Guilds linking up to clear a dungeon, depending on its risk level and characteristics, wasn't an especially rare arrangement.
This time Seonmyeong was the one providing help, but the reverse could come around just as easily.
So it was worth keeping good relations with Songhwa Guild, which had been called the best in Korea for a long stretch before Seonmyeong and still carried enormous weight in the hunter world.
And even setting that aside, Songhwa Guild was reliable about compensation, so there was no reason to refuse their request.
“You got there fast. Did you hurry because you missed me?”
Hanul's question came the instant the car started moving, and Dojun answered evenly.
“Turning someone down doesn't take many words.”
The reason Dojun had reached the conference room later than Hanul today was a separate appointment.
Another place had asked Seonmyeong for help exactly as Songhwa had, and the way they kept quietly testing the waters was distasteful enough to warrant a warning.
Some places, like Songhwa Guild, behaved consistently regardless of Hanul's condition, while others poked around to gauge the mood, and in cases like the latter Dojun made a habit of responding without room for argument.
So when Dojun said he'd finished early and come over, it wasn't a lie.
Nor was what followed.
“And it's true I hurried because leaving you alone bothered me.”
Hanul's smile deepened at the answer.
“Since you're at it, it'd be nicer to hear you hurried because you missed me.”
Anyone else who saw that bashful face would have taken it for sincerity.
But Hanul's opening line could be read two ways.
Displeasure, as in did you come tearing over here because you don't trust me? And flirting he tossed Dojun's way out of pure habit.
The contents packed inside that soft tone weren't especially sweet.
Even just now, it amounted to nothing more than a well-dressed complaint that it grated on him to have Dojun read his mind and answer accordingly.
Can you even call this flirting?
Acting kind, speaking gently, manufacturing affection. Those were Hanul's specialties.
Dojun or not, Hanul behaved this way with anyone when it suited him.
Since the two of them were bound together as lovers, the kindness and the affection came out shaped like the way you'd treat a lover, but with no physical contact involved it didn't amount to much.
And it wasn't the first or second time Hanul had acted this way with him.
No sign yet that he's trying to use me.
Honestly, Dojun didn't take a particularly dim view of Hanul smothering his personality and pulling on a kindly mask.
The problem was what came next. What Dojun disliked was Hanul trying to swing the people he'd gotten close to that way around to suit his own taste.
So Dojun had decided not to put a stop to the act until Hanul actually tried to use him as a game piece.
He might carry on like this, change his mind, and turn over a new leaf.
It was probably a futile hope, but the stars evidently hadn't fallen out of his eyes yet, because he always kept a maybe tucked away somewhere.
“Fine. I missed you.”
“We see each other at home every day, though?”
“One day without seeing you and my mouth sprouts thorns. That's why we started living together.”
He wondered if that was too half-hearted, and then Hanul's lips pushed out in a small pout.
“We started living together because of a dungeon aftereffect. The ten-meter distance limit.”
The wounded act was fairly convincing. And he still knew exactly how to look pretty while doing it.
“That's not wrong either. But choosing to live together after that, of my own free will, really was because not seeing you made me anxious.”
Hanul smiled brightly, apparently filing it under excuses.
“And why did that make you anxious?”
“I'd gotten used to living with you. And because I like you.”
Hanul closed his eyes once and opened them, tidying his expression away, then asked as though joking.
“You must have liked me a lot?”
“Probably? You were all smiles every day and we still weren't dating, so I got antsy and told you to move in with me.”
He had been young.
He could have simply said he liked him, but that must have felt too mortifying, because let's live together came out of his mouth first.
They'd already done everything there was to do apart from actually saying the words, and part of him had still worried about being turned down.
As he looked back on it, Hanul smiled with his eyes and asked.
“So you were the one who confessed first, Dojun?”
Just like that day years ago.
This is you confessing to me, right?
A puff of laughter slipped out of him on its own.
Dojun didn't fight the curl at the corner of his mouth as he looked at Hanul.
“Something like that.”
Though it had been half coerced.
That's the least romantic confession I've ever been given. If it were anyone but me, they wouldn't even have known it was one.
Still, if you're going to do it, do it properly. Go on, try again.
Now, what was it you absolutely had to say to me?
The look in his eyes urging him to hurry up and confess.
The tone insisting that yes, this counted as a confession.
And the expression waiting anxiously for it.
“I'm curious what you said.”
Recalling that day's face, emotions on full display in defiance of the leisurely tone, Dojun looked at the Hanul smiling smoothly in front of him and answered.
“Can't tell you. You'd get jealous.”
This time, at least, Hanul couldn't hide the sour look.
Whether he was cursing himself or cursing Dojun on the inside was anyone's guess, but there was no denying that Hanul, along with the ban on physical contact, had loudly declared the moment of that first confession his and his alone.
The difference this time was that Dojun wanted the same thing.
It was far too precious a memory of his own to hand over to a Hanul draped in falsehood.
At Dojun's unabashed expression, Hanul asked a beat late.
“...Then how about telling me why you liked me?”
That one I can give him. Dojun didn't deliberate long before producing an answer.
“You're pretty.”
Hanul took it as a familiar compliment and answered with ease.
“Ha ha, thank you. Should I start taking better care of myself, then?”
But that wasn't what he'd meant by it.
“Do that if you want to, but it's not what I meant. I meant you looked pretty to me no matter what state I found you in.”
Dojun offered an example pitched precisely to Hanul's perspective.
“Put simply, you'd been rolling around in a dungeon for days and you still didn't look dirty?”
If he'd been capable of judging the matter rationally, he'd never have gotten deeply tangled up with someone whose personality was that much trouble.
But he'd get furious at something Hanul did, then actually lay eyes on him and find him irritating and pretty at once, over and over, until turning away from his own feelings became impossible.
The process of admitting that had been an enormous ordeal.
Then, for whatever reason this time, the gaze landing on his cheek turned prickly.
“You don't hold back at all, Dojun. You're not even embarrassed.”
Does it sound like a lie because I said it so casually?
But being too stupid to get out a simple I like you belonged to the early days of the relationship. Still not managing to say it now would just look pathetic.
“The stage where I was too shy to say it has passed.”
Dojun answered lightly, steering the car into the parking garage, and asked.
“You're heading to the training grounds now, right?”
“Yes. I should run at least one check on myself.”
With Songhwa Guild's request putting him in a dungeon as soon as tomorrow, where Hanul was headed was obvious, so the question was pure formality.
“I'll come with you.”
“Are you worried about me?”
This question carried much the same meaning as the earlier one.
Don't you trust me?
Dojun parked the car, let out a dry laugh, and looked at him.
“You were a veteran back when I was a rookie. Why would I worry about you?”
Whatever else was true, Dojun had never once doubted Hanul's ability as a hunter.
If he hadn't trusted it in the first place, he'd never have hauled him off to stop a dungeon break on day one.
“You'll have gone through the records you wrote for yourself, too. The odds of anything going wrong this time are low.”
Hanul had left a great many things documented so that guild business and hunter work would run smoothly whenever he lost his memories.
Several years' worth of material was packed into them, so he couldn't have read all of it yet, but the moment Songhwa Guild made contact, Hanul would have prioritized everything on record about them.
Which was why he'd been able to talk so comfortably with Deputy Leader Im Yeonhwa today.
“Songhwa's hunters are reasonable as a rule, so there won't be any friction with you. And our raid team has worked in step with you often enough that they'll adapt to the current situation on their own.”
If a problem cropped up even so, it was the kind of incident that would have happened with Hanul's memories fully intact.
“You're going to want to ask why I'm tagging along to the training grounds, then... I just want to be with you.”
Dojun unlocked the car door and smiled.
“Technically, this is me asking you out on a date.”
The usual Hanul would have snapped back that this hardly qualified as a date, but a Hanul in the middle of trying to seduce him voiced no complaint.
“A date. I like that.”
Whatever else, this one thing he did like.
