago, much younger and laughing at something off-camera. "Someone should."
Wonwoo stared at him.
"It'll take me about twenty minutes," Mingyu added. "I have my guy on speed dial."
"Twenty—"
"Maybe thirty. He's sometimes slow to pick up."
Wonwoo opened his mouth. He closed it. He thought about six months of claw machine battles and part sourcing and Seungkwan's group chat and Mr. Lee's Tuesday air hockey and Ms. Park's face just now, looking at her counter, and the photo on the wall.
"I need you to understand," he said, very carefully, "that we had a plan."
"I know," said Mingyu.
"There were stages. There was a whole — we had a sourcing operation, and a foot traffic strategy, and Jihoon was going to recalibrate the claw machine's tension mechanism—"
"He was going to recalibrate it?"
"The point is we had a system."
"I know," said Mingyu again. He didn't sound dismissive. He sounded like he actually understood, which was worse somehow. "I'm not trying to take over your system. I'm just—" he paused. "Let me do this part. You keep doing your part. Ms. Park gets to rest."
Wonwoo looked at Ms. Park.
Ms. Park was looking at Mingyu with an expression Wonwoo recognized, because he had seen it on Mrs. Oh's face when she talked about her grandson, and it was the expression of someone who had been surprised by tenderness and was trying to figure out what to do with it.
"Fine," Wonwoo said.
It took twenty-three minutes.
Wonwoo sat in the arcade and watched Mingyu make three phone calls and send approximately forty texts with the focused energy of someone who actually knew what they were doing underneath all the performance of knowing what he was doing, and at the end of it Ms. Park owned her building.
She cried again. She denied it again. In the end, she made them all food.
Wonwoo sat across from Mingyu at the small table in the back and ate the food and felt, against his will and better judgment, an entirely new and inconvenient problem developing somewhere in the region of his chest.
Mingyu caught him looking and smiled — not the practiced easy one, a different one, smaller and less ready — and Wonwoo looked back at his food.
"Your gang," said Mingyu, "is very—"
"Don't."
"I was going to say wholesome."
"Don't."
Mingyu laughed. It was a good laugh. Wonwoo ate his food and did not think about the laugh, with great effort, for the rest of the afternoon.
- seungcheol, or: a man who has found his calling (it is being paid for yelling)
Choi Seungcheol had not become a trainer by accident.
He had become a trainer because he was good at it, which he knew, and because he liked it, which he knew, and because there was a specific joy — particular and difficult to explain to people who didn't share it — in watching someone figure out what their body could do. In pushing someone past the point they'd set for themselves in their head. In the moment, right at the edge of giving up, when they didn't.
He also, genuinely, liked yelling.
This was the part that was harder to explain.
It wasn't mean, the yelling. Jiwon knew that — Jiwon, who was twenty-four and had the build of a small mountain and the endurance of a golden retriever and had been Seungcheol's first professional wrestler client and who currently, four years later, did everything Seungcheol told him with the sheepish compliance of a very large puppy who knew exactly who was in charge. Soonyoung knew it — a welterweight boxer with reflexes that still sometimes made Seungcheol whistle and a very annoying habit of getting in his own head before fights. Dokyeom knew it — Lee Seokmin, heavyweight prospect, grandson of Mrs. Kim at the Sunrise Senior Living home down the block, who Seungcheol had taken on six months ago after Seokmin's previous trainer had described him as "too cheerful for the sport," which Seungcheol had found so baffling he'd offered to sign Seokmin on the spot.
The yelling was: I know you can do more. I'm going to stay here until you do. I'm not going anywhere.
He had not always been good at saying this in other ways. The yelling was efficient.
Dokyeom had texted at 11pm: coach the kimbap is all gone i stress-ate all of it i'm sorry
Seungcheol had stared at this text.
Dokyeom had his biggest match in a week. The kimbap had been meal-prepped, portioned, labelled, refrigerated, and had represented approximately four of Dokyeom's seven planned meals for the next two days.
How, he texted back.
I was nervous, Dokyeom replied. It was so good.
Seungcheol put on his green sweatpants — the old ones, the faded ones, the ones he'd had for so long they'd gone soft as a second skin — and his green hoodie and went to the convenience store because if he was going to rebuild Dokyeom's meal prep tonight he needed supplies and there was no point going to sleep first.
The store on Mapo-daero was open. The lights inside were the particular aggressive brightness of all convenience stores at 3am, the kind that made everyone inside look slightly shocked to be alive.
Seungcheol grabbed a basket and went to find chicken breast.
He was reading the label on a protein drink — the sodium content was criminal, he was going to write to someone about this — when the door opened and a man came in saying "if that machine ate my won again I'm going to—" and stopped.
Seungcheol looked up.
He knew this man. Not well enough though. From the street. The one who was always walking past the gym building with that group of people who took themselves very seriously, toward the arcade down the block. He had the face of someone who conducted all of his errands like they were important operations.
He was wearing a green hoodie.
Seungcheol looked down at his own green hoodie.
He looked back up.
The man clocked the hoodie situation at the same moment. His expression shifted slightly.
"Hey," said Seungcheol.
"Hey," said the man.
They stood in the aisle for a moment.
"Screwdriver," said the man, holding up the reason he was there, which was a small convenience store toolkit. "The claw machine."
"Chicken breast," said Seungcheol, holding up his basket. "My wrestler stress-ate his meal prep."
"Ah," said the man.
"Yeah," said Seungcheol.
The door opened again.
They both looked.
A very tall man in green sweatpants and a green hoodie walked in holding a phone and said "okay I'm here, banana milk, yellow cap—" and stopped.
He looked at Seungcheol. He looked at the other man. He looked at both of their green hoodies. He looked down at his own green hoodie.
"Interesting," he said, in the tone of someone cataloguing data.
"You," said the other man. Not angry. Just recognizing.
The tall man's expression did something complicated. "Yeah," he said. "Me."
The door opened a third time.
This one Seungcheol knew from the building. Green sweatpants. Green hoodie. A bag of chips under his arm that he'd apparently brought from home, which raised questions. He walked in, looked at the three of them, took in the matching situation, and said nothing for a full three seconds.
"Okay," said Mingyu. "Okay, wow. Okay."
"You," said the man in black-and-green, to Mingyu.
"Me," said Mingyu. He pointed at Seungcheol. "I know you. Building."
"Building," Seungcheol confirmed.
"I don't know you," Mingyu said to the fourth man, a younger-looking guy who had just come in behind him looking slightly rumpled and sleep-warm and holding nothing, apparently having forgotten why he'd come in. "Wait—" Mingyu squinted. "Park."
"Yes?" The kid looked up.
"No, the park. The river park. You walk past with the—" Mingyu made a gesture that apparently indicated grannies.
"Oh." The kid — Vernon, Seungcheol's brain supplied, from the building visits, Dokyeom's stories — looked around the store, remembered why he was there, and went for the banana milk with the resigned efficiency of someone who had accepted their circumstances. "The old age home is nearby. Mrs. Oh wanted banana milk."
"At 3am."
"She keeps weird hours."
They stood in the convenience store at 3am — four men, four nearly identical green hoodies, which Seungcheol was going to think about later — and looked at each other with the collective expression of people who have recognized something absurd but can't quite articulate it yet.
"So," said Mingyu, "does anyone want to grab something?"
- 3am (or: the natural endpoint of all things is a motel room off mapo-daero)
The ramen had been Mingyu's idea. The motel had been nobody's idea specifically, which was how they ended up there.
It started with the eat-in section of the convenience store being closed for cleaning — a mop bucket and a teenage employee with headphones on who had not noticed them come in and was not going to notice them leave. It continued with the 4 (or was it?) bottles of Jinro that Mingyu had picked up almost as an afterthought, setting them on the checkout counter next to the ramen cups and the banana milk and Seungcheol's chicken breast, with the energy of a man who had decided something without consulting anyone.
The four of them looked at the bottles on the conveyor belt.
"Are we—" Vernon started.
"I don't know," said Wonwoo.
"I mean," said Vernon.
"Yeah," said Wonwoo.
A beat.
"I don't know about you guys," said Mingyu, with the carefully calibrated casualness of someone who had been thinking about this since approximately the moment they all walked in, "but I could use some fun. And some company."
Nobody said anything for a second.
Then Seungcheol picked up his chicken breast and looked at the cans and looked at the three of them and made the face of a man conducting a very brief internal negotiation with himself about his responsibilities and his bedtime and his wrestler's meal prep and the fact that it was 3am and he was standing in a convenience store with three strangers in the same hoodie.
"Fuck it," said Seungcheol in the tone of someone who had already decided and was just waiting for everyone else to catch up.
"Okay," said Vernon.
"Sure," said Wonwoo,
"We're not drinking in the street though," said Seungcheol.
"Obviously not," said Mingyu.
"Then where—"
Mingyu pointed at the Mapo Riverside Inn, which was literally right there, a building of modest ambitions and a neon vacancy sign that was missing the C.
"That's a motel," said Wonwoo.
"It has rooms," said Mingyu. "Rooms have floors. Floors are somewhere to sit."
"We are not renting a motel room to drink convenience store soju," said Seungcheol.
"We could drink it outside," said Mingyu. "In the cold."
A pause.
"How much is the room," said Seungcheol.
— ✦ —
The front desk clerk was a university student named Jungkook who looked like he had seen everything and been surprised by none of it. He looked at the four of them — matching green hoodies, ramen cups, a bag that was clinking — and said "double room is forty thousand won, checkout at noon" in the tone of someone who had stopped asking questions a long time ago.
Mingyu had the card out before anyone could argue.
"I'm funding this," he said.
"For what," said Seungcheol.
"Strategic overnight consultation."
Wonwoo looked at the ceiling. Vernon was already in the elevator.
— ✦ —
Room 247 was: two mats, a low table, a TV that got four channels, a window overlooking the parking lot, a bathroom, and a small electric kettle next to a single packet of barley tea, placed there with an optimism that the room's current occupants were about to comprehensively betray.
Mingyu set the cans on the table.
They looked at the cans. They looked at each other — four men in the same green hoodie, in a motel room, at 3am, having met approximately forty minutes ago.
"Okay," said Seungcheol, slowly. "What are the actual odds."
"Of what," said Vernon.
Seungcheol gestured at the room. Specifically, at all of them. At the hoodies.
Vernon looked down at his hoodie. He looked at Mingyu's hoodie. He looked at Wonwoo's hoodie. He looked back at his own.
"Oh," said Vernon.
"Right," said Seungcheol.
"I mean," said Mingyu, "statistically—"
"Don't," said Wonwoo.
"It's actually a pretty common colorway—"
"Kim Mingyu."
Mingyu stopped talking, the tip of his ears tinged red.
The four of them stood in room 247 of the Mapo Riverside Inn and absorbed the full absurdity of their situation. The cans sat on the table. The kettle waited. Vernon picked up a can. He opened it. He held it out toward the center of the room.
"What are the odds," he said, "that we're doing this."
A beat.
Seungcheol picked up a can.
Wonwoo picked up a can.
Mingyu picked up a can.
They were doing this. ‘Salute’
— ✦ —
The thing about four men who are each, individually, a little feral when given the opportunity, is that together, with soju, in a small room, the ferality compounds.
It started reasonably enough. They drank. They ate the ramen. Mingyu found the remote and cycled through the four channels with the focused determination of a man who believed in his heart that if he kept pressing the button something good would eventually appear, and something good did appear, which was a late-night music program cycling through old clips with the energy of a broadcast that had fully given up on curation and was just letting things happen.
What was currently happening was a 2008 idol group performing a song with a very committed horn section.
"Oh," said Mingyu, sitting up. "I know this."
"Everyone knows this," said Seungcheol.
"No but I know this," said Mingyu, which was apparently a meaningful distinction, because he stood up — just stood up, in the motel room, in his green sweatpants, off the mat — and did the opening move. Correctly. With feeling.
Vernon made a noise that sounded like whoa but also like a yayy.
"Don't make that noise," said Wonwoo.
Vernon was already making the noise. The noise was taken as encouragement and thus, was working.
The song got to the chorus. Mingyu did the chorus. He did it the way someone does something they practiced privately and never planned to perform, which is to say with complete commitment and no self-preservation instinct whatsoever. Seungcheol watched this for approximately six seconds before something in him gave in, and then he was up too, because the chorus had a specific move that worked better with two people and Seungcheol had known this since he was nineteen and his body apparently still knew it.
The two of them did the chorus move in a motel room at 3am.
Wonwoo looked at Vernon.
Vernon looked at Wonwoo.
They were both still sitting. They were the reasonable ones. They were going to stay sitting.
The song got to the bridge.
Wonwoo's mouth moved, just slightly, with words he wasn't saying out loud.
"You know it," said Mingyu, pointing at him, breathless.
"I don't—"
"You're mouthing the words."
"I'm not—"
"Wonwoo-ya. You are literally—"
"I was in high school," Wonwoo said, with the energy of a man submitting evidence in his own defense. "Everyone knew this in high school. That doesn't mean—"
"Get up," said Seungcheol.
"I'm not—"
"Get," said Seungcheol, "up."
Wonwoo got up.
— ✦ —
What followed was not a thing any of them would be able to fully reconstruct later.
There were more bottles— Mingyu had bought eight, it turned out, not four, the bag had been deceptive — and the TV kept cycling through the late-night archive with the generosity of a program that had nowhere to be, and the room was small enough that four people dancing in it required a certain creative approach to spatial reasoning. Vernon knocked the kettle off the dresser at some point and caught it before it hit the ground and looked so genuinely startled by his own reflexes that Seungcheol had to sit down. Mingyu attempted to demonstrate a move from a 2013 comeback stage and collided with the low table, which went over, which sent the empty ramen cups everywhere, which somehow made everything funnier than it had any right to be.
Wonwoo laughed. A real one — head back, unguarded, the kind that arrived before he could decide whether to have it — and Mingyu, who was on the floor surrounded by overturned ramen cups, looked up at the sound of it with an expression that he then very quickly rearranged into something more neutral, which was not fast enough.
Vernon noticed. Vernon said nothing because he had spent eight months learning the particular wisdom of the elderly, which included knowing when to let something develop without intervention.
Seungcheol noticed. Seungcheol said "okay so that comeback stage—" very loudly and kept the energy moving, because he was a trainer and redirecting momentum was a professional skill.
They did not talk about what they did for a living, not in a serious way. That was not what this was. What this intead was: Seungcheol yelling the wrong lyrics to something and being corrected by all three of them simultaneously. Vernon knowing every word to a song none of them had thought about in a decade and delivering it with the straight-faced sincerity of a man performing a civic duty. Mingyu making a speech — a short one, impassioned, about why a particular 2010 choreography was historically underrated — that was either genuinely insightful or complete nonsense and possibly both. Wonwoo sitting against the wall with his knees up and a can in his hand, not dancing anymore but not looking like he wanted to be anywhere else, watching the other three with the expression of someone who had walked into something unexpected and was deciding, quietly, to stay.
At one point Seungcheol tried to teach Vernon a boxing combination and Vernon, who had the instincts of someone who had been psychologically trained by three elderly card sharks, immediately used it to tap Mingyu's shoulder and steal his chips.
"That's not what that's for," said Seungcheol.
"It worked," said Vernon, eating the chips.
At one point Mingyu, with complete sincerity, raised his can and said "to the green hoodie."
"That's not a toast," said Wonwoo.
"To the green hoodie," said Seungcheol.
"To the green hoodie," said Vernon.
Wonwoo looked at the three of them.
"To the green hoodie," he said.
They drank.
— ✦ —
The party ended the way good parties do: gradually, and then all at once.
The TV found a ballad. The cans ran out. Seungcheol sat down and did not get back up. Vernon, who had been explaining something about Mrs. Oh's go-stop strategy that somehow became a meditation on the nature of luck, trailed off mid-sentence and leaned against the headboard and was asleep in under two minutes, which everyone noted and no one commented on because it seemed rude.
The room settled. Got warm. The knocked-over table was still on its side. Nobody fixed it.
Mingyu and Wonwoo ended up against the wall — not decided, just where they'd landed at some point during the evening, close enough that their shoulders were touching. Neither of them had moved away from it. The TV was on but neither of them were watching it. The parking lot outside was orange and quiet.
"So," said Mingyu, to the ceiling, in a voice that had gone softer. "The arcade."
"Don't," said Wonwoo.
"I was going to say something nice."
"You were going to make a joke."
"I can do both." Mingyu turned his head slightly. "You built something real with all those people. For Ms. Park. That's—" he paused. "I buy buildings. You actually—" he didn't finish the sentence. He looked back at the ceiling.
Wonwoo didn't say anything for a moment.
"You bought the building in twenty-three minutes," he said.
"Twenty-three minutes and thirty-seven seconds."
"You were counting."
"I'm in finance."
"Bitcoin isn't—"
"It has financial elements—"
"It really doesn't—"
Mingyu laughed. Low, easy, the real version — not the one Wonwoo had noted earlier, practiced and arriving before the rest of his face caught up. This one came from somewhere else.
"Saturday," said Mingyu, after a while. "The arcade. Ms. Park said she used to do evenings, back when it was busy. If we brought people—"
"The group chat," said Wonwoo.
"And whatever army he brings." Mingyu gestured at Seungcheol's unconscious form.
"He'll invite everyone he knows."
"Yeah." A pause. "Is that—"
"Yes," said Wonwoo. "Saturday."
Mingyu's shoulder shifted against his. Neither of them moved.
"You're going to lose your money at the claw machine," Wonwoo said.
"Probably." Mingyu shrugged. "I have a lot of money."
"The house always wins."
"You've been losing for six months."
"That's different though."
"How? Do you really want to deny me the pleasure of your company"
Wonwoo didn't answer. The TV played something soft. Seungcheol made a sound in his sleep that was almost a word. Vernon had acquired the extra pillow through means that remained unclear.
"You have a great voice," said Mingyu, quietly. Not for the first time tonight — he'd said it earlier, during the chaos, and it had gotten lost in the noise. He said it again now, in the quiet, where it landed differently. "Just. For someone who wasn't going to sing."
Wonwoo looked at the wall across from him.
"You did the ad libs," he said.
"The ad-libs were correct."
"You practiced it."
"I had a lot of free time at twenty-three." The shoulder against his was warm. "The yacht wasn't helping."
Wonwoo considered this. Outside, the first taxi of the early morning went past Mapo-daero. Inside, the room breathed around them, still warm, faintly wrecked in the pleasant way of a night that had been worth having.
"My thesis," said Wonwoo, "was forty-seven pages on the semiotics ofthe fight scene."
"In film."
"South and East Asian mass entertainment cinema."
Mingyu turned to look at him. "And?"
"The choreography in those performances uses the same concept. The ad-libs are pauses, embellishments, instead of entire conflict resolutions. It's why it feels satisfying when it comes through finally."
A beat.
"That," said Mingyu, "is genuinely the most interesting thing anyone has ever said to me."
"It's not that interesting."
"Tell me more."
Wonwoo told him more. Mingyu listened — listened, followed it, pushed back in the right places. They talked in low voices while Seungcheol slept and Vernon slept and the TV played to no one, and the knocked-over table stayed on its side, and the night went on becoming morning without either of them noticing.
— ✦ —
Seungcheol woke up at 4:30am with a crick in his neck and the immediate awareness that he had fallen asleep in a motel room with three men he had met three hours ago, one of whom he had taught a boxing combination to, which was new for him.
He sat up. Vernon was horizontal, fully committed. Mingyu was asleep on his side facing the wall. Wonwoo was awake, reading something on his phone, and looked up when Seungcheol moved.
They looked at each other in the dark and the orange parking lot light.
"Good nap?" said Wonwoo.
"Don' even startt," said Seungcheol.
Wonwoo smiled. Seungcheol got up, quietly, found what was left of his chicken breast, and ate it standing by the window. The parking lot was empty. The street beyond was beginning, just barely, to think about being blue instead of black.
"He's going to win the match," said Seungcheol. Not to Wonwoo specifically. Just to the window.
"Dokyeom?"
"He stress-eats when he's nervous. He's always nervous before the ones he actually cares about." He finished the chicken. "He's going to be fine."
Wonwoo was quiet for a moment. Then, "Ms. Park was nervous. Before she let us fix anything. She kept saying it was already fine, don't bother." He looked at his phone, or appeared to. "She stopped saying it around month three."
Seungcheol looked at him.
"People stop pretending when they figure out you're going to stay," Wonwoo said. Not profound about it. Just a thing he'd noticed.
Seungcheol thought about Jiwon, year one, so careful about looking like he wasn't struggling. Soonyoung, who still sometimes did it before he caught himself. Dokyeom, who'd stopped almost immediately, which had been alarming and then, eventually, exactly right.
"Yeah," he said.
They stayed by the window a few minutes more. Outside, the first delivery scooter of the morning went past. Inside, Mingyu shifted in his sleep and said something that wasn't a word, and Vernon pulled the extra pillow over his face, and the room breathed around them, warm and quietly wrecked and theirs, briefly, until noon.
— ✦ —
Checkout was noon.
They left at seven, when the city had fully decided to be morning. The bakery two doors down was open, the smell of it making everyone slow down without deciding to. A grandmother walked a very small dog. A delivery scooter passed.
They stood outside the Mapo Riverside Inn — four men in green hoodies, in the early light, with their empty cans and their ramen cups and the general air of people who had not planned this and were not sorry about it.
"Saturday," said Mingyu.
"Saturday," said Seungcheol.
"I have to return the banana milk," said Vernon. "Mrs. Oh is going to want confirmation of receipt."
"That's not how—" Seungcheol started.
"She'll want a photo."
"Of the banana milk?"
"Of me. Holding it. Proof of concept." Vernon already had his phone out. He held the milk up. He sent it. Mrs. Oh responded thirty seconds later with a voice message: "finally," in the tone of someone who had been waiting for hours.
Wonwoo watched this. Something in his face did the thing that wasn't quite a smile but close enough.
"Okay," said Seungcheol. "I have to go yell at a wrestler."
"Give Dokyeom my love," said Vernon.
"I'm not doing that."
"Give him my regards."
"I'll tell him to call you."
Seungcheol left. Vernon left, banana milks tucked under his arm. Wonwoo and Mingyu stood on the pavement in front of a motel with a broken vacancy sign, in the morning, which had arrived.
"The arcade opens at ten," said Wonwoo.
"I know," said Mingyu. "I own the building."
"You could come. See how it actually works. Not the buying part."
Mingyu was quiet for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "Okay."
"There's a claw machine."
"You mentioned."
"You're going to lose your money."
"You've been losing your money for six months."
"That's different."
"Well good i have a lot of it."
Wonwoo started walking. Mingyu fell into step beside him, because that was apparently what was happening now, and the city went about its business around them, and the arcade would open in three hours, and the claw machine would eat their money with equal opportunity, and none of this was what either of them had planned.
Behind them, the Mapo Riverside Inn's broken sign buzzed in the morning air.
Va_ancy, it said, and then the light steadied.
—