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CHOI JONGHYUN |
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But the build of the young boy was made for something more than flesh wounds. Tragedy had its way of trying to sneak through the cracks, and it found every place light managed to slip through just to try and tear it all asunder. At seven years of age, Jonghyun lost his father. The memory is fuzzy, at best, but it paints the picture even now when he thinks of it: the phone call, the television set turned to news, the burning of the plane. Jonghyun was too young to fully wrap his head around it until his sister explained it through a burst of tears. "Daddy is dead!" She screamed, mother still in shocked, hand to her mouth as she watched the scream. "Daddy is never coming home!"
At the funeral, a week after, Jonghyun remembered the taste of salt trickling into his mouth and little else.
The weeks that followed are more static than memory the same, as if Jonghyun himself has reached into the membrane of his thoughts and turned the dial all the way down. The flowers died in the kitchen, and the phone never stopped ringing. There was shouting, too, though Jonghyun knew it was not for his father because he was dead now — dead and buried, feeding worms all the while — but the shrill voice of his mother hardly made sense. Her days went bad, Jonghyun's sister taking up making lunch sandwiches, handling cash in hand when they walked home from class and stopped in shops. She was only nine, going on ten, and the number clings where all other memory fades.
Nine, going on ten, and acting like the trumpet player urged her feet to march sincerely.
For a while, things remained that way. Odd and awkward, colors awash in blooming flowers before they fell into the winter. His mother began a habit of breaking things, laughing after as if she hadn't any reason to care. Jonghyun thought it was funny, too, laughing with her when he passed until he realized she wasn't stopping each time; his smile faded down into something more set in stone as he made his way to his bedroom and closed himself off from her. She was broken too, he thought, nine years old and watching films. Mother was broken and no one was laughing about that.
You Mi never stopped her care. Even when she started going by 'Amy' to her friends for a while, she was there for Jonghyun, the tried and true expert at all-things-proper. She took such care of him, of both his mother and he, that Jonghyun made a pact to himself one night when he watched her say goodbye to her friends. If mother was broken and Youmi had stress, then Jonghyun would have to grow up to be able to protect them all. It was boyish, the whim of a child trying to string together the reality of a life he could never fully comprehend, but it managed to stick.
Even when they lost everything and the money ran out, it stuck. America managed to take away the nature of his accent, turned his voice box into a thing with a switch on it that came and went wherever he stood his ground, and it managed to take them from comfortable homes with cabinets full of goods to a small two bedroom apartment with a radiator that hummed too loudly and roaches that crawled too fast.
Jonghyun remembers marking down every one he managed to catch and kill, on the baseboard beneath the bunkbed he shared with Youmi there, but he's forgotten how many marks had earned their carving into the ground.
Quiet returned to the Choi family. It was simpler, but there. Hyosoon worked her way up in Delta and with their aid, she actually moved them into a better home: in Georgia, where things were a little more green again and not quite so run down. The radiator didn't hiss all night like some waiting snake, and Youmi had her own room again so she could enjoy her life. Which was good, because Jonghyun was going on fourteen by then and already learned that being alone was a better thing. Having lost all shades of friends already he made himself someone new in Atlanta, made himself someone he could manage.
Which he knows now was only a process he could undertake thanks to Hyosoon making enough money to afford martial arts classes, but that didn't matter. Not to the child. The child just took the classes and ran with them, earned his way up as hard and fast as he could, more dedicated to the arts than he'd ever been to learning. Because books, books were obnoxious. Stories were kind and gentle but books liked to treat you as if you had nothing else to do; Jonghyun never found comfort in a text book or a novel he couldn't find better out of the soft lips of someone reading it aloud.
And there were those that would, and could, read it aloud. Kelley came first, the sweetest girl Jonghyun had ever laid eyes on, far too old for him and much too put together. But she was kind, kinder than the first drizzle in a slow rain, and Jonghyun liked that. Liked it enough to risk asking her for meals together at first, confessing and wanting nothing more than to know her better. Their friendship grew and she would let him watch her dance, and he would try to teach her new things he'd learned in martial arts, pretending to be the guard to her kingdom of beauty. It made the memories that were still strong enough to be called mementos then start to fade, made the emptiness vanish for a while.
But there was light again and in that light, tragedy found a home.
It was 2:47 PM on the 23 March 2009, when Jonghyun saw the way a skull could crack beneath the weight of a car. Youmi was gone so fast that Jonghyun couldn't even scream. The salt returned to his mouth, though, and Kelley's voice was screaming louder than anything even as the whole of the school rushed to the ground to see what happened. And the car, the car tried to keep going before Jonghyun watched it fly into the air and crumple like paper, falling back into cement and crushing another car along the way, the sound of the engines and gasoline igniting burning through the sky as Kelly tried to pull at Jonghyun.
He was floating, too, shrouded in sparks and light before he looked into her terrified eyes and fell. Fell into an empty place and woke later in the hospital, with his mother still asking where her daughter was. It was the first thing she asked Jonghyun, too, shaking at his chest. "Where is she where is she?" Jonghyun doesn't remember having a voice to reply. He remembers the look in her eyes, the way she suddenly seemed as soft as porcelain despite the strength she carried every step with. Heavy porcelain, waiting to shatter underneath its own mass. She'd always been that, he supposed, and suddenly she did.
Trying to train was impossible. Jonghyun fought with everyone and everything along the way. Not having to be there because someone had to make sure his mother didn't hurt herself. Having to skip a course because there's more important things than a little fucking kid who throws cars around. He didn't get it. Not until he came home one day and saw two men in suits as grey as rain clouds standing on the porch. Jonghyun rushed them down, no questions asked, and found himself face down on the porch beneath a two step move he would have never guessed either of them could manage. The dust of the wood and pollen off the garden still brushes against his cheek some days, when he thinks of the way he died then. But he clears it with a finger and carries on, same as ever.
The CIA had heard what happened. They'd been searching for Requites like him, they said, boys and girls whose powers were hard for them to handle. The training with Safe Haven was great, they admitted, and he should go; but they knew he had to do more with it. The more, it got Jonghyun curious, curious enough to listen through their little test and answer back with all the empty loom of a boy who wasn't broken inside, just impenetrable. When he called out the attempt by them to have someone in a car outside trying to read his thoughts, they smiled and Jonghyun, he was confused. But they offered him a thing no one else could at the time: peace.
They offered to take care of his mother, so she could never break again.
For two years, Jonghyun trained in the offices in Langley. School was finished on exams, paperwork more fabrication than anything, because Jonghyun wasn't quite an agent. He was assigned to an operation consisting of a select few agents who would be used in times of dire need. Stressful assignments for anyone but them, was how they cast it, and Jonghyun ate it up better than anyone. So well, in fact, he offered to take on other missions first; in an effort to prove he could handle field work, he was assigned to run for one of the older agents working out of Colombia at the time. From Colombia to England, to Belgium to St. Petersburg Jonghyun traveled hand in hand with his agent, working crowds at parties, stealing information from databases, erasing video footage from phones and satellites and various cameras in the streets. He proved himself, time and time again, returning back to America just to take long drives out to see his mother at the only place that still uttered his real name.
She's never fully there these days, not even when she remembers Jonghyun or his name, but it's fine. She's happier and for that, Jonghyun lives with knowing that he makes the cracks now, makes dents in the world that will never be altered back again.
The light stopped getting in, too, except in slow drips. Relationships here and there, people he almost trusted before it fell apart. Except for one girl, a figure skater he had to meet on a recon mission at the Olympics. She'd always had the image of an exceptional professional, some daring girl who pushed it on the ice and didn't let herself be caught being anything but crisp and sharp as her blades. But when they'd met, she bite at him, and Jonghyun liked it. He liked it enough to offer her his email, so they could stay in touch, when he found out that they had themselves a mutual friend in common.
She was sort of dating Fells at the time, sure, but Jonghyun hadn't any intention of more than getting to know her more and better. But better became reliance, with her way of avoiding asking too many questions while still trying to be there for Jonghyun. He'd offer back to her what he could, including offers to murder annoyances, which she always laughed at; he wasn't sure if he laughed along to the sound because it was nice or simply because he suddenly meant it every time. These days, when she twinkles like light on her own, Jonghyun half wonders how long before something else breaks in the menagerie of life, but he puts it aside.
Because he couldn't protect Youmi, or his mother, but he can protect her. Now he can do that, better than anyone else alive.
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CHOI JONGHYUN |
