A Little More Like a Kid
"What did you say?"
I glanced at Director Yoon's dumbfounded expression and spoke, feeling a little sheepish. "It's just a personal opinion. Feel free to ignore it."
"No, no. Say it again. What was—ah, hold on a second."
Director Yoon hurriedly summoned the assistant director and the rest of the directing staff.
And here I thought I'd just tossed out a casual remark. This is turning into a much bigger deal than I expected.
As the group huddled together around me, I repeated what I'd said earlier. "We're shooting the scene today where the rival organization launches a surprise attack, right? I mentioned to the director that I thought it might be interesting to tweak Kang Tae-il's reaction a little."
"His reaction? What do you mean, exactly?"
Whether it was because of how he grew up or simply his innate temperament, Kang Tae-il was a character with plenty of grit. Or, to put it more precisely, Director Yoon had designed him that way. He'd stressed from the start that Kang Tae-il's dogged refusal to buckle no matter what hardship he faced was crucial to how the story unfolded.
So during the ambush, Kang Tae-il resists without pause. He spits in his attackers' faces with a perfectly blank expression, sneers at them, greets the stunned men closing in around him with a blood-soaked hand and a jab about how slow they were. But—
"I was thinking it might work to show a slightly more childlike reaction."
"Ah, something a little more grounded? More real?"
"Yes. The current script does a better job of making the character pop, but no matter how much nerve he has, I think it would be right for him to be a little scared in that situation."
He'd grown up brawling with gangsters, sure, but this was the first time he was facing violence with intent behind it. No matter how familiar someone is with brutality, witnessing it and living through it are two very different things.
The assistant director nodded along as I finished. "There's something to that. What brought this on all of a sudden?"
"Ah... it's just something I've been mulling over lately."
Really, I'd been thinking about it since that hallucination. I kept turning over the fact that Kang Tae-il suffers nightmares after the ambush, and the more I chewed on it, the deeper the thought sank. I could picture it—valid, plausible—and at the same time I could see Kang Tae-il's eyes going wide with raw, trembling fear in an instant.
It was also something Director Yoon had brought up time and again, and I worried it might come across as presumptuous to add my own words on top of a character he'd built. Thankfully, when I stole a glance at him, he didn't seem offended in the least.
"You're right that being scared to some degree is more realistic. Still... going full kid-mode might be a bit much. Hm."
"Even a slight variation could work well. For example, something like..."
I gave them a brief glimpse of the frightened version of Kang Tae-il I had in mind. Director Yoon's half-convinced, half-doubtful eyes went perfectly round.
"Let go of me!"
"Shut it. Tiny thing won't stop squealing."
My scalp stung where an iron grip had seized my hair. Before I could even register the sharp, stabbing pain, I was being dragged across the ground wherever the man pleased.
I flailed my arms, but whatever I grabbed slipped away in a flash. The hand holding my hair was simply too strong.
"You little—!"
Yanked along in a daze, my vision suddenly cleared as the man hauled me roughly upright. A pitch-black night. The paper door of the hanok sagging, fragile and half-broken. The cold dirt floor. Black-suited men ringing me in on every side.
Before I could even work out what was happening, a chilling sensation brushed my left hand. I turned my head—and stopped breathing.
"Let's break the left hand first. Nice and easy. They'll be back soon."
"Yeah. Make it quick."
It wasn't the first time I'd seen one. I'd even gotten my hands on a hammer before. But I never knew a hammer could be this cold.
My thoughts wouldn't string together. All I could think was that it was cold. Just cold.
"Look at this little bastard. Why're you shaking so hard? Hey. Scared?"
Only when the man in front of me sneered did I realize I was trembling. F—ing hell. I snapped my eyes up and glared at him. I could see him raising his hand, demanding to know where I got off looking at him like that, but I didn't turn my head away.
An unfamiliar stinging bloomed across my cheek, but I felt better for it. It was less humiliating, that way.
"...!"
So when the man's hammer rose high overhead—and came swinging down—I bit down hard and bore it. It was fine. It had to be fine.
"Whoa. Look at this punk. He's laughing."
"Guess he really was raised by Hanseong. F—ing maniac."
My ears rang. Even as the shrieking tinnitus tore through me, I kept grinning. But why won't my body stop shaking? Embarrassing as hell.
Shuddering all over, I refused to stop laughing. Whether it was from the slaps to my face telling me to shut up, or from biting down wrong in the middle of it all, my mouth had filled with blood.
And then, just as the hammer rose again—
"You f—ing dogs!"
A wall of noise crashed down, drowning everything that had come before it. Watching my hyungs come charging in like a storm, I smiled faintly. That was slow, even for them.
"Cut—!"
At someone's shout, every sound died at once.
"You okay? Did I hit you too hard?"
The man who'd just slammed me into the floor reached out a hand, his face twisted into something close to tears.
I blinked a few times and shook my head out of habit. "I'm fine."
"Sorry. That was my first time doing action."
"Really, I'm okay. It didn't hurt."
While he hovered over me, completely at a loss, Manager Ahn Jinbae came sprinting over with a towel. "Are you all right?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, but... wow, why is this stuff so sweet?"
Having held it in the whole shoot, I finally scrunched up my face. I shuddered at the saccharine taste of the artificial blood, and Manager Ahn Jinbae laughed and handed me a bottle of water. It was sweet enough to make me grimace—another moment and it might have broken my concentration entirely.
"Okay~! Perfect! Moving straight to close-ups!"
I was in the middle of mentally filing away a note to mention the taste of fake blood in my next diary entry when Director Yoon, reviewing the footage, let out a tremendous bellow. His ringing shout rolled straight into a chorus of cheers from the staff.
Maybe it was because the schedule kept flowing without a hitch, but the mood on set was honestly pretty good. Director Yoon flung his headphones aside, sprinted over, and wrapped me up in a hug, beaming from ear to ear. "Our little Bokdeong-i! I'm going to have to start calling you Lucky Charm from now on. How on earth do you act like that? Honestly, I've never seen anyone like you."
"Can't... breathe."
I limply batted at the hands of the director who'd charged down from his chair to squeeze the life out of me.
"Cold-hearted, you are. We're going into close-ups next—you feeling confident? Just do exactly what you did a second ago."
"Yes. I'll give it a try."
After wiping my face clean of the fake blood, I took my mark. I checked the camera path, then tapped my slackened hand in an irregular rhythm. When the call came, I opened my closed eyes, and after that the red light on the camera flickered on and off, again and again.
By the time the day's shooting wrapped, I was utterly drained.
"Actor-nim, are you all right?"
"I don't think I am."
"Understood. If there's anything you need—"
Manager Ahn Jinbae, who'd been sorting through my bag, trailed off mid-sentence and jerked his head up. "...What did you just say?"
"Hyung, if you snap your head up like that, you'll hurt yourself."
"You just said you're not all right, didn't you? Or did I hear that wrong?"
He was so startled that his already widened eyes seemed determined to widen past all human limits. I was half-reclined in my chair, and I laughed at the sight of him.
"Yes. It's been rough."
Today's shoot had been uniquely exhausting. The camera choreography was hopelessly tangled, and with so many people crowding the scene, we racked up more than our share of unexpected NGs. The emotional register alone was demanding enough, but having to bite down on a capsule of artificial blood right on cue made it all the more chaotic. On top of that, I'd held my eyes in that hovering state—tears on the verge of falling but never quite falling—for hours, and now the corners of my eyes stung.
"Okay, then—wait, in that case, one moment—"
Staring blankly at my exhausted smile, Manager Ahn Jinbae scrambled to his feet. One hand swept a blanket over me while the other cracked open a vitamin drink—and through it all, his eyes darted around frantically in search of Director Yoon.
"Excuse me one moment. I'm going to check whether the remaining scenes can be pushed to tomorrow."
"But then they'd have to redo the whole setup. I can still do more."
I said it with a laugh, as if I hadn't asked him for anything at all—and then found myself puzzled. Why did I bring that up? There was nothing behind it.
I tilted my head, and before long Director Yoon had wandered over, drawn by the commotion. "What's this? Something wrong?"
"Nothing, really. We can roll cameras now, right?"
"Ah, one of the pieces of equipment broke down. Looks like we'll have to push to tomorrow... You think the momentum will break? You okay with that?"
"That's perfectly fine. I wasn't in great condition anyway, so it's actually a relief. Shall I head out, then?"
It was Manager Ahn Jinbae, not me, who answered the question. You might expect that to be absurd, but Director Yoon shifted his gaze over with the most natural ease in the world. Well, it wasn't as if this was the first or second time.
"Of course. Go right ahead. The serialization schedule stays unchanged, yes?"
"Yes. Exams are coming up soon, so you just need to keep to the schedule I mentioned before."
"Okay. Oh—and you're still going to counseling?"
"Yes. I go regularly."
"The doctor there is pretty well known in this business. I've already put in a word for you, but if you're not happy with him for any reason, just tell me."
I stared at the two of them discussing my life with blank faces. Manager Ahn Jinbae, fine—but what on earth was Director Yoon's excuse?
"Your counselor is a good one. I'm going again tomorrow, and I won't skip it, so you don't need to worry."
"When did I ever say I was worried?"
Apparently oblivious to the fact that he had already half-transformed into a doting parent, Director Yoon drew himself up primly and stepped back. I tried to laugh at the absurdity of it, but I didn't have the energy, and my eyes drifted shut again.
"You look very tired."
This was already our fourth meeting. The words greeted me the moment I opened the door to the consultation room, and I smiled awkwardly. "I'm sleeping well enough... I suppose it's from juggling acting and schoolwork at the same time."
"Is school life giving you any trouble?"
"No. The kids are kind, and... maybe because of the filming, the teachers are very understanding, too."
It had been almost two months since I started middle school, but nothing about it struck me as particularly new. If anything, it was that the uniform I'd worn for the first time felt a little stiff.
"Anything unusual in the two weeks since we last met? Any recurrence of the hyperventilation?"
The question slipped into the middle of an otherwise unremarkable conversation, and I flinched. "No. Not once since it happened two weeks ago."
"I see."
The doctor picked up his pen again. "Last time, you said it was because of nightmares. Could you tell me today what those nightmares were about?"
I thought this every time, but that unhurried, gentle cadence doctors had could be surprisingly ticklish. Squeezing my hand tight to keep from committing the rudeness of scratching my ear in front of him, I answered. I claimed it was just a dream about losing a friend, and the doctor quietly wrote something down in his file.
Listening to the scratch of his pen, I turned next shoot's lines over in my head.
"To think we've known each other four meetings already. Time really does fly."
"It does."
"How is it?"
At the soft question, I smiled and answered, "Counseling is new to me, so it's fascinating. It's calming, somehow, to open up to someone."
Boring, honestly. And isn't that question awfully soon? Shouldn't you wait until a rapport—a relationship of mutual trust—has actually formed before asking how the counseling is going?
I was recalling books I'd read on psychological counseling, puzzling over it inwardly, when the doctor let out a booming laugh that didn't suit him at all.
"No, no. Not the counseling."
"Sorry?"
"The counseling is obviously tedious—that's not what I meant. I was asking about performing, moment to moment, the way you do. Isn't it exhausting?"
Before I could hide it, one of my eyebrows climbed all the way up. The doctor's laughter grew even louder.