Idol of the Heavenly One - vanish into fiction

“…You’re not asleep?”

Startled, I shot up and looked at Baek Jae-heon. Since I couldn’t see well in the dark, I raised my phone screen and pointed it in his direction.

“I told you to stop watching.”

Jae-heon had only turned his head to look at me, and in that moment I realized my mistake. The screen was showing his face, and I had basically shoved it right at him. It was practically advertising that I had been watching only him. I had insisted less than a day ago that I wasn’t into men, and now this. What a sight.

“…I was just monitoring our stage.”

So I threw out a lame excuse, as if to say I wasn’t watching just him, but all of us together. Of course, Jae-heon wouldn’t believe me.

“Then why did you keep rewinding only my part?”

“…I didn’t.”

How did he know? I quickly lied and denied it.

“The sound was leaking out of your earphones.”

“Ah…”

I was caught instantly. It was so embarrassing. I finally understood what people meant when they said they wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear.

“…It’s just that you use your expressions well and sing live really well, so I watched it a few times. Nothing more than that.”

But I stubbornly pressed on and insisted otherwise. And actually, I wasn’t even lying. Jae-heon really did have great expressions and strong live vocals, so it was true I had rewatched his parts for that reason.

“Alright. But stop watching now and get some sleep. We have a schedule later.”

“…Okay.”

I had been prepared to argue and deny it more boldly if he pushed me, but instead, his calm words telling me to rest somehow made me feel even more embarrassed. How was he this mature at just nineteen? Meanwhile, I had lived more than fifty years in my past life, yet after being reborn, it felt like my mental age had reset to match this body.

Now that I thought about it, that was exactly it. In my previous life, I never would have had the patience to be an idol. I never would have worked this hard to debut. I would have just chosen a stable life, living with the mindset that it was enough to get by peacefully. Maybe I wouldn’t have even gone to college, and I might have become a government employee again.

Could it be that with a younger body, my heart and mind had also become younger?

Sometimes I suddenly found myself feeling like a stranger to myself, like everything was novel. Right now was exactly one of those times. I didn’t feel the slightest bit tired from all this emotional back-and-forth. Instead, I felt curious. What was Baek Jae-heon thinking?

In my past life, all I had wanted was for people not to hate me. I had never cared to wonder what others thought.

“Are you amazed that we debuted?”

“…Of course I am.”

Out of nowhere, he asked me something strange, something that felt too obvious to even be questioned. Obviously, I was amazed. How could I not be? He had to feel the same way.

“…”

“…Aren’t you?”

When he didn’t respond, I asked quietly. By now, my eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could faintly make out his face even without any light.

“…”

But Jae-heon stayed silent for a long time, as if it really wasn’t that amazing to him. Was it because he had always known he would debut no matter what? Was that why he was so indifferent?

“It is amazing.”

When he finally spoke, his words sounded the same as mine, but they carried a different weight.

“…”

“It really was amazing.”

For me, saying it was amazing meant that everything felt new, that meeting my fans and stepping on stage was unfamiliar yet wonderful. But when Jae-heon said it was amazing, it sounded more like, “Yes, this was a good time.”

“You really do seem like someone who has debuted before.”

“…”

“You sing well, you command the stage, you’re always calm.”

“…”

“Don’t tell me you’re secretly a veteran, like a recycled rookie?”

As I kept talking, I realized it sounded like nothing but praise, so I added a joke with a laugh.

“Out of everything, you’re the most amazing.”

“Huh?”

But the words he returned were strange again. That I was the most amazing. What kind of comment was that supposed to be? Was his teenage phase acting up? He never responded to anything I said in a straightforward way. Even when joking, he always came back with something offbeat. They say good-looking people tend to have eccentric sides. Maybe that was the case with him too.