71. I Love Your Scent
"Our Yeon-woo may have zero common sense, but he's not a bad kid. Right?"
Jong-woo, who had watched the whole incident unfold up close, answered with an awkward laugh. "That much is true."
"You did well too. Called 119 right away, and then you stuck to the lady who'd collapsed, calling in her location the whole time, didn't you?"
"That's just, you know, the bare minimum."
"It was more than the bare minimum. I'm proud of you."
Embarrassed, Jong-woo just stared harder at the tablet PC resting on his knees.
The day's events had dominated the news from morning to night. For a single life saved, there was surprisingly little of the tearjerker about it, but at the very least, Yeon-woo's absence from the #1 announcement ceremony was thoroughly buried. No — better than buried. The people who had been cursing him for skipping the ceremony went quiet the moment they learned he'd missed it while saving a life, or promptly switched sides.
Oh Jung-shin's fans grumbled that it hadn't been Woo Yeon-woo who saved anyone but his manager and a cat, and sneered that bringing a cat anywhere near an injured person was peak stupidity — but public opinion, on the whole, landed on "weird, but a good deed nonetheless."
Besides, the testimonies from people who claimed their illnesses had improved after stanning Woo Yeon-woo, and the words Yeon-woo had spoken to San So-ra before her collapse, were making the rounds all over again.
Ordinarily, this kind of publicity would have made any self-respecting idol break out in hives. But CEO Im was satisfied with this much attention. Before losing his memory, Yeon-woo had had no name recognition whatsoever, and after losing it, his image had been beyond salvage. He was still seen as an odd, bizarre weirdo — but that beat being written off as a hundred-percent-pure trash human being. Definitely.
And by the next day, the whole affair bore even sweeter fruit. The title track, which had been stuck at #7 like something was physically blocking its way, leapt to #5.
That wasn't all. Yeon-woo's solo song, sitting even lower, jumped to #2.
"Sa Gam-jae, are you really coworkers with Sa Jik-jae?"
Tuesday. Rembrary had gone to the studio to shoot Dear God, and the moment Jong-woo stepped out and left the two of them alone in the waiting room, he seized his chance to ask.
Sa Gam-jae glanced up at him mid-pour, hot water from the thermos still streaming into the cup.
Rembrary was reclining at an angle against the folding cot, watching him intently.
"Jik-jae mentioned that?"
"Yes."
"Coworkers... yes, we are."
"But your workplace is here, isn't it, Gam-jae?"
"Ah, well."
Sa Gam-jae gave a half-hearted answer and went back to pouring water in a steady stream. It was abundantly clear he had no intention of elaborating.
Rembrary stretched out just one leg comfortably and observed his every move. Pale. Bloodless. His body was genuinely cold to the touch. Taken all together, that pointed squarely at vampire or zombie.
But for a zombie, his appetite was remarkably well controlled. For a vampire, he got around in daylight just fine. And above all, he showed no pain whatsoever in the presence of divine power.
He can see souls. Touch them, too... A demon?
Rembrary had no idea that Sa Gam-jae, studying him right back, was entertaining a strikingly similar thought.
By the time their intense mutual surveillance wound down, an FD came to fetch Rembrary, telling him to wait on standby at the set. He set down the water bottle and headed over.
As he scanned the script and the filming setup, his eyes met Lim Yu-han's, and she flashed him a quick wink. Rembrary laughed despite himself — until Sa Gam-jae muttered, "You'll be punished for that," and he hurriedly rearranged his face.
Being an idol really was inconvenient, he thought. Here was a chance to simply befriend a perfectly nice person, and just because she was a woman, he was supposed to keep his distance. Priests couldn't take lovers either, back in his world — but no one had ever demanded that your friends be exclusively your own sex. Wasn't this world taking things a bit too far?
Meanwhile, the director, having wrapped a scene, beckoned Rembrary over. When he approached, she walked him through today's shooting schedule.
"The enemy couple joins the parish congregation, and everyone just gushes over them. So gentle they couldn't even crush a bug, so virtuous they could live without laws — that kind of thing. Apparently they're doing volunteer work now, too. You can see how that'd piss Deungbaek off, right?"
"What does 'piss' mean?"
"It means you're fuming."
"What does 'fuming' mean?"
"My mood right now. No time for jokes, Yeon-woo."
I wasn't joking. Rembrary kept the complaint to himself and shut his mouth, and the director barreled on in her rapid-fire delivery.
"Anyway, Deungbaek goes to volunteer at an orphanage — and the enemy couple from his past life shows up there too..."
Deungbaek swallows his anger and tries not to let it show, but it isn't easy. Im Seo's words keep echoing in his head — that the couple's sin isn't from their past life, but this one. He does his best to wear a stoic face, but when one of the couple asks Deungbaek to go fetch something for them, the fury finally boils over.
"Why don't you do it yourself?"
The surrounding volunteers cringe on his behalf at the line, and right in the middle of it all, a child who absolutely adores the enemy couple rounds on Deungbaek — "Father, how can you be like that?" — scolding him as a bad man in their stead. Under normal circumstances, he'd write it off as a child's thoughtlessness, but the person this kid is comparing him to, in total ignorance, is the very one who drove his lover to death. Deungbaek can hardly hold back.
Then, staring at the couple's backs as they stand with the child on the steps, he thinks, for one instant, of shoving them — and is seized with disgust at himself for the thought. In the end, Deungbaek claims illness and returns to the cathedral, where he pours out his heart to Im Seo.
Until now, Deungbaek had been off doing volunteer work without Im Seo in tow — but from this scene onward, Rembrary would once again be trailing at Deungbaek's heels like a devoted duckling.
I can read a script, you know. Rembrary wondered why the director had bothered to summarize it all for him, but she went on explaining Im Seo's emotions in painstaking, line-by-line detail, eyeing him with open skepticism.
"You've got a lot of lines today. You'll be all right?"
"I've memorized everything. I'm not an idiot, Director."
"Of course you're not an idiot, Yeon-woo."
When the briefing ended, Rembrary headed for the set dressed as the priest's study. Maeng Woo-shin was already there, and the sight of Rembrary made him scowl openly.
The director, however, deliberately let the scowl pass without comment. She knew that whatever his real feelings, the moment Maeng Woo-shin started acting, his expression — and the emotion beneath it — would flip in an instant.
Just as expected, when the director called "Ready..." his face changed in a heartbeat. Rembrary too took the spot the staff had marked out for him and settled into his usual kindly expression.
At last came the call of "Action!" — and the camera rolled.
Maeng Woo-shin, who had been sulking a moment before, was instantly consumed by fury, his breath coming ragged. His face made it unmistakably clear he was angry enough to choke on his own air. He gritted his teeth, clawed at his own hair, and finally let out a low, pained groan.
Rembrary just stared blankly at him. And then Maeng Woo-shin let out a small, strangled cry — and something seemed to crumble in him, his face going slack as he looked at Rembrary and spoke.
"Im Seo. Say there are men you truly, truly, truly despise."
"I like dogs, sunbae. Puppies even more."
"Then not dogs. Say there are bad men you just... hate."
Rembrary clicked his tongue, putting genuine feeling into the line. "A priest, cursing."
For an instant Maeng Woo-shin looked ready to erupt — but it lasted only an instant. Rembrary stepped closer to him and said with a slow, curling smile, "Sounds depraved of me."
"Don't mess around."
"Is this messing around?"
"What would you do, Im Seo? Say there are men you want to kill — but you can't kill them?"
At the words want to kill, Maeng Woo-shin swallowed dryly, as if terrified that merely speaking them might be a sin.
Seeing that, he looked for all the world like a junior priest truly lost in agonized contemplation — and Rembrary's supremely benevolent High Priest expression surfaced all on its own.
"I would kill them."
But the line came out ice-cold.
Maeng Woo-shin was silent for a moment, then shot back, "Ha. You can't be serious. You're not even capable of hating anyone enough to kill them."
Deungbaek was a genuinely tiresome character. If he thought that way, why on earth had he asked such a question in the first place?
Clicking his tongue inwardly, Rembrary let out the soft little laugh the script called for. Maeng Woo-shin stared at him for a long moment, then dropped heavily into the chair and muttered, "I used to pity you for having no emotions. Frankly, right now, I envy you for it."
The chair had been placed at the precise spot where sunlight through the window laid a window of light across the floor — half-slung across it, to be exact. When Maeng Woo-shin sat there, half his body fell into light and half into shadow, a deliberate visual device to externalize his inner torment.
Rembrary set down the book he'd been idly shuffling through under the pretense of tidying up, and sank to his knees, crawling toward Maeng Woo-shin — all the way to where the light from the chair fell.
To exactly the place before Deungbaek's knees.
Stopping there, Rembrary looked up at Deungbaek and smiled. "Then share some with me too, sunbae. That thing you call emotion."
Deungbaek's gaze came down and landed on him.
This line was a scene Writer Shim had slipped in deliberately to milk the Deungbaek–Im Seo chemistry — in truth, a thoroughly pointless scene.
But Maeng Woo-shin, true to the writer's intent, delivered it with a barely perceptible tremor in his pupils, gazing down at the junior who claimed not to know what emotion was.
And yet, in that moment, Deungbaek crumbled — and Maeng Woo-shin burst out of him. The side effect of holding faces for too long with no dialogue between them.
Unable to master his rage, Maeng Woo-shin smacked Rembrary squarely on the forehead.
Rembrary looked up at him, utterly bewildered, then asked, "What was that, sunbae?"
He wasn't asking as Im Seo — he was genuinely startled. This wasn't in the script. And Rembrary had never once encountered an improv situation in his life.
Maeng Woo-shin froze in turn and stared back at him. He had hit him, yes — but it hadn't been a planned ad-lib on his end either.
As it happened, Im Seo's term for Deungbaek and Rembrary's term for Maeng Woo-shin were one and the same — sunbae. Sick of hearing sunbae, sunbae over and over, he'd simply planted a knuckle-rap on that glossy forehead of his. That was all it was.
But when the director, who should have been yelling "NG!" on the spot, stayed conspicuously silent, Maeng Woo-shin grew flustered in his own right.
Still — he was a professional. Rather than let his confusion show, he rubbed Rembrary's forehead in a few perfunctory strokes, rose without a word, and let out a long sigh. Only then did the director finally call, "Cut!"
Having trailed Deungbaek — or rather, Maeng Woo-shin — like a lapdog through every inch of filming, Rembrary only managed to slip away from the set when the turn came to the supporting character actors. He sank into a chair tucked in a corner, and a staffer brought over an enormous sandwich, saying it was a snack that had been sent for Maeng Woo-shin.
Confirming that Jong-woo was nowhere in sight, Rembrary tore the wrapper open and hurried the sandwich to his mouth. If Jong-woo showed up, he'd confiscate it with some lecture about weight management — it had to disappear first.
He was mid-chew when the sandwich caught in his throat and sent him hacking — and a pale white hand extended a can of cider toward him. Rembrary accepted it, took a long swallow, and looked to his side.
Lim Yu-han.
"Thank you, sunbae."
In lieu of an answer, she gave a small smile, settled into the seat beside him, and asked, "Sounds like things are rough between you and Woo-shin."
"I think he hates me, sunbae."
"Really? Why would that be?"
"No idea. Hardly anyone hates me, so I must admit it's a bit bewildering."
"...Hmm. Has no one ever told you you're oblivious?"
When Rembrary just gave him a what-on-earth look, Lim Yu-han laughed playfully, flipping her long hair, and asked, "By the way, Yeon-woo — do I happen to smell nice to you today? Some good scent?"
Rembrary sniffed the air, then went, "Ah." A good scent, all right. He knew this one...
"You smell like Sik."
"Sik?"
"The dog we keep at our office."
Lim Yu-han's eyebrows shot up. The same scent as a dog...
Well, it was possible. What she'd put on was baby powder, and that scent got used absolutely everywhere, by everyone.
Still — for an idol's fake girlfriend to spray on baby powder she didn't even like, only to get lumped in with a dog... The absurdity of it was so overwhelming that her real voice slipped out for a moment.
"So the mutt uses baby-powder shampoo, does he."
< 71. I Love Your Scent > — End
© Shinhwajin