DP Episode 75

Deep Pivot Episode 75

Seo-joon turned to face Yeon-woo, who had just finished showering. Yeon-woo, towel-drying his damp hair, froze. Their eyes met for a few seconds.

“…Why are you looking at me like that?”

Sitting on the blanket, Seo-joon smiled awkwardly at the gaze.

“No reason… It just feels strange having you here, Lieutenant.”

Yeon-woo used the hair dryer Seo-joon had brought out and busily organized the towels and clothes. When he touched the light switch and glanced over, Seo-joon silently turned on the desk lamp instead, replacing the room’s main light.

The small room grew dim, and the two sat across from each other on the blanket, illuminated only by the faint desk lamp. Yeon-woo placed a pillow near Seo-joon and rolled up his hooded zip-up next to it.

“You use the pillow, Yeon-woo.”

“No, Lieutenant, you should…”

“How could I take the homeowner’s pillow?”

A small squabble broke out over the lone pillow, but Yeon-woo’s insistence on treating his guest properly meant the pillow ended up with Seo-joon.

“Hand that over.”

Seo-joon unrolled the hooded zip-up and neatly folded it again. He placed the sleeves inside the hood to shape it like a pillow, then set it back in Yeon-woo’s spot. His deftness suggested experience, and Yeon-woo smiled in surprise.

“How do you know to do that?”

“How do I know? I’m a soldier.”

“Do they teach you this in training camp?”

How to make a pillow from a hooded zip-up…? Seo-joon chuckled and lay down in response to Yeon-woo’s question. Yeon-woo lay down beside him and pulled the blanket over them both.

“I didn’t learn this in camp, but I did it a lot at the orphanage. There were never enough pillows when new kids arrived.”

“…You were in an orphanage, too, Lieutenant?”

His casually spoken words brought a surprisingly strong reaction. Rolling over to face Yeon-woo, Seo-joon looked at his surprised expression and asked,

“You didn’t know?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess there’s no reason to bring it up unless asked.”

Yeon-woo looked at Seo-joon in disbelief.

“I never would have guessed. I thought you were… always…”

His words trailed off, and Seo-joon smiled faintly.

“Born into wealth?”

“…Yes.”

Seo-joon chuckled softly at the hesitant reply and turned over. A strange ceiling filled his view.

“Well, that’s true. Not me, but my adoptive parents were wealthy.”

His words ended in the past tense, and silence filled the room. The pillow carried Yeon-woo’s scent. Surrounded by that comforting aroma, Seo-joon continued quietly.

“…They were good people. They died in a gate accident when I was 17.”

As he spoke calmly, he recalled his earliest memory of being very cold.

“I was in a snowfield. In winter.”

✽✽✽

A child abandoned naked in the snow, left to die in the dead of winter.

When Seo-joon first arrived at the orphanage, people described him like that. They said his parents would suffer divine retribution, whoever they were.

Seo-joon hadn’t understood much on that first day, nor did he remember where he had come from. The adults believed his prolonged exposure to the cold was to blame, but Seo-joon felt it was more than that.

The first face he saw in the snow was that of a nun. Her veiled face appeared very strange to Seo-joon: eyes that glittered like glass through split eyelids, a nose with two holes, and lips with strange protrusions.

Every time those lips parted, a strange sound emerged, and a red, tentacle-like tongue moved. It wasn’t until the second day that the alien-looking creature registered in Seo-joon’s mind as something familiar.

It was then that he began to understand human speech. The moment when incomprehensible sounds started becoming words was still a mysterious memory, even at the age of 29.

A day after his arrival, Seo-joon grew accustomed to seeing human eyes, noses, mouths, and limbs.

‘So, you don’t remember anything from before you got here?’

The kind nun had asked similar questions several times. But Seo-joon truly knew nothing. It felt as if his life before gazing at the tree lights in the snow had never existed.

He accepted it when the adults said he was six years old, but Seo-joon thought of himself as one year old.

“Because I had no prior memories, it felt like I was born in that snowfield.”

The name “Seo-joon” was given to him by the nun at the orphanage. “Seo” meant dawn, and “Joon” meant bright, as he had been found under a tree in the freezing dawn of winter.

Life at the orphanage was peaceful. The nuns were kind, and the occasional visiting adults were gentle. Seo-joon watched as children younger than him left the orphanage, holding strangers’ hands.

In the meantime, he became an elementary school student. Third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade. The older he got, the more worry appeared in the nuns’ eyes.

In the adoption market, Seo-joon was considered old. The nuns believed he would remain at the orphanage because he was already in the upper grades.

But contrary to their expectations, an elderly couple arrived one day when he was in sixth grade, expressing their intention to adopt him.

“…I was very lucky.”

Since then, Seo-joon lived in abundance, receiving quality education and loving protection under kind parents.

One day, however, a gate opened in the backyard of their home. The quiet, pristine neighborhood turned into a wasteland overnight.

The elderly couple wasn’t wealthy enough to be called tycoons, but they had amassed a sizable estate. They had no relatives or children of their own and seemed to have planned to leave everything to Seo-joon when they adopted him.

“After the funeral, the people from the Awakened Center visited immediately.”

There was no time to grieve, as Seo-joon underwent a barrage of tests and examinations. After a month of that, he had no sorrow left to process.

“I first met Colonel Jin then. He was a lieutenant colonel at the time.”

That’s how Seo-joon joined the SAU. His ability couldn’t be classified or evaluated. He was called various names—Tentacle Esper, Monster, Alien. The name “No-named” became official a year later.

There were supposedly similar espers abroad, so the name had been standardized internationally.

“Did you awaken as an esper when the gate opened?”

“…I’m not sure.”

Officially, his first manifestation was on the day the gate opened. However, there was a truth only Seo-joon and the elderly couple knew.

Awakened ones came into being with the first gates. But Seo-joon had been a monster long before that.

During his time at the orphanage, his powers weren’t that bad. Only his hands or arms would occasionally change shape, and he could easily hide this.

But as he grew older and entered middle school, the monster inside grew with him. The elderly couple who had adopted him kept this hidden from the world.

Even when mysterious holes appeared, unleashing monstrous creatures into the world, they kept Seo-joon’s powers a secret.

“They were probably trying to protect me.”

The center staff didn’t believe him, dismissing his claims as arrogance or delusion. After a few such remarks, Seo-joon naturally began hiding the truth.

“In retrospect, it could have been a mistake on my part. I’m not sure.”

When everyone denies something, it starts to feel like it’s not true. He had spent too much time to determine what was real and what wasn’t.

Maybe what the elderly couple hid wasn’t his power but a mental illness. He might have indeed manifested when the gate opened, but the trauma made him believe he was always that way.

“How could I trust my memories when I don’t remember anything before I was six?”

Since that first memory in the snowfield, Seo-joon had lived every day as an outsider. Even among people, sharing laughter and tears, he always felt separate.

“…People who don’t know their origins probably live with similar feelings.”

Anyone who had lost their memory or didn’t know their parents’ identity would probably feel the same way.

If you don’t know where your existence began or where you came from…

…you live with the feeling of being an outsider.