Guiding the Male Lead out of His Trauma - Chapter 45.1
The male lead needs no one
I had expected him to get angry.
But if he were to leave… This wasn’t one of the outcomes I had considered.
How much had I underestimated Hyacine?
Watching his back as he walked away, not even bothering to get angry but instead removing himself from the situation, I felt momentarily breathless.
My first thought was—
“How did Hyacine find out?”
I had kept quiet so well, so how did he learn about the deployment?
I instinctively knew something had gone seriously wrong, but I didn’t have the courage to chase after someone who had turned his back on me.
He had never been this disappointed in me before… and trying to stop him to explain would only be like pouring oil on the fire.
“…So it’s my fault?”
“He probably understands why you did it, Senior.”
Acteon, adjusting his disheveled collar, neither confirmed nor denied it.
“I do know I was in the wrong.”
“Then apologize. Even if not right away, he’ll come around eventually.”
That’s true.
He wouldn’t accept my apology today, but if I sincerely apologized after some time, he’s someone who would understand.
But in two days, I wouldn’t be here, and Hyacine would be left worrying about me the entire time.
‘Usually when things fall apart like this and you tell yourself you’ll fix it when you come back… you never do, right?’
I became afraid. Afraid that I might end up leaving him with a wound that couldn’t be undone.
“There’s still time. You’ll run into him in class anyway, so I’ll try to talk to him.”
“You think he’ll open up that easily?”
“If it stays like this, both you and him will keep carrying this burden.”
As I bit my lip, a warm hand gently swept back the strands of hair that had fallen forward, as if to say not to do that.
Just as I was worried about Hyacine, Acteon was looking down at me with concern.
This wasn’t the time to be comforted, but when someone else reached out to help with a problem I didn’t know how to fix, it did ease the weight a little.
Acteon escorted me back to the dorms, telling me to get ready for roll call.
With half my soul lost somewhere, I followed him blankly. But during the night training that came after roll call, I couldn’t focus at all.
How Hyacine had found out didn’t matter anymore.
‘It’s true that I tried to hide it from him.’
But the next day, I couldn’t find Hyacine at all.
Clearly upset, he didn’t allow me a single minute, not even a second, to approach him.
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The way Hyacine had found out about the deployment was through the faculty.
After Professor Hession’s funeral, classes like Guiding Theory and Field Practice were carried out by temporary instructors.
One of them, hired short-term by the academy, happened to have a connection with someone in the Administrative Bureau.
That person, having a keen interest in me as the first S-Class Guide from Barmos, overheard news of my deployment and, in casual conversation, asked Hyacine about his ‘sister’s situation’. And that’s how it was exposed.
Worried I might run into him, I wandered all over the main building until I eventually sat down on the central staircase.
Was I going to leave without getting to say a single word?
Since Hyacine had walked away with that cold, unreadable face, I hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of his shadow even by the following evening, and a growing sense of urgency crept in.
‘I didn’t want us to fight and fall apart like this.’
Even though I didn’t want that, ever since the fight with Hyacine, I felt like I’d reverted to the clueless child I used to be.
‘Back then, too… I often ended up fighting him harshly because I failed to understand what he was feeling.’
When we had nothing to eat, I had to beg or pickpocket.
Sometimes we received aid from the temple, but to do that, I had to leave him alone all day.
Even begging had its gate sentries, you had to appease the right people to keep your spot.
Pickpocketing was something I couldn’t pull off alone.
By the time I’d split what I stole from a few wallets and returned, it was already the middle of the night.
Hyacine would be sleeping near the outskirts of the temple, where the orphans gathered.
The reasons we fought then were, unlike now, trivial.
‘…No, they weren’t trivial.’
Just because it was wartime didn’t mean a growing child would eat less.
Not just him, me too. Every day, we had to worry about what to eat the next day, and the day after that…
Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow…
Every single day was filled with the pressure of being chased.
Whenever the monster called time tried to take a breath, it would suddenly loom behind us and bare its fangs.
You’d fall asleep and wake to find the sun already up, and the setting of the sun became terrifying.
Because if you closed your eyes, the next day would come again.
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