Angel - Park Sohyun

You’ve always been a seasoned “bodyguard”. You were trained young, and have been doing the dirty work of multiple people, whether it be the Yakuza, the government, the flithy rich, you’ve always been their blood hound. You have killed men, not many, not more than necessary, but enough to know what it feels like to hold something irreversible in your hands. You’ve always done it without rage, without hesitation, without the trembling aftermath described by lesser men. You’ve always done it the way you usually go through things; cleanly, completely, without hesitation, without failure, and then you moved on. You’ve never felt anything you couldn’t file away.

That was, until now. You find yourself in Seoul, operating under orders from your new employer. You work for a new company called Modhaus, and you were hired as a bodyguard to protect a group of 24 members. The company has paid the expenses to hire you, and here you are. Your chain of thought is broken once the lights dropped and the speakers roared. You see 24 of the girls, but one catches your eye. She walked out and the bass frequency of the opening note moves through the floor and up through the bones of your feet and into your chest, your heart. She opens her mouth then, and you who have stood unmoving before collapsing men and burning legacies, felt the floor of yourself give way.

Something happened to you in that moment that you would spend the rest of your life understanding. It was not love, that was a word made for ordinary people in ordinary circumstances and you were neither. It was closer to what happens when a man who’s been living in darkness finally turns to see blinding, divine light. You do not choose it, nor do you negotiate. You simply recognize it, and every version of yourself that existed before this moment becomes irrelevant.

There you are. I have been waiting without knowing I was waiting this entire time.

Thousands of people screamed her name. and you hear it. You said nothing. You did not need to say it. Her name was already engraved somewhere deeper than language, cut into your very bones, into wherever passed for your soul, and it had been there. Ah, you understand it now, understand it now long before you hear it.

“Park Sohyun”, you whisper her name, testing it on your lips. “Park Sohyun”, you say it again, with reverence and something deeper. Your jet-black eyes widen slightly, a fire seems to light itself from within the void of your corneas, and a smile slowly makes it way to your lips.

You stand vigil until the last light dies on stage. You watch her and the group take their bows, walking back into the wings. You watch the space where she had been, the air rearranged by her passing, and you stand there in the dark till the crew start to break down the rigging. You do not move, your smile stills on your face, your eyes lost in thought, like a man who had just witnessed a miracle and cannot bring himself to leave the site of it.

Then you leave to your hotel room. You sit yourself onto the edge of your bed in the pitch dark of night, pressing both your hands flat into your thighs and breathe, you breath deliberately, measured, and controlled. You do not sleep, your eyes stare at the ceiling and listened to the wind and the building. You knew, with the cold certainty you bring to the assessment of every irrevocable fact, that something new enters your life. You bring out a small notepad from the bedside, and write a small note down. I have found the only thing in the world worth dying for, and she doesn't know my name.

You stand your watch, beyond the official one. The contract gave you eight hours on, sixteen off. You used none of the sixteen for sleep until you had walked the perimeter of whatever building she slept in and satisfied himself, by criteria no manual had ever taught him and no superior would have sanctioned, that she was safe. With the doors held, the windows latched, with the corridor outside her room containing nothing that breathed without your permission. Only then did you return to your own room.

You lay in the dark and you say her name. Not aloud, never aloud, that was not for you, that was something you kept below language, but in the place behind thought where the truly essential things lived. You say her name, “Park Sohyun”, and underneath it, always, underneath it like a root system beneath a forest you put your feelings, your devotion, to words: Angel. Mine to guard. Mine to keep. As long as I breathe, nothing comes near you that I have not approved. Nothing touches you that I have not assessed. You will never know how many things I have turned back from your door. You will never know. I do not need you to know. You chuckle to yourself. I need nothing from you. I need only to be the thing that stands between you and everything that is less than you. Which is everything. Everything in the world is less than you.

There was one night you remember, where she was up late finishing the production over a comeback track for her group. When she stayed awake and you hear her moving through the wall at 3 AM. You know her by the rhythms the way a sailor knows the seas. You know her specific sounds, the sound of being tired, of insomnia, and the sound of her nightmares (she has had two that you knew of, and each one had required every restraint possessed to stay at the post rather than breach the door and put yourself between her and whatever her sleeping mind had built to terrify her).

You stay within the shadows of the corridor, you do not move to the door. Your attention simply orients towards her through the walls, like a compass finding north. You stay outside in the dark for an hour and forty minutes, until you hear her rustle in her bed and she sleeps again. Only then did you move and return home.

You did not consider this strange, you considered this correct. The truest expression of what you are and what she was and the order of things that existed between it all, which didn’t belong in any contract or protocol. It was older than employment, older than duty, as old as the first creature that ever stationed itself at the entrance to something precious and said, with its entire body: not past me. Nothing gets past me.

You memorize Sohyun the way a devotee, a worshiper, memorizes a sacred text: exhaustively, obsessively, until there was no version of her you had not turned over in the cathedrals of your mind and studied in every angle. You remember her love for books, particularly Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. She’s talked about it with her groupmates, Yooyeon if you remember correctly, in a conversation you had eavesdropped from a nearby shadow. You memorize the way she signs her name for fans, with the cute little flower she draws. You memorize the precise shade her voice drops to when she is genuinely tired. You see her manage her groupmates with a careful warmth, and give to fans generously almost to a fault, but you learn to read underneath everything. The exhaustion she sometimes hides, where there were nights where you watch her give and give until she was hollow.

No more. She has given enough. You do not get any more of her tonight. None of you are worthy of what she has already given.

He kept the notepad. It began with one note, but now it spans across multiple pages. Not schedules or responsibilities, those he knows by instinct already. No, these were observations. The sound she makes when she is truly laughing versus the sound she performs for cameras, they are different, the real one is quieter and silent. Her appreciation for music, her value over silence in still moments. She mourns privately. I have seen her cry once. She turned away. She does not know I saw. I will take it to the grave.

You know these were not the notes of a bodyguard, and you do not care. You were beyond caring about the clinical name for what you were doing. You were busy building a monument to Sohyun in the only medium available to you. In absolute unreserved attention, and you would go on building it until you died or until she turned you away, and you don’t dare believe she will turn you away.

You began to give Sohyun things she would never trace back to you.

Her dressing room at the Busan venue had poor heating, and you had persuaded the facilities manager to correct it before she or the group arrived. You leave behind packets of her favorite honey for her throat, the specific one briefly mentioned by her nutritionist in an appointment you had no formal reason to have overheard. They begin appearing in her station without explanation. A light source repositioned three degrees to reduce the migraine she didn’t know anyone else had noticed she was developing. You moved through her world like a god managing the weather. Unseen, and unacknowledged. You correct anything that was wrong, removing anything that resembled even the tiniest possibility of a threat, shaping the very air around her into something worthy of her being, worthy of what she was.

It was worship. I know that. I have stopped trying to call it anything else.

The first time Sohyun notices your presence happens backstage. She has a ritual between sets, one you’ve come to memorize. The other members fill the backstage air the way they fill every space, with warmth, loudness, and the energy of twenty-three girls who have been performing for two hours and ready to give more. Yooyeon is laughing at something near the snack table with Nakyoung. The younger of the bunch are in the corner recording something for social media. Managers and coordinators are moving around with clipboards and earpieces in a frantic efficiency.

You see her find a chair left slightly apart from all of it, and you see her open her book. Your eyes scan the cover, Jane Eyre, again. Your owl-eyes see its spine soft from reading, pages gold at the edges and slightly wavy from time. You know she has read this enough times that her hands open it the way hands open something they know by touch, by instinct.

You stand at your post near the corridor entrance, submerged in the darkness. You wear the color black and its shadows like a cloak. You sport your usual fit, a long cascading black wool coat over a tailored suit. Pleated dress pants ending at your black leather boots. You watch her read, and you do what you always do, which is everything and nothing all at once. You track the room, assess and analyze every moving thing in the room, and you do your job. Despite everything, the center of your attention, the fixed gravitational point which everything you do orbits around, is Sohyun. It has been since you started, and will remain that way till you stop breathing.

She reads for approximately ten minutes. You count them, every breath and sigh. You count everything that concerns her. Then, she looks up. You know it before it happens, you have learned the rhythm of her reading, when her eyes need to rest between paragraphs. Her gaze moves around the room before it locks on you, and she stops. She holds. One second. Two seconds. Three. You understand that she is waiting, waiting for you to do what everybody does. To glance away, to find somewhere else to look, to perform the social courtesy of pretending you were not looking at her specifically and completely.

But you do not look away. Your head tilts to its side, your gaze unconsciously focuses to remember every inch of her face. You look at Sohyun the way you’ve always looked at her, with the full absolute weight of what she is to you, and you hold it. You hold her gaze across the width of the backstage room. You do not flinch, you never do, and you do not pretend or avert your gaze.

Sohyun looks away first, eyes dropping back to the page. You watch her read the same line twice and you can tell by the stillness of her face, the slight pause of a mind that has received words without processing them. Then she closes the book on her thumb and does not look up again, her posture still.

Good. Let it sit with you~ Let it sit.

You return your gaze to the room. Your face reveals nothing, but something in your chest has shifted. Something settles within your chest, like a held breath being released. You feel it, it is joy and delight. Sohyun looked at you, she held it, and she felt something. You read it in the pause in her, the deliberate action of her not looking up that, in of itself, is a kind of looking. Sohyun knows you are there now, not as furniture nor protocol, but something that is specifically, intentionally, watching her.

When the group goes out, you open your notepad. You add this to your reliquary, and close it carefully. You take a steady breath and make your usual rounds around the area, waiting with the patience of a man who has been waiting his whole life for something he only recently learned to name, for the next time she looks up.

You are standing near the door, performing neutrality, when you watch Sohyun pick up the fourth pack of honey. You see the pause, the way her fingers turn it over — once, twice — with the careful attention of someone who had arrived at a realization unexpected to her. She had asked Seoyeon about it midway through her second packet. You were close enough to the wall to hear it, the way you were always close enough. Seoyeon had dismissed it, and you let yourself breathe.

By the fourth one, Sohyun doesn’t ask anyone. You watch her set it down with the deliberateness of someone making a decision. You watch her eyes lift to the mirror, not to look at herself, you understand this immediately. You have memorized every way she uses the mirrors and this is not the self-regarding look, this is one more tactical, she is using the mirror to scan the room. Ah, she is scanning for you.

You have already looked away, your gaze redirects itself to the corridor entrance the moment her eyes prepare to look at the mirror, because you have anticipated this and are not about to get caught unprepared. You stand with your arms to the side and your eyes on the middle distance, performing stillness and composure. It was more difficult than you think, to perform not looking at Park Sohyun while Park Sohyun looks for you.

You feel her gaze finally find you in the glass. You feel it in the change of atmosphere, not dramatically nor with any outward sigh, but in the oldest part of your nervous system, the one that was built to know when someone is attending to you. She is attending to you.

You stay still, breathe once, and you do not look at her despite how much you want to. In your peripheral vision which is calibrated to her the same way a compass is to a pole, you see her reach for her tea, opening the packet and stirring the honey in. You watch her take a sip, her soft lips on the edge of the cup and her eyes focused on her own hands around the cup. The expression on her face is something you have not seen before, something newer turning over, something trying to find the shape of you.

Sohyun performs the show that night with everything she has. She always does, your angel gives the crowd everything every time, it is one of the things about her that fills you with a reverence so acute it borders on anguish, but between songs, in the dark of the wing, you watch her stand alone for thirty seconds. You watch her reach up and touch the right side of her throat. Not in nervousness, but in thought. And her thinking, you understand, has acquired a new subject.

Good.
Think about it, Sohyun-ah~
Think about it for as long as you need.
I will be here when you arrive at the answer.
I have been here the whole time.

You should not have moved. You find yourself within the rehearsal halls of a stadium in Seoul. The choreographer calls a water break and the hall fills with the sound of all the girls exhaling. You are standing at the rear left wall, arms at your sides, eyes performing the sweep of the room that is your function and your cover. Sohyun is seated on the floor near the mirrors, knees drawn up, eyes closed. You know the thing she is doing, the way she steps sideways into a private quiet between demanding things.

Then, Seo Dahyun you recognize, from across the hall calls for her name. “Sohyun-ah—” At the mere mention of her name, your head moves. Not towards Dahyun, but towards your angel, towards Sohyun. One centimeter, even less, perhaps, the smallest possible correction. It was the instinct of a man whose entire nervous system has been rewired around a single fixed point. You realize what you’ve done in the same instant you do it.

You go still. You return your gaze to the middle distance. You perform the wall, the neutrality, the professional man doing his professional sweep of a professional room. Your face has not changed, you are quite certain of this, your face has not changed in ways visible to most people, but the movement happened and it was real, directional, and wrong. You knew this before you had fully completed it that someone saw it.

But you know. You know with the same absolution to every irrevocable fact, with the same knowledge built on weeks learning the exact qualities of her attention, that Sohyun does not miss the small things. You know she saw the movement, and you know she has filed it, you know she will remember it.

You stand at your wall for the rest of the rehearsal and you are more careful than you have ever been, more controlled, more rigidly professional in the direction of your gaze. And the effort of it, the effort of being so careful now that she is starting to look, is something you feel in your jaw and in the tendons of your hands.

Your name is a tripwire in me.
I know that. I have known that since the first time someone said it in a room I was standing in.
I cannot unhear it. I cannot make my body not respond to it.
You are the only thing in the world I cannot be controlled about.

The rehearsal resumes. You watch Sohyun find her position in the formation, watch her body do what it has been trained to do while her mind, you understand, is somewhere else entirely. She is running the small movement you made through whatever internal architecture she uses to process significant information. She is turning it over. She is arriving, piece by piece, at a picture of you that is more accurate than the one she has been permitted to hold until now.

You stand at your wall and you hold yourself perfectly still and you let her arrive. You have been waiting, after all. You are very good at waiting.

The hall is full and loud. You are at the rear perimeter doing what you always do, when you feel it, you feel her gaze. You feel it before you see it. This is not mysticism, it is not the language of sentiment; it is the simple fact that you have spent weeks learning the specific quality of her awareness so thoroughly that you can distinguish it from the general ambient attention of a room the way a musician can distinguish a single instrument in an orchestra. You feel the particular weight of Sohyun's attention and you know that she is looking for you. Not glancing. Not sweeping. Looking for.

You do not move. You are already where you always are, already still, already the fixed point that you have always been in every room she has occupied. You are simply present, as you are always present, and you let her eyes travel the hall and find you, and that they do. You feel the moment her gaze lands, you feel it settle, and this time you decide to look back. You look at her across the crowded hall through the noise, lights, and through the hundreds of people present between you. You look at her the way you look at her in the quiet of your own mind, with the full truth of what she is to you. The devotion and hunger present ever since you took the job, you let her see the weight of it. Not all of it, you are not yet ready to give her all of it and she is not yet ready to receive it, but enough. Enough that she knows, when she looks at you from across that hall, that what is looking back at her is not a bodyguard just doing his job. It was never only that.

The fanmeet ends, you observe all the fans exciting in a orderly manner. You remember the fans which took pictures with her, those who think they are special, filing it in a manner of arrogance because you know it will always end with you. You watch her remain at her table slightly longer than she needs to, her hands busy with her pen. You watch her not look at you, the deliberate quality of it, the way she is processing something she is not yet ready to open. You know this. You are patient, you’ve always been patient.

Then you see Kaede take her arm and steer her towards the exit and she goes. You fall into position and follow behind. Just before she passes through the door, she does something she’s never done before. She almost looks back. You see her stop herself, the check of it, the slight resistance in her shoulders. She continues to walk out the door, and into the corridor and away. Your mind fills with delight, with obsession.

You almost looked back.
You wanted to look back.
Sohyun-ah~
Park Sohyun~
My angel, You almost looked back~

Something has happened and you know it, she knows it too. The knowing now lives in the space between you like a low and constant frequency. It’s like a bass note of a song, the song of everything between you and her. It runs underneath, always running underneath, from Seoul to Busan to every room you will stand in together from this point onward.