7. What Exactly Are You Two to Each Other?
Jrrrk.
Tears rolled down Han Su-yeon's cheeks.
A flustered Oh Hyeon-seong asked if she was alright, but she only nodded silently. Then, one by one, she began picking up the potatoes laid out before her and eating them.
If she had spent all these years in fine restaurants surviving on elaborate, colorless dishes, then this single roasted potato crumbling apart in her mouth right now—rustic and unrefined as it was—felt alive.
Most food circulating in the cities these days treated it as a virtue to smother the taste under aggressive seasoning.
At best, you selected ingredients that were only slightly less defective and buried their flaws under strong sauces and seasonings, and that passed for the pinnacle of cuisine.
Anyone who tried to do things the old way—bringing out the natural flavor of the ingredients—was dismissed as a lunatic.
Yet the potato she was eating now leaned entirely toward the latter approach, dressed in nothing but a scattering of salt. No sauce of any kind.
Which only made the shock of it land all the harder.
"Um... Han Su-yeon?"
She had already worked her way through both arms' worth and was now shoveling roasted potatoes in with single-minded devotion. Every bite filled her mouth with an overwhelming richness, and every bite sent her expression reeling.
Her carefully maintained poker face had shattered long ago.
A few minutes later, the two of them sat facing each other across an emptied bowl.
"...You finished it all?"
"Sunbae."
"Yeah?"
"I'm going to stay here for one night."
What on earth just happened?
Standing in the kitchen, Oh Hyeon-seong stared down at the empty frying pan.
Every last one of the potatoes he'd roasted had vanished.
He was glad she'd enjoyed them, sure, but he hadn't expected a reaction like that. Han Su-yeon, of all people, so engrossed in food that she couldn't even hear what he was saying.
He plucked the single remaining chunk of potato from the pan and ate it.
Then he conceded.
"Damn, that's good..."
He stood in the kitchen for a while, savoring the lingering taste of potato in his mouth, before heading back outside.
Han Su-yeon was sitting on the wooden platform in the yard, taking in the view. When he came to stand beside her, lights were glimmering up from the village below, and stars had begun to flicker one by one across the darkening sky.
"It's already night. When were you planning to head back?"
"Don't worry. I already told my office."
"No, I'm serious. You're actually staying the night here?"
"...Is that a problem?"
Han Su-yeon turned and asked, looking straight at him.
At that look, Oh Hyeon-seong pressed a hand to his forehead.
Cornering him with a choice out of nowhere—what a sly move. But he couldn't exactly throw out a woman who could barely drive, not at this hour, and tell her to get going.
"You can just decide that on the spot? I heard you're slammed with work lately."
"Tomorrow's schedule is packed, but none of it can't be pushed back. So I'll stay exactly one day."
"Fair warning—there's no bed."
"There's somewhere to lie down, isn't there?"
"Look at the state of this house. Space is the one thing it's got plenty of."
"See, big houses really are the best. Thanks."
Han Su-yeon said it with a bright smile.
It was the happiest he'd seen her look since she'd arrived, and with a strange feeling in his chest, Oh Hyeon-seong sat down beside her.
What followed, though, was silence.
They each stared blankly out at the scenery, an awkward current settling between them.
Has it really been that long? I can't think of a single thing to say.
At first, seeing his junior after so long, he'd simply been glad. But now that he was actually facing a whole day alone with her, the whole thing felt strangely aimless.
More time than he cared to count had already passed, and on top of that, he'd just watched her burst into tears out of nowhere.
Come to think of it, why was she crying earlier?
Did the potatoes really taste so good they moved her to tears?
No, that was absurd.
However much she'd changed, it wouldn't be that. Han Su-yeon had always been even more indifferent to taste than his past self, with hardly an appetite to speak of.
Hmm. Should I have brought back a board game from Seoul?
The silence stretched on.
Then it occurred to him—was it really okay to sit like this with a guest in the house? But there was genuinely nothing to do in this country home.
That was when a thought struck Oh Hyeon-seong, and he dug a set of hwatu playing cards out of a drawer in the living room—the sole piece of entertainment that remained in the entire house.
"Bored? Want to play hwatu?"
"Sunbae, you don't even know the pictures on the cards."
"...Let's just sleep."
"Ahaha! You really do crack me up in the weirdest ways, then and now. Besides, it's way too early for bed."
Han Su-yeon sprang to her feet.
Then she went to her car's trunk and came back with a bottle of liquor. A gift from somewhere, apparently—an expensive-looking whiskey, unmistakably so at a glance.
"How about a drink with your junior for old times' sake?"
"Works for me."
When he nodded, she poured him a glass. They clinked lightly and each tipped one back.
The proof hit him like a wall, but neither of them was exactly human when it came to tolerance—awakened rarely were—so there was nothing to worry about.
"I should've brought a housewarming gift, but I showed up out of nowhere, so this is all I've got."
"Now that you mention it, I am curious. What made you decide to come all the way out to a backwater like this?"
"I just... suddenly found myself thinking of you, sunbae."
Han Su-yeon downed another glass and let out a long sigh.
Then, her cheeks flushed faintly red, she said:
"I miss the days when I was working alongside you."
"We had plenty of work back then too. Is the President giving you a hard time?"
"No, he treats me almost too well. Sometimes I wonder if it's crossed into obsession."
Back when she'd been part of the Special Task Force, Han Su-yeon had once rescued civilians kidnapped by hostile-nation awakened during an operation.
When the negotiations behind the scenes collapsed, those people had been on the verge of being terminated—and she had saved them, quite literally, by a miracle.
Of course, at the time, no one had dreamed that the greenhorn politician she'd rescued would rise to become the ruling party's leader and eventually the President himself.
"Then why the sigh?"
"When I first joined the team, you struck me as a genuinely cold man, sunbae. You'd hand two people over to save ten without a flicker of hesitation."
"That's why you and I fought, once."
"We did. Back then I couldn't stand the thought of working under a squad leader like that. It was only later that I understood it was the optimal result possible."
Han Su-yeon took another swallow.
Her pace was picking up noticeably, but Oh Hyeon-seong matched it.
"That doesn't make it the right thing to have done, though."
"Either way, I'm not in any position to judge. The longer I do this job, the more numb I feel—just like we all got used to watching comrades die. And now... human lives look like numbers to me. Numbers laid into a report... numbers that'll be swapped out again tomorrow."
Han Su-yeon bowed her head deep, a bitter smile ghosting over her face.
Exhausted, precarious eyes lifted to meet his.
"How... how did you ever endure it, sunbae? That hellish time?"
The nights come early in the countryside.
But that evening, their conversation went on unusually long.
"Ugh. How many bottles did we go through last night?"
The next morning.
Oh Hyeon-seong woke up rubbing his cheeks.
Who knew how much liquor she'd loaded into that trunk—the night had turned into an unplanned drinking session.
Maybe that was why, even though it was later than usual, Han Su-yeon showed no sign of stirring.
When he cracked the door open, he found her sleeping like the dead, sunk in the deepest of slumbers.
She'd been saying lately that the workload had ground her sleep down to nothing, so he decided to leave her be and let her rest properly this time.
Truly, it had been ages since he'd felt a hangover. He downed some water and set out on a morning walk.
Stepping through the gate, he took in the wide sweep of land before him.
All of it—fields and grounds that had come with the house. Oh Hyeon-seong wandered along, gazing absently at the scenery, until he noticed an empty field pockmarked here and there with mole holes.
"Come to think of it, this place could use some work too."
The field had been left untended for a long stretch of years.
Deprived of proper care, it naturally couldn't hope to serve as a real field anymore. Unlike the small kitchen garden attached to the yard, the sheer scale of it was on another level entirely, so even he hadn't seriously considered touching it until now.
Now that I think of it, why not just deal with it today?
Oh Hyeon-seong stopped and looked the place over carefully.
Time was the one thing he had in surplus. And as it happened, he'd just been thinking that the kitchen garden needed expanding.
I can't live on potatoes alone forever.
It wasn't laziness that kept him eating nothing but plain potatoes.
It was that anything beyond the most basic seasonings—salt, sugar—was a serious liability. Even the simplest dish called for staple vegetables like onions or garlic.
Whether natural or factory-made, the moment those got mixed in, all was lost.
But no matter how fast the spirits could make crops shoot up in a single day, that tiny kitchen garden in the yard simply couldn't support multiple varieties.
Which meant one thing: the garden had to grow.
Oh Hyeon-seong went back inside and fetched a hoe.
It's a massive undertaking... but I'll take it slow, bit by bit.
Thwack!
He cleared away the riot of weeds and sifted out the stones that would stunt the crops.
He'd read online that the ground needed compost beforehand and neutralizing soil treatment, but he decided he could skip all that. The previous two harvests—that is, two rounds of what barely counted as farming—had already proven it.
Once the groundwork was done, he carved out ridges for the crops to grow on and furrows for the water to drain through.
Clumsy work, as befitted a farming novice, but it was more than enough.
By the time the repetitive motions began to feel familiar, Oh Hyeon-seong was mentally sketching out what crops to plant next.
An hour or two slipped by, perhaps.
He was in the middle of reworking the field, his hands steadying with practice, when a voice called out from a distance.
"Hyung! What are you doing over there?"
He turned at the sound and saw Yoo Seung-su and Yoo Eun-ha.
The siblings were trudging toward him, arms loaded down with something.
"Me? Farming."
"...Farming? Since when?"
"Anyway, what brings you two here?"
"Eating alone is lonely, so we came to have lunch with you, obviously."
Yoo Eun-ha said, lifting the bundle with a flourish. Turned out it was packed lunches.
The siblings closed in, pestered him for the full story behind this sudden agriculture, and came away with the rough outline—everything except the part about the spirits.
"Ah, so you want to try doing this properly, is that it?"
"Perfect timing. Consider us your farming seniors—we'll help."
"No, forget it. Everything you brought's going to get cold. Let's hurry up and eat lunch."
They'd gone to the trouble of bringing lunch; he couldn't put them to work for free.
Oh Hyeon-seong set down the hoe and headed back to the house with the siblings in tow.
Following him into the yard, Yoo Seung-su glanced back over his shoulder.
"There's a car I haven't seen before. Isn't that one crazy expensive?"
"Ah, that's not mine."
"Huh? Then whose is it?"
Yoo Seung-su asked, thoroughly bewildered.
But before he could even finish the sentence—
"Ah, sunbae. You're back."
At that soft, honeyed voice, they turned—and there stood Han Su-yeon on the wooden porch, awake at some point without them noticing.
She'd evidently just washed up; she was toweling her hair dry, dressed in the loose men's T-shirt she'd borrowed the night before.
The siblings froze stiff on the spot, mouths hanging open.
Then, exactly three seconds later, they screamed in unison.
"Ha... Ha... Han Su-yeon!"