Chapter 7
As he talked on like that for a long while, Baek Jin slowly raised his head. Seo Young-woo was conscious again and again not to let his expression twist as he met his eyes. Baek Jin was not at the level of having lost a little weight. His completely sunken cheeks and the wounds all over his hands visible above the sleeves of his top showed traces of severe torture. Unlike before, when he had given off killing intent, his empty eyes held nothing.
“It must have hurt.”
When he pointed lightly at his hand with his chin, Baek Jin’s eyes slowly went down and examined the backs of his own hands, covered in bruises.
“Can you stand up? I want to check your state.”
Whether because of the interrogations and torture that had continued for days, or because he had given up everything, Baek Jin thought for a moment, then raised his body.
There seemed to be no big problem with moving, and Baek Jin got down from the bed alone without help. Since he was not short, his body with no flesh on it looked even thinner.
“Let us treat what is injured first. It may take a little time, but my guiding works on you, Mr. Baek Jin.” At the word guiding, a strange light turned in Baek Jin’s eyes. Usually, they said, they had stopped his rampages with sedatives.
Seeing Baek Jin react, Young-woo raised the corners of his mouth slightly. He maintained a smiling expression, as if to show he was not a dangerous person.
“Standing is no problem. I will try only contact guiding.”
At those words, Baek Jin slowly nodded his head. Seo Young-woo, who pulled the chair back so he could get back on the bed, chose waiting over urging. Proper guiding was only possible after they recognized each other as safe. But at the situation that followed, the expression of Seo Young-woo, who had been maintaining a smiling face, gradually hardened.
Baek Jin knelt in front of Seo Young-woo and bowed his waist completely. At the act of rubbing his lips on top of his dress shoes and slowly kissing his way up from his shins to his knees, Young-woo was frozen just as he was.
Baek Jin, who had scanned up from below, raised his waist, rested his cheek between Young-woo’s thighs, and in that state raised his eyes to meet his gaze.
“……What are you doing right now?”
Seo Young-woo’s expression, which had maintained calm, twisted completely. At his voice, lowered at once, the atmosphere changed. But Baek Jin, at Seo Young-woo who had said he would guide him and yet did nothing, rather narrowed his brow.
“So, this is right now……”
Seeing Seo Young-woo clearly flustered, Baek Jin, as if remembering something, went ah, and opened his mouth again.
“I will receive it gratefully.”
At the unexpected situation, Seo Young-woo’s head rang as if he had been hit hard in the back of the head.
***
Re: Field Deployment of Esper Baek Jin
Back at his office, writing a report, Seo Young-woo rubbed his face roughly with both hands.
“I am going crazy…….”
Baek Jin, kneeling and waiting for guiding, would not leave his head.
The standards for guiding differed a little from country to country. But contact guiding was literally contact, and belonged to the lightest skinship among guiding. For example, holding hands, or gradually widening the area of contact depending on intimacy. This was an example given even in the International Guiding Standards Act.
However, the guiding Baek Jin had in mind seemed to be completely different from the general standard. Even Seo Young-woo, who every day faced corpses and touched espers no different from corpses while guiding them, felt the emotion called shock with his whole body for the first time in a long while. What kind of life on earth had Baek Jin lived……
It was not only Seo Young-woo who was shocked. Park Jin-wook, who had been watching the two people from outside and writing a log, also could not open his mouth for a while from the shock.
‘If I did something wrong, please tell me.’
Baek Jin asked in a slow voice. He did not even recognize what the problem was. Without needing to ask on purpose, it was clear he had been receiving guiding mixed with sexual abuse.
Just then, an alarm rang on his watch. Seo Young-woo, saying he had forgotten an urgent matter, personally raised Baek Jin up, sat him on the bed, and for now left the research room.
Even after the interrogation ended, for the time being there would be surveillance by the security bureau, but the thought that he could appropriately rehabilitate him and let him adapt to Korean society collapsed nicely.
“What on earth do I have to teach him first…….”
A few years ago, when the youngest awakened at fourteen appeared, Korea lowered the age for awakened education. They added to the curriculum so that from entering elementary school, children learned about awakened and abilities right away, and among the various educations to prevent crimes that could occur during guiding, they carried out sex education especially thoroughly.
After that, the awareness grew strong that making sexual demands in the name of guiding was also clearly a sex crime.
This was the most basic of basics, a fact even an elementary school student knew.
That is, it also meant Baek Jin currently knew less than a ten-year-old elementary school student.
“The variants do not do anything but not kill dirty bastards.”
He pressed his eyes closed and tried to take some stability, but in the end sighs burst out in succession. Even if he really had come here to play the spy, as a human being his life would have been miserable his whole life. Putting someone like that here too, and into the field position of AXIS, which fought at the very front, could not be called the right thing.
After thinking for a moment, Seo Young-woo pressed backspace repeatedly on the keyboard.
Re: Rehabilitation of Esper Baek Jin
***
After that day, Seo Young-woo headed to the research center on the days Jin-wook was on duty.
If he tried guiding while Baek Jin was awake, another sudden action might come out, so he used the time when Baek Jin fell asleep.
For an ordinary esper, thirty minutes of guiding was more than enough, but for Baek Jin it was endlessly insufficient. Mucous-membrane guiding would make a difference, but Seo Young-woo was in a state where he judged he could not do mucous-membrane guiding on him.
Park Jin-wook agreed on that part, too.
Young-woo, who had bought chicken as a late-night snack, opened the door of the research lab he now visited more often than his own home. At the savory smell of chicken spreading in the room, Jin-wook sprang up.
“Why did you buy another late-night snack like this?”
“My conscience will not let me come empty-handed when I bother you every night. I will go straight in, so open the door for me.”
“All right. Go straight in.”
Park Jin-wook hummed a tune at the fried chicken that had arrived just when he was feeling peckish. Perhaps it had been brought freshly fried, and biting into a steaming hot chicken leg, Park Jin-wook, seeing a light come on, pressed the open button.
When the door opened, Seo Young-woo, as always, took a chair and headed to the side of the bed. Baek Jin always lay in a proper posture and slept like the dead. He had heard he had insomnia symptoms and took a sleeping pill before sleeping.
He pulled the blanket back a little and rolled up the sleeve of his hospital top. It was still a thin arm, but with continuous guiding, the visible external wounds were almost gone.
Suddenly, the ability-blocking bracelet on Baek Jin’s wrist caught his eye. At first it was made to subdue awakened who committed crimes, but it was also used to prevent accidents by espers who could not control their ability after awakening.
Fiddling with the bracelet, Young-woo shook off his stray thoughts and completely overlapped and held Baek Jin’s hand. Holding it completely covered with both hands, as if praying, he attempted guiding. He had grown more skilled than at first, but it was still a difficult guiding.
Time passed like that. Today he had run to three field sites alone and attempted guiding in between, so he felt fatigue, unlike himself. His concentration kept dropping and he kept re-gripping the hand. He was so tired. It would be nice if he could take a sleeping pill, sleep a bit, and get up.
Young-woo, who always filled thirty minutes and then got up, let go of Baek Jin’s hand without filling the last five minutes. It had just passed midnight. The moment he rose from his seat and stretched, he felt a presence.
Seo Young-woo turned his body quickly, but he was knocked straight backward by Baek Jin, who had already pounced on his body. The moment he barely braced himself on the floor with his hands, a sharp piece of glass was aimed at his neck as if to stab it at any moment.
“You do not seem to have any intention of dying.”
If he had, after securing the piece of glass he would have slit his own neck long ago. Young-woo gazed at eyes that still held no emotion.
“A phone.”
“You seem to have someone you want to call.”
“Do not talk nonsense, hand it over.”
“I do not like that your speech is short.”
As soon as the words ended, he felt a stinging pain in his neck.
“You do not think I can kill……”
Before the words could even end, Seo Young-woo twisted his body quickly and struck the wrist holding the glass at once. With a jjaeng- sound, the glass fell to the floor.
“Ouch!”
“Oops. I tried to hit you softly.
The words holding worry sounded to Baek Jin like mockery. As if they had provoked him, more force went into the fist he threw.
Seo Young-woo rolled to the side to avoid him throwing punches straight at him, but subduing him against the attacks that followed right after was no easy task. It was difficult. For days he had barely treated his external wounds, and he did not want to injure him by failing to control his strength.
In the meantime, Baek Jin again gripped a piece of glass in his hand. Bright red blood flowed over his pale skin.
“After I went to the trouble of guiding you…….”
Sighing at Baek Jin, who rushed in not knowing how to give up, Seo Young-woo offered his forearm just as it was. Seeing the glass drive in with a puuk, Baek Jin showed a somewhat flustered look.
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