"But the thing is that when—well, assuming he was the one who tried what happened yesterday—from your perspective it would've looked like a tragedy but not his fault. If it had worked."

"He could get rid of you in a way that looks like it's not his fault, too."

"But he didn't have a reason to. Or, kind of, my power, but... Imagine a world in which everyone who cares about hyung suddenly dies. There's no way hyung wouldn't be suspicious as hell, and my model here is that Kang Jaeha wants hyung to love him again. He doesn't want to trap hyung in a basement forever, he wants—something else."

Nod.

“…….. do you think he was working to scare off Tae-gun-ah’s potential partners, then? Since they would be getting in the way, and taking out his backlash. Not overtly, like with me, but. Like with,” and she motions to Juheon and Si-yeon.

"...you mean, over the years? Oh, shit, that would make sense, wouldn't it?"

"...it would?"

"We've had... more than one person we looked into about being your partner have one reason or another come up why they couldn't follow through and all of the reasons were plausible on the surface but in fucking retrospect—"

"...that's vile." It's one thing for Tae-gun to not want partners but if there were potential ones that could have worked and didn't because of Kang Jaeha...

"I didn't know that."

"Prez didn't want to tell you until it was more of a known deal. We did get—some people, right, that you rejected, but the most promising ones..."

“Mysteriously had something come up. Fuck. And I was a surprise imported from Japan, almost certainly out of his range.”

"Wow this guy's been, like, high-key obsessed. Like, not just in an 'oh shit he got this hot new partner' way?"

"If that was the case it's more points for the theory that he was trying to get Tae-gun-hyung to come crawling back when he was at the very end of his rope, making sure he'd definitely not get a partner at all ever."

...he can't muster the outrage everyone else is feeling about it but that might also be some rose-coloured glasses because the place his mind goes to is "well at least this way I got to meet Hye-jin".

He's hopeless.

“Brrr. Thanks, I hate it.”

"Does this change anything?"

"Not very much, just... To the extent it's relevant we shouldn't assume he's going to be monomaniacally focused on getting physical access to Tae-gun, he wants something more complicated."

"Something that works in our favour at least a bit, though, right?"

"Maybe. If he sticks to this pattern. But he might not. Now that that the façade has been broken, he might be more dangerous. Since, you know. I lived and what happened was very obviously not an accident."

"Hmm..." Woo-young edits the table again, adding red exclamation marks next to the three bigger problem entries then drawing a circle around the "physical" cells with an arrow to the side and writes "he might try more things?" next to it.

"...Hye-jin is right, that could make him more dangerous... to Woo-young especially."

"Hmm, yeah."

"You seem very blasé about it."

"No point freaking out about it," he shrugs. "We'll figure out how to deal with it. I trust us."

"...that is a level of chill most people can only aspire to."