Work Text:
The committee had been talking for forty-seven minutes about a budget reallocation, and Yoo Jaeyi had decided approximately forty-two minutes ago that she was going to die in this room.
Not literally. She was a doctor. She knew exactly what dying looked like and this wasn't it, which was unfortunate, because dying would have been a reasonable exit strategy.
She kept her expression neutral. It was one of her most finely developed skills, honed over thirty-seven years of life, the last several of which had been spent at J Medical Center where the administrative staff operated on the unspoken assumption that the doctors with the best poker faces must have nothing better to do. Jaeyi had learned early that any visible reaction was an invitation. So she sat with her hands folded and her face composed while Director Kim explained, for the third time, why the procurement timeline could not be moved up, and she thought about Seulgi.
Specifically she thought about the restaurant she had booked for Friday. A new place, opened last month, the kind with a long waiting list that Jaeyi had skipped through means she preferred not to disclose. Jaeyi loved to take Seulgi out on little dates, but they had been so busy and their schedules had gone so hectic that it was getting increasing difficult to pull something off. So, in classic Jaeyi fashion, she went overboard to compensate for all the lost time with her wife with some fine dinning.
Director Kim went on about a five-year projection. He clearly didn't know the meaning of any of the data points on his own presentation.
Jaeyi changed her mind, she was not going to die — this man was making a good case for that spot himself. Her blood pressure was about to shoot up, so she redirected her thoughts to Seulgi's face, and how she would feel on their date. Friday couldn't come fast enough.
The meeting ended without resolution, which she had predicted in the first four minutes, and she was gathering her folder when she glanced through the glass wall of the conference room and saw her. Down the corridor, at the nurses' station. Seulgi was leaning slightly over the counter, reading something a nurse had handed her, head tilted in the specific three-degree angle that meant she was concentrating. She wasn't looking toward the conference room. She wasn't looking anywhere except at the paper in her hands.
Jaeyi watched her for a moment.
Her blood pressure, which she had been monitoring internally with some concern, did something it was not supposed to do in response to a person standing thirty meters away reading a patient report.
I can't wait to go home to this princess, Jaeyi let herself daydream for a minute about Seulgi, even in scrubs, just as beautiful as she'd be in anything else.
She became aware of this, calmer now, and went back to work.
She had been planning the Friday reservation for three weeks.
This was not, she wanted to be clear, an unusual amount of lead time. The waiting list alone had taken ten days to navigate. She had researched the menu, identified two dishes Seulgi would like, and made a note about the lighting on the left side of the room being better. She had been, by any reasonable standard, thorough.
The meeting request arrived at one forty-seven. Emergency budget review, four-fifteen Friday. Attendance mandatory.
She stared at it for a moment.
Then she picked up her phone.
I may need to cancel tomorrow, she typed. Budget meeting. I'll find something Saturday instead. I'm sorry.
The reply came in under a minute.
It's fine. Saturday is fine. Eat something today.
Jaeyi looked at the message for longer than it needed. This was the thing about Seulgi — she never made it worse by minding, which somehow made Jaeyi mind more on her behalf. That was their dynamic, but she was too annoyed by executives and their stupid meetings to examine it further. Self-knowledge had its limits.
She ate a granola bar at her desk and considered it a victory.
At two-thirty she was passing the stairwell when she caught a glimpse of Seulgi near the far end of the corridor, partially obscured by the door. On the phone. She had turned toward the wall slightly, the way she did when she didn't want to be overheard. Whatever she was arranging sounded logistical: yes, the terrace. No, I'll bring— and then she stepped around the corner and the sentence ended.
Jaeyi frowned at the empty corridor.
Then her pager went off and she went to do her job, which was what she was there for, she reminded herself. That was the point.
The mandatory compliance refresher notification arrived at five fourteen in the form of an email from the administrative office with three exclamation points in the subject line, which was already more exclamation points than Jaeyi typically allocated to any given situation.
She read it once. She read it again. She closed the email. This week was really not giving her a break.
The training was four hours. It was technically overdue, but since March 1st was a holiday — that she worked on, but who's counting? — she got until Friday to finish it. Tomorrow. Lucky her.
She was facing a day full of consultations, chart checkups, budget reviews, and the administrative office had, apparently, not considered her acute case of "lack of Seulgi" when selecting a date.
She opened a new email, wrote three sentences, deleted them, wrote two more, and sent it. Politely. She was always polite in writing because written things were permanent and she had no interest in providing leverage to anyone who was not her wife.
She was halfway to the coffee machine when she saw Seulgi again. Different corridor, coming from the direction of the imaging wing, chart in hand. Still not looking at her. Moving with that particular focused efficiency that Jaeyi had spent years admiring. Seulgi was talking to herself, or possibly to the chart — it was a thing she did when working through something.
Jaeyi stopped.
Then, as if sensing it, Seulgi looked up.
She didn't smile — they were at work, in a corridor — but something in her expression shifted in the way that was only ever for Jaeyi. She changed course without breaking stride, walked over, and glanced at the cup in Jaeyi's hand.
"That's your third today."
"It's my second."
Seulgi looked at her.
"It might be my third," Jaeyi said.
Seulgi reached over and took the cup. Drank from it once, unhurried, and handed it back. It was a small thing. It was also the first moment of the day that hadn't required anything from Jaeyi, and she felt it the way you feel a muscle you forgot was tense finally letting go.
"I have a night shift," Seulgi said. "Don't wait up."
Jaeyi looked at her. The chart under her arm, the slight smudge of fatigue under her eyes that she was too disciplined to let into her posture. A full day, and then a full night, and Jaeyi had a compliance training to finish and a restaurant reservation she was increasingly less certain about.
"Eat something before it starts," Jaeyi said.
"I will if you will."
They stood there for a second, which was all they were going to get. Then Seulgi's pager went off and she was already moving again, chart back in hand, and then she turned the corner and was gone.
Jaeyi got her coffee — her third coffee, fine — and went back to her office and thought, not for the first time, that the hospital was significantly more bearable as a building than it had any right to be.
The thing about hospital restrooms — and Jaeyi had developed opinions about this over the course of her career — was that they were the only rooms in the building where the performance was temporarily suspended. No patients, no administrators with exclamation points in their subject lines, no Director Kim and his procurement timelines. Just fluorescent light and cold water and a mirror that did not require anything from her.
She ran the tap and pressed her hands to the basin and looked at herself for a moment. Thirty-seven. She had been told, often and by people whose opinions she had not solicited, that she didn't look it. She took this to mean she looked younger, not that thirty-seven was a problem, because it wasn't. Thirty-seven meant she knew what she was doing, which meant she knew why she was doing it. Right?
She was in the middle of this thought when the door opened.
Seulgi walked in, stopped, looked at her, and said: "I looked for you everywhere. Let's go eat. I'm hungry."
Jaeyi blinked. "But I have—"
"I moved it." Seulgi grabbed her hand. "Let's go."
She said it the way she said most things: as a statement of fact, final and unpretentious, offered without particular ceremony. Her hand was just there and she took it.
The corridors of J Medical Center had witnessed, over the years, a number of events worth noting. Three visiting delegations. A few moderately famous patients. The founder director being evicted, losing his license and going to jail for medical malpractice.
They had not, to Jaeyi's knowledge, witnessed Woo Seulgi pulling her wife through the main ward corridor by the hand while walking at a pace that did not invite questioning.
Jaeyi let herself be pulled. This was not a thing she did with most people — being led, being moved through a space by someone else's decision — but Seulgi's hand in hers had the quality to just move her, and also Seulgi clearly knew where they were going. She had put them in motion and she did not require Jaeyi's input about it.
A resident flattened himself against the wall to let them pass. Jaeyi caught his expression and felt something in her that she recognized as petty satisfaction.
She and Seulgi were, by most professional assessments, what could only be described as a power couple.
They weren't flashy about their accomplishments (well, Seulgi was the one who didn't brag) but they were certainly comfortable at being at the top of their profession. At a first glance, people often assumed they were rivals or competing at the hospital by how intense they were about their craft — an assumption that died the moment anyone found out they were married to each other. She had always found this observation faintly amusing from the outside and completely ridiculous from the inside.
Nobody knew how much Jaeyi loved seeing Seulgi crushing people in her wake. Yes, my hot wife is in a hurry. Move, peasant!
They took the service stairwell up two floors.
The roof terrace door was propped open.
Later, she would try to reverse-engineer what Seulgi had done and the time frame, and she would conclude that the little surprise required a high level of logistical precision. Yoo Jaeyi — who had once coordinated a surprise trip to Jeju island with two days' notice and a scheduling conflict — was, for lack of a better word, impressed.
The small table she recognized from the break room, third floor. The grill was a portable one she did not recognize, already heating. The fairy lights strung from the ventilation housing to the railing were new — or had been acquired specifically — she couldn't tell. On the table: side dishes, tongs, scissors, a small cooler. Music playing from a small speaker, low enough not to carry.
Seulgi pulled out a chair and looked at her.
Jaeyi sat down.
"When—" she started, still taking everything in.
"Does it matter?" Seulgi sat down and started working on the grill. "Eat first."
And so she ate. The pork belly was good, the side dishes were fresh and delicious, and — Seulgi had clearly thought this through — the colorful plastic tent and the lights were doing a nice contrast against the cloudy grey sky. Jaeyi was on a rooftop in the middle of a work day with her wife, and she found herself convinced this was better than the reservation she had planned. Not that she would be saying that out loud.
She was about to ask again about how this surprise came to be when Seulgi set down her chopsticks, looked at her with her characteristic calm attention, and said:
"Happy anniversary."
Jaeyi's brain did something she would describe, clinically, as a brief interruption of normal function.
Shit.
She was the one that ran the calendar, the one that kept up with all the events and dates and details. She'd never forget an anniversary.
What am I missing?!
Jaeyi was very close to panicking. She was already imagining the nightmare: beating Seoul traffic that afternoon, squeezing past Director Kim and his stupid compliance training, scrambling to find a gift worthy of a very special event in their lives that she, somehow, could not remember.
Why can't I remember?!
Jaeyi's face was turning red and Seulgi's mouth did the thing. The almost-smile. The one that appeared when she was finding something genuinely amusing but had decided to give it approximately thirty percent of the expression it warranted.
"Which," Jaeyi finally asked, because she couldn't take this torture any longer. "Our wedding anniversary is in May."
"It's not May yet. And I still haven't used all the bath soap you gave me last year."
"I know it's not May yet." She was already moving through her mental files at frantic speed. Something significant but not as big as a wedding. "Our first date! But that was in December."
"Correct. December. The worst time to book a trip and you still took us to Japan last time."
"Right. And —" she had this, she absolutely had this — "our first kiss. But that was in November."
"Right after the CSAT. Your nose was cold. And you've been taking me to a sauna date every year since."
Jaeyi looked at her.
The almost-smile had graduated into something fuller, no longer restrained, with much more warmth in it than Seulgi usually permitted herself in a setting that was technically a place of work, even if the setting was a rooftop with fairy lights and contraband KBBQ.
"I don't know what day it is," Jaeyi finally said. They could have used her face to grill the rest of the meat by now. "Just tell me."
"March fourth." Seulgi picked up her chopsticks again. "Twenty years ago."
Jaeyi went through the March fourths in her memory. Twenty years put them at their first day of senior year at Chaehwa High School, which meant —
She stopped.
"The day we met," she said.
Seulgi looked at her over a piece of grilled pork. Said nothing. She didn't need to.
Jaeyi sat back.
March fourth. Twenty years ago, she had laid eyes on Woo Seulgi, a transferee from the countryside, an orphan on a scholarship with nothing but good grades and a fierce will to succeed.
She had found Seulgi in one of the school's restrooms, already cornered by bullies — that she thoroughly neutralized later on — and something in Jaeyi had made a decision so fast she hadn't consulted the rest of herself before acting on it. She had taken Seulgi's hand. She had walked her through the corridors of Chaehwa like a declaration, which it had been, even if she hadn't had the language for it yet.
She remembered the way Seulgi had looked. The surprise, and then, very quickly, the recalibration — Seulgi adjusting to new information, new school, new people. That was their very first lunch together.
Twenty years.
"I can't believe you remembered that," she said.
"I remember everything." Seulgi said it simply, matter of fact. "I remember every time."
"Every time what?"
"Every time your hand was on mine." She was looking at the grill now, turning something with the tongs, casual as if the sentence hadn't just reorganized Jaeyi's whole world in her chest. "That first time you took me to lunch. The rooftop at the cram school. When we both ranked first at Chaehwa. The first time you drove me somewhere and I fell asleep and you didn't let go until we got there." A pause. "In the hospital, after my board exams."
"You were shaking," Jaeyi said.
"I know." She set the tongs down. "I remember all of it."
Jaeyi looked at her wife. This person who had come into her life as a variable she hadn't planned for, who had dismantled her armor one small gesture at a time and had done it so quietly that Jaeyi hadn't noticed until the armor was gone and she hadn't wanted it back.
"I forgot the date," she said. "I'm sorry. I should have —"
"Don't." Seulgi's voice was mild but certain. The tone she used when she had made up her mind and had no interest in being argued with. "You booked a restaurant in advance. Life happens."
"That was different."
"Jaeyi." She looked at her directly now. "You have taken me to dinner every month for nearly twenty years. You booked a camping site for my birthday and lied to the hospital saying it was a work trip. You found out my favorite childhood snack and ordered it in bulk and left it in my locker during residence." The smallest pause. "You came to my orphanage event because I said once, once, that I was nervous about going alone."
Jaeyi opened her mouth.
"Every single one of those things," Seulgi said, "is like taking vitamins."
Jaeyi closed her mouth.
"It may seem small. But it replenishes me. Every time. It makes me —" she chose the word with care, "— stronger. Healthier. I don't need you to remember every date. You've already given me twenty years of evidence." She picked up her glass. "I just wanted you to know that I notice them. That I count them. And I appreciate every single one of them."
There was a version of Jaeyi who would have had a response to this. The version from way before, who had managed every relationship from a position of controlled distance and would have made the math to see who was winning, who had the higher score. That version had been replaced, consistently, by the current version, who couldn't imagine not doing any of those things. Because to please Seulgi felt like breathing, and if she stopped doing it she might stop living altogether. This version of Jaeyi loved Seulgi completely, without strategic reserve, and with no patience for any internal voice that suggested she dial it back.
She reached across the table. Seulgi let her take her hand.
"You know," Jaeyi said, "if you wanted to tell me this you could have just said it."
"I'm saying it now."
"You smuggled a grill into a hospital to make me food."
"I wanted you to eat a hot meal for a change."
"You moved three of my appointments."
"I moved only three of your appointments."
Jaeyi looked at her. "You moved three of my four appointments for a Friday lunch."
"I couldn't get rid of the compliance training, though. That's beyond my reach," Seulgi said stifling a laugh.
"Oh!" Jaeyi faked indignation but was almost laughing herself. "How disappointing. And you call yourself my wife?"
"I've left something in your office to help you with it. I take my wife title very seriously."
"Thank you, princess," Jaeyi lifted their joined hands, pressed her mouth to Seulgi's knuckles.
"Happy anniversary, my love," Seulgi said again, and this time the full smile appeared, unhurried and private, dimples in full display.
She was back at her desk by two forty-five.
The afternoon held a consultation, a chart review she had been putting off, and an email thread about the compliance training that she intended to resolve before end of day through means that were entirely within the bounds of professional conduct. She had a plan. She was in a good mood.
She opened the desk drawer for a pen.
She found the pen, and then she saw what was under it. The gift Seulgi mentioned.
It was a collage. Printed, assembled on a single sheet. Photographs, printed small: some she recognized, some she was almost certain she had never seen. The two of them at what looked like the camping trip, Jaeyi squinting into sunlight, Seulgi holding a marshmallow on a stick. A blurry one she thought was the Jeju trip — she was laughing at something, face half-turned away. A restaurant she recognized. Another she didn't. The hospital courtyard. Somewhere with a lot of snow. A kitchen. The back of a car. Sleeping. She looked extremely undignified in that one.
Every single one, she had been doing something she thought was ordinary.
She looked at the collage for a long time.
There was a yellow post-it in the center, Seulgi's handwriting.
don't forget to take your vitamins
Jaeyi sat with it.
Outside the office, the hospital continued. Somewhere down the corridor, Seulgi was probably with a patient, doing the thing she had always done — being completely present with whoever was in front of her, making the space around her feel considered and safe. Doing it the way she did everything: without fuss, without ceremony, because it was simply what she thought should be done.
Twenty years of evidence. Running in both directions.
Jaeyi closed the drawer.
She straightened her coat. She picked up her pen and the chart review she had been putting off. She thought, briefly, about the restaurant reservation, which Seulgi would surely tell her was unnecessary. And which she was going to keep, because some things were simply non-negotiable.
She opened the chart and got back to work.
She had a plan. She had somewhere better to be at the end of it. And she did not intend to forget that.
Do it for her.