1

/waking up to ash and dust/

Kim Nana held the armrests of the hospital in a death-grip. It felt like she was breaking inside, all the nerves concentrated in a tight ball in her stomach.

He'll be fine, he'll be fine. She said over and over to herself, trying to ignore the bloodstains on the knees of her suit. And that that was the same chant she'd said during her parents' desperate and ultimately pointless surgeries all those years ago.

Outside the private waiting room she could dimly hear the noise of reporters clamoring for a scoop on the near assassination of President Choi and the hero who'd taken the bullet for him. It grew briefly louder as the door swung open, and then dimmed again as it shut.

Someone crouched down before her. Nana managed to focus her eyes long enough to get a good look at her companion. "Shin Eun-ah." She managed a smile for her partner, before it twisted into a grimace.

Eun-ah forced a paper cup into her hand. "Drink this." She instructed, worry laced through her tired voice. "You've been here for hours, no food, no drink. You need something."

Nana looked down tiredly into the brown goo. It didn't look very appetizing. Lee Yoon-sung loved her coffee. He always made her make it for him. She stuck it between her knees, keeping her hands wrapped around its welcoming warmth. "Have you seen the doctors?" She said, surprised at how rough her voice sounded. She hadn't used it for a while.

Eun-ah hesitated, and then nodded. "The would-be assassin is dead."

Nana closed her eyes. Yoon-sung's father. The man, who despite all his rage and hate, Yoong-sung had loved. The man with the cold, cold eyes. "Lee Yoon-sung?"

Eun-ah's silence was longer. Nana's eyes flew open. "Eun-ah?"

"It doesn't look good." Eun-ah's usually good-humored face looked drawn, as if someone had penciled in age marks around her eyes and mouth over the past few hours. "Unni…"

Nana felt like she was choking. Why did everyone she love wind up here, in the cold hygiene of hospitals, fading away into tubes and bleeping machinery? Was she a curse?

"Is there someone I should call? Does he have family?"

Nana bit her lip. "His mother…Ahjusshi…Soo-hee unni." Oh God, unni, who had lost the prosecutor, and now would lose another friend. His mother, still in the hospital fighting her cancer, who had just found her son. Ahjusshi…

"His mother." Eun-ah caught at the phrase eagerly. "Do you have her number?"

Nana nodded numbly, and dug her cell out of her bag, sliding through the numbers until she found the appropriate one. Her thumb hovered over the dial number, but she couldn't bring herself to punch it. Ahjumma's voice on the other end would bring this all home in a way nothing else could.

"Can you do it?" She said, thrusting the phone at her friend. "Her name is Lee Kyung-hee. She's lovely. She…" She wants me to marry her son, for us all to live happily together, to leave the past where it belongs. Buried.

But she couldn't say any of those things.

Eun-ah just nodded and took the phone. She pressed the dial button, and after a few rings began an earnest conversation with the person on the other end of the line.

Nana found herself gasping, and had to hunch over her knees wrapping her arms (coffee cup still clenched in one hand) around her midsection. "Nana? Nana! Ahjumma, you know where to find us? Alright, I have to go." Eun-ah put the phone down, and knelt before her friend. "Nana, are you alright?"

No, Nana found herself mouthing to her blood-soaked knees over and over again. No, and I'll never be alright again, do you understand that? Because I knew he might die, but I was stupid enough to hope he wouldn't. And now he might never wash my hair again, or let me flip him in judo, or engage in stupid heroics just because he wants to change the world. The city hunter might never hunt again.

There was that brief burst of noise again, heralding someone entering the waiting room.

Eun-ah's hand froze on Nana's head, then lifted away, to be replaced by a full arm wrapped around her shoulders. It was enough of a warning. Nana looked up to meet the tired face of a doctor in pale scrubs. He looked as if he had lived through all his worst nightmares this past night, and woken up to find they were all real.

In a dim sort of awareness, Nana decided she liked that face. It meant he cared. Too many doctors didn't, she'd found.

Through that dimness, the doctor's words penetrated. It was by Eun-ah's arm tightening around her that Nana realized what was being said before the actual words processed.

I'm sorry. We tried everything. He's gone.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Nana tasted ashes and dust, and to wipe it away she took a swig of her coffee. "It's not sweet enough." She told them, aware that to them it was irrelevant, a symptom of shock.

But to her, to her and Yoon-sung, it was the most relevant of all things. Because she would never make coffee sweet enough again. Because no coffee, no matter how much sugar she put in, even if she made it just as he liked it, would ever be sweet enough to get this taste of bitterness out of her mouth.