Chapter Text
If human interaction could be reduced to a simple quadratic equation, Han Jisung would have graduated from the school of life with flying colors.
Unfortunately, people did not follow the laws of mathematics. People were unpredictable, loud, and formatted in a chaotic, non-linear syntax that Jisung’s brain thoroughly rejected.
Take Malaysia, for instance. Specifically, Kuala Lumpur in the middle of April. The humidity outside was a suffocating 85%, which felt less like weather and more like being gently simmered in a giant pot of spicy laksa. Jisung sat in the back corner of the school library—the only room on campus where the air conditioning actually functioned at a sub-zero, penguin-friendly temperature—staring at his advanced calculus textbook.
Around him, the ecosystem of high school was thriving. To his left, a group of boys was loudly debating whether a local football match had been rigged. To his right, a girl was crying over a text message while her friends offered a chorus of synchronized gasps.
Jisung lowered his noise-canceling headphones by a fraction of an inch, caught a stray wave of teenage drama, and immediately pulled them back over his ears. Nope. Too many variables.
He shifted his gaze back to his notebook. Here, numbers behaved. If you treated them with respect and followed the theorems, they gave you an answer. They didn’t change their minds halfway through a calculation because they "felt a vibe." They didn't look at you with that suffocating mix of pity and awkwardness when your throat closed up during an oral presentation.
Jisung sighed, his thumb tracing the edge of his desk. He was seventeen, and his social resume was impressively blank. He didn’t hate people; he was just profoundly, mathematically incompetent at dealing with them.
His anxiety was a living, breathing entity. In Malaysia, it manifested as a permanent knot in his stomach, triggered by the simplest things: the chaotic traffic of Bukit Bintang, the sheer volume of the crowded school cafeteria, or the dreaded moment a teacher said, "Now, find a partner for this project." That phrase alone was enough to send Jisung’s heart rate into hyper-drive, his mind instantly calculating the probability of being the odd one out. (Spoiler alert: it was always 99.8%).
"Jisung-ah."
A shadow fell over his desk. Jisung flinched—a violent, full-body twitch that nearly sent his mechanical pencil flying across the room. He looked up, blinking through his round glasses.
It was his mother, holding a plastic container of sliced mango. She worked part-time at the school administration office, which meant Jisung’s dream of being completely invisible was fundamentally flawed.
"Mom," Jisung whispered, glancing around to see if anyone was watching. "You can’t just materialize out of thin air. It defies physics."
"Your father called," she said, ignoring his existential crisis and sitting on the plastic chair across from him. She looked tired, but there was a strange, manic spark in her eyes that Jisung didn’t quite like. It looked like... optimism. And in the Han household, optimism usually meant trouble. "The contract in Seoul. It’s approved. We’re moving in three weeks."
Jisung stared at her. The words registered, but his brain refused to process the data. "Seoul? As in, South Korea? As in, the place with a population density that will literally crush my ribcage?"
"It’s a massive promotion for your dad, Jisung. And honestly..." She reached out, placing a hand over his cold fingers. Her voice softened, entering that dreaded 'we need to talk about your mental health' tone. "Maybe it’s a good thing for you, too. A fresh start. You haven't exactly... blossomed here."
Blossomed. Jisung wanted to laugh. He wasn't a flower; he was a cactus. He did perfectly fine in dry, isolated environments with minimal watering and absolutely no touching.
"I like it here," Jisung lied, looking out the window at the palm trees swaying in the stifling heat. "I've memorized the exact layout of the library. I know which floorboards creak. I have a system, Mom."
"Jisung, you spent the entire school festival last week hiding in a literal broom closet because someone asked you to help sell cotton candy."
"The air quality in that closet was excellent," he muttered, pulling his hands back to clasp them in his lap.
He could feel it already—the familiar, cold coil of panic tightening around his chest. A new country. A new language (sure, he spoke Korean at home, but academic Korean was a whole different monster). A new university where he would be the weird foreign transfer student who couldn't look people in the eye.
His father had already pulled some strings, pulling the "my son has special needs but is a genius at math" card to get him into a prestigious college program in Seoul. But Jisung knew the truth. His parents weren't just moving for the promotion; they were moving because they thought a change of scenery would magically cure the glitch in his brain. They thought if they dropped him into a hyper-competitive, fast-paced society, he would finally be forced to 'grow up.'
"You'll study mathematics there, just like you wanted," his mother coaxed, trying to sweeten the bitter pill. "And the campus has excellent student support. Your father already spoke to the dean. They have a fantastic counseling program."
Jisung’s stomach dropped. Counseling.
"I don't need a therapist, Mom. I need people to stop talking to me. There's a difference."
"We'll see," she said, giving him a look that meant the decision had already been signed, notarized, and delivered. "Start packing your books. Especially those heavy ones. We have a weight limit on the flight."
She patted his knee and walked away, leaving him alone in the freezing library.
Jisung looked down at his textbook. He had been working on a complex probability equation, trying to determine the likelihood of a specific variable failing under pressure.
He picked up his pen, crossed out the numbers, and wrote a single sentence at the bottom of the page:
Probability of Han Jisung surviving Seoul: P(A) = 0$
The flight to Seoul was twelve hours of pure, unadulterated sensory torture.
If Jisung were to calculate the sensory load of an economy-class cabin, the formula would look something like this: the high-pitched whine of a jet engine multiplied by the smell of recycled airline chicken, divided by the terrifying proximity of a stranger’s knee pressing against his own. For twelve hours, Jisung sat frozen, praying his bladder wouldn't betray him, because the alternative—shuffling past two sleeping passengers and navigating the narrow aisle like a criminal on display—was mathematically worse.
When they finally stepped out of Incheon International Airport, Seoul hit him like a physical blow.
It wasn't just loud; it was efficiently loud. Everything in Malaysia had a certain slow, humid drag to it. People moved like they were walking through honey. Here? People moved like particles in a particle accelerator. Everyone was dressed in sleek coats, staring into glowing screens, walking with a terrifying, synchronized velocity that made Jisung want to drop his suitcase and curl into a ball right on the terminal floor.
The signs were a blur of sharp, neon Hangul. The air tasted cold and metallic, completely lacking the familiar scent of rain and fried bananas he’d grown up with. It was beautiful, sure, but it was a cold, glass-and-steel machine, and Jisung felt like a loose screw waiting to be crushed by the gears.
And then, there was his father.
If Jisung’s anxiety was the villain of his internal monologue, Han Jin-wook was the final boss of his reality. His father was a man built entirely of spreadsheets and unyielding expectations. He didn't look at Jisung as a son; he looked at him as a poorly managed asset that was currently underperforming on the quarterly returns.
Throughout the entire taxi ride to their new apartment, and the subsequent morning prep, his father didn't ask Jisung how he was feeling. He simply lectured.
"This university is a massive opportunity, Jisung," his father said, adjusting his pristine tie in the reflection of the dean's office window. "I went out of my way to secure this spot for you. Do you know how it looks if my son flunks out because he's too afraid to speak to his professors?"
Jisung stared at his own sneakers, his hands jammed deep into his hoodie pockets. He was sweating despite the crisp Seoul spring air. "I'm not going to flunk. My grades are—"
"Your grades are fine. Your attitude is the problem," his father cut in, his voice cutting like a razor. "You hide. You've always hidden. In Malaysia, I let it slide because we were expats, but here? You are a Han. You will not embarrass me."
Before Jisung could formulate a mathematically sound defense, the heavy oak door swung open.
Dean Shin’s office looked exactly like the lair of an academic dictator: mahogany shelves bursting with leather-bound books, ancient certificates, and an overwhelming smell of expensive ginseng tea. The Dean himself was a small, sharp-eyed man who smiled with too many teeth.
"Ah, Director Han! Welcome, welcome," Dean Shin beamed, rising to shake his father’s hand. The two men immediately launched into a seamless display of corporate-academic flattery, leaving Jisung standing there like an awkward coat rack.
Finally, the Dean’s sharp eyes pivoted to Jisung. "And this must be Jisung. The mathematics prodigy."
Jisung managed a jerky, awkward bow that almost made him lose his glasses. "Hello."
"We are very excited to have you," Dean Shin said, though his eyes lingered a bit too long on Jisung’s white-knuckled grip on his own backpack straps. "Your father has briefed me on your... unique circumstances. Coming from abroad, the transition can be overwhelming. Which brings us to our agreement."
Jisung’s stomach did a violent flip. The trap was springing.
His father took a step forward, his hand coming down on Jisung’s shoulder. To an outsider, it looked like a supportive paternal gesture. To Jisung, it felt like a hydraulic press keeping him anchored to the floor. "Yes. We discussed the mandatory counseling. Jisung is fully on board."
I am literally the opposite of on board, Jisung screamed internally. I am drowning next to the board.
"Excellent," Dean Shin nodded, pulling a file from his desk. "We have a stellar support system here. I’ve personally assigned Jisung to Dr. Lee. He’s our chief resident psychologist and a tenured professor. Truly the best of the best. He usually only takes on severe clinical cases, but given your father’s position, he agreed to oversee Jisung’s integration."
"Dr. Lee is an old acquaintance of mine," his father added, his grip tightening just a fraction on Jisung’s shoulder—a silent warning to shut up and behave. "He’s a man of discipline. He doesn't coddle. He will fix this ridiculous social block of yours."
Fix it. Like he was a broken hard drive.
"He has a private office in the faculty wing," Dean Shin explained, sliding a campus map across the desk. "Twice a week, Jisung. It’s a non-negotiable prerequisite for maintaining your scholarship enrollment. Dr. Lee will send a monthly progress report directly to your father."
Jisung felt the air leave his lungs. A monthly report. His therapist was going to snitch on his brain functions directly to the villain of his life.
"I expect total cooperation, Jisung," his father said, looking down at him with a cold, challenging stare. "Don't waste Dr. Lee's time with your usual silence."
Jisung looked at the map, his eyes tracing the red ink line that led straight to the faculty building. To an office inhabited by a man who was apparently "disciplined" and "didn't coddle."
Great, Jisung thought, his throat tightening as the panic coil squeezed a little harder. So my new savior is just a licensed version of my dad. Probability of survival: officially recalculated to negative variables.
The faculty wing of the university was terrifyingly quiet. The floors were polished marble that echoed every single step, which meant Jisung’s cheap sneakers practically announced his approach like a car alarm.
He stood outside the door labeled Dr. Lee – Chief Psychologist, his hand hovering over the wood. His heart was beating at a steady 130 beats per minute. He had calculated the absolute worst-case scenarios: Dr. Lee would have a leather couch, a glaring spotlight, and a notepad where he would write things like 'Patient exhibits pathetic lack of backbone' to send back to his father.
Jisung took a deep breath, knocked, and pushed the door open, ready to face the firing squad.
Instead, he stepped into a room that smelled faintly of cinnamon and old paper. There were no harsh lights. In fact, the blinds were half-drawn, letting in a soft, amber afternoon glow. Plants—real, slightly overgrown ones—cluttered the windowsills.
And sitting behind a messy desk covered in sticky notes was a middle-aged man with kind, crinkling eyes and a soft grey cardigan that looked like it had been washed a thousand times. He didn't look like an academic dictator. He looked like the kind of uncle who gives you extra allowance when your parents aren't looking.
"Ah, you must be Jisung," Dr. Lee said, his voice a low, soothing hum that instantly took the edge off the room's silence. He didn't stand up to give a stiff corporate handshake. He just gestured warmly to a comfortable, deep navy armchair. "Come in, come in. Take a seat. You look like you're expecting me to throw a textbook at you."
Jisung blinked, slowly shuffling over and dropping into the armchair. It was incredibly soft. He pulled his backpack onto his lap, hugging it like a shield. "Good afternoon, Dr. Lee."
Dr. Lee leaned back, adjusting his glasses, a gentle smile on his face. "You know, your father called me three times yesterday. And this morning, he sent a messenger down here with this."
He reached onto his desk and picked up a crisp, heavy piece of paper. Even from a distance, Jisung recognized his father’s precise, rigid handwriting.
"It’s a list," Dr. Lee explained, tilting the paper. "A very detailed, bulleted list of all the 'glitches' and 'defects' in your personality that I am supposed to magically 'fix' over the next semester. Complete with checkboxes."
Jisung’s throat closed up. He squeezed his backpack tighter. Here it comes. He braced himself for the lecture, the rules, the expectations.
Dr. Lee looked at the list, sighed softly, and then—with absolute, effortless casualness—crumpled the paper into a tight ball and tossed it over his shoulder. It landed perfectly in the trash can with a soft thud.
Jisung’s jaw practically dropped. He stared at the trash can, then at the psychologist. "You... you just threw that away."
"I did," Dr. Lee said, resting his chin on his hand, his eyes warm and entirely devoid of judgment. "Because I don't treat spreadsheets, Jisung. I treat people. And frankly, your father’s formatting was terrible. No creative vision whatsoever."
A tiny, involuntary bubble of laughter caught in Jisung’s throat, though he managed to suppress it into a weird cough. He stared at Dr. Lee, his defenses suddenly scrambling. He had prepared for a battle against a monster, but he didn't know how to fight someone who offered him a comfortable chair and threw away his father's orders.
"Look," Dr. Lee continued softly. "I know why you're here. You're here because it was the tax you had to pay to go to this college. You don't want to talk to me, you don't know me, and you'd rather be anywhere else. That’s completely fair. So, let's make a deal. We have fifty minutes. You don't have to tell me a single personal thing today if you don't want to."
Jisung shifted uncomfortably, the silence stretching between them. It wasn't the suffocating, heavy silence of his father's car, though. It was a waiting, patient silence.
"I don't... I don't like talking about feelings," Jisung muttered, his voice barely above a whisper. "They don't make sense. There are no constants. It's all just... noise."
Dr. Lee nodded slowly, understanding completely. He didn't push. Instead, he reached over, picked up a ceramic mug of tea, and took a sip.
"I read your file. You're a mathematics major. First in your regional class back in Malaysia, despite... well, everything," Dr. Lee said. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk, looking genuinely curious. "So, let's talk about something that does make sense. Tell me, Jisung—which formula is your favorite?"
Jisung froze. Of all the psychological trap questions he had anticipated ('How does your mother make you feel?' 'When did the anxiety start?'), this was definitely not on the list.
"My... favorite formula?" Jisung repeated, adjusting his glasses.
"Yes," Dr. Lee smiled, his voice encouraging. "Mathematics is a language, right? Surely you have a favorite poem in that language. What is it?"
Jisung stared at Dr. Lee, his fingers loosening their death-grip on the straps of his backpack. For a mathematician, being asked to choose a favorite formula was like asking a musician to pick a single chord out of a symphony. It was an intimate question, but because it was wrapped in numbers rather than emotions, the tripwires in Jisung's brain failed to detonate.
He cleared his throat, his eyes darting to the floorboards, then to a small potted fern on the desk, before finally settling somewhere near Dr. Lee’s shoulder.
"Euler's Identity," Jisung said, his voice tentative, but gaining a fraction of stability as the familiar digits ran through his mind.
Dr. Lee tilted his head, giving him an encouraging nod. "And why that one?"
Jisung swallowed. He didn't mean to get excited, but mathematics was the only language he actually spoke fluently. "Because it... it doesn't make sense on the surface, but it’s completely absolute. It takes five of the most fundamental, completely unrelated constants in mathematics. You have e, which is the base of natural logarithms—it’s an infinite, chaotic decimal that never ends. Then you multiply its power by i, the imaginary unit, which technically doesn't even exist in the real number world. And then you multiply that by pi, which is the ratio of a circle’s circumference, another infinite, irrational number that has nothing to do with logarithms."
Jisung took a breath, his hands moving slightly in the air, tracing an invisible equation as he forgot, just for a second, to be terrified.
"You take all that chaos, all those numbers that shouldn't fit together, and you add 1 to it. And the result? It equals exactly zero.
e^{i • pi} + 1 = 0
It’s perfectly balanced. It forces the impossible and the infinite into absolute stillness. It’s elegant. No matter how messy the variables are on the left side, the right side always resolves into total peace."
He stopped abruptly, realizing he had just spoken more consecutive words than he had in the entire past three weeks. A flush of heat crept up his neck, and he immediately pulled his chin back into the collar of his hoodie, suddenly mortified. Great. You just geeked out in front of the chief psychologist. Now he’s going to write 'patient uses mathematical abstraction as a coping mechanism for emotional detachment.'
But when Jisung risked a glance through his bangs, Dr. Lee wasn't writing anything down. He was just looking at Jisung with a profound, quiet respect.
"Total peace out of chaos," Dr. Lee repeated softly, savoring the words. "That is beautiful, Jisung. Truly. I can see why you like it."
"It's just logic," Jisung muttered, trying to shield himself again. "It’s not like human beings. If you add up a bunch of chaotic people, you don't get zero. You just get a louder crowd."
"True," Dr. Lee chuckled, leaning back in his chair and taking another sip of his cinnamon tea. "Human psychology doesn't resolve to zero quite so neatly. But you know what I think? I think your brain is currently running an equation with too many unknown variables. A new country, a new school, a father who demands perfection. It’s a lot of noise. You're trying to force the left side of your equation to balance out, but you haven't been given the right constants yet."
Jisung shifted in his seat. The analogy was clever—too clever. It made him feel exposed, like Dr. Lee had found a backdoor into his system using the very language Jisung used to lock people out.
"I don't need constants," Jisung said defensively. "I just need to finish my degree and avoid people."
"We'll see about that," Dr. Lee said, his eyes crinkling with that warm, indestructible optimism that Jisung usually hated, but found strangely grounding in this specific room. He glanced at the vintage clock ticking on the wall. "Look at that. Our fifty minutes are almost up, and you didn't have to tell me a single personal thing. See? We survived."
Jisung blinked. He looked at the clock, then back at the psychologist. The heavy, suffocating weight in his chest had actually loosened a fraction. It hadn't disappeared—the panic was still there, a dormant beast curled up in his stomach—but it wasn't choking him anymore.
"Same time next Tuesday?" Dr. Lee asked, pulling out a small paper appointment card. He didn't fill out a report form. He just wrote Tuesday, 3:00 PM on it and slid it across the desk. "And don't worry about your father's checkboxes. If he asks, I'll tell him we are working on 'foundational structural analysis.' Which isn't a lie. We're just using Euler instead of Freud."
Jisung hesitated, then reached out and took the card. For the first time since he had boarded the plane in Kuala Lumpur, his heart rate was under a hundred beats per minute.
"Okay," Jisung whispered. "Tuesday."
As he gathered his backpack and stood up to leave, he felt a strange, unfamiliar sensation. It wasn't happiness—he was still terrified of the crowded campus waiting for him outside the door—but it was a tiny sliver of predictability. He had found a room where the rules didn't change, and a person who didn't look at him like a broken machine.
He didn't know it yet, but this small, safe routine was about to become the only anchor he had in Seoul. And he certainly didn't know that in a few weeks, a sudden flu virus would completely shatter this equation, throwing a two-years-older, incredibly cocky variable named Lee Minho right into the middle of his carefully calculated life.