Retire 555
by Cristae555 (Hunter Academy Side Story 22) Lemon Candy_1
Kang Tae-woo was nineteen years old.
If he had to pick the most surprising thing in his nineteen years of life, it was the fact that he was still alive at this age.
And not just alive, but doing well.
He went to a real school, had a home instead of an orphanage, and had a family. He could make plans for what he wanted to do, what he wanted to become.
Tae-woo still found it all amazing—in a good way.
Honestly, he’d thought he’d never make it out of that lab alive. Even if he did, he didn’t think he’d last long. The older boys and girls before him hadn’t.
His earliest memories were hazy. He couldn’t recall if it was America or Korea, but he remembered making a cake with his mother in a sunlit kitchen.
To be precise, his mother made the cake. Tae-woo was busy eating the strawberries she’d prepared, playing with batter and whipped cream. He ended up covered in flour from head to toe, with cream smeared all around his mouth.
He didn’t remember why they made the cake. Was it his birthday? His mother’s? Or did they just want cake for no reason?
He didn’t remember the taste or the look of the finished cake. But he remembered his mother, covered in flour and cream, laughing helplessly as she cut the cake. He remembered sharing it.
That memory made it impossible for Tae-woo to hate his mother. The lemon candies she liked—he’d get them as a reward for errands or homework, always with a warm hug. Once, he’d asked for a different flavor, but she said lemon was her favorite, and his father bought them for her every day.
That was the first—and last—thing he ever heard about his father.
Tae-woo didn’t know when his mother became the way she was. Was it always like that? Or did it start after his father died? Or did it just happen one day, for no reason?
He didn’t know, but the lemon candies still came to him. Every morning, after swallowing pills he didn’t understand and after countless injections.
It felt like proof that his mother still cared for him.
He couldn’t hate her for that. A few candies weren’t enough to make him love her either, but…
Unconsciously, Tae-woo rubbed his left forearm.
The needles that had pierced his young skin had left scars. He opened one of the emergency potions the teachers had given him and rubbed it on the scars before bed. It was better than nothing, he thought.
Still, the scars remained, faint but visible.
As Tae-woo grew older in the lab, his mother’s attention shifted to the younger children. After years of experiments with no results, a “test subject” lost meaning for the researchers. Yet Tae-woo still clung to the lemon candies, even though he couldn’t bring himself to eat them. Even now, he couldn’t eat lemon candy.
His mother didn’t come to see him on the day he left the lab. Tae-woo didn’t dwell on her.
He was too old to cry for his mother.
He hadn’t seen her for a long time even before that. In the lab, where there was no sunlight, it was hard to track time, but it must have been months. Still, the lemon candies kept coming. Back then, he’d thought his mother sent them, but now… who knows? Did she really?
He was moved to an orphanage, and thought he’d never see So-hee again, but they reunited. He figured he’d never escape the organization, but as long as he was alive, he could hope. At least he wouldn’t have to endure any more mysterious experiments.
“Kang Tae-woo? Are you all right?”
Tae-woo dropped his hand from his arm.
For some reason, he’d always assumed his mother was dead. Maybe it was because the lab had been in chaos before he was sent to the orphanage.
If she wasn’t dead, wouldn’t she have come to check on her son at least once? He realized only now that he’d been carrying that childish hope all along.
He hadn’t known that hope was still in him.
So he spoke without thinking, just saying what came to mind.
“Why?”
Woo Hee-jae looked startled.
Tae-woo blinked.
What did I just say? Why? Why is my mother alive?
But that was honestly how he felt. Why was she alive?
“Well, I mean… she was arrested this time, so…”
Woo Hee-jae looked unsure how to respond, but answered anyway. In that way, he was strangely diligent.
Normally, Tae-woo would have forced a smile for Woo Hee-jae, but not today.
“I didn’t think she was alive.”
“……”
His mother was alive.
Tae-woo murmured, eyes downcast.
“For some reason… I just assumed she was dead.”
“…I actually considered not telling you.”
Woo Hee-jae spoke carefully.
“But I thought you deserved to know.”
“I’m glad I do.”
“Do you… want to meet her?”
“Can I?”
Woo Hee-jae looked reluctant, but nodded.
“If you want to. We’ll take every safety precaution. …Do you want to?”
Tae-woo kept his head down and didn’t answer. Without looking up, he could sense Woo Hee-jae’s anxiety—afraid he might actually want to meet her.
Of course,
“……”
He didn’t want to.
If this had been before he left the lab, he would have had something to say. He might have screamed curses at her, or clung to her feet and sobbed like an animal.
He would have said something.
Even in the orphanage, it was similar. He stopped thinking about his mother after So-hee arrived. When he thought his sister was dead, he… no, even then, he hadn’t thought about his mother. He was distracted by other things.
After that, he never really thought of her again. He hadn’t forgotten the lab, but it just didn’t matter to him anymore. He’d left that narrow cage, filled with uneaten lemon candies, gray walls, and the cake he’d made with his mother, and his world had grown. He had a new family now.
He didn’t need his mother.
“Does she know I’m alive?”
“Well…”
“Did she ask about me?”
“……”
He could see the answer on Woo Hee-jae’s face. He wasn’t even surprised.
“If she never asks about me, I’d rather you not tell her anything.”
“What if she does?”
“……”
He didn’t know what his mother had been doing when she was arrested. If she asked, maybe they’d tell him.
But Tae-woo didn’t want to know. He just didn’t care. The fact that someone he thought was dead was alive only surprised him for a moment, nothing more.
After Tae-woo had found the orphanage director’s hidden notebook, sometimes Daseon’s Hunter teachers would come and ask him about the lab, under the supervision of Woo Hee-jae or Hong Seok-young. That was mostly at first; later, they stopped asking. Not until they started asking about his childhood in America.
The graduates would joke about the teachers being detectives, but Tae-woo knew they weren’t just detectives.
The teachers didn’t ask him about the lab anymore. But if he asked how the investigation was going, they’d tell him, at least in broad strokes. The kidnapped kids had gone home. They’d caught a staff member from another lab, not his. That was enough for Tae-woo.
“…Could you just say you don’t know?”
“Are you sure you’re okay with that?”
“Yes. That’s part of why I came to the Academy. Here, I’m cut off from the outside.”
“It’s hard for information to leak from the school.”
“She was caught in America, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Teacher Han?”
Woo Hee-jae, who’d been sipping coffee, choked. Tae-woo smiled faintly.
“Come on. I know enough to guess. Didn’t he go to America too?”
“……”
“I really am fine now. I can stay at school, right? You didn’t send me to America because of me, did you?”
“No, nothing like that.”
Woo Hee-jae hurriedly drank his coffee and waved his hand.
“She’s always on TV. And, uh, Dr. Sandra is your friend, right? She’s the one who hid So-hee, isn’t she?”
“……”
“I won’t tell anyone else.”
“Yeah… thanks.”
Tae-woo laughed aloud at the rare sight of his teacher flustered.
“I doubt she’d care whether I’m alive at this point, and going forward, I just… don’t want to think about it anymore.”
“……”
“She’s never coming back to Korea, with the trial and all, right?”
“Yeah. The US gets first jurisdiction.”
“She’ll never get out of prison?”
“For life.”
“That’s good enough.”
Woo Hee-jae looked at Tae-woo calmly. Tae-woo was used to that look.
It was the look of someone trying to judge whether he was telling the truth.
Not for any other reason, but out of worry. To see if Tae-woo was just running away.
Sometimes, you have to avoid things. But running away isn’t everything. Tae-woo had learned that from Woo Hee-jae.
That sometimes, to become stronger, you have to take on cruel roles.
That even when it would be easier to run, you force yourself to stand and face things.
“She’s not my family.”
Tae-woo straightened his shoulders and said it with conviction.
“So it’s fine. I just don’t want to see her.”
“…All right. That’s enough.”
“Yes. Thank you for telling me.”
“You needed to know.”
Tae-woo wrapped up the conversation and stood. The sofa in the teacher’s counseling office, worn from a year of students coming and going, sagged as he rose, but he smiled with relief.
Still, Woo Hee-jae’s concern hadn’t completely faded. As he saw Tae-woo out, he said,
“…If you need someone to talk to, come find me.”
“Yep.”
“It doesn’t have to be me. You’ve been hiking with your grandfather on weekends, right?”
“Ah… Ji-eun keeps waking me up.”
“She never gets tired.”
Teacher Woo had been dragged out for a few hikes by Ji-eun, too. He clicked his tongue in mock annoyance, but he didn’t really mind.
“All right. Go on, then. Who’s supervising your training today?”
“The principal…”
“Do well.”
“Okay…”
Woo Hee-jae smiled as he watched Tae-woo’s slumped shoulders.
“Come on. Chin up.”
He held out his hand to Tae-woo. Reflexively, Tae-woo held out his palm, and two lemon candies dropped into it.
Tae-woo looked at the lemon on the candy wrapper and asked,
“…Why do you always give me lemon candy?”
“Didn’t you used to like lemon?”
“I do, but…”
“Eat it and do well in training.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
Tae-woo walked down the hall, clutching the two candies. Behind him, the door closed.
He looked at the candies. Lemon flavor. Lemon candy.
Tae-woo knew that Woo Hee-jae wasn’t the crow-masked janitor he’d seen in the lab.
Because that brother knew Tae-woo hated lemon candy.