Honbul: Flame of the Soul

Standing in front of an empty bookcase, flipping through a stack of paperwork, Yoon Taehee suddenly lifted his head.

He had sensed someone at the door.

A small smile touched his mouth as he guessed who it was. He stared at the door for a moment, then dropped his gaze back to the papers in his hand. The smile vanished from his lips ისე completely that it was as though it had never been there at all.

The library door opened almost at the same moment.

“......”

Jaegyeom, who had just stepped inside, stopped short and blinked.

The young librarian looked subtly different from how he had before.

He was wearing glasses.

He stood before the shelves, absorbed in whatever he was working on. It seemed he had not yet noticed Jaegyeom had come in. After a brief hesitation, Jaegyeom deliberately shut the door hard behind him.

The thud made the young man look up.

The moment he spotted Jaegyeom, he smiled faintly. Behind the round glasses with their thin metal rims, his eyes curved gently. Perhaps because the frames were so fine, his whole impression looked sharper, more sensitive than usual. They were clearly the glasses he always used when reading books or dense print.

“You came? Ah....”

The young man lowered the glasses slightly, then looked at Jaegyeom with his bare eyes.

“Did your nose bleed?”

Jaegyeom sniffed and looked away. He had stuffed tissue tightly into the nostril that had been bleeding, and it made breathing uncomfortable. Setting the papers aside on one end of the empty shelf, the young man walked over to him.

“What happened?”

When lunch ended and the afternoon classes began, every teacher who came into the classroom had looked startled the moment they saw Jaegyeom. Then, just like the librarian now, each one had asked what had happened. Every time, Lee Juyeol, seated diagonally across the room, had glared at Jaegyeom with openly hostile eyes.

Watch your mouth.

After a short silence, Jaegyeom decided to give the same answer he had given the teachers.

“I wasn’t paying attention and ran into something.”

“That’s too bad.”

The young man offered the mildest possible sympathy in a tone that said how unfortunate. The teachers had been the same. That must’ve hurt. Be more careful. Then they had gone right on with class. For Jaegyeom, it was easier that way. Much easier when people did not care enough to press further.

But—

“When you say you ran into something, do you mean a fist?”

The young man asked the question with his arms loosely folded, wording it indirectly. He was asking if Jaegyeom had gotten into a fight.

At that, Jaegyeom gave an involuntary little snort.

“Yes.”

“And then? You just let it happen?”

When he thought about it, he supposed he had. He had not really done anything in response. Just because the other side came at him first did not mean he could start trading childish punches on the spot. No matter how blindly furious Lee Juyeol might get and start swinging, he was still only a weak ordinary boy.

“They say if you endure three times, you’ll avoid committing murder.”

Jaegyeom answered absentmindedly, glancing around the peaceful interior of the library.

“Do you really believe that?”

The young man smiled mischievously.

“That’s an awfully harsh proverb for someone as impatient as me.”

Jaegyeom lifted his eyes as if asking what that was supposed to mean.

“I just mean enduring isn’t always the answer.”

With a playful scrunch of his nose, the young man nudged his slipping glasses back into place and picked up the papers again.

A brief silence followed.

Ah. Right. He had come to return the tie.

While the young man’s eyes were still on the papers, Jaegyeom, standing there awkwardly, reached for the knot at his throat.

“Oh, right. Friend.”

Just before he untied it, the quiet young man suddenly looked up.

“Can you help me with something?”

“...Help you?”

Jaegyeom echoed back, bewildered.

“I cleaned up the shelves today. I’m going to gather the books that haven’t been checked out in years and put them together in one section. I already printed the list. I pulled all the books too, so all that’s left is putting them back in order. But it takes a lot of hands to check the papers and search for the books at the same time.” He gave the papers in his hand a light wave and smiled. “If you helped, I think we could finish quickly. Will you?”

Jaegyeom narrowed his eyes and looked over the page.

Just as the young man had said, it was packed with a long list of titles. He could not bring himself to answer right away, and instead cast a sidelong glance at the man’s face.

“Ah, how cold. I even lent you a tie.”

Apparently noticing his reluctance, the young man complained in a playful tone.

A faint crack appeared in Jaegyeom’s blank expression.

You’re the one who shoved it at me in the first place, and now you’re acting like this....

He looked toward the large tray set off to one side of the library. It was stacked high with old, worn books. Just as the young man had said, they seemed to be the books he had pulled out to shelve. There really were quite a lot of them.

After thinking it over a moment, Jaegyeom reluctantly nodded.

“...Fine.”

“Thank you. This school might as well not have a library club at all. The few students who come by now and then to help clean are all I’ve got. So I’m always working here alone.” He smiled softly. “Looks like I’ve got no one but you, friend.”

The young man carried the tray over beside the empty bookcase. He explained that he would call out three or four titles at a time, and Jaegyeom only had to find them in the tray and hand them over in order.

Adjusting his glasses, he began reading down the list.

“Warrior of the Wind, The Habit of Making Each Day, Spring in Syracuse.”

Jaegyeom searched carefully through the tray and handed them over. As soon as he found one set, the young man called out the next. While Jaegyeom searched, the young man checked the call numbers on the books Jaegyeom passed him and slotted them into place in order.

At first, Jaegyeom was slow at finding them. Whenever it started taking too long, the young man would step over to the tray and help search too. After doing that a few times, Jaegyeom’s hands and eyes gradually began to pick up speed.

At some point, the two of them fell into rhythm perfectly.

Whenever the young man finished shelving the books Jaegyeom had already handed him, Jaegyeom would place the next ones into his hand at exactly the right moment.

“Friend, you’ve got a good eye.”

Yoon Taehee praised him from time to time.

Each time, Jaegyeom lowered his eyes and muttered vaguely, “Yeah, well....”

At a glance, the boy still looked indifferent, but he seemed oddly embarrassed by praise.

“A Long Journey and a Cat, Morning in Morocco, Crown Village Essays.”

Jaegyeom found them immediately and handed them over. Taehee took all three at once in his large hand. As he checked each cover in turn and carefully read the call number label stuck to the bottom, his movement suddenly stopped.

Crown Village Essays.

On the worn old cover and along the spine, every bit of writing was in classical characters.

“......”

Still peering down into the tray, waiting for the next title, Jaegyeom finally looked up. No matter how long he waited, the young /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ man said nothing.

When Jaegyeom gave him a puzzled look, the young man slowly met his eyes.

“What?”

The young man stared directly into both his eyes.

It was not the look of someone glancing at another person. It was the look of someone appraising something, as if examining a work of art. Under that strange gaze, Jaegyeom frowned faintly.

“What is it?”

Behind the glasses, the young man’s eyes curved.

“No, it’s nothing.”

He lowered his gaze back to the list in his hand.

Then, as though nothing at all had happened, he resumed calling out titles just as before. Jaegyeom went on plucking the books out one after another with an unbothered face. Hand it over, take it, find it, shelve it. The stack in the tray shrank fast enough to see.

Before long, there were only around ten books left.

“By the way, friend.”

“Yeah.”

Jaegyeom answered without even looking up.

“Seeing you this close, you’re taller than I thought.”

“Yeah.”

Busy gathering up the last few books, Jaegyeom nodded absently. Unlike before, Taehee was now sliding books into the newly crowded shelves as he asked in an offhand tone,

“How tall are you? About six feet?”

“Something like that, probably.”

“Really? Then maybe there’s only a couple inches between us.”

“Maybe.”

Jaegyeom answered flatly and handed him another book.

Taehee accepted it with a small, “Thank you.”

Jaegyeom stacked the remaining books neatly together. Once these were in, they would be finished. Taehee crumpled up the list in his hand. It had served its purpose now.

“But, friend.”

Why does he keep calling me that?

At the young man’s voice again, Jaegyeom frowned and raised his eyes. He was already annoyed enough as it was, and the man kept filling the silence with pointless chatter. Jaegyeom handed over the final stack of books with a prickly look that said Stop wasting time and get to the point already.

The young man glanced down at the books thrust right in front of him, then tilted his glasses down his nose and raised his head to look at Jaegyeom.

“But, friend—how old are you?”

The gentle voice and the sharp gaze that pierced straight through him were complete opposites.