6Ep.. Put My Name Down

For a while, Do-hyeon said nothing.

The lantern light tilted slowly across his face. The composure that had covered it a moment ago was now like glass gone faintly cracked—you couldn't tell which way it would split if you touched it, or where.

"…What about the report?" Do-hyeon asked at last. His voice was still low, but underneath it came the sound of something quietly locking a door.

Ji-won set the empty bottle in her hand down on the desk. The water had ended with that one mouthful earlier. The bottle was light. From the list of things that would carry her through the night, one had just fallen away.

"That report," she began. Her throat was dry. "Your name going down on it."

Do-hyeon's eyes moved from the lantern to her.

"That—I could have," Ji-won said aloud, for the first time, the sentence she had swallowed for three years. "I could have stopped it—"

"You didn't write it." Do-hyeon cut her off.

It was the first time he had ever broken across her words like this—no reproach, no hesitation—to nail his guilt down as his own.

Ji-won looked at him.

"That name," Do-hyeon said quietly. "I wrote it. With that fountain pen, with my own hand."

The darkness of the floor seemed to grow a hand's breadth heavier. Ji-won had known this for three years. And yet, knowing it, the sentence that had just come from his mouth fell on her shoulders with an entirely different weight.

The lantern light wavered once. Following that waver, she was dragged back into that night.

Even after Director Kang left the room, Ji-won sat a long while with that single sheet in front of her—until the stripes of the blinds had crept all the way across the desk.

At last she picked up the document and the fountain pen and left the room. By the time she sat back down at her own desk, the afternoon outside the window was tipping into evening, and she stayed there with that single sheet on the desk while the seats emptied one by one and the ceiling fluorescents came on white.

The box marked 'Responsible Party' was empty. The fountain pen lay uncapped, waiting for her hand to reach it. She thought no one but herself was left in the office.

"You're still here, Team Lead."

Ji-won had no time to turn the paper over. Do-hyeon was walking toward her from beyond the partition. That day too, he was the last one to stay—briefcase in hand, threading through the darkened desks.

"…Lee." Ji-won covered the fountain pen with her palm. Too late. His gaze had already landed on the document on the desk.

Do-hyeon stopped. He was a man who had worked the ground for a long time. An accident-cause report, an empty responsible-party box, an uncapped fountain pen—it did not take him long to connect the three.

"That thing," he said slowly. "It only closes once somebody's name goes in."

Ji-won did not answer. Not answering was itself the answer.

"Put my name down."

Ji-won thought she had misheard. "…What did you say."

"I said, put my name down." Do-hyeon said it without a flicker—in the same tone he'd used a few hours earlier on this floor, not this night but that one, when he'd told her to at least drink some water. "They're settling it as something missed at the blueprint-review stage, aren't they? Someone who was in that room—I fit just as well."

"Lee." Ji-won's voice hardened. "This is not your matter."

"I know," Do-hyeon said. "That's exactly why it can be me."

Ji-won felt the words didn't fit front to back. A man who knew it wasn't his matter was saying that for that very reason he would carry it.

"If your name goes in that box," Do-hyeon said, looking down at the document. "It doesn't end with just you being finished. Everything this team built over three years gets handed, whole, to Director Kang. And everyone left has to grind under him. That's a different weight from just me dropping out."

"Then what about you," Ji-won asked. "What happens to you."

For a moment Do-hyeon did not answer. That silence resembled, somewhere, the silence three years later that would keep her from meeting his face under the red emergency light.

"I'm," he said. "I'm someone it's all right to do that to."

That was not a reason. It was something set in the place of a reason, something shaped like a reason. She should have asked, then. Why it was all right. What had made this man into someone it was all right to do that to. But she did not ask. Because she couldn't know where the answer would take her if she did.

Do-hyeon held out his hand—toward the fountain pen pinned beneath hers.

Ji-won looked at that hand. A hand callused with work. She could have stopped it. She could have pulled the pen toward herself and written her own name in that empty box. It would have taken a single stroke.

She drew her hand away.

Do-hyeon picked up the pen. He turned the document toward himself and wrote his name in the responsible-party box. Without hesitation. Lee Do-hyeon. There wasn't even the sound of ink soaking into paper.

Ji-won watched it happen. By not stopping it, she wrote, that night, the name that was her share to write.

"So it isn't your fault." Do-hyeon's voice pulled her back out of the darkness. "That day, I decided it. You just… you were only there."

Only there.

Ji-won was someone who had repeated those very words to herself for three years now. I was only there. At the place where the stamp comes down, where the papers get passed along. And yet, hearing them from Do-hyeon's mouth, they sounded not like comfort but like a verdict. He was saying it to forgive her, and the more she was forgiven, the more sharply guilty she became.

For the first time, Ji-won's shoulders gave way. The posture she had held rigid for three years folded once, under the lantern light.

"…I should have stopped it." Her voice cracked. "That hand. That pen, back then. I should have taken it away."

"Team Lead."

"It's been three years, Lee." Ji-won pressed her face into her hands. "For three years you've lived with that name tag on, and knowing it, not once—not a single time—could I bring myself to walk back into that room and say let's change the paper. Even watching you get pushed out of your seat. Even tonight. Even watching you pack your things into a box."

The phone screen lit and went dark on its own. A battery warning. Nine percent. The rain outside the window kept on, and the dawn when the water would drain was still far off. Five hours trapped on this floor—and more than that still left until nine in the morning. On the list of things running down, now the last line of defense she had held up for three years had been added too.

For a long moment Do-hyeon looked at her. At his collapsed team lead, with eyes that held no reproach.

"If you had stopped it," he asked quietly. "What would have been different?"

Ji-won lowered her hands.

She knew the answer to that question. Had she written her own name then, Do-hyeon would have lived without the brand. That much was clear. But why had Do-hyeon raised his hand so easily for something that wasn't even his? Behind the words 'someone it's all right to do that to,' what was it that he had, in the end, never said?

The question she had put off for three years rose, at last, to the very edge of her lips. She still couldn't know where the answer would take her if she asked. Only, this night, she no longer wanted to close her eyes just because she couldn't know.

"Lee." Ji-won lifted her head. This time she looked at his face straight on. Not after three days—after three years. "Let me ask you just one thing."

Do-hyeon's eyes wavered, ever so slightly, in the lantern light. Like a man who already knew what the question would be.

"Why was it you." Ji-won's voice was low and clear. "Why you, and not me."

The lantern wick gave a single crackle.

Do-hyeon did not answer, for a long, long time.