"I'm gay, Nam Hee-seo-nim," he interrupts. "I'm gay and I'm not planning to stop being gay and I'm not going to bury that and pretend I'm not for the sake of being Kang Jaehyuk's model heir with a perfect wife and perfect children. I'm gay and I will have a lovely autumn wedding with my male partner in British Columbia and it will be very public and after that I will wear a wedding ring which will match my male partner's."

"So you're opposed to giving Kang Jaehyuk grandchildren?"

Blink.

"Suppose you didn't have to give that up. You could be as, ah, you could show your homosexual affections in public and have your public wedding and all of that. Is there anything more that is objectionable about the deal? Would you be willing to father an heir? Would you be willing to run your grandfather's group?"

"I confess I have never stopped to consider that possibility."

"I don't know if it's possible. But I need to know what you actually want, what you can't give up, and what you can. And then I'll see if Kang Jaehyuk can be convinced to ever bend on anything if it means he will have the heir he wants. Then, if that's not possible, I will ensure that you can cut him off cleanly, and that this will cause no repercussions to you and yours. Does that seem acceptable to you?"

"All of that... for teaching Kang Dal-seo those 'skills' I supposedly have that she lacks?"

"And I might make use of your network a couple of times, if I have need of it."

"Nam Hee-seo-nim, I am going to need something a lot more concrete than 'a couple of times, if I have need of it'."

She grins a grin sharp enough to cut steel. "Why don't we schedule another meeting for later this week?"

"So I guess I'm meeting her again on Friday."

"Wow, what a person." Snuggle snuggle guiding yaaaaay. "Have I been underestimating your network, should I be getting in on this, can you get me an interview with the guy at Tsinghua University who does backlash biomarker research? - that's a tangent, table that. Should I expect to meet either of these people?"

"...I can probably get you that interview, yes, and, uh, if you want? Clearly Nam Hee-seo is not looking to have a mother-son relationship with me and I don't know what kind of relationship I'll have with Dal-seo but the idea of introducing you to either of them does not feel meaningfully like I'm introducing you to family."

"I don't feel the need if you don't, just, if you're going to do some kind of weird mentorship thing with Dal-seo she might ever be around, and I too am around."

"Yeah it'll probably happen, I suppose. I'm really not sure what to think about all of that, I want to say it was a success but it was a very weird one."

"No kidding. ...if you wind up deciding on giving 'em a grandkid what ballpark timetable would that be on?"

"I don't know. Kang Jaehyuk was nineteen, maybe twenty when I was born, but clearly that's not what's expected of Dal-seo. ...though I could believe that Kang Jaehyuk would've wanted that of me.

"I—would still be uncomfortable with letting him raise a child? Which means that I want a say in it?"

"- well, yeah, don't give him your kid, why would you do that, I mean do I need to be ready to be a dad in the next year or do I have longer to get used to the idea."

Give him a minute, please, he needs to hide in Haru's neck.

"Backlashing here, if you would rather talk about the guy who got dungeon-napped while bench pressing a hundred twenty pounds and did not want to leave the weights behind we can do that instead."

"Sorry, sorry, just—I—was a bit. Overwhelmed. By the idea of—with you—"

"You told your mother you were planning to have a lovely autumn wedding in British Columbia and then she said 'what if you did that and also had a kid', so it seemed the logical extrapolation, to me..."

"I said that for—effect, mostly—I of course wouldn't have wanted to commit you to anything before talking to you and we should date for a respectable amount of time before I propose to you in a suitably romantic fashion and then we'll have our beautiful wedding and then we can think about children and, and to think I was making fun of the normal standard family life when all it would take to make me want it is turn it gay."

"It's amazing how much more appealing gay things are to gay people. I didn't take you to be committing to anything and agree with all of that except apparently there may be some sort of reason to think about children on a more accelerated timetable. Unless there isn't and it can wait another five years, which I don't know, hence the original question."

"I don't know either, I'd need to consult Kang Jaehyuk or more to the point Nam Hee-seo, but my guess is that five years would be at the high end of acceptable to him."

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