Chapter 103

A cold hush settled over the office. Suho couldn't easily find anything to say. Hajin wasn't the type to joke about something like this — and on top of that, the countless déjà vus surfacing in his own head were backing up every word Hajin had said.

"So — let me put your story together. A mission dropped that says you have to safely finish the third round with Yugeon…. Up through the episode-3 airing there wasn't any problem, but because of this business Yugeon's ending up dropping off the show. So you've regressed again, but still couldn't stop Yugeon's dropout, and that's kept…."

At Suho's summary — laid out as calmly as he could manage — Hajin let out a deep sigh and nodded. Having spilled it once, he seemed to have gotten some of his composure back.

"What saves it, at least, is that I keep coming back to this morning. Though I'm not sure 'saves it' is the right way to put it…."

The way Suho saw it, Hajin had completely lost his ability to think rationally right now. As someone who knew nothing about all this, adding anything felt reckless — but one thing was clear: the Hajin in front of him wasn't in any state to look at things objectively.

"Hajin-ah."

"…no matter how I do it, nothing changes. However much I talk, however many times we have the same conversation, when I come to it's this morning. A day passes, a week goes by — the second Yugeon drops out, it's this morning. Selreg, that crazy fucking bastard, I swear if I ever meet him I'll kill—"

"Hajin-ah. Kang Hajin! Look at me. Breathe. Right now you can't even breathe properly!"

As Hajin was about to sink back into his own head again, Suho grabbed his hand hard.

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Something scrolled past and vanished, fast, in Hajin's field of vision. Then Hajin jerked as if he'd been shaken out of a dream.

"You — you sure you're okay? First, first — the hospital…. No, no. Going to the hospital isn't going to fix a…."

He'd taken care of idols hit with panic attacks before, but he'd never dealt with one whose mind had come apart from infinite regressions. Just as Suho was starting to burn up inside from not knowing what to do, Hajin's voice — finally back to himself — came through.

"Sorry. …that startled you, didn't it. I'm okay now."

"Okay my ass. You know what you were just like?"

"Looked like a lunatic. I know."

Hajin dragged a hand down his face repeatedly, as if he already knew all of it. Like a different personality had taken over, the emotional Hajin from a moment ago was already gone.

"Hard to explain in detail. Feel like I'd get treated like an actual lunatic."

"When you sat here and said we'd had the same conversation more than twelve times, you should've already thrown that concern out. We had this out fully last time. Tell me. I have the right to know your state."

"……"

Suho pressed the point, as if he was going to pin down Hajin's exact state one way or another. Hajin, who'd slipped back into his usual composure, hesitated for a beat and then slowly started explaining.

"Team Lead, when you first got that ability — you said you thought you were losing it and went in for a psych consult, right."

"Yeah."

"Kind of the same. If I let regressing over and over hit me straight, I'd lose my mind — so my emotions and my rational side are… walled off to a certain degree, on purpose. This business threw that off. So now, every so often, the emotional control just goes."

Hajin added that even he hadn't expected the Mental Care to come with a side effect like this. Up until now the extent of it had been that his feelings ran hot and he'd suddenly start crying.

"Normally it's not this bad. It's just — situation being what it is. Once this one gets sorted, I'll figure out how to deal with it too…. I mean, I've been holding it together okay this whole time, but with the same situation looping like this—"

"Hajin-ah, Hajin-ah. It's okay. It's okay. I'm not interrogating you about your state right now. Me needing to know your state isn't me trying to check whether you're mentally fit to be an idol or not."

"……"

"I'm only asking so I can help — I need to know exactly what's going on to figure out how. Also I'm worried about you."

"…yeah."

"You're really okay, right? No — 'okay' probably isn't the right word anymore. For now, at least, you can think clearly, right?"

At Suho's careful question, Hajin nodded. Suho chewed and swallowed the last remaining ice from his coffee, rolled up his sleeves, and started ordering his thoughts.

"It's going to be hard, but there's got to be a way. First off — I don't want Yugeon dropping out, and neither does the production side. The company sees big potential in Yugeon, and PD Kwon was against it too — he said reacting to a fake controversy like this just feeds them a bigger meal. He also seems to feel responsibility for how it's landed."

Meaning: as long as Yugeon steadied himself, no outside pressure was going to force him off the show.

Hajin, wearing a heavy troubled look, clasped his hands together and leaned forward. Almost the posture of someone praying.

"But Lee Yugeon — the guy actually at the center of it — is telling me he'll drop out no matter what I do…. I don't have anything left to say to talk him out of it. You know how far I was actually about to go?"

"…how far."

"I was about to hold a knife in front of Yugeon and threaten him. Told him — if you quit and run like this, I'll die."

"What? You—"

"Only mentally. The second I picked the knife up I got regressed again."

He said it like it was nothing, but there was no way it had actually been nothing.

"Anything… else you might have to go on? Let's think it over. Hajin-ah, there might be things you've missed because of how scared you are of getting regressed over and over. You've run it enough times — that's data. It's on you somewhere."

"…nothing much. All I've got is what you just told me. That someone put together a malicious edit of Lee Yugeon and posted it. And that only turned up around the… fifth time I retried."

Suho, who'd thought there wasn't anything left that could shock him, caught the hidden weight in that line and looked at Hajin. Hajin shrugged as if it were nothing and pushed himself upright.

"Things got handled suspiciously fast, right? The production team, the company people. That's all been me — after rolling through this more than ten times. At some point they started moving on their own without me having to push."

He tacked on something about the sheer number of repetitions probably having locked certain events in place, but Suho couldn't follow him that far. Either way, one thing was clear: the whole rapid response to Yugeon's rumors was something Hajin had engineered from the ground up.

That was where Suho spotted the clue. Something Hajin — after grinding through countless versions of today — had to have been missing.

"Hajin-ah, listen. I don't really get this regression… thing. But looking at where you are right now. The external situation around Yugeon is nearly all sorted."

"……"

"If the response to this had been slow like you said, or the clarification hadn't landed properly, sure, maybe. But thanks to everything you've been pushing, honestly, right now it's not that dire. Even the company's writing it off as a run-of-the-mill scandal."

The very first time this had blown up.

That is — in the countless vanished 'todays' only Hajin knew about.

Back then, the situation might really have been serious enough to push Yugeon all the way to quitting.

Maybe the company had been the first to push him to withdraw, using Yugeon's behavior or the damage to his image as an excuse. Maybe the production's clarification article hadn't gone up in time and they'd missed the golden window.

But the 'today' Suho was living in didn't look like that.

"What I'm saying is — the situation isn't bad enough that Yugeon should be this locked on quitting. Sure, him getting shaken by his family taking heat because of him — that's understandable. But once legal action's on the table, even that part'll die down."

"…I've talked through all that too. But once that kid decides on something, there's no stopping it. And I can't exactly tell him to just eat the hate so I don't regress, can I."

"Right, exactly. Let's rethink that."

That was the exact point Suho had been zeroing in on.

"The situation has scaled down this much. So why does Yugeon still want to drop out?"

"…what?"

"You said it yourself earlier. Loop through something enough times and certain events naturally settle into playing out the same way."

"……!"

At Suho's words, the set of Hajin's face slipped.

"Isn't it possible Yugeon's quitting got pulled into something like that? So every time you push him the same way, it just reinforces his resolve."

"The approach wasn't the same, though…."

"What I mean is, the underlying reason behind your actions was the same. Your reason for having to stop Yugeon from quitting. You said it yourself just now — 'to stop the regression, I'm going to stop Yugeon from dropping out.'"

"……"

"Do you actually think that? If it weren't for the regression, you wouldn't care whether Yugeon dropped out?"

At that, for the first time, Hajin looked back at his own approach.

What have I been like this whole time? Every time I've tried to stop Yugeon quitting, what was my stance?

"Yugeon — he might come off breezy, but the truth is he's a sharp reader of a room. You and the other teammates not being sold on him? You think he didn't feel that?"

"……"

It was true.

Looking back, through all his attempts to talk Yugeon out of quitting, Hajin hadn't spared a thought for Yugeon's position or how he felt. He'd been drowning in the fear that if Yugeon dropped out like this, he'd regress.

Without registering the hurt or fear Yugeon must have been feeling through all this, all he'd hammered was how irresponsible and inconsiderate quitting would be.

Because….

'Because Yugeon's appeal point was a sense of responsibility.'

Now, back in his right mind — with the fog lifted by talking to Suho — Hajin could see it.

'How does sizing a person up and treating them off a stat window alone even make sense?'

The system window was, literally, just a system.

And on top of that, wasn't he still a low-level player who hadn't even fully understood every skill yet?

Standing on that foundation, what arrogance had made him think he'd fully figured Yugeon out?

The unfiltered feelings he — unable to keep himself in check — had poured out onto Yugeon: what exactly had they been?

"Let's take it slow and try again. You look like you've got some of your calm back — go have one more steady conversation with Yugeon. If it looks like it won't work with you, I can step in, so tell me."

"…okay."

"I'm not sure I'm even in a position to say this — I have no idea how many times you've come back…. But coming back to this same spot every time, that's way better than the alternative, right?"

Suho gently patted Hajin's shoulder and met his eyes.

"You haven't lost everything, Hajin-ah. You still have a chance."

"……"

"Why exactly it has to be Yugeon you finish the third round with, what the Selected Regressor's real intent is — that I don't know. But coming back to this moment again and again — that means, at the very least, if you can solve just this one thing, that's it. You're not getting suddenly thrown back ten years, or losing everything you've built."

Let's pin our hopes on that. Yeah? You have to hold onto it, Hajin-ah.

Even after Suho's last line, Hajin stayed silent for a long while. He turned Suho's words over, and over, and over.

A chance.

A chance, he said.

There'd been a time, once, when Hajin had thought like that too — that a chance to change his life had come.

In the end, not even a few years in, he'd been thrown back into regression — and he'd folded that thought up neatly and shoved it in the trash. His belief that regression was nothing but escape and a curse still hadn't changed….

"…okay. I'll try again."

Even so, Hajin nodded.

If this really was the 'chance' the Selected Regressor was giving him — this time, he wasn't going to lose it. With that resolve, Hajin's eyes flashed, bright and hard.