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What tips him over the edge is something small, like always.
It’s game night, something Yerim set up, claiming that all Myeongwoo did was make weapons in his workshop, and he needed to get out or he’s never going to be cool and have hobbies like a real person. Now that I think about it, you better come too, Ahjussi—
Yoojin gives in after a mild protest. Yerim is unstoppable like this, bouncing with excitement and sparkles in her eyes, and she knows he’s weak against that face. Game nights weren’t a thing he ever did, even in his last life—hobbies being a luxury he couldn’t afford—but it sounds, in theory, like a nice time, and Myeongwoo would be at least as confused as him. Besides, knowing Yerim, she probably told Myeongwoo the exact same thing about Yoojin not being cool so now he can’t prove Yerim right by not coming.
Because Yoojin has discovered that he enjoys mild amounts of chaos when he’s the one starting it, he invites his brother. Having Yerim and Yoohyun in the same room is like throwing two cats together, claws first. Yoohyun starts out with a No before quickly begging to join after Yoojin talks at length about all the fun they’ll have and how, since it’s a four-person game and Yoohyun can’t be there, it’s just too bad, maybe they’ll invite someone from another guild…
Yoojin tries not to feel too bad, but, well. It’ll be good for Yoohyun—he fits Yerim’s rubric even closer than Yoojin does.
Naturally, Yoohyun and Yerim quarrel about who plays with Yoojin. In most other situations like this, Yoojin watches Yoohyun and Yerim argue for a few minutes before disappointing both of them by picking Myeongwoo. (Myeongwoo used to panic, but he’s resigned to his position by now, good boy.)
But Yerim’s the only one who’s played the game before, and Yoohyun did research the previous night, the nerd. It’d probably be unfair to put them on the same team. They grimace at each other, throw rock-paper-scissors, and Yoohyun and Yoojin end up on one team, with Yerim and Myeongwoo on the other.
Yoojin sort of understands the game, but mostly sticks to following Yoohyun’s suggestions after he’s still clueless after a twenty-minute overview of instructions. It’s a game that Yerim would pick out, an RPG-based game with a deck of cards with little fantasy creatures on them. There’s also a huge tiled board with five colored dice, tokens for each player and each final enemy, and a whole other bag of plastic bits that Yoojin doesn’t understand at all.
Yerim and Yoohyun, in a quickfire round, trade colorful cards back and forth until Yoojin and Myeongwoo start laughing. Eventually, Yoohyun drops his cards in defeat.
Yoohyun huffs. “No use. Hyung, I’ll pass the Joker to you. I’m out.”
“What a good brother!” Yerim cackles. “Sacrificing himself for Ahjussi. Too bad it won’t do any good!”
And in that split second, the ball drops. The feeling Yoojin had tried so hard and so long to avoid claws back into him, bitterness and anger and grief and guilt so heavy the world flips upside down, wrong-sided and off-kilter. The breath drops out of his lungs.
He’s always doing this. Sacrificing himself. And for what?
Yoojin doesn’t know what his face looks like, but Yoohyun’s face across from him becomes concerned, then alarmed, and Yoojin sees the moment Yoohyun crosses the threshold into there’s danger, must protect hyung, and that’s it—
“Sorry, I gotta,” says Yoojin before leaving the rest of the sentence behind and fleeing the room.
As soon as the first hunters were registered and the world began to categorize, classify, and evaluate skills, it became quickly obvious that most skill descriptions—while not false—are incomplete. Most skills have hidden edges and nuances that you have to discover for yourself, like whether your weapon skill is equally resistant to cold and to heat, or if you can grow plants in zero gravity. Testing sites sprang up quickly, some government-backed, some privately-funded, where people could get their skills evaluated professionally.
Yoojin has not, and will not, get any of his top-level skills evaluated. Skill evaluations should be private, but he’s seen enough news leaks to be suspicious and wary. He’d hit headline news within a day if he suddenly revealed SS- and L-Class skills, given his background.
[My Kid’s the Best] is an L-Class skill. It’s a ridiculously good buff, if you can get over the stupid keywords, but Yoojin hasn’t tested the bounds of what it can do and hasn’t been eager to try. So he doesn’t know exactly where the limitations of [My Kid’s the Best] lie.
If he says I love you in another language, does that activate the skill? Does the other person have to hear and acknowledge the words? Does it matter what the other person feels? What if they reject the words?
Yoojin has only said I love you and meant it once. Every other time he’s manipulated his way into a situation where he’s had the chance to throw out the keywords to net another S-Class. Doesn’t that make him the worst kind of liar? What he has with Yerim and Myeongwoo—would you really call that friendship?
Yoojin doesn’t know if [My Kid’s the Best] also influences the target into liking him, like [Caregiver] in the past. He doesn’t want to think about what that would mean. (Every smile, every laugh, all fake—)
And here’s the final fucking blow, the real coup de grâce: how can he tell others I love you when he barely understands what that means?
Yoohyun finds him in Peace’s room. Yoojin has his back turned to him, but he can imagine the look on his face. It’s a face Yoojin sees alarmingly often, now that he lives with his brother: Yoohyun, brows tight in worry, pleading in his eyes, a question on his lips. In his old life, did Yoohyun ever show this face to anyone? Yoojin is self-aware enough to know that Yoohyun shows an entirely different face to others, a fierce and merciless one. Which one’s the real Yoohyun? Is this what that wild obsession does to S-Classes, warping their personalities into waking contradictions?
“Hyung.” Yoohyun approaches his back, but Yoojin doesn’t turn around. “Is everything okay? What happened?”
Yoohyun sits down next to him. Yoojin doesn’t look at him, but stares at Peace in his arms, who cocks his head curiously.
“Was it the game?” Yoohyun sounds uncertain. Yoojin feels battered between two impulses: one, to hug his brother and tell him nothing’s wrong, he’s perfect; two, to punch him and demand the truth, whatever that is. He shrugs instead.
“Sorry if we were going too fast,” Yoohyun starts. “Yerim and I were caught up in the round. I did mean to slow down, but she…” At Yerim Yoojin watches Yoohyun’s face carefully. There’s a miniscule chill in his face when he says her name. Yoojin feels cold: does Yoohyun even like Yerim? Does he like anyone besides Yoojin? Fuck, is his brother a sociopath?
“It wasn’t the game.” Yoojin pulls Peace closer to his chest, who happily cuddles into him, totally oblivious. “It’s—Yoohyun, why do you always sacrifice yourself for me?”
Yoohyun looks totally confused. “What do you mean?”
Voice calm, Yoojin. Steady. “You left home. You built Abyss. You went through loneliness and hardship to protect me. You live a life where there are literal attempts on your life. For—me.”
Yoohyun smiles easily. “If it’s for my hyung, of course I’d do it.”
He isn’t getting it.
“I’m not—" special, Yoojin wants to say. Or, worth it. He swallows the words and drags them into the bottom of a deep, deep chest and locks it up. Later, in his room, he’ll let himself feel… feelings … over that.
“It’s not that,” Yoojin says. "I didn’t ask you to do any of that for me.”
Yoohyun hears the bitterness in Yoojin’s voice, and he leans back, startled. “Hyung, you’re—are you upset? I did what was necessary!”
“No, you did what you thought was necessary,” Yoojin snaps. “You didn’t even ask me what I wanted!”
“I knew you wouldn’t agree. It was the most logical decision, so I did what was needed to keep you safe.” Fuck his brother and his reasonableness—
“You didn’t think I needed my brother in my life?” Yoojin’s hands are shaking. Peace is growling and pawing at his fists, but he’s too angry to stop. “You really thought I’d be safer, living alone and failing to find a job that covers food and rent?”
Yoohyun stares at him, a mix of anger, frustration, and guilt flickering across his face. He says nothing.
“You didn’t think—“ Yoojin blinks tears, keeps going, even as he regrets the next words out of his mouth—“You didn’t think I needed to know my one last piece of family thought I was more than trash to be abandoned?”
He can’t bear to see Yoohyun’s face, so he looks down at Peace instead.
“Is that Yoohyun’s love? Leaving me alone, sacrificing yourself silently, even if I never asked or wanted that from you?”
Yoohyun remains silent, breathing shakily.
Then, slowly, as if each word is a burden: “Of course that’s how I love,” he says, staring directly at Yoojin. “Who do you think I learned from?”
As far as the world knows, Yoohyun’s and Yoojin’s parents are gone before they even enter the story: Han Yoohyun [S-Class hunter, Abyss Leader], was orphaned early and raised by his brother, Han Yoojin— The truth isn’t much different, because Yoohyun and Yoojin didn’t see them much more when they were alive. Yoohyun was really just a child when they passed, so he has an excuse, but even Yoojin’s strongest memories of his father and mother are distant and faded like old photographs.
He remembers one bright summer holiday by the beach, one of the handful of vacations that Yoojin can recall, where he and his father walked for hours on the beach picking up sand crabs and turning over rocks. He remembers a salty, playful wind that never let your hair rest still, and his father’s crinkled, laughing face when Yoojin spat out sand from his lips.
He remembers that vacation and his father so clearly, even though it happened years and years ago, because it was the last time he had seen his father so alive. When they packed everything up and drove the car back into the city, his father seemed to have shrunk on the drive home: his shoulders curled in, and a grim, resigned look settled on his face. Most evenings after work, he was a shadow reading the newspaper under the dull ceiling light in the kitchen, turning worn newspaper pages back and forth endlessly, searching for a better-paying job.
Their mother was busy, and kind, but being busy rarely provides time to be kind. She commuted far into the city for work, and never came home before dinner, and she smelled like cigarettes and printer ink. Yoojin remembers only one weekend when she didn’t work or bring work home. They curled into the worn yellow sofa in front of the TV and watched an episode of a random soap opera that happened to be playing. Yoojin, look, she told him, pointing to the family drama on screen. Those brothers, they’d do anything for family. Just like you and Yoohyun, hm?
The fact is, by the time his parents and their car crashed headfirst into a truck that had run a red light, Yoojin had learned all of the important lessons they had to teach. He knew how to take care of his brother, and he knew the meaning of love: a self-sacrificing tradition of workaholism and regular absence that he inherited from his parents. Doing whatever you could to pay the bills, or get your brother to school, or protect your brother, no matter the cost.
Yoohyun, despite Yoojin’s fiercest hopes, turned out no different: he did not wander far.
After Yoohyun storms off, Yoojin tucks Peace in his arms and heads straight to his bedroom. He can feel the onset of a breakdown—there’s a dull pounding behind his eyes and a headache growing more insistent. He needs time to decompress, time to lie in his bed with Peace on his chest and the silence of a room to himself and his own dark, spiraling thoughts.
Yerim ambushes him on the way there. “Ahjussi!” Her gaze darts between him and to the side, and she’s put on an unsure, awkward smile. She looks every bit the teenager she is. “Are you, uh.”
“It’s fine,” Yoojin reassures her. “I just needed some air.”
“I was—I mean, I wasn’t worried. I just wanted to see if you wanted to finish the game.” Yerim frowns and rubs the back of her neck. “It’s fine if you don’t. Myeongwoo already went back to his workshop.”
She tries to sound careless, but Yoojin hears the disappointment.
Yerim and Yoohyun are, quite literally, like fire and ice. Aside from their bristling rivalry over Yoojin’s attention, something that still bewilders him, they couldn’t be more different as people. Yoohyun, even in high school, had grown into a quiet, serious teenager who spent most of his time working, not unlike his current self. Yerim is the fun, wild child of the group: she’s always dragging Myeongwoo and Yoojin off to see movies or play games. It’s like she’s catching up on years of childhood all at once.
But Yoohyun and Yerim pull at the same Caretaker instinct of Yoojin’s, the one that makes him smile when they smile, and sad when they’re sad, and want to see them well and whole. He hasn’t tested the limits, but he would probably do anything to make them happy, no matter what it costs him. In this respect, Yoojin and Yoohyun are exactly alike.
She looks uncertain. Yoojin looks down; Peace is already asleep in his arms, his head and heart are heavy, and Yerim looks like she needs reassurance.
Yoojin sighs. “How about some tea instead?”
Yerim teases him about really being an old man, drinking tea in the evening, but her mood bounces back instantly and that’s all Yoojin wanted. She’s so starved for attention and so eager for affection that it’s painful to watch. It stirs up a bitter thought that floats in the back of his head, the one that says Yerim’s uncle got off too easy.
He grabs a sachet of barley tea and breathes it in deeply as it steeps. Yerim’s choice is hot chocolate instead, because why not, Ahjussi, it’s just a hot chocolate kind of night.
“Sooo,” she starts. Yoojin knows exactly where this is going. “What’s up with you and your brother?”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s definitely not nothing.”
“Fine. It’s… complicated.”
Yerim laughs. “First it’s nothing, now it’s complicated?”
Yoojin grins. He probably shouldn’t be telling her this, but who knows, maybe she’ll have something to say. “Not only that. It’s stupid, too. My brother keeps making sacrifices for me.”
"Mmm, is that a problem?”
“It’s his way of showing love,” Yoojin says, feeling drunk on the rollercoaster of emotions. “I don’t like it, because I don’t want him to be hurt. But I do the same for him.”
“Because you love him, too."
Yoojin stops. “I do love my brother,” he says slowly. “For most of our lives, we only had each other.”
He tilts his cup up, takes a sip, and sets the cup back on the table. Yerim watches his pause, wary.
“I raised him and I gave everything for him, and I was glad doing it, and I would do it again,” Yoojin says. “And he sacrificed for me, and was glad doing it, and would do it again.”
“Well, then, what’s the problem?” Yerim smiles. “You’re both the same.”
He looks up at her with a half-smile.
“I don’t know, Yerim. Shouldn’t there be better ways to love, than constant mutual loss?”
Yerim stares at him, biting her lip, and then lifts her shoulders in a slow shrug. “I don’t get it, Ahjussi. Why do you have to define love, if you know you love him? And he loves you? Isn’t that enough?”
Because I’m afraid, Yoojin doesn’t say. Because I’m afraid that he’ll eventually count the cost of loving me, and find it a poor tradeoff. I’m afraid of him hurting himself on my behalf, and having no say in how he tries to love me. I’m afraid of an endless cycle of sacrifice, where we think we’re doing it for the other, but we’re really doing it for ourselves.
“I would probably be dead if he weren’t here,” Yoojin reflects, and Yerim freezes over her hot chocolate. “He’s saved my life before. And—he would destroy himself if I were gone.” Yoojin tips his tea back and forth, watching it slosh against the rim of the cup. "There isn’t a good ending if we can’t survive together without trading things away.”
Yerim makes him apologize for the weird chat (Seriously, what kind of Ahjussi talks so much about love—) and forces him to promise that he’ll make up with Yoohyun. It’s too awkward if you two aren’t all over each other, she laughs, before dashing off.
Yoojin wanders around the rooms looking for Yoohyun, but in the end he finds his brother standing in front of Yoojin’s own room door, looking hesitant. Yoohyun turns to face Yoojin, then looks at Yoojin’s door, then Yoojin again.
“Ah—hyung,” Yoohyun stutters out. “Can I—um, go in?”
Yoojin grins and pushes open his own door, letting them both inside. Yoohyun settles himself awkwardly on a chair, while Yoojin settles the still-sleeping Peace on his bed. He looks over at Yoohyun, who looks exhausted and probably no better than him. There’s no worse trigger for feelings than their own family baggage.
There’s a moment of awkward silence.
Then Yoohyun starts: “I was thinking about what you said earlier. How I… all those years ago… I didn’t ask you what you wanted. How I just went ahead and did what I thought was best.” He pauses, and then fists his hands in his jeans. “I’m sorry.”
Yoojin considers this, but despite Yoohyun’s apology… he knows his brother. “But you would have done it anyway, even if I disagreed. You would have still abandoned me.”
It’s nothing he didn’t expect, but saying it aloud stabs him just the same.
“Hyung—“
“To be honest,” Yoojin carries on, “I don’t know what you should have done. Maybe you made the right choice.” Yoohyun’s eyes are shaking, watching him.
“But maybe, if we had put our heads together, we could have come up with another option.” Yoojin folds his hands together and stares down at them. “Still, even if nothing would have changed. I would have been happier if we had made the decision—together.”
His brother’s jaw is clenched. He grips the arms of the chear, which creak under his fingers. “Hyung, but what if…” The silent fear courses through him: What if it doesn’t work? What if I can’t protect you? What if I lose you?
Yoohyun looks at him, lost, and Yoojin feels crushed by an intense urge to gather his brother up and bundle him with blankets, just like he used to when Yoohyun was young. Yoohyun can be as powerful or rich as he likes; there’s a piece of Yoojin’s heart that will always hold on to the small, quiet child who liked trains and frogs and Yoojin’s convenience store ramyeon, and who asked, one day, Hyung, will I ever be as tall as you?
He reaches out, and buries his hands in Yoohyun’s hair, and Yoohyun’s head falls to rest on his shoulder. “I want the best for you,” Yoojin says. “And you want the best for me.” Yoohyun nods. “So we’re going to figure things out together, okay? No matter what comes our way. No more sacrifices, no more trading things away when one of us isn’t there. We’re family. We’re in this together.”
Yoojin breaths in, and breaths out, and wonders if this is the right step. It feels right, but it also feels like a totally new path, untrodden, barely visible. Together, he thinks. Only together.
“We’ll be alright,” Yoojin whispers to his brother. “We’re not alone anymore.”