A Star Was Alone From the Moment It Was Born - 2
Saturday morning broke.
But A-yeong didn’t go home. She changed clothes in the lounge, washed up, and came out with a light touch of makeup. Then she smiled sweetly. “I’ll come with you too, hee-hee.”
…
If she was only going to tag along, there was no reason to put on makeup. To anyone watching, she looked exactly like someone who planned to linger here again.
I was standing in front of the donation truck when I asked, “Don’t you need to go home?”
“It’s fine. I decided Saturday would be my day off.”
She answered casually, then suddenly knitted her brows in mock severity and pointed a finger at me. “I even wrote that in the stream notice! You didn’t read it, did you? Ace, disqualified—!”
…
Was this the red pill? I had somehow become the first fandom ever to be disqualified by the VTuber herself. But since it was obviously a joke, I tried to steer things back to the original subject.
“Wasn’t there anything else on the schedule today besides the stream?”
“Yep, just a day off.”
…
“?”
The answer was painfully simple.
In the end, I asked what I really wanted to know.
“Aren’t you tired?”
“Nope. No customers came by, so I watched movies on the lounge TV until dawn and slept like a log. Didn’t you sleep well? Is the rooftop room noisy? Or was it because of the stocks?”
…
“That’s unexpected. I figured once you fell asleep, you’d sleep straight through.”
Something about the way she said it felt a little off. And she’d been stuck on calling me oppa since earlier, so this clearly wasn’t just a one-off tease.
—It wasn’t impossible, but—
Did she think that one thing I said yesterday had been permission?
But the timing was awkward, and I couldn’t exactly correct her now. I wasn’t even sure whether she had simply been using the word because she was in a good mood, or whether she was deliberately bringing up that one line and poking at it because her memory was sharp.
So I decided not to react to the way she addressed me.
I told her, “I don’t have insomnia.”
“Then let’s gooo~! Floor it, oppa!”
A-yeong yanked open the passenger door and hopped into the cab of the truck.
Then, the moment I settled into the driver’s seat, her eyes lit up and she slammed the horn with both hands. The empty space in front of the convenience store instantly turned noisy.
HONK—!
HONK—!
“Whoa!”
“If you keep doing that, people will think I’m a reckless driver.”
“So what? No one except you is even listening.”
…
I wanted to point out the flaw in that logic, but it was annoyingly reasonable, so I couldn’t.
In the end, I nodded and accepted it. “Well, when you put it that way…”
And so we set off.
Leaving the quiet convenience store behind, the truck gradually merged onto the road.
Even on the way to the orphanage, A-yeong kept talking beside me. She turned the radio on softly and sat there beaming like she was having the time of her life.
“Do you play games, oppa?”
“Sometimes. Mostly competitive stuff rather than sim games. Just a match or two whenever I feel like it.”
“Heeey, that’s kind of like DoDa.”
…
The blue maniac from ABCD had come up.
Bigmaaaaan—!
I thought of her tendencies.
Yeah, everything DoDa says does seem heavily influenced by the internet. And she was incredibly good at controlling her character on stream too.
“I definitely got the impression that she really likes games.”
“Yep, but she plays a ton even when she’s not streaming. Once, she streamed during the day for three straight days, then stayed up all night playing games, and in the end she collapsed with a fever.”
“I see. She’s extremely passionate about her research into streaming.”
“Huh? No. She just did it because she was having fun.”
…
As expected, a lunatic’s behavior was impossible to predict.
After finishing that story about the past, A-yeong went back to the topic she’d actually wanted to talk about.
“Anyway, I only really know rhythm games. But thanks to DoDa, I learned a bunch of other stuff and tried them out. Still, I can’t handle the gory ones.”
“Rhythm games?”
“Yeah! The ones in front of the arcade. Have you played them, oppa?”
“Sometimes, but they’re too hard for me. I can’t really see the things coming down.”
“Heeey… yeah, that’s true. I can’t do gory games either.”
A-yeong shut her eyes for a moment, then opened them wide again.
“Look at this. Can you see my hands shaking just from imagining it?”
…
Sure enough, her hands were trembling.
Apparently she had been imagining herself playing a particularly violent game.
“It’s not even that I’m scared right now… it’s just weird. If I think about gory games, I start shaking for no reason. Bloody movies are fine, though. Isn’t that strange?”
It was a physical reaction whose cause even she didn’t understand. The people around her must have looked at it and decided it was strange, and after a while she had come to think, Yeah, that is strange.
At the intersection, I turned the wheel and corrected her.
“People have things they’re suited to and things they aren’t. It’s too hasty to judge someone by what happens on the surface without considering the traces life has carved into their unconscious.”
“You’re right.”
A-yeong nodded as if she’d understood something, and then the conversation immediately drifted back to something she actually liked.
“If you can’t sleep again, come watch a movie with me in the lounge sometime. Quiet movies are nice. After you watch one, all the complicated thoughts just disappear. I’ve been like that ever since I was little.”
“Since you were little?”
“Back at the orphanage.”
“I see. So even in a group home, there were times when you could watch TV by yourself.”
She spoke with distant warmth. “Yeah! Father Kwon would sometimes gather the well-behaved kids and show us late-night anime or movies. He was strict as hell, so he’d never let us touch smartphones, but he allowed that kind of rebellion... Isn’t that funny?”
“Everyone has a different threshold for what they’ll tolerate.”
Even though it was Saturday morning, the road was starting to clog up little by little.
Before long, we were caught at a light and forced to slow to a crawl.
I stepped on the clutch, shifted gears, and answered, “For him, smartphones were an uncontrollable, overstimulating medium, while media broadcast on TV was something that had already passed through a filter. The stricter someone thinks they are, the more they rely on those kinds of fixed ideas.”
“Yep! Exactly! He always told us, ‘Don’t trust your phones; trust the words of the important people on the news.’ We all just nodded because we wanted to get to the TV as fast as possible.”
Japan, news, politics. Somehow, that was a chilling combination.
I could guess what sort of man the orphanage director was.
A-yeong’s strange memories kept going.
“And then there was the part where he showed us something himself, but once it passed midnight he’d say, ‘It’s late,’ and turn it off by force. So the things that were only fun if you watched the whole series, we’d just watch anyway and make up our own guesses about the beginning and end of the story...”
“Sometimes things are more fun when information is limited. It’s uncomfortable when you’re actually living through it, but in memory it can be elevated into something romantic.”
“Romantic...”
With those words, the truck moved again.
As the speed picked up, A-yeong’s dazed expression melted away and she smiled.
“Yeah. When I lived there, I thought it was such a cold, miserable place. But now I can talk about it with a smile. Maybe that’s romantic too?”
…
“What’s Sae-chan, Hare-chan, and Kana-chan up to now, I wonder. I was the only one who left at seventeen to join the trainee program, so I don’t even know where they all ended up.”
…
Silence fell between us.
…
…
When we stopped at the light, A-yeong lightly poked my shoulder with her baseball cap. Her yellow hair swayed, announcing itself from the corner of my vision.
“Hey.”
“That hurts.”
“The way you just take it when people look at you like you’re weird... seriously, it makes my heart melt.”
“Does it?”
…
Then she said what was really on her mind.
“Thank you. I’m glad I met you, boss.”
“It’s nothing.”
The light changed, and silence settled over us again.
…
…
By the time we reached the area near the orphanage, A-yeong had gone quiet, turning something over in her head.
And after a little while, we arrived.
We got out in the narrow alley and looked around. The orphanage building was frighteningly old, and the heavy iron gate hung there with a sluggish, miserable rattle.
Olive Sprout Orphanage
The orphanage building looked like that gray one over there...
The alley was packed with vehicles, so there was nowhere to park.
“We’re here. But there doesn’t seem to be a proper place to park.”
“Hmm, what do we do?”
“We’ll have to circle around and look for a spot.”
In the end, we got back in the truck.
Then we looped around the alley, checking every corner.
I muttered, “It’s a narrow lane, so there are a lot of illegally parked cars.”
“When I first came to Korea, I thought that was so strange. In K-drama streets and stuff, the alleys are always cluttered with cars. I thought it was just a setup...”
“So you’re used to it now?”
“After I heard the manager lady yelling curses at the car next to us while she was driving...”
…
That sounded like a pretty intense form of local acclimation.
And apart from A-yeong’s very specific memories, our little parking loop ended after four rounds.
We finally found a space a little way from the orphanage.
“Lucky us, there’s a spot nearby.”
“Yep!”
“I’ll carry the boxes from the back, so could you open the gate for me from up front, A-yeong?”
“Huh? Just you? Wouldn’t it be better if we carried it together?”
…
Where was I even supposed to start correcting her?
There were so many things wrong with that one sentence.
…
In the end, I decided to point out the most immediate issue.
“I appreciate the thought. But if no one opens that old gate for me, I’ll have to stop halfway through and set the load down just to open it. That would be harder.”
“Ah...”
A-yeong looked away and accepted that. Apparently the gate, though absurdly old, was also absurdly huge. She got out of the passenger seat and went to open it.
Meanwhile, I pulled a box of snacks out of the cargo bed.
And the moment I turned to head into the orphanage...
With a chill gust of wind, a white sedan came tearing past in a reckless blur.
Whoosh—!
“?!”
What kind of idiot speeds through an alley like that...?
I stared dumbly after the car.
…
It shot down the alley and vanished more than a hundred meters away in the blink of an eye.
If that had hit me, I had a feeling it would’ve been a fatal injury, or close enough to it.
…
I couldn’t remember it clearly, but in the loop where I’d regressed before the full term was up, I’d been hit at that speed and ended up rolling straight off the bed in my one-room apartment on May 1st.
That was the round when I first realized that death and regression were connected.
…
If I’d been one step faster.
I would’ve been sent straight back.
That realization hit me with surprising sharpness.
…
I held the box carefully against my chest and, glancing around, headed toward the orphanage with extra caution. Thankfully, no more speeding cars appeared.
After the donation pilgrimage was over, A-yeong and I ate at the temple.
“Eat before you go.”
“...Thank you.”
“So when are you two getting married?”
...The head monk’s rough kindness was exactly the same as always.
The taste of the bibimbap, and A-yeong snickering beside me.
The atmosphere was the same too.
…
It was still the same.
Kang Do-dam wandered out in the afternoon on Saturday. It had been a rare, lazy day, and she was strolling around Mapo-gu, her territory.
Aki said she was heading out somewhere... Ae-ri and Ye-seo are old fogeys, so they’ll probably sleep until evening because they’re tired...
...Hah.
Her teammates had all collapsed.
Living alone, going alone—was life really so empty?
Kang Do-dam shook her head and headed for the place where her father was waiting. Of course, he wasn’t her biological father. Her biological parents had run off ages ago.
Still, he raised me with his heart, so maybe it’s okay to call him father? Like, wasn’t that a valid call?
Kang Do-dam wasn’t Mister Hong Gil-dong, so she decided to call the orphanage director “father” however she pleased. Considering his actual line of work, it was a rather fitting title, too.
Father don’t say father. Brother don’t say brother.
Mister Hong, I’ll settle your grievance for you.
The place she headed for was Olive Sprout Orphanage. Even after aging out, she still came by whenever her heart felt hollow.
…
Once her mind was made up, her steps quickened.
The orphanage came into view before long.
She swung open the gate of the frighteningly old building with bright energy.
Kang Do-dam shouted, “I’m homeee—!”
And then she saw something astonishing.
!
There was a lavish snack party going on after all this time.
“Hey! I said that one was mine!”
“Are there no salty snacks left?”
“Jelly, jelly~!”
I thought they were saying snack prices had gone up and things were tight lately.
And over there, the priest was walking up with an awkward laugh.
“Hey, you little brat. You’re back again?”
“Father don’t say father...”
“What are you talking about now?”
“Did a gang of righteous thieves come through or something? Why is there suddenly a snack party?”
“Ah, well, you see...”
The priest grinned easily. “There’s a convenience store owner I know through an acquaintance. He came by because he wanted to donate some surplus stock.”
!
My goodness...
Even in an age when virtue and decency had fallen to the ground, chivalry still lived, didn’t it? That man was the righteous bandit of the era—Mister Hong himself.
“Mister Hong... He’s almost worthy of being compared to Bigman.”
“You little brat, you’re still spouting nonsense as always.”
“What convenience store does he run?”
If it was nearby, then she’d have to go there and at least eat ramen before leaving.
But the priest’s answer was more surprising than she expected.
“Somewhere over by the Han River, I think. He came with a part-timer with yellow hair. He was a really kind, humble man.”
...
Huh.
Huh...?
Kang Do-dam tilted her head.