I'll Stay Right Here

I'd managed to get Baek Yu-gyeong back to Shin Chae-il's officetel, but the problem was finding him something dry to wear. There was no way I could leave him in soaked clothes, and the size difference made everything difficult.

Ugh. I can't exactly take him home, either…

Honestly, both Shin Chae-il and Shin Jae-heon were big enough that I could have grabbed just about any of their clothes and thrown them on him. But sending Yu-gyeong home alone didn't sit right with me, and heading for the family residence felt just as wrong. A freeloader like me had no business bringing a friend over.

Fortunately, the day after Shin Jae-heon had beaten him, Shin Chae-il had given Cha-heon the location and passcode to this officetel, which meant I at least had something resembling a secret hideout. It was in Gangnam. Shin Chae-il had tossed him the keycard as casually as if he were throwing away trash.

Sleep at home, he'd said. And if anything went wrong at home, he was not to go crashing at some friend's place, either.

But that had been the end of it. Shin Chae-il was the kind of man who lived for work; after that conversation, he almost never came home, and stepping into that house in Shin Cha-heon's body still felt wrong.

I'd wanted to sleep at the officetel too, but I figured it was smarter not to rock the boat and risk having the place taken away. Better to keep what I'd been given. So I was following Shin Chae-il's rules for now.

…Looking at the big picture, Shin Chae-il isn't a good man.

He'd cheated on his wife. He casually passed judgment on his son's friendships and handed down verdicts as if that settled everything. It was control, more or less.

…But from Shin Cha-heon's narrow point of view alone, he was also the only real shield he had. In his own way, maybe even a decent father who looked after his son's safety.

From the standpoint of a senior figure in a prosecutor's family, wanting respectable friends was understandable. Someone like I-hyeon would be hard to look on kindly—big, a little rough around the edges, not high in the rankings… and on the athletic team. Not that every athlete was the same, but the prejudice existed. He wouldn't want his son hanging around the wrong crowd, getting into fights, going down a bad path.

…He'd probably seen enough of those cases as a prosecutor that, on this one point at least, he was playing the conservative but protective father.

Father, huh.

I'd never had one who looked after me, so I couldn't really say. Still, it occurred to me that for Shin Cha-heon, Shin Chae-il might have been something he needed.

Damn it. I shouldn't have said that crap about how great his dad was, or the Shin family this and that.

Without meaning to, I'd ended up talking behind someone else's father. Now that I was standing in this position, I almost couldn't believe how well I understood it.

…Maybe I'm pretty biased myself.

I hoped none of what I'd done so far would come back to hurt the future Shin Cha-heon.

…Though whether Shin Cha-heon could ever come back at all, no matter how hard I tried, was the real problem.

…So he and I used to be about the same size.

I sent Yu-gyeong into the bathroom first and handed him the roomiest, most comfortable sweatshirt and sweatpants I could find. Watching them fit Baek Yu-gyeong almost perfectly, Cha-heon let out a hollow laugh. They were clothes I'd bought by mistake, thinking they were my original size—far too big for Cha-heon's body.

I'm an athlete, so fine, but what the hell is he…

Cha-heon shot Yu-gyeong a look, then pulled him into the bedroom when he came out. Apparently he couldn't even dry his own hair; even with a dryer in his hands, he just stared at it, then blankly at me. I had no choice but to go over and dry it for him myself.

"All right. Lie down."

"…Huh?"

Baek Yu-gyeong was still completely out of it. Not a broken AI—more like his brain had simply stopped processing. He just sat there, dazed.

Cha-heon patted the bare mattress a few times, then finally forced Baek Yu-gyeong down onto the bed.

"Just lie down and get some real sleep. I'll have your uniform washed."

Neither of us was the chatty type, and I wasn't confident about offering comfort either, so Cha-heon decided the best move was simply to put Yu-gyeong to bed.

"……."

If this had been Baek Yu-gyeong's usual pattern, he probably would have come out with something weird like, What, putting me to bed so you can do something~? Instead he just blinked at me in silence. It felt like being stared at by a golden retriever that couldn't understand words but was still trying to read the room.

Cha-heon answered even more calmly than usual.

"I'll stay right next to you, Mister— …no. Hyung will stay right next to you."

Cha-heon sat down on the floor, leaning against the side of the bare mattress where Yu-gyeong lay.

"…My hand, too."

The first human words out of him in a long while since we'd gotten here almost moved me. Cha-heon looked at Yu-gyeong and asked,

"What about your hand? Is it cold?"

"Like earlier. Are you going to hold it?"

"…Sure. What's hard about that."

On any other day I would have assumed he was up to something and swatted him away. Today, Cha-heon simply took Yu-gyeong's hand and held it tight, looking at him as if it were nothing.

"Yu-gyeong. Sleep well and wake up. You'll be all right. When you wake up, we'll eat."

Lying down right after eating is bad for the stomach, so eating after he woke up seemed better.

Or maybe not. He's a teenager—maybe it doesn't matter. Am I thinking too much like an old man?

Even as the thought crossed his mind, watching Baek Yu-gyeong's eyes slowly close, Cha-heon felt his lips twitch.

…What a ridiculous kid. For all the noise he makes, he really does listen when it counts.

I'd put Yu-gyeong to sleep and meant to get his clothes into the wash—then something I never expected happened.

I must have dozed off without realizing it. When I opened my eyes, I was the one lying on the bed under a blanket, and my guest had long since vanished.

I checked outside the room, but Yu-gyeong was already gone from the officetel. On the living room table lay a note from him saying he'd take his uniform and PE clothes himself and would wash the cardigan and return it later. Baek Yu-gyeong's handwriting—whether it suited him or not, I couldn't say—was remarkably neat and clean. Not what you'd expect from a high school boy.

Cha-heon read the note over a couple of times, then finally let out a weak breath.

…At least eat something before you go.

It worried me.

Was this a kind of guilt? …I wasn't sure.

It had only been a few days, but the person who'd dared to casually judge and pass sentence—yes. It hadn't just been Shin Chae-il. It had been me, too.

…As an adult, this was mortifying beyond words. Cha-heon grimaced at the bitter taste in his mouth.

The incident had happened on Friday, so over the weekend Cha-heon dug through every necromancy book he could find until his eyes nearly fell out, recording every scrap of content. Even if he was going to take responsibility for this body until adulthood, he still had to find a way to give it back, didn't he?

God damn it.

The more he thought about it, the more he started to worry whether any of this would even work. Spending another fifty thousand won on related books made him feel pathetic. Squatting down and doing that duck dance last time was still humiliating.

He couldn't understand why he was doing any of this either—but the whole situation was already unreal, so what did one more absurdity matter? For reasons he couldn't name, leafing through the necromancy books filled him with a strange sense of hope that this might actually solve things.

Damn it. What's this on my wrist?

Cha-heon frowned at the unfamiliar scar left on his wrist.

One of the necromancy books had instructed him to cut his left wrist, draw blood, and use it to draw a magic circle. He'd closed the book in pure disbelief—then discovered the faint mark already there on his wrist.

…This isn't from a suicide attempt or anything, is it?

Cha-heon dug through what memories he had, turning the thought over seriously, but thankfully nothing like that came up. It could have been a birthmark… and thinking about it, there was no guarantee it was even a cut scar at all.

The curiosity never quite left him, but the weekend slipped by fast all the same.

And then it was Monday. After a spectacularly late arrival, Cha-heon was hauled into the teachers' office at lunch and handed his report card. He narrowed his eyes. They must have distributed them that morning, but when it had come out didn't matter. The only thing that did was—

Oh, for fuck's sake. It really came out an 8.

Looking at the unspeakable score written under math, even a rough estimate put it at an 8, not a 7. Korean and the other memorization subjects hadn't been this bad, but math—he'd never so much as touched it in his previous life—was a massacre of numbers.

The grades had come out while he was still trying to get his bearings in this body, with no time to study, so he had plenty of excuses. The problem was that even if he protested how unfair it was, there was no one around to listen.

Back in college lectures, I used to record everything…

He hadn't exactly been gifted, so he remembered asking professors for permission, turning on the recorder, and replaying the lessons over and over. He'd gone that far just to pass the teaching certification exam.

"Shin Cha-heon, you little shit—you cutting class?"

"…I'm sorry."

Under the bellow of his homeroom teacher—the English teacher—Cha-heon crumpled the report card into his uniform pants pocket and bowed his head without a word of defense.

So I wasn't called in for being late. …And since I really did skip, I've got nothing to say.

Even when he'd been on the judo team, he'd never walked out of school without a word. Becoming an adult and then going back to school, though, seemed to have loosened something in him. He still couldn't believe he'd thought it was a good idea to take Baek Yu-gyeong off campus like that.

Probably because he'd gotten used to treating university with a little more flexibility once he was grown.

…Ah. I wonder if Baek Yu-gyeong is getting chewed out too. I feel bad.

At the time, Yu-gyeong's condition had mattered far more than any class. There hadn't been room to hesitate, and no real alternative. Being an adult on the inside meant he focused more on the kids' well-being than on the school rules a student was supposed to follow.

…Shin Cha-heon, I'm sorry to you, too.

Cha-heon felt a pointless pang of guilt over Shin Cha-heon's attendance and academic attitude—then remembered a report card already full of 8s and 7s and rationalized that it was probably fine. Dropping one more point from minus a hundred was just mildly regrettable, wasn't it? No university on earth was going to take someone with ranks like 8s and 7s through early admissions. He himself had only gotten in as a special talent admit; on grades alone, he wouldn't have stood a chance.

"And on top of bottom-tier grades, why are you only doing night study three times a week?"

The teacher rolled up a sheet of A4 paper and rapped him on the head with it a few times.

Years in the athletic world had made getting hit routine, so it didn't really bother him—but people didn't usually tap your head like that, and the sensation was strange. Honestly, it put him in a foul mood, but Cha-heon forced himself to settle and moved his lips.

"Ah…. Well…."

Saying he just really didn't want to do it was probably not the right answer. Truthfully, during night study he cracked a book open and then spent the time either zoning out or pretending to study with a pen. There was no better example of a room that existed purely as a waste of time and space.

Cha-heon bowed his head in silence. Just accepting it and saying he was sorry seemed like the best approach. The method of discipline was a little irritating, but none of what the man was saying was wrong.

"What's that expression the kids use these days…. Planning to get married instead of getting a job?"

"…Excuse me?"