Chapter 52

The officer who had singled me out escorted me to the main office so that I could be briefed on what exactly the ROK-SWC entailed so I could make a decision. It was the first time since I’d joined the army that I’d been given an option. Every time a higher ranking officer addressed you they were demanding something of you that must be done, and done immediately.

I thought about turning it down just because it was the first time I could do so. But at the same time, I couldn’t help being intrigued. After all, this was an elite regime. Somehow I’d been singled out among all the recruits during the training as a potential. It was surprising, but the recognition did go to my head a little.

I was given some time to think about this. They’d even allowed me to take my monthly leave to do so. I let Taejun know I would be home for the weekend. He insisted on coming to pick me up despite me saying that I could take the bus back easily.

If there was one thing Taejun was good at, it was cramming last minute meetings and appointments into his schedule. As promised, he showed up at the base to pick me up not long after our call. He grinned as he saw me.

“You look good in military fatigues,” he said brightly.

“Sure,” I responded doubtfully. Only the big guys were able to look decent in fatigues. Smaller guys and leaner ones like me tended to just look lost in the baggy, heavy uniforms. Taejun was probably just more pleased to see me primly stiff in my uniform rather than cowering in cuffs.

“I mean it,” Taejun insisted. “Most guys look half starved after the initiation training. You look well. In fact, you look like you might have actually gained some weight.”

“If you say so, Agent Baek,” I said in the woodenly staccato military voice I’d come to learn during my time in training. But it was nice to see Taejun looking so proud rather than the ever present concern he’d been showing me before.

That made Taejun laugh. “I think being in the military suits you,” he said, pleased.

As we got into the car, I figured that was a pretty good transition to tell him about the offer I’d received. Taejun was just as surprised as me to hear about it.

“Wow,” he said. For some time my brother didn’t say anything.

“Do you think I should do it?” I asked.

“That depends,” he said slowly. “What do you think of the military so far?”

“It’s not as bad as everyone says it is,” I replied. The training had been exhausting, but I’d actually enjoyed the physical exercise. It kept my mind busy from thinking of other things. I wasn’t a picky eater, and I could sleep anywhere. Even the abuse from the higher ups had been tolerable. It was easy to just tune them out when they were just yelling. And I’d never given the officers any reason to cuff me over and over.

Taejun flicked his eyes over to me briefly before returning them to the focus on the road ahead. “Well, you’re tougher than most of the guys there. You’ve been through a lot already.”

He sensed that I didn’t like thinking or talking about that and quickly changed the subject. “You know the term for the SWC is double the service term for a normal conscript right? Four years is a long time.”

“It’s the same as studying at a university, isn’t it?” I pointed out.

That threw Taejun for a loop. “I guess it is.”

“I think I’d rather be in the military for four years than go to a university.” And who knew how long I’d even need to prepare myself for higher education in the first place. Maybe a military career wasn’t a bad option. I didn't have any other idea as to what I should do with my life. At least the military offered straight forward career paths with clear requirements for promotion.

Maybe Taejun was considering that too. He’d always seemed overly concerned that I didn’t have any future plans for myself. It wasn’t uncommon for directionless people like me to end up in the military. And I’d already been shortlisted as a candidate for SWC. If I made it through the preselection training, I’d receive a decent stipend. As for the danger… well, it’s not like anyone or anything put a heavy price on my life.

“Do you think you’d be able to make it into SWC?” Taejun asked.

“Maybe. What? You don’t think so?”

A small smile twitched his lips. “With the way you fight? Maybe not.”

“Asshole. I’ll fight you right now.”

“Uh huh.”

I felt pretty certain I could take him now. I’d done really well in the sparring exercises at initiation training thanks to his previous instruction. And I’d learned more as well.

Taejun glanced over at me again. Despite my hostile thoughts, he was smiling. “Being in the military really does suit you. You’re looking more like your old self.”

Personally I didn’t think much had changed. I just didn’t have time or energy to mope in the military.

“So, for your first meal out of the military, what did you want?”

Immediately my first thought was meat. Any kind would do. We rarely got to have actual meat in our military meals, and even when we did, it was always pretty poorly done. My mouth almost started watering as I recalled the first meal I’d had out with Taejun at the gogi-jip.

“Meat,” I said.

Taejun laughed knowingly. “I knew you were going to say that.”

Taejun basically had to roll me back into the apartment after how heartily I feasted at the gogi-jip. I was certain I’d singlehandedly eaten the restaurant into a deficit after we’d paid for the all you can eat.

Immediately I flopped onto the couch (that didn’t belong to Taejun). I sighed contently as I sank into its pillowy comfort. The sagging couch (that didn’t belong to Taejun) seemed to hug me back, as though it were welcoming my return.

“Don’t lie down after eating,” Taejun admonished me.

I ignored him.

He snorted and went into his office, as expected. But unexpectedly, he came out almost immediately, this time with a phone. He dropped it onto my stomach.

“Ow,” I winced, as I rubbed my overstuffed belly. “What’s this?”

“I got you a new phone. The one before was taken as evidence, but this new one has the same number as the old one,” Taejun replied.

“What for?” Cellphones were allowed in the military now, but because mine had been taken from me, I hadn’t brought one. I hadn’t needed one. My friends had been addicted to the apps on their phone, but I’d never developed that sort of attachment to it.

“To contact me, of course. And your friends, if you’ve made any.”

“Did you bug this one too?” I asked.

Taejun looked sheepish. “No. There’s no need for that anymore.”

I squinted at him suspiciously, but it was true. With the gang disbanded I wasn’t in any danger anymore (other than the danger of being in the military of course, but that was unavoidable). And as long as I was on base, my whereabouts were known at all times. Besides, Taejun’s intuition had been right. The bugged phone was the key the NIS (or whoever) had used to uncover the 7D gang’s hidden base. I turned the phone on.

Almost immediately, a message popped up. I stared at it. It was from Eunsoo.

E: [ hey, Jaehyun. Hopefully this is still your number. Just wanted to check in with you… is everything ok? ]

I was baffled at how timely the message had come in. It was uncanny. I texted back.

J: [ yeah… everything’s fine ]

Even though the initial message had cojme in almost immediately, it took a few minutes for him to respond.

E: [ HOLY SHIT YOUR ALIVE ]

E: [ uh thanks for replying like a month later ]

Huh? I checked the timestamps and immediately felt stupid. No wonder the message had come in so immediately. It must have just popped up when the phone was turned on. I texted back sheepishly.

J: [ sorry… ive been doing my military service ]

E: [ oh damn ]

E: [ you really just went to the military after all that????? ]

J: [ yeah ]

I didn’t know why I had to reply to such a redundant question.

E: [ crazy ]

E: [ im glad you’re ok though, i had no idea what happened to you ]

Taejun had told me what had happened to Sungmin, but I hadn’t stopped to think about Eunsoo. Or any of the other Tigers. Even though I’d technically cut ties with them, I probably should have been a little more emphatic about how the rest of them had handled the fallout of Sungmin’s arrest.

E: [ are you on leave? Lets meet up ]

I guess I owed him that much. Because I was only off for the weekend, we arranged to meet up tomorrow for lunch.

I should have known that Eunsoo would have picked somewhere weird to go. Eunsoo was running late, as usual, so I’d been sitting in this chicken place for some time now all by myself. An idol group plastered to the wall stared back down cheerily at me. Unusually this idol group was Western. I’d never seen a Western boy idol group before.

The only clue as to who they were was a mysterious logo plastered alongside the five men. Nsync.

“Fuck, sorry I’m late– holy shit look at you!” Eunsoo interrupted my stare off with ‘Nsync’. “Did you grow more?”

“I don’t think so,” I said a bit hesitantly.

“Damn, well. It’s good to see you, man.” Even though we hadn’t seen each other in months, he pulled me into a friendly hug. Awkwardly I patted his back to get him to let go of me. He did, eventually.

To my surprise, the usually easy-going and cheerful Eunsoo looked melancholic as he backed up. His face was gaunt and his eyes were dark. He looked like he hadn’t slept well in a while.

“You’re not looking so good,” I commented.

“Ji-ral. I always look good,” he countered. But his counter lacked his usual unflappable confidence.

I decided not to push it. “Ok. What the hell is this place you’ve brought me to? Why does it have random oegugin all over the walls?”

“You shut your ignorant mouth. That’s Nsync. They’re icons. Bay Chicken is my favorite chicken place. Let’s order.”

Somehow I had a feeling that his bias was less about how good the chicken here was and more about its extremely questionable decor. Despite his stressed appearance, at least Eunsoo was doing well at putting up a front of normalcy. Even if his voice lacked his usual energy, the relaxed ease and friendliness of his banter remained still.

I was right. The chicken sucked.

As I picked at the chicken, Eunsoo peppered me with questions as to what I had been up to. I gave him a brief, censored version of my experience that night and how they had decided I wasn’t accessory to crime after all. He was understandably horrified, but to my relief, he didn’t dwell on it too long. I think he was a little sad about how things had played out for Sungmin.

The interrogation quickly moved on to my experience in the military.

“Have you done your service yet?” I asked him.

“Nope. I got an exemption,” he told me.

“What? How?” I looked him over. Apart from his sullen look, Eunsoo looked to be in excellent health.

“I have an autoimmune disorder,” he said, with a twitching smirk.

Uh huh. Somehow it wasn’t surprising to me that Eunsoo was a draft dodger. I continued answering his questions.

Eunsoo hadn’t mentioned Ryusuke while we were making our plans, and I was probably still on his shit list, so it wasn’t surprising that Ryu hadn’t tagged along with Eunsoo. But it was still odd to see Eunsoo showing up anywhere alone.

“So… how are the Tigers?” I asked after he finally ran out of questions.

“What Tigers?” Eunsoo replied wearily. My heart sank. “Hoojin’s long gone. Sungmin was arrested. Sunhee broke up with him before that, after what happened to Seolhee. Seolhee’s still in rehab. And Ryu… his family took him back to Japan.”

That last one was truly surprising. “I thought he and his family weren’t on good terms.”

“They aren’t,” Eunsoo said heavily. “So it’s a bad thing.”

“What exactly happened with him and his family?” It was probably a bit rude of me to ask when Ryu himself wasn’t there, but I never had gotten an answer. And with my and my family now estranged, my curiosity for someone in the same plight had only grown.

Eunsoo looked at me as he considered answering. “Well, seeing that you might not ever talk to Ryu again, you might as well know. So you know how he was a WRC driver, right?”

I nodded.

“His co-driver was his cousin. They were driving a rally in Belgium, trying for their second championship title. It was snowing. Ryu lost control of the car on a hard turn. The car rolled off a slope and hit a stone cabin at over a hundred kilometers an hour.” With every word he spoke, Eunsoo seemed to struggle more. “Tsuki didn’t make it.”

I felt like I had been punched. My skin prickled sharply at the revelation. But Eunsoo continued.

“Ryu almost didn’t either. But that didn’t stop their family’s wrath. So Ryu’s, like old, old money, like their ancestors used to be nobles or some shit. But Ryu’s family, his immediate one, I mean, they’re just a branch family. Tsukiro was the heir to the main family. The main family basically demanded reparations or else they'd disavow Ryu’s entire family. So Ryu’s own parents basically just threw him under the bus and cut ties with him, literally while he was still in recovery. Even his sister blames him for Tsuki’s death.”

“Fuckin’ hell.” But my reactionary cursing felt small and crass in the magnitude of that story. I couldn’t imagine what that must have been like. To wake up after a near death accident (a key word here) to find out your co-driver, who was your blood-related cousin, hadn’t survived. The guilt Ryu must have felt then… and then on top of that, to have his entire family verify that guilt by condemning him.

“No shit,” Eunsoo said.

“So why the hell is he back with them?”

“No idea. But it can’t be for anything good. They’ve actually been looking for him for a while. He’s actually been listed as a missing-person in Japan for some time now. Obviously he’s not keen on seeing them either, so he’s been laying low here. I hate to say it but… I’m pretty sure Sungmin must have been the one to tell them where he is. What he gets out of that though, I have no fucking clue–”

“Sungmin had a really good private lawyer on his case,” I said, slotting in the information that Taejun had passed onto me. “It’s how he got off so lightly. And it wasn’t arranged by his family either. Even his dad just got a public defender.”

Eunsoo stared at me in awe. But then he sighed resignedly. “Well. I guess you can’t blame him for trying to get out of a shit situation himself.”

Eunsoo’s diplomacy was surprising. I thought he would have been more upset to hear how one of his friends had fucked over the other.

“Were you there?” I asked. Eunsoo looked at me for clarification. “I mean, when Ryu’s family abandoned him.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, at that time… I was the only one there for him.”

My family had disowned me too, though I don’t know if the events leading up to that had been as dramatic as Ryu’s. The numbness and the loneliness I’d felt (and still felt) afterwards had been soul crushing. Ryu was fortunate that he had a friend like Eunsoo there for him then.

“Are you going to go to Japan?” I asked.

“What? Me?” He seemed a little surprised at something that I thought was obvious. “I don’t know what I can do–”

“Maybe you should just go find out. If it’s as bad as you said it is, he probably needs you there,” I reasoned.

Eunsoo still seemed shellshocked by my suggestion.

“It’s not like you have a job,” I said, trying to lighten the mood.

That roused Eunsoo a little. “Hey. I’m no bum. Once you make a certain amount of money you can just trade stocks and investments for the rest of your life,” he grouched. It worked. Eunsoo seemed to be contemplating, but now there was a more determined look on his face.

As we left, Eunsoo thanked me. Just for fun, I thumped him on the back hard enough to make him wince. “Aish!” he cursed me. “You’re a brute. Goodbye, I guess. I’d say call me the next time you’re on leave, but I might just be in Japan,” he said. I was pleased to see him look a bit more fired up than when he had shown up.

“Of course. You should be. Ryu’s your best friend, isn’t he?”

“He’s more than that to me,” Eunsoo said.

“I know.”

He grinned wryly at me and waved as he left. Eunsoo and Ryu were an odd duo, but they were closer than brothers. Closer than me and my brother were. They’d been through a lot together. Without Eunsoo, who knew if Ryu could have been able to survive that level of abandonment and betrayal from his kin. Maybe he would have. That was what I was trying to do right now.

I wondered what my life would have been like if Taejun had stayed in my life. We were back in each other's lives, but it wasn’t the same as before, nor would it ever be. It didn’t matter that Taejun had cut off his family by choice and that I hadn’t. Whatever emptiness and loneliness I was feeling now, Taejun had felt too. Now both of us would be forever separated by the walls we’d constructed to protect ourselves.

I didn’t know what was going to happen to Ryu and Eunsoo in Japan, but I didn’t think I’d find out. As I watched Eunsoo walking away, I had an empty feeling that I’d never see either of them again.

With nothing for me to do, the weekend dragged on. I went down to the apartment gym but I hate the feeling of running in place on the treadmill. Instead, I jogged up and down the streets of Seoul. With all my friends gone, I was left in a city full of strangers. The thought weighed heavily on me.

As my brother dropped me off at the base on Monday, he asked me if I had made a decision.

“I think I’ll try for it,” I told him. Most people hated the military because they missed their lives on the outside. I didn’t hold to any such sort of sentiment. Nothing was waiting for me on the outside.

“I think you’re making the right decision,” Taejun said. That surprised me. I thought Taejun might oppose the idea more, considering how dangerous a military career was. (Then again, he’d just recently been shot several times. His own choice of career wasn’t exactly a safe, civilian one either.)

“I don’t think you’ll have any problem getting through the training,” he said. “You’re tough enough for it. Just…”

I waited for him to finish.

“You have a habit of trying to put yourself into danger,” Taejun grumbled. “Try to unlearn that in the training, will you?”

“You’re one to talk,” I scoffed at him. “You’re the only one of either of us who’s been shot.”

“I definitely didn’t try to get shot,” he fired back. “But… you know, the NIS and the Special Forces work together often. So do your best. In the future we might actually get to work together.”

The thought was surprisingly appealing to me. Though the NIS and SWC weren’t exactly comparable, the idea of working at Taejun’s level with my background was a satisfying one. “That’s actually kind of cool,” I said. I slung my duffel over my shoulder.

“I’m proud of you,” said Taejun, as we said goodbye.

I didn’t know if he actually was, or if he was just saying it to make me feel good about myself.

I expected to be hazed a little when I was introduced to my new dorm mates and fellow trainees.

“Holy shit, look who it is,” exclaimed one of them. He stood up with a wide grin. “Baek Jaehyun, you crazy gaesaekki!”

As soon as he called me that, I recalled where I had seen that face before. But embarrassingly, I could only remember his nickname from the meet. It was Doggie, the first guy I had raced with the Mitsubishi Eclipse. Even though he was barely counted as a familiar face, the way he had greeted me so warmly made me feel welcomed.

“Yeah… that’s me. Er, I’m sorry, but I only remember you as…” I trailed off, not wanting to spout off weird nicknames in front of everyone else.

“It’s Sae Joohyuk,” he reminded me. “You probably don’t remember me much. I started my draft not too long after our race.”

“I’m surprised you remember my name.”

“If I ask someone for their name, I never forget it,” he proclaimed boldly. Well, I had no reason to doubt him. So far he was one for one in my book.

“Is it true your brother is Baek Taejun?” one of my dormmates asked.

For a moment I was baffled that this random guy would know who my brother was. But I remembered that the NIS and the SWC worked closely together. I hadn’t considered that there would be people here who would recognize my brother, and probably compare me to him. It was a distasteful thought.

“Who’s that?” asked Sae Joohyuk. He wrinkled his nose, as though he could sense my distaste.

“He’s a big hotshot over the NIS. He was one of the only guys to make it out of the Incheon operation.”

“NIS, huh? Not SWC?” Sae Joohyuk turned to me with a toothy grin. “Then he ain’t shit.”

I was starting to like this guy.

Sae Joohyuk and I quickly became friends. Even though he’d been in the army a lot longer than I, he too had just recently entered in the SWC pre-selection training.

The guy might not have been a very good driver, but he was an astonishingly good fighter. Despite all that I’d learned, on our first sparring match he planted me on the ground almost as instantaneously as Taejun had the first time I’d accidentally swung at him.

But Joohyuk was a good sport. He laughed and let me up before any of the instructors or our fellow trainees could see.

“How the hell did you do that?” I sputtered.

“I’ll show you,” he said smugly.

And then he did it again. Of course the two back to back defeats fired up my competitive spirit. I didn’t let him do it a third time. I jumped back from him as he advanced towards me.

We must have looked silly with him pursuing me around and around our mat, but at least this way only my ego, and not my body was bruised.

“Get over here,” Joohyuk laughed as he taunted me using a popular video game quote.

“Nope,” I retorted. But our antics had caught the attention of an instructor, who angrily demanded for us to stop fooling around. (I wasn’t fooling around. I was running for my life.)

“Here,” said Joohyuk later. “I got you this, to make up for earlier.” He handed me a bottle of soda. It was a CC Lemon.

“Where did you get it?” I asked in surprise.

“Secret perks,” he answered mysteriously. He had his own soda, which I noticed was not a CC Lemon. It was a Coca Cola. As though Joohyuk had heard the question in my mind, he said, “You look like a guy who likes CC Lemon.”

I had no idea what CC Lemon liking people looked like. “How so?”

“I have good intuition,” Joohyuk bragged.

I didn’t really care for CC Lemon, to be honest. But it was still nice and cool, and off base treats like this were hard to come by. I eagerly chugged it. After a long day of training, and barely enough food and water to get through it, it was refreshing and satisfying. Joohyuk looked victorious.

I probably should have said something the first time about not really liking CC Lemon. By the fourth time he offered me one, it was far too late to tell him that I didn’t really like it all that much.

Jooyhuk had that warm, outgoing personality type that got along well with all kinds of people, even introverts like me. He was well liked on the base. Even the usually abusive and crankier higher ranking officers let him off easy. Sticking by him was a good idea. His very presence lessened the tensions in the room, and the officers were less likely to find fault when he was around. Even if they did, the punishments were always a little bit lesser than their usual cruelty.

Joohyuk never questioned why I stuck to him, but soon he was also seeking me out. Maybe I had the edge of familiarity from having known him before, however briefly, in the meet. As different as our personalities were, we knew we had similar interests when it came to cars and taking risks. On our first HALO jump, we were the first out of the plane, and had the widest grins when we were safely back on the ground untangling ourselves from our parachute lines.

For some reason, Joohyuk didn’t take take his monthly leaves, so neither did I. I preferred spending time with him over skulking around in my brother’s empty apartment. Taejun was a little disappointed, but understood why. I told him I’d see him after I made it through training.

The longer the training went on, the less and less trainees were retained. I didn’t bear the ones who left any judgment. Every week, the training was tougher, and it pushed our bodies and minds to their limits. There was a particularly rough program we had to learn in enduring interrogation. A lot of people were cut or dropped out during that one.

As for myself, I always kept that one mental lifeline that the interrogation wasn’t real, it was just training. No matter what they put me through, I knew that they were obligated to let me go at the end. It was an idiotic lifeline that wouldn’t hold true in a real interrogation situation. At least it worked for now.

But when I relayed that thought to Joohyuk when we laid in our dorm that night, drained from the day’s sufferings, he disagreed.

“If they’re interrogating you, they want something you know. Which means they’ll keep you alive as long as you have that information, and they don’t yet. So that’ll always be your edge,” he said coolly. “But then again, how alive is a different matter. The real enemies don’t need to keep you fully intact like our instructors do.”

I shivered despite myself. “You’re always surprisingly insightful about this stuff,” I observed.

“My family’s always been in the military,” Joohyuk replied. “Sort of.”

He wouldn’t answer when I asked him to explain. “Tell you later maybe. Let’s sleep.”

One of the worst experiences for me to relive was the exposure survival training. I thought I’d panic during SCUBA training, but my own mental fortitude surprised me. With the air mask securely over my face and a flashlight strapped to my shoulder, I felt only a trace amount of fear making our dives into the watery depths. But one time, the survival training had us plunge into icy cold water in our fatigues. The weight of my clothes dragging me down as the sub zero waters paralyzed my muscles threw me into a full blown panic. I was one of the first to fight to resurface, despite the objective of the exercise being to endure as long as you could.

“This the first time I’ve seen you so shaken up,” Joohyuk said sympathetically as he handed me a CC Lemon. I looked at the bottle. Even though I was in no mood to put any liquids into my body, there was something comforting now about the familiar gift.

I ended up telling him about my experience, going more in depth than I had ever told anyone else.

“That’s fucked up,” he said solemnly. I almost laughed at how simply Joohyuk replied. He looked at me, but he didn’t seem to be pitying or judging me. “You’re doing pretty fucking good for a half drowned rat,” he told me.

“Um, thanks?”

He clapped me on the back, and honestly, that was all I needed to be able to get back onto my feet that day.

I liked Joohyuk’s pretty hands-off approach to supporting each other. It wasn’t often, but when he was struggling with the difficulty of the training, I did my best to let him know I was there to help without being overbearing like he was for me. Eventually we got the sense of when the other needed to talk or when he just wanted to sit together quietly and not be alone. Supporting each other in this way, the two of us made it through the SWC training together.

The night before our last official day of training, I called Taejun to let him know the good news.

“That’s incredible,” he said, but he seemed distracted. “Jaehyun, that’s such an achievement.”

“There’s going to be a little initiation ceremony to welcome the graduating trainees,” I said. I told him the date and time. Even though I’d felt awkward with him at the draft orientation, this time I really did feel proud of my accomplishment. I actually wanted him to be there. “Do you think you could come?”

Taejun hesitated at the other end of the line. “I don’t know if I can,” he said carefully.

It surprised me to hear him say that. No matter how busy Taejun was, he’d always managed to squeeze time for me (even when his presence wasn’t wanted). “Why not?” I asked.

“I’m being transferred to France,” he said hollowly.

I remembered he had been working towards that before. But I hadn’t heard any news about it for a long time, and I just assumed he had stopped trying for it, especially with me now situated in the army. “I didn’t know you were still going for that,” I said.

“I never said I’d stopped trying,” Taejun replied. He sounded almost defensive, which made me bristle a little.

“Why did you keep going for it after I joined the army?” I asked, even though it was a bit of a selfish question. He’d offered to take me to Europe with him, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t allowed to go without me. I just felt that way at that moment.

“You’re in there for four years,” Taejun said testily. “I’ll probably be back before then. And if not… you… you can still come.”

“Not likely,” I snapped. “There’s no active ROKA base in Europe and they don’t send SWC there. I’m not going to France just to bum around at your apartment again.”

“It’s not like I’m falling off the face of the earth,” Taejun said. I don’t think he appreciated me starting to get testy back at him. “You can still contact me, and I’ll come back to visit at least a couple times of year.”

Even though we’d barely talked in the last three months since I hadn’t been going off base, it still felt like he was abandoning me for better and great things again. I felt childishly angry at my unfounded irritation. We were both adults. Neither of us had any obligation to the other. But the way Taejun so brazenly and constantly demonstrated that hurt me still.

“Why France?” I asked glumly.

Taejun hesitated before answering. “There’s something I need to investigate there,” he said. I’d heard that hard edge in his voice before. At the hospital, outside of his ward, as he was talking to Investigator Cha. I doubted it was the same case, but Taejun’s unrelenting determination was unmistakable. He was fixated. Whatever it was he was investigating was personal now, and Taejun wouldn’t give in until it was shut.

Somehow, that same deadly determination had never made it to the 7D case. During that time, it had seemed that he could have cared less about the gang that had stricken his own family. I tried to bite back the bitterness rising up in me.

“When are you leaving?” I asked.

“Five days from now.”

“Ssi-bal! Were you just going to sneak off without telling me?” I complained.

“I was going to let you know tomorrow,” he said defensively.

“Sure you were,” I scoffed. “I’ll request a leave of absence to see you off then.”

“Ok.”

Seeing how happy it had made him last time, I wore my uniform to the airport to see Taejun off. It caught a few people’s attention, and they stared at me openly. But when I looked back at them, they quickly averted their gazes. Clearly, something about someone in an obvious military uniform made them nervous. I felt pervertedly pleased at my newfound power.

“I still can’t believe you’re going to France,” I said. Even now, standing in the airport next to my brother and the luggage he had packed, it didn’t feel real. Europe was so far away. “Have you ever even been out of the country?”

“Plenty of times,” Taejun said.

“No way.” I don’t know on what basis I made that claim. I wasn’t obsessed with my brother’s movements like he was with mine.

“I bet the Seoul Division’s upset they’re losing their golden boy,” I said. During my time in the SWC training, I’d run into quite a few people who had recognized my brother’s name. Every time I did, the conversation usually ended with something like, ‘We’ll be expecting great things out of you, too’. I don’t know if they intended it as a compliment, but it wasn’t. Now that my brother was leaving, however, maybe the shadow he had always cast over me would be gone too.

“They’ll be fine,” Taejun said breezily.

The rest of the time at the airport was spent in long, awkward silences. Neither of us really knew what to say to the other. Nothing seemed significant enough to say when we knew that it would be a long, long time until we saw each other again. And yet making small talk would have seemed like a waste of the little time we had left together. So instead, we wasted that time on an unmeaningful silence.

“Don’t forget about me while you’re over there living it up in France,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen,” Taejun said, a little forcefully.

“Ok, then don’t get hitched to some random baegin girl while you’re over there,” I retorted.

Taejun gave me a baffled look. “What?”

“You’re almost 30. Most guys your age are looking to get married. And European women are beautiful,” I said cheekily. “So don’t get distracted and fall in love while you’re over there. Otherwise you really might not ever come back.”

Taejun snorted. “I won’t.”

It was time for him to board the plane now. As he stood up to join the queue, Taejun looked stricken. “Jae... “ he started. Taejun’s eyes drifted over to his boarding gate.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally.

“Don’t be.” Even though I’d been upset with him when he initially gave me the news, a few conversations with Joohyuk later, I’d resigned myself to the idea that Taejun would just be gone, and not out of any malicious spite. We might have been related by blood, but that didn’t bind us together. I had no more hold on him than he had on me.

“The ones who should be sorry are the ones you’re investigating over there. I bet they’re all shaking in their boots knowing the great Baek Taejun himself is going there to drag their asses to justice.”

“You say the weirdest things sometimes,” Taejun said. He gave me an awkward, tense smile. “I don’t know where you picked any of that up from.”

Probably from my friends, the ones Taejun had never known. Sungmin. Eunsoo. Ryu. Seolhee. And now Joohyuk. Suddenly I realized I didn’t know any of Taejun’s friends either. I don’t think Investigator Cha counted.

That’s just how close but distant we were. Our lives touched but didn’t intersect.

I hugged him one last time. “Goodbye, hyung. Good luck overseas.”

It took a moment for him to let go of me. “Goodbye Jae-ya. I’m sorry I’ll be missing your ceremony. I’m proud of you, I really am.”

“It’s just some dumb ceremony.” I waved him off.

As I watched him walk down the gangplank, I felt strange realizing that I had felt more sad watching Eunsoo walk away.

Despite his promise that he would be back a few times a year, I didn’t see him again for the next two years.

When Joohyuk told me about Yeonghon Corp and asked me if I would defect from the army and join with him, I told him yes without hesitation.