FALLING SLOWLY ||Complete||

Company of pawns

Uncertainty nips at his heels as Jung awakens. When the moment of truth comes, he learns most bitterly, that he is no hero. He does the best thing he could for the woman he had grown to care for over the years by swallowing up his pride and making that phone call to the same brother he had been avoiding over the past weeks. It is no truce - but he knows, he feels it somewhere in the most foolishly juvenile corners of his heart, that So is hardly the enemy. And Jung is not the man Ha Jin wants, it had always been So. Wook has been a fool to think he could change it.

But he cannot help but fall - especially when it is her that reaches to his pit of hell to pull him out. He is not even aware of the shadows consuming him - the pent up energy giving way to boiling frustration and processing itself into something twisted and vile. In the lucid intervals between his episodes of rage, guilt consumes him and in turn he seeks the shelter of fury once more. Anger takes away the space other emotions can occupy, but also takes from him the man that he had been. He realizes only when her soft hands on his cheeks anchor him to the reality.

“This is not you Jung -” her words are soft, meant only for his ears with accompanying look of plea in her eyes. She had chased the servant girl away, and pours over him tending to his new self caused bruises. “You were always a soft hearted boy.”

“You know nothing Noona -” he tells her, with a shake of his head. “You are too easily trusting.”

She had been his tutor for a year when Myung Hee ( the original arrangement) had gone abroad to pursue her high studies. Jung had never cared more about his marks. Someone - now that he thinks of it, it must have been So - had told him that if he does not improve Ha Jin would come no more and he had even managed to stay awake during history for one entire term. He had a crush on her - she was so beautiful and cute - Yo had rolled on the floor when he mentioned it rolling his eyes at So who had hit him with the dictation book he was checking on. It hurts, but he does not understand what he had done to earn the beating. It is only afterwords that it occurred to him that perhaps his brother felt the same. And it takes even more time for him to work out his crush has a crush on his brother. Jealousy claws at him and he glowers when they would bury him under sums and exchange glances over rustling pages. She gives So a plush wolf when he goes on a tour, and blushes prettily over something that he whispers in her ear.

“Why does he get toys?” Jung asks, the little green monster that he is peeking from the half closed door.

The pair exchanges a glance, just as So stuffs the animal in his bag and away from anyone’s sight.

“So that he sleeps well at night,” Ha Jin tells him, as she steers Jung towards the study area. “Your brother can’t sleep if he doesn’t have a plush toy.”

“Why didn’t I know that before?” He wonders aloud and Ha Jin doesn’t enlighten him, her cheeks stained pink for the entire evening that follows.

He finds the wolf by her bedside when Jung goes to visit a comatose Ha Jin and So packs in silence back at home, pausing to look at him thoughtfully when he offers his own alligator as a replacement for Ha Jin’s wolf. He grows up to detest So for how easily he turns his back on the girl who had adored him, how easily he flies away in pursue of better career opportunity when she lies unconscious and broken, oblivious to his obvious infidelity. In the years that come he learns the dark side of the story, from his mother, from his brother, he learns the untold story of Tae’s death. He finds it believable, the more detached So becomes from Ha Jin. He had been playing around with her - he thinks as fury boils inside him. In the light of So’s reality, Wook seems much, much better man for her and he agrees when his older brother who had been by her side for no gain of his own asks him to keep Ha Jin’s past a secret. Jung tells Hae Soo nothing about So and wishes, in silence that she never learns of his betrayal either.