closed starter for @insanityinflux!
it’s after he’s had a very upsetting, intense phonecall with hyejung that his hands begin to shake. most of the time he never wanted to pick up when he saw hyejung’s name on the screen anyway, but it wasn’t like he had a choice when they had to have a functional co-parenting relationship. she hurls accusations at him as soon as he picks up - and it’s the fact that some of these accusations are true that’s so damaging. but the rest is wild leaps and bounds of fiction that hyejung’s overactive imagination has conjured up, and he knows trying to talk her down - to reassure her that he hasn’t done anything to ‘endanger’ their daughter is a lost cause. it was a difficult balancing act keeping his personal and professional life completely separate, but something he’d managed none the less. he never told anyone his birth name, so nothing he ever involved himself in could come back to hurt mijoo or his baby mama from hell.
nonetheless, it’s evident that teddy is spiraling - the wheels in his mind rapidly turning as he tries to figure out how this information could have leaked. he only had a few friends he still talked to, much less confided in from his old life - and one of those friends happened to be damian. which is how he ends up at his old friend’s door with a drink-holder filled with coffee and a distraught look on his face. the coffee was the least he could do, the most half-assed apology he could manage for the potential hell he was about to put his old friend through.
“can i come in?” he asks as a formality, stepping inside as soon as damian opened the door so he could put the drink carrier down and turn to meet damian’s gaze. “we need to talk. it’s about my past. you know that ... you’re the only one i really talk to, right? i don’t say anything, to anybody else,” he says, his voice already beginning to rise a little in volume and sound strangely wet, like tears were a few seconds away from falling. “i didn’t think you were a fair-weather friend, you know. i really didn’t. so let me cut to the chase: what did you say?”











