When I roughly ruffled the commendable bastard’s hair and let him go, he flinched away from the part my hand had touched and put a wide distance between us.
He clearly wanted to run right away, but he seemed to realize belatedly that I was already blocking the door with my back.
Gowon glared at me, bristling like he would shove me aside and run if it came {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} to it. Now he wasn’t even trying to hide his expression.
In front of him, I kept swiping through my phone until I found a certain song.
The moment I pressed play, bitterness and relief burst out at the same time.
—♪♬
It was a song with only a topline and no lyrics, but it was enough to understand the structure.
A tearing electric guitar sound. A powerful beat.
“Junior, what do you think of this song?”
“......”
The corners of his eyes, which had been sharply raised upward, slowly lowered. Though they ended up forming a doubtful expression.
“...What kind of song is this?”
I let out a laugh full of wind.
It was such a damn waste.
But at the same time, it also felt relieving, as if it had found its owner.
“A prerelease track.”
The strategy was this.
“Let’s go to my room, junior. I’ll protect your song.”
I understood why Gowon’s quest had come to me.
This was something only I could do for him.
Among all the adult bastards who had fed you empty promises until now, there probably hadn’t been anyone like this.
So trust me just once.
Gowon’s eyes were full of anxiety. But faint hope had settled somewhere within it.
I felt as if I’d heard the sound of the slump that had tormented me for so long finally breaking.
***
It felt like a lie that, in the past, I had spent months clinging sluggishly to a single song.
It took exactly ten hours to arrange the raw track and add lyrics to it.
I had good inspiration, and on top of that, a time attack. While I had my nose buried in the monitor, my chronic illness of a slump had somehow been cured.
And so, after crossing a long dawn, one song was reborn from an old cloud storage account.
Then I called Gowon to the recording studio.
I had told him to just open the door and come in, but today too, he got stuck between the double doors and lingered there for a long while again.
“Hello, Senior.”
He was still putting up walls.
But rather than trying to push me away like before, there was a trace of hope and the question, “Can I really trust him?” hanging over him.
“Junior.”
“Yes.”
“My recording booth has a bit of a reputation.”
“......”
“Let’s have a good time together today, yeah?”
“...Yes.”
Since he was tense, I gave him an additional performance by clicking the studio door lock shut. His eyes widened until his pupils were clearly visible.
“Go in.”
I pointed inside the recording booth.
Then I propped my chin in front of the screen.
“Again.”
I tilted my chin at the air, then pressed the talkback button.
“Again. Mm-hm. This time, you were wrong from the start. Let’s do it again.”
The backing track I’d heard dozens of times played identically. After abusing “again” that many times, we eventually reached this point.
“Now my mouth hurts from saying it. Just do it again when you hear my fingers snap.”
At those words, Gowon, inside the recording booth, finally looked out through the recording room glass.
—Senior.
“Yeah.”
I answered half-heartedly and glanced at the time.
Seeing as he was only resisting now after I’d rolled him around for about five hours, he had a fairly patient side. At first there had at least been direction, but for the few hours after that, it had just been an abuse of “again.”
—If you tell me what the problem is, I’ll fix it.
“What? Are you saying you still haven’t figured out what the problem is? Unbelievable. You still don’t have the heart to do your best. Is that all your desperation amounts to?”
—......
Oh?
For a moment, a fierce look appeared in his eyes. Though he immediately put his mask back on.
—I’m sorry—
“Bastards who say vague crap like that are, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people who don’t know what the problem is themselves, so ignore them.”
I snickered as I looked into the recording room. Gowon had a stunned look on his face, unable to adjust to the abrupt change in topic.
“To be honest, there’s nothing I’d call a problem. Nothing stands out badly. Even if I just stitched together the bars you’ve sung so far, it’d be around an eighty.”
My fingertips tapped beside the talkback button.
“But every time you do it again, it goes up by one point. Eighty-one, eighty-two... The feeling is coming alive. That’s why I keep making you do it.”
—Ah... So that’s how we get to a hundred.
“What hundred? We’re going to a hundred and twenty. Even if we record more than enough, whether it all goes in during mixing is still unknown.”
—...Understood.
The quest scenario title was “A Senior Paving the Road to Glory”?
Turns out that road was paved with flames.
Now that I had full authority over the producing, I had no intention of letting this pass easily.
“Don’t worry. There’s only been one person who managed to record something that satisfied me in a few hours. You’re about average.”
—Who was that one person?
“Me.”
—......
“Shall we try again?”
—Yes.
Honestly, in most cases, I would have gotten frustrated and given direction midway through.
But after a few “again”s, Gowon started trying various things on his own. Some were clumsy, some were fresh, and some didn’t even need a second listen before I muted them.
The fun part was that, if I rolled him around dozens of times like that, he really did pull out phrases that stuck in the ear.
I heard was the first time he received proper training.
Then this was talent. In the area of expressiveness.
After repeating the recording a few more times, I waved my hand at Gowon to tell him to come over. Gowon put down the headset and came out of the booth. I confidently held out my hand in front of him.
“Hand it over.”
All Gowon had in his hand was the lyric sheet.
“I wrote a lot of notes on it, so it’s messy.”
“That’s why I’m telling you to hand it over. It’ll take half a day to drag what’s in your head out of your mouth.”
“......”
In the end, Gowon had his lyric sheet extorted from him.
In front of the restless Gowon, I deliberately scanned the lyric sheet where he could see me, then pointed to one spot.
“What does this say?”
“I wondered if it might work to sing it so it falls more gradually... sir.”
“Wow, your handwriting is really bad. What are you going to do at fan signings later?”
“...I’ll fix it.”
“Should I revise it?”
“Should I rewrite it neatly for you?”
“No. I’m asking if I should revise the song in the direction you want to sing it.”
“......”
Gowon looked half surprised and half unable to understand.
Well, this was probably his first experience like this. Until now, he must have only received completed songs.
“It’s your song, so it should be adjusted to you. If there are parts you want revised, say so. I’m not saying I’ll do everything, but I’ll at least hear it.”
I picked up the guitar leaning against the studio wall. My fingertips plucked the strings.
“By ‘falls more gradually,’ do you mean like this?”
“Ah, yes, like that...”
“Anything else? Tell me now if any lyrics are awkward to pronounce too.”
Gowon’s eyes scanned the lyric sheet in confusion, but busily. I pointed to the door set into the studio wall.
“I’m going to rest while you organize your thoughts. If you want to lie down, come in there. Lie on the sofa or something.”
After saying that, I went inside and flopped down unsteadily. It was a bedroom the size of a studio apartment attached to the studio.
After staying up all night and then pushing through without even a chance to close my eyes, all the strength drained out of me.
I had been sprawled there for about ten minutes, but no sound came from outside.
They say when a kid is quiet, he’s causing trouble...
Instead of looking outside, I turned on the CCTV monitoring app installed in the studio. You didn’t know about this, punk.
“Oh.”
Gowon had gone back into the recording booth.
He repeated the process of singing the song and diligently writing something on the lyric sheet. His expression was as serious as if he were taking the college entrance exam.
I realized that what I’d said had become an assignment to Gowon, something he needed to complete to earn a chance at revisions.
Well, would you look at that.
He wrestled with the paper for a while, then soon stood up and even tried matching the choreography to it.
We were both equally sleep-deprived, but the longer time passed, the more life returned to him.
Resignation, my ass.
His current expression was completely different from when he had been crushed in the meeting room before. His face was full of reddish waves. Desire and passion for his own song, joy at the opportunity, desperation, and more.
Looks like you’re the type who’ll die if you can’t stand onstage too.
Watching that made the bed, which had been sucking my body in until just now, feel like it was now kicking me out.
In the end, I got up and came out the door.
“Hey, Gowon, Gowon!”
“Yes?!”
Inside the booth, he snapped his head up. I spoke to him in a grave voice.
“You. Go down to the first floor.”
“...Why?”
“The desk called and said a very important item for your recording has arrived, so hurry up and go get it! Tell them my name!”
When I rattled it all off in an urgent tone, my panic infected him smoothly.
“O-okay.”
Gowon sprang up and left the studio.
I picked up the paper he had been scribbling on.
Maybe because I’d criticized him earlier, there were signs that he had tried to write a bit more neatly. He was also going through it pretty meticulously from the beginning.
I took the paper he had written on and sat down at the studio desk. This was nonsense, rejected. This seemed decent, maybe we could try it. This one...
“...Senior.”
Gowon, who returned shortly afterward, lifted what he was holding with a dumbfounded face. It was two servings of blood sausage soup with rice.
“You need to eat so you’ll have strength to keep going. It’s an important item, isn’t it?”
“......”
“Never mind if you’re not going to eat. Wow, still not hungry even after all this? Youth really is something.”
“I’ll eat.”
As expected, when the body suffers, stray thoughts disappear.
When he first came here, he had only barely perched on the edge of the sofa. Now he knew how to sink pretty deeply into it, and he crammed rice into his mouth too.
“Gowon.”
“...Yes.”
“Eat a lot. After you eat, I’ll roll you around more.”
“......”
Because the more I pushed in, the more results he spat out, so it was quite satisfying to roll him around.
In many ways, this might have been unfortunate for my dear junior, but I liked Gowon quite a bit. It felt like I’d discovered a muse after a long time.
Ah, wait.
If there are any wishes left, please send me a muse this time.
I felt like I’d added, Preferably a pretty rookie, to that...
“Damn it, no way.”
The reason the quest started couldn’t be, surely, please...
“...Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Fuck...”
“What now...”
“The soup is too hot. Go get water.”
“......”
“If you’re pissed, debut twelve years earlier than me. Or get both lyric-writing and composition ability.”
Gowon stood up with a face twice as sullen as before.
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