Chapter 13
Chapter 13
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Translator: penny
Chapter: 13
Chapter Title: Snoozy
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Doyoung suddenly stared fixedly at Gamal and said,
“Salt.”
Gamal handed over the salt shaker. Doyoung gazed absently at the salt shaker. When he just sat there doing nothing, Gamal asked,
“Why?”
“Nothing.”
Doyoung shook the shaker to sprinkle some salt.
After finishing the meal, Gamal began making a pump drill—a friction-based fire starter that worked on the principle of a pump. It was a relief he didn’t have to rub sticks together by hand like some caveman; this really felt like the dawn of time.
If only he could make a fire piston—an ignition tool that used compression—it would be so much easier to start a fire, but Gamal didn’t even have a knife capable of carving wood. He genuinely used a stone knife. A stone knife.
No matter how you sliced it, three thousand years ago, the Egyptians had already finished building their pyramids and then some, hadn’t they?
At this rate, it seemed more plausible to call him a survival fanatic deliberately sticking to primitive methods.
“By the way, where’s my knife?”
To bring it up now, the knife he’d used to attack Gamal at the start had been stolen from that Spetsnaz guy too. She must have been pretty pissed once she realized it belonged to him.
“Dangerous. You can’t play around with stuff like that.”
Gamal spoke like a mother scolding her child. Doyoung was floored. In any case, he reached out toward her and said,
“Hand it over.”
And in its place, he made the pump drill.
Gamal pulled out a flower and watched as Doyoung assembled the pump drill with practiced ease, then asked,
“How does a lieutenant know how to do all this?”
The people who had come to the island before Doyoung had been somewhat skilled in hands-on work the older they were, but even they had floundered helplessly in the wilderness. Doyoung, though, moved with the proficiency of a tribal warrior.
Doyoung replied offhandedly without pausing in his task.
“My dad used to take me out to the woods and mountains all the time when I was a kid.”
It wasn’t exactly because he was special forces, but it was thanks to his father all the same, so it wasn’t a lie.
Fortunately, Gamal didn’t seem to realize that the clothes Doyoung was wearing were a military uniform.
“What about your mother?”
Out of nowhere, Gamal grew curious about Doyoung’s family.
“Regular office worker.”
Doyoung answered.
It was a famous cosmetics company, the kind that immediately sprang to mind when you thought of France—but compared to Doyoung’s or his father’s former professions, it fell squarely into the “ordinary” category. As for how a special forces operative like his father had ended up marrying her…
“How did the two of them get married?”
Gamal asked exactly that.
“They grew up in the same neighborhood. There was an age gap, so they weren’t particularly close, but apparently, one day when Mom was in college, she started working part-time at the McDonald’s my dad always went to.”
The French, being from the land of haute cuisine, weren’t huge fans of American fast food chains…
“My dad’s job had irregular hours. He was coming and going at all hours when the other shops were closed, so he ended up frequenting twenty-four-hour fast food joints a lot.”
It was a place he patronized anyway, but then his acquaintance’s little sister started working there, so Dad went even more often.
“But one day, he got curious. Why was Mom always picking the graveyard or overnight shifts, pushing through her exhaustion? So one night at the store, he straight-up asked her why.”
Mom, on the other side of the counter, looked at him with the most impassive gaze and said…
“What do you think it was?”
Doyoung shrugged.
“That’s how it was.”
Gamal got it and let out a soft gasp of admiration.
“Cool. So… really…”
Gamal clenched and unclenched her fist, struggling to find the right word.
“Romantic?”
Doyoung supplied it knowingly, and Gamal nodded vigorously.
“Yeah.”
Doyoung chuckled.
“The uncle who heard the story from my dad chewed him out, like, ‘You’re just figuring that out now?’…”
“You have an uncle too.”
Doyoung glanced at Gamal. After a second passed in that oddly charged air, he said casually,
“I did. He’s gone now.”
By a vampire’s hand.
It had happened when Doyoung was ten. His father had tried to save his uncle and ended up confined to a wheelchair for life. Unable to run anymore, Dad had no choice but to leave GIGN—France’s elite counterterrorism unit—and the family endured some truly brutal times.
And yet, because they were family—precisely because they were—they held fast. His mother never abandoned her husband despite his lost legs, and his father never surrendered to despair over losing his brother, his legs, and the dreams tied to them.
Which meant Doyoung never had the luxury of wallowing in hatred or resentment toward the things that had taken his uncle.
He glanced at Gamal on impulse, and there she was, so absorbed in the story that she’d forgotten to eat her flower, just holding it blankly.
One day, the vampires had arrived bearing flowers as symbols of peace.
He’d certainly harbored hatred for vampires once upon a time, but after all these years, he now had a vampire for a friend, a comrade… and…
Maybe it was from eating too much, but drowsiness started to creep in.
“Sleepy. I’m crashing.”
Doyoung flopped down out of the blue. Gamal’s eyes went wide.
“Suddenly?”
“Sleep always hits like that.”
And with that, Doyoung closed his eyes.
It wasn’t long before he was truly asleep, his breathing falling into a steady rhythm.
Gamal chewed on the flower she’d forgotten about and studied Doyoung. Beneath his closed lids, pale lashes lay neatly arrayed.
He looked just like one of those statues from ancient Athens.
By the standards of the era she’d been born into—when burly, hyper-masculine men were hailed as the ideal—Doyoung’s features appeared almost femininely smooth and delicate. And yet, it didn’t diminish his masculinity one bit.
His shoulders were broad, his abs—the ones she’d touched last time—rock-hard. His hands were large…
For some reason, she wanted to stroke the bridge of his nose.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
A powerful beating echoed from within his ribcage.
The sound of his heart.
The sound of life.
Gamal drew closer, following the rhythm. As the distance shrank, she could feel his breath slipping from between slightly parted lips that looked soft to the touch.
This sensation was utterly foreign to Gamal.
Doyoung’s mother, deliberately working unpopular shifts at the restaurant just to catch a glimpse of the man she loved.
Was this what that had felt like?
‘This feeling?’
Gamal found herself questioning the thought.
Did she like Doyoung the way his mother had liked his father?
But no matter how evenly matched they’d been at first, Doyoung was just a human. He was certainly different from all the other humans who’d washed up on the island so far…
At that moment, Doyoung’s eyes snapped open.
Gamal flinched.
She braced for him to scowl and demand what she was doing, but whether it was lingering sleepiness, his gray-flecked blue eyes—calm as the sea before a storm—simply gazed at her.
‘Must be because I got too close.’
Gamal thought and started to pull back.
“Sorry…”
But Doyoung caught her and tugged her down. Gamal went with it reflexively. He settled her down beside him.
“You sleep too.”
He patted her shoulder like he was soothing a baby to sleep. He withdrew his hand quickly, but the warmth lingered where he’d touched. Gamal rubbed at the spot.
A faint smile tugged at her lips.
***
Morning light broke, and Doyoung opened his eyes. Gamal’s spot was empty. The blankets were neatly folded, so she must have headed out with purpose.
There was a note atop the tidy bedding.
Gonna go potty.
She’d clearly put in effort, but the spelling was a masterpiece.
“What a mess.”
Doyoung muttered, holding the note.
Yet somehow, those effortfully scrawled, crooked letters struck him as adorable. Baffled by his own reaction, he set the note back in place.
The fire pit held a heaping breakfast spread, piled high like the pot of pasta his mom had left before a trip.
Doyoung ate, then limped outside. The beach was deserted.
‘Where’d she go?’
The thought crossed his mind, but she wasn’t some five-year-old left by the water’s edge. He wasn’t worried—like with a cat that slipped out, figuring she’d saunter back by dusk.
He washed up lightly and settled under his usual tree for shade, opening the book he’d brought out with him.
<Moby-Dick>
He’d found it amid a stack of books in various languages left by past visitors. First time reading it since he was a kid…
Deep into it, something was tucked between the last page and the back cover.
‘What’s this?’
Flipping it open revealed an old, faded letter envelope.
Doyoung opened it, pulled out the letter, and unfolded it. It was written in archaic French and what looked like a Germanic language based on the words and sentence structure. Not German, though…
Dutch.
‘Johannes.’
For some reason, Doyoung instantly knew who had written it.
Johannes had apparently been a well-educated intellectual with the Dutch East India Company, and since French had been the lingua franca back then, he must have been fluent.
Doyoung didn’t read Dutch, but given the similar lengths of the sections, it seemed like the same content repeated twice.
Doyoung began reading the letter.
[I taught Gamal my native tongue and told her about the world outside.]
The archaic phrasing made parts tricky, but as someone who’d read all of Molière, he could manage.
[I have lived here precisely twenty-two years.]
He paused there.
Twenty-two years…?
A chill ran through him, mingled with a weird emotion—like jealousy—at the thought, ‘He lived with Gamal for that long?’
No, don’t forget. He and Gamal were nothing to each other, and they never would be.
Doyoung pressed on with the letter.
[I missed my wife and children back home. Every day, I waited for a rescue party. I begged Gamal for help, and sometimes unleashed my rage, but she only said there was no way off this island. Our relationship soured to the point it couldn’t get worse. But in the end, it was just the two of us here. We made peace. I fell in love with Gamal. She was beautiful and strong, and she cared for me with utter devotion.]
Doyoung forced himself to keep reading and turned the page.