Click— Click—
His hand shook as it worked the phone, but his eyes stayed calm.
This was only the part where suspicion got itself some proof.
'If it was going to end up like this anyway......'
Seung-chan stepped back into the shoes he had set down so neatly and walked quietly toward the roof.
A clatter of noise came from beyond the door. It did not matter.
All he wanted was one cigarette to take the bitterness down.
On the roof, with the apartment complex laid out below him, Seung-chan chewed at the cigarette between his lips.
"Haa...... Even now, all I can see is merchandise."
Lee Seung-ah and Kim Yul, caught by the camera, looked as good as a photo spread.
The love and the friendship had once been irreplaceable, and still he was putting their market value ahead of the betrayal.
That was a bigger shock than the affair itself, and Seung-chan made a low sound at it.
"I take the pictures and still can't send them, and the reason is what their careers are worth."
Even the clean feelings were gone, it seemed, and the bitterness rose in him.
"Back when they begged me to push them, just once, to help them. I should have sat on my hands."
When those two went down on their knees and asked him to help them act, Seung-chan gave up his own dream of acting, gladly.
He had been an actor people rated, a face full of character and acting with real depth, and he never looked back.
Friendship and love came before a dream.
A new stretch of time began, and Seung-chan gave it everything, the way he always did.
Before he knew it his wife, Lee Seung-ah, was an actress nobody argued about, and his friend Kim Yul had grown into a top actor commanding the highest asking price in the business.
-Lime Ent, agency to actors Lee Seung-ah and Kim Yul, takes the number one spot among the agencies investors are watching......
-Lime Ent named the agency actors most want to join......
-[Exclusive] Lime Ent signs a string of first-rate actors including Lee Seung-ah, Kim Yul and Jeong Da-eun.
Seung-chan, too, had become the successful CEO of an agency with a long roster of actors.
"It was better when I didn't know anything......"
But he was hollow.
The love and the friendship he had thought would last forever felt set down somewhere between the agency and its talent, and left there.
He was thumbing the lighter to catch the cigarette when loud footsteps came up behind him and a hand snatched him by the collar.
"S-Seung-chan! Haa, haa! Wow......! What did you just do?"
Kim Yul's face, furious over the fistful of collar, was a little puffy.
Tsk. He had been sneaking late-night food again, by the look of it.
And after all the times he had told him to watch himself with a production coming up.
"What?"
Seung-chan shook his friend's hand off and lit the cigarette at his leisure, and Kim Yul's face buckled.
"Hey, you......! Never mind."
"What, then?"
"Ha. You bastard. What a cheap look. This is all your fault anyway."
At that, Seung-chan's face hardened for the first time.
"All of this happened because you couldn't understand Seung-ah."
"What......?!"
"See. You don't get it. You have no idea how airless it is up at the top. You weren't doing your part, so I did it for you. That's what friends are......"
He had meant to secure the proof and plan out what came next, but he had no intention of listening to another word over the line.
THUD—!
Seung-chan drove his fist into Kim Yul's stomach.
"Y-Yul oppa!"
Seung-chan's wife, Lee Seung-ah, came up behind them, gasping, and ran to the crumpled Kim Yul.
"Y-you......! What do you think you're doing?! A CEO, raising a hand to an actor?!"
Seung-chan looked down with sunken eyes at Lee Seung-ah, holding up his friend instead of him.
She should obviously have come to his side. Watching her not do it, strangely, he felt no anger.
'Seung-ah was prettier back then, I think.'
Back when she couldn't act and hadn't had the work done. Back when she was clean.
"What are you going to do with pictures like that?! You f*cking bastard!"
"He's right, oppa. You run the agency and you've lost your mind? Are you trying to bury us?!"
Seung-chan understood exactly, now, what it meant for cold eyes to weep hot blood.
The fine-sounding game called love and friendship had ended a long time ago.
What stood in front of him were monsters who had been using him for their ambition.
A truth he had sensed for a long time and had not wanted to confirm with his own eyes.
It seemed it was time to face it.
"That's right. I'm taking us down together. Worst case, we all end up at the Han River."
Seung-chan spat it out evenly, what it felt like to have to smash his whole career to pieces.
Only then did Kim Yul and Lee Seung-ah force their faces smooth and take a step back.
They knew better than anyone what Seung-chan was like when he snapped.
"S-Seung-chan. Put that down and let's talk. Who actually goes and takes the pictures? Let's be rational about......"
"Oppa. I know how hard you've had it all this time. I'll set you up for life, I promise. Put the phone down."
Looking down at the pair of them, Seung-chan took the cigarette from his mouth and threw it on the ground.
[Sent.]
Seung-chan let out a long breath, pressed the button, and turned the screen toward them.
"Too late."
"Y-you......! You crazy bastard—!"
Kim Yul and Lee Seung-ah snapped in the same instant and threw themselves at him.
The three of them tangled together, and the rooftop fence shuddered dangerously.
"Quit this pointless...... stubbornness and hand it over!"
The two of them clamped rough hands around his and pulled their mouths up in a sneer.
Seung-chan was small-framed and short on strength; holding off the two of them was never going to work.
But even with his wrist caught, there was a venom in his eyes that sneered right back at them.
"It's all over."
Seung-chan let his hand go slack, and the phone dropped into free fall.
In the same motion he kicked it off the roof.
"N-no!"
"You son of a b*tch!"
The two of them lunged after the phone as it went over the edge, and of course there was no catching it.
That was when it happened.
LURCH—
The fence that had been shuddering tipped hard, and all three bodies pitched downward with it.
"Whoa, whoa?!"
"Aaah!"
Still tangled together, the three of them went over.
Kim Yul and Lee Seung-ah came down on the safety railing below the roof. Seung-chan did not.
'Wh...... what?!'
He stretched for the railing, but his arm was too short.
Falling toward the ground, he met the eyes of the two of them watching him go.
Shock, and fury, and......
'Are they...... smiling? What...... did I even do?'
THUD—
The emptiness lasted a moment; then the impact came, and with it the pain of his whole body coming apart.
'To end like this. Only this......'
As his mind blurred, the first thing to rush in was the thought of the company falling into panic.
The thought went almost at once.
'If I'd known it would end like this, I'd have just...... acted. All I wanted.'
He cursed the man he had been, the one who gave up the dream so easily.
In the fading of his mind he made a decision, and made it again.
Next time......
If there is a next time, then......
***
"Gaaaah!"
Seung-chan came up off the bed with a yell, as though something had flung him.
Dragging in rough breaths, he flapped at a hospital gown soaked through with sweat.
'Wh-what is this...... I was definitely......'
Had he somehow been rescued, miraculously, and patched up?
But for a man who had gone off a roof, his body was far too intact.
'Were my fingers always this long? My arms look thinner, too.'
He looked around, and a table mirror nearby caught his eye.
Wanting to know what state he was in, he tipped it to catch his face.
'Wh-who is this?! Th-this is Eun Tae-il, the Face Genius?!'
Seung-chan sat down hard without meaning to.
The small, round face of Kim Seung-chan was nowhere to be found.
In its place was Eun Tae-il, smooth-skinned and pale and beautiful, the idol turned actor.