Backstage (7)
Seo Geonwoo made call after call as he headed for the company. The timeline had been moved up sooner than expected, but it wasn't something he'd left out of his calculations.
"Yes, Director. I'm on my way there now."
"Detective, can you get to group headquarters immediately?"
Chairman Seo had hardly been sitting idle either. Little by little, he'd been working to ship the son who was tightening the noose around his neck off into exile at the entertainment subsidiary — and in the meantime, to pin every one of his own misdeeds on him.
Worse, Geonwoo had made plenty of enemies through his hostile M&A campaigns. The Chairman gathered them up and turned them against him.
"Mr. Director."
"You're not late, are you?"
"No, sir."
Geonwoo hurried into the building, Secretary Yu close at his heels.
"Can we really take first place?"
"We have to."
Meanwhile, Icarus — finished with their pre-recording — waited in their dressing room until the live broadcast. Still, when rookie groups came by to pay their respects as their sunbaes, they received them as if the gesture were an honor ten times greater than it was.
"We actually saw your Hongdae video."
"We'll be cheering for you from now on."
To think we'd be getting greetings like this... Icarus sent the youngsters off with lumps in their throats, thinking of the one person who had done the most to bring them to this stage.
"The Director still isn't picking up?"
"No."
Seo Jihu stared at his phone with anxious eyes.
"There is evidence that Director Seo Geonwoo embezzled slush funds during the acquisition of AA Steel—"
And so the assault from Chairman Seo and his cronies began. Ji Gwanghyun played the Chairman so devastatingly well that you almost found yourself wondering, wait, is Geonwoo actually going to lose?
But the pacing was blistering given the episode's runtime, and Geonwoo had been shown preparing for this moment with meticulous care every step of the way — so he dismantled the Chairman's attacks point by point and laid his evidence on the table.
"Since everyone's already gathered, I have one more item to bring before the board."
Geonwoo produced the motion to remove Chairman Seo from his position. The room gasped; the Chairman's eyes went wide with fury.
"Yes — that group everyone's been talking about lately."
"They say this will be their final promotion... Shall we watch together?"
And Icarus took the live stage. The small handful of fans who had waited for this broadcast held up their slogans — some even clutching the acrylic light sticks that had sold for exactly one brief moment at their debut.
Icarus gave their all on a stage that would never air. This was a farewell performance for themselves.
"H-how?! How is that possible?!"
In the meantime, Geonwoo exposed the Chairman's corruption outright. The doors of the wide conference room swung open, and the police walked in.
"A large-scale investigation begins tomorrow."
"L-let's end the board meeting here, shall we?"
The directors scrambled out of their seats, and the only ones left in the room were Geonwoo, Chairman Seo, and the detective who had cooperated with Geonwoo.
"You — you little...!"
Geonwoo snatched up the nameplate the Chairman hurled at him and flashed a cold, crooked smile.
"I'll have a wheelchair arranged for you. A brand-new model."
"W-what?!"
"Since you'll be appearing before the prosecutors shortly. Consider it a son carrying out his filial duty."
"You — you...! You ungrateful wretch! This is how you repay the grace of the man who raised you?!"
Geonwoo walked toward him. With every step, the mocking expression he'd worn changed — sliding into hatred and fury, an overwhelming presence that seemed ready to swallow the Chairman whole.
"You chose to have me. So why act surprised now? Raising me was simply you doing what you owed. It becomes a problem only if you start calling that a special gift—"
Yoon Jay had deliberately kept his body slightly hunched through the scene, and only now straightened his shoulders with full, defiant confidence — all to heighten the drama of this moment.
Watching that subtle shift of the body, the eyes, the expression — Ji Gwanghyun felt he finally understood why Moon Changmin had praised the man so extravagantly.
"It was you who tried to get rid of me first, Chairman."
Even though Ji Gwanghyun was a tall, imposing middle-aged actor, standing beside the 190-centimeter Yoon Jay made him look small.
And when Jay radiated an atmosphere of such total domination, no explanation was needed for which way the battle had tipped.
"I have been waiting for this moment."
It brought back all the old humiliations. The man who had wounded his mother so deeply — and the younger brother who had never been properly loved or raised.
He had wanted to live together with the two of them, but he'd left for their sake. After that, his father had treated him like an invisible man.
Only the child born of his mistress counted as a son, while Seo Geonwoo and Seo Jihu were treated as nothing of the kind — so Geonwoo, in turn, had stopped treating the man as a father at all. And it had all come back around like this.
"Do you think you'll walk away unscathed after this?! The prosecutors and the police are all in my pocket anyway! What do you think some wet-behind-the-ears rookie detective can do to me?!"
"Do you believe this is all I've prepared?"
And then the scene changed again.
"Yes! The music show is finally moments away from announcing its final rankings! Top-ranking candidates, please come to the stage!"
Icarus stood at the very front. It was the first time they had ever experienced this — standing here, watching the tallying process unfold on the screen above.
In the experts' preliminary voting, the rival group had come out ahead — though Icarus had racked up a respectable number as well. But the gap already opening up made the members' heads start to droop.
So it really is no use after all?
The video score, based on music video views, also favored the other group. They'd had capital poured into them, but views didn't shoot up dramatically overnight. On this score, the two groups were roughly even.
And then the live text-voting score came in.
ICARUS — 3,302
PEANUTS — 1,206
And here, the upset began.
They'd done well in the preliminary round, sure — but the rival group had been ahead in both of the first two categories. It was far too early to let their guard down.
Could it actually happen for us?
They refused to resign themselves just because of this. The hope they had set down for a while was slowly coming back into their hands, and their faces were flushing brighter by the minute.
Album sales and digital streaming carried the most weight in the final tally. The numbers climbed and climbed, and the instant the total flashed on screen, fireworks went off around the studio.
"First place goes to... ICARUS! Congratulations!"
"Huh...?"
Twenty-eight years of trainee years combined across the five of them, and six years and seven months since their debut. More than half of that had been dead air.
Even while working part-time jobs to survive, they'd had to compare themselves to the bandmates who appeared on TV and swallow the sting of feeling small.
"Please accept this."
"Ah — yes."
Anyone else would call it nothing more than a cable-show win, but to them it meant everything. These were men for whom even this had been a desperate wish.
Icarus, dazed, accepted the trophy from the MC — and tears were already streaming down their faces before anyone had even said a word.
"You should give your acceptance speech."
"Sob... yes."
Winning first place for the first time filled them with joy, with elation — but more than anything, they could feel in their bones that a moment like this would never come again.
It was bittersweet, but they knew it was time to let go. Because this was the end.
Even attention like this would be nothing but a passing spark, and without Geonwoo, none of it would have been possible at all.
"To our fans, who believed in us... and to our members, who endured everything until now..."
Still — it had been a joy to chase the same dream together for so long. They had finished their ending without regret.
Seo Jihu looked back at his members. They all felt the same.
Then, slowly, they rolled their eyes in search of Geonwoo. He was nowhere to be seen. Somehow, that made the tears come harder.
"And to our CEO..."
The moment the words left his mouth, the doors of the studio swung open, and Seo Geonwoo burst in, disheveled and breathless.
"Thank you for giving us back the dream we had given up on."
He'd sprinted the whole way — he was gulping down air — but when he saw the members holding their trophies and bouquets, he smiled.
"CEO!"
"Hyung!"
After the encore stage, Icarus charged off the stage and tackled Geonwoo with outstretched arms.
"Chairman Seo! Is it true that you engaged in offshored tax evasion?"
"There's testimony from one of your aides that you tried to pin the evidence of the illegal slush fund on your own son, Director Seo Geonwoo!"
Chairman Seo, wheeled through the crowd of reporters, feigned illness and tugged his mask up even higher. From a distance, Geonwoo and Seo Jihu watched him go.
"He's actually riding that thing out of here."
"What?"
"Nothing."
Afterward, Icarus disbanded. Their agency had been implicated in Chairman Seo's illegal slush funds, and they had chosen not to renew their contracts.
Cha Noah signed favorable terms with one of the many agencies he'd been meeting with all along.
Lee Taein discovered an unexpected talent for acting and moved to an actor's management company. Lim Doyun and Kim Yunjae shaved their heads, declaring they'd knock out their military service first.
They scattered in every direction, but promised to meet often. The promise would probably be kept. They'd ended things well, and the years they'd spent together were long.
"So what are you going to do now?"
"A good agency reached out. I'll probably promote as a solo artist."
"That's great. Everything's okay now?"
At Geonwoo's question, Seo Jihu broke into a brightness he had never once shown before.
"I think it will be. What about you, hyung?"
"I'm about to become Chairman. Of course I'm fine."
Geonwoo gave a wry chuckle. And then, behind the two of them, their mother appeared.
"Geonwoo."
"...Mom."
Was it just his imagination, or did she suddenly seem smaller? Geonwoo fell into her open arms. Seo Jihu followed, and their mother gently patted their backs.
"You've both been through so much."
"Great work, everyone!"
"Come on, one photo — cheese!"
The wrap party was as warm and lively as it could possibly be. A drama they'd only meant to add a single line to their résumés had spread by word of mouth and finished first in its time slot among cable dramas — a genuinely fine result.
On top of that, the staff even received bonuses for Backstage's success.
Yoon Jay — who had first drawn attention under the eyebrow-raising premise of "a top actor doing an idol drama" — had become famous in more ways than one.
"Jay."
"Director."
"You worked hard."
"So did you, Director."
The man had seemed a bit uninspired at first, but he was a capable director. Within the tight episode count, he protected every lead and supporting actor's screen time without ever letting things turn into a mess.
He left Jay with the words that he hoped to work with him again. The writer, whom Jay was seeing for the first time since the script reading, said the same.
"H-hyung."
"Hmm?"
Kim Yunjae and Lim Doyun approached Yoon Jay. Unlike the three idols in the cast, the two of them were rookie actors who had kept their stage names identical to their character names to build recognition.
It wasn't as strange as it sounded — there were even people who legally changed their names to match a role they'd played.
"Even after this ends, can we keep in touch?"
"Were you planning not to?"
"What? N-no, of course I will."
The two of them went wide-eyed. Their acting — which had once reeked of web-drama amateurism — had improved enormously thanks to all the advice Jay had given them.
Compared to rookies like themselves, Jay was a star whose popularity had yet to cool, so they'd assumed it would be hard to keep the connection alive.
"Honestly, hyung, it was because of you that I decided to become an actor."
"Because of me?"
"Yes."
Becoming someone's idol was gratifying, but it stirred up a strange feeling in him. Jay clinked his glass against theirs and wished them well on the road ahead.
"Hyung, I'm going to text you a lot too."
"...? Sure."
Him too, huh. So he wasn't planning to either. At Jay's nod, Lee Junseo's cheeks flushed. The truth was, his anger had long since faded — he'd simply kept dragging it out because he'd enjoyed Jay's reactions and now felt a little guilty about it.
I already knew everything anyway.
It hadn't bothered him in the slightest. Jay allowed himself a small smile.
Behind Lee Junseo, the director of Junseo's agency was visible, bowing deeply over and over in gratitude.
"Jay! Come over here for a second!"
"Over here too!"
He was the lead, and the undisputed hero who had turned the whole production's listless atmosphere around, so people were calling for him from every table.
In all the commotion, he'd neglected Yoon Dojun. By the time he finally made his way over to Dojun's table, the boy — head sunk down — spotted him and immediately broke into a delighted giggle.
"It's my broooother!"
"...How much has he had?"
His face was still softly amused, but his voice had dropped a few degrees. Yoon Dojun had only just turned twenty. The question carried an unmistakable edge — did someone force him to drink? — and the people around the table hurriedly shook their heads.
"No, no! He only had two glasses!"
"I told him to stop after one sip because he seemed off already..."
So he'd ignored that and downed the rest anyway. Still — two glasses does this? Yoon Jay let out a long sigh.