“I’ve been thinking on that,” he said, “and I see what you meant now. I’ve been seeing it for a while; the way you move through your routines. It’s like you’re constantly waiting on the call to go somewhere. You’re on standby, and I kept telling myself that I could ground you, but I don’t think it was ever meant to be me, and maybe it’s not even London. I want that for you, Kaiya, I want you to find a place, or a person, that’s so safe for you that you let yourself put down roots. I don’t know if it’s him, but I want you to know that if it’s not, it’s still okay, because I believe you will find where you’re meant to be. I want that for you, and I want it for me, too.”
“I wanted it to be you.” My voice trembled with the restraint I’d been holding onto for so long, sometimes the only thing that had kept me together.
He pulled me into his arms, and I buried my face into his warm chest. So comfortable, but not home, knowing it was for the last time.
He hushed me, rubbing circles into my back.
“I know, and it’s okay. We tried.”
Chapter 38
March
GVibes had begun to discharge following the completion of their mandatory military service, and the whole world of K-Pop was abuzz with energy. It was almost a tangible thing, and quite extraordinary to watch – once I’d managed to reclaim a level of disassociation from it all.
In South Korea, pictures of the group were going up everywhere, and not just in Seoul, but in all the member’s hometowns, aswell. Billboards, bus stops, shop windows. Even the entire frontage of the ENT building in Gangnam had been lit up with their image.
I saw the pictures every day, it was impossible to miss them, and every day it felt like I was fighting with myself. Scroll past, or linger on the images. Label the twist in my gut as pride for them, or… something less magnanimous.
They came out in intervals, depending on which branch they’d gone into.
The two youngest came out first. Seokmin and Sungmin had gone into the police and firefighter divisions and came out on the same day.
Watching the way they stood on the pavement outside the gates was harder than I was prepared for. I had to look away as memories of them laughing and goofing off superimposed themselves over the stoic men on the screen. The two youngest members stood side by side in their uniforms, blinking in the relentless flashes of the assembled cameras and shouted questions. It made them seem somehow younger, standing close together, unsmiling and squinting, although from the sun, or the cameras, I couldn’t tell.
It was difficult to watch, and I don’t know why I didn’t put my phone down. They were so clearly out of place in a world that had waited for them while they’d grown accustomed to being away from it.
They were driven to ENT in a limo that was chased through traffic by eager – rabid – press. The videos were everywhere. I couldn’t not see them.
Bitterness coated my tongue as I saw the way their car was swamped. I shuddered to think what it must be like inside, watching people follow you, pressing cameras against the glass to invade your privacy with no care for the lines they overstepped, or who it affected.
We liked to think that we’ve learnt from the mistakes of what happened when the press pushed celebrities too hard, chase tooclose, invade too far, but we hadn’t learned anything. Or hadn’t cared to.
Minjae was discharged at the end of the month from his service with KATUSA - the Korean Augmentation to the United States Army. Until that moment, I’d never heard of it, but according to just about every publication that had an opinion on the matter, this assignment suited him. I’d have to take their word for it. I barely knew him.
His discharge ceremony was much the same as when Lee and Ace had come out, but quieter, so in all the ways it mattered, it was vastly different. It seemed people had heard the complaints from the online community about harassing the members, because less actual fans had turned up, leaving the crowd to be predominantly composed of shouting paparazzi. Without the bolster of a hyped-up crowd, they couldn’t hide what they were. Opportunists screaming at strangers.
Minjae looked stoic in every picture I saw, except in the ones where his youngest members had emerged from a car and had ran towards their leader, then the mask had slipped, and his evident joy shone through. Gone was the officer, and in his place was the older member who had lived, trained and gone through everything with those two trouble makers.
April
Woojin had served in the Special Forces branch of the army. He’d discharged secretly though, which had made me laughwhen I read about it later.
People had queued up all morning at the gate to watch him come out, but he’d apparently gone out the back door, giving the assembled press the slip. No one had known about it until he went live a whole four hours later.
His dedicated followers reacted the same way I had, and thought it was hysterical, and very on brand. There were some pretty loud, obnoxious groups of people who thought it was ungracious to the people who had waited for him, but honestly, the members had asked repeatedly for people not to come, so who’s fault was that?
Weeks passed, and the weather was just beginning to brighten up with a hint of the coming summer when he – Jihoon, I had to keep reminding myself to use his name – was formally discharged. I’d learned that even thinking his name felt like pricking myself with a thorn. But I persevered in the name of my own mental well being.
By now, I’d learned what branch of the military all the members of GVibes had chosen to serve in, and he had chosen the Marines.
I got all sorts of notifications from all sorts of publications, and so when the notification popped up on my phone, helpfully informing me that Sergeant Baek would be discharged imminently, my thumb had hovered a little too long over the screen, stuck somewhere between wanting to open it, and wanting to swipe it away. As if it were that easy.
In the rare moments that I allowed myself to think about it, his decision made sense to me.
He was always so attuned to public perception that it seemed reasonable he’d choose a branch so notoriously cut off from the public. My mind kept picking at the information, slottingit alongside the insight I used to have about his distrust of the media.
It tracked with who he’d allowed me to see in those rare, vulnerable moments. The ones I tried not to dwell on, where I’d seen past his polished veneer and down to the bone of how deeply affected he’d been by certain events. The memory of sitting on a sofa, with his head in my lap. Memories I shoved down. Hard.
