North - South

Myeong-sun

After what Mu Hyeok had told him about Se-ri's brothers, he hadn't been able to sleep. The whole night. 

And it was a good thing. Because would have he slept, he would have dreamed of Yoon Se-ri, and this time it wouldn't have been a good dream. 

Not a memory of their days. Not her ghost chatting with him. Not their wet, famished kisses, but the fear and pain inside her eyes. The gaze her eyes had sometimes held when she was a girl, and that Mu Hyeok had understood, and he hadn't. 

Jeong Hyeok hadn't been able to sleep, and he had hardly been able to breathe through all the day, knowing he was the monster who had sent her back to that pain and fear.

It was dinner time, when Myeong-sun knocked on Ri Jeong Hyeok's door. Not without a hint of shyness, as she'd been and would have always been a modest and demurred person, someone who didn't knock on the door of a stranger without feeling amiss. Though she felt she owed it. To her husband, to Ri Jeong Hyeok, and ultimately to Yoon Se-ri too.

"Ri Jeong Hyeok dong ssi?" She questioned the man as soon as they were one in front of the other. 

They had never been friends, and after the school years, she had never seen him again. Though she felt that the question was useless. His bad condition could do nothing but confirm his identity. If she would have been asked to describe a man who had lost his brother and had uselessly roved for nearly a decade to find him, that was exactly how Myeong-sun would have described it. Dry, grey skin, slumped shoulders, and red-rimmed eyes which held nothing but void. 

"It's me," the man, however, confirmed.

"My name is Hyeon Myeong-sun. I'm Man-bok's wife. I went to school with Yoon Se-ri, we used to be friends."

Clouded and dazed until that moment, Jeong Hyeok needed a couple of seconds to process. In front of him was a woman, a box in her hands. She was small, about his same age, a gentle face. Maybe only Myeong-sun remembers about me, I made a dress for her...

"Please, come inside. Can I offer you something to drink?"

"So, you two were schoolmates?"

"And good friends. Even if she has stayed with us for a short time, Yoon Se-ri was very dear to all of us. We often remember her."

"Very dear, yes."

"She was like fresh air," Myeong-sun continued, lost in her memories, "she was fun, and it seemed as if she knew everything. I mean, it seemed to us, as we didn't know anything. Having her with us has been the big deal of our youth, I suppose. Often we wonder if she's fine."

Jeong Hyeok was looking at her, though he wasn't watching for real, nor completely following her words. Inside him, a silent conversation with Her ghost. See, Yoon Se-ri? They haven't forgotten about you, they're still your friends. 

"I..." Myeong-sun gently pushed the box across the table "I came to give you this. Se-ri gave me many of her belongings when she left. You know, she was generous. This box is hers. There isn't much inside. Pens, notes, things like these. But she told me that there's a thing which belongs to Ri Mu Hyeok, and to contact him if I would have come to know that he was looking for something," under the weight of the compassion she was feeling for that young man, her voice lowered to nearly a whisper, "I thought... I thought you should have it. You have more rights than me to have it."