Okay.

Alright.

(His hyung is acting really weird. Really weird. Tae-gun doesn't know in what way but it's really really weird, like there's some missing step somewhere. He doesn't like it.)

Yeah. It's a lot.

"Please bear with me, here," he says after he's started with breakfast and Tae-gun is sitting at the table waiting for him. "Imagine you one day wake up and you find yourself six years in the past. In your own body, as it was then, in the same place you were, but with the memories of six intervening years that haven't happened yet.

"How would you convince everyone around you that that happened?"

...that is so extremely not where he was expecting this conversation to go!!!!

"I. Guess I'd. Try to remember things that happened that I shouldn't be able to know...?"

"Tonight is Park Yoo-min-shi's birthday reunion."

Wait, is it? Oh, right, yeah, he RSVP'd.

"In that party, I'm crazy with jealousy. Your friends are really close to you. I'm still not over Nightmare. Ha Si-yeon flirts with you a lot, and you don't push him away completely. He and Baek Hyun-jae and Min Woo-young make various comments that I interpret as being malicious, in my direction. They hint that I'm bad for you. It all goes over your head, I think, and so I decide to take matters into my own hands and make you understand what they really mean. You respond to those words, the imagined words that I put in their mouths, and they get surprised and dismayed. It goes badly. You leave the reunion early, and I comfort you, and I feel really really guilty about it but also vindicated. I feel like I just proved, to you and me both, that your friends aren't as good for you as you think they are.

"This isn't the last time I do this. When they text you, I edit what they say in your eyes, and I make you feel worse about it. When you meet, I make you dislike them, and I make them dislike you. Ha Si-yeon is angry, and thinks you're pulling away from your friends to spend time with your shiny new boyfriend, that you're being a dick. Lee Juheon is sad, and feels like you're making a mistake, but not one that he can do anything about while still calling himself your friend. You're confused and upset that they're acting so weird. Min Woo-young—I am so, so thankful for Min Woo-young. Right now, not back then.

"Back then, I didn't realise how much of a problem he was going to be. Min Woo-young never lets go of you, and I don't even know, because he isn't one of your ex-partners. And he can get to you when I'm not around, and he notices. He notices the way you're acting. The way you keep pulling away. On Christmas, you have no one but me. It's normal, isn't it, to spend Christmas with your boyfriend? But it's not normal to ignore your friends like that, and it's not normal to ignore them for your own birthday. I don't remember exactly, but I think that, by then, Ha Si-yeon has already written you off, and Lee Juheon only makes a token effort towards reconnecting. Min Woo-young, thankfully, doesn't let me get away with it. I don't know what he does, exactly, because the two of you succeed at hiding it all from me.

"And one day, when I get home from a dungeon, you're not there anymore. You're not there, and you left me a message saying you're dissolving our partnership, and telling me to never contact you again. Quasar abandons me, which shocks everyone, most of all me. I don't understand what's happening, not until much, much later. It hurts. It hurts so much. I don't understand what's happening, I keep trying to contact you and I can't. You block me completely. You move out of your house. You get a new house, somewhere, I never learn where."

He has absolutely no idea how to engage with literally any of this.

"Are, are you saying—what are you saying, hyung?"

"I'm saying that I systematically abuse you for nearly a whole year, I destroy everything good about our relationship, I do it for no fucking reason. I do it for no fucking reason except that I'm selfish and cowardly and jealous. I frogboil myself into thinking it's fine, and I frogboil you into burning every single other relationship in your life."

"I traumatise you. You stop going out in public, ever. You stop seeing your friends. You get one partner, six months after that, and you go to one dungeon with him and then break it off immediately. The thought of getting a new partner sickens you. You can't ever let anyone get as close to you as I did. You stop looking, and every new potential partner Quasar looks into for you gets mysteriously otherwise engaged, courtesy of me. I bribe them, I get them other partners, I arrange for them to just never even get to meet you. You don't get any new partners. For five years, you don't get any new partners.

"Someone else would have died, but of course not you. You have better backlash control than any other esper alive. You spend five years partnerless, and you are chronically backlashed, in pain, exhausted, and you're still one of the five most powerful espers on this planet. You overwork yourself, because you can't do anything else with your life. Min Woo-young is your only friend, and he's probably the reason you survive at all."

"Wh—why—why would you do that? Keep partners away from me? That—makes no sense—"

"Because someday you will have to face a choice between me and dying, and I am betting you'll choose me. Because you'll forgive me everything, afterwards, since I've done it under so much backlash—as I, myself, am not getting guided very much. More than you, but I am actively manipulating everyone around me into thinking I am doing so much better than that. I have a few partners, one of whom lasts the better part of three years, and I'm horrible to them. I'm horrible to him. He's a sweet kid, and he hero-worships me, and I make him love me, and I'm awful to him. His name is Kim Insoo, and he hasn't awakened yet, right now in the present. But I don't get guided very much, because that monstrous version of me feels disgusted by the idea of letting anyone but you touch me. There is no Kang Jaeha without Lee Tae-gun, I think, and so I focus my entire life on the goal of getting you back, so that I can exist again.

"I am so, so, so bad at knowing myself when under no backlash, though. I don't realise how much I will hate myself for everything I've done. All I can think of is getting you back, so that I can be."

That—that makes it sounds like Jaeha succeeds at this insane plan...?

"And then another person shows up, whom I am also so, so thankful for. Her name is Kim Hye-jin. Currently, she lives in Japan, and she's awakened recently. She's half-Korean half-Japanese, and her partner in five years is awful and they break up in such a messy and spectacular way that she decides to flee to Korea rather than stay in Japan with her guild. I imagine Quasar was jumping at the opportunity, since it seemed like there was a huge chance she'd be a good fit for you, and I can't imagine they didn't suspect something was weird about how every other lead of theirs kept failing. They wanted to jump on it and not miss their chance.

"I'm completely blindsided by her. She's everything I'm not. And the guild president bungles his introduction to her extremely badly yet she still—you two are so compatible you can guide each other across the room from each other."

"That doesn't happen in real life."

"...Tae-gun-ah, you can guide me from where you are. I can't guide you that far, but the reverse is true. Our compatibility is very asymmetrical in that way."

What.

"I never bring this up in the—original timeline—because it feels so scary. It feels so scary that I need you more than you need me, even though it's true, and I don't want to make it any more true.

"But you and Kim Hye-jin are more compatible than that. It's mutual, too. And you are so, so wary of her, and—I don't know what happens. I have no idea. But you accept partnering with her, despite everything, and you start getting close to her."

Food's done, so he starts to serve it and sits across the table from Tae-gun. "It drives me out of my mind. She's ruining my plans. She's fixing you, she's helping you, she's helping you live and bringing you happiness, and all I can think about is how much I hate her. How she's getting in my way. How she's an obstacle."

"It's so insane, Tae-gun-ah. It's so insane. I've driven myself to a point where I can't be happy for you. I can't see the good in someone making you live longer. Because it gets in my way, you see. Because if she helps you, I can't. If she has you, I don't."

Tae-gun's not touching his food at all. He's just—listening. He doesn't know what to make of it, it seems like whatever happened Jaeha believes it did and—and there are, actually, checkable elements of that story. If there is a half-Japanese esper called Kim Hye-jin, if they are that compatible, then, then...

...then something really horrible has happened and—hasn't. Somehow.

"I go after her. I try to push her away. I try to scare her. I make her feel unsafe. I make her unable to go out in public. I corner her, I trap her. I keep hoping she'll give up, she'll decide she can't deal with it, she'll leave you because I'm too much. But I'm planning to kill her. Because if she doesn't leave, she needs to be removed."

The scariest thing about this whole story is the way Jaeha's telling it in such a—matter-of-fact tone. A description of events. It sounds more real, for that.

"A new confluence starts. That's... six years from now, in autumn. And very early in that confluence—you've been to Volcanic Range this time, haven't you?"

"...yeah?"