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Goryeo, 1351.
Joohyeong is seven when he starts to wander.
But when he gets up from bed, he knows he’s far from seven.
His limbs stretch for miles, and in place of the quilt blankets on beds of the orphanages are what appears to be plain matted ones.
And in place of children as old as him are grown men with long hair preparing for what he hears is a packed day out for the Kunryongwe to save their general.
He’s supposed to panic, he knows, but he doesn’t. Not at all. Not even when it feels like he’s being taken through the motions of someone else’s life. Not even when what seemed like a peaceful ride in the woods led to one thing and another.
He doesn’t even know how to fight, being seven for crying out loud, only learning to fight the demons from within clawing at what seems to be an aimless, hopeless future.
But in this life, he is not seven. And in this life, he fights.
The king’s men outnumber them, however, ten to four. Hanbaek, the most outspoken of them all, is singled out and tied to a wooden chair with the king himself torching his leg with burning iron.
“Where is Honglim?” the king asks. “How much more do you think you can endure?” The king is furious, through and through. Joohyeong feels they’re never gonna see the light of day again. “Tell me where he is.”
“He already left,” Hanbaek wails out. “He’s not coming back.” Joohyeong doesn’t even know his own name in this life but he knows he might be next. “Why are you doing this?”
The king only answers with more fury, burning his captive’s leg with no mercy left.
Joohyeong feels himself coughing out blood, wondering if this will be the end for him, too. As Joohyeong, and not whoever’s life he wandered to.
He doesn’t get to ponder further. Soon, Hanbaek’s shrieks grow more and more distant before everything goes black.
Incheon, 1992.
He wakes up in sweat, and very much alone. His grip is tight on the patterned blanket of the orphanage, his heart heavy because it’s been hours and he still hasn’t heard again from his eomma.
The kind priest tells him she’ll be back for him. It’s what she told him, too.
I will come back for you.
She doesn’t.
He wishes this was a dream, too. But it isn’t.
(He still heads straight for the washroom, though, to check on his face, his legs and wrists. If the ropes left marks. If the fight left scars. There’s none, of course. But when he closes his eyes, he can still hear it. A comrade’s endless wailing in the darkness. The king’s wrath for someone who broke a promise.)
In a few weeks, strangers will take him to some place far away from Seoul. His new family. A family that will care for him since the one that brought him to this world chose not to.
In his new home, he will learn his dream could have been from a time years and years before this. Where kings rule and armies of men willingly die at their feet. Or beheaded. For treason. For friendship. For love.
Not much has changed since then, though, he thinks. People change. Vows are broken.
He still dreams of her . More often than he dreams of fighting with comrades with not much time left. It’s the same dream, over and over. The same woman, leaving and leaving, not looking back.
Joohyeong may never be as powerful as the king to move the earth to pull his eomma back to him. To ask her questions he wasn’t able to. Why did you not come back? Do you hate me? But he can do better.
It takes a year and a half but eventually he makes up his mind. To Joohyeong learning Italian at eight, his eomma is as good as dead.
Soon, his dreams of a woman walking away become shorter and shorter until there isn’t anyone walking away at all.
Changyeong Palace, 1422.
He wakes up to the news of his father on the verge of death.
Joohyeong is startled because he’s never known his father. But as he takes in his surroundings of wooden floors and scroll paintings hung up in walls, he keeps his mouth shut.
He’s older again, he observes. Older than he is in his own life. There’s a strange sense of comfort knowing how he will look like in time as he stares at his reflection on the wooden bowl of water that perhaps is meant for washing his face in this lifetime.
Servants soon flock to him, help him get dressed in thick robes that feel a little too heavy on his frame. They tell him he’s not heading towards the Sajeongjeon today for the early meeting. Instead, he’s led to his father’s—the former king’s—quarters where an old man is lying down, grinning bitterly at the sight of him.
“ Aba mama ” comes out of Joohyeong’s lips in a breathless whisper.
Joohyeong—no, Lee Do—as his dying father calls him—walks forward and for a moment Joohyeong mistakes his action as longing, yearning, a feeling similar to what he once felt before.
But then, the dying former king asks him “The Joseon you wish for where words reign over swords, and patience over death, is it still the Joseon you want?” The tightness in his chest tells him it’s more of a challenge than a question, from a prideful father to his foolish son.
“I can see it,” the former king spits out. “You kneeling at my tomb, crying as you tell me that you were a fool.”
Lee Do is unfazed and moves even closer to look at his dying father in the eye. “The King of Joseon doesn’t have that kind of idle time to spare.” The former king responds by pulling him closer, shaking hand gripping the collar of his robe to tell him “Then rule, you should.”
How can I call myself King?
Memories of a heated exchange of words come to him in a flash, unbidden.
Because of me, everyone died.
He remains standing there, watching his dying father’s eyes flickering between this plane and the next.
I don’t have an answer.
There’s a sick feeling to his stomach, thinking back to the woman who left him, on who’s going to watch her on her dying bed like this.
I can’t do anything.
When King Taejong dies, grief takes over the palace.
Joohyeong watches as a eunuch stands at the rooftop, shaking clothes that the former king used to wear, calling for his spirit to come back. Joohyeong is still watching as they wash the corpse and cover it in clothing and blankets on the third day. He continues to watch as they cover it with more layers of clothing on the fifth, tying it with strings as it is finally laid to rest on a coffin built months before this.
The servants dress him in myeonbok on the sixth day. His wife, the queen, trails behind him as he pays his respects in the royal mourning hall.
Joohyeong learns that the queen despises the fallen king, for ordering her father’s death. But she offers him her condolences her anyways, even asking him to join her for tea. “He is of your blood, still, Jeonha ,” she tells him. “You are still his child.”
Lee Do thanks her for the goodness of her heart and accepts her offer. But Joohyeong doesn’t get to stay longer for it, leaving the mourning palace on the seventh day, wondering if familial ties truly cannot be broken.
Seochu-gu, 2000.
He wakes up with his drool all over the pages of the Korean history book he’s reading for the afternoon.
Joohyeong is Joohyeong again, and not the young king in a palace mourning the death of the former king.
“Sorry for waking you up,” the short-haired girl from across the table tells him. She’s almost as tall as him and looks like she’s around the same age as he is. “But we’re closing this section soon.” She points to where the clock strikes six, her straight-cut bangs following the motion of her head. “They’re renovating early tomorrow so this part is being closed earlier than usual.”
Joohyeong makes no noise apart from thinking about missing someone speak to him in Korean again. Even if thinking about hearing anything in Korean reminds him of someone he now refuses to remember.
“I’m sorry,” the girl says in English, grin apologetic. “I thought you knew Korean.”
Joohyeong shakes his head, oddly wanting to have her talk to him again in Korean. “I can understand,” he says in Korean.
“Oh, good.” Relief washes over her face. “I’m glad you can but we’re closing soon, could you wait somewhere else if someone will pick you up?”
Joohyeong quietly stands up and closes the books in front of him. The girl helps him close them, too and takes them from him. “I’d let you borrow one but I left my card so—”
“It’s alright,” Joohyeong says. He won’t be able to return it anyways. Coming back to Seoul was a one-time thing, after all. His Mamma and Papa were against it too, knowing it might bring back memories they knew he was trying to purge from his mind.
But Joohyeong is fifteen and stronger. Wiser, too, in a way.
He may still have kept his name but everything else is no longer the Joohyeong that left Korea years ago.
No more days of looking up Oh Gyeongja’s name on the internet even if they return the same irrelevant results every single time.
No more looking back at a life that can barely even be called living.
No more looking back.
At fifteen, Joohyeong makes a vow as he looks outside the glass of Gimpo that this will be the last.
Pyeongchang, 1965.
He wakes up as soon as he hears engines roaring.
The room he finds himself in smells like a pigpen. Joohyeong knows because he bathed in it once, when people still saw him as defenseless and weak.
This person Joohyeong inhibited today doesn’t mind it though, feet already making their way onto the wooden wall through which a bit of a light is streaming in. He’s careful, seated all the way down only taking the smallest glimpse of the commotion outside.
There is a man, a girl and an old woman, walking around through the snow.
“When Donghwa Industries went bankrupt, they left this house to Yu Okhee-ssi,” Joohyeong hears the man outside say. Every syllable is clear to Joohyeong’s ears, clearer than what he’s used to even as someone who always tries to quietly pay attention to everything around him. “When she passed away, it passed on to Kim Suni-ssi.”
The person’s ears perks at the name and Joohyeong feels their gaze shifting from between the girl and the old woman. Joohyeong deduces this person must know one of the women but doesn’t know which.
The man talks some more, telling them something about summer homes being built in the area ending it with a call to sell the lot. House included.
The person doesn’t seem to care. The old woman, too, stopping to look right at their direction.
He stays frozen, wondering if the old woman saw them—saw him.
But instead, she turns around and asks “Can I stay one night?”
The man allows them to, leaving as the women settle in at the house outside. Joohyeong is trying to guess why this person is living in this pigsty when there’s a perfectly more spacious house outside, more fit for a living person and definitely more spacious than the smallest house Joohyeong lived in with his—the woman who left him before she left him at the orphanage.
Joohyeong’s mind is filled with more questions come evening when the person carelessly steps outside to look at the girl from earlier. She’s on her phone looking down to kick at the snow one second and the next she’s looking straight at them—at him.
“Oppa,” she calmly speaks onto her phone. “I’ll call you back.”
When she ends the call, she heads straight to the car parked just outside the wooden fences, looking at him every five seconds to see if he’s moved. Of course, he doesn’t.
Wait. Chulsoo. Don’t move.
The voice in this person’s—Chulsoo’s memories—sound like the girl and Chulsoo knows it too. He makes no move however, staying perfectly still as instructed by the voice in his head.
When the girl finally gets back inside, he goes back inside, too, to his barn, filled with stacks of papers with messy handwriting and a guitar that’s been Frankensteined to look like it’s still intact even if it’s barely trying to stay together.
Chulsoo busies himself holding a pencil to write some shaky hangul. Apparently not too sleepy yet. (Joohyeong wonders if he ever does get sleepy or if he ever gets any sleep at all, and if he won’t..? Joohyeong finds himself wondering further, Then how do I leave?)
He’s brought back to the present—Chulsoo’s present—when the door to his room opens, the old woman from earlier stepping in as she looks at him with recognition.
She continues to step forward and Chulsoo stays still, rooted in his bed as if, waiting for her to come to him.
I will come back for you, Joohyeong hears from their collective memory and he just knows. This is her. The voice in his head must be hers.
He’s still seated as he hands her a folded piece of paper. The edges too crumpled that Joohyeong is surprised it’s still intact for God knows how long. The tears start falling as she opens the paper, covering her mouth in disbelief. “Did you wait for me?”
Chulsoo stays quiet, only nods once as he slowly raises the patched up guitar to her. When he’s looked at her enough, Joohyeong finds himself bowing down, memories of gentle and loving pats coming back to him as if it were his.
He continues to fidget on his seat and only settles down when he feels her hand on his head, ruffling through his hair in gentle strokes.
“Come here,” she tells him and he does. She puts her hand on the back of his head and leans in, other hand on his back to hold him closer. She breaks into sobs of apologies, litanies and litanies of it. “Why did you wait?” she cries out, telling him everything she’s ever done since she left.
“I did everything.”
“I ate everything I wanted.”
“Wore the clothes I wanted.”
“Met a man and got married.”
“I had children.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m a grandmother now,” she tells him when they’re finally untangled. “My hair is all white.”
“No,” he speaks for the first time. “You haven’t changed at all,” he tells her. “I missed you so much.”
It’s still too little yet all too much at the same time that it makes the woman sob harder.
She only stops crying as she lies down on his bed, falling asleep to him reading from his tattered story book.
Chulsoo doesn’t sleep that night. Instead, he steps outside, trekking through the snow. Joohyeong has a feeling they should come back to the barn soon. Suni left Chulsoo once, Joohyeong thinks. And though, Kim Suni is not Oh Gyeongja, one person cannot keep coming back to this shabby old place, seemingly forgotten by the rest of the world.
I will come back for you.
Joohyeong doesn’t know who says it in his head when he hears it this time, staying still as he watches the car from yesterday leave and disappear into the distance.
We’ll always be alone, Joohyeong thinks as Chulsoo starts to roll a ball of snow as if the one he loves has not just left him. Again.
Chulsoo finally tires himself that night, falling asleep on his bed with his head lying next to the paper with Suni’s letter from years ago. I will come back for you, it reads.
No, Joohyeong thinks . She definitely won’t .
Songpa-gu, 2012.
He wakes up with the worst jetlag of his life.
He looks at the clock on the cream wall of his expensive hotel suite and knows he doesn’t have much time left until the hearing. He takes a quick shower, and heads down to the hotel’s café to get bread and an iced americano that he immediately wanted to throw away at first sip.
“Prosecution, question the defendant.”
He looks at Oh Gyeongja, all ashen and grief-stricken, looking like there’s no longer any fight left in her. It’s his first time seeing her again since she left him as Joohyeong, shaking and alone, desperately waiting for her return.
The prosecution continues to read more of her sins according to the family of the person she killed, sins that Vincenzo frankly could care less about. He’s just passing by and happened to be here on the day of her hearing. She’s just someone from his other life now.
“The defense rests.” Her legal counsel sucks, Vincenzo knows this much. It makes him want to punch the shit out of him and whoever hired him. (As far as pinning helpless people as murderers, Vincenzo knows it’s the family of the deceased that hired this scumbag of a lawyer.) He punches his thigh instead.
“Your honor,” the prosecution starts again. “Defendant Oh Gyeongja had abandoned her own child in the past.”
Vincenzo looks up.
“I’m submitting her affidavit of voluntary relinquishment of parental rights to an orphanage in Incheon.”
The church. The priests. The nuns. The other children. Like him. Left to be picked up by other people who have some spare love to give.
And Vincenzo is no stranger to this, being taken in by a set of kind strangers twice, only to lose them twice as well.
But instead of being left to fend for himself again when his second set of parents were taken away from him, this time from a massive shootout—that Vincenzo learned later to be a bloodbath opera, planned to a T, he learned how to fight. Both with his mind and his fist. Education for both of which were handsomely paid by another Papa that lived longer than those ones that came before him.
The Papa that took him to the Cassano family shooting range the day he came home to them all beaten and scarred and soaking wet with pig manure and sewage water.
“Yourself is your best ally,” he spoke to him in Italian which Joohyeong already understood by heart, having learned the language desperately everyday as if it’s breathing. “Because everything that comes can always leave.” It’s not his first time hearing it, spoken in Italian. His Mamma who died from the shootout, with kind eyes and a kind smile told him that, too. And when she told him that, she told him she means all the bad things in life. He didn’t know she meant people, too.
Days later, Joohyeong died and Vincenzo lived.
Whoever’s name will be on that document is not Vincenzo’s.
The judge in-charge reviews the document for a moment before projecting it onto the screen for everyone to see.
“It’s highly likely that she does not value other people’s lives.” Vincenzo still hates her even if Joohyeong and her means nothing to him now. But she’s in court for murder and not for this . “This proves the validity—”
That’s irrelevant to the case.
“That’s irrelevant to the case.”
Vincenzo clenches his fit tightly, looks at the woman he used to call eomma.
“You’re my lawyer,” she looks to her useless counsel, pleading. “Say something.”
“I was sexually harassed,” she declares and Vincenzo pounds his fist onto his thigh again. And again.
“His whole family is lying!”
And again.
“Don’t say anything,” the judge says and right there and then Vincenzo knows . Everyone in this room is useless. “This will work against you.” All scum.
“Chairman Hwang sexually harrasses his housekeepers,” she speaks again, a mile a minute, as if she still gets a say in this. Vincenzo’s seen this . He’s seen this from clients of his opponents, has seen it many times in all of his years practicing law for the family that took him in when the one that adopted him died an untimely death. “He harassed every woman that came to work for him.”
He wonders why she’s putting up a fight now when it’s all futile and her sentence is set in stone.
“Defendant.” The judge calls out. “If you speak without permission again, you will be escorted out.”
“Suit yourselves,” she finally says, taking a seat. She’s had enough. Vincenzo had too. “You’ve already made your ruling.”
He doesn’t look at her again when he leaves.
Gunkanjima Sea, 1945.
He wakes up to a head of a little girl nested peacefully on his lap.
The crick in his neck tells him he’s fallen asleep in this position for so long. When he tries to move, the fellow next to him comes to his aid and moves the little girl’s head from his lap to his.
No words are exchanged except for a smile and a small nod when he tries to stand up with shaking legs.
The sky is a brilliant orange, a telltale of the day bleeding onto night. But it’s not the vast sky that takes much of his sight. It’s the seemingly endless pairs of eyes watching him as he walks around the ship.
Hashima Island. A mission. Betrayal. Their escape. Bloodshed and burning bodies left and right. The island of hell on earth exploding right in front of their very eyes.
He’s a hero in this life, he concludes, remembering bits of commanding everyone as they fight their way out of the island surrounded by nothing but ocean. His dirtied nametag reads Park Mooyoung and Vincenzo never felt more distant to a person he inhabited.
Park Mooyoung is one of the reasons his fellow countrymen are on this ship, sailing home. For a moment, Vincenzo ponders on how long this travel will be for him. Because he’s been used to living for himself for so long, even in service to the family that can kill for him when needed. It’s easier to think of himself and himself only. Simpler.
“Where do you live?” comes a soft voice from behind him. Vincenzo—Park Mooyoung—turns to her—the child sleeping on his lap earlier—in an instant, crouching down to tuck the stray hair behind her ear. “Is it far from the city? By the mountains? By the sea?”
She’s asking so many questions except one.
Can you take me with you?
When he reaches forward to wipe the soot from her cheeks, he thinks of her dad telling him Please take care of Sohee before closing his eyes for the last time.
“We have the best soy noodles with sugar,” he offers. It immediately makes her grin.
Gangnam-gu, 2020.
He wakes up after God knows how long, to the sound of Hong Yuchan byeonhosanim’s daughter crying beside his hospital bed.
He blinks once, twice, eyes scanning if the steel-eyed human rights lawyer is in the room, too, when it dawns on him.
A missed call. RDU-90. The rain outside. Glass shattering. The blinding headlights of a truck coming at them at full speed. Not by accident. But aimed to kill.
The crying from beside him stops. After a while, she stands up and quietly leaves.
He doesn’t try to get up right away, knowing that pushing his body to the limit after having endured so much won’t really do him good. Years in the mafia taught him this. Of course, he survived an attempt to kill him. It’s not the first time he does. But it’s the first time that he’s just collateral damage, not the target.
“I said I wouldn’t cry,” Hong Yuchan’s daughter says in frustration the next day she comes to visit. “Don’t be an idiot.”
You’re not , he wants to say. There’s nothing idiotic about mourning for someone who has left before their time. His only parent left him but Hong Yuchan has no intention of leaving his daughter, even if they threw words like knives at each other. Vincenzo knows that much.
“Get up and say something already,” she whines and he understands. Ten days is a bit too long to wait for someone to wake up, especially someone who’s the last person to be with her father. ”I’m so frustrated.”
Somehow, he’s relieved that she’s this stubborn. Stubbornness saved her from ending up as collateral damage. Had she arrived earlier and drank with them, she might not have survived too. Vincenzo winces at the thought.
“I’m paying for this private room and your hospital bills just to hear your story,” she complains through her tears.
He wants to crack a laugh. It’s about time he wakes up.
“Do you even know how much it costs?”
“Then, let’s go to the bank first.”
“Just transfer it to me online,” she replies quickly, only realizing moments after that he answered back.
“You woke up so randomly,” she says. “What’s going on?”
He gets up, and she gets up, too, blocking him from walking away.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Her right hand is on his forehead in an instant and her left moves to cup his face. The warmth is foreign. Nobody is allowed to come this close. The only ties worth keeping are with the family. Nothing else.
Because everything that comes can always leave.
“We need to see if you’re all right.”
And he is. He always is. And he always will be. Babel and Wusang were so used to comfortably watching the world burn from their tower, having things go their own way that they left him out of the equation completely.
It’s about time their tower comes tumbling down burning.
So when Hong Yuchan’s daughter propositions to help him with the plaza building in the condition of her tagging along on his own plans to take the conglomerate down, he agrees.
Sangwolgok-dong, 2012.
He wakes up to heavy downpour and furious pounding on the front gate.
“Kang Maru!” shouts the voice from outside and it makes him wince. His body feels sore all over and he struggles to stand up to check the mirror and see himself and the state he’s in in this life.
When he does, his insides constrict. He’s a bloody mess. Cracked lips, nose smashed and one eye almost shut swelling.
The screaming from this person’s visitor is persistent and becoming unbearable noise to his ears. If it were up to him, he would just wait it out, wait until the visitor leaves. Because everyone does leave eventually. Because everything that comes can always leave.
But as always, Vincenzo is just a traveler. Not completely control of this person’s actions.
So to his disappointment, he finds himself walking in staggering strides to the front porch, barely opening the door, not even bothering about the rain that’s far from gentle.
The knocking has stopped but when he finally opens the gate, Kang Maru’s visitor is still there. Soaking wet, looking at him from head to toe, taking in the sight of him bloody and almost beaten to death.
“That kiss,” she starts, lips quivering. “That was my first kiss.”
As always, he’s not supposed to know but he sees it anyway.
“The kiss with you in Hirosaki.”
A kiss shared under the moonlight.
“It was the first time I ever told anyone that I loved them.”
He’s frozen on the spot, not from the cold or from the pain on his ribs but from her honesty. Earnest and terrifying.
She tells him that when he told her “I love you” her heart fluttered for the first time. She thanks him, too. Thanks him for making her happy, making her feel alive for the first time ever.
He isn’t in control of his limbs again, one hand reaching out to her as he closes the gap between them. His other arm is still wrapped around his guts like he’s holding them in but touching her face is electric. Makes him feel alive, too, even if he’s barely keeping it together.
He wipes away a tear on her face and he sees the trust mirrored in her eyes. Vincenzo doesn’t need any more memories. He knows Maru loves this person. And she loves him, too.
She pours her heart out some more, telling him she wants to be with him everyday, and do anything and everything with him for the rest of her life.
He finally closes the gap, taking her into his embrace, holds her and she holds him back.
His chest feels light for the rest of the evening even if the rest of him doesn’t, returning the best smile he can with his burst lips, and a few words, simple chatter, even if his throat is not working the way he wants it to, voice all choked out.
Her earnestness with him washes over him in waves that he feels too much of an intruder in someone else’s life for the first time. He knows it’s not jealousy that makes his stomach queasy when she starts dozing off still smiling at him as if he’s her entire world. He’s just overstaying. Something that he doesn’t really like. Because staying for too long ties him a little too tighter than he’d like to be.
He tells himself having one person as your entire world is too much. He tells himself that and more, lying down on his side on the floor beside her, facing her, thinking of someone who’s been asking him a question he still doesn’t have an answer to.
When he falls asleep with swollen eyes, he hopes to wake up in a different place, to a different person by his side, thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to not have an answer just yet.
Cheonggye Plaza, 2021.
He wakes up to one side of his face almost numb from where it’s lying on the living room table.
His face and body do not feel sore, a telltale that he’s no longer carrying Kang Maru’s scars and not lying down next to someone who fiercely braved the pouring rain for him.
But he’s still expecting someone else with her head on his table too— Chayoung-ah , as he had so clumsily called her last night between her egging him on to drink a few more shots and him trying to tell her that No , he doesn’t have more gold scattered in South Korea, underneath plaza buildings that are just hiding in plain sight and No , he doesn’t have gold hidden under the Blue House.
The morning after bottles and bottles of makgeolli always brings Vincenzo hangover, the next one slightly not as terrible as the last. But it’s mostly due to someone for making it a little bit bearable.
As he lifts the lid of the bowl in his kitchen nook, the smell of haegukjang fills his room that’s suddenly too big for one person.
“Haegukjang always makes hangovers better,” Chayoung had said, pulling him down once to the ahjumma’s food shop for their shop’s own recipe of haegukjang. In between sips and his still sort of half-awake state, he made the mistake of asking if the ahjumma’s haegukjang tastes better than her father’s. He apologized quickly and was met with a smile that he thinks he doesn’t deserve.
(He’s learning it’s always like that with her. Be given things he doesn’t ask for. Because somewhere along the way, from a life before this, a lonely boy at seven had to grow up too quickly to learn to take things for himself. Something he still believes in at thirty four. And will probably believe in for the rest of his life.)
“Oh,” he lets out, feeling a crick in his neck as he wakes up properly, folding off the blanket that Chayoung must have put on her before she left. He looks around and sees all her stuff gathered in his couch, packed and ready to go as if she hasn’t taken residence in his home for the past week.
When his phone rings, he sees it’s her and picks up right away.
“You’re finally going home today?” he asks.
Laughter bursts from the other end of the line and just like that he’s drunk again.
“Don’t miss me too much, byeonhosanim ,” she says to him in a singsong manner. “I still want to prove I’m the better drinker.”
“In your dreams, byeonhosanim. ”
“We could drink at my place next time,” Chayoung says easily. “Let me show you how the Hong’s haegukjang is still better than ahjumma’s,” she boasts and he laughs. “No offense to her.”
There’s chirping outside. Maybe from Inzhagi, maybe from a couple more. Chaos brewing outside his window to match the one he’s battling himself. He’s barely holding himself together at the thought of her asking him to come over. To stay the night, even.
“So, what do you say?” she asks. “My place, next time?”
It’s terrifying, he thinks. Because just a few nights ago, when she’d ask him if he’s going to leave after all this, he could barely give her an answer. He wasn’t able to, in fact. If a day comes and she asks him to stay he realizes he might actually do it. Stay. Even if it’s outside the picture. Even if he’s outside the picture. And he’s just passing by. A traveler. Even in his own life.
But for now, because he knows there’s still a long way to go in taking down his enemies and hers, he looks at his friends merrily chirping outside the window and feels a little foolish at thirty four as he says “Sure. Your place, next time.”
Seochu-gu, 2016.
He wakes up to chaos in an emergency room.
He’s not supposed to, but as always, bits and pieces of what happened to this person’s life comes to him in waves.
An underground parking lot. A person running towards him. A rain of bullets and the piercing pain that follows.
But what happens next is as clear as day.
Anger meets him in the form of the head surgeon operating on him. She’s seething from beneath her facemask but this person’s priorities are set straight when Vincenzo finds himself asking “What happened to the person that came with me?”
She doesn’t answer his question, and instead calls him Yoo daehwinim, each syllable laced with rage and concern, something Vincenzo has grown familiar with since he flew to Seoul for his gold.
Yoo Sijin, Vincenzo learns, is on the opposite side of the spectrum from where he is. He suspects he’s someone high up the South Korean military forces, based from the salutes of Tangyul given to him as he’s transferred to a private room for two.
Sijin’s priorities fill his mind when his roommate is led to the bed beside him. A North Korean soldier who Vincenzo classifies to be a friend to Sijin despite their respective origins. The surgeon from earlier pays them a visit a couple of times, Sijin’s commanding officers a couple times more. Vincenzo usually keeps to himself when he wanders, limiting human interaction as much as possible, not wanting to tangle himself into the life of the person he’s inhibiting.
But commands were given, intentions made clear. Soon, it’s Vincenzo—no, Sijin, putting the plan in his head into motion. He hands his North Korean friend a pack of chocopie, which Vincenzo sees again being torn open by bloody fingers, from his binoculars, from his view way up the rooftop of the building nearby the hotel his comrade was taken to.
Vincenzo knows Sijin’s friend makes it.
He takes that tearful smile with him back to the hospital, back to the nagging warm presence of the doctor who Vincenzo thinks to be someone like Chayoung to him in his own life.
Vincenzo finds out he’s right when he’s welcomed with an endless lecture from her on staying still for his own good, not wandering off without a word.
Vincenzo wonders if Sijin wanders in the same way he does, too, cracking a smile which the doctor presumes to be mockery even if it isn’t. She’s about to launch into another tirade of lecture when someone knocks on the door of his room calling for the doctor to attend to her other patients.
He doesn’t notice if the doctor comes to drop by again but he knows he’s sleepily murmuring “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything” over and over to someone who doesn’t even exist in this life before completely succumbing to sleep.
Samcheong-dong, 2021.
When he wakes up again, he’s no longer under the sheets of the hospital bed assigned to Yoon Sijin but on Chayoung’s couch.
His eyes feel heavy, not from sleep, nor from his latest escapade as a special forces Captain. But from crying for the passing of the mother he’s longed to return to. It’s ironic that in his dreams, he’s always saving people yet in this life, even if he can, he wasn’t able to.
He remembers his heart had felt too heavy to bear on the day before, when he finally laid her to rest and that Chayoung may have felt that, too and thus offered to drink with him at her place.
He had initially turned the offer down saying he’d like to drink by himself. She only fixed his tie for him then and there saying “But it doesn’t have to be.”
She offered him her bed, too, saying she could sleep at her dad’s room. But Vincenzo knew better than to let her wallow back onto the same pit he is helplessly sinking in, so he refused.
He opens his eyes to the light from the Hong’s living room window, and to the smell of what smells like the banchan from the ahjumma from the snack shop.
“I don’t have coffee right now but we can stop by for your favorite Espresso and my favorite sewage waste.”
He laughs, like he always does with her, taking a seat on the table from across her like he always does, too.
Everything feels like clockwork, puzzle pieces fitting together, something he didn’t notice he was taking part in until a week ago, when he stopped by her house by himself, letting himself in with the spare key she gave him.
“You’re always here, anyway,” was what she’d said when she gave him her spare key. “I won’t be here for long” is what he should have said then, and is what he could and should say now, as she fills his plate with all the meat from the ahjumma’s packed meals for them.
But it’s her who speaks first and asks him “You’re always in a deep sleep, you know?” She chews and swallows before looking at him, not prodding, not threatening. Just asking. It’s what she does. With everyone. With him. Most especially him. Even if she doesn’t have to.
“Makes me wonder if you wander off too far when you sleep.”
The sun is too bright and so is she, her hair tied in a bun like it always is on some mornings he’s slept over and on some mornings she’s slept at his. It’s taken him this long to realize but now he knows he can tell her. He wants to.
So when she asks him “Where do you wander off to, Joohyeong-ah?” with a smile so bright that he wants to keep waking up to next year, the year after that, all the years after, he tells her right there and then. He tells her everything.
Agoha forest, 118 BCE.
The sun on his skin tells him he’s wandered off to somewhere again.
But he’s also dripping wet, drenched from head to toe, held up by too many hands as he’s being punished from the heat of the sun in the sky. There are voices of cheer around him in a language he doesn’t recognize at first.
“Eunseom-ah!” calls out someone—a friend, Vincenzo presumes—who sounds more than relieved that the owner of the body Vincenzo has found himself in is alive. Someone else comes forward, embracing him so tight that Vincenzo wonders to how selfless could this person be in this life. The celebration gets the best of them, his head bumping against a rock amidst the running water.
He winces in pain. “This isn’t a dream,” he finds himself saying even if he knows it always is.
“You survived! You’re alive,” the first friend yells in glee, face stained with tears of joy that their friend survived what Vincenzo guesses to be an almost death.
He learns later that it actually was. It almost was a sure death for Eunseom who the Ago tribe has demanded to be put to the judgement of the waterfall. Vincenzo’s head spins from the specifics that sound even more complicated than law jargons and business models he’s learned serving the mafia.
He decides to play everything by ear for the evening. But the next morning he sees a face of someone he’s certain he’s already lost in his own lifetime.
Eomma , he almost calls her. As if he’s always said it in his own lifetime, from when he could but did not.
She’s not alone. In fact, there’s an entire clan worth of people walking alongside her and behind her.
“You said you weren’t sure as to yourself being Inaishingi,” she tells him and he finds himself reeling at the sound of her voice. At the sight of her, in the flesh, alive and breathing. “You must believe now.”
And he does. He always has. Because for every unfortunate accident that is out of his control comes something else.
And sometimes, they come to him in a dream, much like this one, that’s too real for this person he’s come to be in this life, but will merely be a memory for himself, to bring with him back to his own life. A life that no longer has this woman standing in front of him, looking at him in reverence and respect.
He knows she isn’t his eomma .
And soon enough, he’ll have to bid her farewell, too, because their time with each other will be up and this is but a mere stroke of an intended coincidence, from whoever is in control of Vincenzo’s escapades.
He knows all that but he asks her anyway. “What’s your name?”
She replies, kneeling down on the earth beneath their feet, everyone with her following suit. It’s Vincenzo’s cue to come to his senses, to manage what can be managed up until before his time in this life is up. Because everything in his travels is always temporary even if the sight of his eomma feels too real. And Vincenzo’s already a seasoned traveler, having travelled from one lifetime to another for most of his life.
So when he closes his eyes after a hearty feast that was apparently prepared in his honor—Eunseom’s honor—he smiles in contentment.
He smiles because he knows it’s time. It’s time to go back to his own life, and to her. Always, to her.
It’s time to go home.
Gangnam-gu, 2021.
He’s not home when he wakes up.
His back hurts from where he’s seated and slept. The moment he properly adjusts his eyes to his surroundings, the vast white walls of the hospital room fills his sight. And right next to him is Chayoung and the beeping heart monitor attached to her.
It’s an encore of a performance from earlier on, from a time Vincenzo just thought of gold and collateral damages. But now, instead of him, it’s her lying on the hospital bed, unconscious and on the brink of death.
She got shot. She got shot for him .
If he could do it differently, he would.
He’ll do the same for her, multiple times over. (He’ll do it even in other lives, as those other people. As long as she needs him to—and even when she does not—he’ll still die for her.)
Vincenzo wonders if Hong Yuchan byunhosanim is watching from up there—or somewhere if up there doesn’t exist. He wonders if he’s regretting ever getting himself involved with someone like Vincenzo.
There’s so much blood on his hands now, including hers, and all he could see is red. Instead of fearing if he might stay for her— with her —if she asks him to, it’s now the fear of losing her completely that makes him sick to his stomach.
This never happens on his travels. This never happens to the people who share the same face as him. This only happens to him. It already has. And it will happen again , his mind traitorously supplies.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow but one he finally understands now.
Because he was born to be a traveler. So anyone up there watching might have ensured he can never be tied down. Cut loose ends. Leave. Start anew. Rinse and repeat.
A traveler through and through.
“You look tired,” she comments as if he hasn’t been waiting for her to wake up for God knows how long.
“Please tell me it’s from wandering off to somewhere again,” Her words are slurred but he manages to understand her anyway. “And not because you haven’t slept at all.”
He pulls his chair closer to her, sighing. He gets a small smile in response, as if she did not teeter dangerously between life and death a while ago.
“I paid for this private room,” he starts.
“I paid for your room for ten days,” she says.
They’re at it again, exchanging silly inside jokes they formed as colleagues turned friends turned something more than friends but not quite lovers. He’s going to miss this. He’s going to miss her .
“Does it still hurt a lot?” he asks even if he’s scared to hear her it from her. She still humors him, telling him that now she knows what it feels like to get shot and renders him speechless when she asks “You blamed yourself all night, didn’t you?”
He cracks a sad smile because Yes, of course there’s no one else to blame but No, it’s not all night technically because as always the universe led him to some place else again.
“Your muscles are damaged,” he tells her first instead. “So, you can’t—” he gently raises her injured arm to tuck it inside her blanket. “Move your arm for the time being.”
“We were fighting a war together,” she tells him. “And I happened to get shot.”
He almost replies Don’t go off following me as I put this war to an end but decides against it, and caresses her cheek instead in gentle strokes. Because nothing else matters to him more now than to have her alive and breathing, looking at him like he means the world to her.
The storm is at bay. He’ll unleash it later, tomorrow. But today, at this very moment, he has to tell her something he’d promise to tell her.
A knock on the door breaks his reverie. It’s Mr. Nam all solemn before stepping forward to smother Chayoung with his attention the moment he says she’s woken up. When he turns to Vincenzo, face a little serious again and says “Mr. Ahn called,” Vincenzo knows his promise to Chayoung can wait.
“You can tell me later,” Chayoung says as if she’d read his mind. “But don’t call until it’s all over.”
“It’ll be done in twenty-four hours,” he says to her, a promise. Even if this is the last time he’ll see her, the thought of hearing her voice again is enough to keep him going.
And twenty four hours later, as he bids Mr. Cho and Mr. Ahn farewell as they lead him to the port where he’s off to leave for good, he finally brings out his phone to call her.
Don’t you want me to stay? Why haven’t you asked me to? Can I stay?
He’s unable to ask her of the questions he wants to ask because the sound of a phone ringing nearby makes him turn back around.
“You called,” Chayoung says, barely standing on her feet, coming closer to him. They meet in the middle and he holds her in his arms. “Because you told me to,” he murmurs into her hair, kissing the crown of her head with all his answers to the questions she asked him once before.
“I saw eomma ,” he shares and it makes her turn his head toward him, still in his embrace, ready to listen in earnest as if they have all the time in the world. So, he tells her. He tells her in the briefest way possible. And as he tells her, he just knows . He knows he could do this everyday. For the rest of his life.
He holds her tighter because they’re running on borrowed time, as if this is just another stop in Vincenzo’s travels and that he’ll wake up later to some place else, to a life without her.
But it doesn’t have to be.
“Can I come back?” he asks like a fool. There’s no turning back, he knows now. If she refuses, it’s no way but forward for him. At least, there’d be no regrets. And if she says—
“Do you?” she asks him back, looking like she barely believed that he considered. “Do you want to come back?”
He responds with his lips on hers, cradling her face already trying to remember what he’ll miss for the next year or so. “Always.”
UTS Orbit, 2092.
Today is the day he’s waiting for. Not Vincenzo. Not even Joohyeong. But Taeho. The owner of the body he’s inhabiting today.
“Slept well last night?” one of Taeho’s comrades ask him. There’s a little girl nestled in his arms who reaches out towards him. Before Vincenzo could process it, he’s reaching back to take her and cradle her into his arms, an action he’s now no stranger to.
Warmth spreads in his chest as the girl beams at him, and signals for him to put her down. Once both of her feet touch the ground, she turns to him, tiny hand stretched out to hold his, tugging him along, forward and giddy and says, “Let’s see Suni today.”
“It’s a 99.99% DNA match,” one woman tells him, as they strap both Dorothy—or Got-nim, as Vincenzo reads from Taeho’s mind—and him to their respective chair-like contraptions, a meter apart. “We won’t know Suni’s location but Got-nim will be able to communicate with the nanobots around her.”
One of the men explain to him further how the nanobots work and even if he can sort of follow, the words fly past one ear and out of the next. His mind, focused on the apparent unbridled happiness Taeho is feeling.
“We don’t know what form the data will take, or just exactly how the interpretation process works,” one of the men tell him. They’re still plugging wires and checking them and Vincenzo could only look forward, at Got-nim and her pupils starting to change in an instant.
“But we know that for that one moment,” the man adds, tone hopeful. “You and Suni will be connected and Dorothy will be your medium.”
When the woman says “We’re synced,” something starts to form from between Got-nim and him. They start off as particles of light that eventually wipe the entire room in an instant.
One minute Vincenzo is sitting down strapped to the strange chair-like contraption. The next he’s standing, walking towards a tiny figure hunched down on the ground, seemingly drawing something in tiny strokes. The dirty plaid on the child and her mussed up hair tells him this must be—
“Appa, I finished writing,” Suni says, walking up to him with her book that says Hangul in the cover.
“You did?” Taeho asks back, and Vincenzo could feel his chest expanding with sadness, but overwhelming warmth, too. “Show me.”
So, she does.
“You wrote so well.” Taeho flips through the pages but Vincenzo can barely read anything, their vision dimmed by tears that Taeho must have been holding back for so long.
He crouches down to her height then, limbs moving on their own accord. “Can you give appa a hug?”
So, she does.
“I’m sorry I’m so late,” Taeho repeats over and over, sobbing onto her shoulder. Vincenzo could only hold Suni tighter, compelled by the need to contribute, to let Suni know how much his dad must have missed her. How much he loved her, still loves her, and will love her for the rest of his days.
Vincenzo once thought this kind of love doesn’t exist. Or at least, will never exist to him. Too foreign. Too loud. Too impossible.
But Vincenzo at thirty four didn’t know what Vincenzo at forty one now knows.
And when Taeho finally kisses a tearful goodbye onto Suni’s forehead and a ray of light sweeps the entire room again, Vincenzo hears it.
He hears his cue to come back. Hears his cue to come home. “Appa?”
Yongsan-dong, 2026.
Today is the day he’s waiting for.
No matter how many times he’s flown from Malta to Gimpo, his body will never be immune to the grueling time difference.
No one from the family is there at the airport to pick him up. Which is what he wanted, too, since they will all be busy helping with the move from the Hong’s residence to their new home in a quaint subdivision near the new Jipuragi office at Yongsan-dong.
The cab driver tries to engage him in small talk, nothing too friendly reminiscent of his arrival years ago for the gold, before Babel, before Chayoung.
He looks outside and sees part of his reflection on the car window. He’s not wearing a suit today. And even if through the years, wearing it has become second skin, he’s learned to wear something else, something that will always be with him wherever he goes in this life or in the other ones he wanders off to.
“We’re here,” the driver announces. It’s Vincenzo’s cue to tap on his phone to transfer his payment, even tops it off with a handsome tip just because he feels like doing so.
The driver’s face lights up when he sees it and makes a move to open his door to help with Vincenzo’s luggage. Vincenzo stops him saying there’s no need. He packed light anyways.
He only has one luggage with him, with most of his things already shipped earlier.
Even before pressing on the doorbell, he could hear the commotion inside. He’s already sighing (albeit with fondness that he may never confess to) knowing how the family might end up staying up late again, wondering who’s that screeching on the noraebang machine, hoping it’s not Dalrae who’s considering a singing career as encouraged by her father and the entire Geumga Cassano family.
When he rings the doorbell, the gate is opened before he can even come up with something to say to Cheolwook to tell her daughter she might need singing lessons if she seriously wants to pursue a singing career.
He hasn’t even moved an inch when a pair of small forceful arms find their way around his neck pulling him down into a tiny embrace.
“You’re here!” screams the owner of the arms around him, anchoring him down to the spot, refusing to let go. Vincenzo lets her, letting her settle her chin onto the crook of his neck, fitting perfectly in his hold in the same way he fits into hers.
“Gyeongmi says she met you last night,” says Chayoung, hair cut shorter than the last time he saw her, fondly looking at them before being called in by Gyeongmi to join their embrace.
“I did,” Gyeongmi echoes, barely holding onto her giggling as if she’s about to spill a secret. “I told eomma everything.” Her bangs sway with her small animated motions, similar to how Chayoung’s did way back from a life that now feels like an entirely different life from this one. “We did meet, right, appa ?”
Vincenzo nods, standing up, and lifting Gyeongmi into his arms, her left hand holding onto his neck, her right in the hands of her eomma. “Can you tell me all about it, too?”
Gyeongmi grins, bright and blinding. Next to her, Chayoung does, too, inching forward and he meets her halfway. She gives him a kiss, a Hello, Darling, and her smile tattooing into his lips. “Welcome home.”