“No, I—” Kuro gives him a look that reminds him of a kicked puppy. Iseul’s not the kind of person to kick puppies. “Why do you want to?”
“Well,” Kuro says, dragging the word out and looking Iseul over. His gaze sweeps over him from head to toe, then back up again to meet his eyes. “I like taking pictures of pretty things. Attractive people.”
Iseul's unsure of what to make of this. “No one’s around to witness your fanservice.”
“I’m not doing any.” Kuro’s tone is light, but the look in his eyes is serious.
“You’re so weird.” Annoyingly insistent, Iseul doesn’t say. He sighs reluctantly. “If you won’t upload it, then—I guess it’s fine.”
Kuro’s expression brightens, more genuine, and Iseul chooses to ignore his satisfied hum. It would have bothered him more if he wasn’t so used to Leo taking photos of him, so when Kuro tells him to look at the phone camera, he does. While Kuro poses beside him, he simply stares into the camera with a blank expression.
Kuro snaps one photo with practiced precision, then shows him on the phone screen. The sun’s rays lend a softness to their skin, reflecting diamonds across the ocean in the background.
Pleased with himself, Kuro changes his wallpaper. “Nice.”
To anyone else, the picture makes it look like he’s the fan and Iseul’s the celebrity. “Please don’t lose your phone.”
“Don’t worry,” Kuro assures with a smile, then continues walking along the shore.
He stops every so often to crouch down and inspect the graveyard of pale seashells and exoskeletons at their feet. Iseul wonders if he should be writing everything down in a notebook or documenting his surroundings with photos, but when Kuro quietly admires the sea with his gaze, he does the same.
They spend most of the time at the edge of the sea and in this time, he’s done more than he has for the past few months with anyone that wasn’t Leo.
It’s a little sad.
“The sea,” Iseul starts to say, shivering with the gust of salt-tinged air. “What do you like so much about it?”
Kuro arches a brow. “Are you finally making an effort to get to know me? I’m flattered.”
Iseul snorts. “I just want to know what’s so special about it.”
“Hmm. I wonder.” Kuro’s tone is contemplative, but not in the way that suggests he doesn’t know how to answer. Instead, he’s finding the right words to say. As the waves slide up to their sandals, the tide pulls back, lifting the sea like a veil to expose specks of colored stones and glass embedded in the sand beneath.
“I didn’t grow up in the nicest place, but I lived near the sea. I had a habit of collecting things—old books, marbles from Ramune bottles, seashells and sea glass from the shore.” Kuro bends down to peer at the sand. From the slush of wet sand, he picks up a glimmering piece of sea glass, the color of vintage Coca-Cola bottles. “When I was ten, a bottle washed up ashore.”
Iseul stands beside him, keeping a distance away from the tide. The waves collapse over each other in tumbles of seafoam, receding before his sandals get wet. “A message in a bottle?”
Kuro nods. “An author wanted their story to be heard—wanted affirmation from someone other than himself—so he threw his message into the sea. Who knew that it would reach a place like Hoshinoshima?”
Hoshinoshima.
The kind of place that belongs on the cover of National Geographic—and not in a good way. It’s something that no one else would know about Kuro unless he told them himself. The image is stark in his mind—the island's shores crippled by waves and waves of refuse and plastic debris, accumulating from the waste amassing in the waters. The government shouldn’t have dealt with the unwanted by throwing them aside, but that’s exactly what they did.
Iseul would have never imagined that someone like Kuro grew up in a place like that, when he gives the impression of a celebrity born with a silver spoon, but there’s a lot he doesn’t know about him. He imagines a young Kuro searching through fragments of bottles and glass tossed on the shore, broken, polished smooth by waves, only to find beauty in something that the sea discarded.
“It was the neatest thing. Seeing the sea extend all the way to the horizon never failed to leave me with awe, but I never expected that the world beyond could ever reach me.” Kuro stares toward the water, and Iseul follows his gaze. The sea and sky blend seamlessly into a blue so vivid that his fingers burn for his phone camera, but he wonders what else Kuro sees. “So I wrote a song, folded it up in a bottle, and sent it adrift on the water.”
Iseul’s voice grows softer. “And?”
“I don’t know if anyone ever found it or tried writing back to me,” Kuro says quietly. “But I wanted to find that answer, so I went to find it myself instead of waiting for it to come to me. I wanted to be aboard one of those boats traveling beyond the island, so I moved to Seoul.”
Kuro closes his hand over the glass, and Iseul understands what he means. The distance separating Iseul’s home from Seoul was too far to comprehend, too distant to be reached. Eventually, he chose to pursue his dreams, even if it meant leaving his family and not looking back.
There’s a world of differences between them, but the revelation bridges the gap between them a little more. Ten-year-old Kuro delivered a message in a bottle across the ocean to share his story with someone in another part of the world, even if it never found them. Ten-year-old Iseul sent a folded paper swan across the river in hope it would travel far from his home, but it crumpled and ripped along the way.
Both of them longed for something more, something that would never come to them if they remained where they were, but whereas Kuro rose to the very top of the industry, Iseul disappeared, forgotten in a sea of artists trying to make it.
Iseul refuses to be forgotten.
“But you return to the sea,” Iseul says. It’s different from the way he deliberately isolates himself from his own home in Nami. If he doesn’t contact anyone, then he thinks of himself as not burdening anyone, responsible for no one except himself.
“Because it feels like coming home.” Kuro rises to his feet and the tide shoves in, staining his sandals with seafoam. “The sea gives me broken things polished by its waters. Stories that should have never found their way, but somehow did.” Maybe it’s the storyteller in Kuro, because there’s something about the way he says things that should be read from pages instead of being said aloud. He motions for Iseul to hold his hand out. The piece of sea glass falls into Iseul’s hand, gleaming a clear blue-green like Kuro’s earrings. “The sea—”
“—is beautiful.”
The words escape Iseul’s lips in a single breath. He holds up the weathered glass against the shining sun above. It’s something thrown away by human hands, smoothed over by the waters of the sea. It shouldn’t be anything special—just another piece meant to be part of a beachcomber’s collection—but Kuro has a way of making things seem more than what they appear to be.
It’s something worth appreciating, like the way Kuro seems to appreciate him.
“Yes,” Kuro says while watching him. The wind picks up around them. Iseul’s hair flutters against his neck. “Yes, it is.”
The ocean’s song swells in his ears, and Iseul can’t hear anything else.
* * *
Even when the sea falls to darkness, Iseul can hear the gentle sigh of its waves through the walls of the room. Having left dinner with Aoi and Kotone early, letting Kuro continue the conversation on his own, he finds the warmth of his futon and the softness of its covers.
Iseul has never been particularly good at relaxing. He only exists in two states: asleep or working himself to the point of exhaustion. It’s difficult to explain what happens when he finds himself in the dance studio or the desk of his bedroom, because his mind and body become completely immersed in his work. There are no excuses for yielding to his limits and there are no excuses now, when there are songs that need to be written and a performance to prepare for.
He can't deal with any distractions or mistakes right now. The back of his neck is sensitive and irritated from sun exposure, putting him in an even worse mood. He turns to lie on his side instead.
The anxiousness refuses to settle in his stomach, making him consider withdrawing from the concert, but he’s never been one to back down from a challenge. If he knew the stories he should tell, then maybe he could actually write them.
All he can think of are his half-finished songs scrawled in old notebooks and thrown haphazardly around his bedroom; his completed songs set aside by Kuro’s hands.
His first album was what Chairman Noh called a cautious debut, with ballads written by the lyricist Dambi and composed by Gyeoul. With those two established as in-house artists, Noh Media developed its trademark sound, but their songs were never as dramatic as Iseul wanted them to be. Instead, they took on a subtler, more ephemeral approach that was restrained in terms of vocal performance. His voice became as elusive as a whisper in someone’s ear, a quiet breeze in the nighttime.
Despite the softness of the lyrics—remembering all that was loved and lost, finding beauty in the everyday moments of life, seeking hope for the future—Gyeoul brought an orchestral quality to his music. Lee Aera called one of the B-sides from this album her absolute favorite, especially since it was used as a soundtrack for a romance drama—the kind where the main characters confessed their love under a shower of blossom petals.
His second album branched out with uptempo dance tracks, not quite highlighting his vocal strengths, but possessing melodies orienting towards not only sounding well but also performing well. The title track relied heavily on visual choreography, but the repetitive sound was so addictive that it was played at nightclubs and used in popular advertisements. This solidified his place on the top of the music charts for months.
It was clear that people loved his music.
Iseul didn’t.
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