"Do you want help carrying the dishes?" he asks, getting up.

"Yes, please."

She’ll let him get space to think, and. …. Hopefully everyone here isn’t looking at her like she’s a fucking psycho??

No one's particularly looking at her like she's a fucking psycho, or even necessarily at her at all. Hyun-jae is examining a slice of gimbap she's holding between her chopstick and looking thoughtful.

Si-yeon is nuzzling the top of Chun-hee's head with his eyes closed.

And Chun-hee is looking between Hye-jin and Tae-gun and occasionally down at her plate, also with a thoughtful expression on her face.

… okay. Not quite the reassurance she was looking for, but, uh. Not disgust? Hooray?

"You're doing fine," Woo-young murmurs in her direction, when he notices that she's looking for reassurance. "This is a hard topic on all of us but especially the two of you."

She relaxes a little, and smiles gratefully.

“Thank you, Woo-young-sunbae. You’re really good and I appreciate your efforts in both translating Tae-gun-ah and in being generally a really great guy.”

"Awww you'll make me blush."

“And we can’t have that, can we!”

Then something occurs to her, and she turns serious.

“….. we need to make sure you’re safe, too, actually. Since, um. Assassins are on the table. You might also be a target.”

"Oh yeah, we will," he says, sort of matter-of-factly.

"Does Kang Jaeha... know about your relationship with Tae-gun?"

"Actually how come you knew about all of this before us?" Tae-gun and Woo-young weren't this close way back when.

"Woo-young was the one who got me out," says Tae-gun, arriving back at the table and placing the bibimbap and the sliced meat and the kimchi onto it with Juheon before starting to distribute bowls to everyone. "He's the one who figured out that something was wrong, and he helped me get away from—him." Tae-gun still can't say Jaeha's name aloud, can he, not when he's referring to his Jaeha as opposed to the monster out there. "So Kang Jaeha definitely knows about him."

"...oh."

Juheon and Si-yeon both apologised to Tae-gun for having let him pull away and not trying harder to keep him around but it's... even starker, as a failure, juxtaposed with how Woo-young, who wasn't as close to Tae-gun as they were, didn't fail that way.

“Right. Uh. … I suppose you’re also much harder to assassinate, since you don’t do crazy things like ‘go into a dungeon by yourself,’ but. Please be careful??”

"I'm also a lot less famous so it's harder to find me, hopefully, but I think I'm going to lay low and spend at least tomorrow feeding the guild battery rather than going into dungeons. We'll need to figure out something more permanent, though.

"All that said, Kang Jaeha has a lot less reason to get rid of me. I was around for five years and didn't manage to get Tae-gun back on his feet, whereas you're a more direct threat to his goals. ...presumed goals."

"Ice cold."

"...I don't know how to be reassuring about that, it really is that bad."

"We'll think of something."

“I suppose he’s had plenty of time to try and get rid of you, and hasn’t. It seems more like he’s possessive of partnering with Tae-gun over, hm, tactical reasoning? But still. Please be careful, and maybe hire a bodyguard or something when you’re out in the field?”

"Bodyguard isn't a bad idea. I have to imagine that he must've pulled out all the stops for that, if it were straightforward for him to do and if he's willing to go that far then there's no reason for him to not have done it earlier."

"Assuming it was him."