Memory Recovery (3)
Memory Recovery (3)
Sniffle.
When Jo Ah-yoon’s nose twitched, Han Jae-jung wordlessly handed her a tissue. She muttered, her voice thick and nasal.
“This is so embarrassing...”
Then she blew her nose.
The corners of her eyes, the tip of her nose, her cheeks, her ears, even her neck—there wasn’t a spot that wasn’t red. You couldn’t tell if she was Pink Deneb or Red Deneb. Her body, flushed hot with tears and shame, looked pitiful.
“Then why’d you do something embarrassing?”
“Then why’d you put on that show on the rooftop?”
He had nothing to say to that and shut his mouth. His throat was dry for no reason; he just swallowed. Feeling awkward, Han Jae-jung averted his gaze and looked around.
This was Pink Deneb’s home.
After she got her emotions under control, she brought Han Jae-jung here.
It was an invitation that bordered on kidnapping.
Before Han Jae-jung could even get his bearings, she’d wrapped him in Crimson-Winged Crows and flown him straight here.
She hadn’t really done anything out of line. Han Jae-jung didn’t hold it against her.
As a place to hide and talk, the location choice was perfect.
The overall interior had a hip vibe. A flamingo neon sign decoration on the table, rock band and movie posters plastered all over the walls. Avant-garde contemporary art pieces sat in frames.
The famous character dolls on the sofa softened that rough impression a little.
The place was bigger than her old apartment, and the decorative items were more abundant, but the overall feel was the same as the home of hers that Han Jae-jung had known before.
“...What happened to you?”
Jo Ah-yoon asked, hugging a pink doll that was a cute, deformed version of a bird to her chest. It was an unmistakable expression of anxiety.
“You said you’d come back but didn’t contact us for years, and before that, why were you dressed like a homeless person, and why are you tangled up with monsters, and no—no, why... You said you were going to live a normal life, that you were just going on a trip for a while. Is, is this the result of that trip?”
A barrage of questions hit him in an instant, but he remained silent for all of them. They were less questions she wanted answers to and more a projection of her sense of injustice.
Han Jae-jung felt like a sinner. In practice, he wasn’t far off. In a moral sense, he was undeniably guilty.
“I should have figured something out for sure back then... I shouldn’t have just left it alone... A suicide hotline consultation. Why would you go to that? You were always the one preaching about treasuring your life. Did your values change over the years?”
“No, that was...”
I went to collect the government subsidy. He almost said it but held back. It would have just needlessly provoked her.
“We...”
Moisture began to seep back into Pink Deneb’s voice.
“Do you have any idea how long we searched for you?! We searched for three solid years. Three whole years! Enough time for some brat to graduate high school!”
Han Jae-jung had vanished without giving the two of them a chance to stop him. He’d disappeared while Pink Deneb and Blue Sirius were hospitalized after being attacked by a monster.
Leaving behind only a few letters and gifts.
The first line of the letter still remained as a vivid memory.
‘What do you think a moral action is? Respecting the other person’s will? Or protecting the other person? By my standards, it’s the former. I’ll just state one thing before I go.
Don’t look for me (this is not a distorted expression meaning come find me. It’s not that thing from melodramas. I mean it. If you don’t believe me, three generations of your family will get sick).
It’s fine to curse my actions, but don’t try to deny them.
I won’t deny it. This is running away.
But sometimes, running can be a good strategy, my friend! :)
This time, my case was just that. I have to survive too, you know.
Don’t worry too much. I’ll come back when I feel like I’m ready. I’ll contact you too!
My lovely girls, you believe me, right? ^^ Love you~’
This was only the first paragraph. After that, there were several more sentences written that were enough to make Yoon Seol-hwa and Jo Ah-yoon lose their minds. In fact, Yoon Seol-hwa had fainted before reading even half of this letter.
The word love was thrown around like a sentence-ending particle, utterly devoid of weight.
It was a goddamn runaway letter having a seizure.
At that moment, Jo Ah-yoon learned exactly what it felt like for your heart to sink.
That pain of lead fragments—rage, sorrow, and the like—tangling around your heart and dragging it down into an abyss.
“What on earth have you been doing all this time? Behind our backs, what on earth...”
Her words trailed off. Recalling all the pain she’d endured made it too hard to control her emotions.
“Searched for me? Hey, I told you not to look for me because I’d come back someday.”
“You didn’t come back, you son of a bitch!”
Jo Ah-yoon suddenly shouted. A faint yet fierce rage. Faced with her fully justified anger, Han Jae-jung could only shut his mouth.
For a moment, silence settled over the house where her voice had been music.
Perhaps the speaker was more surprised than the listener, because her pink eyes trembled violently. Her lips held a similar tremor.
She scrunched up her brows as if suppressing tears, then buried her face in the doll.
“You didn’t come back... you damn bastard of an oppa...”
Her congested, nasal voice hit a stumbling block and became an even more wretched and pitiful sound.
“...At first, I believed you’d come back. Because that’s what you said. But you didn’t show up even after a year... Do you know how hard we searched? We looked, even resorting to authority we can’t normally use privately. My crows are a given, but we even dug through moving records and CCTV... But, as time went on, the records just stopped, you know? As if the person had truly evaporated. So you couldn’t be found...”
“...?”
Han Jae-jung felt a flicker of puzzlement. No matter how powerful the Association was, they couldn’t just delete a person’s entire records.
It was absurd.
A magical girl couldn’t find one person, even while using her own powers and digging into national-level information?
Of course, given the times, gathering information outside the city was difficult, so they probably could only access information within the safe cities...
Even so, it was strange.
Han Jae-jung probed his memories. The memories he’d just regained showed only a period of about half a year right after his disappearance. There were no memories after that.
The point they’d started searching in earnest was the one-year mark.
There was a blank.
Han Jae-jung was certain something had happened during that blank. Had he been abducted somewhere?
‘Or maybe I did something insane...’
There are limits to where a person can hide. Because a human’s range of activity is finite.
But the moment you transcend that range, you gain infinite possibilities when it comes to concealment.
A place that even an existence like a magical girl can’t find, no matter how hard she tries.
A place did come to mind. A forsaken region beyond the city’s outskirts. Land stolen by monsters. An unknown space that had been eliminated from human habitation zones and hadn’t been approached by anyone for over a decade.
Commonly known as Dark Matter.
A nickname given because it was marked in black on the map.
If he’d been there, it explained why they couldn’t find him. But the probability was low. No one set foot there unless they were insane, and even if they did, they wouldn’t come back alive.
“Making it so I couldn’t even find you is too cruel... You said you’d come back... you lying little shit... bad guy...”
On the other hand, Han Jae-jung was trembling with anxiety about information he didn’t want getting out.
‘They didn’t look into the hospital records, right...? Please let it be so.’
The hardships he’d suffered while he was away from them would deal a critical blow to Jo Ah-yoon’s already poor mental health.
Being attacked by a lunatic wasn’t even newsworthy, so he could let that slide.
In a society where people died to monsters every day, a person getting stabbed in the gut by a lunatic wasn’t rare.
It was an incident where he could have easily died, but in the end, he didn’t.
Besides, he hadn’t even gone to the hospital after the first attack.
The lunatic kept tracking him down, but it ended with only a light graze from a weapon; instead, he beat the guy senseless and sent him packing. That was thanks to him being on edge, wary of everything, his nerves hypersensitive after being stabbed by the lunatic.
All of these attacks happened in the dead of night, in secluded places without CCTV. He remembered it clearly. Because he had just seen it. The surging revulsion crept back up and covered his body.
Even considering all this, it wasn’t proof that they didn’t know.
With complicated feelings, Han Jae-jung looked at Jo Ah-yoon. She was also peeking over the doll, looking at him. When their eyes met, she buried her face in the doll again.
Her words continued.
“...I was scared.”
Her arms squeezed the doll even tighter.
“That everything I was doing was just a nuisance to you... That I really wasn’t respecting you, like the letter said... That I’d just get cursed out for looking for you for nothing... When you got mad before... it was scary. So at first, I endured it while thinking that. But I couldn’t stand it. I know it’s so fucked up and I’m being an idiot, but I still wanted to find you. Pathetically.”
What was the path to respect? It was a problem with no answer. He’d only get hurt if she went to find him again. Such thoughts never left her head. Yet she acted anyway.
To respect her own heart.
“But... I couldn’t find you. I don’t even know where you were or what you were doing, whether you were alive or dead.”
But in the end, everything had failed.
She hadn’t respected Han Jae-jung by not searching for him, nor had she been able to respect herself by finding him.
“So... I just hoped you were living well.”
Give what you can. Give up what you have to. Jo Ah-yoon defended herself with that way of thinking. It was one of the many defense mechanisms she had.
Act nonchalant, pretend nothing’s wrong, and look to the next thing. Rationalization is the shield that protects the ego. A breakwater that makes you believe the harsh reality means nothing to you.
“You’d be living well... because you’re a shameless, positive oppa, you’d be living well wherever you were... you could have gone abroad somewhere and be living happily... the reason you weren’t coming back was because you were living so well you’d forget about us... like that... over and over... constantly...”
She didn’t think about the possibility of what would happen if she hadn’t given up.
Because if you don’t confirm it, it remains only a possibility. There’s still hope.
Jo Ah-yoon was afraid. She chose to remain in that fear.
Hoping that he, somewhere out of her sight right now, was happy.
“Then what is this.”
Jo Ah-yoon lifted her head. Before she knew it, tears were streaming from her eyes again.
“You said you got a suicide consultation, but aren’t you acting crazy on a rooftop? Didn’t you get attacked by a monster and get hospitalized? Weren’t you at the hospital looking like some homeless person?! And why!”
Bam! Her delicate hand slammed the table. Still clutching the doll with her other hand, she rose from her chair.
“Does the monster know you...?”
Han Jae-jung shut his eyes tight. He wasn’t surprised. He had the thought that what must come had come.
“Do you know how I found you today? I went to the last place that monster bastard’s star showed a reaction, and you were there... What’s going on? Why did you give off that bastard’s reaction?”
One of the Crimson-Winged Crows’ abilities was tracking a star’s power.
Since the last place he’d powered down was that rooftop, there was bound to be a trace left there.
Once more, Han Jae-jung looked at Jo Ah-yoon. Her jewel-bright eyes held moisture, shining with an even more beautiful luster.
“I know this might... really... feel unfair. But if you have any idea, please tell me, oppa... please...”
Han Jae-jung placed his own hand over hers.
“...Ah-yoon. Two things. I have two things to tell you.”
Her slightly cold body temperature hadn’t changed even after all these years.
“Right now, I’m suffering from amnesia. Even though I know what our relationship was, I can’t recall most of the memories I had with you.”
That cold hand flinched and trembled.
“Wha, what do you mean...?”
“And one more thing.”
Before she could even fully express her shock, he parted his lips with a firm, solemn attitude.
“Oppa...?”
“Ah-yoon. I don’t hate you for suspecting me. It’s a perfectly natural suspicion. It’s okay. I’m not going to hate you. Rather, I’m sorry. I’ve only made you anxious, haven’t I.”
He made up his mind.
A monster’s disguise always leaves a clear trace. There is no such thing as a perfect disguise.
Therefore, if he had a perfectly intact human body, paradoxically, that meant he wasn’t a monster.
“Ah-yoon, I’ll strip naked for exactly five minutes.”
“...?”
“Check for yourself.”