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From one minute to the next, Jin-chul discovered an entire life he'd lived and lost. One minute, he was a senior detective questioning a high school student; the next, he was a hunter, an employee of the KHA, a manager of the monitoring department, until finally he was the Chairman.
He felt the power of an A-rank running through his veins. He stood before an S-rank and had the stark realisation that his power meant nothing in the face of that. He felt the all-consuming fear of realising one man stood between the world and destruction.
And he felt the love he had for people he'd never known in this life. The grief, too.
It was an...experience, to say the least. To feel grief for a person he had loved, when neither of those feelings were ones his current self shared for that person.
Jin-chul had set those aside, initially. His own feelings didn't matter when there were more pressings concerns at hand. He'd needed to understand the bigger picture, to get answers about what had happened. A war had broken out, which only one man could have won, and the world had filled with light. It was the last thing Jin-chul could remember, and he wasn't an idiot: it was the last thing he could remember, and Sung Jinwoo was now a teenager, pretending like he was an ordinary high school student, and his shadow ants had ripped apart some criminals right before his very eyes before dissolving again.
No, his feelings didn't matter, not at first. He'd needed answers, and then he needed to come to terms with all that Jin-woo had done for them. The world. In secret, silence, and shadows. His chest had ached with insurmountable feeling, but he'd shed his tears in private.
It was on a quiet night that Jin-chul allowed himself to think back on what he'd remembered. Not the big moments, the world-ending ones – the quiet ones, the in-between ones. Chairman Go Gun-hee featured in most of them, which was to be expected – Jin-chul had lived and breathed his job, had overworked himself to the point where he went home only to sleep, and sometimes not even for that.
Go Gun-hee, too, had worked perhaps too much for a man who had a wife to return home to. Jin-chul could picture him most clearly sitting behind his desk, bent over some papers on his table, than anywhere else. It was, he remembered, the very same office he'd met his end in, the first time.
Jin-woo had promised vengeance for it, and he had delivered. Jin-chul could remember sitting alone in his office, consumed with so much feeling he'd bent in half, knowing he could never truly thank Hunter Sung.
Now, he stood before Go Gun-hee's headstone in an empty cemetery, thinking about what Jin-woo had told him, once again knowing he'd performed the impossible and there was no way anyone could ever truly thank him for it.
A sickness, he'd said. Incurable. He'd offered Go Gun-hee the chance to extend his life once before, and Go Gun-hee had taken it. The next time Jin-woo appeared in his hospital room, he had refused.
He didn't want a longer life, Jin-woo had told him. He wanted to see for himself all that Jin-woo claimed he'd done in his previous one.
If Go Gun-hee was anything at all like his previous self, that would have been enough for him, Jin-chul knew. He didn't blame the Chairman; he only wished he could've seen him once more, face to face, recognition in his eyes.
There was a curious overlap with his grief from the previous timeline and his grief in this timeline; they were vastly different in nature, and yet both shadowed his heart in mourning all the same.
There was regret, too, a little bit of it, hiding in the back. Why didn't you just meet him? it whispered. You could have begged Hunter Sung to give him his memories back sooner.
It was a traitorous thought, one that made shame lick up the back of his neck, sit uncomfortably in his chest, made him feel sick to his stomach. Sung Jinwoo had given the world so much, and some tiny part of him still wanted to ask for more. It was unfair, and he wished he had never had the thought. He banished it, instead focusing on the rationalisation for why he'd kept his distance from Go Gun-hee ever since he'd gotten his memories back.
It would have just been too painful, to see the man who'd occupied the most space in his life look at him and not know who he was. It didn't make keeping his distance any easier – it was a constant fight to remind himself to stay out of Go Gun-hee's life, and it was one he fought everyday.
But Jin-chul was a rational man above all else – he felt what he needed to feel, fought his internal battles, and then he shelved them and carried on with his life.
It helped, to remind himself he didn't know Go Gun-hee in this lifetime. That he had already mourned the Chairman last time. He didn't want to linger in the past when Hunter Sung had given them all a future.
With one last look at Go Gun-hee's headstone, Jin-chul turned on his heel and walked away. Yes, Hunter Sung had given them all a future, and now Jin-chul was going to offer his thanks in the only way he could: by paving a path for him to live his own future, with the least amount of stress and most amount of ease.