Jihyun &. Sujin’s Relationship
@sarxng
Sujin actually meets Jihyun for the first time a year and a half prior to the events of Another Story - two and a half years before the events of the Main Story take place, and a year before Rika’s supposed death. She’s 20 (21, in Korean) and he’s 23 (24). Sujin has just started university and she’s going through a bit of slump, artwise - she’s failed to hand in several assignments, the ones she has handed in haven’t been her best works, and she’s at a serious risk of flunking out. It’s then when she meets him, and their introduction sparks some of Sujin’s muse back to life - she finds that she both wants to paint the pictures he takes, and him himself. He agrees to help her with her efforts, and the two strike up a sort of mentor/mentee relationship.
Thanks to Jihyun’s help and her refound inspiration for painting, Sujin is able to not fail out of school and her marks see a steady increase over time the more time she spends with him. She grows to trust him a great deal over this period - even going so far as to consider him her only real friend, though she never tells him that.
About six months after their initial introduction, however, their meetings begin to grow few and far between. It’s not for a lack of effort on Sujin’s part; she still tries to meet up with him as often as they usually were, but Jihyun is the one either cancelling or rescheduling, and when they do get together it’s hard for her not to notice that he seems weary and tense all the time. After about two months of this, all contact with him comes to a halt - he stops returning her calls and texts, and she never sees him anywhere in passing.
The reason for this, though Sujin doesn’t know it, is that Rika (his fiance, whom Su actually didn’t know about) has grown steadily more and more unstable, and much of Jihyun’s time is now spent trying to help her and talk her down from her ravings of creating the perfect paradise. The point at which contact between Jihyun and Sujin stops is around four months before Rika’s disappearance.
While Sujin is admittedly concerned by Jihyun’s sudden and unexplained disappearance from her life, she resigns herself to the fact that there’s not much that she can do about it, nor would it be her place to do so even if there was something
Eight months pass and Sujin’s life continues in a relatively routine pattern of school and work. Everything seems to be typical and ordinary - until one day she discovers an app on her phone that she doesn’t remember downloading. She opens it up and is immediately contacted by someone who claims to be the app’s developer. They want her to test out their new app (a ‘romance chatting game’) before it’s released to the public. Her curiosity getting the better of her, Sujin agrees, and soon enough is on her way to what the developer called their ‘testing headquarters’.
From this point, things progress as they would in-game from the first day of Another Story’s prologue. up until the game branch on Day 7. There are slight spoilers for what happens during that branch down below incorporated into mine and Via’s headcanons, if you haven’t had the chance to play it yet and would like to not be spoiled, I recommend you stop reading now.
After Sujin meets Rika, the other woman offers her tea before taking a walk out in the gardens that night. After everything that has happened and been revealed since she first arrived, she’s rather wary and reluctant to accept anything from anyone - but fearing the potential repercussions if she refuses (for it’s clear that whatever’s going in is bigger than she’d initially been lead to believe), she accepts and accompanies the other woman outside.
At some point, while they’re deep within the gardens, Rika excuses herself, claiming that she’s needed inside to oversee something, but letting Sujin know that she’s free to roam the gardens as she likes. Now that she’s left alone, V takes the opportunity to go to her, and with his help she escapes from the Mint Eye headquarters.
During their escape, however, Sujin becomes ill and collapses rather suddenly. V takes her to the hospital, where when she wakes up it is revealed that she remembers nothing of the last seven days - her most recent memory, aside from waking in the hospital, is waking up on the day she discovered the app on her phone - but she doesn’t remember finding the app, and it’s strangely been deleted off of her phone as well.
As it turns out, the tea that Rika had given Sujin had been laced with a drug made to induce amnesia of the recipient’s past week. Rika had been fully aware of V’s presence in the garden, and had allowed him to ‘rescue’ Sujin, to show him how easy it would be for her to simply take her again if she so decided. It’s a point that’s well proven.
Because of the new complication surrounding Sujin’s loss of memories of the past seven days, V sees trying to explain things to the RFA as hopeless and far too heavy a thing to burden them with. Instead, he sneaks back into Magenta and steals some of the same drug that Rika gave Sujin, and, under the guise of meeting with the RFA over drinks to explain everything that happened with Sujin, slips it to them so that they’ll forget as well.
Things from this point in time seem to return to the normal they’d been at before Rika attempted to pull Sujin into Mint Eye; Sujin returns university and her job, and the RFA returns to their somewhat doldrum lives after Rika’s death - completely ignorant of anything that’s happened thus far. V continues his surveilance of Rika and her growing band of followers while Rika continues to build Mint Eye up into the large organization that we see it as by the time the Main Story happens.
This goes on for a year and half, with nothing particularly alarming happening - until one day Sujin finds an app she doesn’t remember downloading on her phone. Perturbed by the strange sense of deja vu she feels, she investigates further and it contacted by someone claiming to be trying to find the owner of a lost phone.
The deja vu is joined by an apprehension that tells Sujin that despite how fishy the situation seems, if she doesn’t agree to help, then something very bad could happen irregardless. Lead by this unnameable feeling, she follows this Unknown contact’s directions and finds herself at an apartment with a lock on the door - and once she enters inside, finds herself disconnected from the stranger she’d been speaking with and now connected instead into a chatroom that seems oddly familiar, alongside several faces that summon the same faint sense of recognition.
It’s when V enters the chatroom after being called by the person named 707 that her apprehension reaches an all time high - for he looks suspiciously like the Jihyun that she had known almost four years prior already
important note that i probably should have mentioned earlier - before the events of another story days 1-7, Sujin never knew V as V - only as Jihyun. it’s not until her initial introduction to the RFA that she learns of his pseudonym - which she then conveniently forgets after Rika drugs her.
so anyways back on topic, she finds out that this V is really Jihyun, and the decision is made to accept her into the RFA and prepare for a party to be held in the near future. What is not disclosed, however, is Sujin and V’s prior friendship, nor the previous events that occurred when Sujin was first introduced to the RFA
From this point on, things proceed as they would throughout the events of the main story - i have as of yet to figure out the particulars in what events from each route are included, as i plan on incorporating things into a sort of penultimate route of sorts for v and sujin themselves (unfortunately of course this means i have to disregard days 8-11 of v’s route, as well as the entirety of saeran’s. >_> heckin timeline would be impossible then.
The later events of Seven’s route and his good ending will indeed occur, though - where V goes off the grid and Seven asks Sujin to accompany him to look for Saeran. (this is entirely platonic, however, as the ship focus here is, quite obviously, sujin and v). his after ending, however, will also be ignored.
That leaves us with the Secret Endings! which, admittedly, is the big thing we’ve been building up to this entire time. Spoilers below if you haven’t read them yet (although idk why you would have played through another story before reading the secret endings since…. y’know there’s a lot of spoilers. this entire post is a fucking spoiler lets be real here. Anyways, as I was saying, picking up with Secret 001.
Everything proceeds as it does in-game at first. Sujin and Seven go on to track down and eventually find Saeran and Vanderwood, Saeran ends up calling for back up and lo-and-behold it’s V who shows up, much to everyone’s surprise. They’re taken back to Magenta, Seven, Su and Vanderwood are locked up, etc. Things continue on like this, eventually culminating with Saeran shooting V.
This would be where things veer off into our canon again. Instead of dying like he does in the secret end, V survives. He is now 100% blind as well, refusing to go in for the surgery on his eyes as he views it as the price he has to pay for his role in everything that’s happened. He moves in with Sujin, who’s sort of… volunteered herself to be his caretaker, of sorts. There’s no romantic relationship between them - though Sujin does have feelings for him, she ignores them and chooses not to act on them; what she wants most right now is to simply help V heal as best as she can, in all the ways that he needs, and far be it for her to let her heart get in the way.
Eventually at some point, they do strike up a relationship together - but it’s not for at least a few years, honestly. Jihyun still refuses to get his eyes fixed, though - that doesn’t happen for another few years after that.