Kim Hye-jin has been soloing a lot of dungeons.
It wasn't concerning at first, because it made sense as a way to take power back from the people that tried to kill her, be powerful, and at the same time give every other exhausted esper after the confluence a break.
It's now perhaps starting to get concerning.
Outwardly, though, she... seems fine? Just really work focused. Distant towards everyone, maybe.
Before, the image of Kim Hye-jin in his mind was unassailable, inviolable, and most of all not someone he could ever do anything for. He needed her; she didn't need him. That's what he thought. That is, in hindsight, one of the big drivers of why he failed so hard at supporting her. She didn't look like she needed it. He could only take, never give, because he didn't have anything to offer.
Tae-gun knows that was wrong, now, though. Ever since she asked to be pampered, that day, something changed in him. Like some switch flicking, some angle of reality shifting that made him see things in a way he couldn't. She does need him. She needs him, and, God damn it, he's going to be there for her. He can't be anything short of perfect, that's who he is. He is Lee Tae-gun, Korea's only S-rank boyfriend. And while he has a long way to go to get there, he knows that the only way is through, it's putting in the work. This means that he's paying attention.
So while Tae-gun's tried to give her some space and taken the couple of rebukes she gave him lightly, he's... noticed. He's noticed that she's not fine. He's watching for it. He can tell. And it's getting to be a bit too much, she's a bit too distant, and he knows what she looks like when she's demolishing dungeons because they're fun and it's not this.
He needs to talk to her about this. He's not sure how, but the only way to figure it out is by trying.
She arrives back from her latest (soloed) dungeon, cheerily half-singing her, "Tadaima!"
Tae-gun has also been soloing some dungeons, if not quite matching her intensity (which is a wild emotional state to inhabit), so he's also somewhat actively backlashed.
"Okaeri," he calls back, somewhat less energetically than he usually does but not wanting to rain on her parade.
In a short period of time, he has a girlfriend on his lap!
"Hi," she purrs, before she immediately moves to kissing him.
—right, he's somewhat backlashed but also he still has a lot of backlog and all it takes is one touch for his motor to rev all the way up. He's so predictable.
He's caught her in his arms and is kissing her back, hungrily, thoughts of Having A Conversation momentarily forgotten, and it takes him all of his willpower to pull away and say, "Do you want water or something before I ravish you?"
He can do that. He can start ravishing her right there and then, and then he can move them to the bedroom, and then there can be some more ravishing on their way to the shower because he accidentally looked at her and remembered how hot she is and how much he likes her, and he should probably give her a break and not ravish her all night long. Her backlash was dealt with a ravish and a half ago anyway.
Mmmmm but it's so nice though, and she doesn't want to have those pesky thoughts anyway.
Eeeee.
She's still at least pretending to be sensible though, so: water and food? While snuggling? She does have more dungeons scheduled for tomorrow, it wouldn't do to show up to them starved and dehydrated.
Mmhmmmmmm. Tae-gun can cook her something nice, he's been looking up and favouring some new recipes to try so that he can be a better boyfriend.
But speaking of being a better boyfriend, "Hye-jin-ah."
"Mmm?" she wonders, a little sleepily, from where she's perched for food.
There's a bit of a break in the cooking while things are being heated up so he can sit on the stool across the kitchen counter from her and hold her hand, running circles on her skin with his thumb.
"I like you. Really quite an unreasonable amount."
Awwwwwww.
"I like you, too," she replies, with one of her pretty smiles.
"So... I... promised things would change for the better and, and I don't know all of what that means yet. I think I'm, I'm probably gonna make mistakes along the way while I figure out how to be a good boyfriend. But I think a good boyfriend pays attention, and tries to make his girlfriend feel better rather than worse, and tries to support her and be there for her and listen to her.
"Hye-jin-ah, I've seen you demolish a bunch of dungeons solo while you're having fun, and it doesn't look like this."
She opens her mouth, then closes it.
".... I..." she begins, then stops. She looks down. "It's."
She shrinks a little in her seat, and murmurs:
"They're the only place I feel powerful and in control."
...he lifts her hand up to his lips and kisses her knuckles. "That's so relatable it hurts."
"Yeah. I've heard someone mention before that they think we're both from the same alien planet, they might be onto something," she snorts.
"Bright side, me handling my baggage with this particular vice will help knock out your backlog faster, so, as long as I don't accidentally die, no loss?"
"...no loss? Hye-jin-ah, I wouldn't wish what I've gone through on anyone. The fact that you can't feel in control of the rest of your life, that's, that's a loss."
"Sure, but. ... I don't know how to fix it. How to regain control. It, just. I still don't even really believe everything is over, you know?"
"I... get that." Still running slow circles on her skin with his thumb. "But it's—it shouldn't be something you do on your own. I also promised I'd be there for you and support you, so let me fulfill that promise. Lean on me. Share your burden with me, let's try to deal with it together."
"I'll - try? Am trying, just." She shrugs helplessly. "I feel like there are worse coping mechanisms than flattening a bunch of dungeons solo and giving everyone else a break? I don't know what else to do."
"That's... fair, I don't know, either, but... that was... 'I don't know what else to do' isn't the same as 'we don't know what else to do' and I think even if you and I don't know what else to do that doesn't mean that we don't... Um, I'm not sure that was a good way to put it."
"I think I understood that? Uh. I wasn't... including you in my calculus of 'welp, better fling myself into as many dungeons as they'll let me and see if it makes me feel better,' which. ... I probably should have. Sorry."
He squeezes her hand, kisses it again, then gets up to go finish up the food now that it's probably cooked.
"And also that there's... things neither you nor I can do alone that we could do together. ...not that I'm thinking of any right now but thinking is also a thing we can do together."
"Yeah. I'll work on it. Try to, you know. Think with you."
"... I did attempt to find a therapist, actually. I haven't mentioned it because it. Didn't go well. She was, ugh, I don't even know how to describe it, she wanted me to talk about how I was victimized and how I was hurt and it was all, just. What part of S-rank combat esper was unclear to you, ma'am, I was shot in the head in a closing dungeon and still managed to survive, don't - ... take away my power like that. I've had enough power taken from me, thanks, someone else doesn't get to dictate my narrative, either."
He flinches. "Yeah. I—told Woo-young something like that once, that I—hated how much of it made me feel so—helpless. Like things were just happening to me and there wasn't anything I could do. Kang Jaeha happened to me, and then I was broken for years, and then—it wasn't because of anything I did that things started getting better for me, either.
"But I don't want to try to—be a thing that just happens to you, either. Just—I don't know. And we don't have to figure it all out right now but I just wanted to—not ignore it, it's... I noticed before and I thought that maybe if... but maybe I should've said something sooner, I don't know."
He serves them their food and brings it over to Hye-jin then sits next to her to lean his head on her shoulder.
"I don't think you just... had me happen to you," she snorts, reaching over to pet him. While, yes, eating food with her other hand. "It - takes a lot of courage, to try again? You wanted to reach out to your friends again, too. I was just the one compatible person from out of meddling range, who was good at holding still and not scaring the shy bunny."
He chokes on his food and reaches for the peach juice to try to clear his throat up.
Giggle!
"You know in English it even rhymes with your name! What do you think, is bunny-gunny, or hunny-bunny better? I feel hunny-bunny flows better, but then people might get confused about who I'm talking about...."
"No? Is there another shy, skittish woodland animal you feel fits you better?"
"Maybe a deer, I could see some kind of deer," she muses, as if he hadn't said anything at all.
He's gonna resume stuffing his face with food rather than engage with any of that. That's what he'll do.
hey
Hye-jin
let's hang out
not like right now but let's go get drunk or something
I guess you don't like getting drunk
ygm
I do, yeah. But no getting actually drunk for me, thank you.
Just hanging out would be nice.
cool
when are you free
I'm joking I saw your goddamn schedule
free up some time for me
also feel free to bring hunny gunny with you if you want ig
lmk if you want me to bring Hana too
lol
I see I've been caught
No double date for me I think?
idk I'm trying to not be joined at the hip with him, get out more
Will do.
Maybe I'll send Tae-gun-ah off to hang out with his hyungs if they're free.
Social enrichment for both workaholic introverts.
excellent
I'm sure if he asks both of them will be willing to free up their own schedules for him
they're literally not
if you poke a hole in a thing it becomes thing with hole it doesn't become a new thing
...I guess a bun becomes a bagel if you poke a hole in it
hm.
I think they're made differently.
Like volcanoes and mountains.
This is a chance to educate yourself! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcano
Well done! We'll have you making more correct observations about the state of the world in no time!
But so fun!
Live a little, delight in the complexity and beauty of the world around you!
Also freed up a space on Friday night, that work okay for you?
She gets an email from one jeong.hoyeon@quasarguild.co.kr. It's listing her some resources she might want that they could offer, ✨just in case✨. It's suggesting that taking breaks is normal and healthy and good. It has links and various people who could be points of contact for her if she wanted this or that.
It's trying to not be overly familiar, but the message is clear: Are you okay? Can we help? Is there anything we can do?
To: jeong.hoyeon@quasarguild.co.kr
From: kimhyejin@gmail.com
Listen, while I appreciate the attempt to help me in a - safe corporate way that doesn't overstep my boundaries, it's really misunderstanding my discomfort? You have clearly spent all of this time and effort to find resources specifically for me, to try to help me, and then you scrubbed all hints of the person responsible from it all, and frankly, that just freaks me out. I don't want a nebulous corporate entity taking interest in my affairs and mental health, I want a person, preferably with minimal strings leading back to nebulous corporate entities that can screw me over.
So: can I have an agent or representative, to interface with Quasar for me? I'd wanted to find something out of guild to represent me in such a way, but, well. Kang Jaeha. I still want that, but I can have a Quasar based representative of me in the interim, and then pick back up my own personal side projects as I'm able. I think it would be both more constructive and more comfortable than this.
To: kimhyejin@gmail.com
From: jeong.hoyeon@quasarguild.co.kr
Cool! I'll start over.
Hi, Kim Hye-jin-shi! Nice to meet you! I'm Jeong Ho-yeon. I can be that representative. Just tell me what you need! You can also message me on the company app, and my work phone is in my signature below.
Hope we can work together productively!
To: jeong.hoyeon@quasarguild.co.kr
From: kimhyejin@gmail.com
I hope so too! Thank you, that's much less disconcerting.
On a direct resources level: I've got a real estate agent already for selling my house, I'm okay on that front. What I'm having more trouble with is finding a therapist. Not in house, please, I realize that means they will probably be worse but I'm already pushing it as it is on trusting Quasar an inch. Just please help me narrow down some options for my extremely weird circumstances, with special care towards avoiding being victimized.
Actually, since it'll be relevant to representing me in the future: how much of my history with White Star, Quasar, and Lee Tae-gun's whole situation do you know of? Because I feel it's important for you to have context of wtf is going on with me and why I'm so wary of corporations, including Quasar. I expect you've heard prez pissed me off, but I think it's still not clear as to how he managed it?
To: kimhyejin@gmail.com
From: jeong.hoyeon@quasarguild.co.kr
I don't know the details of Lee Tae-gun-shi's backlash situation but my understanding of it is that it was really, really bad but he didn't want to have a new partner for what is now clear were Kang Jaeha reasons so prez decided to surprise him with a new one, except he didn't tell you you were going to be a surprise either so you were used as a weapon against Lee Tae-gun-shi against your will. Is that about right?
To: jeong.hoyeon@quasarguild.co.kr
From: kimhyejin@gmail.com
Yeah, that's most of it. I also didn't have a heads up about how bad his situation was - I thought he was some kind of alien or had several other side partners or something, not that I was needed for an ongoing medical emergency. But it was approximately the worst intro Quasar could have possibly made, aside from holding my parents hostage or something, because - it was a lot, to trust a guild enough to leave Japan. I was trusting your company to help me adjust. It sucks to trust someone to catch you and help you get settled in a strange new country, and then immediately get dropped in favor of being weaponized against someone else. Prez did not help by pitching his attempt at an apology as 'think of all the people you're disappointing by cutting contact and all the friends you could make,' which just sounded like entitlement and potential traps to me.
I have since been forced by circumstance to get over it, because Kang Jaeha. I didn't really have any other choice. Frankly, I haven't been particularly impressed with Quasar's ability to interface with me as a corporate entity. No offense to you, I really do appreciate the attempt to help me, just, the way your company is organized means I slipped through a lot of cracks, and no one seemed to care. There were a lot of ways that Quasar could have helped me - sending me links to resources, promising to protect me in legal situations, laying out the rules for whether or not I could tell my parents that I was being stalked by an S-rank psychic esper, helping me find alternatives to Quasar resources - that it didn't, or did later rather than sooner. Hell, I didn't know where the fucking blankets were in the silo Tae-gun brought me to the first day.
So, uh. That's where I am. I do not expect my relationship with Quasar as a corporate entity is salvagable to the point where I'm going to be just another ordinary esper in this guild. I'm going to be weird and traumatized and fighty, and I am and have been holding my nose to work with Quasar as a company this entire time. I trust several people in Quasar, but that's different. Probably all important information in representing/interfacing with me.
To: kimhyejin@gmail.com
From: jeong.hoyeon@quasarguild.co.kr
Man, prez really messed up, huh.
Well, I'll do my best to help. We actually don't have any in-house therapists because it'd be a conflict of interest to have someone who's counselling you about personal things to be in any way employed by your employers, but I have a directory that I can triage and send to you based on recs, how does that sound?
To: jeong.hoyeon@quasarguild.co.kr
From: kimhyejin@gmail.com
He really did, yeah. Downright artful snipe of my traumas, it's in retrospect pretty impressive.
That sounds great, thanks!
To: kimhyejin@gmail.com
From: jeong.hoyeon@quasarguild.co.kr
Alright! I'll get back to you asap. Cheers!
Nothing comes up to interrupt her time out with Woo-young, probably to be yelled at that she's being stupid and breaking herself, but, well. He's allowed to be worried about her.
Anyway, here she is! Attempting to do a social!
And so is he! He thinks they are well past the "hugging" stage of friendship so he will hug her, incompatibility be damned.
Aww. Yeah, hugs are fine, incompatibility be damned. Hug.
"Hi. You doing okay?"
"I am! I've mostly been feeding Quasar's sadly depleted batteries of my powers post-confluence, recently."
"I could use some boring. Unlike some people I know." He can move, which means he can sit at the table of the nice Japanese restaurant they're at, and gesture for her to do same.
Yep. Here they go. Sigh.
She sits, though, giving an awkward shrug.
"Boring just... still feels like an opening for an attack right now, you know?"
"...sorry, I'm not trying to get on your case about it. I'm sure hyung'll do it better than me. Just—it was—I saw your schedule and I thought, she needs a break and she's not gonna take one so I'm gonna be a break and—I should walk the talk and not talk about that, how about."
Aw. She relaxes, a little. Not entirely, but a little. He's trying, and she appreciates it.
"Thanks. I'm - not self destructing, though, just. Letting off steam and chipping away at Tae-gun-ah's terrible backlog at the same time." Shrug. "Anyway."
No idea what thing to talk about instead though.
That's the problem with workaholics, isn't it.
"Hyung showed me the video games you introduced him to a while ago."
"He did. God, it was so stupid, he was still in the, like, that was back when he was still pretending he didn't like you? And he was all like, well they're not that useful I think, though they're interesting and make me think in twisty ways, and I went, are you having fun, and he was quiet for like ten seconds and said I guess??? and I was like then that's probably mission accomplished!! and he looked like I'd grown a second head."
This earns a giggle!
"Of course. What is a fun, can you use it to vanquish more dungeons, if not, then why does it exist?"
"When I suggested that you might possibly maybe perhaps have positive regard for him as a person he looked like he'd never heard of the concept. —anyway I played them, too, and they are fun."
"They are!! I'm glad you had fun. The developer of the - I forget the name, the colored squares through 3D one - is making another puzzle game, it looks neat."
"Oh I should look it up, I was actually really mad about that one because it looked so perfect to have a level editor like Portal 2 does but it just doesn't? For some reason? Like what if I want to keep playing, what then, I've got to do something with my time when I'm sitting bored feeding a battery!"
Giggle!!! "Oh no. Do I need to give you media recommendations? I did a lot of killing time back at White Star, before, uh, my relationship with Hideyoshi went sailing majestically on its maiden voyage off that cliff." As in: before they filled the backlash hours with sex. Cough. "So my knowledge is a little out of date, but I might know something else."
"Yeah, actually!"
She still of course reads, even with Tae-gun present to fill her hours with really-quite-efficient-for-backlash-reduction techniques.
Does Woo-young want strong literary opinions from her, because she sure does have them! (And tries not to think of when she last remembers speaking of her strong literary opinions.)
Hell yeah he'll hear them. He is also pretty opinionated about media—well, perhaps he's just opinionated in general—but he's the type that likes hearing other people's opinions, too, even when they're objectively wrong.
Nope. She's totally right about everything, thank you, especially her dumb shipping opinions. Those two would have been great together if they had ever been put in the same room, the canon pairings are dumb and stupid and they act like idiots!
No he's with her on a lot of those actually, the average writer is just so bad at making the obviously correct pairings happen. Woo-young got queer-pilled on that too after he came out of the closet and realised just how many pairings in stories are just coasting on the fact that the main characters happen to be attractive able-bodied specimens of opposite sexes who spend some time together even while having zero onscreen chemistry or reason to stay together whatsoever, so he started aggressively pairing the girls with girls and the boys with boys in his head and now it's a hobby. Everyone's gay if they try hard and believe in themselves.
Right! Or - well, okay, she doesn't actually aim for same sex pairings in particular, she tends to go with people that have similar sorts of aesthetics? They need to have a similar sort of - feel to them, that they're on at least one similar wavelength while still being different enough that they offer something to one another. But it turns out that because of writing tropes, often that means that the answer is lesbianism (or whatever)! So. They have come to the same conclusion by different methods. Therefore: they are both right. There can be peace in the literary opinion kingdom. On this one topic.
(Okay but like the pacing of that third book was awful, no you cannot convince her otherwise, you're just wrong -)
See, now she went and had a wrong opinion in front of him! The pacing was great, the whole point of what that book was going for was that they were in a chaotic mess of their own making and the feeling of being jerked around by some stuff happening too fast and other stuff happening too slow was meant to instill that same sense in the reader! It was very true to life, too, feeling like time is passing at inconsistent rates because of the shit going on in your life is extremely relatable.
Ahuh, ahuh, except that if it's meant to instill that sense in the reader it also should have given the reader less information, the signal to noise ratio was all wrong. Also, this is probably genuinely personal taste, but why would she want a book to instill the sense that she's being jerked around and things are happening too fast? She has enough of that in her work life! She doesn't want it badly simulated for her in literature!
She is perfectly happy to continue on in this vein for a while. Companionable literature arguing.
They get food, and its arrival prompts Woo-young to start telling Hye-jin about his favourite restaurants in Seoul, since he has a sneaking suspicion the literal only times Hye-jin went out to eat were the single-digit ones he was personally witness to plus that one time on Christmas Tae-gun told him about. Seoul may not be Paris or New York or São Paulo but it has plenty of culinary landscape to be explored, too!
Oooooooo, yes, those are great, and - yeah, he's totally right about her inability to go out to eat. She's down to explore some culinary landscape options!
(She wishes she had more friends to invite to these places, but that is probably a solvable problem.)
...does she want to be matchmade? Most of his friends are espers but not all of them are Quasar and she might get along with some of Tae-hwan's old friends she met on his birthday. Also Woo-young's twin isn't an esper and has a non-esper social network so that might help too?
... Yeah, she can be matchmade. With potential friend options. Um. If that wouldn't be too much trouble.
Sure! Does she want aliens like hyung and her, though, those might be harder to find.
She can in fact interact with people that originate from this planet, thank you, just. ... Please be selective, she's an introvert and, er, a bit... sensitive right now. (Read: she's kind of a massive moody bitch.)
Okay, introverted, thick skin, any other requirements? Oh or does she prefer to be friends with extroverts so they'll drag her places?
Nope, absolutely not, that is Tae-gun's thing, she will resist and furthermore resent being dragged places.
"Alright, I have some people in mind maybe and I'll tell noona about it, too. You do already know Kim Chun-hee, though, she fits the bill, other than being Quasar."
Nod. "I - can try to make friends with her." Considering she.... kind of also.... already got to know her carnally.... ahem.
He peers at her face. "Okay, spill it, what about what I said is making you look like that?"
"Nothing! Nothing, don't worry about it, she's very nice and that is a good plan."
She admittedly might have already ruined it by making it weird via that whole orgy thing but probably it's fine! Esper culture! It's fine.
"She's very nice, is she? I don't think I remember you interacting with her all that much last time we all got together..."
"It was - there were - anyway I approve of this plan so far just, you know, um, I am going to take it slow on the social front and keep being a crazy workaholic because I do find soloing dungeons kind of empowering and, I mean, it lets other people take a break after what was probably the worst confluence in decades, it chips away at Tae-gun-ah's backlash backlog, everybody wins really..."
She's babbling. Worse, she's being too honest in her babbling.
"Hey girl I'm not gonna stop you from using the coping mechanisms you have available to you to get through your life as a sane and functional human being, it'd be real hypocritical of me, I smoke cigarettes. Just, you know. Having nice things in life is nice, regardless of whether it's anything to do with, like, being healthy or whatever. Some video games are just fun."
"Mmhm! And speaking of nice things, have you tried this onigiri here? It's to die for, I would literally trade my soul for the recipe for the filling, it's just spiced salmon but it's delicious."
"I feel like on a matter of general principle you should avoid selling your soul for material goods," says Hye-jin, amused. "But no, I haven't tried it, maybe it really is worth a sketchy backalley soul sale for."
Nom nom nom.
"Delicious! But not worth selling my soul for," she confirms.
"Adding that to my little compiled list of incorrect opinions you hoild."
"I feel like this one is more arguable as objectively correct, considering it means I get to keep my soul! Better for my long term interests!"
"Well on the bright side they only charge money and not souls for these so the question is moot. You have plenty of that."
"It's true, I do. I actually even leveraged some out of Kang Jaeha out of principle, when in doubt apparently my go-to is ask for money."
"I've heard it can generally be exchanged for goods and services so it's not a bad pick."
"Right! And making the world better. I figure there are worse things than extracting maximum financial value out of things and then throwing them at half-decent causes."
"So I usually go for disease eradication or containment, because there really isn't any argument about whether or not pathogens are bad for humans, just math about how efficiently it should be done. For me in particular, throwing money to research and then patent vaccines and then make them free to reproduce is the kind of fantastic absurd big spending only someone like I can do, but I also have a fondness for energy efficiency now after my silo -"
Tae-gun made a reservation, so they're expected, and are quickly shown their private room.
"What made you pick this place?"
"You said Kim Hye-jin was going out to hang out with Woo-young? Are they close?"
"Come on, Tae-gun, I know you pay a lot more attention than you pretend you do. Gimme more than that."
"—and he's—Woo-young. I dunno, he's, he's, he does a thing that's like the thing she does. Of being good at—expressing what he wants. And he stood up for her, and supported her in ways that I couldn't, and then we were there for him when he lost Tae-hwan, so I guess they got close."
"...why? Don't you guys already live together and all? And you've got couple rings, right?"
"It's just different. She'll be my wife. Like, what if I fuck up, what if I'm not a good husband, what if her family hates me—"
"Her mom has said, and I quote, 'I wish you were my son instead of this good-for-nothing bum', multiple times over the years, and that was just within my earshot."
"You're fine, my guy. Noona's lucky to have you, she loves you to pieces, she's the one who proposed."
(...so many moments with his friends he missed, over the years...)
"...I'm not actually worried. Not for real. Just, you know. Anxiety. I'm mostly excited and really happy."
(...but he can be there for all new moments in the future. Like the wedding.)
"I'm sure my mum will love to share pictures of the whole thing but until then you're going to have to live with just your imagination."
"Are you guys... planning to, um. Have kids?" Is that a weird question? He's not sure if it's a weird question. The only other long-term relationship Tae-gun's been in was—you know—and then he was removed from society for years.
"No, probably not. My mum really wants us to, especially since I'm an only child, but... neither of us really wants to stop working, and noona's backlash would be—particularly hard to carry to term with. Not to mention after."
"As, you know, sort of a pipe dream, I guess? It would be nice to be a dad. But I don't think it's in the cards for us."
Si-yeon leans on Juheon and rests his head on Juheon's shoulder. "I think you'd be a great dad."
Tae-gun drags his cushion around the table closer to Juheon so that he can do the same. "Yeah, me too."
He wraps one arm around each of the two of them and squeezes them close, kissing the tops of each of their heads. "I like you guys, too."
Jeong Ho-yeon sends Hye-jin a small but varied list of therapists, organised by type (CBT, DBT, psychoanalysis, a handful of others) and whether they do remote, in-person, or both. Each has a short description with their main area of interest, and Jeong Ho-yeon has also highlighted the three therapists (two DBT and one CBT) he thinks are most likely to be able to help with Hye-jin's problems in particular.
Whether she'll have time to actually look into them will depend on how willing she is to reduce her workload. Quasar does require at minimum four days off a month of its espers, though, so she could use one of those instead.
And until then, she has dungeons to clear.
She's - cranky about attempting therapists, or perhaps guarded and wary, so she focuses on something she's really really good at instead. That being dungeons.
As dramatic as sending Hye-jin alone to kill a dungeon is, it's not really the norm. She doesn't need any kind of martial backup, she's fully capable of destroying a dungeon on her own, but being directed and supported means she spends less time wandering around and more time being a one woman demolition and firepower team. There are usually teams of (armed and trained) non-espers trailing along behind her to escort rescues to the exit, or direct her to pockets of monsters she might've missed on her own, or relay updates from the dungeon's central command.
She burns through the lock on the door of the last kidnapping victim of the psych-ward themed dungeon, kicks it open (because it's fun), and steps out of the way of her minions assistants to let them do the fiddly bits of freeing the poor soul from the straitjacket the dungeon stuffed them in.
"That's the last one?" confirms Hye-jin, on her comms.
"That I can see," confirms Minseo. "The core seems to be in a chomping deathtrap... thing. Mostly metal. I recommend backup of someone that can pry open things instead of melting through them."
"It'll probably grab someone else in the time it takes to get backup," says Hye-jin, flatly. "Even if it's Tae-gun-ah and he teleports right over."
"... Yeah," agrees Minseo, who does not need to be a sensor to see where this is going.
"And the resource extraction of the fancy glass panes is all done already?"
"Okay. Then let's get this done before it grabs someone else. Spot me so I don't accidentally destroy the core in my path of destruction?"
SIGH.
"... Fine," says Minseo, who really doesn't like this, but: she's not, actually, the boss of Hye-jin, and she already made her recommendation.
"Begin evacuation of the support crew in case I fuck up my aim," she says, as she then marches off to melt through metal.
She does not, actually, fuck up her aim. She neatly and efficiently (and with great unspoken glee) cuts through every single great big chompy death-trap thing that is in her way, along with the spikes and the buzz saws. The pit of fire is neatly flown over, it not actually being all that threatening to the fire esper.
"And the core's in the middle of the pillar directly in front of you - wait, there's something weird with the -"
A small hole opens up in the floor, right under her right foot, then almost immediately closes.
Oh her foot.
Just as neatly as Hye-jin's earlier surgical precision, it slices it off at the ankle.
The walls of the trap were, of course, sharp.
"I'm, fine," hisses Hye-jin, falling to her knees and biting back her scream. She doesn't pass out from pain only because the lava bath was worse than this, actually. "Give me that - back - "
It is hard to think properly while she's in agony, so instead of something with a bit more finesse, she lights her hands on fire and reaches down to the offending hole to rip it open with her bare hands. Her skin sizzles under the heat, but the metal bends accordingly, and her severed foot is retrieved.
She is not really sure if this is going to work, but she doesn't see why it wouldn't - line severed foot back up with her leg, cauterize the edges so it all stays together - that time she screams, though she turns her comms off before she does it - and then - wiggle her toes to test? Yes? Functional? Awesome.
"- done," she says, clipped and business-like. "Retrieving core now."
Her hands are already a bit shot from the whole 'ripping apart molten metal' thing, so, might as well do it again, right? Right. She stands on wobbly feet, limps forward (carefully avoiding anymore floor based traps), and then promptly rips the pillar open.
She takes a few seconds to let the ambient heat cool a bit, so as not to destroy the core. (That she spends the time panting in pain is irrelevant to her mission.) Then she reaches forward with blistered hands and grabs it.
"Got it. Coming back."
"The fuck did you do to your hands. And you're even walking on -" begins Minseo, who then stops and takes a deep breath. "- just get back, I'll yell at you in the debriefing later. Evacuation of the dungeon's nearly complete."
Hye-jin needs to take a break from doing dungeons. She just got her foot chopped off, and her reaction was to blister her own hands getting it back without assistance, before she cauterized it back on her own leg.
She's walking on it now. It hasn't fully healed yet.
Idk, she hasn't left the dungeon yet. I'm going back in for the final look over, wanted to tell you ASAP.
Gotta go.
Hye-jin is awkwardly standing on the other side, still holding the core.
"Um," she begins.
"Gimme that. Out," snaps Minseo, snatching the core from her without looking. (With her eyes, anyway. She's lost her ordinary vision, and is accordingly cheating with her powers.)
"Yeah, okay," agrees Hye-jin, who slinks through the portal with her injured hands and legs, uh, definitely still not fully healed up yet, looking sheepish.
And then he sees her and, still looking perfectly neutral, wraps his arms around her.
"Are you okay?" he whispers, with the barest hint of a tremble in his voice.
Well now she feels terrible for scaring him.
"Yes," she says softly, leaning into him. "Uh - silo time, I'm sorry..."
He doesn't say anything to that and just teleports home. Once they're there, he doesn't let go of her, and just continues standing up and holding her, but he's starting to shake a bit.
Yeah. She'll. She'll just hold him. And consider how much of an idiot she was being - she should have just waited for backup, Tae-gun could have iced over the floor and prevented all of that, and - in retrospect she was going too fast for Minseo to catch everything, in her bid to avoid the dungeon snatching anyone else.
"Sorry," she repeats, feeling like the word is so small and useless and stupid.
"I'm just—I don't want to—I—" He shivers. "Hye-jin-ah, I've lost you twice already," Tae-gun whispers. "I, I can't—I'm sorry, I'm sorry I'm making everything about me, I—"
"I was being very self centered and stupid and I really should have just waited for backup - I mean, look how long it took you to show up, it wouldn't even have - sorry." Lean. "I, I didn't mean to scare you. It wouldn't have killed me, even though I - was being very stupid."
He nods and takes a deep, sniffling breath, and pulls away. "Are you—healed enough that I can—guide you?"
"Um - I should have someone look over my leg probably, because, I, might've..." messed up, considering she reattached it herself.
Knock knock your appointment with me is now
get your ass to my ward asap or you'll never do another dungeon again if I have anything to say about it
Eep.
"- we should teleport over to Ji-woo-sunbae," says Hye-jin, who gets to - oh she just has to accept the teleport, how efficient, and Tae-gun can come too - bwip.
Bwip indeed. He doesn't bother trying to fix his face before accepting the teleport but he does wipe his eyes as soon as he gets there.
Good news for Tae-gun! Ji-woo does not care. She is a very angry healer.
"Foot," she demands, without further elaboration.
Being partners with the sensor that saw the whole thing means that she got all of the gorey details.
There's a pause, then -
"You fucked up your nerves," says Ji-woo, flatly. "Never do another field attachment unless your life depends on it ever again, do you hear me? This is a fucking mess to clean up, would have been cheaper to reattach it myself - rrrgh, got it." From her pained expression, fixing the fuckup was not cheap. "Now shoo. You have used up your stupid allotment for the next six months."
"Thank you, Ji-woo-sunbae," Tae-gun says and then yeah back to silo.
(Note to self: if Hye-jin ever loses a limb again, go see Ji-woo-sunbae first.)
(Hopefully this won't come up again!!! Hye-jin feels really bad, actually!!!!)
She'll just quietly and meekly lean into her boyfriend and murmur another apology. And, um. Maybe cry a little, actually, she feels horrible about - everyone being upset and scared and making Ji-woo's backlash worse.
Yeah. Okay. And he can get them sofa-wards, probably—it'll need a cleaning but what's S-rank esper money if not this—to hug her some more. There is a part of him that's kind of mad, but it's much, much smaller than the part of him that's just worried and scared and upset, and furthermore he thinks that expressing anger will help no one, she's probably beating herself up enough. For the moment he just wants to hold her and make sure that she's here and whole and alive, they can figure out what to do next later.
Yeah.
"I'll, take a break from doing dungeons," she volunteers, after a while of being held and - quietly crying into his shoulder about how she's the worst and most stupid person ever.
...
Well that makes her feel worse.
"You probably shouldn't - I was really very stupid, and, and most of it was motivated by pride instead of sense or logic, and objectively I feel you should be mad at me for getting myself critically injured in a fucking B-rank," which she should probably unpack, normal people don't go 'it's just a B-rank,' actually...
Well he's not normal either. "I don't want to be mad. Hye-jin-ah, you're—very special to me. I want to, to take care of you, I want you to be happy, and I don't want to—I'm not your dad. I'm your boyfriend. You're going through a tough time. I want to help you through it, not, not—scold you. Especially not when you're—there's going to be enough other people who'll do that, yourself included. You don't need to add me to the mix."
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."
... 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."
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 a house, 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? Why only one, why couldn't she kill every other S-rank dungeon she could reach? 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 between them 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...
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—"
"—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?"
"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?"
"Reporter-nim," he says, his voice suddenly twenty degrees colder, "if I were you, I would find new sources, rather than mislead your viewership with entirely unfounded rumours. That is, of course, assuming you have any sources, and haven't just made those claims up right now to boost your searchability. But surely a professional such as yourself wouldn't do that, so my belated apologies for casting aspersions on your person."
WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING
GET HIM UNDER CONTROL
HE'S BACKLASHING INTO ANGER AND THAT IS GOING TO EXPLODE
are you hyung's media manager?
you are not
you know who is?
me
and this is a gold mine
you do your job, and I'll do mine
...alright
I'll trust you
but only because you're incredibly talented and competent and have done an exceptionally good job of this over the past several years
don't let it get to your head
"Kim Hye-jin is the most competent esper I have ever met," he continues, not letting the reporter get a word in edgewise. "It has been a pleasure and an honour to work with her. I would not be alive right now if it weren't for her. I would certainly still be under over five years of unguided backlash due to my own idiotic choices, which I am sure on priors alone you and your kind have analysed to hell and back, especially given recent events."
"She has saved countless lives throughout her career, and I would like to remind you, reporter-nim, that the event that promoted her to S-rank involved her destroying a named dungeon that has been around for as long as espers have, a dungeon whose unofficial name was Hellscape. She did it, not me. Whatever else happens, whatever else you hear, she deserved that promotion."
"As to her future plans, they are, quite simply, none of anyone else's business. So it would be appreciated if, as a news outlet, you reported on true facts rather than baseless speculation. I'm certain a person of your professional integrity would agree with that."
"But I should get going, now. I hope you have a wonderful day."
And he is going to teleport away because aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa this was a bad chooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooice aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
come on
it's his whole thing
like I'm sure he was panicking throughout but
come on
if he can be in front of cameras smiling unbothered while his cock is doing its level best to break out of his trousers
he can serve some burns when he's angry on behalf of his partner
I'm gonna need to figure out how much of that is going on Insta but my instincts say "all of it"
it was great
He does not start screaming as soon as he gets home but that's because it would be very rude, not because he doesn't want to. As such: he gets home, takes his shoes off, and does not scream.
Hye-jin is on the couch, idly testing to see if she can get her not-technically-fire lights to be obviously different colors and watching a terrible sci-fi movie. She perks up when she hears her partner arrive, turns off the TV instead of pausing the truly horrendous movie, and heads over.
"Okaeri," she says, tilting her head a little. "Are you - sorry, stupid question, what's wrong, how can I help?"
"...I... think I fucked up. Um." Great, where are the words he'd been saying just now, why have they been replaced by an erection, why is this his life.
"In the dungeon? Is anybody hurt??"
She's not sure how he'd feel about being touched right now, so - she holds out her hand to him, so he can take it when he wants to??
Yeah he'll take it.
"No, no, the dungeon's fine, just, I—talked to the media." Aaaaaahhhhh he wants to do a bunch of things and he shouldn't do them because he fucked up specifically in a way related to Kim Hye-jin and what if she doesn't want to touch him afterwards he should be honest with her aaaaaaah.
"Oh." She brings his hand to her face and gently kisses it. "Well if you need to go dark for a while in shame, I still have my secret underwater silo, I guarantee no reporters could find you there, no matter what you said."
"I, um. No it's. They were. Saying some stuff. About you. And I got—really mad—and I should've teleported away but instead I—said—stuff to them. Because I was really mad and—I'm sorry."
"Just—that—they were talking about these, um, rumours? That—we weren't partners, or—stuff about your S-rank assignment and—I told them they were full of shit. Uh. Without swearing. Um. ...probably you can find it on the internet."
"That doesn't sound like it needs an apology? I can go watch the YouTube clips of it now if you're worried? But honestly that sounds very sweet, though replying just gives them fuel to try and poke you more to see what you'll do."
"I—dunno. Um. I just feel like it's really rude to—talk about you in public without telling you about it and then—"
"—but they're so full of shit, they said your promotion to S-rank was political. Political!!!! Who do they think was gonna be politically satisfied with this? Is it meant to be me, is it Quasar? Is it about fucking, fucking, Korea versus Japan? That's stupid. That's extremely stupid. And then I showed up and the first thing, the first thing they asked me was how I felt about our partnership being dissolved? Like that's some known fact? And I fucking took the goddamn bait and tore them a new one for spreading the most braindead rumours they could find on the internet completely uncritically, and obviously they're, like, some tabloid probably, I didn't recognise their symbol on their van, only I'm not super into news so maybe I'm wrong, but if they're big that was even more embarrassing, can you imagine doing such shoddy reporting? I'd want to quit my job if I delivered something that bad and sloppy. I mean, what the fuck? They were just saying whatever the shit would get them clicks, and then I went and fed them so now they're going to learn that they should talk shit about you where I can hear it because I'm gonna lose my cool and go yell at them and that'll give them more clicks, ugh. And they were just filming the reporter against the blank backdrop of the media screen, too? Like, the scene composition probably fucking sucked, which is points for them being some small tabloid thing rather than anyone who knows what they're doing, but it's still people like them who fill the world with useless slop you gotta trudge through to figure out what's true, and that's why I don't watch the news anyway, and who watches the news anyway, actually, do people even watch things anymore? I mean, I'd much rather read an article. Maybe they were just recording something to be transcribed later. God I'm such a fool."
Oh no, he's adorable?? And she... feels warm fuzzies about her partner having done a stupid media misstep to defend her.
"If you're a fool, then you're a very sweet one. For, um. Thank you."
Oh.
"Kim Hye-jin, I want to have quite a lot of sex with you right now." Turning on a dime, now, isn't he.
She shouldn't be thinking about her ex right now, but she is, and what she's thinking is How many times did Hideyoshi defend me? and noting that the answer is not coming to her immediately. Certainly sometimes he defended her incidentally, when defending them as an esper unit, but. Not just. Her.
"Yes okay," she murmurs, feeling her face heat up even more as she attempts to adjust to, to. Being publicly defended.
Oh but she should not be thinking about her ex at all. She should be thinking about Tae-gun. He will make sure of this. And if this is still fuelled a little bit by being super mad and wanting to make sure Hye-jin feels appreciated and knows that she's great and he loves her and thinks all of those media vultures are awful, well, so be it.
He loves her. They suck. Fuck them. And also fuck her, but the good kind rather than the bad kind.
And then: snuggles. Because c.f. what he just said, he's in love with her and likes spending time with her. It feels nice.
Snuggles!
"Is it weird that I want to look up what exactly you said? Um. I can wait until you're doing something else, if it'd be weird for you, just. I think I'd like getting to see how you eviscerate the tabloid reporter and their shitty leading questions."
"...no, it's fine." And if she hates it then he should be present so that she can tell him off. "Go ahead."
Kiss. Then a commscreen summoning, and:
"Oh no," she giggles. "Oh, you didn't even get asked any of the interesting or funny terrible questions, did you. You got baited by pure tabloid trash. You poor man." This earns him another kiss.
Followed by a little bit of sniffling.
"Um - thank you, this, um, I stand by it being very sweet, it's. I mean they're going to be very loudly spouting nonsense outside any dungeon they know you're in, in hopes that there's a repeat, and you might get ambushed going outside by people asking for clarifying questions, but, I mean, it's. Thank you."
"U-um. Right." He doesn't know how to respond to that so he just won't. "To be fair to them I didn't give them time to ask any more questions..."
...oh, right, uh. "So, um... Hyung and noona's wedding is this weekend."
"Oh! Yes, it is. Uh - I should have a dress for it, though I've completely spaced on if the dress code is weird. It's probably not weird, I think I would have remembered if it were?" She's not sure. She's been distracted, lately. Ha, ha.
"Western-style clothes are fine, yeah, but if you wanted to come in a hanbok or a kimono that'd be fine, too. I think they're gonna be in suit and dress for the main event but then afterwards there's the traditional part with just their close family and they'll be in hanboks for that."
"Oh I hadn't thought of a hanbok, I don't think I have one, actually - I was assuming that as an esper marriage it'd probably be a bit Western about it, and a kimono seemed weird for people that aren't Japanese, but I hadn't connected the dots there. Uh. What are you going in, can I crib your clothing notes and copy you?"
"I'm just wearing a suit. I don't like hanboks, they're difficult to move in."
Nod. "I don't have a lot of practice with them, visits to my family were usually never formal? But. Yeah I'll just go with a dress, then, that's easiest." And she doesn't have to go shopping and potentially venture into the public eye in doing so, which sounds great to her actually! Win-win.
"You look really good in a dress so I'll be looking forward to it."
That's a good way to cheer her up; she smiles and then leans over to kiss him. "Thank you." Kiss!
Hana's attempting to put together a reliable staff to help with managing her, uh, everything. Objectively speaking, personally trying to do all of the management of where she should be leveraged, and then also squishing feelings and tanking the resulting backlash, would be, well. A stupid fucking idea, as Woo-young would put it. She has the self awareness to know it. And, comparatively, the anxiety around picking the right people to manage her scheduling, the updating and dissemination of her procedures, backlash management, priority lists etc is not as bad as actually doing all of that herself. It's only mostly her fault, not entirely her fault.
Unlike some other things that are arguably entirely her fault. Which she's thinking about right now, properly, instead of spiraling into perfect anxious stillness as is her custom. She's nestled against her partner, and - fidgets in a way that he would probably find telling. It is the 'I am no longer backlashed and I'm piecing together my actual thoughts and they're tricky,' fidget.
(Yes, it is that specific. Hana is very predictable about these things.)
And Woo-young has years of practice with that kind of thing, now. "Let me know when you want my input," he says with a small grin.
She is, if anything, both more self aware and more emotionally proactive than Tae-gun.
"Mhm," she agrees, with a tiny almost-smile.
"My complicated feelings are about Kang Jaeha. I'm - I don't regret anything, exactly," because she followed the procedures and everyone agrees she was very good at doing that, "but I'm also not sure I would have tried to save him if I'd known why he wanted to kill himself? So figuring out how I feel about it is. Hard."
"...ah. Yeah." That one is hard, yes. He feels... complicated about that, too.
"Mhm. So on one hand I - don't think we should let Nightmare torture anyone into suicide if we can at all help it, especially counters to it. From a, a - purely tactical level, it's a permanent loss of resources with which to counter it, which is to be avoided as much as possible. So on that front I regret nothing."
There's a pause as she lets this hang in the air; she checks to see that Woo-young doesn't have any questions, but he kind of likes hearing everything systematically laid out instead of picking through things piece by piece, so she continues.
"But I'm also not sure of - so, because of what he did, he might never be allowed, or able, to ever use his powers again. So keeping him alive is neither useful, nor kind, and I don't like being a party to keeping a man in a box because no one can decide what to do with him if it won't serve a purpose. It's just - torturing someone."
"Except I then also think about - I am mad about everything he did to Lee Tae-gun and Kim Hye-jin and you and everyone else, but actually the thing that makes me furious enough to want him to suffer in a cold dark cell for the rest of his life is how he - he's not shielded against Nightmare. He was never shielded. And he never told anyone. He just kept going back in and being - the, the perfect anti-Nightmare, when that was a lie. How could he just, I don't understand, it's - I - I have worked so hard to manage my everything, I am still working so hard to get help to better manage my everything. I was and am painfully honest about my abilities and weaknesses, even though it's - not standard for psychic espers, makes me weird and scary to everyone, even my own peers. I spend hours every week looking for potential improvements to my intake and empathy procedures, I carefully catalog my backlash levels and mental state, I'm - attempting to figure out how to hire people that will tell me what to do when I can't think straight, even though I am the one that has to live with the consequences of what I do, and I don't even know how I can give someone that level of power over my life and choices and it's scary, but - I need to. I want to. Because it will help. Because I can't do this by myself. It would be," and her mouth twitches a little and she parrots, "'a stupid fucking idea.' To try to do it all by myself. To pretend I'm perfect to the detriment of all else."
"But then he did just that, and it ruined his whole life, and hurt a lot of other people, who didn't do anything wrong, and it was so stupidly predictable and I'm. Furious. Horrified. Disgusted. I can't - I don't - it's -" Snuggle the partner as she tries to words. Words are so hard.
Yeah he'll hug her and kiss the top of her head. He... does have thoughts and feelings about those things... but he'll wait until she's let it all out before he chimes in. Especially since he also doesn't really have everything neatly resolved in his mind, either...
Hug. Hugs help. For more than just guiding reasons, because she's zeroed out on backlash and this is just ambient 'person that she's compatible with' niceness, now.
"... I used to idolize him," she murmurs. "I - he was - the psychic esper that made me realize that we could kill people's nightmares for them, with these powers of ours. That made me want to try and make it work, with my - my weird and scary power that lets me look into and then meddle with peoples' minds, even though probably no one should have that power. Because the monsters out there are scarier than anything I can do, and they win if we do nothing, and I can learn how to be brave. Even if it sucks a whole lot, and takes so much work, and sometimes I just want to hide under the bed and pretend I don't exist. So I'm angry at him for lying to me, for risking so many people for his stupid pride, for being an active risk to combating and mitigating Nightmare, for - just. He unknowingly gave me a big job to live up to, and then he wasn't even doing it himself. So I think that's what I am selfishly most mad at him about. On my own account."
Pet pet pet.
"He... got to a lot more people than he was even trying to," Woo-young agrees, quietly.
"Yeah." Lean. "... I don't think I actually want him to rot in prison forever, or be executed, it seems like too much of a waste, practically speaking. Anyway it's harder to go on instead of not. So it's probably actually meaner, and it was neither a mercy nor a kindness that I didn't let him kill himself."
Pet pet pet.
"When I first found out, found—everything out, six years ago, I wanted to kill him," he says, matter-of-factly. "I'm not sure I wouldn't have, if Tae-gun hadn't stopped me."
Nod!
"Using psychic powers to tamper with an S-rank is in fact the sort of thing dungeons and their monsters get killed for. I don't see why it shouldn't also apply to espers if they go rogue enough. ... You didn't have a plan for getting away with it, did you. You were just mad."
"What do you take me for, of course I had a plan for getting away with it! It'd take some doing because I'd need to hide the fact that I got suddenly backlashed but I'm sure prez would have aided and abetted me. And if Tae-hwan—" He stops short as the breath hitches in his throat, then clears it. "Anyway."
"Oh, okay. Good. No further complaints, then." Only petting, because. Her poor partner.
"But Tae-gun... loved him. I'm not sure he doesn't still. He... I had to stay mad. For years. Because if I didn't then Tae-gun would keep, keep, keep trying to make it so much smaller than it was, trying to make it his fault, trying to make it make sense by wishing it away.
"But now that everything happened, I'm just... tired. I'm just so tired of it all, and, and I'm sad, because, because hyung loved him, and he loved hyung back, and it was all so fucking stupid."
Nod, hair kiss.
"Yeah. It's hard to - be someone else's defense mechanisms, emotionally. Which is what it sounds like it was? So."
"お疲れ様でした*."
*Roughly translates to, Thank you for your hard work.
"Ha, yeah, I really fucking am*." Sigh. "I'm just... I don't even know. I even feel a bit sorry for him, now that he definitely won't touch anyone. Crazy as it sounds."
* It more literally translates to "you must be/have been tired".
"It sounds crazy for me to feel sorry for him! I hate his guts! I want him dead! And yet! Here we are!"
"No, it makes perfect sense. Humans have complex, multilayered emotions, and you have empathy. It makes you a good person." Hair kiss.
If Woo-young had told Tae-hwan this, he'd have said much the same as Hana, but been a lot more sarcastic about it, and made fun of Woo-young while at it, probably.
That pain is not quite dull, now, but it's getting there. He wishes—so many things, actually.
"Right back atcha."
She gives him a small smile, wishes that she could ever get that message through to her anxiety, then settles in to enjoy snuggles with a brain that has only a normal, nonmagical amount of damage.
They do what they can for each other. It doesn't fix everything, but it helps.
Tae-gun, as promised, is putting on a suit for the wedding. He had it tailored, because Juheon is one of his best friends and it's his wedding and it would not do to not look great for it, it would feel... disrespectful. So he looks stunning, and does not have the ability to appreciate it at all.
Hye-jin picked a dress that matches well with Tae-gun's suit, a deep navy that hugs her curves well without dipping into inappropriate for a wedding. She's similarly deliberate with doing her makeup and styling her hair; she hasn't put in the work to look this nice in... A while. It's nice.
Though something in her stomach makes her feel like she's just been given a pity invite, or is just Tae-gun's plus one instead of a guest in her own right. She doesn't, really, know either the bride or the groom, one orgy notwithstanding.
She pushes aside thoughts and feelings she definitely doesn't have, and takes her boyfriend's hand and tries on a smile.
"Ready," she says, even if it doesn't quite fit.
Tae-gun is allowed to exist in public again but Hye-jin and he are still, you know, world-famous and stuff, so they decided to teleport so as not to draw undue attention to the wedding. It's meant to be Hyun-jae and Juheon's day, paparazzi ruining their fun would suck.
The reception is in a very traditional house, with an enormous garden area that has a little brook with tiny bridges to cross it and gazebos and cherry blossom trees. It's far too early for them to be blooming, but they're still pretty. The area is filled with paper lanterns as the main light sources, and the little cobblestone path stretching out in front of the place they arrive at by the gates leads to the area where the ceremony itself will be held, with chairs laid out in neat rows in front of a flowery arch above a small podium.
It's really pretty and cute, and if the traditional style of the house (kind of like the one she's trying to sell, now) hurts a little, it's not an overwhelming hurt. And she can, um. Attempt to remember how to be normal? She's never actually been to a Korean wedding before, how does its ceremony differ from the Japanese or Westernized ones? Are the seats assigned?
They have assigned seats, yeah, though the ceremony will come first so they should just find somewhere in the "pews" to sit.
"Tae-gun! Hye-jin!" calls Si-yeon from where Chun-hee and he are seated in the front row. "Over here!"
Oh, but isn't the front row usually meant for the close family of the intended..? Uh, she'll wave and let Tae-gun decide seating arrangements.
It is! Apparently Tae-gun and Hye-jin count. Or, at least, Tae-gun does not seem particularly surprised by the idea of sitting there.
"Hi."
Okay? He knows how this goes better than she does, so: after him she goes, and beside him she sits. Even if she feels. Kind of weird about it. "Hey," she agrees, smiling a little.
"Thanks! It's nice to dress up, though I expect we'll be out-shown shortly."
"Well I wouldn't know because that bastard wouldn't let me in the changing room! Like, come on, I'm not the bride!"
"There's a Western custom that the groom and bride shouldn't see each other on their wedding day before the ceremony itself, because it brings bad luck. Usually it's just after they're at the venue, though, nowadays."
"Maybe he wanted to preserve the wonder of surprise?" offers Hye-jin, who mostly just thinks that probably Juheon did not want to deal with Si-yeon's shit while he's preparing for the happiest and arguably most important day of his life.
"Oh I bet if Tae-gun asked to see he'd be let in, but little old me? Juheon's best bud? Noooo, I'm relegated to the chairs."
"Can't fault him for not wanting to deal with your bullshit on his wedding day."
He summons a small ice cube next to Si-yeon's neck, small enough that it can easily slide down the back of his shirt.
Hye-jin giggles, then reaches over for Tae-gun's hand to give it a squeeze. Yes, he is evil, and it's great.
There's the recognisable sound of Woo-young's teleportation and this time it's the man himself who shows up by the entrance, alongside Hana.
Hana: sure is here! As Woo-young's, er, technically date? But really as his partner? Without it being a date, date? She likes weddings, and thinks it's very practical for her to be present when Woo-young is likely to be doing a lot of gratis teleporting, and has positive impressions of everyone present. Other espers, especially from Quasar, usually tend to get it without making it a whole thing, but she's slightly prepared for someone asking awkward questions or assumptions about if she and her partner are dating.
(They are not, is the answer. They are both perfectly happy with this, and in fact the prospect of Doing A Dating kind of stresses Hana out quite a bit, and frankly she's got enough going on. The way things are now is good, actually.)
Also she's bad at smiling, hopefully that is fine.
"There is my favorite new support esper, hiiiiii, I am so proud of your organizational work, I probably can't literally translate your stuff to mine but you're doing so well~!" singsongs someone who has spotted the quiet member of this couple.
Ji-woo has learned several things about Hana, and one of them is that she is okay with hugs.
Which is why she is scooped into one by a much shorter and more energetic Ji-woo.
"Also, hi Woo-young," she adds, playfully, around hugging his (very pretty!!!) partner.
Hugs are admittedly nice, as is being praised for doing good work, and Hana doesn't know how to have a facial expression about any of it but... attempts smile?
"Hi, sunbae," Woo-young says, giggling. "How's stuff going? You're looking great."
"Oh, you know. The usual. Poking people all better. Leaving scores of thankful patients in my wake. Excited for any chance to let off steam. Thanks! You almost match up to your pretty, pretty partner!"
(Oh noooooooo don't make it weird don't make it weird everything is fine she is not going to be weird to the healer esper she made so much extra work for and kind of arguably inflicted agony upon, and the sensor esper who witnessed all of her terrible self destructive mistakes...)
She's, uh, fine? Don't mind her?? Today is not about her and her damage so if her partner could just ignore it for now that would be great. She's not going to make it weird.
She attempts a smile back, and gives his hand a squeeze, and then attempts very hard to be wallpaper. Wallpaper doesn't make anything weird, it's very convenient that way. Enviable quality, that.
Minseo checks on her with a surreptitious use of sensory power, but... yeah, right before a wedding is not the time for that, is it. Hye-jin clearly doesn't want to get into anything right now. She murmurs something to Ji-woo, and the two of them give her some space.
Not that it's clear they're doing that, though.
Nope! Ji-woo can find an excuse to go say hi to this person over here! Dragging her partner along as always! Hiiiiiii~
Hye-jin relaxes, just a little, but there's still some serious tension in her. Maybe it was a bad idea to come to the wedding at all....
He squeezes her hand but she literally just asked him to not mind her so he will do that.
More people arrive. Some of them Hye-jin knows from Tae-hwan's birthday, some seem to be espers or other Quasar employees, and some are family, in hanboks. No one comes to bother them beyond saying hi, and people start taking their seats.
She is perfectly capable of putting her mask right back on and smiling and waving at people as appropriate! This is a skill she has honed over years of her career. If she still feels really out of place in the front row, well, she's here as Tae-gun's date and he picked the spot, so. Too... bad...?
...hmm.
I know you said you wanted me to not mind you but just checking that you're okay with us sitting here in front?
he texts her before the venue is too full.
It's kind of setting off my 'don't look at me' anxiety, and I don't feel like I'm close enough to either of them to have earned this spot, but it's also already too late, we've sat down ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Moving would probably be worse and draw more attention.
Sorry.
Noona and hyung really like you though.
There's still enough time that we could get up to go talk to someone for a bit and come back and sit somewhere else, we could architect that to look natural.
It's fine, I'll just deal.
Tabloids aren't allowed in here anyway, my instincts are calibrated wrong.
Okay.
I'm sorry, it didn't occur to me it would make you uncomfortable but it should've.
It'll be fine, they do really like you.
Thanks. We know for next time I guess.
(And even if anyone did notice, they wouldn't call attention to it. It doesn't take a genius to guess that attention is the last thing she wants right now.)
The ceremony starts shortly after that. There's a master of ceremonies, who asks everyone to take their seats, and then some music starts to announce that it's happening.
Juheon is the first to show up, and he walks down the aisle on his own, looking ready to burst out of his skin with anxiety, and like he's about ready to cry.
... aw.
Okay. It does help soothe her - whatever she's having - to just. See someone so obviously and blatantly and uncomplicatedly happy.
(Why does that make her heart ache?)
And then it's Hyun-jae's turn, led down the aisle by a man much shorter than she is, presumably her father.
Juheon's smile grows even bigger when he sees her, and while he doesn't break down crying, his cheeks are glistening a bit by the time Hyun-jae's joined him.
The ceremony is short and sweet. The officiant tells everyone the story of how they met, skipping over the part where Hyun-jae's prior partner had just died and also the part where they got together in a queer meetup. He talks about their families and friends, and about honouring their parents.
....ohhhhh she's in so much trouble. She's not sure she can avoid her own tears after this.
... same.
Actually, scratch that. She's just crying. That's normal at weddings, right? Right.
And finally, the officiant asks, "Lee Juheon, will you accept this woman as your wife, to love, cherish, and protect, forever?"
Cute.
She sniffles, gives Tae-gun's hand a squeeze, and wipes away the tears she's definitely crying with her free hand. Overall, she has too may feelings to fit into one person. Give her a bit, she needs some time to recollect herself. If that's, you know. Possible.
And then they go each talk to their respective spouse's parents. They both bow to their in-laws, then meet again in the middle, in-laws in tow, for pictures to be taken.
"Have you been to a Korean wedding before? They're going to take pictures with family, then all of the guests in one big picture, and then the buffet will start."
"I haven't - oh, damn, at least I had the foresight to wear waterproof mascara..." she can easily distract herself with fixing her makeup and trying to look like she wasn't just crying.
"Still! You know I'm very vain..."
She can't quite make it up to 'did not cry,' but she can at least clean herself up a little.
Si-yeon's makeup was waterproof too but he also definitely looks like he's been crying.
Yeah. She will try not to feel self-conscious about it, though she's currently failing a little. Mostly she's just - very self-conscious, about everything, right now.
She's still perfectly capable of smiling pretty for the camera, though!
And then the couple has to go to a private little room with their close family for the private ceremony, but not before Hyun-jae stops by Hye-jin and says, "We gotta catch up when I'm done with this, I miss my fiery hoobae, we haven't seen each other since the end of the confluence but I'm blaming the wedding prep."
??????? what???
"Yeah, of course," she agrees, on automatic, "the wedding prep was worth it though, this is beautiful."
Social circuits: still in working order! That's nice, though probably she didn't manage to successfully disguise her surprise at - being personally addressed. Yeah, no, she didn't, but. She said the right words, she thinks! Hooray?
"Hold you to it," she says with a wink, before disappearing off wherever it is she and Juheon have to go now.
And then: food! They have assigned seats at the cute little tables and there's a very wide selection of food at the buffets that are now available.
Okay! This is a social script she is better equipped to follow! Who are her table-mates, and how can she get along with them?
And it seems like Yoo-min and Seungjoo are also seated at that table.
"Hey guys."
Oh good! All people she can easily get along with! No terrible post-wedding social explosion in sight, at least at this table in particular! If it were Si-yeon or Ji-woo she might have a problem of some kind.
"Hi!" she says, actually cheerfully.
"I hear they got sushi. I don't know if it was because they wanted to make the local Japanese cohort feel welcome or just because sushi is delicious."
"Well if it's because of the Japanese cohort then we gotta thank Hana and Hye-jin, sushi is delicious."
"You're welcome, for a decision I had no personal involvement in, and for which I am only acting as a figurehead for the outcome of," says Hye-jin, wryly.
Little smile from Hana, who declines to say words right now. (People do not have nametags at this wedding. It is oppressing her, personally.)
Woo-young peers at her.
Then gets himself a name tag.
They all have commscreens they can just do this.
Hey legit sure.
"Can you attach screens to other people, I think there's a bunch of non espers at other tables."
Woo-young!!!! That's so embarrassing, but also so sweet, she wishes to melt into a little socially awkward puddle of affection. Rude. (It's not, it's very thoughtful.)
Hana is not very good at displaying an affection in public, but. ... She does covertly find his hand to give it a little 'thank you' squeeze.
And then yes she will put her own nametag on. With the name she's known by under it. ... And also her age. And pronouns. Look. It would make it easier for her if all of the Koreans declared their age and pronouns. Hana can mostly assume she's younger than literally everyone, but it gets tricky if she needs to talk about how people relate to each other in Korean.
(Ow why does that hurt???? The - casual thoughtfulness from Woo-young towards Hana, specifically, it - ow???? Why ow????)
Doesn't matter, introspection is for people who are not her right now, she can banter and put her nametag (with screenname and age, for Hana) on and have all of her feelings neatly in a nice little box.
"I'm pretty sure we can, though it has a range limit, so they'll go poof once the name-tag giver leaves the party."
"So we make noona and hyung do it, they're legally obligated to stay here until the end, it's their wedding."
"I think they probably have enough to deal with right now," snorts Hye-jin. "It's rude to dump more problems on the bride and groom at their wedding, you know."
"So I don't like standing in line for food and I vote we go grab it before all of the awkward Koreans at this party decide it's okay to be the first ones to do it than wait until they're all done, who's with me "
"I vote some of us stay at the table and get served like royalty," says Hye-jin, brightly. "It would mean less crowding at the buffet. And I think we're pretty neatly paired off, and accordingly know each other's preferences?"
Oh, excellent, that sounds like a task to do that does not involve talking even a little bit. Hana can fetch food! Is Woo-young fine with her fetching food for them both? Please? Pretty please??
"Well that works. And hyung can even carry more people's plates with I Can't Believe It's Not Telekinesis."
Hooray! A helpful task for her to do! Hana is pleased. Admittedly she's very subtle about being pleased, but. Nonetheless. Pleased is what she is.
Which is all to say: yes obviously she's fetching food for Woo-young. Literally why would she not do that.
Cute.
.... shit, wait, now what does she do? She doesn't have a social script to follow anymore, and she just cleverly delegated away the nice easy task to do instead of making social sounds. And trusted acquisition of her food to Tae-gun, who... probably knows her tastes well enough by now? Probably?? She thinks??? Eh, if he fucks it up, she can wait to eat until she's back home, it'll be fine. It is low stakes if he fails.
(Him fucking it up is unlikely, but, well. ..... he could.)
???? she blinks in confusion at the non-sequitur. what?????
"I. No? I did not know that?"
"They're actually ambidextrous! There is no scientific evidence to support the widespread myth that they are all left-handed."
"I. Didn't really spend much of my time considering the hand - paw? - dominance of polar bears, to be honest." Pause. "And there's a widespread myth about it??? And it's been scientifically disproven??? By whom? And why???"
Hye-jin: successfully distracted from her shit!
"I don't know by whom but I think the why is because of the persistent myth. People even claimed stuff like that they only scratched their noses with their left paws! But they use both paws. Also for tool use and hunting."
This is just such a topic that Hye-jin was not expecting at all. It has not been accounted for in her plans or schemes or anxieties.
"Do.... do polar bears... use tools???"
"Yeah! Not like a lot but they can be induced to if presented with some that are useful, they're pretty smart. They don't like make tools though."
"Oh yeah I've seen a video once of a polar bear using rocks to fight a walrus. I hadn't known they had actual thumbs before that."
?????
She briefly considers what would happen if a polar bear tried to fight her. By throwing rocks at her. The picture is theoretically terrifying, but... eh, she could take it. It wouldn't even incur particularly bad backlash, and at best it would only get one rock throw off before she boiled its insides to the point that it couldn't control its own muscle system anymore. And from there it would swiftly become ash.
"Huh," is what she says out loud, because she is aware that a detached tactical breakdown of if she could personally fight a polar bear and win is perhaps not a normal person thing to say out loud.
"You just thought through whether you'd win a fight against a polar bear throwing rocks at you, didn't you."
"... maybe. You don't know. But it wouldn't be close, and the polar bear would at best get off like, one rock throw, if I'm being very generous."
"Everyone at this table would win against the polar bear, it wouldn't even be fair."
Hana might have trouble with it, actually, but - no, no, crushing despair probably affects polar bears just fine, wouldn't it. She'd win the fight, though killing it would be a bit trickier. But the conceit was to win, not kill it.
"Poor polar bears. Not equipped for the apex predators humanity started throwing once they started getting snatched by dungeons," muses Hye-jin.
"I think we were pretty apex-y even before that. Maybe not at much in one-on-one fights..."
"Well, sure, but even with a gun it would be dicey with a polar bear? They take a lot of shots to go down." She hasn't personally fought any polar bears, but she is aware of what animals of that size can take before they stop moving, and there is a reason why she is brought in for these problems instead of bullets. "Unless it was the right caliber of gun with sufficient distance, it's very likely you'd get a mutual killing. But in any conceit where the human and the polar bear are placed in an arena naked before espers started awakening, the polar bear just wins. And now it wouldn't, provided we pick the appropriate esper champion for this incredibly amoral hypothetical arena fight."
"Fun with what?" wonders Tae-gun. He is carrying multiple plates on flying ice blades for the others to dispense to their partners, and he serves Kim Hye-jin hers first. It's mostly sushi, but it's specifically the sushi he's seen her enjoy the most.
Awwww.
"Thank you," she says, to Tae-gun, feeling a little bad about doubting his ability to successfully get her food.
Hana meanwhile is very confused about why they are talking about fighting polar bears.
"... why would anyone want to fight a polar bear? Whose arena is this???" she asks, but: yes she's also serving Woo-young.
"It would be very illegal to force a polar bear to fight in an arena. They're protected as a vulnerable species."
"Only consensual polar bear wrestling here, gotcha," he says, accepting the food with a slight bow.
"Maybe a polar bear themed dungeon monster would be a better target."
"I don't think polar bears can meaningfully consent to pit fights. Dungeon monster facsimiles of polar bears would be fine if their dungeon is still alive, but would not necessarily accurately reflect a true polar bear's combat capabilities. And if they were an orphaned dungeon monster it would be an unconscionable waste of a living specimen, even if they're able to consent."
"And for all we know dungeon polar bears are left-handed and that would ruin the experiment!"
"This started because he was correcting the false sentiment, that none of us specified, actually, that polar bears are left handed. They're not."
Hana will stay focused on the important topic, though the trivia of how they got to this conversation is interesting.
"I don't think this hypothetical experiment would result in anything scientifically viable anyway, even if the dungeon polar bears accurately matched the regular ones?"
"Hana is right that this experiment will have zero scientific validity. But also polar bears can smell you up to twenty miles away, so if they wanted to fight you, you'd know."
His partner considers this.
"I don't think that would turn out well for the polar bear. Not if it wanted to fight any of us, anyway. I guess you'd leave the polar bear completely intact, presumably by just teleporting away."
"That depends, if I was somewhere inhabited I might teleport the bear away instead."
"True. But then the bear would still be fine, if somewhat confused about its new location, so my point still stands."
"Yeah. I mean I could hurt it if I wanted but it's a protected species so why would I want to?"
Kim Hye-jin is not okay. It's really painful to watch. Tae-gun is extremely thankful for Woo-young, who manages to use some kind of social superpower to help her not be as high-strung as she was when they arrived, but Tae-gun really wishes he had a more... long-lasting solution. She said she was okay with them trying to figure it out together but she's still kind of... shutting him out, and he has no idea what to do about that.
...no, that's defeatist. He can work with that. That's not an S-rank boyfriend kind of attitude. Reframing:
This is a really complicated problem and he's going to need to strategise and plan and come up with some very good ideas in order to overcome it. He'll need help, to help her, but he's got friends, he's got people, and they can help him, too.
"Oh my God you guys no one told me I'd be so damn busy in my own wedding, we've been dragged all over everywhere all night."
"Really? I always got the impression they were very busy and exhausting, especially for the happy couple. Congratulations, by the way! You look lovely."
"Well yes okay I knew it but it's also my prerogative as the bride to complain anyway. And thank you!"
"I know it's tradition but he took singing classes? In secret? I was just!"
"It was incredibly sweet," gushes Hye-jin, absolutely ignoring the horrible pang in her heart around this subject in favor of doing the social correctly. "Full marks, well done, I'd say I think you should marry him, but, well..."
"Why, yes, I agree, I should marry him," she says, doing the extending her arm out to show off her ring thing.
"I want you to use your fortune to buy whatever politicians there are to make gay marriage legal in Korea, I cannot handle this."
"You hear that, baby? Our wedding was so awesome it inspired law changes in Korea."
Giggle. "Is that how they judge weddings? How many laws get changed in honor of it? Congratulations on your victory."
(Ow. Ow. Ow. Why does this topic hurt so fucking much.)
"Anyway if everyone will excuse us Hye-jin and me gotta go catch up over there away from all of you."
"Well you put a ring on it so you got a lifetime of me to look forward to." Tiptoes kiss and then dragging Hye-jin off.
Okay, this is happening now?????? She will go along with this??????? She's kind of terrified she's about to get yelled at about the foot chopping incident, and that would be terrible, because Hye-jin is absolutely certain that she will burst into tears the minute she's pressed on that subject.
And once away from prying ears: "So, where did you get this dress, it must be some kind of trade secret because I've seen the dresses you wear and I can't find them anywhere."
!! Oh. Oh, that's a much safer topic. Okay, yes she can do dress talk, that is safely listed in the Hye-jin guidebook of How To Not Cry.
"Oh! I actually still have a designer from my days at White Star, do you want the agency's number? They generally love designing stuff for combat espers, and I had, uh, unique textile needs. The pretty dresses are so they can use me as advertisement. Though, they are Japanese, so..."
"I've got nothing against Japan, I wasn't born yet when they did a colonialism. I confess I had been hoping for a more exciting secret, though, maybe a secret lair of dressmaking monks passing down an ancient oral tradition..."
"I just meant that they'd mostly be speaking Japanese, which might be a problem. They might be an abbey of dressmaking monks, though, I didn't exactly ask, you know? Your dreams could still become reality!"
"If they do have a secret monastery I'm enlisting you to come with me to raid it for its secrets."
Giggle. "I think I can just give you a recommendation and - actually that would make a good wedding present, I can just put a deposit down for you to have them make what you like, can't I..." Commscreen!!! She has things to throw money at that sound like fun. Yes, yes, she does the charity stuff as well, obviously, but she does just keep fun money around, too, and this would be very fun!
"Wh- Hye-jin! You really don't have to!" she says, like someone who would nevertheless really appreciate it.
"Goodness, I—well. Thank you." She's maybe a bit easier to make tear up today than most days.
Hye-jin beams. Inflicting happy emotions in people she likes is nice, and now she feels like she actually deserves to be invited to this wedding!
"You're welcome!"
"Well you'll definitely need to help me pick, my sense of fashion died in a ditch years ago."
"Groupie? Well I hadn't been thinking about that but I wouldn't say no."
"Groupie! At least for the first time venturing into designer clothes, since you haven't been before. Help you pick pieces out to use as baselines for new designs, and be someone to do your dramatic reveals from the dressing room to. It is an important service that is traditionally offered to new inductees into the fashion model experience."
There's something a little sad in her smile, at that.
"Oh, no, it was a whole," she motions with her hands vaguely, "thing at White Star? Have a fun girl's day out, get your look set before the press ever sees you, that sort of thing. It's just a part of the whole public image thing that I actually liked."
"I mean. My wardrobe has remained uniquely expensive even without the designer clothes aspect, demonstrably I have kept at it. And I am now here, seducing you into the wonders of designer clothes. First hit's free~"
"Not an active one. White Star managed it, along with my other social media accounts, until I fled to another country. It's back under my control, but inactive. I might hire someone to manage it for me again at some point, but," and she shrugs. Keeping up her social media has been the absolute last thing on her mind."
"But all the everything, yeah. You should post to it, you look gorgeous in everything you wear."
"I do, thank you! But... eh? Mental overhead?" She gives another awkward shrug. "I'm dressing up for me, not for attention, you know? Other people are free to benefit if they want."
"Valid, valid.
"So, uh, hey, I wanted to ask, and, you know, feel free to tell me to shove it it's none of my business, but." She lowers her voice so esper hearing won't catch it. "Had you and Tae-gun really never done it before—you know. That dungeon?"
"Oh. Um. Yeah, it was, we um, were having an extended pretending not to have feelings for each other kind of, thing, and then. Yeah."
"And... are you guys okay about that? If it just kind of happened and it wasn't really your choice so much..."
"Uh. Well. It. Um. No regrets?"
But they... totally haven't talked about it, have they. They've talked a bit, but they haven't really... dealt with how a lot of their relationship was a bit forced upon them by outside forces instead of conscious choices. They consciously decided to be dating, at least, that's something.
Still: oops.
"I do think we needed the outside push to admit feelings for each other, for what it's worth, but. Yeah things were a bit... We were very forced together by circumstances and told to get along or leave the other to die?"
"So, maybe I'm getting ahead of yourself, but here's some unsolicited advice from the married girl: talk about it. Talk about everything. Tell him everything you want and need, and tell him to do the same. God knows Tae-gun will sit on his needs for years if you let him." She'll leave the "and you're the same" implicit; they're maybe not that close yet. "Communication is everything. Especially in a, you know, if you're not monogamous that's most likely to bite you in the ass but esper relationships just aren't ever normal. We can't just follow the regular scripts. Even this wedding is a bit—I mean, we're never having children, Juheon and I. So we picked what we liked and wanted out of our relationship, even if it wasn't what was normal or expected, and we made it work."
"We have absolutely been working on that, the uh, almost getting assassinated definitely hit a breaking point of... needing to communicate needs... but. Yeah. Work in progress. Though... hm, I suppose we could get couple's therapy? I'm sure there's someone that specializes in the weird professional-personal queer space of esper partnerships with feelings involved."
"There totally is, yeah. Quasar probably has a directory, they don't like employ any therapists they offer to espers because talk about conflict of interest but."
"I am already trying to find a therapist for my, uh. Stuff. But I hadn't looked into couples therapy in addition. That'd probably be with Quasar's help, but, er... you know the whole... thing about me and Quasar?"
".... not exactly anyone else in particular, but as a whole... Yeah, kinda. Let me just... find the email I wrote about it, I don't want to get into it again..." She pulls the set of replies up on her phone to show off. "Which I know now is all downstream of Prez pissing me off, and me telling him to bug out of my life because I expected corporate meddling like in White Star, and it has since been rectified, but... I dunno. They did not make any effort to help me find alternatives to them, especially at the beginning, or when it was clear to certain high up people that I was dealing with an S-rank psycho stalker. It was near complete radio silence."
She reads the email chain and doesn't hiss but it looks like she wants to. "...honestly it feels like half the blame here is with Tae-gun, for making prez promise not to tell anyone or do anything about Kang Jaeha."
"Yeah. But he's been. Pretty yelled at already. There were a lot of things that went wrong around... that."
She abruptly remembers she is at Hyun-jae's wedding and is making this about her damage.
"Uh - not that I don't appreciate the concern - I do, really! - but I really don't want to make your wedding about my complicated social life and mess of issues? Today should really be about you and your husband!"
"Frankly I'm kind of tired of being about me and my husband, it's been sooooooooooooooo exhausting. Besides, weirdly invasive and personal questions is how you become close friends. Or it's how I become close friends, anyway."
Snort!!
"Fair enough, and I do... Have an ongoing 'make more friends' project," she agrees, fidgeting a little.
She's much easier to read than her partner, so it's fairly obvious that this means: she's at her limit talking about heavy topics and the way her personal life is kind of on fire right now. Not that she's against this kind of stuff, because clearly it means a lot to her, but. Baby steps.
Yeah, she gets it. "Anyway, I'm definitely holding you to that promise to be my groupie. I want to look hot for other people to look at and I'm gonna post so much stuff to Insta."
"Yesssssss please do!!!" agrees Hye-jin, brightly and sincerely. "It'll be fun, and do a service for everyone with eyes and an internet connection!"
She does a hair toss. She loves doing hair tosses. It's a big part of why she has hair that goes nearly to her knees.
"Anyway if everyone will excuse us Hye-jin and me gotta go catch up over there away from all of you."
"Well you put a ring on it so you got a lifetime of me to look forward to." Tiptoes kiss and then dragging Hye-jin off.
Hye-jin is bemused, but acquiesces??? She does not seem to have a choice in this matter.
"Noona wants to be friends with Kim Hye-jin and decided to take matters into her own hands."
"Yeah but I haven't seen you since the confluence and I want to catch up. Hope you guys don't mind," he says, directing that last to the rest of the table.
This gigantic cat is spawning an ice cube inside Woo-young's shirt.
"Evil," he says, teleporting the ice out of his shirt and onto his plate.
"You guys should stop with the gratuitous power use," Juheon suggests, but then yeah he'll drag Tae-gun off.
Yeah, Hana is not engaging with any of that. She's just going to pretend not to have heard Tae-gun, in favor of getting all of the ice related moisture off of her partner.
"I literally just wanted to catch up. See how you were and stuff. We haven't talked since the confluence and I'm not letting you vanish from my life after a confluence again."
"I wasn't fishing for an apology, Tae-gun, and it's my fault if it's anyone's."
"No, it's just, I mean, I'm happy for you, man. It's—character growth, or something."
He sighs. "It's just kind of tough, I'm—not really—any good at all this. Social stuff. I just wish she'd tell me everything she wants and needs and then I wouldn't need to guess. I'm not a mind reader, that's that fucking guy."
"You know what I mean. Whatever. I don't want to talk about him." Even though he was the one who brought that fucking guy up. Twice. Ugh.
"Well, Tae-gun, I do kind of have to ask, do you tell her everything you want and need?"
"Character growth schmaracter growth, Tae-gun, you never tell anyone what you need. You sit on it like a dragon on a pile of gold."
"There's no point in being mad when you're right and it's not funny."
"...well, it's just that I just made my problems her problems for months without even meaning to and right now I don't want to dump any more on her plate? And besides I don't really... have any problems anymore? That aren't just, uh. Wanting to do right by her."
"It's true! I'm, like, over Kang Jaeha—don't look at me like that, I know, I'm not, like, literally—but it's been years. And when he tried to have her killed I just—the thing is—I'm fine now. Mostly. I'm fine now. I'm not scared of him anymore."
"No, it's not. You were being kind of a dick and overly familiar the times you met her when she was pretty sensitive, and you said some shit that was extra insensitive, and you made it seem like you didn't care."
"Yeah! You are! That's why I'm saying holy shit! What did you just say about not being good at social stuff?"
"...I mean, it's just—I dunno. It was obvious when I thought about it."
"Anyway I have no idea how I'd even do that. Like, I totally do care! I lost so many nights of sleep working to catch that guy! And then he fucking turned himself in and made it all moot but hey at least we got all the changes to dungeon security so it wasn't a total waste. But still, like, how do I even say, hey, by the way, I did care, in a way that doesn't sound overly familiar, like you said? Or like I'm trying to brag or be defensive or—"
"Just say you're sorry. You don't need to overthink it. Think about what it is you regret and why and what you wish you'd done differently, and then apologise for what you mean."
That's, like, almost exactly what Woo-young told him that day at his place, and it—makes a lot of sense, to him, actually. Thinking about it. Especially from this side.
"So, you remember that postcog I mentioned? The one that can see causal connections..."
"So I think we give her space for this party and pick another time to tell her we just want her to be okay," says Minseo in an undertone, to Ji-woo. "She just got ambushed by the bride, and I think Si-yeon is looking to also apologize for something."
"The man has much to apologize for in general, sounds like him," grumbles his frequent esper doctor.
"Ughhh. You sure though?? I just want to give her a hug and tell her we care!! Poor hoobae baked me apology treats, like I'm the one whose feelings matter here!!!"
"Yeah. She's real jumpy. We'll give her hugs when she's not so besieged by people, poor thing looks like she might cry if someone looks at her wrong."
"Nooooo my precious hoobae I only yell because I carrrre, forgive meeeeeee," bemoans Ji-woo, loudly and dramatically enough that she gets some looks.
Generally cheered by Successfully Making A Friend (if, admittedly, one who is still in fucking Quasar, but that's hardly Hyun-jae's fault) Hye-jin is looking a little less out of sorts when she returns to the table. (Hyun-jae got a hug before she got whisked away to more wedding stuff.)
Tae-gun is gone, which... immediately fills her with concern. This is a social gathering, not a dungeon. He could do any number of stupid social things at it, and she's not there to hold his hand at it.
She immediately feels kind of guilty for thinking that of him, even though she also feels very fucking justified in having a "Oh no, Tae-gun is doing a social on his own, panic!" emotional reaction, but she is a complicated person who contains multitudes. Probably this is what couples therapy would be for working out.
Anyway she's going to try! Her hardest! To be cheerful! And have fun!!
Tae-gun returns shortly, accompanied by Juheon, and does not look to have started any social fires! They seem pretty cheerful and are bantering on their way back to the table before Juheon goes to join his wife on wedding things.
Cool, cool, okay, and she'll try very hard to not look like she was really concerned he would get himself into some kind of complicated interpersonal mess she would have to help him out with!
Anyway, uh! Party! Someone help please she is currently broken.
Well there's alcohol, if she wants, and music to dance to, and a dance floor on which some people are dancing, and nice food. Plus, the place is pretty and has a nice garden they can walk along to be unobserved amongst some trees. Would she like any of those alternatives to having to be social?
Well, you see, her nuanced and thoughtful answer to such offered choices is:
AAAAAA!!!!!
Does that clear things up?
It does, actually. He thinks that means garden, so, the garden looks lovely, doesn't it? They found such a pretty place to host this wedding at. He'd like to maybe go take a walk, won't Hye-jin accompany him?
He's watching her reactions as he says this, gauging whether she's more likely to be grateful or resentful of him to some extent deciding for her, and choosing his words carefully. In other words, he's treating this situation as a constrained problem to solve, and applying the same skills he uses to solve dungeons to this.
It makes him a hundred times better at navigating social situations.
...
Mostly she is only here because she knows she'd probably be sad later about having missed the wedding, or being rude to the bride and groom by not showing up, both of which are perfectly lovely people and do not deserve that. She doesn't, actually, want to be here or do anything in particular, she just desperately wants to make it through this entire party without making an absolute ass or spectacle of herself, which seems increasingly impossible the longer she's here. Unfortunately, it seems like it's too early to flee without it being rude, so she's just going to have to keep doing things that seem completely and utterly impossible.
So, uh. Garden sounds good?
There are lots of little paths amongst the trees and benches in hidden-away corners lit by paper lanterns (with battery powered lights inside, not fires, they're safety-conscious here), and it's easy for them to find a quiet spot where no one can see them (unless they have a sensor power).
This is actually a place that causes her to relax a little, yeah.
She's, uh. Still a little high strung, though. And leans into him for a hug.
He can hug! And talk about it or not, up to her, he's feeling the companionable silence vibe but if she looks like she wants to talk he can talk.
Choices?? How choices??? Hye-jin cannot make high level decisions about what would be best for her overall well-being right now, she's too busy desperately trying not to drown behave in a way which she'd later hate herself for.
Which is all to say: she is only barely not crying on him, and it's mostly because she doesn't have any idea why she'd even need to, what the fuck, feelings???
Yeah he's not like asking her to choose he's just following her lead. Hugging silently is fine. It'll be fine if she starts crying too but he's not gonna say that because he feels like she doesn't necessarily want this acknowledged.
She absolutely doesn't, that would definitely start her crying, and she's currently trying! desperately! to not do that! Because normal rational people who do not have her issues would not be crying here, and if she were okay she wouldn't even be a little bit tempted, and she's trying so hard to be okay.
Which is all to say: she's totally going to cry on him, but would please like him to pretend she didn't, and make sure no one sees.
Yeah, sure, can do.
(He loves her. He wishes she were okay. He hopes this is helping. He's not going to suggest that they leave now because that'd be a choice but he's inclined to leave as soon as it's socially appropriate to.)
If she knew the precise method by which to get better, she would be clawing her way there with enough stubbornness and force that she'd have probably torn off a few of her fingernails by now. Which is part of her problem, isn't it.
The crying does seem to help, in that complicated and somewhat backwards way anything at all seems to help her anymore. Some of the tension's out of her, at least.
"You know, when most people cry at weddings, I don't think it's precisely like this," she mumbles into his chest, a little miserably.
"Isn't it? I think people cry at weddings for all sorts of reasons..."
"I guess, but. It seems incorrect to be hiding in the garden to cry..."
"I think if they didn't want people to hide they shouldn't have rented a place with so many places to do it in."
"I think they were probably aiming for 'pretty,' not 'place in which people could hide to cry,'" she says, but it's kind of a weak argument that she doesn't mean. Okay. Maybe she... is not behaving badly at a wedding. Which helps.
He runs his fingers through her hair. "Maybe. It is pretty. But you're prettier."
He is saying something that absolutely brings a smile to his girlfriend's face! Look, there it is, bright and shining and sincere! Followed by a little giggle.
"You're sweet." Kiss; a quick, gentle one. Her eyes are still a little red and puffy, but the smile is so genuine. "Thank you. For - this. I'm sorry I'm..." she waves vaguely. A mess. Incredibly high maintenance and touchy. Bad at being happy. All of those things.
"Objectively speaking you dealt with me being all fucked up for several months, and, you know, we're dating, I think it's only fair?"
Snort. "No, I think it's fair to say I'm kind of fucked up right now." She sighs: it is neither fun, not comfortable, to be fucked up, and impatient to be fixed. "- Hyun-jae-unnie mentioned we might want couples counseling, on account of, uh. The everything. I thought it sounded like a good idea...?"
"Oh. Uh. If you want? It's probably a good idea? ...what exactly, uh..." God this is so embarrassing. "...is that?"
"Oh. Uh. Professional person that helps couples improve their relationship with one another? Gives them communication tools to use, points out issues that are non-obvious from the inside of it, helps put us on a trajectory that will end up where we both want to go. Our relationship got extremely rushed by circumstances, and with being both professional and personal partners, it's, you know, dating on hard mode. Especially after both of our previous relationships, which. ..... well. I fled Japan to get away from my ex, and comparatively he was the tame one."
"...oh, like... therapy for couples? That sounds like a good idea."
"Yeah! Therapy for couples. I thought so too!"
She cheers up immensely on hearing this from him. Yay, her boyfriend agrees that it's a good idea, and she doesn't have to drag him kicking and screaming to the thing that she thinks is smart! (... That one is some Hideyoshi trauma, isn't it, though Tae-gun's handling of Kang Jaeha didn't exactly.... help...)
Crying really helps give perspective on these things.
"I probably have, like... all sorts of, um. Bad habits. From. You know. Everything. So that'd be good I think."
"Right. Me too."
Not to mention all of the bad habits that came about because of how they were in emergency mode for most of their relationship. The last couple of months have been nice and... mostly peaceful (foot incident notwithstanding)... but the habits are probably still there. The scars certainly are. Relatedly, it'd be nice to have some kind of help with her ongoing trust issues towards his competence outside of combat situations, but she doesn't see how saying that out loud would do anything besides hurt him, which she'd rather not do, though actually he might need to hear it, so she should figure out if he needs to and then choose the precise wording to get the appropriate result from him, and she is ending this train of thought right this instant, because she's trying not to wind herself back up into a nervous wreck.
"Do you want to go see if they're giving out dessert yet?"
And she will studiously try to stuff that entire earlier train of thought into a box in favor of being fucking happy at a wedding, and accordingly go see what the dessert's like! If any is offered yet.
There is indeed dessert! Despite them going for a traditional vibe by request of the parents there's non-traditionally Korean dessert, too, like ice cream and cake.
Oh good. Okay. Then she will happily raid the desserts and make some attempt to politely socialize with people nearby! As long as things stay shallow and friendly, she is perfectly competent at this!
Yay!!! Then Hye-jin can successfully have fun at this gathering until it is socially acceptable to flee, and maybe chill out just a tiny bit. The sweets help. So did the crying. The crying helped a lot.
They mostly hang out around the gardens, because Hye-jin likes them and because there's less of a crowd, and Tae-gun also doesn't really like crowds anyway.
A while later, though, he gets a text, frowns at it for a moment, then turns to Hye-jin. "Hye-jin-ah, would you be okay talking to Si-yeon-hyung? He wants to apologise to you."
Blink blink.
So, on one hand, interacting with Si-yeon more sounds unpleasant. On the other hand: apologies are nice?
"... Uh. Sure? What does he want to apologize for?"
"Ummmm I think it's best if he says it but, like, the whole way he was when you guys interacted last year I guess?"
"Oh." Yeah uh, if this is a bid to get her to like him, it's not happening. It is going to take a lot to get her to even neutral with him but, sure, she can let him try to climb out of the pit he's dug for himself. "Okay. Sure."
She's a little nervous about this, but she will attempt to be brave! She gives his hand a squeeze, nods, then releases it.
No witnesses if she decided to just kill Si-yeon, though Circumstantial evidence would unfortunately do her in.
"Hi," she says, perfectly polite, but still in a way that is kind of like chewing on broken glass.
"So, uh, guess I'll get it out of the way. Sorry for being an ass. I know I made it look like I didn't really care or take seriously what you were going through, and said some stuff that ended up rubbing things in that you didn't need reminding of. I was in a rough headspace and was channelling it in a lot of pretty unhelpful ways, and I made a time in your life that was pretty awful be worse than it needed to be, unnecessarily. I should've been helping, and instead tap danced on your triggers and emotional sore spots like I was being paid for it. I'm really sorry."
She knows what she should say. It goes something like: 'I understand, it's okay, it was a hard time for everyone, apology accepted.' It doesn't promise that she'll like him, it is just accepting of facts and polite and gracious, and does not pointlessly pick any kind of fight with one of Tae-gun's close friends. Even if he needs better ones.
What instead comes out is:
"You know, for all that it's called Hellweek, my awakening was not actually the worst week of my life," she says, conversationally. "I was mostly unconscious for that."
Uh huh.
"Would you be apologizing to me if I were not dating Tae-gun-ah."
"Obviously? I, like, slept four hours a night on average in December 'cause I was chasing the guy who shot you, this has nothing to do with Tae-gun."
"Oh, obviously, he says, like I didn't spend six fucking months of my life playing second fiddle to the Tae-gun trauma show," she snaps.
"Well. I'm not apologising to you 'cause of him, I'm apologising to you 'cause of you. I—know this may be stupid to say but I think you're really cool and badass. You won, did you know? It was your idea that won."
She was going to say something about sitting in a room full of people the day after she got shot in the head, none of whom bothered to ask her how she was doing, definitely makes her feel real fucking respected, but -
- the phrasing of 'how she won' stops her.
"... what?" she says, warily.
"That esper I mentioned? The postcog? They were so mad about what he did to you—and they kept looking at stuff. Even after he delivered the shooter. Even after he confessed. We found another guy the shooter was working with, memory esper, he erased his and her memory of the hit so she could say honestly that she didn't know about it but this postcog testified against them and we got him too.
"—tangent. What I mean to say is that the postcog kept looking into it and they found out that the thing that made Kang Jaeha give up and decide to find the shooter himself and then off himself was the email Tae-gun sent him. The one you told Tae-gun to send him.
"You won. It was your idea that did him in."
She has absolutely no idea how she's supposed to feel about that.
Happy, right? It's probably happy. She did it, she defeated the crazy stalker ex! It was her all along! The power was contained within an email the whole time! Hooray!
Instead she just. Feels bitterness and despair, and doesn't really understand why.
"Oh," she says, and it comes out as a sob, "Great! So you're telling me I saved myself again!" She lets out a laugh that is far too loud and unhinged. "Great! On the payroll of the most powerful and well connected guild in the world, and in the fucking end, when the insane S-rank psychic esper they had a history with came to get me! I! Ended up! Saving! Myself!!!" Another bark of laughter. "Best apology ever, in the history of apologies, 'I sucked at helping you or even treating you like a person at your worst, and so did everyone else, but at least you saved yourself!"
She's not keeping her voice soft enough to avoid esper hearing. She is, in fact, nearly shouting now. Probably most of the esper party guests can hear every single word she's saying. At someone else's wedding.
"Fuck you," she snaps, pulling up her commscreen so she can leave before she makes even more of an ass of herself. "This was not the time or the place for your shitty apology, and if you wanted me to think you gave a shit about me as a person, you should have sent me a text message or, yes, an email, instead of having my boyfriend play wingman for you."
And there's a flash of blue light, and she's gone.
"Si-yeon," says a pleasant voice that nonetheless strikes fear into the hearts of espers from around the world.
"I honestly have no idea. I was trying to apologise, she bit my head off, I told her she was the one who defeated Kang Jaeha, she exploded and left."
"Yeah. That sure is what happened. Man, you just did not at all understand what you were dealing with before you poked that bear, huh."
"...I guess not??" Why is Ji-woo-sunbae scolding him, he was trying to do a good thing!
"Have you considered," she sighs, taking him by the shoulder and leading him away from the garden and to the fucking drinks bar, "asking the advice of literally anyone who is not in your little combat esper hangout sphere. For like. Any of this."
"Si-yeon. I love you. I respect you. I want to throttle you for what you do to yourself on a regular basis. Sometimes the best time to tackle problems is not the first minute you see an opening."
"That wasn't the first minute, it's been over a month! ...I guess it's the first time I saw her since."
"It sure was, buddy. And I understand! Combat esper, you see an opening, you do the proper setup, you take it. No hesitation, because if you hesitate, people die. It's the right thing to do for your job. Nice and efficient and commendable. In that context."
Drinks counter! No idea what Si-yeon likes, but she's grabbing herself a little martini.
He's really predictable and he likes fruity and girly and sugary. "I should've waited for a different opportunity to apologise, huh?"
"Yyyep. Girl needs some fucking time and therapy, did you see what she was like?" She is saying this loud enough and centralized enough that all of the Koreans politely pretending they can't hear her definitely can. "She, my friend, was primed to fucking explode, and knew it, and was trying desperately, desperately, to avoid it."
"...yeah, okay, I can see that." He sips from his drink.
".......I thought she'd be happy. About the email. —uhhh TL;DR the thing that tipped Kang Jaeha over the edge was and email Tae-gun sent him on Kim Hye-jin's recommendation," because that part of the conversation was not loud enough to be overheard.
"And that unrelated thing would have helped with your apology about your conduct... how, exactly?"
"...it might've made her believe me more when I said that I was doing that because of her and because I respected her but that wasn't why I said it, I just thought she'd be happy and that it'd be nice to know."
"Yeah. I don't think it's bad for her to know, exactly. It'll probably give her some measure of peace, just. Eventually." Martini sip. "But - medicine in the wrong doses is poison, you know?"
"Not saying no isn't the same thing as an enthusiastic yes~" singsongs Ji-woo, but she sets her martini down and gives him a hug anyway. "Sorry it went to shit."
He hugs her back. They match heights.
"I should probably just avoid her for the next year or two."
"My dude, she said it, with her mouth words, to your face." Hug squeeze. "You following her preferences or yours, hm?"
"I just mean I wouldn't have thought of it. I guess if she wants that. But not for a year or two, anyway."
"You can probably send the apology email sooner than that, but. Yeah. Absolutely avoid her like that fucking plague dungeon. For at least a year." Patpat. She unhugs, and retrieves her martini.
"But since you're on an apology streak, right this way, c'mon, you've got a bride to apologize to..."
Hye-jin arrives in her stupidly expensive, ecologically wasteful, logistically incovenient, underwater silo, that she can only get to via incredibly stupid wasteful teleportation, with energy that could instead be used to teleport people to where they're needed most in the world to save people, but instead is being used so a stupid fucking woman - who can't keep herself from exploding for a couple hours so as not to ruin someone's wedding! - can go be alone where her gigantic fucking damage won't hurt anyone else. She sets up the system to deny anyone usually allowed in to her stupid waste of time and materials and money and effort, because apparently by the time it was finished, she'd gone and solved the reason for even doing this, because, apparently! Kang Jaeha! Was undone by an email that she pressured Tae-gun to send!
She's not being any amount of fair to herself. She knows that. But, see, she just can't seem to stop.
Everything keeps going wrong, and she keeps - seeing how it could almost go better, almost go right, if she just handled things correctly. Except she can't. She cannot do anything right, can't take any action without hurting someone, either nearby or far away or literally just her. Kim Hye-jin, unable to attend a wedding without having a meltdown. Kim Hye-jin, unable to accept an apology without making a whole Thing of it. Kim Hye-jin, unable to accept that she won with anything resembling grace, has to find new and exciting ways to self destruct because nobody knows how to treat her the way she wants to be treated, including, most of all, herself!
S-rank combat esper, isolated from all the world, a force of destruction that can't seem to turn it off.
And she could sit in the middle of the Pacific ocean and cry about it some more, but she hates that, and demonstrably crying will not get her anything that she actually wants. And anytime anyone else tries to help her, even if they try very very hard, they fuck it up, because she's just such a fucking - mess -
Being herself comes with so much baggage. She can't just be a person at a wedding and be happy for people, it comes with people she doesn't even like ambushing her in a garden, and a boyfriend with a goddamned doorstopping novel of emotional history with both her and with her abuser, and who arguably might have done more damage than that abuser by how he wouldn't let her fucking do anything, and she still feels indebted to him and likes him and doesn't know who would even care about her if she didn't have him, and it's all, it's all -
It's so complicated. She doesn't want it.
She doesn't want to be Kim Hye-jin right now.
This is stupid, and insane, and probably some kind of nervous breakdown. She doesn't care.
She changes out of her dress, and into a pair of thick leggings and the most boring skirt she owns. She bundles her lovely red hair, usually something she adores and takes pride in, into an out of the way bun. She digs through the dregs of her closet and finds a hoodie, and pulls up the hood and draws the strings around her face tight as is comfortable. She retrieves sunglasses, and puts them on.
Because she thinks ahead, she gets a hotel room in - not Seoul. Nowhere even near Seoul. Not anywhere in Japan, either, she'd worked out of that country for years and so many people know her there and she's got no chance at all to escape notice when that was the place all of her fucking TV interviews that Hideyoshi and White Star pressured her to do were televised. Busan, then. Yes, that will do fine.
Then she hits a convenience store, and finds a temporary hair dye in black, and returns to her really quite nice hotel room, and commits horrible crimes to their drainage system in the name of getting some goddamned anonymity for a while.
She could hit a normal bar, theoretically, but. That would just be uncomfortable and unpleasant. She doesn't, really, know how to be a normal civilian anymore. She'd stick out like a sore thumb.
DRT bar, then.
And then! She can just! Be a normal person! Who is upset about Non-descriptive Shit In Her Life! And trying to drink away her problems, like anybody else!
Hello, yes, she has a lot of esper money and wishes to unlock alcoholism.
She is very normal and also very good at this.
She has no plan besides 'get incredibly drunk and probably cry in a corner,' and that is okay, because she is not Kim Hye-jin right now, she can be a random esper who just came out of Hellweek or some shit, and that isn't even that weird.
(She was, at least, thoughtful enough to have sent Tae-gun a text along the lines of "I'd like to be alone right now." Mostly so that he won't show up and get his social nonsense all over her, or bring his stupid asshole friends who couldn't bother to try to comfort her after she'd been shot, or have anything at all to do with the person she is being right now.
... But he does also know that she's staying safe. So. That's nice.)
She can definitely find a bar that's mostly frequented by the non-esper dungeoneers, yep. It mostly doesn't look any different than any regular bars except the people in it are mostly DRT.
What will she have?
She is torn between the strongest alcohol with the vilest taste available in a fit of self hatred, or having something she doesn't actively despise.
Probably something she'll actually like. Fruity with the alcohol as undetectable as possible, please.
Sure, she can get a strawberry caipirinha with condensed milk, how's that, really sweet and extremely alcoholic.
Yep. Sure. Fine. Sounds great.
She'll be moping in this corner, though, and it will be her corner of misery.
(She's such an overdramatic bitch.)
She's mostly left alone for a while, but eventually someone does approach her corner of doom.
"Hey. Is this seat taken?"
She has no idea if she is glad someone finally tried to talk to her, or feels irritated that her angsting is being interrupted, or despair because she is absolutely going to fuck up this interaction somehow, too.
But it's okay if she does. She's not Kim Hye-jin. There is less pressure to be perfect.
So instead she's going to be a cranky bitch.
"No, but if you try to roofie me I promise I am the worst subject imaginable."
He chokes a bit on his spit. "In a DRT bar? I'd get lynched," he says, taking that seat.
"If they could find the body fast enough, maybe," she says, almost flirtatiously. Not that she'd leave one.
Oh he thinks he might be in love. "My fate is really inescapable then so I should simply not try at all. There go my nefarious plans."
"Yep! Whatever they are, doomed from the start. I am very spooky, do not get on my bad side. OooOoooOoo~" This is said with a highly menacing wiggling of fingers to punctuate it.
"Hmmmm, in theory, but in practice I seem to have an aura of destruction that foils even well meaning plans," she says, and wow that is far too honest, but fuck it, she's allowed to be bitterly honest about how she's a mess if she wants to be!
"You know, actually, on the scale of shitty days recently it doesn't even rate into the top ten? It's just this shitty cherry on top of the shit pie that was this last confluence."
"Oh yeah. You know, I almost wish it had instead been a longer confluence, in exchange for being less shitty."
"Oh, it only felt shitty working it," snorts Hye-jin, more than a little bitterly. "Have you heard? This was a fantastic win for the worldwide community! Comparatively minimal amounts of casualties and property damage, and one of the most actively deadly S-rank dungeons is now just dead. With potential inroads to killing more in the future. Whoopee, celebration, everybody wins."
Just not, you know. Her.
"Was it? Comparatively minimal, I mean. With Arrakis leveling up in Toronto, and all the everything else..."
"Oh, the esper and DRT communities are freaking the fuck out, but I meant to the general world population and civilians. This was good statistics wise, and any and all mayhem caused by restructuring and esper in-fighting is just, you know. Growing pains of a world that is getting better and better at handling dungeons."
"They sure were fucking painful." A waiter shows up with a whisky on the rocks he ordered just prior to coming over to her table. He accepts it with thanks then lifts it up in a mildly ironic cheer. "To the goddess of efficiency, and everyone that she squishes under her heels."
"Ugh." Yeah, she'll give an ironic cheers for that. "Maybe one day we can stop getting stepped on by her..."
Though it's more like she flings herself under those heels and arranges herself for maximum squish to efficiency ratio, but, well. ... She still resents it, okay.
"Hear, hear." He sips from his drink then swirls it around, looking thoughtfully at the ice as he does.
She'll sip from her own more morosely, and maybe kick herself for not ordering a second drink while a waiter was here. Little inefficiencies of action, inconveniencing the people around her yet again.
"Ah, I just realised I never introduced myself. I'm Lim Jae-min. I don't actually live in Korea, I'm half-American and I work from there most of the time, but I'm over here visiting family."
....
She did not come up with a fake name.
She doesn't really feel like coming up with one right now, either.
"Nice to meet you, Lim Jae-min," she says, continuing to lean in to being blatantly rude and not worrying about it. "What's the - I guess it's not a guild scene, but agency scene like, there?"
"...very different, so much so that I don't know how to answer that question very usefully," he admits. "And I'm not actually in an agency, I'm D-rank in the Eastern system," because she's probably realised he's an esper, "and work with the American Dungeon Response Teams, so I don't interface directly with the agencies very much."
"Oh." She does wilt with disappointment a little, at that. Not his ranking, she doesn't give a shit about that, but the lack of perspective on a system that she really quite envies, and wants to import. "Well, the guild system sucks, if you were wondering."
"I could just try to—describe it for you? I'm not sure if it will go better than the Wikipedia page, but I'm game to try. And I do have contacts in lots of agencies. The DRT interfaces directly with the agents themselves, to request espers for dungeons and so on, and I'm a squad leader so that falls to me pretty often."
"Oh," she says, in a completely different tone of voice, perking up. "That'd be very helpful actually, I'm - I've been burned by guilds pretty badly," ha, fire pun, she didn't even mean to and he'll have no idea, "and have been looking to get some kind of agent to just. Advocate for me."
Now, is it maybe questionable to go picking out agents based off of some guy she met in a bar? Yes, but that is for future Hye-jin. She is not future Hye-jin, and in fact, not even being Hye-jin right now. That's two degrees of separation from consequences!
"Sure thing. Do you speak English? There's a couple of agencies in Korea I believe but they're pretty niche and tend to not so much cover the dungeoneering side of things. Agents across the Pacific will have less local context but the interfaces we use during confluences don't just magically vanish outside of them so they can probably figure it out and might be interested in branching out as necessary."
"Some, I've had time to pick up more classes lately, but I'm not great at it? And. Yeah, I've looked into agencies here, and the results were not... great. For my situation and needs." Which is why she plotted to change that herself, but that side project is currently bleeding out in a ditch somewhere. Maybe with her house.
"Well, I'd recommend practising, but probably a bit of English plus machine translation should suffice." He grabs his phone and starts tapping at it. "I'll make a shortlist of agents I trust to deal with foreigners in unusual situations and you can vet them."
"That would be really great, thank you!"
She is genuinely so relieved and touched that she kind of wants to cry. But she's so sick of crying, and it would be actively detrimental to her goals this time, so: she'll just finish off her glass of fruity whatever-this-is, and try to pretend she has no feelings. She's got practice with that.
"Yeah, of course. You got a number I can send these to?" he asks after a bit more tapping.
"Oh, um!" Do not pull up your comm screen, they're getting more common by the day, but it's still a dead giveaway what guild you are probably associated with in Korea. She can just recite off the number like a normal person.
Nailed it.
If he noticed the aborted motion to grab the commscreen he didn't give any indication of it.
Send! It's a neatly itemised list with names and specialties and a five word summary of why he thinks they might be reasonable (like "speaks Korean" or "worked with West Asian espers" or whatever).
Eeeeeee!!! This is so excellent and exactly the kind of thing she wanted, which no one on this side of the Pacific Ocean was really well set up to offer her, except maybe Quasar, but she's got them working on therapists instead of this, on account of how she kind of still hates Quasar as a corporate entity with a passion and doesn't trust them an inch even with a lot of forcing herself to grimly bear it!
"Thank you!" she says, brightly, grinning over the message in her phone and definitely not having any crying-adjacent emotions like a normal person who is normal about getting actively helpful information she wanted and asked for.
Smile! Shoving down the urge to cry again How about she goes and gets another drink, that sounds like it would be smart. She's just going to politely excuse herself to order another one of these, how about, excuse her!
Yeah sure. And if she decides to not come back to the strange man who accosted her out of nowhere that's fine too, he did his good deed for the day.
No, she will, just. She needed to have a feelings reset of some kind. And she'll return with her drink and a conversation topic already planned, in advance, like a normal person who does not have problems.
"So how are the, uh, extra portal security measures going, from the DRT side of things? Is it a - bad inconvenient trade, or...? It's hard to know from the esper side of things."
"Honestly it's great? If I never need to shout at a civilian to not get so close to a portal again in my life, it'll be too soon. The new canvas walls are annoying to set up but that's mostly not us anyway."
"Really?" She perks up a bit. It wasn't the answer she was expecting. "You got a lot of new civilian volunteers for assistance, then?"
"Well, 'volunteers', they're being paid. But yeah, Americans like to talk about how stuff created a lot of jobs and this created a lot of jobs."
"Oh, good, that sounds like the best result, then. Depending on where the pay comes from." Damn it, now she's thought about it too much and needs to ask more questions. Just like her, gotta pokepokepokepoke until she finds where it all is going wrong... "... I guess then I've got to ask if it's coming from something sustainable, is this like, higher taxes or...?"
"I honestly have no idea. Or, there hasn't been an increase in taxes in the US related to this but it's too soon for it to have had an effect? My guess would be just a change in budgetary priorities or something like that. So, taking that money from somewhere else. Hopefully the Ivies."
"Oh. Okay." This is a little incomprehensible to her, because 'It would be better for the money to come out of education' is a frankly insane thing to say to a Japanese-Korean woman, but. She's almost certainly missing something?
"—that's probably too much American inside baseball. The Ivies are sort of super elite, you get in by being rich or by having a parent who went to one or very occasionally by being smart, and they get tax breaks despite not actually producing measurable value to the average taxpayer, and as far as I can tell their main goal is to make sure rich kids can find rich spouses and then donate a lot of money to the school where they met to replace the name of some building with their name instead.
"...that's a bit cynical, I guess."
"Oh. Uh. I'm really not in a position to say whether something is too cynical or not right now, but it was pretty incomprehensible to someone without any context, yes."
"My apologies for the excessively high context necessary to get my joke."
"It's fine." Mostly she's too confused to come up with new and exciting ways to decide that this is all her fault, which is kind of more comfortable than her new normal, on the whole?
Speaking of that new normal: damn. She didn't think of a secondary conversation topic if this one fell through. She failed and is horrible at everything.
"I think it might be mostly the same people who are setting everything up? The canvas walls take longer to set up but not really a ton more specialised skill sets, and likewise for the cameras and other equipment. They're finding themselves busier and maybe being paid more but it's still basically the usual job of making sure everything is as streamlined to get victims out as possible. The job shares a lot of commonalities with that of stage hands, I actually know a couple of people who work at Broadway but take breaks to help out with this during confluences specifically for this reason."
Blink. "Just now volunteering for canvas duty, or - exterior portal setup assistance in general?"
"Exterior portal setup assistance in general! The tents and tables and power generators, making sure food and common OTC meds are available, making sure any special materials needed by the relevant espers are located and moved to the right places... One of them, her name's Victoria, she's really into UX in general and she talks about—I won't be able to reproduce one of her rants, but you know how strange it is to touch a button on a screen and have no tactile feedback? There's a name for that kind of thing, designing experiences so that they align with the way people expect things to work, and she says that it's not just apps on your phone that have that, and making your three-dimensional space efficient involves making sure things are where and how people subconsciously expect them to be."
"How does that work if you don't have guilds managing specific portals?" she wonders, fascinated. "I would expect it'd be much harder if it's... generic setup assistance, plus needing to adjust to new espers with a million different weird requirements, instead of an associated guild that is used to handling their own set of espers."
"So in the US we have two branches of governmental non-esper dungeon response, the local DSWAT, for Dungeon Special Weapons and Tactics, and the federal DRT, for Dungeon Response Teams. The DSWAT is usually adjacent to, like, firefighters and the like, and they're the ones you call to report a dungeon portal. Bigger cities have multiple DSWAT teams covering different geographical areas, smaller cities might only have the one, and any portal that appears on a team's territory is that team's responsibility. They coordinate resources and response for most dungeons, and they know most of the espers available locally.
"If the dungeon is a bit hairier than local teams can deal with but not yet quite so hairy they need to call their espers, they'll often call us—DRT—instead. And then if things get really hairy we get espers from farther afield, as necessary."
"Huh. And have to scramble to outfit them as they require? Or do they usually get transported with their own - management team and gear?"
"They usually get transported with their own gear, but I'm not sure what you mean by management team other than DSWAT and DRT?"
"Oh, so, some espers will tend to get whole - I call them management teams, but support teams is probably less biased? People to make sure everything is set up as the esper needs, that they have specialized gear they might need and it's working properly, that weird needs are being met, like - people not raising their voice above a certain decibel, or something. The ideal is something akin to on field agents, I suppose, advocates for the esper's interests on the logistic side of the portal? But the reality can get very." She waves, vaguely. "Managerial." And can it ever.
But then she thinks of the jack and shit Quasar offered, and clarifies:
"But there are upsides to just having a gaggle of minions following an esper around making sure everyone is aware of how not to get them killed."
"Oh! Yeah that's usually DSWAT, they keep tabs on the local espers and work with the agents to provide what the espers need. Espers that are deployed over long distances often rather than just occasionally will typically have the DRT keep track of them, too, in addition to their local DSWAT teams, and the agents are the ones who mediate everything.
"From the esper's perspective this is all mostly invisible, I think, other than letting their agent know what exactly it is they need so that we can figure it out for them."
"Hmm. I would expect that would work fine in normal contexts, but - I also expect that in a confluence setting, espers would fall through the cracks and get crushed by people that don't understand why they can't just do the magic power some more? And all of this support being invisible would also mean that there isn't any kind of culpability, right? On this side of the Pacific, if you're on the support team for an esper, and you're the guy that nearly killed a guild's star esper, you get fired, and probably blacklisted, and replaced by someone who will make sure they are okay."
"I'm not sure it's as different as you're imagining? Guilds don't send all of their support personnel overseas when one of their espers is needed for a niche dungeon or during a confluence either except in cases when the esper needs very specific unusual and hard to acquire accommodations, and in those cases typically the agency will deal with it and send such personnel and equipment overseas, too, at necessary.
"As for culpability, we do have very thorough post mortems and incident reports whenever anything goes wrong—at least in the DRT, I'm not sure about DSWAT, but anything overseas is taken care of by us not them anyway. We have pretty good tracking of the communication and supply lines, if I do say so myself; there's always a specific person with a specific responsibility."
"But that's relying on a centralized government entity to get it right, instead of - letting espers do any kind of guild shopping for what they feel their own needs are? Whereas the DRT is presumably only concerned about if the esper is still alive at the end of it, instead of their long term health, mental and physical. And what if it doesn't get elevated to the DRT level? Or even if it does - are agents just kind of expected to raise hell with the US government?"
Because: badass if so. And she wants that kind of energy in her life.
"Absolutely. If anything goes wrong the agents will hound everyone involved and figure out what the fuck. At least the good ones. The shopping is for a good agent instead of a good guild but the job is very similar.
"Sometimes it's the agents that fuck up, though. There was a situation I heard about a while ago where an agent was found to be at fault for the death of their client and some victims because they'd been pushing their client to keep doing dungeons even though their client was between partners and their backlash caused them to become dangerous."
She gives a sober nod. Her head is kind of spinning from comparing two systems, one of which she's only passingly familiar with, and trying to figure out the best way to make them mesh. This is not helped by the alcohol in her system in the slightest.
"All systems can fail under the wrong kinds of pressure, I guess." Ask her how she knows...
"Yeah... I know I'm a stranger but for what it's worth I trust every agent I recommended you to have your best interests at heart."
She nods again, and she is not going to start crying here, crying helps absolutely nothing at all, and she sips her drink.
"A-anyway, uh. Visiting family then? I hope they all made it through the confluence okay?"
"Yeah. My grandmother keeps saying I don't visit enough, she might pass any day now, even though she's healthy as a horse and goes swimming four times a week, and after this confluence she demanded that I show up immediately, she was almost kidnapped by a dungeon, don't you know, because someone in the pool next to her was. So here I am."
This earns a little giggle from her. "Very dutiful of you. I'm glad she's okay, I - dungeons usually avoid children, but it's not the same for the other vulnerable end of the age chart, and they can be so tough on the elderly, and..." She gives an awkward shrug, then repeats, "I'm glad she's okay."
"Yeah," he says, softly. "She is. Tough as nails, she is, even if she did get captured I think she'd be okay." He sips more from his drink.
"Yeah? Runs in the family a bit, hm, sergeant?"
Oops, now she's flirting.
"Oh, I think I still don't match you for toughness," he says, leaning forward a bit.
That seems to catch her a little off guard, and she snorts.
"Ha, no, not much lately. I have been sadly benched for psychological reasons," she demurs. Perhaps a bit too honestly.
"And yet here you are, telling men that if they try anything funny no one will find their bodies. That was, if I'm allowed to say it, really attractive."
"Well thank you," she says, wryly. "But. Eh." She looks away. "I'm. Totally being a coward and hiding from my problems. In a DRT bar." With sticky hair dye on. "So." Awkward shrug.
"You're a combat esper. Sometimes tactical retreats are necessary. Sometimes the best way to deal with the monsters is to hide from them. ...or at least it is for most of us, but I kind of feel like the kind of monster you're hiding from isn't the kind being a powerful esper helps you fight."
... snort.
"Yeah. No kidding. I just...." sigh. She doesn't know how to finish that sentence. So she doesn't. Instead she thonks her head on the table.
".... Figured out my secret identity already, have you?" she mutters, mulishly.
"Well, I don't need to have figured it out if you don't want me to have. And if it helps, I hadn't until I sat down. But, ah... if nothing else, the way you speak really reminded me of your dungeon reports."
"It's fine, it wasn't a very good secret identity, anyway, I just... wait, you recognized me from how I write my reports???"
"Then I squinted and recognised your face, but you gave a vibe of a powerful and experienced esper and I was like, why do her turns of phrase sound familiar, who does she remind me of, and, yeah."
She sits up to properly squint at him to detect if he's lying. Hm...
"... huh," is her assessment. Because she thinks he's being honest with her. "Did they make you read them my Volcanic Range report because you spoke Korean, and you went down a report rabbit hole from there?"
"Oh, no, I just make a habit of reading dungeon reports and incident postmortems whenever they're public—I know it sounds weird, but you'd be shocked how many things feel obvious to analyse to some people and not others, so I'm always looking to find the things that aren't obvious to me. I read one of yours for the first time in... I want to say late 2034? The dungeon with the flying froglike monsters, I don't know if that'll ring a bell, and I was like, wow, this was written by someone who knows what she's talking about, and so now whenever you write a dungeon report that you publicise you're on my RSS feed."
...
That's really charming, actually????
"... All of them????" Because. She writes many reports. And publicizes most of them, because data is valuable. So that RSS feed has been getting spammed??? Especially after she partnered with Tae-gun, wow.
"It's my free time reading! I like to read some reports while I'm having breakfast and after dinner, and catch up on my backlog on the weekends."
???? what an adorable nerdy weirdo?????
She's so charmed????
"I. Well. Okay. I'm glad someone is reading them? I mean, I knew, intellectually, that someone is reading them - and definitely the Volcanic Range report, I heard that made it to the internet - but. Wow. Okay."
"You're a very compelling writer! And a very competent esper! It's always great to read your reports." Sip sip.
...
fjkdsl;fjeyfdsjklfhg?
She's just going to. Sip her own alcohol. And. Maybe mumble a little, "thanks."
—and holds out his hand, laying it palm up on the table. "Would you take my hand?"
..... okay. yeah. they can. um.
She tentatively does in fact, reach out to touch his hand. If it sucks, it sucks, she hopefully still made a friend, and if it doesn't...
... she doesn't know what, really, but.
Oh.
Yeah, it doesn't suck.
He clasps her hand gently, drawing circles on the back of it with his thumb.
It is not Tae-gun or even Hideyoshi levels of compatible, but.
That doesn't make it not nice.
"Would you... like to hide from the world somewhere more private?" he murmurs.
ajgklsghufdsjklghshg????
(... She and Tae-gun aren't exclusive, right? Right? Wait, they can't be, he also fucks Woo-young, haha, she's fine! Take that, irrational flinch response brought about by the media indoctrination to be monogamous!)
".... yeah," she murmurs back, then smiles a little and adds: "... Though I warn you the temporary dye is a menace to sheets, there is a reason I'm wearing a black top..."
She has the absurd urge to also warn him about how she's, like, a complete and utter mess as a person right now, but - he knows? She's pretty sure he knows. He knows who she is, and with that comes most of the rest, and...
He doesn't seem to hold it against her.
"As long as you're adequately warned," she says, still a little shyly. But she's also still smiling.
"Most apologies don't end with the party being apologised to storming off after yelling at you for five minutes!"
"Hyung."
He's not going to yell, he doesn't think noona's wedding needs more yelling, but.
"Look, I heard what Ji-woo-noona and Hyun-jae-noona had to say, what more do you want from me?"
"There's only so many times a guy can be berated for the same thing and apologise for the same thing before he's feeling like people are just gratuitously rubbing it in his face, Tae-gun."
"No, seriously, Tae-gun, I get it. And the biggest mistake I made was doing it tonight, which you didn't realise was a problem either, so you don't get to be mad at me when the central thing I should've done to do this better would've been ignore your advice altogether. There isn't a good way I could've done this tonight because! She's not okay! She's barely okay enough to be in public at all, and I'm not her boyfriend, I don't have the, the map to her subconscious that would let me guess the most graceful and least triggering way I could find to do it. So I'm not sorry I'm not you, Tae-gun, and given that I'm not you, you don't get to be mad at me."
"I don't have the map to her subconscious, either. I just—try, and pay attention, and—"
"And that's fine and expected because you're her boyfriend and you live with her and it's literally your job to be there for her. It's not my job to do that. I'm not specced for it, I don't have the tools for it, I could not succeed at this job just by trying. Okay? It's good that she has you, it's good that she has someone who loves her and who's trying, really trying, but that person isn't me, it's not going to be me."
"So I'm sorry I hurt someone you cared about very deeply, Tae-gun. I really am. But she needs therapy, and she and I need to spend a long time not talking to each other, and we're all adults and this is not the end of the world. Don't do the nerd social fallacy, here, your friends don't all need to get along, it's fine. I'll apologise again when that's more feasible."
"To be okay! To not be looking for knives everywhere! To be happy! You hurt her a lot, without meaning to, you said it yourself, and the whole thing with her old partner, and now everything hurts, and I get that, and it's not gonna get fixed on its own. I'm not calling her an unstable nutcase. I'm just saying she's not okay, because she's not, and she needs to heal, because she does, and that's it."
He clasps Tae-gun's shoulder. "She'll be okay. She's a tough cookie. You survived Kang Jaeha, and she'll survive this. Believe in her, and believe in yourself."
So would it help if I made the entirety of Quasar aware that if they wish to apologize to you for something they did, they must do it by email first?
.... that is such a strange message to read when she wakes up the next morning?
She peers at it thoughtfully, absently petting the man nestled next to her as she thinks.
... Would that be preferable?? That might be preferable. But she's not sure.
I would really appreciate that, actually, that would be wonderful? Thank you so much, sunbae
Hey, so...
I'm sorry I yelled at you. About the whole - foot reattachment thing. You were and are already going through a lot, and you didn't need that to know not to do it again, and it wasn't fair to you to yell. It didn't accomplish anything except hurt you, and that's, just - not what I wanted to do.
Frankly, I was scared. I've seen a lot of promising people get themselves killed or permanently maimed by not valuing their health and their bodies enough. By just - treating themselves as tools to leverage to accomplish goals. And to a certain degree that is extremely impressive, and can get a lot of important shit done, but it's also so, so easy to fuck up in the wrong direction.
You are valuable for more than what you contribute to dungeon clears. You are precious, and beautiful, and one of the most badass people I've ever had the pleasure to meet. You are wicked smart, and impossibly brave, and you have worked so, so, so hard to make the world better with everything you do. Please keep yourself safe and happy, okay? That's all I want.
And I shouldn't have yelled to try and get it.
I am truly sorry.
hi, thank you, apology accepted, that's very sweet, sorry for scaring you
Sweetness, you already baked me apology sweets, we are square if you say we are, except for the hugs! <3
"They're good tears, I'm okay, someone is being very sweet to me over a textual medium and I am weak to it," she says in a slightly blubbery rush.
"Oh! Then I'm glad," he says, running his fingers through her hair soothingly.
Sniffle!!!
(She did eventually get really annoyed with the shit in her hair, and washed most of it out before properly going to bed. For the record.)
"Yeah it was really nice of her!!!!!"
Anyway she needs cuddles now.
(He's trying to withhold judgment of Lee Tae-gun, that his partner would rather go fuck a stranger than go to him for comfort, he just doesn't have all of the context, but... He's only mostly succeeding.)
She's just. Going to snuggle him for a bit until she stops crying, and ignore her messages for now.
"I should probably stop being a coward and avoiding my boyfriend," she sighs, eventually.
"I'm glad to encourage you or enable you in whichever endeavour you wish me to." So they're actually dating? And she's avoiding him? But the way she said that, it doesn't look like she's exactly mad at him? Hmmmmm.
"Thank you," she snorts. Then she eyes him thoughtfully (in an obviously different way than last night.)
"... Oh, no. You're completely unaware of the massive complicated trainwreck that is my personal and professional life, aren't you. Oh, oh you poor man, okay, this is your chance to tell me if you want to hear absolutely none of it, I will be a little sad but not think less of you if you decide to flee from the S-rank disaster that is - the everything. I'm just going to call it the everything. It's easier that way."
"I would never dream of making you uncomfortable and forcing you to tell anyone anything you don't want to. But I confess I'm curious and—I did read the news, when everything went down."
"Honestly, it will probably do me some good to talk about it with someone who is completely uninvolved with. The everything. Though - absolutely no running off to any media, at all, I will be extremely upset, and your real actual DRT sergeant status is the only thing getting you an in, not the - admittedly really nice sex." Cough. ... Yes, obviously, she checked on that in the database, why would she not have done that?
"It would've been such a stupid lie to tell. Well, why don't you tell me this story while I get us some breakfast, surely this kitchenette came equipped with something to eat..." he says, hopping to his feet then kissing her temple and walking over to the kitchenette to explore the possibilities.
"If not, we can also order room service," she says, sitting up and arranging herself comfortably. "Okay, so, I have actually avoided reading the news on a lot of this for, uh, obvious reasons? So I don't actually know where you are at with the dorama background. What all do you know about the everything?"
"Lee Tae-gun-shi was partnered to Kang Jaeha-shi half a decade ago. Kang Jaeha-shi hid most of the details of his powers and all of his backlash from the public, but he was in the habit of regularly using his powers on other people, and constantly backlashed. He hit zero for the first time since awakening thanks to Lee Tae-gun-shi, but developed an unhealthy obsession with Lee Tae-gun-shi, and abused him for a year before Min Woo-young-shi rescued him.
"Then Lee Tae-gun-shi never got a partner again, partly because Kang Jaeha-shi was working behind the scenes to never give him access to other partners in a deranged attempt to make Lee Tae-gun-shi come back to him at the end of his rope, partially because—this one is a guess but I'm pretty confident in it—Lee Tae-gun-shi was extremely traumatised.
"Enter you. Kang Jaeha-shi couldn't stop you because you came out of nowhere, and you started digging Lee Tae-gun-shi out of the backlash hole he'd buried himself in. Kang Jaeha-shi tried to get rid of you with no success. Then Volcanic Range happened, which triggered Kang Jaeha-shi to go ahead with his plans to have you killed. He almost succeeded, but you survived, and then he delivered the shooter to Quasar to attempt to convince Lee Tae-gun-shi that he hadn't been the one behind the hit.
"After a particularly bad encounter with Nightmare, which he wasn't usually shielded from but had lied about even to Lee Tae-gun-shi, he tried to kill himself. Then Fujimura Hana-shi stopped him, and Quasar found a dungeon material that completely suppressed Kang Jaeha-shi's backlash symptoms, causing him to have a crisis of conscience and confess everything in detail.
"There was more detail but that was the gist of it."
(Also: kitchenette does have some food! Some bread and fruit and coffee and cheese and butter, and a toaster. Fancy hotels are something else.)
"Okay, yeah, those are the broad strokes of what happened. Then I don't have to go over the big events, just the background information and some important context. You are indeed correct that Tae-gun-ah was extremely traumatized. Uh, Volcanic Range might not have been what drove him to have me killed, he actually tried to scare me off first by using his powers on me, uh..." She has to pause and think about how many times it definitely happened. "... just twice, I think? One subtly and then one extremely not subtly. Which fucked me up a bit, but I should start at the - beginning of my damage, I guess? Because it is also extremely relevant to. All of this.
"So, my partnership before Tae-gun-ah was also pretty shit? In a long term, subtle... frog boiled kind of way? And not even in a particularly interesting fashion, it was the - you know, you partner young with someone who's okay but not great, excellent guiding compatibility, pretty good power compatibility, it's probably the best partnership you will get in your career. You get kind of psychologically fucked up by the management and the media circus around the whole relationship, the fans thinking you're cute together when you're just coworkers, the, it being weird for me to be involved with anyone else because I was his girl even though. Literally no? At least at first, anyway, I kind of got worn down over years and decided to just settle instead of being alone."
"...ah. That... sucks, and I kind of can't be sad White Star guild is crumbling, now."
"Oh, don't worry, I haven't properly gotten to their sins yet," she snorts. "Speaking of, the whole thing explodes when I do decide to date my partner, and we get to sex, and - guess what the Japanese government hesitates to give a twenty-something female combat esper with a male partner she's sleeping with." Her smile is so sharp.
"It's birth control~!" she announces, laughing. It's kind of good that she can laugh about how stupid it is now, even bitterly. "Gotta think of the next generation of espers, you know. And lots of espers can keep working while pregnant, never mind that I'm a combat esper, and nevermind that my backlash is the kind of thing that would cause miscarriages left and fucking right. Oh, but my partner and White Star are ~here for me~ if I decide I want to take some time to start a family, and maybe the Japanese government has a bit of a point!"
Okay, that part of the explanation is less bitter laughter and more actual venom. Oh well. Baby steps.
"That's—not—" He's speechless. Actually speechless. That's the stupidest fucking argument???
Isn't it just.
"So this causes me to snap, because..." She motions to herself demonstrably. "I would be wasted in all senses as a domestic housewife, especially the one where I absolutely do not want it, and it's, just - it became so obvious that these people had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I do think they wanted what they thought was best for me, but that was - safe little fire esper that just sticks to Japan, doesn't get into any kind of trouble, doesn't get hurt or do anything really big, does the reasonable, long term smart option of making more espers for the future - and it's just. In actuality so wrong and wasteful. White Star would not have ever sent me into Volcanic Range, even if my partner was somehow for it and at all useful in there, because it wouldn't have been worth the risk." Huff.
"Anyway, so that's why I fled the country."
"White Star has completed its disintegration and closed, and Japan itself is... hm. I might need to make the problem about the birth control public in some way, and shame them into being better with my S-rank powers." She calls up her commscreen to make a note of that to herself, feeling - a bit more like herself at the action. Ha! She's picking up projects again!
This note complete, she darkens kind of obviously with:
"Enter Quasar."
The exasperation and irritation is obvious. Blatant, even.
"Okay kind of surprised Quasar managed to fuck it up, given the bar set by all of that."
"Yeah. Well. So you mentioned that I came out of nowhere, and that was the experience for Tae-gun-ah himself, too. I was leveraged as a surprise, you see. Emergency medical intervention, in fact. Without warning, oh, either involved esper beforehand. He wasn't warned because presumably he would have run like the frightened bunny," and she uses the English word for the pun on his name, "he is, but I just. Did not get told." Smile. Such a sharp smile.
"What an excellent question I never really got the answer to! As far as I can tell the guild president handled most of it personally, and he just completely forgot."
"I got an apology later, from him personally, and he tried really, really hard to make it a good one, but he sucked at that too, frankly. 'There are many people here who would like to get to know you,'" she parrots, then scoffs, disgusted. "Like it's about their feelings instead of helping me do my fucking job. And it's not like he explained what was going on with Tae-gun-ah, either? So from my perspective it looks like this guild actively destroys its espers, so obviously regardless of anything he says I want absolutely nothing to do with any of them."
"...oh that's totally what it would look like isn't it?" Here, he's got some toast and assorted breakfast foods now, he can serve them. "Without the context of Kang Jaeha-shi's confession it just looks like they've ground him to paste. Wow that was bad optics."
"Yep. Absolutely what it looked like to me. No idea of Kang Jaeha-shi in the slightest. Which is really fun, because, oh, just a little over a month later, guess who creepily stalks me to a bookshop in the cute little town I'd bought a house in."
"Mountainload of backlash that he incompetently managed, because he was a self-obsessed arrogant jackass with far too much concern for his masculine dignity." 'Masculine dignity' is a translated phrase from Hideyoshi, and yes, she does hold some level of bitterness for it, thank you for asking.
"Anyway, so I get the ick from him, even though he was literally in my head trying to make himself look the best, and had me for who knows how long trying to figure out the best way to introduce himself to me. I smell something fishy and I teleport away. I text - uh, I expect you know of Min Woo-young-sunbae, but - I texted him, and went 'Hey how alarmed should I be, because right now the answer is very,' and..." she trails off, looking kind of forlorn. She'll have some toast, while she tries to figure out how to phrase things about. That time of her life.
She returns the little hand squeeze, sniffles a little, then has to put her toast down to wipe at her eyes, because - because.
"Um. So. We all... sorry, 'we' here is basically me, Tae-gun-ah, and Woo-young-sunbae, are definitely all very concerned and scared shitless and trying to figure out what to do, and - Tae-gun-ah is basically shut down from trauma at this whole thing, for obvious reasons, and he's - he was - ... I probably shouldn't talk about what was going on with him. I'll just. Stick to the facts. I wanted to go public with all of it, they don't. We go with their preferences." Awkward shrug. "It felt stupid then, and in retrospect I still think it was fucking stupid."
And. She might still be kind of angry that no one agreed with her and supported her on that? Huh. Maybe talking about this is helping.
"It's not hindsight when I say it to their faces from the start," she snaps, then winces. "Sorry. I don't mean to snap at you, it's not your fault, it's just. Fuck."
She's started crying properly, now, but her ability to talk remains, so:
"A-and, and, that is the ongoing theme for the next several months, right, this, this fucking demented game of cat and mouse where we're, sorry, no, I'm doing all of this stupid overcomplicated shit for, because as far as I can tell I'm the only one actively doing anything, like stuffing a fucking teleport call button in an earring on a goddamned whim, which by the way absolutely came up for round fucking two trapped with the S-rank psycho and, and, and -"
Nope. Ability to words gone. Only sobbing, now.
She'll just sob pathetically into him, then. For a while, anyway. Eventually she wants to try to explain more, how this was worse, even though she's not very good at it:
"And, of course, most of this is during the fucking confluence, a-and I'm bending over fucking backwards to accommodate the man with massive trauma no matter how inconvenient it is to me, and Woo-young-sunbae loses his partner that is like his husband, and, and, I'm, patiently playing nursemaid to everyone's problems but my own, and Volcanic Fucking Range is literally where we go past holding hands and, I tell Tae-gun's friends about his psycho stalker ex and he yells at me for it and, and, and it's." Sob.
"and nobody's trying to keep me safe. I'm, I'm nobody's priority, and, the, when I wake up in the hospital after I was shot in the fucking head he tells me not here when I ask if we can finally go public and - and - I -"
It is back to incoherent bawling. Almost wailing, actually.
(Factually, she knows that some people were by that point trying to keep her safe. But, also factually: they failed at that. So.)
She's going to get so hugged. The most hugged.
(So she's still together with this Lee Tae-gun character... why again? Sounds like he really fucking fucked up.)
(...Jae-min should not be so quick to judge.)
(......still.)
Those are all of the words she's able to get out for a while. Mostly she just. Needs to cry some more. She's cried about it a lot already, but somehow, she needs to cry about it some more. Maybe it'll be helpful this time.
When she's sufficiently exhausted herself:
"He's apologized. A lot. He knows he fucked up, and he's - made me his priority now, and he's - it's - I -" Thunk, into the chest of the man she met yesterday. Words. Words hard. She feels so shitty trying to explain all of this. It's like she's trying to explain Hideyoshi, how he meant well. "Everyone that's fucked me over this time has apologized and seems to be sincerely trying to do better. And, I'm, still angry but I don't want to throw away their efforts, and - we are actually very good partners in a dungeoning capacity, I don't know how to explain it but when we are in the field I know in my soul I can trust him with my life, it's just, with, the..."
"...with your heart? With the parts of you that aren't the parts that are threatened by monsters, or not nonhuman monsters..."
"I guess with my heart," she agrees, gloomily. "And socially. Socially he's a fucking trainwreck." That description sounds strangely affectionate, though.
...huh.
"He does not come off as very... social... in the few times he speaks in public, no."
"No, he's a poor little introverted autistic workaholic who buries all of his feelings and doesn't - Kang Jaeha-shi fucked him up, socially. Isolated him from, everyone. He's working on it, but he's got a lot of learning to do. And I just." Sigh. "It's like he's asking me 'Okay, now how do I do right by you,' with the biggest saddest puppy eyes, and he absolutely means it and will commit 110% to wherever I point him, but I don't. I don't know. I don't know how to fix this. I don't know if I should, I just, I, I'm so so stupid because I still want to it's just I don't see how when everything is - all - it's - everything is a mess, I went to a wedding yesterday and he and his friend got the bright fucking idea that that friend should apologize to me there, which, stupid fucking me, I talk myself into it like a dumbass because apologies are good things, right, but, it's. I don't know. It's all so fucked up."
"...you mentioned... sorry, I may be guessing wildly from too little information, but... do you have your own place, right now? After..."
"Technically yes, practically no." Sigh. "My house is ruined for me, I'm trying to get it sold, and I got a - silo that is completely out of a certain psychic's range, but it's kind of weighing on me that I have to teleport to get to it. Objectively it's, like, yeah obviously that is not wasting teleport juice, I know the man who juices the battery and he arguably owes me for it, but. .... still." Another sigh. "I've been living with Tae-gun-ah, which. Has not been helping things, really. We really were forcibly shoved together by circumstance and told 'get along or leave the other to die'..."
Lean. "But I did go and wise up and get a hotel room, so I'm not completely fucking hopeless, right."
"But you might want to make this a bit more permanent? If circumstance pushed you together, maybe now that it's not it could do you good to have some space from each other and... go through the normal dating motions, in the right order. If that's what you want."
"Mm. Yeah. That sounds smart. Ugh but I don't know how to get some kind of temporary setup though, I don't want to buy another house, and, what, do I rent an apartment or something...?" Sigh. "I guess I can go bug my associated guild, but you've heard about my relationship with them. I'm trying to work with them a bit more now, but its with my nose held and I, don't, I've been forcing myself to do a lot and I don't want to force myself to trust them when they failed me." Pause. "... Because they also failed me, to be clear, since, you know. Not going public about the S-rank psychic threat to my welfare."
"Yeah, what exactly was up with that, did they know about it? Why didn't they do anything about it half a decade ago?"
"Tae-gun-ah asked them not to because he's monumentally stupid about his ex. Well. Was. The very nearly successful assassination was a point of no return for him, because literally how do you forgive that, but. And they didn't realize Kang Jaeha-shi was still obsessed with him, they thought it was a bad relationship and a worse breakup but that was that. So I'm only moderately mad about their shitty follow up there?" Sigh. "But after they knew he was actively stalking me, they still decided the thing to do was to follow his preferences instead of. Literally anything else."
"So you had to just... deal with that guy, practically on your own. What's even the point of having a guild if they just won't do anything?"
"What a good fucking question," she mutters. "Ugh. In Quasar's defense I did tell them to buzz out of my life? And it was up against Samsung without a lot of hard evidence. But. Guess who still got shot in a dungeon by another esper! That's right, it's meeeeee~"
This is, of course, punctuated by a sob.
"...that's right that little creep's daddy owns Samsung doesn't he. Holy shit this is like a plot out of a bad manhwa."
"Told you! My life is a dorama!! You still have time to run!!!"
She's kind of holding him a little too tight to allow for that, but maybe he could wiggle free.
"Are there any long-lost twins? Someone swapped at birth? Improbable esper lineages?" He's not wiggling.
"Not that I know of, not to my knowledge, and I sure hope not!" she laughs. "But then, maybe those reveals are next season, and I have a secret aquamancer esper twin and am the granddaughter of Scarlet Inferno, ooooo~"
"Wow, this season has been a bit too much of an emotional rollercoaster for me, I think we'd all benefit from a beach episode or twenty."
"No kidding!! Though I'm... I don't know, I find doing dungeons my beach episode? Except I can't do those right now because, um. .... I scared some people with how flippant I was with my own safety, and I should work on that before I get myself killed and lose the world another S-rank."
"I've only just met you but I'm finding that I would be quite upset if you got got by a dungeon. And think of my RSS feed!" Despite the lightness of his words he did hug her a bit more closely at that.
Snort.
"... Yeah. Yeah. I voluntarily went on this sabbatical, for the record, just." Sigh. "It was my outlet, you know? And to do stuff that helped people, with the psychological trainwreck that is Kim Hye-jin, instead of just being... I don't know." Demonstrably someone who was not worth anyone's care. "This was also why I didn't want to be her for a while. Didn't want to be connected with. The everything."
"Yeah, I get that. I'm taking this week off but honestly my job is... I mean, I read dungeon reports in my free time. So. I can't imagine I'd be in a good place, either."
"Ehh. I need to find healthier outlets. I kind of... don't have any besides dungeoneering. I suppose sex? Which, you know, hi, thank you! You're very sweet, full marks!"
He laughs. "You're welcome! I'd say I'm here anytime but actually I'll be in the US."
"... Mmmhr. Yeah." Hye-jin: genuinely sad about him being on the other side of the world! She likes him! He's cute and sweet! And not at all involved in any of her Everything! "I, um, sorry but I just fled a country and I don't feel up to doing it again, and also my English is not great, so, uh. ... Shit."
"—you should definitely not flee Korea to join a guy you just met yesterday no matter how charming I am. Or how good at sex."
"Fleeing the country was already on my list of potential things I could do without your involvement," she sniffs loftily. "I definitely though about it a lot early on, when I thought Quasar was mulching its espers and I needed to run for it. I just. ... do still want to try to make things work here, and separately I'm so tired, I do not want to do another international move again, mine was comparatively easy and it still sucked so much."
"Yeah. Well, we can be email pals and share funny Instagram reels with each other and maybe sext and do phone sex if you're into that."
"I - have never tried it before," she admits, blushing a little. "But, um, yes, I'd like to keep in contact. Like I said, you're very sweet."
"I only just arrived in Korea yesterday though, so I'm still here for a week. We can meet up more if you'd like. I'm in Busan until Tuesday then I'll be in Seoul until Sunday and then I'm back in the US."
"I'd like to! I've got, uh, some English classes and a prospective therapy appointment..." she consults her schedule. Yeah, that sure is inconveniently empty. Kind of depressing, that, even if it's nice for hanging out with the sweet American sergeant. "... and a mostly free schedule, which I should not find depressing but I admittedly kind of do! So. Um. Yeah, meeting up more sounds nice, and we don't even just have to have sex."
... Really making it obvious how much she wants friends, isn't she. Augh.
"Cool! So I actually haven't visited Korea much over my life, and I'm guessing you haven't seen much of it either due to all the everything since you moved. How about we get to know Busan and Seoul together a bit?"
"- Though, uh, I do have - even if I do hide my hair in a hoodie and wear sunglasses I'm likely to be recognized at some point, so, uh."
.... Shit, people are going to be weird about her spending time with an esper man who is not Tae-gun, aren't they, the fuckers. Augh.
He follows the unspoken logic. "We could try to go more low-key places? And Lee Tae-gun is welcome to join if you and he would like that."
Blink blink.
"That wouldn't be too... Uh. Awkward?" Look, she's new to esper poly, okay, she needs reassurance!!!
"Right. Okay."
But then, now she has the irrational fear that the minute she introduced this nice uninvolved man to the rest of her social sphere, he will suddenly come down with the 'not giving a shit about Hye-jin' disease that had afflicted so many. .... No, that's a bit too melodramatic and shallow even for her, shoo, bad brains.
"... I have no idea if he'd want to either, but he does kind of need - well. More social connections. Like I do."
"It'd be a pleasure to meet him, too." He wants to get the measure of this man, he's currently very unimpressed.
But what if Jae-min realizes she's terrible and abandons her, too??? Damn it, she thought she told you to shoo.
"... I'm having some irrational fear that the minute you're exposed to the rest of my social sphere, you're going to see how I am bad, wrong, selfish and crazy," she admits, because this is the kind of thing you admit to people, with your words.
"Would it make sense if I said 'the person who wrote the reports I've read is not a bad, wrong, selfish, and crazy person'?"
"Yyyyyes, but I did just say this was an irrational fear, right, I'm - I'm thinking back to the day after I nearly got assassinated and everyone sitting in a little circle completely ignoring how incredibly not okay I am and not giving me an exit and doing a tactics talk that involves painstakingly belaboring all of the ways the psycho psychic can weaponize me personally and getting snapped at by the guy who said he was going to always be on my side because I'm venturing a concern for how assassination of aforementioned psycho psychic in the world and he thinks it's just a little bit too murdery for his flinch response and," and she is not quite up to 'hyperventilating' but there sure is something wrong with her breathing right now, isn't there, possibly she should stop talking and instead focusing on breathing, so she doesn't turn blue and fall over, and also talking about this topic at all hurts hurts hurts and so she stops. And focuses on trying to breathe properly.
Aaaaand she's going to get hugs. So many hugs. All of the hugs. "I am not going to think you are any of those things."
".... 'kay," she mumbles, and then it is indeed sobbing time again. While trying to remember to breathe properly. But all - well, maybe not Si-yeon - of the people in that room were individually very reasonable, it's just all working together they were fucking horrible to her, and this is the exact same pattern she recognized in White Star and arguably Quasar, and so she really really wants to keep the one (1) uninvolved friend-alike from becoming a part of a System that will Inevitably Fuck Her In Particular Over.
Jae-min is very good at hugs, and does not particularly mind being cried on. Clearly this woman really needed someone for this, someone with no—history, baggage—so he can be that someone for her, at least for today.
Yeah. Yeah, she really did.
"... s-sorry, this, probably was not what you were expecting from picking a girl up at a bar, huh..."
"Well, the beauty of getting to know a new person is that you never know what you're going to find, and if you go in with rigid expectations you're bound to be disappointed. And I'm sincerely happy to be able to offer you what little solace I can."
She needs a little bit to disentangle this.
"..... so you're totally having fun picking apart my weird dorama life while I cry on you?" she confirms, after a pause.
"Having fun is... perhaps not how I'd put it. But Lim Jae-min living his best life doesn't not include some of that sometimes."
Snort.
"Fair enough." Sigh. "Kim Hye-jin who is living her best life does not suddenly start yelling and crying at someone else's wedding. I'm going to need to apologize for that..."
"Are the bride or the groom friends? They'd surely understand, if so." Although, they're Korean, you never know...
"I am making friendmaking overtures at the bride, and the groom is additionally a sweetie." Sigh. "I was trying not to freak out and make a spectacle of myself, and I was - doing pretty well, only minimal crying, until that - prick showed up and... ugh. I should have been smart enough to just say 'not now,' even if apologies are nominally good things to be cherished. I'm such a fucking idiot."
"It was probably ill-conceived of them to want to have an emotionally heavy conversation there, like that."
"Yeah, that too, but I know the guy's a tone-deaf asshole, so..." ... that sounds like she's saying she should be able to manage all interactions with tone-deaf assholes, and be able to always tell them to fuck off before they involve themselves stupidly with her. Hm.
"... okay, having said that out loud, yeah, that is perhaps too much responsibility to expect of myself always, isn't it."
"If by 'that' you mean 'navigating social interactions with tone-deaf assholes', yes, a bit."
"I do, yes," she snorts. "I - guess I'm just used to being the... socially aware and knowledgeable one... and feel personal responsibility for every social interaction I'm involved in that goes wrong. Which. When I say out loud also sounds pretty fucked."
"You are not personally responsible for everything that goes socially wrong about you, repeat after me."
Giggle. "I am not personally responsible for everything that goes wrong socially about me. Nor about what socially goes wrong about Tae-gun-ah, actually."
"You are especially not personally responsible for things going socially wrong about other people! ...unless they're your children I suppose, then there's a bit of responsibility there, but I do not think you want to have that kind of relationship with Lee Tae-gun-shi."
Snort. "I really, really don't! He's just. Ugh. Sad wet cat of a man. I just want to keep him safe from his own stupidity."
"He's going to need to get burned by his own stupidity to learn that it's stupid. If he's been isolated for years he'll be very rusty and preventing him from, as they say, fucking around and finding out will in the end not help him."
Then she turns more serious.
"I knew that already, and I was even trying to implement it, just. It's. Hard to be dating someone and then also not socially trust them, you know?"
"I think... social trust isn't just one thing. You can trust him with some things and not others. I... don't know which, not having met the man, but—there must be some reason you like him that's about his—personality, the social part of him, right?"
"Well for one, he dove into magical dungeon lava on the off chance it would save me, which I do really appreciate," she says, a little drily, but: yeah she should actually answer the question. "But he's - thoughtful and well meaning and sweet, just, he sort of. ... I want to say gets social information overload and he doesn't know how to process it all? And he's not good at - prioritizing, or going 'Okay, this should not happen now,' because he's just moving from proverbial emergency to emergency instead of thinking of the overall strategic situation. Does that make sense?"
"Well, that's an understandable problem, when he was getting approximately no information up until now? So hopefully he will learn to triage soon."
"That is the dream, but until then, he keeps - the competence varies wildly? He'll realize I need a break from the wedding and carefully and patiently lead me to a nice garden so I can quietly cry until I'm feeling more put together, but then turn around and go, 'Oh yeah, that friend of mine she hates, he should apologize right now,' and then ask me if I'm up for that in the same hour as the aforementioned crying! And it's just. Ugh."
Thunk.
"And stupid me, didn't have perspective either, blindly trusted him to not set me up for failure, but. Nope."
"...yeah. That... yeah. It sucks, and I don't know of a good way to skip it."
"Me neither! And if I tell him any of this, he's going to overthink it and probably overcorrect and do something else stupid and insane and, and, and. ... Space will probably help. We probably just need space from each other, so we stop getting treated like a unit. That was a good idea, I need to implement that..."
"Our walks around Busan and Seoul can double as hunts for places you might find cosy to live in."
Nodnod.
"Thanks. Um. First should probably be. Text boyfriend, make sure he's not - I don't remember if he has any dungeons today," she's not jealous, you're jealous, shut up, she doesn't want to actively drag the people around her down just because she is responsibly taking some time off for herself, "but if he does, I'm being his professional partner equivalent? And I told him that I wanted to be left alone like twelve hours ago and locked him out of my silo so, he might be freaking out a little."
She will tentatively check her messages. Just from Tae-gun, she's not going anywhere near any other social anything right now. She has the system set up to let her see only the things she's looking at, instead of a great big bundle of '100 new messages' or something.
The only messages are from yesterday.
okay
please take care of yourself and let me know if I can help in anyway
and I'm sorry about hyung
Look at this sad wet cat of hers. So sad and wet.
She sighs.
Okay. Engage with the boyfriend. Limbo is a bad place to leave people, especially someone she's partnered with and also dating.
Hey. Feeling a little better now. I do think we need some space from each other though, because
"Okay, nope, no idea how to write this," she decides. "Insane idea. I teleport him here and we both talk to him to explain why I think we need space from each other, and you can see the sad wet cat in person?"
"I should probably put some clothes on? But otherwise this seems like a reasonable idea."
Hey. Feeling a little better now. Met + fucked a very nice guy who is being very helpful for getting my head together. Do you want to come here to meet him and also talk about stuff? Idk how to say things in text right now.
Do want to hug you though.
Tae-gun responds very quickly.
Oh, okay
Send me the coordinates whenever
...Jae-min has a suspicion.
Well, he is gonna go put clothes on, how about.
He was totally on tenterhooks waiting for a reply, wasn't he. Sigh. He's so himself...
She waits until everyone is at least mostly decent, then sends her boyfriend the teleport request directly, since she feels bad making him pay for it.
And then he appears, immediately adopting his usual "assessing an environment for threats" look for a fraction of a second.
Then he notices where they are and the stranger and immediately bows. "I am Lee Tae-gun. It's a pleasure to meet you."
...oh he's understanding so many things right now.
He bows back. "I'm Lim Jae-min. The pleasure is mine, Lee Tae-gun-nim."
"—Lim Jae-min-shi doesn't need to be so formal," he says, straightening up immediately.
Then, threat neutralised, he turns to look at Hye-jin and his face immediately softens. "Hi, Hye-jin-ah."
She's sitting on the edge of the bed, in a hoodie and panties and nothing else, and smiles back at him. And opens her arms for a hug.
"Hi, dear," she says, and she can hug him first.
Ohgoodshe'snotbreakingupwithhimshestilllikeshim—
He hugs her back.
Kim Hye-jin had a very good idea when she decided not to text this man, she might've killed him.
He leans against a wall, arms folded, smiling slightly.
Yeah, see!!! This was why she couldn't write the message!!! He would have read way too much into it and given himself an aneurysm!
"Soooo I should not interact with that particular friend of yours for at least a year, probably longer," she says, lightly, as she pets him. "Because my feelings toward him have truly calcified into a proper burning hatred, and I feel we are fundamentally socially incompatible, and also I kind of never want to interact with him ever again."
"Pretend I'm not here. If Kim Hye-jin didn't want me to hear it she wouldn't have begun talking about it."
...oh, yeah, that makes sense.
"He also thought the same. That he probably shouldn't try to talk to you for a while."
"He has some self preservation instincts intact!" she says, with a smile.
"Yeah a lot of my processing was info dumping on this poor nice American man, so he is aware of the broad strokes of the situation. Um. Have you got any dungeons today?"
"I'm half-American," he clarifies, "and I live in the US. I'm a D-rank esper and I work for the American Dungeon Response Teams." Something tells him Lee Tae-gun will appreciate the neutral delivery of facts.
"And, um. I'm. Sorry. About last night. —uh, maybe I should email you, Ji-woo-sunbae said—"
"No, no, those are rules for everyone else, you have special boyfriend privileges," she interrupts, a little drily. "You are okay to apologize to me in person."
Do you see, Jae-min. Do you see why she keeps being tempted to take full responsibility of this sad wet cat of hers. He's trying so hard.
He does! He does see! He also see how it's much more endearing in person than described. Lee Tae-gun is trying so hard.
"Oh. Okay. Well, um, I'm sorry about last night. I thought it would be a good idea for him to apologise for being a complete ass, and then he was more of an ass, and he and Ji-woo sunbae pointed out that probably trying that last night at all was a bad idea and I think they were right. I—didn't realise you'd feel so strongly about the email, though—"
"About being apologized to over email? It's not that I feel it's precisely the best possible apology medium, but I am legitimately so relieved to have everything socially intimidating in a purely under my control formal. My problem was more that he checked with you to see if I was okay to apologize to? And uh. I think it is a bad plan to have you as any kind of social gatekeeper for me."
Because he sucks at it. He sucks at it a lot.
"Oh. That email. I feel complicated things about that and don't want to deal with thinking about it right now, so I will not."
Moving on!
"Okay so, when a friend asks you if it's okay if they apologize to your girlfriend, they are usually like. Also quietly asking that friend's judgement about whether it is a time when it is both appreciated and will not explode? And I as your girlfriend was trusting you to - I guess police potential social situations I might be put in for the same thing. And this was just a bad plan on all fronts from the start, that would have been obvious if any of us were thinking about it at all, but we weren't, we were following social scripts around you, and you had no idea."
"I'd recommend that you relax and review what Kim Hye-jin just actually said rather than whatever your brain reinterpreted her as having said."
He goes through it again in his head. Then one more time.
"Oh. Okay. Um. You should definitely not, uh, I should definitely not be—able—allowed to—do that. Social gatekeeping. Um. I'm sorry, I didn't realise I was expected to do it."
"'Hell iPhone' is a term Woo-young-sunbae coined for 'your brain finishes a sentence in the worst possible way,'" she clarifies, for Jae-min's benefit. Then she pats her boyfriend. "I didn't consciously think of it either, it was just in that - package deal of 'dating' in my head, sitting back there like a trap waiting to be sprung. Um. Sort of in the same vein.... So I am really very grateful you invited me into your home, but think I need to move out? I think we both need some space to, uh. Breathe. Think. Be separate human beings without people treating us as a unit."
"Oh." And she didn't say "I want to break up" so if he's not letting hell iPhone say anything here...
"... For general bad memories?" she clarifies, gently. "Because that - yeah, I bet you do have some serious bad memories there, huh?"
"And it's just—it's just so big. And in the middle of nowhere. And I can't get deliveries there, it's not registered anywhere, I have the coordinates memorised to teleport to it and I only live there because it's my silo too and so that that guy couldn't find me and I always thought it was too much, of course Kang Jaeha was already over me and I was being paranoid, but I wasn't being paranoid enough, but now he's in fucking prison so I don't need to be paranoid at all."
"Lee Tae-gun-shi, your girlfriend fucked me last night and then cried on me a lot about the last several months of trauma in her life. You're allowed a little an outburst around me, as a treat."
"I'd suggest forgoing formality entirely to help you have somewhat better social scripts for it but something tells me you'd rather not."
"And I would need to kiss you before you were willing to bend on that, wouldn't I?"
Hye-jin is overcome by a fit of giggles.
It is very cute to see her boyfriend get flirted with??? She did not expect this, but she's not complaining! (And: yay! She did not screw up poly! Her boyfriend gets to flirt with the nice American, too! It is Very Fair!)
"It's kind of a pity that you'd probably be incompatible, with how guiding statistically works," she sighs, forlornly, once she's done giggling. "But I can happily give him a high rating, if you're wondering!"
"I mean, not necessarily, Si-yeon-hyung and Juheon-hyung are actually slightly compatible too—"
"She is statistically correct, but we could always find out the normal way. That said, I'm not entirely sure me kissing you right now is what the situation needs, though do let me know if I'm wrong."
Help, he's so cute. She doesn't tend to cause this reaction in him, and maybe she should try to more often!
"He is, for the record, really actually a verified DRT sergeant, with all of the actual responsibility that holds," she offers, in case that helps. "I checked."
Why would that—oh. Oh.
Yeah, okay, that is something he wasn't being anxious about which he is—still not being anxious about. Okay.
"Um."
"I succeeded at my goal of making you less anxious about outbursts in front of me, though, so you may carry on with the actual conversation the two of you were having."
"Um. Right. Okay. So. Um. You should get a new place and so should I probably and they should not be the same place so we... can... when you say spend some time apart you mean...?"
"Have - living spaces that are both ours in a way I had trouble with moving in with you, even though you wanted me to be myself all over the place? Still be esper partners, dating, and probably still inevitably end up sleeping at one or the other place a lot because snuggling is nice? ... Possibly we should get two apartments in the same building, but I can't tell if that's appealing and cute, or if my inner self-sacrificial efficiency weasel is making a mess..."
"Okay. Then we can tentatively go for apartments in the same building, or a duplex or something," she says, with a firm nod. "And if I turn out to be insane about this I can work it out with my therapist, and get a new place. Because being across the hall from each other or something would be pretty cute."
Kiss! Eeee~
And: yay! She feels some amount of enthusiasm about figuring out her housing situation now! And she has the underwater silo as a general flee from the whole entire world location!
Eventually though, the urge to plot logistics breaks through:
"Probably this is a 'bother Quasar' kind of thing, isn't it," she sighs, a little resigned. "Because, you know. Esper senses, superstrength. Things we will want to do in our respective domiciles."
She does not sound happy about asking Quasar for help with things.
Pout.
"Ugh. Fine. Quasar. But let's have a couple days to think about what we each want in a new home separately before we go bug them? I feel like we've had a lot of - jumping into things too quickly problems, and I would like to not do that this time."
"—oh I don't mean the apartment, owning the apartment is fine, just, things in it. Objects. I've—I don't—decorate. Or do things other than work and train and... when I used to have a life I... went out sometimes... but..."
"Is the problem here that you think you won't be able to spend much time in your apartment anyway, because you'll always be doing things outside it, so what's even the point?"
On one hand: she does kind of want to help him out in some way? But on the other hand: this kind of thing is why she would like some space from her boyfriend, actually. He's gotta figure this shit out on his own.
But she will make sure he's been fed and is generally taking care of himself.
"Have you eaten?" she asks, because she has suspicions.
How did she guess. Oh, wait! She's met him.
"Uh huh. Okay! Room service it is, toast is not enough for three hungry espers..." There should be a little card somewhere with room service options, she's going to set about making sure they Have Food.
This also neatly makes Tae-gun having to figure out how to have a space of his own not her problem! She is very clever and wise.
"...ah, I don't really—get guiding from people I'm not partnered to."
"I would be fired if I told anyone what your backlash is," he points out. "But I don't want to pressure you." He drops his hand.
Ah. Yeah. Legit. Though he still has his massive backlog of chronic backlash that is not entirely chipped away at, such that he should probably be buried under a pile of compatible espers for the next six months to be completely sure. She gives him some soothing pats while she gets them food, though.
Food: ordered! There will be a drone at their window shortly.
No obvious emotional catastrophes imminent, Hye-jin will... tentatively... check her email. There might be delicious apologies in there, and she... does still feel overall pretty wronged by the state of the world and how she's been treated in it, actually.
There are some! Here's one.
Hey Hye-jin. I think I owe you some apologies, too.
I'm sorry about last night. I wish I'd known what that clown had been planning. I don't know what he was thinking, doing that then and there. I hope you'll still have fond memories of the wedding despite it.
And I'm sorry about how I acted when we went to your and Tae-gun's place after that ice dungeon. I should've realised you wouldn't have wanted to be there in the center of it so soon after what happened. I should've suggested that you could leave and let us take care of it without losing face. I was so focused on the task, I didn't think about how you must've been feeling about it until it was really obvious. I'm sorry for making such a time in your life worse than it should've been.
I hope you're okay. Love you, girl.
Thank you!
I still had fun at your wedding, yeah, though I don't think that clown and I are ever going to be friends. Or on speaking terms. I don't super want to interact with him ever again, honestly, he is not making it obvious to me that he has redeeming qualities!
Thanks. I'm - still processing some things. The tactics meeting was.... very hard for me in ways I wasn't completely cognizant of at the time. I think the really big thing for me more than any one person was everybody not - giving me space to leave? And also doing the polite Korean 'if we do not see the thing it does not exist,' while also seemingly being chill with Si-yeon tapdancing all over my traumas, and then not giving us space even after I started crying, that it all added up to... idk. I have some issues around organizations of perfectly nice people coming together into a group and screwing me over. Dunno how to prevent that sort of thing in the future, would appreciate some kind of interference to prevent things like that, please. I 100% will be dying on the inside with a smile on my face, White Star fucked me up good.
I'm doing okay. Met a cute guy at a bar, turned out to be compatible with him. Ended up having a very nice night in the end! ;)
Hey! Ji-woo-sunbae said we should email you to apologise for stuff so I'm doing this here, but let me know if you'd like something else instead.
I'm really sorry about how I treated you that time at Tae-gun's. I think I was just sort of acting like we were pushing the meeting we'd already planned forward without considering why we were doing that, and even though I noticed you were in a bad way, I thought you wouldn't have wanted us to bring it up. But we never gave you any space to leave if you in fact didn't want to be there then, and just jumped straight to it.
I'm sorry even after we acknowledged it we didn't really take it in well enough. I think we were all out of sorts about how to engage with it—I know I was—and kept trying to fit the situation into some mold that made sense, rather than really reassess and consider what you needed.
And I know I'm not Ha Si-yeon's keeper, but I'm also really sorry about not reining him in when I knew what he could be like. I'm also sorry for going along with him and with Min Woo-young when they were acting familiar. I should really have thought about it a lot harder.
Finally, I'm sorry about yesterday. I was the one who suggested to Ha Si-yeon that he mention the email to you, and it should've occurred to me that it was not a good time for more highly emotionally difficult topics. I'm sorry for encouraging him; I should've urged restraint instead.
I don't know if this is okay to say, but I think I had an image of you as kind of invincible. I'm not trying to say any of it is your fault at all, you shouldn't need to be invincible and invulnerable and people shouldn't assume you are. But you're always so cool and badass, and I admire you so much, that I let myself believe nothing could get to you, and so I acted in unacceptable ways as a result.
I still think you're really cool and badass, and admire you a lot. You're a cool and badass and admirable human, and I shouldn't forget about the human part, and should treat you with the care and respect and thoughtfulness you deserve.
If you ever need anything, be it a hug or a shoulder or an ear or firepower to destroy your enemies, please know that you are very dear to me and I will be here for you.
Lee Juheon
... Yeah, she's not going to be able to reply to this one right now. On one hand: Juheon as a person is hard to be mad at, and he does clearly care? On the other hand: everything else.
So it was the combined brain power of Tae-gun and his two hyungs that resulted in the wedding apology nonsense? That's kind of funny, it's like 'Three idiots try to disarm a bomb at a wedding,' except she's the bomb, and was actively trying not to blow up. Nobody asked them to try and disarm the proverbial bomb at the non proverbial wedding. They just decided to, for some reason.
This one gets to go in a folder named 'NOPE,' and then she moves on.
Kim Hye-jin-san,
I am not sure if you will remember me. You helped me in a way I dearly needed at a very difficult time in my life, but I would not at all be surprised to learn that you do that every Tuesday.
My new partner and I are doing well at our new guild. I remain very grateful for your support in those early days, without which I am sure I would not be where I am today.
I hope it is not too presumptuous of me to say that if you need anything, I would be glad to offer it. Please feel free to disregard this message for that or any other reason.
Thank you again,
Ueno Midori
She's briefly thrown by it being in Japanese instead of Korean, but once she processes its contents, she stares at it. Ueno Midori... the name doesn't ring a bell, but her face and hair color might - she does a brief search on the esper database and... ah ha.
The pink hair is very memorable, and connects the appropriate dots. She... paid for her to get her own personal silo, instead of a shared or guild one, she thinks. Or possibly did a down payment for several months rent on an apartment? The apartment might've been the silo? Something like that. She remembers encountering 'new esper without built up savings and at the mercy of the whims of others' and just. Well, even then, she was an A-rank who liked to do tricky dungeons, she had spare cash to spend on stuff. Like 'make sure a young female esper had a place to be safe.' Like that.
... Well she's definitely feeling a way about this. Not sure what way, but. A way. It's really nice to know she did some real, tangible, non-destructive based good for someone? Such that the someone would send an email into the void on the chance that it would reach her and make her feel a little bit better.
Ueno Midori-san,
I do remember you, actually! I can't remember if it was a silo or an apartment or both, but I helped get you a place that was yours where you were safe, right? I'm really glad it helped.
Your email is extremely sweet and I love it intensely? Thank you for it, truly. It's a ray of sunshine in what's been a bit of a dark time. It's, uh, been a hard couple of months for me, as you might've guessed.
Would you like to keep in contact? Maybe meet some time and catch up? I would like to be your friend.
Thank you in return,
Kim Hye-jin
Tae-gun was initially alarmed but now he looks pensive upon studying her face. "Something... good?"
"Mmhmm," she sniffles. "Could one of you hug me anyway, I think I might've made a friend, and relatedly I'm having feelings."
Well Tae-gun is located right next to her so he can probably hug?
Snuuuuuggle.
"I turn out to be weak to someone making it clear I affected their life in a positive way without any weaponizing of myself at all! Which is an objectively sad sentence to say out loud, now that I've said it, this seems like it should be a topic in my upcoming therapy," she says, babbling a little.
"Hye-jin-ah, you're the best thing that's ever happened to me. Even before you knew me, before you knew anything about me, after prez and Quasar had just fucked you over, you stayed because you wanted to help me. You were incredibly understanding and patient about my stuff, you didn't pressure me, you were kind and safe, I had all of the triggers in the world about someone wanting to get close to me and instead you just let me go at my own pace, and that helped more than anything. My life is one hundred percent, unambiguously better because you're in it. You took on a lot of burdens that I didn't mean to place on you, and that really sucks, and I'm sorry I didn't realise I was doing that, but I would not be here where I am without you.
"You're not a weapon. You're an amazing person, and the world is brighter for having you in it."
