5Ep.. Someone Has to Fall

"I know. It's been a few days now."

After those words settled into the dark, neither of them said anything for a long while.

Jiwon just fidgeted with the bottle cap in her hand. For hours she had been perched on the assumption that he didn't know. The box she'd pretended not to see, the apology she'd swallowed back down her throat, the face she hadn't been able to turn to him for three days straight — all of it had leaned on the belief that he still didn't know. And just now the floor had dropped out from under it.

There was nothing left to hide on this floor now. Strangely, that fact loosened something that had been clamped tight. With no place to hide, she could suddenly breathe.

Jiwon looked at him. This time she didn't look away.

"…Since when."

"You mean the list?" Dohyun was watching the tip of the lantern wick. The flame, turned down one notch dimmer, left only half his face in yellow and surrendered the rest to the dark. "I had a feeling a while back. It became certain about three days ago."

Three days. Jiwon counted the number to herself. Which meant that for three days he had known, and still come in to the same desk every morning, packed half his things away, and calmly handed her documents to sign. For those three days she hadn't once looked him in the face, and each time he had bowed to her all the same, composed.

"So why didn't you say anything?"

"And if I had?" Dohyun looked at her. There was no reproach in his eyes. "You'd just have had a few more hard days, ma'am."

Jiwon's fingertips went still on the bottle cap.

"Don't try to apologize," he said first, before she could even open her mouth. "You didn't decide it. The company decided it, and you just happened to be in the chair that stamps the paperwork. If anything, I'm glad it was you sitting in that chair—"

"Lee." Jiwon's words came a little quick. "Don't say it like that."

Dohyun fell silent.

There were things he didn't know. That his name at the bottom of that list hadn't been decided by the company but was a spot someone had dug out for him. And, separate from that, that she carried an older debt of her own, one that had been sinking for three years. Knowing neither, he was trying to lift her guilt off her shoulders in her place. Right now that kindness hurt like a punishment.

Jiwon picked up the water bottle from the desk. When she shook it, a shallow sound came from the bottom. Two mouthfuls left, maybe. She opened the cap and held it out toward him.

"You drink it, Lee."

"You have it, ma'am."

"Just listen to me for once, tonight." Her voice dropped without her meaning it to. "Let me look after someone else, just once."

Dohyun looked at her for a moment. His face showed that he'd caught his own words from earlier — when he had handed her the bottle — coming back to him. He didn't refuse again; he took the bottle and swallowed a mouthful. That was the one and only thing Jiwon had been able to control the whole night.

She woke her phone screen: eleven percent. It was still a long way to nine in the morning, and to the dawn when the water would drain. Among all the things running down, only the mouthful he'd just drunk sat on the side of things that had grown.

"Doesn't it make you angry?" Jiwon asked.

"What does?"

"Getting cut like this. On a night like this, of all nights trapped in here with me, sharing the last of the water on top of it." She shifted the lantern a little. The edge of the light slid up to his eyes. "If it were me, I'd have punched a wall at least."

Instead of answering, Dohyun gave a brief smile. It was that strangely serene smile she'd seen a few hours earlier, when their eyes had met beside the box. Only this time the loneliness hanging off the end of it was a little clearer in the dark.

"What would getting angry change?" He turned his gaze back to the lantern flame. "I already tried all of that, three years ago."

Three years ago.

Those words hung once more in the darkness of the floor. Jiwon knew she had to ask what lay behind them, and at the same time she didn't want to ask. What he had burned through so completely three years ago that left him this composed now — half of that answer she already knew. The other half she had kept her eyes shut to for three years, because she didn't want to know it.

The lantern flame wavered once. Following that flicker, Jiwon's memory was dragged backward — to a certain afternoon when no red emergency light would ever come on, when the fluorescent lamps burned white and bright.

It was the fourth day after the project had collapsed.

Executive Director Kang's office was, as always, coolly bright. Afternoon sunlight came through the blinds in stripes and lay across the conference table, and on top of it the documents about the collapse were squared away in neat order. Jiwon sat before them. Her face was that of someone who had barely slept in four days.

"It's been chaos, hasn't it," Director Kang said, adjusting his glasses. His tone was consoling, but his eyes, as always, did not smile. "The site's been cleared. Lucky no one was hurt. It nearly went badly."

"…Yes," Jiwon answered shortly.

"Now, then. We need to tidy up the aftermath." With his fingertips he slid a single sheet toward her. Jiwon knew what it was without looking. A draft of the incident cause report. "There'll be an audit from above. Where the cause lay, where the responsibility lay — we need a clean, tidy picture."

"The cause was…" Jiwon began. Her throat was dry. "Forcing the unit cost and the deadline down too hard at the design stage is what—"

"Team Lead." Director Kang cut her off gently. The gentleness made it colder. "That's a picture drawn from above. And a picture drawn from above isn't for the top to answer for — your job is to make sure the top doesn't have to answer for it."

Jiwon looked at him. Just as, three years later in that sealed-off floor, she would be unable to meet Dohyun's face head-on, in that moment she could not meet Director Kang's eyes.

"Let's be realistic." Director Kang leaned forward. His voice was low and clear. "If this whole thing gets shaken, the team is gone. You, your team members, three years of work — all of it. If my office gets shaken, what's above it gets shaken, and then this company gets shaken. Nobody wants that. Right?"

"…"

"So the cause is best pinned at the working level. Something missed at the drawing-review stage. One person. Clean." He looked at her over his glasses. "Someone has to have their name put down for the audit to close. That's the way everyone survives."

The room went quiet. The stripes of the blinds shifted across the table very slowly.

Jiwon looked at the document. There weren't many people in this room who truly knew where the cause had lain. And she was in a position where she could not say that truth out loud. Because the moment she put it into words, the one who collapsed wouldn't be the company — it would be her.

"If I write that the review was missed at the working level," Jiwon's voice cracked a little, "then that… would be different from what actually happened."

"What actually happened." Director Kang smiled faintly. "Nobody looks at what actually happened. What the audit looks at is paper. And that paper is right there in front of you."

He drew out a fountain pen and laid it on the document. Without a sound.

"You settle it, Team Lead. Whose name goes down." Director Kang rose from his seat. "You know best of all. Who was in that spot."

The door closed, and the room was left with Jiwon, that single sheet of paper, and the fountain pen.

Jiwon sat there for a long time. The 'Responsible Party' field on the document was blank. There were only a few names that could go in that blank, and one of them was her own. And another was — the name of the person who always stayed until the very end, holding on to the one decimal place no one else bothered to look at.

The fountain pen lay before her, having written no name yet.

"Ma'am?"

At Dohyun's voice, Jiwon came back to the lantern light.

"Are you all right? You went somewhere for a moment there." He set the bottle back down on her side. The water was truly at the bottom now.

"…It's nothing," Jiwon said. She picked up the bottle and swallowed the last mouthful. It was lukewarm, with a faint metallic taste somewhere in it.

Dohyun didn't ask anything more. That drawing-back felt exactly like the silence three years earlier, when she had faced the fountain pen alone in that room. Then and now, no one had forced her to do anything. They had only set the paper before her and waited, quietly, for her to write a name.

Jiwon looked at his face in the dark. She knew which name had, in the end, gone into that blank three years ago. And the owner of that name was, right now, on the night before he was to be cut loose, smiling as he gave up the last of the water to her.

"Lee," she said.

"Yes."

"Three years ago… about that report."

On Dohyun's face, the composure cracked, ever so thinly, for the first time. Under the lantern light, he slowly raised his eyes.