She's not the only one realising it just now. "Holy shit, Tae-gun, I always thought you just didn't like the attention..."

"I mean, there's that, too, I don't, so it's not that big a deal—"

"Someday I'm going to get a little buzzer button and carry it with me all the time and press it to buzz really loudly whenever you do your self-effacing shit. For now just consider yourself buzzed."

"...right."

"And yet you don't want—"

"For fuck's sake!" Tae-gun says, pulling away from the hug to glare at him. "Ha Si-yeon, you of all people will know this best: what's the sentence for misuse of psychic esper powers?"

"Sentence? Like, legal sentence? Uh, that's... broad... but in Korea it's from two years up to life in prison. In theory it could get capital..."

"Uh huh. Now imagine he got caught and nailed for everything he did that we know of up until two days ago. What would he get?"

"Ten to twenty."

"So I rest my fucking case."

... So, yeah, it would suck for the hypothetical Jaeha that is unbacklashed, but.

Then she and Tae-gun would be able to just live their lives.

But it's not just about them, is it?

"See, I'd almost prefer that, except going entirely public means that there will be even more stigma against other psychic espers," muses Hye-jin, out loud. She knows very well, the careful dance of not looking too scary to the public.

"...so, what, are we meant to kill a guy just to avoid public stigma?"

"It's an important angle to consider."

"It's a very sharp angle."

Hye-jin flinches away at Tae-gun’s sharp reply. She wasn't, actually, even jumping to murder, she was trying to think of the wider picture and how the greater populace would be affected.

She doesn’t say anything. She pokes at the food, wondering what ever could have persuaded her to perhaps sit on her feelings and thoughts. What an absolute mystery this is.

"Hyung you're being a bitch."

"I am. Sorry." Then he looks at Hye-jin specifically. "Sorry," he repeats. "I'm—twitchy."

...what the fuck.

“I wasn’t actually proposing murder as the better solution,” she grumbles, still upset. “I’m - trying to think.”

"I—get you. You're right. I shouldn't have assumed."

"I should take some of the blame for that, too. We've been too flippant, I guess. Or at least I have. Or maybe too quick to anger. If we want to figure out how to deal with this problem then I can't be—secretly wishing I could just teleport him into the sun while you feel too miserable about the prospect to ever evince an opinion.

"I'm sorry for how I've treated the subject. I've been too angry, on your behalf, and hurt, and I've felt that you weren't angry enough and that I should push back against you, make you see how horrible that was, but..."

"...I was doing wrong by you. You'd have felt a lot more able to process your emotions about this if you could express the conflict within you and get acceptance rather than pushback, and I couldn't give you that, and now you feel like there aren't any grey areas to navigate, it's just black and white. So I'm partially to blame for that, and I'm sorry."

...oh.

"On the object level... Hye-jin and Si-yeon are right, this is an angle to consider, and we can't be flinching away from plans because they feel to distasteful to think of. That includes plans that would let Kang Jaeha walk away scott-free, and it includes plans that would have us assassinate him in the dead of night."

Si-yeon scoffs.