Ah / It Was Easy
If you really got down to it, her only crime was falling in far too deep.
“...No. What are you doing. You can't act like that.”
Yes. One single line, spilled out because she had sunk in much too far.
Ack.
A beat later Sua bit her tongue and startled. Lately that tongue hadn't known a single peaceful day, but this shock ran deeper than any of them—the proof being that she couldn't even feel the pain where her teeth had caught.
She'd hoped the mask might have swallowed the sound. It seemed to have done very little good. Every eye was already on her.
PD Choi Heewon, seated high in the director's chair, asked.
“Ms. Sua, did you say something?”
“Ah.”
Her mind went pure white.
She was scrambling for the best answer to smooth this over, but the deliberation didn't last. Someone else was faster.
“She's telling me not to act like that?”
Park Dohui's words came sharp. Sua went awkward.
“...I didn't think anyone would hear.”
Even Sua knew it was a stupid answer.
Lee Sua, what was that? First you explain that you didn't mean it that way—that's the order of things, isn't it?! What are you doing, acting so pathetic and small?
The problem was that no one around her found it pathetic in the slightest. If anything, the tone only drove the nail in deeper.
“...”
That the mood should grow even more serious was only the natural next step.
Some of them, like PD Choi Heewon, were simply curious about what had just happened, but there was no way everyone felt the same. One look at Park Dohui's face was enough. She was thoroughly displeased.
“This is the first time my acting's ever been cut off like this. What are you trying to pull? You're not even the PD, so why are you getting into someone else's performance...”
That was when it happened.
“It was a scene that needed to be reshot.”
A voice cut in from nowhere. Kim Seonil.
“What?”
Kim Seonil addressed Park Dohui, whose brow had drawn tight.
“Lee Kang-cheol is a man who holds the firm trust of everyone around him. Your eyes were wrong, Dohui. They weren't that.”
Seo Yeon-ju, listening at his side, carefully laid a word of her own on top.
“Yeah. I felt it too, only I wasn't quite sure. The PD hadn't called a stop, though, so I was gonna just keep going.”
“I had been about to stop it.”
This time it was PD Choi Heewon.
“Ms. Sua was faster, so the moment passed me by.”
Solid as a boulder, he went on.
“Even in the middle of a great shock, in that desperate instant, it has to play as a flicker of relief—because Lee Kang-cheol has come into view. I assumed an actress of Park Dohui's caliber would have finished that analysis as a matter of course.”
Sua nodded. On the inside, of course.
Right, right. The dissonance she'd felt lined up exactly with what they were saying. Should she have been the one to lay all of that out so cleanly? But what was she supposed to do about having no gift for talk?
...And from now on, she was going to watch her mouth.
“Mm. I'm sorry. I'll take it again.”
In the end Park Dohui accepted it, and the incident seemed to settle—but a considerable aftershock was inevitable. The gazes pouring toward Sua had multiplied far past what they'd been a moment ago.
Baffled eyes. Had Lee Sua halted the take because she had truly read every element of it? Or had she simply taken a dislike to Park Dohui? No—even granting that, a newcomer, stopping a shoot? All of it stormed through their heads.
“Good. We'll wrap the rehearsal shoot for this section here.”
PD Choi Heewon called the end of the scene.
“Straight into the next one. Ms. Sua, Ms. Dohui—positions!”
At last Sua's turn had come, and with it a tremendous tension.
She was moving, settling her hat, when her shoulder brushed Park Dohui's. The woman spoke so that only Sua could hear.
“Well then. I'll see just how good you really are.”
The business from a moment ago had clearly lodged itself deep.
Sua didn't find the words unpleasant in the slightest. Only—
“...I'm curious too.”
Right? How good am I even going to be?
Lee Kang-cheol enters the story upright and principled.
Kim Yu-han's first appearance is the exact opposite.
Kim Yu-han (Lee Sua), possessed of a genius he cannot restrain, carries a rather peculiar record. He is flawless straight through the work of identifying the culprit—yet afterward, that culprit invariably disappears.
A genius detective. And at the same time, dead last in arrests.
A strange phenomenon, in which bizarre titles coexist.
And Kim Yu-han had a secret....
The scene changes.
A club, the music loud enough to split an eardrum. Clink—! Sergeant Lee Garam (Park Dohui) knocked her glass against another with fierce good cheer, there in a place where people danced soaked through with euphoria.
In truth, the rank of Sergeant Lee Garam was a lie, and her real self was a traitor. An informant who handed personal details over to a criminal organization and collected the various payments in cash.
Spending was a truly happy thing.
It was money easily come by, so blowing it just as easily didn't matter. Hand over a few people's private information, and the cash filled itself back in.
Afterward, on her way toward the restroom, someone bumped her shoulder as if by nature. Not an accident. Merely the way information changed hands in the underworld.
The other steadied Garam and asked, low.
“Who's the target this time?”
“Of course I brought one. You're going to love them.”
The answering voice was bright with excitement. Drunk on the liquor?
No. She was drunk on the taste of a criminal organization tormenting a target she herself had picked. She even got paid for the work.
“First off, they're from an orphanage. The face is seriously pretty.”
“No mess to clean up, even if we kill them.”
“Right? And that's not even all. Studies in a reading room all day, works a part-time job on weekends. A solid, upstanding target. How fun would it be to ruin overnight a person living this desperately?”
“Bit by bit, you're becoming one of us.”
At that, Lee Garam let out a short laugh.
“I know, right. Ah, this is addictive.”
The other slipped several checks into the space between Garam's dress and her chest, and she turned away, satisfied. In the very moment she started off to indulge in the liquor—
“...”
A vast sense of wrongness snapped her mind wide awake.
They had never once paid her this way.
Which meant the person she had just spoken with was fake. Someone had disguised themselves and deceived her. Certain that something had gone wrong, she stopped short in a rush—
Thud!
A dull impact burst against the back of her head.
A pain from nowhere, vision gradually blurring, and the last words to reach her were—
“You shouldn't have.”
Something like that, probably.
Park Dohui sat bound to a chair, a blindfold over her eyes.
This rehearsal shoot was simple. A scene in which Kim Yu-han, having disguised himself as a member of the criminal organization, kidnaps Lee Garam and passes private judgment.
In other words, a shoot in which Lee Sua interrogates Park Dohui.
Waiting for PD Choi Heewon to call the start, Park Dohui retraced what had just happened. The moment Sua had called her out.
Lee Sua.
That the eyes were no ordinary thing, she could easily admit.
But a woman taking the male role of Kim Yu-han—wasn't that absurd? And that wasn't all.
The costume had looked comfortable. Far too comfortable.
Proof she didn't understand the role of Kim Yu-han. However generously you read it, she looked like a freshman on her way to some welcome party.
And what that Sua had said to Dohui was—
—No. What are you doing. You can't act like that.
Honestly, curiosity ran stronger than displeasure.
What on earth was she thinking?
What on earth was a newcomer thinking, saying a thing like that?
The slip of someone desperate to be noticed—or the nerve of someone who had spotted, first, what Kim Seonil and Seo Yeon-ju had seen?
Park Dohui's thoughts, bound there to the chair, were stretching long when—
“Standby—cue!”
PD Choi Heewon signaled the start, and Park Dohui swept every stray thought clean. First, sink completely into the role she had been given.
She was a traitor. An informant who had thrown in with a criminal organization.
But.
“You're awake?”
“...!”
In that instant the eyelids beneath Park Dohui's blindfold twitched hard.
A voice whispering at her ear, slow and yet certain. The other's voice was uncannily sticky.
“Welcome.”
The moment something she took for the other's hand swept her hair gently upward, her shoulders trembled of their own accord. She had the illusion of a great serpent coiling around her.
At the same time a perfume stabbed sharp at the tip of her nose. A scent she could not possibly call bad, and still the nausea surged.
It couldn't have been the scent. Only the air itself was crushing her.
“We're already acquainted. Hello, Sergeant Lee Garam.”
Slip—
All at once the cloth sealing her vision came undone.
“...Hah.”
Park Dohui dragged in an empty breath before she knew it.
The only part of a body the other had left revealed, between hat and mask.
The eyes.
Those eyes alone sent a chill over her entire body.
Stroke. Stroke.
Sua was still running her hands over Park Dohui, place after place. The touch did not stop at combing through her hair.
The gaze fixed on Park Dohui was rather tender, and the hands seemed to caress a woman's cheek.
Park Dohui's impression was nothing like it. Far, far from love or warmth, she felt only some suffering kin to a chill.
Only later did she understand why.
This very moment.
Because Lee Sua herself was death made flesh.
Frightening. She had become frightened.
The one to whom death offers its affection. The one death regards as a lover. Of course death would treat only someone about to die that way.
Because this was surely a body declaring, entire, that it would kill Park Dohui.
Grab!
Without warning Sua seized a fistful of Park Dohui's hair and wrenched.
“Hah—hhk...!”
Park Dohui reacted in shock. It was not acting.
“Caught them in the end. And you got caught.”
A gleam spilled from Sua's eyes as she spoke. She who had kept honed in her chest a blade of will sharper than anyone's finally murmured.
“Why did you do it. Every bad one ends up in my hands anyway.”
“Wh-what are you trying to do. L-let go. No. You're a detective. All you can do is arrest me. Why—why are you...”
“Wrong.”
“What...?”
That was when Sua closed a hand around Park Dohui's throat.
“I'm Kim Yu-han. The one who finds things like you and kills them.”
It looked like nothing more than a hand held tight, but Park Dohui was genuinely struggling to breathe. As if something were constricting her like madness.
“So, from now on...”
Sua whispered, small.
“...You go through it too. You lose them too. One by one.”
“Hhk, hk...! Hnnk...!”
The grip around Dohui's neck drew tighter and tighter.
She's trying to kill me. I'm going to die. I will certainly die.
Park Dohui was sure of it. This was absolutely not acting.
She couldn't understand the reason, and they had met for the first time only today, but the Sua before her eyes was, in this very moment, unmistakably set on killing her. Not reason. A sense her instinct delivered.
Why? Why on earth?
—Well then. I'll see just how good you really are.
Surely not because of that one line?
It was unfair. She didn't want to die.
A large drop gathered at the corner of Park Dohui's eye.
And.
Right after, something unscripted broke loose.
“Hnnnghhhh!”
Park Dohui bit down on Sua's arm.
An accident that, of course, was nowhere in the script, and Park Dohui's eyes had filled with a savage will to live. Tears ran down her cheeks.
“Hhk! Hnnnnk!”
It was simply what instinct commanded. There wasn't even the awareness of acting left. Only the thought that if she did not resist, she would die.
But.
A moment later.
Park Dohui's expression went blank.
“...”
Because some whistling had reached her ear.
...Suddenly?
It didn't stop there. Soon, a voice laughing at its leisure.
“...”
Park Dohui's mouth was still clamped on Sua's arm, but the strength had already gone out of her jaw. Something incomprehensible had happened.
Slowly.
Park Dohui's pupils turned, slowly, upward.
And she looked straight at her.
Lee Sua.
She was looking down at Park Dohui as if the woman were lovelier than she had ever been. A tender gaze. That was all.
“How cute.”
Park Dohui's pupils shook as if an earthquake had struck them, and Sua slowly lowered herself. Their eyes came level of their own accord.
With the one hand she had not surrendered, she stroked Dohui.
“Keep holding on just like that. Don't break.”
The face of Park Dohui—who a moment ago had seemed capable of harboring any venom if it meant she would live—crumbled under the shock. And then it was only an instant before Sua drew the black mask down and brought out her full lips.
“...Understood?”
Peck.
A kiss, laid on Park Dohui's forehead.
That was the end of it.
With a snap, something severed inside Dohui's head.
“Ah...”
Park Dohui's eyes rolled back, and she fainted.
A moment in which everyone went quiet, as if they had promised it.
“Writer Lee. PD Choi.”
Hwang Myung-pil, the luxury supporting actor, asked.