For now, he had brought Baek Yu-gyeong to the officetel that belonged to Shin Chae-il — but since he couldn’t put wet clothes back on him, he needed to find something that would fit, and the difference in their builds was the problem.
Ah, I can’t exactly bring him home with me either….
Honestly, since both Shin Chae-il and Shin Jae-heon were built, he could just grab any clothes from either of them and throw them on Yu-gyeong — that would’ve worked fine.
Sending Baek Yu-gyeong home alone didn’t sit right with him, but going to the family home wasn’t something he felt easy about either. He was there as a freeloader — he couldn’t exactly bring a friend along.
It was fortunate, at least, that on the day after Shin Chae-il had hit Shin Jae-heon, Chae-il had told Cha-heun the location and passcode of the officetel — something of a secret hideaway had come into existence because of that. It was an officetel in Gangnam-gu, and Shin Chae-il had handed over the card key as casually as if he were tossing it aside.
He had told him to sleep at home, not here. And alongside that — not to go to a friend’s place if there was ever trouble at home.
But only up to that point. Shin Chae-il was someone so caught up in matters outside the home that he was rarely ever in after that, and stepping inside the house as Shin Cha-heun still felt uncomfortable.
He had wanted to sleep at the officetel too, but rather than needlessly go against the rules and risk losing what he’d been given, it seemed better to just follow Shin Chae-il’s word — and so that was what he was doing.
…Honestly, looking at the bigger picture, Shin Chae-il isn’t a good person.
He cheated on his legal wife, and on top of that, he arbitrarily judged and drew conclusions about his son’s friendships. Wasn’t that bordering on a form of control?
…But looking narrowly, from Shin Cha-heun’s position alone — he was also the only shield he had, and in a way, he was a father who looked out for his son’s wellbeing, which wasn’t nothing.
From the perspective of an elder in a prosecutor’s family wanting respectable friends for his son, it might have been difficult to view I-hyeon favorably. Big build, rough impression, poor class ranking — and he was in the athletics club. Not that being in the athletics club meant anything in particular, but prejudice existed. He probably wouldn’t want his son hanging around bad influences and getting hurt or going down the wrong path.
…Having lived as a prosecutor and likely seen cases like that firsthand, perhaps in that one respect he was being a conservative but genuinely protective father.
Father.
He had never had a father who looked out for him, so he wasn’t sure — but it occurs to him now that Shin Chae-il might have been someone Shin Cha-heun genuinely needed.
Damn, I shouldn’t have said that stuff about your father and the great Shin family.
Without meaning to, he had ended up talking behind someone else’s father’s back. Now that he was standing in this position, it was hard to believe he could actually understand it.
…Maybe I really am quite a biased person.
He hoped that what he had done up until now wouldn’t end up working against Shin Cha-heun in the future.
…The problem was that he wasn’t sure whether Shin Cha-heun would be able to return, no matter how hard he tried.
…So his frame is actually about the same as mine originally.
He had sent Yu-gyeong to the bathroom first, then handed him the most generously cut sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms he could find — and when he saw that they fit Baek Yu-gyeong almost perfectly, Cha-heun let out a hollow laugh. He had bought them by mistake, thinking they were the size he used to wear, but they had been too big for Cha-heun’s current body.
I was an alpha, so that makes sense for me — but what exactly is his deal….
Cha-heun shot Yu-gyeong a sideways look, then pulled him over as he wandered into the bedroom. He apparently couldn’t even dry his own hair — even after being handed the blow dryer, Yu-gyeong just stared at it and then kept blankly looking back over at Cha-heun, so he had no choice but to go over and dry it for him himself.
“Okay, lie down.”
“…Huh?”
Baek Yu-gyeong was still in a daze. This wasn’t a broken AI — it was as if his brain wasn’t processing anything at all, leaving him blank.
Cha-heun gave the bed mattress a few pats, then ended up physically pushing Baek Yu-gyeong down onto it.
“Just lie there and sleep. I’ll take your uniform to the laundry.”
Neither of them was particularly talkative, so what was there to do — and not trusting himself much at comfort either, Cha-heun decided to just put Yu-gyeong to sleep for now.
“…….”
Going by Baek Yu-gyeong’s usual patterns, he would have said something odd like, “What, you’re putting me to sleep — what are you planning?” — but Baek Yu-gyeong said nothing again, just blinking and staring over at him. He gave off the feeling of a stray dog that couldn’t communicate in words but understood the situation well enough.
Cha-heun responded to that by speaking even more plainly than before.
“I’ll — …hyung will stay by your side.”
Cha-heun settled onto the floor, leaning against the side of the bed where Yu-gyeong lay on just a bare mattress.
“…Your hand, too.”
It was the first human thing he had said in a long while since arriving here, and Cha-heun was almost moved by it. He looked at Yu-gyeong and asked.
“Your hand — what about it? Is it cold?”
“Like earlier — will you hold my hand too?”
“…Sure. What’s so hard about that.”
Under normal circumstances he would have thought it was an attempt at something and brushed it off — but today, Cha-heun held Yu-gyeong’s hand with no hesitation and looked at him steadily.
“Yu-gyeong, get some good rest. You’ll feel better when you wake up. When you’re up, let’s eat.”
Lying down right after eating is bad for your stomach. So eating after waking up is the better call.
Then again, he’s a teenager so maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s too much of an old man thing to think.
Even as those thoughts crossed his mind, Cha-heun watched Yu-gyeong’s eyes gradually close, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
…Funny kid. The more you watch him, the more he actually listens.
So he had gotten Yu-gyeong to sleep and was going to have his uniform laundered — and then something completely unexpected happened.
He must have fallen asleep without realizing it, because when he opened his eyes, Cha-heun himself was lying on the bed, covered with a blanket, and the guest had long since disappeared.
He went out of the bedroom, but Yu-gyeong was already gone from the officetel. On the living room table was a note from Yu-gyeong, saying he would take his uniform and gym clothes himself, and that he would launder the cardigan and return it later. Baek Yu-gyeong’s handwriting — whether to call it fitting for him or not — was remarkably neat and clean, not at all like something a high school boy would write.
Cha-heun read the note a couple of times and then let out a slow, deflated breath.
…You could’ve at least stayed for a meal.
Worrying.
Was this a kind of guilt — he wasn’t quite sure.
It hadn’t been many days, but he had presumed and judged carelessly — yes. Not just with Shin Chae-il. The same had been true here.
…As an adult, he couldn’t be more embarrassed by himself. Cha-heun pressed his lips together in a bitter taste that had nothing to do with anything in particular.
Since the incident had happened on Friday, Cha-heun spent the weekend furiously combing through necromancy books and writing down everything he could find. Even if he had to carry this body through to adulthood, he still needed to find a way to return it, didn’t he?
For crying out loud.
The more he thought about it, the more he worried whether any of this would even work. He felt pathetic for having spent another fifty thousand won on books related to this. The memory of squatting down and doing that duck waddle was humiliating.
He couldn’t understand why he was doing any of this himself, but the situation was already unrealistic — so what did it matter what else he did? For some reason, the vague sense that using a necromancy book might actually solve this persisted.
Damn. What’s this on my wrist.
Cha-heun frowned at the unidentifiable scar left on his wrist.
In one of the necromancy books, it had been written that you needed to slice open the left wrist, draw blood, and use it to draw a magic circle — which was so absurd he had shut the book immediately, and it was then that he noticed the faint mark on his wrist.
…This isn’t like, a suicide attempt…. It’s not that, right?
Cha-heun turned the thought over seriously and searched his memory, but thankfully, nothing of that nature surfaced. It could be a mark he had been born with — and thinking about it, there was no guarantee it was necessarily a cut scar.
The question lingered unanswered as the weekend slipped quickly by.
And then — Monday. Having impressively overslept and arrived late, Cha-heun was hauled into the staff room during lunch and handed his report card, which he received with narrowed eyes. The report cards had apparently been distributed in the morning — when exactly they had come out didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was —
Damn, I actually ended up with an 8.
Looking at the unspeakable score written under math, it was safe to estimate it wasn’t a 7 — it was an 8. His scores in Korean and other rote memorization subjects hadn’t been this bad, but math was something he had never touched once in his life, which was probably why the number was this dire.
There were plenty of excuses — these were results from when he had no time to study while still getting his bearings in this body — but the problem was that even if he protested, there was no one who would listen.
Back in university, I used to record the lectures to listen to them….
He wasn’t particularly gifted academically, so he had gotten permission from his professors and recorded lectures to listen to repeatedly. He had gone to such lengths just to pass the teaching certification exam.
“Shin Cha-heun, you punk, you’re skipping school?”
“…I’m sorry.”
At the reprimand from his homeroom teacher — the English teacher — Cha-heun crumpled the report card and stuffed it into his uniform pants pocket, then bowed his head without a word of argument.
I wasn’t called in just for being late then. …And I did actually skip, so there’s nothing to say.
Back when he was in judo, he had never slipped out of school without a word — but coming back to school as an adult, it seemed he had gotten a little lax. He still couldn’t quite fathom how he had thought it was fine to take Baek Yu-gyeong outside like that.
Probably because university had been a bit more flexible.
…Oh no, I wonder if Baek Yu-gyeong is getting an earful too. I feel terrible.
At the time, Yu-gyeong’s condition had been far more pressing than any class, so there had been no room to deliberate and no other option. Maybe because the person inside was an adult — he tended to focus more on the children’s state of being than on things like school rules.
…Shin Cha-heun, I’m sorry to you too.
Cha-heun felt a flicker of guilt toward Shin Cha-heun over the attendance and academic record — then rationalized that it would probably be fine, given that the report card had already been full of 8s and 7s to begin with. Dropping one point from negative one hundred — that’s just a minor setback, isn’t it? No matter how he looked at it, there was no university anywhere that admitted students through early application with a record of 8s and 7s. He had only gotten into university himself because he was a special admissions athlete — on grades alone, he would have had no chance.
“And on top of that, your grades are rock bottom — so why are you only doing after-school study hall three times a week.”
The teacher brought a rolled-up A4 paper down on his head a couple of times.
Having spent years in the world of athletics, getting hit was part of daily life, so it didn’t particularly bother him — but getting tapped on the head like this specifically was unusual enough to feel strange. He was actually annoyed, but Cha-heun did his best to compose himself and moved his lips.
“Ah…. That’s…”
He couldn’t exactly say it was because he found it unbearably pointless. Honestly, the extent of what he did during after-school study hall was space out and pretend to study by holding a pen. There was no room and no hour quite like it for wasting time.
Cha-heun bowed his head in silence. Just accepting it and saying he was sorry about everything seemed like the most sensible approach. The disciplinary method was mildly irritating, but nothing being said was wrong.
“What do they call it these days, with the kids…. Are you planning on getting married instead of getting a job?”
“…Pardon?”
