Brotherly Love

Kyungsoo woke up the next morning to the smell of fishy cat breath. Groaning, he blearily opened his eyes to find Dinah sitting on his chest, staring at him with large, expectant eyes. “Stupid fat cat,” he mumbled affectionately, rubbing her head. He’d never been much of an animal person, but after taking the poor, shivering thing in one afternoon, and his brother’s horrified ‘oh my god, you’ve reached this stage’ at the sight of Kyungsoo talking to it, it was obvious that she would be staying with him permanently. She purred, as Kyungsoo reached over to look at the clock beside his bed. It was already past eight in the morning. He’d been up most of the night scrawling down information and reading over old documents. Sunlight creeped in through the closed curtains. He could hear the sounds of Sunye bustling about downstairs. 

Getting to his feet, Dinah giving a yowl of protest, he headed into the kitchenette to make himself some coffee. After feeding the cat, he settled down and noticed that there was a red, blinking light on his answering machine. Frowning, he turned it on and a familiar stiff, reserved voice floated into the kitchen. Unconsciously, his lips quirked up at that: there was something almost amusing about the stuffiness of her speech.

“Do Kyungsoo? This is Han Yulhee. I won’t be able to join you today because of work at the bakery. I apologize. Please do not call back.”

The message ended there. She was an odd one, that Yulhee, he thought, sipping his coffee. She clearly distrusted him, for good reason, and she was closed off as an individual. Most of the time it startled him to hear her speak several sentences in a row, and this was coming from someone who’d never been the most talkative of individuals. It was unlikely she would be particularly warm to him for a long time. Well, becoming friends with her was not his intention. Still, he needed information on her case, and he doubted she was inclined to really give it to him at this stage.

Her family wouldn’t be of help either. The last time he’d tried to call her address, her mother had picked up, assumed based on his statement, “I’d like to ask some questions about what happened to your daughter; I’m a private investigator” that he was actually a ert, and hung up with a yell to never call their number again. Which was just plain insulting, especially since he was certainly bringing about more justice than Suho was, seeing as how their cases were gathering dust and left to rot because of a lack of leads.

At least, that was how he’d like to see it.

Speaking of his brother, he would need to get Yulhee’s case files from the precinct, and Suho would no doubt have many choice words on that issue. He sighed to himself.

It would be a bad day.  

Suho was having a bad day.

His troubled younger brother (he had been raised better than to call him bratty, even though Kyungsoo deserved it) was driving him up the wall, his co-workers were insane, and the criminal before him was really just a bored, weird teenager.

It hadn’t helped that he’d been late for work this morning because he’d had to send Eunju off at the train station to go to the nearest hospital, on account of how sick she’d been feeling lately. While he admired how independent and plucky his wife was, he was a worrier by nature and wished that she hadn’t insisted on going by herself. He was greeted as he stepped into the cramped precinct by a camera flash. Suho sighed. “Really, Hongbin?”

The problem, Suho reflected, was that Siwon was too softhearted and simply allowed anyone to join the force because it was a stable job. The result was that they had too many officers for the size of the town, most of whom weren’t particularly qualified, all crowded into a tiny space and liable to drive everyone (mainly him) mad. It was especially irksome because Siwon had basically dumped the entire responsibility of running the place on him while he stayed in his office and tried to get the provincial government to actually fix everything wrong with the precinct.

The officer in question flashed him a charming smile, dimple visible. “It’s for this year’s precinct scrapbook!”

Siwon had appointed Hongbin as responsible for ‘squad-morale’, a task he’d taken up with a little too much gusto – and combined with his love for photography. Everywhere in the precinct, photographs of the officers had been strung up to ‘brighten the place’, and Hongbin personally made yearly scrapbooks for every squad member. Everyone was too nice to tell him that they had never bothered to actually look at them. Eunju was currently using one of them as a doorstopper. “Oh, but you weren't smiling…”

“Let’s take that photo another time, okay?” Suho said tiredly, squeezing past Hongbin in the crowded space and nearly accidentally strangling himself with several of those photograph strings. Good grief, how were any of them supposed to get around, he thought. Not to mention that the building was basically a complete fire hazard. 

“Well, you can look at them later, you know, I’ve just taken these photos of –”

Suho tuned him out, seeing his co-workers sprawled on their desks, doing absolutely nothing close to productive work. Taekwoon was sitting silently at his desk, petting the precinct’s cat – how they budget for a cat but not a working electrical system could only be explained by the fact that Taekwoon got his way very easily with his face – while Minho and Kyuhyun were playing table football at their desks.

The radio was on; Kyuhyun had attempted to fix it but for some bizarre reason, the only station that it could pick up was Radio Moscow. Everyone tended to give it a wide berth.

“You’re late,” Kyuhyun said, glancing up, head balanced on one hand.

“Sorry everyone, I had to send off Eunju.”

“Don’t rub your wife in the faces of all us single folk,” Kyuhyun groused, as Suho shuffled around them to take a seat at his desk, which was next to Minho’s. Someone had knocked over the pho