The Bus to the Dorms
Photographer K, who had spent years shooting trainees under KCOM, pressed a hand hard over his hammering heart. Through the viewfinder, the eyes that met his seized his attention completely.
I thought it was just a face doing all the work.
At first he had registered the handsomeness and nothing more—nothing worth special note.
He photographed people for a living, yet deep down he still believed his true aesthetic belonged to nature. He had shot plenty of faces famous for being beautiful or handsome, and the occasions when any of them truly moved him had been vanishingly rare.
Work was work. I almost never poured real feeling into it…
So discovering himself fully immersed came as a shock. A fierce desire rose up inside him—to capture a little more perfectly the glittering image he was seeing—and the sensation felt utterly foreign. It was the same quiet awe he had known years earlier, when burnout and assorted troubles had driven him to take a long leave and chase landscapes instead of people.
They say that once you reach the extreme in any field, everything starts to look the same.
A shiver of pure feeling ran through K. The handsome face mattered, of course, but it was the successive images the boy kept offering that stole his heart. Clean, yet razor-edged. Unstable in a way that made the transitional beauty all the more dazzling.
Art was like that. The closer something approached the high end, the more microscopic differences sent its value soaring. It was never simply a matter of adding or subtracting detail. There were moments when a thing simply looked perfect as it was. His only task was to select those moments of beauty with the greatest care.
Time, however, was far too short. The alarm on his wristwatch nearly made him snap with irritation, but there was nothing to be done. Plenty of people were still waiting for their turn. K forced down the excitement, finished the shoot, and mechanically prepared for the next subject.
His thoughts, though, refused to stop.
I need to see him again somewhere more deliberate, before that feeling disappears—as soon as possible. Is there another photo schedule later in the program? I don’t remember anything on my own calendar. Does that mean there isn’t one at all? Or is someone else handling it? If there is one, they have to call me. Is there any way I can put dibs on it?
“All right, let’s keep going!”
Photographer K’s eyes glittered with fresh life as he continued the session.
“I’ll help you check the mic.”
“Ah, thank you.”
Once the profile shoot ended, we moved to another room. The moment the mic check finished, the interview began. True to a first interview, it opened with simple personal details—name, age.
Then came the shared questions: when had I first dreamed of becoming an idol, why had I joined this program, what were my impressions so far? After that it wrapped up lightly.
Because it was the common interview everyone went through, there weren’t many questions. With a hundred of us, anything long would be chopped into fragments for editing anyway, so I answered simply enough to avoid any future trouble.
“Now change into the clothes written on the board and wait on the bus. Once the later groups finish, we’ll all head to the dorms together.”
Following their lead, I changed in the dressing room into a sky-blue sweatshirt and training pants, received a sticker with my name on it, and stuck it on my stomach.
When I reached the bus I spotted the person who had been such a help during the photo shoot, so I took the seat across the aisle. I stared hard enough that a status window appeared.
Type:Ordinary Person
Name:Han Min-hyeok (24)
🎤 Vocal:80 (C+) / 92
💃 Dance:79 (C+) / 90
✨ Charm:90 (B+) / 95
◈ Trait:Loves the Camera! (S)
A charm-specialized set of stats that felt oddly familiar. Same age I had been before I died, even.
That Song A-seong kid earlier too—looked like the knit-group had a lot of charm specialists.
“Hello.”
“Yes, hello.”
I must have been staring too hard, because he greeted me first. Realizing I had been watching him without even introducing myself, I hurried to add,
“I’m Lee Han-hee. Nineteen.”
“Han Min-hyeok, twenty-four.”
“You can speak comfortably with me.”
“Yeah, sure~.”
Like Lee Jae-jin, he had no hesitation about dropping formal speech.
Five years younger—I guess that makes sense.
His eyes definitely held the look of someone regarding a little kid.
“This is A-seong. A-seong.”
“Song A-seong. Seventeen.”
“Ah, hello.”
Looking toward the window seat, I saw the high-schooler from earlier sitting beside Han Min-hyeok. Song A-seong.
Seventeen—same age as Woo Cheong-hee, then. For a second I remembered that soft face smiling even while soaked by rain. He must have passed.
“I’m Lee Han-hee. Please call me whatever’s comfortable.”
“…Then I’ll call you Han-hee hyung.”
“Sure, that works.”
Once the titles were settled, Han Min-hyeok turned to Song A-seong.
“What’s this? Hyung all of a sudden?”
“He is a hyung.”
“Do the two of you know each other?”
Sitting side by side, the easy back-and-forth between them felt completely unreserved. Song A-seong’s blunt replies especially. It wasn’t the comfort of people who had just met here—it was the ease of a long acquaintance.
“Well, we’re cousins. We’ve been pretty close.”
So that was why Song A-seong had been strangely aggressive toward the middle-schooler earlier.
“Cousins, huh.”
Now that I looked, their atmospheres were similar too. Both tall, both good-looking, for starters.
“That’s impressive—both of you making it.”
Was that whole family an entertainment family? Two cousins enter and both clear two-hundred-to-one odds. On top of that, Song A-seong had looked almost certain to survive until the end.
Different surnames, so maternal cousins, probably.
Still, a seven-year gap and they seemed close. Usually that kind of age difference left people more distant.
“Han-hee hyung, did the photos go well?”
“Ah, yes. I think they came out all right.”
I started to speak to Han Min-hyeok and hesitated. What should I call him? You? Min-hyeok-ssi?
“Ah, just call me comfortably too. Hyung’s fine~.”
“Ah, yes. I’d never done a proper photo shoot like that, so I was really unsure what to do, but watching you shoot helped me a lot. Thank you.”
I hadn’t liked the shoes, then saw him shoot barefoot and followed. It brought the feeling out beautifully. Beyond that I had also borrowed a lot from the way he used the clothes and the overall presence he projected.
“Come to think of it, you were watching Hyuk hyung pretty hard, huh.”
“There seemed to be a lot I could learn.”
“That’s nice to hear. I like that.”
Song A-seong had been good too, but the one with the real impact had definitely been Han Min-hyeok. I could already guess how the trait Loves the Camera! (S) — presence in front of the camera +80% actually manifested.
“Are you working as a model?”
The status window said ordinary person, but I honestly found it hard to believe.
“Nah, just a regular college student. I’ve done photos for the school magazine, though.”
“This hyung is in Business Administration at XX University.”
“You must be good at studying.”
So he really was a civilian. An ordinary person with that kind of presence—another uncommon talent.
“Why’s A-seong so excited? Something good happen?”
“I’m not excited.”
“You are. You’re being super proactive.”
Song A-seong’s face, peeking over Han Min-hyeok’s shoulder, crumpled. Han Min-hyeok’s own face was full of laughter; the cousins really did seem close.
“Shut up. More importantly, Han-hee hyung—how’d you end up on this program?”
“Mm, the timing just worked out.”
It had been closer to forced timing, but I couldn’t say that straight out.
“I see. Then…”
“Ah! That guy from earlier!”
We had been talking in low voices while waiting for the remaining seats to fill when the middle-schooler who had clashed with Song A-seong earlier climbed onto the bus. Song A-seong’s brow creased faintly at the interruption.
He really can’t stand him, huh.
“Hello!”
And a greeting of tremendous volume came flying in. He would sing well.
He walked right up and said hello; for a second I thought he was addressing Song A-seong to smooth over the earlier incident, but his eyes were locked on me.
I pointed at myself to check, and he nodded.
“Yes! Lee Han-hee hyung! I can call you hyung, right? I’m sixteen!”
He was reading the name tag stuck on my stomach, so I checked his. Kim Seong-min.
“Yes, that’s fine.”
“Please speak casually!”
“Ah, yeah. Okay.”
Sixteen meant only a year younger than Song A-seong, yet the atmosphere was completely different.
“This is…”
“Ah, but!”
“…?”
Given the earlier trouble it would be awkward, but I couldn’t leave one side out, so I was about to introduce Han Min-hyeok and Song A-seong in the seats across the aisle when the words were cut short.
“Hyung, would you maybe sit up front with me? I want to get closer to you, and I get carsick pretty easily.”
His eyes sparkled with pure innocence, yet he never so much as glanced sideways; for a second I wondered if I was the only person in the world sitting here.
“Han-hee hyung was talking with us.”
Song A-seong threw another challenge. This time Kim Seong-min didn’t back down. He swept a glance through the bus, then answered with a faintly cynical look.
“Then you’ve already talked for a while, so couldn’t you yield him to me now?”
“Yield? I don’t think that’s something you say to me.”
“Then why are you butting in?”
“You’re the one who butted in.”
They kept the bare minimum of polite speech, but the exchange was razor-thin. I looked at Han Min-hyeok; he only offered an awkward smile and quietly averted his eyes.
Right. A twenty-four-year-old wouldn’t want to get between a couple of seven- and eight-year-younger kids having a staring contest.
I didn’t want to either, but I was the only one left who could stop it. I hadn’t asked for this, yet the fight was happening over me.
“Hey.”
“Yes?”
“Yes?”
I almost said “Please don’t fight because of me,” then swallowed it. They were kids you could joke with, but their faces were far too serious.
“We’re about to leave, so you should sit down. And thank you for the offer, but we still have a conversation going.”
“Ah… it’s fine! We’ve got plenty of time ahead, so let’s get close slowly, hyung!”
The quick acceptance made the earlier argument feel almost unreal. The middle-schooler who somehow drained energy just by looking at him moved toward the front, and silence settled over our seats.
Song A-seong quietly opened his mouth.
“Um, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? For what?”
“I think I was being… too much of a fighting rooster…”
The same Song A-seong who had been countering with a face like a knife suddenly shrank in on himself. A fighting rooster? It hadn’t been that bad.
“I understand. There are people you just don’t click with.”
Luckily there were no cameras on the bus we had been guided to after the profile shoot and interview. With the long wait, they seemed to want us to sleep or rest. A little verbal sparring shouldn’t become a big problem. Fistfights would be another story.
If you really want to assign blame, the first punch came from the other side.
Thinking of Kim Seong-min’s eyes racing around to check for cameras before the argument with Song A-seong, I didn’t particularly feel like blaming A-seong. It felt a bit rude to say about someone who had approached wanting to be friends, but I didn’t think Kim Seong-min and I would click all that well either.
Song A-seong himself, though, seemed to feel differently; his words dropped off sharply. Watching him out of the corner of my eye, I met Han Min-hyeok’s gaze.
“Hmm, how about catching a little sleep first? We might get busy the second we arrive.”
“Ah, yes. You should rest too, hyung.”
About an hour to the dorms—I agreed with the suggestion to rest in the meantime.
We had been running around since morning with photos and everything else; they probably wouldn’t throw us into something the moment we arrived. Still, remembering that they had run the first and second auditions back-to-back, I doubted they would waste time either.
To prepare for whatever might come, I needed to top up my stamina a little.
Anyway, why set the dorms so far out on the outskirts?
A faint unease rode with me as the bus left the city center, yet sleep rolled over me like a wave and pulled me under.
And so the first joint dorm life of Idol Survival raised its curtain.