Fondness
Even after the door of the examination room had closed behind her, Seo Ha-rin stood frozen for a long while, unable to take a single step.
The moment the hand she'd been holding dropped away, her palm went hollow, cold enough to sting. The room where she'd been sitting across from him mere seconds ago suddenly felt impossibly far away, as if a single door had divided them into two different worlds.
But she couldn't exactly reopen the door and claim she'd left something unsaid, so Seo Ha-rin pulled her hat down a little deeper and headed for the emergency stairs instead of the elevator.
Only after descending a couple of floors and confirming she was alone did she lean her back against the wall. Until she'd entered the hospital, she'd been on constant edge—what if someone recognized her face, what if she got caught slipping in and out of a psychiatry clinic—but now even those worries felt strangely distant.
I should have stayed a little longer.
It was an unfamiliar regret that raised its head first.
"...This is so weird."
From the moment he'd first opened the door, she'd thought he was a well-groomed, pleasant-looking man. If she were being technical, he was objectively handsome—but back then, that had been nothing more than a surface-level impression.
Now was different.
Pressing her lips together, Seo Ha-rin pulled her phone from her pocket. She found the number she'd saved just minutes ago, opened the message window, and started typing.
After pressing send, her hand paused as she was lowering the phone.
That calm, steady voice. Those gentle eyes. And above all, the warmth of that big hand of his.
It was a kind of ease she had never once felt before.
As long as she focused on the heat coming from his hand and his voice right in front of her, the terrible thoughts that filled her head went strangely quiet. The pressure that squeezed her chest with every breath loosened bit by bit, and she was able to set down—for a moment, at least—the compulsion to save everyone, and the constant vigilance of wondering what would happen if she made another bad call.
For that moment alone, it was okay to do nothing at all.
She wondered if she'd had a single hour like that in the past year.
This wasn't her first time seeing a psychiatrist. After that massacre, when the insomnia and nightmares had become unbearable, she'd gone through treatment a few times at the urging of the Association and the people around her. Her body would lock up at the slightest noise in the field, and her Quirk had grown unstable—she knew perfectly well on her own that this wasn't normal.
When doctors asked about the incident, she'd recited the situation like a machine.
She'd fallen victim to the enemy's illusion Quirk. There had been a friendly-fire misidentification on scene. Civilian casualties had resulted.
It was the same thing she'd repeated countless times during the official investigation.
That much, she could do.
The problem was what came after.
For nearly a month after the incident, Seo Ha-rin had watched the footage of that day like a madwoman. Pausing, rewinding, playing it again—checking over and over what she'd been looking at in which moment, where her judgment had come apart, whether being a few seconds faster or slower would have changed the outcome.
Every time she watched it, the blood-soaked sentence echoed in her skull.
I killed them.
I was wrong.
It was my judgment.
And yet, not once had she ever properly admitted the truth she carried as her own guilt aloud with her own mouth.
Every day her mind drove her to the breaking point, but the words I misread it, I misjudged, and innocent people died never left her lips. She buried them deep.
The court had declared her not guilty. Everyone around her kept insisting it wasn't her fault.
She couldn't bring herself to believe those words, and yet at the same time she kept hiding behind them. The moment she admitted everything out loud, she felt the last excuse that had barely been shielding her would vanish entirely.
That had terrified her too much.
So she buried it in the deepest part of herself and started pretending to be fine.
And then, after a long absence from psychiatry, she had come back this time of her own will. She knew full well that she wasn't actually fine, even as she played the part in front of her teammates and the public.
She had definitely planned to mention only mild symptoms and leave.
She hadn't intended to talk about the incident at all.
But at some point, the part of her that had been calculating how much to reveal had gone hazy, and when she came to, she was reliving the memory she hated most, dragging the shame she most wanted to hide out into the open with her own mouth.
Everything after that was a blur.
It had happened only minutes ago, yet she couldn't clearly recall what she'd said first, or at what point her breathing turned ragged.
One thing, though, she remembered with perfect clarity.
When she was so terrified she could barely breathe, her vision narrowing to a tunnel, it was that man who reached for her hand first.
Holding onto his hand, somehow, gave her courage.
No.
More than courage—she found she wanted to try being honest to the end, this once.
So she stopped hiding.
For the first time, she laid out everything she'd kept concealed from others, and from herself.
He didn't deny what she'd said.
He didn't tell her it hadn't been a mistake, didn't offer pretty comfort like you were cleared, so forget it all.
Instead, he said it plainly.
Yes—it had been her mistake.
The moment she heard those words, her chest lurched and dropped—and what followed was nothing like the condemnation she'd braced for.
Remembering a mistake, he said, was a different thing from tearing yourself apart over it for the rest of your life. You could remember what you did wrong and do better next time—without any need to keep punishing yourself for that day.
Hearing that, for the first time, the things that had been tangled up inside her for the past year seemed to loosen, just a little. The idea that she could admit her fault and still go on living. That she could grow a little lighter without forgetting that day. That, maybe, both of those things could be true at once—it was the first time the thought had ever occurred to her.
It had been a single appointment.
Remembering how much she'd confided in front of a man she'd just met, she still half couldn't believe it. Words she'd never been able to get out—not to doctors, not to her closest teammates, not even to herself—had all come pouring out.
And she didn't regret it. If anything, her heart felt so light it was almost empty.
Like a great stone that had been crushing her chest had finally worked itself free.
Salvation.
It felt like a grandiose word.
But if she had to pick the single word closest to what she felt right now, that was it.
And strangely, when she thought of that feeling, what surfaced first wasn't anything he'd said—it was the warmth that had wrapped around her palm.
There was nothing inherently special about hand-holding in her life. Since becoming a hero, she'd reached out to countless people first: extending a hand to someone slumped on the ground and telling them to get up, taking a terrified, frozen stranger by the hand and saying it's okay now, follow me.
She had always been the one offering her hand.
Natural enough—she was a hero.
But she couldn't recall a single memory of someone extending a hand toward her.
It wasn't the hand she reached out to pull someone else up. This time, it was a hand she was allowed to hold. It seemed to say it was okay if she couldn't hold on for long. It seemed to tell her she didn't have to carry it all alone.
Which was probably why she hadn't wanted to let go.
At first she was just holding his hand; at some point she was touching his wrist; and in the end she'd wrapped both arms around his. If she stayed just a little closer, it felt like the warmth—and that new ease she'd felt—would last that much longer.
Even now, in this moment, it was the same.
Seo Ha-rin squeezed her empty hand into a fist, then slowly opened it again.
The arms and palms that had been wrapped around him moments ago ached with emptiness.
Next time too.
If we meet again.
Just once more.
Sent.
"..."
The moment she checked her own message on the screen, Seo Ha-rin's eyes went as wide as a rabbit's.
What. Wait. Am I insane? What on earth did I just send?
Horrified, she jabbed her thumb toward the screen to delete it—
—but in that split second, the little 1 beside the message vanished.
"Ah...!"
Seo Ha-rin froze solid, unable even to draw a breath.
Will you hold my hand at my next appointment too?
Reading it again, it was far more brazen than she'd thought.
She had asked him to hold her hand.
It didn't just look that way—she had flat-out written it and sent it.
Heat shot up from the back of her neck to the tips of her ears.
Desperate to salvage the situation, she hurriedly pulled up the keypad again—but what surfaced in her head was something else entirely.
"Now that I see you in person, you're really beautiful."
The remark he'd tossed out out of nowhere, before the appointment had even begun.
He'd gotten so flustered by his own words that he'd scrambled to walk it back, begging her to pretend she hadn't heard since it wasn't related to the session—that oddly clumsy, almost cute recovery of his replayed in her mind right along with it.
Seo Ha-rin bit her lip hard.
Why does that have to pop into my head right now of all times?
But once it had surfaced, she found she didn't want to just let it go. Her fingers stopped more times than she could count, yet in the end she couldn't bring herself to change that first sentence much at all.
Only after sending it did all the messages stacked above it come flooding into view at once.
"..."
Didn't this read a certain way?
I'll think about your words even after I go home.
I want skinship again next time.
You calling me pretty made my heart race.
It was the perfect after-date text—messaging someone first after a wonderful blind date to say how much fun she'd had, promising a next meeting, and fishing with you do like me too, right?
Her face, already burning, now felt like it might actually catch fire.
"I really must be out of my mind..."
Seo Ha-rin lightly tapped her flushed forehead against the cool phone screen.
It did nothing to cool her down.
She couldn't even remember the last time she'd felt this fluttering, tingling sensation.
Ever since she'd debuted as a hero at such a young age, her life had lived under the public's gaze. A single mistake in the field could end someone's life; in front of cameras, the smallest shift in her expression became headline material; even walking down an ordinary street, scanning for anyone who might recognize her was simply daily routine.
Especially since that incident a year ago.
And yet here she was, three text messages glowing on her phone, her face going hot over how he might take them, her mood inexplicably lifting at nothing more than the memory of a compliment.
It was strange to learn that such feelings still lived inside her—but it wasn't unpleasant.
Did I really... look pretty to him?
Seo Ha-rin stared down at her reflection in the darkened screen.
Days of sleeplessness had left faint shadows under her eyes, and the corners where she'd cried just moments ago were still red and swollen. She was barely wearing any makeup, and her hair was a mess from having her hat pressed down so long.
And that man had looked at all of this and called her beautiful.
Compliments about her looks weren't a novel experience. She'd heard them to the point of exhaustion—from comment sections under interview articles, from online communities, from fans who recognized her on the street.
But only today's single remark lingered, strangely.
Her heart beat a little faster.
It wasn't like the panic—no suffocating breath, no trembling fingertips. Instead, something light and ticklish stirred inside her chest, an emotion she wasn't used to but didn't dislike, rising slowly.
She didn't need to agonize over what it was.
...So this is fondness.
The moment she put the word to it herself, her face grew hot all over again.
It wasn't love, or anything like that. She wasn't so simple that she'd fall for a man she'd had one real conversation with today.
Still, she wanted to see him again.
Next week suddenly felt worth waiting for.
And next time, she wanted to show up looking a little more put together than she had today.
As she checked her reflection in the dead screen one more time, she fiddled needlessly with the brim of her hat.
"...Next time, I should come looking a bit prettier."
Even after sending off the last scheduled patient, there was still plenty of time before closing.
A hospital that had only recently opened was hardly going to be booked solid, and until now, whenever a patientless stretch appeared, passing the time with books or papers had been second nature. Over the past ten years, not once had hours spent that way ever felt boring.
The problem was that the ten-year-long suggestion was over now.
Out of sheer habit, I picked up the paper spread across my desk, couldn't manage more than a few lines, and closed it again.
It wasn't that the material was difficult, or that the words wouldn't read.
It was just... boring.
"...Wow."
Only now was it sinking in that the ten-year suggestion had actually ended.
I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling for a while, then picked up the phone sitting at the edge of my desk.
"..."
Rereading them, they were still pretty brazen.
I'll keep thinking about what you told me.
Hold my hand again next time.
And the compliment made her happy.
As messages between a patient and her doctor, they were a little uncomfortable; as messages received after a first date, they were startlingly natural.
And the fact that it had come to this was, in the end, my fault.
I had rushed to use my Quirk from the very first session, and dredging up sensitive memories that fast had thrown my patient into a panic.
I had managed to recover.
Judged purely by the outcome of the treatment, it hadn't gone badly.
But that didn't mean the process itself had been acceptable.
Above all, I had invoked my Quirk without the patient's consent, hiding behind the convenient justification that it was "for therapeutic purposes." That alone put me far, far past the line.
And no one knew better than I did just how dangerous my Quirk was.
What I cast was, at the end of the day, a powerful suggestion. I could never know with certainty how far it reached into a person's heart, or which emotions and sensations it had bound together—I could only infer from their reactions and their words.
This time, I'd simply been lucky that the result was good. Going forward, whenever I used my Quirk in treatment, I resolved to be far more careful than I had been today.
Still, what embarrassed me even more than all that was what came next.
When Seo Ha-rin had gripped my hand, touched my wrist, and finally thrown her arms around me—I hadn't pulled away. I'd told her to focus on my hand and my voice, and kept linking her body heat to a sense of ease, so from her perspective, physical contact with me had become fused with the feeling of safety itself.
Whether that comfort had truly arisen from her own recovery, or from the suggestion I'd planted, I couldn't even tell anymore.
And yet I'd left it exactly as it was.
Redirecting the suggestion wouldn't have been hard. I could just as easily have made her feel that same calm even when we were apart, or loosened the connection binding contact to security.
But I hadn't.
Because I didn't dislike it.
No.
To be honest—it felt good.
Claiming I felt nothing when a beautiful woman had wrapped herself around my arm and refused to let go would have been a lie.
"..."
Honestly, if they revoked my license over this, I'd have no defense.
I dragged a palm down my face.
"Haah..."
I needed to clear my head.
I rose from my chair, grabbed my bag, and stepped out of the director's office.
The employee seated at the front desk looked up from her monitor.
"I'm going to close up a little early today."
Her eyes widened slightly.
"...You're heading home already?"
"Yes. I'm planning an early finish today."
Since opening day, I'd been camped in my office reading books and papers even during empty appointment slots, and more than once I'd stayed long after the staff had gone home. Coming from that guy, announcing an early departure apparently made it look like I'd come down with something. I pretended not to notice her stare and headed for the entrance.
"I'm off, then."
"Oh—yes, sir. Get home safe."
With a light wave, I stepped out of the hospital.