Hanbyeol laid a hand over his burning cheek. His long lashes fluttered down and up, down and up again.
“Uh... huh?”
His mouth opened on reflex, but since he hadn’t caught up with the situation yet, all that came out was a stupid, dazed little noise.
Hanbyeol stared at Raewon, utterly at a loss. And then.
“Hey.”
“Y-yeah?”
“You know we’ve cut you a lot of slack all this time, right? Honestly, we could’ve skipped coming here and gone straight to the police station. We could’ve just pressed charges, like Taeseo said.”
“...”
“But I talked him out of it. Why do you think I did that?”
...No clue.
I figured it was because you’re a good person. I mean, no, considering I haven’t been in and out of police stations and courtrooms until now, you really must be a good person.
It felt exactly like standing in front of his parents as a kid while they told him to explain, in his own words, what he’d done wrong. Lower your head and it’s your parents are talking to you and you won’t even meet their eyes? Lift your head and it’s the nerve, staring straight at us like that. Keep your mouth shut and it’s why aren’t you saying anything? Open it and it’s are you talking back to me?
Seriously, why, though?
Not a single guess came to him, so he just read the room.
Ah, should I try flattery?
“Because... because your heart’s as lovely as your face?”
“...”
“Because you were worried I’d be an even bigger pain if you pressed charges...?”
“...”
Raewon slid the phone he’d been holding into his trouser pocket.
And then.
“Right. I guess I expected way too much from you, Hanbyeol.”
They say people don’t get fixed, you just throw them out. I was an idiot.
Having muttered that coldly, Raewon screwed his face into a scowl and shoved up his sleeves.
...Huh?
“Kang Taeseo. Hold him.”
“W-wai—!”
Sensing the danger, Hanbyeol backed up and raised both hands to head height. A declaration of surrender.
Smack!
It did him no good at all, though, because Taeseo grabbed him from behind on the spot like a man with no will of his own. Bastard, you hate even touching me, and now you pick this moment to do it!
Given what he’d done, he couldn’t bring himself to fight back, so he just kept his guard up. Raewon slapped the other cheek, then drove a fist into his stomach, and shockingly enough, he knew how to throw a feint, too. Hanbyeol tried to block clumsily and got hit again. It hurt a lot.
Holy sht, how does a body that tiny pack that kind of power?*
Only after taking one last hit to the back of the head was Hanbyeol released, and with his whole body throbbing, his tightly pressed lips trembled. If he let the tension go, the tears would spill right that second.
“Dan Hanbyeol.”
“Y-yeah.”
“I’m refusing your apology. Instead, I just hit you, so let’s call it even. We go to the same school, so we might run into each other, but if we do, pretend you don’t know me, same as always. I don’t even want to deal with you anymore.”
“Okay...”
Raewon said it while breathing hard. Whether he was winded from hitting him or simply furious was anyone’s guess.
I should’ve done this ages ago. Stupid of me to keep holding on.
Having muttered that, Raewon left as abruptly as he’d arrived. Why he’d come in the first place remained just as unclear.
Taeseo glared at him standing there awkwardly, then clicked his tongue as he shut the hospital room door.
It came with a warning that he’d recorded everything Hanbyeol had said earlier, so if he came sniffing around again, he’d better be ready to get served.
“Count yourself lucky.”
“...”
His exit line is way too thuggish. Having left behind that pointless little review, Hanbyeol finally let the strength drain out of his body. The moment he dropped the thread of tension, a single stream of held-back tears came pattering down.
“Hnngh, that hurts...”
This is a hospital, and I’m, well, technically a patient here.
He had no idea whether he’d bruise. It hurt like hell, but he’d racked up so much karma that he couldn’t go anywhere and claim he’d been wronged, so he just sniffled quietly and rubbed and rubbed at the sore spots.
His cheeks had puffed up plump and hot, like a baby’s after a good long nap in a steam bath, and the skin stung all over.
“Hrnnng...”
Knock knock.
“Meal service. Where would you like it?”
“...Hgk. J-just a second!”
He stopped mid-rub of both cheeks. The food service worker had come in with dinner and a bright voice, and Hanbyeol’s eyes lit up as he scurried over. He quickly dragged the folding tray table into place and pointed at it.
“Put it here, please!”
“Of course. Enjoy your meal.”
“Thanks!”
Hanbyeol waved back at the worker, who gave a light bow on the way out. Then he blinked his still-damp eyes a few times, wiped his worries away, plopped straight down on the bed and lifted the lid off his food.
Beef bulgogi. Egg soup. Stir-fried mushrooms and seasoned cucumber. Cabbage kimchi.
No matter how lonely or sad you get, the whole point of all this is to eat and live, so I’ve got to fill my stomach.
He promptly scooped up a spoonful of rice, piled bulgogi on top and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. It was a touch mild, but not bland by any stretch. Just right.
Who says hospital food is bad?
“Ish goob.”
Chew, chew.
He sniffled, then giggled. Yeah, people really do have to eat.
The second carbohydrates hit his system, positive thoughts came right along with them.
It still hurts a bit, but so what.
I probably got hit because I deserved to get hit!
Honestly, flip the positions around: if this had happened to the version of him before he remembered his past life, it was obvious he’d have grabbed a fistful of hair and screamed about pressing charges on the spot. And even then he wouldn’t have cooled down, so he’d have thrown in some verbal abuse and a generous helping of personal revenge, too.
No, scratch the hypothetical — that’s exactly what he would have done. He looked back on his own temper and nodded.
Like a man fresh out of prison shoveling down an entire block of tofu.
“Mmf! Thish place doesh a greab cucumber shalad.”
He chewed his rice diligently and swallowed it down.
He wasn’t sad anymore.
“...”
What the hell. Is he a stray mutt?
Beyond the small window set into the hospital room door.
Having happened to catch Hanbyeol break off crying, grin to himself and dig into his dinner with gusto, Jueon couldn’t hide how absurd he found it.
He’d remembered that an important USB drive was sitting in the pocket of the coat he’d draped over some guy the day before, which was why he’d come to retrieve it himself.
As it turned out, the hospital was keeping the coat in storage, so he collected it and then went looking for the room. It wasn’t out of some sense of duty to check on the patient’s condition; it was simply that he was curious what kind of person this brazen omega was, the one who’d crawled into his room in the middle of a heat cycle.
But of all people, he’d never dreamed it would be the nation’s favorite degenerate, the one said to have dragged the word “chaebol” through every humiliation known to man.
Jueon dredged up the articles about Dan Hanbyeol he’d seen at some point.
Something about getting scolded by his parents, having his feelings hurt, and renting out an entire hotel floor for two whole months just to live on it alone. Something about bidding at an auction, winning a piece of national heritage, then deciding up close that he didn’t like it and handing it off to a random passerby.
Beyond that, he knew the man was more or less a regular fixture in the society pages. And that thanks to him, DB Group’s quarterly earnings announcements kept setting new record lows.
He’d simply never bothered to go look up the face, and since the guy barely did anything official, there’d been no occasion to run into him. So he hadn’t recognized him.
Only.
“...He doesn’t look like he’s got the brains for any of that.”
For all the rumors about how vicious he was, the sight of him right now, dopey-faced, nose practically in the bowl, shoveling rice into his mouth, was, well, how to put it.
It brought to mind a puppy he’d seen out in the countryside as a kid. A plump little creature with a stub of a tail wagging like a propeller, filling its belly with such enthusiasm it seemed ready to climb headfirst into the dish. The resemblance was uncanny.
...Maybe he’s just stupid.
Jueon turned his back without a shred of lingering interest and soon climbed into the sedan waiting in the parking lot. His secretary kept stealing glances at the rearview mirror before finally asking.
“Director. Did something good happen?”
“No. Not particularly.”
“Ah, you were smiling, so I thought I’d ask. You don’t usually smile.”
“...”
I was smiling?
It was only after he’d finished eating and personally handed his empty dishes to the staffer who came by wheeling the meal cart.
“Come on in.”
“Yes, sir. Excuse me.”
Just as the doctor had told him, Hanbyeol stepped into the consultation room. And, doing as instructed, he sat down in the chair and looked up at the monitor.
“Mm, I’m not sure if you’ve been told, but when you came in to us, you were running quite a significant fever.”
38.7 degrees.
Not alarmingly high, but too high to be written off as some temporary spike in a body with nothing wrong with it.
And yet that fever, which had refused to come down no matter what they did, had apparently dropped off a cliff around lunchtime today.
“The thing is, for it to be an immune response, your inflammation markers were normal, and nothing else was out of order either... So just in case, I changed tack, and,”
“...”
“Take a look at this first.”
The doctor pulled up some chart on the monitor, crowded with lines. When Hanbyeol lifted his head to stare at the screen, the man tapped the cursor on one spot and spoke.
“This is a pheromone level graph. The blue line here is omega, the green line is beta. And you can take the red line as alpha.”
“...”
“The black line among them is your reading from yesterday. See? Even allowing for the margin of error, it’s remarkably close to the blue line, isn’t it?”
“...”
The ominous groundwork had Hanbyeol’s eyes darting around. The doctor, however, paid it no mind and let the nonsense out of his mouth.
“We presume this is an omega manifestation.”
“...Sorry?”
“Both of your parents are presenting types, and your grandparents as well, correct?”
“...”
“And your trait test as a minor came back omega, yet no manifestation ever followed.”
“...”
Running a fever and being briefly ill for a day or two was a common symptom of manifestation, he said, so that accounted for it. Having explained all this in that mild, measured way of his, the doctor now pulled up some academic paper on the monitor and continued.
“It’s rare, but it isn’t as though cases like this have never been reported in the literature. When the trait gene is extremely recessive, it can linger in the body in a very faint form and then, given some particular trigger, erupt into a belated pheromone response.”
Scroll, scroll.
The page, racing downward, came to a halt at a certain point.
The doctor zoomed in on a single line of the paper, printed in the original English. About one in 1,000,000 people.
Translated: roughly one person in a million.
“...”
You’re joking...right?
In Korea, people released from prison traditionally eat plain white tofu as a fresh start.
