In Good Hands
The call came at 2:43 am. Yang Chun-dong cursed as he jerked awake and fumbled for his phone. He found it with his third pat on the bedside table and answered it by the fourth ring.
“Yes?” he groaned, expecting it to be Detective Go, calling to ask him to pitch in with his observation. Nothing like throwing your least favourite colleague a bone in the form of spending a night staring at some perp’s door with nothing to show for it.
“Is this Detective Yang?” asked an unfamiliar female voice.
Chun-dong hummed and nodded before his half-asleep brain caught up to the fact that he was on the phone. “Yes.”
“Could you please come to the University Hospital? We have a patient here who doesn’t have any identification on him and your number was the only clue we could find.”
*
By the time the taxi rolled up to the hospital’s entrance, Chun-dong was more or less awake, even if he still yawned when he walked to the reception. The nurse on the other side looked just as tired as he felt and directed him to a doctor who couldn’t have finished his degree more than six months ago. The young doctor was clearly nervous and fidgeted as he led Chun-dong to the room with the patient and explained the situation – a young man was found unconscious, possibly due to head trauma, although the tests were all inconclusive and no contusions or fractures had been found on him. There was always the possibility of drugs, but the tests had come back negative and there weren’t any track marks.
When Chun-dong saw the pale face he sighed. “Should have known,” he muttered to himself.
“You know the patient, then?” the doctor asked, perking up now that at least one of his problems had been solved. “Do you know anything about his medical history?”
Chun-dong knew better than to answer truthfully, so he shook his head. “His name is Kim Jun. He was involved in a case I had a couple of months back.”
“Is he dangerous?”
Chun-dong looked at him with a raised eyebrow.
The doctor shrugged. “There are precautions and protocols if he is.”
“He isn’t. Saved a little girl’s life, in fact.”
“And you really don’t know what might have happened?”
Oh, he had an idea, alright. He still remembered the shaking and the nosebleeds Kim Jun got whenever he used his power too long. But there was no way to explain that, especially not without causing more trouble. Chun-dong didn’t want a repeat of what had happened at the station.
“Do you mind if I stay with him?” he asked the doctor, who shook his head. And so Chun-dong sat on an incredibly uncomfortable hospital chair, his head pillowed in his hands, waiting for someone who was an ally and maybe a friend to wake up. But before that happened, his eyes slipped shut.
*
Chun-dong woke up to a phone call. Again. Only this time he fell out of a chair and onto a cold laminate floor that smelled faintly of lemon and disinfectant. His back was twisted, his shoulders stiff and unmoving, and for a few seconds, he knew neither where he was nor where to find his hands. Then he remembered the call in the middle of the night, and his hands started to prickle now that he had gotten his circulation back. The phone kept ringing, then went to voicemail, and Chun-dong sighed. It was probably work, considering that it was daytime and that birds were chirping happily outside the window. He had forgotten to set his alarm.
“You should call back,” a voice from the bed told him. “It might be important.”
Chun-dong stretched and cracked his bones, hoping to feel less like a sixty-year-old after a bender and more like the athletic twenty-five-year-old he remembered being at some point. That man could sleep in a chair and feel nothing the next morning.
“You’re awake.”
“Obviously,” Kim Jun replied. “What are you doing here?”
“The hospital called me when they couldn’t figure out who you were and what was wrong with you. You were unconscious for the better part of a day.”
Jun didn’t answer. When Chun-dong finally stood up and sat back down in his chair he found Jun staring at the ceiling with a faraway look in his eyes, which told him everything he needed to know.
“This is my fault, isn’t it? I asked you to use your gift to help people, and now you’re doing too much. That is what happened, isn’t it? You didn’t stop, even though it was too much?”
For a good long while, he didn’t get an answer. “There’s a body buried where they must have found me, under the concrete,” Jun finally said. “An old one, but her pain was still so present. I was going to call it in after I found out more, but it was all blurred, except for the pain.”
Chun-dong made a note to call his boss once this was sorted out, and after he’d had a coffee and something to eat. It was as good an explanation as any as to why he wasn’t at work yet. Anonymous informant wanted to share a rumour, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Certain that Jun was well enough to be left alone and not well enough to just up and vanish again, Chun-dong went on the hunt for sustenance and got directions to a cafeteria from a nurse. While getting his coffee and a pre-packaged sandwich, he quickly called his impatient boss with his information and one of his worse excuses for why he couldn’t show up to work immediately. One of these days, “running down some leads” would cease to work, but so far, it hadn’t.
When he arrived back at Jun’s room, the doctor – a different, clearly more experienced one – was already there and arguing with his patient. Jun was no longer lying down and instead stared at the doctor with determination in his eyes.
“I can’t in good conscience release you, Mr Kim,” the doctor said. “Prolonged unconsciousness is a very serious matter and until we know what caused it, there’s no telling when or if it will repeat itself. And while you don’t show any signs of brain damage that I can observe right now, we need to run tests. You need to be under constant medical supervision.”
But Kim Jun was nothing if not stubborn, and there was no law that would allow the doctor to keep a patient confined against his will. Well, there was, but it didn’t apply in this case. No matter how much the doctor protested, or how much Chun-dong echoed his words, Jun stubbornly put on his shoes and coat before walking out of the hospital with a writ saying he left against his doctor’s wishes. Chun-dong could do nothing but follow him.
“Hey, wait up!” he called as Jun took off down the street. “Where are you even staying? I’ll get you a taxi, at least.” Even if it would hurt his wallet.
Kim Jun froze when he heard the question and looked down for a moment. “Here and there,” he finally admitted.
“Are you kidding me? You’re honestly telling me you live on the street?”
Jun shrugged. “Seung-gi lets me stay at her place sometimes.”
“And you’re going to do what now? Curl up under a bridge and hope you don’t die of a seizure?”
Jun pursed his lips. “It’s not that bad.”
Chun-dong put his hands on his hips, looked towards heaven and cursed Kim Jun and his stubbornness, but more than that he cursed himself. Kim Jun had saved that girl, but Chun-dong had saved him (okay, so maybe the situation he needed saving from had been his fault, but still …). They were quits. Finally, he rolled his eyes and ran a hand through his already messy hair.
“Alright. You can stay at my place. Until you’re better, at least.”
*
“Until you’re better” turned into “until you can find a job”, which turned into “until you can find a place that isn’t a fucking deathtrap.” And it wasn’t so bad, Chun-dong had to admit when he was alone in his bed at night. Having a roommate. Kim Jun could make instant noodles better than he could, at least, which meant he was twice the cook Chun-dong was. He was quiet, too. There were two problems, however:
First of all, while Jun didn’t own a lot of things, everything he owned was messy. Chun-dong wasn’t a neat freak by any means, but he owned clothes that didn’t have holes or fraying seams. Not everything he owned was covered in paint stains of some description, and then there was the bird food. Jun also had a habit of spreading his mess. The epicentre was the area around the couch – the once almost-empty coffee table was covered in paper and pencils. Sketches and various art supplies spread outward, and the balcony had been taken over by an assortment of spray cans in plastic shopping bags. These days, the nest of blankets that Jun used instead of a duvet were always rumpled and never neatly folded. It wasn’t so bad, really, Chun-dong tried to tell himself, but a part of him just didn’t like chaos that wasn’t of his own making.
But all of that paled compared to the fact that Kim Jun was just too damn cute. Without an abducted girl hanging over his head, Chun-dong found himself admiring him in idle moments. When they were watching TV. When Jun was drawing, or when he did the dishes. One time, Jun forgot to take a change of clothes into the bathroom and went to his bags in nothing but a towel, water dripping from his overly long hair. It was both enjoyable and maddening for Chun-dong, who hadn’t got laid in far too long. One day, Chun-dong thought, he was going to explode.
*
Chun-dong didn’t have it in him to answer Jun’s greeting when he got back. It had been that kind of day. All he wanted to do was empty a bottle of soju, fall into bed and forget all about it. Instead, he was confronted with Jun’s frowning face when he turned around with a bottle he’d taken out of the fridge. There was a smudge of charcoal on Jun’s right cheek, and his fingertips were just as black around the mug of tea that sat in front of him.
“Did something happen?” Jun asked.
Chun-dong wanted to curse. He wanted to forget. He did not want to speak about it. But Jun just looked at him patiently, and so Chun-dong got two glasses instead of one out of the cabinet and filled both to the brim. He downed his own in one go before speaking, grimacing as he felt the burn in his throat. Then he refilled the glass while Jun still clung to his mug.
“There was a dead child today. A boy.”
“Ah.” Jun nodded.
He watched as Chun-dong drained another glass. But when he moved to fill it again, he reached out and gently put his hand on Chun-dong’s. The touch was enough to make Chun-dong freeze. Jun did this sometimes, now. His touches were always hesitant, as if he had forgotten how to touch anybody he wasn’t trying to read. Hell, his mother had been dead for years and he had no friends; he probably had.
“Do you want my help?” he offered.
Chun-dong sighed and shook his head. “It was pretty obvious who did it. We’re just waiting for the DNA analysis to make it airtight. The father had a habit of being too rough, the scratches weren’t healed yet and there was skin under the boy’s fingernails. But …”
He didn’t need to speak any more. That was the good thing about Jun’s power. He had seen what Chun-dong had seen. He didn’t need an explanation for what it did to him to see a small body discarded like it was trash. Oddly enough, that helped more than the booze that was starting to make its way into his system. Chun-dong looked into those calm eyes and wondered what they had seen, how much violence and pain. It was a wonder he could still touch anything after all this, that his eyes could still look so vulnerable. It was easy to lose himself in those eyes as they looked at him with warm acceptance. Before he could stop himself, Chun-dong leaned over the table and kissed Jun, pressing their lips together and taking hold of his neck to draw him closer. It felt glorious, joyous, perfect to finally be this close and everything in him screamed to get even closer, to slip the rumpled shirt off Jun’s shoulders, draw circles on his chest, get charcoal stains all over his own—
—but Jun was not moving. Even Chun-dong’s sluggish brain eventually picked up on that, and so he let go and sat back down in his chair with a heavy sigh. The soju looked very tempting again.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, and poured himself another glass.
“It’s alright,” Jun said, but Chun-dong could tell it wasn’t. One of his hands was gripping the mug so tightly the knuckles turned white and the other was in hidden in his lap.
“It’s not.”
“You just surprised me,” Jun explained. “It has been a while.”
“Since you got kissed by a man?”
“Since I got kissed by anyone. I don’t know how to do it right.” Chun-dong saw him tense at that admission, as if he feared the mockery that was sure to follow. And on a different day, he would have been right. But not today. Today Chun-dong felt lost and unmoored, and it felt good not to be alone in that.
“It comes with practice,” he said, and took a sip of his drink. Jun looked at the untouched one in front of him and finally took it, emptying the glass in a couple of decisive gulps.
“I’d like to practice some time.”
After a couple of beats of silence Chun-dong laughed. “I think that can be arranged.”
Jun smiled shyly. Chun-dong replied with his best rakish grin. It was good not to be alone.
Fin