All You Have to Do Is Take It

Unlike in the future, Yun-seul powered on the clunky old laptop with its thick, worn bezel and searched the internet for the drama competition hosted by DBS Broadcasting Station.

She checked the deadline. Next Friday.

In the past, exactly one week before the competition closed, Min Sa-ra had taken her laptop without a word of warning and returned it days later in pieces, claiming she'd been in a fender-bender. The machine wouldn't even turn on, and the USB drive she'd left plugged in for backups was smashed beyond recognition — not a trace of the files remained.

And just like that, her shot at the DBS drama competition had evaporated into nothing.

Then, a month later, Sa-ra's name had appeared on the list of winners, bold as brass.

Only then did Yun-seul understand that Sa-ra had stolen her work deliberately. She could never forgive the woman who had ripped away the one chance she had to make her dream real.

When she tried to contact the broadcasting station to expose the truth, it was Jung Hee who stopped her. If she went through with it, she tearfully pleaded, Sa-ra's award wouldn't just be revoked — Yun-seul would be liable for damages. Please, please let it go. Cornered by her mother's desperate begging, Yun-seul had no choice but to fall silent.

But there was no way Sa-ra, having won with a stolen script, could ever write what came after it.

"Yun-seul, honey, can't you help Sa-ra out just this once? It'd be such a waste to throw it away. It's not just for her sake, you know. Your mother so badly wants to see the drama you wrote on TV."

Winning the competition had already transferred the copyright of Insomnia to the broadcasting station and Min Sa-ra. So if Sa-ra couldn't deliver the script, Insomnia would simply be buried and forgotten.

"Isn't that better than the work never seeing the light of day at all?"

Worn down by her mother's tearful pleading, Yun-seul had become Sa-ra's assistant writer, ghostwriting the script herself.

"Hah……"

Yun-seul shook her head hard, shaking off the horrific memory.

She turned the laptop on with cold, newly hardened eyes and opened the Insomnia folder. Her gaze swept down the synopsis and script at speed. The version glowing on the screen was the early draft — the one that had actually aired was the final product, hammered out over nearly a year of endless meetings and rewrites with the station's PDs. Thankfully, her mind, sharpened and cleared by the return to the past, still held every word of it, vivid and complete.

All weekend long, sacrificing even her mealtimes, Yun-seul rewrote the scripts for episodes one and two of Insomnia from the ground up. And then, at last, she submitted the finished final version — not to the DBS drama competition, but to the storytelling competition hosted by Hansan Media, a subsidiary of the Hansan Group. At the same time, she saved every mountain of research material and every backup file of Insomnia to the cloud.

The only thing she left on her laptop was the early draft of the script. The one Min Sa-ra would steal.

"Go ahead and steal it this time too, Min Sa-ra."

Zzzz-zzz-zzz.

Yun-seul's eyes flew open at the jarring vibration of her alarm. The faint phantom smell of antiseptic stung her nose, and fear slammed into her all at once.

"Hah… hah… hah…"

Gasping, she whipped her head around and stared at the wallpaper. Not a white wall. Paper patterned with tiny squares, spaced in even rows.

"It's not the hospital. It's my room."

She murmured it aloud, as if to reassure herself. Only then did her heart, which had been pounding at a terrifying clip, begin to slowly settle.

Reaching out, she silenced the alarm and looked at her phone screen.

A message from Tae-kyung.

In the past, he'd texted her like this several times a day. Even as a busy office worker, he never missed a single day, and that thoughtful attentiveness had moved her — she'd taken it as proof that he loved and cherished her.

But it had been nothing more than chum scattered to keep the fish from swimming out of the pond.

Yun-seul's brow knitted hard, and she pressed send with grim reluctance. It was all so that she could appear, in Woo Tae-kyung's palm, as the naive Min Yun-seul he believed her to be.

"I'm off to school."

Yun-seul left the house and caught a bus toward her alma mater, Korea University. The campus she faced again after rewinding ten years was steeped in the bright, raw memories of her undergraduate days. As she walked the corridor toward her lecture hall, a familiar voice called out from far down the hall.

"Yun-seul!"

Running toward her with a beaming smile was her classmate and best friend, Ju Ah-rin.

In the past, the two of them had been close enough to share their writing with each other without reservation, trading frank feedback. But after Sa-ra's DBS win, the relationship had begun to fray. Ah-rin had been against her marriage to Tae-kyung, too.

"You're only twenty-three — aren't you rushing it? You're supposed to spend your whole life with this person. You should be careful."

Back then, drunk on Tae-kyung's sweet deceptions, Yun-seul hadn't wanted to hear it. After the wedding, she and Ah-rin had drifted apart entirely.

Even so, Ah-rin had honored Yun-seul's plea to keep silent about Sa-ra's theft to the very end. Looking back, Ah-rin had been a precious friend — someone who rejoiced at Yun-seul's good news more than Yun-seul herself did, and wept alongside her at the bad.

This time, she would never let go of that hand.

"Ah-rin!"

Yun-seul stretched out her arm and waved. They sat side by side through a lecture, then ate lunch together at the noisy student cafeteria. It was the ordinary, dazzling daily life Yun-seul had ached for during those days locked away in the closed psychiatric ward.

"Yun-seul, are you going to the special lecture today too?"

"What special lecture?"

"That thing — it had some title like 'Global Platforms and Whatever'…"

"Ah…"

It was an era when the very concept of a global OTT platform still felt foreign. People were skeptical of the idea of releasing dramas and films through some mysterious platform instead of a terrestrial broadcaster or a cinema. The Yun-seul of the past had been no different — and besides, the lecture had fallen right after Tae-kyung's proposal, and her mind had been elsewhere. She'd missed it entirely.

"Here! Look at this."

Ah-rin handed over her phone, and a notice for the special lecture glowed on the screen.

Do Lee-gun.

At the sight of the name, Yun-seul's eyes went wide. She knew exactly who he was.

In her freshman year, she'd been paired with him on a group project for a media production practicum — they'd shot a short film together. She'd gone on to weave part of the script she wrote back then into the film-within-the-film that appeared in Insomnia.

Maybe that was why it happened. The day after the very first episode aired, a call had come in from an unknown number.

He was the only person besides Ah-rin who had recognized Insomnia as Yun-seul's writing.

To the man reaching out a hand of help, Yun-seul had lied — said she'd done it of her own free will. And he had cut back, ice-cold:

His reproach had clawed savagely at her heart.

A few months later, he reached out once more.

He'd been trying to introduce her to a production company — but knowing he was aware of her disgrace, she'd found the idea awkward and uncomfortable, and she never made the call.

Why did Do Lee-gun reach out to me twice, back then?

A question she'd never managed to ask in the past bloomed late in her mind.

"Yun-seul? What are you staring at, daydreaming like that?"

"Huh? Oh — nothing, nothing at all."

Shaken from her reverie by Ah-rin's voice, Yun-seul rose from her seat. They promised to meet at the special lecture, then headed off to their next classes in separate buildings.

Yun-seul's destination was the humanities building. The lecture hall was on the sixth floor, so she approached the elevator and slipped in just before the doors closed.

I should've waited for the next one.

She regretted boarding the instant she did — because of the man standing inside.

Do Lee-gun.

The man who'd been stirring through her thoughts mere moments ago stood before her as if conjured. A commanding physique pushing 190 centimeters, built as solidly as an athlete's. And a face so striking it would have stolen the spotlight from seasoned actors — exactly as it had looked back in her freshman days. The only thing that had changed was the man himself: gone was the casual college student, replaced by a fully mature twenty-eight-year-old whom a sleek, classically tailored suit fit to perfection.

Yun-seul ducked her head without thinking and took up a spot in the corner, diagonal behind him. Thankfully, Lee-gun's gaze was fixed indifferently on the floor indicator.

Then again — if she thought about it, there was no reason he should remember her face.

Even if he remembered her writing.

And yet.

"Min Yun-seul?"