Work Text:
Han Jisung Best Acting Compilation [19:46]
6.9M views • 10 June 2020
numberonehanner (22.2K subscribers)
Description: Hi y’all, I’ve always said I was gonna make a video like this and here it finally is: a compilation of my favourite Han Jisung acting moments since his first movie ever. The video was originally several hours long and I almost cried while editing it down. Timestamps for the movies here and in the pinned comment:
(read more)
Comments (10k) Sort By: Top comments
vegetables
when he starts crying at 3:47 i start crying too. EVERY DAMN TIME
3.2K Likes
▼ View 15 replies
Yun Hyeji
nobody:
literally nobody:
jisung: i am gonna be so cute and sad that everyone starts crying
(4K Likes)
yeRi.ri
is no one going to talk about how CUTE jisung was as a kid. omg babyyyy
(1.3K Likes)
▼ View 6 replies
quokkabutt
you’d have no idea that he was an introvert from these scenes because his skill on screen is just amazing. and the fact that he’s not even in his twenties yet and he’s already been nominated for some of the most prestigious acting awards in korea? no one is doing it like han jisung
(5.4K Likes)
▼ View 12 replies
bestsquirrel
No hate to the creator but the clips are out of order so here are the movies in chronological order of release from earliest to most recent. Ofc timestamps are attached. (read more)
(3.6K Likes)
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Comments (10k) Sort By: Newest first
Kim Chaewon
rewatching old compilations cos yellow wood /still/ hasn’t made any announcements about upcoming releases
(133 Likes)
wsojgk
does anyone know why jisung is on hiatus?? it’s been so long since he put out any content and he’s been quiet on ig. i’m getting worried…
(89 Likes)
▲ Hide replies
↳yunana
yellow wood hasn’t released a statement yet. we don’t know what’s going on
↳hannieheart
we don’t even know if he’s on a hiatus. its only been a few weeks yall calm down and stop invading his privacy
↳hansleftcheek
ofc he’s on hiatus. you said it yourself its been a month. the last time he stopped posting on insta he was on a six-month break
↳ Show more replies
Nabi (Nana)
okay so my dad knows someone who works at yellow wood and apparently they’re getting ready to debut some new actors, so maybe jisung’s on a break cos they don’t want him to hog the limelight?
(500 Likes)
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↳bunhan
Omg maybe!? Now that I think about it is there anyone else that famous in Yellow Wood? It’s the perfect chance to get some new talents out there.
↳tinyjisung
guys don’t trust people like this. they’re just trying to spread misinformation. the most we can do is wait for yellow wood to send out something official
↳ Show more replies
New Email
From: [email protected]
Subject: Ghost-writing Inquiry
Lee Minho-ssi,
It is my pleasure to make you acquaintance as the primary manager for actor Han Jisung. As you may be aware, Han is currently on a break from promotional activities and acting work, with the hiatus soon to be formally announced. Given that Han has previously expressed his interest in writing an autobiography, though he did not have the time to do so, our team has decided this would be the perfect opportunity to begin its production. I have heard you are an esteemed ghost-writer in the industry and have experience in such projects as this; my colleagues have nothing but compliments on your work. Thus, I would like to formally request that you be the ghost-writer of this book. Of course, I understand that you may be have other projects to attend to but I implore to consider undertaking it. Please contact me if you would be interested.
Han Jisung truly is a boy that deserves to be written about.
Yours most sincerely,
Bang Christopher Chan
Contact: [email protected]
>Send< | Delete | Save
[Sent]
Account: Lee Minho
Inbox (0) By Date
CatCo – 50% Sale on Cat Toys
(Up to 50% off on all the newest toys in our collection, including…)
Lee Minhyuk – Chapter 9 Deadline Reminder
(Hi Minho, I know you’ve had two days off but I needed to make…)
>refreshing…<
Inbox (1) By Date
[email protected] – Ghost-writing Inquiry
(Mr. Lee, It is my pleasure to make you acquaintance as the…)
CatCo – 50% Sale on Cat Toys
(Up to 50% off on all the newest toys in our collection, including…)
Lee Minhyuk – Chapter 9 Deadline Reminder
(Hi Minho, I know you’ve had two days off but I needed to make…)
New Email
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Ghost-writing Inquiry
Bang Chan-ssi,
I hope you find my address acceptable – I am amenable to refer to you as Christopher if you would like. Feel free to correct me! The pleasure is all mine to make your acquaintance. I am honoured by all the people that have referred me, and by your decision to choose me as your candidate for such a daunting but fortuitous opportunity. There really is no option for me but to agree!
Having worked with a few people in your industry, I am aware in some capacity of the various hurdles in the scheduling, planning and confirmation process. If there is anything I could do to make your job easier, or help the process run more smoothly, please inform me. I am very excited to be working with you in the future.
Regards,
Lee Minho
>Send< | Delete | Save
[Sent]
New Email
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Ghost-writing Inquiry
Lee Minho-ssi,
It is great to hear back from you so soon! Your address is perfectly fine; I mostly include my English name for formality purposes.
Your awareness of entertainment industry policies will certainly improve the speed of discussing various forms and agreements, but before we settle on hiring you for the position, will you able available to have a chat with Han? We value our talents above all else and a quick meeting will give us the chance to ensure whether both of you will feel comfortable during the writing of the book, and all the personal discussions that may accompany that process. It will just be a private, off-the-record meet-up with just me and Han, and preferably just yourself. I am wary that you do not work on weekends, so if you are amenable to this, does four in the evening on Monday sound good?
Yours most sincerely,
Bang Chan
Contact: [email protected]
>Send< | Delete | Save
[Sent]
New Email
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Ghost-writing Inquiry
Bang Chan-ssi,
I must say, I admire your commitment to the wellbeing of your employee’s. Rarely have I seen management that takes so much care in these regards. I would be pleased to meet Han and yourself and Monday sounds perfect!
Regards,
Lee Minho
>Send< | Delete | Save
[Sent]
Minho has to admit that when he walks into the company building on Monday morning, he’s riding the coattails of a weekend full of celebration. His body’s pumping out adrenaline and it’s been days. There’s that itch between his bones, a needling at his tongue and lips to tell someone, besides his department head who probably already knows, and it’s not out of a need to brag. Minho never needs nor wants to brag.
He’s already regarded as the star of his department so anything extra would be redundant and obnoxious. His ego gets fed enough by Minhyuk’s weekly reports that Minho is, yet again, the most efficient worker and is the main attraction of their ghost-writing services department. Sure, there’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes, what with everything involving the editors, typesetters, printing officials, and Minho doesn’t actually get any of the credit for himself but at the end of the day, regardless of whose name is on the cover of the book, when the curtains close for the show, everyone knows the words on the pages are all Minho’s. He gets his applause backstage and it’s all the applause he needs. More than.
His self-esteem is a cloud that travels around the tips of the Himalayas and it certainly doesn’t help that the new intern, Jeongin, thinks he ghost-wrote the Bible or some shit. Too long around the kid and soon his confidence is going to fly off to the stratosphere on a straight mission to the end of the solar system and never come back.
Right now, he doesn’t care if his pride launches towards Neptune or Pluto, he has to tell someone that he’s bagged Han fucking Jisung as his next client. Jeongin just happens to be in the blast zone when he arrives.
Bless the kid, he snorts his coffee out of his nose when the name falls from Minho’s lips.
“Han fucking Jisung?!” He screeches, not seeming to care that milk is dripping from his nose.
“Han fucking Jisung!” Minho concurs. He can’t keep a massive smile and an accompanying giggle out of his system as he searches for napkins for Jeongin. Retrieving a handful from the stack on the break room bench, he beckons Jeongin towards him and hands them off. “Now clean yourself up, you animal.”
“No sunbae–”
“It’s just hyung. How many times do I have to tell you, Innie. Just hyung.”
“No hyung, you don’t understand. Jisung is–”
“No, you don’t understand. I said clean yourself. You’re dripping all over the carpet,” Minho nags. And it’s true, the coffee has found a way to the tip of Jeongin’s chin and is now steadily dripping onto the floor in even increments. Like a metronome of stupidity. When Jeongin still doesn’t move to wipe himself, Minho snatches the napkins back and does it himself. The kid’s only a few years younger than him but he feels like a damn mother. “And despite whatever you might have heard from Seungmin, I do keep up with popular culture. I know who Han Jisung is. Why the hell do you think I was so excited? This book is going to be such a hit!”
“Yeah but…” Jeongin trails off. In the wake of cleaning all the milk off his face, Minho can see the inklings of blood working its way to the vessels under the boy’s cheeks. Jeongin’s blushing, which only seems so ridiculous because he has a straight-faced, cold and blunt demeanour to most of the staff. He’s an intern but he takes no shit, knows his rights and sticks to them. This is positively unprecedented. “I’m a fan, okay?” It comes out like a whine and what the fuck? Where has Jeongin gone? Jeongin does not whine, he’s far too dignified for that. “Since way back when Devil Boy came out.”
“Devil Boy?” Minho says incredulously. “What kind of name for a movie is Devil Boy?”
Jeongin sighs, and see there’s the kid that Minho has known for the past few months. All his edges made of out exasperation and determination and an uncanny cuteness to all of it that he can never admit.
“It was a TV show actually. And look, it wasn’t that great but I was like ten and even watching it back now I can say that his character on the show was kinda what made it any good at all. And he was like twelve? Thirteen at the time? My point is that I’ve been following him since. And like seriously, for the past like few years. I buy tickets for his movies as soon as they’re announced and up on cinema sites. I watch all his interviews and variety show appearances. I own box sets of all his shows and extended cut blu-rays of all his movies.”
Getting more and more worked up as he talks, by the end of his mini tirade, Jeongin is lowkey panting and Minho can’t pick his jaw up off the floor. He’s going to be scraping at it for the next hour to detach it from the milk-stained carpet. Kid brushes him and his colleagues off like bugs when they share (unsolicited) work drama but behind their backs he’s been some actor’s fanboy?
Minho barely believes they’re the same person.
“Where did you get the Jeongin-shaped suit? It’s so lifelike,” he drawls, dropping his hand onto Jeongin’s shoulder and making a show of pinching at his neck. “Wow, you must’ve paid a lot to make this feel like real skin.”
Jeongin slaps his hand away. “Not funny, sunbae. You’re so annoying,” he grumbles. His face pales. “Oh my god, you’re going to meet him.”
“Well yes,” Minho says. “That would kind of be important in order to write a book.”
Jeongin clamps his hands down on Minho’s shoulders and shakes him back and forth, suddenly invigorated. “You’re going to meet him! When are you meeting him?”
“Today,” Minho smirks. Finally, he has a bit of leverage over this brat. He’ll have no choice to listen to his pleas for coffee with this hanging over his head. Minho whoops a little for his future self, before turning his attention back to the imminent threat of his head being rocked off his neck. “Okay, stop.”
The hands do leave his shoulders, but Minho gets the distinct impression it’s not out of concern for his own neck’s safety. Not aiding his perception is their placement over Jeongin’s mouth as he tries to muffle his screaming, which he fails spectacularly at. He does however do a very good impression of a teapot reaching boiling point.
“Today! Today! Holy fuck you’re meeting him today. Wait is this why he’s been off social media maybe Yellow Wood was building up to this announcement that means you’re the reason his new drama’s being postponed and fucking fuck you’re seeing him today! You have to let me go with you – take me as an assistant I will do anything–”
“Woah, hold your horses there,” Minho says, hands up and defensive as if he’s actually calming down a wild horse. “I can’t.”
“What! Why not?”
“I mean I don’t really need an assistant and his manager was very specific about the fact that it was only going to be him and Han there. And that they only wanted me.”
Jeongin takes a deep breath, and several more, just to say, “Are you lying because I got too hype about it? I can calm down. This is the best day of my life. You have to let me come.”
The whole department, despite Jeongin’s distaste for them, could write sonnets about his fox eyes – they’re all literature-inclined so you know they’re not joking – about the way they almost disappear when he smiles, how hooded and black they get when he’s upset, the way they sparkle when he gets going about something he loves. The last is the rarest. And in his short time here, no one has been able to deny Jeongin when he pulls those eyes and a pout.
Though Minho believes himself at least partially immune from these charms, it’s also his time to be the adult. The adultier adult, since technically Jeongin came of age last year. A proper sunbae. And though it’s the last thing he likes to do – he’s fun, unlike Seungmin – he needs to pull some rank and show him how things work around here. Beat some sense into him. Figuratively, of course.
“I can’t,” he repeats. Jeongin predictably opens his mouth in protest, but Minho ploughs ahead. “And that’s final. Besides, if they asked for it to be private, they probably have a good reason right? Do you want to be that fan who invades their idol’s privacy?”
Jeongin looks properly cowed already, so Minho holds his tongue from saying any more. Minhyuk can take over on reiterating client disclosure policy at a later point.
“You said you owned some extended cuts?” Minho says, hoping to divert the topic. Jeongin nods cautiously. “Do they have director’s interviews and stuff?”
“Yeah, and actor interviews. And the extra scenes obviously.”
“Can I borrow them? You know, for research?”
Heaving a sigh that signals to Minho that he’s returned to his baseline personality of snark and nonchalance, Jeongin acquiesces, with a grumble under his breath that sounds suspiciously like, “So close yet so far.”
Minho doesn’t both smother the laugh that bubbles out of him.
“It’s just this session, Innie. I’ll see if I can get you in on a different one!”
The only response he gets is a vulgar hand gesture which surely breaks several of the unspoken rules of seniority.
“So Minho-ssi, what do you like to do in your free time?”
Standard interview question. Bring it on. “People tend to call me a workaholic since I like to work on my projects even after I clock off but recently I’ve been dedicating myself to my own works and passion projects. Little short stories here or there. Other than that, I like going drinking with my friends, catching up on the latest drama's, learning some girl group choreo or calling my parents for a chat.”
Practiced smile at the end, perfect alignment of his adorably attractive bunny teeth and a slight eye smile to bring out the sparkle in his eye. Seungmin calls this routine idiotic whenever he’s practicing to butter up Minhyuk to appeal for a project but it works so he’s not going to be stopping any time soon.
Chan lights up and cracks a smile at the mention of dramas, but the A-tier celebrity sitting next to him doesn’t react at all. Han doesn’t even lift his eyes from the iced Americano in his hands, the clinking of the ice in his cup louder than the boy himself has been for the past fifteen minutes.
Minho swallows the needles in his throat, too scared of being thought of as boring by the actor but also too hopeful to miss this golden employment opportunity. As much as he wants to say that it doesn’t matter how much the actor likes him when his manager is doing the hiring, this whole sort-of interview was constructed for the purpose of giving them a face-to-face meeting before Minho got hired. That is, giving Han the option to reject him at the drop of a hat if his personality isn’t up to par.
But how is Minho supposed to use his good-looking face and eye-smile to butter him up if he won’t even look at him.
“What kind of dramas do you like then? Do you enjoy movies as well?” Chan prods, scooping up his own drink, a hot chocolate that he had deemed the best on this side of town. His other hand is trapped under the table by what looks like the vice grip of Han's left.
Is this a test? Is Minho supposed to rattle off every drama and movie that Han has starred in to date and herald them as the greatest masterpieces of all time? Or is that cheap of him? He should probably just be honest, right? Lying is all well and good in interviews to bag the job but in a character test like this he assumes they would respect his candour and sincerity over sycophantic compliments. But what does he know, he’s never employed anyone.
He should’ve let Jeongin talk more when he was babbling about Han's skill this morning. Okay, to be fair, it’s not a hardship to name anything he’s starred in. Much less pick one that did well, because they all did. Minho’s only drawing a blank because he hasn’t watched any recently.
“I usually watch corny romcoms or absurd melodramas,” he says, tacking on a laugh to the end of his sentence to avoid the awkwardness that is soon to follow. Han Jisung isn’t known for corny shows. He’s known for artsy, ground-breaking, emotionally compelling. Anything but the written in a trash can soap operas he’s just admitted to enjoying. It’s like telling a writer your favourite book is Fifty Shades of Grey.
Okay, fuck candour – Minho can barely sit through five seconds of Chan’s possibly taped on smile. Seungmin is wrong. Buttering up always works. “I’ve been getting into suspense drama’s lately though. Sect of the Sun was really interesting.”
He’d only watched bits of a few episodes in the moments between meals and chores or the stray clip recommended on his YouTube front page, but no one needs to know that. Sect of the Sun isn’t uninteresting by any means. It’s probably one of the better pieces of media Minho invested his time in, frankly. He’s just been too occupied to commit to properly finishing it. Or starting it even.
The clips were good, okay? And Minho’s just intellectual enough to be able to ascertain the entertainment value of a piece of media based on five second cuts.
“Really?” Chan beams. “Jisung was really proud of that one. Right, Jisungie?” He nudges the actor with his trapped arm. For a second it seems like there’s going to be no response, until Han gives an almost imperceptible tilt of his head.
Yet still, silence.
Even with how little he knows pop culture, he can’t help but know about Han. Minho wouldn’t call himself a fan, but he’s watched interviews of his own volition. There’s not a single thing about him that is quiet in those. He has a presence that takes up the whole room, and he's louder than a speaker at a concert. If he wants his ideas heard, he will make sure of it. To compare that, to compare the idol that Jeongin got so excited over and the person Minho saw cracking jokes left and right, to the boy slack in his chair without a word or opinion to share?
The incongruence rings out in his bones. The café is warm – it’s spring after all – and yet a shiver racks its way up Minho’s spine.
“I had so much fun watching it as well,” Chan continues, unperturbed by Han's lack of response. “Even though I was on set. It was a different kind of magic to see the later scenes come together.”
Sensing the conversation tilt towards the show, which once again he has not watched, he hastens to move the topic towards something he does know. Something he can talk about. Gush over even. It took him a year after The Last Worst Day swept the award show season to watch the film but once he had, it skyrocketed to one of his favourites of all time.
On the scale of consuming media for entertainment value versus to gain insight and knowledge through it, painstakingly analysing and deciphering hidden meanings, Minho is much inclined to the former. If his predisposition towards soap operas hasn’t said enough about that already. But he’s not absolutely brain-dead. He enjoys a cognitive exercise every so often, when he musters up the energy to care. And The Last Worst Day wasn’t just about making the audience feel dumb about not understanding it.
Most of the movie is just about a kid struggling through drug rehabilitation, the kid being Jisung. And it’s not really ‘just’ if Minho’s being honest. The performance is gut-wrenching. So much so that he’d hardly been able to separate it as a performance. It felt too raw, like watching someone through the actual throes of their withdrawal, all that ugly distorted anger and desperation and hurt as the body expelled the drugs, wringing out the worst of his doped up self. Like the perverted act of filming someone through their real-life recovery.
It wasn’t, of course. Han had made a whole statement about the disparity of the script to his real-life and backed it up in several press interviews before an unprecedented hiatus. But it had still made Minho tear up and jolt backwards in his seat at the unbecoming demands of where his pills were and the keening, wretched pleas for his mother to let him in whenever he saw the scene.
And that was without the layers of film-making, editing, writing and symbolism highlighting the capitalist pitfalls that drew people into drug addictions, that kept them there, the commentary on poverty ridden communities, the parallels and full-circle narrative. Minho must’ve watched at least ten analysis videos on YouTube the same evening he watched the film, devouring every crumb of hidden easter eggs and meanings laid out like a trail. It took him weeks to rid himself of the obsession to find more.
Sure that was years ago, but it’s worth talking about.
Way more worth it than some drama he’s barely seen.
He really should’ve headlined with that.
“The Last Worst Day is probably my favourite though,” Minho says. He’s surprised to see the wattage of Chan’s smile dim momentarily before it draws up again at Minho’s declaration of love towards it. "No toxic masculinity here but I’m not really a crier and that movie made me shed a good few tears. Not to mention I spent weeks watching videos about it online.”
It’s weird to be saying this to the lead actor of the film. Something like an out-of-body-experience, or a dream he needs to slap himself awake from. At least the admiration trapped inside his head is finally meeting its proper recipient.
If said recipient is still listening.
From the looks of it, his focus has been sucked back to his drink, now trying to peel off the sticker detailing his order from the cup. The condensation has loosened the edges but he seems dedicated to the task of making a clean rip from the plastic, with none of the sticker gunk and paper remains tracking. Dedicated to the point of not heeding Minho’s compliments.
Maybe that’s kind of the whole point. Chan said comfort, right? That was the word he had used in the email. Maybe Han is more comfortable not saying anything at all, not being seen at all. Who’s Minho to judge?
He tries to spend the rest of the hour facing Chan, the manager, and with only the occasional glimpse at Han, the actor, to find out where his gaze is fixed on next. It travels around the store, from his drink to the placement of hands and arms on the table, to the table itself, to the cashier in a thousand mile stare and then out the window. He never once looks at Minho, or even remotely close enough to catch his gaze.
It’s fine, because after a certain time, that’s not the point. The more Minho ignores him, the brighter Chan’s posture seems to glow, the only sign Minho has that this is going well. So he abandons Han's direction in total.
For his part, Chan seems endlessly capable of sustaining a forty minute conversation all on his own, a good portion of which is Minho gushing on the genius of The Last Worst Day and Chan validating his praises with concurrence. And for Minho’s part, he rounds out to five o’clock feeling like he’s got this one solidly in the bag. Chan’s demeanour hints so.
Nevertheless, in the seconds before Minho takes his leave from the table, in that gap of time where his ass hovers above the seat in the movement to get out, Han finally turns his gaze towards him, and Minho’s hearts rattles violently at being given the opportunity to assess the judgement that has been made of him.
Han is glaring at him.
Right, so he’s definitely fucked that one up.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Han Jisung Autobiography Job
Lee Minho-ssi,
It was lovely to meet you yesterday. I hope you got home safely and that you had a relaxing night. Of course, you already know that the agency has accepted my proposal to work with you but after our meeting at the café yesterday, Jisung has also informed me that he would like to go ahead with the project with you as the ghost-writer!
Attached to this email are several non-disclosure agreements, contracts, and other forms the company needs you to sign to be on board. Take your time to read through these before you sign them, but ensure you have them returned by the end of this business week.
Independent to the agencies mandates, I would also like to invite you to the villa in which Jisung, his other manager Changbin and I will be staying at throughout the course of his hiatus. If you agree, we will set you up with a guest room with a reduced rent and provide amenities for your stay to make it more comfortable for you to complete the book. All terms and conditions of this offer are outlined in the document titled ‘Stay-in Contract’ and to reiterate this is absolutely not a requirement of the job but merely an offer.
If all forms are submitted in time, we will be on track to begin working on the book in two weeks’ time. Thank you for having us and I hope we can work together well!
Yours most sincerely,
Bang Christopher Chan
Contact: [email protected]
Ok, so he didn’t fuck up.
How the fuck did he not fuck up?
It takes less than a minute for Minho to decide he doesn’t care. Who the hell cares about anything? He’s got a guaranteed best-seller, a discounted luxury villa stay and personal time with Korea’s hottest celebrity lined up for the next six months.
He'll be lucky if he care about anything ever again.
ALLHALLYU
Update: Yellow Wood Entertainment Has Finally Released Announcement on Actor Han Jisung’s Activities
After Han’s mysterious disappearance from social media four weeks ago and the following announcement of delays on his newest drama, fans have been rampantly speculating on the cause of his sudden break. Some netizens have drawn attention to similar happenings four years ago when Han took a seven month hiatus shortly after changing management to Yellow Wood Entertainment. While for the past month it was unconfirmed whether or not the pause in social media activity and delay notice meant a hiatus, Yellow Wood has finally released an announcement this morning on their official webpage offering clarification.
“Hello, this is Yellow Wood Entertainment.
We would like to share a notice on the health and schedule of Han Jisung.
Due to personal reasons, he will be taking a hiatus of undetermined length.
These are the events and activities that will be cancelled due to the hiatus:
- June 12th (Saturday) Fansign Event
- June 13th (Sunday) Fansign Event
- Guest appearance on ‘Everyday Counsellor’
Tickets for the Fansign events can be refunded using this link, or given priority access in buying the remaining tickets for other Fansign events using the same link.
These are the events and activities that will be delayed due to the hiatus:
- Filming and airing of the drama ‘Unsolved’
- August 22nd (Saturday) Fansign Event
Additional announcements will be made in case of any changes to Han’s schedule.
We apologize for worrying fans and ask for your understanding. The Yellow Wood staff are making sure he receives the help and rest to be able to return to his activities.
We ask that fans continue to send Han your support as well.”
While many fans are accepting the official announcement and sending their well-wishes to the actor, others are sceptical about the lack of reasoning for the break and continue to speculate.
One popular theory is that the sudden and elongated break is in part to push the promotions and popularity of the agency’s other talents. Many have jumped onto this story after anonymous twitter users claiming to have relatives in the company spread stories about executive decisions and the possibility of a new idol group debuting.
While this idea is certainly gaining some traction with Yellow Wood releasing suspicious teasers, many fans are fighting back against this narrative and encouraging fellow fans, who have named themselves Sungshine’s after the actor’s given name, to trust the official word of the company rather than internet rumours.
What do you think?
Comments (247)
RESIDENTIAL TENANCY AGREEMENT
This agreement is made on the 20th day of May 2022 at Seoul
Between
Min Byeongsung & Seo Byulyi
(LANDLORDS)
And
Lee Minho
(TENANT)
- PREMISES
The LANDLORD lets the premises known as 9 Seojeok-ro, Gangwon Precinct, 2039 together with those items indicated in the schedule.
- RENT
The testament is ₩686,121 per month.
The date the first rent payment is due is on 20 May 2022.
- PERIOD
The period of the agreement is fixed commencing on the 20th day of May, 2022 and ending on the 20th day of November 2022.
Unless the agreement terminates in accordance with the Residential Tenancies Act 1997, the agreement, will continue as the periodic tenancy.
- USE OF PREMISES
The TENANT must not use or allow the premises to be used for an illegal purpose.
The TENANT must not use or allow the premises to be used in such a manner as to cause nuisance or to cause interference with the reasonable peace, comfort or privacy of any occupier of neighbouring premises, as well as the existing TENANTS of the premises (Seo Changbin, Bang Chan, Han Jisung).
- ASSIGNMENT OR SUB-LETTING
The TENANT must not assign or sublet the whole on any part of the premises without the written consent of the LANDLORD and the existing TENANTS (Seo Changbin, Bang Chan, Han Jisung). The LANDLORD’s consent must not be unreasonably withheld.
- RESIDENTIAL TENANCIES ACT 2001
Each party must comply with the Residential Tenancies Act 2001
(NOTE: Reference should be made to the Residential Tenancies Act 2001 for further rights and duties)
Signed by the LANDLORD: _____________ (Min Byeongsung)
In the presence of (name of witness): Seo Byulyi
Signed by the TENANT: _____________ (Lee Minho)
In the presence of (name of witness): Kim Seungmin
The blessed thing about Minho’s job is that he doesn’t even need to be at the company building to do it. Other people do, the ones who run messages through various personnel, meet up face to face with clients to verify them, push emails and run meetings with officials. But Minho’s whole job is writing. Occasionally he meets up with people to clarify what it is he’s writing, but for the most part the job is just piecing words together to make a blank page not blank anymore. And with something worth reading.
He can do that practically anywhere.
Except near large (or small) bodies of water. You know, electricity and all that? He dabbled with trying to type in a bathtub one time and went through a nervous breakdown after he dropped it in. The situation had been solved only by Seungmin, who revealed a whole hour after the debacle and ensuing breakdown that he had an almost up-to-date version saved on his own laptop.
He’s sworn off water for the time being but is game to try anywhere else. The local park and a spot on a wide tree stump removed from the busier parts has worked wonders on his writers block many a times, and he’s game to try any new café or book store that pops up on his radar, on top of the ones he already frequents.
That being said, the only times he actually shows up at the Blue Moon building is on Mondays and Fridays for meetings Minhyuk insists are mandatory. They’re mostly just status updates of the department and all their current projects, calls for collaborations and confirming the details that have been confirmed a million times over. The saving grace of it is seeing Jeongin and shining up that spark in his eye, giving him more reason to put Minho on a pedestal. He never really gets tired of feeding his own ego.
Which is all to say that Minho is sure as hell not going to miss that building – or his apartment for that matter – for the following six months.
The furniture in the apartment isn't his anyway and he’s been meaning to find one with a better lease and landlord. This is the perfect opportunity – a well-timed six month deadline – to search for one, all while living in the comfort of someone else’s home. Seungmin comes over the day Chan sends over all the forms to be his witness as he signs the chunk of them, rent lease included, scanning over them carefully as was advised. It takes the whole evening, and he ends up cooking a makeshift dinner for Seungmin for all his troubles, but does so with no little amount of grouching.
He has the heart to feel a little bad for Jeongin, but the non-disclosure agreement and tenancy contract and well, all of the forms really, had been very insistent on the fact of not involving unnecessary or ‘non-essential’ personnel to the task. And as Minho had explained earlier, Jeongin was especially unnecessary. Not for any fault of his own skill or character, but because Minho was plenty on his own. All the other processes would come in once Minho had finished initial draft - the editing staff, publishing and marketing - but an intern was a wild cog in the wheel and the definition of non-essential.
So the promise goes unfulfilled, for now. Surely once this is all done, Han will do his graces and visit Blue Moon Publishing and give all the staff a chance to meet him though.
It takes predictably little time to package up everything he wants to take from his apartment. He’s not frugal by any means, but his clothes fit into two and a half suitcases, the books lining his shelves fit into a singled cardboard box, random keepsakes and appliances fit into another and the rest – an assortment of kitchen utensils and self-owned bits of furniture – he sends to his parents to keep until he moves into a new place where he’ll need them. He thought briefly about packing them away in a storage facility, but those places tax you just to give you an empty room and his parents complain about their old chopstick sets and cracked bowls when he calls home each weekend anyway.
Chan had mentioned in the email that it was a massive place, and attached several images after the initial offer to showcase the rooms in the interest of full transparency but the scale of it still surprises Minho when he arrives not even a week later, leases and NDA’s all signed.
Far from the city, removed from society but still near the necessary amenities, the place in in prime real estate location, with privacy and convenience in equal parts. Minho started counting the streets from the last convenience store as he turned onto the smaller roads, but it’s no more than a ten minute drive, perfectly reasonable. The general store and grocers are a bit farther away but it’s a small sacrifice for such a beautiful place.
Two stories tall and wide as a bona-fide palace, the thing looks like something out of a British period piece. Sun-washed stones, vines of ivy creeping around the edges of the building, but just enough that it feels intentional, like a stylistic choice that renders the aesthetic of it more rustic and mysterious. The sunny weather lightens the house’s aura, placed in a clearing between a sea of trees so that the rays land on it like a spotlight, and with how the windows gape from the walls, he can imagine how much sunlight the rooms get, basking them in a golden glow as the sun sets, warming them up during the day.
The surrounding foliage and a cleared out lawn, decked with a steadily spewing fountain of tasteful design – instead of those naked babies Minho loathes – completes the regal image. If Minho winds his car around the bend of the driveway a smidgeon more he can see a lake peaking it’s way from the backyard.
A fucking lake.
The ownership of the estate gets complicated. Chan was quick to correct the assumption that it belonged to either Han or himself, but refused to disclose anything further under the excuse that it was ‘a long story.’ After excessive wheedling, and confusion at the names inscribed upon the Tenancy Agreement, Chan explained that Han had a secondary manager and bodyguard by the name of Seo Changbin, the other recipient of their email correspondence, and said manager’s sister had married rich. Not by any manipulation or particular scheme, she had just been lucky enough that her college sweetheart was loaded.
So by way of rich brothers-in-law, Changbin had been allowed to stay at the villa, Han and Chan along with him, though the location was obviously specifically chosen for Han and to afford some semblance of isolation. It was the ideal place, if that was your purpose, with a healthy side of beautiful scenery and high class amenities.
A built man – Minho assumes this is Changbin, only because the villa has no more than three occupants and he’s already seen two of them – comes down the marble steps spilling from the front entrance to help Minho with his luggage, probably hearing his weary old Camry trundling across the gravel lot. Despite the growing heat in the lead up to the summer climate, he’s decked out in an all-black outfit and miraculously he doesn’t seem to be sweating through it anywhere.
Minho steps out of his car to greet him in kind.
“Hey! Chan’s out to get stuff for a dinner feast so I’ll help you move stuff to your room. The name’s Changbin,” he says, extending his hand for a shake, which Minho easily obliges. He doesn’t expect to be pulled in by the same hand into a hug but accepts his fate as two firm pats hit his back. “Looking forward to living with you and I sincerely hope you know how to cook because none of us do.”
“You just said Chan-ssi went out to buy groceries.” Minho narrows his brows in confusion.
Changbin waves his hand in dismissal. “He can cook enough to not make us starve but if you have standards at all it’s not that great.”
Minho calculates the man’s flippant attitude and concludes it’s okay to laugh. “Well my standard’s at two minute noodles, so anything better than that is scrumptious.”
Minho is well versed in courtesy laughs thanks to his trademark Weird Personality, so he’s honoured to note than Changbin’s snort and full-bellied cackle are entirely genuine.
“Let’s get you settled,” he says, stifling his laughter, and promptly cracks open Minho’s boot to get to work.
It’s a task, even for the two of them – Changbin’s glistening muscle and Minho’s moderate fitness – to transport all the luggage to the second floor, mostly because the chiseled stairs don’t really lend themselves to suitcases being dragged over them and Minho would rather die than accidentally damage something here and have to pay the restoration costs. He might go bankrupt.
He’s even more careful packing everything away in the room once Changbin leaves him with the stuff. On the opposite end of the hall from the three of them, separated by the lead-in to the stairs down the middle of the passageway, his room is more spacious than the living room, kitchen and bedroom of his previous apartment combined. Given, his kitchen and living area were essentially the same room and his bedroom no more than an offshoot but to imagine it as no more than a fraction of a single room in the villa sends Minho’s mind reeling with the scope of the place. There are rooms Minho hasn’t even seen yet, extending further out on the ground floor than he had ventured.
As he makes himself at home, he catalogues the state of everything in the room, with his brain as well as his phone camera to exonerate himself from any responsibility if they find faults and also to remind himself to preserve it as it is. No rushing into the room and chipping the bedframe. No slamming the door and risking that the carved wood splinter. No getting drunk and trashing the room only to wake up the next morning with a killer headache and a lawsuit waiting. His bank account can’t handle that.
The whole situation – writing an autobiography for Han, living in a villa that costs billions of won, living in a villa that costs billions of won with Han Jisung – is right on the precipice of going bankrupt. One wrong move, one actionable misdeed and he’ll be taken to court and sued out of his meagre savings. He’s yet to determine if Han and his team are merciless enough to take it that far, but you have to forgive him for being so naturally suspicious of the entertainment industry.
He still gets war flashbacks from when he wrote a book for an up and coming YouTuber and got himself stuck in a lawsuit for infringing the copyright claims of another YouTuber. How was he supposed to know that YouTubers copyrighted stuff? Seungmin had helped him skirt the charges – apparently he was interested in law before he got side-tracked into literature - but he's learnt his lesson.
It’s a colossal gamble, all of it. He stands to make a fuck ton of money, but only at the six-month risk of being able to lose everything he already has.
Chan makes a veritable feast for dinner but Han doesn’t come down to join them.
Search: han
See related topics: Han Jisung (Korean Actor), Actors, Movies [Followed]
Top Tweets
col | semi @jultmember1 • 4h
day 35498 of missing han: i’m going thru all his ancient baby photoshoots and crying over how adorable he was (yes this is a regular activity but the crying is emphasised this time)
[Image attached]
juli @hanslefteyebrow • 5h
han never took hiatus before joining yellow wood and now he's had two major breaks for no reason in the last four years? what in the world is yellow wood doing?
quid @quidproquo • 19h
what the fuck does ‘personal reasons’ mean? i swear idols and celebrities use that all the time to cop out of admitting to shit. remember when that guy left Trouble for ‘personal reasons’ and he turned out to be a felon. something’s fishy… fess up han!
jisung’s girlfriend @hannuk • 22 May
there’s be no sightings of han at all in seoul for the past week. i did see one of his managers driving out of seoul though. maybe he’s on a break? will keep y’all posted as i try to find where han is staying
hourlyhan @hourlyhan • 23 May
admin here! i don’t usually say anything about stan twitter drama but please unfollow @/hannuk. they’ve been a delulu since a while back but now they’re actively invading han’s privacy and leaking the whereabouts of his managers!
Dailyjisung @dailyjisung • 15h
A thread of what we know about Han’s hiatus/what to do:
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First off, go ahead and unfollow @/hannuk, and don’t interact. They’re invading privacy and harassing Yellow Wood staff, it’s honestly embarrassing. I’ll link a separate thread of what they’ve done if you want more info.
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So, Han is on hiatus, for personal reasons. Important thing is that we do not speculate what these personal reasons are; they were not announced for a reason and it is not our job to go digging. Respect his choice and privacy.
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Translators have said though that in the notice Yellow Wood mentions that they are giving Han the "help and rest he needs" to get back, which should further tell you that it is none of our business.
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The hiatus is for an indeterminate period. This doesn't happen often but it just means the company themselves don't know how long he'll be on hiatus and they'll play it by ear. It may lead to more events, shoots and airings being delayed or cancelled.
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So far the two June fansigns and his guest appearance on Everyday Concellour were cancelled. The August fansign and the shooting and airing of Unsolved has been postponed. Further announcements will be made at any time so I’ll keep people updated!
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That’s what we know so far. As for what we should do, we need to make sure that we maintain his privacy, and don’t share around rumours about his situation. Many antis are going to take this as an chance to drag him down but don’t bother with them. It’s not about fanwars.
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At the same time, while it’s okay to miss him, try not to say guilt-trippy things to force him back into work. It’s likely he looks at social media like the rest of us and the hiatus is meant to be a rest for him.
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That’s all, Sungshines. Let’s stay strong and support our boy in these tough times!
misty | comms open @mistty • 23 May
didn’t this hiatus thing with han happen a few years ago as well? guess he’s finally gone off the rails
Kimchi Jjigae (Grandma’s not Mum’s)
** difference between kimchi-jjigae and kimchi-guk is that kimchi jjigae is thicker and saltier. (and probably other stuff but eh)
(serves 2 with side dishes, serves 4 without)
Ingredients
- 1 pound kimchi, cut into bite size pieces
- ¼ cup kimchi brine
- ½ pound pork shoulder (or pork belly)
- ½ package of tofu (optional), sliced into ½ inch thick bite size pieces
- 3 green onions
- 1 medium onion, sliced (1 cup)
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 2 teaspoons sugar
- 2 teaspoons gochugaru
- 1 tablespoon gochujang
- 1 teaspoon chamgireum
- 2 cups of anchovy stock (**or chicken or beef broth)(which means chicken stock bc eww anchovies)
For stock (makes about 2½ cups’ worth):
7 large dried anchovies, heads and guts removed⅓ cup daikon, sliced thinly4×5 inch dried kelp
Fuck that no anchovy stock just buy chicken stock from the grocer’s
Method
- Place the kimchi and kimchi brine in a shallow pot. Add pork and onion
- Slice 2 green onions diagonally and add them to the pot.
- Add salt, sugar, hot pepper flakes, and hot pepper paste. Drizzle sesame oil over top and add the chicken (chicken, not anchovy) stock.
- Cover and cook for 10 minutes over medium high heat.
- Open and mix in the seasonings with a spoon. Lay the tofu over top.
- Cover and cook another 10 to 15 minutes over medium heat.
- Grandma says you need to chop another 1 green onion and put it on the top of the stew but I don’t want to. Do it or not, I don’t care.
- Remove from the heat and serve right away with rice.
True to Changbin’s word, Chan’s meals are good, but not great. Minho, on the other hand, has confidence about the quality of his cooking but never buys enough groceries or spends enough time with them to make anything decent.
He’s found himself with a lot of free time in this new job.
Of course, there are a few carry on projects that he has yet to complete but he had expected to spend an overwhelming amount of his time here to be taken up by the interviewing and writing process for Han’s book. With such expectations, he had hurried to wrap up the others as quickly as possible, leaving only some loose paragraphs and edits to be made in each before he hands them off to Seungmin – or another editor, they’re all equally capable – where they’ll be lost in the publishing production line of approvals and manufacturing for a year before they get onto book store stands. Or shelves.
While he has a certain reputation in a very niche group, his writing and topics of writing are not so striking that they make headline news or even front of store promotions. He secures a good enough spot in the front half of the store, in a relatively noticeable position on average – he’d know, every few projects he would scour the bookstores in Seoul to see where they are placed, in the event that they even have them – with only a few stores that tuck him away, spine-only display.
None of them have his name on it, but that’s hardly what matters. In fact, that’s the whole part that gives a boost to his pay rates. The façade of self-production warranted a hefty extra dollar.
Point is, he has time.
And groceries, funded by the marvellous Seo Changbin.
Whoever said that the way to a man’s heart is through food was not lying. That’s the absolute and indisputable truth right there, and at a certain point, it’s not even limited to men anymore. Anyone can be wooed with the right quantity and quality of food. Not that he’s trying to woo either of them, Changbin and Chan are both several years older than him and quite preoccupied with their own lives. But he becomes good friends with them through the ingenious proxy of restaurant level meals.
Or so they say. He’s used to these dishes from the practice of his grandmother, and granted it’s been a long time since he’s had her food or even made it himself, but it turns out pretty well. Maybe not five-star Michelin, but worth a complimentary Yelp review, if he does say so himself. And he does.
Cooking is another one of those things that supports his ego. Which is never wrong, the world is a bit lacking in self love right now with the mental health crises of the youth and if he’s well enough to raise those standards, then he should pull his own weight.
They bond over mealtimes – and reach a state where Minho doesn't hesitate with his teasing jabs and prodding banter, feels okay being his unaltered sarcastic self, unleashing his cattier persona.
It’s a result of forcing themselves to eat at a common agreed-upon hour to ‘boost team morale,’ as Chan says, and making conversation whenever they see each other around the house, which is curiously little seeing how big the house is. All of them spend the rest of their days doing… other things. To be honest, it looks like Chan and Changbin are on vacation, which would make sense considering they are Han’s managers and Han’s singular activity for the next half year is to complete his autobiography. But after a few days of keeping his nose where it belongs, he allows it to wander and finds Chan in a fairly leisurely position in the living room with his laptop rested on its namesake – his lap – curtains spread to reveal the floor-to-ceiling window.
Minho assumes the man is simply relaxing, but when he draws closer, Chan’s screen is split between various PDF’s and an email tab, several of them flagged and unread. Turns out that though his primary role at the company is indeed managing Han’s day-to-day schedule, he’s also heavily involved in the public relations and marketing department, as well as the securing of roles and jobs for his talent. Spending his time as a villa doesn’t decrease that duty in the slightest, and the same applies to Changbin, who nevertheless takes it upon himself to monitor the upkeep of the premises.
He knew that work in the industry was tough for everyone involved, but he has the distinct feeling he’s only scratching the surface of whatever that means. It hurts his head though, so he stops thinking about it and retreats to the kitchen to make his Grandmother’s patented mandu as a way to show his consideration for the trials and tribulations of the managers’ jobs.
Perhaps he could drive up to the grocer’s to gather some ingredients for his own feast. But by the time he finishes making the dumpling wrappers from scratch, the thought makes a run for it.
It’s curious that Chan insists on making a small serving of an extra dish every time though.
He knows the man enjoys his food, many a pleased and vaguely uncomfortable moaning around a mouthful has indicated that, so it puzzles him to no end. Chan eats a small serving of it, and leaves the rest out on the counter covered in cling-film. It’s always gone the next morning, but Minho's own leftovers are untouched in the fridge. Or on the counter. After a week he deduces that it makes no difference where his own food is placed, Chan’s takes precedence.
After that same week he stops puzzling. He would say that he has better things to do with his time, but neither manager has made plans or sessions to talk to Han and he would rather kill himself than enter Han’s room, let alone wander towards the other side of the first-floor hallway, without explicit invitation or permission. He bides his time taking a well deserved break. All six months are paid after all, whether he does work or not, so he takes this unexpected vacation not at all for granted.
He explores the various rooms of the house. An indoor pool, which looks especially absurd as the window provides a perfect view of the lake outside. The lake, which admittedly is not a room, but is plenty refreshing, cool and with a relaxing and clean-cut bank of grass near a darn pier to lounge on. A recreation room, fitted with everything from a pool table to a ping pong table, to a TV surrounded by bean bags and all the consoles Minho knows the names to, as well as one he does not. A gym, which he swears never to visit again but he sees Changbin headed towards daily. Though, it checks out when he informs Minho that he actually works as a bodyguard as well as a manager, as well as a driver. The man seems packed with roles.
A theatre room, that he spends a whole day in working his way through the DVD’s stacked up on the walls. A sizeable chunk of them are Han’s works, with several copies of each film and TV season round-up in different stages of release, all of the variety that Jeongin had dedicated himself to collecting. Extended cuts, re-releases, package deals, collectors editions, anniversary sets, dubs in obscure languages, anything with even a slight variation in poster. There’s even a box-set for each new season release of Devil Boy, which ultimately means there’s six copies of the first season. A few of them he doesn’t recognise as Han’s, but after seeing one poster that claimed it featured him in a cameo, he goes through a few other titles online and voila, a dozen more include him as a special guest. A lot are ones he recognises from the copies that Jeongin lent to him for ‘research’ in the week leading up to his move, which he has long since returned after a brief marathon.
The ridiculous thing, Minho eventually realises, is that this isn’t even Han’s house. It isn’t an ego thing like it would be with Minho, who himself has various copies of his own books. This villa belongs to the brother-in-law of his manager, who is either the biggest fanboy the world has seen, with a secret shrine dedicated to the boy, or is just a very adoring sort-of relative. Minho has no clue how to diagnose the correct answer.
He finds The Last Worst Day though and a five-year anniversary re-release that he hadn’t managed to get his hands on, through streaming services or otherwise, and despite it all, it really is one of his favourite movies of all time. The sun is going as he feeds the DVD into the player, draws the sliding doors to the room shut and makes himself comfortable in one of the five spacious recliners, dead centre to the projector.
It’s only a few minutes into the movie when the noise of it attracts two visitors.
Chan is the first to pop his head in, and it’s a testament to his dedication to his job that he doesn’t even have to ask to know what film is playing. And it’s still on the opening company credits. He settles in on Minho’s right without saying a word, and Minho does him the favour of not saying anything back.
Changbin comes in not even thirty seconds later. Minho has the heart to be a bit offended when he takes the seat on the end next to Chan instead of next to Minho, where he would undoubtedly have a better view, but once again refrains from saying anything.
The movie is magic like that. It necessitates silence. You can’t talk even when you want to because you’re so focused on trying to capture everything, experience everything, not missing a detail.
Minho is crying by the end of it. He can’t help himself. He never can, not when it comes to The Last Worst Day.
Chan sniffles from beside him and they don’t say a word about either of their tears.
STARS AND STARS | Reviews
bkogbing • 3 years ago
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The Last Worst Day is the story of a young boy who falls into drug abuse and how his addiction affects both him and all the people around him. Playing the role of the boy, Kang Minjae, is Han Jisung, renowned child actor, and rising adult actor in his own right. The film is not for the squeamish and it has the best drug withdrawal scenes since… well since anything in Korean media.
We meet Minjae with his friends as a group of delinquent school kids. They all play basketball and they all are constantly in trouble, but it’s the innocent kind of any regular teenage boy. Han is your average kid with all the teen angst, self-conscious about his lower class status. His mother, played by Yoon Soyeon, and father, played by Kim Gitaek, work hard every day to make sure they stay in the lower class and not drop dead poor.
But drugs of all kinds are everywhere and while the group dabble with them, Minjae gets hooked.
It’s artistic, the lighting pulls you in from the start, makes you think the whole situation, the drugs, are better than they are because everything looks so pretty. And it devolves so quickly. In a way, the lighting and the appearance of the film represents Minjae’s state of mind. The directors experimented with style and form and it worked. I don’t have a film degree – I can’t tell you exactly what makes a scene or film or technical aspect good – but I can tell you how it made me feel. It was an emotionally devastating ride from start to finish.
There are conversations about whether Minjae is a good person or not, and the existence of the question at all undermines the purpose of the film to highlight the struggles that addicts go through. They are not the most moral or kind or upstanding people through it. That is what drugs do to them, and why they need help.
The movie is absolutely gut wrenching. Han and the rest of the cast give some terrific performances. It's easy to see why he and Yoon Soyeon became the stars they are now because of this film. Hitting the end of his seven year contract period, this was Han’s last project with TG Entertainment before signing with Yellow Wood Entertainment and a subsequent sudden hiatus. A lot of people have doubts on the direction of his career from here, especially with a drop from a big three company to what seems like an indie start-up but I have no doubt Han resuming work and pumping out masterpieces before we know it!
I could sit here for two days typing out every symbol or choice that was made in this movie for specific effect and how it enhances my appreciation, but I’ll let you watch videos about those yourself. It’s worth it. The one thing I will say though, is I adore the title of the movie.
The Last Worst Day is a take on the phrase ‘the last good day,’ used in reference to journeys with a terminal illness. ‘The last good day’ is a phrase that implies despair, that there is no turning back to happiness after a certain point. But The Last Worst Day is the opposite. It is optimism. Hope that sometime in the future, you will reach your worst day, and then, your very last worst day. That you will one day be so much better that the last worst day will be but a distant memory.
It acknowledges that recovery is a process. We don’t know when our last worst day will be, just like we don’t know our last good day until it has passed. But as long as you believe that a certain day is the last worst one, as long as you hope that it is, you can live with a dedication to keep it that way, and someday you will live past your last worst day.
And I love that.
[May 2019]
Minho sees Han for the first time in two weeks after a late dinner. An extremely late dinner. Usually the three of them aim to have something before seven, but it was pushing ten when they finally sat down to eat today. It isn’t Minho’s fault, but he had kind of fallen asleep in the bathtub and the only ingredients the had left were for a pot of kimchi jjigae that Minho wasn’t familiar with but knew would take an hour and a half to make.
The others weren’t much better in that they forgot to even consider food until eight as Minho hadn’t come down to their favoured spots to collect them, at which point they had to tide over their grumbling stomachs with the crisps in the pantry as the stew boiled over.
It is well past eleven now, Minho is leisurely doing the dishes – since it’s his assigned turn – when he catches a glimpse of someone descending the stares. Both of them mutually flinch upon identifying the other.
Han looks… different. Different isn’t the most apt descriptor but it’s the only thing that comes to mind. There’s so much wrong with the image, so many words flitting around his head that ‘different’ is the only one that unites them.
He can’t even see the boy’s clothes underneath the blanket he’s dragged downstairs with him. It’s the comforter of his bed, the thick, heavy thing that is more of a hindrance than convenience in the early-summer heat. Nevertheless, he grasps it desperately around himself, knuckles at the edges about the only body part visible apart from his face, and even tighter when it fully registers that Minho is the one by the sink.
His posture seizes briefly, drawn up in some sort of panic, before it slowly drains out of him and he continues down the stairs.
Minho watches him with eagle eyes as he trudges through the room, slow as a snail and with all the same grace, and pours himself a bowl of the kimchi jjigae, the only thing left on the counter, the remains poured into a separate bowl so that Minho can wash the cooking pot for use tomorrow. He’s so still as he heats both it and a bowl of rice that Minho almost thinks he’s fallen asleep standing until the microwave goes off and he jolts back into alertness.
If sluggishly moving to retrieve the food and amble his way to the barstools can be called ‘alert.’
Minho tries to busy himself by rinsing out the dishes left over in the sink and loading them into the dishwasher but keeps tabs on Han as he simply stares at the food, not eating. For several long minutes, the only sounds in the room are that of the dishes clanking together in the sink as Minho soaps them up then rinses them off.
He finally takes a bite several minutes later, when Minho has already finished with his self-appointed chore.
“This isn’t Channie-hyung’s.”
Minho’s tempted to roll his eyes at the insolence. Is this why Chan had been making an entire separate dish for every meal despite Minho’s own cooking? To appease his actor’s picky habits, lazing around in his room while his two manager scramble to reschedule his events around his sudden passion project that he hasn’t even made an effort to start on? Chan has been working for him, up until late in the night and the one time he’s too tired to make something for Han, he has the gall to be upset?
The internal burst of annoyance surprises Minho himself. Sure, he enjoys his pseudo-vacation, but two weeks of slacking on a personally requested project doesn’t paint the best picture of Han, and after so long Minho is going stir crazy with nothing to write apart from his own personal short stories and writing exercises. He likes his work, likes writing and shutting yourself in your room for a day, two days is fair game but two weeks?
He doesn’t voice any of these complaints, because he’s too consumed by the slight at his cooking in the short-term.
“Well it’s good, isn’t it?”
“It’s not Channie-hyung’s.”
It’s almost comical the way Minho feels the nerves in his temple strain, pushing to burst like they do in manhua drawings.
“Come on, just eat it,” Minho scoffs. “It can’t be that bad.”
Facing front on now, dishes well and truly done, he devotes his full attention to see what Han will do next.
Han drops his spoon back into the bowl, curls the blanket around himself more fully, and just leaves, floating back up the stares with not a word more.
“He asked for your cooking,” Minho tells Chan the next morning at breakfast. Chan stiffens up at the comment. No one needs to ask who ‘he’ is, but it’s the first time Minho has made any initiative to bring him up. “Well, to be exact, he just kept saying that my stew wasn’t yours. But is that why you always made extras?”
Changbin has long since left to do whatever the hell it is he does but Chan had graciously offered to help with the dishes from the pancakes they had made. They had been working silently at them for a few minutes, Chan scrubbing down the oil-splattered stovetop, the sound of running water a soothing white noise in the background. It’s funny how easy-going their relationship is already, that Minho feels okay in their silence and not compelled to make small talk. It’s a feat few have achieved before, and it makes him admire Chan’s steady presence and flawless personality that much more.
Chan pauses at the stovetop, hand so frozen that the disinfectant wipes fall out of them. His motors restart in sections, gaining control of his limbs first and then his neck, and finally schooling his expression back into something more normal.
“Oh my god I forgot to make Jisung his dinner,” he says, not even moving to retrieve the fallen wipe. He brings his gloved hands up to scrub at his forehead, clearly distressed. “Fuck, did he have anything?”
“Like two spoonfuls of soup? He just left without eating the rest,” Minho answers cautiously. “Is it that big a deal?”
Chan blinks at him, and his frantic motions cease again. He looks at Minho as if realising something new about him, like revaluation. Minho squirms under the gaze but waits it out.
“Jisungie has… issues with food,” Chan begins haltingly.
Minho frowns. “Like an eating disorder?” It wouldn’t be unthinkable, with how beauty standards are in entertainment circles, but it makes him sick to the stomach to think about it. To think about it happening to someone he knows, someone he scoffed at. But at the same time, he’s never heard of an eating disorder that means you can only eat food cooked by one person. Sounds a bit niche.
“Not really. He’s not like this all the time either but he just prefers the familiarity of my cooking. And it’s easier for him to eat more, to eat the right amount, if we package it out for him and give him the right proportions. It’s wo– It’s a work in progress.”
Minho doesn’t miss the hasty correction, but can’t fathom what else he was trying to say.
But more than that, he can’t believe it takes this – two weeks of not seeing Han’s face despite living in the same villa, in the semi-middle-of-nowhere, on top of the strict privacy policies leading up to arrangement and his refusal to eat certain food which sounds like a borderline eating disorder – for him to finally consider there might be something else to this all.
“Is it common for actors to not go to shoots for an entire half year?” he broaches carefully.
Chan gives him a quizzical look, like he’s trying to parse something from Minho’s body language. It’s that same confusion, like he’s actively reconfiguring what he thought of Minho, trying to fill in the gaps his rearranging has made. “Haven’t you read the articles?”
Minho returns his gaze, just as puzzled. “I don’t read tabloids.”
Chan returns to his stove, pulling out a new wipe and abandoning the one on the floor in its entirety.
“Jisung’s on hiatus. Probably for the rest of the year.” Neither of them mention that it’s only June now. “But if you’ve kept yourself from the news of it for this long, I wouldn’t recommend searching anything up after this. I think Jisung would prefer to tell you himself, whatever it is.”
So there is something. But Chan has made it clear enough that Jisung is the only authority and Minho can’t imagine he’d react well to Minho interrogating him instead. And he doesn’t even want to take the chances with Changbin’s muscle on the opposing team.
The room returns to the equilibrium of white noise, Chan not willing to add anymore, and Minho not willing to probe any further.
Eventually, Minho sets the last of the pans to dry on the rack and Chan does his last spritz and wipe.
“I’ll talk to him about doing the first session tomorrow.”
Document Name: Han Jisung Biography
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Minho is like, kind of shitting his pants right now. Not literally of course, it’s been decades since that was true in the literal sense and even then, in his potty training days he’d only had one accident, the rest being in diapers thank you very much. He was a quick learner in all senses of the word.
He’s never going to be a quick enough learner to know how to deal with Han Jisung.
But he’s having a session with him in ten minutes and he’s sweating through his meticulously picked outfit. He’s not sure why he even has a meticulously picked outfit because the last time he saw Han, he was wrapped up in a comforter. All boundaries of propriety, at least in the clothing department has been crossed and killed.
His momentary annoyance at the meal debacle quickly transforms into concern, and that ever-present curiosity his existence seems to attract.
It’s weird, the way Han makes him feel. He fluctuates between appearing larger than life and smaller than a stray kitten on the street. There is nothing consistent to him, the human equivalent of a roller-coaster.
Nothing though, that’s he’s seen online or on TV has been remotely similar to what he’s seen in life. Chan had told him not to search up anything but now that he knows that something is being hidden, it’s hard to keep that burning curiosity at bay. Like not taking your eyes off a car crash.
He doesn’t mean to label Han a car crash but it’s the most apt descriptor given by Minho’s detrimental nosiness. There are things he is better off not knowing. That he doesn’t need to know. And it’s not about him. He has enough heart and a conscience to know that much. If Han has something eating disorder-adjacent, if he’s locked himself in his room for two weeks with Chan as his only visitor – an anomaly he should’ve caught onto sooner instead of dismissing it as snobbiness – then it’s got nothing to do with him, and everything to do with Han himself.
It’s not just about keeping in good graces to save himself from bankruptcy. At the risk of sounding like he’s being pitying, Han is a package he’s labelling as fragile, he needs to start treating the situation – and by situation he means Han – with care.
The study is a beautiful place, Minho knows that already from his several days exploring the nooks and crannies of the villa, but it stands under greater scrutiny. There is not a decoration out of place, not a single curve of wood imprints out of line. Though it tempts the rebel inside of Minho to pull the desk slightly off-kilter, for once he allows himself to leave it be and appreciate how impeccable it is.
After a long moment of surveying the mahogany paneling and the view from the window, looking out onto the backyard on the other side of the house from the lake where it leads out into the woods, he sinks into one of the two pine green couches that face each other, attempting to stop his pacing and fidgeting fingers, racing in anticipation for the star’s arrival.
The star, who arrives dressed now not in a comforter but in baggy sweatpants cinched comically at the waist by its drawstrings and an oversized hoodie that he recalls Chan wearing two days ago, with said man in tow. Though when Chan had been wearing it, it seemed like a regular sized hoodie. The comparison makes Minho rethink how tall, or how built he had figured Han to be. Of course, in the past few sightings, he had displayed a tendency to fold in on himself, curl in and make himself even smaller, but the version of him stretched out and proper wasn’t much different. Despite the fact that Minho had looked at the stats online and known they were approximately the same height. It isn’t right to say that Han exudes a sense of tininess, since he has played several an action role, but there is something about him that diminishes himself, even when he isn’t so physically.
He and Chan sit on the other couch.
Thank god Chan, angel among men, is here to act as a buffer. Minho doesn’t think he would’ve survived this confrontation otherwise, though it seems Han is having similar thoughts.
“So where are we supposed to start?” Chan says, putting on the smile for the sake of having at least on in the room.
All of Minho’s apparatus is splayed across the coffee table between the couches, and by that he means his laptop mostly, and a notepad with a pen in case he gets tired of typing and wants to change things up. He grabs the notepad and pen up, because he’s resolved to just asking a few general questions today.
“We can start wherever you want to,” he says, purposefully avoiding Han’s gaze and looking at Chan as he talks. It’s almost a mirror of how they conversed at the café, Jisung pressed into Chan’s side and half-present, while the other two kept the discussion going. “I’m pretty flexible in terms of style so we can go with the broader thematic questions to discern what message or tone we want to go for or just basic chronological order stuff, picking up on key events along the way. Up to you.”
He tries to radiate a casual confidence, to make up for the lack of it from the other side of the room, but the irony is that he draws his inspiration from the very charisma that Han and his colleagues present on camera. It’s always easier to capture the ego and lovableness of a celebrity when said celebrity is your point of reference after all. And someone needs to be the picture of joviality in this scene or the whole thing is going to fall apart pretty soon.
Chan isn’t exactly lacking in joviality, but now that Minho knows to look for it, he can tell that most of it is faked, or wrung out of the depths of his soul for a certain someone in the room.
Han averts his eyes to the laptop and says nothing for a few seconds too many, and look, Minho has never been an inherently self-conscious person but Han has a particular ability to draw that out of him. And really, he hates to build it up, but again, Han is a critically-acclaimed and widely beloved actor and Minho is just Minho. His opinion of Minho matters a lot more right now.
After giving sufficient room for Han to assert his opinion if he wants to, Chan exhales and replies in his stead. “We’ll go with the broader questions to start, if that’s okay? And maybe more of a reverse chronology thing when it gets to that part?”
Reverse chronology? Sure, that’s not the wildest thing someone’s asked for and it definitely makes a lot of sense to backtrack from something you can recollect instantly to the fuzzier details.
“No problem, whatever works. As I said, I’m flexible.”
“Thanks Minho,” Chan says, breaking the professional atmosphere that Minho had tried to create, moulding it back to that easy comradery that he had found with Chan in the past weeks, now with a little addition. Noticing Minho’s joking glare, he puts his arms – or one free arm, Han has once again captured the one closest to him – out in a placating gesture. “Sorry to disturb your roll. As you were saying…”
“Yes, well…,” Minho dithers, clasping his notepad more tightly and getting all the thoughts lined up in his head, posture unconsciously tightening as he did so. “Even with the general questions there are several places to start, so if you don’t mind I’ll take the lead on the flow of the questions?”
Han nods minutely, which is about as much reaction as Minho has gotten from him in well the entire time of knowing him, personally. He accepts it for what it is.
“With that all out of the way, my first question is: do you want this book to be more about you or your acting?”
He says the question to Chan, as he has been saying everything else, but Chan defers to Han this time. It is going to be promoted as his autobiography after all, it makes sense to seek out his direct opinion instead of permitting Chan to fill in the gaps, or fill in the whole story, at every stop.
“Are they supposed to be different?” Han says, finally.
It’s the first time that Han has spoken to him. Really spoken to him, intentionally. The time in the kitchen doesn’t count because if anything, Minho doesn’t think he was supposed to hear the complaint back then. This though, this is a direct response, a verbal response and momentarily Minho can’t help the thought that he voice sounds just as sweet in real life.
It takes an extra second to process the actual content of the words, and then Chan’s keening gasp as he curls his trapped arm further around Han’s but keeps his gaze steady on Minho.
It’s a somewhat concerning answer, but Chan’s response is more worrisome.
“Well yes,” Minho says, wary of saying the wrong thing, stepping the wrong way in a minefield. “One is your career and one is well you as a person, your personality. Likes, dislikes, passions and all that.”
“Well still, is it not the same thing?” Han persists, and Minho starts to consider whether he’s pissed him off somehow.
“That’s really admirable that you feel so strongly about your career, then. I guess it can be both,” Minho compromises. “There’s no reason to separate them if you don’t want to. Where would you say your love for acting comes from?”
Han bites his lip, leaning further into Chan’s side to a point where the line between their two figures blur, nuzzling into the crook of Chan’s neck. Minho watches him passively, curiously, as does Chan, though his gaze seems more tense and his mouth is open as if he’s about to interrupt.
“I don’t know,” he says. Long pauses are becoming a hallmark of this conversation. Minho jots down the half-hearted response, underlining it to come back to when Han speaks up again, demanding his attention. “My mum,” he blurts.
The colour drains out of Chan’s face.
There’s something here.
Something Minho doesn’t deserve to know. Doesn’t need to know. Shouldn’t know. He wants to take back this whole conversation, to rewind past the hollowness in Han’s stare. He’s stepped on that mine he was so desperate to avoid.
“Um, can we stop here for today?” Han asks, voice as soft as ever, teeth biting into his lip.
“Of course,” Minho says, blinking blankly at the scene. He doesn’t know what to do. “Yeah of course, we’ll continue later.”
Jisung leaves without a word, but Minho can hear the dim sound of sniffles as Chan follows him upstairs.
Meeting someone new? Here are twenty questions you can ask to get to know them quickly.
20 Questions to Get to Know Someone Over Text
If you got to choose, what foods would be in your last meal?- Do you have a crush on someone at school?
- What is the last thing you bought for yourself?
- What is your perfect day like?
Who would you call if you were in serious trouble?- What is something that lifts your mood no matter what?
- What’s something you love even though (or because) it’s terrible?
- Do you sleep on your front, side, or back?
What is your worst nightmare?How many people have you kissed/hooked up with?- Mac or Windows?
- Where is your phone when you sleep?
- Where is one place you'd like to go and what would you do there?
What’s something you’d like to see before you die?- If you got to choose your own nickname, what would it be?
Have you done anything illegal?- If you could choose three people to spend a two-week vacation with, who would you choose?
Who in your family are you closest to?- Are you more religious or spiritual?
What is something you are glad you did even though you didn’t want to do it at the time?
First Date Questions
Are you more of a sweet tooth or do you like salty foods?As a kid, what did you want to do when you grew up?- What is your favorite holiday?
What food will you absolutely not eat?What’s your favorite drink?What is your favorite book/movie/song?How often do you see your family?Were you a quiet kid or a troublemaker?What’s on your bucket list this year?What’s something you wish you were talented in?- What’s your favorite sports team?
- Do you like cats or dogs more?
- Are you more of an outdoors person or an indoors person?
Which part of your body are you most proud of?- What do you think is the ugliest animal in the world?
Do you prefer relaxing with family or friends?- If you could live in another country, where would you want to live and why?
- What is your least favorite chore?
Would you rather be rich or famous?How spontaneous are you on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being “leaving the house gives you anxiety attacks” and 10 being “you’ll buy a groupon ticket tonight to go skydiving halfway around the world tomorrow?”
Take two takes a while, considering how much of a train wreck take one was, but it happens. They’ve already made a down payment on Minho’s services and a commitment to living with him for a considerable while so they must decide that it’s worth another shot at the least.
There are long days between the attempts. Days where Chan disappears as effectively as Han and where he can sense the unease wafting from Han’s room. But he comes back for take two regardless. Minho admires him for that, if not for anything else, but there is a lot to be admired about Han.
This time it’s supposed to be only Minho and him in the room. Something about Han saying there were ‘too many emotions’ with Chan in there as well. Minho doesn’t really get it, and he’s more scared now than ever that he’ll say something wrong to set Han off again, especially if he couldn’t tell he was heading to dangerous territory with Chan in the room. How is he supposed to have any idea if it’s just him?
But he was privy to hearing many a debate – a la argument – about this from across the hall and Han is dead-set on his decision. It’s the most determined he’s been on anything, so Minho is inclined to agree.
Han is already in the study when Minho walks in, reclined on the same couch he was last time. There’s something strange about his demeanour, though that observation begs the question of when his demeanour was ever normal. It’s a trick question without an answer. The one thing however, is that Han is much more disposed to the idea of talking this time around.
“I’m sorry,” he says, as he notices Minho waltzing in. “For how much of a mess I was last time.” He eyes rove upwards and he reconsiders. “All the time actually. I’m working on that.”
“I see,” Minho says. “Well hopefully this session will go a lot better, Han-ssi. I came up with a different style.”
Han opens up his body, unfurling from the position he’d wrapped himself into on the couch and it’s perhaps the first glimpse of something more relaxed in him. He’s not hiding anymore, but perhaps that’s in part due to the fact that he doesn’t have anyone to hide behind. Maybe that was the rationale of kicking Chan out, though Minho is fairly sure both him and Changbin are monitoring their progress from a few doors down.
“That’s good to hear,” Han says. “What do you have for me?”
Minho grins. This time he really needs all that bravado and confidence on his side; he has a lot more to compensate for without Chan here.
“We’re going to play twenty questions!”
Han cocks his head.
As if the action was a question, Minho bulldozes through with an explanation. “I searched it up online. Well, the idea is just to ask basic get-to-know-someone kind of questions but I wanted some inspiration. They’re all lowkey, just pretend we’re at a college orientation event or something.”
Han observes him quietly for a moment before nodding his understanding. He gains a glint in his eyes, something that was noticeably lacking before and Minho can’t even question it when a pretty smile adorns his face. “Got it,” he says and fuck Minho definitely does not feel a heat rising to his face at how his cheeks lift with the smile. He’s an actor, it’s natural for him to be a little handsome. But more than that…
Coupled with the pastel shades of his baggy clothing, he looks like a melting lump of sugar rather than a human being. But Minho does not like cute things. He does not.
He starts with the questions to ignore any and all bodily or heartily responses to the sudden appearance of the smile.
“First question!” Minho declares. “What’s your favourite colour?”
Despite the simplicity of the task, Han gapes. “Wait, that simple?”
“Yeah, college orientation. Twenty questions. Getting to know each other. What’s not clicking?”
“I mean – I guess…” Han sighs, but it’s amused if anything. Which means Minho’s scored two Han Happiness points today, and yes that’s something he made up on the spot and yes it sounds ludicrous but now Minho’s attached to the concept and wants to see it through. If only in the recesses of his mind. “Red, I guess. I always like the red-flavoured lollies so red.”
Minho nods along imperiously, giving the answer all the weight in the world. “Good choice, and an interesting reason too. Most people say ‘just because’ or ‘I own a lot of red clothes’ or something to that effect. I like your use of evidence. Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention but you can ask me questions back as well. If you’d like to that is.”
Han straightens himself up at that, not exactly nodding but giving every other bodily sign of agreement.
“Okay then. Twenty questions each. It’s your turn now.”
Han startles at the sudden passing off, but recovers himself quickly. His fingers are fidgeting with each other, but Minho graciously ignores the sign of nerves, as Han himself is willing to push past it.
“Give a man some time to prepare,” he chuckles. “Whatever, I’ll ask you what you’re favourite colour is as well.”
Minho laughs, not unkindly. “Mine is blue, so I guess we kind of match. Complementary colours and all that. I spoke all high and mighty about it but I don’t really have a good reason for liking it. Just do.”
Minho had taken care curating his list. Even with the example sets online, he’d went back to scrub the clean of any questions revolving around family, noting it was a sore spot and wanting to play it safe instead of risky. In the same vein, anything about childhood was gone and in a sort of similar vein (Minho doesn’t know enough about human biology to make a relevant connection to an appropriate metaphor) anything about food. Which was a concerning lot. Most people tended to have the same idea as Minho, using food to worm their way into someone’s heart. It proved his theory but at the current moment he wasn’t all to pleased with having been vindicated.
“Are you an indoor or outdoor person?” he asks, picking the next safe one off his personally collected list.
“Indoor,” Han says, without missing a beat. “Indoor all the way. Don’t even get me started about all the shoots I had to do outside for the action movies. All the unregulated temperatures, the sand, the moving. I’m gonna ask you the same for my turn, not because I’m unoriginal but because I can’t place you as either.”
Minho hums in consideration. He hadn’t expected that Han would want to ask the questions back, even if he offered, so accordingly he hadn’t put much time into brainstorming his own answers.
“I think I’d say indoor as well, but not for the same reasons. I used to dance so it’s definitely not that I hated moving. There are more facilities indoor I guess, especially for the kinds of sports I did.”
“Oh cool. I used to do dance for a bit too when I was little. We stopped when it didn’t really help me with any of my roles but I remember it being fun. I’d do a pirouette to prove it to you but I seriously don’t remember anything. Also I don’t think I did ballet, so that might be a hurdle,” he says, smirking at the image to himself.
That rouses a laugh out of Minho, but that odd satisfaction in Han’s eyes returning seizes the sound right out of his chest.
This is the Han from interviews, Minho realises. Not in his entirety, but regaining that charisma. It’s a part of the front that he puts on. He feels guilty for the thought that he wants it there, that it’s easier if he has that guard. It’s not fair on Han though, it doesn’t change how he feels, just preserves, and treasures Minho’s comfort over his own.
He hadn’t even noticed. He had allowed Han to fool him with the front.
Instead of prompting him with the next question, Minho says, “You don’t have to act around me, Han-ssi.”
Han rears back as if he’s been slapped and the glint, any sort of light at all, drops out of his eyes. The slight uptick his mouth falls back into a neutral line and his frame deflates back in on itself, a balloon losing all its helium. Minho a week ago might have said he looked callous but now all he sees is a scared and lonely kid.
“Who says I’m lying?” Han says, and maybe he intends it to be scathing but all that comes out is a weak whimper, words that barely fill the room. “I’m not acting. I’m… This is Han. This is who you wanted. You were laughing.”
There’s a growing sense of dread billowing like the beginning winds of a storm in Minho’s gut. He needs to call Chan.
“I’m going to bring Chan-ssi,” he announces, making to stand up. The hand grasping onto his sleeve doesn’t stop him in any physical capacity but it does make him stall in his spot.
“Don’t bring Channie-hyung. I can’t be Han around hyung right now. I can’t–”
“You don’t need to be anyone around me, Han-ssi.”
“No, I do. You don’t understand but I do.”
Minho deliberates.
He doesn’t know what the right option is. If he should go and get Chan anyway. If he should let Jisung go back to being Han. He can’t call him Han in his head anymore, not with the implications of whatever that means. He doesn’t know what to do but for now maybe he could stand to stop and listen.
“If I don’t understand, then explain it to me. As much or as little as you want.”
Maybe he’s making the wrong decision and maybe this mistake is going to cost him, but it’s worth it to afford Jisung some modicum of understanding.
“At your own pace,” he’s careful to assure.
The space between the couches feels like a ravine, a gap Minho thought would have been easy to cross but now rings like the idea of a silly child. There’s a discrepancy between them, between every part of them. Minho has no clue what kind of life Jisung had led and Jisung probably doesn’t know either. If there’s any hope of bridging that chasm, if he even wants to try, this is the first step.
“Han is perfect,” Jisung begins. “And he’s the one I need to be because he makes this easier. To talk to, to get funny anecdotes out of. Jisung is a mess right now so Han is who I need to be. Who you need me to be. No one likes me – they like the characters I play. And that’s okay. That’s the point. That’s why Han exists. He’s another character for people to fall in love with.”
The exhale that leaves Minho is shaky, broken. Jisung has returned to his near-catatonic, blank state and that leaves Minho terrified.
“Like I said Han-ssi, no, Jisung. I don’t need, or even want you to put up a front. I don’t want your media trained persona, no matter how charismatic or funny or likable he might be. I’m writing a book about Jisung, not Han, and I want to get to know Jisung, not Han.”
The light in Jisung’s eye is unlike anything he’s ever seen. There is no right comparison or word he can use to describe it, all of it falls so ruefully flat. He could spend the next ten years trying to phrase it right and not even come close to something that expresses the revitalising of Jisung’s entire body.
“You do?” It’s barely a whisper and in the lingering silence, Minho knows Jisung is reviewing every past interaction to examine how Minho might’ve decided this when all the basis he has is that Jisung doesn’t talk, is sensitive to changes in routine, clings to Chan and cries at the bare mention of his mother. It’s possible he also noticed Minho skip some of the questions he had written down, reconsidering how triggering they might be. Every thought flitting through his head is somehow transparent, all that heavy worry emanates from him, mixed with the distorted hope that he has shown so many things wrong with him and Minho still stubbornly wants to know more.
And it’s not a lie he tells to buy Jisung’s favour, to keep the conversation going with some semblance of normality. If it was something like that, he would have let him keep that mask on for as long as he wanted, or bailed and tagged Chan in to replace him.
But despite it all, and despite how little Minho has even seen him, Jisung has managed to make him care.
The thing is, Minho doesn't do friendships. Or getting to know people. The only reason he's friends with Seungmin – and even that is a concession since they are supposed to be work rivals – is because he and his ‘very good friend and roommate’ Felix stopped at nothing to get Minho to hang out with them. None of the effort had been his but he still reaps the rewards of having someone concern themselves with him.
Jisung makes him want to try.
It’s not pity, he tells himself, because it isn’t. Minho gets more frustrated at pity than most people because he recognises that it doesn’t help.
He wants to help. In what ever way he can.
Right now that’s simply understanding Jisung and wanting to talk to him.
There’s nothing hard about that.
“I do,” Minho confirms, with all the assurance in the world. “Now, does Jisung like cats or dogs? This is important.”
The rest of the session is spent on twenty questions. This time Jisung answers as himself, not Han, which mostly means that though the answers are of a similar variety, he allows himself to say as little as he feels. Sometimes it’s just a one-word answer, others he gives brief explanation, but largely he strays away from excessive story-telling and forcing jokes and banter. In a way, it’s more natural to have the clipped conversation than the visibly ‘normal’ one, because this way Minho at least knows that Jisung means what he says and that he wants to say it.
Comfort through intentionality, Minho dubs it.
It’s intriguing though that Jisung still wants to ask the questions back. Minho would’ve figured that he was just playing along for the sake of pretences, as a show of likability, but’s warming to know that he’s actually curious. For the most part, he simply echoes back Minho’s own queries, but as they venture into the last few questions Jisung goes for more experimental questions, wildly unrealistic hypothetical scenarios like alien invasions and choosing between types of food to eat versus the right to vote and Minho has a fun time amusing him with suitably outrageous answers. It doesn’t garner a laugh out of him, forced or otherwise, not even a curl of his lips – for an actor he’s remarkably poker-faced – but there is a lightness to the way he holds himself, and it grows and the conversation lengthens.
Minho shelves the idea of doing twenty questions again, with slightly more personal inquiries, as a starter for a different session. It’s not for immediate use, but it’ll come in handy some other day.
Jisung exits the study once their self-allotted hour is up, and Minho doesn’t interrogate him on where he goes. But it’s evident from the lack of his face around the house for the foreseeable future after that he’s retreated back into his room.
Minho frets, for a full day, over Jisung and Chan’s absence, worrying that he had made the wrong decision after all. Despite the way the stress of his worry wracks his body, he can’t bring himself to ask Changbin whether they are okay, to ask for forgiveness or absolution of his wrongdoing, if he has any. He can’t put himself on the spotlight for blame like that, and he most definitely can’t bear being selfish in the wake of it.
It results in a lot of stress cooking, which Changbin complains about since he’s the only other one there to eat all of it, but when Chan comes down to the living for meals, he readily reassures them that nothing is wrong, with a weariness in his eyes that says he knows exactly what upheavals took place in the session.
Nevertheless, he informs Minho that their next one will be on the following Monday.
wikiHow
How To Make a Chatterbox
- Crease a square piece of paper diagonally from each corner.Fold the top right corner to touch the bottom left corner. Crease the fold with your finger and then unfold it so your sheet is flat again. Then take the top left corner and fold it over to the bottom right corner. Crease the fold with your fingernail before unfolding it again. (If you're using a piece of rectangular paper, you can cut it into a square. Fold one corner over to the adjacent side. Use scissors to cut off the small rectangle. What remains is a square-shaped piece of paper.) [image attached]
- Fold the paper in half from each side. Bring the top edge of the paper to the bottom edge and crease the fold. Unfold the paper so it’s flat again and rotate it by 90 degrees. Fold the new top edge of the paper to the bottom to crease it and then flatten it out again. Your paper will have 4 lines intersecting in the middle. [image attached]
- Bring the corners to the centre of the paper. Start with one of the bottom corners and fold it into the middle of the paper where the creases intersect. Press down on the fold with a fingernail so it stays in place. Turn your paper 90 degrees and fold the other bottom corner toward the centre. Keep rotating and folding your paper until you’ve made a smaller square containing 4 triangles. [image attached]
- Flip the paper over and fold each corner to the centre again. Turn your paper over to the other side so you don’t see the folds. Grab one of the corners and fold it toward the middle where the creases intersect. Press down on the fold with your finger. Rotate the paper and fold each corner to the middle of the paper until you’ve made a smaller square. [image attached]
- Put numbers on the triangles from 1 to 8.
- Write the questions underneath the flaps. Make them as serious or funny as you want. Close the flaps once you’ve written all the fortunes.
- Flip the fortune teller over and colour the squares. Turn your paper over so the 4 small squares are face up. You can use any colours you want as long as each square on the fortune teller is different. Let the marker dry completely before you use your fortune teller.
For the time being, Minho abandons the novel.
He ditches his laptop, his notepad, and his pen. They stay on the desk in his room where he works on his smaller assignments from Blue Moon and his own personal projects, from competition pieces he never submits to his daily flash fiction journal.
Replacing them is his earnest wish to befriend Jisung.
That’s where it starts.
They do sessions in the study. It’s easier for Jisung that way, Chan relays, when he can cordon off the strain and difficulty of the interactions to a singular room he doesn’t visit under other circumstances, when he has a scheduled and known time to start and end talking, with the promise of reclusion afterwards. Jisung isn’t a wrench in the works but the cogs fit around him. They are happy to.
Chan and Changbin – and Minho as well – are happy to.
Minho entertains himself by devising new ways to weasel harmless information out of Jisung. The first session after twenty questions, he busts out a chatterbox that he made himself in his room the night before using the superfluous copies of contracts and a decade old method he’d thought he’d forgotten. It contains the same inane riddles and questions that he’d inscribed on them as a child.
Stuff like, ‘why did the chicken cross the road’ and ‘who’s your favourite Greek god?’ It’s not an mindless task. Making it, though it barely takes more than a minute, has memories of his primary school rushing back at him, and likely off-the-mark imaginations of Jisung’s school experience traipse in his head. Perhaps that’s the whole definition of mindless though, that he can complete it without a single smidgeon of brain energy devoted to the task, thoughts elsewhere.
Jisung enjoys it. Or Minho guesses he does because despite the stupid questions, Jisung gives sentence-long answers, and an improvement from his single word answers. Minho appreciates both because everything about Jisung lives in aspects apart from his words anyway. It’s the inflection of them, the way he leans into them or away, the ticks in his muscles and the way he sits, a million factors contributing to his response outside of the actual content. Minho learns to acknowledge them all in due time.
Buoyed by the success of the chatterboxes, Minho asks him to make one of his own, and then returns for their next session – several days after and with the same disappearance of two people in between, though this time he doesn’t fret – with the intent to play I am Ground and do a round of word associations.
They’re short sessions, never shorter than fifteen minutes, but never longer than an hour. Jisung does not smile or laugh or frown or cry. His face a perfect statue. But that’s okay; Minho takes it upon himself to exude enough emotion for the both of them, exaggerating his embarrassment at cringy acrostic poems and regaling long tales to back up each answer he reciprocates.
To his credit, Jisung watches it all without a word of protest, sinking into the couch in preparation when Minho begins his stories, pulling his legs up to his chest, arms looped around them and head rested on the arm as he listens to Minho spout bullshit about a kid in his ninth grade class that microwaved his pencil case just to see what would happen. If Minho’s self-admiration was just an inch higher he would’ve labelled the faint expression as amusement.
Jisung falls asleep at the end of the third session and Minho, with nothing to pack up, just leaves the room as quietly as he can, wondering whether or not to bring him a blanket as he dozes off. In the end, he informs Chan, who he sees carrying down Jisung’s comforter not minutes later.
At a certain point, not too many sessions in, the games stop being about questions at all. They’re just a bit of fun for Minho to bring Jisung, a little pastime to inject into the monotony of their days. Minho teaches him children’s games that Jisung doesn’t remember, or know, from school, spending an whole session exchanging riddles and practicing tongue twisters, though Jisung fares way better at them even with his unfamiliarity. Another day, Minho scrounges a bag of marbles from a drawer in the recreation room and teaches Jisung as many games with them as he can in an hour, with a vow to continue the next time.
With no questions, there's even less of a obligation for Jisung to talk, and he becomes even more comfortable in the sessions due to it. Though initially Minho is restless to keep a running commentary, eventually he revels in the quiet of it in a way he can’t picture himself doing without Jisung’s presence. He has trouble keeping still or subdued usually, has a compulsion in him to occupy the spaces of a room or an interaction with teases and stories and seamless chatter. Jisung placates him, puts his mind still, drags the turbulent engines to a slow roll, to a stop until there is finally room for him to breathe.
He hadn’t realised until then that the engines were so loud.
The clack of the marbles hitting each other in a challenge to see who can balance them on the back of their hands the longest is the only sound in the room. Faintly, from outside, Minho hears the low rumble of the fan above the stove, signalling that Chan is cooking something up. More and more these days, Minho has acquiesced his role as the chef, especially so when he notes how much ease it brings Chan to be able to make it from start to finish for all of them, and then section off a portion for Jisung. Minho still cooks from time to time, but he leaves it for occasions when Jisung has already been accounted for, to show that he sees and cares.
Jisung drops a marble but the game continues. It only ends when all of them fall off and currently Jisung is still winning with three marbles remaining to Minho’s one. The clacking now is mostly coming from the idle jitter of Minho’s other hand as he clasps the marbles that had slipped off.
He bestows a generous amount of attention to maintaining the marble’s somewhat steady position on his hand, but even more to the boy seated across the couch from him, marvelling at the fact that said spot had been chosen. It’s the first time, and Minho feels like a bit of a madman for recording each first like a milestone in his brain but it’s momentous. It’s a barrier let down, and a huge one at that. Physical intimacy scares Minho himself and he doesn’t think it’s a stretch to say that it might scare Jisung as well.
They aren’t touching, really. Well no, they’re not touching, period. The couch is wide enough to fit them both comfortably and even still, Jisung has drawn back into his ball-like state, only his hand sticking out for the sake of the game, to ensure that they don’t make contact. It’s not an insult and Minho doesn’t take it as one.
In fact, it’s a compliment. Jisung had been the one to enter later today, and had taken the spot voluntarily and Minho’s skin rippled with a burning sensation at having him so close, so much closer than separated by the coffee table. Jisung on the other end of the couch feels like a live wire or one of those plasma balls, like the slightest touch or even imitation of a touch through the static in the air between them could crispen Minho’s bones.
Even so quiet, even as Jisung and not Han, he is beyond perception and meaning.
The final marble falls of Minho’s hand and the smallest smile graces Jisung’s lips, as he tips his head to the side onto the backrest, retrieving his hand back into his cocoon. “I win,” he whispers. It doesn’t need to be more than, because Minho always hears. The smile isn’t wide, but it’s genuine and his eyes narrow into crescents as proof.
Kim Seungmin – Blue Moon
[10:03]
How’s it going?
I haven’t heard from you in a while
[10:20]
and Felix asked didn’t he
[10:22]
Felix asked
But I’m also wondering how you’re doing
[10:22]
i’m doing well
the villa is huge omfg
wait you already knew that
[10:24]
Yes, I did. I saw the photos with you.
[10:25]
nah but fr. it has a lake in the back and a pool inside and everything. it’s insane.
[10:26]
I’m aware.
I was more asking about the book.
How is that coming along?
[10:27]
Oh
Yeah
See about that…
[10:28]
What? Is Han okay? Is he being uncooperative?
[10:29]
He’s okay. It’s nothing like that.
[10:29]
Okay so what is it?
{read}
Minho what is it?
{read}
Really?
{read}
I give up
{read}
The sessions slowly bleed from one hour to hours, plural. The study gets stuffy, the window to high up for either of them to reach conveniently, not that Minho makes Jisung try.
Naturally, the sessions slowly leave the room. They settle into the bean bags in the recreation room, each pulling a book of a shelf and just reading with the solid presence of each other. It’s not an 'interaction' per se, and still Jisung taps out after a few hours when Chan comes to check in, but it’s soothing. Minho’s mind runs a little more at peace, and a little more consistently calm nowadays and he hopes it’s the same for Jisung.
They lounge in the theatre room and marathon movie franchises – none of Jisung’s own – and Minho offers commentary when he realises it’s not unwelcome. Jisung chips in some of his own here and there, things like “that was outburst isn't realistic” or “why is a stunt double doing that, it’s an easy trick” or occasionally he allows himself an “I like that character.”
One day, Minho takes the jam he pointedly bought from the corner store, slathers up some good sandwiches, packs a basket full of fruits and food and takes Jisung on a picnic. It’s not far from the villa, a spot clearly visible from both the living and dining rooms, just on the cusp of the lake, so that Chan and Changbin can see them if they wish to. Nevertheless, each step away from the house with Jisung is an achievement, a symbol of trust and Minho treasures it with everything he has.
It’s silent, like most of their activities are, but Minho has well and truly gotten used it by now. Here, however, they are backdropped by nature, by the rustle of the trees as a breeze pushes past its leaves and causes them to wisp against each other. By the slow lapping of the waves pushed up the shore of the monstrous lake, big enough that it wills up its own current. By the distant and near calls of the birds, twittering and chirping in the summer heat. It’s well into the season and nature blooms bright and green around them to show for it, the picture of a blossoming landscape, so idyllic it could be instilled in the licks of oil paintings sold for millions.
Minho cracks open a book he’d stored in his bag, leaving the basket on the edges of the blanket to keep it from being whisked away. He expects Jisung will do the same as he’d instructed him to grab his own, but he doesn’t. It’s not for lack of a book; there’s the unmistakeable outline of it cutting out a shape in Jisung’s tote, but Jisung doesn’t reach out for it.
He’s stuck watching the tiny waves.
Minho’s stuck watching him.
The book, open to the page he had bookmarked, lays limp in his lap as he takes in the view. His view. The golden rays of the sun hit Jisung's bangs just so, a moment so unreproducible with how his hair is prone to flopping with even his most insignificant shifts, with how the sun peaks between the drifting clouds. His eyes glow with the reflection of it.
Minho used to think breathless, as a turn of phrase, was hyperbolic.
As if he feels the strength of Minho’s gaze, Jisung turns towards him, the sunlight no longer hitting his eyes but god the gossamer is still in them. He isn’t exactly smiling, but he might as well be, with how placid and pliant he is.
“Thank you, Minho.”
Minho’s throat is a dry well and he cannot dredge up the words to respond.
“For what?” he chokes out.
Jisung drops his head onto his knees, still watching Minho. It pins him in place, that stare, like he’s a butterfly on a board, a specimen in under a microscope. He knows there’s nothing scrutinising to it, but wants to excel under the inspection anyway.
“I don’t know,” he says at long last. His gaze drifts to the basket. “The sandwiches. Taking me outside. Everything.”
“It’s not a problem,” Minho rushes to say. “It’s my pleasure.”
“Still,” Jisung says. “Thank you.”
It’s the most heartfelt gratitude Minho has experienced in years and he doesn’t even know what calls for the magnitude of it. He’s woefully unworthy.
“In that case, I suppose some thanks are in order on my behalf as well.”
Jisung’s brows don’t crinkle, but they move, and Minho interprets it as a sign of confusion.
“I’ve been a lot calmer these days. You probably– You don’t know but before I met you I was kind of a workaholic. And just beyond that, I didn’t know how to shut up the debris floating and crashing in my head but with you it’s all… organised. Like all the space clutter has fallen into a clean orbit.”
The smile is restored and the rhythmic pound of Minho’s heartbeat along with it.
“You’re a writer, after all,” Jisung says. “That was really poetic. And it’s surely not because of me. I’m glad some time off at the villa is doing you well.”
It’s him, though. The two weeks had been reprieve, been that time off that Jisung had described, but it had been nothing different to his usual constant stream of thoughts. His time with Jisung, the moments he's allowed to spend with him, in the same way that it is a marked event of the day for Jisung to manage the potential stress of it, is just as important for Minho. Every few days, and now for a few hours every day, he comes alive. And he does it to make someone happy. To make Jisung happy. And every time, it’s worth it.
Account: Lee Minho
Inbox (1) By Date
Lee Minhyuk – Han Jisung Book Update
(Hey Minho, It’s been a while since we’ve talked, missed you at the…)
[email protected] – May Spending Summary
(Let’s take a lot at your past month! You’ve managed to save more…)
A pile of cards lay between them on the dining table, alternating between ascending and descending sequences. The bubbling of a pot of curry sounds from the kitchen where Chan is puttering, and Minho recognises the swish and brief toks of the knife hitting the board as he slices up some spring onion for the garnish. The dish is almost done then. He’ll be joining them soon and they’ll have to switch up the game to something suitable for more players.
Changbin is beside Jisung, but he opts to watch them play a fierce game of Spit instead of including himself, waiting until Chan joins to become an active participant. The fast paced stacking of the cards seems to elude him anyhow, his eyes flitting between Jisung and Minho’s swift plays with barely a hint of comprehension of their technique, or the rules for that matter.
The game isn’t over until all the cards are transferred over to a single player, and it demands that the game be played in rounds. But the nature of the rounds is that the tides can turn at any point, gaining or losing almost a full deck depending on which of the two drop piles are the most popular and easily built off.
Reviewing the rules and tactics in his head, Minho can relate to Changbin’s exasperation with it but he’s known it since he was a child. The familiarity of it makes the movements coming fluidly, hawk eyes sniping for opportunities, slicing his hands through to get the cards before Jisung can, giving equal focus to both of the growing stacks. Jisung, though, has never played it before in his life and can still keep up. Despite his inherent hatred for exertion, he throws himself into the task of emptying his hand, contesting Minho on each pile, on each number, challenging himself to get there faster.
Minho empties the last of his cards before Jisung and hits the smaller pile, gathering it for himself. There’s only five cards it in when he counts, which means if he does this right he’ll win in the next round or so. But then again, that’s what he had thought five rounds ago and Jisung had flipped the momentum.
They’ve been playing, wordless, for the entire morning since Minho woke up and saw Jisung lazing beside a bowl of finished cereal, and he’s won every single game. The most recent is Jisung’s so-called final attempt to dethrone him.
Changbin and Minho both gape in horror as Jisung empties his hand in the next round and slaps on the smaller pile, if three cards can even be called a pile.
Jisung smirks at their surprise.
It’s hard to tell whether Jisung’s expressiveness recently is the result of Minho becoming accustomed to his behaviours and learning to read his smaller gestures or Jisung being confident enough to emote more. He doesn’t challenge it either way. It’s a welcome change to see him smile more often, and more naturally.
Jisung has a low set gums that he rarely shows in interviews. He never laughs in a way that displays them, and now that Minho notices it, he remembers that Jisung had a habit of throwing his head down or behind a castmate when he laughed. Minho hasn’t watched an interview in months but the image of it is strong and the remembrance of it is too.
They reset the table and go for another round.
Minho clears his cards first but he must be flustered because he slams his hand on the gargantuan pile instead of the non-existent one, and Jisung’s hand follows close behind, slapping on top of his hurriedly.
Minho yelps in pain at the ferocity of it, and Jisung a month ago would have been beside himself with regret and spewing out apologies more than he breathed but Jisung now laughs and laughs and laughs. He stops for a second but that’s only because he gets choked up on his own spit and has to wipe a tear from his eyes and then he’s laughing again, whooping as he celebrates his win with an ecstatic Changbin, who is mostly just happy to see Minho beat.
Changbin wraps him around in a hug, squishing Jisung into his chest and yelling at a volume that is altogether unnecessary but Minho does nothing to interrupt them. In fact there’s a grin on his lips as he watches them, absurdly fond.
With Jisung, the breaking of the ice is slow. It cracks and splinters with each moment spent together, slowly creating the rifts and fault-lines for a break, but never gives way entirely. The moment it does, when he hears Jisung laugh, boisterous and free and real, Minho gets swept along in the current.
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Dictionary
Fuck /fʌk/
Vulgar language
- to have sex with someone
- to damage or ruin something
Exclamation
used alone or as a noun or verb in various phrases to express annoyance, contempt, or impatience.
Fuck – Wikipedia
Fuck Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
“I’m ready,” Jisung says, the day after usurping Minho’s throne as King of Cards. It’s dinner, and it’s the first time Jisung has joined them for a meal, to eat with them. To lessen the strangeness and possible unease of him being there, Chan had cooked.
It’s out of nowhere, especially since they’re halfway through their meal, not close to beginning or ending anything and Minho has not yet mentioned what he’s planned out for today.
“For what?” Chan and Minho inquire simultaneously, not more than a second off from each other.
“To talk about the book. About myself.” Jisung turns to face Minho. “You can ask me questions again.”
The question of it being too soon is on the tip of Minho’s tongue but he holds it. It’s been close to two months out of their six. Nothing about that is too soon. But he’s wary of Jisung going too hard and too fast, and there’s not much he can do but defer to the advice of Chan and Changbin, who themselves are casting wary glances at each other.
“Do you feel ready?” Changbin asks slowly, resting his fork back on his plate. They’ve all paused any motion to eat.
“I just said that,” Jisung says, but he’s quieter now, already starting to lose confidence in his decision. His gaze quivers shamefully and he looks to Chan for help, looking suddenly smaller, all of the assurance and tenacity he’d grown in the past month falling of his in dismal waves. “I can wait a bit longer,” he placates.
“No,” Chan intervenes. He looks at Jisung as if he’s the only thing in the room, as if Changbin and Minho have ceased to exist and Jisung is looking at him in the same way. Despite the month of gradually gaining Jisung’s trust and racking up those Han Happiness Points, he feels insignificant next to Chan. “If you want to do it – if you think you can do it – we can try. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t go well, what matters is that you want to try.”
Jisung nods, the fallen smile creeping back up onto his face. He reaches out to Chan for a hug, which he receives faster than his arms can fully lift in request, Chan darting out of his chair and around the table to embrace him. Changbin on his other side wraps his arms around the both of them.
“Thank you,” Jisung whispers into Chan's chest. “For trusting me.”
Chan says something that Minho can’t hear, muffled by Jisung’s hair.
Something seizes violently in Minho’s chest as he watches the two cradle Jisung close, assembled either side of him like armour or a blanket, the same kind Jisung had bundled himself in the first time Minho saw him in the house.
They look like family.
He wonders, if someday, Jisung will allow him to become part of it and immediately feels brash for thinking he has any right.
It’s been a long time since they have been in here. The study is a timeless place, lifted straight out of a vintage showroom, and the month means nothing to its wooden walls and antique upholstery.
Somehow, Minho looks more nervous of the two.
They occupy the same couch, though on either end. Jisung has gotten more used to the lack of space, but he hasn’t gone out of his way to initiate touch and Minho isn’t going to be the one to break that boundary. Or any boundary. He’s as cautious as a SWAT team navigating a hostage situation.
“You don’t have to be cautious,” Jisung says. He’s picking at his toenails, fingernails already clipped short by Chan’s forceful mandate. “If something hits a nerve, I’ll leave myself – I promised Channie-hyung I would – so just ask whatever you want.”
He says it flippantly but Minho’s heart is still pounding a mile a minute. Jisung can run away from it if it hurts too much, sure, but Minho doesn’t want to make it hurt at all.
“Sure,” he says anyway. There’s really no way to avoid everything. He has no idea what might be a mine and what’s not, so he chances something that he thinks might be relatively harmless on the scale. “How was school?”
Jisung looks up from his feet, fingers freezing in place where they were fidgeting.
“You really know how to ask the most random questions, you know?” Minho cringes, opening his mouth to retract it but Jisung puts up a hand. “It’s okay, I was just thinking you were going to ask about… um. Well, you know. Or something about the acting gig.”
“Figured that might be a bit too much right off the bat.”
Jisung nods in understanding.
“I liked school. It was fun while I got to go.”
The clipped answer behooves another question. Minho’s ideal scenario here is to land on one that sets Jisung off, not in the bad way, but taps into something that he can vent about, pulling him from tangent to tangent.
“When did you stop going?”
“Umm probably second or third year of Junior High? Chan graduated college the year before and became my full time manager, so he was twenty-two, which means I was fourteen. You’re a second year at fourteen, right?”
Minho confirms with a tilt of his head.
“Yeah, so second year. I took the GED so I could focus on my acting.”
Minho gapes. “You took your GED at fourteen?”
Jisung’s brows furrow. “Yes? My m- I was getting busier but I wasn’t going to just drop out without a degree for it so I studied in between takes on set and did my exam the winter before season three of Devil Boy aired.”
Minho scribbles this all down.
“You’re telling me you completed the high school graduation equivalency exam in middle school?”
“Yes? I thought this was on the trivia sites.”
Minho hasn’t searched anything close to relevant to Jisung on the internet for over a month, and before then he hadn’t cared to do so. He moves on without acknowledging it.
“Okay sure,” Minho sighs. “I wasn’t ready to be the dumbest person in the room but here we are.”
“I’m sorry,” Jisung offers, wringing his hands.
Minho backpedals with an awkward chuckle. “No, no don’t apologise. It’s a joke.”
“You went to university, didn’t you?” Jisung points out. “Not the dumbest. I still have the lowest educational experience in this house.”
“Yeah but I dropped out,” Minho counters. “Not dumb but close enough. But enough about me. What was fun about school?”
After taking some time to ponder, Jisung says, “The teachers didn’t really like me since I was always dipping in and out of class and not showing up for months at a time, but I had good friends. We were a small group, only four including me, but I liked them a lot. They were really nice to me but I wasn’t. I never met up with them outside of school. I never invited them to my place. I never invited them to my shoots. We wouldn’t be able to talk for ages because of that.”
“Did you want to?” Minho asks. “Do any of those things with them, I mean. I can’t imagine that you would be that cold.”
Jisung swallows loudly. “I did,” he says, pulling his legs in tighter, and tighter into that familiar ball, words muffled by the obstruction. “Of course, I did.”
“Tell me about them,” Minho says, instead of probing further. “What were they like?”
“Yongbokkie was so cute. He really liked baking and his mum helped him make brownies and cookies all the time, and then he’d bring them to share at school. We tried giving them out to a lot of people to make more friends but everyone just ate them and didn’t talk to us again. So then he just made enough for us, every Friday. Cookie Fridays.”
Minho smiles, jotting it down and encouraging Jisung to keep going as he slows down in waiting.
“He always helped me catch up with work whenever I got back with from shoots. But we would both get distracted by his video games and manhua collection so Minnie would come along to keep us in check. Minnie was the smartest of us” – Minho shoots a glance – “even though I did my GED before he graduated. I just know he made it to SNU or something. And if not, it’s only because he found something that he really wanted to do and he’s doing it. Minnie’s like that. If he wants something, he’ll do whatever he needs to get it.
“But he didn’t like letting us cheat off him or even teaching us because we’d always try to distract him as well or just not pay attention. We were annoying, me and Yongbokkie. And then there was Hyunjin,” Jisung says, breath hitching. “He’d try to help Minnie out with calming us down but we’d always rope him in somehow. When my shoots got longer, when I started missing whole months, we didn’t really talk that much. I think he was annoyed at how much time he had to spend teaching me all the stuff I wasn’t there for.”
For a fourteen year old, that’s not an unreasonable cause for irritation but the grating tone of Jisung’s voice implies there’s more to it. There’s always more to it.
“That’s not true,” Jisung confesses. “It wasn’t just the homework and the lessons. Minnie used to tutor us- no Yongbok was fine, just me. Hyunjin used to tutor me too, when he saw how hard it got to keep up. We were together since third grade you know. Hyunjin, Minnie and I. Yongbok came in fourth grade but still. It was such a long time and then…”
Minho doesn’t say anything, but he offers up a sympathetic gaze that goes unseen because Jisung has his head on his knees as he speaks.
“I think Hyunjin trash-talked me at school.” The worst thing is that Jisung says it completely deadpan, without a single ounce of hurt or betrayal. “I don’t know. I came back after the biggest stretch of shooting for season three of Devil Boy, the year before I dropped out and he didn’t even look at me. And then everyone else wouldn’t stop looking at me and talking. Minnie and Yongbok had to eat lunch in the library with me because I couldn’t stand to be in the cafeteria with everyone’s eyes on me and not knowing what they were saying. I don’t even remember the last time I talked to Hyunjin properly.”
Minho swallows past the lump in his throat. He wants to ask if Hyunjin was always a bad friend but knows the query would only offend Jisung, fatally loyal even to his own detriment. A million follow-ups well to the forefront of his mind but none of them are appropriate.
“Why did he do it?”
“I don’t know,” Jisung says blankly. “I really don’t know. He was the sweetest, you know. So sentimental and quick to tears. He loved romance movies. There was a project I accepted some time after I dropped out, a romance, because it was the kind of script I thought he might’ve liked. 5 Year Plan?”
Minho is familiar with the film. It was a high school romance drama, something supremely out of place amongst the rest of Jisung’s career. He’d never speculated about the odd choice before.
Jisung isn’t done.
“He liked to pick flowers and give to Yongbok as payment for the cookies on Friday. After his mother got mad that he was ruining her garden, he learnt how to draw, bought watercolours, and gave him paintings of flowers instead. When Minnie got stressed out around exam time, he would rally us together so we could pool our money and buy him snacks from the canteen. He brought cakes to school in boxes for me so we could celebrate together…”
It doesn’t end.
Jisung has no shortage of good things to say about Hyunjin. Or Minnie or Yongbok, who he says later gave up on keeping him company in the weeks before he pulled out of school. It’s but a brief mention in the rapid fire flow compliments and thanks and adorable stories of their youth, tinged in bittersweet longing, a desperate wanting to go back.
Beyond informing Minho of the state of their friendship when he left as explanation for why he couldn’t, didn’t, stay in touch, he doesn’t say a single incriminating thing.
He talks for the whole evening about how amazing his friends were.
9/5/2010
MY BEST FRIENDS
Lee Yongbok, Grade 4 Class 2
Hi! My name is Lee Yongbok. Today I am going to tell you about my three best friends.
My three best friends are named Hwang Hyunjin, Jisung and Seungmin. I don’t remember Jisung’s and Seungmin’s last names sorry. I met them this year, in Janruary, but I love them a lot. Almost as much as my mum and dad. I am going to tell you why.
I saw Jisung on my first day of school. We sat next to each other and he looked scared so I asked him if he was new as well. He told me he wasn’t new but he was scared because his friends weren’t there yet. And that’s how I met Hyunjin and Seungmin! We ate lunch together and became best friends. We even made a secret password to prove that we are best friends. Only best friends know this handshake, so I can’t tell you what it is. You have to ask Hyunjin. Hyunjin decides who can be best friends and I am happy Hyunjin picked me.
We have a lot of fun and I like to do nice things for them because they do nice things for me to. Last week I helped mum make brownies to give them and Jisung gave me a card to say thank you. I don’t think his parents helped him with his card because it was a bit ugly but I am happy he made it. Minnie didn’t make a card but his mum bought one to give me. It had a dinosaur on it! Hyunjin gave me flowers instead of a card and I really liked that!
I love my friends a lot and I am going to be best friends with them forever.
The next session, and the session after that, and even the third when they bring Chan in, all Jisung talks about are his friends, his whole schooling stint from the first year of primary, struggling to make friends and keep them, to just before the last years of junior high, treading water as his friendships dissolved around him.
Chan concurs on every front. He was only in Jisung’s life for about two years of it, but they’re the worst two years, the long periods with no contact, just to pop back into the lives of his school friends. Minho wonders briefly why he never had a phone, never hung out with them if he wanted to so badly but it feels like it’s not his right to ask even though it absolutely is. It's his literal job.
By the fourth session that’ filled with nothing but praises, Minho is as clueless as Jisung must have been about why Hyunjin suddenly turned on him. There’s a gut feeling that Jisung is skirting around a topic, and for a while he respects it, but by now he’s burning with it, the question halfway up his throat every time he tries to speak.
“Don’t you hate him for any of it?” he spits out. He feels bad for interrupting whatever Jisung was saying, even worse that he hasn’t written any of it down for the past few minutes, but the relief of getting it out of his mouth is too intense.
“I don’t,” Jisung says plainly. “I never hated Hyunjin.”
“Why?”
“I was mostly jealous of him. I thought we were all loners and that it was a part of the reason that we stuck together, but when he got rid of us Hyunjin rose up the ranks so quickly. We were- I was dead weight. And he was so smart, tutored me so well. I was jealous. That everything at school came so easy to him. And...”
“Go on,” Minho says.
“And I think Hyunjin was a bit jealous of me too," he said softly, and it took something taxing to admit it, some bit of pride he never owned and had to make up. "That I got the break into the industry he never did. When I got the call back for the second season and things picked up, he realised he might have a chance too, but nothing happened. He got jobs as extra in an add here or there but nothing big. I think he resented that I did. We were both jealous of each other and too embarrassed to say so."
With a new resolve in his eyes, he faced Minho. "I want to apologise to him."
“Jesus, Jisungie. For what?”
“For never asking him what was wrong. It takes two people to break something. I should’ve asked what was wrong. Found a way to fix it.”
“You don’t have to take on the responsibility for someone else’s mistake. Not everything is your fault, Jisungie.”
“It is,” he says, with a conviction that sears all of Minho’s insides. “I want to apologise.”
☆ Minnie & Jinnie ☆
Minnie: Have you heard about Jisung’s hiatus?
Jinnie: yeah
Jinnie: is he okay? Do you know something?
Minnie: Kind of
Minnie: He hired a ghostwriter from my company to write an autobiography
Minnie: But I think it might be a cover
Jinnie: like his last hiatus?
Minnie: Yeah
Jinnie: but didn’t he move out of his parents’ place?
Jinnie: last time
Minnie: I mean I think so. I hope so. They might still be in touch though
Minnie: I don’t know I’m just worried.
Minnie: It’s ridiculous. We haven’t talked in ages.
Jinnie: it's not ridiculous. i was horrible to him, i never apologised to him but i still
Jinnie: i still care
Minnie: I can’t even bring myself to ask my friend about him.
Jinnie: the ghostwriter?
Minnie: Yeah.
Jinnie: have you told Felix?
Minnie: Of course.
Minnie is typing…
It’s funny (read: absolutely in no way funny) how Jisung manages to speak about his chunks of his childhood, his entire schooling career, and never once mentions his home situation. Or family members. It’s funny (read: positively disturbing) that the only thing Minho can glean is that his parents don’t let him associate with anyone outside the minimum time he goes to school.
It’s only at the tail end of talking about school, when there’s nowhere else to go apart from exploring the rest of his childhood, that Jisung begins saying anything about his family.
After a brief foray into doing their sessions at the recreation hall, they’ve returned to their usual positions in the study. Mostly because they have so many memories there untainted by the severity and hurt of these conversations and Jisung wants to preserve that. It’s likely he won’t ever come back to this room after the necessity of it wanes, after the book is complete.
Minho etches out passages for a few chapters, nothing overly concrete as it still feels like he’s missing whole chunks, but he makes a dent into the project like he hasn’t been able to do before. It’s easy to write, because Jisung retells stories of his life in such a vivid way, grasping at the details of what he was wearing, what it smelt like, the backdrops of certain scenes and the noises in the background. When he tells stories, it's almost like he's acting them out. He doesn’t give them readily, but when Minho urges him to expound, the details come pouring out.
The details include his home life. He never goes into the specifics, never fluffs his explanations.
Little things, at first.
“My mother threw a fit when I asked if I could stay late after school,” Jisung says, scratching at his forearms. “I think we might’ve had a shoot or a lesson. I wasn’t allowed to go to Jinnie’s birthday party.”
“Did your parents ever let you hang out with friends outside of class?”
“Not really. My mum was always very punctual about bell times and even before acting she got lonely so I wasn’t supposed to go out.”
“Was she always lonely? Was there no one else at home?”
“What, no. Everyone was at home.”
“So why was she lonely?”
“She needs everyone to be there. Needed. Needs. We couldn’t leave her alone,” Jisung says through his teeth, getting frustrated. His legs have pulled back and it’s not to make his cocoon, it’s just to get away from Minho. It hurts and he knows he’s said something wrong but he wants to put and end to it now.
“Why couldn’t you leave her alone?”
“Because she said so, because if we didn’t she’d be hurt and sad.”
Jisung’s answer from the very first session remerges in his mind. Where would you say you’re love for acting comes from?
My mum.
It gets worse when they delve into Jisung’s work, and he doesn’t filter himself so vigorously. Mentions of his mother, his father, brother slip out and none of them are exactly favourable.
He explains why he took each project and most of them in his early career boil down to ‘my mom liked it’ or ‘it paid well and my mum wanted to invest in stocks around that time.’
It’s noticeable in how he talks about the job. If it’s about a later project, the ones he took after Yellow Wood, he chatters about them excitedly, showering Minho with the structures of the set, fun facts about his co-stars, what he had for food each day and his favourite scenes.
The earlier projects – no not even early – the first seven years of his career however are blanketed in deliberate avoidance. He acknowledges the existence of the movies, knows the timeline of their releases and talks about the basic plotlines – anything a casual viewer could have told you – and nothing more. Almost as if he doesn’t remember.
Everything from then is consumed by more exhaustion and gloom than anything. If his memory blanks at the set, it flicks back into focus the second his mum comes to take him home, or the moment he enters his house. That he returns after a shoot and his friends barely talk to him. That he came home one day after work as a twelve-year-old to see the living room trashed for unexplainable reasons and his mother intoning that it was his responsibility to clean it up. That he never had time to watch the movies and shows he filmed, that they never even tried to.
Jisung has no idea why everyone loves his character in Devil Boy, because he’s never sat down to watch it.
To Jisung, it’s a throwaway comment to reveal that his mother never cared when he didn’t want to work on a particular director’s project or didn’t want to take an extra role. “Once she made her mind up, I wasn’t allowed to be mad,” he shrugs. “I learned not to be.”
Jisung in his early years hates acting, though he never says as much in exact words to Minho. There’s no need to. Even speaking about it, years, a veritable decade from the fact, the reminder of it seeps into Jisung like concrete, like pesky weeds growing and caging him in. All that animated motion that had built up momentum through happiness grows sluggish and stagnant, robotic in the grasp of the memories.
His ball is a constant state as he divulges more and more of himself. Minho is tempted to stop him at times, because Jisung’s mouth runs as if he’s not aware of what he’s saying, letting the river of memories catch him up in the current and spill over. After Jisung tells him about the time his mother turned over his room to find the work contract copies he saved from negotiations and locked him in his room when he fought back, tone dead and eyes expressionless, Minho does. He forces him to take a break, end the session and find Chan.
Jisung blinks at him in confusion, cocking his head, but nevertheless does.
Minho enters the study the day after that with a boulder sitting at the base of his stomach, a question he wants to ask that burns the pathway of his throat just to think about voicing. They can’t keep talking around it forever.
He doesn’t even wait until Jisung is fully comfortably in front of him and he curses himself for it.
“Jisung, do you like acting because of your mum?”
Jisung doesn’t breathe.
The room flatlines, shocked into abrupt silence. The sounds of nature from through the window seem to cut out to afford such an intense vacuum of sensation.
“I’m leaving,” he blurts, but he doesn’t. He can’t. Jisung can’t breathe. His lungs seize and Minho can see it because he begins heaving in gasping breaths like an asthmatic respirating through a millimetre wide straw, clutching his chest as he tries desperately to get more air in.
Minho is terrified. He knows what a panic attack is. But he’s never seen one in real life before, let alone dealt with one and he doesn’t know what to do.
Jisung can’t breathe and he’s crying, barrelling his way through the doorway and begging for Chan and Minho has no idea how to help. Doesn’t know if touch is good or bad, if telling him to calm down is helpful or ignorant, if keeping him still would let him relax or rile him up further.
Ice hardens in his veins and he can’t move and he can’t help.
Chan comes surging through the hallways at the sound of Jisung’s voice and lifts him up and away from Minho before he can even lift a finger.
Minho doesn’t stop them.
The hallways of the Min Villa are long. They are straight and orderly, but long - decorated pathways connecting a whole hub of rooms. Sometimes, Minho leaves his room and he can imagine the archways are the marks of a palace. If he stands at the window on one end at the middle of the night, he fancies that he can’t even see all the way to the other side, the light of the moon falling flat three quarters through and failing the final stretch.
They are long and soundproofed which Minho is thankful for since he is well aware that he’s prone to making questionable noises while he sleeps, a special brand of sleep-talking that he’s learned includes muted screeches.
The hallways of the Min Villa are long and soundproofed and still Minho can hear Jisung sobbing through the night.
PSYCHLINE
Signs of Emotional or Mental Abuse – What To Do or How To Help
Isolation and Neglect | Control and Shame | Denial or Blame | Criticizing and Humiliation | Unpredictability | Co-dependence | Long-term Effects | Seeking Help
OVERVIEW
While you may know the obvious signs of emotional abuse and it may seem clear to those looking from the outside, it is easy to dismiss when you are experiencing a persistent pattern of abusive behaviour. It may be challenging to recognize emotional abuse, however knowing the signs can help. Like any other kind of abuse it can be from a romantic partner, a parent, caregiver, boss, or friend.
No matter who the perpetrator is, it is important to remember that emotional abuse is never okay. It is not your fault and you do not deserve it.
ISOLATION AND NEGLECT
Isolating you from sources of help are a significant way of maintaining their control over you.
- telling you that you cannot spend time with friends or family
- begging you not to meet friends or family, or cancelling your plans without your permission
- monitoring interactions with your friends or family
- making fun of or belittling your friends or family, guilt you for spending time with them
- taking up all of your free time
- locking you in a room or the house
- calling you needy when you reach out for support
- being indifferent to your emotional hurt
- disputing or correcting you on your feelings
CONTROL AND SHAME
- threats of isolation, physical harm or abandonment
- unilateral decision-making of financial, medical and work decisions
- financial control, keeping accounts in their name or giving an allowance
- lecturing to ensure you think you’re beneath them
- direct orders
- outbursts
- unpredictability – exploding with rage and then suddenly shower you with affection or become gloomy
- they walk out of social situations or issues at home
- yelling, which is frequently a scare tactic to demonstrate their control
- withholding affection as a punishment, whether verbal or physical
- reminding you of their importance in your life, and of your helplessness without them
[…]
LONG-TERM EFFECTS
Emotional abuse can cause some physical and psychological issues, such as:
- racing heart
- gastrointestinal issues, such as stomach ulcers
- nightmares
- difficulty concentrating
- muscle tension
- changes in mood
Some trusted studies have found that over time, emotional abuse can contribute to these mental health conditions such as:
- anxiety
- depression
- eating disorders
- post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- psychosis
- substance abuse disorder
- suicidal ideation
SEEKING HELP
If you are in immediate danger of physical harm, please call the emergency number 119.
If you are in an abusive relationship, contact one of the hotlines below that offer anonymous help through calls, texts or online chats, or reach out to a friend or family member.
There is a link at the end of this page on a guide to dealing with emotional abuse, but here are some quick tips:
- Accept that the abuse is not your fault or responsibility.
- Disengage and set boundaries.
- If possible, find a support system of those you trust.
- Change/reconfigure your priorities.
- Allow yourself time to heal.
National Abuse Hotline
National Domestic Abuse Hotline
“I thought she had died at first,” Minho admits, head in his hands.
“God I wish she fucking had,” Chan laughs morbidly. “I wish I could kill her now. The only reason I don’t is because I’d go to jail and Jisung wouldn’t have me.”
Minho looks up at him from his place on the living room couch. His eyes are puffy and his throat burns from strain. Jisung hadn’t been the only one crying, though for Minho they are more tears of guilt than sadness.
“I’m sorry,” he gasps. “You shouldn’t say anything. Jisung hasn’t said much.”
Chan shakes his head. “You’re in too deep, Minho. And I know what I said before but I still don’t think Jisung is at a stage where he can tell anyone about it himself. Even with Changbin, I was the one who…”
It makes sense now why Chan is so protective of him.
“Jisung… he wanted me to tell you. If you’re ready to hear it.”
Minho feels like he’s been ready for a long time, like he was waiting for something like this to hit. Now that it has, he’s still thrown of balance. He’s known, in the back of his head, for a while now. Nothing about that family dynamic is normal.
“Just- How bad was it?” he broaches.
Chan smiles, but in that rueful, distraught way you begin the worst stories with. The ones you can only recall if you have a smile because any other way it’s too painful, with the potential to break you.
“You know, when I first figured it out, when I told him, you know what he said?” His voice cracks. “That it couldn’t be abuse because she never hit him. His first response was to say that she didn’t hit him. But then he paused for a second.”
Minho gulps back the tears in his throat.
“When he noticed his mistake he kept insisting that it was just one time, that it didn’t count. And he believed it so fully. I had to,” Chan chokes on his words. “I had to convince him that his mother didn’t love him, didn’t love him right. And who the fuck wants to believe that about their parent. He almost hated me for it." Minho can't believe that, thinking about how they are now. It's too much. "It took years of treating him properly for him to see the difference. To accept that any of it was wrong.
“You know, around that time I watched a lot of podcasts and interviews with adult victims, people who had also been through parental abuse, while I was trying to… prove it to him. I thought that if I understood what was going through his head, it’s be easier to navigate him out. They always came back to this. Parents love their children - it’s supposed to be fact - so when they don’t, when they’re horrible to you, you’re left with the thought that you’ve broken that universal truth. That you’re at fault. That as long as you can be better, maybe one day they will love you like they’re meant to. It’s the only form of control they can get their hands on, this belief that they can make their parents more loving somehow, someday. And you have to maintain that good image of your parents, even if you put yourself down to do so, because if you don’t then reality will haunt you. You won’t be able to live with it if you don’t rationalise it like that. That’s what they all said.”
Chan is speaking through tears but he talks and Minho’s head is pulsing with the effort of trying not to cry but he listens.
“And it’s not just about the abuser. Jisung’s mother wasn’t in that family alone. Harm comes from the presence of abuse and the absence of protection. His father left both of his children to suffer at her hands, always spewing bullshit about how she loved them in her own way. Jisung can’t even talk to his brother now, because of all the ways they were pitted against each other and he has to wonder whether his father didn’t love him enough to protect him.”
There’s so much unearthed frustration and despair in Chan’s grating voice. They spend the whole evening there, Chan explaining as much as he can.
“There’s still a part of him that loves her, even after he has accepted it.” That's the worst of it all.
It takes weeks to see Jisung again. They’ve reverted to the initial routine of Chan making tiny portions and delivering them upstairs. This time however Chan stays up there for the majority of the day and night, and Changbin entertains Minho so that he doesn’t fall into a loop of self-hatred, although he kind of ends up doing that anyway.
“It was inevitable,” Changbin says one day, sick of Minho’s moping. “He wasn’t going to be able to leave it out, so you were going to happen onto it one day.”
“But I could’ve done it in a better way,” Minho retorts.
“No, you couldn’t have.” The ugly part of Minho is relieved to hear that. “There’s no good way to talk about it. Jisung would’ve have avoided it until the last day, wouldn’t have said anything at all, if he could have.”
“I’m sorry.” Minho doesn’t know what he’s apologising for, just feels like he has to.
“Don’t be,” Changbin says, pulling him into a side hug. It’s nowhere near as full on, tender, as the ones he gives Jisung but nevertheless Minho can tell why Jisung craves them and savours them the way he does. The contact is freeing and grounding at the same time. “We’re grateful for you, Minho.”
Minho’s throat clogs with tears and this time he can’t stop them from flowing.
Document Name: Han Jisung Biography
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Chan Insert (interview script) (CUT DOWN LATER)
“Jisung is.... well, he doesn’t know this – no one does – but Jisung is the reason I'm alive. In both senses, literal and metaphorical. Metaphorically, he gives me purpose. He’s someone I have to take care of, have to be around so he can feel safe. I exist to make him happy. He gives me reason to keep going. And then well, literally. Ah don’t look so scared, it wasn't anything dramatic.”
(I was frowning here, probably)
“I was kinda giving up on the whole life thing. I never got it diagnosed but it was probably depression now that I think of it. Like there was no point in doing anything, not even getting out of bed. That semester I watched all my lectures online and I was already underloading. I had a hell of a professor though. She got me this internship at an entertainment company – I was studying marketing. First day I showed up in creased slacks and a mismatched jacket and instead of being put in the marketing department, I was told to shadow this child actor’s manager.
“That’s where I met Jisung. He was shooting the finale of Devil Boy’s first season, exhausted out of his mind from all the wire shots retakes. He was so little, just turned twelve the past week, and I loved him more than I could imagine. I stayed for the overnight shoot even though I could’ve clocked off at five. His manager at the time, the person I was supposed to shadow, was a cold man. Only talked to Jisung as much as he absolutely needed to, was always on his phone, not even doing anything important. I kept him company, played games with him between takes and as they started packing up, all the way until his mum came to pick him up.
“When I went home, I was tired, but it wasn’t in the same way. There’s two types of tired, if you know what I mean. There’s the bone-deep exhaustion you get from working to hard, from giving too much. Then there’s the tiredness from a good day. Think of the heaviness of your body after going to the beach and you’re all weak-limbed and molten in the car on the way home. It was like that. Tired, but satisfied. He made something kickstart back up in me.
“I started going to my classes again, because I didn’t want to lose the internship if they ever saw my attendance records. I got the internship extended, because they were so pleased with how well I was doing, how much Jisung seemed to like me, was more obedient with my rules. By that time, I was getting back on track for an early graduation because the internship earned me course credits and when I graduated school I joined under them as Jisung’s manager. There wasn’t a day that I didn’t see him after the first time.
“I got my life back together because of him, because I didn’t want him to think I abandoned him. Because every time I thought about giving up, I thought about how lonely he would be without me, and I wouldn’t be able to do it. He made me care about myself again.
“I probably never would have said it to his face but if this gets into the book and he reads it, I want him to know that he saved me just as much as he thinks I saved him, and that I love him more than he could possibly ever know.”
Changbin Insert (CUT DOWN LATER)
“I met Jisung after the worst of it. Or more like, right in the midst of the worst. I don’t even know where to begin with the origin story…”
(Like a lightbulb)
“Oh right! I should probably start from Chan. I knew him since university. He was a sunbae in the year above me and insanely popular and friendly to boot. Not many people of whom both could be said in our area. We had a lot of the rich popular kid type. He kind of fell out of the social circles around his third year and no one saw him around anymore. There were rumours that he dropped out, and I was close to him, but not enough that I trusted he would tell me if something happened. So I believed it and I didn’t see or hear about him for a long time after so it seemed plausible.
“Something like six years after? I had been working at Yellow Wood for a year or two – it was my second job out of college since the first was shit. I worked in marketing.”
As well?
“As well as? Oh Chan? Yeah, we were in the same faculty at uni. He was popular in general, but specifically so within the faculty. I don’t think he would’ve known me any other way though. ”
Right.
“Yeah. So six years later, Jisung’s contract period in TG ending. He had the chance to either re-sign with them or make a contract with a different company and almost everyone in the industry was making offers, even if they knew they didn’t have a good chance. But TG is big; most people thought he would end up re-signing just to keep the brand name. Yellow Wood put out an offer as well, but we were little more than a start-up at that point, with maybe a few in-house producers and a failed idol group, so we didn’t expect much.
“I was meant to give them the offer. So I saw Chan, and well I was honestly just surprised he recognised me. We weren’t a big company and we didn’t have that many great connections in the industry yet, but none of that mattered to them. Jisung just wanted an agency that allowed him to act on his own terms, take the projects that he wanted, reject the ones he didn’t. To have nothing impede or obstruct his decision. It didn’t matter if they weren’t going to be blockbuster movies or widely popular. He just wanted the choice.
“His only other condition was that Chan needed to be hired alongside him, and stationed as his manager. Of course no one was going to object to one additional staff, when Han Jisung was part of the deal so it got signed.
“Jisung left his parents’ house the week he turned eighteen, and the TG contract ended soon after that. His mother had taken all the money he made from jobs up until then into her own account, it must have been billions of won, so he lived in Chan’s downtown apartment until Yellow Wood caught wind and set them up in a place with more security. That summer I took a month off to get training so I could work as Jisung’s bodyguard.
“I think it’s funny when people online make those compilations of “Cute Moments Between Jisung and His Managers” from backstage clips because they’re not wrong, we care, but it’s so much more than they will ever realise. Ever be able to know.
“Jisung is the little brother I never had. He’s the child Chan and I will never get to have.”
Chan and you?
(He laughs.)
“You didn’t know? I mean I guess we never really do anything but… yeah. Hope you’re not a dick about that stuff.”
Never. I literally can’t be.
“Hah. If you’ve caught feelings for him, which I highly suspect you have, Chan and I are gonna give you proper son-in-law treatment. Threats and family dinners and all. I’m telling you, he’s the child we would have otherwise never had. I love him like one. And I trust you to take care of him.”
(I must have nodded.)
(NOTE: REMEMBER TO PARAPHRASE CHANGBIN AND CHAN’S….)
[Page 123 of 123] [50981 words]
Jisung’s room is close to pitch black, so even though it’s Minho’s first time going in he can hardly see enough to make an assessment on how good the room is.
The sunlight sneaking through the cover of the blinds can only illuminate the edges of the room, but Minho can still see the lump on the bed shuffling as Jisung rolls over. There’s not a body part of his that is visible above the comforter.
“Hyung?” he rasps.
“Oh, um it’s Minho actually.” He clears his throat. “Should I leave? Get Chan?”
The comforter hisses and it slides against itself, rustling with Jisung’s slightest movements.
“No, it’s okay. I asked if you could come.”
Minho feels his heart heat up, way beyond warming, like someone’s poked a red hot iron right through his arteries into the main atrium. For Jisung, places have power. The kitchen is solitude, where he comes to eat in silence. The dining, the recreation hall and the theatre room are spaces to have fun, to wind down and forget himself in the companionship of others. The study is the worst, where he is made to dredge up memories better left in the past and leave his recounts to be inspected by his newest, most tenuous friend. His room, however, is his sanctuary, where only Chan dares to enter on the horrible days, where he can take time to gather the pieces of himself into something presentable, worthy.
To be let into a place with such power over him feels like being given a key to his heart.
Jisung’s head pokes out of the comforter and Minho takes a seat on the edge of the bed to hear him out.
Jisung wrings his hands under the cover of his blankets as he speaks.
“I want you to ask me that question again. And I’m going to answer it this time. Third time’s the charm, yeah?” he laughs wetly.
“Are you sure?”
“No,” Jisung says. “But I want you to ask me anyway. I want to tell you anyway.”
“Okay,” Minho breathes. Then he breathes some more, just to work up the courage to get it out of his mouth.
The words stick in his throat.
“Jisung, why do you like acting?”
“Because of my mum. And because of myself. There’s a lot of explaining attached to this,” he sighs. “I don’t know how much Channie-hyung told you…”
“It doesn’t matter. Tell me again.”
Jisung nods and Minho lets himself sit more fully on the bed, turning to face Jisung properly.
“There’s this thing in emotional abuse cases that psychologists call enmeshment. Clinically, it’s supposed to be when the boundaries in a relationship get so permeable and unclear that you begin to ‘share’ emotions. In dysfunctional families it usually means that the system revolves around one person’s emotion and apparently it makes it hard for the children to become developmentally independent.
“That’s clinically. But in real life, it meant that I didn’t know who I was without my mum. And not in the sense that she had a lot of influence over my childhood, which she did, but I had moulded my entire personality around her idea of me. I had to be whatever she wanted and liked. And I would grow to love whatever she wanted and liked even if I didn’t at the beginning. There was no other choice.”
The itch of tears prick at Minho’s eyes, the most often he’s ever felt them since his father’s reaction to his coming out.
“So when she decided she wanted me to go into acting, I had to. Or else my mum would hate me and what would I do then. At times it kind of feels like Stockholm Syndrome, even though I know that applies more to people than things. I hated it at first. I wasn’t very good at it to begin with and it took time away from friends, from school. Most of all because it wasn’t really a choice and it was just another one of the things I had to do to keep my mum happy. To keep the peace, the balance in the family. Everything was about that, you know? No matter what each of us did, whether it was about my brother’s extra-curriculars or my dad’s work schedule or money or our emotions, we all had to manage it to fit her arbitrary scale. To make sure it wouldn’t tip into another meltdown. And sometimes it would anyway, despite how careful we’d been. There was no telling what could set her off so we had to be careful all the time.
“No one wanted to be the reason a meltdown. And whoever was, everyone hated them for a little bit until things settled down again. I’m… I’m not innocent in that. I remember giving my brother the silent treatment for a week after he went to a friend’s house one day after school when he wasn’t supposed to and my mum screamed and cried at me for hours for making him want to leave.
“My acting career began because my mother wanted me to go into it and I was too scared of what would happen if I said no. It was just routine. It was work. And it made her happy that I was getting rich and famous, so the boat rocked a little less and I had succeeded at keeping the peace like I was meant to. I got good at it at some point, because if I became someone else, I could be someone that she actually liked. And then I made Han. She loved Han.”
Han, the character made for interviews, to be the bright shining celebrity Jisung didn’t think he could be. The one who oozed charisma and made all the right jokes. The one who’d taken on Minho’s throwaway suggestion to pretend twenty questions was a college orientation activity and made that his role to fulfill.
Minho is grateful he could pick it up and throw the character away.
“At some point, I started to like acting too. But it took me a long time to even begin wondering if that was just because it made my mum happy and if my mum was happy there was no emotional upheaval in the house. It wasn’t just that though. I was good at it, confident at something for the first time in my life, because no matter how much my mum told me I was shit and talentless I had the numbers to prove her wrong. And it was fun, making myself into a new person and losing myself into their lives each time. At times it helped me pretend for a moment that my mum didn’t own me entirely. That there were bits of me that could exist without her, even if those bits were fictional, were made-up characters.”
Jisung lets another tear soak his pillow, where a small puddle has formed.
“When Chan first told me what he thought it was, I got mad at him, did you know? I couldn’t believe he would say those things about my mum. I was furious. She was the one who got me into the industry, got me to meet him and he turned on her by accusing her of all those terrible things. I didn't talk to him for a whole week and for months I would barely listen to anything other than updates about my schedule. He never got annoyed at me for it. I think subconsciously I was waiting for him to also explode at me like my mum but he never did. But after I finally listened, finally accepted what she did and started trying to move in with Chan, I couldn’t tell whether I actually liked it. Acting, that is. It became so hard. I couldn’t be anyone else because I was already such a mess.
“I was filming The Last Worst Day- have you watched that movie?”
“Yeah,” Minho swallows. “It’s one of my favourites.”
Jisung gazes at him despondently, teeth digging into his bottom lip as if to stop himself. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Minho says firmly. “Keep going.”
Jisung shakes his head. “No. I don’t want to ruin your favourite- one of your favourite movies because I was feeling bad.”
“Jisung, I don’t care about the movie. I care about you. Don’t think about me, just say what you want to say.”
For a second, there is a stubborn silence, but eventually Jisung relents. It doesn’t feel like a victory.
“That scene with Minjae’s mum where she locks him out of her apartment ‘cos he just wants money for drugs. I was supposed to be crying for that scene, so that was nothing shocking but I had a panic attack. I thought my mum had actually locked me out, even though I was the one who was putting space between us, moving out. No one realised because it was along the lines of how the scene was meant to play out, they thought I was fleshing the character, giving a better performance than they expected and all that. Someone was holding Chan back from running onto the shot.”
A pit forms in Minho’s stomach. That scene. He's cried at that scene.
“I had to beg the director not to put that take in. Channie-hyung begged him. He ended up splicing it so that it went right up until the panic attack started, all the crying before, and then cut to a different shot and that was the best we could negotiate it down to because he loved the raw emotion of it all too much.”
Minho is about to throw up. He’s praised that scene. How many people have praised that scene without knowing?
“When we wrapped up the promotions and the contract with TG ended, I transferred to Yellow Wood and took a hiatus. Six months. For therapy, time, space. I couldn’t even tell if I wanted to come back to acting at all. But I loved it deep down. I really did, I think. Even with my mum out of the equation, it was the happiest of all the things in my childhood and the happiest still now. I love taking someone else’s skin and story and telling it to the world. But I needed time to make sure. I mean of course it wasn’t all better in six months – I’m still going to the same therapist, online every week. But I knew I wanted to act again and that was enough.
"I honestly thought I moved on from it, that I wouldn’t seize up whenever someone mentioned her. It took me by surprise that I reacted so violently having someone close to the truth. It rears its head in the most unsuspecting times. And I really haven’t told anyone apart from Channie-hyung, Changbin-hyung and my therapist. So it makes sense.”
“So why the hiatus again?” Minho whispers, not intending to be heard.
“I’m close to hitting my expiry date,” Jisung says.
“What?”
“I’m twenty-two. I don’t have much time left.”
“Jisung, what the fuck – are you dying?”
Jisung gives a pitiful giggle, the humour in it is below zero, like he himself doesn’t even believe he’s laughing from amusement.
“No, no, it’s nothing like that but, look. People are always waiting for child stars to fuck it up, okay? We come with an expiry label. Not many of us make it past twenty to be honest and I’m pushing my limit.”
And Minho…
Minho couldn't find it in him to argue. Before he lived in this house, he'd always had a sense that he'd turn on the news one day or scroll through the news to find out Jisung had overdosed on hard drugs or gotten arrested for a DUI. It’s happened enough times with Jisung’s child actor colleagues, and fallen idol stars that it was just a peek around the corner of a street until something bad happens.
“Nobody likes to think of the collateral damage of being in the industry for so long," Jisung continues. "They like the idea of us, children so good at their task, so trained, they’re perfect by the time they get to the real deal. Already rich so they can do whatever they want. But everyone knows it doesn’t last. After a certain point, after you get ‘too perfect,’ people start wanting you to fail, even if they pretend they like you on the outside.”
“Jisung, I’m sure no one’s…”
“No one says it, but they all think it. I can tell. I’ve had eyes on me since I was twelve. It’s the attention that drove me mad. I couldn't deal with... I don't know why but I felt like people were starting to figure it out. I saw this one article that was deducing that I don’t really talk about my family anymore. I wanted you to write my story before I eventually dropped off, because then at least a few people would read it. I want to be someone else’s survival guide, so that they don’t make the same mistakes or so they know how to come back from it. But just. Everyone's waiting for me to fail – I couldn’t be out in the public when it did happen.
“I can’t have everyone watch me as I fall apart.”
But I can have you, is unspoken as Jisung finally lets his tears take over, and reaches for Minho to hug him as he calms down.
Jisung takes a lengthy break from human interaction, with the exception of Chan of course, and comes back down roughly a week later, with the promise that he wants to divulge everything to Minho.
In order to do so, they end up traipsing down the same lane of memories that Jisung had previously guided them through, this time filling in the background of what was happening at home, with his mum, through each instance. The colours of the stores on the street come filling in, where before they were dull imitations of buildings. They are sorrowful stories, things that Minho would never want to happen to anyone, and yet these are the stories that paint the canvas to create the art that is Han Jisung. It’s worth hearing.
These conversations happen all around the villa, wherever Minho happens to see him first once he wakes up, and they no longer call them sessions. It doesn’t make sense for Jisung to fit the experiences into primly packaged boxes, an anecdote here or there that adds up precisely to an hour, or three hour interval. And there's no point to sectioning it off to a room when it's a part of Jisung regardless, what happened to him.
Some days, he sees Jisung sitting at the bar stools by the kitchen counter as Chan is labouring away at the stove, making a hot breakfast and Jisung will share with him in the minutes before Chan finishes up how one time his father told him that his mother’s love had a price, that the price was sometimes sadness and that he was going to have to learn to live with that.
Other times, they spend hours in the theatre room with an inane sitcom running on low volume, trading stories. One particular day, they are sitting on the floor leaned against the footrests of the recliners while Jisung recounts the numerous times he had been invited to parties and play dates and even extracurricular sports that he didn’t get to go to, his mother citing a new excuse each time. Her own laziness, her loneliness, Jisung’s repulsiveness as a person.
“She said that no one liked me anyway, so she was doing them all a favour by keeping me at home.”
Jisung doesn’t cry but his voice is light as a feather as he talks about a time just before Hyunjin stopped talking to him, where he missed an art exhibition that was super important to Hyunjin, his own work being displayed, because his mother had thrown all their ceramic cups onto the floor in a fit and left the house, left him to clean it up alone. A laugh track from the sitcom hums distantly and the incongruence still brands itself into Minho’s mind.
Jisung falls into Minho as he talks and he doesn’t feel manipulative about giving Jisung the touch that he needs and wants, and is comfortable enough to get. Supporting him on his shoulder as Jisung goes on and on, Minho feels the dissonance of being excited out of his skin and the most at peace he’s ever been.
On rare occasions, that gets rarer as the weeks go by, Jisung doesn’t come out of the room until after lunch or dinner, and doesn’t speak to Minho at all. Minho doesn’t begrudge these days, although he can admit that initially he panicked at them, wondering if he’d said anything wrong the day prior. Now he can accept that there’s nothing wrong with them and nothing wrong with him either. Jisung needs his rest from the constant stress of rehashing the worst bits of his life, and perhaps rest from Minho as well. It’s a semi-regular cyclic pattern and the months at the villa have well and truly gotten Minho accustomed.
Jisung always emerges out of these days with a newfound spark and it makes all the quiet fall away into insignificance in comparison to Jisung's glow.
Despite Jisung taking all his necessary breaks from the routine, the stories of his mum become burdensome for the both of them, after almost a month of conversations dominated by her presence. While Minho recognises that it’s something that serves Jisung to talk to with someone other than his therapist and father figures, he still deserves reprieve in the midst of it.
And Minho’s gut churns with the guilt of having incited the intensity of them, so today he’s determined to try for something more light-hearted. A fun episode in and amongst the drama of Jisung’s life.
He settles himself into the recliner right next to Jisung’s, mimicking Jisung’s pose of leaning sideways against the backrest so they can face each other, and with no little amount of hesitation, edges his feet to tangle with Jisung’s on the armrest that they share. Eyes purposefully trained on the movie flashing through its scenes on the projector, he tries to put up a show of not caring what Jisung’s reaction to the barely-there touch is, but it’s futile when his heart picks up as Jisung lets them rest on each other. It’s absolutely disgusting how much he melts from Jisung rubbing his bare shins up against the soles of Minho’s feet. Pathetic. Is this what a crush reduces you to?
“Okay!” Minho chirps, bright smile on his face to incite good spirits. It’s half superstitious. “I know it’s been a while but I want to ask you a question.” When Jisung grins in encouragement, he continues, “Who was your first love?”
And yes, maybe he’s a masochist for digging into the bruise of asking the object of his affection the details of his love life, and signing up for a lot of dreamy sighing about whoever it was that captured his attention, but Minho has plans to hit two birds with one stone. Lightening the mood is one of those things but the other is information gathering. If he wants any chance at wooing the nation’s most beloved actor, he needs that head-start on intel.
The current objective is to figure out Jisung’s type through past patterns.
It helps a little that Jisung’s resulting blush at the topic of conversation travels all the way down past the collar of his shirt and tracks up high on his cheek, rendering him all soft and pretty for Minho’s viewing. It’s a subconscious instinct, and almost irrelevant now that he’s aware it’s all a put-on character, but the back of his mind racks through all the interviews of Jisung that he’s watched, trying to examine whether someone else has been able to elicit this kind of reaction from him before. Something similar flags, but nothing exactly like this, nothing with the slouched shoulders, relaxing back into the chair and embracing the shy embarrassment like a blanket around himself and allowing it to be bared to Minho. On camera, Jisung hides his face in his hands, or behind a co-worker’s back at the first hint of a blush.
Here it is on full display.
This belongs to Minho.
“Have you fallen in love before, Jisungie?” Minho swoons. He might actually be an idiot. It’s his idea, yes, and it’d be good for the book, but goddamn even the thought of Jisung in love with someone else makes him nauseous.
“Yeah,” Jisung trails off and fuck Minho hadn’t even considered the possibility he might not be attracted to men, though Changbin’s reaction to learning about Minho’s feelings didn’t leave much to the imagination. What if Changbin was wrong?
“Awww, don’t leave me hanging, who was it?”
If possible, Jisung’s cheeks tint a brighter red, blotchier and imperfect in all the right ways. His fingers fidget faster with the hem of his shirt.
“They…” Jisung peeks up at Minho from under his lashes and god he has no idea the effect he has on Minho, does he?
He smiles regardless. “You don’t need to worry about that Jisung. I know about Chan and Changbin, and I’m gay too. And if you’re worried I’m going to write about it, you know I’d never do it without your permission. Just say the word and it’s gone. This one is off the records.”
“You don’t care that I don’t want to come out?” he squeaks, too embarrassed to be saying it.
Minho shrugs. “It’s not for everyone. And specifically not for you. Korea isn’t that accepting of a place yet – I went through the whole shebang with my dad to prove it. He came around eventually but fuck that was hard. You’d be flushing away any chance at returning to your career if you came out. It’s good to be proud and all but sometimes it’s just not practical and that’s okay. If everyone you want to know, knows, then who the fuck cares.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot,” Jisung notes.
“Yeah, had a hell of a time regretting and then hating that I regretted coming out to my dad. Overthinking tendencies certainly helped with that.”
Jisung giggles in solidarity.
“Don’t think you’ve got out of this,” Minho prods, hauling them back to the starting point of the conversation. “Who are they?”
“It was one of my friends at school,” Jisung says haltingly.
“One of the three best friends.”
“…Yeah.”
“So? Which one? Minnie, Yongbokkie or Hyunjin” Minho asks, though really he’d rather eat a bag full of needles than know who captured Jisung’s heart so entirely.
“Minnie…." Jisung eyes widen, and oh god that's another thing Minho loves about him. "Oh, I didn’t even realise that I was using this nickname this whole time. His name was Seungmin. Kim Seungmin.”
"Fuck."
Well tie a ten pound weight to Minho and let him drown in the sea. This is as bad as it gets.
No wait, he can’t be too hasty. There are probably a million Kim Seungmin’s in Korea, neither of the parts are particular uncommon names. But the more he digs into it, actually thinks about it...
Felix, Seungmin's ‘very close friend and roommate.’ Felix, whose Korean name is Yongbok. Who went to the same school as Seungmin since grade school where they had two other close friends. If Minho stretches his memory, he can recall Seungmin mentioning they had a close friend by the name of Hwang Hyunjin.
Fuck Minho all the way to heaven and hell, the apple of his eye used to have a humongous boner (i.e. very innocent middle school crush) for Kim Seungmin, his work-rival and sort-of only friend that he pretends to hate.
He has to be one hundred percent sure.
Leaving Jisung baffled, he dashes upstairs to collect his phone before racing back downstairs equally as fast, nearly missing the last step and falling flat on his face. He scrolls through his camera roll and he walks back into the darkened theatre room blind, scrounging up the few photos he has with Seungmin courtesy of Felix when he third-wheeled some of their dates.
When he finally finds one with Seungmin’s face in good view, he shoves it up to Jisung’s face.
“It’s been ten years, and so he probably looks very different, but do you think this is him?”
Jisung stares at the photo awestruck, finger prying at the phone after a few seconds of stunned silence, trying to get a better look, and Minho lets him take it without a fight.
“How do you have this?” he asks reverently.
“He’s a co-worker of mine at Blue Moon, and a good friend. Felix is too. And you know, you were right about Seungmin after all. He got into Law at SNU but transferred after his first year into literature. He’s an editor now. He might even edit this book, if our boss doesn’t consider it a conflict of interest, though by that measure me working on this might be a conflict of interest oh whoops I’ve said too much haven’t I–”
“Do you have his number?” Jisung says breathlessly. “If you work with him, you must have his number right? Can I call him? Text him?”
Minho stops his rambling, and his mildest annoyance at Seungmin flutters away at Jisung’s awed tone.
He would do anything to make this boy happy.
“Yeah, of course.”
Kim Seungmin – Blue Moon
[3:02]
Kim Seungmin
when the fuck were you going to tell me
[3:04]
You finally decided to update me
[3:05]
hell no this isnt an update it’s an intervention
and why the hell wouldn’t you mention that you KNEW jisung when u asked for an update
not like that would make me more willing to tell you or anything
[3:07]
Because we haven’t talked in years. Almost a decade.
[3:07]
yea bc of his bitch ass mother
[3:07]
It’s not my right to pretend I know him.
Oh he told you about that
[3:08]
hello? i’m literally meant to be writing his life story?
but yes.
and that's stupid. he still cares about you, you know?
he would’ve been over the moon to know you asked.
in fact he is.
[3:09]
What
[3:10]
i’m passing over the phone.
[3:10]
Omg
[3:11]
Hi, this is Jisung
[3:11]
Sungie?
Fuck, how have you been?
I missed you so much
Minho is typing…
Incoming call from Kim Seungmin – Blue Moon…
It’s over another picnic, their second ever, in the slightly chilly weather of autumn, that Jisung brings it up. It’s not as great of a picnic, because of said weather, the sun too shy to bless them with it’s full power, and the breeze just on the other end of refreshing, but Jisung prefers to bundle up even in summer and Minho doesn’t care much this way or that about the climate, more who he’s with, so neither of them complain.
The food is good too and sometimes that’s all that really matters. Jisung still eats Chan’s homecooked food for proper meals but he had a slice of a log cake Minho baked last week and made Minho blush with fierce accomplishment so nothing else matters.
“I want you to make it a biography,” Jisung says as Minho sets about packing their scraped clean tupperware and mugs back into the basket.
“It already is,” he snarks distractedly.
“No, not an autobiography. A biography. I want it to be yours.”
A glass cup slips out of Minho’s limp hand. His breath hitches. "You want me to tell your story?"
Jisung nods, a satisfied grin on his face. "And I want your name on the cover."
“Shit, Jisung do you know how many pronouns I have to edit? And that's not even talking about all the phrases that don't work in third person and the passages I'll have to rework. This is going to add almost a month to the timeline.”
“Will you do it?” he cuts in.
As if there was any question. If it’s Jisung who asks, Minho will do anything.
“Fuck yeah, I'll do it. Don't even pay for the overtime. Of course I'll do it. Are you sure though? It’s your story. I’m just giving it the right words. I don’t need to have my name on the cover.”
“Are we not the same in that sense?” Jisung counters, placing a hand over Minho’s. “Nothing I act is wholly mine. It’s all written there for me, all the dialogue and pauses and when I’m supposed to smile or cry, and all I have to do is perform it in a way that the directors likes.”
That’s demeaning the work that Jisung does. In the days after he picked up the job- no the day he received the initial email, way before he knew he’d actually be working for him, Minho watched interviews upon interviews. Not just of Jisung chatting up media men and columnists and reviewers, but also director’s cuts, behind-the-scenes stuff that he pirated and all those extended cut movie DVD’s he’d borrowed from Jeongin.
Every time, the staff had something of a similar nature about Jisung. That he made the characters real beyond what any fine-tuning and directing could manage. That inevitably, at some point during the shooting, Jisung had gotten a better grasp on the role than the writers themselves, that whenever he deviated from the script in the heat of the moment, they were convinced they were the ones who were writing it wrong. That whatever Jisung changed was the perfect realisation of their imagination, far better than what they could articulate into words on a script.
He is talented in a way that inspires people to become poets because there is no way to describe him in simple words. His existence deserves metaphors sprung from a newborn star because there is no cliche that comes close to capturing him. Even Minho hasn't happened upon a way to put him into words yet.
Jisung is a genius, who as much as he borrows from the creativity of the team around him on a set, is able to create a special sort of magic on his own.
And Minho is just… he borrows the greatness of other people to make himself just the tiniest bit noticed. No, he stole from it. After all, none of the acclaim was his own.
“Of course you’re writing out someone else’s ideas but the prose is yours, is it not?" Jisung continues. "You’re better than me in that sense. No one you work with gives you the instructions for how to write out their thoughts, you can just do it. You're amazing, hyung.”
Minho works his throat, tries to let the words out that are trapped in the in between.
“You really think so?”
Jisung smiles and every thought in Minho’s brain vanishes.
“I know so.”
Why Devil Boy Worked – And Why Later Seasons Did Not [1:43:25]
533,940 views • 23 Sep 2021
Dire Thoughts (375K subscribers)
Description: Use the code direthoughts42 to access up 10% discounts on StyleFresh and affiliated brands.
I’m so excited to finally be covering this show. It’s a childhood favourite of mine.
Timestamps:
(read more)
Transcript
[1:21:00] – though it has some issues, her character is great. And then we have Eun. Eun is easily the best character in the show, not counting his villain counterpart. And honestly, he's
[1:21:10] – probably the main thing that makes this show worth watching. And you can really tell because in season six, you feel his absence. This show just falls apart when he's
[1:21:20] – not in it. He's just too good. This character is what we can refer to as lightning in a bottle. What Han Jisung did with Eun can never be equalled or remade. He's a legendary
[1:21:30] - character. I don't have anything else to say.
Comments (5.4k) Sort By: Top comments
fruitsaladyummyyummy
Han Jisung’s earlier acting is criminally underrated. From a technical standpoint his acting in Devil Boy is great. It kinda sucks because I feel like some oldies only know him for Devil Boy and 5 Year Plan, which are both like teen-targeted works, and because of that they think he's not that great or whatever he's just some mediocre "pretty boy" actor.
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Tuna Time
i just fucking LOVE how everyone who watched devil boy from season 1 to season 6 just agrees that season three is easily the best fucking season of the whole series. if i were to rewatch devil boy, i can just rewatch season three so easily without hesitations. everyone’s acting was so good, ESPECIALLY jisung’s. he really shined in that season and how he really fucked everyone’s minds (the characters and the audiences) really shows how much of a great actor he is the range that he can do. it’s been like years since evil!eun and i still believe that he deserves an award for that character alone. he carried the whole show on his shoulders so easily.
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↳dina dk
Season three is responsible for Han Jisung’s successful career. It was when he got to show the great actor he is. He outshined EVERYONE on that show before and After. No one in the cast could match his talent and ability.
↳desertfox yj
98% of the public who watched Devil Boy stayed with it because of Eun!! Han Jisung bewitched us all with his cheerfulness, his acting, his everything! Every single scene of his in this show is PURE GOLD!!!
michi
I also love that Han Jisung actually was at the casting for Sungho, but then during the reading of the pilot script alone he loved Eun so much that he wanted to play him instead of the main character. Legend behaviour
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Mia r.
Let’s be honest Eun is the reason this show is so good
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By early November, when Jisung asks, it’s no longer a surprise.
They’re sprawled out on the living room couch, Chan and Changbin off together somewhere in the gym with the promise that their motivational music is not so loud that they won’t hear a cry for help. It’s reassuring, but at this point, largely unnecessary.
The couch is a sectional, which makes it very simple for them to arrange themselves such that Jisung is laying with his head in Minho’s lap and Minho can stretch his legs out on the extension. There is no movie or music playing in the background, just the far-off chirp of the forest birds and the rustling of the trees as the wind blows past. There would’ve been the ticking of a clock added in but Jisung got peeved by it after he started spending more time downstairs, so the thing hasn’t had its batteries in it for months.
Jisung’s hoodies and sweatpants are at long last becoming weather appropriate. His hair is fluffy and soft against Minho’s thigh, against his fingers as he cards through them, just like the rest of him. Always so soft and pliant.
“Can you kiss me?” Jisung pleads, and it’s the softest thing, the sweetest thing.
Minho doesn’t even reply. He just leans down and gives Jisung the kisses he wishes he could have given him months ago. Just as he imagined, Jisung moulds to him, pressing up, every part of them curling into each other.
Jisung is out of breath, near panting, when Minho stops. His lips are red and Minho's chest swell with pride at the thought that he did that.
Minho sighs contentedly, his body relaxing against Jisung, all the built-up tension seeping out of his in calm waves as he rests his head against Jisung’s soft hair. His voice is little more than a murmur when he speaks. “You’re my favourite person, Jisungie.”
Jisung giggles. “Yeah well my favourite person is Channie-hyung. Sorry.”
There’s nothing to dispute about that. Minho would’ve even dare get accusatory, with all the things he’s seen, all the things Jisung and Chan have told him.
“What about second favourite then?” he prompts.
The answer comes without hesitation. “Changbin-hyung.”
Again, Minho is contractually bound not to argue.
“Third?” he begs, desperate.
Jisung hums as if in deep thought and smirks, malicious. “Seungminnie.”
Minho cannot be held accountable for the ungodly screeching.
Jisung cracks up into riotous laughter and Minho can’t even be mad because it’s his favourite thing to see, no matter that it’s his humiliation that causes it.
“Come on, better than Seungmin at least,” he bargains. Begs.
The giggles still haven’t left Jisung’s body. “Better than Seungmin,” he acquiesces.
Minho can be happy with third place. If third place means he sits just below Chan and Changbin, it’s probably the highest compliment, the greatest confession Jisung can make.
“Hyung, just before you get ahead of yourself…”
Minho’s heart shatters.
Jisung flounders at his broken expression, hands flailing. “No, hyung that’s not what I mean! I was going to say… You know I come with at least a hundred warning labels, right?” Minho frowns and Jisung frowns back. “No let me say this. First off, I’m famous – which, red flag right there. I don’t control my own schedule, I can’t go out to public places often and even when I do I can’t be free. I have security personnel. It’s Changbin-hyung most of the time but still. Add on my anxiety, destructive habits, shaky home life and well homosexuality, I’m literally a recipe for a dating disaster. Not to mention, I won’t be able to come out for a long time and it’s not fair to make you wait.”
He brings up points that should sound important. That are in their own right considerable barriers, but Minho’s always had a strange thought process.
“Jisungie, you need to understand that you’re not everyone’s last priority,” he says, cupping Jisung’s cheeks so he can look at him head on. “In fact, I have it on good authority that you’re quite a lot of people’s first priority. Me, for example. I know that being a secret boyfriend might hard – I might get jealous, and clingy, and crave to touch you more than what flies in public – but I’m also not going to condemn you into living in this bubble your whole life. I can put aside some of my needs to give you that. We’re both important in this relationship, okay?”
“Okay,” Jisung agrees hesitantly.
“Publicity means nothing to me, not if I can have you here in private. I don’t need the world knowing you’re mine. I quite think you’re tired of being owned anyhow. Loving someone loudly, in the day, in front of everyone is overrated. I want you in the shadows of the limelight, because that’s when I know it’s you.”
Jisung is beautiful in the glow of the silver screen but Minho doesn’t care for beauty. Jisung real in the shadows, in the space behind the stars that light the night sky, and that’s the person Minho wants.
“I’ll take care of everything,” Minho says, letting his hands drift back to Jisung’s hair, smoothing out the places where they got disheveled from the kissing. Jisung's eyes close in content, and he entrusts himself to Minho. “You don’t have to worry about a single thing. I’ll take care of it all.”
ALLHALLYU
Update: Han Jisung Returns After Six Month Hiatus – and He Has a Surprise Present
The past six months have been hard for Sungshines, with absolutely no content, scheduled releases, updates or whereabouts of Han Jisung. However after an extended hiatus, the beloved actor is finally back and he has a homecoming gift to announce.
Here is the announcement from Yellow Wood announcing his return to his job:
“Hello, this is Yellow Wood Entertainment.
We would like to share a notice on the health and schedule of Han Jisung.
After receiving adequate help and rest, Han is now able to return to his schedules as an actor. We apologise for all events and shoots that were cancelled or postponed as a result of this but thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting us and Han through these times.
Han will resume schedules on the 5th of December 2022, including award show appearances and MC-ing.
Once again, we offer our sincerest gratitude for your continued support and consideration.”
And that’s not all! Han has already posted his first selca on Instagram since before his mysterious disappearance act in late April, to a massive waiting audience, all greeting him back with tears and smiles in his comment section. Certainly, no one loves their job more than Han Jisung, whose first photo upon his return to social media is one of him back on the set of Unsolved, with his two managers - quite famous in their own right by association - on the fringes of the shot.
[image attached]
It doesn’t stop there! According to several rumours floating around, it seems highly likely that there will be a book published about Han’s life story. Although the sources are not entirely credible, the idea is gaining enough general traction on twitter spaces and in public forums, so many Sungshines are anticipating Yellow Wood’s promotions and subsequent release.
What do you think? Would you buy and read Han Jisung’s biography?
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IN THE SHADOW OF A STAR: A BIOGRAPHY OF HAN JISUNG
By Lee Minho
{Blue Moon Publishing House}
[Out Now]