Tsunami Advisory
Chapter 2
His smile seemed to brush away the dust of years gone by. Fragments of the past she had forcibly suppressed flew back at her, striking against her forehead in sudden flashes. The afternoon sunlight shattering against the gymnasium windows, the light patter of his sneakers taking the stairs, and… even the crinkled texture of the letter she had shoved deep into her pocket, never able to hand over.
Facing “that boy” right before her eyes, her breath hitched and her vision blurred, just as it had when she was seventeen. Every nerve stood on end; even the dull ache of the chair’s backrest digging into her spine felt piercingly sharp. An unidentifiable emotion dragged her heart downward like a heavy plumb weight.
Danbi stood at a crossroads. He had acknowledged knowing her. Should she respond in kind? What reaction would seem natural? ‘Oh, it’s been a while. How have you been?’ No, wait. Speaking casually to a Team Leader? Was she out of her mind?
Dozens of greetings flashed through her mind, but unable to choose any of them, Danbi pulled herself together. They were no longer seventeen-year-olds in school uniforms. He was the Team Leader, and she was a team member. The moment a private past was dragged into a professional relationship, uncontrollable chaos would ensue. If an offhand remark tossed out as a friend happened to offend him, her livelihood could be jeopardized tomorrow.
No. Absolutely not. Here, they had to exist purely as Team Member Lee Danbi and Team Leader Han Hae-il. That was the only way to resolve this situation cleanly and to her own advantage. Though her heart still hammered wildly beyond control, Danbi desperately forced a calm mask onto her face. Drawing a short, steady breath, she deliberately erased every lingering shadow of the past from her eyes.
Then, widening her eyes, she put on a look of bewilderment.
“Pardon?”
At Danbi’s thoroughly puzzled response, his brow twitched ever so slightly. Danbi let her gaze drift, blurring the contours of his face as much as she could.
“What… do you mean?”
Tilting her head slightly and blinking a couple of times, she perfected a polite yet completely clueless expression. For a split second, a flicker of doubt seemed to cross his eyes, but it passed in an instant. He quickly returned to his previous composed demeanor, a faint smile gracing the corners of his mouth.
“Ah~ I must have mistaken you for someone else.”
As he answered smoothly, his gaze lingered, thoroughly tracing each of Danbi’s features. A chilling sensation ran through her, making her involuntarily clench her fists.
“I’m usually quite good with faces… but you look remarkably like someone I know.”
Not a trace of embarrassment showed on his face. Instead, he stared directly at Danbi, his eyes seeming to invite her to search her memory for any passing acquaintance they might have shared. It wasn’t because he believed her words at face value. It was a silent acknowledgment that he clearly recognized the line she had drawn, and was more than willing to play along to her tune.
Danbi felt a twinge of guilt, but having already chosen ignorance, she had no choice but to fortify that line even further.
“Ah, I get that quite often. My face is just so~ generic. People even say I look like a pebble rolling on the street. It’s totally understandable that you’d mistake me, haha….”
Her awkward laughter hovered in the meeting room for a moment before sinking heavily. Only the murky fluorescent light and the precarious silence between them filled the room. Their eyes tangled briefly in midair, then parted as Danbi hurriedly lowered her head. The smile on Hae-il’s face, seated across from her, seemed to deepen a little more.
“Is that so? Are faces like this common?”
“Oh, absolutely. Extremely common. My features are so indistinct… I look like this person, that person, the wall, the desk….”
She didn’t even know what she was saying anymore. Simply unable to endure the suffocating silence, she babbled whatever came to mind while waving her hand in front of her face—a desperate struggle to deflect his gaze even a little.
Resting his chin in his hand, Hae-il watched Danbi intently. As he leaned his elbow on the table, an expensive-looking watch gleamed coldly from beneath his sleeve, its glint aimed at the nape of her neck like a sharp blade.
“Right, then. We can just be ‘familiar faces’ to each other from now on.”
At the pointed emphasis on the words ‘familiar faces,’ Danbi met his gaze with a rigid expression. His eyes seemed to constantly speak to her—not to the team member Lee Danbi standing here now, but to the seventeen-year-old Lee Danbi. Struggling to ignore the signal, Danbi forced an awkward smile to keep her inner turmoil hidden.
Holding Danbi’s gaze, he smiled with his eyes crinkling slowly before moving on to the main topic. Fortunately, the questions that followed were strictly professional. Danbi swallowed a sigh of relief internally. Mechanical answers spilled smoothly from her dry lips.
Danbi chose her words to sound as ordinary and dull as possible, letting only completely emotionless sentences drift through the air of the meeting room. Her heart was still pounding anxiously beneath her feet, but her voice did not waver in the slightest. The voice of ‘Team Member Lee Danbi’ was dry and monotonous.
Hae-il’s gaze remained fixed on Danbi’s face throughout. The corners of his mouth curved into an ambiguous arch, somewhere between a smile and a smirk. She desperately avoided his eyes. Her gaze scattered—to the cooling coffee cup on the table, to the flashing watch on his wrist, to the neatly tied knot of his necktie. Anywhere was fine, as long as she didn’t meet his eyes head-on. Yet even as she looked away, the invisible pressure radiating from his very presence continued to tighten around her throat.
“Understood, Danbi-ssi. Since I’m not familiar with the company’s systems yet, I hope you can help me out whenever there’s something I don’t know. Well, you may head back for today.”
His words were like welcome rain in the midst of a drought.
“Yes, Team Leader. I look forward to working with you!”
Rising from her seat as if waiting for that very moment, Danbi bowed deeply and practically fled the meeting room. The moment the door closed behind her, she exhaled her held breath in a sharp rush. She felt as though she had aged years in just a few minutes. Even as she dragged her heavy legs toward the office, part of her senses remained tethered to the meeting room, anchored to his presence sitting in the chair across from her.
‘Hi. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?’
His smooth voice wouldn’t leave her ears. Those eyes had made it clear that he knew exactly who she was, seeing right through everything. How ridiculous must her desperate pretenses of ignorance have sounded? As her heart hammered to the point of an aching throb, she swallowed dryly.
When Danbi returned to her desk, utterly exhausted, her teammates showered her with curious attention.
“Sunbae, what did the Team Leader say?”
“You guys talked for quite a while. Did he give you some test problem to check your skills?”
“No, nothing like that. Just work stuff. Just saying we look forward to working together….”
Danbi forced a smile, but the dark circles beneath her eyes had deepened noticeably. Seeing her precarious state, Dongjun handed her a packet of red ginseng extract he had been saving. Teammates were like comrades-in-arms who had to endure all-night overtime together when things went wrong. If one collapsed, the domino effect made life harder for everyone, making looking out for each other’s health a sort of survival instinct. Of course, beneath it lay the thoroughly selfish calculation of ‘if you go down, I suffer,’ but the sentiment was warm nonetheless.
As Danbi reached out sluggishly, the impatient Dongjun tore the wrapper open and popped it right into her mouth. While she soullessly slurped down the red ginseng extract, the teammates’ conversation naturally shifted to evaluating the new Team Leader.
“Man, even from another guy’s perspective, he’s seriously handsome. And what’s with that suit? With looks like that, he ought to be all talk and no coding skills for the universe to be fair.”
Cologne, an expensive watch, neatly slicked-back hair, and a crisp, tailored suit. Even the rigid posture of his neck and spine. He was definitely not the typical developer type.
“He probably dressed up because it’s his first day of introductions. A Team Leader with a face like that… I used to scoff at dramas, asking where on earth you’d ever find a young, handsome Team Leader like that in a real company.”
“Is he really a parachute hire?”
“With his credentials, isn’t it weird to call him a parachute? Besides, he didn’t really look like the CEO’s son to me.”
Danbi recalled the family photo she had once seen at his house. Hae-il took after his mother’s side. The subtle asymmetry of his eyes, his fair skin, and the way the corners of his mouth curled when he smiled.
“He was tall, though. And the CEO is famous for being tall.”
His build seemed to come from his father’s side. The only son of LD, crafted from the best genes of both families. A boy who had held all the kids in ‘that neighborhood’ under his thumb. A child who had lived in a completely different world from her.
“Still, if he really is the CEO’s son, even the Director won’t be able to touch him, and he’ll be able to shield us from tight deadlines. Come to think of it, isn’t that actually great?”
“That’s not the issue. If he’s the CEO’s son, the moment you get on his bad side, your career is dead in the water.”
“Ah….”
“Please, please let him have a good personality…. I’ll pray to the Buddha, so you pray to God.”
“Jerusalem Jesus, Hallelujah…. Glory, glory~ hallelujah~ please watch over your lamb….”
“Namu Amitabha Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva…. I beseech you, I beseech you….”
The teammates clasped their hands together earnestly and began offering up their baseless prayers. If this were a prayer offered before deploying a release, Danbi would have gladly joined in, but knowing his personality, she merely sucked quietly on her red ginseng. It was a futile prayer.
‘I don’t even want to deal with them; they’re beneath me.’
‘Isn’t it fascinating? That even kids like that are someone’s precious child. When they go home, they probably hear things like “Our son is the best.” The parents are the problem. That’s why they get all full of themselves without knowing their place.’
Long ago, those sharp, venomous words had lingered in Danbi’s ears. The gaze brimming with chill, the attitude packed with sheer arrogance. That boy is my Team Leader? Having to see his face every day, taking work orders from him, maybe even code reviews…. Just imagining it was suffocating.
Unable to resist the sudden impulse, Danbi slammed her forehead onto her desk. A dull thud echoed, but she barely felt any pain. Only a profound despair, wishing she could erase this entire reality, coiled around her entire body. At that sound, the teammates’ prayers pivoted toward her.
“Heavenly Father, please help our beloved Sunbae not to submit her resignation… and grant that she may still be refactoring code five years from now….”
“Let her not selfishly escape the developer life alone…. I beseech you…. I beseech you…. May we who know nothing else be laid off together on the very same day….”
Of course, it wasn’t much of a comfort.
