Chapter Text
The wind on the track was the kind that didn't howl. It just existed. Cold and indifferent, pressing against Martin Edwards like it had somewhere better to be.
He looked down.
Kim Juhoon was there. Of course he was. Juhoon was always there, had been since the moment he'd appeared in the doorway of Martin's room eleven months ago with that brickwall face and those quiet, watching eyes. Why would now be any different?
You're dramatic, Martin thought, almost fondly. Just get up.
Juhoon didn't get up.
The wind moved through his hair instead. Did it for him.
Martin watched it happen and thought that Juhoon looked peaceful. More peaceful than he'd ever looked watching Martin from across a room. More peaceful than he'd looked the first time he'd said Martin's name like it meant something ancient and chosen and inevitable.
He almost smiled.
There you are, Martin thought. Finally.
And then something shifted.
Something in the way the light hit Juhoon's face.
Something in the way his chest wasn't-
Martin Edwards stopped breathing for exactly five seconds.
Then Jennifer Huh's voice cut through.
"Martin."
The fluorescent light above him was doing that thing where it flickered just enough to be annoying but not enough to be replaced. Martin had been staring at it for the past four minutes. He knew because there was a clock on the wall behind Jennifer's head and he had been reading it the way you read something when you're trying very hard not to read something else.
Like the folder on the table between them.
Like his own hands.
"Martin," Jennifer said again. Softer this time. The way his mother used to say his name when he was seven and had gone somewhere too quiet for too long.
“Do you know why you are here?”
He took a moment before replying.
“Juhoon’s dead.”
Jennifer’s gaze was locked onto the boy. She watched, and said nothing.
“…And I’ve been charged with murder.”
“What do you have to say about that?”
“It doesn’t really matter what I believe in, now, does it?”
"Can you tell me about the first time you met Juhoon then?"
Martin finally looked at her.
Jennifer Huh had kind eyes. The dangerous kind of kind. The kind that made you want to fill silences just to keep them that way. He'd noticed that within the first thirty seconds of sitting down. He'd filed it away the way Juhoon had taught him to file things.
Watch first. Talk later. Know your audience.
He almost laughed at that.
"He moved into my room," Martin said. His voice came out even. Unbothered. Familiar to him in the way that a mask becomes familiar after you've worn it long enough.
"November. It was cold."
Jennifer's pen moved.
"Were you happy about that? Having a roommate?"
Martin looked back at the clock.
"I didn't think about it much," he said. "I didn't know yet that I was supposed to."
Jennifer stopped writing.
The fluorescent light flickered.
Jennifer's pen hadn't stopped moving for the past ten minutes. Martin found himself watching it the way he used to watch Juhoon. cataloguing the rhythm of it, the small inconsistencies, the way it paused when she was thinking versus when she was simply transcribing.
Juhoon would have liked her.
The thought arrived uninvited and Martin let it pass through without touching it.
"The other boys," Jennifer said, not looking up.
"James Chao…Eom Seonghyeon And Ahn Keonho." She said their names carefully, like she'd practiced them. "How are they doing?"
Something moved through Martin's chest.
Fast. Gone before he could name it.
"You'd have to ask them," he said.
"I'm asking you."
Martin looked at his hands. Turned them over once. Turned them back.
James had called him four times the night everything ended. He hadn't picked up. Seonghyeon had sent fourteen messages. He knew because he'd counted them in the back of the police car, watching the numbers go up on his screen like a kind of prayer. Keonho hadn't contacted him at all which somehow hurt the most because Keonho was seventeen and didn't deserve to know what Martin now knew about the world.
"They're fine," Martin said. "They're better at being fine than I am."
Jennifer looked up at that.
Martin hadn't meant to give her that. He noted the mistake the way Juhoon had taught him. Filed it. Moved on.
Watch first. Talk later. Know your audience.
You're a fast learner, Edwards. Faster than you think.
The fluorescent light flickered again.
The wind on the track hadn't changed.
Martin stood in it and this time his mind gave him nothing to hold onto. No buffer. No merciful construction of a boy still breathing, still watching, still existing in that particular Kim Juhoon way that had made Martin feel simultaneously chosen and hunted for eleven months.
Just Juhoon.
Still.
The kind of still that had no morning after it.
Martin's hands were cold. He looked at them the way he'd look at something that belonged to someone else. Distantly. Academically. The way Juhoon used to look at things he found interesting. tilting his head slightly, extracting meaning from them the way you'd extract marrow from bone.
Marrow, Juhoon had said once. Three months in. Standing too close in the way he always stood too close, looking at Martin like he was a text written in a language only Juhoon had bothered to learn. That's what this is. Not a meeting of minds, Martin. That's too surface. Too clean. This goes all the way down. Do you understand what I'm telling you?
Martin hadn't understood then.
He understood now.
He looked at Kim Juhoon lying on the track in front of him and felt the thing in his chest. A wound impossibly tight, eleven month long thing. simply.
Release.
Like a held breath.
Like an amen at the end of a prayer you'd forgotten you were saying.
There you go, Martin thought again.
And underneath that, quieter, almost too quiet to be his own thought;
He got what he wanted.
Martin closed his eyes.
When he opened them he was back in the interrogation room.
Jennifer had put her pen down.
Martin noticed this the way he now noticed everything. With the particular attention of someone who had spent eleven months being watched by the best and had learned, eventually, to watch back.
The folder between them hadn't moved. His hands hadn't moved. The clock behind Jennifer's head read 3:47pm and outside the small rectangular window above her left shoulder the sky was doing something grey and noncommittal that reminded him of Yorkshire in November.
The day Juhoon had moved into his room.
It was cold, he'd told her.
It had been cold.
Jennifer leaned forward slightly. Elbows on the table. Hands clasped. The universal body language of someone who was about to ask the thing they'd actually been building toward this entire time.
Martin had seen it coming since 3:41pm.
He waited for it anyway.
"Martin," Jennifer said.
Quietly.
Carefully.
The way you'd approach something that might bolt.
"Did you love him?"
The fluorescent light flickered.
Martin Edwards looked at Jennifer Huh across the table with her kind dangerous eyes and her stopped pen and her folder full of things people had said about him and Kim Juhoon.
And he smiled.
Not the goofy wide thing that made James groan and Keonho duck away laughing. Not the performative easy thing he wore like a second uniform in the hallways of Harrowfield.
Something quieter.
Something that had no name Jennifer Huh would find in any of her textbooks.
"Thank you for your time," Martin said pleasantly.
"We're not finished yet-"
"I know." He folded his hands on the table. Looked at them. Looked back up. "But I think we are for today, don't you?"
Jennifer Huh looked at him for a long moment.
Wrote something down.
Martin didn't try to read it this time.
He already knew what it said.