Chapter Text
Lies, Jinah often reflected, needed tending to like gardens.
One did not simply tell a lie and walk away.
It sent roots beneath foundations and cracked stone. It climbed walls one did not remember building. It flowered into contradictions that attracted curious eyes the way sweet fruit drew birds. Eventually someone arrived with pruning shears, official forms, and inconvenient questions asked in polite voices.
The finest lies were not the grand ones. The finest lies were watered every day until they became indistinguishable from truth.
He had been among the first children to perish during the early years of the Gates, back when every dungeon break still shocked the nation and every casualty was counted aloud on the evening news. Yet where his name ought to have lingered in the public memory, it instead vanished beneath the weight of larger tragedies. Television anchors spoke instead of the miraculous emergence of Awakened Hunters. Politicians stood behind polished podiums promising that humanity would never again be so vulnerable. Newspapers filled their front pages with photographs of smiling S-ranks shaking hands while grieving families were quietly pushed to the back pages.
Sung Jinwoo became another number, another statistic lost to time. He was yet one more child swallowed by history before history had even learned his name.
Yet her brother had also lived every day since.
When Mother collapsed into her endless sleep and the hospital became her new address, no social worker ever arrived. No distant relative appeared, summoned by paperwork to become her temporary guardian. No government official knocked upon the apartment door asking whether a middle schooler ought to be living alone.
Somewhere, someone glanced at a file and approved to allow one “Sung Jinwoo” to become the guardian of a teenage girl. The file was closed and forgotten.
The apartment lease was easily transferred over to “Sung Jinwoo”. Electricity bills arrived addressed to him along with the water, gas, internet, and more. Tax notices appeared every spring with comforting punctuality, addressed to a man whose funeral portrait still gathered dust atop the family altar. Even the occasional advertisement offering him discounted life insurance, which Jinah found darkly amusing.
Government offices were enormous beasts that fed upon paperwork, and if the proper papers continued being filled out on time, they rarely looked up to inspect who had thrown the meat into their mouths. The greatest advantage of bureaucracy was not its efficiency. It was its laziness and indifference.
People heard her say "my older brother" and saw what they wished to see rather than look deeper.
A tall young hunter, perhaps. A quiet man, probably D or E ranked, that risked his life clearing small gates for pitiful wages before collapsing into bed for 12 hours afterwards. He must be the sort of insignificant hunter who risked his life clearing small gates for pitiful wages before collapsing into bed for twelve hours afterward.
Of course he never answered the intercom - the poor fellow was recovering from injuries. Of course his younger sister handled grocery shopping in his stead; he must be exhausted.
And of course nobody recognized his name from raid reports for there were thousands of low-ranked hunters.
Reality offered only a handful of details and human imagination built the entire man.
No one imagined that the older brother spent most afternoons asleep atop the refrigerator.
No one questioned why the "older brother" never answered the telephone. Or why every signature submitted to government offices resembled an ugly smear of ink that looked suspiciously like someone had pressed a cat's paw onto the paper. They just assumed the family pet cat got into the ink and walked over the paperwork again.
Government clerks possessed remarkably little imagination. They cared only that the paperwork arrived before the deadline.
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The Sung family cat never possessed an official name.
Six-year-old Jinah, who understood death only as an unpleasant word adults whispered when they thought children were asleep, had burst into inconsolable tears the moment someone suggested naming the stray cat anything other than Jinwoo.
"No!"
She had wrapped both tiny arms around the filthy black cat discovered shivering behind the apartment building.
"This is Oppa!"
Her face had buried itself in matted black fur.
"He came back!"
The adults exchanged those helpless looks adults always exchanged when confronted by children's grief. They tried explaining that people did not become cats after death, but the cat promptly bit the veterinarian and escaped the examination table. Then climbed directly into Jinah's lap and refused to leave.
The veterinary records listed him simply as “Sung Cat” but her parents never got Jinah to call the cat anything other than “Jinwoo”.
Exhaustion won the argument and thus the name stuck.
The cat joined the Sung family bearing the same name as her deceased brother.
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Her earliest memories contained short snapshots of a blurry older brother. A warm hand rested awkwardly atop her head during thunderstorms. A boy pretending monsters beneath her bed feared him more than she feared them. A familiar laugh echoed down apartment hallways turned hazy in her memories with time.
Children forgot quickly and easily.
Her later memories overwrote her earliest ones.
The warm black fur and the steady rumble of purring against her ribs whenever rain battered the windows chased away or she woke up scared about possibly monsters lurking around her bedroom. Golden eyes watched patiently from the staircase whenever she ran around the hallways, laughing and screaming at the top of her lungs.
Mother eventually started laughing instead of crying. "Your brother's watching over you again."
Father inevitably corrected her. "Our eldest son is merely on his second life."
Then, after a thoughtful pause, he added, "...Or perhaps his third."
The joke persisted.
The joke persisted so long that eventually it ceased being one.
Jinwoo attended birthday parties along with Jinah, seated beside carefully wrapped presents with profound suspicion.
His whiskers twitched as he supervised Jinah in the parks and intervened with a loud hiss if it looked like JInah was getting bullied.
He gladly accepted fish offered beneath the dining table as payment for listening to multiplication tables recited aloud.
Sometimes he walked Jinah to and from school whenever her parents weren’t careful enough to catch him from slipping outside when the front door opened.
When Father returned from work, Jinwoo always waited beside the front door five minutes before the familiar footsteps climbed the apartment stairs. Even after Sung Il-Hwan disappeared and after newspapers quietly shifted from missing to presumed dead, Jinwoo continued waiting.
Cats, Jinah learned, loved too stubbornly to surrender habit.
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He was ancient, that much every veterinarian agreed upon.
"He’s quite elderly."
"But... he's perfectly healthy."
Another frowned at the X-rays. Another checked bloodwork twice.
"This doesn't make sense."
Sung Jinwoo the cat was over 20 years old, yet his fur remained as pitch black as ever and his joints never stiffened from arthritis. He leapt fences with effortless grace while cats half his apparent age watched resentfully from below.
Neighborhood dogs scattered before him like poorly disciplined soldiers fleeing an emperor inspecting rebellious provinces.
He had exactly the amount of arrogance appropriate for an immortal creature inhabiting a mortal world.
Once, when Jinah had still had enough free hours to wonder about impossible things back before the bills started to overwhelm her, she had crouched on the living room floor with a cat carrier in one hand and a towel in the other, studying the old black tom with narrowed eyes.
"You're cheating."
Jinwoo, loafed comfortably atop the refrigerator again, slowly opened one golden eye.
"You are." She pointed accusingly. "Normal cats aren't this fast."
He blinked slowly.
"You've dodged three appointments already."
He gave another slow blink.
"You know what the carrier is."
She climbed up on a dining chair and lunged for the top of the refrigerator.
But the cat vanished. One moment he occupied the refrigerator; the next he stood atop the bookshelf across the room without so much as disturbing a single loose sheet of paper.
Jinah stared. "...That's impossible."
The cat began licking one paw ever so casually.
“You’re impossible.”
She tried again, but he slipped beneath the dining table before her fingers reached him.
The veterinarian merely sighed when she called to reschedule again. "Again?"
"...Again."
"You know, most cats slow down as they age."
Jinah looked out the apartment window toward the balcony where Jinwoo laid down under a patch of sunlight. "...Mine didn't get the memo. Maybe he awakened where we didn't notice," she tried to joke to the vet and lessen the receptionist's annoyance about yet another rescheduled appointment. "Hunters have magic, gates exist, so maybe animals can awaken too."
Jinwoo yawned and tried to bat off the butterfly circling around him.
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Wondering became a luxury along with fresh fruit and new clothes. She had more urgent issues than trying to corral Jinwoo for his semiannual check up.
Would the electricity stay on another month?
Would Mother's treatment continue if the hospital invoice remained unpaid another week?
Could rice be stretched into three meals instead of two?
Compared to such concerns, Jinwoo felt oddly unimportant. As long as he continued to sleep in her bed and eat his food, he was at the bottom of her priority list.
Still, every now and then, instead of returning proudly with some unfortunate sparrow dangling from his mouth or an entire fish suspiciously larger than anything found in the neighborhood pond, Jinwoo would stroll through the apartment door carrying a glowing mana crystal.
He always deposited it in the middle of the kitchen floor, the crystal still covered in mud and other questionable stains. Then he sat beside it with his tail wrapped neatly around his paws and chest puffed out with unmistakable satisfaction like any respectable housecat presenting today's successful hunt.
The first time, Jinah thought she had somehow won the lottery. She spent nearly an hour simply turning it over beneath the kitchen light and watching blue light ripple through translucent crystal.
"Jinwoo-"
The cat chirped proudly.
"-where did you get this?"
He blinked.
"Did..." She hesitated. "Did someone drop it in the middle of the street?"
She held it for three days for fear the police would come knocking on the door for it before she sold it to pay the overdue rent and buy some proper vegetables instead of instant ramen.
That dinner, she cried quietly in relief.
The second crystal inspired considerably less gratitude. She snatched it from the floor before Jinwoo had even finished setting it down.
"...Whose is this?"
The cat tilted his head and started grooming his shoulder.
"Jinwoo, You didn't steal this from somebody, did you? Did you rob a hunter? No, that doesn’t make sense. Cats can't rob hunters, can they?"
For a sleepless week, she imagined furious A-rank hunters knocking upon the apartment door demanding the return of the cyrstal. She couldn’t identify its rank, but she knew it was a higher grade than the first.
Yet no one came demanding it back.
The third crystal arrived two weeks later. This time she merely sighed.
"Again? You're impossible."
Jinwoo meowed and followed her down the stairs and out into the streets where she quietly located the same broker as last time who was willing to purchase unregistered mana crystals from middle-school girls without insisting upon paperwork, hunter licenses, or stories best left untold.
There was enough money left over from the bills that she stood for nearly ten minutes in front of a bakery window before finally walking inside and buying a whole strawberry cake before she went to the grocery store for a salmon fillet.
The black cat sniffed at the strawberry cream cake before stealing the rest of salmon she had prepared for dinner instead.
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The Red Gate appeared on a Tuesday.
Jinah recognized this because Tuesday was bath day and Jinwoo despised baths with a religious conviction.
Each Tuesday followed identical patterns: she’d prepared towels and he would sense betrayal. By the time she had him corralled in the bathroom within her sights and turned around to fill the tub, he would manage to vanish.
Eventually he would return, damp from rainwater or pond water instead, smelling faintly of wet asphalt, alleyways, and whatever poor decisions occupied the secret lives of cats.
All she expected from him was to return before dinner where she would eventually force him to surrender to a hard scrubbing in the bathroom one way or another.
But that night, the evening news reported an emergency evacuation after an unstable Red Gate had manifested inside an abandoned warehouse district. Hunter casualties were unknown.
Jinah barely paid much mind to the TV.
Jinwoo always liked to wander; the cat would return as usual.
She filled his food bowl and evening stretched quietly around the apartment.
She ate her rice and kimchi along with some spicy tofu stew while the cat food remained untouched.
By midnight the bowl still remained full but she had gone to bed with the window to the balcony left open for Jinwoo to slink through.
By dawn, as she got ready for school, Jinah found the bowl still full and something cold settled beneath her ribs.
Her father was gone, her mother in the hospital, and now her brother was missing.
She stood alone in the silent apartment, listening to the refrigerator hum softly in the absence of familiar purring.
For the first time since she was six years old, the apartment felt empty. In that terrible silence, a thought she had refused to entertain for years finally forced itself into the light.
Am I always meant to lose everyone I love?