"So! You were saying, about me being a housewife?"

He swallows and sighs. "Were you serious? When you said you'd stop being an esper?"

"I meant everything I said."

"You did not mean the part where you'd go to the Sun."

"Did too."

"Why would you mean that part! It's insane!"

Have another salmon slice.

"Well, part of it is because you wouldn't ask me to do that, so if you did... you'd probably have a really good reason? But another part is just that I cannot imagine ever refusing you anything."

"...you should just assume I'm mind-controlled or something if I ask you to fly into the Sun!!!"

"Is there a point in discussing crazy hypotheticals? You understood what I meant, didn't you?"

"...I suppose."

"Do you want me to? Stop being an esper, that is?"

"...I couldn't do that." He tries to imagine Jaeha asking him to stop being an esper and it's like being asked to kill himself. What's the point of Lee Tae-gun if he's not an esper?

"I think I find being an esper a lot less important to who I am than you do, Tae-gun-ah.

"...you know I haven't been fully guided since I manifested when I was seventeen, right?"

...well he hadn't really put it together like that.

"And I keep thinking, that probably fucked me up, right? I don't know who I'd be if I weren't an esper but that's because I don't know who I'd be. I don't care about being an esper that much. ...my father would be thrilled if I stepped down and became his heir, so you wouldn't even need to financially support me or anything."

"Your father?"

"My grandfather is Kang Jaeseok and my father is Kang Jaehyuk."

...oh, Tae-gun knows those names. Everyone in Korea knows those names. Kang Jaeseok is the guy who founded the Samsung chaebol and Kang Jaehyuk is its current chairman and majority shareholder.

Uh.

He smiles a bit. "But I knew I was gay when I was a teenager, and I was not very discreet about it, either. Drove father up the wall. He wanted to set up a marriage for me, and would have if I hadn't become an esper, he had several candidates in mind. And if I come home telling him that I'll be his heir and also that his son-in-law is Lee Tae-gun he might actually die on the spot of an aneurysm."

"I'd prefer not to be your father's cause of death."

"But it would be really funny."

...well, Tae-gun confesses he can't feel very sorry if some homophobic magnate dies because he finds out his son is dating a man. Not in anything more than an abstract way.

"That makes it sound like being gay was pretty important to you?"

"Well... yeah. It was formative. I'd never be the heir Kang Jaehyuk wanted me to be."

"So when you said at the meetup you didn't think you'd be that good a fit for the LGBTQ group...?"

"Well, there's not really much way to bond with other people about it, is there? Most people aren't from the kind of family that will try to arrange marriages for them so there's not much to bond over, there. And despite everything I was never in danger, even when rumours were going around I was still Kang Jaeha from Samsung, some people were assholish and homophobic but never in the kinds of way Ha Si-yeon talked about."