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this_peculiar_power

Lee Tae-gun. Korea's first and, currently, only S-rank. There are A-rankers who could get the promotion to S-rank, if they wanted to, if they revealed enough of their powers—or, at least, there is one, in Kang Jaeha himself—but this flash in the pan boy was the first one to decide to just go for it and now he's probably learning about how much it sucks to be the center of attention.

Not that you'd know from just looking at him. He's always gorgeous, stepping out of dungeons, and that's genuinely impressive in itself, but it's even more impressive if Quasar is right that they might be compatible. This implies things about the shape of Lee Tae-gun's backlash, things that suggest he's quite good at self-control, and that he must be holding quite a lot in, to be able to look like that. So that piques Jaeha's curiosity, and he looks into the boy.

Lee Tae-gun is 21; manifested really late, about a year and a half ago; has had three partners so far, none of them particularly impressive in their own rights, each lasting a handful of months and ending in the normal way these things do, with them finding partners they're more compatible with. As far as Jaeha can tell, there's nothing particularly out of the ordinary in the boy's history. He's really just very straightforwardly boring.

And, well, Jaeha is also between partners right now. The story with him is also usually the same: he's never found anyone he had great compatibility with, and they'd all eventually leave, even if they never found someone else. Better alone than with Kang Jaeha. But he doesn't take it personally. He knows they probably want more out of a partnership than he can give. This boy will be no different, they'll spend a while together and help each other survive and eventually the boy will move on and Jaeha won't take it personally either.

So Kang Jaeha is in a meeting room, reading some files and waiting for Lee Tae-gun to arrive so they can figure out whether they'll do business together or not.

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this_peculiar_power

"Is there a point in discussing crazy hypotheticals? You understood what I meant, didn't you?"

neither_rest_nor_peace

"...I suppose."

this_peculiar_power

"Do you want me to? Stop being an esper, that is?"

neither_rest_nor_peace

"...I couldn't do that." He tries to imagine Jaeha asking him to stop being an esper and it's like being asked to kill himself. What's the point of Lee Tae-gun if he's not an esper?

this_peculiar_power

"I think I find being an esper a lot less important to who I am than you do, Tae-gun-ah.

"...you know I haven't been fully guided since I manifested when I was seventeen, right?"

neither_rest_nor_peace

...well he hadn't really put it together like that.

this_peculiar_power

"And I keep thinking, that probably fucked me up, right? I don't know who I'd be if I weren't an esper but that's because I don't know who I'd be. I don't care about being an esper that much. ...my father would be thrilled if I stepped down and became his heir, so you wouldn't even need to financially support me or anything."

neither_rest_nor_peace

"Your father?"

this_peculiar_power

"My grandfather is Kang Moon-il, founder of Kang Group, and my father is Kang Jaehyuk, its current chairman and majority shareholder."

neither_rest_nor_peace

...oh, Tae-gun knows those names. Everyone in Korea knows those names.

Uh.

this_peculiar_power

He smiles a bit. "But I knew I was gay when I was a teenager, and I was not very discreet about it, either. Drove father up the wall. I'm sure he wanted to set up a marriage for me, and would have if I hadn't become an esper. And if I come home telling him that I'll be his heir and also that his son-in-law is Lee Tae-gun he might actually die on the spot of an aneurysm."

neither_rest_nor_peace

"I'd prefer not to be your father's cause of death."

this_peculiar_power

"But it would be really funny."

neither_rest_nor_peace

...well, Tae-gun confesses he can't feel very sorry if some homophobic magnate dies because he finds out his son is dating a man. Not in anything more than an abstract way.

"When you said at the meetup that being gay wasn't really formative...?"

this_peculiar_power

"Well, I was maybe playing it up a bit. It wasn't formative in a way that made me want to bond with other people about it? Most people aren't from the kind of family that will try to arrange marriages for them so there's not much to bond over, there. And despite everything I was never in danger, even when rumours were going around I was still Kang Jaeha from Kang Group, no one was going to say a peep about it."

neither_rest_nor_peace

"But still, you're—valuable. I mean, your work as an esper." Losing Kang Jaeha would have material consequences to actual people out there, people would die more.

this_peculiar_power

He can't say that he cares about that that much compared to how much he cares about Tae-gun, but—any. He does have any sense of empathy and duty, and it's not even all of it due to Tae-gun.

"Yeah."

neither_rest_nor_peace

"Are you under zero backlash right now?"

this_peculiar_power