Derick W J Tan

All of them waved and gave Soo Young, who was eventually pacified with a bowl of strawberries, a hug before saying goodbye and left for the studio. Noticing that no one else except Tiffany unnie was going to give her a oppa a hug, Soo Young went over and hugged him and bade farewell too. But she was just going back to Tae Yeon’s room to play dress up with her clothes – something which Tae Yeon must never know, mind you.

Yoona was last.

“Oppa, I’ll see you soon,” Yoona said as she slipped on her sneakers.

“Alright, work hard, my little actress!” He clenched his fist. “Fighting!”

‘Work hard!’ in other words.

“Hwaiting!” Yoona clenched her fist and said as well, before she bowed a full ninety degrees and left.

There was a gentle breeze sweeping in from the east so Ixion took advantage of it to watch her walk away. He had initially thought that with all the handsome – whatever that word meant – actors and singers she met, Yoona would have gotten herself a boyfriend by now. And it was common for him to worry about little things like that every time he sent her off, like how he’d worry about Tiffany all the time.

But on this day, he had a rather uneasy feeling when he said goodbye to Yoona.

“Yoona ah!”

“Yes?” She twirled around and looked at him.

He sent a ripple to her and kept it around her body, searching to see if she had any injuries or wound or whether her body temperature was unusually high. Nothing seemed out of the norm other than the two eye-bags that was getting more and more prominent – which reminded him to buy more facial masks for her -  as the days passed. He looked at her again, the uneasy feeling was still there, but decided that he was simply being paranoid after what had happened with Soo Young and Tiffany.

“Oppa?”

“Ah, it’s nothing,” he then told her. “I was just wondering how long it’ll be, before we’ll see each other again.”

Yoona started to laugh. “I’ll come over and play with oppa whenever I’m free, okay?”

“Okay!” he yelled. “Alright,  run along now.”

With that, Yoona twirled around again and hurried off before she was late.

*

Soo Young sat down next to him on sofa and flipped open the enormous photo album. She was dressed in Tae Yeon’s clothes from head to toe, and also had her jewelleries dangling from her ears, neck and wrist. The girl was quite pleasantly surprised when she saw the photographs on the first page.

“We were so small,” she giggled, looking at a picture of Tiffany and her kissing Ixion on both sides of his cheeks, back when they were still in the orphanage. “Oppa is still so shy around girls.”

“No I’m not.”

Soo Young turned and tried to plant a kiss on him but he grabbed her by the face and warned her to stop playing a fool. Her point was proven and she was quite correct.

“Why aren’t there any more pictures of me?” She flipped through the next few pages, seeing only photographs of him and Tiffany.

“You were adopted when you were five.” He was afraid where this was going. “Take out the pink album.”

Soo Young looked at the albums scattered all over the table.

They were all pink.

“I told that Tiffany to get different colours… Never mind, find the one that says ‘Umma’ (‘Mother’) on the front.”

It took a while to search through the mess – which she made herself – until she found an album that was of a much more manageable size. She set it down on her lap, crossed her legs and opened it. Soo Young immediate burst into laughter.

Inside were pictures of Tae Yeon from when she was just a baby to when she had her acne outbreak when she was fourteen. Her hair was completely flat and the spectacles she wore were, well, freaking huge. To put it simply, the beautiful girl who resembled so much like a pristine doll looked completely different many years ago.

But as entertaining as it was to looked at funny pictures of Tae Yeon, Soo Young ended up going back to the album that had only pictures of Ixion and Tiffany.

“The two of you look so happy together,” she said, flipping through the album page by page. “Oh, where was this taken?”

She brought his fingers to the Braille letterings above the photograph.

“Ah, this was taken on the first Valentine’s Day where we pretended to be couples for fun,” he said, remembering how much Tiffany cried on that day – happy tears of course. “We were still quite poor back then so I made her a card and tried to write a message for her.”

Soo Young flipped to the next page where there was a picture of the card.

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t write so…”

Not a word was legible.

“Tippany-unnie was so touched that she was still crying when she took a picture with you!” she realized. “She must have really liked the card.”

Ixion smiled and waited for her to reached the next page.

Soo Young gasped.

“My very first performance in a small bar called Shake & Drink.”

It was a picture of him playing the piano and the way his head was tilted to a side along with the gentle yet also unfathomable expression on his face made him looked so perfect – dreamily perfect. Tiffany described the photograph to him before.

“Oppa…”

“Yes?”

Sadly, that photograph did nothing much to distract Soo Young.

“What happened to me after I was adopted?” The question finally came.

He sighed and simply shrugged. The truth could most likely be guessed and done accurately as well. The first few years were probably just pure love and joy, but as Soo Young got older, her parents began to abuse her more and more until he found her. And Ixion was just being optimistic about the first few years being just ‘pure love and joy’.

Who knows what else your father had done to you, he thought, understanding enough what it meant for a girl to be considered sexy.

“I’m not too sure myself. Right now I’m just waiting for your medical report to come before I’ll know what to do next,” he told her. “All you need to know is that no matter what happens, I won’t abandon you and I won’t let anyone take you away or hurt you.”

Soo Young smiled and hugged him. “Soo Young knows that.”

He chuckled at how she referred to herself as a third party.

After hugging him, she ran off for a while heading upstairs to one of the rooms before coming back down with something in her hand.

“Oppa, let’s take a picture together!” she said, turning on the camera mode on his phone.

And after a few minutes of directing from her, he finally posed a pose which she found satisfactory and with just the click of a button, a picture was taken. A picture that, unknown to Soo Young at that time, marked the first of countless in a brand new life that she was going to live in.

She also took thirty seven more shots right after that, forcing Ixy to play with her the whole time.

He spent the rest of the day teaching her how to play the piano – after he stopped her photo-taking craze by mentally cutting off the battery from his phone – until Tiffany, Tae Yeon and Seo Hyun came home. There was a fair bit of screaming on Tae Yeon’s part when she saw Soo Young in her clothes. After Tae Yeon got the little prankster out of her clothes, Soo Young spent the rest of the night watching television, eating and driving Tiffany crazy before Tae Yeon read her a bedtime story and sang her to sleep.

“You really need to start thinking about her future,” Tae Yeon said after shutting the door to her room.

“We should be getting her medical report and some word on the investigation by the next couple of days. We’ll see how it goes from there. As for her relatives, I’ve already hired a top law firm to represent us in case there’s a need to go to court over her custody.”

He let Tae Yeon lead him down to the living room where Tiffany and Seo Hyun were cuddled on the sofa watching a movie. They sat down with them and wrapped themselves in a woolly blanket as well, pausing the movie for a minute or so to let Tiffany get them up to speed.

Near the climax of the movie, his phone started to ring and his heart skipped a beat when he heard that it was the ring tone assigned to when Yoona’s family called him. Though it wasn’t alarming for them to call from time to time to chat, you don’t call someone at two in the morning unless it was an emergency. Tiffany wasn’t too happy to pause the movie again at such an exciting point, but she said nothing when she saw how fearful his expression was.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, but received no respond. “Ixy, what’s the matter?”

With each ring from the phone, ten different scenarios ran across his mind of what could had happened to Yoona. And with each ring his heart felt like it had aged another ten years. The fear and anxiety kept growing and growing until he finally couldn’t take it anymore.

He answered the phone.

- Chapter 21 (Fears)