Five Months of Waiting
"Hyung, please don't drink too much."
When I tried to rein in Manager Ahn Jinbae, who was lifting yet another glass without so much as a pause, a pair of glassy eyes swung toward me.
"Don't you worry, Actor-nim. I can hold my liquor very well—I'll never end up senseless. And I'll make sure I get home without any trouble, too!"
That wasn't the problem, though.
"That's not the issue—it's bad for your health. Pace yourself."
"Understood!"
He did not, in any way, look like someone who understood.
Manager Ahn Jinbae drifted from table to table, downing drinks with the staff again and again. Even though I'd been seeing his face for months now and knew it well, every time he changed seats he'd bow politely and introduce himself as actor Lee Yeonjae's manager. For someone who normally didn't talk much, he was remarkably smooth about it—almost embarrassing to watch.
"Yeonjae...! Want more cider?"
"Sure. Thanks."
Seong Ijun poured the soda for me and settled into the seat beside me like it was the most natural thing in the world.
He kept stealing glances my way like he was working up his courage, so I swallowed a sigh and turned to look at him. I remembered the homeschooling topic he'd brought up before, and asked him a question—any question—and his face lit up in an instant. It was lovely to watch him answer so earnestly, though honestly the restaurant was so loud I could barely make out what he was saying.
"I see. So does a tutor come to your house separately?"
"Only for math. For the other subjects, I just study on my own...! It's more comfortable that way, so..."
"I see."
My conversational material dried up fast. Since I wasn't actually curious about any of it, no new questions came to mind. But he was glued to my side like this, and I couldn't exactly leave him hanging in silence.
Something about the way he fidgeted and whimpered like a newborn puppy reminded me of Angae, and that made it impossible to just ignore him.
"You're heading into middle school next year, right? Are you planning to go to an arts school?"
While I sat quietly sipping my cider, Seong Ijun wiggled his fingers and worked up the nerve to speak first. Middle school, huh. Since I'd signed with an agency, I'd probably have to keep going out for auditions.
"Probably. Considering attendance policies, I'd have to, I think."
And if I got in, being away from school for shoots would naturally drop off, too.
Should I aim for the place Noh Bihyuk mentioned before?
"Really? Got your eye on any particular school?"
"Hmm, well..."
Both of us seemed focused purely on keeping the conversation alive rather than actually getting anywhere, so the dialogue advanced at a glacial pace. I was idly reciting a meaningless list of school names I'd vaguely heard of when the body beside me suddenly jerked.
"What's wrong?"
"N-nothing...! It's just, I know someone who goes there..."
Was that really worth jumping out of your skin over?
The word that had startled Seong Ijun—Heum Arts Middle School—was an arts school located some distance from this neighborhood. If that friend went there, was he an actor too?
When I turned my head to ask, the blood had drained from his face. I glanced briefly at his frozen jaw, then deliberately opened my mouth with studied indifference.
"Ah, so you don't like anything too greasy, hyung. Your meat's not going down at all."
"Oh... right! I'm not big on meat."
The moment I changed the subject, the tension drained right out of his face. I asked what food he did like instead.
Watching him stammer through his answer, I thought to myself:
So that kid knows who I am.
The moment Heum Arts Middle School came up, something in Seong Ijun's eyes had shifted. It was the same uncomfortable, guarded look I'd caught from him on the first day of filming—something I'd barely seen from him at all lately. Been a while, that look.
The most plausible explanation was that he knew what I was like before my misfortune factor had been drained. Whether he'd seen it firsthand or heard the rumors, either way it had reached him somehow. And assuming we were the same age, Seong Ijun was two years older than me, which would make that kid fifteen.
And if that kid was likely living in the neighborhood near Heum Arts Middle School...
Don't be ridiculous.
I shook my head at the thought. That was far too much of a leap. There was more than one person out there two years older than me. It had to be coincidence.
...Even if it wasn't, there was nothing I could do about it anyway. If that kid really was who I suspected, what could I possibly do?
"Ten minutes left, everyone! Eat your meat now while you can!"
Just as my mood started to sink, one of the staff members cleared the air with perfect timing. Manager Ahn Jinbae, who'd been wandering around, made his way back to my side, and Seong Ijun rose naturally from his seat.
"Actor-nim, did you get enough to eat?"
"Yes. You should eat something too, hyung, if you're going to drink. It's bad for your liver."
He just smiled and told me not to worry, so I couldn't bring myself to sigh out loud—instead I wrapped a meat wrap and pressed it into his hand.
An ad came on the large TV screen, and the assistant director picked up a phone call from someone. At someone's shout to keep it down, the whole room fell silent, every eye fixed on the assistant director. Whose call could warrant this?
"It'll be the network's main control room. They're probably reporting the real-time viewership numbers."
Manager Ahn Jinbae must have read the question on my face, because he whispered it quietly. Ah, I see. I nodded and joined the crowd watching the assistant director, whose scowl—whether from straining to hear—suddenly went slack. He turned around with a dazed expression on his face.
***
At that same moment, a woman who had slammed her hand down on her little brother's shoulder and seized the remote control for herself was staring at a screen where the commercial had just ended.
"Hey, I have to watch the soccer broadcast."
"Shut it."
At his sister's flat refusal, the little brother grumbled under his breath and sat quietly beside her, condemned by his own lack of authority over the remote. The woman paid him no mind, her attention locked on the TV.
It had been five months since the boy in the yellow hat smiled bashfully on screen—five months since this bait had last appeared. She couldn't afford to miss a single scene.
But for all her resolve, twenty minutes into the drama and not one hair of Lee Yeonjae had shown up on screen.
"What gives? He's actually in this, right? He's not going to show up right at the end, is he?"
"Whack!"
"Ow! Why'd you hit me!"
"You jinxed it."
She was already furious enough to burst, and her little brother—fanning flames that were already raging, then dousing them with gasoline for good measure—made her clench her teeth. She couldn't tell if the PD had no sense or no shame, but she was angry either way.
What infuriated her most of all was that even without Lee Yeonjae, the drama was actually pretty watchable. Her little brother, sitting beside her, had at some point gone quiet and started watching the screen too.
The drama opened from the heroine Nabi's point of view. Having lost her father to plague, Nabi lived alone with her mother. Though born to noble blood, their finances were anything but noble. It had been a long time since society had descended into chaos, where commoners who'd amassed fortunes could simply buy their way into the gentry.
Nabi's mother, Lady Lee, had struggled through hardship to raise her daughter in her husband's empty place. Fortunately, Nabi had grown into a child who was poor in coin but rich in compassion, wise enough to look after herself.
Before long, Nabi wandering the market on her own had become a young girl with a faint bloom of color on her cheeks.
"Miss, I really can't go any lower than that. We have to make a living too, you know."
"You know our circumstances well enough—it's been years, don't be so heartless! Five yang, fair and square. How about it?"
As Nabi, bright-eyed and shrewd, haggled with the market vendor, a boy slipped past behind her. The camera followed him naturally.
The moment the worn-faced boy turned into an alley, he clutched his stomach and crouched down. And then, a stomach-growl inserted with perfect comic timing.
Someone approached the boy, whose eyes looked far too weary for his young age. At the suspicious offer of work, he hesitated—but the coin that would land in his hand right away mattered more, and he followed along.
"Th-this is... the royal palace, isn't it!"
"Shh! Lower your voice!"
And so the boy was dragged into the palace. He wasn't dim enough not to realize that any talk of turning back wouldn't fly here.
The man who'd brought him marched him straight to a certain woman and forced him to his knees before her. The woman studied the boy, who trembled violently with his head bowed deep, then gave a small nod. At her gesture, the men standing nearby hauled him roughly to his feet.
When the boy's eyes met the woman's, he froze solid. It was a face he'd never seen before, yet he knew immediately—
knew it the way one appraises a wares laid out on a market stall—that the woman looking down at him was the queen of this country.
"You look quite alike. This one will do. Have him prepared at once."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Has the other child arrived safely?"
"We've confirmed he slipped away unharmed. At first light tomorrow we'll send someone to Lady Lee's house to verify once more—"
"Enough. You've given him the warning; if he's fated to live, he'll manage well enough on his own. Now withdraw."
The camera lingered on the queen's oddly impassive eyes, then drifted slowly out of the room. Retreating the way a servant would, backward step by step, the camera pulled out from the queen's chamber in an instant to a shot that revealed the entire house.
The smooth, flowing movement finally came to rest on a glowing crescent moon hanging in the night sky. When the camera, having held on the moon for a moment, sank back down, it had arrived somewhere else entirely.
A pitch-black night. The sound of ragged breathing. The snap of untamed branches striking against a body. Without a single lamp it was hard to see clearly, but a grown woman and a young boy were pushing their way through the mountainside.
Is that Yeonjae?
About time he showed up. The woman suppressed the swelling anticipation in her chest.
It didn't matter if his screen time was short. As long as there was even one scene where he acted decently, that was enough!
The recent deluge of malicious comments had left her badly stressed. Those obvious manipulation posts—transparent agency schemes, she'd think, who falls for noise marketing these days—had only made her angrier. What was done was done, sure, but she desperately needed one solid card to play against the sneering trolls. Just one decent scene, please...!
"Mother, why are you so late... and who is this?"
"...Greet him."
On screen, the flustered Nabi, caught off guard by the stranger, cut back and forth with Lady Lee, who watched the boy's every reaction as she gave her order.
And then, at last, the one she'd been waiting for appeared.
"Mis...tress. I... greet you. You may... call me... Yuhyeon..."
Lee Yeonjae, head bowed low, recited his lines as his whole body quivered. Nothing exaggerated in his movements, the tremble in his voice calibrated just so. There wasn't a shred of awkwardness in it—so natural that a satisfied smile bloomed across the woman's face.
That's it! How is our little fawn good at everything, even acting?!
But just as her thoughts threatened to dissolve into pure gushing, they were cut off by the camera dipping low.
More precisely, by Lee Yeonjae's—no, by some boy's—expression caught in that lowered frame.
Despite the way he trembled from head to toe, the boy looked not the least bit frail. His glistening eyes looked ready to spill tears at any moment, yet there was a fierce, unyielding force burning out of them. The body that had seemed so helpless a moment ago took on an entirely different meaning now that his face was properly visible.
This was no frightened child. It was the bearing of a beast grinding its teeth in fury.
Dangerous. The thought brushed the back of the woman's mind before she even knew it.
That instinct hit its peak when the boy flung away Nabi's reaching hand as though it were something filthy.
"How dare you!"
The boy's voice cracked out so violently his throat must have been lined with blood—and then he suddenly collapsed. The startled pair carried the boy to a separate building, and when he came to the next day, Nabi nursed him with the utmost care. Born with a naturally warm heart, Nabi offered even this boy, who kept her at arm's length, nothing but gentleness.
"When others are around, call me mistress. But when it's just the two of us, you can use my name. Yuhyeon."
"..."
At words spoken in a warmth the boy had never once known in his life, his eyes wavered, rough and unsteady. As time passed, the stiffness in his face began to thaw, and months later, not a trace of his early hostility remained.
"Nabi~, why'd it take you so long!"
"Mm... it couldn't be helped. I'll be waiting, so you have to come early next time."
Every word wrapped soft and round like a glutinous rice cake, honeyed and warm—but his eyes were exactly as they'd been in the beginning. That contrast came through vividly even to the people watching the screen.
And then came the scene where the woman, completely swept up, found herself clutching her own mouth without meaning to.
"Nabi. I..."
"..."
"I'm so glad you exist."
The boy looked at Nabi—but his gaze reached straight through the screen, to everyone watching on the other side.
Only after the ending credits of episode one began to roll did the woman, breathless with emotion—and her little brother, who'd unconsciously held his breath right along with her—finally realize it.
That the boy had been Lee Yeonjae all along.