Oh, how Seokga hates the silence. His crunching becomes unbearably noisy. It makes him feel awkward, and Seokga is never awkward (except in cases where Kisa is concerned, apparently). Four minutes and twenty seconds go by (the longest he’s ever lasted is ten minutes) before he snaps out: “Fine. I knew not to expect Hani, but…” He clenches his jaw. “I think I did. And it’s disorienting. One moment, she laughs or rolls her eyes like Hani, but the next…The next moment, she’s somebody I don’t even know.”

His therapist’s face—or what he can make of it, at least—softens. “I have a question for you, Seokga,” she says kindly. “And I want to preface it by saying that I know it might stir up some complex feelings.”

Seokga’s entire body stiffens. He’s had enough complex feelings for a lifetime. “I decline,” he replies flatly, and that really should be the end of it, but of course it isn’t.

Jang, the tyrant, is unruffled. “Have you given any thought, perhaps, as to why the red thread connected you and Kisa? Not you and Hani?”

His brows furrow before he can stop them. “It connected us because she was Hani,” Seokga answers immediately, the words springing to his mouth like a knee-jerk reflex. “And Hani was my…She was…” Everything. Throat tightening, Seokga cuts off and attempts to compose himself.

“Hmm,” Dr. Jang says, and above those ridiculous glasses, a thin eyebrow arches.

“I suppose you have an alternate theory,” Seokga drawls coldly, rather wishing Jang’s hmm wasn’t so laden with skepticism. It makes him feel quite violent.

“I do, yes.” She exhales, lacing her hands together. “I’d like you to consider, Seokga, that it is you and Kisa that fate has chosen to vouch for. That even if you’d never met Hani—stop making that face, please, and listen—that you still would have, somehow, met Kisa. Your Threaded. That you met her in her past life was just a coincidence—”

The grinding of his back molars is beginning to give him a headache. “A coincidence?” he demands in a voice that armies have fled from but the elderly therapist seems to find amusing.

“And what a wonderful coincidence, too.” She reaches forward and pats Seokga’s knee as if he’s a small child and not a notorious god. He gapes at the sheer audacity. “But your expectations are holding you back from knowing Kisa for who she is.”

It can’t possibly be healthy for his mouth to be this dry. A long silence stretches out between Seokga and Jang in which the trickster god experiences a complete nervous breakdown while expertly hiding beneath a façade of bored indifference.

“Seokga,” Jang says when the silence has stretched out to five minutes. “Are you all right?”