The Only One Who Reads Me
"You came."
"Hey, Tae-il. Wearing the same clothes again today, I see."
"It's a different shirt from yesterday, okay? Just the same color."
"Really? Because there's a stain in the exact same spot."
"...You being that uptight about cleanliness—does that even fly at school? Nobody's picking on you?"
Three weeks since they'd met, and Lee Jin-woo and Kang Tae-il had grown far closer than either of them seemed to realize. The banter came easier now, the smiles looser, the distance between them visibly shrinking.
Jin-woo bit into the snack Tae-il handed him, and as he chewed, his mind drifted back to the report the Section Chief had delivered a week ago.
"As I mentioned briefly before, sir, we investigated all the children currently at the orphanage, as well as those who have since been adopted into other families—and we found no one bearing your face, young master."
"I see."
"However, when we ran the name Kang Tae-il instead, we did identify a connected party. The head of an organization running illegal moneylending, one Kang Han-seong. According to our sources—"
Jin-woo arranged his thoughts with characteristic calm. The Section Chief's careful conjecture was, under the circumstances, the most reasonable hypothesis available. When the man had tentatively suggested it might be wise to dispose of the boy, just in case, Jin-woo had told him to stand by.
He had to be certain. Killing Kang Tae-il could wait until he'd confirmed the boy was truly who he suspected him to be. It wouldn't be too late then.
The moment he finished sorting through it, Jin-woo strolled over to Tae-il with a smile.
"Tae-il. When are you coming to the barbershop with me? Your hair is so damaged it hurts to look at."
"No thanks. Waste of money for no reason."
"Why? I have to go anyway. Look at this—my fingers won't even run through it properly."
"I said stop messing with my—ah!"
"Whoops. Sorry."
Jin-woo ran his fingers gently through Tae-il's hair and, feigning an accident, plucked out a few strands. He got a punch for his trouble after suggesting, "That's why you should come with me. Yeah?"—and he laughed brightly through the pain.
"Haha! That hurt."
"It's supposed to hurt. That's why I hit you."
Jin-woo slipped the strands of hair into his bag, still smiling. It was a laugh he wasn't even aware of giving—a laugh more natural than any smile that had appeared on screen so far.
It was that night that Lee Jin-woo, laughing aloud like a child for the very first time, finally came apart.
"You worked hard again today. School isn't easy, is it."
"It's fine. All I have to do is study."
Wearing a faint smile, Jin-woo lifted his head carefully. The camera followed his gaze and settled on his mother's smiling lips.
"That's right. All you have to do is study. Was there ever anything else you needed to do?"
"No."
The instant Jin-woo bowed his head, his body began to tremble.
"I thought that if I raised my math score even higher, you'd be pleased with me, so—"
"That's the problem with you!!"
The sudden shriek made Jin-woo flinch violently. His shoulders shook, frail and thin, and the atmosphere plunged into darkness in a heartbeat.
"I'm sorry. Mother..."
"I can't even stand the sound of your voice. It makes me sick to my stomach! What exactly are you sorry for? What!!"
The mother's screaming swelled louder and louder, and the pounding of her kicks grew more savage with each blow. And though the sound pouring from the speakers kept rising, the audience only grew quieter.
"......"
It was a depth of immersion so complete that people had forgotten to swallow. A deep darkness blanketed the theater, so thick that the faces of the crowd itself had become indistinguishable.
Despite the story's dark trajectory, light had always accompanied every scene until now. The riverbank sequences had always shimmered with harsh sunlight; even the scene where Kang Tae-il was ambushed had been drenched in the warm amber glow of the hanok.
"Filthy! The thought that something as filthy as you exists near me makes my skin crawl!"
But now, there was no light to be found anywhere. Total darkness—and that was a signal. A masterstroke was coming.
A handful of Director Yoon's devotees in the audience stared at the screen with barely contained anticipation. They knew his signature: the uncanny way he plucked the protagonist's fractured eyes out of a darkness that spread like fog.
'Oh. It's coming.'
Right on cue, a camera that had been idling quietly in the corner like a disinterested bystander began to move—slowly, slowly.
The eyes of Lee Jin-woo, who had endured the beating in trembling silence like a frightened animal, drifted into the frame.
"...!"
And everyone watching fell into shock.
There, in his eyes, an emotion rang out with perfect clarity. Not a shred of confusion—only boredom, weariness, and even something perilously close to amusement.
The camera itself seemed to hold its breath, freezing mid-motion before the intensity of that gaze.
Then, in the very next moment, the eyes that had seemed lost in some distant thought of their own changed.
"Jin-woo."
"...!"
Jin-woo's shuddering body went rigid. The gaze that had been fixed obediently downward shot straight up. The cold moonlight spilling through the window caught his eyes and held them, silver and unblinking.
"Can't you please just die? Please..."
"......"
"I'm begging you... Mom is so tired..."
While his mother's tears fell in heavy drops, the corners of Jin-woo's eyes were bone-dry.
"...I'm sorry."
Without so much as a blink, Jin-woo whispered those words, dry as ash. His eyes, carved into the memory of every person in that theater, were steady and unbending—yet, paradoxically, they looked more lost than anything else in the world.
The boy's expression, crushing the entire audience beneath it, sank back into the dark.
"Cutie, what're you doing?"
"Trimming my nails~."
Light flooded the screen all at once, and Kang Tae-il's cheerful voice swept in like a gust, airing out the suffocating atmosphere.
"Haaah..."
Only then did the audience release the breath they'd been holding. Hundreds exhaling at once made for a surprisingly loud sound—and startled by their own noise, they all hastily straightened up in their seats like the refined, cultured patrons they were. A few covered their mouths.
Even so, no one could gather their wits. Director Yoon had clearly anticipated this—on screen, trivial small talk was flowing by, dialogue meant to be ignored. But for the people struggling to sink back into the film, only one sentence filled their heads:
'Who the hell IS that actor??'
"Boss. For the past few days, someone's been tailing us."
"You're identifying them and reporting back, aren't you?"
"I'm sorry, Boss. We couldn't pin down who's behind it. But we're fairly certain they're with Isim Group."
"...Isim Group? Since when do the people who play with electronics come stomping around us?"
"I've put two more of the boys on it. We'll report the moment we find anything, Boss."
Kang Han-seong sank into thought for a moment, then waved a hand. Fine. Understood. The underling bowed rigidly at the waist, shut the door, and left.
"We've never so much as done business with anyone from Isim... and now this, out of nowhere?"
Forehead creased, Han-seong eliminated one suspicious factor after another—then abruptly shot to his feet. He crossed the room to where Kang Tae-il sat in the corner, leisurely trimming his nails.
"Tae-il. You still hanging around that kid?"
"Which one?"
"The one they say's got your face."
Han-seong ordered Tae-il to stop seeing him. Tae-il looked puzzled for a moment, but then nodded without argument.
"Good. That's my boy."
Han-seong clapped a hand on Tae-il's shoulder and left. Tae-il watched his retreating back for a long moment, then slipped quietly out of the hanok.
Sitting on the riverbank as he did every day, Tae-il's face was full of something like regret.
"You came."
"I didn't even say anything. How do you know it's me every time?"
"You smell like you."
Jin-woo's brow furrowed.
"I don't smell like anything. If anyone smells, it's you."
"Oh, big talk. You just got here too. You wanna die?"
It was peaceful banter, perfectly in tune with the dusk spreading soft and red across the water.
"It's all over your face, you know. You got hurt? Stomach, right?"
"...You can tell?"
It was just then that the audience, barely clawing their way back from that devastating earlier scene, found themselves smiling without meaning to.
"Tae-il."
"Hm?"
"I can't come here anymore."
Jin-woo said it flatly, his eyes on the river.
"Hey... you alright?"
And as Tae-il spoke, Jin-woo's eyes filled the screen once more.
The audience tumbled back into confusion.
'...What is this.'
This wasn't a pitch-black room like before. It was a space drenched in brilliant sunlight, no less. And yet the boy's eyes were calm as a corpse's—and chaotic as a living man's. Different light, different space entirely, but the emotion rising from those eyes was identical. No—it had grown even fiercer.
The direction was calculated down to the last lumen of light, and the lead actor's command of it was nothing short of staggering.
'How...?'
The actor playing the boy looked impossibly young. Even accounting for the Western tendency to read East Asian faces as younger than they were, he seemed barely more than a child. There was still baby fat on his cheeks on screen—clearly young in real life too.
'And he acts like THAT?'
The audience's minds spun faster and faster. And the journalists' minds spun faster still.
But whatever they did or didn't do, the film rolled on.
"You still won't give me your number?"
"...Huh?"
"Come on. We're friends now, aren't we? Sort of."
Jin-woo handed Tae-il a slip of paper with his phone number on it, and then he was gone.
Tae-il sat on the riverbank, staring blankly after him as if a ghost had walked off with his senses.
"Young master. The results of the DNA analysis you requested—"
"That won't be necessary."
"I'm... sorry?"
The Section Chief committed the faux pas of asking him to repeat himself, but Jin-woo paid it no mind.
"I already know. It came back a match, didn't it?"
"...Yes. Correct, sir. Compared against a sample of your hair, the result showed a 99.9% match. He is the person we believed him to be."
Jin-woo gazed out the window with a blank expression, the picture of a man who'd expected exactly this. The Section Chief, waiting for orders, found the silence stretching on and ventured a bewildered follow-up.
"Young master. Shall we send someone, then?"
"Leave him alone. And dispose of that document."
"I—yes, but why all of a sudden? You've been searching for him your entire life. Now that we can finally settle it for certain, why on earth would you—"
"Section Chief Jeong. That's far enough. You're treading on thin ice as it is."
"...Yes. My apologies."
"The judgment is mine to make. The requests, and the orders."
At the unmistakable dismissal, the Section Chief withdrew in silence. Jin-woo fiddled with his phone and murmured to himself.
"I was going to kill him the moment we met..."
A bitter soliloquy—followed by a short, deflating laugh, like soda gone flat.
"Ah, this is so fucking stupid."
He had searched for that boy his whole life.
There was only one reason he had endured, silent and unmoving, in this shit-heap of a house: his father had made him a promise. That when he came of age, he would let him escape this house. And as compensation for enduring until then, the old man had promised to pass down the very seat Jin-woo now sat in.
But that promise had only ever been valid on the condition that Jin-woo remain his only son.
"Jin-woo. I know how much your mother has made you suffer."
"Not at all, Chairman."
"It's all my fault. If I'd only taken a little more care when she was carrying you..."
It was almost funny, watching his father choke back tears with that face full of regret.
"I know it's hard, but bear with it a while longer. Your mother loves you. She's just... a little unwell, that's all."
Of the two babies born from her own body, she had strangled one to death on the spot. Jin-woo had wondered, briefly, whether that was the kind of thing a "little unwell" person could do—but he'd nodded obediently all the same.
"Postpartum depression, you see. Such a thing... such a concept didn't even exist when you were born. Had I known, I would never have left her like that."
"Of course. Having the Chairman look after me as kindly as you do is more than enough for me."
"Whose son could be this good? Yes, Jin-woo. Hold on just a little longer."
Hold on a little longer, and the chairman's seat would be yours. He had gritted his teeth and endured for years on that whispered promise. All the while, he had secretly searched for his twin brother—because he'd learned that the baby whose breath had supposedly stopped that day had, in fact, never died.
Only two people in the world knew it: Section Chief Jeong, who had abandoned that baby on the street—and Jin-woo himself, who had happened to overhear the man talking to himself.
If his twin had survived all these years, then whatever was owed to him would inevitably have to be divided. Shared out. Handed to someone else.
'I'm the one who endured this fucking hell. Why should it be you?'
What was blood, really—that a stranger could come along and claim Jin-woo's share simply for sharing it? He genuinely could not understand it. And so he had searched. And the moment he found the boy, he had resolved to dispose of him without hesitation.
That was the plan. It truly was. And yet...
"...It's honestly hilarious. Hilarious."
The sight of himself, shackled in the end by that worthless thing called blood—it was laughable. That the boy he'd hunted for years in order to kill him was the only person who could read his face. That the boy meant to steal what was his, that nobody, was the only one who could make him laugh. That even now, in this moment, he was waiting for the boy to call.
"I really do look like a damn idiot..."
Pathetic. That was all there was to it.