Left Alone on the Holiday
Rembrary sprang into action, whipping up an excuse on the spot.
But Woo Sung-woo was sharp. Even though Rembrary had lied without a moment's hesitation, something clearly struck him as off, and he pressed immediately.
It was the same as back when he'd suspected his brother might not be his brother — the man was genuinely quick on the uptake.
Though there was no one around to see, Rembrary glared wide-eyed at nothing as he typed his reply.
But his hasty self-defense proved his undoing, and nonsense was what came out. Realizing his slip, Rembrary rapped his own mouth and hastily added:
His heart lurched for a moment, but fortunately Sung-woo seemed to have made the leap from "adult" to Saint. Relieved, Rembrary replied, "Yes."
But Sung-woo was truly tenacious.
Since the man plainly refused to let it slide, Rembrary finally scrunched up his face and turned the question back on him.
Rembrary was not the sort of strange person who flew into a rage simply because someone else had eaten something delicious. But an excuse to end this exchange with Sung-woo was urgently needed, and so he deliberately fired off a text pretending to be utterly furious that the man had eaten cake all by himself.
Isn't this making me look like a glutton? he thought — but really, the man was his brother, wasn't he?
No sooner had he fired off the message than he slapped the phone face-down on the sink.
"What the hell?"
Sung-woo stared down at his phone, dumbfounded. What even was this...
He'd known his amnesiac little brother was getting famous for a gluttonous image, but wasn't this going a bit far? The unprompted outburst was beyond flustering — it was downright absurd. As for the CCTV business, he'd already all but forgotten it.
"Does the agency starve the kid or something?" He was still turning the suspicion over when the Team Leader passed by and asked, "What's wrong?"
"No idea."
"Huh?"
"He's mad because I ate cake."
No matter how he turned it over, Sung-woo couldn't make heads or tails of it, so he began replaying the very first exchange of the day from the top.
"Looks like he sulked 'cause you didn't tell him it was your birthday. He's way cuter than his TV image!"
At the Team Leader's delighted exclamation, however, his busily typing thumb froze mid-motion.
Is that so? Sung-woo looked up at him. The Team Leader just kept murmuring "so cute, cute" under his breath.
Sung-woo chewed it over for a while, then concluded that the Team Leader was right. And with that conclusion came a fresh wave of being touched. This rascal... just say these things out loud, why don't you.
Feeling pointlessly bashful and awkward, Sung-woo flipped the phone over in his hand a few times, then texted Yeon-woo again.
At that moment, Rembrary was rolling up his sleeves to wash his face, working cleansing foam between his palms.
Just as he was about to begin washing, a ping went off. Glancing sideways, Rembrary saw the three characters Woo Sung-woo and scowled. I said we were done texting — now what?
Only after finishing his face did he dry his hands on a towel and check the message — whereupon he raised his eyebrows in sheer incredulity.
He hadn't thought a thing of Sung-woo eating cake alone, but receiving this, he found himself genuinely a little hurt. "I didn't tell you because it might be a burden" meant he'd originally intended for them to eat it together... Could it be that the cake had come with words like 'share it with your brother' in the first place? No — contextually, there was no way he'd send such a text.
For now, he decided to play dumb. Sung-woo shot back instantly, sharp as a blade.
Rembrary was half certain now. The cake — could it have been sent by Sung-woo and Yeon-woo's parents? For the holiday, with instructions to eat it together? And he'd eaten it alone?
Under that assumption, Sung-woo's texts roughly added up.
And under that assumption, Sung-woo was a truly despicable man.
Rembrary scrunched his face and lodged a protest.
"Wow... look at this kid."
"What now?"
"I think he was worried I'd spent my birthday alone."
Sung-woo kept making and unmaking strange expressions for no reason at all.
Everything had felt unfamiliar since the memory loss, but seen like this, it seemed a few traces of the original brother still lingered after all.
He typed and deleted a reply several times over before finally sending something awkward, though a touch kinder than usual.
That considerate little message irritated Rembrary all the more.
What is this — a truly rotten older brother if ever there was one.
First he'd gotten sore about eating alone a cake that someone — whoever it was — had clearly given him to share, and now what? He ate it with other people?
His character was such a train wreck you'd wonder whether they were really brothers at all.
Clicking his tongue, Rembrary sent that final reply, resolved to answer nothing further no matter what came, switched the phone to silent, and walked out of the bathroom.
"You rascal — embarrassed, are you? You're not a baby, why so awkward about it."
The Team Leader, who at some point had sidled up next to Sung-woo to read the texts along with him, exclaimed all over again, "Wow, so cute!"
No wonder — he'd been binging the variety show A Week on a Time Machine lately. Yeon-woo had apparently won him over completely back then.
Feeling pointlessly pleased with himself, Sung-woo set the phone down beside him and asked, "For one thing, Yeon-woo doesn't seem to have had anything scheduled on the 8th. Team Leader, did you check with the Cheonripung side?"
"I did ask. They say they don't know anything about it."
Sung-woo muttered gravely, "Could it really be Runak..."
If it had been Cheonripung's doing, the matter would have been simple to resolve. Relations with them had been good lately — he might have to lodge a protest, but that much would be the end of it. Their objective had clearly been the demon beast, so for Nakru it was nothing to be alarmed over.
But if it was the work of Runak, the other suspect, it was truly dangerous. Getting entangled with them didn't end at injury — you simply vanished, completely. It ceased to be a question of protest or no protest.
The atmosphere in the hospital room turned grave in an instant. Everyone silently watched each other out of the corners of their eyes.
Then—
"Um, by the way."
Eon Du-sin, whom they'd all assumed was asleep, half-raised his IV-tethered hand from the hospital bed.
"I've been thinking it over, and I don't think it was Runak."
"What's that supposed to mean?" the Team Leader asked.
"No, I mean, come on."
Eon Du-sin scratched his head vigorously, and when blood began backing up the IV line he hastily lowered his hand and finished his explanation.
"If Runak had been the ones to attack, they wouldn't have left those two behind in the first place. They kidnap every single one of us they spot, don't they?"
Unfortunately, it was a remark that painted the situation in an even darker light.
"You're saying there's another enemy out there besides Runak?"
The next day, Rembrary went to the agency with the members and received the hanbok the company had prepared in advance.
"Put this on and come back out, and we'll shoot: a cut of you over there with your hands folded in a bow, one of everyone waving together, one making a heart, and one doing a formal New Year's bow. Plus a solo shot of each of you."
The members each received a hanbok in a different color, changed, and filed back out.
It wasn't a full-scale studio shoot — a makeshift set had been thrown together inside the waiting room.
"Jong-woo."
"What."
"There is a problem."
"What? Did the outfit rip somewhere? Are you hurt?"
"I bow to no one."
Rembrary's flat-out refusal of the bow held things up briefly, and then more time was lost debating how five people were supposed to form a single heart together — but somehow, some way, they got into formation and the shoot began.
Jong-woo stood behind the photographer alongside a PR team staffer, watching the monitor and nodding along as the members came out looking charming one frame after another.
About thirty minutes later, apparently satisfied with the results, the photographer lifted his face from the camera with a pleased smile.
Hearing that once the photos were done they could all go home, the members scattered like startled birds, thinking, So we get to go home now.
"Ah, hold on a second."
But the PR staffer called them all back.
When the five of them had reassembled, wondering what was the matter, the staffer opened the memo app on his phone and said, "Could each of you give a short message for the fans? We're going to tack one line apiece onto the very end of the article, color-highlighted."
Say you're always thankful. Say you're always energized thanks to the fans. Say there's a new album coming and ask them to look forward to it. Say you love them — and so on. Taein, Cathy, Jungseo, and Hye-gyeol each delivered an unimpeachable greeting in turn.
The staffer's thumbs flew across the screen transcribing every word, and then, last of all, he turned to Rembrary.
"And Yeon-woo?"
"Whether it be a war of words or of fists, tell any believer confident in holy war to send me a private message by SNS. And tell them besides that the god bestows blessings."
The staffer stared blankly at Rembrary for a long moment, then bowed his head and self-edited Rembrary's greeting out of existence.
"...I'll just write 'Have a happy Chuseok.'"
"Very well. Then let it be something else."
Rembrary disliked that and hurriedly interjected, and the staffer let out a sigh before offering his advice bluntly: "This time, quit screwing around and just say something."
"Tell any who have no religion, or who wish to convert, or whose faith wavers, to send me a message by SNS—"
"'Have a happy Chuseok.' That's what I'm writing."
There was a bit of a scuffle over Rembrary's greeting, but this time too the two sides somehow managed a bare-bones compromise, and the holiday greeting shoot drew to a safe close.
After exchanging farewells with the staff, CEO Im, and Jong-woo, the members scattered in high spirits, visibly floating at the thought of heading home or to their hometowns.
After long years scraping by as nobodies, taking worry, pity, and mockery from relatives every single holiday, they had finally begun to make names for themselves — their parents could hold their heads high now, and the barrage of nagging from the relatives could be dodged. It was their first holiday since making it, so of course they were excited.
...It might get a little boring for me, though.
Only Rembrary, returned to the dorm and left entirely alone, felt a touch melancholy as he sat abandoned on the sofa.
Just as Jong-woo had said, now that he actually was the one left behind, he felt strangely restless.
And it hadn't even been thirty minutes.
It wasn't that the members had gone their separate ways that bothered him. It was that hearing them chatter excitedly about going home had made him think of his own home.
That world had its holidays too — and one of them was Rembrary's birthday. The believers came to see him often enough on ordinary days, but on his birthday, the floodgates opened.
He missed that teeming, surging crowd.
Trying to shake off the longing, he searched his phone for pictures of Chuseok food — only for the images of ceremonial tables laid out for ancestral spirits to make the ache still heavier.
I received plenty of spreads like that in my own world, too.
At last, lonely and out of options, Rembrary grabbed the self-cam and turned it on.
— End of Chapter 139: Left Alone on the Holiday —