“...”
Now what the hell is this?
Jueon looked down at the man who’d passed out with a grip on his ankle, then slid his leg free. The apple scent was so potent it was like standing in the middle of an orchard, and his face creased on its own.
Pheromones this thick meant an omega, surely.
Did his heat cycle hit or something?
He was already run off his feet, locked in a staring contest over the hotel acquisition. Of all the bolts from the blue, there was none quite like this one.
Jueon immediately pried the receiver out of the hand that was still clutching it and put it to his ear. The small hand that brushed his was burning hot.
“I’d like you to call an ambulance. No, I’m not the one who’s sick.”
“...”
“I left the door open for a moment since I was about to head out, and in that time someone came in and collapsed. Yes. ...Understood.”
He delivered only the essentials and hung up. When he glanced down at the man, who was still wheezing out shallow little breaths, he saw a round wet patch over his backside.
The second he registered the sight, he cleared his throat and turned his head away.
“...”
He deliberated for a moment, then fetched the coat he’d taken off and wound it around the man, wrapping him up from head to toe. After that he laid him out on the bed he himself had used the night before and walked out of the room without a backward glance.
It hadn’t been his intention, but thanks to the coat the pheromone scent seemed to thin out a little as well.
After the lights went out on him in a stranger’s hotel room.
Hanbyeol had a long dream. A strange one, like a lucid dream where he held none of the controls, peering in on the daily life of some skinny man through that man’s own eyes.
[link]
[yo check this out. there’s a guy in here with the exact same name as you, whoa]
[?]
[what is this]
[food for my soul these days]
[ah]
[tf this is BL;;]
[if ni wanna read it, read it yourself;;;;; get lost]
He’d been lying in bed watching YouT*be when a messenger notification went off.
The man in the dream checked the message at the top of the screen, then started trading replies with someone, fingers hammering busily at the keypad.
[Ni?]
At that instant the phone screen went black and a call came through. The hand on the keypad froze in midair, trembling.
[Who exactly are you calling ni.]
[Am I your buddy? Is your noona a doormat?]
[Hey]
[Answer the phone.]
[Not gonna answer?]
[I said answer. You’re finished the second I get home anyway. Think it over carefully.]
[sorrry]
[Hanbyeol.]
[yeees]
[Let’s do better.]
[yep]
The man had been mouthing off to someone with a seriously fearsome temper — a woman, judging by the exchange — and now he whimpered and tucked his tail. Being sentenced to read the entire novel she’d sent him, start to finish, and write up a book report on it was thrown in as a bonus.
Grumbling the whole way, he tapped the link and scrolled rapidly down.
The plan was to skim a few chapters with the most comments and then pretend he’d read the thing.
[AAAH F**K!!!!! FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]
[Dan Hanbyeol is dead. What a load off my chest. bb]
[Since his name’s Hanbyeol anyway, it would’ve been even better if he’d gone out in a spectacular blast like the Big Bang ㅠㅠ Author, this was satisfying and all, but compared to how much this bastard trolled, I feel like you sent him off way too gently...]
“...”
Expressionless, he worked through the comments sorted by Best until he found the chapter with an unusual number of upvotes and tapped it. Hanbyeol’s mood was every bit as sour as the queasy unease of the man he was riding along with.
Not, of course, that there was a single thing he could do about it when he couldn’t so much as lift a finger.
[At a flick of Taeseo’s chin, the men standing silently behind him came forward and poured cement over Hanbyeol. Hands and feet bound, Hanbyeol had been thrashing, and when he saw the grey batter spilling down onto him his face drained of all color and the tears came.
“T-Taeseo. Let’s not do this, let’s talk it out, okay? I was wrong! I was wrong about everything!”
“...”
“If you let me go I won’t tell a soul! No, I-I’ll leave the country for good and never come back! Please!”
“Is that all you’ve got to say?”
At the ugly sight of him dribbling tears and snot, Taeseo finally spoke. Having come this far, he couldn’t let him live, and had no intention of it either.
But if Hanbyeol wanted to nudge his odds of survival up even a fraction, there was something else entirely he should have been saying. Taeseo thought of Raewon, who even at this very moment lay hovering between life and death with a respirator strapped to his face.
“I-I did it because I liked you.”
“...”
“You’re mine, Taeseo. We were destined from the start...”
It was decided that way from the day I was born. So why are you cruel to me and only me? I tried this hard, so why, why won’t you even look at me?
Hanbyeol sniffled wretchedly and let his head droop. The batter had risen to his chest by now, which was probably why the words came out a little rushed.
It was as he said: once, long ago, there had been talk of a marriage between them. Words their parents had tossed around half as a joke, back when the two families were still close.
But Taeseo, the party actually concerned, hadn’t wanted the marriage, and the engagement they’d kept on the books just in case had quietly dissolved into nothing when Hanbyeol — who’d been handed test results since childhood saying he’d manifest as an omega once he grew up — went and settled as a beta instead.
“I waited, I waited so long. From beginning to end I never looked at anyone but you. So how could you, how could you throw me away—!”
“...”
“And for a b-broke omega with nothing to his name, of all people...!”
If it had at least been a family of comparable standing, his pride wouldn’t have taken this much damage. Hanbyeol howled that Taeseo was the one in the wrong, that he’d never once tried to understand his feelings and had treated him so coldly.
Never realizing he had just thrown away the last chance he’d been given, with his own mouth.
His lips went under the batter and at some point he fell silent, and in the end even the crown of his jet-black head sank out of sight. Taeseo stood there blankly in front of it for a long while, then clenched his fist and kicked the fully set drum barrel.
Sploosh!
To the sound of a heavy impact, Hanbyeol sank slowly beneath the black water.
For such a long nightmare, it was an anticlimactic end.]
“...What kind of garbage plot is this?”
Hanbyeol obsessing over Taeseo, keeping Raewon in check, racking up one atrocity after another — right down to the scene where he finally went under.
The man who had been silently reading his way down the text suddenly screwed up his face.
“Dan Hyeseong, fine, it’s uncanny, I’ll give you that — but how do you hand your own little brother a story where a kid with his exact same name dies and gets wiped off the face of the earth?”
A BL novel, no less.
And a nasty piece of work where the character gets stuffed into an oil drum and sunk in the waters off Incheon, at that.
“She is not normal, I swear. I hear that in other families, when somebody gets caught reading this stuff, the first thing they do is hide it. So why does she...”
Hanbyeol was in a truly foul mood. A novel so bizarre it was as though someone had peeped in on his daily life and written it down, with an ending like that, not even bothering to change his name, floating around the internet in broad daylight.
The moment he woke from this dream, he needed to check whether it was just a garbage dream or the real thing. And if that novel actually existed, he’d hunt down the author and tear them clean in two.
Irritating as it was, it was honestly lucky that noona had shown him thi—
— Huh?
Hold on.
A noona?
The thought had slipped out so naturally that Hanbyeol startled and stopped mid-grumble.
Around then, the man let out a heavy sigh and headed for the bathroom. He was going to drain the tank and then sit down to write the book report in question.
Except.
— Wai—,
“Ugh, seriously, I’m already exhausted as it is and now this...”
— Wait, wh-what is this!
Why is your face exactly the same as mi—!
“I swear, that kid is going to be the d—th of —.”
“Sti— what are we supposed to do, he’s our —n.”
Snrrk, phwooo.
“Look at him, even now. We drop every—ing and come running over worried sick, and there he is snoring a—ay without a —are in the world.”
“I nearly died when they said am—lance, so I’m re—eved, but still...”
Snrrk, phwooo.
“Why, this little brat—!”
“Snrr— kheugh!”
Hurgh! Hanbyeol, who had been fast asleep and puffing out soft little snores, jolted and shoved himself upright.
He blinked blankly for a moment, then curled in on himself with a short scream as the headache came crashing in.
“Aaargh!”
“H-Hanbyeol!”
“What is it, what’s wrong! We need to call the doctor...!”
Strange memories were being crammed into his head in real time.
Screeeech, crash!
Parents killed in a traffic accident, and two siblings who barely survived with their lives.
“B-Byeol! Are you okay? Are you hurt anywhere?”
“Who... are you?”
The elder, who woke later, was left alone with a little brother who had lost his memory to the aftereffects of the crash. Both parents had been only children, and their grandparents were long dead, so there wasn’t even a relative to ask for help.
What they inherited was one apartment with a mortgage attached and one car.
There was life insurance money, but after settling the funeral costs and all the other financial tangles, selling the apartment and moving into a place the right size for two, what remained in hand was about two hundred million won.
“Noona. ...Do I go to school tomorrow?”
“...”
And so a girl barely twenty, on the verge of graduating, became the head of a household with money that was a lot if you called it a lot and not much if you called it not much.
And with a little brother who was only fourteen in tow, at that.
What the—!
Hanbyeol clutched his head and shuddered. But regardless of his will, the memories kept eating further into his mind. The old stain left on the living room wallpaper of a house that was neither big nor small. The glass on the dining table with a drink dried onto its bottom because nobody had cleared it away. Two people who squabbled viciously enough at times, and yet somehow looked cozy together,
the only family each of them had.
...Fortunately their circumstances weren’t utterly dire, so as time passed the siblings built themselves a fairly decent life. Not a situation anyone would call comfortable, but not a bad life either, all things considered. And in that string of scenes, familiar and aching with nostalgia, Hanbyeol remembered as if struck by lightning.
...It was me.
That ‘little brother.’
“Hanbyeol. Dan Hanbyeol! C-can you hear Mom’s voice? Son!”
“Does your head hurt? Dad’s called the doctor, so just hold on a little, all right? If you can hear me, count backward from a hundred. Go on!”
Without even a moment to sort out his thoughts, Hanbyeol opened his mouth blankly at the flustered racket ringing in his ears. It was right about when the memories that had been crudely rammed into his head were settling into order and the headache was dying down.
“A-a hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, eighty, no, seventy...”
What, what on earth.
That was my past life, just now?
And on top of that, I was reborn inside a book. As the villain who dies soon?
...Me?
No way!
“H-honey. What do we do! He can’t even count properly!”
“How long ago did I press that button, and the doctor still isn’t here? What on earth is he doing!”
Even in that moment, his ashen-faced parents were wringing their hands over how their kid’s head had clearly gone bad. It wasn’t that he couldn’t count because something was wrong with him. He was just, on raw ability alone, slow at subtraction.
...
It was deeply disorienting, but if he let on about being reincarnated, or about having dropped into the pages of a book, he’d be shipped straight to a psychiatric ward.
That would be a problem, so Hanbyeol cleared his throat, ahem, intending first to clean up the circus his hospital room had become. There’d be plenty of time to think later, when he was alone.
He spun his wheels, trying to work out how to get himself nagged at as little as possible right now, and mumbled.
“I’m, fine. It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
In TV and movies, nine out of ten protagonists who wake up in a hospital bed turn out to have something wrong with their heads.
...Should I give it a shot too?
Calculations complete, Hanbyeol slowly floated his opening line.
“...Um. But who are—,”
His heart was thumping. The thing he’d only ever seen on TV, and here he was about to do it himsel—
“Dan Hanbyeol!”
“...!”
—or he would have, except the bellow that slammed into his ears made him jolt and lift his head.
His father, Dan Seunghyeon, face shifting through every shade of red and purple, roared at him.
“Lying through your teeth again, where anyone can see it!”
“Uh, yes?”
“Four years ago, when you got caught, you sobbed and said you were sorry, you’d never do it again, so I believed you. Then three years ago you turned up with a bandage around your head claiming you’d lost your memory, all anxious, and I worried myself sick over it!”
“...”
“And it was a lie. And then last year you threw your arms around your mother and bawled that you’d come back from the future, so from now on you’d do better! How far is your father supposed to play along with these pranks of yours, exactly!”
...Oh. Right.
Regression, possession, reincarnation, whatever. He’d seen it on YouT*be Shorts and had already trotted it out plenty of times to wriggle out of awkward situations.
It was ancient history, so he’d clean forgotten about it. Catching the blaze in his father’s eyes, Hanbyeol sensed he was screwed and hurriedly got his mouth moving.
“N-no. Father. Hold on a second,”
“Spouting nonsense again, so you must be perfectly fine. I’ve seen you’re all right, that’s enough for me. In exchange!”
But he was a beat too late.
“Consider your allowance gone from here on! Earn it yourself or beg on the street, that’s your problem. I’m done going easy on you!”
Slam!
The moment his father banged the door shut behind him and left the hospital room without so much as a backward glance, his mother, Kwon Jiyun, hurried over to stroke Hanbyeol’s cheek and kiss his forehead.
Then she started for the door herself, talking as she went.
“Mom isn’t angry. But you know how hard it is on your father every time you pull one of those pranks. You were in the wrong this time, so make sure you apologize to him later. Do you have any idea how much your dad cried on the way here after the hospital called?”
“...Well,”
“He left his secretary standing there with the car keys and drove himself the whole way. His hands kept shaking, so we swapped seats partway and I drove the rest of it, mind you.”
“...”
“Mom will cover the rent and the maintenance fees on your place. Once he’s cooled off a little, he won’t say anything about that much.”
“...”
“But beyond that, no allowance. I’ll be freezing the cards too, so take this as your chance to get a part-time job and grow up a bit.”
The hospital bill is already settled through tomorrow, so rest up today and take your time leaving in the morning. I’ll send Secretary Kim to meet your discharge time.
With that, Madam Kwon Jiyun gave him a smile like a flower in bloom and left the room without a shred of mercy.
Left all alone, Hanbyeol rolled his eyes over to steal a look at the clock. Since the moment he’d come to, the hands had crawled forward by about an ant’s eyelash.
Which meant.
“...”
A grand total of three minutes since I realized I’d been reincarnated as a chaebol heir.
Three minutes, and I was dead broke.
