Chapter 51: Taking a Break
While Geonwoo continued adding notes to his phone, the car arrived in Gruyères before he knew it.
“We’re here.”
At Yoon Jihye’s words, Geonwoo looked up.
The village they had seen from afar earlier was now close, stretching across the hill.
Gruyères Castle stood at the far end.
Geonwoo added one final line to his notes and slipped his phone into his pocket.
After getting out of the car, Taejun looked up the hill.
“Are we going all the way up there?”
“Yes. We’ll walk through the village and go all the way to the castle you can see up there.”
The four slowly climbed the hill.
Once they entered the village, there were no cars in sight.
Old buildings lined both sides of the stone-paved street.
Small shops and restaurants occupied the ground floors, while the castle remained visible at the end of the road.
Taejun hadn’t walked far before pulling out his phone.
“Wait. This place is seriously beautiful.”
Yura looked around and raised her phone too.
“There are way too many places to take pictures.”
Jihye laughed.
“We have plenty of time, so take it slow.”
Geonwoo also slowed his pace.
He was now walking through the place he had only seen through the car window earlier.
The uphill path continued.
“This is more of a workout than I expected.”
Geonwoo chuckled at Taejun’s complaint.
Yura had already walked a little farther ahead when she turned around.
“Taejun, stand there for a second.”
“Why?”
“I’ll take your picture.”
Taejun immediately struck a pose.
Geonwoo laughed at him.
“You said you were tired.”
“Being tired and taking pictures are separate issues.”
“Pictures are different.”
Yura took several photos.
Taejun immediately walked over and checked the screen.
“These came out pretty good.”
Yura handed him the phone.
“Take mine too.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
Yura got into position.
Taejun took a few pictures and showed them to her.
Yura’s expression became strange.
“Again.”
“Why?”
“The composition is weird.”
“As long as the person is in the middle, isn’t that fine?”
“No.”
Geonwoo burst out laughing beside them.
Taejun immediately looked at him.
“Hyung, you try.”
Geonwoo accepted the phone.
Yura posed again.
Geonwoo looked at the screen, then moved one or two steps sideways.
He changed the angle so the castle in the background would enter the frame.
After taking two photos, he handed the phone back.
Yura checked them.
“That’s it.”
“What’s different?”
Taejun leaned over to inspect the screen.
“Oh... It really is different.”
“As expected, even a photo taken by a director is different.”
Taejun handed his own phone to Geonwoo.
“Hyung, take mine too.”
“Fine. I’ll take yours properly too.”
Geonwoo took Taejun’s photos.
Only after taking several more pictures did the four continue walking.
The higher they went, the closer the old buildings became.
Taejun looked around for quite a while before saying,
“This place looks like a movie set.”
Geonwoo slowly scanned the surroundings too.
Jihye, walking ahead, said,
“We have plenty of time, so take it slow.”
Taejun spread both arms.
“Now this is traveling.”
Yura immediately took a picture.
“Stay like that.”
“Why?”
“Because you look funny.”
Taejun immediately lowered his arms.
“Then don’t take it.”
The four burst into laughter.
Before entering the castle, they first looked around several souvenir shops.
Taejun picked something up in almost every store.
Sometimes he checked the price and quietly put it back down.
Yura asked,
“What are you trying to buy?”
“I don’t know. I just want to buy something.”
Geonwoo slowly looked over the shelves too.
He picked up a small magnet with Gruyères Castle printed on it.
Taejun noticed.
“Hyung, are you buying that?”
“Yeah.”
“For who?”
“Hyunsoo.”
After buying Hyunsoo’s souvenir, the four headed toward the castle.
The atmosphere changed again once they entered.
It was much quieter than the village outside.
Rooms and passageways continued behind thick stone walls, and narrow staircases led to entirely different spaces.
Through the windows, they could see the rooftops of the village they had just walked through.
Taejun looked around every old room they passed.
“People actually lived here, right?”
Jihye nodded.
“Apparently, it was the castle where the people who once ruled this region lived.”
“I feel like I walked into a game.”
Yura, who had been looking out the window, laughed.
“You said it looked like a movie set earlier. Now it’s a game?”
“Both can be true.”
Geonwoo was passing a window when he stopped.
The village spread out below.
He could also see the road they had walked earlier.
And not far away stood the castle gate.
Geonwoo’s gaze stopped there.
The scene that had come to him in the car flashed through his mind again.
Late at night.
The castle gate was closed.
Someone was running toward it.
Someone inside the castle could be looking down outside too.
His gaze moved to the nearby window.
What if someone is standing here waiting for the person running toward the castle?
Someone stood beside the window, watching a person race toward the castle.
But the gate was closed.
Geonwoo looked down at the gate again.
Why was that person running?
Why couldn’t the person inside go out?
“Hyung!”
Geonwoo turned.
A short distance away, Taejun was waving.
“Come over here.”
Geonwoo walked toward him.
“Why?”
“This looks like an amazing place for a photo.”
Yura saw Geonwoo and said,
“Sunbae, you should take one with us too.”
“Again?”
“We took the earlier ones outside.”
Geonwoo pushed the scene in his head aside.
“Fine.”
The three stood side by side.
Jihye held up her phone.
“Move a little closer together.”
Taejun pressed himself right against Geonwoo.
Geonwoo took one step away.
“You’re too close.”
“Team Leader told us to stand close.”
Click.
Jihye took several more.
Then Taejun called her over.
“Team Leader, you should be in one too.”
“I’m fine.”
“Why? All four of us came together.”
Jihye hesitated.
In the end, she asked a nearby tourist for help.
The four stood together.
Geonwoo looked at the camera.
Taejun was grinning brightly.
Yura was smiling too.
Jihye also looked more relaxed than usual.
The picture was taken.
Taejun immediately went to check it.
“This one’s good.”
Yura nodded beside him.
Geonwoo smiled and followed behind the two.
For lunch, they entered a restaurant inside the village.
Jihye had looked it up in advance.
A little later, a pot of hot cheese fondue was placed in the middle of the table.
Taejun immediately leaned forward.
“Is this Gruyère cheese?”
“It isn’t only Gruyère cheese.”
Jihye explained,
“Apparently, around here they often make fondue with half Gruyère cheese and half cheese from the Fribourg region.”
Taejun stabbed a piece of bread with his fork.
“We came all this way, so we definitely have to try it.”
He dipped the bread deeply into the melted cheese.
After letting it cool for a moment, he put it into his mouth.
Yura immediately asked,
“How is it?”
Taejun chewed several times.
“Oh, this is good.”
“Then why are you making that face?”
“The flavor is way stronger than I expected.”
Geonwoo dipped a piece of bread into the cheese too.
The salty, rich flavor hit him first.
“It definitely tastes different from the cheese we usually eat.”
Yura tried it next.
She immediately nodded.
“I like it.”
Taejun laughed.
“You already like cheese.”
Yura picked up another piece of bread.
The four slowly continued eating.
And for the first time, they had a meal without talking about movies.
Which photos had come out best.
What souvenirs they should buy.
What they wanted for dinner.
Those were the only things they talked about.
Thanks to that, Geonwoo laughed comfortably too.
After lunch, they continued wandering through the village.
Taejun and Yura kept taking pictures.
Geonwoo left the two behind and walked a few steps ahead.
At the end of the road, the view opened wide.
Mountains stretched in the distance.
Low land and villages filled the spaces between them.
Geonwoo slowed his steps.
“There’s another village over there.”
The village below the castle wasn’t the end of the world.
A road continued through the mountains, and beyond it, small rooftops clustered together in another settlement.
The scene from earlier appeared in Geonwoo’s mind again.
The closed castle gate.
Someone running from outside.
Someone waiting inside.
At first, there had only been those two people.
But now the village below the walls entered his imagination.
Then the village beyond the mountains as well.
The people living over there must be different too.
Perhaps they didn’t even speak the same language.
Their clothes.
Their way of living.
Even the rules they had to obey could all be different.
Something enormous could happen inside the castle without the people beyond the mountain knowing anything.
And something that happened in that distant village might reach this castle months later.
Geonwoo followed the road between the mountains with his eyes.
What if people who know nothing about one another eventually become tangled in the same event?
He took out his phone.
He wrote down several lines.
Taejun came up beside him.
“Hyung. Writing something again?”
“Just had an idea.”
Yura, who had followed them, asked,
“What’s it about?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“I think I’ll have to think about it more before I know.”
By the time they got back into the car at the end of the day, Taejun was much quieter than he had been that morning.
“We walked a lot today.”
Yura fastened her seatbelt.
“Seriously. My feet hurt from walking all day.”
The car started moving.
Less than ten minutes later, Taejun’s head tilted to the side.
Yura looked at him and chuckled.
“I knew it.”
After scrolling through several photos, Yura gradually became quiet too.
Jihye was checking the next day’s schedule from the front seat.
Only soft music played inside the car.
Geonwoo looked out the window.
Mountains and villages slowly passed behind them.
Only then did he take his phone from his pocket.
He began writing down the scenes he had imagined throughout the day.
At first, they were simple notes.
But when he gave one of the people a background, that person gained a family.
When he thought about the family, someone who had lived before them came to mind.
Then he began imagining what that person would leave behind several decades later.
Geonwoo’s fingers stopped.
What if it’s years later?
That person grows older.
Has a child.
The child grows up.
The choice made by the first person remains behind in a completely different form for that child.
Geonwoo reread the sentence he had just written.
One generation.
Below it.
The next generation.
The more he followed one person’s life, the more people appeared.
One person was born beyond the mountains.
Another lived their entire life within the castle walls.
They might never meet even once, yet still be affected by the same event.
And time continued into their children’s children.
Geonwoo’s fingers stopped again.
What had originally appeared in the car as a scene lasting only a few seconds had now stretched across several decades in his mind.
He could see one character both as a young person and as an old one.
Even after that person died, the story didn’t end.
There was someone after them.
Geonwoo scrolled upward.
The notes had become much longer than expected.
I can’t fit something this big into one movie...
No matter how he looked at it, this wasn’t a story that would fit into two hours.
But he also didn’t want to keep only one of the characters and discard the others.
The lights of Fribourg were already drawing closer outside the window.
After returning to the hotel, they had a simple dinner at a nearby restaurant.
Perhaps because he had napped in the car, Taejun had become talkative again.
“I’ll send you all the pictures.”
He dumped all the photos he had taken that day into the group chat.
Yura checked them on her phone.
“Wait.”
“What?”
“Why did you post this one?”
Yura showed him the screen.
It was a photo taken outside the lunch restaurant.
Taejun was smiling.
Yura had her eyes closed.
“It’s funny.”
“Things like this become memories.”
Geonwoo scrolled through the photos and stopped.
There was a picture of himself.
While Taejun and Yura were messing around in front, Geonwoo was smiling a little behind them.
He didn’t remember when it had been taken.
Taejun glanced at his screen.
“I took that.”
“Pretty good, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You actually took this one well.”
Yura looked at the picture.
“One of the few good photos Taejun managed today.”
“That’s hurtful.”
“I took so many pictures for you today.”
For a while, they continued talking about photos.
The next day’s schedule was to visit another place before returning to Fribourg.
Taejun was already talking about the pictures he wanted to take tomorrow.
Geonwoo listened and laughed.
After finishing dinner, the four returned to the hotel.
In front of the elevator, Jihye said,
“Good work today, everyone.”
“If this is what you call hard work, I’d gladly do it every day.”
Everyone laughed at Taejun’s response.
The four said goodnight and separated for their rooms.
Geonwoo showered and lay down on the bed.
His body was more tired than he had expected.
He looked through a few photos from the day, then put down his phone.
He closed his eyes.
But not long afterward, he opened them again.
The notes he had written in the car came to mind.
Geonwoo stared at the ceiling for a moment.
Then he picked up his phone again.
He opened the notes.
Slowly, he read through them.
Soon he sat up.
After thinking for a moment, he went to the desk.
He opened his laptop.
Then placed his hands on the keyboard.
“Let’s start with the castle gate closing at night.”
Geonwoo’s fingers moved quickly.
Then, at some point, they stopped.
Only the cursor blinked at the end of the screen.
Geonwoo sat motionless with his hands above the keyboard.
The next scene wouldn’t come.
He slowly leaned back in his chair.
“What should the next scene be...?”
Geonwoo rested his chin on his hand.
Then a good idea came to him.
He put his hands back on the keyboard.
A smile gradually spread across his face.
“This is more fun than I expected.”
