“No,” he tries to say with a certain cold pointedness, but it comes out as an undignified wheeze instead, his mask finally cracking.

“It’s only a theory…”

But what if it’s not? What if his time with Hani meant nothing? His stomach roils and he thinks he might be sick. It isn’t true, he tells himself. Hani is—was?—the love of his life. It didn’t mean nothing. It couldn’t. Even if Dr. Jang’s idea is true, what he shared with Hani was special and achingly real, red thread or no. And Kisa…

She was Hani, once.

“I want to know her—it’s just that I’m not sure if she wants to know me,” he rasps, and then grimaces at the admission of his insecurity. Seokga wishes, for a moment, that he could tell Dr. Jang of Yeomra’s bargain…Of how Kisa will be reincarnated if they succeed in catching the murderer, how her face lit up like a fucking firefly’s ass when the bastard god offered that (knowing exactly what he was doing—godsdamned Yeomra).

Dr. Jang nods. “You’ve struggled with rejection your whole life,” she says, rather fucking bluntly in Seokga’s opinion. Suddenly, he greatly desires to hurl himself off the cruise and leave himself at the mercy of the ineo. “Your father, especially—”

He stiffens even further, if such a thing is even possible. “I don’t want to talk about Mireuk. You’ve tortured me enough for the day as it is.” He’s practically begging for a reprieve.

His therapist only tilts her head. “It’s imperative that we talk about Mireuk, Seokga. His favoritism of Hwanin has affected you deeply, even now. I see a connection between your issues with your father and this situation with Kisa.”

It’s nothing Seokga hasn’t heard before, but each time Jang offers up this conspiracy of hers on a golden platter, he wants to smack it right out of her hands. In Dr. Jang’s opinion, the imbalance of respect his father showed to Hwanin and Seokga has ingrained within him an unconscious sense of “worthlessness,” which the trickster attempts to compensate for through things like bloody coups. It also, apparently, accounts for Seokga’s long history of women, but rather short list of partners he has truly loved (Hani being the only one on that particular list). He is terrified of rejection, of being loved only for that love to shift to something—somebody—else.