for the fic writers meme- questions 8 and 12 :D
Oh yay! 😊 Thank yooouuuu.
8. Apologies in advance for the length of this; it's less snippet and more excerpt, but I love it all and it's not likely to ever see daylight outside of my hard drive, so...
“This is a new service,” Han Yeo-jin said. Her voice was rough, as though she had been shouting. Si-mok spilled some soup on his hand; he hadn’t heard her porch door open.
“I thought you might forget to eat.”
She was wearing a sweater, though the autumn evening was still warm. In the dim light from her kitchen window her face seemed older and wearier. Her shoulders did not form their usual straight line.
“The soup is too salty,” he warned her.
She sat on the bench beside him and took the second cup. “I tried to eat.” She pried the lid off and blew gently on the surface of the soup. “It made me sick. That was a few hours ago. The extra salt will be good.”
He looked more closely at her face. She didn’t appear sick. She sipped, then waited, her face tight and frowning. “Was it him,” she said.
He tipped his cup back, considering. He’d intended to talk about anything but the case. Han Yeo-jin put her cup down and stared; he’d taken too long. “Probably,” he said, and tipped his head to relieve some of the muscle tension in his neck. “Old injuries match the x-rays from the report. I won’t be certain until the lab can match DNA.”
She hummed an absent reply and leaned her elbows on her knees. “You think his accomplice murdered Congressman Youn, don’t you?”
Si-mok sighed and twisted the lid back onto his cup. His neck still ached. Stress and lack of sleep seemed to hide in the muscles of the shoulders. He wondered if it always had and he was only now noticing, or if this was new. Pointless question: there was no way to tell.
“It was too personal. It had to be someone with a grudge.”
Han Yeo-jin rubbed at her temples and hummed again. “Well. That was probably him that I—that I shot in the arm. I guess that’s something, right?”
The strain in her voice was difficult to read. The way her fingers clutched at her hair before she shook them suggested guilt. “You had no choice,” he told her.
“You saved Mrs. Park’s life.”
“I know.” Han Yeo-jin took another cautious sip of her soup, then another. She was curled around herself as though she had taken a blow.
“How do you feel?” he asked finally, because trying to determine it for himself in the dim light was clearly not working. She huffed a laugh and looked at him over her shoulder.
“Now it’s your turn to ask me that, is it?”
Difficult to tell if he’d offended her. He fell back on the lessons she had taught him, the sort of bald honesty she tended to employ to encourage confidences. “I don’t know how to help. I’m worried about you.”
This was the source of the tension in his shoulders and neck, he realized; speaking it made it clear. Worry.
Her laugh wasn’t a laugh. She took a ragged breath and wiped her face. “I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. I guess that’s the problem. I killed someone.” Her next breath was more even, but shorter. “I had to. I know that. But I killed someone. I took him out of the world. Somebody’s son.”
There was nothing Si-mok could think to say that would resolve that. It was true. That it had been necessary didn’t make it less true.
“You also saved somebody’s daughter,” he said.
She set the soup down between her feet and pressed her hands to her face, took several deep, unsteady breaths. Not helpful, then. Or maybe it was? People often claimed to feel better after tears. Maybe he should go and let her shed hers in private. Maybe he should stay and make her tea, her preferred response to upset in others. Maybe there was something better he should say. He’d only told her what she already knew: she was more than intelligent enough to have concluded it already. But he had never taken a life, himself. Yoon Se-won had done it for revenge and believed it to be a right act, yet still carried the weight of it. Han Yeo-jin had been forced to do so in the performance of her duties as a police officer, in connection to a case he had involved her in. A case she had involved herself in, on his behalf. Whether he stayed or left her alone, the damage was already done.
“What can I do?” he asked her. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
“Oh—” She heaved a sigh and wiped her face. “You already brought me soup.”
Her laugh this time was a laugh. She sat up and rubbed at her neck. “Hwang Si-mok,” she said, “Thank you. You are a good friend.”
A good friend would probably know what to do without needing to ask. “Tea?” he repeated.
“No. No tea.” She sighed. “Just sit with me for a while, okay? Will you do that?”
This didn’t seem like it would be helpful. But she seemed to know what she needed now; she was thinking again.
This was well before I wrote in transit, and well before season two came out. It took a crazy long time to get down the dynamic of HSM trying to feel his way into offering support, and HYJ figuring out how to accept it. (And then we got a season centered around that, which made me SO HAPPY.)
I'm not 100% happy with the pacing, but pretty pleased with the reverie in this part: HSM's head is just such... a tough nut to crack.
12. I'ma have to go with S2E14, when all the brakes come off at once. Plot-wise, it's still an episode and a half away from climax but the final, steep climb toward it, which is a structure they employed in season one as well. Thematically, though, it's the climactic episode, when the big pieces come together and we can see how all these little compromises and corruptions, these "that's just the way it is" choices to accept what we feel we cannot risk trying to change, can lead to life-changing (or life-ending) acts. All the big threads wind together in this episode.
In terms of character development, it's gloriously cohesive: Si-mok and Yeo-jin working at a furious pace and as a single unit against not only the culprit and his father but the entire system and its roadblocks, switching roles without hesitation, playing to their own and one another's strengths. And backing each other up in more personal ways, too: he pulls her back twice when she gets too involved, and she does the same for him at least twice. There's nothing of the feeling-their-way element to their partnership that characterized their best moments in season one: these are two people who have remembered that they know each other well and trust each other in a way they can't do with anybody else, and it comes across so clearly in their interrogations of Kim Hu-jeong. Their confrontation with their respective bosses might be the climax of the plot, but it's a denouement in nearly every other respect.
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romaincrisis
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