Sniffle.

"You can be mad at me if you want to be," she offers, even though he - already went and said he doesn't. "You're allowed."

"Okay. I'll keep that in mind for if I want to be."

... She gives a little watery giggle.

"You're very good. I'll - do my best not to scare you again. And. Spend my copious amounts of free time trying to find therapists, how about, because fuck do I seem to need one."

He nods. "How about I draw a bath and then give you a massage? Do you like bath bombs?"

"Only if they're not the glittery ones," she sniffles. She'd protest about the bath if she were going to have it alone, but - she's not, so. It sounds good.

"Oh, no, I'd object to the glittery ones, that stuff gets everywhere." Hyup, he can carry her upstairs.

"We'd be finding glitter in our underwear and sheets for months!" She kisses his nose before he reaches the stairs. "Thank you."

"What, for not getting glittery bath bombs? You're welcome!"

"That, but also. This. Thank you. You're a good boyfriend."

"I'm the only S-rank boyfriend in Korea."

Giggle.

"Yes you are." Smooch!

Smoooooooch he is getting the BEST GRADE in being a BOYFRIEND.

Anyway! Bath time! It is time to pamper his girlfriend.

So. Time off.

She's really not sure what to... do with it.

She does the obvious things, of scheduling appointments with several potential therapists, assisting with drafting the whole - announcement thing about her taking a break for a bit, baking Ji-woo delicious apology treats in a vain attempt to make up for the mess she made of her foot. Ji-woo seems mollified by her groveling, and sighs and pats her on the head and tells her to take some time off, but everyone fucks up. She agrees to various things from her realtor about the slow, ponderous process of selling real estate, including inspections and price ranges and whether furniture can be moved in to make it look inviting. Her answers boil down to "I will throw as much money at this as you want to make it so I don't have to think about it and it will go away as quickly as possible," which is perhaps not the best coping mechanism, but tough luck, she doesn't like any of the therapists she's talked to so far, it'll just have to be good enough for now. She visits her parents. She spends time with her boyfriend, and tries not to let herself be consumed by raging jealousy over how he's still allowed to do what he's good at and she's not.

Then she does some non obvious things, like picking up English classes, because free time should... probably be productive? English is basically the lingua franca of the international esper world, learning it can only be helpful. She does more interior decorating of her personal silo, which is still ludicrously expensive to even get to, and highly impractical for all non-Jaeha paranoia related activities. She - wants a real house, with an actual internet connection and the ability to go wandering in a nearby town to look at the local hardware store's garden department or book store, but she can't bring herself to go house hunting (or even town and county hunting!) and instead just. Attempts to exist in public sometimes.

This doesn't really go well for her.

Korea has different celebrity norms than Japan, and the media shitstorm around her is, to put it lightly, charged. Kim Hye-jin, fucked a named S-rank dungeon to death and walked out showing her tits to the world, did she do it for attention? Was the assassination real or was it a publicity stunt? Is she a slut for swapping partners so quickly, gosh she's dating this one too, Lee Tae-gun deserves a good hot boy/someone that's not damaged goods/Kang fucking Jaeha instead of her. Is Korea's second S-rank broken forever, is she going to retire, should she retire, doesn't she have a responsibility to the world, why didn't she say anything to the media earlier, is she stupid, why didn't she have a set of bodyguards watching every dungeon portal she ever went through. Was she really just skirting on Lee Tae-gun's coattails after all, she's not even doing dungeons anymore. Endless nitpicking from a thousand contradictory sources that all just think she wasn't good enough, that they could have done better in her shoes.

It's not even all of the - toxic judgmental trash that gets to her, that mostly just makes her angry, it's the pity. It's the knowledge that people keep wanting to have an opinion about her, ask her how she's doing, act like they know anything about her at all because she's famous. Even other espers are all - weird about it at her. She can't even go to mixers without someone asking about if she's going to push Korea to go for the death penalty for a certain criminal. A number of espers are out for blood, the unspoken pact of neutrality so blatantly broken, and maybe with Hye-jin's help in particular they can get it, if she just -

She doesn't want to just. She doesn't want to talk about it. She doesn't want to go on any kind of crusade. She doesn't want him dead, not really, because she doesn't think that'd end things, either, not anymore. She wants to try and figure out how to be a normal person again that doesn't feel like at any moment someone might try to wipe her brain, cause her to commit a murder, or fucking kill her.

It's just really not obvious how. She doesn't, really, feel like anyone cares about her the person. Just - what she's had done to her, or how they've let her down, or how they can use her for their own ends.

Lee Tae-gun is a remarkably offline person. He doesn't really read the news beyond a bare minimum to be at most about a day late to important news, such as that the Earth has exploded and suchlike. He certainly doesn't read anything related to espers, at all, because if anything is relevant to his life his guild will inform him of it. He also has years of practice with being a Korean celebrity, so he knows how to dodge most of that. This is how he manages to be mostly oblivious to the way the public is treating Kim Hye-jin.

It's not that he doesn't notice her upset. He notices it, and he tries to help, and he isn't great at it. And he'd probably have noticed the problem more specifically reasonably soon. But the way he does notice it is... not ideal.

This last confluence changed a lot. Ha Si-yeon seems to have pulled quite a lot of strings and applied quite a lot of pressure behind the scenes, but of course he wasn't the only one, and there was pressure from multiple directions. And while it wasn't an overnight change, it was still sufficiently quick that Tae-gun is still not totally used to the changes. That's why he still steps out of the dungeon portal with his Public Face on, despite the fact that there is now a proper barrier surrounding it rather than just yellow tape and the media vultures don't have immediate access to him. It's blissfully quiet and empty, here, just him and the support team. This was a simple dungeon that he solo'd, and he's sufficiently on top of his backlash backlog that he's not even in a panic needing to go back to his silo immediately to jerk off (or, more likely, have sex with Kim Hye-jin). Not that he doesn't want to, of course, but it's a lot less pressing. The urgency is gone.

So, while he's getting some last checks from the medical team...

...he overhears Kim Hye-jin's name across the media barrier.

Esper hearing being what it is, he of course can't help but keep listening, now that his attention's been caught.

"—that he will be looking for a new partner remains speculative, but our eyes on the scene confirm that he once again went into this dungeon on his own—"

...what. Looking for a new partner? Who, Tae-gun? What??

"—has been sighted on her own, too, but has refused to offer comments as to the nature of their partnership and its future. Some sources suggest that her promotion to S-rank was premature and political in nature, especially considering the lack of followup—"

"Excuse me," says Lee Tae-gun, one of Korea's two S-ranks, one of the ten most powerful espers in the world, who seems to have somehow despite his best judgment found himself on the other side of the media barrier right next to a person holding a microphone and being filmed. The van behind the camera person does not belong to a news channel Tae-gun recognises, which makes this an even worse idea, but he is suddenly remembering that "horny" is not the only way his backlash can be and that there are other reasons that he might have wanted to go back home immediately.

Unfortunately, realising this is not actually causing him to go home.

The reporter startles—the camera person didn't warn them that Tae-gun had appeared behind them because they were staring slack-jawed at him for a bit too long—but regains composure quickly. You can't work this job if you let stuff like this faze you. "Lee Tae-gun-nim, care to comment about what your plans are now that your partnership with Kim Hye-jin's been dissolved?"

"...now that what."

What??????

"Are the rumours that she will be returning to Japan true? How do you feel about having been misled about her abilities as an esper?"