FALLING SLOWLY ||Complete||

Kairos

Black and white have too many shades in between. Shades of vivid gray that bleed on the screen before her and Mun Seong clutches the edge of the table with a white knuckled hand as she watches the unfolding scene. Her eyes are not on the back profile of the unknown man, but on the enhanced frames of the opposite building where another figure blinks in an out of focus.

The shades of gray washes away years worth hard work she had put on to move on and Mun Seong blinks rapidly, trying to catch her breath turning away from the screen. It is then, she catches his eye, prosecutor Hwang leaning against his desk watches her rather placidly like she is a bug under his microscope, awaiting dissection. And suddenly, it all starts to make sense. Her failures as well as her sudden successes.

“You knew?” She tries to sound calm, but her voice comes out strangled.

“I had a hunch,” he bows, in the silvery light of the screen he looks as young as he actually is, but similarities that he shares with his father are also eerily highlighted. “I went to check the vintage point didn’t I?”

“That was not when you found out,” the conviction in her voice frightens her.

“You knew from the moment you picked me as your investigator.”

“Manager Park - it’s all in your file.” He tells her as if its the most simple thing in the world. “Your entire career up until the last assignment.”

“First and last assignment,” she corrects him automatically. “But you took me in because you knew it was your father who set the balls rolling. You took me in as some kind of a twisted redemption.”

“Mun Seong -” He says abruptly. “I had no idea what my father was hiding, I just knew it had something to do with this. Something to do with Haes and Tae.”

“Was it pity?” She barely registers his words. For it no longer matters to her. Instead, Mun Seong tries to come in terms with the fact that the new life she had rebuilt for herself instead of her own creation had been given in charity. “Did you pity the detective your father was set out to ruin - prosecutor nim?” She dashes away a tear cringing at the weakness it represented.

And finally Yo comes to the same page. She doesn’t look up when he claps her shoulders, his grip warm and reassuring.

“Mun Seong I wanted to give you a chance to finish your last case, to finish it properly because I know you are capable of that. Would you call it pity?”

“Why would you do that?”

Suddenly Yo wishes he had not spoken at all.

“I don’t approve everything my father does - manager Park.” He lets her go as abruptly as he had held her and turns away, flipping through a file absentmindedly. The ends of his ears tinted pink. Mun Seong watches him for another moment before turning back to the screen.

“So Haes did it?” She muses aloud. “Her own family?”

“Hae Myung Hee was an adopted daughter just like her new replacement Hae Soo, all daughters of distant relations. Hae Hong Ha Jin doesn’t have children.” Yo tells her, now that the sensitive topic was firmly shut he comes back to stand beside her and observe the screen. “I thought you knew that?”

“I did. That’s not what I meant. Anyway - this is why they did it? Because her photographs might have caught the man’s face?”

Yo frowns, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“This is not an accident.” He says in the end. His finger follows the figure of the photographer as he speaks. “She means to capture him.”