Episode 4.5
I came unannounced, so he must have been working, but he was so neat.
“What were you looking at?”
“Mr. Eunwoo’s office. I was surprised at how clean it is.”
“You are the only one who says so.”
He smiles and hands me a teacup, and as I sip the warm tea, I
feel the fatigue of the day melt away. It was been a long, long day.
“By the way, the story’s flow has changed.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know where or how, but I was pretty sure her mind is twisted.”
I relayed my father’s reaction and what Han Seo Ri had said to him to Park Eun Woo.
Park Eun-woo listened to my story with a serious expression, and then his face stiffened as something dawned on him.
“The Flower of Trials isn’t as smart as I thought. Does Ye Ryun know that?”
“What do you mean?”
Park Eunwoo also seemed to know something. He was possessed by the Flower of Trials two years before me, so he might know something that I didn’t.
“There was a proposition that even Ms Ye Ryun can’t refuse, right?”
“Yes. When you don’t oppose Han Seo Ri’s marriage to Cha Yebin when you don’t bully Han Seo Ri, and…… when you try to escape the Flower of Trials.”
I briefly recalled the first time I was possessed by the Flower of Trials. An engagement.
The vivid text message that popped up on my broken smartphone when I tried to avoid going to the ceremony.
My fingertips turned cold as I remembered the horror, and I clutched my teacup tightly.
“That was what I did when I tried to get away with denying the flower of trials, which would have been a violation of the thesis.”
“The Flower of Trials is a painter who’s painting a big picture, and it is coloring in the underpainting that it wants, using me, Ye Ryun.”
Park Eunwoo ran a hand through his hair. It was something he did when he was uncomfortable or irritated.
“But if it doesn’t go the way we want it to go, we’ll add color, and add color, and add color, and add color, until we get the color we want.”
I nodded. The Flower of Trials made us repeat our characters’ lines over and over again and created unusual situations until we did what it wanted us to do.
“But the Flower of Trials can’t touch anything that was outside of the original painting, not us.”
“Why?”
“Because that was the sketches of the Flower of Trials.”
“What do you mean, weren’t Cha Ye-ryun and Park Eun-woo also one of the sketches of the Flower of Trials?”
“We were simply the paint that colorfully decorates the story of the main characters.”
I see. It was like a thunderbolt struck in my head. The drama Flower of Trials was not Cha Ye-ryun and Park Eun-woo’s world.
It was a world that works strictly for Han Seo-ri and Cha Ye-bin. Me and him were just obstacles and enablers to make their love shine.
I was a supporting actor who only occupies that position.
My hatred for this world was bubbling up. Cha Ye-Ryun and Park
Eun-woo’s lives were ruined just to make the protagonists’ love shine.
And even now, he and I had to fight to make their love shine. Trapped like this in this fake world, I felt terrible, wishing I could wake up from my dreams several times a day.
“But if we’ve changed the story a little bit, and the characters don’t behave as it wants them to, how will the flower of trials come out?”
“We’ll either have to paint over it again or…….”
A hypothesis flashed through my mind as I answered Park Eunwoo’s question.
“What?”
Eunwoo Park nodded with a smile that said he knew without me saying it. As if it was the right answer.
“You think the Flower of Trials can fix it itself?”
“Yes.”
I could see the conviction on Park’s face. He’d been in the Flower of Trials for two years before me, so I could believe him. But can
it change? Really?
“I don’t think the Flower of Trials can change the outline, of the original story.”
“But Ms Ye Ryun, Once you started changing the outline, it might end up being ruined beyond repair, or it might bring about some better results.”
“Like this one?”
“The happy ending you want for the characters can coexist with the happy ending for the main characters.”
Park Eun-woo had keenly realized what I had been worrying about for a long time.
I wanted to at least avoid an ending where Cha ends up in prison, just in case I couldn’t return to reality. But I didn’t know how much longer I could maneuver around Cha’s obligation to commit more and more evil acts in the original story.
Park Eun-woo offered a new possibility for what had always been a stranglehold on me.
“What if,” he said, “It breaks?”
“……. Wouldn’t that be good in its way? We could crush the flower of this trial.”
A chill ran through Park Eunwoo’s eyes. Maybe he hates the drama named Flower of Trials even more than I do, I thought.
He must have suffered much longer than me, and he must be trying to keep himself from going insane.
Unlike me, who thought the people here were fake and yet gave them compassion, he must have lived his life with steel, with no recourse to anything.
Even though he was smiling in front of me now, I remembered my first meeting with him, when his pupils were as empty as a wax doll’s and contained nothing.
“You could have been remained as Park Eun-woo here for the rest of your life, weren’t you afraid?”
