Translator: SourKimchi
The chat held its breath right along with it.
-SquishyCheese : uh whats with the mood all of a sudden
-Ertel : akasha really looks rattled
-DaeNari : wait what did he even see
-BongcheonFireFist : look at her face go stiff yikes yikes
Akasha kept her lips pressed tight and stared at Park Ji-hun.
Park Ji-hun didn't look away.
In that moment, a scene buried deep in Akasha's mind flickered past like a Vision.
A cramped room.
An applied music program's entrance-exam schedule taped to the wall.
A keyboard drawn out on a sheet of A4 paper.
Tuition and lesson fees jotted beneath a cram-school flyer.
A mother tapping at a calculator, her hand going still.
A little girl standing beside her, unable to say a word.
What she'd folded shut wasn't an application envelope. It was a dream.
Park Ji-hun opened his mouth.
"You were trying to get into an applied music program. But you couldn't."
At those few short words, Akasha asked, her face caught off guard.
"......How would you know that?"
The chat stirred.
-Ertel : wait? applied music?
-Gokdil : huh she was prepping for music?
-SquishyCheese : so THATS why theres a piano in her studio
-NeonSign : yeah she used to just play piano way back
-FrogKing : first im hearing of it, only ever watched her dance
-DaeNari : how is he hitting stuff she never even mentioned
Park Ji-hun answered shortly.
"Because I can see it."
Akasha let out a short breath and said,
"Everybody's got their reasons."
Park Ji-hun nodded.
"Sure they do."
A brief silence passed, and then Park Ji-hun went on in an unwavering voice.
"You still miss those days. Don't you."
Akasha's expression visibly wavered.
In that moment, Park Ji-hun's sight swam for a beat.
A message window, never sent in the end.
A piano gathering nothing but dust.
The members of ZXCV beaming on a stage.
And Akasha's face, watching it all in silence, her eyes going red.
Park Ji-hun opened his mouth.
"Take the offer. Miss it and you'll regret it for the rest of your life."
In that moment, Akasha couldn't say a word.
The chat exploded again.
-Ertel : whoa
-SquishyCheese : uh that reaction tho
-BongcheonFireFist : yeah she really hasnt let it go
-ChewyButterChip : thats 100% the face of getting nailed dead on
Park Ji-hun said nothing more.
He watched Akasha quietly for a moment, then parted his lips.
"That's it for today's broadcast."
***
Even after she got home, Akasha couldn't seem to settle her mind.
The Spirit Reading broadcast she'd watched today kept circling through her head.
Normally she'd have rinsed off the second she got in and killed time scrolling shorts on her phone, but tonight she wasn't in the mood for any of that.
Akasha paced in front of the studio door for a while before she carefully stepped inside.
A tripod, lights, a mic, a computer, a monitor.
And then her gaze lingered, long, on the upright piano sitting in the corner of the studio.
Akasha shook her head hard and knit her brow.
"......Like he knows the first thing about me."
She muttered it under her breath, but there was less force in her voice than she'd expected.
Because she couldn't quite bring herself to say, even to her own face, that he'd been completely wrong.
She let out a sigh and sat down at the desk.
She switched on the computer without thinking, the way she always did.
And then, almost without realizing it, she clicked the replay of the Spirit Reading special.
"This is insane."
The view count was already climbing toward a million.
She could tell just how much attention people had given it.
Akasha hesitated for a beat, then played the video.
Because all of today had stayed nothing but a blur in her memory.
"Huh?"
The instant the video started playing, things she hadn't caught earlier began to jump out at her.
Chae-rin had been faking a smile, but at the decisive moment, the corners of her mouth froze first.
Croco had held out to the end, acting unbothered, but as Park Ji-hun kept talking, the color shifted in his face.
Do-yun was worse. At first he'd been smirking, smug, and then at some point the focus drained out of his eyes, until in the end he shot up out of his seat and stormed off.
Akasha paused the playback and stared at the monitor for a long while.
"......What the hell."
At the time, sitting right there beside them, she hadn't noticed.
But watching it back on the screen, she could see it.
All three of them, the same.
The instant Park Ji-hun hit the mark, their faces changed like they'd seen a ghost.
"......He really did get every single one of them right."
Even after the words slipped out under her breath, Akasha couldn't make her hands move right away.
The fingers resting on the spacebar stalled for a moment.
Watching her own turn over again was, strangely, more daunting than checking the other three's faces.
Only after a short, drawn breath did she slowly press the spacebar.
This time it was her turn.
An applied music program.
Couldn't get in.
And then the last line.
「Take the offer. Miss it and you'll regret it for the rest of your life.」
Akasha's face went stiff.
'No way.'
During the broadcast, she'd wondered what he could possibly know about me, talking like that.
But watching the replay, that wasn't it at all.
He had seen straight through every bit of it.
Her gaze turned back to the corner of the studio.
The upright piano sat quietly in the exact same spot as before.
"......."
She did play it now and then, but only ever as a hobby.
And yet right now that piano looked a little different.
If anything, it stood out the most in the whole room.
She looked toward it for a while, then dropped her eyes back to the screen.
The fingers gripping the mouse trembled a little.
In that moment of hesitation, almost without meaning to, she rolled the mouse wheel down.
All the way to the bottom.
A list of old videos she'd set to hidden.
Broadcasts from back when she still played piano, before the cam streams, quietly surfacing one by one.
***
After hesitating for a long time, Akasha clicked on the very oldest video.
Even the picture quality was different from now.
The lighting, the camera, all of it cheap.
The title was clumsy too.
[Late-Night Piano Stream. Tonight I'll only play soft, mellow pieces.]
The moment the video began, the number floating in one corner of the screen caught her eye first.
[Viewers: 8]
Akasha gazed quietly at that number.
By her standards now, it was a number too pathetic to even laugh at.
There were no donation alerts, and the chat crawled up slowly.
-TwoAM : i'm here
-WhiteKey : looking forward to tonight too
-GlassCup : love how calm this is
The chat scrolling up, slow.
There were no Water Drops bursting across the screen like now, no rowdy spam burying everything.
But the her inside the screen was different from now.
She wasn't forcing a smile in front of the camera, wasn't puffing up her reactions for no reason.
She was just sitting at the piano, quietly pressing the keys.
And every time a piece ended, the face reading the chat looked far more at ease than it did now.
-SilentNight : tonight's playing is really lovely
-MoonlitWalk : kinda tearing up for no reason
-TangerineTea : this really settles me down
-LittleUmbrella : rough day today but this is healing me a bit
The her in the video gave a small smile.
"Thank you all for listening."
It was a far plainer face than now.
The makeup wasn't heavy, the clothes were ordinary.
The room was cramped, the picture dated.
And yet, strangely, the her of back then looked far happier than she did now.
"......."
Akasha bit her lip.
Back then she'd had so little.
Money at home had been tight, the viewer count low.
Donations were almost nonexistent, and however long she streamed, there was nothing left to show for it.
And still, the her on the screen was smiling.
It wasn't a forced smile.
It was the face of someone smiling because she truly loved it, truly enjoyed it.
"......What is this."
The small voice that slipped out was shaking.
Akasha couldn't take her eyes off her own face in the video.
The Akasha of now knew.
What choices she'd made after that point.
How the direction of her streams had shifted.
What turned a profit faster, what gathered a crowd more easily.
And yet, knowing every bit of it, that one face on the screen kept nagging at her.
8 viewers.
A broadcast without a single donation alert.
And even so, the her of back then had been more alive than she was now.
Akasha drew in a slow breath.
This time, she couldn't deny it.
***
After staring at the screen for a while, Akasha slowly rose to her feet.
Her eyes drifted naturally to the corner of the studio.
The upright piano.
Akasha walked over to it.
She rested her fingertips on the black lid, and then, after a long pause, slowly lifted it open.
The keys came into view.
"......Just once."
A moment later, she slowly raised her hand and laid it on the keys.
Plink.
A single short note rang out.
Akasha's eyelids quivered faintly.
Another note.
And then another.
She pressed out just a few notes, letting her fingers go where they wanted.
And those few short sounds were enough.
The feeling buried beneath the keys came back to life all too easily.
She had loved it.
She had truly loved it.
It had been hard, it hadn't paid, reality had always been too much to carry.
But for as long as she sat there at the keys, at least, she had unmistakably been happy.
That much, even now, she couldn't deny.
Akasha drew in a slow breath.
And then she picked up the phone she'd set down beside the piano.
[About the project offer, get me your answer by the end of next week.]
It was a message she'd done nothing but read and close and open again for days.
This time too, her fingertips stalled for a moment.
It wasn't that the fear had gone away.
Because taking the leap didn't mean it would all work out.
Only the cursor blinked over the empty field.
Akasha let out a short sigh, typed a few characters, then deleted them again.
She didn't want to pad it out with some long, pointless message.
She knew that what she needed right now was neither an excuse nor a show of resolve.
But this time, she didn't want to run from it.
Akasha worked up her courage and tapped at the keys.
[I'll do it.]
The instant she pressed send, her heart pounded.
She was more nervous than she'd ever been, and more thrilled.
Not long after, a reply arrived.
[Ha-yeon, good call. Let's give this our all. You've got this!]
Akasha looked down at the message for a long moment.
Ha-yeon.
The moment she saw that name, a part of her chest went tight and heavy.
These days no one called her that anymore.
Everyone called her Akasha.
Because that was the name she smiled under and earned her money under, on air.
But that wasn't all there was.
The dream she'd put off hadn't disappeared.
Akasha slowly closed her eyes, then opened them again.
At the end of her gaze, the piano lingered.
I was Akasha, and I was also Jeong Ha-yeon.