Chapter 7

The Chief of Staff could only mean Yi-tan’s father, Prince Jun-ik Lee Hui-eum, a first-generation Aberrant. Myeong-joo, unable to keep pace with the abrupt turns in conversation, looked blankly from one man to the other.

Then Yi-tan glanced back at him. Something in the look felt cool enough to make Myeong-joo start. A heartbeat later Yi-tan looked away as if nothing had happened, speaking with an expressionless face.

“I’m not certain this is something Sergeant Cha is cleared to hear.”

“Ah! Of course—what am I thinking?” Kim exclaimed. “Sergeant, forgive me, but would you wait outside for just a moment? I won’t be long.”

Before Myeong-joo could answer, Kim was already on the internal telephone summoning the private to escort him to a waiting room. There was no mistaking it for anything but a dismissal.

Thus the earlier visitor found himself pushed out almost as abruptly as he had arrived. Even as he left Chief Kim’s office, Myeong-joo kept looking back at Yi-tan in a daze. Their shoulders brushed for an instant near the doorway, and the familiar scent of cologne reached him. Yi-tan did not spare him so much as a glance. Then the door shut between them, hiding his face and eyes from view. If not for the faint fragrance lingering in Myeong-joo’s nose, he might have doubted they had occupied the same room at all.

“You may wait in here, sir,” the private directed.

Myeong-joo nodded faintly. “…Thank you.”

The private who had shown him to the waiting room apparently feared a scolding if he stayed away from Chief Kim too long. He turned and hurried off before Myeong-joo had even finished thanking him. Left alone without warning, Myeong-joo scrubbed both hands over his face.

If he signed the contract today, the money should arrive by the end of the following month. His first plan was to send Myeong-in to a women’s university. She was twenty-two—not so old that the chance had passed her by. Once she was studying among classmates, calling one another unni and dongsaeng, steady, capable Myeong-in would surely be loved. But first he had to prepare her for the preliminary entrance examination.

Poverty had forced Myeong-in to leave high school halfway through. She had picked cotton, sold it to a wadding shop, and saved her coins one by one until she could buy study books. Then she had passed the high-school equivalency examination entirely on her own. If Myeong-joo remembered correctly, that had been only the year before.

Freshly discharged and rotting with inferiority, Myeong-joo had been so ashamed that he could not even send his brilliant, self-taught sister to school that he turned the shame against her. What good is all that studying anyway? he had snapped.

For an instant, resentment had flickered through the eyes of the gentle sister who usually did nothing but worry over him. The sight shocked him so badly that he fled the house. He spent a week in the back room of the gas shop where he worked and returned only after primary-school-aged Myeong-hui came all the way to the shop, sobbing and demanding her brother back.

Whenever he remembered that miserable episode, he wanted all the more desperately to lay a proper foundation for Myeong-in’s entrance-exam studies. The sooner she began, the better. Yet despite having every reason to be hopeful, unease kept needling at him.

From Chief Kim’s reaction, Myeong-joo could tell the man regarded the appearance of a Harmonizer with Harmonization Saturation as a stroke of outrageous luck. There was no reason to fret; all Myeong-joo had to do was wait until Kim and Yi-tan finished talking. Even so, his heart was pounding strangely hard.

“…”

With no other choice, Myeong-joo sat in a chair tucked into one corner of the waiting room and folded forward until his forehead rested on his knees. Exhaustion rolled through him with a wave of nausea.

He pretended not to know the cause, though it was painfully obvious. He could not bear how suddenly he had been forced to face Lee Yi-tan. Alone in the waiting room, Myeong-joo drew in a deep breath as if the man were still standing before him. Yi-tan’s cologne seemed to cling to the tip of his nose—the same scent Myeong-joo had occasionally caught in the house his sister once shared with her husband.

Oppa, he just used that bathroom, so I haven’t tidied it yet, Myeong-in would say.

And Myeong-joo, already reddening for no good reason, would answer, It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. I’ll straighten up when I’m done.

The master bathroom belonged mostly to Myeong-in, which meant Yi-tan generally used the bathroom off the first-floor living room. Myeong-joo knew that perfectly well. Sometimes he chose it over the bathroom nearer his own room anyway.

Yi-tan, a soldier with an early duty schedule, would shower before dawn and leave the house. Myeong-joo—who ordinarily did not open his eyes until the sun stood overhead—would suddenly discover the habits of a diligent man, slipping into that bathroom just to breathe in the cologne his brother-in-law had left behind. He knew it was a ridiculous, perverse habit. Knowing did nothing to stop him.

Myeong-joo was a man, and even when satisfying himself alone, there were times he wanted something to sharpen the sensation. Meticulous by nature, Yi-tan always dropped used towels into the basket beneath the sink and lined up his hair mousse, pick comb, razor, and aftershave before leaving. But even he could not scrub his cologne out of the warm steam hanging in the room.

He had probably never imagined there was a filthy rat living under his roof, and so he had never thought to guard against one. Who could reasonably predict that his wife’s older brother would stand in the steam after his shower, breathe in the scent he left behind, and grow hard from it?

Eight times out of ten, Myeong-joo endured it. On the days he could not, he slipped into the bathroom after Yi-tan left, filled his lungs until the man’s scent saturated him, then clamped a handkerchief over his nose and ran upstairs to his room.

He barely heard Myeong-in scolding from below. As an officer’s wife, she was forever telling her brother not to thunder around the house so shamelessly. By then it no longer mattered. Myeong-joo would lock his bedroom door, press his back against it, free his painfully swollen erection, and masturbate until the pressure finally broke.

He knew it was depraved. He knew it was contemptible. Still, he could not stop. When release brought guilt toward both his sister and her husband crashing down on him, and that guilt curdled into hatred of himself, Myeong-joo would strike his forehead against the floor again and again and swear that today he would finally cut this diseased feeling out of himself.

It never proved so simple. Throwing away his life had been easier. Was that not the only reason he could now stand in the same world as twenty-one-year-old Lee Yi-tan again? What a miserable ending Cha Myeong-joo’s love had come to.

“Are you unwell?” a gentle voice asked.

A voice far too familiar, and far too dearly missed, sounded almost at his shoulder. Myeong-joo had heard neither the door open nor footsteps approaching. He jolted. Before he could even lift his head, a hand moved gently down his hunched back.

“Ugh—what…?”

Startled, Myeong-joo jerked upright and knocked the hand from his back with more force than he intended. The slap cracked sharply through the room. Of course the hand belonged to Lee Yi-tan.

Yi-tan looked down at the back of the hand Myeong-joo had struck, then met his eyes. He did not look surprised. Something else, impossible to name cleanly, lay in his gaze. Myeong-joo was the one who looked stricken. Horrified by how hard he had hit him, he stared blankly up at the man who, in another life, had been his brother-in-law.

Their eyes locked. Yi-tan’s expression revealed nothing of what he was thinking, and whatever meaning lay beneath his gaze belonged to a category Myeong-joo could not define. He sat frozen like a prey animal caught in a snare.

Watching him, Yi-tan slowly parted his lips. “Truly.”

“…”

“It truly has been a long time, Instructor.”

There was the faintest tremor at the end of his voice. Myeong-joo’s eyes wavered like tiny pendulums. Yi-tan sounded as though he had finally found someone he had missed with all his heart, the emotion in his voice so deep and full that Myeong-joo could do nothing but part his lips, momentarily at a loss.

Come to think of it, this was the first time Yi-tan had seen him since Myeong-joo left the military. Myeong-joo himself had spent years facing the man across the same household as his brother-in-law before returning to the past, but to twenty-one-year-old Yi-tan, this was a reunion with a former instructor who had disappeared from his life. Perhaps the emotion was only natural.

The winter just before Yi-tan turned twenty—the final year Myeong-joo served as his instructor—Yi-tan had gone into battle alongside his half-brother, Lee Yi-ho, only to have the demonic fiends they were pursuing turn on them. His platoon had nearly been wiped out. They escaped pursuit only after hiding in a mountainside cave for twenty days and nights, covering themselves in dead leaves to smother the scent of human bodies. By then, two of his men had contracted pneumonia so severe they hovered at death’s door—an uncommon fate for Aberrants, whose bodies were ordinarily resistant to illness.

Yi-tan had carried the two fever-stricken men back to friendly lines on his back, then collapsed the moment they reached camp. He did not wake for fifteen days. Twenty days in the freezing mountains, followed by the march back from near the border with his men on his shoulders, had exhausted not only his physical strength but the harmonization force within him. His abilities had fallen into such violent internal disorder that he lost consciousness altogether.

Even while Yi-tan lay unconscious, the military began moving to convene a disciplinary committee. No one expected every battle to end in victory. The problem was Lee Yi-ho’s testimony: according to the elder brother, the defeat had occurred because Yi-tan ignored his warnings, led his platoon after the fleeing demonic fiends, and pursued them against better judgment.

Yet high command could not readily punish Yi-tan himself. He had delivered two sweeping victories in the preceding campaigns, and the military had staked too much on the young prodigy. Being the son of Chief of Staff Lee Hui-eum did not hurt, either. Just when the disciplinary proceedings seemed likely to dissolve into nothing, the committee abruptly changed direction and found another target.

Cha Myeong-joo—who had been making the trip to the military hospital every day, waiting for Yi-tan to wake—was informed that he would be brought before the committee. Their reasoning was simple enough: with nearly every officer gifted with special abilities deployed to the front, Sergeant Cha Myeong-joo had been assigned to fill the shortage as Yi-tan’s instructor. Therefore, they argued, his negligent training had indirectly contributed to the disaster.

Even Lee Yi-ho, who had initially thrown accusations at his half-brother with all the mindless force of two bulls locking horns, seemed to realize the incident would not be enough to drag Yi-tan down completely. As though he had never said otherwise, he began loudly insisting that Cha Myeong-joo was plainly to blame.

Cha Myeong-joo, naturally, had neither glorious victories to his name nor a powerful father inside the military. He was swept away with hardly a chance to resist. From the moment he entered the hearing, generals took turns bearing down on a mere sergeant. He was never even granted a proper chance to speak.

Absurdly enough, what had tormented Myeong-joo most was not the prospect of being thrown out with no trade by which to support his sisters. It was the feeling he had finally recognized only after Yi-tan returned unconscious from battle—the feeling he had spent years mistaking for nothing more than an instructor’s affection for his student. It seemed unbearably unfair that he had to leave before the man he loved even opened his eyes.

If Myeong-joo wanted to see Yi-tan wake in the military hospital, he needed to remain a soldier. He pleaded to be allowed to keep his sergeant’s rank only until Yi-tan regained consciousness. It made no difference. Fewer than ten days passed before Cha Myeong-joo was driven out of the army.

He and his sisters were forced out of the military quarters soon afterward. Humiliated, consumed by inferiority, and furious at the injustice done to him, Myeong-joo lost his bearings. He began obsessing over a single warped idea: he had to restore the fortunes of their ruined house. Looking back now, it had been a foolish resolve scarcely different from being bewitched by a demonic fiend.

And time had carried them from there to this moment. For Lee Yi-tan, this truly was their first reunion since then. After waking and learning that his instructor had been forced out of the army on his account, Yi-tan had gone to considerable trouble to find him. Myeong-joo, steeped in an inferiority so shameful he could hardly bear to remember it, had refused to meet him and sent him away.