Fate
"You really don't have to drive me..."
Fresh from wrecking the X-ray room, Kang Dae-han made his report to the administrator and led So-yul straight to his car.
"Get in. Don't keep your mother waiting when she's worried."
A model son to the entire human race. She cocked her head at the way he so scrupulously looked after somebody else's mother—a woman he had never even met—but she was no match for that force of will, and she climbed into the passenger seat.
Kang Dae-han put in the destination as if it were nothing. At the very top of the recent list sat Ong's Ongsimi House. He didn't seem to have touched the navigation once since the night of the last staff dinner, when he had driven So-yul home.
And so, instead of a bus or a subway, she rode along in a trip that was easy on the body and hard on the heart—until, out of nowhere, Kang Dae-han sniffed the air.
"By the way, Dr. Ong. Someone who calls herself a doctor—should she be wearing perfume, or shouldn't she?"
"Sorry? I don't use perfume. My shampoo is unscented, too. I barely even put on lotion or hand cream. Do you want to smell?"
Stung by the unfairness of it, she thrust her wrist right up under his nose.
"Nothing, right? I really don't wear any!"
"You really will try every last thing."
The look he gave her, brow knotted hard, was frightening enough that she yelped and dropped her hand. He turned the wheel and, unlike himself, muttered under his breath.
"Enough to drive a man mad. Of all things, a flower."
The problem was So-yul, who misheard like a flower as like shit. Remembering a whole day of running herself ragged until she was damp with sweat, she flung the window open.
"Then let's try purifying the air. Hahaha."
Her head throbbed at the sense that she had been stamped, one way and another, with a filthy reputation today—but what could she do? She was a resident with no time to wash. She squirmed and crumpled herself toward the open window.
After all those twists and turns they reached the front of the shop, and the car rolled to a stop. So-yul burst out of the passenger seat and bent into a bow.
"Thank you! Get home safe!"
She had armed herself with an exceedingly perfunctory smile for the farewell—only for Kang Dae-han to open the driver's door and step out.
"Doctor, aren't you leaving?"
He brushed the question aside without effort. A shopping bag hung from his hand, and with it he strode to the shop door, opened it, and walked in.
"We're closed—"
"Major Kang!"
The astonishing part was her brother, Ong Jun-soo, who came scrambling out the instant he laid eyes on Kang Dae-han.
"Loyalty!"
A half-peeled potato still clutched in one hand, he snapped a salute sharp enough to cut glass. Ong Jun-soo moving with that kind of speed and military snap was a rare sight—but harder still was tearing her eyes off Kang Dae-han as he received it. The pressure rolling off him seemed to weigh on the very air.
Kang Dae-han slowly lowered his gaze to Ong Jun-soo, one hand tucked in his pocket, and returned a loose salute with the other. Superior and subordinate. Anyone could see the chain of command at a glance.
Whoa. That's brutal. So this was the presence of a career military surgeon who had deployed four times.
"Sergeant Ong. You been well."
"Sergeant Ong Jun-soo! Nothing to report, sir! What brings you to a humble place like this, sir!"
Ong Jun-soo was roaring loud enough to lift the shop off its foundations. Kang Dae-han raised a hand and let it fall—a gesture to bring the volume down.
"Seeing you like this, Major Kang, it honestly feels like a dream, sir."
His decibels dropped, and Ong Jun-soo went so far as to tear up as he seized Kang Dae-han's hand in both of his.
"Enough. I came to give this back."
Kang Dae-han set the shopping bag into her brother's hands.
"Wait—why is this here, sir?"
At the unexpected contents, Ong Jun-soo's eyes went round as saucers. An Ongsimi T-shirt, the restaurant's own potato-dumpling shirt, stretched hopelessly out of shape by Kang Dae-han's massive frame, and a pair of military trousers. They were her brother's clothes—the ones So-yul had handed over to change into on the day she had accidentally dumped Ongsimi all over the man.
"Why did you have these, Major, sir?"
"Good question. Dr. Ong, why would I have them? Go on. Explain."
Kang Dae-han lifted a dark brow and looked at So-yul.
"Well, the thing is..."
Listen. Somehow I stripped your old commanding officer stark naked, dick and all. Everything he had on got soaked through, so I gave him your clothes to change into—
That was what she could not say. She was still spinning her wheels when Kang Dae-han let out a short breath of a laugh and spoke first.
"When Sergeant Ong was stationed in Cheorwon, he said the Ongsimi at his mother's shop was excellent. I remembered, and I stopped by once."
"But why would you have needed to change clothes..."
"It happened to rain that day, and I didn't have an umbrella. I got soaked to the skin. Dr. Ong saved me."
"Ahh, so that's why So-yul gave you clothes. Good job, my little sister! You've got an eye for my benefactor!"
Benefactor?
"Anyway, it's late. I'll see you tomorrow, Dr. Ong So-yul. Sergeant Ong, you take care as well."
An unexpected word had planted a question mark in her head, and already Kang Dae-han was opening the shop door and stepping out without a backward glance.
"Doctor, get home safe!"
"Major Kang! Come by anytime you're hungry, sir! We'll look after you with everything we've got! Loyalty!"
Ong Jun-soo saw him off in his stocking feet, and then the shop held only the two of them.
"Holy shit. Seeing Major Kang here. I still can't believe it."
"Anyway, what was that about a benefactor just now? Why is Dr. Kang our benefactor?"
The itch of it wouldn't leave her, so she asked, and Ong Jun-soo poked his little sister's temple—lightly, so it wouldn't hurt—and asked in return.
"You seriously don't remember Major Kang?"
"Today was the first time I met him."
"Hey! How could you forget? He saved both of us. Me and you."
"Quit circling and just say it."
"You remember the firearms accident, when I was serving in Cheorwon up in Gangwon Province?"
There was no way she could forget. The incident had made the newspapers.
It was while So-yul was a second-year pre-med student. People said pre-med was when you could afford to play a little, but So-yul had no money for tuition, and on top of her coursework she was running more than three tutoring jobs a day.
And back then she had been through something large enough that she had no choice but to keep moving even harder.
Skipping meals, squeezing in part-time shifts wherever a gap appeared, she dragged herself through exhausting days. In the middle of it, a call came. Her mother.
"So-yul... Your brother, he... sob."
Sloppy weapons handling. During marksmanship practice another soldier's stray round had hit her brother, and he had gone down.
By a mercy almost too large to believe, a career military surgeon had been there, and his swift action had kept her brother alive.
She couldn't leave her mother alone, not with a voice that sounded ready to collapse. So-yul packed at once and set out for the military hospital where her brother had been admitted.
Haa. Why am I so dizzy.
She was nearly there when a spinning vertigo took her, and So-yul blacked out.
She opened her eyes in the military hospital's emergency room, IV lines dangling off her in clusters.
"Do you wear that mouth just for show? You don't eat? Underweight, dehydrated, malnourished. If you don't want to die, lie still, get treated, and then go. Understood?"
A devastatingly handsome doctor had torn into her about something or other. Only a faint memory of the scolding remained.
And that doctor was Dr. Kang?
"Sso, look, look—you see where the bullet went into my shoulder? Major Kang clamped all that pouring blood with his bare hand, got me to the hospital, and pulled the round out clean without ever touching the artery. If it hadn't been for the Major, my shoulder would've been fucked. I'm telling you, I died and came back."
She had heard this tale of heroics from Ong Jun-soo well over five hundred times, and learning that the doctor in it was Kang Dae-han was astonishing all over again.
"So it was fate."
So-yul tilted her head and murmured it. After the Ongsimi incident, when they had met again at the hospital, she had taken it for a cursed bond and had even raised her voice over it. And yet he was the one who had kept both siblings alive.
"Fate, exactly! To think Major Kang is Sso's fellow. Whoa—but you're dead now. That man is not ordinary. Do a good job. Don't drag your brother's name through the mud. Discipline, and snap to it!"
"What are you even saying. What name is there for me to drag through the mud."
Grumbling at her brother, So-yul took the shopping bag from his hands and drew out what was inside. He must have laundered it with care before bringing it back; a faint scent of cotton rose from the Ongsimi tee.
"Give me the T-shirt. You've got plenty anyway."
"Why?"
"I just don't have anything to sleep in. I'm going. Close up properly so you don't make things hard on Mom tomorrow."
Whatever she was plotting, So-yul made off with her brother's tee and stepped out of the shop.
The walk led toward a villa not far from the shop.
"Why does this feel so steady."
All she held was a single T-shirt, and yet it felt oddly as if she were gripping a weapon. Maybe because she kept seeing him snap a handle clean in two. Small as she was, So-yul had swallowed more than her share of being dismissed in Orthopedic Surgery, and so Kang Dae-han—who settled anything and everything with that clean, unhesitating force—struck her as both enviable and dazzling.
"Right. From now on, this is a talisman!"
A soldier-doctor she had come to want to resemble, and a benefactor. For So-yul, her humiliating history wiped clean, it was the day Kang Dae-han came to mean something else entirely.