Setting Idle Talk Aside (2)
Two men drank in silence.
Toseong took a cup. Tae-il took a cup. Each filled the other's glass and stared as if he meant to swallow the man across from him whole, and the stillness pouring off the pair had already spread to everyone around them.
The members of Tales Tale—and Ayane, who caught on a beat too late—saw Tae-il drinking and shot to their feet in alarm.
"Shin-chan!? Minors can't drink—mmph!"
"Read the room, you gloomy idiot."
Rena clamped a hand over Ayane's mouth and hauled her off into a corner. Fuyuko watched the whole thing with keen interest.
"Hiyah. Sera, that kid can hold his liquor. Isn't he about your level?"
"Unnie, as a teacher, shouldn't you be stopping this?"
"What's the harm? His guardians are right over there."
"Guardians...?"
Fuyuko jerked a thumb toward Hotaru and Yuuna. They were Ayane's parents, but close enough—practically next-door family—to stand in as guardians without anyone batting an eye. Since neither of them so much as reacted, Fuyuko left the men's drinking match alone.
A bottle cracked down against the table. The third was already empty.
Sake went down easy. The real pleasure was the drunken heat that crept back up the throat a little later. Maybe it was the pace—Toseong's face had already flushed red.
"Ah. Toseong's about at his limit."
"Shut up."
Drink had roughened his tongue. Refusing to lose, he knocked the next cup back in one go. Pure stubbornness.
Idiot Toseong. He's forgotten what the bet even was.
Baekya shook her head. The wager was simple enough: whoever got drunk and keeled over first lost. You could drink slower than the other man and it wouldn't matter in the slightest. And yet the two of them clung to one-shot after one-shot as if they'd sworn an oath. Obvious. A festival of male pride and pigheaded stubbornness.
Haa. I'm the judge. I could rig this if I wanted...
Looking at the pace, rigging wouldn't matter. Toseong winning was already impossible.
And in practice, he was in real pain.
Tch.
He drove a thumb hard into his throbbing forehead and propped himself up on it. His head weighed like stone, and inside his skull something burned as if a fireball were thrashing around. Even with his glasses on, his vision swam. No question—he was drunk. Keep this up and the loss was his, no doubt about it.
Toseong glared at Tae-il.
Perfectly calm. Toseong's own face was already beet-red; he could feel the heat rolling off it. Tae-il's hadn't changed in the slightest. Astonishing.
Fourth bottle. The moment the slosh of liquor vanished, a hand moved straight to the fifth. Toseong swayed as he poured. He'd drunk a great deal, yes—but the pace was so brutal the buzz climbed faster than it ever had, and with the drink his temper roughened too.
"You drink like a goddamn monster! Son of a—"
"It runs in the family."
"Family trait, my ass. Even that bastard Seongil couldn't drink like you. You lunatic..."
"I'm only his cousin."
Shameless, blank as a robot, Tae-il drained his cup clean. A kid still wet behind the ears, and he didn't so much as sway.
"Where the hell does that nerve come from...?"
Toseong set his cup down and pressed both hands to his forehead. Half a surrender.
"You do know what kind of situation we're all in, right..."
"I know."
"..."
"Mingi-hyung's working as a fitting model."
The reason was absurd. He refused anything tied to the family business, so instead of joining the company he was picking up part-time work as a fitting model for cosmetics and clothes. In a way, he was the member getting along with the least to worry about.
"And Sora-hyung's about to be discharged, right?"
"How do you even know that..."
They'd thought the military suited him better than expected, that he was holding up fine—but his superiors' attitudes had soured him completely, and he was already preparing to get out. Toseong, who'd heard Sora's complaints firsthand, was startled. Sora, the band's eldest, was one of the members who worried out loud most often that he couldn't get hold of Seongil.
"Suseong-hyung's got formula to pay for, so he's probably out in the field grinding session work."
Correct. Lately a famous band's leader had taken notice of him, and he was tearing it up as their near-exclusive guitar sessionist at every concert.
"And you, Toseong-hyung—graduation's right around the corner, after all those leaves of absence you took like meals, just to make money?"
Family circumstances had exempted Toseong from military service. But after quitting music to get into a good university, he'd retaken the entrance exam several times while studying late, and even after he got in, tuition had forced him to take leave after leave, right up to the limit, working part-time to scrape the money together. A long, long stretch of time. Now he stood on the verge of an ordinary working life, completely cut off from music.
"You knew all of that..."
"Yes. I'm doing this knowing all of it. I know I have no shame."
"Haha. This kid's actually insane."
Toseong leaned against the wall and laughed like a man who'd lost his mind. The curses came on their own.
"Okay. I'll give you that. You really are Shin Seongil's cousin. Hell—are you sure you're not his actual little brother?"
They looked nothing alike. The shamelessness, though, was identical, like twins. Toseong chuckled under his breath and propped his cheek on his hand.
"So. You know where every one of us is. Why is Shin Seongil the only one missing? He must've told you all of this."
"Because I don't know."
"...What?"
"I don't know either. Where Seongil-hyung is, or what he's doing."
Tae-il let the corners of his eyes droop, mournful, filled his own cup to the brim, and emptied it himself.
In his past life and in this one, Seongil's whereabouts were a blank. Just like Iris.
On top of that shocking failed live, every problem the band had been piling up exploded at once and dragged them into scandal. Other bands started giving them the side-eye, and even getting a live house to book them became difficult. The album, needless to say, had bombed spectacularly. Thanks to Noh Mingi they'd avoided an ending spent flailing in debt—but the wound to Seongil's heart had been enormous.
Right after, Shin Seongil fought bitterly with the members, split from them as if cutting them off for good, and wasted nearly half a year shut up in his room. Then, without warning, he vanished from the house. He contacted no one—not his friends, not his family, not even Tae-il—and simply went under. The only proof he was alive was the money that kept landing in the family account. Beyond life or death, everything about him was unknown.
"Haha. Hell of a guy. Still. Cold as ever. Ice cold."
Toseong dipped his head and held out his cup. Tae-il filled it, and this time Toseong didn't throw it back. He only wet his lips.
"So. You want us to find him for you?"
"Half of it, yes."
Tae-il answered without resistance. He was frustrated too. Maybe it was because he'd faced it so young. Even now, more than ten years on, the ruined figure of the person he'd admired kept flickering in front of his eyes.
He'd been given a chance. A chance no one else would ever be handed twice—one you couldn't buy with all the money in the world. And good people had come with it. Bluntly put, without them he never would have made it this far. Even today's satisfying result, Tae-il figured, was entirely thanks to having met the right people.
"It might sound like a lie to you, hyung, but... well."
Hesitation clung to him, and the sentence trailed off. Toseong, head bowed and forehead braced on his hand, waved for him to spit it out.
"At first, my goal was pretty modest."
"Modest?"
"I wanted to prove something to Seongil-hyung."
That Shin Seongil's band, and his music, had never been wrong. That he himself would succeed, and prove it.
"I'm the seed Seongil-hyung planted. I thought if I made it as a band, I'd be able to be some kind of strength for him."
Toseong swallowed a laugh and murmured.
"If the man himself heard that, he'd beat the shit out of you."
"Haha. You're probably right."
The arts were always like that. If you didn't succeed yourself, none of it meant much—and Tae-il wasn't even a student he'd formally raised. Far from bringing Seongil joy, Tae-il's success would only drive the wedge of old failure deeper. On top of that, Tae-il's circumstances had flipped a full hundred and eighty degrees from his past life. So had his goals. For him, Seongil was sliding further and further down the list. Izumi, and Iris, and the rest of the members—their weight was growing. They were becoming what mattered.
Seongil-hyung can't remember me anymore as Shin Tae-il, the little cousin who used to trail after him begging to learn bass.
If a Tae-il with no real point of contact suddenly showed up claiming he'd prove something, he'd be lucky not to get the door slammed in his face. Which was why he had no choice but to rely on them.
Hon.
The band Tae-il had once admired.
"..."
Toseong went quiet.
"All right. I get the gist. You want to drag Seongil back into this world. Or if not that, you at least want to see his face."
"Yes, so that's why—!"
"But there's not a single reason the old members and I should get dragged into your personal business."
Toseong was sick to death of bands.
"You girls over there. Listen up."
Until now they had been speaking Korean. For the first time, Toseong switched to Japanese. The Tales Tale group—who'd been eavesdropping in secret and leaving the interpreting to Iris—flinched as one.
Toseong emptied his cup, old memories moving behind his eyes.
"You know what's so goddamn awful about playing an instrument? Even when you're sure you can't do it, sink enough time into it and this hope shows up—that maybe, little by little, you can."
If you could look at yourself objectively, fine. The ones who couldn't took shortcuts without a second thought.
"And if you dodge around it with a shortcut, does anything actually change? Not a damn thing."
Ignore the fundamentals, skip the middle, and sooner or later your own progress grabs you by the ankle. By then, going back to learn the basics from scratch is nearly impossible. The bad habits have already set in.
"Learning it the proper way isn't any better. You're stuck replaying a game with infinite stages and a difficulty that only ever climbs—boring, and nothing but pain."
Still, watching your skill rise would feel good. You might even turn out more talented than you thought, smash through walls with ease, and settle for a reasonably high place.
"But does that mean you can make a living off it? That's a completely different story."
Skill, if you worked at it, at least gave you a thread to pull. Success, though—no matter how hard you tried, no matter how badly you wanted to enjoy the music—never so much as appeared in your line of sight, let alone within reach.
"And then there's recording. We fought like it was a daily chore. Somebody nearly threw a punch. Everyone's ego was so damn big that compromise was out of the question. There wasn't enough time. The emotional rift kept widening, and the playing started coming apart."
Once their heads went, everything else collapsed like dominoes. The friendship they'd sworn they wouldn't trade for anything began to crack—and too much money was riding on them to fix it on the spot. So the band compromised with time instead. They shoved aside the things that needed solving now and let the schedule chase them, and somehow they put out a result.
But in the end, all that remained was a broken friendship and hearts full of nothing but scars.
Toseong buried his face in both hands.
"Honestly, not making it... I can live with that."
No one, Seongil included, had ever expected the band to succeed. But they had dreamed. They had wished.
"Honestly, believing you'll blow up after just a few years is the shameless part. In this business, people more talented than me end up bouncing between academy teaching and church gigs. That's the reality."
"Toseong..."
"I just... don't want to."
"Hyung..."
"I don't want to have to be in a band again if it means taking on that stress all over."
That was the arts for you. An industry where input and output never balanced—the final boss of inefficiency. And yet countless people dreamed of the romance of it. The young, and even those well past young, never stopped trying.
The stage. A cursed jar of honey with a devil's pull on people, a poisoned grail. Whoever drank from it met a miserable end.
"Sorry.... Getting older, and all I do is talk like this..."
"No. I'm the one who should be sorry."
"Haha. At least your face changes when you're actually sorry."
Seeing the guilt on Tae-il's face, Toseong smiled, satisfied, and collapsed onto the table. Baekya quietly draped a blanket over his shoulders.
"I—I'm sorry..."
"It's fine. Toseong really did still have feelings left for the band."
Baekya stroked the head of the soundly sleeping Toseong. He'd called it embarrassing and still never cut it. That long hair he'd kept growing was the shape of his lingering attachment.
"Guess where Toseong and I met?"
"I wouldn't know..."
"Hehe. So even you don't know everything. We're from the same school."
"Really?"
"Mm. I was a total loser at school. An otaku."
"Uh..."
Baekya's sudden confession threw him. More than anything, the idea that this cute, graceful beauty—someone it wouldn't be strange at all to see dating Toseong—had once been a loser simply wouldn't land.
"Then how did you...?"
Toseong had belonged to the so-called popular crowd, the one Mingi and Seongil led. There hadn't been a single point of contact between the two of them.
"You know how, at the school festival, they ignored the whole schedule and crashed the stage?"
"Ah."
That, he knew. In his past life, Seongil had warned him ahead of time that they were going to crash the stage. Tae-il had begged his mom, skipped kindergarten, and gone to see it.
"That's when I changed. Because I saw him."
"H-how?"
"The song they played up there just happened to be an anime song."
"Right. The anime bombed, but the song was supposed to be incredible—that one..."
"Ahaha! Yes. That one."
Baekya laughed quietly, saying people still told the story of Hakju's face going green as that unidentifiable Japanese song rang through the auditorium.
"Tomorrow..."
Her light-brown eyes softened with affection, carefully holding the image of the sleeping Toseong.
"You can look forward to it."
"Sorry?"
"Even when Toseong's drunk, he tends to remember everything."
Giggling, she told him to look forward to tomorrow—and asked, in exchange, if they could borrow a place to sleep tonight.
"Ah, sure. My parents aren't home right now, so there's a spare room."
"Ooh? You sure it's okay to say that out loud?"
"Huh?"
As Tae-il blinked in confusion, Baekya flicked her eyes toward the women, whose ears were still pricked.
"Isn't it a problem if they hear that?"
"No? I already sleep in the same bed as Ayane anyway, so..."
"Are you insane...!"
Baekya was aghast—less at the fact that he was already sharing a bed with his childhood friend, and more at how calmly he said it.
"You really need to be careful..."
"Huh?"
Today, too, Tae-il stacked up more karma.
"Haaa."
Iris blew out a breath. As if to announce that autumn was coming, the night air carried the white plume up into the sky, where it thinned and scattered pale. A brief pocket of free time, after taking out the trash.
"What do you think?"
"About what?"
Outside Katsura Asobi, Sakuya sat on the bench meant for waiting customers, a mint candy tucked in her cheek as she mumbled around it.
"About what that pretty guy said earlier."
"That?"
Iris, on the receiving end of the question, let out a short laugh.
"I'm the one who wants to ask. Are you okay?"
"Me? Well..."
Sakuya laughed the answer away. She didn't particularly mind that protagonist-of-a-shonen-manga details kept sticking themselves to Tae-il one after another. Iris pressed her.
"Even if we fail as a band?"
"It's fine."
Sakuya cracked the mint between her molars.
"Even if the band falls apart, I'll take responsibility for Tae-il."
"What?"
The brazen answer twisted Iris's face. Sakuya grinned.
"If the band fails, you're finished, Iris. I'm the only one here who could feed a heartbroken Tae-il, aren't I?"
"Are you seriously saying that out loud...?"
"Ahaha. Ayane's here too, I guess. But I'd still make more money than her, wouldn't I?"
"Hey!"
Iris raised her voice before she could stop herself.
"What?"
Sakuya shot back, slick as anything. Iris stammered.
"Y-you're talking like I've fallen for Shin Tae-il the way the rest of you have...!"
"So you haven't? I've been assuming you had this whole time."
"Wh-what are you saying! Why would I, with him!"
"You're not? Then why are you mad? It shouldn't matter, right?"
"I-it does matter! He and I are in the same boat right now! One heart, one body, practically! Do you understand?"
As if something about it snagged, Iris flushed and kept stumbling over her words.
"Hmm?"
Watching her, Sakuya smiled a wicked little smile.
"Hngh! I don't know what you're misunderstanding, but it is absolutely not what you think."
"It isn't?"
"Of course not! I just..."
"Just?"
"If Shin Tae-il goes and gets w-weird because of you...!"
"Ahaha!"
Sakuya burst out laughing.
"Would I do that? Tae-il's dream is to make it with the band."
"W-well, yes, but..."
"As long as Tae-il's heart doesn't break, I'll keep working to make his dream come true."
"I know it's strange for me to ask, but... is that really possible?"
She was the one receiving the help, and still Iris couldn't understand it. Just as Toseong had laid it out, the road you ran while praying for success was nothing but misery. That was true even if you loved music—and the other members didn't even love it to the death the way Tae-il and Iris did. Maybe the process would be so grueling that whatever feelings they had would simply cool off.
Sakuya answered lightly.
"I don't know either."
"Hey."
"But there's romance in it, isn't there? Working together like this for someone you love."
"If you come this way, you have far too much to lose..."
"It's fine."
Unlike herself, Iris had drawn in small. Sakuya slung an arm around her shoulders and pressed their heads together.
"Whatever I like, I never let it leave my hands. I'm greedy, you know."
"Greedy. Greedy..."
Iris turned the word over and over.
"You should be greedy sometimes too. Stop reading the room so much."
"I'll have you know I don't read the room."
"Really? From where I'm standing, you do it an awful lot."
Sakuya grinned and stretched. Iris had nothing to say to that. The truth was, the only place she acted without reading the room was in front of her friends, and Sakuya fell inside that category. Even so, Sakuya had said she seemed to be watching herself.
Maybe I need to make my stance a little clearer... I ought to just let them arrange an engagement.
At home, too, every kind of talk about where she was headed had started circulating. The time to choose was drawing near.
Thanks to the two men's utterly tactless drinking battle, the afterparty had more or less broken up. Tae-il left first with Baekya, to get the passed-out Toseong back to the house.
"I'll be right back!"
Until he returned, the members helped close up the shop.
"Oh my? You really don't have to. What good kids."
"Heh. You all ate plenty, so hurry up and help! It's our shop, so don't you dare slack off!"
"Hehe. Ayane, honestly."
"Aaaaaah! That hurts, Mom!"
The moment Tae-il was gone and Ayane started playing captain, Yuuna ground a knuckle hard into her temple.
"We'll take out the trash!"
"Ahaha. Is a young lady allowed to do work like this, Iris?"
"What are you talking about. Sakuya, just hold this already. I want to tie it and it won't stay shut."
"Okay."
Sakuya and Iris, the strongest of them, bagged the trash and headed outside. Fuyuko and Sera wiped tables, keeping a careful eye out in case Yuuna or Hotaru said something. When it came to cutting corners, they were more adult than anyone.
"But unnie, what's with you drinking so little? Usually once you get going you don't stop until you're completely wrecked."
"Because I'm a woman who knows how to read a room."
"...If I'd known, I would've just drunk too."
"Ehe. If you drink, who's driving?"
"True..."
Of the adults, Sera alone hadn't been able to drink, stuck with the driving, and she let the regret show.
"Ayane, want to help with the dishes? Mom's going to check the stock for a minute."
"Yeah! Leave it to me!"
Ayane took the job she knew best: the dishes. Rena stepped up onto a stool beside her and dried the bowls Ayane passed over.
"Hey, gloomy girl. Where's that green-haired senpai?"
"She's working on a video."
"Yeah?"
Yuuya alone, instead of helping close, was hunched in a corner hammering at a laptop, editing the video she meant to post today. Rena dried a bowl in a daze and muttered.
"This is kind of boring."
"Boring? Want to switch with me? Washing dishes kills your back. Not boring at all."
"I'll pass. If you want to watch me smash every dish in your shop, be my guest."
"Ehh. Shorty, don't tell me you can't even do dishes...?"
"Don't provoke me."
A petty battle of pride passed between them.
"Hmph."
Rena snorted and, between plates, tapped the phone she'd propped at an angle against the wall.
TokTik. A short-form video service, posts running anywhere from fifteen seconds to ten minutes. An evolved descendant of Stain—the app that required every post to come with a photo—it had, among young people, more pull than even iTube. In Japan, artists dropped song demos on TokTik, and stars built entirely around the app were hardly rare. When Rena was bored and alone, she used to watch the comedy clips that went up there.
Today was different.
"Whoa, gloomy girl. Did you see this?"
"Which one?"
"Us. Playing earlier."
Rena held out her phone, the video playing, for Ayane to see. Ayane stopped washing and peered at the screen.
Iris was singing her heart out. Behind her, Rena hammered the drums with everything she had, and Ayane played bass like her life depended on it. The video swayed left and right. Tae-il appeared cropped to his arms and the synth, and Sakuya, with perfect timing, winked at the crowd. Someone had filmed their busking in Yoyogi today, straight from the audience.
"I heard it went up on Bluebird, but I had no idea it was on TokTik too."
"Really? I saw it a while ago."
"How?"
"My friends sent it to me, and Yuuya-senpai showed it to me earlier while she was absolutely fuming."
Yuuya talked a little more these days, but her face still barely moved. And Yuuya had blown up? That was not a small thing.
"Why was she mad?"
"No idea. She was angry that other people posted and spread the video she was going to upload first."
"Over just that?"
"Yeah."
Curious, Rena stared at Yuuya, still groaning over her work in the corner.
"She's not what she looks like."
"She's a good person."
"You know that doesn't sound convincing coming from you, right?"
"What did you say!"
Ayane reached out with a sudsy hand and touched Rena's cheek. The rubber glove, prickling-hot from the water, rasped against her skin, and the slick foam made Rena yelp.
"Ack!"
"Puhaha! Take that! And that!"
"I-it's getting on my clothes, you crazy bitch!"
"Take that!"
"You're dead...!?"
"Ayane's arms are longer, you know? Shorty can't even get down from there, can you? Take that!"
"I was trying to be nice, and this is what I get...!"
"Kyaa!"
Rena lunged at Ayane like she meant for both of them to go down together.
"Sweetie...?"
Before Yuuna, finished checking tomorrow's stock, could appear—
"Take that! A white beard suits a Westerner! Why don't you be Santa someday?"
"I'm a Japanese citizen! Hyah!"
The dishes abandoned, the two of them were busy smearing suds across each other's faces and scuffling without end.