Happiness Is Not a Clean Thing (6)
Fwoooosh—!
Humbly accepting death did not mean he was obliged to empty his mind before the last breath left him.
Inside the warehouse, where the blaze was spreading, Kim Yu-han sat bound with his eyes shut—and still he was thinking of a great many things. The serial killer who had murdered his parents.
The truth was, it wasn't as if he'd never had a chance to win.
In that final clash inside the warehouse, victory had not been beyond Kim Yu-han's grasp. He had simply hesitated for a single instant, and on the strength of that hesitation the fight had been turned against him. He was never a man who hesitated. Once he laid a plan, he carried it out exactly as laid. So why had he hesitated then?
I must have changed, a little.
It was surely because, in that fleeting second, Lee Kang-cheol had risen in his mind. Lee Kang-cheol was forever driving the point home. Everyone had a role that belonged to them alone, and Team 808 was no exception, so in any moment you held to principle and gave everything to the part you had been given. Kim Yu-han had always thought it absurd, and he was hardly the sort who lived by it. But human affairs were ridiculous in precisely this way. Of all moments, he had kept those words at the most decisive one there was.
Now, as the price, he would have to lay down his life. How unlike him. How foolish.
And yet Kim Yu-han laughed. Strangely, no regret came. He knew the reason, of course. He himself did not think the change he had undergone was a bad one. Looking back, his life had been paved with nothing but hatred for criminals. It was different now.
After meeting Lee Kang-cheol, he had been through experiences that were, in their way, entirely new. Another way of seeing. Other thoughts. Other things understood. And a feeling that had not existed in him before. The name of that feeling was probably friendship.
"Everyone has their own role."
Kim Yu-han murmured it once more, and in the same breath turned his own identity over again. Calling himself a detective was a misuse of the word. He had never been just, to begin with. How many criminals had he condemned in private? The detective's shell had only ever been a means to an end. So it was a little regrettable. It wasn't as if, at this late hour, he could become a detective like Lee Kang-cheol.
But helping a detective that capable carry a flawless career all the way through—that much, at least, he could do. Kim Yu-han thought an ending of that kind suited him well enough. By now, Lee Kang-cheol had probably already taken the culprit in.
Fwoooosh—!
The warehouse went on burning. Then a face he was not glad to see flickered once across his mind. His parents. Kim Yu-han spoke with a shameless ease.
"What, you're sore I didn't avenge you? Don't put it on me. Be satisfied the bastard got caught. And I'd appreciate it if you'd stop turning up in my head. Rest easy."
"...Because I'd like to get some rest myself, now."
Even as he muttered it, he felt his mind going dim. The flames, close by then, seemed to invite him along for a dance, but the smoke had already left him hazy. Slowly. Very slowly. Kim Yu-han's consciousness sank deep.
Nothing. He could see nothing anymore. It took only a moment for every sense to blur.
"—...han!"
He seemed to hear something, faintly, but he could not answer it. It felt like someone grabbing hold of a desperately sleepy version of him and trying to shake him awake.
"—...Yu-han!"
The corner of Kim Yu-han's mouth lifted before he knew it. The voice resembled Lee Kang-cheol's.
"—Kim Yu-han! Kim Yu-han!"
It struck him as rather interesting. So the hallucination he would hear at the very end was Lee Kang-cheol's voice. Funny, wasn't it?
But right then, something seized him and shook him like mad, and only then did Kim Yu-han understand that none of this was a dream.
Snap!
The rope that had held him still came apart, and in the same instant he felt someone hoist him up. That someone tore through smoke banked thick as a thunderhead and ran like a lunatic. Carried that way for a little while, they burst free of the warehouse, and clean air stabbed into his lungs. Kim Yu-han's fogged mind cleared with it. Then whoever it was dumped him on the ground.
Thud—!
"Ghk!"
Kim Yu-han winced at the pain of hitting the earth, but the look that had settled on his face vanished as if it had been wiped clean. A person he had never expected had come into view.
"...Senior?"
Kim Yu-han's eyes went perfectly round. Bewilderment took his face in the space of a heartbeat.
"What's going on? What about the arrest?"
Lee Kang-cheol didn't answer. Kim Yu-han shot to his feet.
Sudden as it all was, his mind was sharp enough to seize every circumstance in a flash. He understood at once what judgment Lee Kang-cheol had made.
"Don't tell me...?"
Still not a word. By then Kim Yu-han was certain his guess was right. The man had abandoned the arrest and come running all this way. He grabbed Lee Kang-cheol by the collar at once.
"...Have you lost your mind? You're letting that killer go?"
"I only put it on hold."
"On hold? Don't give me on hold!"
Kim Yu-han was so dumbfounded he could barely get the words out in order.
"We might never catch him now! From here on he'll operate twice as carefully! Do you have any idea what it took to get a lead on him!"
Lee Kang-cheol said nothing.
"Weren't you always the one hammering on about principle? Hold to principle no matter the moment—that was you. So what did you just do? You let a killer we'd already caught walk free! You threw away the chance of a lifetime!"
It was while Kim Yu-han was shouting himself raw that strength went into Lee Kang-cheol's fist.
Crack—!
A heavy blow. Kim Yu-han's head whipped sideways, and he sat down hard on his rear. Lee Kang-cheol had swung.
A brief silence fell. He looked more stunned that Lee Kang-cheol had broken principle than that he himself had been hit. Lee Kang-cheol slowly straightened his clothes and spoke.
"Principle. Yes. Principle matters."
He looked down at Kim Yu-han and went on.
"Which is why I kept to principle this time, too."
"That's ridiculous nonsense—"
"Team 808's Principle Zero. I've never mentioned it before. I'll tell you now. Listen carefully, and remember."
Lee Kang-cheol cut the rest of it off short.
Kim Yu-han could not say a word. More precisely, he had lost whatever words he might have had.
He was not a man who broke principle because he didn't know it. If anything, he was the type who broke it while knowing every last rule. So he knew perfectly well. There was no such thing as a Principle Zero.
"Principle Zero? A principle that doesn't even exist—"
"And on hold is right."
Lee Kang-cheol said it smiling, just a little, now.
"We'll catch him eventually. However mad he is, he isn't as mad as you. Isn't that so?"
After that, silence for a while. Kim Yu-han stared up at him, blank. Only now did he understand the whole of it. Lee Kang-cheol's words assumed the two of them would go on working together. He hadn't given up on the killer. There had simply been something he held more dear. And that something was Kim Yu-han himself. Somewhere along the way, each of them had become the other's principle.
They faced each other for a long time. Then, at the same moment, both of them burst out laughing.
"...You know something? You're not in your right mind either, Senior."
"Never thought I'd hear that from you."
They didn't bother saying aloud that they had come to resemble each other. There are moments in the world when you understand what the other is thinking without a single word, and this was one of them.
And then something tapped, light, against the crown of his head.
Tap. Tap-tap.
He lifted his face, and something struck his forehead, cool and clean. It had started to rain—heavily, at that. Sure enough, it soon came down in a flood.
Shaaaa—
The whole world was getting wet. Kim Yu-han still sitting where he had fallen, Lee Kang-cheol standing as he was, the two of them looked up together, easy with each other, at the sky pouring rain.
"Kim Yu-han."
"Yes."
"Let's head back. It's time to report a failure."
Head back. The words felt newly good to him. Come to think of it, his life had never held a place he could call home. Now it did. Team 808. His own people.
Waaah—waaah—!
Sirens tore open from every side, and fire trucks began taking up position. Lee Kang-cheol narrowed his eyes against the glare of the headlights, and the firefighters charged the burning warehouse.
"We'd better hurry back."
It was just as he muttered this that Lee Kang-cheol startled—something rare for him, and badly. The headlights of the trucks that had come tearing through the dark had thrown light on a sight he had never been able to see before. Kim Yu-han's body, soaked through.
The rain had plastered the clothes to the body and laid every contour bare without mercy, and those contours, plain at a glance, were not a man's. At the chest there was a curve that had no business being there, and at the groin, nothing of what a man was supposed to have. Only a hollowed trace, as if someone handy with an axe had done the carving.
"Kim Yu-han...?"
Only then did the things that had sat in Lee Kang-cheol's head as nothing but questions begin to make sense. They had never once used a public restroom or a locker room together. The line of the face, the voice, that had always felt somehow off. All of it.
"You...?"
The rain kept pouring.
"Shh."
Kim Yu-han quietly laid an index finger across those lips.
"This is a secret."
A cheeky little smile went with it, as if Lee Kang-cheol were an accomplice now, too. Who could say how long they looked at each other.
Then the rain stopped dead. The water truck had simply ceased spraying it down out of the air, and for a moment a rainbow hung there.
"Okay—! Perfect—!"
Director Choi Heewon's shout, more fired up than it had ever been. Watching the crew come running from every direction like a horde of zombies, Lee Sua and Kim Seonil quietly wore smiles of pure satisfaction.
Special Task Force 808.
This was the moment the climax shoot came to a successful end.