At that time, Ihwa felt deep pity for Cheonghyeon. More than anyone, he had no presence. After the showcase, when Ihwa, who had been keeping an eye on him, discovered that at M Company’s music show he had not been shown even for a single second, she impulsively opened a Twitter account.
GIDIAN.
At least she wanted to make this kid known. She selected only the shots that had come out really well from what she took at the showcase and spent a full eight hours retouching them before posting, but the response was meager.
If she did not even tag EAST, the retweet count was zero. Was the world filming a hidden camera prank on her? Mr. Lee Kyung-kyu, please come out…
All her life, Ihwa had looked at the world through a camera. Even when she saw a landscape, she would automatically calculate saturation and brightness. She believed her world existed inside an aperture.
In the portraits she shot, the subject’s unique atmosphere was captured. A photo is not something you make by half-heartedly pressing a shutter.
People do not only speak with their mouths. They speak with their eyes, with their bodies.
There were idols who, even while staring into the camera with a handsome expression, had eyes that said, “What are these crazed fangirls?”
There were idols who, even while seeming to perform very diligently, shouted with their whole body, “I just want to go home.”
She photographed the messages a subject sent.
In the midst of countless moving things, the split-second sincerity you catch for an instant. It was for that taste that Ihwa could not put down her camera.
When, with her small salary, she applied to a fansign and faced Cheonghyeon, he teared up a little while talking with her during the signing.
“Noona, it is strange, right? But I have lived like this for nineteen years.”
Idol rule number one. Never contact a fan privately. Yet Cheonghyeon wrote his number in her album.
“I want to become close with you. I am definitely not trying to hit on you or anything like that. It is just, just… you are the first person to remember me, so I do not want to lose you.”
In that way, Ihwa and Cheonghyeon built a friendship.
She could not go to fansigns that easily cost over three million won per session, but on days when there happened to be a broadcast schedule, she would take a day off if she had to and shoot Cheonghyeon.
Even when Cheonghyeon openly held her hand, no other EAST fans paid the two of them any mind. It was truly a strange thing.
Thus, at the first schedule she faced after Cheonghyeon fell ill, Ihwa habitually looked at him through her camera.
The moment he entered range, she pressed the shutter and instinctively read the message coming through the lens. Startled by what she read, she immediately lowered the camera to look properly at his face, but by then Cheonghyeon had already gone inside.
Until then, the message she always received from him was “Ihwa noona!” Yet that day, for the first time, as he looked at her camera he left the message, “Hello. It is nice to meet you for the first time.”
It felt like being possessed by a ghost.
In truth, GIDIAN was not the only one clutching their head in complicated feelings.
A smooth, masculine hand that had been hovering above a keyboard dropped with a sigh.
What on earth should he write? It felt more daunting than when he had sat before an undergraduate paper he did not want to write.
The board he had used like his diary now felt unfamiliar. Now, new nicknames besides his own were writing to Cheonghyeon. In fact, the new nicknames taking over the board did not bother him much. The problem was the photo Cheonghyeon had posted on Instagram the moment he woke up. After that, he had not been able to post anything.
There could not be anyone who knew Gi Cheonghyeon better than he did. At least compared to Cheonghyeon’s parents, he was certain he knew him better.
Seoan was the third child of the Yeonggyeong Group. With only older sisters above him.
Primogeniture inheritance carried out like an unwritten rule. In the business world, it was taken for granted that Seoan would take the right of succession, but that was a miscalculation.
From childhood, not once had Seoan ever had an interest in company management.
Seoan’s single goal was to be a professor. After graduating from university in the United States, he immediately entered the combined master’s and doctoral program at Korea University.
With sisters who desired management rights, and himself who had no interest, the deal flowed naturally like water. His sisters supported him in every way so he could obtain a faculty position.
To be honest, even without taking a doctoral course at Korea University, his sisters would have somehow created a tenured professorship for him there. But that was not what Seoan wanted. He knew that there were also professors at Korea University who had completed their doctoral studies abroad.
However, if the university preferred those who had completed undergraduate and possibly master’s and doctoral programs in-house, then he could conduct research there as much as he liked.
Yet when he entered under Professor Gi Mujin at Korea University, for the first time Seoan wanted to rescind his decision.
If you have money and connections, can you not use a few expedients? This professor was not one who nurtured juniors and led his students. He was a professor for whom his own research and papers meant more. A man obsessed with work.
The one saving grace was that he did not, at least, steal graduate students’ theses to publish under his own name. Of course not.
From the start he only made them do odd jobs. When Seoan first entered, Professor Ki had him do nothing for three days. On the fourth day, Seoan by himself set a research direction, wrote a paper, and studied. He received materials from other professors through his sisters’ help.
Then one day, his senior in the lab, Changhwan, called him up to the rooftop.
“Seoan. Can you keep doing this?”
“Even if I cannot, I have to.”
Did he call him to say this pointless stuff? He was supposed to receive some materials by three in the afternoon. Holding down the irritation bubbling up, Seoan answered meekly.
“I am going to give up on being a professor.”
At that, Seoan, who had been looking off at the distant sky, turned his eyes to his senior. This senior had always looked down on graduate students who washed out under Professor Ki’s temperament and lived like a lone rhinoceros horn with eyes only for a professorship.
To hear such words from his mouth…
“Do you know what happened to me today?”
Seoan quietly looked across the rooftop toward the research building. Beside him, Changhwan’s voice trickled out in a low tone. He stood with his back to the research building he had always looked upon. As if he did not want to see it anymore.
“They said Professor Ki’s son was debuting as an entertainer, so I went to sign in his stead. They asked me who I was, and when I said I was a guardian’s proxy, the people there just sighed. And do you know what the company president’s eyes looked like?”
“’Ugh. You graduated Korea University and you are doing a professor’s dirty work, huh’. That look.”
“It could just be my inferiority complex running wild, but anyway. I am going to quit everything now. I am going to prepare to get a job. You probably will not have these worries since you look exactly like a well-off family’s son. My parents are retiring now, my sister is getting married, and there are mountains of places that need money. In the middle of all this, how can I keep going around doing babysitting for a professor’s kid? My mom has been going around the neighborhood telling everyone for six years that her son is preparing to become a professor. I am going to stop being an unfilial son now.”
After that, Changhwan openly prepared for employment in the lab. Six months later, he left the lab when he joined S Life.
When even Changhwan left, the spacious lab was left with only Seoan. His regret was brief. He silently returned to writing papers. Would he, in six years, become like that too? Would he end up asking his sister to make a professorship for him?
Around that time, Professor Ki came to find him. With Changhwan gone, he turned to Seoan. As if he did not even know whose support from Yeonggyeong was funding his research.
Professor Ki gave his instructions as a matter of course. He had given the agency Seoan’s number, so if anything came up, Seoan should receive the contact directly. Also, he was to gather news of his son and prepare a report every Monday and leave it on the professor’s desk.
He had kept a secretary at his side, but this was the first time he himself was taking the role of secretary. Seoan gave a crooked smile.
At first, Seoan had planned to simply collect whatever articles came up by searching the name Gi Cheonghyeon and hand them to the professor, but soon his thinking changed.
Is this kid really an entertainer? How can there not be a single article?
Gi Cheonghyeon was truly timid, and if you looked away for a moment, he would be gone from the camera. Even when an album came out and they made a comeback, not one article would appear. It was to the point that he wondered if he had really debuted.
He signed up for the fan café out of curiosity, but the “to. Gi Cheonghyeon” category was utterly empty. Maybe he debuted and then did something wrong and got kicked out?
That day, Seoan added one more item to his research list. Gi Cheonghyeon. What on earth is this punk’s true nature.
Once he bit down, he would never let go. Even for such a person, Gi Cheonghyeon was a very difficult subject. That the camera might capture him but he would be out of focus was a given.
To see Cheonghyeon, he had to watch with maximum concentration, and even then, after a short while, his memory would grow hazy, so he had to jot things down in a notebook on the spot.
He felt like a scholar studying rare animals rather than someone in the humanities. The less visible Cheonghyeon was, the more exhilarated Seoan felt. It was like pinpointing a creature with camouflage and placing it on A4 paper. It also felt like a hidden-picture puzzle.
The reports he brought Professor Ki a few times always occupied a corner of the professor’s desk exactly as he had first left them.
Is this not disrespectful to both the subject and the researcher? Seoan found Professor Ki very displeasing. Still, he was his own son. So he stopped bringing reports. Perhaps the request had been a throwaway line, for the professor did not ask again. He barely listened to the contacts passed along from the agency, let alone the reports.
Once he stopped the reports, his hands felt idle. After doing it for a few months, observing Gi Cheonghyeon had become a routine. So now, instead of reports, he began to write observation notes in the empty “to. Gi Cheonghyeon” category.
At first he wrote the schedule and analyzed how the styling and the stage were that day, but as time went on, there was not much to say about the research subject, so he ended up just writing his own diary long ago.
Even so, in keeping with the category, he always wrote in the form of addressing Cheonghyeon. It was a peaceful daily life.
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