* * *
Hajin fiddled with the mobile phone, which he had charged beforehand, and watched Suhyeon’s face repeatedly darken and brighten.
The expression on his pale face was mostly the same, but the corners of his mouth subtly twitched, conveying his mood.
His light-colored eyes moved continuously, like small, rolling marbles, as he looked at the small screen. He was like a small squirrel.
Hajin flinched at the bizarre epithet that popped into his head, but then sighed and gave up.
Ever since this man, Chae Suhyeon, had fallen into his arms, his mind had long escaped control.
His body kept performing uncontrolled actions, and he would come up with thoughts he had never once had before, like the one just now.
‘What is he, really?’
Hajin stared intently at the man he had impulsively brought along.
In fact, this behavior was also strange.
Hajin fundamentally paid no attention to others.
He didn’t particularly like humans, and he didn’t even like himself much, so there was no way he had ever observed someone like this.
Yet, looking at Suhyeon wouldn’t stop for some reason.
The light-colored man was diligently looking at his phone with the IV line still attached.
He seemed completely oblivious to Hajin’s intense stare.
“The year 20XX…”
Hajin, who was about to say something because the obliviousness strangely bothered him, paused at Suhyeon mumbling today’s date.
‘—I thought it had been at most two or three days.’
Hajin remembered Suhyeon a few minutes ago, stumbling over his age, and gazed at the pale man again.
‘He said twenty-six, but I should think of him as twenty-three, right? And I’m twenty-nine.’
He thought alternately about the difference between twenty-six and twenty-nine, and the difference between twenty-three and twenty-nine.
A three-year difference and a six-year difference is quite significant.
Especially between the early twenties and mid-to-late twenties.
‘…So what in the world does this have to do with anything?’
Hajin, who had been pondering the difference in his and Suhyeon’s age for a long time, paused.
He was worried about the person who was making him feel strange and brought him home, but what did the age difference matter?
Realizing he was agonizing over something he didn’t even have a reason for, he scowled at his increasingly strange behavior.
“…Hajin?”
But then, strangely enough,
As Suhyeon took his eyes off the phone and looked at him, the unpleasant feeling of not being himself instantly disappeared like melting snow.
Not only did it disappear, but a soft sense of satisfaction seemed to bloom from somewhere deep within.
So, Hajin forgot to answer and simply stared intently at Suhyeon’s face again.
Looking at Suhyeon from the front, clearly meeting his gaze, was different from looking at his profile earlier.
It felt more satisfying.
His pale, clear face seemed even smoother and softer when viewed like this.
His cheeks, illuminated by the sunlight, were slightly flushed, looking as if they were tempting him to touch them.
It was a ridiculous thought, but that’s how it appeared to Hajin.
‘I want to touch him.’
As soon as the impulse arose, his body began to move faster than his brain.
His ungloved hand stealthily crept toward Suhyeon’s cheek.
Woong—!
It was the watch on his wrist that jolted Hajin’s stopped brain.
It was an alarm.
The mind that had wandered out of the house snapped back, realizing it was standing outside.
“Hajin…?”
‘My mind must really be messed up.’
But even as Hajin quickly withdrew his hand and stood up, he couldn’t take his eyes off Suhyeon, who was looking at him with a puzzled, tilting head.
Tossing his head like that seemed to be a habit.
He was brought here because Hajin was concerned about him, but keeping him nearby was making him lose his mind even more.
*
Suhyeon blinked at Hajin, who had suddenly reached out his arm toward him, only to suddenly stand up and walk off somewhere.
“What was that?”
With the person who could clear up his confusion gone, only Suhyeon’s muttered question remained in the air.
Suhyeon, suddenly left alone on the first floor, looked around the quiet surroundings.
The phone he had been fiddling with was now placed beside him.
In fact, there wasn’t much to see.
Just the realization that three years had passed after seeing the blinking date on the phone felt real.
It was fortunate that he hadn’t lost the device itself, but it seemed the phone had broken down somehow after being sucked into and coming out of the Gate.
The messenger and other communication apps were all dead. Calls and texts were the same.
‘I need to contact my brother.’
He looked down at his contact list and belatedly thought of his brother, Ryu Yihan, who was quite a few years older.
The name Do Yejun was also in there, but Suhyeon tried hard to ignore it.
Falling out of the Gate, receiving a shocking diagnosis at the hospital, and coming to Shin Hajin’s house.
With so many things happening, his other thoughts were mostly paralyzed, but seeing the contact list made his brother the first person he thought of.
Since his brother had virtually disappeared for three years, even if they didn’t communicate often, he must have been worried.
‘Should I ask Hajin to contact him when he returns?’
“Shin Hajin! Hey! Where are you—, ah, Suhyeon.”
The owner of the voice that boomed through the quiet first floor was Yihan.
Suhyeon blinked, reuniting with the somewhat abnormal doctor he had seen yesterday.
“Are you okay? Ah, did Shin Hajin just go out?”
He must still be a doctor, as he asked about Suhyeon’s well-being before asking about his apparent objective, Hajin.
“I’m fine. He just left, but—”
“Phew, that’s a relief. An alarm just went off. I thought something bad happened.”
Yihan looked genuinely relieved, as if something had just happened.
When Suhyeon, who hadn’t heard anything, wore a bewildered expression, Yihan finally said ‘Ah’ and explained.
“Well, it’s not a blaring siren or anything. It’s an alert on the watches that Shin Hajin and I wear. It seems someone tried to trespass on the mansion grounds just now.”
Suhyeon instinctively looked out the full-length window that clearly overlooked the garden, but nothing was visible, and Hajin was nowhere to be seen either.
“Shin Hajin usually sets up traps around here. They take care of petty thieves and such, but this one must have been a bit of a big shot.”
“…Is the public safety really bad here?”
“Oh, no, it’s not. It’s just that Shin Hajin is a very, very famous Esper, so he has a lot of enemies. The same thing probably just happened. Don’t worry, though, that guy is still the strongest.”
‘He was that famous.’
Suhyeon, who had only vaguely thought of Hajin as a high-ranking Esper until now, nodded in understanding.
“No one has ever actually broken in, so don’t worry.”
Yihan, who was subconsciously paying attention to Suhyeon, smiled, seeing that Suhyeon didn’t look worried.
“This is our first time alone, right? Should we speak casually? We’ll probably be seeing each other for a long time.”
‘Is he hinting that my condition is serious?’
‘Well, since I keep collapsing, I’ll have to keep receiving treatment next to him.’
The suggestion was actually made out of an intuition that Shin Hajin wouldn’t let Suhyeon go, but Suhyeon, naturally, didn’t know that.
Suhyeon, feeling a little downcast, nodded.
Conversely, Yihan, who didn’t notice the mood, had sparkling eyes.
“Suhyeon… um, how old did you say you were? I’m twenty-nine, the same age as Shin Hajin.”
“Twenty-six.”
Suhyeon recited the number, which still felt awkward, a little more easily than before.
“Ah, I’m the older brother then. You can speak casually too.”
Yihan grinned and dropped the formalities.
Suhyeon, who didn’t particularly care about speech patterns, nodded that he would.
“How did you end up being sucked into the Gate?”
As soon as he dropped the formalities, Yihan sat on the opposite sofa and threw out a probing question.
‘—They said you came out of the Gate!’
This was the same person who had approached him with eyes full of madness yesterday.
Suhyeon correctly realized that Yihan seemed to be obsessed with the Gates.
‘How did I get sucked in?’
Regardless, Suhyeon instinctively recalled the memory in response to Yihan’s question.
The scenes flashed by like a panorama.
His pale face was naturally contorted.
So, to summarize it:
“…My lover was cheating with a Guide, and when I told him I wanted to break up, a Gate opened right next to us, and—”
Suhyeon didn’t know if he was truly cheating, but Do Yejun had at least shattered Suhyeon’s trust in him.
Looking back now, Suhyeon wondered if it wasn’t a relationship destined to end.
“My lover saved the Guide.”
“…Huh?”
Yihan asked dumbly.
“…”
Suhyeon, belatedly realizing there were two people reacting, turned his head.
Hajin was standing not far away, having returned at some point, wearing a look that was hard to decipher.
“…Huh????”
Yihan seemed to be suffering from an overload, frozen with a smiling face.
‘Ah, did that sound too unbelievable?’
Suhyeon went over what he had said.
He thought it could be heard that way.
It was the truth, so he wasn’t ashamed of it, though.
* * *
