The Fan Who Knew
Lee Sunggyu, an aspiring actor, had been irritated by everything related to his cousin ever since he entered the same industry as Lee Heeyoon. Heeyoon, after all, was barely a child actor—hardly someone with a leading role to his name.
The discomfort only grew after he retake-tested his way into a university with an acting major. And the thing that bothered him most was a senior he'd recently grown fond of.
Son Jion, a year above him, took one look at Lee Sunggyu and immediately fired off a question.
“You're Lee Heeyoon's cousin?”
“Uh, yes. That's me, senior.”
“He's never mentioned you.”
“It's not like cousins really come up in conversation...”
“Not just cousins—you lived together, didn't you?”
Son Jion was fundamentally uninterested in people; the only classmate she was close to was Han Dohyun. When your best friend is Do Jaeyeon from your own agency, students in other years rarely even got a chance to exchange a word with her.
And yet this same Son Jion had approached Lee Sunggyu purely because he happened to be Lee Heeyoon's cousin.
“Ah, senior, and about me being a retake student—”
“We go by student number here.”
“I'm not asking you to drop the formalities... Never mind.”
“Does Heeyoon act that insufferable at home too?”
“Sorry? Oh. Yes.”
“Ah. At home too.”
Son Jion gave a slow nod. So this kid was an insufferable piece of work even at home—figures he's the same out in the world, she thought. Still, having spoken to him once, she decided to try again the next time their paths crossed. The moment Son Jion spotted Lee Sunggyu, she spoke.
“Oh, right, Lee Heeyoon's cousin.”
“Yes. Lee Sunggyu. You remember me. By any chance, this evening—”
“Lee Heeyoon, you know.”
“Ah, him.”
“What does he like?”
“What does he... like?”
“I got him connected to an agency. His birthday's coming up soon, so I'm thinking of getting him a small present.”
“...Heeyoon's birthday is in December?”
He knew this because he'd once watched his uncle agonize over how to separate a birthday present from a Christmas present, seeing as his own son was born on Christmas Day. Which meant that birthday was still four months away. Being told a gift was being bought for it now struck him as utterly absurd.
Son Jion replied with her trademark expression that gave away nothing of what she was thinking.
“I don't know Heeyoon well, so I'm planning ahead. Is that a problem?”
“No. Not at all. Why not just ask him directly? What he likes, I mean.”
At the word directly, Son Jion's face hardened at once.
“I'm not close enough with him to ask something like that.”
And then she vanished. Lee Sunggyu was too dumbfounded to get a single word out.
He couldn't understand why she talked as though he owed some colossal debt of gratitude just for being introduced to an agency.
A few days later, when they ran into each other again, he learned she was deliberating over buying some kind of dinosaur toy and asked whether Heeyoon even liked dinosaurs. So he asked, just maybe, did she think Lee Heeyoon was an elementary schooler? Son Jion replied that she hadn't considered the matter quite that thoroughly.
In any case, with her interrogating him about nothing but Lee Heeyoon every time they met, the irritation was starting to build. Every question left him with the almost overwhelming urge to grab that smug little face and—well.
Lee Heeyoon, three years his junior, had long been something of a punching bag to him. He could be annoying at times, but he made a satisfying target to hit when bored, and he was useful for fetching things. Then the kid had become a working actor. The students at his own school paid more attention to that younger sprout than to him. For aspiring actors, nothing drew the eye quite like a rising rookie.
And so it was, with all of that resentment toward Lee Heeyoon piled up inside him, that Lee Sunggyu answered this call.
What followed was a relentless stream of news he absolutely despised.
The hottest topic in the theater and film department these days was, without question, the short film Giyeon. A low-budget film that had crossed a hundred thousand admissions—of course it was. Landing a role in a movie like that and watching it catch fire through word of mouth was something every student in theater and film had dreamed of at least once.
—So it sounds like the role was supposed to be a secret.
“...The monster in that film was Lee Heeyoon?”
—Yeah. You've seen it, haven't you?
And the one who'd turned that dream into reality was Lee Heeyoon of all people.
Lee Sunggyu's face crumpled in an instant.
His father, who had broken the news over the phone, spent the rest of the call rambling about nothing at all, wondering aloud whether he could sell information like that to the reporters.
My next legal guardian became my maternal grandfather.
He had been living alone when his only child—the person who'd come before him in death—and then, not long after, his wife to the shock of it, leaving him with severe depression and alcoholism. Yet from the moment he heard about me, he quit drinking, after more than a decade of addiction, for over two months straight. The family court recognized that effort.
And then he took me to the bank, and with hands trembling badly from years of alcoholism, opened my very first account for me.
“I'm sorry, son. This isn't the time for me to be like this...”
Blood ties are a strange thing. They made my childhood a hardship, and yet, on the other hand, they pulled a man free overnight from an addiction that no medication could touch.
My grandfather was a gruff man, and he and I didn't have any deep conversations. I doubted we'd call each other often, or even see much of each other going forward. But before we parted, he asked me to tell him about everything I appeared in from now on. I promised I'd let him know about my projects in advance, too.
A few days later, a box arrived at Leader Actors—a gift from my grandfather. When CEO Gam Seongbeom and VP Gam Soohan opened it, both of them choked up and had to turn away, and it fell to Do Jaeyeon—the least prone to tears of the three—to take out what was inside.
It was a wooden signboard for Leader Actors, sent by my grandfather, who had originally made his living crafting wooden plaques.
“His hands shake so badly he can barely write, and yet he makes something like this?”
I said it out of genuine amazement and got scolded for being disrespectful. Unfairly, I might add.
But really, wasn't it amazing? A man whose hands trembled that much had produced a signboard of breathtaking craftsmanship. CEO Gam Seongbeom hung it up together with VP Gam Soohan. It felt a little ceremonious, but with that plaque on the wall, the place finally looked like a real company.
I gazed up at the wooden signboard for a moment. Even after regressing, I still couldn't shake the certainty that I'd be able to save the people at this company. I couldn't even begin to guess what had happened before my regression.
But a great deal had changed, too. New bonds being formed, for one.
New memories being made with people I'd already known, for another.
Amid all these goings-on, the film Giyeon stubbornly climbed past 120,000 admissions and was now pushing toward 150,000.
Somewhere in that stretch, CEO Gam Seongbeom paid a courtesy visit to the broadcasting station to greet the CP of the drama Seo Joongsung was shooting, and I received the script that had been brought back from the company.
“...Wow. How does a single drama cram in this many plotlines?”
I read the drama script as though bewitched. I'd always loved reading scripts, but rarely had I devoured one the way I did this—like I'd blacked out and come to only upon finishing it. It was that gripping, that addictive.
From the very first episode, an explosion rocks an amusement park, and Seo Joongsung's character—a firefighter and a father—leaves his son briefly in the care of a children's welfare center worker and rushes off to fight the blaze. When he returns, his son is gone.
The mother, daughter of a famous makgeolli brewery, comes home deflated after having her ideas stolen by her older sister—only to learn that her husband has lost their son. And before even thirty minutes of the first episode have passed, the two of them divorce.
Having absorbed an episode packed to the brim with incident after incident, I slumped onto the sofa, drained. VP Gam Soohan smiled and handed me an iced Americano.
“Intense, isn't it? Fun, though, right?”
I nodded and accepted the coffee. And no wonder—my stomach felt raw, as if I'd eaten something blazingly spicy.
The son had appeared from the first episode. Toward the end of it, a young man unmistakably the son stepped into the frame. His real name was Raon; after being separated from his parents, he went by Gyeowool.
The firefighter had wrapped a scarf embroidered with his own surname in English around his son's shoulders, which was why the boy remembered at least his family name. Of course, he still had the scarf, too. In time, that very scarf would let the family recognize one another again.
I read as if under a spell. The script was brilliant, and I wanted this role.
Just then, Do Jaeyeon—still topping up her daily dopamine from Giyeon's box office numbers—brought my phone over to me.
“Someone actually figured out the monster actor was you?”
“How? Are they in the industry?”
“Doesn't look like it.”
With that, she took the Americano out of my hand and replaced it with a can of sikhye.
“You need to put healthy things in your body.”
“No, honestly, the caffeine of an Americano beats the sugar of sikhye...”
“Lee Heeyoon, you're way too skinny. You need to gain weight if you want to play that role. How is this face supposed to come out of Seo Joongsung senior's face?”
“Well, it's fine—Mihui senior is a beauty.”
“Their departments are different.”
Call it whatever you liked, but the people at our company were, at their core, hopeless face-chasers. The two of them were steadily spiraling into an ominous conversation about how I was so devastatingly handsome I might get dropped from the cast.
It was a refrain I'd heard a hundred times, so I let it slide past one ear as I looked at what Do Jaeyeon had shown me. There was a post on Instagram inviting people to play detective over who played the monstrous creature in Giyeon, and beneath it sprawled a pile of speculation. Of all the comments, exactly one consisted of three syllables—a single name.
Oh.
A username I knew. I very nearly said the name Lee Joobin out loud.
Before my regression, I had fans too, of course. And among them, the one who stayed sharpest in my memory was, without question, this fan.
She'd first come along on a friend's invitation and sat there looking thoroughly unimpressed, but after that I kept running into her at every film I shot. Even while everyone was tearing into my personality—this about my character, that about my attitude—she'd held up a shield: that's just how he talks; he's not actually a bad guy. Watching a fan grow into a walking battleground day after day, I'd applauded her—truly, a fan worthy of that celebrity. ...Looking back now, maybe I should have stopped her.
Anyway, she was the one who organized my first-ever birthday café, too. She'd made a point of telling me to appreciate just how appallingly expensive it was to rent a café during the Christmas season. This fan knew my personality well enough that she never once asked me to actually come.
It was a strange thing. Even after my regression, my fan recognized me. It felt almost like a bond carried over from a past life. No—forget past lives; how on earth did she figure it out?
Did I have some tell? Some hidden quirk? I couldn't think of one.
I was still wondering when new comments appeared in real time.
Everyone was calling it nonsense, but I couldn't help being curious—how on earth had this fan figured it out? As far as I remembered, she'd had absolutely no connection to the broadcasting world.