He'd sent the message himself. Short, no subject line, the kind that didn't require a subject line because the summons was the subject. My office. When you're free. Which was a courtesy phrasing. Ji Hao was not free. Ji Hao was whatever Hyun needed him to be for the next twenty minutes, because that was the quiet understanding that lived underneath their professional arrangement, unspoken and uncontested.
Hyun was on the phone when Ji Hao arrived. He held up one finger, indicating just a moment, and smiled, and the smile was the first unsettling thing. Not because it was false. Because it wasn't. It reached his eyes and everything, warm, the smile of a man genuinely pleased to see you, and it sat completely at odds with the fact that he was clearly ending a conversation that hadn't landed the way the other person had hoped. His voice was light. Cheerful. "No, I understand. I do. I just think you'll find that the window for that particular option has…" Hyun gave a small laugh. "Closed. Yes. Take care of yourself." He hung up and the smile stayed, seamlessly, like it had never been about the call at all. Then, almost to himself, still looking at the phone: "That whole family." He shook his head, letting out a short exhale. "Fuck." He set the phone face-down and looked up at Ji Hao with the expression of a man returning from a mildly interesting tangent. "Sorry. You know how it is. Or…" Hyun tilted his head. "You're about to."
"Sit, sit." He gestured broadly at the chair across from his desk. Then, already turning toward his monitor: "Do you want anything? Water? I have those little…" Hyun rummaged in a desk drawer without looking, and produced a small wrapped candy, which he set on the edge of the desk nearest Ji Hao with the precise placement of a man leaving an offering. "Things. From the front desk. I take them. No one has stopped me yet." He folded his hands. He looked at Ji Hao. The smile didn't change, but something behind it settled and the office was suddenly a different room than it had been ten seconds ago. "Anyway, Karma situation." Hyun said pleasantly, watching Ji Hao's face with the careful attention of someone waiting to see where a reaction might land. The name itself was light in his mouth, amused, but something about him felt fractionally out of sync. Distracted. Not visibly enough that anyone else outside of their circle would have noticed.
"You know what I find interesting?" He didn't wait for an answer. He stood, not abruptly, just fluidly, like the thought had lifted him and drifted toward the window, hands loosely clasped behind his back. He looked out at nothing in particular. "I have worked with a lot of heroes. A lot. And there's always a moment. This…" Hyun made a small, looping gesture with one finger, illustrative of something working in his head. "Moment, where someone very talented does something inexplicable, and every person in the room is watching, and you can see them doing it, and no one says anything because everyone is hoping it will simply resolve itself." He turned. Still smiling. "It never resolves itself."
He came back to the desk. Sat behind it this time. Both hands flat on the surface for a moment before he reached for his mouse. "I made a call this morning," he said, almost conversationally, navigating his desktop with the ease of a man who knows exactly where everything was. "To his sister. I thought—" a soft sound, not quite a laugh "I thought perhaps there was a reasonable person somewhere in that orbit. Someone I could have a productive exchange with." He paused, clicked something. "There was not." Another click. "No. That whole family is a—" he stopped himself, shook his head once, and the laugh came out properly this time, brief and genuine and inexplicably warm "Fucking disaster. An absolute disaster. Across the board. Generational, even. You really have to respect that kind of consistency." Hyun turned one of his monitors toward Ji Hao. "How much do you know about him, Murphy? Truly?"
@notjustblood