Disclaimer: The SKKS-verse belongs to the creators of Sungkyunkwan Scandal.

Technical Notes: I still can't think of a reasonable explanation for why Yoon-hee was still called "Yoon-shik" in the canon epilogue despite being outed as a woman to the king. I'm assuming everyone knows, including the SKK Headmaster (as clueless as the man can be sometimes), so I just pulled a possible explanation out of thin air. Let's all just roll with it, OK?

EDIT 02-06-2016: It's come to my attention that Bok-soo (and Bok-dong) wouldn't have a family name due to his social standing, so I had to remove it. Sorry, dude! You and your brother still rock.

Chapter Six

"P-Professor Kim? You have a visitor."

Yoon-hee, who had been taking a stroll through the Sungkyunkwan campus, turned to the small crowd of eager boys that had come up behind her. "I do? Who is it?"

"It's a lady!" came the reply from somewhere within the group. "She says she knows you."

"Where is she?"

"Right here with me, Professor!" said another voice from the back.

She favored them with the twinkling smile that was part of the reason why she was the most popular professor among Sungkyunkwan's male student body. "Well, thank you all very much for escorting our guest here, scholars," she said politely. "Would you mind leaving me and my guest so that we can talk in private?"

"Right away, Professor! You're welcome, Professor!"

The crowd melted away, leaving Ka-hai standing on the path. She gave a small smile when she saw the other woman before her. "I was confused when the guards told me to look for Professor Kim Yoon-shik," she admitted, "but when all those boys volunteered to help me find you, it was obvious that I was being directed to the right person."

Yoon-hee laughed. "Yoon-shik is my brother's name," she explained. "I officially registered at Sungkyunkwan pretending to be him, so even now that I'm allowed to teach as myself, I'm still listed in the records under his name."

"They couldn't change it?"

She shrugged. "I think they told me the records were sacred or something like that," she said with a roll of her eyes. "Anyway, it doesn't matter what name I use. The important thing is that I'm able to work."

The taller woman nodded understandingly, then supposed she had to re-introduce herself. "I'm Cha Ka-hai," she went on with a small bow of greeting. "I'm not sure if you remember, but we were introduced at my wedding."

"Yes, I remember," the professor replied, returning the bow. "How may I help you, Lady Cha?"

"Please call me Ka-hai," she answered, coloring a bit at being addressed so formally.

"Of course," she said easily. "And you must call me Yoon-hee. How may I help you, Ka-hai?" she asked again.

"This may sound like a strange request," she began hesitantly, "but I was wondering if I could borrow some books from the university library."

"Books?"

Ka-hai nodded, her cheeks turning pink. "This might sound silly, but... you see, my husband is always reading. I'm not much for reading myself," she admitted, "but I think that it would be good if I understood him a little more — not that we're fighting or anything like that," she added hastily. "Anyway, I thought that one way to do that is to read some of the books that he has read."

Gu Yong-ha had worked quickly and his contribution to helping improve her and Jae-shin's marriage had already arrived: new garments in colors that, according to him, would better showcase her complexion and figure, and underthings so thin that they had Kwan-sook giggling and wiggling her eyebrows meaningfully. Ka-hai still didn't quite have the nerve to parade around in her new finery in order to catch her husband's attention, but she realized that there was at least one other thing she could do to reach out to him, at least as a friend.

Now that she had said her idea out loud, though, it sounded silly and she was afraid that the other woman would laugh at her. However, all that Yoon-hee did was smile warmly. "I think it's wonderful that you want to make such an effort for him," she said.

Still blushing, she mumbled her thanks.

"I'm afraid you're going to have quite the task ahead of you, though, because I know for a fact that your husband has read every book in the library."

"Of course he would make things difficult for me," Ka-hai sighed, rolling her eyes.

The professor laughed. "Perhaps you can take it area by area? The library covers a lot of subjects: philosophy, political science, medicine—"

"Medicine?" she repeated. "That sounds good. I'd like to read about that."

"I've done a bit of reading on the subject myself, so I know that it can be very... weighty," Yoon-hee warned gently. "You aren't taking on all of that just for your husband, are you?"

"What? Oh, no." The taller woman blushed again. "I mean, I did say that I wanted to understand him better, but I picked medicine because it interests me personally. I'm quite good at doctoring animals," she said with a self-conscious laugh, "and I think I'd like to learn more about curing people. I'm sure I'll enjoy this task more if I started with something that I really wanted to learn for myself."

"I think so, too." Yoon-hee smiled. "I'd be happy to check out some books for you, Ka-hai. I'll try to have some sent over as soon as possible."

"There's no hurry if you're busy," she replied. "But I appreciate all your help."

"You're married to a friend of mine. It would be best if we were friends, too, right?"

Ka-hai smiled shyly. She remembered Yong-ha saying essentially the same thing, but this was different. Apart from her maid, who was a bit of a special case she was a servant, she hadn't had many female friends, and none at all nearby since the last one married and moved away.

"Yes," she agreed, "it definitely would."

A few days after Ka-hai went there, it was her husband's turn to visit the Sungkyunkwan campus. Professor Jung had sent word that the faculty was finished verifying whether or not the Blue Messenger was a student at the university, so Jae-shin and In-soo came over right away.

Unfortunately, the results of the investigation were negative. "I'm sorry," he said, "but there's no indication that the Blue Messenger is a Sungkyunkwan scholar. Professor Yoo and I have compared the writing on the leaflet with samples from every registered student, and the penmanship and writing style do not match with any of them."

Jae-shin felt himself deflate. "What a shame," In-soo said, visibly disappointed. "And to think this was our biggest lead yet."

Professor Jung gave them a small smile. "I hope you don't mind, Officers, if we on the Sungkyunkwan faculty are relieved that the Blue Messenger isn't one of the scholars. I don't think we would ever want to admit that we have a student who writes this poorly."

"I told you it was terrible," Jae-shin gloated to his partner. The other man had needled him endlessly about criticizing the quality of the Blue Messenger's writing. It was nice to get some vindication.

"I already knew that," In-soo retorted. "I was a student myself, you know. And I don't know why you're so pleased — this means we're no closer to finding the Blue Messenger than when we were first assigned to this case."

"That's not completely true," Professor Jung reminded them. "Even though the Messenger is not a Sungkyunkwan scholar, there's still a very strong possibility that she is a woman. In fact, the brushstrokes appear more consistent with the writing of our female students than the male."

"All right, so we're looking for a woman who is fairly educated and skilled with a bow and arrow, and who owns dark men's clothing," Jae-shin concluded, ticking off the clues on his fingers.

"Should be easy to find," In-soo said sarcastically.

The blow to the investigation weighed very heavily on Jae-shin's mind, and he spent the rest of the day wondering how they might be able to build on the little progress that they had managed to make. Where would you find a reasonably educated woman in the area, other than at Sungkyunkwan University?

He was still caught up in thinking of possible places even after he got home that he failed to notice certain other things that required his attention.

"If I may be so bold, my dear," Minister Moon said loudly, "you look particularly lovely tonight."

"Thank you, Abeonim," Ka-hai replied with a shy smile.

"Are those new clothes?"

"Yes." She smoothed her pale green skirt self-consciously. Yong-ha had given her a friendly discount on the clothes (in fact, he would have given them to her for free if she hadn't insisted on paying), but of course her father-in-law wouldn't know that, and she didn't want him to think that she was wasting her money on frivolities.

"Very nice. I know that you work very hard, so it's good to see you enjoying nice things for once."

"Thank you, Abeonim," she repeated, stealing a glance at her husband as she returned to her dinner.

Jae-shin had said very little throughout the meal, and certainly nothing at all about how she looked; and to her mortification, her father-in-law had noticed. "Doesn't your wife look lovely, Jae-shin?" Minister Moon asked loudly, all but physically prodding his son to pay his wife a compliment.

"Hmm? Oh. Yes," he agreed, then went back to eating with a distracted air.

Her husband had barely looked at her, but Ka-hai inclined her head graciously. "Thank you, my lord."

Minister Moon gave her an apologetic look, but she replied with a smile and a little shake of her head that she hoped made her look patient and understanding.

She wasn't angry. The extra effort she had expended to dress for dinner — she had just bathed early, spent some time choosing her clothes instead of tossing on the first ones that came to hand, and had Kwan-sook rearrange her hair — hadn't been all that much. Besides, it hadn't been in vain: Ka-hai and her maid agreed that she looked very fine in her new things, and she trusted that her father-in-law's compliments were genuine. It was just embarrassing how Minister Moon seemed to understand that she was trying to make herself pretty for her husband, and that the target of her efforts obviously did not notice, let alone appreciate, them.

Ka-hai finished the rest of her dinner quickly and withdrew. "If you will excuse me," she said, addressing mainly her father-in-law because Jae-shin remained huddled over his rice bowl, "I... have some things to attend to."

"Of course." Minister Moon nodded and, when she was gone, sent his son a withering stare. "Would it have killed you to take your mind off your work and pay some attention to your wife for just one moment, Jae-shin?"

Jae-shin looked up, confused. "Did she need anything?" He hadn't heard any screaming and no one was running around in panic, so everything was all right, wasn't it?

"She was trying to get you to notice her," his father pointed out with a long-suffering sigh.

"What for?"

"Ka-hai was wearing new clothes, boy!" Minister Moon burst out, his jowls quivering. "You could have at least told her she looked nice or something."

"Our biggest lead in the Blue Messenger case just went cold, and I'm supposed to notice her clothes?"

"Keeping the peace in Joseon begins at home," the older man explained testily. "If you don't want to turn this house into a battle ground, then I strongly recommend that you go to your wife and try to do some damage control."

Scowling, Jae-shin he took a large gulp of wine straight from the bottle, just to be annoying, and got to his feet. This was why women gave him the hiccups, he thought irritably as he stalked out of the dining room. They became irrational over the silliest things. He had begun to think that his wife was different from most other women, but it turned out that even she was prone to this condition.

A passing servant told him that Ka-hai had gone to their bedroom, so he went off in that direction. In his defense, he had prepared himself to make up a flowery compliment in order to appease her feminine caprices, but when he entered the chamber, he found that there was nothing left to compliment.

She froze in the middle of removing her overskirt and glared at him in maidenly outrage. "Do you mind?"

Jae-shin shut the door quickly, his carefully prepared speech swept clean out of his head. "A-Abeoji said there was something you needed me to do," he managed to say.

"What I need you to do," she said curtly, tugging off the garment and striding in her underclothes towards the chest where she kept her things, "is to leave so that I can finish changing in peace."

A hiccup escaped him as he looked away. "You didn't have to change," he told her lamely. "Your clothes... looked very nice."

There was a loud rustle of fabric, as though she had shaken out something a little more violently than was necessary. "Thank you for noticing," she replied crisply, "but actually, I do need to change. If you had been listening at dinner earlier, you would know that one of the horses went lame today and I need to go and check on it. I suppose I could look 'very nice' to do that, but I doubt that the horse would care. Now, if you don't mind," she concluded, "please go away."

Although it had been his room first and he was perfectly entitled to stay, Jae-shin fled.

He made his way to the garden on one side of the house. He remembered telling Ka-hai about this place, but he didn't know whether she came here to reminisce about growing up in the country. It had been a while since he visited this place himself.

Though the garden featured a small pavilion in which one could sit, read or enjoy the view, he bypassed that in favor of a large, irregularly-shaped rock under a pear tree. Said rock featured a flat spot that held him quite comfortably, and Moon Young-shin's name chiseled down the front. He had done it himself a few years after his older brother died. Young-shin had his own memorial in the family's ancestral shrine, but this was where Jae-shin chose to remember him.

"What must you think of me now, hyung?" he murmured, reaching down to rub his fingers over the carving.

He had been too young to notice whether Young-shin had ever had a sweetheart, but his brother had been so good-natured and charming that it was impossible to imagine him not being popular with the ladies. In contrast, Jae-shin couldn't even look at a woman without suffering a nervous hiccup attack.

He was sure that if Young-shin were here, he would have laughed and ruffled his younger brother's hair fondly, and then he would have helped him figure out how to make amends with Ka-hai. That was what he had always done when Jae-shin came to him with a problem.

He hiccuped again as this particular problem crossed his mind wearing nothing but her undergarments. His wife had been covered from neck to toes, but the cloth was so thin that it bordered on indecent. He hadn't looked at her all that long, but it had been enough to catch a glimpse of the slender length of her limbs, and of skin gleaming golden in the candlelight.

If she was going to spend money on clothes, couldn't she have bought herself new underwear, too?

Jae-shin shook his head to clear it. He didn't know whether Young-shin, wherever he was, could read his thoughts; but just in case he could, he didn't need his brother finding out what Ka-hai looked like in her underwear.

The only good thing to come out of that night's debacle was that Jae-shin came up with the idea to ask the ban-in, the residents of Banchon, about the Blue Messenger. Although Banchon was one of the poorest areas in the city, it was right on Sungkyunkwan's doorstep; there was always a chance that a ban-in might have gleaned enough knowledge in order to write those leaflets.

Bok-soo, the young thief whom the Jalgeum Quartet had exposed when Yoon-hee was accused of his crimes, was still working at the university, so it was easy enough to get in touch with him. "I'll ask around," he assured Jae-shin as he patrolled campus grounds in his green guard's uniform, "but I can't promise anything. You know how closemouthed the ban-in can be if they think you're out to hurt one of their own."

"Yes, I do," he agreed, remembering how difficult it had been to find Bok-soo. He smiled ruefully and slipped the younger man a few coins. "It's worth a shot, though. Thank you for your help."

He grinned. "Hey, I owe you and your friends my life; and in all the years since His Majesty ordered me to keep an eye on you, you haven't done anything wrong yet, so I guess you still deserve to be helped."

Jae-shin went home wondering how else they might investigate in Banchon, and had already stepped inside the house when he realized that something he had never heard before was echoing through the house.

Ka-hai was laughing. This wasn't the polite titter she used to react to his father's (admittedly feeble) jokes, but full-throated, genuine laughter, the kind one used when something was truly funny.

He stopped in his tracks, mesmerized by the surprisingly musical sound, until he heard the sound of another voice. The speaker was a man whose voice Jae-shin didn't recognize.

Frowning thoughtfully, he followed the sounds down a corridor and came upon his wife inside one of the western-facing rooms, taking tea with a richly-dressed young man.

Ka-hai caught sight of him and smiled. "Oh, you're home!"

"I just got in," he replied. That smile, the first one he had seen on her face in days, helped curb his temper, which had begun to simmer at the sight of his wife laughing with a stranger. With some effort, he glanced mildly at the guest and then arched an inquiring eyebrow at his wife.

Remembering her manners, she gestured at the man seated across the low table from her and smoothly made the introductions. "My lord, please meet Im Dong-wook, an old family friend. Dong-wook, this is my husband, Moon Jae-shin."

"It's a pleasure, my lord," Dong-wook said with an easy smile. "I missed your wedding because I was away on business for my father, so I'm here to offer my belated congratulations."

Jae-shin grunted and managed a polite nod.

"Why don't you get changed and join us?" Ka-hai suggested to her husband.

"I think I'll just join you now." He seated himself at the head of the table. The hilt of his sword, which was in the scabbard still strapped to his back, waved meaningfully over his shoulder. "I'm comfortable enough in these clothes, anyway."

"If you say so..." She regarded him dubiously for a moment, then turned away to instruct one of the servants attending them to bring another teacup.

"So, my lord," Jae-shin said, helping himself to a honey cake, "you're a friend of my wife's family?"

Dong-wook nodded. "My father and Lord Cha are neighbors," he explained. "Cha Ka-sar and I are the same age, and I often visited their home to play."

"We all grew up together," Ka-hai added brightly.

"How nice," Jae-shin drawled.

"He and my brothers used to play all sorts tricks on me," his wife went on, and grinned. "Perhaps I could prevail on you to take revenge on my behalf?"

"Maybe." Rather liking the idea of having a legitimate reason to strangle Dong-wook with the ties of the man's own hat, he turned to the other man with what he hoped passed for a friendly smile. "Do I have reason to demand satisfaction, my lord?"

He probably didn't look friendly enough, because Dong-wook's smile wavered and he shifted uneasily. "O-of course not," he replied. "All of that happened a very long time ago, when we were just children, and they were all stupid, harmless tricks. Besides," he added, "I thought the matter was settled long ago, when your wife threw me into a fishpond."

Despite his irritation, Jae-shin had to laugh. "You did that?" he asked her.

Ka-hai nodded shamefacedly. "I started growing before the boys did, so I was bigger and stronger than them for a time," she explained. "I had forgotten all about that."

He grinned and, acting on impulse, reached out to stroke her cheek with his thumb. "That's my girl," he murmured.

Jae-shin smiled thinly when she blushed and lowered her gaze. It had been a rather intimate gesture to make in front of a stranger, but that was the point.

Dong-wook didn't linger, due in large part to his host's forbidding presence, and took his leave as soon as was acceptable. Nevertheless, Jae-shin still had to sit through a seeming eternity of joking and easy banter between his wife and her childhood friend. It was as though Ka-hai was rubbing in his face the fact that she was closer to Dong-wook than to her own husband, and he'd had no choice but to play along and pretend that they were a happily married couple even though he felt as though he were being cuckolded in his own home. By the end of the visit, his simmering anger had build up to a rage so intense that it was almost visceral.

Once Dong-wook's horse finally disappeared from sight, Jae-shin grabbed his wife's wrist and hauled her into their bedroom. "Who was that?" he demanded, slamming the door shut.

"I told you," she replied, startled, "he's an old friend. He came to congratulate us on our marriage."

Ka-hai met his gaze squarely, but he detected a gratifying tremor in her voice and pounced on it. He leaned towards her, speaking in the quiet snarl that had so terrified many of his classmates at Sungkyunkwan. "You don't entertain male visitors unless I'm present, too, do you understand?"

She frowned, perplexed. "What in the world is your problem?" she asked. "It was all very proper. We—"

"Do you have any idea what people might think, seeing him come here while your husband is not at home?"

She gasped and paled, but instead of falling to her knees in a penitent heap, she reached out and slapped him smartly across the face. "That's vile! If I don't do that with you, what makes you think I would do it with anyone else?"

The blow stung only a little, but it was enough to unleash the full brunt of Jae-shin's vaunted temper and he pinioned her roughly against the wall. "Is he the reason why you're parading around in new clothes all of a sudden?" he demanded. "Were you just testing your feminine wiles on me because you knew that your lover was coming?"

As he ranted and bombarded her with questions, he was dimly aware that he was not at all acting like the good husband that Yoon-hee had once said he would make. However, he reasoned, this was not the time to keep calm and remain in the background. Ka-hai rightfully belonged to him!

The uncooperative female, however, refused to be cowed. "Stop yelling at me!" she snapped. "I don't know what your problem is, but if it'll make you feel better, then I'll gladly submit to a physical examination to assure you that I've never lain with a man. You might even want to conduct that examination yourself," she added with a note of challenge in her voice, "if you're up to it!

"And one more thing!" Ka-hai went on. "I'm not wearing my new clothes right now. They weren't for him, they were for you! Now, let go of me!"

Baring her teeth, she punctuated her rebuttal with a kick to his shins. Although she didn't have the range to cause any real pain, the mere act of retaliation was enough to startle Jae-shin into loosening his hold. Ka-hai glared at him, eyes bright with angry tears, for a few moments before jerking away from him and flouncing out of the room, leaving him staring after her.