※ Episode 5 : Please Make Me Not Kill Myself!
Maybe I should just die... How should I do it this time... If I jumped into the river, maybe no one would even come looking... No... if someone saves me again, that just means there's no hope left for me at all...
The light in Cheon Cheri's bright, sparkling eyes vanished in an instant, and she muttered on as though terror had swallowed her whole.
She's probably fretting over whether she should apologize... must be humiliating for the daughter of a great family...
"G-G-Gah! Bear a commoner's child!"
We'd been told the families didn't discriminate, but Cheon Cheri was, in the end, still a great family's daughter, so I figured she was agonizing out of some inborn sense of privilege.
And on top of that, I'd actually witnessed her trying to kill herself...
She had tried to hang herself because she didn't want to get married... and the one who happened to stumble onto the scene and save her was me. Having barely survived and then been dragged here against her will, she was now slammed with the shocking truth that the man who saved her was the very man she was to marry.
"Are you okay?"
After Bada left, I spoke up, hoping to calm Cheon Cheri down at least a little from her panic.
"Whew... I'm fine... I can't be falling apart in front of my own fiancé..."
Having steadied her breathing, Cheon Cheri pressed a hand to her chest and psyching herself up like something out of a self-help book, then—
"I'm all better now! Full revival! Perfect☆Cheon Cheri has arrived!"
She treated me to the bizarre fan service she usually performed up on stage. Bada really should have been here to see it.
"And how do you really feel?"
"I want to die... right now, right here, this very second..."
That little performance seemed to have burned off the last of her adrenaline, because Cheon Cheri's soul promptly left her body.
"...Did you happen to film me trying to kill myself?"
She candidly admitted that she'd tried to end her life somewhere no one could see.
"I didn't. And I'm not spreading rumors about it either."
"You were about to tell Bada!"
I had been on the verge of telling Bada that she'd been trying to kill herself when Cheon Cheri herself barged in and cut the whole thing off.
"Does that sound like something people would take seriously? They'd just laugh and let it go."
"There goes our Ora-bang spouting nonsense again, huh?"
Knowing Bada, she'd assume I was joking and say exactly that, thumbs up and all.
"If you go around telling people someone's about to attempt suicide, you're the one who ends up looking like the lunatic..."
"Soylent Green... no! Cheon Cheri is suicidal! Cheon Cheri was trying to kill herself! Someone has to stop her, no matter what!"
Even if I had learned the truth, exposing Cheon Cheri's suicide attempt to my friends would've gotten me treated like a crazy person nine times out of ten.
"If anything, I'm the anxious one... I kept thinking she might actually go through with it..."
I really was a soft-hearted man.
When I first saw it, I'd grumbled that if she was going to die, she could at least do it somewhere other than school—but the moment she actually kicked the chair away and made a real attempt, I dove in without a second thought. Thankfully she showed up to school perfectly fine the next day, but I'd been so wound up with worry that I spent the entire night before lying awake.
"Being an idol must have been brutal for you. If someone forced me into marriage, I'd want to die too."
Idol life, for all its glossy TV image, is a genuinely grueling job. In an era where a single careless word can send you plummeting into ruin, you have to keep your mouth on a constant leash. Even the food you're craving is off-limits thanks to weight management. And since she's a student before she's an idol, she has to squeeze in studying between schedules so no one catches her falling behind. Being a great family's daughter, she could probably have crushed anything with sheer power, but I'm sure the unfair demands came anyway. With all that stress piling up and a marriage being forced on her at the end of it, no wonder she'd been driven to the brink.
"She just hates the idea of marrying a commoner like me, that's all..."
If the news of the engagement was what drove Cheon Cheri to attempt suicide, then first and foremost, the blame lay with me. It was a shame, too—losing Cheon Cheri would have been like throwing away the last piece of chicken at the table—but marriage was, at bottom, a matter of interests between families... Even if not someone on Cheon Cheri's level, I was optimistic enough by nature to figure my family would turn up some reasonably decent bride for me anyway.
"Do you... not want to marry me either, Yongsung...?"
The moment those words left my mouth, Cheon Cheri asked, on the verge of tears.
"Weren't you doing that because you didn't want to marry?"
"W-well, yes, that too, but—look, I may not seem like it, but I'm a great family's daughter AND an idol! Getting rejected still hurts, you know!"
Quite the opposite of what I'd assumed—she was the one sulking, saying that if I came right out and declared I wouldn't marry her, that would wound her.
"Yongsung, do you know why this marriage suddenly started moving forward?"
"Moving forward? The way it looks, wasn't it decided ages ago? Probably the old folks on both sides traded money or something."
Since I'd just eagerly accepted the whole arrangement, I knew even less about the background of this engagement than Cheon Cheri had managed to piece together herself.
"Sometimes I really envy how simple your mind is, Yongsung."
"Don't lump me in with Bada. I'm not an idiot like her."
Cheon Cheri straightened herself up and put on an impressively grave expression.
"I'll ask one more time. I would like to hear what you actually think about marrying me."
"As long as you're not a terrible person, marrying you is the better deal."
The words were barely out of my mouth before I'd answered her question.
"Why did you answer so fast! At least pretend to think about it!"
Watching me reply without a single second of deliberation, Cheon Cheri got scared in a whole different way, insisting she hadn't known how else to take it.
"Honestly, this is an era when people can't even get married at all. For a commoner like me to wed a great family's daughter? That's plain good fortune."
"You sound like some nouveau riche gone mad over money... I distinctly remember you being a genuinely good person back in our history class group..."
"I never thought much of idols because they had nothing to do with me... Well, now that we're engaged, all you have to do is take an interest. Cheon Cheri."
"'Cheon Cheri' is way too stiff. Call me Cherry, like Bada does."
Somewhere around middle school I'd learned that guys call girls by their family name unless they're truly close—but since we were going to be married, she told me to just make myself comfortable.
"I did try to kill myself, but... it's not like I particularly dislike you at school, Yongsung."
Cheon Cheri—no, Cherry—earnestly implored me not to get the wrong idea. Her suicide attempt hadn't been because of me.
"But I still want to die."
Regression... she'd regressed straight back to square one. Cherry made it clear that, deep down, wanting to die hadn't gone anywhere.
"But if you do want to get married... then please, Yongsung, help me so I won't kill myself."
"So you won't kill yourself?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. You'll make me into someone who doesn't kill herself."
"You're not killing yourself right now, are you."
"I-I still get those feelings, you know! Like... how do I even put it! Wh-when those cringe-worthy old memories pop into my head sometimes...!"
"I don't have anything like that, but I think I get what you mean..."
Suwon, the friend I was closest to at school, had once been a chuunibyou cosplayer through and through. She'd slap on an eyepatch, drape something like a cape over her shoulders, strike a dramatic pose, and spout mortifying lines like, "No—think, minions! Follow the True Ancestor!"
She's escaped that phase now, but whenever the memory of what she calls the worst mistake of her life resurfaces, she sinks into a gloom every bit as deep as Cherry's—to the point where she says if she ever truly remembered it all, she'd kill herself.
"Was that too much to ask? I could change it to something less demanding, if you'd like..."
"Only an idiot would turn down marrying an idol. All I have to do is patch up that little heart problem of yours, right?"
Listen to her, talking like she's resigned to despair. There's no such thing as despair in my dictionary.
Marrying a great family's daughter who was also a nationally famous idol put me pretty close to blessed by fortune itself. And since I was marrying an idol anyway, all that was left was to manage her mental state so she'd stop wanting to die. Simple.
"Please understand, even if I threaten you with suicide sometimes... threatening suicide has become a habit before I even realized it..."
"SHAPE! Are my dongpo pork and eel safe and sound, Ora-bang?"
Bada had finished her phone call and came bursting into the room, her twin tails swinging wildly, asking in the speech of a warrior from one of those high-rated historical dramas whether the dongpo pork—the soy-braised pork belly—and the eel had survived unharmed.
"Ah... right, we should eat... I wasn't eating, was I..."
Only then did Cherry pick up her chopsticks and move a piece of dongpo pork over to her own plate. She must have been starving—she'd really held out this whole time.
"What took you so long?"
While Cherry worked on the pork, I whispered to Bada, who had finally returned.
"Phone call with a friend?"
Girls do love their marathon phone calls, and with Bada being such a chatterbox by nature, it made sense it had taken this long.
"And I got calls from the family elders too! Ora-bang!"
"Pick one way to call me—Ora-bang or big bro. Just one."
Announcing that she had words from the family elders to pass along, Bada leaned in close to my ear and delivered "some rather inconvenient news."
"...This is basically an engagement I stumbled into by accident. Aren't they dumping way too heavy a responsibility on me here?"
"Nothing you can do about it. You married an idol—just accept it."
Thumbs up, Bada told me to take the sudden demand in stride.
This was asking a bit much...