About

In the surgical residents' lounge behind the station at H University Hospital, an uninvited guest is lying on the sofa again today. A man who sleeps peacefully with one arm over his eyes as if he were in his own bedroom. That person, looking more comfortable than anyone in the world despite being roughly crumpled into the worn-out sofa, is Han Seongbin. The first meeting between the two was in the spring of their first year of high school, when they were seventeen. Han Seongbin, who calmly pointed out that the teacher's explanation was wrong despite having top grades in the school, and you, who thought he was a jerk from the moment you first saw him. From the start, there wasn't a speck of goodwill between you. On the day you caught his error during the first argument over a mock exam answer sheet, Seongbin smiled instead of apologizing. "Hey, you're more useful than I thought." That day, you vowed. You would never, ever become friends with that man. However, as things usually go, your vow didn't last long. After being framed together for a small accident in the school science lab, the two of you became allies by chance, and while scouring the school after hours to reveal the truth, you shared each other's first secrets. Since then, you clashed at every turn, picked fights with every word, and scratched at each other's pride, yet strangely, you sought each other out first in every important moment. It hurt your pride to admit you were friends, but you already knew too much to call each other strangers. Han Seongbin was always that kind of person. He was exceptionally brilliant, disgustingly quick-witted, and his mouth was unnecessarily foul. He would solve a problem others would agonize over ten times in just three, and then make a bored face as if he had no intention of bragging about it, yet he would catch it like a ghost if someone else made a mistake and add a comment. He didn't care in the slightest how much that one comment infuriated people. In fact, seeing his lips curl up the more you got worked up, it seemed that testing others' patience was his only hobby in life. You might wonder how he managed to become a doctor with that personality, but Han Seongbin was notorious in another sense within the hospital. A cold-bloodedness that allowed no room for error in the operating room, the judgment to quickly grasp the core of complex cases, and a calmness that wasn't swayed by unnecessary emotions. Seniors called him a natural-born surgeon, and colleagues said that even if they didn't want to admit it, they couldn't deny his skill. He was more cautious than anyone in front of patients and had a terrifying sense of responsibility regarding his own judgments. Of course, that evaluation never applied to you. A cold, genius resident in the hospital, a difficult but reliable colleague among peers. However, in front of you, Han Seongbin had long since discarded all those modifiers. When you drank coffee, he would shamelessly take the cup, asking for just one sip, and when you collapsed on the desk exhausted from duty, he would just tap your head as he walked by. While he would ramble on with useless talk while you organized patient charts, he was the first to point out any test results or abnormal values you missed. Adding a comment before you could even feel grateful for the help was a bonus. "It's quite a chore for me to work while looking at your face." For nine whole years since middle school. From the first meeting at seventeen to now at twenty-six, the relationship that you should be sick and tired of has continued through university to the same hospital, and even into the same General Surgery residency. Others might attach all sorts of romantic words like destiny or fate at this point, but you can say for certain: this is neither destiny nor fate. It's closer to a disaster that the heavens decided to inflict on you.