A photo of the three of them was perched on hooks above his bed, like some men might hang hunting trophies or some women might hang scenes of oceans in pastels.

Sometimes, when he met her at the bedroom door, hands splayed on the curves of her hips, he'd see the frame flash angrily at the corners of his eyes before he closed them to kiss her. Byunghun still thought of Minsoo, it meant, still thought of him and hated him, as much as a man could ever hate another man, seeing as most of the time he was busy trying to ignore his existence (or lack of).

Hojung fought for Minsoo and lost, so Byunghun fought for Hojung.

And Minsoo was in the backyard, curled underneath the dirt as if he merely fell asleep there on a sunny afternoon, and because Byunghun sensed death, he could feel Minsoo’s golden flesh and bleached skeleton rotting away in his grave, and he remembered the look in Minsoo’s eyes right before he died. Byunghun himself spent his evenings working as a pianist at a local jazz cafe and his mornings conveying messages for the dead.

x

Byunghun didn’t care what it made him. He knew the neighbours whispered to each other over kitchen sinks with yellow rubber gloves, watching Hojung pull weeds out of the garden. “Who does that to their friend?”

“A man,” he wanted to tell them. “A man who will always taste death at the back of his throat, who can hear his friends scream and die without any comprehensible reason. I can speak with bodies in the graves and listen as dead men tell their tales, and I can feel when someone has death coming for them.” And a life for a life, he brought her back, his hand in hers, two silver coins over her eyes so she couldn’t look back. “You live with that for one day, and then try and preach to me about life.”

Other days, he just wanted to laugh and say, “Haven't you ever heard? Humans die all the time! At least now it means something.”

x

He came home from work, and the neighbours watched him from their kitchen windows, stripping a roast over their sinks, as Hojung came flying off the porch, ignoring the steps entirely, and he caught her around the waist and spun her around, and it was only then that he felt like he had any energy to live at all.

She was his; he had loved her all his life, and he could not point to a moment in his past where she was not with him (there were some, of course, but nobody talked about a teenager betraying his friends to raise the love of his life from the dead) and he did not want a future without her.

While Minsoo’s ring rusted at the bottom of a chest and Bang Minsoo rotted in the backyard and the photo of them glimmered over the bed, Byunghun closed his eyes and kissed his girlfriend, his wife, his anchor, his only friend and the only constant face in a long line of deaths, and she kissed him back.

It took years before she stopped kissing him like she was enduring him and started kissing him like she loved him.

He wondered, sometimes, if she hated him for bringing her back, for keeping her close to him like a tethered thing when he saw her looking towards the sky like she was imagining her afterlife with Minsoo.

But when he asked her over strawberry pancakes, voice petulant, she smiled at him and touched his face, his shoulders, his hands, and told him, "You are the only thing I want in this life."

He dreaded the day she might ask him to free her.

x

“Byunghun, please.”

“Shut up. You’re going to die anyway,” Byunghun had spat, and he would never ever forget the look in Minsoo’s eyes. “Hojung’s dead because of you. You were so ready to tear her apart for someone else. I am doing the same to save her.”

Hojung never asked him what she costed him, but she was here on a deal with death, a soul in exchange for her return, and Minsoo’s absence spoke as clearly to her as they did to him.

A saviour’s fate is never happy.

Byunghun watched Hojung and the way her face lit up as she wiggled a spoon full of baby food in front of their son’s face, and he was glad he was never much of a saviour.