Ji-young's study was smaller than Jaemin had expected, elegant and well-furnished, but most of all impressive in its practicality, neatly organised and clear of clutter.
She looked up from behind her desk as Jaemin and Do-hyun came in, the folder she often carried now sitting open on the tabletop, and gestured to the two chairs arranged across from her.
"Thank you for agreeing to this," she said as they took their seats. "This might not be easy for you to speak about, considering the ordeal that you've been through in the past few months, especially most recently. But if you're ready to speak about it, I'm ready to listen, and I promise I'll try to keep this as quick and painless as possible."
Do-hyun gave a small snort. "Sounds like a mercy killing, Omma," he said lightly.
Ji-young's thoughtful gaze took in the tension in the line of her son's shoulders that belied his joking words, the way his fingers twitched restlessly on the arms of his chair, before turning to Jaemin, who was watching her with a look of resolution on his face.
"Mercy, certainly," she said quietly. "As for the killing—That's rather the point of having a lawyer. I have yet to lose a client, and I don't intend to begin with either of you."
She waited for Jaemin's lips to soften from its determined line into a small smile, and for Do-hyun to give a slight nod before she continued.
"Before we begin, I want to be clear about what today is. This isn't a formal deposition. Nothing we say here goes anywhere until we decide, together, what to file and against whom. What we're doing is building a case file. That means I need both of your accounts, stated clearly and in your own words, so that I understand exactly what we're working with. Later, if and when we choose to pursue this, these accounts can become the basis of sworn statements. For now, I'm simply listening. Do you understand the distinction?"
Jaemin nodded again. "Yes."
"Good." She looked between them both. "I've already spoken with Do-hyun at some length about what's been happening in Seoul—the defamatory attacks through the media, the logistical interference with the SPS, the civil suit. But I'd like you both to walk me through the events together, in sequence. What I know from Do-hyun, I'll be looking to Jaemin-ssi to confirm or add to, and vice versa; there may be things that neither of you knows the other knows." A beat. "Do-hyun-ah. Why don't you start."
Do-hyun shifted slightly, taking a breath, and began.
He started with the Revival Gala, voice level, unhurried, as if he had rehearsed the lines a dozen times. He described the spiked bouquet arriving through the audience, Jaemin's collapse, the rush to the clinic. The anti-suppressant levels that Dr Lee Jisoo had found in Jaemin's blood, the confirmation of what had been in the needle.
"Choi Seungcheol was in the audience that night," he added. "He was seated in the balcony."
"Did he speak to either of you, that night?" Ji-young asked.
"No, but…" Do-hyun's expression hardened, "he was laughing as it happened."
As Jaemin listened to Do-hyun's recount, a strange feeling of dissociation settled over him. It felt like they were talking about something that had happened to someone else.
He had always known that Choi Seungcheol had sent the bouquet. He had said as much out loud in front of his family, had watched Do-hyun absorb the knowledge with a stillness that was carefully holding his fury in check.
But there was a difference, he was finding, between knowing a thing and hearing someone else name it aloud.
He was laughing.
He thought, distantly, of the man he had known in Vienna. Not the man who had stolen so much, too much, from him, but the man before that.
The handsome, charismatic senior who had singled him out from the rest of the Academy. Who had lent him scores from his own collection, with notes in the margins. Who had brought him porridge when he was unwell. Who had, for a time, made him feel like he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Jaemin had idolised him. And then that man—that same man whom Jaemin would once upon a time have given up his flesh and blood for—had stood in that concert hall balcony and laughed as Jaemin collapsed from a drug that he had administered.
A cruel joke.
The thought arrived without heat, without the anger he might have expected. Just a kind of dull, distant recognition, like pressing on a bruise that had been there so long he had stopped remembering it hurt.
Choi Seungcheol had done things to him that he had never dreamt possible for one person to do to another. And yet somehow, sitting here, it was this detail—him laughing as Jaemin had lost control of his body and fallen to the ground—that briefly made the whole shape of it, the twisted nature of the man, visible.
Why hadn't he seen it sooner?
"I see," Ji-young acknowledged. "But how did you know that the bouquet was from him?"
Jaemin stared down at his hands. "There was a note," he murmured softly. "It wasn't signed, but it was quite clear that it was from him."
"How so?"
Jaemin closed his eyes, reciting the words on the card:
Just for you, my fragile omega.
Ji-young gazed at him for a moment, then asked carefully, "Do you still have it?"
Jaemin's head dropped low. "No, I… I'm sorry. I couldn't—I wasn't able to—"
A large, warm hand covered his. "He collapsed from the anti-suppressants almost immediately after," Do-hyun supplied. "And I was rushing to seek medical attention for him." He gave Jaemin's hand a small squeeze as he held his mother's gaze. "It's not his fault."
"Indeed it isn't. That's alright." Ji-young's voice was soothing. "But you have the toxicology report?"
Do-hyun nodded. "Yes, a copy. The original is with Dr Lee Jisoo."
"Good. That's a clean piece of evidence, and we can get Dr Lee in for expert testimony." She made a note. "Jaemin-ssi. Was this the first time Choi Seungcheol made direct contact with you since you returned from Vienna?"
Jaemin nodded. "Yes."
Ji-young held her pen still for a moment after she finished writing, her gaze resting thoughtfully on Jaemin.
"The phrasing of that note," she said, "suggests a prior relationship of some significance." Jaemin's throat seized, but Ji-young only said, "I'd like to return to that later, if you're willing."
She made a small mark in the margin—a placeholder, Jaemin understood, not a dismissal—and looked back to Do-hyun.
"Continue."
Do-hyun then proceeded to recount the media attacks in sequence: the first wave, the second, the destructive headlines that had followed Jaemin from the Revival Gala like a second injury.
The attacks had been two-pronged from the beginning, he said: Jaemin framed as a compromised omega unfit for the podium, and Do-hyun himself as the predatory alpha who had exploited a vulnerable colleague for his own perverse gain. The pairing was deliberate. Each narrative propped the other up.
A third strand ran alongside them: that Jaemin had deliberately weaponized his omega pheromones to manipulate his audience. That the SPS's critical success was not a matter of professional musicianship but of chemical seduction; that the orchestra itself was complicit.
Ji-young wrote it all down in a swift hand. "You have copies of these articles?"
"All documented."
"Good."
"There was also an incident at a restaurant," Do-hyun continued, "in April. Jaemin and I were having dinner with his family when another patron threw a cup of iced water at him. Unprovoked. Her words echoed the claims in the articles." His voice flattened. "His parents were there, and his two younger siblings."
"Many witnesses." Ji-young looked up from her notes. "Choi Seungcheol wasn't present then, I suppose."
"No."
"But the incident was a direct consequence of the campaign."
"Yes."
She wrote it down. "It goes on record as evidence of harm caused. That strengthens the defamation charges considerably. The campaign didn't just damage Jaemin-ssi's reputation in the abstract. It made him a target in public." She set her pen down briefly. "Jaemin-ssi. Were there other incidents of that kind? Hostility in public, from people who didn't know you personally?"
Jaemin thought for a moment, then shook his head. "Nothing as direct as that," he said.
"I'm glad to hear that. Still, I'd like you to note if anything of the sort happens again, even if informally; dates, locations, what was said."
Jaemin nodded. "Okay."
Ji-young spared him a small smile before picking her pen back up and looking to Do-hyun again.
As Do-hyun continued speaking, Jaemin kept his eyes on the folder, or on the window, or on the precise and steady movement of Ji-young's pen. He had lived through it all once. He did not need to inhabit it again.
What caught him, unexpectedly, was hearing Do-hyun name the harm. Not the events—he was well aware of what had happened—but the legal shape of them, the way Do-hyun described each campaign not as something that had simply happened to them, but as something that had been done, deliberately, with intent.
Defamation.
Coordinated media attack.
False facts, published with knowledge of their falsity.
During a pause, Ji-young leaned back slightly, contemplating her notes. "Each wave constitutes a separate count," she said. "We're looking at multiple charges of defamation by false facts—up to seven years per count under the Information and Communications Network Act, if we can establish that they were coordinated." She wrote something in the margin. "We can."
Jaemin had known this, in the abstract. He had known that what Choi Seungcheol had done was wrong, had felt the wrongness of it in the pit of his stomach for months.
But 'wrong' and 'criminal' were not the same word, and sitting in this room, watching Ji-young's pen move from line to line, he understood for the first time that there was a framework for this, that what had been done to him had a shape that the law could hold.
It was a strange thing to realise, sitting in this quiet and orderly room, unearthing the troubles of the past months with Do-hyun and his mother. It felt like something between vertigo and relief.