The Accident
“Look at me.”
Seo Ha-rin's gaze, which had been fixed somewhere in the empty air, moved very slowly, but even after it finally made it to my face, her condition showed little sign of improving. The color that had drained from her already pale complexion was fading faster by the second, and the two hands clasped over her knees were trembling so violently that her knuckles had gone white.
I had asked why she was so afraid to use her ability, and after stripping away her thin, defensive cover story with my Quirk, I had finally dragged out the terrible memory buried at the very bottom — the memory that she had killed people.
Even if this was a conversation that had to come out eventually, we had gone from the first session straight to the deepest part of her, far too quickly.
Using a Quirk to make words easier to pull out, and making the memories that came out bearable again, were two entirely different problems.
I stopped simply watching and leaned forward, folding my hands over the ones she was gripping so tightly.
A faint tremor came through her cold, chilled palms directly into mine.
Her eyes wavered once at the sudden contact, but she didn't pull her hands away.
“Seo Ha-rin, you can feel my hand, can't you?”
Her gaze wandered through the empty air, drifted slowly downward, passed over our joined hands, and then crawled laboriously back up to my eyes.
My Quirk had been running since earlier, but now I needed to narrow its focus a little more.
“For now, focus only on my hand and my voice. You don't need to pay attention to anything else.”
This was a safe clinic. The man in front of her was not an enemy. There was no one who needed saving this very moment.
Reality she already knew in her head but couldn't accept, trapped as she was by fear — I made her reclaim it piece by piece through the sensation at her fingertips and the sound of my voice.
“Just follow the feeling of my hand touching yours. All you have to do is notice whether it's warm or cold.”
The fingers trembling inside my hand moved, ever so slightly.
“This is not the scene from that day. There's no one you need to save or fight right now, and there's no need to worry about misjudging anything. While you're holding my hand, you don't have to decide anything at all — so just hold onto this feeling, don't let go of it, and breathe slowly.”
For the first few tries, Ha-rin choked and couldn't draw a proper breath at all.
But I didn't rush her pace. I simply kept my hands wrapped around hers and waited, pressing my thumb lightly against the back of her hand now and then to re-anchor the sensation, so she wouldn't lose the feeling she was clinging to at her fingertips.
“You're doing well. Just keep feeling my hand.”
Her breathing, which had been breaking off in short gasps to match the tempo of my voice, gradually began to lengthen.
Her hunched shoulders slowly lowered, the rigidity in her neck eased little by little, and strength returned, bit by bit, to fingers that had been stiff as a dead woman's for what felt like an eternity.
Then, at some point, it was her hand that closed around mine this time — hard.
It was different from the desperate clutching of someone paralyzed by terror, grabbing whatever she could reach. Her fingers curled in slowly and deeply, as if, having confirmed that my hand was really there, she meant not to lose the feel of it. Feeling that change, I didn't pull away — I simply waited a little longer.
“Are you feeling a bit better now?”
Still holding my hand, Seo Ha-rin took several more deep breaths before she slowly nodded.
“……Yes. A lot.”
“Then I think you could let go of my hand now.”
Ha-rin followed my gaze and looked down.
She stared at our joined hands for a long moment — and instead of loosening her fingers, she clasped them even more tightly.
“……Can't I hold on a little longer?”
“Are you still anxious?”
“It's not that…… it's just, holding on makes me feel safe.”
From the very first moment I'd pulled her back to reality, I had anchored the suggestion of safety to the feel and warmth of my hand — so apparently the two had become linked somewhere along the way. Right now it was working as a kind of stability that let her keep talking, so there was no particular reason to cut it loose.
“Very well.”
Only after hearing that did a faint slackening come into her face.
“Can we…… keep going with what we were talking about?”
“You don't have to tell me everything today.”
“……I know. But if I don't do it now, I feel like I'll dodge it again.”
I studied her face for a moment, then nodded.
“Take your time.”
Seo Ha-rin bit her lip, as if deciding where to begin.
Her hand was still holding mine, and her thumb was moving absently across the back of it, little by little.
“……It was exactly one year ago. I'd been a pro for about three years.”
It began, she said, when the hideout of a wanted villain was discovered in the middle of the city.
The man was a Mental-Type Quirk user, though not on the level of rewriting memories or conjuring perfect hallucinations — his ability scrambled perception itself, making faces momentarily overlap, sending sounds in the wrong directions, warping how movement registered.
“I knew something was off from the start. That he was a mental-type too…… But at the time, the thought that I needed to end the situation fast was bigger than any doubt about what I was seeing.”
Then one figure seemed to be charging straight at her with something in hand, and Ha-rin judged it an armed henchman of the villain and blasted him away with her psychokinesis. Several similar misreadings followed, and by the time the villain was subdued and the cognitive distortion lifted, the number of civilians she had attacked came to four.
“One died on the spot…… two were taken to the hospital but didn't make it. One survived.”
Her grip tightened as she finished, but this time her breathing held.
Instead, she squeezed my hand once more, moved her fingers as if checking its warmth, and let out a long, slow exhale.
“At first, I thought I was the victim too…… The police said so, and the Association said it was essentially an accident caused by the other man's Quirk. The trial ended the same way.”
“You were acquitted, then.”
“……Yes. Since it happened while I was under cognitive distortion, the court ruled I bore no responsibility.”
There was nothing strange about the verdict itself.
I knew better than anyone how catastrophically a Mental-Type Quirk could warp human judgment. Even if that villain hadn't been able to twist what his targets believed or concluded the way I could, a few seconds of clouded judgment in the middle of combat would have been more than enough to kill several people.
“……But I watched the footage.”
She said she'd watched the footage recovered during the investigation — CCTV, police bodycams, dashcams from nearby cars — over and over. At first it was for the inquiry, but later she kept replaying the same moments to find exactly where her judgment had gone wrong.
“What did you think after watching it?”
“That it was my mistake.”
There was no hesitation in her answer.
“The first man wasn't running toward me. He was fleeing toward the exit, and what was in his hand wasn't a weapon — it was a phone. And there were a few seconds where I could have stopped…… I knew he was a mental-type, so that's when I should have doubted my own eyes.”
“And you couldn't.”
“No.”
Seo Ha-rin looked down at our joined hands and gave a bitter smile.
“I thought I could handle it. By then I figured I had plenty of field experience, and I believed that ending things quickly was how I saved the most people.”
And in truth, that same judgment had probably saved a great many lives.
But three years of experience was enough to trust her own strength — not nearly enough to handle a situation where she'd needed to doubt her own senses.
“How did you take the verdict?”
This time the answer didn't come right away. Seo Ha-rin stared down at my hand for a while, then slowly curled her fingers deeper around it.
“I understand why the law found me not guilty. I was under the influence of a Mental-Type Quirk, and I couldn't reasonably have judged that those people were civilians.”
Her lips trembled faintly.
“But being not guilty doesn't mean I did nothing wrong.”
Her grip tightened again.
“People died. Three of them. And I killed them.”
I didn't interrupt.
“Just because the judge said I couldn't be held responsible doesn't mean they come back to life, and it doesn't erase the fact that I misjudged…… But everyone kept telling me it wasn't my fault…… that it couldn't be helped, because I was attacked by a mental-type villain……”
“Did hearing that make you feel better?”
Seo Ha-rin shook her head slowly.
“It hurt more, honestly. Everyone kept insisting I'd done nothing wrong…… and since I was acquitted, it felt like I was supposed to be okay now.”
The tears she had been holding back spilled down her cheeks.
“I'm not okay at all……”
I watched her for a moment before speaking.
“……I'm not going to tell you that you made no mistake, Seo Ha-rin.”
The hand rising to wipe her tears stopped midair.
“……What?”
“If what you've described is accurate, then yes — there was room for better judgment. You could have doubted the information in front of you one more time. You could have chosen not to use that level of output, that first strike, against someone whose allegiance wasn't certain.”
“……You're right.”
Her voice shook.
“That's what I've been trying to say, all this time.”
“Yes. You made a mistake.”
The tears fell again, but this time something was different. I applied the gentlest pressure to our joined hands and used my Quirk.
“You can still feel my hand, can't you?”
Seo Ha-rin gave a small nod.
“Just stay like this. Listen while feeling only the warmth against your palm and the sound of my voice.”
Her fingers curled around my hand once more.
“It's true that Seo Ha-rin made a mistake. But you didn't attack them knowing they were civilians, and you didn't strike believing their lives meant nothing.”
“I still killed them.”
“Yes. And I'm not trying to erase that fact.”
I pressed my thumb slowly, once, against the back of her hand.
“You're allowed to regret it. You can remember those people, and you can be careful so it never happens again.”
I could feel the tension draining out of her hand, little by little.
“But remembering is not the same as sentencing yourself to punishment forever.”
“That I'm…… punishing myself?”
“Does Seo Ha-rin have to be miserable for it to count as being sorry to them?”
The answer took a long time.
“……I don't know.”
It was the first time her voice lost its certainty.
“It just feels shameless, living like nothing happened. Eating well, sleeping well, even enjoying it when people like me…… If I live like that, what do they become?”
For Seo Ha-rin, guilt was less a form of reflection than a form of punishment. Only by suffering, endlessly, could she prove she hadn't forgotten the dead — and the moment she felt any ease, it felt like betraying them. So for the past year, she had never once allowed herself to let go, punishing herself over and over.
“Can you feel the warmth in your hand right now?”
“……Yes.”
“It's warm, isn't it?”
Her nod came a beat late.
“Feeling that warmth doesn't erase anything you've just told me. Sleeping well, laughing, feeling a little lighter — none of it means forgetting them.”
I could feel her fingers moving slowly against mine, checking my body heat through her fingertips, and I went on.
“Remember the mistake. Do better next time — that's all it takes. But that memory is not a reason to keep tearing yourself apart for the rest of your life.”
The tears came again.
“It's okay to feel at ease, like you do now.”
Seo Ha-rin looked at me for a long moment, then asked, very quietly:
“……Can I, really?”
“Yes.”
And this time I said it more clearly.
“Yes. Feeling at ease doesn't mean forgetting that day.”
The moment those words landed, the composure she'd barely been holding onto collapsed completely.
Seo Ha-rin tried to wipe away the torrent of tears with her free hand, gave up after a few attempts, and her grip on our joined hands tightened again. At first it was just a matter of clutching mine harder, but when the crying refused to settle, her fingers began to move — slowly, along the back of my hand and up toward my wrist.
As if checking my body heat.
I was the one who'd told her to do that, just a little while ago. She was probably not even conscious of it.
“I…… for the past year…….”
The sentence never made it to the end. I waited, still without pulling my hand away.
Then Seo Ha-rin slowly drew the arm holding my hand toward herself. The fingers resting on my wrist slid up my forearm, and, as if the warmth she'd only felt in her palm until now needed to be confirmed more completely, she wedged my arm between her own and pressed it there, rubbing gently.
At first I thought she was simply trying not to lose hold of my hand. Then her other arm wrapped around too.
Seo Ha-rin hugged my arm to her chest with both of hers and drew her body close, resting her head near my shoulder. Against my forearm pressed a softness I could identify without looking down, and as her body molded against mine, her warmth transferred over an area far wider than my palm had covered.
……This is a bit too close.
Holding a panicking patient's hand to bring her back to reality, confirming whether a sensation was cold or warm — those were standard, thinkable methods.
But right now, the patient was hugging her doctor's arm to her chest and pressing her whole body against it.
No matter how I looked at it, this was not a typical scene in an examination room.
The moment I tried to ease back, Seo Ha-rin noticed, and her arms tightened a little more.
“……Just a little.”
A wet voice, right beside my ear.
“Can't we stay like this just a little…… a little longer?”
Somewhere in the back of my head, medical ethics started clanging loudly again.
This is getting hard to call 'treatment' with a straight face.
And yet, at the same time, I understood exactly why she was doing this. First I'd told her to focus on my hand and voice. Then to feel the warmth where we touched. Then, over and over, my Quirk had steered her toward the thought that feeling comforted was allowed. From Seo Ha-rin's perspective, my body heat itself had become almost inseparably bound to the emotions of this moment.
She hadn't intended to end up hugging my arm and nuzzling it either.
But I was the one who had made her feel this way.
I'm screwed.
Seo Ha-rin, blissfully unaware of whatever was going through my head, didn't let go. If anything, she ran her palm slowly down my forearm, confirming the warmth, and a moment later she was rubbing her cheek against it too, pressing herself in even deeper, little by little.
My head knew, quite clearly, that something about this was wrong.
The problem was that I was painfully, honestly aware of the other fact too: that as a man, I didn't dislike this situation in the slightest.
A long while later, when the crying had finally quieted, a small voice came from near my shoulder.
“……It's strange.”
“What is?”
“When I'm next to you…… no — when I'm holding your hand. And when I hear your voice.”
Seo Ha-rin corrected herself, looking a little embarrassed.
“Even when I think about that day, it's less frightening.”
Of course it is.
“That's not a bad sign, for now.”
“……It isn't?”
“For now, it isn't.”
Still holding my arm, Seo Ha-rin let out a long breath.
“Then I'll stay like this just a little longer.”
“Take your time.”
After a while longer, it was Seo Ha-rin who pulled away first. Only when she lifted her head did she seem to fully register the position she'd been in until seconds ago — and beyond the redness around her eyes from crying, her ears flushed scarlet in an instant.
One of her hands was still resting on my forearm.
Only after discovering that fact too did she snatch it back in a panic.
“……I'm sorry. I'm not usually like this with anyone……”
“When you first came in, you seemed like you wouldn't even let me touch your hand.”
Seo Ha-rin paused for a beat, then laughed quietly in a voice still thick with tears.
“I didn't know I'd be like this either.”
“Neither did I.”
We checked a few more symptoms after that, and she said that even when she brought the same memory to mind, it no longer choked the breath out of her the way it had earlier.
“Don't assume one session has fixed everything. The next time that memory surfaces, try to bring today's words up along with it. Remember the mistake as a mistake — but don't turn it into a reason to torture yourself for the rest of your life.”
“……I'll try.”
Even after saying it, Seo Ha-rin kept glancing sidelong at my hand, and finally spoke up with a slightly sheepish expression.
“……Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Could you hold my hand one more time?”
“……Just until the session ends.”
When I held my hand out, she took it as if she'd been waiting — and this time she didn't stop at wrapping her fingers around mine. She stroked the back of my hand slowly, once, with her thumb. Almost exactly the gesture I'd used on her earlier, to help her confirm the sensation.
This is a problem for me.
Even thinking that, I didn't bother pulling my hand away.
Only after we'd set the date for her next appointment did Seo Ha-rin finally let go, unable to hide her reluctance, and rise from her seat. With her mask back up and her cap pulled low, she looked almost identical to the woman who had first walked in — but her entire presence was different from the person who had entered, scanning the hallway and even the ceiling.
She walked to the door, took hold of the handle, and then didn't leave.
“Doctor……”
“Yes.”
“Could I…… possibly get your number?”
“The clinic's number should be in your appointment confirmation text.”
“Not that one. Yours, Doctor. Your number.”
This time it was me who took a moment too long to respond.
“My…… number?”
“My condition could get bad suddenly like today, and if I call the clinic a staff member might pick up first. Having to explain everything I talked about today to someone else would be…… a lot……”
The real problem was that the man who, barely an hour ago, had been reciting never with a patient in his head had held her hand on day one, had his arm hugged to her chest, and was now about to hand over his personal number.
Still, she's the one who asked.
The moment my thoughts reached that point, I wanted to laugh at myself.
You absolute idiot.
So I gave her the number, adding only that in a genuine emergency she should call 119 or get to an ER before she called me. A short while later, my phone buzzed once.
As I checked the screen, the crescent of her eyes visible above the mask curved slightly.
“Then I'll see you next week.”
She opened the door, then turned back for one more look. After a brief hesitation, she added in a small voice:
“Thank you for today. Really. Especially…… for holding my hand.”
The door closed.
I stared at that door for quite a long time. Then, when it buzzed again, I picked up my phone.
I tapped the notification and opened the conversation.
Almost simultaneously, a new message arrived.
“……”
Just as I was lowering the phone, one more short vibration.
“……”
Out of nowhere, a thought surfaced — one that had flickered through my head before I'd ever met this patient.
……Why not seduce her?
“Goddammit.”
Was my self-restraint really only worth this much?