We're Rolling (3)
The clip of Lee Songha falling spread quietly, mostly through social media and online communities.
It was a little different from before. It didn't seize the real-time search rankings in an instant, and it didn't plaster the news. That didn't mean the bait had no effect. If anything, the response was startlingly positive.
The tags of topic-of-the-moment and center-of-controversy came off, and more people began looking at Lee Songha herself in a kinder light. And that carried over into the reaction to Neptune as a whole.
More people were talking about Neptune, and some of them weren't satisfied just hunting down what already existed. They started making it themselves. Traffic through the official homepage and the portal fan cafe run by the PR team grew by the day.
Posts were shooting up on a homepage that had been close to an empty house, so monitoring had actually started to feel worthwhile. The Neptune kids checked the fan cafe and the official site on their phones whenever they had a spare moment. Lim Seoyoung, in particular, was addicted enough to be concerning.
Of course the people flinging malicious criticism at Lee Songha hadn't vanished. But the ones answering them now weren't passersby jumping in to toss off a line. Fans had appeared who built careful, worked-over rebuttals and pushed back.
The change was gradual. It was also unmistakable.
"What's that?"
"Gifts. From fans."
"......Fans?"
The others looked thrown too, but Lim Seoyoung's face was in a class of its own. Her eyes, already huge, went wider still. One tap to the back of her head and those eyeballs looked ready to spill out the front.
I set the paper bags down on the dorm living-room floor, two clutched in each hand. All of them were gifts addressed to the Neptune members. The staffer who had gathered them and handed them over laughed that they were awfully modest next to Blackout, but the scale wasn't the point. What mattered was that gifts had come for the kids at all. It was as good as proof that real fans existed.
"For real? For real?"
"Pretty sure."
I answered like it was a joke, and Lim Seoyoung looked anxiously back and forth between me and the bags.
"H-hey, you can't joke about something like this. Oppa, you're a man with no blood and no tears, but I believe you're not cruel enough to mess with a person over something this enormously impor—"
"I'm taking these back."
"Don't!"
The second I lifted the bags again, Lim Seoyoung practically slid across the living-room floor and latched on. I let out a short laugh and called the others in closer. Nobody made a production of it the way Seoyoung did, but they all came over with expectant eyes.
I checked what was inside and handed the gifts out. Two for Lim Seoyoung, one each for Lee Taehee and LJ. I'd heard there were strange people who sent things that belonged in a food-waste bin and called them presents, so I looked through all of it. What had come for Seoyoung was dainty character merch and dolls. She lit up, eyes brimming, as if she might burst at any second.
"Who is it? I want to know who sent these. Aaaah... four dolls! How did they know I like dolls?"
"Your photo went up on the official socials, idiot. You, hugging a doll and bawling like a citizen whose country just fell."
LJ said it flatly. Seoyoung, who a moment ago hadn't known what to do with herself over the new dolls, immediately narrowed her eyes to axe blades.
"You're the one who punched it and ripped its leg off, you thug!"
"I was pissed because of Son Chae-young! And I fixed it, didn't I!"
She had. LJ had stitched the split seam back together with a needle and thread, and done it convincingly. It was a talent I never would have imagined, and it had surprised me more than a little. They'd taken a photo of the repair and posted that too, which was probably why a sewing kit had found its way into LJ's gift.
What had come for Lee Taehee was throat lozenges and red-ginseng concentrate, the kind meant to fight fatigue. Maybe because she sometimes rubbed at her lower back or went listless, an old-person image had stuck to her. She was only twenty-two.
Taehee drained a whole pack of the concentrate in one go and nodded. Must have been good. I'd felt it since the days she drank sansamju by herself, but her tastes really were something else.
I took a few shots of them clutching what they'd been given, for proof photos. Then I turned my head.
"......"
Lee Songha, who had been watching in silence the whole time, tilted her head and peered behind me. Once she confirmed there was nothing there, her eyes went to my flat coat pockets, then to my empty hands. She sat back down on the rug and opened her script. She looked unbothered, but the tips of her shoulders had dropped a little.
"Songha, come here. Have one."
Lee Taehee held out a throat lozenge. Seoyoung and LJ, realizing Songha was the only one who had received nothing, wiped the excitement off their faces and gathered in. Seoyoung mouthed at me, asking if there really wasn't anything.
"Hang on. Why is this taking so—"
I was watching the front door when it rattled open right on cue. The traitor came in at a quick stride.
"Sorry. I spilled it in the elevator and had to pack it again."
Every eye locked onto the hand cart he was pulling. A box and two paper bags sat on it. The box was so big I couldn't have lifted it even with both arms wrapped around it. Lee Songha's eyes lit up, and she crossed the room in long strides.
"This..."
"It's for you."
The moment I finished, Songha opened the box. Her mouth fell open, blank.
Everything inside was food. From big bags of snacks down to chocolate bars smaller than a palm, the enormous box had been filled with things to nibble. A Post-it was stuck carefully to the packaging.
"You know Seo Ji-joon's fans? The people you saw on the first day of drama filming."
"Yes."
"They sent this to cheer you on."
They must have gone home after watching her pile snacks on a plate and eat, because the gift was perfectly optimized for Lee Songha. Those fans had mentioned, in their write-up of supporting the drama shoot, that Songha liked to eat, and thanks to that the other gifts were mostly food as well. There were handwritten letters, too. Most of them were the kind of words that lend a person strength: things are rough right now, but hang in there; ignore the nasty comments; we're looking forward to the drama.
Songha sat wedged among the gifts, picking up a snack, then a letter, then a snack again. She didn't show it much. She was happy. That was her being enormously happy.
"Songha. Must be nice."
"Hey, you could open a convenience store in your room."
"There's handmade stuff too! How are you even going to eat this when it's too precious?"
Watching the four of them put their heads together and chatter, a pleased smile spread across my mouth before I knew it.
"Getting gifts and all, it finally feels real that people know who we are."
"Right."
The traitor nodded as he said it.
"If the fandom keeps firming up like this, and Next K-Star and Songha's drama succeed one after the other, and the next album's numbers hold up... next year we could actually lock in a real place for ourselves."
"That's how it has to go."
"Yeah. That's how it has to go."
I turned and looked at the traitor's profile. A pleasant face, and among its features those easy, genial eyes were on the Neptune kids. Then he turned toward me. Our eyes met. The look wasn't much different from a moment before, but strength gathered in my fingertips on reflex.
The traitor smiled, just slightly.
"That's how we have to make it go."
Drama filming was a forced march.
There was no day and no night. Commute times, obviously, did not exist. Depending on the set, you could arrive at night and do nothing but wait until the morning sun came up. Mealtimes were irregular. Sleep was worse.
At least Songha and I had a van we could rest in. The crew slept anywhere they could plant their backsides, no better than people living on the street. Open an emergency-exit door during a shoot inside a building and someone was always crouched there, dozing. In all seriousness, I wondered whether anyone had ever dropped dead of overwork in the middle of making a drama.
Fortunately there was no drama shoot today, because of the Next K-Star recording, so I avoided sleeping in the van. Not that the company overnight room was a prize.
I stood with a toothbrush in my mouth, staring blankly at the whiteboard. At first Neptune's name had shown up as rarely as beans in a drought. Now there were two or three entries every single week without fail, so even if my body looked like a wreck, my heart felt full. Most of it was still Lee Songha's drama schedule, but from here on the team schedule and the other kids' individual schedules would start to grow, little by little.
"Morning."
Kim Hyunjo, who had slept in the overnight room with me, came over mid-yawn. I looked at his face and flinched. The man already wore his dark circles like a tattoo, and these days his entire face was the color of one.
"Chief. I'm only asking because I'm genuinely curious."
"Yeah?"
"The work you used to handle — Geonyoung and I are splitting some of it now."
"Yeah. You're splitting a lot of it."
"So why doesn't it look like your workload is going down?"
Usually, when a new hire looked at a superior, the thought was supposed to be I need to work hard and get there fast. But if I pictured myself as Kim Hyunjo a few years on, I wanted to collapse where I stood.
"Hey. When you get money, things to spend it on show up."
"True."
"When you get time, things to do with it show up."
Kim Hyunjo smiled faintly and changed the subject.
"So when's your next shoot?"
"Right after the recording. Standby at two in the morning."
"They're killing people. Killing them. What is that damned drama filming every single day? You started with a decent chunk of the script already out, and compared to network you went into production early. And yet the two of you are busier than The Mermaid Who Came Ashore. How."
"Director Shin's a perfectionist."
For one thing, the shooting storyboard was insanely detailed. It didn't just mark camera positions and shot sizes in broad strokes. Emotions and editing notes were written in too, so the storyboard book was black with text. They also shot each scene with enormous care, and in a lot of variations.
But nobody complained about it. They believed the finished product would be that much better for it. And if they banked a thick cushion of footage in advance, they wouldn't be chased once the broadcast started. Being busy now was far better than scrambling to shoot it right up against air.
"Two weeks left until Cat Guardian Spirit premieres, right?"
"Yes."
Two weeks until the first broadcast. Interest in Cat Guardian Spirit still hadn't died down. More precisely, it was being managed so that it wouldn't.
Bite-sized making-of clips, teasers, and set photos went out on a regular cycle, and just when the controversy around Lee Songha looked ready to settle, it lifted its head again. Go Joon-tae, the PD of Next K-Star, was using Songha as kindling for the sake of ratings.
That bastard.
Next K-Star had broken a peak rating of 7 percent not long ago. It was climbing higher by the day, and PD Go Joon-tae's nose was pointed at the sky. It was good that Neptune's recognition rose along with the numbers. The problem was that Lee Songha was the one going up in flames. She held on with a straight face because she was Songha. If she'd been someone with a weaker mind, something in her would have already broken.
He edited her like that, then at the recordings grinned that greasy grin and spouted nonsense about how he'd given her so much screen time. I wanted to rip his mouth clean in two. Someday I was going to have to throw shit at that face before my chest would feel any clearer.
Still, these days Neptune's fans were tearing PD Go Joon-tae to shreds online, and watching that was how I kept my peace. Without even that small comfort, I wouldn't have been able to hold my temper either.
I was biting down hard on the toothbrush, worked up from the thought alone, when the traitor came up behind me. Water dripped from his bangs, as if he'd just washed. I turned and flinched. Kim Hyunjo had been bad. This one was worse. His face had I'm dying of exhaustion written all over it.
I knew that while I was tied up with the drama, he was helping Kim Hyunjo prepare Neptune's next album. I'd assumed he at least had it easier than I did. Not even close. He looked like he was suffering more than me.
"I'm going to step outside for a smoke."
His voice was half gone, too.
"Call me when you're ready."
"Okay."
He took only my answer and disappeared in search of a place to smoke. I watched his back, then asked Kim Hyunjo.
"Album prep must be brutal too, huh."
"Ah, he's got something else he's putting work into these days..."
Kim Hyunjo, speaking through another yawn, caught himself and shut his mouth.
"Putting work into?"
I asked right away, but Kim Hyunjo shook his head.
"There's a thing. From where I sit it looks like wasted effort, but well, that's experience too."
I asked a few more times. He only shook his head, saying it wasn't something to talk about now.
Something he was putting extra work into lately...
What the hell was it?