Artistry, A+
Oh. A second title.
The first thing I did upon opening my eyes was check my status window. Even by yesterday's standards, I really did kill it…. The feeling of character and self becoming one — that perfect unity — was not something I thought I would ever be able to forget. And yet…. For some reason, my whole body felt impossibly heavy.
"Hey! Are you okay?"
Dokgo Min fussed over me, pressing a hand to my forehead. This woman never gets up at this hour, ever… had I really overslept that badly?
"Unnie, what time is it…?"
My voice was completely gone. Not hoarse — gone. Whether my tonsils were swollen or not, swallowing hurt with every single gulp.
"Right now? Nine."
"Unnie, why are you even awake at this hour…?"
"I didn't sleep. Pulled an all-nighter."
Splat—.
I was mid-conversation when something cold suddenly blanketed my face. This moisture… this serenity… this coolness….
"It's not just hydrating, it has a lifting function too. I knew this would happen. How's that for foresight? Good, right?"
Dokgo Gyeol smoothed the mask pack up along my jaw and then generously slicked lip balm over my lips. So this was what a top-tier artist was like — the kind who did house calls for A-list actresses. The moment the cold mask touched my fevered face, I felt like I might actually survive. At some point, a humidifier had been switched on in the room as well.
"Please keep the humidifier off… I want to keep this voice…."
"Sweetheart. Are you in your right mind right now?"
"Han Yeo-reum has lost it. Mm-hm. Genuinely lost it. Show me your thermometer?"
"Being sick is temporary… but the footage lasts forever. If I'm going to be sick anyway, let's go for a little realism…."
Only when they realized I wasn't joking did both women screw up their faces.
Knock knock—.
"Yeo-reum… are you awake?"
It was Director So, clutching Boksun tight in his arms. The instant Boksun laid eyes on me, her tail whipped back and forth as she whined with delight, and I reached out my arms to receive her.
"Yesterday felt freeing, didn't it…?"
"Yes. You truly cried with everything you had."
"Then shall we rest a couple more hours, and start again as a Yeon-doo with a lighter heart…?"
"No. Right now is perfect, actually. Give it a little more time and my condition will bounce back — so let's move straight into setup."
At my words, Director So nodded as if he'd expected nothing less.
We were now in the final stretch of the location shoot. Beyond the window, summer sunlight poured in and filled the room to its corners.
For the first time, I felt I could finally let it all flow out of me the way Yeon-doo did — every feeling from those days. I'd never once shown it on the outside, but there had been a stretch of time when I'd felt like I was alone at the bottom of a dark pit. Those days were blurring now, fading at the edges.
"Sob… not even a single crumb of content…."
Ae-ta-mi was going through Yeo-reum withdrawal at the nanometer level. One web drama, Pachehi, and one ALAB commercial. That was the entire official catalogue of Yeo-reum content in existence.
"She does sometimes post photos on her story, but…."
Behind-the-scenes shots from the set did trickle up now and then, but even being generous, it fell far, far short of enough. Ae-ta-mi did what she always did, searching Yeo-reum's name into the portal site out of pure habit.
"Wha!!! It's Yeo-reum!!!"
As it happened, an interview with Director Jjang of Pachehi had just gone up on one of the portals. Ae-ta-mi clicked the post on pure reflex.
She skimmed down through the director's thoughts on producing such an unfamiliar format as a web drama, anecdotes from the set, his intentions as a director — and the moment she spotted Yeo-reum's name, her scrolling hand froze.
Apparently the reaction to the final episode had been explosive. The cast had even shown the viewers their wrap-party live, streaming it directly.
— It was Yeo-reum's (playing Pi Chae-won) idea. A lot of our viewers are people who live close to 'memes' and 'SNS,' so I was worried a company dinner might make them look too loose and unguarded. But watching it back, I think we made exactly the right call. It felt like our own private premiere screening.
"That's our Yeo-reum for you…."
Ae-ta-mi wanted to scream it from the rooftops: Look, everyone — this is MY actress, taking care of the audience before she's even blown up!
She had, in fact, watched the live broadcast in real time herself. Reaching out to viewers in a move this slick — what a pro. It felt like the freshness of the web drama format was bleeding right through the screen, and she'd wanted to follow the party all the way to round two.
— Haha. If I'd known it would turn out like this, I should have been streaming from the wrap dinner itself. Yeo-reum and Jun-seo even went out and bought ice cream for the whole staff themselves. You have no idea how adorable and how clever they were.
Director Jjang was dutifully serving as a vending machine of wholesome Yeo-reum stories — and then, at the tail end of the interview, he even dropped a teaser for his next project.
— For my next work, I'd like to try another fresh subject. Ghost stories, maybe.
"Please let the next one star Yeo-reum too!"
Ae-ta-mi stomped her feet in frustration. If it was a ghost story, the production budget would surely be higher than Pachehi's — and a bigger budget obviously meant a quality gap you couldn't even compare. Her calculations raced ahead of her.
That settles it. Time to look at Yeo-reum one more time.
She had just opened Youstagram to dive into Yeo-reum's feed when—
"Huh???"
A brand-new photo had just been uploaded.
"No way…."
It was, quite impossibly, both the most refreshing and the most bittersweet picture she had ever seen.
"Is this a pictorial?!"
Click— click— click—.
This was Dokgo Min's studio. Having personally witnessed every single frame of the Seoul shoot, Dokgo Min was now deep into the still-cut editing work.
Just a little faster….
The exhausted eyes Yeo-reum had shown on the subway platform. The voice soaked through with the weariness of daily life. The body language of someone fleeing from a life that had ground her down. And beneath it all, the faint, stubborn flicker of will that somehow still came through.
Faster. Faster….
Even just recalling the directionless despair Han Yeo-reum had radiated while trapped at the bottom of that pit, staring up — Dokgo Min's breath still caught in her throat.
She wanted to capture that exact emotion, from that exact moment, in a photograph. Simply capturing beauty wasn't enough anymore; she wanted to climb one level above it. But the something that lay just beyond kept hovering at her fingertips, close enough to brush and never close enough to hold.
Click— click— click—.
Dokgo Min's hands flew without pause. Her eyes darted from corner to corner of the screen as she pushed and pulled at the photos, and above her head a status window flickered without rest.
One hour… a barely-over-one-hour video, total.
Han Yeo-reum's previous work, Pachehi, was eight episodes in the ten-minute range — and if you summed up only the scenes where Yeo-reum appeared, it came to just over an hour. Her follow-up, Not Interested At All, was also a single hour-long piece.
Too little. Far, far too little.
Han Yeo-reum was a genius. It would take the audience a very long time yet to accept a proposition so obviously, painfully self-evident.
That was what drove Dokgo Min half-mad with frustration — the fact that to everyone who had watched her on set, it was plain, unarguable truth, while to the viewers on the far side of the screen it would never land with the same force.
Click— click—.
Dokgo Min's hands grew busier still. She watched the sun rise and set over her monitor again and again, and the stacks of donut boxes and coffee candles scattered around her only multiplied.
"Done…."
At last, the screen filled with Yeo-reum, typography layered over her.
No one would mistake this for a poster made for a single-episode drama. This was festival-submission quality, full stop.
The profile shot of Yeon-doo sitting on the veranda floor with a plum in her hand was flawless from color to composition. Even the cloud peeking in at the edge of the sky was enormous and blindingly white.
And then there was that — a feeling, ever so slight, truly only the faintest hint… that the Yeon-doo in the photograph was trying to say something.
That I can finally breathe a little now.
"Unnie. You've already finished this?"
Yeo-reum's voice came from behind her — she had apparently been there for who knew how long. Dokgo Min slumped forward onto her desk. She had poured out every last drop of energy she possessed, and her eyelids were sliding shut.
"Wow. As expected of Dokgo Min. Best senior ever. Seriously, five stars — no, one thousand five hundred stars."
Click—. Han Yeo-reum moved the mouse and began flipping through the next photos.
Boksun poking her head out coyly from Yeo-reum's arms. The scene of her riding the tiller truck into town. Han Yeo-reum standing alone on the subway platform. They passed across the screen one by one — photographs through which, faintly, the feeling of those exact days could still be sensed.
"…I'm going to work with Do Gyeo-ul too, you know."
Dokgo Min said it quietly. The long exhaustion had slurred her words into mush.
"If other people… ask me to work with them, I'll do that too… and after that, I'm not taking any more outside jobs…."
The status window above Dokgo Min's head flared brilliantly once more.
"Just like that weird director — So Ye-sol or whatever her name is — said… no matter how many shoots I do with anyone else, I'm going to make it so that when you hear 'Dokgo Min,' the first person you think of is Han Yeo-reum."
"So you'd better not… run too far ahead of me on your own."
Bzzt— bzzt— bzzt— bzzt—.
The instant Dokgo Min's monologue ended, the phone lying on the desk erupted into a frenzy of vibration.