Chapter Text
When Han Juwon wakes up, the first thing he notices is that he’s in pain: a full body cacophony of aches reaching their apex in his pounding temples. It takes a moment or two to fully reckon with the pain, appreciate it. He lies there with his eyes closed, breathing through his nose, as the waves of it crash over him, needily making themselves known.
The second thing he notices, when his eyes blink open, is that he’s in a hospital room: everything in antiseptic white replete with the requisite bevy of tubes and machines. More specifically, he’s in a hospital bed, and the tubes and machines in question are attached to him.
The third thing he notices is that there’s a hand resting atop his own. He stares down at it. A man’s hand, weathered skin and thick fingers—and germs, probably millions of them.
He jerks his hand away. Sharp pains bloom in his abdomen and his head; a bevy of alarms begin to sound in beeps and flashing red lights.
The hand raises to his shoulder, as if to steady him. Juwon cringes back from it, ignoring the plaintive cries of the machines. “I don’t like to be touched,” he mumbles. The words taste dry in his mouth.
Silence.
He hazards a glance up, and sees the man the hand is connected to, categorizes the look of him in a detached way. Older. Has the bloodshot eyes of someone that hasn’t slept in a few days, though he’s handsome despite it. Somewhat familiar, in a way Juwon can’t place. Brow furrowed with concern.
The man swallows. “Juwon—”
Juwon scoots further towards the edge of the bed. Alarm bells go off in his head, mirroring the shrieks of the machines. “How do you know my name?”
The man blinks and opens his mouth as if to speak, but he’s spared having to answer when a door on the other side of the room bursts and two more people rush in, a man trailed by a woman. Judging by the white coat and stethoscope the former is clearly a doctor. The woman is dressed in a leather jacket and a grim expression, and once again sets off that same niggling sense of familiarity. The woman and the man at his bedside exchange a look that Juwon can’t parse.
“Glad to see you awake, young man,” the doctor says. He’s a kindly older man with round cheeks and thick glasses. “You gave us all quite a scare.”
Had he? Juwon tries to think. It hurts. “What happened?”
“You were in a car accident a few days ago,” the doctor says, pressing buttons on one of the machines at his bedside until it stops filling the room with beeps. “I’m not surprised you’re having trouble remembering it; you had a nasty bump on the head.”
“I don’t,” he says cautiously. “Remember it, that is.”
“Mmm.” The doctor retrieves a notepad from his pocket, scribbles something down. “And what would be the last thing you remember?”
He tries to remember. Fuck, but it hurts. There are flashes, glimpses—reeds sighing under a blue sky, an umbrella in the rain, dark earth—but the scenes dissolve when he tries to focus on them, like wisps of cloud between his fingers. “Driving,” he says at last. “I was driving.”
The doctor nods and scribbles a bit more. The scratch of the pen and Juwon’s own ragged breathing are the only sounds in the room.
Juwon glances over to his bedside as the doctor writes. The man is staring at him intently now, in a way that makes Juwon feel vaguely uncomfortable. The woman is hovering behind him, her hands jammed in her pockets like she’s fighting the urge to put a hand on his shoulder.
“Excuse me,” Juwon mumbles in their general direction. “But do I know you?”
The woman blinks. She glances at the man and then back at him, opens her mouth and closes it again. “My name is Oh Jihwa,” she says at last. “I’m a police officer. One of your coworkers.”
That makes sense; he can’t remember working with her but he remembers that he’s a police officer. He starts to nod, stops when the motion sets off his dizziness again. He waits for the room to stop spinning before he speaks. “You’re a coworker as well?” he asks, looking at the man.
“Former coworker,” the man says. There’s a hoarse rasp to his voice. “Retired now.”
Why has he been allowed into Juwon’s hospital room, then? Juwon prods at this, but thinking makes his head hurt more. “What’s your name?” he asks, not that he really cares what the answer is.
The man’s face does something complicated, spasms with a series of emotions Juwon can’t name. “Lee Dongsik,” he finally says.
Again, the name sounds familiar. Juwon worries at his memory like a loose tooth.
“Juwon,” the woman says at last. Her voice is cautious, as if she’s approaching a skittish animal. “You said you remember driving. Where were you driving to?”
He thinks. Fuck, but it hurts. “Out of Seoul,” he says at last. “Into the countryside. I had—I had a new position. It was my first day.”
The man—Dongsik, his name is Dongsik—abruptly stands up, chair shrieking against the linoleum.
Oh Jihwa grabs at his arm but he bats it away and shoves the door open to the hallway beyond. He looks back over his shoulder once, his eyes connecting with Juwon’s for a fleeting second—
—and Juwon remembers.
It’s him. Lee Dongsik. The serial killer.
***
Juwon stays in the hospital another week, all told. His body heals in fits and starts: the scrapes crust over with healthy scabs, the bruises bulge with blood and then fade from blue to green to yellow. His mind heals not at all. Oh, it gets a bit better: he can think without shooting pains lancing across his skull, he can stand up without getting dizzy, he can handle seeing and hearing the normal array of lights and colors and sounds without becoming exhausted.
The doctor, unfailingly jocular, insists that he should be pleased with his progress, that he should be grateful.
Juwon can’t get there. Every little weakness feels like a betrayal. And besides, what does it matter that his bruises are healing when the most important thing, his memory, still remains stubbornly out of his reach?
“A bad concussion paired with retrograde amnesia,” the doctor opines as Juwon once again tries and fails to recount basic details from the last year of his life. “It’s not common, but not unheard of. Most cases clear up on their own as the brain trauma heals.”
That makes Juwon want to scream, because most cases are not all cases, and what happens if he doesn’t heal, and why does he have no say in this, no control over any of this?
He tries to remember. He thinks as hard as he can, until he can barely move from the pain in his head, and still there is nothing, only fleeting bits of light and color and nothing else.
By the time a week has passed and Juwon has grown both thoroughly sick of hospital food and also well enough in body that the doctor has pronounced him ready to go home, he still remembers absolutely nothing.
This leads to an argument about his discharge.
“Someone needs to drive him home,” Oh Jihwa says. She’s been by every day to talk to the doctors, listening intently to all of the details about medications and home care regimens and jotting down notes. Juwon wonders if she’s his emergency contact.
Dongsik invariably accompanies her for some reason, trailing after her like a ghost. He stares at Juwon when he thinks he’s not looking. “I can drive him home.”
Jihwa looks at him, then back at Juwon. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Why?” Dongsik asks with a laugh. There’s something bitter about the flavor of it. “What are you afraid of?”
Juwon watches Jihwa intently as she bites her lip with something akin to nervousness. Does she know that Dongsik is a killer, then?
“I can get a cab,” Juwon feels compelled to point out.
That at least gets the two of them on the same page. They turn to glare at him in unison. “No.”
He wants to scream at them that he’s not a child, he can take care of himself, he doesn’t even know them.
But yelling would make his head hurt again. He curls in on himself, nursing the indignity of his helplessness and glaring at the floor.
“Take him, then,” says Lee Dongsik. “Doesn’t matter to me.”
***
On the appointed day of his discharge, Oh Jihwa helps him out of the hospital and down the stairs into the parking lot beyond. He stands there a moment, blinking at the shocking brightness of the sun. He can’t remember it being so bright, before.
Of course he can’t. He can’t remember anything.
He snaps at Oh Jihwa when she offers to bring the car around for him, but still has to stop twice to rest while walking to her parking spot. She studiously does not say anything.
When they finally make it to the car, his forehead is beaded with sweat. He eases himself down into the passenger seat and fights to catch his breath.
Oh Jihwa glances at him sidelong from the driver’s seat. “Are you hungry?”
He is, a little. But he doesn’t like eating anywhere but in the safety of his own kitchen.
She starts up the car, eases it out of the parking spot. “Your co-workers are meeting up for dinner at a place in town, if you want to swing by. It might jog your memory to see them.”
That’s what convinces him, the lure of fixing whatever’s broken in his head. He’ll go for a few minutes, see if anything shakes loose. He doesn’t have to eat anything. He doesn’t have to touch anything. “Sure,” he says shortly.
***
Going to the restaurant is a mistake.
Everyone seems thrilled to see him, these people that he doesn’t know. They clamor over each other to re-introduce themselves to him as he sits stiff as a board in their midst, listening as they rush to explain how they know him and from where.
It’s too much, they’re too close, invading his space and breathing his air. The words are passing over him like water in a stream bed; he’s too focused on keeping his breathing from spiraling out of control to catch more than one word in ten.
The waitress elbows one of the officers out of the way and places a full bowl of broth in front of him, “since it’s your favorite.”
He stares at his reflection in the bowl. The ripples on the surface contort his face like a funhouse mirror; the shifting liquid mirrors the roiling in his stomach. Had he really done this? Eaten with these people? Liked it? Or was this all some elaborate practical joke?
The bell at the door rings; Juwon looks up to see—
“What is he doing here?” he blurts out.
The rest of the room falls into hushed silence as Dongsik stalks through the door and makes his way over to an empty seat at the table to Juwon’s right.
“They didn’t kick me out of team dinner night when I quit the force,” Dongsik says as he shrugs out of his coat. He’s not quite looking at Juwon.
Conversation hesitantly picks up again, but Juwon’s eyes stay trained on Dongsik.
As he sits, the waitress touches him lightly on the shoulder and hands him a cup. “Are you okay?” she murmurs.
“Why wouldn’t you be okay?” Juwon bites out.
Dongsik lets the question hang for a moment, takes a sip of his drink. He sets it back on the table, taps the pad of his thumb against the brim. “Pulled my back picking up something heavy.”
Something heavy. “Like a body?” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud but he’s concussed, sue him.
Dongsik’s eyes sharpen, and suddenly he’s looking at Juwon with a strange intensity. “Something like a body, yeah.”
***
By the time Juwon makes it back to his apartment, he’s exhausted. They’d barely stayed twenty minutes after that strange exchange with Dongsik, but he still feels completely undone, as if all the life has been squeezed out of him. A vaunted police academy graduate, undone by a dinner with coworkers. And for what? He still can’t remember a thing.
Oh Jihwa had offered to walk him up to his apartment, but he’d declined in no uncertain terms. He hates feeling indebted to anyone, but especially to a stranger. Of course, everyone is a stranger now.
He lets himself into the darkness of his apartment, clicks on the light, and hobbles his way through a slow tour. He remembers living here, had lived here before the bright line cutting across his memory.
Everything that should be here still is. And yet…
The closet isn’t full. All of his clothes have been shoved to the right; the left-most side is just a section of bare hangers. They flutter at odd angles, as if the clothes on them had been removed in a hurry and no one had taken the time to right them.
There’s a cup of water on the side of the bed he doesn’t think he sleeps on. There’s an extra phone charger plugged in there as well.
He sits down heavily on the edge of the bed.
Someone else has been here. Someone else has been living here.
He swallows.
He’s never… it’s never been something he’d been particularly interested in. He’d had a vague notion that one day he’d marry a nice girl like he was supposed to, and had generally shied away from thinking about the specifics of what that would entail.
He pulls off his shirt, stares down at his bare chest. It looks the same, other than a few lingering bruises from the accident. Has someone… shouldn’t it look different, if someone has touched it? He imagines a woman’s delicate fingers tracing over the soft skin of his belly, manicured nails dragging slightly over the swell of his hip.
A bout of nausea crashes over him and he stumbles to the bathroom just in time to get to the toilet. He shudders there, body heaving as he cradles the cool ceramic, tiles hard beneath his knees.
When the nausea leaves him, all that’s left is bone deep weariness. He shuffles back to the bed and is about to collapse onto it when he has a thought.
His phone. If he has a girlfriend, they would have texted, right? People text their girlfriends. Or so he’s heard.
His hand goes to his pocket but of course it’s not there. He checks his discharge bag, and then the pockets of the clothes he’d been wearing when the accident happened. Nothing
He searches his apartment from top to bottom, once then twice and then a third time just to be sure.
His phone is nowhere to be found.