Grab the Regressor by the Collar and Debut - Chapter 490

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com

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490. I’m Not That Kind of Person (2)
The first words to bridge the misunderstanding between us were these.
“Ha-jin, I…”
“…”
“I have never once been disappointed in you.”
If words could have weight, Do-ha’s words right now would feel as heavy as paper folded fifteen times over.
I found it deeply reassuring, yet somehow burdensome.
It was because I couldn’t understand how someone else could trust me so completely when I myself often failed to believe in myself.
“…Even when I opposed you doing that solo performance at NMA?”
“You had valid reasons for opposing it. I understood.”
“You accept everything I ask of you without question or complaint, but I didn’t do the same for you.”
“You generally ask for things that are possible.”
“So the NMA solo performance is impossible?”
“It’s my fault for not convincing you.”
Do-ha’s dark blue hair swayed with the tilt of his head. The sharp, straight eyes visible between his casually swept bangs and the dark pupils within them made his conviction all the more evident.
“If I’d thought you could do it, I would have made sure you succeeded no matter how much you said it was impossible.”
Just like during our first monthly evaluation.
Looking at Do-ha as he added this, he seemed to harbor no regret whatsoever about the NMA matter.
I furrowed my brow and tilted my head. Opening my mouth urgently as if I couldn’t possibly understand, I pressed him like an interrogation.
“So… really, truly you were fine with it? My opposition?”
“Yes.”
“Then… then what? Why haven’t you said a word to me since that day? You haven’t spoken to me privately even once since then.”
“Well…”
As I pressed him with an aggrieved tone, Do-ha looked troubled, stroking his cheek with his hand and scratching the back of his neck.
After a moment of deliberation, Do-ha opened his mouth with an awkward expression.
“Because you didn’t speak to me first.”
“…What?”
“We’ve always been like this—in most cases, our conversations start when you initiate them with me. Since you didn’t speak to me, I thought…”
“…I didn’t speak to you, and you didn’t think we were fighting?”
“I just figured you didn’t have anything to say. You were busy anyway, and you tend to take time to organize your thoughts when your mind gets too cluttered. I didn’t think that was particularly strange.”
At Do-ha’s flowing explanation, I hung my mouth open like someone whose jaw had come unhinged, my eyes wide with bewilderment.
Seeing me like that, Do-ha added a word as if in excuse.
“And… anyway, we communicated fine about things that required discussion. So I didn’t think there was actually any problem between us.”
It was testimony so sincere it bordered on naive.
-But Do-ha hyung, you seemed pretty much the same as usual.
-Aren’t you just digging yourself deeper because you thought hyung was upset with Do-ha hyung alone?
I recalled Dan Ha-ru’s words from some time ago—so cynical and sharp that they’d struck the truth dead-on.
Acknowledging that all of this had been my own excavator blunder, I quietly grabbed my hair with both hands. (I only pretended to pull—hair is precious, after all.)
It was infuriatingly unfair, but hearing it all made sense, and I had no way to refute it!
“Then! So then! Why did you change the Studio password!? You didn’t even tell me!”
“Ah, that’s because a sasaeng actually tried to break in last time, so we changed it for security reasons. It wasn’t long ago.”
“When did you change it?”
“That… ah, the day you went to film Boy’s Supremacy.”
Lee Do-ha nodded repeatedly as he traced through the calendar, confirming the date.
Then, as if remembering something, he added a word with an “oh” expression.
“So that evening, I turned on the messenger to tell you about it….”
“…turned it on?”
At Do-ha’s testimony that he’d meant to say something, Ha-jin’s eyebrows twitched.
‘What message did I get from him that day?’
In Ha-jin’s recollection, a single text he’d received from Lee Do-ha that evening suddenly came to mind.
【Miro_Kairos_De-on ‖ Have you thought about it?】
That single-line message had been as concise and simple as the guy sitting in front of him.
“…I was in the middle of sketching your wedding gift at the time, so I just… forgot.”
“….”
“And then I completely forgot I was supposed to tell you the password. Sorry. Since you use a card key to get in, you wouldn’t have noticed anything strange….”
This damn bear…?
Now that Ha-jin understood the full story of what had happened, he blinked, overwhelmed by a sense of injustice and absurdity.
His right eye twitched beneath the lid so much it seemed like he was magnesium deficient.
Bang!
“…!”
Kang Ha-jin slammed the armrest of the sofa with a bang.
At that sudden movement, Lee Do-ha flinched. When he lifted his gaze from the floor to look at his friend, he could see his friend’s dark eyes darting busily back and forth.
Do-ha waited in silence, knowing his friend was reconstructing the timeline up to now with these new clues.
He knew there were still several question marks that Ha-jin would need to press him about.
“…So then.”
After finishing his thoughts, Kang Ha-jin straightened his crossed legs and leaned his upper body forward.
Ha-jin exhaled a sigh with his arms draped across his own thighs, swept his bangs back, and looked up at Lee Do-ha to ask.
“So, has it been like that even after the wedding day?”
“….”
“Fine, okay. Let’s say I was the one who got scared and made a fool of myself up until then. After the day I collapsed, you really never avoided me?”
After the day Ha-jin collapsed, Lee Do-ha had definitely avoided him.
Since he himself clearly had something pricking his conscience, when Ha-jin came charging in to hunt the bear today, he must have averted his eyes and dampened his momentum like someone with guilt.
Ha-jin waited for Do-ha’s answer, fully prepared to book a consultation at the psychiatry clinic where Jeong Si-u worked tomorrow if this too turned out to be nothing but his own paranoia.
“….”
This time too, Lee Do-ha remained silent.
But Ha-jin, who understood that this silence was not a non-response but rather a process of selecting and filtering his own language, did not rush him.
Lee Do-ha, who had been frozen in place without moving, slowly clenched and unclenched his fists.
“…The day you collapsed.”
“….”
“The doctor asked me if there had been anything recently that caused the patient significant stress.”
A murky light clouded over Lee Do-ha’s dark eyes. The two hands clasped together seemed to tremble slightly.
“So I….”
“….”
“I was worried—what if you collapsed because of me?”
Lee Do-ha knew well that his friend was naturally strict with himself.
He didn’t know all of his past, but he certainly understood that those events had become shackles binding his wings.
“I just wanted to become someone who could give you wings too.”
From the moment he first heard about Kang Ha-jin.
And from when he first met the legendary Kang Ha-jin and was able to make music with him.
Lee Do-ha wanted to become a synergy for Kang Ha-jin.
To the man who had shown him new possibilities when he couldn’t be whole anywhere on his own, he wanted to become that same possibility in return.
“But then I started thinking—what if my own greed actually pushed you off that cliff…. It felt strange.”
Lee Do-ha’s confession was blunt and matter-of-fact.
Do-ha couldn’t bear the bitter taste in his mouth and sucked down the iced coffee Ha-jin had bought for him. Even as the cold drink washed through his mouth and throat, that acrid aftertaste lingered.
The fleeting moments when Ha-jin had lost consciousness and collapsed kept flickering before his eyes.
“Hey.”
Ha-jin’s call reached Do-ha, who was avoiding his gaze with his head bowed, unable to wait for Ha-jin’s response.
When Do-ha didn’t lift his head after being called once, Ha-jin deliberately tapped the floor with his foot to catch Do-ha’s line of sight and called him again.
“Hey, Bear.”
“…Yeah.”
Do-ha finally lifted his head in response to that call.
Ha-jin was staring at him with an incomprehensible expression—the kind that looked like he was about to fire off a barrage of “what are you talking about?”
Ha-jin, who looked even more bewildered than when Do-ha had asked “when did we ever fight?”, opened his mouth to face him. The answer that came back was very simple and clear.
“You know it’s not, right?”
That’s it.
That was all of Kang Ha-jin’s answer.
There was no lengthy explanation about what it actually was, or that you might be the cause but I don’t care, no barrage of words or anything like that.
Just that look in his eyes—as if asking “are you seriously thinking something that stupid right now?”—explained everything.
“….”
Lee Do-ha gazed at Kang Ha-jin for a long time.
Then, as always, he nodded.
Clear and concise.
“…Yeah.”
“Then that’s it.”
The moment Ha-jin saw Do-ha nod, he relaxed his body as if it didn’t matter and leaned back against the sofa in a sprawl.
Remarkably, in that instant, the awkwardness and unstable atmosphere that had filled the studio melted away like snow. The usual mood had returned.
Without needing to say anything more, both of them knew this was settled.
“Geez, you had me nervous for nothing. This is all because of your expressionless face. When you don’t talk, I can’t tell if you’re angry, serious, laughing, or crying.”
“…Yeah, I’ll try to fix it.”
“…What are you fixing? You’re not a robot, are you?”
Our conversation continued in the usual, lighthearted manner.
It was the kind of everyday, ordinary exchange where Ha-jin mostly chattered away while Do-ha played along.
Yet Do-ha, knowing that these mundane moments represented a return to normalcy after such a long absence, wore a gentle smile at the corners of his mouth.
“…I mean, so Tae-hyun and I actually got into a real fight right in the middle of a highway rest stop, right? And you know how it goes—rest stops mean walnut pastries, and walnut pastries mean rest stops, yeah? So how could I possibly say I’d eat sweet potato instead of walnut pastries? That’s a statement of hostility that turns both the walnut pastry faction and the sweet potato faction into enemies….”
The moment the tension broke, Ha-jin, sprawled comfortably across the sofa as always, began chattering away to his friend about everything that had happened throughout the day.
Do-ha listened eagerly, consuming the snacks and coffee Ha-jin had brought without restraint. He even remembered to share the newly changed password.
“…Ha-jin.”
“So that’s when I told the Executive Director…wait?”
It was when their conversation had reached its peak that Lee Do-ha interrupted his friend for the first time, calling out to him.
“I have something to show you.”
“To me?”
“Yeah.”
“What is it?”
Ha-jin, who had been speaking animatedly just moments before, looked up at him with curiosity. Do-ha, having finished his coffee, rose slowly from his seat as though he had made a decision.
“Something important.”
Do-ha’s expression looked so resolute that Ha-jin couldn’t bring himself to ask further questions and simply followed him.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com

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