Chapter Text
The attending announced it on rounds, offhand, like it wasn't going to detonate anything: Yoo Jaeyi would be scrubbing in on Mr. Park's stomach resection, second assist, under chief surgeon Dr. Baek himself. Six interns applied. One got picked. Jaeyi didn't need to look up from her tablet to feel the room recalibrate around her.
By lunch it had a shape. By the end of the shift it had a name for what she'd done to deserve it, and the name was her father's.
She'd expected it. She'd have been almost disappointed if it hadn't happened — it would have meant six years of cutting her own name loose from his had actually worked, and she knew better than to hope for that in a building he used to run. So she let it roll past her like it was nothing. She was not her father, after all.
What she didn't expect, and didn't especially enjoy, was how loud one particular intern got about it. Big voice, bigger opinion of what fairness looked like when it wasn't in his favor. He said nepotism in the stairwell like she wasn't three steps behind him. She simply rolled her eyes at it, because this man clearly was behind on the news of her father's malpractice lawsuit. If anything, being a Yoo should have been a detriment, not an advantage at this point.
So she ignored it, mostly. The trouble was never what he or any of their peers thought of her. It never had been, not since she was seventeen and had already decided whose opinion was worth paying attention to. If there was anyone that could ever make her question her own worth, it was Woo Seulgi.
Seulgi had this one rule: no funny business where we do serious business. Which was a long-winded way of saying no PDA at work. Jaeyi hated it.
Not because she didn't understand Seulgi's reasons. This was a very competitive internship program and they basically had to prove everyday their medical degree was worth something. She respected the way Seulgi walked around the hospital with her head high and steady feet. No one could touch her. Unfortunately, that also — quite literally — included Jaeyi.
So she relied on stolen moments in the break room when she was feeling particularly clingy, missing her girlfriend's embrace.
"Congratulations on the surgery," Seulgi said with her arms around Jaeyi, rocking her gently. "I bet you're excited."
"I am. This is a complex case, it will be fun to work on it," Jaeyi said, voice muffled by Seulgi's neck.
"You deserve that spot in that OR." Seulgi said, now looking directly into Jaeyi's eyes.
Jaeyi sighs. "So you've heard." The nepotism rumor, she doesn't say.
"Nonsense. Gibberish. Noise." Seulgi punctuated each word with a peck on her lips. Jaeyi basked in the warmth of it; it wasn't every day that Seulgi made such an exception to her rule. "Stupid people will say stupid things. Just keep on working, yeah?"
"Yeah..." and Jaeyi buried her face in Seulgi's neck again, already missing her scent.
They stayed like that for a moment longer, until Jaeyi's hands started to wander.
"Yoo Jaeyi, no funny business—"
"—where we do serious business. Yeah, yeah, I know." Jaeyi reluctantly broke away from the hug, pout already on her lips.
"We should get back to work."
"What if I can't? What if I'm sick?"
"Sick?"
"I just got diagnosed as your wife." Jaeyi said in faux seriousness, like giving a real diagnostic, the back of her hand on her forehead for dramatics. "They said it's terminal. We have to stay together forever until I die."
"Then I suggest you increase your fluid intake and observe the symptoms," Seulgi gave her a final peck on the lips and started pushing away. "You're going to be fine."
"But I'm craving the kind of intimacy that requires surgical tools, Seulgi-ah!" Jaeyi whined.
"That's the best prophylaxis I can prescribe to you without a marriage certificate." Seulgi was barely containing her giggling, half annoyed and half amused at Jaeyi's antics. "Go back to work." She lightly shoved Jaeyi out of the room.
They'd played this joke many times. For the time they'd been together, they were practically married. But today of all days, Yoo Jaeyi really wanted that piece of paper.
That's when it started. It was always like this, with small things.
Tuesday: Seulgi in the cafeteria line, laughing at something a member of the staff said. A pretty girl, at that. Jaeyi watched from across the room, ordered a black coffee she didn't want, and left it on Seulgi's tray on her way out without a word, because that was easier than examining why her chest had gone tight over four seconds of someone else making her girlfriend smile.
Wednesday: a cluster of interns around Seulgi at the nurses' station, all of them leaning in like she was the interesting one in the room, which — correct, obviously, but Jaeyi had opinions about who got to know that. She wrote I'm so proud of you, you're doing amazing in the margin of a chart Seulgi wasn't even attached to and made sure it got back to her.
Thursday she caught herself doing an extra hour of chart review she didn't need, purely so that if anyone was going to be the last one still working when Seulgi walked past, it would be her. Not because Seulgi had asked. Not because anyone was keeping score except Jaeyi, who kept score on everything.
She didn't say anything to Seulgi about any of it. That was the rule she'd made for herself without writing it down: she would never once make Seulgi's competence, or her likability, or the fact that half this hospital seemed helplessly drawn to her, into something Seulgi had to manage. Jaeyi's father had made an art form out of turning other people's ordinary existence into a problem for them to solve. She would rather choke on it quietly than do that to Seulgi.
So she overcompensated instead, in a hundred small transactions nobody but her was tracking. Coffees. Compliments. Gifts. She told herself it was generosity. She knew, somewhere behind her ribcage, that it was closer to a woman leaving offerings at a shrine she was afraid might stop listening.
Because that was the actual shape of it, if she let herself look: it was never that someone else might be better for Seulgi. They never could. It was that someone else might be easier. Uncomplicated. Un-fathered by a man currently serving time for taking pleasure on other people's pain. Someone who wouldn't require Seulgi to love carefully, considering a dozen different factors outside her control.
Jaeyi had spent six years building a name that didn't belong to her father. But she was struggling to feel like it belonged to someone worth keeping.
The hospital cafeteria at 2 p.m. was quiet — the lunch rush had cleared out, the evening shift hadn't arrived. Kyung sits across from her with a folder of documents, her notes already half-covered in coffee rings.
"The property settlement came through," Kyung says, all business. "Gangnam estate goes to you, lake house to Jena. Your mother's trying to contest the split, but it's not going anywhere."
"Sell it," Jaeyi said. "I don't want it."
Kyung looked up from her notes. "Okay? This is basically the last piece to be settled in the lawsuit. He's finally in jail and his assets were forfeit. He will no longer have any ties to you. You're allowed to keep some of the spoil without it meaning anything."
"I don't need it." Flat. Final. Kyung knew better than to push.
They met here sometimes instead of her office — easier for Jaeyi, who was usually between rounds. Today there was a particular reason: Kyung had been her lawyer long enough that "legal update" had become code for I need to think out loud with someone who won't tell Seulgi.
"Anyway, Seulgi's place suits you better," Kyung added, neutral.
Jaeyi glanced toward the restricted area entrance. Seulgi was there, talking to a security guard, and the conversation seemed pleasant. The guard was ruggedly handsome and muscular, the posture of someone who'd clearly never once in her life had a scar she was ashamed of. Jaeyi's brain did a quick calculation of how acceptable it would be to "accidentally" trip her on her way past.
"Earth to Jaeyi," Kyung said, glaring at her.
"What?"
"You've been staring at Seulgi for thirty seconds like you're planning a murder. What's going on?"
"Nothing's going on."
Kyung set down her pen. "You've seen the news, right? About the marriage law passing?"
Jaeyi's stomach did something complicated. "Yeah."
"You've been wanting to propose for how long?"
"Kyung."
"I'm serious. You joke about it all the time, and that's cute, but—" Kyung leaned back, studying her. "You actually want to do it. Legally. A ring and everything."
"She doesn't need me to ruin her life with," she gestured vaguely at the documents in front of them, "this."
Kyung blinked at her like she'd grown a second head.
"Yoo Jaeyi." She sighed. "Seulgi isn't going to care about your family's reputation. She cares about you."
"I know that," Jaeyi said, and meant it, and didn't believe it, all at the same time.
"And you didn't go through all this," Kyung mimicked Jaeyi's gesture, mocking her in the process, "to let your father live in your head rent free."
Jaeyi held her gaze for a long moment.
"Evict the bastard."
The last couple of hours of her double shift were uneventful enough that she could scroll on her phone. After spending forty minutes on a ring catalog from the jewelry shop nearby, she went to grab her bag from the locker room and heard voices on the other side of the row.
She stopped. Not deliberately — her feet just stopped, the way they used to at Chaehwa when she recognized something significant was about to break open.
"— whose daughter she is," someone was saying, and Jaeyi recognized the voice immediately, the nepotism guy. "Baek picked her because Baek's an idiot who cares about big names. Everyone knows it."
"Baek picked her," Seulgi said, "because she's better than you."
Flat. Not raised at all. People usually mistook Seulgi's tone for gentleness, until it wasn't: she never had to get loud to sound certain.
"You want to talk about what she's earned versus what she's done? I've seen her redo an entire blood test from scratch at four in the morning because she wasn't satisfied with the results. I've seen her stay two hours past a shift because a patient's family needed someone to explain something twice, gently, when nobody else had time."
"She hasn't even—"
"Jaeyi was already tying suture knots when you were still figuring out how to tie your shoelaces." A pause, exactly long enough to let that land. "I've watched her hands. You haven't. That's the whole disagreement, really."
Jaeyi's own hand came up and pressed flat against the cold metal of the locker beside her. Her breath caught.
"You're saying that because you're sleeping with her."
"I'm saying it because it's true, and also, yes." No shame in it. No defensiveness either — like both statements were simply correct and there was no contradiction between them. "If I ever needed a body disposed of — let's say hypothetically, yours — Jaeyi is the person I would call. Because she's the only person I trust not to ask why, and not to leave until it's done right."
A short, disbelieving laugh from the intern, like he was trying to locate the joke. There wasn't one. Jaeyi, frozen against the locker, understood that Seulgi wasn't performing loyalty. She was reading off an inventory she'd apparently been keeping this whole time. Like she had been building an argument for Jaeyi's defense in the background for years, just in case it was ever needed.
"You done?" the intern said, recovering some of his swagger.
"One more thing." Seulgi's voice didn't change at all, which was somehow worse than if it had. "The overnight logs you signed off on Mr. Park last week — the checks you documented at midnight and two a.m. looked suspiciously clean. The security footage showed you weren't on the floor either time. The attending co-sign was also forged to cover it."
Silence. The good kind, if you were Seulgi. The other kind, if you were him.
"You can have your own opinions about who deserves what," Seulgi went on. "I don't care that you are a lousy doctor. I don't even care that you falsified medical records and violated the hospital code of conduct. But you just couldn't stop talking shit about my girlfriend, could you?"
"You bitch—"
"Baek should have received a nice little report by now," Seulgi interrupted him absentmindedly, like she was checking her wristwatch. "Good luck on your next internship. If you get any."
Footsteps. The intern's, retreating, stomping out of the room.
Jaeyi stood there with her hand still flat on cold metal, breath caught, and thought: oh.
Not oh, she loves me. She'd known that for years. This was different. This was the discovery that somewhere underneath years of careful, private, at-work-we-don't-touch devotion, Seulgi was protecting her. Keeping receipts, footage pulled and everything, ready to burn something — or someone — down on Jaeyi's behalf without alarm. Not once mentioning it to her, not once making it Jaeyi's problem to carry.
If I murder someone, Jaeyi's the person I call to help me dump the body.
Jaeyi had known for years she would do anything — everything — for Seulgi, no matter how absurd or illegal it could be. But now she knew that the feeling was mutual, the statement went both ways. Seulgi would ride or die for Jaeyi too, no questions asked.
Jaeyi took a deep breath, composed herself, and finally made herself known like she was just entering the room.
"Ready for brunch, Seulgi-ah?"
It was their new tradition, ever since they'd started working together at J Medical Center. Whenever they both had a night shift, they would spend their morning off together enjoying brunch at the café around the corner. It was a simple routine, but they cherished it dearly. It was a chance to be a couple more freely — in public, outside the constraints of work — and Jaeyi would never pass up the opportunity to show off her girlfriend, scrubs and all.
It was moments like this — seeing Seulgi relaxing in the morning light, the orange and yellow hues framing her face so beautifully — that filled her brain with wedding fantasies. Spring flowers and pretty dresses and a golden ring on her finger.
Those fantasies shattered when the waitress came with their food and smiled at Seulgi for longer than Jaeyi deemed necessary for such a small interaction.
"It's just brunch, Jaeyi-ah, relax," Seulgi said as she picked up sugar packets from the table and turned her attention to her latte.
"What?"
"You've been doing that face all week. You can relax now."
The exhaustion must have made her sloppy, because Jaeyi glared at the waitress and Seulgi had noticed. Shit.
"I've been jealous." Jaeyi said, too fast. "For days. Of half the hospital, apparently, which is humiliating to say out loud."
Seulgi blinked at her, unhurried. "Jealous of what."
"Of everyone who gets to be near you and not be a problem. Everyone who isn't—" Jaeyi's hand made a vague, furious gesture at herself, at the whole architecture of her life. "Doomed. Complicated. My father's daughter."
Seulgi reaches for her hand across the table. "Jaeyi—"
"There will always have some shit falling next to me. I may have cut him out of my life, but for some people I will still be Yoo Taejoon's daughter," the honesty dam broke open and she couldn't stop it. "You deserve someone easier."
Seulgi firmly took her hand with both of her own, pulling Jaeyi out of her rant and pulling her gaze in.
"That man can't make me turn away from you. No one can."
Jaeyi was part shocked and part melting inside at the tenderness in Seulgi's voice.
"You are very easy to love, actually," Seulgi said, bringing Jaeyi's hand to her lips and kissing her knuckles. "Just so you know."
They stayed with hands entangled a moment longer.
"Besides," Seulgi broke the moment, gently but solemnly, "I have a condition, you see."
"Condition?"
"It's called being your wife." The smirk sneaked into her features. "It's terminal."
"That's insane," Jaeyi said, and meant it as the highest compliment she owned.
"You've been growling around work like a woman staking territory and you think I'm the insane one." Seulgi's dimples were at full display now. "I noticed every single intern you glared at. I've got a list too, you know. I don't tell you either."
That stopped Jaeyi cold. "You have a list."
"I've had a list since Chaehwa." Flat again, absolutely certain. "It's longer than yours, probably. I just don't set fires about it."
"Wait." Jaeyi was having flashbacks. "Is that why Jo Ara still can't look me in the eye to this day?"
"Yep." Seulgi said, taking a sip of her latte.
"And people in college..."
"You're charming, Jaeyi. Swatting your admirers was a full-time job. I deserve compensation."
Later, back at the apartment, Jaeyi couldn't hold it anymore. The knowledge of what Seulgi had done, the words she'd said in the locker room, the casual way she'd dismantled someone for daring to speak against Jaeyi — it sat in her chest like a fuse.
"I heard you." Jaeyi's voice cracked on it, finally, the thing she'd been holding since that morning. "Today. With him. I heard all of it."
Something moved across Seulgi's face briefly.
"Good," Seulgi said. "It was all true."
"You never told me you'd pulled dirt on him."
"I didn't want to bother you with it, you had a big surgery to focus on." Seulgi shrugged out of her coat, unbothered, like this was obvious. "You don't need to fight everyone who says something ugly about you and also protect me from watching you do it. I'd rather just handle it myself and get it over with quickly."
Jaeyi looked at her — twenty-four years old, scrubs still on, a hospital's worth of exhaustion under her eyes and somehow still standing in their front hallway looking like the only fixed point Jaeyi had ever had — and felt her fear simply give out from under her.
"Marry me," Jaeyi blurted out. Not like a question. This was way off her original proposal plan but she couldn't help it. She didn't only want to marry Seulgi in the near future — she wanted to be married to her right now, like her life depended on it.
"Yes," Seulgi said, instantly, no pause at all — and then stopped, visibly, caught up short by her own answer. Her eyes went wide, then narrow, then something that wasn't quite a smile and was so much more than one.
"Yes," she said again, slower, meaning it all the way through this time. "Yes. Obviously. Were you seriously unsure?"
"Maybe," Jaeyi admitted, sheepishly. "But I didn't know you'd need me to dispose of bodies for you, so..." she trailed off with a smirk, lacing her arms around Seulgi's waist.
"That's a figure of speech, I haven't killed anyone," Seulgi retorted with a light smack on Jaeyi's arm.
"Yet," Jaeyi punctuated with a light kiss on her lips, breathing her in.