7. I’ll be there(3)
After reading that absurd skill description and falling asleep, I had a nightmare.
Hajun, Yeongbin, Gyeonghwan, Sebin, and Kim Ubin, all dressed in stage outfits, were staring at me with cold eyes, and I was leaving the dorm with a suitcase in hand. And in the middle of all that, why did the skill have to activate, making the accusations the kids were pouring out inside appear right before my eyes?
“Ughaaah!”
I sprang upright, drenched in cold sweat, and only after hitting my head on the frame of the upper bunk did I realize it had been a dream.
“Ow….”
Why did I have to dream something so loud and unlucky?
Poing, who had definitely been beside me before I fell asleep, was nowhere to be seen, and the sky outside the window was dim, so it seemed it was still dawn.
I had an eerie feeling that if I went back to sleep like this, I’d have a similar dream, so I got out of bed.
Since I’d dreamed about “I Can Hear Your Voice,” I was somehow terrified that dreams about other skills like “The Giving Tree,” “Diehard,” or “Inner Familiarity” were still waiting for me.
Fortunately, the faces of Yeongbin and Sebin, who shared the room with me, were peaceful.
Whether the fatigue that had built up all this time had been no joke, they were so deeply asleep that even the loud noise I’d made hadn’t woken them.
Letting out a sigh of relief, I went out to the living room and checked the clock. It was still a little before five.
I seemed to have fallen asleep as if passing out around midnight yesterday. Since I’d slept a decent amount, I decided to wash up and shake off the rest of my drowsiness.
Because of last night’s insufficient dinner, I clutched my hungry stomach and opened the refrigerator, but all I saw were a container of kimchi I had no idea when anyone had brought, ion drinks, some leafy greens, and various things from the chicken breast series.
Feeling a little sorry, thinking they’d at least need to eat properly to have energy during practice, I decided to make breakfast myself and took out the sadly over-fermented kimchi container.
“It should be fine if I just use a little less oil.”
The chicken we’d eaten last night probably hadn’t even made a dent in anyone’s stomach, so I set a full rice cooker’s worth of rice for myself and the other members to eat, then started roughly sorting the laundry.
Of course, I only took care of mine, and just folded the rest and piled it on the floor. They could find their own clothes themselves.
After washing up, I pulled on a random tracksuit lying around and looked over the living room. Fortunately, it seemed to have survived one night in the same clean state I’d left it.
Just then, the rice cooker let out its little cry to announce it was done, and I couldn’t help but chuckle.
It was a little funny that I’d never properly made even one meal for Mom and Dad, yet here I was cooking rice in such an out-of-the-blue place.
I hadn’t expected perilla oil, but it was a little disappointing that there wasn’t even sesame oil. Should I have been grateful there was cooking oil? Honestly.
As for sugar, there were only a few stick sugars that looked like they’d been taken from a café.
I didn’t know who had brought them, but after inwardly offering my thanks for putting them to good use, I stirred everything together and completed the kimchi fried rice.
Thanks to the well-fried kimchi, the smell alone made my mouth water. The classic way would have been to top it with a crispy fried egg, but unfortunately, there was only an empty egg tray in the refrigerator.
What on earth do these guys live on? Do they survive only on the company cafeteria’s food?
I’d made the portions a little smaller since eating too much would sit heavy when they moved, but since I’d fried up an entire rice cooker’s worth of rice, as long as they didn’t oversleep, it seemed like they could each eat at least one bowl before leaving.
After eating an amount that was just a little short of satisfying, I set up the low table in the middle of the living room. I placed the wok right on top of the table and even kindly left a note.
- The 6 of you should split it appropriately
Before I knew it, an hour had flown by, and the clock hanging on the living room wall was approaching six.
“What, you’re already up?”
“Oh, hyung, you’re awake?”
The one who came out with a bird’s nest on his head was Hajun.
Whether he’d tossed and turned or slept too deeply, his eyes were swollen, and his already low voice was drifting off to the other world.
“I’ll go ahead first and warm up. Eat before you come.”
“No, let’s go together. Why are you trying to go alone?”
“I’m not running away. I just want to check something that came to mind, that’s all.”
This hyung still didn’t seem to have cleared his suspicions about me. I stopped Hajun, who was hurriedly trying to get dressed, and pointed at the table.
“It should be edible.”
When I tossed that out with a grin, Hajun seemed dumbfounded and let out a short laugh before plopping down in front of the table and picking up one of the bowls and spoons I’d stacked there.
“Hyung, you have to wake Gyeonghwan and Sebin, so eat a little more and gather your strength.”
“Ah… are you running away first on purpose?”
“…Haha, no way.”
Baek Gyeonghwan and Gang Sebin were famous for being unable to wake up.
There had even been an interview saying that on days when it seemed they’d be late to the schedule because of those two, Hajun would wake up two hours early, get ready first, and then spend the remaining time dragging the two of them around in their half-asleep state and taking care of them.
It seemed that was the same even now, back in their trainee days when every single day was busy.
I stealthily slipped away, gave Hajun an awkward smile and a wave, and left the dorm.
I felt like a gaze had brushed over my back, as if to say, “Of course you would,” but I decided to pretend I hadn’t noticed. I also dismissed as my imagination the troublesome feeling that I kept hearing Hajun’s inner thoughts even though I hadn’t activated the skill.
“Where did Poing go again?”
It had said it would stay with me, but somehow it seemed like it only stayed with me when I was sleeping, so resentment toward Poing began to rise in wisps.
When I breathed in, there was that cool, damp smell unique to dawn air that had not yet received the sunlight.
The reason I had gone out of my way to head to the practice room first was because I needed to objectively check what my current level was.
It took a little while to walk there, but thanks to the cold air, my head actually seemed to work better.
I’d confirmed that I could follow the choreography reasonably well, but in vocal lessons, we’d only practiced the roughly four-minute song with each person’s part already assigned, so I couldn’t accurately know my vocal range.
I didn’t know why, but yesterday, I hadn’t received an individual vocal lesson.
In any case, the company could be entered twenty-four hours a day, and as long as it was before nine, anyone could use the practice rooms.
Actually, while making the kimchi fried rice, I had activated one skill.
I’d activated “The Giving Tree” on Hajun and Yeongbin, and I intended to observe what kind of change the skill brought to them.
I bowed to the security guard and went into the smallest practice room, then began warming up my voice while groping through my memories.
Since it made no sense for someone like me, who hardly ever even went to karaoke, to produce the correct pitch and vocalization, I thought I should get myself used to it in advance.
The song I chose for that was an OST from a drama that should have ended not long ago.
I think it had been a historical fantasy drama, and I’d heard it had been popular in many ways, enough that even I, who hadn’t watched the drama, had heard the OST.
“The title was… ‘Only You,’ was it?”
I remembered that both the lead actor and the child actor had been pretty good at acting. It had also become famous as the drama whose adult-role actor had sung the OST himself.
The truth was, all the songs I remembered were either Unravel’s songs or songs that hadn’t been released yet.
As someone who had gone through a time paradox or whatever it was yesterday, I was frightened by the thought that something might happen if I sang a future song in advance. As I groped through the songs I remembered, this was the only one that came up.
If I was going to come back to life anyway, wouldn’t it have been nice if I’d been born with all kinds of abilities and remembered the lottery numbers too?
As I calmed my troubled mind and sang, something felt strange.
The parts where I should have run out of breath passed by, and sounds in a range I hadn’t been able to produce before flowed out naturally. Even after the song ended, I was swept up in an emotion I couldn’t understand and went blank.
Was Jihwan originally this good?
In my memories, “I” had always been scolded for being unable to put emotion into songs and rebuked for unclear vocalization. I even recalled being verbally abused, told I was singing with nothing but pretentious affectation and should quit being a singer.
After hesitating for a while, I eventually couldn’t overcome the desire hidden deep in my heart and decided to sing one of Unravel’s album tracks.
No one would come into a practice room if someone was already inside, and even if I got caught, the song hadn’t been released yet and there was no audio source, so I figured I could roughly talk my way out of it by saying I’d just been humming to myself.
Unravel’s albums were full of songs that were comfortable to listen to but difficult to sing along to. If I exaggerated just a little, the tears countless cotton wads must have shed while calling Unravel deceivers would probably have been enough to fill the Han River.
Of course, I was one of those fans too.
There were quite a few album tracks with a different atmosphere from the title songs. Among them, I’d liked the song “Graduation Ceremony” quite a bit, with its fresh yet wistful feeling that made me feel the emotion of an unrequited love I’d never even had.
It was a song filled with countless sorrows, one I could never bring myself to sing in front of others and had often hummed only when alone.
When I hummed this song while editing photos in my room, my older sister would barge in through the door and mercilessly scold me, telling me not to ruin the kids’ song and to sing it only when I was alone.
Even thinking about it again, it was a memory that made my heart ache.
But somehow, right now, I felt like I could sing it really well, and an inexplicable sense of duty that I had to sing this song immediately swelled up in me until my mouth itched like crazy.
The fight between my complacent thought of, “What does it matter, I’m alone anyway,” and the thought that reminded me of yesterday and warned me to be careful ultimately ended in the obvious result of desire’s victory.
With my tension suddenly soaring, I hummed the melody of the song and soothed myself, thinking that today I’d sing just this one song and then go warm up my body.
-The story I couldn’t tell you, that I hid away because I didn’t want to lose you,
Please allow me just this one day.
I won’t ask for anything more.
If we greet each other like this today and part ways,
We can’t promise when the next time will be.
Let’s pretend for a moment not to notice the friends calling us over there.
Even if my words are clumsy, please listen without laughing.
I have a story I couldn’t tell because I didn’t want to lose you.
Because I liked you so very much,
That was why I couldn’t tell you.
And it seemed that the story I couldn’t tell would remain untold forever.
Because the presence I felt behind me was sending a trickle of cold sweat down my back.
“What song is that?”
“…Hello, Director.”
“Mm, yes, hello. That song you just sang, I’ve never heard it before. Whose is it?”
There was no way for a mere trainee like me to know why not even the team leader, but the director, was here at this hour and in this place, but one thing was certain.
I was screwed.
“It just came to mind….”
“It sounded pretty serious. Did you make it?”
Unable to say anything, I floundered, and when it felt like lasers were shooting out of Director Jeong Yun’s eyes, I just wanted to cry.
This damn mouth had no caution in it whatsoever, not even enough to scrape together and die on!