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Doctors, Jin Suk says, are cold and clinical. She hated them as clients—and she said this as she reached up to stroke your hair, smiling her secret smile, so you said,
“What am I to learn from this, noona? Am I a doctor or not?”
(You are going to have to do something about this head of yours.)
“You think too much,” Soo tells you. Almost conspiratorially, he adds, “You need a woman.”
But Soo had a woman, of course. Little good it did him. He let her first into his bed, then into his heart, and even Jin Suk would tell you that that was the wrong way to go about it.
Now that woman is dead. By some counts, you killed her—at least, you were not sorry to let her die, full as your arms and purpose were with him. His weight, his blood, his breath near-gone…you haven’t been afraid like that, in a long time. It never matters, so much, what they do to you.
Soo is not the only friend you have ever had. Jin Suk, whatever she is to you now that you are a man, whatever she was to you when you were a child, is not your only memory of family. And yet—
What would you do with a lover? What would you do with freedom? In the moments between hair-split decisions, you ponder. You gaze at yourself, dark mirror and darker eyes, and you think that you might as well be glass. You are not easily moved. You shatter when you break, but you have had the dubious good fortune of men who lifted you up again, who said, you are not a child, you must not cry, and averted their eyes politely from your fault-lines.
Someone (him) put you on the side of the law, then chased you from it. He called it duty.
Someone (him) taught you how to raise your fists as a child, then deserted you. He called it luck.
“You think too much,” Soo says, and what he means, knife-sharp sincere beneath his peacock feathers, is:
I am worried for you, and the way you scarcely live.
You say: “Have another drink,” smiling so that he knows you have heard both what he said and what he only looked.
Later, he will stumble towards you, bleeding and brutal in his grief, and when he asks if you knew, you will shut him out. You will do it with glass, and you will do it without caring to remember how her hands clung to you, begging, because still—
You would do it again.
The first shock of impact, the first bullet, the first blade tearing skin and weeping blood—you never exactly feel it. It is always the moment afterwards, when everyone else has rushed forward and you are standing back, that the world ends.
Traitor, savior, you are a man now.
(You are going to have to do something about that heart of yours.)