Idol of the Heavenly One - Chapter 70.2
And I protested desperately, asking how he could just leave things like that.
At that, Baek Jae-heon let out a short sigh.
“People like that always stick to idols.”
His voice was calm, but beneath it lay a weariness that had clearly been there for a long time.
“Huh? You mean a lot of them do?”
“Yeah. You’re a bit slow to notice, but ever since our debut, we’ve had plenty of people like that following us.”
“Since debut?”
I blinked in confusion. I had never seen anything like that. Seeing my puzzled face, Baek Jae-heon gave a faint smile, opened the approaching taxi door, and let me get in first.
“Even on the plane, the seats around us are always filled with those kinds of people.”
“What?”
“They’re all over the music show hallways too.”
“What?!”
“They’re at the shared entrance of our dorm as well.”
“They weren’t residents?”
“And when we went to your family’s home, the crowd in front of the claw machine shop was the same kind of people.”
I was speechless. It was shocking.
When fans had gathered at the airport, I had simply wondered, How did they know we’d be here? I thought that was all there was to it. The unfamiliar faces seated near us on the plane, I had assumed, were just random passengers. The people I saw in the broadcast station hallways, I thought were staff or crew. The shadows I noticed at the dorm’s shared entrance, I believed were just neighbors.
And the ones outside the claw machine shop… thinking back, yes. I did wonder how they recognized us when we had covered ourselves up so much. I truly hadn’t known. No, I had never even considered that they might actually be following us like that.
But something still didn’t sit right.
“Then… you must’ve gone through this kind of thing many times, right?”
Baek Jae-heon had experienced these things across three different lives.
“Yeah.”
That was why I could sense his reluctance, the exhaustion in his eyes whenever something like this happened. But then, why back then…
Ah. Could it be…
“The gray hoodie.”
“…”
“Was that the reason you died both times?”
I asked carefully, glancing at the taxi driver through the rearview mirror. Baek Jae-heon had said he died at twenty-one in both of his previous lives. Which meant he met the same kind of death right when YEARZ was at its peak. The fact that he was familiar with being followed but had panicked at the sight of that gray hoodie meant it wasn’t just weariness from a past life. That gray hoodie must have been the cause that led to his death both times.
When Baek Jae-heon nodded, I began to understand the behavior that had always baffled me before.
“So that’s why you don’t get close to fans, and why do you do metal detector checks?”
“Yeah.”
“The company agreed to that? Just because you said so?”
“No, it was a condition.”
“A condition?”
The condition he described with the company was this:
Because he had a deep fear of strangers, he requested that as a condition for debut, he would not be forced into sudden contact with fans. He also asked that they conduct metal detector checks at fan signings and strengthen general security overall.
“…They actually agreed to that?”
A company agreeing to the demands of a trainee who hadn’t even debuted yet?
“Yeah. They asked if I had any other conditions, but I told them that was the only one I wanted them to keep.”
I stared at Baek Jae-heon’s face for a while, then nodded. Thinking about it, with that face, of course they would debut him no matter what he asked. They probably saw money written all over it. That was also the reason I had wanted to debut alongside him.
“Do you know the face of the woman in the hoodie?”
The real problem was that gray hoodie. That woman who had smiled so eerily.
“I don’t.”
“You don’t?”
“Yeah. I never saw her face. Not either time.”
He said he had never seen the face of the person who killed him twice. That was troublesome. If he knew who it was, he could at least prepare himself. But he didn’t. And every day, he met countless fans who were about the same age and build.
“You’re really something, doing this again, then.”
Thinking about that made me realize how incredible Baek Jae-heon was. He had been killed twice by someone whose face he didn’t even know. If it were me, I would’ve run away out of fear.
“I would’ve kept doing it.”
“Huh?”
“This time too, and the next time. And the one after that.”
“…”
“Until I met you again.”
“…”
“I probably would’ve kept doing it.”
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