Desert • Flower | TaeJin || BOOK 3#

XII. Gifts for good deeds

Try as Jin might to understand, Taehyung strikes him as the most incongruous thing on the planet. He insists that he helped him because he felt like it, he believes that everyone needs help. What a person who understands that Japanese people are human and should be respected. It is such an innocent, childish thought that Jin does not have the impression that he is talking to someone close to his age. At first Jin thought Taehyung was older, since he is big, but Jin found out that Taehyung is not; he is three or four years younger. It was a surprise and now it only makes him more understandable or at least more grounded in his behavior.

However, in his position, it doesn't make any sense that Taehyung does everything because he likes to do it, without expecting payment in return. Life itself functions on giving in order to receive and Taehyung only gives. What he receives is thanks, but with that he is not going to get richer, he is not going to have anything relevant. Words don't give anything. Jin wonders if Taehyung is dumb or there is something else going on in the background. He wants to believe it's the second option. Perhaps he is someone who waits for the right time to ask absolutely everything from others.

The real problem with this theory is that all the workers here deny that it can happen. They have worked for their entire lives, since before Taehyung was lord to begin with.

"He has always been a very curious child. All the children thought him weird," comments one of the serving ladies as she washes clothes. Jin came over to ask. He wants everyone's opinions, to see what they have to think of him. "Be it his way of thinking the way he laughs, what he does, what he says" she pauses giving a sigh. "His hair, his hands. There are so many things that everyone just mentions" she sighs. "He's always been a weird boy."

"Weird?" Jin repeats. He didn't ask regarding his hair, hands, color of his hair; he gets a nice shade of brown red hair and never notices his hands beyond that they look huge.

"Yes, very weird" agrees another lady on duty approaching to wash sheets. "He looks like he's come out of the ground. No one knows his parents. Even he himself doesn't know where he came from. Sometimes he jokes about things that..."

They both gasp at the thought and Jin reddens, if they knew his jokes, he possibly wouldn't say what Taehyung is weird at.

"Sometimes he grimaces, sometimes he makes noise, he talks strangely, he is a weird boy simply."

The simple conclusion Jin got by saying what he is someone strange doesn't work for him. I was expecting some sort of complaint, not a description like that with a surrendered tone that gives the impression of being resigned and feeling almost tenderness.

As much as Jin looked for other opinions they all told him the same thing: Taehyung is someone weird, strange, peculiar and incomprehensible, beyond what he is a person with too good a heart capable of helping, even while paying attention to his own interests and those of the people he has already promised to help. Jin concludes that Taehyung is a very sweet person and still can't believe it. There is no one who is so pure. There is no one who is like that, it's impossible.

~ * * * ~

"Seok! Let her go!"

Jin lets out an uproarious, languid laugh that surprises Taehyung. The kisaeng leans on Eunji to keep from falling to the ground. Seok holds a cow and lifts it off the ground because he wants to? It doesn't make sense, but it looks so funny as he goes back and forth with her clutching it that Jin can't resist bursting into laughter. Seok gurgles, approaching Jin with the cow still clinging to him. The cow moos and licks Jin in the face, the kisaeng wipes and laughs while petting her.

"How disgusting and stinky you slime! Don't do that again!" his outrageous complaint is not congruent with what he does with the cow, petting her as if she were a dog. "Even though you have such beautiful eyes, you can't pretend to match or devour my beauty."