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Wol-ju just meant to properly close up for the night, but when she returns from Samshin’s, she can only stand there, staring at the paper cup of coffee on the counter.
Hell.
This night, she feels like she has the weight of the world on her shoulders, that alcohol by itself won’t seem to lighten. She’s bone-weary, the most exhausted that she’s ever been, she thinks dramatically (she’ll allow for self-pity today – she deserves it). The hollow feeling that comes and goes, lingers in the air tonight like a fine mist that dissipates into her skin. She curses without heat and starts packing the leftover anju in the fridge.
The receptionist at the hotel doesn’t recognize her when she walks in, not that she expects it, and greets her with a warm smile. She waves off his polite greeting: “Whatever. Where’s the sajangnim?”
He blinks at her in confusion and offers a very helpful [uh]. A part of her marvels at his unchanged cheery disposition, after all these years; perhaps it was an indication that her own youthful optimism had just been a façade after all, crumbling at the first touch of bitterness. [Pity], she thinks, as his eyes glaze past her to spot an approaching colleague, [he would have done well for himself had he the chance.]
“May I help you with something, Miss?” the colleague says from behind. Wol-ju turns with a sigh.
This one is smartly dressed in a suit and, with a tinge of sadness, it reminds her that, the first time she was here, a young woman had his position. She, primly dressed in a hanbok, asked her that question a long time ago too (everything was a long time ago). (Wol-ju spares a moment to wish her well, though there was no doubt that she would be saving the realm somehow, whichever one she chose. This place was blessed with top-tier talent while she had to deal with – well, she concedes, hospitality management was not the same as the bottom-rung of food services.) This current successor to her position – there would have been several in between as well – is adorably baby-faced, probably not that much older than Kang-bae, if that…
“Manager?” she asks with a lilt, though the question is answered before it is asked, “at such a young age.” It must have been difficult to cope, Wol-ju muses absently, with the change in staff. And recently. Wol-ju let’s out another big sigh – gods above, what a depressing day.
Wol-ju repeats her request for the sajang to the surprised young man dismissively, and looks around for bar (this place got even bigger, damn it). “Oh and if she turns me away,” she says, already walking away – she lifts the plastic bags in her hand, “tell her I brought snacks.”
Man-wol looks good, as always, dressed in a bespoke outfit and accessories that strikingly accentuate her petite frame and her tragically-young face, ever a hauntingly-beautiful doll frozen in time. Wol-ju stares at her enviously as Man-wol pokes at a small jeon with her chopstick. (Wol-ju stopped aging once she was released from her last hell, but still: it was the principle of the thing. Man-wol’s been dead [or whatever she is] for a lot longer than Wol-ju has anyway.)
“If you were going to come here, couldn’t you have at least heated this one up too?”, Man-wol sneers. She picks up the jeon anyway and finishes it in two bites.
[I take it all back], Wol-ju corrects herself, [the spoiled brat]. “You run a fucking hotel,” she shoots back, “get me a large ribeye.”
Pay the guest fee. No, get your own damn anju. Then find another drinking buddy. Who says we’re friends? Do you know how hard it is to run a luxury hotel for dead people who don’t have real money? You think it’s easy cooking real food and making real alcohol, for self-pitying, living ones – all for less than twenty thousand won? Fuck you. Fuck you too.
And so it goes.
Man-wol drops her chopsticks on the table with petty, childish disgust. “Fine. I won’t eat, I won’t eat.”
Someone clears their throat firmly and Wol-ju looks up to find the young manager from before smiling down at them. “Miss Guest,” he addresses her, “please enjoy some complimentary ddukgalbi while you catch up.”
Wol-ju sits up straight and blinks as he lowers a large plate on the table. “Oh,” she says, with a prim clearing of her throat, staring blankly at him as he beams down at her, unfazed by the death glares Man-wol sends his way (perhaps he is not so new after all). “Thank you.” He bows and walks away.
Intermission over, the proprietresses stare at each other until Man-wol huffs and calls truce by grabbing one of the fancy patties and unceremoniously dumping it in warm ddukbokki sauce. “So,” she starts, giving her a sardonic glance as she pulls the ddukbokki container closer toward her, “what brings you here after all this time?”
The script goes like this:
- Wol-ju gives a rant of less than ten sentences.
- Man-wol gives an appropriately noncommittal and sometimes improperly-timed [ah/mm/ng/is that so] in between bites of food.
- When Wol-ju is done, Man-wol begins to complain about the impoverished state of her theoretical trust fund or her wardrobe while Wol-ju takes leisurely shots and politely tunes her out.
It’s therapeutic.
Talking at Man-wol is nice – Man-wol’s greed in all things and blatant disinterest in anyone else gives Wol-ju permission to nurse her own han with impunity. It’s also complicated. Nice in that, objectively, Wol-ju hardly says anything at all and Man-wol never actually pays attention; nice and complicated in that whatever of her drivel Man-wol picks up through osmosis, she deciphers and connects like Sherlock Holmes (she probably deconstructed and reassembled Wol-ju’s entire life in her first glance); and then actually-rather-problematic in that in front of Man-wol, Wol-ju never successfully says what she wants to say.
[I found the bastard I hated for five hundred years today. Or rather he found me, biding his time until he could break me.]
What comes out is:
“I didn’t actually think I’d see him again.”
The words surprise her as they always do, and they’re followed by the ritualistic, dazed stare Wol-ju gives Man-wol as her brain catches up with her mouth. That is how she catches the unexpected, visceral reactions that flit across Man-wol’s face mid-bite of pork liver.
Wol-ju could spend the next millennium recalling the other girl’s face without placing a single emotion. Altogether, they render the other girl as transparent as any one of her customers, better than any sip of ssanggapju ever could. Just like that, Wol-ju feels the bitter tug of empathy for her counterpart.
Han and love; soju, anju; fate and the stupid mortals who dare try to change them. She’s tired of it all.
Man-wol heaves a sigh and with a no-nonsense glance, uncharacteristically picks up the bottle of ssanggapju. Oh? Wol-ju holds up her glass. Man-wol takes it, pours herself a shot, drinks – oh, right, she should have known – and stares at the bottle in surprise. She likes it. [This is your brew, right? It’s sweet.] The pleasantly less-bitter taste seemed to be the only magic Wol-ju could detect for herself; it was nice to have it confirmed.
“The sleep is good,” she says in response. It is not strictly true (alcohol was still alcohol, after all); but the dreams she has those nights contain only the sweetest memories of an era long gone – smiles and hands held tight. It helped, on abjectly shitty days like this. Man-wol pours herself a drink again, and another.
Wol-ju tamps down a snarky [rude, much] and watches with a proud little smirk. Let the girl have her fun. And then her smile fades into a marked grimace – that was probably her first sip of water from the afterlife – as she continues watching her companion, thinking of everything and nothing at the same time.
“Men,” Wol-ju mumbles, and either the expression on her face or the way she says it startles a chuckle out of the other girl. Ever the mind-reader, Man-wol leans back in her chair and lets out a scoffing [tch] with a wave of her hand, as if to say, look at this girl – “as if he’s the idiot fool in all this.”
Ha. Put that way, it is a bit embarrassing. [It’s your damn fault for trusting him.] “Yeah.” Wol-ju picks up her chopsticks.
A delighted shriek interrupts them, and Wol-ju turns to see that the manager is playing peek-a-boo with a little infant sitting on their mother’s knee on a lobby bench…the baby shrieks a second time and burrows their face against the mother’s chest—
Person–“ally,I think you’re making a big deal out of nothing.” Surprised, Wol-ju turns back.
Man-wol nibbles on the edge of a jeon, watching her, watch the baby. Wol-ju flushes; it feels like getting caught by a precocious child…[which is true]…[whatever, it’s Man-wol. Who gives a shit?].
“Why’s that?”
“All this time you’ve wanted one thing – to save someone you love,” Man-wol says, pointedly, a little heated, “and it’s not him. You have other priorities and, literally, very little time to care for anything else. Although –” Man-wol affects a pleasant smile, “if you ever have the guts to use it, I’d be happy to give you a rifle. Or – shall I help?” She cackles and spears another rice cake.
Wol-ju stares at her for a long while, before picking up a rice cake herself, and turning back to the lobby scene. “You judge me for not wanting revenge,” she says, embarrassed. Her blood boils thinking of him and how he indulged her for a year, how he had said such nice things about her mother…and what little amusement she had found in people-watching tonight dries up, as even that reminds her of him and the life she might have had. [I once loved a man] she remembers saying, [My dream was simply to marry him, have his children, and enjoy ordinary happiness…]). “For letting him just stand there.”
Man-wol slams her chopsticks down on the table.
“I judge you for still loving him,” Man-wol fumes. Wol-ju flinches and does her best not to blush under Man-wol’s glare. “All this time he’s seen you suffer; but he’s probably also seen that you still think of him; heard you say how happy you were with him; smile wistfully at how different things might have been, of the life you might have had!”
There’s a pause, in which (Wol-ju sees out of the corner of her eye) Man-wol continues glaring, first at her, and then at the table. She unclenches a fisted hand and to clutch the soju bottle as she does so. There’s a longer pause before Man-wol says calmly, voice low, “It’s pathetic. I bet if he gave you a ring tomorrow,” – jade, she recalls – “you’d wear it, since you’re – really?”
He wears it around his neck. She has no idea what that means…nor does she care because this is not what she came here for (she has no idea what she came here for). “Okay, okay, I get it, you bitter old hag,” she snaps, thoroughly humiliated. “Who the hell did you die for?”, she mumbles heatedly.
“I didn’t,” is the reply, “He died for me.”
Wol-ju turns back. Man-wol looks at her coolly, her arms crossed; then, immediately looks at a speck on the table, face falling, eyes already faraway as she does. There’s a long pause in which Wol-ju tries to recover and find something to say – but the silence is probably for the best…
“It’s not the guy you’re thinking of, you know,” Man-wol eventually says, suddenly affecting a casual tone. She puts the shot glass in front of Wol-ju and picks up the bottle, signaling at her (bewildered, Wol-ju holds up the glass, and then, as afterthought, wraps her other hand around it, too).
“It’s the boy you need to kick out.”
Wol-ju blinks. Man-wol rolls her eyes. “You gave your soul for that boy. What else would you give up? You can’t afford to care for anything or anyone else.”
Wol-ju takes her shot in response. “I’m not so soft as to be swayed if he attempts to reconcile me with whatever-his-name-is,” she mumbles.
“It’s not just that either…”
Wol-ju turns back. Man-wol is busy unscrewing the cap of a thermos. She lets out a little squeal of delight at the sight of warm, eomuk broth. (If it weren’t for her prissy [“competition is bad for business”] attitude and all the potential contractual headaches that would inevitably arise with Jang Man-wol as landlady, Wol-ju just does.not.have.the.time.for, Wol-ju would have been nicely situated right outside, done with her counseling quota ages ago; and Miss Priss, secret little plebian that she is, could have had all the street food she wanted.)
“Live ones,” she says, pouring out broth into the cup, “have a way of weakening one’s resolve.”
In the distance beyond Man-wol’s shoulder, Wol-ju sees the manager at the other entrance of the bar, likely to make his rounds. She catches his eye, and he begins to walk towards their table with a wide grin that’s so like Kang-bae, that it…reminds her of the cheesy lines that came out of his mouth this afternoon. Man-wol has a point. [Ah], she begrudgingly admits, feeling hollow once more, [I guess this wasn’t enough tonight.]
“–You know what I mean?”
Wol-ju offers a noncommittal hum in response.
Wol-ju leaves the rest of the soju with Man-wol and doesn’t bother to remind her of its intended purpose on the still-living – it won’t last the night in her hands, anyway. Though she says she’ll come back with another bottle soon, they both know it’s just a pleasantry. There are far too many unsettling comparisons between them to be actual friends, and too many boundaries each would erect, besides.
Perhaps to mark the rare meeting of the moon sisters (the del luna barkeep was terribly proud of the name he coined), the moon seemed exceptionally bright tonight…she can’t help but look up at it on her way back.
Thinking of Man-wol is easier. It helps, thinking of her friend’s irritating face, lightly flushed, unwittingly tasting a foreign sweetness from a place empty of all han (a place she could not go). She thinks of the blankness in her eyes as she reacted in delight to Wol-ju’s cooking, and she wonders if that’s what that one aunt, the one who gave her the recipe for shrimp dumplings, saw in her…
Wol-ju really does not want to know who died for Man-wol, nor any other detail of her love life. The important part is that one: Man-wol was also jilted; and also two: the gods are fucking with them. And so –
[I hope you dream of fond memories tonight…
or not, whatever. Maybe all the fond ones became other, too.]
It’s the nicest thought she can muster for the wench. She tried. She scowls up at the moon. “Hey. I thought I asked you to set me free.”
She really needs to control her temper. There could really be a moon deity receiving a very nasty voicemail on the other side, after all. “At least give one of us a happy ending,” she amends, “I was basically going to hell until this afternoon anyway – it might as well be her.” There’s no response, of course.
In her dreams that night, her mother sits her down and braids her hair.