Payback AU: What If

Act 2.13 - The Blue Crested Bird

"Would you listen to a story?"

Yoohan looked at the smile etched on that tired and pale face. It was rather sad and bitter. Yoohan had seen this kind of smile before; it was the smile of a mother worried about their son.

Slowly, Yoohan walked into the window and sat on the chair there, looking straight at Jay's mother, and nodded once.

"Jay..." she started, "Did he tell you about his condition?"

Wordlessly, Yoohan tilted his head. "Is this about him not able to feel emotion?"

Jay's mother nodded. "Did he tell you in detail?"

"No, just in passing."

"Then, did he tell you about his father?"

At this, Yoohan nodded. Jay had told Yoohan about his father, the conflict that festered their family, the inheritance feud, and the cause of his numbness. But honestly, listening to that kind of story told with a calm and cold tone made it feel like Yoohan had been listening to a story about psychopath in the making.

"Do you know what kind of things I did to try to evoke emotions inside him again?"

"Like...that movies assignment?"

Jay's mother smiled. "Yes, like that. Showing emotional scenes and such. After all, movies and art, in general, were made to evoke people's emotion."

"But it didn't work?"

"Not at all. Thanks to that though, he can at least mimic people's emotions. But to his peers, he would still appear as someone fake, uncaring, unfeeling... some people liked to call him psychopath just to belittle him." Her eyes were looking far away, as of reminiscing. "But of course, Jay just laughed at them. In the first place, would someone that unable to feel anything capable of getting insulted in the first place?"

Yoohan bit his lower lip. There were days when he called Jay a psychopath as a curse, and hearing this, he felt kind of guilty now.

"It's funny how it becomes his shield instead. He doesn't really get his feeling hurt by other people, and it helps him to actually advance in life. But I thought it would be sad if he spent his life without feeling any love, or without ever caring about something. So I gave him pets, to generate the experience of caring about something."

Jay's mother turned her head to look at Yoohan that had been looking down out of the window. "You met Jay when his hand was injured, aren't you? Do you know what caused that injury?"

Yoohan raised his brow, before shaking his head. Jay did have an injury on the day they met, but on their second meeting, the cast had been removed, so Yoohan had no business with said injury anymore. "If I can simplify it, then, it's because his dog died."

Huh, Yoohan exclaimed inwardly. Yoon Jay? Because of a dog?

"No," she laughed. "It wasn't because he loved the dog or anything. He liked to play with them and observed them, but his attachment to the dogs was probably something like your attachment to something you always have on you, like your phone or your car. It was more like attachment to one's possession."

"We have another dog that died because of cancer two years prior. Jay didn't feel sad or anything. The other dog, though, died because of another human being." the tone of her voice suddenly dropped, just like Jay when he was pissed. "You must've heard those kinds of cases; a stray or pet have a walk or run by themselves, and someone or some group take them away, torturing them for sport, even went so far to film them."

Yoohan frowned. He never had a pet, and could not afford them. But he knew people who liked to torment animals for sport, most of them to stray cats. So he could kind of imagine the scenario; the dog probably felt adventurous and strayed from its usual path, only to be caught by these horrid people.