-66-
It seemed like it was finally his turn to record his part.
Coming out of the practice room and heading to the producer’s room, Bunhong unknowingly shook his knee from nervousness.
Since Jeong Ido was overseeing this album overall, just like the pre-released song ‘Neverland’, he knew that the recording of the remaining songs would also be done under Ido’s producing.
The song Bunhong had to record now was a track called ‘Joker’ that had been decided as a B-side for this first album. BLACK was planning to do follow-up activities with that song after the title track.
The problem was that this song was a digital single that had been released before Lee Hanbit joined. So he couldn’t imitate this song.
As he had worried, when Bunhong entered the recording booth and started singing, he could see Jeong Ido’s expressionless face gradually becoming distorted through the partition.
He let out a short sigh and gestured for him to come out of the recording booth. This happened before even one verse of recording was finished.
“……Are you going to keep singing it so boringly?”
As soon as he came out of the recording booth, Bunhong’s face began to redden with shame at Ido’s words that pierced like a dagger.
It wasn’t Ido’s fault – the voice he had let out in the recording booth was honestly quite terrible even to his own ears.
There was no original to imitate in the first place. So he had to sing while clumsily imagining Lee Hanbit’s singing style, and therefore it might have been a natural result that his limitations were quickly exposed.
Ido, who had been silently looking at the monitor for a while with Bunhong standing in front of him, raised his head and stared at him.
“……”
“……”
His expression was still unreadable. Wondering what to say to such an Ido, Bunhong moved his lips then decided to give up.
Eventually Bunhong went back into the recording booth and put on the headset again. If the result wasn’t satisfactory, he just had to keep doing it until it worked. And only after several hours could they get a reasonably completed result.
After the recording ended, clearing his hoarse voice, Bunhong headed back to the practice room to finish the practice he had left incomplete earlier. In the meantime, he thought blankly.
‘See, you can do it. You succeeded in the end because you worked hard.’
However, as soon as he turned the corner, the moment he confirmed no one was around, he collapsed on the spot. He crouched for a while, burying his face in his knees. For quite a long time.
* * *
Before long, preparations for follow-up song activities were nearing the end.
The final choreography check was finished. For a more perfect stage, they continued to match up with the members while modifying the movements according to the choreography teacher’s lead.
“Kids, I think it would be better to make the movements a little bigger here. Wouldn’t that look much better?”
“Yes.”
In the meantime, he frowned and looked back at Bunhong.
“Kim Bunhong.”
“……Yes.”
He spoke firmly as if frustrated toward Bunhong who somehow had a dazed expression.
“How many times have I told you about making mistakes here? You know how important each of these small mistakes will be when you start activities soon. Won’t you really get it together?”
And rightly so, as this was already the third time Bunhong had been pointed out for the same part. Even when the choreography teacher, who had already repeated the same words several times, got angry, he couldn’t make any excuses. No matter how unintentional it was, since it wasn’t a solo effort and mistakes were repeated in work where teamwork was important, everyone looked exhausted.
“Alright, alright. Should we take a break for a moment? Bunhong, go wash your face and come back.”
Eventually the choreography teacher spoke to Bunhong, who couldn’t finish his part until the end.
‘Why am I like this?’
Bunhong, who had been worrying, headed toward the bathroom, but his body collapsed before he could even reach his destination. Staggering, he finally arrived at the bathroom and ended up vomiting everything he had eaten for breakfast.
“Urgh……”
It was painful. Even after vomiting continuously without rest, it felt stuffy because the lump-like thing filling his chest seemed to remain the same.
It was the manager who found him barely breathing and collapsed over the toilet.
Eventually he had to urgently receive IV fluids at a nearby emergency room. Listening to the doctor’s explanation that it was dehydration symptoms, Bunhong looked up at the ceiling helplessly with a needle stuck in the back of his hand.
‘I don’t have time for this. I’m being a complete burden.’
To collapse at a time when activities weren’t far off. He was worried about the schedules that would soon be lined up one after another.
From beside Bunhong, who was feeling very depressed, someone’s voice was heard.
“Hyung. Are you okay? Does it hurt a lot? You’re not seriously injured anywhere, right?”
“……”
“I heard you went to the bathroom earlier and slipped and fell on your butt. I’ve experienced that and it really hurts.”
From the non-stop chattering tone, he knew without looking that the voice belonged to Lucy. Since he was babbling just like when they shared a room together at the dorm, it was so familiar that he thought this was the dorm and not the emergency room. Wondering if he had followed the manager hyung, Bunhong looked at Lucy and thought.
Honestly, it was noisy, but seeing Lucy grimacing as if he was feeling vicarious pain even though he wasn’t the one who fell, holding onto his own tailbone, it seemed like he was worried as a roommate, which made him feel grateful.
However, Lucy’s voice was too loud, so drawing attention was unavoidable. The manager seemed to feel it too and whispered to Lucy with an embarrassed face.
“In hospitals…… you have to be quiet. You punk! Don’t they teach you that in America?”
Then Lucy answered, but his expression was so bright that Bunhong could only understand what he was saying after a few seconds.
“No one has told me where Bunhong hyung is hurting yet! It’s not hemorrhoids, is it?……”
His head throbbed with pain.
Bunhong muttered weakly.
“……Please.”
“What? Can you hear me?”
“Please lower your voice……”
It was a desperate plea. To hide his increasingly flushed face, he raised the arm without the needle and covered his face. Before he knew it, the complicated thoughts that had filled his head until just now disappeared, and only shame remained.
Lucy, who had been watching Bunhong’s mood, said carefully.
“Hyung. You’re not angry, are you?”
“Pfft……”
He was curious who would come to the emergency room for hemorrhoids. As Bunhong was thinking carefully, he suddenly burst into laughter.
‘This is really ridiculous.’
Seeing Lucy’s sullen face like a dog watching its owner’s mood made him laugh secondarily.
Then their eyes met, and as if by agreement, they both started giggling. Nurses and doctors passing by the bed with charts glanced at them, but they couldn’t stop the laughter from leaking out.
In the end, it was the manager’s job to handle the awkward situation.
“Why are these kids like this?? I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
* * *
“Hyung. Hyung. Bunhong hyung.”
“……Yeah?”
After returning from the emergency room, Bunhong was resting lying on the bed at the dorm when Lucy, who had been busily doing something while looking at his laptop, suddenly called him.
“Let’s play a game together.”
“Don’t we have…… a schedule tomorrow?”
“Come on, still. Just one round!”
The reason he couldn’t readily refuse a proposal he normally wouldn’t have accepted was because he remembered the effort of coming to visit him like a hospital visit today. Unable to turn away from eyes full of expectation, Bunhong hesitated for a moment then approached Lucy.
When they played the game together and Bunhong’s character kept dying first, Lucy giggled and said.
“You’re really bad. Hyung is the first person I’ve seen who’s this bad.”
Feeling embarrassed by those words, Bunhong took his hands off the keyboard.
“It’s harder than I thought……?”
“So funny.”
“I’m bad at it because I haven’t played games much.”
“You haven’t played many games?”
Lucy laughed, saying he was a really unique hyung.
“Yeah. If I had time, I could win by working hard, right?”
“Oh. Are you provoking me now?”
After throwing meaningless jokes back and forth, Lucy asked Bunhong again, seemingly curious.
“Then what do you do for fun? You must get bored.”
Come to think of it, he really did live quite boringly, Bunhong thought instead of answering that question. When he was in school he was busy studying, and when he was an idol he was busy practicing, so he didn’t seem to have leisure to look at other things. He regretted not having small hobbies.
He wanted to be loved. Because only one goal was clear, he couldn’t look around or take care of himself. So he just seemed to have neglected things. Without even knowing that if anything just piled up, it would collapse under its own weight.
‘I’m stupid.’
Even after his regression, there seemed to be no big change in his life.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
