For a moment, silence filled the ambulance.
Yoon Palsik, pale enough to look ready to faint, suddenly shot to his feet.
“G-Gyujin’s awake!”
He bellowed it as if delivering a speech, making an enormous fuss to draw everyone’s attention. There was almost a sense of mission in his desperate movements.
“The medication! Gyujin’s on painkillers right now! You’re completely out of your mind, Gyujin! Oh, Gyujiiin! Our Gyujin! Ohhh!”
His blatantly fake wailing filled the ambulance.
Apparently deciding that alone was not enough, Yoon Palsik lunged toward the stretcher where Gyujin lay. The paramedic recoiled in alarm and stopped him.
“Sir, you can’t do this in here! Don’t shake the stretcher!”
“Oh, Gyujin! Ohhh! My baby!”
Instead of the stretcher, Yoon Palsik grabbed the paramedic by the collar and shook him back and forth.
The inside of the ambulance descended into chaos in an instant.
Amid all the noise, Gyujin only blinked blankly. His twisted senses slowly began settling back into place.
Only then did Gyujin realize what he had accidentally said.
There was no taking back words that had already left his mouth, so all he could do was sigh.
Covering his eyes with one hand, he tried to force his pounding head to work, but every attempt only made the headache flare.
The medication was making him hazy, yet pain still throbbed from different parts of his body, causing his thoughts to keep grinding out of alignment.
It was not unbearable, but neither could he call it fine. His side felt hot.
His whole body ached far too much for someone who had only been grazed by one bullet.
Gyujin turned his head toward Kwon Dajung.
Dajung sat close enough that Gyujin could reach him with one hand. He showed no particular reaction to the commotion around them.
With an unreadable expression, he simply stared at Gyujin.
Is he thinking about what I just said?
Judging by how violently Yoon Palsik had reacted, there was no way Kwon Dajung had failed to hear it.
Gyujin had regained consciousness and immediately asked whether the baby was okay.
No matter how anyone looked at it, that was strange.
His thoughts tangled like thread as he tried to decide what to say first.
There’s a baby. Yours and mine.
I wanted to have it.
Would saying something like that now even mean anything?
Leaving the countless emotions pooled at the tip of his tongue unspoken, Gyujin silently held out his hand.
Right now, he simply wanted Kwon Dajung to hold on to him.
Just as Gyujin wanted, Dajung interlaced their fingers tightly.
Only when their warmth met did relief finally wash through him.
Perhaps Dajung felt the same, because with tears brimming in his eyes, he pressed his lips against the back of Gyujin’s hand.
“Gyujin, you can’t ever leave me alone.”
The tears pooled at the corners of Kwon Dajung’s eyes spilled silently down his face.
“So don’t get sick. Don’t get hurt. Don’t close your eyes and leave me behind…”
Tears kept pouring from him like a broken doll.
Kwon Dajung’s lips trembled.
“I’ll be good. I’ll do anything. Please don’t leave me all alone…”
The love and pleading tangled through his incoherent words made something inside Gyujin crumble helplessly.
His lips felt reluctant to move, but he forced them open.
“How could I… ever leave you alone?”
Gyujin whispered gently in a voice gone completely hoarse.
That only made Kwon Dajung cry harder.
Looking at him like this, no matter how much he tried to act like an adult, Kwon Dajung was still young and fragile.
The way he blindly begged for affection, the desperate hunger to be loved—none of it had changed from when Gyujin first met him.
And that was why Gyujin could never stop reaching out to him.
“You don’t have to do anything. I’ll keep liking you anyway. So don’t worry, Dajung.”
If Gyujin had been capable of pushing him away, this relationship would never have begun in the first place.
He had never told anyone, but there had really been only one reason Gyujin wanted to have the baby.
Because it was Kwon Dajung’s child.
He had wanted to have the baby simply because it was Dajung’s.
That was how much Gyujin loved Kwon Dajung.
***
Yoon Palsik’s heavy body was shoved helplessly into the wall.
The arm that struck the corner of the vending machine buzzed with pain. Swallowing a groan, he raised his guard as he watched Kwon Dajung approach him threateningly.
“W-we can talk! Let’s talk! We can settle this with words, Kwon Dajung!”
“That depends on you, Director. I really want to keep this verbal too.”
Kwon Dajung walked toward him with his hands in his pockets.
He was, without exaggeration, more terrifying than an S-rank boss monster.
“I-I have no idea what you’re, uh, talking about…”
“Is the baby okay?”
Kwon Dajung tilted his head and smiled.
“Yoon Gyujin definitely said that in the ambulance. He asked if the baby was okay. That was the very first thing he asked. I heard it. You heard it. The paramedic there heard it too. He definitely said it. ‘Is the baby okay?’ That’s what he asked. He asked whether the baby was okay.”
He cornered Yoon Palsik against the wall and planted one hand beside him.
Yoon Palsik’s face went white.
“In that situation, instead of asking whether he himself was okay, why would he suddenly bring up a baby? It’s not like he’s carrying one in his stomach. It’s not like he’s pregnant. So why would he suddenly ask that?”
BANG!
Kwon Dajung slammed his hand into the wall, grinding out each word.
“Tell me the truth. You two went to the hospital together. You definitely know, don’t you? Whatever Yoon Gyujin is hiding from me.”
Yoon Palsik desperately shook his head.
He was just about to insist that he had no idea what Dajung meant when Kwon Dajung drove the final nail in.
“Yoon Gyujin is pregnant, isn’t he?”
“Ha… hahaha, Esper Dajung, you don’t seem to understand… Gyujin is a man, so pregnaaaancy… isn’t physically something he can…”
“Oh. I forgot to mention this. This is really the last time I’m asking with words.”
The vending machine crumpled with a crunch.
With a clattering crash, drinks spilled through the crushed openings.
Kwon Dajung smiled brightly.
“Tell me the truth before I crush something else. Is Yoon Gyujin pregnant?”
The corners of Yoon Palsik’s eyes trembled.
One wrong move here, and the next thing getting crushed might not be the vending machine.
Tears gathering in his eyes, Yoon Palsik nodded.
“G-Gyujin…! Because of a side effect of guiding dependency syndrome, there was this incredibly, incredibly tiny chance that a baby could… form inside him…”
His voice dwindled away as he mumbled the end.
Cold sweat poured down him like rain.
Who could have imagined that he would be the one confessing the truth Yoon Gyujin had fought so hard to hide?
But this was self-defense.
He had to stay alive first.
No, come to think of it, Yoon Gyujin had technically confessed first.
He had openly said something about a baby right in front of Kwon Dajung. There was no way that sharp-eyed lunatic would simply let that pass.
“Who’s the father?”
Kwon Dajung tilted his head.
Before that lunatic could get some bizarre misunderstanding into his head, Yoon Palsik hurriedly explained.
“Obviously you! Who the hell else would Gyujin…! No, more importantly, even that tiny probability only applies when the compatibility rate is over ninety percent and, what was it again? When someone has repeated relations with the same Esper over a long period of time! So obviously it could only be you, you idiot!”
Whatever else might be true, Yoon Gyujin had only ever had Kwon Dajung.
The moment Gyujin had been told he was pregnant, he had named Kwon Dajung as the father without a shred of doubt.
And now this bastard was doubting Yoon Gyujin?
That was unacceptable.
“You can’t fucking do that to Gyujin! The whole reason he tried to hide it in the first place was because he said he didn’t want to tie you down!”
Yoon Palsik shouted, panting with anger.
The entire time Gyujin had been suffering over this problem, his concern had not been for himself.
It had been for Kwon Dajung.
So Kwon Dajung, at least, needed to stand completely on Gyujin’s side.
“It’s yours and Gyujin’s baby. The two of you made it and the two of you had it—no, not had it yet, but anyway, it’s your child!”
Even after hearing all of that, Kwon Dajung showed no reaction for a long while.
The situation being completely unreal was one thing.
But more than that, he remembered a conversation he had once had with Gyujin.
This is really just hypothetical. Completely hypothetical. If I had a baby, what do you think you’d do?
When Dajung had asked whether he had guiding dependency syndrome, Yoon Gyujin had suddenly asked him that out of nowhere.
Only after replaying the conversation that followed did Kwon Dajung curse under his breath.
“Fuuuck…”
Yoon Gyujin had been trying to confess back then.
He had clearly been trying to say that he was carrying a baby, and that the baby was Dajung’s.
And what had Dajung done?
He had gone on about how he would kill the fucking kid with his own hands, Gyujin’s child or not.
From Yoon Gyujin’s point of view, of course he would have swallowed the words he had been about to say.
It was so absurd, so ridiculous, that Dajung could only laugh.
“He should’ve told me it was my baby first!”
Yoon Gyujin was a man.
Yoon Gyujin could not have children.
So naturally, Dajung had assumed that the baby Gyujin was talking about must have been one conceived with some other woman.
But Yoon Gyujin himself was pregnant.
He was carrying Dajung’s baby inside him.
Not someone else.
Not anybody else.
Inside Yoon Gyujin’s body, a fragment of Kwon Dajung had taken root.