Peerless Perverted Actor Has a Celebrity Harem?!

The set descended into glorious, frantic chaos the moment Park clutched his skull.

Crew members leapt up like startled ravens — medics, assistants, the grim-faced director himself, all converging in a whirlwind of disorganized heroism that looked less like a rescue and more like a particularly elaborate dance number staged by someone who had never witnessed an actual emergency. Folding chairs scraped, a clipboard hit the floor, somebody knocked over a cup of lukewarm coffee, and the soft gasp of mourning that followed was, frankly, more sincere than any concern offered for Park’s skull.

"He nailed the fall!" a voice shouted from somewhere outside the scrum, with the inappropriate cheer of a man who had not yet been informed that screaming meant pain. "Perfect corpse work, mate. Ten out of ten, would watch again."

"Mate, shut up — "

"What? I’m complimenting him — "

Dark laughter rippled through the circle of bodies leaning over him, because of course they joked.

To them he was just being funny and even death would just be another take, and a take that good deserved at least one bad pun at its expense before the medic arrived.

Through the white-hot storm raging behind his eyes, Park remained cruelly, obscenely aware of every detail.

Billions of memories — his and not his — slammed into him like red-hot iron rods forged in some infernal smithy, piercing brain and soul alike with a precision that suggested the blacksmith had been practicing. Faces. Names. Streets he had never walked but somehow knew the smell of. A mother’s hands then different mother’s hands. A childhood bedroom with cartoon dinosaurs on the ceiling. A different big bedroom:

Two lifetimes shoved through one keyhole; Park.

’Ah,’ his mind drawled with the bitter amusement, he was being mugged for the second time in a single hour, ’this feeling again. The exquisite pleasure of losing everything. Hard work, sweat, sleepless nights chasing shadows and the dignity paid in full — all of it leading so faithfully to sweet fuck-all. How delightfully consistent the universe remains in its commitment to making me look ridiculous.’

Deeper still, something far more intimate stirred beneath the avalanche.

These new memories weren’t strangers. They wore the same scars he wore although different at once too. They loved the same ghosts he had loved, bled in the same quiet, unglamorous ways he had bled for twenty-three years.

’Different surfaces, identical wounds.’

The boy in those memories had also stood in front of a mirror rehearsing lines no one would ever hear him deliver. Had also sat on the edge bed, although not small, at three in the morning composing the brilliant text he would never send to his father. Had also auditioned, and auditioned, and auditioned.

’It is,’ Park realized with a slow cold dread he did not want to name, ’as if —’ and he feared to admit this, even to himself, even here, even in the privacy of a skull no one else could yet apparently be trusted to stay out of — ’were the same person.’

With nothing different between them at all apart from the families they grew up in and lived in.

Bump.

The medic bed received him.

Soft, to them. A polite cushioning of his weight, four professionals lowering an unconscious actor with the practiced gentleness; they had insured this set for a great deal of money and did not intend to pay out a claim today.

To Park, the impact arrived through the back of his skull like a door being slammed by a god in a hurry.

The world tilted while the coming memories howled in unison.

Park let go and fell into darkness that received him gladly.

***

Haaahh!

He woke with a huge deep gasp.

His arm flew up across his face on pure instinct, shielding himself from a sudden bright thing, and thank the indifferent gods — the limb obeyed. Fluid. Responsive and finally his.

His eyes too had opened just like how his limbs replied, there was no more glued eyelids and rebellious joints performing private mutinies.

The body finally, finally belonged to its tenant — not just answering when he called, but answering the first time, with the easy completeness like a lease at last signed in full and the keys dropped in his palm.

’Excellent,’ his thoughts murmured, dragging themselves upright in the cool quiet of his skull. ’The paperwork is in order. Let us please refrain from any further evictions in the next half hour.’

Sounds returned in tidier increments this time. The steady electronic beep of a monitor somewhere to his left, hushed voices behind a curtain, the wet rattle of someone’s cough two beds over, a trolley wheel that needed oiling. The distant, dependable clatter of a busy emergency room going about its small daily business of saving and losing and occasionally just waiting on the people inside it.

The smell hit him next — antiseptic, stale coffee, and that faint, particular despair hospitals everywhere wore as a perfume.

Unmistakable.

’No surprise,’ his inner rogue noted, settling back into its chair with crossed legs. ’Last thing I remember was being dumped on that bed like yesterday’s prop and passing out mid-monologue. Classic exit. Greta Garbo could not have improved on the timing.’

What did surprise him was the absence of pain.

There was no shattered limbs screaming their reports up his nerves, blood-freezing cold gnawing at his extremities.

Just — wholeness.

The unfamiliar, almost suspicious feeling of a body that had not, recently, been ruined.

He flexed his fingers experimentally; they flexed.

He flexed his toes; they flexed.

He flexed something else, in the unbothered privacy of his own thoughts, just to take inventory — and a pleasant, heavy warmth answered, thick and unmistakably alive beneath the thin hospital blanket

Park cleared his throat with theatrical dignity.

’Easy there, old friend,’ he thought, with patience as if he was addressing a beloved but unreliable colleague. ’We have just survived death. Possibly twice. At least buy the body dinner before you start drafting the evening’s agenda.’