Chapter 188

Seo Taeil leisurely pushed his chair back and stretched out his long legs. Leaning way back, one hand on the armrest propping up his chin, he flattened Lee Doha with everything he had — his pose and expression the very picture of arrogance.

"You ever taken first on a music show? Number one on the streaming charts? A four-hour concert with the whole setlist packed with your own songs? Tens of thousands of people singing along in unison to lyrics and melodies you wrote? Hundreds of commissions coming in asking you to write, no matter the genre — trot, rock ballad, whatever?"

"…….."

"I have."

Seo Taeil tapped the armrest with his other hand — the one not propping up his chin — and reset the room.

"So if a guy like me were on the same level as you — wouldn't that be a serious blow to my pride?"

If you're gonna chew someone out, at least drop the smile.

Seo Taeil was still smiling — warm, gentle — even as he stomped all over someone's pride. I was dying to know what expression Lee Doha was wearing right now, but I couldn't work up the nerve to actually look.

Just shut up and count the pattern on the floor….

While I kept my head down and studied Seo Taeil's studio floor to the nanometer, Seo Taeil kept laying into Lee Doha.

"Wanting to hold your own on the team — the mindset itself, I get. As a producer, that's a genuinely healthy kind of ambition. And your submission this round — I gave it a proper listen, honestly."

"…….."

"Mm…. which is exactly why I don't get it, then."

Seo Taeil, as if he genuinely couldn't work it out, tilted his head this way and that and asked:

"You felt your own gaps, you saw how great I am. So what comes next shouldn't be frustration and despair — it should be whoa, I've got to pump this guy for every last drop of know-how and make it my own! Right? It's not like you're putting out this one album and then wrapping it up."

"…ah."

Only then did Lee Doha seem to have a moment of realization. Seo Taeil gave a couple of light pats to the shoulder of the guy softly reacting.

"Back in our day, if I hadn't done it there was nobody else who'd write us songs, so I had to grit my teeth and do it — but you're not in that situation. Doha, you're an idol, aren't you? A composer? Did you sign here as a producer?"

"…no."

"You've got to think this through. Kairos's debut track is your debut track too. And your role model — me — wrote it for you. So if you show up to your own debut track with rap prep in this shape — is that acceptable, or not acceptable?"

"Not acceptable."

Was the mood suddenly kindergarten? Ah, no. Basic training?

Even inside the confusing mood, I could feel Lee Doha's mental slowly rebuilding.

His answers came faster, his tone got firmer, and his eyes sharpened. Sneaking a look — shoulders squared, back ramrod-straight — this was definitely the usual bear.

Honestly, I couldn't tell you which specific part of all this is healing him….

Whatever. As long as it worked on him, that was all that mattered, right?

Seo Taeil, apparently catching Lee Doha's shift too, dangled a carrot at just the right timing.

"If you really want to be an asset to the team — do what you can do right now."

"What I can do… would be…"

"You're the rapper, aren't you? So rap. Harder than anyone. Better than anyone. This is the one thing on your team that only you can do."

If you're a rookie, act like one — know your place and put in the work at your own job — dress it up politely, and this was roughly what it'd come out sounding like, wasn't it?

To my ears — sitting at 51% F — it read as max-DPS burn any way I sliced it. But to 100%-T Lee Doha, apparently, it landed as the clearest answer in the world.

As if the fog in his head had fully cleared, Lee Doha bowed low to Seo Taeil.

"Thank you, sunbaenim. …That was a real help."

"Whether it was actually a help or not — we'll see at the next recording, right? I'm expecting good things."

"Yes. I'll come back properly prepared."

The conviction Lee Doha had been after came back into sharp focus.

Jung Siwoo and I glanced at each other at the same moment and let out a breath of relief. Seo Taeil caught what the two of us had just done with uncanny precision and spun his chair back around toward us.

"I'm normally the type who comes down real hard on this kind of thing…. I'm going easy today because your groupmates are here, so don't disappoint me next time. Look at them — you got a little demoralized and they came trotting straight to me."

"Wait, why us all of a sudden…"

"Doha, this 'music we make together' you keep talking about — think again about what that actually looks like. There's definitely more you can do right now. That's homework."

"Yes. …Thank you, sunbaenim."

No. This counseling room's confidentiality was way too loose, seriously.

Recast on the spot as the guy who came sprinting to the teachers' office to bang on the door because our kid was feeling down, I protested with an aggrieved face — but Seo Taeil didn't so much as react, and even piled homework on top of it for Lee Doha.

Lee Doha, face full of gravity as if he'd been handed a monumental mission, stood right up from his seat and bowed deep to Seo Taeil in thanks. Since it would've been awkward for me and Jung Siwoo to be the only ones still seated in that moment, we sort of clumsily got up too and added our own thanks.

"Right. Consultation over. Off to practice with you. Our maknae's due in soon, so I've got to start getting ready too."

"Yes! Thanks for the good words!"

"Yeah — see you at the next recording."

The moment the business was done, Seo Taeil unceremoniously chased us out of the studio. The three of us were suddenly standing alone on the stark white hallway floor — and somehow, Jung Siwoo and I found ourselves stealing looks at Lee Doha.

What do we do now?

I don't know either.

It wasn't like we'd done anything wrong, but somehow it just felt off. He'd basically been chewed out because of us, hadn't he? Clear-cut-T Lee Doha himself might see it however he liked, but at a full 51% F, I couldn't stop feeling bad about it.

"Should we go?"

"Huh? Ah, yeah."

Whether or not he had any idea what was going on in my head, Lee Doha started walking ahead as if nothing had happened. Jung Siwoo and I hurried after him, working hard to read what was going on inside.

"…….."

No real conversation carried on the walk to the practice room.

Lee Doha wasn't much of a talker without a reason to be, and right now he looked lost in thought about something — while Jung Siwoo and I were too busy trying to read him.

Ah, whatever.

In the end, once again, the one who took the bullet to end this suffocating tiptoe-around-each-other standoff (which the man of the hour, Lee Doha, was oblivious to) was me.

Jung Siwoo might've been fine with it, but I was the kind of person who could not stand this kind of stillness, silence, quiet. As the saying goes, it's the thirsty man who digs the well.

"Hey, Doha."

"…….."

"Doha!"

"…ah. Sorry. What?"

A beat late, Lee Doha turned back to me and asked. Reading his expression carefully, I thought for a moment about how to ask. Then, finally landing on a question, I put it to him.

"You okay?"

At that, Lee Doha was quiet for a moment, then nodded firmly and answered.

"Yeah. I'm okay."

Yes — got him.

At the clean answer, I turned back to Jung Siwoo with a satisfied look. Trailing along slowly a few paces behind us, Jung Siwoo was wearing a similar expression, smiling like I was.

The bear's back.

The bear-cub mental that had wandered off had, at last, come home.

---

After that day.

Just as Seo Taeil had told him, Lee Doha put even more into practice to fulfill 'his role.'

Choreography, rap, gestures, even language study.

Everything he had to accomplish as Lee Doha, member of the idol group 'Kairos,' he threw himself into with even more focus.

All the while, in diligent Lee Doha's head, the homework Seo Taeil had given him kept turning over and over.

For music we make together — what is it I can do, right now?

To fulfill his calling as Kairos's main rapper, Lee Doha had lately been putting more effort than anyone into sharpening his own rap skills.

Sometimes he'd risk being a bother and go to Seo Taeil for help, sometimes he studied by hunting down videos of famous foreign rappers, and he never stopped researching ways to produce a wider range of variations.

But even that felt like it was missing something.

He couldn't have meant it as just "get better at rap."

Today too, wrapping up practice in his personal practice room at a very late hour and stepping out, Lee Doha kept turning Taeil's homework over in his head, without stop.

"……?"

As his thoughts piled up, his steps slowed; as his steps slowed, his field of view widened. Things he'd normally have walked past without a thought were, today of all days, landing on him with unusual weight.

The choreography practice room off to one side of the hallway caught Lee Doha's eye. It was the space Kairos had been using exclusively lately.

Everyone had clocked out for the day, so the lights should have been off — but somehow the light was very much on, and he could faintly hear what sounded like music.

Jaeyoung or Taehee?

Wondering if maybe one of the trainee friends who'd started coming back in a few days ago was using the room without knowing the current arrangement, Lee Doha turned his steps away from the stairs and back toward the practice room.

Normally he wouldn't much care who was using the room or how, but these days it was Kairos-exclusive — a lot of the members' personal stuff was in there, and new-song files that couldn't be leaked were sitting right there too.

Thinking that if it did turn out to be one of the trainee friends, he'd just give them a quick heads-up, Lee Doha carefully opened the practice-room door.

"…ah."

But when the door opened, the song playing in the practice room turned out to be none other than their own debut track.

And the person practicing inside wasn't a trainee — it was a Kairos member.

Slightly startled at the unexpected face, Doha called his name almost without meaning to.

"Yugeon?"

"Ah, what."

At Doha's voice, Yugeon — mid-practice — flinched slightly and turned toward the doorway where Doha was standing. Doha slowly pieced the situation together, an I don't get this look on his face.

Yugeon definitely told me earlier he was heading straight home after our extra choreo session….

The Yugeon who'd said he was going home to pass out — why was he still at the practice room at this hour?

Slowly scanning the practice room, Doha noticed the speaker playing the debut-track MR and Yugeon holding a wired mic in one hand and a lyric sheet in the other, and let out a small sound of realization.

"Sorry. You were in the middle of practice. Am I interrupting?"

"…no. It wasn't going anywhere anyway. Come in if you want."

Given permission, Doha changed into the practice-room slippers and stepped inside. Watching him come in, Yugeon flopped down where he stood and leaned his head back against the mirror behind him. Doha walked over next to him and settled at a spot neither too close nor too far.

Doha asked:

"Practicing your part?"

"…yeah. But it's going god-awfully. Doesn't sit in the mouth right. The rhymes, the flow, whatever it was you taught me — I must've forgotten all of it."

Yugeon's lyric sheet, briefly visible, was packed with all sorts of notes. Traces of him trying to analyze and study it in his own way.

Yugeon, with his instinctive sense and natural talent, tended to overwhelm the other members when it came to dance — but on vocal and rap, the sheer shortage of practice hours meant he still had a long way to go in his training.

The rap parts especially — which he'd started properly taking on from the last Miro Maze round three — he still seemed to find foreign.

"With singing, I can at least roughly hit the notes and the beat and get through it…"

The moment he saw Yugeon like that, Lee Doha finally knew.

What he, right this moment, could do — for 'music they made together.'

"Want me to help?"

"You?"

"Yeah. I've been practicing rap again lately myself."

The way Doha saw it, Yugeon had talent.

With just a little more training, he'd soon take to writing his own lyrics and working with beats, it seemed to him.

And once that happened, Kairos would be able to make 'more music,' 'together' — that was the thought.

Doha handed back to Yugeon the line that had been the biggest source of strength for him lately.

"Doing it together's easier than doing it alone. And it's more fun."

Because we're on the same team.

Keeping the one line still too awkward to actually say aloud engraved in his chest, Doha carefully reached out his hand toward Yugeon.

A moment later, after some hesitation, Lee Yugeon slid his lyric sheet over to Lee Doha.

"…I can't get the pronunciation and timing right here."

"Ah. Yeah, that section looked tough to me too. I ran through it a few times myself and couldn't nail it either."

"Really? …I thought it was just me being a straight-up newbie."

"That's also true."

"You really don't cut me any slack, huh."

Inside the practice room, which had been filled with nothing but sighs and irritation, small laughs and small pleasures started to bloom, a little at a time.

He'd only taken a handful of steps out of that little back-room-sized studio where he could barely squeeze in and sit alone — and with just that, Doha's music was no longer lonely.

"Let's practice together from now on too. …We're on the same team now."

Just that alone was, more than enough, a satisfying step forward.