Chapter Text
Whenever Senior Inspector Han Yeo Jin invited Prosecutor Hwang Si Mok out for drinks or dinner, he said ‘yes.’ He never initiated these impromptu hangouts, but if he was available, he would humor her. This had been going on since the days when they first got thrown together on a case accidentally, and it had continued every time he happened to be in Seoul. Whether he was there for a special assignment or just passing through, they always made time for each other. Now that Si Mok had left the prosecution altogether and was enjoying a quieter life as a law professor, they had even more time to spend with each other.
If pressed to name one friend he had, Hwang Si Mok probably would have named her. Ever since they met all those years ago, she had exuberantly and unapologetically taken him as her friend. He didn’t bother putting up a fight, and she wasn’t so easy to argue with, anyway. Theirs was a relationship tempered through loss and disillusionment that had still come through to have mutual respect and appreciation.
Due to surgery during childhood, Si Mok found it difficult to process emotions or understand other people’s emotions, but Han Yeo Jin was someone he trusted implicitly, even when they were on shaky ground. Nowadays, their lives had calmed down to the point where Yeo Jin had established “Operation Feed SiMok,” which took the form of weekly dinners where she made sure he ate at least one proper meal per week. Truth be told, he still forgot to eat sometimes when engrossed in lesson plans or grading. So, she volunteered for that noble task.
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One late Spring evening, they blew off some steam in a pojangmacha. Yeo Jin wasn’t one to overdo it, but she was a little more stressed than usual that day. She had recently heard from her landlady that her rent was going up again.
“How are we supposed to survive when all the prices increase faster than we get raises?”
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“My landlady wants to increase my rent by ₩100K!”
“Well, that’s reasonable.”
“No, not for the year; for the month.” Yeo Jin thought that Si Mok wouldn’t have made that mistake if he hadn’t had a few drinks himself.
“Oh, how will you manage to pay that? Are you going to move?”
“Well, I can pay it, but I don’t want to,” she pouted.
The conversation fell into a lull after that while Si Mok contentedly munched his bar snacks. Yeo Jin asked a few questions about how his Mom was doing lately. He gave Yeo Jin the shock of her life when he mentioned that he had moved in with her.
“But it’s not for long,” he explained. Explaining was not a typical trait of his. It must have been the drinks once again.
“What happened?!”
He quickly described how after her husband had passed away, his mother had done some soul searching and reached out to him to come and stay while she looked for a house in the countryside.
“So, you’re just staying with her until your tenant’s lease is up?”
“Yes, it’s lucrative to rent that place out, but it doesn’t make sense if I’m here in Seoul now.”
At this point, Yeo Jin switched to water, and Si Mok followed suit.
“So, where’s your Mom moving to?” She didn’t want to pry too much about their living arrangements, and she suspected it was a bit like two senior cats who had agreed to disagree.
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Yeo Jin grew wistful hearing about the small house his mother was buying in a small town about an hour away and expressed that she wished she could live in a house someday.
“Don’t they have programs and so on for police officers to help them purchase homes?” Si Mok asked. He knew a thing or two.
“Yeah, they have a lottery, but I would be way down on the list because I don’t have a husband or kids, so unless you wanna marry me, I’ll be waiting on that list until retirement.”
With anyone else, Yeo Jin wouldn’t have made a joke like that. But it was Si Mok. She was 110% confident that of the feelings Si Mok had, few of them were for her, and any feelings he had toward her were of the professional collaboration persuasion.
So, Yeo Jin thought little to nothing of it. Perhaps her filter needed to be a bit stronger. She tended to speak off the cuff sometimes. That time she told her old coworkers she cried when the dumpling shop was closed, she actually had cried. But because she made it a joke, they took it as a joke. Phew, that one was close.