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Hong Yu Chan thinks the Grim Reaper's outfit is a little too predictable. He says it nicely, but he doesn't think the sentiment is appreciated. The Grim Reaper is incredibly handsome, however, so Yu Chan tells him that and, mollified, he is offered a calm walk up and down the street before heading off to wherever the Reaper is supposed to take him.
Depressingly, as they walk, Yu Chan sees a crowd begin to gather around his dead body and Vincenzo Cassano's injured one. "Is he going to die too?" Yu Chan asks, nudging his new friend. The Grim Reaper checks his notecards and shakes his head. "Not yet," he answers gruffly, as though he's been instructed to only speak in limited syllables.
Yu Chan nods in understanding, then freezes. Slowly, through the crowd, he sees his daughter arrive at the scene, approaching his body. For the first time in a long while, he's seeing a blank expression on her face, and he knows… he knows what it is because he's seen it once before, on a day when his own heart had been broken beyond repair and he'd gone ahead to handle all that emotion very badly.
Don't go closer, Cha Young-ah, he wants to say. He knows it'll be gruesome and he doesn't want her to see him like that. Better she remembers him yelling at her—oh. The last thing they shared was a fight.
Regret comes careening into him like a heavy truck, the second large impact he's—quite unfairly, by the way—felt in the past hour alone. All they've done is squabble and fight and now he's dead.
"I'm winning the Parent of the Year award," Yu Chan murmurs, still frozen in horror as Cha Young delicately picks her way through the crowd, across the shattered glass, to peer at the lifeless body of her father.
"There are worse parents," the Grim Reaper says unhelpfully. Yu Chan glares at the fellow. "What? I'm just saying," he hurriedly defends himself.
A strangled, half-sob grabs his attention as Cha Young murmurs, “Abeoji?”
Yu Chan closes his eyes, turning away so he doesn't have to see the movements that accompany the awful, sad sound of his only child realising she’s lost her father.
"What is supposed to happen next?" Yu Chan asks gently of the Grim Reaper, who looks vaguely relieved at not being raked over the coals for bad bedside behaviour.
"I take you with me."
"And what if I want to stay?"
The rain, crowd's chatter, distant sobs of his unfilial, passionate, heartbroken daughter and approaching ambulance sounds all surround them as the Grim Reaper stares at him in consternation.
"You're dead!"
"Yes, I'm quite aware of that. I'm asking you what I have to do if I want to stick around."
"Stick around?"
Yu Chan frowns. Has he been assigned a particularly stupid Reaper? He waves his hands around to gesture at the world around them, just as two ambulances park in front of the wreckage. "Hang around here as a ghost," he explains slowly, keeping an eye on how they take one body, then another, already strapped to an oxygen mask. Cha Young follows the first, tears tracking down her beautiful face.
He turns away again.
The Grim Reaper's expression clears. "Ohh, I see. There's a form you have to fill," he says.
Of course there is.
-
In the days that follow, Yu Chan spends a considerable amount of time trying to understand the Laws of Spirits and Ghost-kind, having been pointed very kindly towards a ramshackle post-life library by the lady at the Ghost Applications counter. A part of him marvels at the fact that even in this regard human beings have found a way to try and inject order, but a larger part of him is frustrated at the amount of paperwork he has to wade through. His original application had been accepted within a few days, but he'd quickly discovered that he was tied to Hong Cha Young. While that in itself wasn't bad, of course, he wanted to see what was happening with Nam Joo Sung, the tenants of Geumga and his new Italian friend; not just when Cha Young saw them.
"You need to apply for a wider periphery of haunting," the kind lady had told him, giving him forms. "But I don't think you're allowed to roam without an anchored life form," she'd finished doubtfully. His ears had pricked up at the word allow, which is how he'd ended up in the library, poring through a list of ghost laws.
He feels like he's in law school again, except instead of classes and the library, he's flitting between haunting his daughter and reading a dusty tome for loopholes.
Finally, a few days after Vincenzo Cassano wakes up from his coma, Yu Chan finds the perfect sub-clause, hidden under a long list of amendments made in the early 30s about Possessions.
Possessing an animal is only allowed for any Ghost between 04:00 and 23:59 hours. The animal's body does not fall under the laws stipulated under Section 13 (a) and Section 89(f) of Ghost Radius and Haunting.
If he's reading it right—and Hong Yu Chan is not a lawyer of little intellect—he can possess an animal during the day and roam around wherever he wants.
Overjoyed, Yu Chan makes his new application for both a wider periphery as a spirit and a ghost possession, waiting excitedly for approval. In typical bureaucratic fashion, it takes days, so he glumly spends time following Cha Young around as she butts heads with Cassano while trying to piece together her life. He's distracted (and delighted) when she stalks into Wusang and resigns, crowing with happiness at her newfound determination to achieve justice.
Watching her threaten Choi Myung Hee, he mentally changes that sentence. Maybe she's not after justice but merely revenge. Either way, she's on the path he wanted, so that's all he's going to focus on. Before she can leave the building, he pettily sinks his hands into the CPU on her erstwhile CEO's desk and fucks up the inner workings, then runs after her, unable to rid the smile off his face.
-
His application is finally approved on the day his daughter is arrested, which is good news because he really can't do anything hovering around her at the police station as she snootily tries to hold her own against two very obviously corrupt cops.
"Check the CCTV from the shop in front of the house," he tries to say loudly near her head, hoping that maybe some kind of astrophysical bond between them will make her hear him.
Mr Nam arrives and leaves numerous times during the day and night, and while the paralegal is extremely efficient, he has a predictably difficult time getting Cha Young free.
"Check the CCTV!" he yells intermittently around Mr Nam, but to no avail. Finally, by dawn, he gives up. Yu Chan knows this kind of charge can only be fought by a crafty and corrupt person who will be able to hold their own against the cops and also think to check the goddamn CCTV.
He runs a soft, ghostly hand over Cha Young's head, then leaves her. She can fend for herself. He needs to find her capable legal representation.
At the steps of the station, he hovers doubtfully and looks around him. If he must leave, he needs an animal to possess, but what kind of animal? They're in the middle of Seoul; his options are either street dog, street cat or pigeon. And he's not a fan of pigeons.
A cop throws a half-finished sandwich at a dog near the doorway and Yu Chan grimaces. He'll never be able to get access to Cassano's house if he's a dog. Shaking his head, he groans then closes his eyes, trying to follow the instructions that had been sent to him on a heavy card.
Being a pigeon is going to be terrible.
-
Being a pigeon is amazing.
It's a fantastic idea and Yu Chan is extremely proud of himself for having thought of it. He'd reached Geumga Plaza faster than he ever had before and found Cassano's apartment with ease. Sure, he'd had a minor squabble with the neighbourhood pigeons; from what he could gather, there were gang politics even amongst the birds, who had recognised 'him' as a stranger. But that had been easily remedied when Yu Chan jumped out of his first host's body into another. The new pigeon seemed to be a leader of sorts, strutting near Cassano's window, and Yu Chan liked the idea of having a gang of pigeons under his wing - so to speak.
Spying through the living room window, he can see Cassano lying on the ground, eyes firmly closed. Ah, alcohol, Yu Chan thinks wistfully. If only that was something he could enjoy in his post-life as well. Putting the idea out of his mind as something to be explored later, he rears his little pigeon neck back and rams his beak as hard as he can into the window.
Wake up, you bastard, he thinks grimly.
Wake up and help my daughter!
-
Freedom from his daughter's earthly body as an anchor gives Yu Chan a new interest in his post-life. His first few steps are to go visit his wife's gravestone, then check on Mr Nam and the rest. Sometimes, he tries to swoop around the open halls of Geumga to spy on the tenants and see what they're up to - he sees Mrs Kwak yelling at her son, Mr Tak ironing clothes diligently and even, once, catches Ms Seo lightly stalking Cassano in the halls. It's a crush, he notes wisely, thinking back to the party they'd thrown before Babel had taken the kind step of murdering him. Cassano had been quite flirtatious then with various people; the man must be popular.
He even remembers Cha Young and Cassano having a separate chat, though Yu Chan knows his daughter is too smart to get caught up in the likes of someone as transparently bad news as the Korean-Italian fellow. Sure, Yu Chan considers him a friend, but the kind of friend you call when you're in trouble with the mob.
After a while, he takes to simply hanging outside of the Jipuragi and Apartment 606 windows, trying to eavesdrop on conversations as his daughter teams up with Cassano and Mr Nam.
This is how he finds out that Vincenzo Cassano isn't just some slightly mysterious, most-likely-caught-up-in-shady-dealings human rights lawyer from Italy, but a full-fledged mafioso.
Yu Chan is just minding his own business one night, pecking half-heartedly at the crumbs Cassano's left at the sill for him, waiting for the man to sleep so he can try and irritate him just a little (there's not a lot of entertainment for a ghost, okay?). His phone rings just as he's cooking, so he hits the speakerphone setting, as one does, and a distinctly foreign-sounding voice greets him with Ciao, Consigliere. As any self-respecting fan of film, Hong Yu Chan has watched the Godfather. He knows what that word means and hearing it nearly sends him reeling off the sill. As is, he squawks in surprise, which in turn wakes up all his sleepy brethren in the surrounding windows and there's an unhelpful fifteen minutes of cooing and flapping around him.
Said consigliere walks to the window to check on what's happening, glares at Yu Chan as though it's his fault, then closes the curtains.
He's in the mafia?!
-
They're going to blow up a building.
It's not like Cha Young's never done something illegal before, he's well aware that she's got a list of crimes committed that have been well-hidden from the public eye.
But they're going to blow up a building.
At least it's for a good cause.
But they're going to blow up a building.
He can't help but glare at Cassano as he stands next to Cha Young, drawing a detailed arson plan on what used to be Yu Chan's whiteboard. Mr Nam has just left the office to see off the grieving family members—Yu Chan's old clients—who have somehow fallen for this accursed plan as well.
As Cha Young excitedly adds points to fine-tune their getaway, the mafia overlord next to her smiles in appreciation. When he'd wished for a monster to fight the other monsters, he hadn't meant for his daughter to join forces so seamlessly with the monster in question. As Cassano hands the marker to Cha Young and their fingers brush just slightly, Yu Chan scoffs and in a moment of abject pettiness, flicks his fingers so that the pen falls and Cassano has to apologise profusely before picking it up.
He smiles grimly before seeing Cha Young appreciatively glance at the other lawyer as he bends down.
Well. That's not something he wanted to see.
-
By the time Cha Young and Cassano are walking out of court after winning the Babel Chemicals lawsuit, Yu Chan is certain that he was right in one of his two earlier assessments: the monster he's chosen and the daughter he's brought up are the correct people to put things right in the country. He watches them leave the courthouse confidently, as only young people can be, happy in their shared manipulation and teamwork, eager to move on to the next big part of their plans. This brings him to the second of his assessments, the one he was wrong about: Cha Young's eyes are beginning to linger on Cassano a beat too long. Her laughter—a gregarious thing he'd always loved to hear—is loud and free when she's around him, elicited usually by Cassano's dry humour.
Yu Chan had been wrong: Cha Young is not impervious to the Korean-Italian's charms. He has seen her at home, curled up in a ball in her girlhood bed or standing quietly in the door to gaze at the master bedroom he has only just vacated, wiping away tears as quickly as they'd risen. No more tears, Hong Cha Young, he's heard her chant.
Conversely, he's seen her in the office, plotting and scheming with Cassano, eyes sparkling with mischief and the joy of being around someone who operates on the same wavelength as her.
Yu Chan remembers her as a teenager and then a young adult in law school, recalls conversations with her mother about how Cha Young was too smart for her own good, that she would always feel bereft without another intelligent mind to spar with and encourage her. He can see now that she's found that mind and the owner of the mind in question seems to enjoy her presence equally, though his earlier flirtatiousness has all but disappeared. Unfortunately, only half of Cha Young's appreciation seems reciprocated.
He wants to slip his arm around his child as he would when she was a girl and had lost a race or gotten marked down in school and tell her to find someone else, someone who will like her back for more than her partnership.
That night, through the windows, he watches Cassano stare at a pen that Cha Young has gifted him, looking for all the world like it's a burden, and resolves to peck at the bedroom glass through the entire night (or at least until his midnight deadline). Instead of making his way to bed though, he sees Cassano leave the apartment and meet with Mr Cho. As he overhears their conversation about blowing up the Geumga Plaza, baffled, hidden amongst the shadows of the rooftop, he swears to himself that Cassano will not have another night of sleep.
And maybe he'll ask one of the pigeon's friends to explain how this shitting on a human business worked.
-
Alright, maybe Vincenzo isn't as bad as Yu Chan had thought. He breaks Cha Young out of jail a second time—and really, Yu Chan is beginning to think he's failed as a parent, because how many times can one child get thrown into jail?—then helps the Geumga Plaza tenants fight back. More importantly, he opens doors politely for Cha Young and holds her bags like a gentleman. Call Yu Chan old-fashioned, but he likes to see some basic manners. Especially with brats nowadays.
And anyway, he'd liked Vincenzo when they'd first met, hadn't he? They'd been friends. He's a good boy, he just has a bad job and a stupid heart that can't recognise how precious Cha Young is.
-
He is around, in his own not-body, when Cha Young gets a call about Oh Gyeong Ja's deteriorating health. Stricken, Yu Chan stares at Vincenzo as the man's eyes flash with panic before a valiant struggle ensues to smoothen his expression back into one of calm. "We should go check on her," Cha Young says hurriedly. Vincenzo doesn't see it, but his daughter's eyes linger just a little on his tight shoulders as he grabs his car keys and leads the way out the door. She looks suspicious.
It is gratifying to see over the next few days that Vincenzo listens to Cha Young as she plans out a scarily-detailed homme fatale plan.
He's standing next to Cha Young when Vincenzo is prancing around on a horse like some kind of ridiculous model and laughing at it all, turning to catch what he's sure will be delight and laughter on his daughter's face—oh, no.
When Yu Chan was a rookie lawyer and Cha Young a runt of a thing in school, he'd take the family out for pork whenever he won a case. She'd always wait patiently for the food to arrive at their table, staring at the door to the kitchens, eyes unfocused because she'd just been thinking about the one thing in her mind that she wanted but didn't have. Yet.
Unsettlingly, he now sees the same unfocused expression on her face as she watches Vincenzo preen for another man.
Sometimes, Yu Chan thinks he'd be less stressed if he'd adopted dogs instead of having a child.
-
How hard can it be to apply for a poltergeist's licence?
As Myung Hee mockingly uses his name to slice at Cha Young's vulnerabilities, throwing the words ‘your father’ on the floor like a gauntlet, all Hong Yu Chan wants to do is swoop at her and strangle her neck. To his relief, Vincenzo steps closer to Cha Young and covers for her as she sends an icy glare at the older woman. The air around them is thick, despite a throng of reporters. It's like a horrifying tableau he cannot rip his eyes from, a car crash tempered with road rage that he can't stop replaying in his mind's eye. As Vincenzo steers Cha Young away, one hand wrapped protectively around her shoulder, Yu Chan makes to follow them until he sees the giant intern grin. Now, why would someone who professes to love his 'sunbae' smile?
-
Fuck men.
Rearing his head back, Yu Chan delivers a sharp peck at the window outside Vincenzo's bedroom.
He's aware of the irony of his thoughts, but as a ghost-pigeon hybrid, he gives himself a pass. To be fair, he knows he is equally to blame for Cha Young's deep-seated issues but it's not like he can force her to go to therapy with him now on account of the whole 'being dead' shtick so, instead, he lets out his frustration on her suitor's window.
It would probably make sense to fly away and irritate Jang Han Seok, the lying bastard, but Yu Chan's been told by neighbourhood pigeons that the windows of Babo's house have security systems and he's not interested in testing what that means.
So Vincenzo is, once more, the recipient of Yu Chan's angry cooing and window pecking. How unfortunate for him.
The problem is that Cha Young is surrounded by horrible men all around her. Why could she have not just become a school teacher or something? Maybe then he wouldn't be stuck haunting her as a stupid pigeon. He tries not to think about how she'd have likely just found a way to piss off a school principal or the Minister of Education directly. He doesn't want to accept that it's probably in her genes to anger and attract the wrong sort of people.
Speaking of.
He flaps his wings as hard as he can against the glass, listening with pleasure as Vincenzo groans and pads to the window to yell at him.
With savage pleasure, he listens wide-eyed as the irate lawyer shouts and pleads with him to allow him to sleep—which he's not in the mood to allow, at least not till it's midnight and he has to switch back to his own not-body—before seemingly accepting his fate.
To his surprise, the pigeon is nicknamed Inzaghi and a final argument is made for a settlement between the two parties, where 'Inzaghi' doesn't coo through the night.
You know what? Fair. He likes the name.
-
Inzaghi has a girlfriend. Or whatever it is that pigeons call their paramours. She likes to sit next to Inzaghi silently, like a partner in his crimes against Vincenzo's windows. He's not sure if she senses when he's in Inzaghi's body, but she never moves to do that cuddling thing he's seen other pigeons do, so maybe she knows and respects whatever Yu Chan has going on. Which is starting to be quite a lot.
First off, Cha Young was stalked, attacked and nearly maimed by a hammer. He's very happy for Vincenzo's existence because of the whole saving-her-life bit, up until it leads them all to Yu Chan's second big problem: Vincenzo ends up sharing his apartment with Cha Young for a few nights, letting Cha Young drink his alcohol and eat his food. (Maybe he pities Vincenzo a little for that last one: she's inherited her appetite from her mother and he's personally seen her put away a whole budae jigae by herself then call for an additional bowl of tteokbokki.) On all of those nights, he barges into the apartment as Inzaghi and stays there till midnight. Surprisingly, Inzaghi does him a solid (with the much-appreciated help of Bidulgi) and stays in the bedroom till the wee hours of the morning while Yu Chan sits as his ghostly self every night cross-legged between Cha Young and Vincenzo, eyes narrowed and alert. He'll be damned if they close the gap between them.
At this point, though, he's starting to be a little miffed that Vincenzo seems to be uninterested in even flirting with Cha Young. She's smart, vivacious and beautiful. Who does he think he is? Is his stupid Italian face and stupid Italian hair gel somehow better than Hong Yu Chan's daughter? He'd been getting whispered marriage offers for her hand for years before Vincenzo ever set eyes on her and now this haughty mafioso is not even interested?
Pettily, Yu Chan makes Vincenzo lose his grip on his makgeolli one night as the two drink merrily, slopping it on an expensive shirt. Unfortunately, this just makes him take it off, which gives Cha Young an uninterrupted view of Vincenzo drinking in a plain cotton undershirt.
You know what? Yu Chan is this close to just stepping into the light. Cha Young's heart be damned.
-
"Babo is Jang Jun Woo!" He's yelling at his child and her stupid partner, but they're wrapped up in themselves, hugging each other at an underpass like some kind of drama’s lead couple.
"Stop hugging and focus on Babo!" Yu Chan bellows in Vincenzo's ear. Miraculously, the man brings up the topic and then dashes all of Yu Chan's hopes to the ground when he calls Han Seok's phone number and proceeds to overlook the coincidence of mysteriously hearing an invisible phone ringing in Jun Woo's vicinity.
"You're in love with an idiot," he snaps at Cha Young, though he knows she cannot hear him. As she scrubs at the tears still sparkling on her face, he wonders if she'd even care.
It is when Cha Young is torturing three killers in a car, barely restrained rage and manic glee warring on her face, that Hong Yu Chan is truly worried about her. When he'd hoped that she would blaze a new trail of stubborn justice, is this the path he'd accidentally led her to? He wants to stop her, wants to lay his hand on her and pull her away, but it's pointless to try.
Instead, he sees Vincenzo quietly move to stand with her and then encourage her to leave. He sees Cha Young tilt her body just a little towards him naturally, as though it's not just their work but her sanity that's anchored to him. For a scary moment, Yu Chan thinks that she may not listen.
As it turns out, Vincenzo Cassano might be a murderer, a mafia man and a liar - but whatever he is, she listens.
-
He stands far away, near his old stereo, when Cha Young is hugging Vincenzo. It is wrong, he knows, to be anywhere closer, because this is not a moment he should ever have witnessed. There's a fleeting look of grim acceptance on his daughter's face when her test fails and Vincenzo does not hug her back or seemingly react at all.
Yu Chan wants to tell her she is the one who is wrong now, because he has seen what she didn't; the open-mouthed realisation on Vincenzo's face and the tight grip on the back of a dining chair. Yu Chan has got used to being wrong about these two, so he's fine with the revelation that he was wrong once more, just as wrong as Cha Young now is: Vincenzo Cassano is very much interested in more than his partner's brain.
-
Ahn Gi Seok saves Vincenzo from being incarcerated and Hong Yu Chan wonders what his life would have been like had he just had a kid like Gi Seok instead of a tempestuous and unpredictable ball of energy like Cha Young.
-
"Not in my office, please," Yu Chan groans from where he's been hanging out with Eun Seom, Sijin and the rest of his faithful plants. He eyes Cha Young and Vincenzo darkly as they stand much too close together, ostensibly for the purposes of a finger flick.
Her eyes widen and she drifts closer to Vincenzo.
"Not in an office of the law, Cha Young-ah!" Yu Chan calls again, but obviously, nobody wants to listen to the dead guy.
"Stop it!" he snaps louder. Vincenzo twitches and opens his eyes and the two fools stare at each other. Honestly, at this point, it would be nice if they just kissed and stopped desecrating places like Yu Chan's one remaining pride: an office he'd set up all on his own.
He floats closer to Cha Young and bellows into her ear: "Stop flirting in my office!"
Something in her brain clicks, whirrs and settles back to life, which makes her smack Vincenzo on the head and push him away.
"Yes, that's better," Yu Chan mutters, turning away from them. He's going to choose to believe his insistence is what made her brain switch on again.
-
Yu Chan wants them to get their hands on gold and Guillotine files and whatever else, he really does. He is actively rooting for them, but the thing is, he can't be bothered to pay attention to this new development because he's got his hands full worrying about his daughter's truly terrible love life and the constant state of imminent danger she finds herself in.
-
He comes to the unsettling realisation that Vincenzo might be his closest friend when he's being fed Premium Bird Feed one night. Vincenzo calls him Inzaghi, of course, so it's at best a farc—wait, did he just ask to be paid back in return for the bird feed?
Fuck Vincenzo.
Yu Chan should have convinced Cha Young to marry that doctor boy her mother had found back when she was in law school.
-
One day, when Yu Chan and Cha Young had been in a good mood and she'd just graduated law school, they'd gone out to buy ice cream together (which had quickly turned into them picking up makgeolli at the nearby store too).
She'd been asking him for tips to deal with the older lawyers who were being sexist bastards at the agency she'd been hired and like a fool, Yu Chan had suggested something to her that Cha Young—predictably—took wildly out of context.
"If you can't win, irritate your enemies by being the best and most efficient you can be," he'd said, distracted and paying for their bad decisions. He'd caught her sharp, wicked grin and internally groaned, knowing she'd only ever remember the first half of his sentence.
Watching Cha Young blithely say Vincenzo poured pig's blood on Jang Han Seok as a prank now reminds Yu Chan of that night, years ago, when they'd bought makgeolli and ice cream and he'd vastly underestimated his daughter.
He can't help but be impressed.
-
A fake date at a gallery is a terrible idea. What if the gallery director has already seen the real couple's photos? What if they're caught? What if the fake date distracts the fools and they make mistakes?
He's screaming no no no at them all, even poor Ms Seo, whose only fault is her apparent skill at being a hacker, but nobody's listening and Yu Chan decides he's going to accompany them because there needs to be an adult at this date to remind them it's not a mission to make heart-eyes at each other.
A marriage proposal is the last thing Yu Chan was expecting. He knew this had been a terrible idea. They're lucky the director already had the ring otherwise Vincenzo and Cha Young would have been proved to be frauds.
As Vincenzo drops to one knee like he's got a gun to his head, Yu Chan hunkers down so he's face-to-face with the man and hisses pettily into his ear.
"You should be asking for my permission first!"
It's a terribly dated idea and he knows Cha Young would scream at him if she'd heard him, but she's currently dropping down to her knees and simpering at Vincenzo and Yu Chan is stuck in between them, glaring at both sides and he's dead so he's allowed to be archaic and irritated and—no, he really doesn't need to see them kissing.
"You don't need to kiss for so long," Yu Chan comments idly, after a minute, narrowing his eyes.
Instead of stopping, Vincenzo begins to kiss Cha Young back, something like resignation and acceptance decorating his brow, so Yu Chan gives up and gives his idiot children—because at this point, he's the de facto parent of a fool of a consigliere too—a moment to enjoy being fused together.
When it's been a couple of minutes and he's starting to feel antsy about their plan again, he leans a little too close to Cha Young, losing his footing just a little and sliding into her a little before righting himself. "Are you done yet?" he barks.
They break away and start to accept the well-wishes flowing around them, though Yu Chan catches Cha Young looking around her like she's looking for someone specific.
-
It's almost midnight and Vincenzo has dispatched Cha Young to buy alcohol while he heads up to challenge mystery assailants.
Yu Chan dearly wants to take Cha Young aside and berate her for not noticing very obvious men in black clothes tailing them, but he's currently busy possessing Inzaghi in a hurry to be able to keep an eye on Vincenzo.
Don't die, you bastard.
It's almost midnight, and there's no time for Yu Chan to hang out in Inzaghi's body lest he get stuck in it forever, but he can't risk missing this. Plus he knows bone-deep that, if something happens, he cannot let Cha Young find Vincenzo's body too late.
It's too many men, Yu Chan realises with horror. He doesn't wait to see how Vincenzo tries to creep up on them and instead flies down to the side of the building where his team of pigeons is resting for the night.
"Wake up!" he roars at them in his best pigeon-speak commander voice.
Predictably, everyone rustles feathers and squawks and one particular idiot called Daeshim even manages to fall off his perch and rocket to the ground before remembering he has wings.
We don't have time for this, Yu Chan thinks desperately.
Bidulgi calmly flies up and rallies the crowd, then turns expectantly to look at Yu Chan and coos softly. He nods in the most un-pigeon way he can and flies up to the side of the roof, explaining what he needs them all to do.
"Thank god for dramatic Italians," he thinks when he peeks over the edge to check on Vincenzo and the assailants. They've predictably gotten the better of him, but they're all staring at each other like they're in a play, so he thinks they've got another minute.
"When I say 'coo', that's when you all fly out, okay?" He reminds everybody as they flap around and wait on the side of the building, out of sight.
"Coo or Coo?" Daeshim asks unnecessarily.
He's going to push Daeshim off a ledge tomorrow, but for now, Yu Chan exasperatedly clarifies "Coo!"
They all begin to fly. It's an accident, this wasn't the right time—or so he thinks, but when he checks to see if the plan is working, he's just in time to see Vincenzo using his brain to take advantage of the moment and get the best of his attackers.
Satisfied, he waits on a convenient rusty perch, because yes, he's got only a few minutes till midnight, but he'll be damned if Vincenzo doesn't know it's he who saved his life.
Vincenzo sees him, registers that it's ‘Inzaghi’ and then Yu Chan exits the pigeon's body, allowing the bird to fly away.
-
The little TV in Jipuragi had been the first indulgent thing Yu Chan had bought for the office, a small extravagance he'd allowed himself because he'd always thought it was better to have the news running in the background.
It is at this TV that Cha Young throws a mug, in a fit of rage. But he doesn't care about it anymore. If he could, Yu Chan would buy her five more. He helplessly watches as she fumes and then runs out of their—her office now. He wants to comfort her, wants to tell her he knows how it feels to be hitting a wall despite all the hard work. This is the one lesson he could have taught her in his life, but he didn't. He didn't because he had been foolhardy, thinking he had time to slowly breach Cha Young's defences, too proud to go to her and explain his side of their arguments, too cowardly to admit that he'd abandoned their family out of the inability to process his grief.
Now he is stuck, stuck as a stupid ghostly spirit, trailing after her forlornly as she stalks out of the doors.
Vincenzo runs outside and stops her.
It is in that moment that Yu Chan promises he will never judge Vincenzo or begrudge him his love for his daughter ever again. Because while Yu Chan cannot be around to give her support and bolster her confidence when it needs help as she strives to excel and bulldoze walls of corruption, Vincenzo can be.
More importantly, he seems to want to be.
And Hong Cha Young deserves to be chosen above all else.
-
They both have horrible gift-buying tastes. Ms Oh has had a life of hardship, why are they buying her some silly designer purse?
"Shouldn't you be buying her something useful?" he murmurs to Cha Young, a habit he's developed as he floats around her, so he can pretend she can hear him. She clearly cannot, though, because they buy the useless purse, ignoring his muttered suggestions of buying her warm socks and gift it to Ms Oh, who says she loves it.
Sometimes, he really feels taken for granted.
-
Yu Chan has been impressed every time he's seen Cha Young handle Vincenzo and Ms Oh's situation with empathetic elan. She is more her mother's daughter than his, he knows. But now, in this quiet sunset moment in her office, the strong CEO he's been watching in awe melts away and Yu Chan sees his daughter again, blinking away tears as she looks at their photo, the one from her law school graduation.
Without thinking, he walks to her and puts a hand tenderly on her shoulder, wishing desperately for it to somehow be felt.
"Abeoji, I'm sorry," she whispers out loud. He freezes.
She looks to her left, just a little over her shoulder, as though she knows he's standing behind her—but she cannot, he knows she cannot, they'd specifically told him when he'd applied for Ghost Rights that she'll never know—and smiles tremulously. Then the moment is broken. She sniffs, shakes her head and turns back to her work. "Stop being stupid, Cha Young," she mutters to herself.
-
He waits at Ms Oh's bedside with Cha Young, but he does not see her nor a Grim Reaper. They were too late; he knows from Cha Young's conversations that the murder had happened much before she'd arrived at the hospital. Knowing how quickly the Grim Reaper had arrived to escort Yu Chan, he’s aware that Ms Oh would have been escorted away immediately. He's tempted to head to the Office of Laws of Spirits and Ghost-kind, but seeing Cha Young's shoulders shake as she cries silently, he knows he cannot make the same mistake in death that he'd made in his life.
He will be with her to share her grief, instead of focusing on other people. Ms Oh, he knows, will do what she thinks is right. And if she chooses like he did, he knows he'll see her around.
-
Hong Yu Chan does not see Oh Gyeong Ja ever again.
-
Cha Young loses blood quickly, too quickly. Yu Chan flutters, panicked, at her side as Vincenzo calls for help.
"No, no, no," he mutters, hands uselessly pressing at her shoulder, even as Vincenzo does the same thing, waiting for the ambulance to show up. Her eyes stay trained on Vincenzo, determined as she is to focus on the thing she wants the most and doesn't have. There's a rustle next to Yu Chan and he tears his eyes away to see the same Grim Reaper who had escorted him standing next to Jang Han Seo. There's a beat and then Han Seo stands, looking shell-shocked, next to the Grim Reaper. Yu Chan can see that there's an explanation, a reaction, but he cannot look at them more, not when his daughter is dying in Vincenzo Cassano's arms.
He looks down at her again and is startled to see her eyes have shifted to stare at him.
Cha Young can see him. He doesn't think she could before this, but she can now. Which can only mean that she's dying.
"Abeoji," she murmurs, loud enough for both Vincenzo and Yu Chan to hear her. Next to him, Vincenzo lifts a shaking hand to her cheek and cups it. "No, no, no," he says, echoing Yu Chan's own desperate pleas. "No, Cha Young-ah, it's not your time to see him, look at me, look at me..."
The doors fly open and the rapid response team surges inside, pushing Vincenzo aside to get to Cha Young.
At the hospital, Vincenzo keeps vigil while they wait for doctors to report back during her surgery. Yu Chan's seen wads of money exchanging hands. He knows what Vincenzo's done, the kind of doctors who are operating on his daughter.
"Ahjussi, do you think Hong Byeonhosa-nim will make it?" Yu Chan turns sharply to look at the spirit of Jang Han Seo, who's begged for extra time to see the outcome of Cha Young's operation. He'd been pleased as a puppy when the Grim Reaper has accepted the demand, but now that he's hovering next to Yu Chan, he has time to wonder why the boy's been given this boon.
"Yah," Yu Chan snaps at the Grim Reaper, who looks up, surprised, from the tiny bottle of Yakult he's contentedly sipping out of. "Why are you still here?"
"Ahjussi, that's a little rude," Han Seo murmurs reproachfully. Yu Chan makes the universal hand gesture for yes, yes, shut up at the child, eyes trained on the Grim Reaper.
A cough.
A rustle.
"Because you said I'm handsome, I'll tell you," the Grim Reaper says reluctantly. He pulls out a card from his pocket and hands it over.
Hong Cha Young
?
"We don't know yet what her date will be. So my orders are to stick around and see. It'll update and then I'll know."
Yu Chan wants to rip up the card. "It won't be today," he snarls, then ignores the child and the Reaper, walks past Vincenzo, who has fallen to his knees in miserable silence outside the doors no other human being but for a doctor can cross.
He strides in, heading for Cha Young's OR.
If she's going to die, she's going to see her father first.
-
Cha Young doesn't die but Yu Chan does think she and Vincenzo can tone down the following dramatics a bit. All the longing staring at each other in a hospital room followed by silent, pretty weeping when Vincenzo is gone... really, Yu Chan's just a bit tired.
"This isn't some movie," he snaps at his daughter, as she tenderly wipes tears away from her face and looks wistfully out her room window.
"He's not gone to war, you know," he continues, looking balefully around and wondering where Mr Nam's gone.
"You know he can just shoot them, he's just going to do all that complicated torture to be dramatic and stupid. And anyway, I really don't know why you told him not to call you when you clearly want him to cal-"
"Abeoji, can you shut up?"
It takes a full five seconds for Yu Chan to look up from where he's been lounging at her bedside. She's glaring directly at him, eyes and nose red.
At him.
After talking to him.
"Can you see me?" he asks, mouth hanging open much after his sentence is over.
"Ever since I woke up," she confirms, rolling her eyes and reaching for a bottle of water on the table next to the bed. "I wasn't going to say anything but you're really irritating me."
"Yah, is this the way to talk to your dead father?"
"It is if he insists on being a pain."
"A pain! Look who's talking!"
"Excuse me?!"
-
He never wants to see Cha Young cry again. Not in that horrible, broken way when she'd cry in his bedroom after he died, not in the stifled, sad way at Ms Oh's bedside in the hospital and not like this, this anguished, devastated way about Vincenzo Cassano.
"Cha Young-ah," he starts to say, as she lies in bed miserably, crying to herself.
"I know he's just a man, okay?" she snaps at him. "I know I shouldn't - I just - he's important to me."
Yu Chan sits on her bed, itching to put his hand on hers uselessly. They spent some time earlier testing it out, but she can't feel him in any way, can just see and hear him.
This feels like some kind of twisted duplication of when she was five and he was putting her to sleep.
"I know you love him, idiot child," he says affectionately.
Her watery eyes snap to him and she frowns. "How?"
Did the blood loss take away her IQ points as well?
-
In a way, Hong Yu Chan is relieved that Cha Young can see him because now it's less boring to be a ghost. Unfortunately, this means that she spends most of their time alone chiding him for his bad paperwork and asks him unnecessary questions as she gets to work on redoing the bedrooms in their house. "Did you choose this blanket, by the way? I always wanted to ask," she calls out to him one day. "It's ugly and I feel like eomma would have told you not to buy it if she'd known."
Her mother had, in fact, told him off for buying something so ugly, but Yu Chan doesn't feel like telling Cha Young that. Instead, he tells her to shut up.
"How you got a woman like eomma to fall in love with you, I don't know..." He hears Cha Young mutter in response.
Popping back into the master bedroom—she's finally clearing it out and getting it refurbished so she can move into it, after checking with him for his permission—he raises his eyebrows. She's waiting, a wicked smile on her face, because of course she just wanted his reaction.
"At least she fell in love with a man who stayed in the same city as her," he says snarkily, flicking his fingers so the careful pile of bedclothes she's been creating topples over.
-
"I don't know, Cha Young-ah, this whole post-card business seems flakey to me. You're both richer than most human beings, what's so hard about calling you from a public payphone?"
"It's romantic, abeoji," she snaps at him.
-
A year later, she is packing her bags to fly to Seychelles, for a two-week vacation 'alone'. As someone who is still watched by the authorities, she cannot fly to Italy for a while, though she's explained that they're slowly working on expunging Vincenzo's (many) crimes from the record using the Guillotine file and well-timed bribery. Till then, encrypted messaging and secret vacations are the plan.
She is happy with the solution, he knows. It's visible in the way she works, back to being ruthless and irreverent. Cha Young's even confided in him her five-year plan to expand Jipuragi, her sights already set on things he'd never imagined he'd be able to make happen.
He watches as she protects her 'Geumga Cassano family' fiercely and loves Vincenzo from afar as passionately and boldly as Vincenzo loves her.
She's even finally finished with the physical therapy her shoulder needed and she seems prepared—almost ecstatic—to be constantly in danger. He tries to tell her to tone down the insolent challenges she lays down for corrupt politician after corrupt politician, but she always laughs and says they can just try to kill off a crime boss with the backing of another crime boss.
Now, as he stares at her trying to neatly fit in tubs of gochujang for Vincenzo alongside beachwear in her suitcase, he can see that she doesn't need his help or protection.
"Abeoji, are you going to haunt me in Seychelles too? Not that I don't like having you around, but I really don't feel comfortable with you being there when I'm sleeping wit-"
"Aish, Cha Young-ah, I had no intention of it. So, please don't finish that sentence."
She smirks and subsides into silence and he wonders how he can bring up the pressing matter he's just realised is a concern.
He clears his throat. She turns inquiringly.
"So... I explained to you how Ghost Laws work, right? And how I had to fill in applications?"
She nods, shoving her suitcase aside to sit on the bed patiently. "Yes, and?"
He rubs the back of his neck and shifts his weight from one foot to the other. "For the application to be accepted, it required a valid reason to stay on as a ghost. For me, it was the need to look out for you, because you were alone."
She smiles warmly at him and Yu Chan pauses, committing the image to his memory. If anything, he wants to leave with that image in his mind.
"The application runs out in a few days and if I need to reapply, I'll have to fill the form again."
She stops smiling, piecing together what he's said, as he knew she would.
They stare at each other in silence, as she suddenly blinks rapidly.
"Wow," she mutters, looking away.
Then, "thanks for ruining my vacation. Now I'll be sad there. How am I supposed to explain my mood to Vincenzo, hm?"
Yu Chan flicks his fingers and one of the gochujang boxes flies up to bonk her head. "You have no respect for your father," he barks.
She laughs; her carefree, loud laugh that always warms his heart and hurts other people's ears.
"Abeoji, come on, help me. What do I do? I can hardly explain to Vincenzo I've been chatting with my not-fully dead father for a year and a half. He'll break up with me."
Yu Chan rolls his eyes. "So much for villains being tenacious."
She gasps, outraged. "I knew you eavesdropped on us!"
He chuckles.
They fall silent again, staring at each other.
"I..." she starts, then looks away, eyes suspiciously red once more.
"I'm glad we got to talk," she finally says, voice thick with tears. But she's smiling and the tears don't sound devastated and heavy. He feels awkward and clumsy, but sits down on the bed next to her, wishing again, desperately, that he could just hug her.
“You were alone, when I… I just didn’t want you to be alone,” he offers, knowing he’s repeating himself but unsure of how to say any of the feelings inside of him.
Cha Young smiles, looks at him like she understands.
"I'm not alone anymore."
-
When the Grim Reaper comes to collect him this time, it is easier.
“Ready to go?” The Reaper asks, smiling like he knows the answer.
“Ready,” Hong Yu Chan confirms.