PIA 95

Ji-an stretched his body, which was clinging to the guy like gum, and approached the wall. Seo Ji-hyuk’s photos were plastered everywhere, some showing moments Ji-an recognized and others he didn’t.

Photos of people associated with him were also arranged radially, and among them, a small photo of Jeong Hee-seo in the corner caught his eye.

‘Why is our hyung’s photo so tiny?’

Ji-an couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that Jeong Hee-seo’s passport-sized photo stood out before the large A4-sized photo of Jeong Han-joo next to Seo Ji-hyuk. It was funny despite the rather serious situation.

If he could, Ji-an would have wanted to remove his hyung-nim’s photo from this unsettling space, but without a body, it wasn’t possible. Ji-an turned his eyes to appreciate ‘Seo Ji-an’s’ messy collage work. It looked like he had made a chart of Seo Ji-hyuk’s life. There really wasn’t anyone missing. He had even found and pasted photos of Seo Ji-hyuk’s high school friends that were hazy in Ji-an’s memory.

‘What the hell is this guy up to?’

There were memos tightly attached under each photo. Seeing a memo under Jeong Han-joo’s photo that said ‘husband,’ it seemed the timeline was clearly after the wedding. As Ji-an scanned through, his gaze turned to a memo that read ‘birth mother.’

The woman in the photo was a beautiful woman with sharp features reminiscent of Seo Ji-hyuk’s appearance. Lines drawn from that photo connected to Ji-an’s father and to Seo Ji-hyuk.

It was a scene often seen in thriller dramas. Protagonists who make photo maps to catch someone always succeed in their revenge. If reality had a genre, this guy’s genre was thriller.

‘Is he plotting some revenge? Did he come here to take revenge on my hyung… I mean, the original Seo Ji-hyuk?’

But it didn’t quite fit. Wasn’t the ‘Psycho Seo Ji-an’ in the drama supposed to have died? Ji-an had long suspected that this guy had a different purpose for taking over his world.

He had the chilling thought that he might have annihilated the soul of ‘Psycho Seo Ji-an’ to create a vacancy and send Ji-an to another world.

Come to think of it, he had clearly been in a serious traffic accident in his world, but how had that incident been resolved? There must have been many witnesses, so it couldn’t have just become a non-event.

The feeling of being hit and dying was still vivid.

Ji-an shivered, even without a physical body.

‘Who are you really?’

He turned to look at the guy and asked, but of course, there was no response. After drinking all that whiskey, he wondered if the guy was dead. Ji-an approached him, but just then, the guy’s eyes shot open.

‘Whoa, that startled me!’

At the same time, a phone started ringing loudly. On the screen lighting up in the dark room, the caller ID clearly showed <Seo Ji-hyuk>. Ji-an swallowed hard, his heart racing from learned fear.

The guy slowly sat up, picked up the phone, and smiled deeply. Smiling like that made him look even less like Ji-an. No, how dare he use his face like that. Ji-an sat opposite him and frowned.

As he pressed the answer button, a familiar voice rang from the speaker.

-Hey, you son of a b1tch!

Ji-an’s eyes widened as the guy casually adjusted the volume. Seo Ji-hyuk’s following words became inaudible. As Ji-an leaned in to listen, the guy slightly moved his body and stepped back.

‘…What? Can you see me?’

For a moment, it seemed their eyes met. After listening intently to the sound coming from the phone for a while, he slowly got up and stood by the wall covered with photos. Ji-an scurried after him.

Though he couldn’t hear exactly what Seo Ji-hyuk was saying, curse words like ‘fvck’ and ‘bastard’ came through clearly now and then. His temper hasn’t died down. Ji-an clicked his tongue.

The guy just smiled, gently tracing the photos with his fingertips. Then he whispered softly.

“You made me like this.”

It was an ambiguous statement. Was he referring to being the ‘Seo Ji-an’ created by Seo Ji-hyuk in the drama? Or was he implying he was Seo Ji-an, the younger brother mistreated by Seo Ji-hyuk for years? It was hard to tell.

His finger stopped in front of a photo of a certain man. The memo attached below it had a question mark drawn on it.

‘I know who that person is.’

Ji-an muttered unconsciously, then startled when he realized the guy was looking directly at him.

W-what? Can he really see me? Is this really a dream?’

“…”

The guy just silently stared at Ji-an. There was no threatening movement other than his gaze, but Ji-an somehow felt like he was being choked.

He rolled his eyes to indicate the photo with the question mark.

Did he want Ji-an to tell him?

Ji-an licked his parched lower lip. Somehow it felt like something terrible would happen if he told him. Like something really bad would happen to Seo Ji-hyuk.

‘….’

Ji-an lowered his eyes.

Though he didn’t know what the guy was planning to do to Seo Ji-hyuk, this information clearly seemed quite helpful to him. Ji-an didn’t feel the need to particularly protect Seo Ji-hyuk either. It seemed that he and this guy, whom he had thought was a completely different entity, were connected somehow after all.

Ji-an felt some kind of common goal with the guy and shuddered.

As if reading Ji-an’s mind, he held out his palm. Ji-an slowly wrote the name of the man in the photo with his finger.

“There are many holes in my memory… and now I learn this like this.”

The guy laughed out loud, saying he had solved one piece of the puzzle.

It seemed he really could see Ji-an. Not only that, but he could even sense him. When Ji-an met his gaze with a bit of fear, he smiled gently, his eyes curving.

“Thank you, Ji-an.”

The moment he heard the kind gratitude, everything went dark, and when he opened his eyes, he was back in Jeong Hee-seo’s comforting arms in bed.

The man, quickly noticing that Ji-an had woken up, patted his back with his eyes closed. Ji-an blinked while being held. The sensation of his eyelashes touching Jeong Hee-seo’s chest was vivid.

‘It’s too… for just a simple dream.’

It was too vivid to be a dream created by his resentment towards Seo Ji-hyuk. Confused, Ji-an blinked his eyes and then buried his nose in Jeong Hee-seo’s chest to alleviate his anxiety.

“Did Ji-an have a bad dream?”

It was only a few days ago that he had cried loudly like a child with night terrors. Jeong Hee-seo’s voice was sleepy but tinged with worry.

“Yeah. I dreamed that hyung-nim became tiny.”

“What’s that about?”

Jeong Hee-seo chuckled and pulled him into an even tighter embrace, as if he wanted to squeeze the breath out of him. Ji-an found comfort in that, wriggling to find a more comfortable position in his arms. Compared to when he first experienced the voice, he strangely didn’t feel scared at all. Instead, he increasingly felt that he could solve anything. He drifted back to sleep without a trace of fear.

* * *

“You weird bastard. Why are you bringing me along to meet that person?”

“Should I bring hyung-nim instead?”

Ji-an responded shamelessly to Woo-seok’s dissatisfied voice. Just moments ago, Woo-seok had jumped in surprise when Ji-an, after luring him out with the promise of buying him food, suggested meeting Seo Ji-hyuk together.

Ji-an squirmed uncomfortably.

“I can’t show hyung-nim my pathetic side.”

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really his past, but since he had chosen to live in this world, he had to carry the burden of it. That didn’t mean he wanted to share his ugly history with someone he liked. Not unless he was crazy.

Woo-seok shuddered as he watched Ji-an snort forcefully, saying it was nonsense.

“Fvck, are you really dating him?  I told you, if I die, you die too. Both of us die.”

“Be quiet. Our Ppoggeul can hear everything. Speak nicely, okay?”

Ji-an placed his hand on his stomach, the gesture irritating enough that Woo-seok’s fists clenched, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to hit him. Instead, he pounded on the innocent tree pillar next to him. Seeing the café part-timer’s eyes widen, Ji-an patted Woo-seok’s shoulder.

“You brute, stop it. Come on!”

“You bastard talking about prenatal education, I mean, why are you meeting Seo Ji-hyuk?”

Knowing his true identity, Woo-seok rubbed his thick forearm, saying it gave him goosebumps. It was hard for him to understand why Ji-an wanted to meet Seo Ji-hyuk, given how his family situation was already complicated due to his father’s dirty lifestyle.

“You think I want to see him? He insists on meeting me. Says he has something to tell me. And I’m scared, so I dragged you along…”

“…”

Ji-an pretended not to see Woo-seok staring at him, seemingly at a loss for words. Woo-seok couldn’t know his desperate wish to end this with a three-way meeting. He knew a makjang drama couldn’t be resolved so easily, but…

Perhaps it would be easier if grandmother collapsed with some implausible last words, or if his long-lost father suddenly appeared with a serious illness, asking for an organ donation.

Ji-an continued his unfilial imagination with regret, then put his hand to his forehead.

Ppoggeul is listening. Calm down.

If Seo Ji-hyuk somehow got tangled up with his grandmother or father, it would be a disaster. So, attending the engagement party was actually the lesser of two disasters. 

“Damn… this is creepy. You used to stalk Jeong Han-joo, right? Isn’t that why you and Seo Ji-hyuk were enemies? Why does he want to meet you? What could he possibly have to say?”

Woo-seok muttered as if he had read Ji-an’s mind.

That’s true too. How pathetic must ‘Seo Ji-an’ have behaved? That was the part that drove Ji-an crazy. There was nothing more frightening to the current Ji-an than what people call ‘paying for one’s karma’.

How will Seo Ji-hyuk react?

As Ji-an was shaking his head to dispel various terrible imaginations, Seo Ji-hyuk appeared in the distance.

Woo-seok and Ji-an’s heads turned simultaneously at the sound of the café door chiming. He was alone as he had said beforehand, but upon discovering the huge Alpha sitting next to Ji-an, he frowned deeply.

That face looked exactly like his evil brother’s—of course, they were the same person—so Ji-an instinctively scowled as well.