#1. Healing? No! Zombie Apocalypse!
If someone were given a new life, what would they hope for most? Abundant wealth? Meaningful relationships? Or perhaps a warm, loving family — or a certain, secure future.
Well, since what people feel they lack and what they wish for differs from person to person, the answers would vary wildly. But at the very least, what I wanted was a comfortable life.
Money — I don’t need a lot, just enough to eat and get by. Relationships — they don’t have to be anything grand; one friend I can truly open my heart to is enough. Family? It’d be nice if we got along, but if not, I didn’t mind.
They say let go of greed and luck will find you — and sure enough, I ended up with everything a comfortable life requires.
Wealth enough that I’d never have to work a day in my life, and a family that dotes on me like I might shatter if the wind blows too hard, like I might disappear if they hold too tight.
Of course, nothing in this world is perfect, and there was one drawback.
“Time for your morning meds.”
“Now? Can’t I take them later? I ate so much I’m stuffed.”
“It’s been exactly thirty minutes since you ate. You keep putting it off and you’ll forget again.”
“Fine.”
I exhaled deeply in response, and my oldest hyung came over, offering a warm smile as he pressed a glass of water and the morning medication into my hands.
They were just tiny pills, barely the size of a fingernail, but the sheer number of them made the handful feel surprisingly heavy. One, two, three…… I could’ve sworn there were twelve pills just last week, and now there were fourteen. I looked up at my oldest hyung with a silent what happened?, but he only gave a small tilt of his head, as if to say don’t worry about it, just take them.
I knew that when he got like this, no answer I wanted would come no matter what I said, so I obediently tipped the pills into my mouth.
“Good. Don’t forget you have a hospital visit this afternoon.”
“Okay.”
“And contact me if anything comes up, alright?”
“I know. Hurry and get to work. You’ll hit traffic at this rate.”
“Why are you so eager to get rid of me? Are you hiding something?”
“Hiding what? Look at the time — it’s 7:30.”
My oldest hyung worries too much.
When I grumbled softly about it, he laughed, ruffled my hair, and disappeared into his room. Right — the one and only downside of this life was this frail, feeble body of mine that couldn’t last a single day without medication.
Running was out of the question; even walking for long was impossible. So despite being born into a good family, I spent my days shuttling between home and the hospital rather than traveling anywhere. Naturally, I never went to school either — I was homeschooled instead.
Still, I had no complaints. As long as I didn’t push myself, I wouldn’t be bedridden, and there were always people around to look after me — hyungs who were like friends, who’d do anything I said. Besides, on days when the weather was nice, I could even take short walks. Compared to my past life, this felt like absolute freedom, and I was happy.
“Hyung’s heading out, okay? Miss me and bear with it.”
“That’s exactly what I want to say to you. Stop video calling me while you’re at work.”
“But that’s because you don’t respond to messages in time.”
“Five minutes. You can wait five minutes.”
“Haaa…… How am I supposed to leave my youngest behind…… Hmm?”
I waved my hand to tell him to get going already, but my oldest hyung drooped his eyebrows into a pitiful expression and then suddenly pulled me into a tight embrace and made a whining sound. Here we go again. I let out an exaggerated sigh and gently stroked the back of his head.
His fine, soft hair shifted and tangled under my hand. Even with his carefully styled hair now completely ruined, he didn’t seem to mind at all as he rubbed his cheek insistently against the nape of my neck.
If I let this go on any longer, he’d genuinely be late. I quietly glanced around to check where the twin hyungs were. Fortunately, it seemed neither of them had come out of their rooms yet.
“……I’ll give you a kiss, so hurry up and go to work.”
“Really?”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than my oldest hyung’s eyes lit up and he immediately stepped back, lowering his head and offering one cheek with a slight tilt. He’d clearly been stalling for exactly this from the start.
Perhaps because of the large age gap between us, or perhaps because he’d raised his younger siblings alone after our parents passed — my oldest hyung seemed to think of me not as a brother but as something more like a son. Since our parents died when I was six, I suppose there wasn’t much difference.
When I tilted my head up and pressed my lips to his cheek with a small peck, my oldest hyung — that is, Baek Hyunwoo — broke into a smile so content it was as if he had the whole world in his hands. His dimples deepened, and the mole beneath his eye disappeared slightly behind the swell of his aegyo sal. I’d been looking at this face every single day for fifteen years, yet it still made my head swim. How can a man be this pretty.
“I’m heading out.”
As though it were only natural, Baek Hyunwoo pressed his lips to my cheek in return. Rather than soft, the touch that grazed past felt cool enough that I almost worried something was wrong with him. I knew he ran colder than most people, but it still caught me off guard sometimes.
“Okay, take care.”
With a light wave, Baek Hyunwoo swept out the door with his coat billowing behind him. Alright — one down, two more to send off and——
“……!”
I turned around smiling, and the second oldest hyung, who definitely hadn’t been there a moment ago, was standing there like a shadow. I was so startled I couldn’t even scream and stumbled back a few steps — he must’ve thought I was going to fall, because he urgently wrapped his arm around my waist.
“……Hyung! I told you to make some noise when you move around!”
I’d been so shocked that it felt like all the blood had drained from my body and pooled downward, leaving my back damp with cold sweat.
“Sorry.”
My second oldest hyung, Baek Beomho, cast his gaze slightly downward and apologized in a tone that didn’t sound particularly sorry. Among the four of us, he had the biggest build and the stiffest impression — the type that others might easily feel looked down upon by — but in truth, he was the most tender and sensitive of all of us.
“It’s okay.”
Naturally, the apology he’d just given was surely filled with sincerity regardless. I patted his arm to show that I really was alright, and he slowly loosened his hold — but rather than heading to the entryway, he just stood there gazing down at me.
“You’re heading out now, right? Take care.”
“…….”
“…….”
“…….”
“What?”
Even after I’d said my goodbye, he neither responded nor moved a muscle. If anything, the way his lips pressed together more tightly than usual told me he was feeling a bit put out about something. My second oldest hyung had a tendency to be quietly sulky and couldn’t bring himself to say things outright, so it was usually up to me to pick up on it — and this time was no different.
“I’m an adult now. Doesn’t it feel a little weird?”
“There’s no way I’d ever feel that way about you.”
Should I be thankful for that……
I rose slightly onto my tiptoes and pressed my lips to Baek Beomho’s cheek — the hyung who wanted a kiss but couldn’t say so and was simply standing there stiffly. Calling it a kiss felt almost too cute a word for what it was; it barely amounted to a light touch and pull away, but my second oldest hyung seemed satisfied, the rigid set of his eyes softening into something gentle.
Instead of bowing his head down to me, he gripped my waist with his large hands and lifted me clean off the ground, planting a kiss right beside my eye. I’d only had my pride hurt the first time something like this happened — by now it was practically routine, so it didn’t faze me at all.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Just make sure you come back in one piece. Don’t come home with new injuries like last time.”
“Okay.”
He’s good at answering, I’ll give him that.
Instead of nodding, I pressed my finger into the scar on his face. The deep scar that cut from beneath his left eye all the way down to his lips hurt to look at every time I saw it. He was born with such a handsome face — why won’t he get it treated.
Even if it couldn’t be erased completely, it’d be nice to at least fade it. What kind of work was he doing that he kept coming home with scars like this?
“……Excuse me, when does my turn come?”
While I was lost in thought, a hand with particularly prominent knuckles suddenly intruded into the space between us. With that, Baek Beomho, who had been quietly presenting his face, stepped back and made his way to the entryway — and only after waving him off did I finally turn my gaze to the last one heading out for the day.
“Don’t tell me you want one too, hyung.”
“You’re not going to give me one? That’s a little hurtful……”
The man saying this while slumping his shoulders dramatically was Baek Yitae — my third oldest hyung, born at the same time as Baek Beomho. Being fraternal twins, not only did they look nothing alike, their personalities were also completely different, to the point where it was sometimes hard to believe they were twins at all.
He’d grown his hair out to his shoulders without ever trimming it, yet bleached it stark white. Starting from his eyebrows, then his ears, lips, and cheeks — he’d gotten piercings everywhere, and eventually even came home one day with his tongue split in two.
If only it had stopped there. Once he’d pierced everything he could, he apparently got bored, because he went ahead and turned his own body into a canvas, tattooing it all over. His features were already sharp — borderline severe — and with tattoos layered on top of everything, he looked every bit the delinquent.
“If you don’t give me one, I’m not going to work……”
“The café runs just fine without you, and you know it.”
But his personality was a complete opposite. If you took the word ‘sloth’ and made it into a person, that person would be my little hyung — I’d thought that more times than I could count. That’s how lazy, sluggish, and yes, even sleepy Baek Yitae was. In that one regard — looking nothing like what you’d expect from his personality — he and Baek Beomho really were twins after all.
