1. Today, the Indoor Weather is Overcast
“Stupid bastard.”
The curse struck like a slap, and the boy keeping lonely vigil over the funeral hall lifted his head.
The men who barged in wore pitch-black suits. Fifteen of them, give or take. The way they trampled through the funeral hall in their dress shoes completed the picture — textbook gangsters, down to the last detail.
The sheer force of their presence, as if they might overturn the entire hall at any moment, made Yieum’s body seize up on its own.
Surprisingly, they lined up in neat, orderly rows. Into Yieum’s frozen field of vision — too stunned to do anything at all — walked a single tall man, cutting unhurriedly through the middle of their ranks.
“All that over something as worthless as love.”
The low murmur that drifted out sounded exactly like a line from a drama. Yieum’s gaze snagged on the man’s face, caught on the faint curl of contempt at his lips.
Standing beneath the pale fluorescent light, the man looked exactly like a death god. The sharp, chiseled line of his profile was as cold as carved marble, and his pale skin held not a trace of human warmth.
Yieum stared blankly up at his stepfather’s memorial portrait and asked, silently —
Was that really the kind of man you worked under?
“Should’ve found himself a decent woman.”
The son of that “indecent woman” was none other than the chief mourner of this very funeral hall. Yieum’s gaze drifted slowly to the side, coming to rest on his mother’s face in the portrait beside it. The two of them had been enshrined together not merely because they had died in the same accident, at the same moment.
It was because, for both of them, the only person who could be called family was Yieum alone.
That was all.
Perhaps because of that, the hall had been quiet throughout. A few of his mother’s old friends. Yieum’s homeroom teacher and some classmates. And the occasional acquaintance of his stepfather who stopped by to pay their respects.
This was the first time a group this blatantly, unmistakably gangster had come barging in.
He had known from the start that his stepfather’s line of work wasn’t something to be proud of. But that was never a reason to think poorly of him. At the very least, among all the adults Yieum had ever known, none had been as genuinely adult as his stepfather.
And yet, toward that same stepfather’s portrait, the man unleashed words that sounded like a curse.
“Rot in hell, you son of a bitch.”
As if even crude profanity wasn’t enough to vent his fury, he spat on the floor. It was the first time any crack of emotion had shown through that arid face.
That impression lasted only a moment. He pulled out a cigarette, lit it with a disposable lighter. The flame that leaped from the flint swept across his face.
The crimson glow — tracing the clean cut of his jaw, skimming the straight ridge of his nose, staining his cold eyes red — burned itself into Yieum’s vision before vanishing.
He was completely snared, unable to move.
Sharp eyes that looked as though they had never once curved into a smile. The instant he met that parched, dry gaze, he felt as though he had glimpsed something he shouldn’t have seen. His heart beat in an unsteady, lurching rhythm.
The man lifted his chin again, arrogant as ever. His face, as he drew languidly from the cigarette, held nothing but a dry, expressionless mask. As though he had never spat a single curse in his life, pale blue smoke seeped slowly from between his sealed, unmoving lips.
He turned the lit cigarette upside down and pressed it into the incense burner. The short stub planted in the burner — where only ash had remained — sent up a stale, acrid plume, just like incense.
Before it, the man brought his hands together and bowed his head in silent tribute, as though none of what had just happened was real. Yieum, who had been following the line of his straight shoulders with his eyes, spoke before he could stop himself.
“That’s not right.”
His voice rang through the hall, clearer than he expected. The man and all his subordinates turned to look at him at once. Under the weight of a dozen and a half pairs of eyes, his shoulders shrank instinctively.
Even so, one thing was clear. That man standing alone at the front was the youngest among them all.
And yet he was unmistakably the one who led them.
Yieum fixed his gaze upward against its will to drop, and forced his hunched shoulders back. It took real courage to look directly into those utterly arid eyes.
He swallowed a dry lump in his throat and parted his cracked, chapped lips with effort.
“That’s not the cigarette my dad smoked.”
One of the man’s dark brows ticked upward. But that was all. He turned his head away, apparently losing interest, and tossed out casually —
“When did Bongwoo knock one out?”
“He’s a tumor that came attached to this little thing, sir.”
A burly man bowing at the waist whispered, holding up his pinky finger. None of it was surprising — being questioned through someone else while the person in question stood right there, being called a tumor to his face.
The young boy’s gaze drifted naturally toward the portrait. In the photograph, his stepfather was grinning like a fool. Right beside him, the woman who was an absurdly terrible person, smiling just the same.
He tried to smile along with them, but the corners of his mouth refused to move. He should have cried at least once by now, but the corners of his eyes were dry and scratchy. Yieum pressed the back of his hand firmly against his eyelids.
He had never learned how to grieve, not from anyone.
Was that why.
On impulse, he stretched his right hand out toward the gang boss and murmured —
“Give me one too.”
The man only looked down at Yieum in silence. A stark contrast to the heavies behind him, who stirred with expressions of pure disbelief.
He’s a gangster — slapping me across the face for insolence would be nothing, Yieum thought. If anything, maybe taking a few hits would give him an excuse to cry.
But the man, his face giving nothing away, simply turned the cigarette pack over and over in his hand. The same motion repeated two or three times, and then he tapped the bottom of the pack lightly. One cigarette slid up from the top, just as before.
Without sparing the white stick so much as a glance, Yieum watched only the gang boss’s face.
The truth was, he didn’t even know how to smoke. He’d never once thought he wanted to.
So why.
An impulse he couldn’t explain even to himself.
As if in answer to Yieum’s gaze, the man lifted the cigarette to his lips, bit it out of the pack, and lit it. Those sharp eyes stayed fixed on Yieum to the very end. Drawing deep from the freshly lit cigarette until his cheeks hollowed, the man took an unhurried step forward.
The sound of dress shoes echoed through the quiet funeral hall.
Yieum met him head-on without blinking once. The man’s lips seemed to twist upward — and then a cloud of acrid smoke was dashed directly into his face. The moment he instinctively squeezed his eyes shut and turned away, a taut, razor-edged voice came cutting through the air and lodged itself in his ear.
“Hey, kid.”
“…….”
Kid — of all things, the one word the boy, who was small even for his age, least wanted to hear.
Yieum’s eyes flew open. He narrowed the space between his brows and glared up at the man with everything he had. His petty defiance must have been amusing, because the man let out a short, derisive laugh and drew from his cigarette again.
He bent down to meet Yieum’s eye level and pinched his cheeks — soft, still covered in fine down — between his fingers. The pliant flesh compressed and his lips parted helplessly, like a goldfish gasping. Into that gap, the damp filter was suddenly pushed.
Careful that not a single ember might fall, Yieum pressed his lips shut around the filter. A satisfied smirk settled at the man’s mouth.
Then a rough index finger tapped lightly at Yieum’s cheek. Tap, tap.
The smoke that drifted out — like the finale to something — scattered unfailingly toward Yieum’s face.
This time, though, Yieum didn’t back away. Brow still furrowed, he held the man’s gaze with eyes that had, in their own way, some force behind them.
It fell far short of a threat.
The man simply smirked and shoved his hands into his pockets.
“Live a long life.”
A blessing, or a curse.
Yieum watched the man’s back for a long time as he walked away without a single glance behind him. The cigarette that had somehow come to cling to his lips burned slowly down.
The acrid smoke blurred his vision.
When he rubbed his eyes, the heavies who had tidied up with crisp precision were already gone from sight.
Yieum stood there for a moment, dazed. Then he held the cigarette between his fingers the way the man had shown him.
He stood in the empty funeral hall a little while longer, mind blank, before his feet carried him toward the condolence book table. His fingertips flicked through the pages of the guest register, and a name scrawled in wild, slashing strokes caught his eye.
Cheon Jaehyeok?
He looked again — actually, it seemed like it might be Cheon Chaehyeok.
“Hey, hey! Don’t you know this venue is non-smoking?”
Just then, the venue manager’s shout came barreling in, shattering the stillness.
Yieum looked down at the cigarette tucked between his fingers. Under normal circumstances he would have apologized immediately and put it out, but…
This was the man who had looked at Yieum with undisguised contempt from the moment he’d come to arrange the funeral hall.
So much so that the police officer handling his parents’ accident had eventually stepped in on his behalf. A defiance he hadn’t even known he had simmered quietly in a corner of his heart.
“You little — where were you raised, ignoring an adult when they’re speaking to you?!”
Perhaps because he had, quite literally, become a child without parents. Somehow, he felt entirely ready to let things go however they would go.
Yieum recalled the way Cheon Chaehyeok had done it, and drew the smoke into his mouth. Something sharp and unpleasant coated the inside of his mouth in a thick, choking layer.
“And these marks, what are you going to do about these marks! Coming in here and tracking up the floor with their shoes — tsk!”
The black footprints on the floor weren’t Yieum’s to begin with. Yet the manager was trying to dump every last bit of the blame onto him.
“You, as a student, take responsibility for all of this and——”
Mid-tirade, face flushed crimson, Yieum breathed out — hoo — a puff of smoke in his direction.
He was imitating Chaehyeok, but the smoke that came out wasn’t nearly as long or dense. The wisps that dissolved almost immediately in front of his nose were feeble and thin.
But it was enough. More than enough to drive the manager’s fury to the very top of his head.
Nostrils flaring, the manager’s blunt hand shot up high above his head. That demon-like face overlapped with the face of his biological father, the one who used to hit him.
