[POINT OF VIEW: LEE JUNG-JAE - THIRD PERSON]
Lee Jung-jae, a man who had seen method actors take their performances to absurd extremes, had to admit he had never witnessed a performance like the one Leo had just delivered. The fall, the splash, the lily pad on his head... it was physical comedy so unexpected and so silly that it had broken the last remaining membrane of tension in the villa.
The silence that followed the splash was replaced by a sound no one had heard in days: Min-jun's choked laughter. He tried to suppress it, but it escaped in a snort, and that was all it took. Like a broken dam, the laughter spread. Ho-yeon covered her mouth, her shoulders trembling. Wi Ha-joon, the stoic detective, turned away, but his back shook with silent laughter. Even Mr. Choi, who looked like he had aged twenty years, let out a sound that was half groan, half guffaw.
Leo, meanwhile, tried to climb out of the decorative pool with the dignity of a wet cat. He slipped on the marble edge, fell back into the water on his bottom, and finally managed to crawl out on all fours, leaving a trail of chlorinated water and bits of aquatic plants on the priceless Persian rug. He stood up, dripping, shivering slightly from the cold, and gave them an embarrassed grin.
"Well," he said, teeth chattering. "That was... refreshing. I think we should install a slide for the next meeting. For efficiency."
There was only one person in the room who wasn't laughing.
Helena hadn't moved from her spot. She watched Leo not with anger, nor amusement, but with the cold, distant patience of an entomologist examining a particularly erratic insect. Her lack of reaction was more intimidating than any shout. She waited for Leo to finish wringing his hair, for the group's laughter to die down and turn into tired smiles. She waited for the chaos to settle. And then, she moved.
[POINT OF VIEW: HELENA - THIRD PERSON]
Helena had reached a point of decision. The damage containment protocol had been activated. The uncontrollable variable, Leonidas's brilliant but chaotic mind, had proven to be a danger not only to himself but to the entire operation. The nuclear prank was the first warning. The muffin serenade followed by an unscheduled flight had been the confirmation. She could not afford any more improvisations of that caliber. Not when Helix was, no doubt, regrouping for a new assault.
Ignoring the aquatic disaster, she walked calmly towards her personal bag, a black leather one she never left far from her reach. She opened it and from inside pulled out a small white plastic vial, unlabeled, the kind used for clinical samples. She opened it with an efficient movement and shook a single, small white pill into the palm of her gloved hand.
She approached Leo, who was still shivering and trying to dry himself with his hands. The rest of the group watched her, their amusement fading and being replaced by curiosity.
She stopped in front of him. The height difference was considerable, but at that moment, she seemed the most imposing figure in the room.
"Open your mouth, Leonidas," she said. Her voice was not a suggestion. It was not a request. It was a command as absolute as gravity.
[POINT OF VIEW: LEO - FIRST PERSON]
The cold, the humiliation, the embarrassment... it all vanished the instant I saw the white pill in her palm. A chilling terror, deeper and more real than any shootout, seized me.
No. Not that. Please, anything but that.
My smile faded. I instinctively took a step back, bumping into the small table where, ironically, my empty food bowl still rested.
"No," I said, my voice sounding weaker than I intended. "Helena, no. I don't need it. I'm fine. It was just a silly slip, I was joking. I'm focused now, I swear."
I hated that pill. I hated what it represented. It was the chemical cage for my brain. It was the switch that turned off the world and left me alone with a silence that drove me mad.
"Your 'silly slip' has interrupted a war council for the second time," she said, her voice uninflected. "Your previous 'joke' almost put us on the radar of every intelligence agency on the planet. The tolerance phase for your... eccentricity has concluded. Recess is over."
She took a step towards me, and I took another step back. "Helena, please," I pleaded. "I can't. I need it... I need my head to solve the screen riddle. You know I can't think with... that."
"You can think," she retorted. "You will simply think more linearly. Slower. Safer. And right now, safety is our priority." Her gaze was steel. "Open your mouth."
I knew there was no escape. I could have tackled her and run. I could have refused. But I knew that look. It was her "this is non-negotiable" look. Fighting would only prolong the humiliation. With a sense of complete defeat, I closed my eyes and opened my mouth.
I felt her place the small, dry pill on my tongue. She offered me a glass of water she had taken from the table. I swallowed. The act was like swallowing my own soul. I felt the pill go down my throat, a small time bomb of silence and order about to detonate in the anarchy of my mind.
When I opened my eyes, I saw everyone looking at me with confusion. Yu-ri, in particular, looked at me with genuine concern in her eyes. I wanted to tell her it was fine, but I already felt the edges of my world begin to soften, to fade.
"Go change," Helena ordered me. "And then you'll sit here and listen. No singing. No dancing. No falling into pools."
I nodded, defeated, and headed for the stairs, feeling like a ghost in my own skin.
[POINT OF VIEW: JO YU-RI - THIRD PERSON]
Jo Yu-ri watched Leo go upstairs. His walk no longer had that restless, elastic energy. He moved with a heaviness, his shoulders slumped. The light seemed to have dimmed in him. The scene she had just witnessed had left her bewildered and deeply uneasy. It hadn't been a funny punishment like the taser. It had been something else. Something clinical and cruel.
She turned to Helena, who was now calmly wiping the water Leo had splashed on the table.
"Helena-ssi..." Yu-ri began, her voice a whisper. "What was that pill? Is he sick?"
Helena finished wiping the table, folded the cloth precisely, and set it aside. She sat back in her armchair and looked at the group, who were watching her with the same question in their eyes. She let out a sigh, a sound so full of weariness that it seemed to age her ten years in an instant.
"Leonidas is not sick," she said, her voice losing its edge and acquiring a clinical, almost academic, tone of explanation. "Not in the way you understand it. His brain, let's say, operates on a different operating system than ours."
She leaned back in the armchair. "Leo has a severe, diagnosed case of ADHD: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, combined type, hyperactive and impulsive. And to make the picture more... unique, he is also on the autism spectrum. A diagnosis that in the past would have been called Asperger's Syndrome."
The revelation dropped into the room. Not with a crash, but with a dense silence. The pieces of the puzzle that was Leo began to fit together in everyone's minds, forming a completely new image.
"His impulsivity," Helena continued, as if giving a lecture, "the nuclear prank, the chair stunt... his brain has a chronic dopamine deficit. It craves constant stimulation. Risk, novelty, chaos... they are not just personality traits; they are a neurological necessity. He doesn't think about long-term consequences because his prefrontal cortex is completely hijacked by the immediate reward of the 'now'."
"His hyperfocus," she went on. "That same mind, when it finds a sufficiently interesting stimulus, like a historical riddle or an ancient mechanism, can concentrate on it with an intensity that borders on superhuman. He can go three days without sleep, deciphering a code, because in that moment, nothing else in the universe exists for him. It's the flip side of distraction. And that's why he's the best at what he does."
She looked directly at Yu-ri. "And it also explains his... social blindness. It's not that he didn't care about your fear in the alley, Miss Jo. It's that his brain isn't wired to easily process complex non-verbal emotional cues from others. He saw the facts: 'You're in danger, the solution is to get you out of here.' He didn't process the nuances: 'You are terrified, you need comfort, my presence scares you.' It's not cruelty. It's a disconnection."
Wi Ha-joon nodded slowly, his detective's eyes gleaming with new understanding. "That's why he's a genius at tactical improvisation, but a disaster at long-term strategic planning," he murmured. "He reacts to immediate stimuli with incredible brilliance, but gets bored with planning."
"Exactly," Helena confirmed. "And that condition is both his curse and his superpower. That inability to perceive risk in the way we do allows him to see solutions that a neurotypical mind would dismiss as suicidal. He jumps off a rooftop because he has calculated the vectors and probabilities in a split second, without the paralyzing fear of death clouding his judgment. His mind sees the world as a huge, fascinating puzzle of patterns, not as a set of social rules and physical limitations."
"It's a gift that allows him to survive the impossible," Helena concluded, her voice tinged with unmistakable sadness. "And it's a curse that prevents him from living a normal life."
The truth settled upon them, heavy and revealing. The chaotic, exasperating man transformed in their minds. Now they saw the loneliness that must come with having such a mind, the constant struggle to fit into a world not designed for him.
Yu-ri's anger completely dissolved, replaced by an empathy so deep it hurt. The man who had called her a "package," the one who hadn't understood her terror, hadn't done it out of arrogance. He simply didn't know how else to do it.
[POINT OF VIEW: LEO - FIRST PERSON]
I returned to the living room after changing. I felt... empty. The world, which was usually a chaotic, vibrant symphony of colors, sounds, and ideas in my head, had been reduced to a monotonous hum. The noise was gone.
The constant storm of thoughts that always accompanied me—what's the breaking point of that beam? could I use that chandelier to swing? that stain on the carpet looks like the outline of Crete, what if I mixed this whiskey with that cleaning product?—had quieted, leaving a dense, unnatural silence. The colors in the room seemed duller. I could focus on one thing, on one conversation, and I hated it. I felt slow. Heavy. Normal.
I sat on a sofa, apart from the others, and watched them. They looked at me differently. The exasperation and anger in their eyes had been replaced by something I immediately recognized and despised: pity.
I decided to speak, not to justify myself, but for them to understand. My voice sounded strange in my own ears, flat and without my usual energy.
"It turns off my mind," I said, staring at a fixed point on the wall. "It makes me... silent inside."
I looked up, and my eyes met Yu-ri's. I saw a deep understanding in them. "It makes me slow. In a collapsing tomb, Helena, 'slow' is a death sentence. When bullets are flying around me, I need to think of ten things at once. I need to see all the exits, all the angles, all the possibilities in a split second. The medication... it forces me to follow a single path. It forces me to be normal."
I spat the word "normal" like it was poison.
"That's why I don't take it when I work," I continued, my voice barely a whisper. "Because the chaos... the noise... the storm in my head... it's the price I pay. And it's what keeps me alive."
The confession hung in the air, raw and naked. For the first time, they weren't seeing me as an action hero or a clown, but as what I truly was: a man whose greatest strength was also his cage.
Yu-ri looked at me, and her expression was one of infinite sadness. She compared the calm, muted man sitting on the sofa to the maniac who had sung about muffins while falling into a pool. And I knew that she, in that moment, couldn't decide which version was more heartbreaking.