Humans Are Clumsy
We were still sorting through the gear from the Cheongdam expedition when it came up.
"You left the radio behind?"
"Yeah. I gave it to the security lady."
Harin said this as if it were nothing, rummaging through the things she'd brought back with her.
Fuck. Those things were nearly impossible to find anymore.
"Why, though?"
"Because she helped us. It's so she can radio if things get dangerous or she needs a hand. I asked if she wanted to come with us, but she said that might be too much."
The reason was sound enough that I couldn't really argue. In a world like this, if there was even one person even slightly on our side, keeping that relationship intact mattered more than I wanted to admit.
"So that's why you wanted to swap the repeater batteries on the way back?"
"Right? It was a battery swap, not a retrieval, so I figured you'd have understood. You're such an idiot."
"So what."
No wonder. On the way back from Cheongdam-dong, we'd stopped at every building that had a repeater. I'd been so full of the fact that I had Harin back that I hadn't even thought about what it meant.
Harin giggled and kept going.
"Plus, apparently she and the Guard Captain are a couple."
"...Come again?"
The hell.
I'd found the way he kept shooting at us so irritating that I'd tased him five times, and now it turned out he was our ally's boyfriend. That was some soap-opera shit. Maybe I shouldn't have just beaten the hell out of him like that. I felt a little bad, unbidden.
"She said they've been together two years. She even showed me a photo of the Guard Captain wearing a cat-ear headband and acting cutesy."
"...I'm sorry, what?"
After that next sentence, I no longer felt bad.
A guy with that build and that face, wearing cat ears and acting cute. I should've tased him eight times and thrown in three left straights to the face. A real missed opportunity.
"Then will you wear a cat-ear headband and act cute for me?"
"Sorry, but I don't keep unholy artifacts like that in my house."
What Harin had just asked, to put it vulgarly, was some real horseshit. Of every sentence I'd heard since we started living together, it was the most asinine by a wide margin.
"I stashed one last time we went looting together. I'll go get it, so you'll wear it, right?"
"Fuck no."
"No."
Even if we were a couple, that was not a request you made of another human being. I thought this, and went back to sorting the rest of the gear.
Anyway.
It was while finishing that inventory that I learned something else: I might actually have come close to dying.
The iron plate I'd strapped to my arm was torn up with bullet tracks. No wonder it had hurt like a bitch even when I was taking hits — a glancing shot had been enough to wreck the plate. A clean hit and I really might have been done.
The body armor, too, had a round buried halfway through it. I'd written the shotgun off as nothing special, but the thing packed more of a punch than I'd given it credit for.
"I... um. I'm sorry. For pushing it too far."
"It's fine. Nobody died, and we got everything sorted without any real problems."
The truth was, even knowing I'd almost died, I still couldn't feel it. Somewhere along the way I'd gotten used to people dying, used to the possibility that I might be next, and these days tension and fear barely registered.
"Still, once the world gets back to normal, I should probably see a doctor."
"Why? Are you hurt somewhere?"
"No. I should go because nothing hurts at all."
That was probably why I'd been able to think about Crayon Shin-chan in the middle of a smoke screen and act like an idiot, but thoughts like that had a way of stirring up all the other junk in my head. However wrecked the world was, I had to wonder whether I was still in my right mind.
"What's that supposed to mean."
"I don't know either."
I still felt like I ought to be tense, ought to be afraid in situations like that — and yet watching myself adapt so smoothly, handling it all so well, I think I resented that, a little. A man who'd always been clumsy, always been left behind in ordinary landscapes, growing competent the moment the world fell apart. That, I definitely did not like.
And then we were at the Officetel Safehouse.
"Meow~"
"Ah, for fuck's sake. Read the room."
Every stray thought that had followed me down the walk collapsed at once under Assistant Manager Kim Min-seo's single meow. She greeted us wearing cat ears. Her hands were cat paws too, which was unhinged even by her standards.
"Excuse me, kiddo?"
"Ah."
"Even so, that reaction really hurts, you know. Apologize."
"I'm sorry."
It was still her fault. I wanted to burn those fucking cat ears to ash.
The reason Harin and I had come to the officetel was simple. Imaginary KATUSA Warrior Lim Ju-cheol had wanted a welcome-back party, and so had Guan Yu Head-Collector Assistant Manager Kim Min-seo.
We stepped inside, and everyone looked absolutely deranged.
Kim Min-seo in cat ears was, by comparison, the normal one. Lim Ju-cheol was in a winter-character fur hat, fur gloves, and fuzzy slippers. The siblings were wearing birthday-party cone hats and bulbous-nose joke glasses, blowing party horns. And Marine Choi Young-ho had on a Marine D.I. helmet — the fuck was that? Where the hell had he even found one?
It wasn't just them. Every last person in the room had turned out in some grotesque getup to greet us. There were panda onesies in the mix, and video-game-character mascot heads, so I'll leave the description of this unholy tableau at that.
"...This is actually insane."
"Well. I told you, that hurts. It's a welcome-back party. You have to go this far."
I looked them over one by one, incredulous, and gave a slow nod. My mistake for not realizing they'd take a welcome-back party this seriously.
"I've never seen a party like this in my life."
"So what. We're throwing a party that fits our station."
It did fit our station, I'd give them that. The kind of scene that burned itself into your memory whether you wanted it to or not. I thought this, and turned to Harin.
"Harin, you of all people, going from dress-and-suit parties to looking at th— wait, what are you doing?"
"Huh? What do you mean? Never mind me — why aren't you putting yours on?"
I turned around, and sometime in the last few seconds she had become a creature perfectly at home in this landscape. They say that in the land of the one-eyed, the two-eyed man is the freak — and apparently I was the freak, because there was Harin, holding out a Rudolph headband and a red nose.
The bashful little smile was pretty, I had to admit. It was still pretty with a Santa hat and a fake beard stuck on. Though I had no idea why Santa needed a whip.
And so the pandemonium of a party began with cake and champagne.
"The hell. Where'd you even find cake?"
"We found them last time we were out looting and saved them for a special occasion. We did good, right?"
Kim Min-seo had casually produced three cake boxes, and she said this with a look of deep self-satisfaction.
"This doesn't mean I'm handing out a generator for free, you know."
"I get that you're excited Harin's back, but stop killing the mood and just help, would you?"
"Yes, ma'am."
I opened the boxes and lifted out the cakes, still perfectly intact, and set them on the table. Cute little things, prettily made.
"Wait. These are ice cream cakes."
"Huh. Didn't see that coming."
"No wonder they were in a freezer when we looted them."
Cute and pretty, if you ignored the fact that all three of them were ice cream cakes. Harin started giggling like she couldn't believe it, and Kim Min-seo, trying to salvage the moment, set a champagne bottle on the table with a smart little thud.
"It's fine. Champagne and ice cream go together."
"Who says that?"
"I do."
She gave the bottle a natural little shake. Then she shook it harder, up and down, like she was about to put on a champagne-fountain show, flashed a grin, and announced:
"To the return of our precious little factory girl~ Hyah!"
She shook it with everything she had and thrust the bottle forward, as if sheer enthusiasm would make it pop. The cork jammed in the neck, however, showed not the slightest intention of going anywhere.
"Well. What a grand party."
"Ah, be quiet. Why won't this thing pop. Hyah!"
Kim Min-seo pouted at me, shook the bottle wildly again, and thrust it out once more. Still not a hint of a pop.
"Just give it here. I'll yank the cork out."
I took the bottle from her and pulled the cork.
Pop.
No foam. No bubbles. Nothing came out at all.
"Huh."
"..."
Which made sense, because what was inside was not champagne.
"Pretty nutty, actually. That would be the aroma of eighty-seven-year-old Grandma Kim Chun-ja's last personally pressed, all-or-nothing perilla oil."
"..."
Inside the champagne bottle was Grandma Kim Chun-ja's premium perilla oil, aged eighty-seven years and change. In terms of aroma, it beat champagne by a landslide.
In other words: the whole scene was clumsy from top to bottom. A dress code that was a different circus on every person. Ice cream we'd mistaken for cake. Grandma Kim Chun-ja's perilla oil we'd mistaken for champagne. Not a single thing had gone right, and everyone was standing there in a daze, when a small sound of laughter started up at my side.
"No, that's—"
"Pfft—. Ahem. Hmm. Ahaha...!"
And then Harin let go, the way you do when you've been holding a laugh in and it finally breaks, giggling, bright and clear. She looked like she liked it more because it was all so clumsy — she even started clapping, and then she was laughing in earnest, that helpless rolling kind of laugh.
"This... wasn't how I pictured it..."
"Ahaha..., kh—. Hah, ah.... I like it, actually.... Hn, khp.... Pffhah...!"
Harin nodded along as if Kim Min-seo's look of utter devastation were the last piece the scene needed, and she laughed like that for a long time.
In the end, the welcome-back party stayed that kind of mess until it was over.
We all dumped instant rice, perilla oil, young radish kimchi, and stir-fried anchovies into a giant basin, mixed the whole thing together, and shoveled it down. I'd brought polar bear meat just in case, so we grilled that and dunked it in ssamjang, and once we'd finished all of that, we each had a single bite of ice cream cake for dessert. Even so, there was no choking down more than a bite of ice cream in a world sitting at minus seventy-eight degrees.
"Well... a party where nothing goes right is nice too, you know."
"It was our first time. Planning a party, I mean."
"Of course, of course."
It had looked that way. From the first second, it had been a clumsily, openly amateurish party.
Still. Harin was smiling that bashful little smile of hers, as if she'd liked it even more because it was this clumsy — so maybe it hadn't been so bad.