Intermission (5)

The remaining three members of Agitato practiced without Yoo Tae-hyuk. At first, with the guy who picked fights for no reason and couldn't keep time to save his life out of the picture, they'd figured things would actually go more smoothly.

"...Shall we call it a day?"

"Yeah."

But it wasn't as fun as when all four were together. The moment Tae-hyuk walked out, the space he left behind made itself felt. Tae-hyuk had built Agitato, and only with him there did their sound become whole. They realized it far too late.

"How the hell did it come to this?"

"No idea."

Jung Yi-hyun had started skipping out constantly, claiming ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠something kept coming up at home, and the two left suddenly hollow, Min Joon-young and Oh In-soo, filled each other's empty glasses instead.

They were earning more money than before. They'd moved into a bigger practice room, and even the people who once sneered, you can make a living off a band? were now singing their praises. And yet sometimes ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠they missed the days of mindlessly playing music in that shabby old studio where the rent was always a month from unpaid.

"It does feel kind of empty."

"That guy. Should we call and see what he's up to?"

"Forget it. He wouldn't pick up for us anyway."

Which wasn't actually true. Yoo Tae-hyuk had wondered, once or twice, whether he'd gone too far — but his pride wouldn't allow him to apologize first, so he was waiting for them to reach out.

"Well, our new album is doing fine, isn't it?"

They tried hard to convince themselves everything would be okay — and then trouble blew up with Jung Yi-hyun.

"You heard from Yi-hyun?"

"No."

The scheduled radio appearance was bearing down on them, and Yi-hyun, their vocalist, wasn't showing. His phone rang and rang, went unanswered, and then all at once switched to a recorded message saying it had been turned off.

"What do we do? We're out of time."

"If we floor it, we could make it to his place, but..."

"Would his parents even allow it, though? From that phone call before, his family seemed pretty strict."

Just as a heavy silence settled over the practice room, Yoo Tae-hyuk appeared out of nowhere.

"What the — you were here?"

"Wh-what? Why are you here?"

"...I left something behind."

The truth was that Tae-hyuk had come back to apologize. A band wasn't something you could do alone, and he missed playing with the three of them.

Then a instinctive feeling crept over him that the situation was turning in his favor, and he crossed his arms and coolly surveyed the scene.

"What do you want? You look like you're in a bind."

"Well, um..."

"Where's Jung Yi-hyun? Doesn't he have a shoot today or something?"

"...No idea. He's not picking up."

Min Joon-young heaved a deep sigh. At that, Tae-hyuk's face flashed with unmistakable glee for an instant before he feigned ignorance and cleared his throat.

Tae-hyuk had felt the members' absence too, had even reflected on himself a little — but the prideful, insufferable personality he was born with wasn't about to change. It was a personality the audience could feel through every delicate beat of Yoon Jay's performance.

"It's a radio show, no? How's that gonna work without a vocalist?"

I don't even have to be the one to bend first, do I? Fine. Guess I'll help you guys out.

"Uh, uhm..."

"Where's the gig?"

Min Joon-young and Oh In-soo, who had been hovering and stammering, stared at him in surprise. Tae-hyuk's expression said, plainly: If you want, I'll fill in.

"...You're coming with?"

"Take it, and we'll call it even for the punch."

"Fine."

They'd assumed they would never make peace. But the moment one of them reached out a hand, the frozen air thawed in an instant.

Awkward as it was, watching Min Joon-young and Tae-hyuk walk side by side, Oh In-soo trailing behind them broke into a wide, beaming grin.

With the schedule too tight to sort out Yi-hyun for now, the three of them powered through the radio appearance, leaving his problem for later.

"Oh? Tae-hyuk's here too. We heard something came up and you wouldn't be able to make it today..."

So they haven't kicked me out yet? Tae-hyuk shot a sidelong glance at Min Joon-young and Oh In-soo, then simply nodded.

"Yes. It's not me — it's Jung Yi-hyun. Something came up with him."

"Is that so? That's a shame."

Min Joon-young studied Tae-hyuk's face carefully.

He looks... okay?

With the staff sighing so openly over Yi-hyun's absence, his pride could well have taken a hit — but Tae-hyuk didn't look the least bit stung. It was a quiet signal that something in his attitude was changing.

"Hey — hold on a second!"

It was a reporter who grabbed Tae-hyuk just as he managed to slip out of the broadcasting station unscathed.

The man had ground his teeth at Tae-hyuk's chronic rudeness, but he was a tenacious soul who had never once let go of his Agitato coverage.

"Mind if I get a quick interview?"

"Out here?"

"Honestly, there's just one thing I'd like to confirm."

There was a barb of mockery in the man's tone, and it boded nothing good.

But Tae-hyuk swallowed it down. He remembered Min Joon-young's advice: don't lose your temper with reporters.

"Yoo Tae-hyuk, didn't you take second place in the violin division of the Queen Elisabeth Competition as a kid? And first in the violin division of the Tchaikovsky Competition? Word is you swept every major competition out there..."

"...How do you know about that?"

"The netizen detectives dug it up."

Tae-hyuk raked a furious hand through his hair.

This is exactly why I hated going anywhere near the media. The past I wanted buried keeps getting dragged up against my will.

"The press once hailed you as a once-in-a-century genius... and then your skills stopped improving, and you quit."

"He — really?"

"You didn't know, Mr. In-soo?"

Min Joon-young, his old classmate, had known — but Oh In-soo's eyes went wide, hearing it for the first time. So that's why he got so touchy about Yi-hyun touching the violin.

Min Joon-young grabbed Tae-hyuk's forearm before anything could happen. He knew better than anyone how raw the man's past could make him.

"Anyway — remarkable. Truly. To hold on to music until the very end, in that situation."

"What exactly are you trying to say?"

"Haengbok Mental Nursing Hospital. You know it, don't you? I visited Tae-hyuk's mother there, you see..."

Tae-hyuk's breath caught in his throat.

What the hell is this? Even Min Joon-young doesn't know that. Min Joon-young and Oh In-soo demanded the reporter explain himself.

"A devoted goose dad who sacrificed everything for his prodigy son. But the son's skills kept slipping, and the father, crushed under the weight of poverty, took his own life."

What? He never told me any of that.

What came next was just as devastating. The mother, shattered by her husband's suicide, had collapsed in turn and ended up in a nursing facility.

"Would it be all right to run this as a story? Public sentiment's ugly these days over all those infamous rants — wouldn't a little sympathy do you some good?"

People love nothing more than a deep, dark shadow behind a star. The famously arrogant, perpetually foul-mouthed Yoo Tae-hyuk, carrying a past like this?

The reporter hadn't come to ask permission. He'd come to knock the always-insufferable Tae-hyuk down a peg.

"Ha, I... what was it I was saying again."

Tae-hyuk's face twisted. He was so angry that the opposite happened — an ugly chuckle spilled out of him. His hands trembled as if they were about to fly into a fist, but it was Min Joon-young and Oh In-soo who exploded first.

"Are you done?!"

"Excuse me?"

"Hand over the camera. We're deleting the photos."

"Now hold on, I'm only exercising the public's right to know—"

The reporter's excuses got him nowhere. The two of them bore down on him like they were about to beat him senseless, snatched the camera, and smashed it against the ground.

"To hell with the right ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to know — what do you want, following us all the way out here?"

"Yeah. You digging at old wounds for fun? Get lost!"

Their fury was so fierce that the reporter had no choice but to back down.

"So you don't care what the article says?"

"The cost of the broken camera is right... here. Bill me later. Or don't."

Min Joon-young made a show of reaching for his wallet and flipped his middle finger out of his pocket instead. Cowed by the menace in the air, the reporter fled the scene, and only the three of them remained.

Tae-hyuk, oddly embarrassed, scratched at his cheek.

"...I thought you said to go easy on reporters."

"You—!"

Standing there as four again, Min Joon-young suddenly remembered something Tae-hyuk had once said — the advice he'd given to Jung Yi-hyun, who kept ignoring his parents' calls in pure irritation.

And back then, too...

No wonder his voice shook. And the way he'd flare up out of nowhere, too... Min Joon-young blew up on the spot.

"Why didn't you ever say anything?"

"Would saying it have changed anything?"

"Goddammit — if you'd told us, we could've at least gone to your father's funeral! Why did you act like everything was fine whenever family came up?! Did you actually think of me as a friend?"

"I did."

Tae-hyuk grinned, strangely warmed by the two of them raging on his behalf — which only infuriated them more.

"Anyway. It's all in the past, so drop it."

"You little bastard..."

"Thanks. For caring."

Min Joon-young and Oh In-soo let out a long, long sigh. It felt absurd to keep raging at a man so utterly unmoved by it all.

"Right, whatever. Jung Yi-hyun — you got through to him yet? Try calling again."

"No."

"You know Yi-hyun's home address, right?"

Director Shin Ji-won had torn up the screenplay for Intermission and rewritten it several times over. It had begun as something autobiographical, but it kept shifting as he went.

True to its nature as a film about music, he had poured his heart into every single track, enlisting master after master to contribute — but he never let the screenplay take a back seat to the songs.

"Yi-hyun is a genius, you see. Through Tae-hyuk's eyes, he's a kind of idealized paradise — something you'd only ever paint in your dreams."

From the beginning and well into the middle of Intermission, Jung Yi-hyun was a munchkin: hand him any instrument at all and he played it at a professional level. Even his clothes looked expensive — he carried the air of a pampered young master who had never wanted for anything in his life.

"But does being that kind of person mean life is nothing but fun?"

As he said it, the director stole a glance at Yoon Jay.

Before he became a director, the man named Shin Ji-won had wandered for years after putting down his violin. And in that wandering, he came to a realization.

What is an inferiority complex, really? Why do I keep measuring myself against other people? I'm a perfectly worthwhile person just as I am.

Yoo Tae-hyuk was a portrait of Shin Ji-won before he learned that truth.

Did Tae-hyuk's own talent lose its shine simply because Jung Yi-hyun joined Agitato?

No. In Min Joon-young's and Oh In-soo's eyes, Tae-hyuk remained every bit the genius he had always been. He was only forfeiting his own potential by holding himself up against Yi-hyun, over and over.

"Do you think Yi-hyun's family backstory is too much?"

In the film's latter half, as the subtle conflict between Yi-hyun and Tae-hyuk begins, it's revealed that Yi-hyun carries shadows of his own.

Gaslit by his parents since childhood, Yi-hyun — a grown man, a veteran who had completed his military service — still couldn't break free of his family's suffocating grip.

Occasionally he would stare in silence at the messages his parents sent, edging close to verbal abuse, and sometimes he'd practice until he dropped only to leave midway, muttering that something had come up at home.

"A grown man pushing thirty who's never once defied his parents — it might come off as laughable."

"Hmm... Yes. My parents were never like that, so... but I do think it's believable. He was brainwashed, more or less, from the time he was little."

"Right. Somewhere out there, there are surely homes like that. I did exaggerate it deliberately, of course."

But that wasn't the point the director wanted to make. There was a reason he had swapped the roles between Yoon Jay and Kang Hajun.

"Hajun, we've talked a lot over meals, haven't we."

"Yes."

"Didn't it feel unfair to you? You trained from such a young age — the passion was there, surely."

"...Yes."

Every ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠so often, the world produces someone like that — genuinely capable, yet nothing they ever touch works out. Kang Hajun was the textbook case: the talent was there, and his luck was abysmally, insultingly absent.

It wasn't a matter of skill falling short. He had ranked first in every evaluation, every time. And still he kept getting cut from the lineup of every likely debut group.

"Your dream was taken from you by force, wasn't it? Of course, speaking for myself, I'm grateful it led you to become the actor you are."

The dream was there, and so was the passion for it. But every time it came down to making that dream real, he slipped and fell.

It ran perfectly parallel to Jung Yi-hyun in the film. He ran away from home for the sake of the music he wanted — and never once managed to escape his parents' cage.

"Mm..."

It was time for him to come out with it. He'd had no choice but to fold up his idol dream, but even so, he was satisfied with the life he'd built as an actor. Kang Hajun's expression slowly grew grave.

"The family that oppresses Yi-hyun here stands for 'society.' Not the reasonable, commonsense society we're supposed to live in — something compounded of wrongheaded prejudice, distorted perceptions, other people's ossified ways of thinking."

"That's..."

"Think it over carefully."

Jung Yi-hyun wanted to make music, and his parents' opposition had always stood in his way. Kang Hajun had wanted to debut as an idol, and circumstance after circumstance turned against him until the dream had to be folded away.

The rivals who had coasted into debut lineups on connections. The agency he'd moved to, convinced this was his last chance, which dangled a debut in front of him — watching, testing — before dropping him from the group for the crime of being too old.

He was barely twenty-three at the time.

Too old to debut as an idol — who decided that? There were people who debuted just fine at that age. Why was he the only one it never worked out for?

"I think I get it."

Kang Hajun's expression turned complicated. Jung Yi-hyun's family was everything in this world that pressed down on him.

The director's face split into a wide grin.

"Then pour all of that bottled-up rage into it."